by Mark Austin
One weekend, a Zulu gang of two hundred men, armed with AK-47s, machete-like pangas and wooden clubs called knobkerries, left a migrant workers’ hostel in Tembisa township and went on the rampage, stopping cars, setting fire to them with occupants inside and gunning down entire families in their homes. By dawn on Sunday, thirty people from the ANC-supporting area of Tembisa were dead, including a five-month-old baby, executed in his bedroom with his parents. By the afternoon, the violence had spread to Thokoza township about twenty miles away. Sixteen more people died there, mainly Zulus from another hostel who were killed in a revenge attack by ANC supporters.
I was asked to go to Tembisa on Monday morning and compile a report on the violence – and, in particular, the issue of Zulu migrant workers living in the midst of largely ANC-supporting townships. Things seemed reasonably calm in Tembisa, and so we drove in.
My sound man Gugu, a big, huggable bear of a man from Soweto, did something I had never seen him do before. He put a handgun under the seat of the car before we set off. He didn’t know I’d noticed, and I pretended not to. I am utterly opposed to reporters arming ourselves in almost any situation. I think it turns us into combatants rather than neutral observers. But I could understand why he did it. Such was the atmosphere for black South Africans at the time. I felt sad but kept quiet.
At the sprawling hostel compound we found barely any Zulus willing to talk. But one man told us it had all begun when a young Zulu selling milk from his bike was cornered by township vigilantes. He was accused of being a spy, and was beaten, hacked and then necklaced. ‘He was a harmless kid,’ we were told, and that was why the massacre took place.
It was all so familiar and typical of what was happening. The violence was beginning to follow a classic pattern, only it was becoming more frequent, almost routine. And it was all connected to the prospect of the looming elections.
I was very pessimistic about how things would turn out. The talks were stalling, Mandela and de Klerk were at loggerheads and the townships were in flames. On top of all this, many white South Africans and expat Europeans who had made their lives in the country were now talking openly about leaving. Mandela knew that an exodus of white talent and business know-how would deal a severe blow to the economy, wreck hopes for his rainbow nation and send out a terrible message to the world. A year earlier, it was an impassioned speech from Mandela that had prevented a panicked exodus of whites.
On the afternoon of 10 April 1993, Chris Hani, one of the most charismatic leaders of the anti-apartheid movement, was shot dead outside his home. He had huge popularity and support among young ANC voters in the townships. A firebrand in the style of Che Guevara, he would often appear at rallies in combat fatigues, making rousing speeches that would delight the young radicals who swarmed to hear him. The militant wing of the ANC clearly viewed Hani as a possible successor to Mandela, and a future president in a democratic South Africa. He was that popular.
It soon became clear that his attacker was Janusz Waluś, a neo-Nazi Polish immigrant. Waluś shot him once in the stomach and several times in the head.
The timing was significant. Hani was a key player in the fragile negotiations taking place following the release of Mandela, which the ANC hoped would lead to the first-ever free and fair elections in the country. At that time, the talks appeared to be on the verge of a major breakthrough. Waluś and the white extremists who had put him up to the murder didn’t want that to happen. Later, at a Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearing in 1997, Waluś admitted that he’d intended to try to provoke a race war, derail the political process and halt any progress towards elections and the inevitable end of white minority rule.
Many senior figures in South Africa seriously believed it could be the moment that tipped the country into all-out civil war. ‘I fear for our country,’ said Archbishop Desmond Tutu. ‘Chris Hani, more than anyone else, had the credibility among the young to rein in the radicals.’
It would prove to be Mandela’s greatest test in the run-up to the election.
There was an upsurge in violence, and within hours more than seventy people had been killed. There was an immediate sense of foreboding after it became clear that it was a white man who had killed Hani. Until then, apart from the desperate crime rate, the privileged white population had largely been isolated from the murderous and worsening violence taking place in the townships all around Johannesburg.
Immediately after the killing, Mandela had gone on television to deliver an address to a nervous, fearful and divided nation.
