[1] His father, Dumile Kondile, who died at the age of 90 in February 2023, was a prominent lawyer, magistrate in Port Elizabeth, Eastern Cape and was later appointed as a judge for the Pietermaritzburg High Court, KwaZulu Natal (KZN).
In his 2021 memoir, Pikoli speaks about how as kids Kondile always wished to work for the Ford Motor Company's assembly plant in Port Elizabeth and would joke also that he wanted to be president of South Africa.
[4] While students at the Fort Hare University, Kondile and Pikoli were detained for planning a memorial lecture for Steve Biko, a murdered prominent anti-apartheid activist and intellectual, and soon after their release fled South Africa to Lesotho with two others - Phaki Ximiya and Thozi Majola - where they joined the African National Congress (ANC) and militarily trained with uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) in the 1980s.
When he battled to find a telephone booth in Maseru, he drove to Van Rooyen Border Gate to try make a call and was arrested by a team of Security Branch led by Colonel Hermanus du Plessis and Hani's car was also taken by the police.
[5] He was initially detained in Bloemfontein, Free State province and then on 10 July 1981 he was transforted to Humansdorp police station in the Eastern Cape where he was subjected to torture while being interrogated for two weeks.