Ann Eveleth
A WOODEN ladder fashioned from tree branches leans across the trunk of the old gum tree where the lifeless bodies of Vitalis Mthembu and Muzikawubanga Sitholi dangled until the police arrived on Wednesday last
The branch above bears no scars from the ordeal, but three rivulets of dried blood down a rock shaded by the tree’s wide awning betray the lethal tale. A gaunt middle-aged man emerges from the shade of a paraffin tank at the shop across the road. Glancing back at the five wizened men still sheltering from the white-hot afternoon sun, he agrees to talk about the hanging.
Mesatshwa Dlamini says the young men had come to attack him for the second time, firing a shot through the window of his rondavel in rural Sizanenjana before his wife’s screams brought the neighbours running. He says there is no politics in the area. He thinks they wanted the money he earns on the mines in Johannesburg.
Dlamini claims nobody wanted Mthembu (24) and Sithole (22) — “known rapists and housebreakers” — to die. “When the community threatened to call the police they said they’d rather hang themselves than go to jail … They even admitted to raping and housebreaking. They were always causing trouble.”
Neither Dlamini nor the younger Bheki Mazibuko, who joined in telling the tale, could remember who Mthembu and Sithole had admitted raping or which houses they said they had burgled. But both said the two young men had spent time in jail for their deeds.
Dlamini says the neighbours chased his attackers and brought them back to face justice: “First we went to the induna (councillor) to ask him to take the case. He refused and said he didn’t want to get involved.” (The induna — a Mr Mazibuko — refused to speak to us.)
Dlamini’s tale continues: Some 500 men, women and children gathered at the tree that fateful morning to question the suspects and decide their fate: “No one was acting as the judge. The whole community had to
The “court” proceedings lasted some six hours. “We tried to get them to confess. Finally Sithole admitted to the attack, but Mthembu refused until the end. When we said we were going to call the police, Mthembu said it was better if he hanged himself. He knew he was a wanted man.” Dlamini says Mthembu took the rope handed to him by the community he had known all his life, climbed the eight steps of the ladder to the lowest branch, tied one end of the rope around it and the other around his own neck — and jumped.
“His last words to his friend Sithole were, ‘You sold me out.’ ” Dlamini says Sithole followed suit, hanging himself so close to Mthembu that his dying body kicked out at the corpse of his friend.
Sithole’s mother is still in mourning. Huddled in a blanket and kneeling on a grass mat on the cement floor of her son’s rondavel, a frail Thembene Shabalala stares blankly at the single white candle burning in her son’s memory, in keeping with Zulu funeral
Her neighbour and sister-in-law Mafana Sithole speaks for her. She says Dlamini is “telling lies”. Her nephew was in Bulwer with his girlfriend when Dlamini’s house was attacked: “In the morning when he came back and went to his room, more than 100 people came to take him down to the store. They killed him there. They hit him and forced him to hang himself.”
Describing the young Sithole as “a good boy — a man who behaved himself well and helped the people fetch their cattle from the hills”, Sithole says neither her nephew nor Mthembu ever spent time in jail. Mother Shabalala interjects that this is the first she has ever heard of her son committing crimes.
Sithole’s brother Sihambhele avers Mthembu was “at his home listening to a Radio Zulu programme when we heard the shots”.
The official police statement says a “people’s court” found the two men guilty of attempted murder and they were “ordered by the community to hang themsleves with ropes supplied by the community … in the presence of the community”.
Dlamini seems more relieved than remorseful, but says the community doesn’t speak of what he calls “the
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