Maureen Maluleke, née Mphikela, never met her uncle, Solomon “Bushy” Mphikela. In fact, she, like many members of her family, has never seen an image of Uncle Solomon. By the time she was born, he had already left home to join the armed struggle against Apartheid.
Somewhere along that journey, Solomon became Sparks Moloi, his war name in Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress. In August 1967, Sparks was killed in an ambush in Rhodesia. The family knows that Moloi died. What they do not know, nearly six decades later, is where his body was taken and where he was buried.
A few weeks ago, I travelled to Soshanguve, about 30 kilometres north of Pretoria, to meet Maureen and her two brothers, Brian and Jimmy Mphikela. I had come looking for answers about their uncle, Sparks Moloi, but what I found was a family that has lived with the same unanswered question for generations.
Maureen received me warmly. She has an easy smile and a welcoming manner, and as we settled into the family home, she quickly became the voice of the conversation. She spoke carefully but confidently, reaching back into a history that had been handed down to her long before she was old enough to understand why it mattered. Sitting opposite her, I was struck by how vividly she spoke about an uncle she had never met. Sparks was not simply a name from the distant past; through years of family conversations, stories and searching, he had remained present in their lives.
On this topic
Her brothers, Brian and Jimmy, sat quietly beside her. Throughout much of our conversation, they said almost nothing. When Maureen spoke, they mostly nodded small acknowledgements that seemed to say they knew the story well, perhaps too well. Occasionally, as the conversation turned to their uncle’s disappearance and the failure of successive generations to discover where he was buried, their silence seemed to grow heavier. There were moments when words appeared unnecessary; the emotion on their faces told its own story.
Their quietness was a powerful contrast to Maureen’s steady narration. She carried the story in words, while her brothers seemed to carry it differently in long silences, nods and expressions that at times suggested the weight of a loss inherited rather than personally remembered.
The search for Sparks Moloi has, in many ways, become part of the Mphikela family’s own history. It did not begin with Maureen, Brian and Jimmy. Their father had spent years trying to establish what had happened to his brother and where his remains lay. He died in 2005 without getting the answer he had hoped for. The question was then passed to another generation.
Sitting with the three siblings in Soshanguve, I began to understand that this was no longer simply the story of an MK fighter who disappeared during the liberation struggle. It was also the story of what disappearance does to those who remain behind. Nearly six decades later, Sparks Moloi’s absence still occupies a place in the Mphikela family at the centre of conversations, memories and a search they refuse to abandon.
And now, another generation is asking the same question their father once asked: Where is Sparks Moloi?
But this story is bigger than one missing fighter. It opens a window into one of the most important, yet still insufficiently understood, episodes of Southern Africa’s liberation struggle: the 1967 Wankie Campaign, when South African and Zimbabwean liberation fighters crossed the Zambezi in unison and confronted Rhodesian forces deep inside the country. For the Moloi family, however, the history is intensely personal.
Where is Sparks Moloi?
According to the family, Solomon “Bushy” Mphikela was born in 1945 at Robert Heights in Pretoria, the military area now known as Thaba Tshwane. The family later moved to Wallmansthal, north of Pretoria. Around 1962, while still a young teenager, Solomon left South Africa to join the liberation struggle. Maureen and her brothers had not yet been born. “I don’t know him. I was not yet born when he left,” Maureen told me.
For many years, what had happened to their uncle remained uncertain. After the ANC came to power in South Africa in 1994, Maureen’s father began searching for information about his younger brother. He followed up with veterans, liberation records and whatever fragments he could find. Eventually, the family learnt that Solomon had died in Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia, during the liberation war. But knowing that he had died was only the beginning. Maureen’s father kept looking for answers until his own death in 2005. After that, the next generation took over the search.
The family spoke to former liberation fighters. Maureen met the late General Teddington Thamsanqa Nqapayi, known as Peter Mfene, who told her that he had been with Moloi when he was killed. She also got information from Tate Chulu, now 102, and from MK veterans, including Mavuso Msimanga. Another crucial breakthrough came when the family later encountered an account of the Wankie Campaign written by Chris Hani. Among the names of the dead in Hani’s article was the man they had been searching for, Sparks Moloi. The family later approached Luthuli House, the ANC headquarters in Johannesburg. A delegation subsequently visited the family home to discuss what was known about Moloi’s death. But one question remained unanswered. No one could tell them where he had been buried.
The night the war crossed the Zambezi.
To understand what happened to Sparks Moloi, we must return to the night of 30–31 July 1967. A combined force of fighters from South Africa’s ANC and Zimbabwe’s ZAPU, known as the Luthuli detachment, crossed the Zambezi River from Zambia into Rhodesia. They crossed roughly 15 kilometres upstream from Victoria Falls, near the area where the Chobe River meets the Zambezi.
Chris Hani remembers Moloi’s death
Nearly two decades later, Chris Hani recalled the campaign in an account published in Dawn in 1986. Hani described a major battle involving his column and recorded the deaths of three comrades. One was Sparks Moloi. The other two were identified as Charles Seshoba and Baloi (with no surname). For the Mphikela family, Hani’s testimony provided one of the strongest pieces of evidence confirming Moloi’s fate. Here was a senior commander who had been part of the same force naming Sparks among the dead. But Hani’s account created another problem. It told the family that Moloi died, but did not mention the fate of his remains, or where the body was taken or buried. And it gave no precise date for the battle.
