André Lincoln — from Mandela's protector to anti-gang pioneer, leaving a legacy of resilience

(Graphic: Rudi Louw)

30 May 2025

Retired top cop André Lincoln died on 30 May 2025 at the age of 63. He arguably had one of the most tumultuous careers in the history of the South African Police Service. What he leaves behind is not just a legacy of controversy, but of resilience and perseverance.

“Please remember we still have lots left to do.”

These are the words André Lincoln, a retired policeman, wrote a few months ago when signing a copy of a book framed around his life.

Lincoln, a married father of five, died in Cape Town on Friday, 30 May 2025. He was 63.

Before Lincoln retired in 2021, he had a remarkable career in the South African Police Service that stretched over decades.

He headed the Anti-Gang Unit in the country’s gangsterism epicentre, the Western Cape.

Read more: Top WC cop retires after a momentous career, from protecting Madiba to tackling gangsters and fellow police

Years earlier, he was convicted of crimes of which he was later acquitted — Lincoln always maintained he had been framed because investigations he was conducting were causing panic among figures in the government who were up to no good.

Opinions about him over the years were somewhat split — despite his acquittal, some individuals peddled the idea that he was criminal, while others believe he was still being maliciously targeted.

Lincoln, when detailing his past, said he was effectively the first victim of State Capture in democratic South Africa.

Before his time as a police officer, Lincoln was assigned to protect the democratic country’s first president, Nelson Mandela, and before that he was an ANC intelligence operative taking on the apartheid regime.

Lincoln recently said he was hellbent on trying to ensure that young children had decent role models.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0KUeAWtuVY

The country’s trajectory disheartened him, he distanced himself from individuals linked to the state whom he had spent time with during earlier years, and he wanted a better South Africa, saying we must push for it.

That is perhaps the legacy he now leaves behind.

This journalist wrote a book, Man Alone: Mandela’s top cop – exposing South Africa’s ceaseless sabotage, that tracked Lincoln’s life as this country’s political arena shifted.

It was published in November last year, and Lincoln signed my copy.

Part of the message he penned says: “Please remember we still have lots left to do.”

This is an extract from the book:

Man Alone

André Edward Lincoln was born in the city of Mahikeng in South Africa’s North West province on 28 October 1961 to devoutly Catholic parents, Reginald and Wilma.

The two met in Mahikeng and later got married there in October 1960.

They had three children, Lincoln and two daughters.

Before 1994, Reggie was involved in underground MK activities — he’d helped smuggle recruits from Mahikeng to Lobatse in Botswana.

Wilma, on the other hand, wanted to distract her husband from politics and protect her son from it.

So she convinced Reginald to move to Cape Town (where he had gone to high school) to try to sever ties with political matters.

This plan backfired. Spectacularly.

SAPS Western Cape management bid farewell to Anti-Gang Unit head Major-General Lincoln. (Photo: SAPS)

Lincoln’s footsteps matched his dad’s.

He and Reggie obviously share genes — Lincoln looks a lot like his father.

And the two also shared deep foundational bonds.

Aside from his MK activities, Reggie became a motor mechanic and had a workshop in the Cape Town suburb of Athlone, where Lincoln spent long periods next to him.

Reggie also enjoyed sports such as soccer, cricket and, most notably, karate.

He became a sensei, later spending his evenings and Saturdays teaching.

Read more: Man Alone by Caryn Dolley — The life of Mandela’s top cop, and South Africa’s ceaseless sabotage

Those who experienced his mentoring recalled how he taught students and those around him that everyone was born equal. Reggie, to them, truly understood and practised ubuntu – part of a Zulu phrase meaning “I am, because you are.”

Reggie was no ordinary sensei.

He’d trained in Okinawa, Japan, the birthplace of karate. (When he retired from the sport in his late 70s, he was graded a sixth dan in Okinawa, which is a very high rank.)

On home soil, Reggie dealt with issues like poverty and hunger through the sport.

