INTRODUCTION
In June 1952, the African National Congress (ANC) launched the Defiance Campaign, galvanizing opposition to apartheid. Disobeying ‘unjust laws’ and courting arrest, ANC activists promoted two objectives: inclusive African nationalism and organized civil disobedience.Footnote 1 While the Defiance Campaign was promulgated in Durban and promoted in Johannesburg, the fiercest protests buffeted Port Elizabeth and East London. In these two Eastern Cape cities, militant Africans diverged from ANC policy. In October they mustered in Port Elizabeth railway yards and fought armed forces (Lodge Reference Lodge1983: 59).Footnote 2 On 9 November, Bantu Square of Duncan Village, one of three East London black townships, became a battlefield.Footnote 3 There, police fired on 1,500 ANC congregants at a Sunday afternoon prayer meeting, igniting spontaneous ‘riots’.Footnote 4 The authorities believed that this crowd intended to rampage – and it did by many accounts, including those presented later by anthropologists and historians (Mayer and Mayer Reference Mayer and Mayer1971: 82; Mager and Minkley Reference Mager, Minkley, Bonner, Delius and Posel1993; Lodge Reference Lodge1983: 59–60; Switzer Reference Switzer1993: 309–10). Both an Afrikaner salesman and an Irish nun were killed in the unrest. Rumours circulated that a mob hacked and ate the white woman. A morgue vehicle retrieved the two white corpses early in the evening, as more constables and troops fanned into the township with guns blazing. The apartheid state waged a retaliatory war until midnight. Oral histories from Duncan Village describe a predatory invasion: the vicious clashes, thudding bullets, soldiers fixing bayonets, and whirl of armoured vehicles.Footnote 5 Upwards of 200 Africans may have been slain. But the official toll records only nine fatalities with ‘27 Natives wounded’.Footnote 6 Oral sources allude to why the slaughter is not widely known. Township residents secretly transported the dead to ancestral cemeteries in the countryside, not daring to report their losses for fear of being implicated in treasonous combat.Footnote 7
With the advent of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1995, the massacre could have been exhumed, but it was not. Today, the ANC mayor and managers of East London seem content to bury the memory of the incident notoriously dubbed Black Sunday. There is no memorial as yet to those who died on 9 November. Instead, the city commemorates Steve Biko, a struggle hero who grew up in nearby King William's Town and led the 1970s Black Consciousness Movement. He was martyred by security policemen in a Port Elizabeth torture chamber. His statue in downtown East London is located in front of City Hall and gazes across the busy high street. It is as if Black Sunday never happened in a country profoundly aware of apartheid's far-reaching devastation.
In Forget Colonialism?, anthropologist Jennifer Cole explores why there is little remembrance of violent white rule elsewhere in Southern Africa. Her book probes the French massacres of restive peasants in Madagascar during the 1940s. While conducting research, she noted that ‘the only topics’ her rural informants initially discussed ‘were rice, cows and the ancestors’, prompting her to ‘wonder if colonialism … had ever happened’ (Cole Reference Cole2001). Delving into local responses to bloodshed, Cole identified rituals that healed survivors of lethal oppression by evoking the spiritual power of cattle and ancestors to safeguard communal resilience. During apartheid, no equivalent process occurred in East London. Government crackdowns made it difficult for Duncan Village to mourn Black Sunday. One of the few ANC meetings called in its wake took place in the sea off an Africans-only city beach. Due to banning orders preventing assembly, ANC members arrived separately, waded into the water, and communed while pretending to swim.Footnote 8
Forget Colonialism? further examines recent political transformations that revived Malagasy recollections of French brutality. A parallel phenomenon occurred in East London during the late 1990s as a newly democratic nation convened inquiries that enabled township residents to bear witness to and be compensated for the abuses of apartheid.Footnote 9 These restitution hearings sharpened popular memory of 9 November, kindling long-deferred conversations that raised the issues of concealed casualties and the killing of the nun Elsie Quinlan. Several ceremonies of atonement have honoured her, the first in 2002 on the grounds of St Peter Claver Church in Duncan Village, where she was known as Sister (Sr) Mary Aidan. This ‘fiftieth anniversary’ involved religious leaders and township spokesmen apologizing to the Catholic diocese. Repentance was again expressed in 2012 when the provincial Department of Arts and Culture sponsored city memorials and invited Professor Njabulo Ndebele to address Sr Aidan's legacy. His public lecture scarcely referenced how she died; he chose to focus on finding love and mercy in random tragedy (Ndebele Reference Ndebele2013).
