WE MUST RETUTRN HOME ARMED OR UNARMED THE BIOGRAPHTY OF JOHN NYATI POKELA by HLONGWANE AK

ISBN: 9780620952934

Publisher: Skotaville publishing, November 2021

Paperback, 214 pages

Jon Nyai Pokela was dramatically kidnapped from Lesotho in September 1966 by the apartheid police; brought to trial in then Grahamstown (Makhado); and formally charged with two counts of sabotage and was subsequently found guilty and sentenced to Robben Island Prison. Some of his speeches and writings are included in the book. He died in Harare, Zimbabwe, in July 1985, at Heroes’ Acre. The ceremony was officiated by the then Prime Minister Robert Gabriel Mugabe-among the first none-Zimbabwean political leader on the African continent, to bestowed this historic honour.In the Foreword to the John Pokela book, Dr Teboho J Lebakeng, of the Thabo Mbeki African School of Public and International Affairs, UNISA, states that Dr Hlongwane’s biography is ‘a programme against forgetting the life of a dedicated freedom fighter, and his untimely death while criss-crossing Africa and the world on assignments furthering the cause of the Azanian liberation struggle. ‘ He says it addresses ‘the perils of tendentious historiography.’