Peter Dickson
Shocked Mdantsane commuters, tired of a taxi war which has been raging in the East London township, were greeted with a horrific sight early last Wednesday morning.
Tied to a pole at the side of a dirt track at Bulura, a note bearing the word “thief” nailed to his chest, was the severely beaten body of a man.
It had been a relatively quiet week on the streets of Mdantsane. Troops had to be brought in to stop rival taxi operators from killing each other again at the disputed new rank, while angry residents had flogged three suspected thieves up the road in King William’s Town.
But in Mdantsane, the South Africn National Civic Organisation war on crime appeared to have slopped into the shadows after police National Commissioner George Fivaz sent his right-hand man to jack up a wanting local police force. The vigilantes were nowhere to be seen.
Police took several days to piece the story together.
The previous weekend, the dead man and a friend, accused of stealing a generator, were rounded up by locals and handed over to the Bluewater police station where they were detained. On Tuesday, they were released pending further investigation, says police representative Captain Sibongile Ndyoko.
When the men returned to their homes, they found them vandalised. Ndyoko says they decided to seek retribution.
The two found themselves up against a stick-wielding crowd. One of the men managed to run away, but his friend was beaten to death.
The following afternoon, in Duncan Village’s C Section, an enraged mob attacked five young men and accused them of stealing money from children.
Police and traffic department officials, one of whom, Superintendent Malcolm Stevens, succeeded in rescuing one of the critically injured men from a vicious beating in a shack, raced for once to the area after the emergency radio control network reported a “riot” had broken out.
But for one of the accused, Ntisikelelo Yabo (18), the heavily armed police were too late.
When a tyre was placed around his neck he made a run for it, but the mob chased him and killed him.
Mdumiseni Myodeni (56) was taking his afternoon nap when he was awoken by screaming and shouting. When he looked out of his window there were “over 500” people gathered at the bottom of his garden.
“He [Yabo] was lying on the floor and the people were dropping rocks on his face,” Myodeni says.
The battered young man somehow managed to crawl to a makeshift drainage trench a few feet away and tried to squeeze into a concrete pipe only 50cm wide.
When police pulled his body from under the bloodstained rocks in the trench, the hundreds of onlookers let out cries of joy.
In East London’s Frere hospital, the man Stevens rescued still sits in mute silence a week later, so badly beaten he cannot even speak.
There have been no arrests for the two murders.
Earlier this week, the provincial legislature heard that nearly 20% of the police in East London had been on sick leave every day last year. Adding maternity and normal leave, more than 38% of the city’s police were off duty on any given day.
In Port Elizabeth the figure was 33%, and in the Transkei centres of Idutywa – President Thabo Mbeki’s hometown – and Cala they were 57% and 60% respectively.