‘Tonight, I am reaching out to everyone in South Africa, black and white, from the very depths of my being,’ he said. ‘A white man, full of prejudice and hate, came to our country and committed a deed so foul that our whole nation now teeters on the brink of disaster.
‘The cold-blooded murder of Chris Hani has sent shock waves throughout the country and the world. Our grief and anger is tearing us apart. What has happened is a national tragedy that has touched millions of people, across the political and colour divide.’
And then he said this:
Now is the time for all South Africans to stand together against those who, from any quarter, wish to destroy what Chris Hani gave his life for – the freedom of all of us. Now is the time for our white compatriots, from whom messages of condolence continue to pour in, to reach out with an understanding of the grievous loss to our nation… Now is the time for the police to act with sensitivity and restraint, to be real community policemen and women who serve the population as a whole. There must be no further loss of life at this tragic time. This is a watershed moment for all of us… We must not let the men who worship war, and who lust after blood, precipitate actions that will plunge our country into another Angola.
Now, it would have been easy for Mandela to pander to the angry young militants who supported Hani, in order to cement a constituency that wasn’t naturally on his side. It would have been easy to call off the talks and paint the apartheid leaders as masters of the dark arts, seeking to destroy the move to democracy. It would have been popular and there was almost certainly an element of truth to it.
But he didn’t. Mandela saw the immediate danger of all-out civil war and realized that was exactly what Waluś had been out to achieve. And he realized that the only way forward for South Africa was through reconciliation and peaceful change.
It is no coincidence that less than two months after the killing of Hani, negotiations between the ANC and the white government led to an agreement setting the date for South Africa’s first-ever free election – 27 April 1994. It would be the date when apartheid would finally collapse and the country would get its first black president.
One other point about the Hani killing and its aftermath was the almost-immediate arrest of Waluś for the shooting. It was a white Afrikaner woman, a neighbour of Hani’s, who called the police and identified the killer. In the tense atmosphere of South Africa at the time, that mattered.
Mandela had prevented an immediate descent into civil war. But he knew he now had a fight on his hands on three fronts. He had to keep the talks with the apartheid leaders on track. He urgently had to quell the conflict raging in the townships. And he also had to mollify those white right-wingers plotting to undermine the entire transition.
That particular threat was dealt with for him, in a way he could never have imagined.
It all unfolded in Bophuthatswana, a place I had never heard of before I arrived in South Africa. There, in March 1994, the world got a glimpse of the violent chaos that could ensue if things went badly wrong at the elections in South Africa, now just a month away.
Bophuthatswana was one of apartheid’s great cons. It was a nominally independent black homeland within South Africa, created by the white regime in Pretoria to present to the world the impression of a free country. They spent millions of dollars on a kind of toytown capital, Mmabatho, complete with an ‘independent’ government and even its own president, Lucas Mangope.
; But when the apartheid regime collapsed, so too did the illusion that was Bophuthatswana. Mangope – a puppet of Pretoria – refused to countenance his people taking part in the elections and demonstrations flared.
Unable to control the protests, Mangope inexplicably appealed for help from a group of white right-wingers led by a former army general, Constand Viljoen. Viljoen immediately sent men from his Volksfront militia to protect key installations. But the mission was hijacked by hundreds of khaki-clad fanatics from other white extremist paramilitaries, who took to the streets in pickups and battered old Mercedes cars and unleashed utter mayhem, firing randomly at innocent black shoppers and bystanders. It provoked fury among the locals, who ran amok, smashing up shops and businesses and looting whatever they could. Local Bophuthatswana troops only added to the carnage by shooting wildly in a forlorn bid to restore order.
Into this chaos flew our charter plane from Johannesburg, dropping us at the airfield on the outskirts of Mmabatho. We picked up the car we’d arranged and were heading towards the city, when a convoy of white racists approached. They were members of Eugène Terre’Blanche’s Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB). I asked my cameraman Andy Rex to start filming. He was reluctant, but grabbed the camera and filmed the oncoming militia from inside our vehicle. Unfortunately, they very quickly saw what we were doing and didn’t like it at all.
