A Case to Ressurecting the Colesberg Four

Over three decades ago, 3 July 1985, four youths perished under a fusillade of gunshots in Colesberg’s Kuyasa township. Known as The Colesberg Four; Funeka Siyonzana, Thozamile “Krakra” Maciki, December Morumo and Mongezi Juda were untimely casualties in the barbarism that was South Africa’s political past.

On that day, a searing Karoo winter’s evening, an impassioned mob had assembled in the march and song of a toi-toi. Its design: To descend on the homes of two local police officers as reprisal for the manner in which a black resident, Mr Solani Gcanga, had been viciously assaulted inside a police armoured vehicle before being paraded around, sjambok tightened around his neck, earlier that day. 

Unbeknownst to the activists, the police had been tipped-off on the looming onslaught, preemptively coordinating an ambush from inside one of the homes. They opened fire on the approaching crowd. And when the gunsmoke had cleared, these four youths had sustained what would prove to be fatal wounds.

Unlike an unrelated incident involving four Cradock activists, the Colesberg story perished quietly as was the tendency in the nationwide carnage that characterised the State of Emergency of the 1980s. It did however signify a turning point in the local political landscape, culminating in frequent, prolonged consumer boycotts, protest marches, shutdowns at schools and a general intent to heed the national revolutionary mantra and make “apartheid unworkable and our country ungovernable” in the phrasing of late ANC president OR Tambo. 

Some of these incidents have inflicted such severe trauma and spoken of in hushed tones that an underling like myself is fated to only fluff it up woefully if he does not turn to a man who’d borne witness to the aftermath with his own eyes. One of the victims, Krakra Maciki, was blood – his own dear son, only 17 years old.

Scores have come knocking on his door. Activists, drunks, clerics, politicians, PhD students, and just when he thought after so many years of constant harassment he might be let alone, there I stood at his threshold unsure exactly what to say. And the old man, Tat’uMaciki, affectionately known as Lume, cool in his tartan cardigan and slacks, affably holding the door ajar to this intrusive nondescript. Not like I had much of a choice. The gutter telegram has it that no one can ever hope to tell a formidable story about Kuyasa without tapping on Lume’s (abbreviation to Malume – uncle) counsel. 

Besides, stories like this one stand in agonising contrast to the claim that “history has no blank pages.” If we ignore native Dr Sipho Mbuqe’s seminal work entitled Political Violence in South Africa: A Case Study of “Necklacing” in Colesberg that touches on those times, chances are entire chapters and empiricisms will forever be obliterated from the local slate. Through his standalone work, a dissertation at Duquesne University, we are able to interrogate aspects of these events as they unraveled. Dr Mbuqe has laid down the blueprint in that swirling pleasure of research that is devoid of the common trappings of scholarly pomposity. Far from being intellectual for the sake of it, the narrative is at times stirring, emotive and deliberately eschews the stiff-neck banalities of academia, telling a powerful story foremost complemented by solid academic underpinnings. More than anyone else, he has put forth this sagacious template, paving the groundwork for a possible wider shelf and audience so that the urban legends might find the clarity and dignity of verifiable truth. 

C Wright Mills an American sociologist, long dead, writes of a “sociological imagination” which is “the urge to know the social and historical meaning of the individual in the society and in the period in which he has had his quality and his being.” In those turbulent struggle years what then could be said was the “quality” of those “beings” navigating their way under the yoke of oppression? 

Behind thick bifocals, Lume’s small, twitching eyes magnanimously welcomed me inside. I declined. Suggested we perhaps find an appropriate setting, preferably one that offers the sort of libations that allay pressing nerves. Physically, Lume is hardly what you might call a man of stature. But what he lacks in size is sufficiently made up for in what comes out of his mouth. I have once eavesdropped on the toppie elaborating on concepts like “metaphysics” to a gawking rabble at a speakeasy for crying out loud!

At the height of the political riots circa 1985, the entire country repressed under a state of emergency, here was a man participating in furtive classes in “umrhabulo.” In obscure, dimly-lit venues, gathered about him were both his comrades and charges: activists who were being groomed in the ways of the United Democratic Front (UDF), subversive front of the banned African National Congress. 

A keen erudite, head-deep in the mechanics of this then-banned and dangerous undertaking, Lume was in the business of politicising young Colesbergians, an offence that naturally carried serious jail time not to mention brutal torture. Still, there he would be, handing out illegal pamphlets and daring the cadres to “rhabula” – “to imbibe” liberally on the insights and literature that kept him up all night.

