Raised in a house full of women, you can understand why every school holiday I would sneak away from home and visit either of my two older cousins, who lived across the street in one of the main municipalities in the small town of Pietermaritzburg, Imbalí. It was a chance as a teenager to get away and be as boisterous as any kid at that age was, minus the lectures that came with that kind of behavior.
At that time, in the early 1990s, municipalities in most of the country, and especially in Kwazulu-Natal, were abuzz with tension; it wasn’t just hills and gravel. I remember being warned not to wear particular colors of clothing as it would denote that I was from a supporting ANC or supporting Inkatha Freedom Party household. Depending on which street I had ventured down, it could spell trouble. Fortunately, yellow wasn’t my color, or it was red, who knows?
Unit 13, Imbali, was a section of the township considered more aligned with the ANC agenda than the Zulu nationalist agenda that defined the IFP at the time, or so my young mind thought. While enjoying walking up and down the Imbali Hills or another escape from Umlazi on the outskirts of Durban, the tension in this part of the world was ever present.
What a time to be alive, as the country navigated its way to its first democratic election.
Thoughts of my more innocent years came to mind last week with the news of the imminent release of Janusz Walus, the man who assassinated South African Communist Party leader Chris Hani in 1993. The mention of his name immediately brought me to Imbali already Easter. vacation I spent there when Hani was killed. His death may have taken place 500 km away, but the repercussions of him were felt in those streets.
At that stage, all talk of a political settlement was off the table, a civil war was inevitable, and what I knew and experienced as a deadly war between IFP-ANC factions in my province would now be national.
For a 13-year-old boy, dreaming of a better future and taking the highway to Johannesburg, it was a nightmare scenario. I vividly remember a conversation with Thando, an older cousin, who regularly went on nightly patrols against police and IFP-led raids on the township, about what would soon happen. Walus had essentially pushed the nuclear button as at that point it looked as though the country would explode right in our face, collapse in a heap and experience a meltdown similar to what most of sub-Saharan Africa experienced in the years since. get freedom from him in the 1950s.
It’s a traumatic memory, not just for a boy in a small town outside Pietermaritzburg in 1993, but also for the vast majority old enough to consider their own future against a bloody backdrop. (The cargo shedding: how I wish that had been my main concern back then and not whether or not my cousin would return from his nightly patrols.)
Walus’ imminent release, according to our laws, is no small feat. Like Gavrilo Princip, who ignited the flames of World War I in 1914 with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, his actions were pivotal.
The real “miracle” is that we did not choose that path, and perhaps for that reason alone above all else, I still applaud the leadership of our greatest statesmen and statesmen of the day, Nelson Mandela, Winnie Mandela, Walter Sisulu, among others. .
I am torn by his release, I fully understand that the laws of this country must be upheld, regardless of the trauma men like Walus have put us, particularly my young self, through.
Its release should perhaps be a time to reflect on how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go. Next April we will celebrate the 30th anniversary of Hani’s death. we would do well as a country to reflect on the path we chose that day and where we are on that journey. This is not an ANC, SACP issue, this is the story of us troubled people.
