MOROGORO (Tanzania): When Monica Mathe married her South African husband, she also married his ideals, embracing the beliefs of an exiled member of the anti-apartheid African National Congress.
Elias Mathe fled white rule in his homeland in the 1970s and underwent military training in Tanzania, where he met and married his wife.
“I was a freedom fighter and got all the rights accorded to one,” said Mathe, who works as a nurse in a hospital on the outskirts of the central Tanzanian town of Morogoro.
“I got free education paid for by the ANC on this very campus,” she said as she carefully wrapped steel surgical instruments in green hospital linen.
When apartheid began to crumble in the mid-1990s, Mathe’s husband went home. He never came back and never sent for her.
Mathe is one of scores of Tanzanian women who married exiled ANC fighters and who now, more than a decade after the end of apartheid, feel cheated and forgotten either by the men they married or the movement that came to dominate their lives.
Tanzania, one of the so-called Frontline States which hastened the end of white rule by pressing for sanctions and assisting the exiled ANC, trained more ANC fighters than any other African state during the 27 years that anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela was imprisoned.
The ANC set up camps in central Tanzania and many men took Tanzanian wives. The women worked for free in the ANC camps and were promised wages once the fighters secured majority rule.
They were told they would be embraced into the wider ANC family and live better lives as citizens of South Africa.
When the apartheid system finally fell apart in the mid-1990s, many ANC men living in ‘Frontline States’ like Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique headed home. Some took their families but others left alone, promising to return.
In many cases, the men re-married when they got home and made no provisions for the ‘exile families’, a senior ANC official in Johannesburg told Reuters.
The ANC has no public position on the problem, but officials say privately that every conflict leaves deep wounds, citing the families left behind in Tanzania as well as the many ANC members who disappeared during the years of apartheid.
The tales of those left behind in Tanzania differ in the detail, but the sense of betrayal is the same.
Anna Bhutto carefully stores away the only thing that links her to her father — a photo of him in an officer’s uniform.
He left to study in Zimbabwe when Bhutto was four and she has not seen him since.
“This guy has betrayed us, he has denied his children. He knows he left children behind but ... he does not care.”
Monica Mabuya’s South African husband died in Tanzania, leaving her with four children. She still lives near the farm where they once worked to feed ANC fighters living at the nearby Solomon Mahlangu ANC camp.
The camp is now a university campus and still goes by the name of Mahlangu, a 23-year-old hanged for murder by the apartheid government during student unrest in the late 1970s.
When Mabuya’s husband died, the ANC took her and her children into the Mahlungu camp and took care of them.
But when fighters began to return home, she and her family were left behind with other widows.
“They gave me a card to say that I am ANC. They knew I helped the ANC,” she said.
The ANC widows of Morogoro say a representative of the South African embassy visited them once and took down their names but there has been no contact since.
Richard Ndlovu’s South African father died when he was a teenager but he still speaks the Zulu his father taught him.
He lives near Bhutto in a mud-brick house with his disabled mother, sister and wife. They scrape by on his wages from casual labour and the money his sister makes selling charcoal.
Ndlovu, 30, is happy to stay in Tanzania but he would like some help from his father’s homeland.
“The solution is not going to live in South Africa. Life can be anywhere if you have a way to live,” Ndlovu said in Zulu.
“All we ask you (the South African government) is to help us. We are tired.”—Reuters