Fish Keitseng

Fish Keitseng was the key Botswana citizen member of the ANC during the early 1960s. After extensive involvement in the ANC’s passive resistance campaigns of the 1950s, he was arrested by South African authorities and prosecuted in the Treason Trial, along with Mandela, Mpho, and 153 other leading ANC members. Following his deportation to his native Bechuanaland Protectorate in 1959, he established and successfully ran an underground transit system, which funnelled ANC members from Lobatse in the southern Protectorate to Northern or sometimes Southern Rhodesia (later Zambia and Zimbabwe), from where they journeyed to Tanganyika/Tanzania. This operation was of vital importance for it enabled the ANC, along with its Congress Alliance allies, to rescue thousands of activists from the clutches of the apartheid state. This in turn allowed for the re-establishment of the organisation from exile as a liberation movement capable of ultimately assuming state power.