That missing detail has become critical, because the search has now turned to the battlefield trail itself.
Following a trail through Tsholotsho
Over the years, the family gathered another version of Moloi’s final hours, from the period after his death.
According to information passed to them by veterans and other sources, Moloi was heading towards Botswana when his group was ambushed by Rhodesian forces around Tjiwubu Pools, near the Wankie National Park area. The location is associated with the Mabhongane communal area in what was then the Bulilima-Mangwe district. It lies in the border region close to the area called Pandamatenga on the Botswana side.
Moloi was reportedly shot around the ribs. His comrades carried him for several hours, but he was losing blood and eventually died after about five hours as his fellow fighters desperately struggled to save him. The fighters could not remain with his body as they had to move away from the enemy.
They covered him with tree branches and continued moving. According to what the family was told, a Rhodesian Air Force pilot later found and collected the body. But where it was taken is unknown.
“My uncle was shot somewhere near the ribs,” Maureen said, recounting the information the family had received. “His comrades carried him, but he died about five hours after he was shot because he lost a lot of blood,” she said with unmistakable sadness in her voice.
She says the family was subsequently told that the body may have been collected from the battlefield. That possibility has become one of the most important leads in their investigation. If Rhodesian forces recovered Moloi’s remains, then somewhere there may be a record of what happened next. That possibility leads to another thread in the family’s search: the pilot in their story.
The pilot in the family story
The family had also heard a particular surname connected to the battle, Geldenhuys. That detail initially existed in the oral history surrounding Moloi’s death. It only became clear when another record emerged later. A Rhodesian Air Force account describes a battle on 22 August 1967 near the Nata River, where a Provost aircraft piloted by Flying Officer Prop Geldenhuys provided air support to Rhodesian ground forces before they came under fire.
Warrant Officer Havahli Timitiya of the Rhodesian forces radioed that a lost Lieutenant Nick Smith had been shot. It said that radio contact was lost soon after that, but the records confirm that two Rhodesian soldiers were killed. The Rhodesian account also records that five guerrillas were killed and two wounded, with the bodies reportedly discovered the following day. Geldenhuys’s aircraft was also struck by ground fire, but there are no records that it went down.
For the Moloi family, the reference to Geldenhuys is significant.
A name that had reached them through memory and testimony also appears in a Rhodesian account of fighting in the area. It strengthens the possibility that the family has been following the trail of a real engagement. But that does not solve the mystery. Another part of the family’s search remains unresolved.
Named on one side, numbered on the other
Records associated with the Rhodesian forces identify several men connected to fighting in the Tsholotsho area. Names include Nicholas Smith, Warrant Officer Havahli Timitiya, Lance Corporal Mushure Cosmos and Morgan Spencer-Thomas. Some of those names had already reached the Moloi family through its own search. The records therefore provide valuable confirmation that the family has been tracing genuine events and individuals. But they also expose one of the central problems confronting families searching for missing liberation fighters.
Rhodesian soldiers who died were often recorded by name and rank. The African guerrillas they fought were frequently recorded simply as numbers: Three killed. Five killed. Two wounded. The individuals behind those figures disappeared from the official records. For a family searching 58 years later, that difference matters enormously. Somewhere behind one of those casualty figures could be Solomon “Bushy” Mphikela. But a number cannot tell his family where he was buried.
Searching across borders
The investigation has therefore expanded beyond South Africa, following oral testimony from Zimbabwe and other leads. The family has followed oral testimony from people in Zimbabwe, including accounts from villagers in Tsholotsho whose parents reportedly knew of unmarked guerrilla graves. They have sought information from surviving ZPRA and MK veterans. They have followed possible leads involving former collaborators and people who lived in the affected areas. And the search may eventually have to extend even further. Former members of the Rhodesian security forces are now scattered around the world, including in countries such as the United Kingdom and New Zealand. Some may still remember the battles. The Rhodesian Roll of Honour and other records can help reconstruct the movements and casualties of Rhodesian units.
More than a grave
For Maureen and her brothers, finding that place would end a generations-long search. Their first hope is to locate Moloi’s remains and bring them home to South Africa. But the family has also confronted the possibility that, after almost six decades, the grave may never be positively identified. If that happens, they want at least to find the ground where he died. That would allow the family to carry out a spiritual repatriation ceremony.
“We agreed as a family that if we can’t get his remains, we will have to do the spiritual repatriation,” Maureen said. “If we get the remains, it will be a bonus to the family,” she added with an optimism that would surprise many, given how many years the family has been searching.
The disappearance has left an emotional wound in a family whose younger generations never had the opportunity to know the man they are searching for. Maureen says Moloi has even appeared in her dreams. She never met him. But twice, she says, she has seen him. In one of those dreams, his message was simple: “It will be okay.”
The unfinished business of liberation
The search for Sparks Moloi raises a much larger question for Southern Africa. How many families are still waiting? Across Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique, Botswana, Angola, Tanzania, South Africa and other countries touched by the liberation wars, men and women died far from home. Some were buried beside battlefields. Some were laid to rest in hastily dug graves. Some died in camps. Former soldiers who might remember where bodies were collected or buried are also disappearing. And with every death, another piece of the historical record risks being lost. That makes the search for Sparks Moloi urgent. It is not simply an attempt to solve a 58-year-old mystery. It is part of the unfinished work of documenting Southern Africa’s liberation history while the people who lived through it can still speak.
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