Thomas Tlhapane: 93 Years of Wisdom

In his 93 years, Thomas Tlhapane has lived a life of faith and leadership. He told Daluxolo Moloantoa about his experiences.

Wisdom, the Book of Job says, “belongs to the aged, and understanding to the old” (12:12), reminding us of the value of knowledge implanted in the elderly. Over his 93 years of life, Thomas Tlhapane has accumulated such wisdom in abundance.

Those have been years of living in faith, and a true commitment to his family, community and the Church. And years punctuated by an indefinite mountain of stories to tell about the Church and about significant periods of life past in South Africa.

Mr Tlhapane was born on December 18, 1929, in Tsitsing village near Rustenburg and was raised the third of five children in a single-parent household headed by his mother.

At the age of ten years he started his education at a local Lutheran missionary school. In 1944, he enrolled at St Eugene Vocational College at Ga-Monnakgotla, near Randfontein. “Upon arrival at the college, I chose to convert from Lutheranism to become a Catholic. I was baptised on the Easter Sunday of 1946 at the St Eugene church, which was part of the college,” Mr Tlhapane recalled. While at the college, he acquired various vocational skills, mainly in livestock farming and agriculture.

In 1948, the college was forced to close due to the newly-elected apartheid government’s forced removals policy.  The school’s staff and students were transferred to Glen Cowie Catholic Mission School, near the town of Jane Furse in the Northern Transvaal (now Limpopo). When Mr Tlhapane completed his studies in 1950, he was appointed boarding-master for the male students at the school and tasked with the job of teaching the boys livestock farming and agriculture.

Because of his bravery in dealing with the hazards of  an “outback” type of environment, including constant encounters with snakes and other menaces of nature, the German missionaries gave Mr Tlhapane the nickname Tau, meaning lion.

He also taught the boys boxing. “I had been an amateur boxer since my days at St Eugene Vocational College. A normal school day would start with me waking the boys up at five in the morning. Then we would go on a 10km-run to the edge of the mountain traversing the mission. There we would conduct some exercises and a bit of sparring and shadow boxing. In winter we would make use of the animal shelter for the exercises. From there we would run the 10km again back to the dormitories, wash and get ready for the day.”

Among the boys he taught to farm and box was Fr Smangaliso Mkhatshwa, future secretary-general of the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference and political activist, and Dominic Phaahla, father of current health minister Joe Phaahla.

Life at the Glen Cowie mission centred around prayer. “Every weekday morning the entire school — students, staff, priests, religious — would attend morning Mass, conducted in Latin, in the mission church. Every evening at six we would all be back in the church for evening prayers, usually led by the religious Sisters or Brothers,” he said. The priests and Brothers were German Oblates. The nuns were mainly British Sisters of Loreto and mainly African Handmaids of Christ the Priest.

Move to Pretoria

In 1955 Mr Tlhapane moved to Pretoria and soon after joined the South African Railways and Harbours Agency (SARHA), a government parastatal. “I was part of the team which was responsible for installing the train signals on the new railway track from Pretoria to Messina,” he recalled.

While at Glen Cowie he had fallen in love with Magdalena Lephaka, a local girl from nearby Botshabelo. Since she was still at high school at Motse Maria College, a Catholic missionary boarding school near Polokwane, he had to wait for Magdalena to complete her schooling before they could marry. He returned to Glen Cowie to marry his bride on December 27, 1957 at the mission church there. They went on to have seven children. Magdalena died in 2006.

After the completion of the railway route to Messina, Mr Tlhapane was roped in as one of the first black train ticket examiners for the new trains connecting Johannesburg’s Park Station to Soweto’s stations. But this marked the beginning of yet another period of moving due to forced removals.

“To be close to my workplace, I rented a room in Sophiatown. One of my neighbours was Dr Eduardo Mondlane, who would later lead the Frelimo Movement in toppling the Portuguese colonial government in Mozambique. It was a time when the government was intensifying its forced removal campaign to move the people of Sophiatown to the newly-built Meadowlands settlement in Soweto. Instead of moving to Meadowlands, I decided to move back to Pretoria,” Mr Tlhapane said.

Forced removals

In Pretoria he settled in Lady Selbourne. As fate would have it, the apartheid government had also targeted that settlement for removals. The choice presented to the black residents of Lady Selbourne was for them to be moved to the new townships of Mamelodi in the west or Atteridgeville to the east of Pretoria. He settled for Mamelodi township.