The lead pickup truck drew up alongside our car and several armed men jumped out. They were screaming at us in Afrikaans, and I got out of the car to try to placate them. It quickly became obvious that was not going to happen. They were furious and out of control. The tall, bearded figure who was apparently in charge pointed his pistol at me and barked orders I simply could not understand. He became more and more irate, and I thought he was going to shoot. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ I said, ‘put the gun away.’
‘Fuck? Fuck?’ he screamed. It was obviously the only word he recognized, and he was furious. At that point, my young producer James Brittain also got out of the car to try to calm the guy down. That didn’t work either. They grabbed both of us and pointed to the field at the side of the road. In broken English, one of the racist lunatics told us to walk down the embankment into the field and get down on our knees. Two of them were now pointing guns at us.
We did as they asked and it was utterly terrifying. They told us not to turn around. We should just stare ahead.
So there we were on our knees in a dusty field in some godforsaken place no one had ever heard of, and even less cared about. Not for the first time, I wondered why on earth I put myself in these positions. James was shaking with worry. ‘They’re going to kill us, aren’t they?’ he said.
‘Bloody hope not,’ was all I could manage as reassurance.
I really wasn’t confident they wouldn’t. No story is worth dying for, but this one certainly wasn’t. It felt like we were there for an hour; in truth, it was only a matter of minutes. Behind us, out of sight, they were emptying our car of flak jackets and camera kit. They took it all. Then we heard their trucks move off, followed closely by the sound of laughter. It was Andy’s unmistakable Zimbabwean cackle. ‘Hey, you two. You can come back now. They’ve gone.’ And then more chuckling. He may have seen the funny side. James and I certainly didn’t.
For James, it was one of his first assignments with us. Until joining ITN he’d been working on the local paper in Johannesburg. The blood had drained from his face, he was still shaking and he didn’t speak for an hour. I, on the other hand, couldn’t stop talking. It’s odd how people react so differently to the same experience. We did, however, share one emotion: huge relief.
But we were still in a spot of trouble. The story was happening a few miles down the road right now, and we had no means of filming it. We made our way to the hotel where most of the media were camped, and hoped to be able to beg, steal or borrow enough equipment to get a story out.
On the streets, events had taken a highly significant turn. The South African Defence Force had moved into Mmabatho and started chasing the white right-wingers out of town. In one much-publicized incident, three wounded white racists were found slumped by their blue Mercedes pleading for help. A Bophuthatswana police patrol stopped at the scene and a constable, Ontlametse Menyatsoe, went over to speak to one of the men, an AWB colonel, Alwyn Wolfaardt. Menyatsoe asked him if he was a member of the AWB. When Wolfaardt confirmed that he was, the police officer lifted up his rifle and shot all three men dead at point-blank range, in full view of the cameras. ‘Who do you think you are?’ he shouted angrily at them. ‘What are you doing in my country?’
It proved to be a stunning and seminal moment in the creation of the new South Africa, and quickly became a big story. Somehow, we managed to buy footage from a freelance cameraman who had captured the killings, then borrowed some equipment and sent a story to London.
The picture of the shooting was an image that symbolized the defeat of the white right, the feebleness of their pathetic last stand and the vacuity of their cause. And it went around the world. It was also the moment the threat to the elections posed by the racists receded into the distance. In the wake of the humiliating fiasco, Constand Viljoen quit as head of the right-wing coalition. The extremists were in disarray. Mandela’s job of neutralizing the threat had effectively been done for him.
The outcome of the crisis also showed the loyalty and effectiveness of the South African Defence Force. White and black troops acting together for the good of the new South Africa. It was a reassuring sight for many who welcomed the transformation taking place in the country.
For many reasons, I will not forget Bophuthatswana in a hurry. Andy Rex still laughs about the day I had a gun pointing at my head. Curiously, I don’t.
