| By merely making a stop at the Cape of Storms, once more, the people of the Sedibeng region made history.
Led by the Sedibeng district Executive Mayor Mahole Simon Mofokeng, a strong contingent comprising mostly the heroes and heroines of the 1992 Boipatong massacre and a few of those from the preceding era – Sharpeville 1960 and the 1980s ungovernability period – spent a week in Cape Town to rewrite history.
Here to witness the State of the Nation Address, which the district Executive Mayor Mofokeng finds historic in itself due to it being the first ever by the third president of a democratic South Africa, the people of the region quietly did it.
The historic State of the Nation address coincided with an equally historic celebration of twenty years since the first democratic president of South Africa Nelson Mandela was announced a free-man by a former Sedibeng politician and the last president of the old-order, FW de Klerk on February 11, 1990. De Klerk was there in Cape Town at the State of the Nation Address and so was the man he freed and thus opened the door to the country's freedom.
The old-statesman Nelson Mandela who's sentencing to twenty-seven years in prison is so inseparable to the events that happened in Sharpeville in 1960 was there, and so were the heroes and heroines of that memorable 21 March 1960 event.
Underscoring this inseparability is the coinciding official opening of the Nelson Mandela museum at the Slave Lodge in Cape Town. To the amusement of the crowd, a museum guide confirmed that the people of the region are the first to visit the historic museum. Boasting pictures – some seemingly unpublished – of Mandela himself, the museum also has audio-visual tapes of the television interviews he did just on the wake of the Sharpeville massacre, the banning orders that followed the same year and the decision to take up arms.
The rest is history, so they say. The decision to engage in armed-struggle resulted in the uncovering of the ANC secret military cells in Rivonia, a treason trial ensued and he was sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison.
And today, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary since his release, another historic episode was recalled by the Emfuleni mayor Assistance Mshudulu. A veteran of Cape city-life who spent time as a member of the democratic parliament in town, mayor Mshudulu spoke of the connection between Cape Town and the 1980s Vaal uprising.
'Where we are,' he echoed to the heroes and heroines present at the gala dinner at the Cape Sun hotel, 'It is not far from Mitchell's Plein [a township outside Cape Town] where the United Democratic Front was formed back in 1983.' He cited an intervening chapter connecting the arrest and release from prison of the man of the moment, Nelson Mandela himself.
Painstakingly, mayor Mshudulu explained the connection between the formation of the UDF in 1983 and the concomitant militancy that engulfed the Sedibeng region in what is known as the Vaal Uprising that started on September 3, 1984. The uprising soon blanketed the whole country and paved the way for the release of Mandela from prison.
But Reid Mokoena of the Sharpeville-Six is here, he is one of the last four surviving co-accused in a case relating to the events that happened on that very day, September 3, 1984.
As the September 3 insurrection ensued, followed another momentous trial – the Delmas Treason Trial in 1989 – the longest political trial in South African history books. A historic trial in which over eighty percent of the accused were from the Sedibeng region ended in 1989 to signal the release of the Sharpeville-Six and the historic message on February 11, 1990 on the release of Nelson Mandela and comrades from Robben Island.
The heroes and heroines of Boipatong and their Sedibeng counterparts also visited Robben Island. They made a stop at the Island just a day after commemorating the twentieth anniversary of his release from prison. And a day before, on February 10, the Sedibeng contingent had a briefing in the old parliament building – the very scene of the assassination of a prime minister who sent Mandela to prison.
The heroes and heroines of Boipatong and their Sedibeng counterparts were at the very scene of the events that took place on 6 September 1966 when the prime minister was killed. Ironically, the prime minister went up to Vereeniging five years earlier on 31 May 1961 to unveil a statue that still stands tall in the Sedibeng District Municipal headquarters in town.
'Then prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd was stabbed to death by Dimitri Tsafindas right there, where the woman in a red jersey is seated,' remarked a parliament worker to the visitors from Sedibeng.
Dimitri Tsafindas was a Greek-man working in parliament at the time, Reid Mokoena of the September 3 revolt was in our group and had spent time on death-row at the Pretoria central prison with Tsafindas himself.
In many respects, the trip to Cape Town by the Sedibeng people coincided with a multitude of historical events and was in itself, despite all odds, historic.
One other historic coincidence in the trip is noted by the district executive mayor Mahole Mofokeng when revealing at a gala dinner that this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre. In the same vein, another trenchant coincidence was noted by another man of the evening, president Jacob Zuma.
In his State of the Nation address the president notes that this year marks the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the first Indian communities in South Africa. The president went further to indicate that the year also marks the forgotten hundred years since the formation of the union government on May 31, 1910.
Well, in the whole scheme of historical episodes, where does Boipatong fit? Most historians are in general agreement that the 1992 massacre in that Sedibeng township unblocked the dead-lock that existed during the negotiations between the now unbanned liberation fighters led by Mandela and the de Klerk-led government of the time.
‘Before Boipatong, F W de Klerk was riding high,' writes Rian Malan in Frontiers of Freedom, 1999, ‘buoyed up by his referendum victory and his rising status in the eyes of foreigners. After Boipatong, he was just another racist, held responsible worldwide for the massacre.
'By September l992 De Klerk and his negotiators were so deflated that they just caved in. They made extraordinary concessions to get negotiations going again.'
It was only after the Boipatong massacre that the negotiation process was brought back on track in South Africa; otherwise the talks had become moribund.
The Boipatong massacre on June 17, 1992, right in the middle of the dead-locked talks triggered a re-think in the negotiation strategy by the Mandela-led liberation movement.
Negotiations with the regime were suspended after Boipatong, and key conditions outlined which included the adoption of a Constituent Assembly, a hall-mark in the political transition of South Africa from Apartheid-rule.
The constituent assembly was established and a date set for the first democratic elections that installed Nelson Mandela as leader of the first democratic government in South Africa.
The first democratic elections were held in 1994, and two years later in 1996, on the 26th anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre, Nelson Mandela chose Sharpeville as the site to announce the signing of the new democratic constitution. The day, March 21, is now commemorated as South Africa's Human Rights Day.
It is this interconnected historical episodes that makes mayor Mahole Mofokeng somehow furious.
He hinted at a gala dinner that some local newspapers had already started raising eyebrows about the costs of the trip.
'It seems that they neglect our struggle history,' he said to the gathered heroes and heroines, adding that: 'We are where we are because of our struggle.'
The honourable mayor warned the gathered heroes and heroines to guard against some forces that could dent the rich political history of the region.
He warned that 'tribalism and regionalism are an insult to our struggle and to the blood that was lost.'
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