He joined the African National Congress (ANC) underground in the Northern Transvaal in 1969, and from 1979 to 1991 he lived in exile with the movement, serving as a political commissar for Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) in Swaziland.
[1] He became politically active while a high school student in Pietersburg, influenced by one of his teachers and by debates within his family about his sister's marriage to a policeman.
He was detained in 1976 during an attempt to leave the country via Botswana, but he left three years later, in 1979, after the Security Branch found him in possession of a banned book; he went into hiding in Soweto, where his aunt lived, until the ANC dispatched an escort to transport him across the border.
[1] In 1987, while in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on MK business, he was badly injured in a car accident, which damaged his memory.
After the accident, he received medical treatment in the Soviet Union and then studied political science in the United Kingdom on a scholarship.