Being Chris Hani's Daughter - Ferguson Hani

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after he was no longer with us, when I was obsessed with discovering everything I could about my father.

      In 1981, in the year after I was born, a bomb was planted in Daddy’s car in Maseru, but for some reason it failed to go off. A few months later Daddy’s trusted driver, a man by the name of Sizwe Kondile, was abducted by the South African security police while driving my father’s car just outside Bloemfontein. Always loyal to Daddy, he refused to divulge any information about my father’s whereabouts despite being badly tortured. When they realised they could get nothing out of him, he was drugged and shot dead close to the Mozambican border.

      A year later, on 2 August 1982, there was another car-bomb attempt on Daddy’s life, but this time the bomb exploded in the hands of the would-be assassin, a man by the name of Ernest Ramatolo, before he could get to Daddy. Less than four months later, in December 1982, the Lesotho Raids would target our entire family. After the Raids, Daddy was forced to relocate to Lusaka.

      Over the following years, from the end of 1982 right until 1990, Daddy was not a permanent fixture in our lives because, over those eight-or-so years, he was based ‘Overseas’. Most of the time we would only see him once a year during our July holidays. I accepted this as normal as this was all I’d ever known. I would only come to terms with the sense of loss and abandonment much later in my life. As a child, you adapt to what is given to you and we simply got used to my father not being around.

      Despite Daddy not being there physically, I had what seemed like a pretty idyllic childhood. There were times in the early years after the Lesotho Raid that my parents discussed relocating us to Zambia to be closer to my father. They finally decided that it was best that we were raised in Maseru because that was where Mama had been born; her entire family still lived there, providing us stability and support as we grew up.

      As a result, we were very close to Mama’s family. One of my favourite places to visit was the home of our maternal grandfather, Ntatemoholo Sekamane. His garden was something out of a picture book, with a mini vineyard bursting full of plump grapes and the most amazing orange and peach trees. But heaven help you if you didn’t ask permission before picking the fruit. He was tall with very short hair and startling blue eyes. From the time I could remember, he walked with a cane due to the arthritis in his knee. Every time I asked him why he had such blue eyes he would glare at me and hiss ‘Voetsek!’, vehemently reluctant to discuss his lineage. Only later, through the family grapevine, I came to learn that his father was Scottish and his mother a Mosotho woman. In those early years, I resented the fact that I hadn’t inherited my mother’s green or his blue eyes. The home of my aunt Maseme – whom we affectionately called Sammy – was also a place of refuge for me; she too had a large luscious garden where I could lose myself for hours in a world of make believe.

      I was always a child with a vivid imagination who loved to play dress up in my older cousin Pali’s sophisticated clothes. I was obsessed with her high heels. I loved getting lost in a fantasy world where I was either a princess or a lawyer. The scenario would invariably entail me meeting the love of my life, getting married and having a whole batch of children.

      But my perfect world was rudely interrupted when Pali gave birth to a little boy, Tsitso. He was the first baby in the family after me, which really put my nose out of joint. Suddenly I was no longer ‘the baby’, the focus of the family. My princess life changed dramatically when little Tsitso came to live with us because suddenly everything belonged to this imposter. “Don’t make a noise, the baby is sleeping”, “Don’t eat that Purity, it’s for the baby”. Dethroned, I went out of my way to eat all the blasted Purity with a vengeance.

      At the age of nine, long past my terrible twos, I suddenly became a tantrum thrower of note – in direct competition with Tsitso, who had graduated to toddler status. I was convinced that he was trying to take me out when one afternoon, this dangerous one-year-old intruder bashed me on the head with the end of a heavily weighted curtain rail. Somehow, he had managed to grasp it in his chubby hands, draw his arms back and bring it down with incredible force against the side of my head. Naturally, I took full dramatic advantage of my injury, wailing at the top of my voice – only to be told by the adults that he was “just a baby” and that it was “only an accident”. Sure! All I could see was his demonic smirk.

      And yet, despite my run-ins with the toddler and Khwezi, when I recall my otherwise sheltered childhood, the best decision my parents ever made was having us grow up in Lesotho.

      CHAPTER 2

      Less idyllic

      Selective memory has a way of whitewashing details. There were naturally less-idyllic experiences in my childhood, like those times when we had to steal out of our home in the middle of the night, cruelly woken out of deep sleep in the middle of a dream, and hastily bustled off to my aunt Sammy or Ntatemoholo Sekamane’s houses. Our exodus would usually start with Mama, having heard whispers that we were the target of a possible SADF raid, shaking us awake and telling us that we needed to pack our things quickly. Without fail, each time it happened, it was a huge disruption of our safe, cosy world.

      These panicked pack-ups happened quite regularly until one day Khwezi simply put her foot down and refused to leave the house. There was no drama, no shouting; she just dug her heels in and said, “No.” There was nothing Mama could do to convince my sister otherwise. The rest of the night was spent lying in bed, eyes fixed to the ceiling in terror, waiting for an attack in the dark, until morning dawned only to discover we were all still alive. After Khwezi’s night of resistance, we didn’t leave as often as before, unless Mama really insisted.

      Although I tried to erase them from my thoughts, preferring to live in the rose-tinted land of my fantasy world, in the back of my mind my mother’s fears played havoc, for I knew they were based on real evidence of how seriously the SADF wanted to see the destruction of Chris Hani’s family.

      Only a few years earlier, we had survived a very real attack. I was too young to have known what sinister forces were really at play, but the incident had a traumatic effect on our mother. Although I have hardly any real memories of that night, it would become one of the strongest story threads in my life, told over and over throughout the years to come.

      Two weeks before I turned two, on 9 December 1982, the Lesotho Raids took place between 00:30am and 05:30am in Maseru. At the time, we were staying in Letsei flats, in the centre of the capital. In the dead of night, while the rest of the world slept, special forces from the South African Defence Force used helicopters to drop off a load of guns, grenades and explosives in Maseru. They were on a deadly mission to look for ANC comrades, or so-called ‘terrorists’. Our family was one of the main targets.

      At the time of the attack, we were all fast asleep, unaware of the bloodshed that was raging outside. When the SADF came for us they approached the old guard who was on night duty downstairs, demanding information on the whereabouts of the Hani family.

      The guard had been an ANC cadre who had fallen ill and, when nobody would take him in, Mama had brought him into our home and nursed him back to health. That fateful night, terrified but steadfastly loyal to our family, he saved all our lives when he told the group of soldiers that we lived in number 303, instead of our actual flat, number 302. By this point the terrible sounds of the attack erupting had woken us all. Petrified, we huddled together, Mama, my two sisters and me, cowering under the bed. The chaos outside reverberated as though the killers were right there inside our flat. We lay in terror as they stormed flat 303, bashing down the neighbour’s door. Then we heard the desperate screams of the woman as she was shot dead. My little mind back then could not process the horror she must have gone through.

      When I was older I was told how, the following night, Pik Botha went on South African national TV to state that the SADF had killed Chris Hani’s wife. It was clear that the South African government would have loved to have seen Mama and us, the wife and children of one of South Africa’s most hated terrorists, dead. Although I could hardly comprehend the complexities, my almost two-year-old self subconsciously understood something about the closeness of death that night.

      The details of the attack soon spread throughout the usually vibrant streets of Maseru, which had now fallen deathly quiet, like

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