Jim Day
THE knife in his hand was a good 15cm long. But he was pleasant when he said, “I don’t want to hurt you. Just give me your money.” His buddies surrounded me, four or five of them, pulled me back and to the ground and started grabbing at my pockets.
They didn’t beat me, so I found myself trying to brush their hands off, as if I were covered with spiders. Lots of people were milling around, so after a few seconds they stopped, and I was able to get up and run.
I’d seen the one with the knife just a few minutes before in Jeppe Street. He and his friends tried to mug me there, too, hauling me to the ground and going for my pockets. I got away, but I made a mistake. I patted my breast pocket to see if my wallet was still there, which it was. And one of them saw me do that. “Shit,” I thought.
I jogged across Jeppe, made for Commissioner Street, where I’d seen dozens of cops in riot gear loafing around earlier that morning. But before I could get there the guy with the knife crossed the street in front of me.
After the second unsuccessful shakedown, I made it to Commissioner Street at a fast walk and headed for a bright-yellow armoured vehicle where cops were cradling their shotguns. There I took a moment for quiet reflection.
I flew into Johannesburg six weeks ago from my home on the open plains of the American West. I moved into a heavily fortified commune in leafy Parkhurst with a couple of white guys who told me within an hour of my arrival not to go to the city centre unless I wanted the very South African experience of getting shot.
I’d smelled a whiff of paranoia in their advice, but on Wednesday morning, as I smoked a cigarette alongside the police, I was thinking South Africa may actually be a somewhat violent country. That’s when I heard the chanting of 15 000 Zulus marching up the street.
This was what I had been sent out to cover: Zulus marching to demand that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission find out the facts behind the 1994 “Shell House Massacre” in which 11 Zulu marchers were killed, most of them in a bloody battle said by the ANC to be an attempt to storm the ANC’s headquarters.
“That sounds fun,” I thought. I put my tiny tourist camera in my pocket, grabbed a notebook and went looking for some action.
The marchers hadn’t arrived at Library Gardens yet, so I went looking for them. That’s when I got mugged.
But now the Zulus were coming. They came in waves, led by men in fur loincloths, dancing and hooting and chanting, painted shields at their sides, and thrusting their knobkerries and assegais into the air.
While choppers circled overhead, the marchers passed razor wire1,5 m high around City Hall. Library Gardens was filled; people perched in trees and on top of buildings.
I stood near the library steps. Some of the men around me had thoughtfully sheathed the tips of their assegais with corn cobs. Self-styled “soldiers” in T-shirts that said “Self-Protection Unit of KwaZulu” separated the speakers from the crowd. Then came the long speeches from Zulu royalty.
“It is with a deep sense of sorrow and sadness … that we remember those who were mercilessly mowed down with heavy weapons of war,” said Prince Vanana Zulu of Kwaminya in KwaZulu-Natal. “No amount of cover-up will blot out from our minds the sad memory of the Shell House Massacre.”
The Inkatha Freedom Party has called for March 28 to be made a national holiday and for the truth commission to find out the facts of the “massacre”. They want President Nelson Mandela to testify.
That was all fairly routine and could have been dispensed with in a press release. They gave a closing prayer and people started dancing again. Then someone got a little trigger-happy. Immediately hundreds of shots popped from all over the square, like packs of firecrackers. I saw several people shooting semi-automatic handguns into the air. One of the gunmen was a couple of metres to my right.
Some people ducked for cover and others fled. But many kept dancing, as the shooting continued. I finally straightened up and ran from the library steps toward Market Street, where police squatted among their Casspirs, aiming into the crowd as Zulus dove for cover. But the police held their fire, most of the shooting stopped, the crowd started marching toward the east, and I emerged unscathed.
Others were not so fortunate.
Police put the day’s death toll at three: two people at the Merafi Hostel in Soweto and a third at the George Goch Railway Station on Wednesday morning. About 18 injuries were reported in connection with the march, mostly from gunshot wounds, with a couple of assegai attacks, stone throwings and other assaults thrown in.
The ANC compared the march with the 1994 “assault on ANC headquarters” at Shell House and blamed march leaders for leaving “a trail of blood in and around Johannesburg”.
The National Party backed the marchers’ demands for an investigation into the Shell House shootings.
As I wandered back to the newsroom, I was thinking a day in Johannesburg has a bit more pepper than one back home on the plains. Getting mugged, ducking random gunfire, looking down some cop’s gun barrel. I sat at my desk, lit another cigarette, and recovered my wallet from my sock.