One “obese,” – the daunting 1.5litre – bottle of Paarl Perle splayed empty before us, a lucid mouth now in place of my earlier nerves, I called on the tavern keeper to keep them coming. It was time to talk. The elder to impart, the novice to imbibe.

The backdrop of this story unfolds in a curious setting with the least likely characters in the foreground. On Sunday mornings, for instance, the late Reverend Thozi Mcoyana is a cleric tending to his flock. When the hymns have been sung and prayers said, he is standing before an altogether different crowd preaching a gospel of a non-pacifist variant that mentions nothing about turning the other cheek. Or praying for thy enemies. Instead, fiercely it calls on the mad scientists of apartheid “to let my people go.”

To the outside gaze his house bears all the modesty of a laypreacher’s lodgings. A family home with a doting Mrs Mcoyana lovingly tending to two children. In a town where much of the older populace had accepted their fate, resigned themselves to the seeming impossibility of toppling white rule, the reverend was putting his foot down like only those of first-class courage can.

It was during these years of obstinate defiance that would see prominent figures riding into town. One of those was Roshan Dehal, famous attorney to Robert McBride in the Magoo Bar bombing case. Snazzy-dressed, smooth-talking, Dehal was a liberal city slicker who’d have difficulty adjusting to the upfront racism that was a feature of everyday life down here in the platteland. Back then, no black person would even dream of entering the then Central Hotel as anything but a kitchenhand or housekeeper. If they were lucky, a separate area out back was reserved to those of a darker hue. Dehal might have stomached this were it not for one kink: his clients were all black, some facing the scaffold and there just weren’t enough hours during the day for meaningful consultation. 

On top of that he was a cosmopole, a scholar of law and would sooner die than cower to the prejudices of racist hoteliers. And so it would pass that the diminutive Durban lawyer would affirm his position to the establishment’s management and in no time, there they were, black cadres uncapping Castle dumpies and downing whisky “on the rocks, thanks” in the reserved white area….

eParkeni had endeavoured to bring this history to the future, to remember the gallant heroes who pushed serious time on the cold floors of some of the worst prisons imaginable. 

Those who are prone to cold sweats when the nightmares come. 

Who are sometimes overwhelmed by emotion when they remember what being an activist meant in the days before tenderpreneurship and politics of the tummy. 

Men who will never quite be the same again. 

Traumatised, haunted, pained by what they saw, what they did, what they endured. 

Those whose bones bear the stigmata of the savagery of police brutality. 

Who lay in the beds of the damned on death row waiting for their hour to come. 

Sadly some of these men are spread out across the land and hard to track down. Some lie six feet underneath it and their versions are lost to eternity. And outside, the world is plodding on so intently that if those who dare to speak do not make their peace now nobody has a right to accuse history of being unkind, of having left them in the void.

Agonising over this possible loss to posterity, this distance from the stories closest to us, an e-mail from Mr Solomzi Mtubu somewhat kept my hopes alive. More than the enthusiastic tone, it was something altogether human – the nicknames (nom de guerra perhaps) of the comrades who were always at the front of the marches. The usual suspects who were always first to be tossed inside of a police holding cell when the proverbial had hit the fan. 

We have “drink encane,” “Mtlokwa,” “Bhabhana,” “Oupa,” “Nomlay,” “Mrev,” “Mzalwana,” “Ken,” “Skyn”. Strange names. Looking at their human owners, the sobriquets just don’t match up. Too innocent, even child-like. That is when it hits you sharply that these were youngsters who probably played soccer and hung out outside shops talking about girls and secretly smoking cigarettes like many teenagers. Except the times dealt them a hard hand. Where they gave up the soccer boots and took up stones and petrol bombs to hurl against the establishment that had clamped its boot down on their necks, bent on keeping them as second class citizens in their land of birth. For their stance, many would pay a heavy price. For that, at the least they deserve to be remembered so that nobody ever forgets what they did there. Nobody ever forgets that they risked it all so that the rest of us might enjoy the fruits of liberation in our lifetime. 

May their names live on. 

May their spirits be honoured. 

The last five lines in the second stanza of Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poem Charge of the Light Brigade – probably the greatest ode to valour you are likely ever to read – bears a befitting recitation:

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die.

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred