A police colonel, an army brigadier and a top Inkatha official have been charged with the 1987 KwaMakhutha massacre. Anne Eveleth this week revisited the scene where a priest and a dozen women and children were assassinated
The sun was setting over the rambling hills of KwaMakhutha, 25km south of Durban, as we navigated the maze of jumbled township addresses to find number 1866.
A group of small children playing on the gravel road looked on curiously as we approached, and a young girl went to call off the Labrador guarding the entrance to the faded pink mudbrick house. Small round cement patches peppered the exterior. The young woman who emerged in the doorway said they covered the bullet
Eight years ago, gunmen emptied more than 100 AK-47 cartridges into the four-roomed house and the small outbuilding in the backyard, killing a priest and 12 women and children.
Most of the victims were sleeping when the white minibus pulled up under the cover of darkness on January 21, 1987. It was 2.30am and the house was quiet after a prayer meeting called by Reverend Willie Ntuli and church elder Ernest Thusini. The Thusini family and other members of the Twelve Apostles Church had decided to spend the night at the Ntuli home after the day of religious devotion.
When the attackers battered open the wooden door, Anna Khumalo woke up, grabbed her four-year-old daughter Pinkie and squeezed into the wardrobe. Sheer luck saved their lives from the bullets that whizzed millimetres over their heads. The others were less fortunate. The methodical killers’ searchlight revealed their hiding place under the bed. Only the two infants managed to escape the hail of bullets which raked each room.
Phumelele Ndlovu’s body was all that shielded her one- year-old daughter, Nomvula, from death. Another wardrobe in the outbuilding saved Ernest and Faith Thusini from the barrage of gunfire that killed four of their children, aged between four and eight, instantly, and fatally wounded 10-year-old Nomfundo. The couple’s bed was hidden from view behind the wardrobe partition.
The assassins’ visit had only lasted a few minutes. When it was over the floors of the two buildings were soaked with the blood of their victims. Their target — Ntuli’s son Victor — was not home at the time. The 22- year-old treasurer of the United Democratic Front- affiliated KwaMakhutha Youth League had gone into hiding after a string of death threats and the recent murder of another league member.
Veteran Natal violence monitor Mary de Haas said members of the league had suffered constant persecution from the police since its formation in 1985: “Like all of the early trouble areas, a rising civic activism led by the youth was met with with harrassment and targeting by vigilantes,” she said.
When Victor came out of hiding to visit his shattered home and console his grief-stricken mother, Ethel, who also escaped the attack, the police picked him up for questioning. The Bureau of Information in Pretoria initially blamed the attack on “terrorists”, emphasising the use of “Russian-made AK-47s”, then projected as the hallmark of attacks by the liberation
African National Congress MP Archie Gumede, who led the UDF in those dark days, recalls “the subdued anger, subdued wrath” of the 3 000 people who attended the funeral he addressed: “What aggravated it was that the state was not interested in finding out who the perpetrators were. It was quite clear the police felt it was none of their business,” he said.
Gumede says the attack “came like a bolt from the
“It was the first really savage, vicious attack in KwaMakhutha. It came at a time when there was growing resistance by the young people, especially with regard to the state’s education policy,” says Gumede.
“It was a very traumatic period for the organisation. Such incidents appeared to be taking place in order to intimidate people in the various communities where organisations were emerging that were not going to be subject to Inkatha,” he added.
Describing Victor Ntuli as “a very intelligent young man” whom he met only after the attack, Gumede added: “He apparently drew the wrath of the IFP and they felt if they did away with him they would frighten the students off from boycotting the school fees.”
Although the attackers missed their target — despite a second attempt an hour before the funeral of the massacre victims — the remaining Ntulis fled KwaMakhutha and another family moved in. Tensions continued to mount in the township, with comments by an IFP mayor that he was “sick of these UDF nests”, leading to the “eviction” of 10 UDF-alligned families by an impi of several hundred IFP supporters in June the same year.
Today, a third, unrelated family lives in the Ntulis’ pink house which now stands in the heart of an IFP stronghold, in Ward 5 KwaMakhutha.
Local IFP leader and councillor Agrippa Mkhize, who lives next-door, says KwaMakhutha is “quiet now, except for the ANC youth in Ward 1”.
Although Mkhize says the neighbours who remember the attack “are afraid now to talk about it,” three young men who appear to be the local self-protection unit stop to comment that “this house has become more popular recently”.
In a vivid testimonial to the slow-churning wheels of justice under apartheid, the alleged perpetrators are only now being called to answer for their crime. Five people — including IFP deputy secretary-general Zakhele “MZ” Khumalo, former security policeman Colonel Louis Botha, and Military Intelligence officer Brigadier John More — have been arrested for the eight-year-old murders in a whirlwind clean-up operation launched by the Investigation Task Unit (ITU) two weeks ago.
Mkhize echoes the view of his organisation, which claims the ITU — set up by Safety and Security Minister Sydney Mufamadi last September to investigate hit-squad allegations in KwaZulu/Natal — is an ANC organ: “They are unfair, they only target the IFP. The ANC wants to press the IFP down. Why not forget about the violence from before to have a clean page?” he
Gumede, not surprisingly, disagrees. He believes the killers deserve the death penalty, but adds that “seeing as the Constitutional Court has outlawed that particular weapon against criminals, they should be given the next harshest sentence. They sentenced their victims to death, so I think they should be sentenced to a living death,” he said.
* Although Victor Ntuli escaped the two 1987 attacks, he was eventually gunned down at a wedding reception on January 7, 1990, allegedly by a man identified to be an IFP member.