21 Facts About Mzwai Piliso

Mzwandile "Mzwai" Piliso was a South African politician and former anti-apartheid activist.

Mzwai Piliso was a member of the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress from 1962 to 1985 while the organisation was banned in South Africa and operated in exile.

Mzwai Piliso is best known for his tenure as head of the National Intelligence and Security Department of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC's armed wing, and briefly represented the ANC in the post-apartheid National Assembly after the 1994 elections.

Mzwai Piliso was born in 1922 or 1923 to a Xhosa family in the Transkei in the former Cape Province.

Mzwai Piliso had relatives who were senior members of the African National Congress, among them Joyce Piliso-Seroke, and joined the organisation in the late 1940s.

However, shortly afterwards, Mzwai Piliso left South Africa for Edinburgh, Scotland, where he qualified as a pharmacist; he subsequently worked as a pharmacist in London, where he saved up capital to start his own pharmacy in the Transkei and where he was probably not politically active, though he claimed that he had joined the Communist Party of Great Britain.

In 1960, Mzwai Piliso met in London with Oliver Tambo, an ANC leader who had gone abroad to establish a headquarters-in-exile for the recently banned ANC.

Shortly afterwards, Mzwai Piliso was sent to Cairo, Egypt, where he led the SAUF's Egyptian mission together with his PAC counterpart, Vusi Make.

In early 1969, he was appointed as a member of the seven-man disciplinary tribunal appointed for the sentencing of Chris Hani and the other signatories of the Hani memorandum, an open letter that was highly critical of MK's leadership; Hani later told historian Vladimir Shubin that Mzwai Piliso had intervened to advocate for a less severe punishment.

Mzwai Piliso was re-elected to the NEC later in 1969 at the ANC's Morogoro Conference, and was appointed to the NEC's new Revolutionary Council, established to coordinate the anti-apartheid struggle inside South Africa.

Mzwai Piliso thereafter took a long leave with his family in Burnley, England.

Possibly with an explicit brief from the NEC to root out spies, in 1981 Mzwai Piliso presided over the so-called Shishita, a clean-up operation which led to the executive of several alleged spies, and he later presided over NAT's repressive response to the Mkatashinga mutiny of 1983.

Mzwai Piliso was dropped from the NEC elected at Kabwe, but he continued to represent NAT on the NEC's Politico-Military Council, the successor to the earlier Revolutionary Council.

In 1990, the apartheid government unbanned the ANC, which was therefore able to return to South Africa to undertake negotiations to end apartheid, and Mzwai Piliso continued as head of the manpower department after the ANC relocated to headquarters at Shell House in Johannesburg.

In South Africa's first post-apartheid elections in 1994, Mzwai Piliso was elected to represent the ANC in the National Assembly, the lower house of the new South African Parliament.

The first of the commissions reported that Mzwai Piliso had "candidly" admitted that Shishita had been based on intelligence extracted from recruits under torture; he told the commission that he had personally participated in beating a suspect in 1981, believing that information about a presumed assassination plot had to be extracted "at any cost".

Mzwai Piliso received substantial media attention as a result, with the Weekly Mail's front page declaring him the "ANC's torture chief".

Debate about Mzwai Piliso's role continued after his death when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission held hearings on MK abuses, during which the ANC insisted that such abuses had been neither widespread nor systematic.

The ANC responded that both had been "seriously censured by the leadership of the ANC", with Mzwai Piliso removed from NAT and the directorate restructured.

Mzwai Piliso was married to Joyce, with whom he had children; while working for the ANC, he rarely saw his family, who lived in England.

Mzwai Piliso developed diabetes upon his return to South Africa and died of related illness on 25 June 1996 at St Dominic's Hospital in East London.