22/09/2026
At four o'clock on the morning of 12 December 1986, Ebrahim Ismail Ebrahim ended a seven-hour clandestine meeting with Umkhonto we Sizwe commanders in the mountains outside Mbabane, Swaziland.
Gebuza, Paul Dikeledi and Thami Zulu had spent the night reporting on operations inside South Africa and planning the struggle for 1987.
Hours later, Ebrahim was awakened by a telephone call from Lindiwe Sisulu.
South African forces had struck during the night.
His old Robben Island comrade Shadrack Maphumulo had been shot in the stomach in front of his children, dragged bleeding down the stairs and thrown into a vehicle. He died from blood loss before his kidnappers crossed into South Africa.
Ebrahim established that the commanders from his meeting were safe, then telephoned Jacob Zuma in Maputo to tell him Shadrack was dead.
He broke down and wept.
At about 9:30 p.m. on 15 December, Ebrahim was watching television at his secluded Pine Valley home when two men knocked and asked to borrow a wheel spanner.
Ebrahim took his keys and walked outside, but as he reached his car boot, a gun appeared.
"If you make a noise or shout, we will kill you."
The men bound his hands behind his back, blindfolded and gagged him, then drove him towards South Africa.
Near the border, they made Ebrahim jump a fence, shackled him in handcuffs and leg-irons and drove him to Pretoria.
At Security Branch headquarters, Ebrahim protested that he had been kidnapped, but Brigadier Willem Schoon told him how he arrived was “of mere academic interest.”
At John Vorster Square, interrogators blasted piercing noise into his cell and deprived him of sleep until he feared he was losing his mind.
They demanded that he betray the ANC, but Ebrahim refused:
"I'd rather go to my grave than betray one single person or organisation".
Ebrahim tore a plastic bag into a string, lowered it to prisoners below, pulled up a pen and paper, wrote down his kidnapping and torture and smuggled the account to his lawyer.
Apartheid prosecuted Ebrahim for treason and sentenced him to twenty years, but Ebrahim fought the conviction on the grounds that South African agents had kidnapped him from Swaziland.
On 26 February 1991, the Appellate Division overturned his conviction.
For nearly forty years, from a boy in Effingham entering the struggle at fifteen to sabotage, Robben Island, underground resistance, exile, abduction and imprisonment again, he fought white supremacy.
Ebrahim Ismail Ebrahim carried the struggle that felled apartheid.
Asalaam alaikm warahumatullahi wabarakathu