There he became friends with Dr Fabian Ribeiro, a fellow Catholic and the local community surgeon who in 1981 would be assassinated alongside his wife Florence by apartheid forces (the couple was profiled in the January 2023 issue).

In 1967 the community in their part of Mamelodi was informed that the area had been earmarked for another development by the apartheid government. Once again, a forced removal was on the horizon. The Sotho, Nguni and the Shangaan people were moved to Soshanguve township (the name is an abbreviation of the three ethnic groups). As Motswana, the Tlhapane family was moved to Garankuwa township, north of Pretoria, in the early 1970s.

In Garankuwa Mr Tlhapane became an acolyte, altar assistant and catechist. In 1974, he co-founded the Catholic Men’s Association (CMA), which soon spread to the surrounding areas. Today it covers most parishes in Pretoria’s townships and beyond. Mr Tlhapane also became a member of the local Sacred Heart Sodality, for whom he helped draft its rulebook.

In 1979 he was among the local Catholics who, along with Stigmatine Father Charles Mittempergher, founded the second parish in the township, the Maria Mater Ecclesiae church. It has been the Tlhapane family’s parish ever since. “Before this happened, we would hold our Mass services in various classrooms at the schools in our vicinity. Eventually, we identified a site for a church. I was the one to manage the removal of big rocks and to lay the foundation on the site,” Mr Tlhapane recalled. His Marian devotion led him to head the building of a parish grotto soon after the church building was completed.

Fruits of pilgrimage

In 1981 Mr Tlhapane was chosen to represent the archdiocese of Pretoria at the International Eucharistic Congress in Lourdes. He extended his trip to go on a pilgrimage to Rome and other holy sites in France, Spain and Portugal. It was a dream trip for him, as it enabled him to visit the holy sites of Lourdes and Fatima.

“One of the items he brought back with him was a picture of the Black Madonna and Child,” daughter Anastacia recalled. “It was the first time that my family and many Garankuwa Catholic families were seeing a representation of Mother Mary and the baby Jesus as black people. Remember those were the days of apartheid when we, as black people, were made to believe that every important figure in history and Christianity was white. It changed a lot of people’s ideas about what we had always thought to be true about Jesus and his roots, taking into account that the picture was coming from Europe.”

A number of his children have followed Mr Tlhapane on international travel for Church business. One travelled to Chile for a youth pilgrimage, another to Germany as part of a Garankuwa parishes marimba music group, while another went to Rome for a youth conference. One worked for the SACBC, while another headed the children’s centre at the Christ the New Man church in Garankuwa.

Police massacre

Mr Tlhapane also worked closely with the late Fr Michele D’Annucci CSS who was noted in the archdiocese of Pretoria as an active voice against apartheid. Mr Tlhapane recalled an ecumenical protest against the Bophuthatswana homeland government, of which Garankuwa was part, in November 1985.

“I participated in the march as part of the local Catholic leadership alongside Frs D’Annucci and Mittempergher. I was chosen to carry a big cross at the front of the march, followed by the various church ministers and hundreds of protesters behind us. We marched down the road from the local magistrates courts and into the grounds of the administration offices. As soon as we walked through the gates we found apartheid police waiting for us. Mind you, this was at the height of the State of Emergency, with a horde of local and international reporters following the mayhem of apartheid oppression everywhere in the country,” he remembered.

“A policeman instructed us through a loudspeaker to disperse in the next five minutes, or else they would force us to disperse. We refused to disperse. All hell broke loose, and in the end 18 protestors were killed by the apartheid police. We knew that the police would try and confiscate the cameras of the newsmen. By quick thinking, the reporters handed all their cameras to Fr D’Annucci who hid them under his cassock and swiftly made his way out of the crowd back to his car parked a short walk away. At the end of the chaos, he handed the cameras back to the reporters. The next day the news made front-page headlines in some local and international newspapers,” Mr Tlhapane recalled.

These days, Mr Tlhapane spends most of his days in his rural homestead in Tsitsing, his birthplace. He spends his time tending to his plants and vegetable garden and still plays his part in several community initiatives. Some time ago, at his local parish, he helped with the installation of a large cross made of two electricity poles alongside the village mountain. It directly faces his house.

“I can see the cross from my kitchen door. Every morning as I open the door, I look up at the cross on the mountain, thank the Lord for the long years of life that he has given me, and I make the sign of the cross.”

Published in the April 2023 issue of The Southern Cross magazine