Twenty years ago, on 28 March 1994, the ANC’s militia massacred a crowd of protesting Zulus in downtown Johannesburg, using automatic weapons against men armed only with symbolic “cultural weapons”, such as spears and cowhide shields. Mandela himself gave the order “to kill, if necessary”.
The official death toll ranges from 9 to 53, but anecdotal evidence suggests it may have been much larger. Pamela Wallace, a commenter on the Daily Maverick article on the massacre, claims that there was so much blood on the floors of the Johannesburg General Hospital on 28 March that staff had to wear gumboots:
My late husband was working at the Johannesburg General at the time. They wore gum boots as they waded in blood and that hospital alone declared more than a hundred and fifty dead when the official figure at the time was about ten. I wonder what that figure is today?
And here lies the rub: no-one has ever been charged with any wrongdoing! Mandela, who gave the order to mow down the Inkatha men, afterwards delivered a speech in parliament exonerating himself and placing the blame squarely on the Zulu nationalist movement….
