Solomon Mahlangu

Solomon Kalushi Mahlangu was born in Mamelodi, on the outskirts of Pretoria, on the tenth of July 1956. He attended Mamelodi High School through the early 1970s and was an active participant in the student movement that led to the Soweto Uprising of the sixteenth of June 1976.

He left South Africa for exile in late 1976 in the aftermath of the Soweto suppression. He travelled north through Mozambique to Angola, where he completed military training with Umkhonto we Sizwe (the ANC's armed wing) over the next eighteen months.

He returned to South Africa with two comrades, Mondy Motloung and George Lubisi, on the eleventh of June 1977 — five days before the first anniversary of the Soweto Uprising — to conduct an operation against an apartheid-era security target. They were intercepted by Johannesburg police in Goch Street, Fordsburg. Motloung opened fire in the gunfight that followed; two civilian bystanders died. Mahlangu did not fire his weapon. Motloung was severely beaten by police on arrest and was found unfit to stand trial. Mahlangu was charged with the killings under the common-purpose doctrine of South African law.

He was convicted on the second of March 1978 by the Pretoria Supreme Court. The South African Attorney General's office rejected all appeals despite the substantial international legal-rights campaign that followed (Amnesty International, the United Nations General Assembly, the Organisation of African Unity, and individual European parliaments).

He was hanged at Pretoria Central Prison on the sixth of April 1979, age twenty-two.

His last words, as transmitted by the prison chaplain to the family: "My blood will nourish the tree that will bear the fruits of freedom. Tell my people that I love them. They must continue the fight." The Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College in Tanzania was founded in 1978; it operated through the apartheid era as the principal exile school for South African students.

He is honored here as the MK soldier whose execution made his name the cry of the Soweto generation.