Out of his own pocket, he was said to have created a dojo first in the Cape Town suburb of Salt River, and then in Maitland.

Reggie had also coached at a primary school on Robben Island — where Mandela was imprisoned for 18 of his 27 years; these were training sessions for the workers and officials (and their children) based there.

(Graphic: Rudi Louw)

He taught timeless karate prescripts: “To strive for the perfection of character. To defend the path of truth. To foster the spirit of effort. To honour the principles of etiquette. To guard against impetuous courage.”

These were likely the lessons Reggie instilled in Lincoln, who also excelled at karate.

A primary school friend of Lincoln’s said that Reggie had been the sensei at a karate school both he and Lincoln attended from a young age – “I think that’s where André got his discipline from.”

Indeed, Lincoln achieved a grading of fifth dan in Japan in 1992.

Read more: ‘You haven’t seen the back of me yet,’ says retired Cape Town police general André Lincoln at event to honour him

In the years after that, figures linked to underworld investigations recalled that Reggie was an impenetrable karate master whom they respected. It was his son they had issues with.

Lincoln has textured memories of his father.

“His life, his influence, his energy, are inextricably linked to mine,” Lincoln recalled. “I’m grateful that I’m becoming a more fully realised human being. A more caring, compassionate and empathetic person because of my dad.”

Lincoln does not believe that money, possessions, or professional success quantifies a person.

He said of his father: “The true measure of a man is how much love he gives, how selflessly he shares whatever he can to help others, how consistently he lifts those around him with a kind word, a funny joke, a compliment, a humble ear, or the very shoes off his feet. By this measure my dad was immeasurable.”

Lincoln also remembered Reggie as the most “sincerely unselfish” person he had ever met, with no attachment to material goods. “He would literally give you the clothes he was wearing; this became abundantly clear to us as children when he would always see to himself last and Mom and us first.”

In 1974, at the age of 13, Lincoln was recruited into the ANC by Brian Williams, a former trade union leader who became the first head of the Labour Department in the Western Cape post apartheid, and whom Lincoln now describes as his mentor.

A tender teen, Lincoln was effectively being trained to fight apartheid. He was being ushered towards MK — and towards becoming a child soldier.

During an informal conversation with me, one of Lincoln’s associates explained that theirs was a generation that lost out on vast tracts of childhood.

Read more: Andre Lincoln’s safety fears: ‘Cops have removed my security despite info on hits,’ says retired Anti-Gang Unit boss

They were reared to fight for liberation and against racism, and did not have the chance to have other children’s experiences.

Playtime was cut short. Toys were exchanged for guns, bullets or makeshift weapons.

They were under immeasurable stress, even though they may not have understood it at the time.

Those children had to defend themselves, a country, and the children they’d perhaps have one day.

Lincoln, the child undergoing a baptism of political fire, attended St John’s Roman Catholic School in the Cape Town suburb of Kensington.

Of his time as a young boy, Lincoln, with a naughty look in his eyes, says, “When I was at school I was afraid of only two things — the Security Branch… and my mother.”

Read more: Legal tussles see State Attorney wanting millions from retired top cop Andre Lincoln

By 1980, aged 19, Lincoln was part of the ANC’s national tactical unit.

In 1982, still following in his dad’s footsteps, Lincoln joined MK as part of a cell led by Tony Yengeni, now a former ANC chief whip, who gave him a crash course in underground warfare in an abandoned classroom in Kensington.

Lincoln received further military training in Zimbabwe and Angola, and later worked in the MK information wing.

By 1989, he worked on a campaign that involved marches and other acts of defiance by organisations that the apartheid government had banned.

An informant of his would later recall that Lincoln drew strength and motivation from anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko’s words: “Black man, you’re on your own.”

Lincoln then found himself working for the ANC’s Department of Intelligence and Security (DIS), which was still operating underground beyond the grasp of apartheid.

On the surface it looked like South Africa was inching away from that regime, but some who’d been ensconced within the state felt that wasn’t exactly the case. DM

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Man Alone