Themba Khoza, who died on Sunday, was at the centre of some of the most brutal killings in living memory
Ivor Powell
When Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) firebrand Themba Khoza died of Aids- related illnesses on Sunday, so did many of the secrets of one of the darkest chapters in South Africa’s recent past.
Khoza was facing 19 charges arising out of the bloody violence that gripped the townships around Johannesburg in the period of constitutional negotiations.
The charges, which included gun-running, incitement to violence and attempted murder, were to form part of a series of showcase trials brought by the National Directorate of Public Prosecutions.
The string of trials was planned as a symbolic catharsis of the apartheid era through prosecutions of individuals, including former Vlakplaas commander Eugene de Kock, chemical and bio-logical warfare programme chief Wouter Basson, police general Krappies Engelbrecht … and the man at the centre of some of the most brutal and cynical killings in living memory, IFP Youth Brigade leader Khoza.
Incomprehensibly, this is the man over whose death the African National Congress expressed a “sense of grief”, extending condolences to both Khoza’s family and the IFP, and going on to commend the IFP’s one-time warlord-in-chief for his “important role” as a conciliator.
The IFP’s Musa Myeni described Khoza as a “soft man”.
While politicians’ tributes may come cheap, the actions to which Khoza has been linked have cost South Africa dear.
Indeed there is a case to be made that Khoza could lay legitimate claim to a place among the top 10 mass murderers in South Africa’s history.
Khoza, as the IFP’s Gauteng leader and the top man in the party’s militant Youth Brigade, was effectively commander-in- chief of the IFP impis that used the migrant workers’ hostels to launch a bloody war of attrition in the East Rand and Vaal townships between 1990 and 1994.
“Wherever Themba Khoza showed up in those days, violence was sure to follow, whether it was a rally, a protest march or a migrant workers’ hostel,” recalls investigator Sally Sealey, at the time attached to the Independent Board for Inquiry into Informal Repression.
Another prominent researcher of the hostel violence in the early 1990s, Dr Dave Everatt (at the time with the Community Agency for Social Enquiry) agrees: “We never really understood how Inkatha worked, but I can say Khoza was in all the wrong places at all the wrong times.
“He played an immensely destructive role in the violence, and while I can understand the impulse to heal the wounds of the past, I think the ANC is being a little hasty in trying to put the past behind us.”
Somewhere between 14 000 and 20 000 people lost their lives in the township war of the early 1990s – about 70% of them township residents targeted by the IFP-supporting hostel dwellers. In the first year of the carnage, less than 10% of the victims of violence were impis.
Moreover, the genesis of the violence has convincingly been dated to a series of unprovoked massacres launched from IFP-supporting hostels on township residents, first in the Vaal, then later on the East Rand, in Soweto and other townships on the Reef.
Testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), both in amnesty applications and public hearings, has named Khoza as the chief supplier of firearms to the hostel dwellers. Balancing this there is equally weighty evidence from former Vlakplaas operatives, including De Kock himself, that Khoza was working as an agent of the apartheid regime’s security apparatus.
According to De Kock, as well as his fellow Vlakplaas operative Brood van Heerden, Khoza made the first approaches that led to his partnership with the security police dirty tricks operation. Intriguingly, De Kock also claims he cut ties with Khoza when he learned that Khoza was also on the national intelligence payroll.
It has subsequently emerged that the township massacres were often planned in tandem with Vlakplaas operatives, Civil Co-operation Bureau agents and other agencies connected to the security forces – coincided closely with the launch of the IFP as a political party in the PWV region in July 1990.
The picture that has subsequently come into focus is of the killings as part of a carefully co-ordinated strategy of low- intensity conflict, in which the IFP impis were used as surrogate forces by the apartheid regime in an attempt to weaken the liberation movement and demoralise its support base in the townships.
As such the violence played itself out not only through the usual techniques of demorali-sation – the indiscriminate murder of innocents, like bystanders, ordinary civilians and children and babies – but also in specialised horrors, like the unselective massacre of commuters on suburban trains.
All of these atrocities were committed with seeming impunity, and after the conflict had already been raging for more than a year, the courts had yet to convict a single IFP-supporter or hostel dweller.
Let alone Themba Khoza. Apart from the 19 charges brought by the National Directorate of Public Prosecutions, Khoza was directly linked to the planning and ordering of assorted atrocities, including the murder of East Rand community activist Sam Ntuli in 1990, the killing of 38 mourners at a night vigil in Sebokeng in January 1991, the alleged plot to massacre the ANC leadership in Shell House, Johannesburg, in April 1994, and the notorious massacre of nearly 50 civilians at Boipatong on June 17 1992.
In recent testimony before a TRC amnesty committee, one of the self-confessed Boipatong killers, Andreas Nosenga, claimed that not only was Khoza (with South African Police Service members) involved in planning the Boipatong killings, but he was also instrumental in providing the firearms used in the massacre, and in removing the guns ahead of police investigations.
Numerous IFP supporters have been jailed in connection with these and other incidents, allegedly incited by Khoza. Yet until the time of his death, the former IFP firebrand was an IFP member of parliament.
His position as Gauteng populist leader ended in 1994 – at a time when the IFP, having decisively lost the elections, adopted a more conciliatory stance towards its former foe. Khoza as well as his comrade-in-arms, IFP PWV leader Humphrey Ndlovu, were summarily dumped from the party’s provincial executive. But in one of South Africa’s more surreal political makeovers, he subsequently clawed his way back as one of the architects of the IFP’s peace pact with the ANC.