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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 April 2025
Botswana
While everyone needed a cover story, not all covers were as clean cut as being a teacher or an artist; in some cases, cover stories could have an undercover side to them as well. Heinz Klug and Patrick Fitzgerald's exile years in Botswana are perhaps the most complex – and also the most compelling – cases in point.
Klug had been a journalism student, and part of the radical leadership of Nusas, after the entire executive disbanded in 1976, and after Williamson's flight from the country. Klug had been living in Durban when Rick Turner was killed and had experienced a nasty increase in harassment from the police in the aftermath of the assassination. At the end of 1978, Klug moved down to Cape Town and began an MA in January of 1979. Meanwhile, Klug continued his radical organising, often focused on opposing the conscription of white men into the apartheid military. ‘The pressures were building, and all of a sudden I got a letter that said that they had cancelled my deferment.’ In response to being called up by the military, Klug attempted to organise a group of students to all refuse to serve, together. However, the state strategically offered deferments, to whittle down this group of conscientious objectors. Furthermore, Nusas had decided that they were unwilling to encourage young white men to resist conscription.
I told exactly two people, close friends, that I was planning to leave the country. One of these friends invited me to beer at the Pig and Whistle in Cape Town. My friend wasn't there when I arrived. Karl Edwards was sitting there, and he said, ‘I hear you're leaving the country.’ I said that I had no idea what he was talking about. He said, ‘Well, look, if you decide you’d like to leave, there's this project in Botswana called SANA [the South African News Agency]. They need somebody to take it over. So, it's a job …’ I asked what SANA was, and he said, ‘Oh, it's funded by the International University Exchange Fund.’ I had no idea what that was. Karl explained further, ‘It's Craig Williamson; he's in Geneva now.’
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