But our trip was marked by sadness on a personal level, too. John Harrison, the BBC’s correspondent in South Africa at the time, was killed in a car accident near the capital as he and his camera team were driving to a TV station to send back a report for BBC News. It was a dreadful shock to all of us. He had become a mate as much as a rival. At the wake at his family home in Johannesburg, the phone rang and the caller asked to speak to John’s widow. It was Nelson Mandela; a measure of the man who would become president, and of the reporter himself.
A month before polling day, the Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party was still vowing to boycott the elections. They were staging protest marches in Durban and right across their Natal heartland. But on Monday 28 March, they planned a big demonstration in Johannesburg. Andy Rex and I weren’t particularly bothered about yet another political march, and Andy actually suggested we played golf instead. I decided we would put the clubs in the car, but we would also go to the march to take some pictures to use should we decide to do a story later in the day. Suffice to say, we never got anywhere near the golf course.
It was a noisy and colourful march. Thousands of Zulu warriors in traditional dress, armed with knobkerries and spears, dancing and chanting their way through central Johannesburg. Andy was busy filming the scene when suddenly gunshots rang out. Pistol fire at first, but then, within a minute or two, the sustained rapid clatter of AK-47s. It was loud and close, and marchers ran in different directions; some fell close by to us, others drew their own weapons and started firing themselves.
I dived for cover under an armoured police vehicle. Andy was leaning against the wall of an office building filming the gunfire and the chaos in front of him. He claims he looked everywhere for me to do a piece to camera while the firing was taking place, but says he gave up when he saw me huddled nervously under the vehicle. I wasn’t the bravest.
When I emerged, during a lull in the shooting, bodies were everywhere. We saw several dead and many, many more injured. The pavements of Johannesburg ran with blood that Monday morning.
Most of the shooting came from ANC security men guarding the organization’s headquarters, Shell House, on Jeppe Street. Nineteen died there, and many others were shot dead in surrounding streets. It became known as the Shell House massacre, and ref
lected the still-rising tensions between Mandela’s ANC and Buthelezi’s IFP. The ANC claimed its guards had acted defensively and were protecting its property and staff. A subsequent judicial inquiry found absolutely no evidence for this and concluded that such a justification had been ‘fabricated after the event’. It was hugely critical of the ANC guards. Later, Mandela admitted that he had given orders to protect the HQ and its staff, even if it meant having to shoot to kill.
The blame game was just getting underway, but the fact was that, just weeks before the election, dozens of people were lying dead on the streets of downtown Johannesburg. It did not augur well. In my report that night, I said that it was quite possible that Zulu fighters would now seek not only to boycott the elections but also to disrupt them with a campaign of threats and intimidation. I was convinced the desire for vengeance would be overwhelming. It is what normally happened, and we were now perilously close to the elections.
Around this time, I went to Cape Town to interview Archbishop Desmond Tutu. I wanted to know how the country’s popular spiritual leader with the infectious, screeching laugh and unbridled optimism felt about the way things were going. I pitched up at his home with my cameraman Andy Rex and he seemed delighted to see us. He always greeted me with a fist bump and a wonderful smile, and I felt uplifted and special. It was as if we were great friends, and even though we were not, it made me feel good.
As usual, he was in a hurry. We set up the camera and we sat down to do the interview. And then came the crushing moment. ‘Now, how are you, Michael?’ he asked. As I crashed forlornly back to earth, I pretended not to notice. Interestingly, a few years later the BBC correspondent Allan Little mentioned to me that he had met Tutu on numerous occasions, and almost every time they saw each other, the archbishop failed to recognize him.
I had no doubts the interview would make a good story, but I was quietly hoping he would see some optimism for the future. I was beginning to feel a real affinity for the place, and I felt I had no small emotional investment in the country. I wanted him to tell me everything would be fine and that my family and I had nothing to worry about. As it was, I left disappointed and worried.