Johannesburg - To many June 28 seems insignificant in history, but it has helped shape our country into what it is today.
June 28, 1942: In the dusty confines of a rural Xhosa village in the Eastern Cape, a man who would inspire a nation was born. Chris Hani was a freedom fighter who played a large role in the Struggle.
Martin Thembisile “Chris” Hani joined the ANC Youth League as a teenager in 1957. “The 1956 Treason Trial convinced me to join the ANC and participate in the struggle for freedom. I was 15 then,” he wrote in his autobiography My Life.
In 1961, Hani also joined the SACP and, in 1962 the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto weSizwe. “This was the beginning of my long road in the armed struggle in which there have been three abortive assassination attempts against me,” he wrote.
Hani went into exile in the Soviet Union in 1963 while out on bail pending an appeal against a sentence under the Suppression of Communism Act. He returned to South Africa in 1974 after fighting with Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army forces in Zimbabwe as political commissar.
In 1987, Hani was elected chief of staff for MK and rose to a senior position in the SACP. He stepped down in 1992 to focus more on the SACP’s campaigns.
On April 10, 1993, he was assassinated outside his Boksburg home by Polish immigrant Janusz Walus.
Clive Derby-Lewis was the alleged mastermind of the murder. The pair were jailed for Hani’s murder after it was found that Walus used Derby-Lewis’s revolver. Derby-Lewis was released on medical parole on May 29.
The Star