plant tree
Peter Dickson
It was seven years to the day when Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry Ronnie Kasrils returned to a massacre site outside Bisho’s Independence stadium this week.
It was his first return to the site of the September 7 1992 massacre by Ciskei bantustan troops of 28 African National Congress marchers he had led through a gap in the stadium fence for a prohibited push to Bisho.
Hundreds were injured when the troops, ostensibly on the orders of Ciskei dictator Oupa Gqozo, suddenly opened fire. The marchers – including Chris Hani, Cyril Ramaphosa, Steve Tshwete and Harry Gwala – had planned to occupy Gqozo’s capital and force his resignation.
Kasrils remains a hero to the once militant rural people of the Ciskei, 80 000 of whom followed him from King William’s Town to Bisho that day.
On Tuesday, the climax of his gruelling nationwide Arbor Week tour to plant trees in the memory of those who had died for democracy, they flocked to the stark sandbrick and granite memorial on the massacre site opposite the modern Eastern Cape legislature.
Kasrils, accompanied by his wife Eleanor, sat mopping his brow in the 32C noonday sun as an array of choirs and dancers paid homage.
The Yeoville boykie began his address with a passage from the Bible’s Book of Isaiah, Chapter 56, in which God tells the Israelites he is about to lead from bondage they will live long and never again be slaves.
Arbor Week trees, he says, are symbols of South Africa’s own freedom struggle and beacons of healing.
Maybe it was the heat, or a glimpse of the cold concrete stadium on his right, perhaps even a glance at his watch, but Kasrils fell briefly silent. Suddenly, his voice rising, he began again.
“It was at this hour,” he stammered, “just after 12 on one such hot, sunny day, when 80 000 of us came over the hill from King William’s Town, saying `no more slavery’. The police helicopter was high in the sky.”
Shouting, he added: “Gqozo gave the order of the apartheid masters from that building [the present legislature] to open fire and our people’s blood was spilled, blood that nourishes the tree of freedom.”
No regrets. And the thunder of applause showed no recrimination. In King William’s Town on Tuesday, Gqozo, who submitted a statement on the massacre to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996 before being treated at Queenstown’s Komani state psychiatric hospital for depression, denied giving the order to fire.
He was sorry, he said, for the loss of life, “indeed any loss of life”, and sympathised deeply with the families of the victims. The question of just who gave the order that day, Gqozo or his “apartheid masters”, may finally be answered next week by former Ciskei soldiers Velile Mkhosana and Mzameli Gonya, who have applied for amnesty for their role in the massacre.