A biting winter chill clung to the windswept cemetery in Cradock, a small town in South Africa’s east, where the neglected graves of four activists, brutally assassinated by the apartheid regime, stood beneath a weathered monument, itself crumbling with time.
Two hours away, in the city of Gqeberha, the 1985 murders of these young men – one of apartheid’s darkest chapters – were at the heart of a poignant courtroom inquest, stirring deep emotions and unresolved pain.
Four decades later, the families of Fort Calata, Matthew Goniwe, Sicelo Mhlauli and Sparrow Mkhonto – husbands, fathers, three teachers and one unionist – remain devastated, still searching for truth and justice.
“We are not going to rest in this matter until there is some form of justice,” Calata’s son, Lukhanyo, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) in Gqeberha, an Indian Ocean city formerly called Port Elizabeth.
The 43-year-old journalist was barely in school when his father did not come home one night in June. His body was later found beaten, stabbed and burned with the others.
“I was pregnant and my hope was taken away ... everything was taken away in such a brutal manner,” his mother, Nomonde Calata, now in her mid-60s, told the inquest.
Her third child was born two weeks after her husband was buried. “I couldn’t show the enemy my pain because they would laugh at me,” she told the court, fighting back tears.
A first inquest was held in 1985 in Afrikaans, a language Nomonde did not understand, but it did not identify the killers.
A second inquest in 1993 confirmed security police were responsible but gave no names.
After the apartheid regime that enforced a brutal system of racial oppression ended in 1994, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission into the atrocities committed during apartheid also heard the case of the Cradock Four.
Led by Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu, it found six members of a police hit squad were involved and denied them amnesty from further prosecution.
But there was no follow-up action, and all six have since died.
Lukhanyo Calata was unsurprised that the apartheid authorities covered up the killing, one of scores of government-ordered actions against people seen as threats to the apartheid system.
“They did everything that they could to protect themselves. We weren’t actually expecting better from them,” he said.
But this time, he and the other relatives in the latest inquest are expecting more.
Relatives are allowed for the first time to give testimony, which is regularly broadcast live on national television.
The court also visited the location where the four are believed to have been killed after being pulled off a road at night while driving back from a political event in Port Elizabeth.
Of the one former police officer who confessed before he died, Nomonde said, “He robbed me of the love of my husband, he robbed the children of the love of their father. I will not and did not forgive.”
Besides wanting accountability, these families and many others who lost loved ones in apartheid-era killings want to know why there have been no prosecutions 30 years since the fall of the previous regime.
Delays may have been due to a “toxic mix of idleness, indifference, incapacity or incompetence” and even political interference, one of the families’ lawyers said at the opening of the inquest.
President Cyril Ramaphosa set up a judicial inquiry in April into claims of deliberate delays in prosecuting apartheid-era crimes.
A separate court case by 25 families, including these, is seeking government compensation.
In the small, dusty town of Cradock, now called Nxuba, residents who knew the slain activists have watched the decades pass without answers, and their sense of loss is still unresolved.
“I grew up in front of those people,” said Sibongile Mbina Mbina, in his late 50s. “Two of them taught me in high school, so I’m worried that this has not been solved.”
“It’s painful because it has been quite a long time,” said Mawonga Goniwe, 65, whose uncle was among the Cradock Four. “We wanted closure as a family. How did our family member die?”
“The truth must come out ... they must face what they have done,” he told AFP while in Gqeberha for the inquest.
