/ 29 November 2022

The release of Walus, the man who pressed South Africa’s nuclear button

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Janusz Walus has been released on parole. (Photo by Gallo Images/Oryx Media Archive/Getty Images)

Raised in a house full of women, you can understand why every single school holiday  I’d escape from home and visit any one of my two older cousins, who lived across the way in one of the main townships in the small town of Pietermaritzburg, Imbali. It was a chance as a young teen to get away and be as rambunctious as any boy was at that age, minus the lectures that came with that sort of behaviour. 

At that time, in the early 1990s, townships across most of the country, and especially in Kwazulu-Natal, were tension-filled — it wasn’t just rolling hills and gravel. I remember being warned not to wear particular colours of clothing as it would denote that I was either from an ANC-supporting home or one supporting the Inkatha Freedom Party. Depending on which street I’d ventured into, it could spell trouble. Luckily, yellow wasn’t my colour — or was it red — who knows?

Unit 13, Imbali, was a section of the township considered more aligned with the ANC’s agenda than the Zulu nationalist agenda that defined the IFP at the time — or so my young mind thought. While I enjoyed running up and down the hills of Imbali or another escape of Umlazi outside Durban, the tension in this part of the world was ever present.

What a time to be alive, as the country navigated its path to its first democratic election.

Thoughts of my more innocent age came to mind last week with the news of the imminent release of Janusz Walus, the man who assassinated South African Communist Party leader Chris Hani in 1993. The mention of his name immediately took me back to Imbali and the Easter holiday I spent there when Hani was murdered. His death may have taken place about 500km away but its reverberations were being felt on those streets. 

At that stage, all talk of a political settlement was off the table, a civil war was inevitable and, what I knew and experienced as a deadly IFP-ANC factional war in my province, would now be national. 

For a 13-year-old, dreaming of a better future and getting on the highway to Johannesburg, it was a nightmare scenario. I vividly remember a conversation with Thando, an older cousin — who’d routinely go on nighttime patrols against both police and IFP-led raids in the township — about what would soon unfold. Walus had essentially pressed the nuclear button as at that point it looked as if the country would blow up in our faces, collapse in a heap and we’d experience an unravelling similar to what most of sub-Saharan Africa had experienced in the years after getting their freedom in the 1950s.

It’s a traumatic memory, not only for a boy in a tiny township on the outskirts of Pietermaritzburg in 1993, but I imagine for the vast majority old enough to consider their own futures against a bloody backdrop. (Load-shedding — how I wish that had been my ultimate concern back then and not whether or not my cousin would come back from his nightly patrols.)

The  imminent release of Walus, in line with our laws, is not a small matter. Much like Gavrilo Princip, who lit the flames to World War I in 1914 with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, his actions were seminal.

The real “miracle” is that we didn’t choose that path, and for perhaps that reason alone above all else, I still applaud the leadership of our elder statesmen and women of the time, Nelson Mandela, Winnie Mandela, Walter Sisulu among others. 

I’m torn by his release, understanding full and well that the laws of this country must be upheld, regardless of the trauma that men such as Walus have put us through, particularly my young self. 

His release should perhaps be a time to reflect on how far we’ve come and just how far we have yet to travel. Next April, we will mark 30 years since the passing of Hani. we’d do well as a country to reflect on the path we chose that day and where we are on that journey. This is not an ANC, SACP matter, it’s the story of us — a troubled people.