Pretoria - People in Mamelodi East can easily identify with community activist, the Reverend Chris Nkomo, 60, who has shouldered the responsibility to locate and preserve the history of the 1985 Mamelodi massacre.
“I don’t know what the people see in me but I'm able to get things done,” says the father of four, sitting on a sofa at home in Marena Street.
He is a widower.
Driven by his passion to preserve knowledge, Nkomo went to Ditsong National Museum of Natural History in Pretoria in May, hoping to come across the pieces of the historical puzzleof the massacre.
However, he was disappointed when he could not find anything related to the massacre.
From that day, he told himself he won’t rest until justice has been done by having the township's history integrated into the history of South Africa.
While at the museum, he talked to the person in charge and some curators about making the history of the massacre part of the museum.
“I started compiling the material which was published in newspapers,” he said.
He kept in touch with the family of the people who died and the museum workers.
He also interacted with the people from Freedom Park Museum, who were in the process of starting the same project, assembling the massacre stories.
“I faced some hurdles when I started as some of the people I approached were suspicious because they thought I was looking for money from them,” he says.
His talk about the importance of having a history with the people at the museum proved to be a turning point about how people viewed the massacre.
The man of the cloth says he was worried that the young people know nothing about the history of the country and they don’t read.
Still more needs to be done to dig out the township history and he would like pupils to do more research in that respect, he says.
Born in Eastwood township he was forced to move to Mamelodi after his former home was declared a whites-only area.
Nkomo recalls that on that fateful day of the Mamelodi massacre he had just arrived from work in Germiston with his 4-year-old son.
Little did he anticipate the horrifying events that would unfold that day.
He can still conjure up the spine-chilling scene of a man with his face skin completely removed, screaming hysterically and running away from the trigger-happy apartheid police.
That traumatic picture has been seared on his mind forever and it was one of the reasons he wanted to know what happened to the Mamelodi massacre history. Fourteen people were killed and many more injured.
His relentless efforts eventually paid off when he was appointed chairman of the Mamelodi massacre subcommittee to see the project through.
He says it is his love of history and desire to preserve knowledge for future generations that inspired him to go out of his way to find out what happened in the township.
On November 21 this year during the commemoration of the massacre held at Freedom Park, the fruits of his tireless efforts were evident when the mobile museum with the stories of the massacre and pictures was showcased.
He says the mobile museum will soon go to schools where pupils will be taught about the massacre.
But Nkomo is not only preoccupied with the history of the township. An avid reader, he is also a chairman of an oldies social group called Active Ageing.
Forty-five members of the group encourage each other to live a healthy lifestyle by eating nutritious food and exercising by playing football.
Nkomo’s role is to lobby for financial support for the group, which meets three times a week.
He is thankful for the support he's received since joining the group. He says people believe he is intelligent and able to get things done.
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