Tangeni Amupadhi
Nine-year-old Mita Molete came home from school crying a few weeks ago. She pleaded with her mother not to let her go on a school tour to Durban.
Molete, whose scalp was hacked with a panga during the 1992 Boipatong massacre on the Vaal Triangle, has developed a fear of Zulus.
“She does not like these people,” says her mother, Matseleng Molete, pointing to a group of kwaMadala hostel residents in the Sebokeng College of Education hall at the Truth and Reconcilliation Commission this week.
“When she sees Mangosuthu [Buthelezi] on television she gets scared and wants it switched off.”
For the past two weeks Mita and her mother have attended amnesty hearings in nearby Sebokeng to learn to deal with her fear and understand the events that led to her being confined to a wheelchair.
But the Moletes and the rest of the Boipatong community are no closer to reconciliation or comprehension than they were eight years ago.
In the still of the night on June 17 1992 a mob of about 300 men wearing white headbands and gloves rampaged through the township and the adjoining Slovo Park squatter camp indiscriminately hacking people, breaking windows and looting.
Apart from leaving 45 people dead, mostly women and children, and 18 seriously wounded, the massacre derailed negotiations between the African National Congress and the National Party. The ANC pulled out of the Codesa talks at the World Trade Centre in Kempton Park.
Sixteen men, convicted of murder in 1994, have applied to the truth commission for amnesty. The Boipatong community is opposing the applications.
This week amnesty applicant Victor Mthembu, who is serving 20 years for murder, spoke of the attack in general terms, insisting the target was ANC supporters in revenge for the burning of the house of an Inkatha Freedom Party member.
Asked by the community’s lawyer, advocate Daniel Berger, to explain the killing of children, Mthembu retorted with a Zulu adage that “a snake gives birth to a snake”, causing the packed hall to erupt in murmurs. The hall was divided between supporters of the amnesty applicants and the victims.
Most Boipatong residents have said they will not forgive the applicants and a few feel Mthembu did not tell everything. They are demanding to see white people who they insist took part in the slaying. Mthembu said police stood guard at the entrance to the township and did not attempt to stop the killing.
The IFP’s Gauteng strongman Themba Khoza has denied Mthembu’s confession that he (Khoza) told the perpertrators to destroy goods looted in the township.
The hearing was postponed to August 11 this week after Judge Sandile Ngcobo ruled that the hearing into the other 15 applicants go ahead in the interest of gathering the truth. Berger had asked for the applications be dismissed on the grounds they were incomplete and did not comply with the National Reconciliation and Unity Act.