Johannesburg – “We give you hope and sympathy Boipatong, May your loved ones rest in peace,” sings Brenda Fassie on her album – Yo Baby – released in 1992.
As the blanket of night enveloped the township of Boipatong and Slovo Park on Friday, June 17 1992, the residents retreated into their rugged matchbox houses and patch-patch shacks.
That night, they went to bed in a country full of hope, a country of freed political leaders, returned exiles and a country deep in the throes of negotiations for a new political dispensation.
But the next day, they woke up in hell.
When the sun rose on June 18, Bakoena, the boundary street between Slovo Park and Boipatong was glistening with blood.
Several other streets of Tshirela section were also damp with blood. During that cursed night of June 17, a group of about 200 armed men from Kwamadala hostel next door, widely believed to have been the supporters of IFP, invaded Boipatong.
With their assegais, pangas, axes and guns they ambushed people in their sleep – this being one of the distinguishing features of the Boipatong Massacre.
At least 45 people, among them a four-year-old, a pregnant Maria Mlangeni, Sibusiso and Ronica Msibi, Julia Mgcina, Flora Nkala, Flora Moshope, Matilda Hlubi, Andries Manyika, to mention but a few, were killed.
There was almost total unanimity among survivors that the killers were escorted and assisted by the police.
But as Allister Sparks noted then, among other forms of evidence, the “tapes from the police central room that day were tampered with and destroyed”.
Happening as it did in the middle of the first Codesa (Convention for a Democratic South Africa) negotiations, the Boipatong Massacre was intended both to disrupt the negotiations process and to weaken the hand of the liberation movements. What followed was a series of attempts by several participants in the Codesa negotiations to use the massacre to their advantage.
The morning after the massacre, Cyril Ramaphosa and the late Joe Slovo were in Boipatong, whereupon Ramaphosa wishfully declared that “there must be no more Boipatongs”; only to be contradicted three months later when the Bisho Massacre occurred. How ironic that 20 years later, the same Ramaphosa was to be implicated – though later cleared by judge Ian Farlam – in the post-apartheid state-sponsored massacre at Marikana in the North West. Not to be outdone, FW de Klerk went to Boipatong on June 20.
But it seems Winnie Madikizela-Mandela beat him to it.
Whereas she received a hero’s welcome, De Klerk was chased away by angry residents.
They were singing: Ha o enkentse konyana tjena Mandela, setjhaba se ya fela, meaning, while you behave like a lamb Mandela, people are being killed off.
Some of the posters people waved read: “To hell with De Klerk and your Inkatha murderers” and “De Klerk, kill apartheid, not us.”
On June 21, Nelson Mandela went to Boipatong to “express my deepest sympathy to the people of Boipatong and Slovo Park for one of the most brutal slaughter of human beings in the history of this country”.
Later, Mandela announced, among others, the suspension of ANC participation in the negotiations.
In the process, Boipatong became a pawn in the political chess game that was playing out at the Codesa negotiations, a game whose real losers were the people of Boipatong. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission failed to bring anyone to book for the massacre.
Twenty-nine years later, Boipatong and its residents remain pawns in contemporary political chess games played between some corrupt and/or incompetent leaders of the Emfuleni municipality, the provincial and national governments.
Twenty-nine years later, Boipatong, Slovo Park and its gravesites are floating in rivers of sewage. Nay, in 2021, Boipatong is being slowly turned into a massive gravesite. The people of Boipatong and the greater Vaal currently live in an ongoing humanitarian and ecological time bomb; born, among other things, of incompetent, uncaring and unethical leadership.
In its February 17 2021 report following the Human Rights Commission inquiry into the sewage problem of the Vaal River, it found “raw sewage flowing in a small stream … burst sewerage pipes on the banks of the Rietspruit, defective bio-filters … a clogged sewerage manhole at the Sharpeville Cemetery and children swimming in, and consuming, polluted waters in the area of a school”.
Could the massacred martyrs of Boipatong be dishonoured more contemptuosly and more spectacularly? We doubt.
• Maluleke is senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship. Follow him on Twitter @ProfTinyiko
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