TODAY, December 16, is an ideal date to flush out a hidden bit of Durban history, especially the murder of Johannes Nkosi. On this day in 1930, the trade unionist met his death at the hands of police at Cartwright’s Flats during a pass-burning protest.
The site is now a bustling long-distance taxi rank. In Nkosi’s day, it was where the circus set up at Christmas. The road leading from the bus rank opposite the Early Morning Market to the vicinity of Cartwright’s Flats is now called Johannes Nkosi. To those born before Madiba became president, it used to be Alice Street.
Princess Alice Maud Mary was the second daughter of Queen Victoria. She married Prince Frederick William Louis of Hesse-Darnstadt in the old German Empire. Their fourth daughter married Czar Nicholas II, who was executed during the Great Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. That is where Nkosi and Alice connect again.
Nkosi was a great admirer of the Bolshevik promise of an egalitarian society. He was born in 1905, four years after Britain’s Queen Victoria died and 26 years after her armies seized the Zulu kingdom.
As a dispossessed African forced into labour, he worked at different times as a farm hand and a “kitchen boy”. He was attracted to the firebrand politics of the Communist Party of South Africa and joined it in Joburg in 1926. His comrade and contemporary, Alfred Nzula, who was the first black secretary-general of the party, recalled in a tribute in the party newspaper, Umsebenzi, that Nkosi took an active part as a youngster in the 1919 anti-pass campaign and the strikes by unions affiliated to the African Federation of Trade Unions.
In 1929, he was appointed a party organiser in Durban and was at the forefront of radicalising workers.
Thousands responded to the call to burn passes on Dingaan’s Day, as December 16 was then known. The meeting, which started at 11am, was peaceful with Africans streaming on to the platform to put their passes into a bag provided by the organisers. At around 4pm as the crowd prepared to march through the centre of Durban, the police charged at them. Records show that Nkosi and three others were killed and 20 seriously wounded.
A witness reported: “When the crowd was dispersed I saw them pack the wounded on a lorry. I followed in my car. There was a trail of blood dripping from the lorry. The lorry waited outside the police station for three-quarters of an hour or more. Then they were removed to hospital.” There is no indication which hospital they were taken to but at an inquest into the deaths, the hospital doctor testified that all the dead had been horribly mutilated with signs of hacking and fractured skulls.
Nkosi had been struck down by a single bullet in the head, but the post-mortem showed that his skull had fractured and that he had stab wounds all over his body.”