Janet Smith
SIX years ago, a new year in South Africa started with allegations of a racist murder when farmworker David Mohaule was attacked by farmer Willem Rochia at Swartruggens.
There was a chilling reference. That shadowed spot on the North West landscape was also the site of the Skierlik horror, which happened on January 14, 2008.
By 2010, we might have expected white supremacists to have been cowed after the killings at the hand of 18-year-old Johan Nel. It was the year of the World Cup. Our nation was making yet another attempt to unite. Yet, accused of stealing cows, Mohaule’s death only reminded us of the ongoing pain of the people who sweat in the fields and factories of the white-run rural areas.
Later that year came Eugene Terre’Blanche’s murder and an opportunity for the white right to again brandish their Nazi tattoos in public, suffused with the nostalgia of apartheid. Afrikaans superstar Steve Hofmeyr was a prominent mourner at the AWB leader’s funeral and has since remapped the supremacist struggle.
As we mark the tragedy that unfolded for the people of Skierlik – and the nation – on January 14, we have to be honest and say that white supremacy is not dead. It exists in Penny Sparrow’s tweet, and in the words of all those who believed she was exercising freedom of speech. It exists in shopping queues. It exists among intellectuals like Annelie Botes, a lauded Afrikaans writer who, like Sparrow, openly admitted she does not like black people.
We may always hope that it’s underground, but for the people of Skierlik and so many others like them it remains very much alive.
Johan Nel became the new name for the clutch of shacks as the people who lived around the slate quarries of Swartruggens tried to recover. Emmanuel Motshelanoka, whose treasured 10-year-old nephew Tshepo was the first to be shot dead in the massacre, explained in 2011 that that’s just the way things happened.
“We say, ‘oh, you going to Johan Nel’, or ‘oh, you’re from Johan Nel’. When we get in the taxi, they now know this place like that.”
Motshelanoka, a young man who toughed out his working life on the busy 7pm to 7am haul at the poultry factory down the road, was very troubled. Riotous pink zinneas billowed out of pots in the front yard of his parents’ shack. It was the same next door and the door next to that. Everyone had a pretty hedge funnelling through a cheap wire fence.
That apparent harmony was utterly out of place in Skierlik, clustered on a heartless piece of rock-hard ground owned by an absent landlord.
The murders blew away Motshelanoka’s happiness. His older sister Christina, who worked with him at the factory – she in the day, he in the night – lost her only child to Nel’s evil.
Growing up in ruthless poverty, Tshepo was their big love.
“It’s just like a nightmare. That boy of ours was more than incredible. He just loved fixing cars. He’d watch out while we were doing it and then he saw that he can do it, and he was very good…”
Motshelanoka wasn’t there when Nel, the son of farmers, suddenly appeared on the road into the informal settlement. Nel had morphed grotesquely from a quiet scrawny boy who’d been bringing chickens to sell in the community into a terrifying figure clad head to foot in an old soldier’s uniform.
He bore a rifle.
Saturated in January’s heat, the shacks alongside the road were drowning in a silvery haze of metal around Nel as he bellowed his shocking instruction. “Kom uit julle k*****s! Ek is polisie. Kom uit julle k*****s!”
Motshelanoka will never forget the cellphone call from his mother soon after she saw where her bloodied grandson lay.
Tshepo Motshelanoka, Anna Moiphitlhi, her three-month-old baby Elizabeth and 35-year-old Sivuyile Banani were gunned down in the dust in a place which was the very picture of rural poverty and the worst kind of lack of delivery which the government claims it is desperate to change.
Margaret Madimabe was not able to work after a bullet from Nel’s rifle burst through her arm just below a crude tattoo of a heart. She couldn’t lift weights the way she used to, so her days of mostly manual labour were over. Her reticent smile completely disappeared when she talked about January 14.
“When he came here before with his chickens, he was looking like a good man. But that day, I looked up, I heard the terrible noises, and he was screaming: ‘I want you, black people. I want to shoot you’. Before I could get back inside my house from the road, he lifted up his gun…”
Madimabe said she was now “not the same Margaret”. She echoed what everyone else felt.
Thys Lekgoale lived just steps away from the place on the road where Anna and Elizabeth lay spilled as Nel finally ran off into the thick bush across a railway line to hide. There’s no trace the woman and her baby, that moment strapped to her back, were ever there now, but he would always know the exact spot.
In places like Balmoral, outside Emalahleni, white people couldn’t care less.
There’s a Volksmoord (People’s Murder) Museum there where Boer nostalgia reigns. People like Frieda Mulder speak with apocalyptic pauses: “Why are they so afraid of us? This is all we have. All we have, all that’s left. This little place which is sacred to us Boers.”
The museum heaves with a violent energy. There are portraits of 15-year-old commando soldiers with terrified old, white eyes, and women digging graves under umbrellas, their faces hidden by huge black bonnets flapping like crows’ wings in a dark heat.
These are pictures from more than 100 years ago when Balmoral, this exact spot, was a concentration camp of the empire, filled to capacity with Boer women and children. The ghosts tap insistently inside your head, and call you outside. But in the museum, as you round the corner after the portraits of the dying in the camps, come astonishing pictures of what is labelled as the Second Genocide – abortion – and then comes the Third. Among those pictures are murdered farmers with half their faces blown off. There are men hanging from ropes in their own baths, women in bloodied heaps.
A photocopy rails against “the cesspits of the Black gulag… the skewed Azanian justice… the darkest African hell holes… the new potentates”. There is a tyre and a plastic vial of petrol. There is a large photograph of Chris Hani’s killer, Clive Derby-Lewis, and a smaller one of Nel.
The killer was sentenced to more than 100 years for the murders of people who were led to a hellhole like Skierlik through deprivation, victims of racist iniquity. But while white people like farmer Ben Marais, who was the DA councillor in Swartruggens at the time, had quickly insisted the white community had been revulsed by the loss of life, they had also thrown a protective veil around Nel. They blamed his violence on the brutality of crime in the country.
It’s clear we are still struggling with South Africa’s hidden racist truths. It takes a Sparrow to remind us of a Nel.
l Smith is an executive editor of The Star and a special writer at Independent Newspapers