In this paper we consider Sr Aidan's legacy from a different analytical perspective: the context of a forgotten slaughter, an incisive subject of historian Alessandro Portelli (Portelli Reference Portelli2003; Reference Portelli1997). In studying this form of violence he values oral sources, which have ‘a different credibility’ embedded ‘not in … adherence to fact, but … [in] departure from it, as imagination, symbolism and desire’ illuminate the meanings of massacre (Portelli Reference Portelli1991: 51). There are constraints to this approach, anthropologist Donald Donham observes. Most researchers do not witness ‘the creation of violence’, he writes, and therefore ‘“what happened” in any particular case … is established by after-the-fact narratives … of those affected by the violence who are either willing or chosen to speak … and by agents of the state, such as policemen and judges, who may or may not have agendas of their own’. Anthropologists, for example, ‘can conduct their own interviews’, although ‘these necessarily take place in relation to an … already narrated event’. Donham adds that much evidence underpinning after-the-fact narratives is ‘produced by a local cultural and political process quite different from the protocols of social science’ deployed by anthropologists and historians, who scaffold past ‘events on the basis of “found” data’ (all quotes taken from Donham Reference Donham, Bay and Donham2006: 27).Footnote 10
Incorporating these methodological concerns and the percolated memories of township residents, this article reconstructs a narrative of ‘critical events’ that determined the mood in Duncan Village during the months and minutes surrounding the nun's death (Das Reference Das1995; Das and Nandy Reference Das, Nandy and Das1986).Footnote 11 Their accounts have been walled behind her monumental demise, which remains the proverbial structure that dams the flow of evidence (Breier Reference Breier2015).Footnote 12 Fixated on chaos and cannibalism, the story of Sr Aidan's murder dominates histories of the East London Defiance Campaign. As a consequence, her ghost haunts the experiences of township people who still recall fierce encounters with a symbolic (white person) and ubiquitous (militarized police) enemy on Black Sunday. Their observations, recorded in oral interviews and archival repositories, contradict a common perception of the ‘1952 riots’. Indeed, they reject the notion that an aimless ‘riot’ occurred, instead reflecting on cultural enactments of purposeful violence. As Blok's research into the Mafia suggests, there is no such thing as ‘senseless’ homicide.Footnote 13 Similar to theatrical performances, lethal action makes figurative statements about power, vengeance and solidarity. The morality of murder, Blok argues in Honour and Violence, resides in its time and place of execution, and in the meanings of self-protection ascribed to dehumanizing the victim through mutilation (Blok Reference Blok2000). Similarly, the fatal attack on Sr Aidan affirmed Xhosa customs of defensive retribution and resistance. Conceptual questions about bodily mutilation likewise shape Jonathan Glassman's investigation of racial violence in Zanzibar. Like him, we contest the idea that disfiguring ‘enemy’ corpses simply represented ‘senseless violence’. Rather, this ‘spectacular’ act expressed symbolic messages of ‘revenge and … warning’, which generated distinctly problematic historical memories and recollections. In analogous ways we reassess Black Sunday by tracing how historical memories of the nun's murder ‘transformed into remembered memories’ of a hidden massacre (Glassman Reference Glassman2011: 19–20).
RACIAL NATIONALISM: THE DEFIANCE CAMPAIGN REVISITED
Scholarship on the Defiance Campaign highlights how the ‘politics of inclusion’, inspired by the ANC 1949 Programme of Action and by Indian Gandhism, persuaded African masses in the Cape to embrace civil disobedience (Kuper Reference Kuper1965; Gerhart Reference Gerhart1978: 134, 136–7; Lodge Reference Lodge1983: 61).Footnote 14 This non-confrontational strategy in the struggle for equal rights was supposed to turn wayward youths, even hardened delinquents (male tsotsi and female tsotsikazi), into disciplined activists. Yet an aberrant outcome unfolded. ‘Riots’ instigated by ‘fringe’ youth derailed the Defiance Campaign (Mager and Minkley Reference Mager, Minkley, Bonner, Delius and Posel1993: 241; Lodge Reference Lodge1983: 60).Footnote 15 ANC leaders publicized this opinion soon after the ‘indiscriminate shooting’ in Bantu Square, stating that ‘law-abiding Africans resent and deprecate the action of the irresponsible element’.Footnote 16 But what if Black Sunday was not simply stoked by transgressive mobs?Footnote 17 More specifically, what if ANC-leaning groups in the Eastern Cape promoted racial reprisals? In the summary below, an alternative interpretation of urban mobilization traces anti-white sentiment from the eve of the Defiance Campaign to Black Sunday.
Following the formation of the ANC Youth League (ANCYL) in 1949, three men from Duncan Village – Alcott ‘Skei’ Gwentshe, Cornelius Fazzie and Joel Lengisi – emerged as staunch adversaries of apartheid. The triumvirate drew insights from an architect of the Programme of Action, A. P. Mda, who lived in Herschel District north of the city. Another ANC activist, Robert Sobukwe, came from nearby University of Fort Hare to create a Youth League branch in East London (Gerhart Reference Gerhart1978: 127–35).Footnote 18 Mda and Sobukwe envisaged the urban area as an ideal site for testing radical ideologies. After religious services and social gatherings in Duncan Village, Youth Leaguers held weekend political education meetings that challenged the go-slow approach of local ANC elders R. H. Godlo, chair of the National Native Urban Representative Council, and Clements Kadalie, Location Advisory Board member and labour unionist (Rich Reference Rich1984: 71, 105; Bradford Reference Bradford1988). Godlo and Kadalie advocated trusteeship through ‘non-European councils’ nominated by white chairmen who facilitated the ‘consultative’ participation of a few disenfranchised elites in municipal matters (Mayer and Mayer Reference Mayer and Mayer1971: 52).Footnote 19 Championing boycotts and non-cooperation, Mda and Sobukwe repudiated any scheme to collaborate with the state, regardless of the liberal agenda.Footnote 20
In 1951, ANCYL leaders hoped to sideline the trusteeship faction, seizing their chance when the city council sought to pay for township road, lighting and sanitation upgrades by imposing a 2-shilling levy on residents of Duncan Village. This new financial burden was deeply resented. High rents already required lodgers to devote a third of their income to accommodation in crammed houses. Adding insult to injury, the municipality decided to collect the levy before it was legal to do so.Footnote 21 This scheme provoked the Youth League, in April, to organize a march of poor families, youth and single women eager to protest against the ill-treating ‘white man’.Footnote 22 The procession travelled along Oxford Street to City Hall and climaxed with a presentation of grievances by Skei Gwentshe, a musician, sportsman and activist who rented one room in Duncan Village for himself, his wife and four children (Figure 1).
Figure 1 March of lodgers along Oxford Street led by ANCYL leaders, April 1951.
The mayor ignored this petition, prompting the ANCYL to take the municipality to court. The charismatic Gwentshe was selected to argue the brief, justifying why township residents refused the levy. During the proceedings, his supporters congregated outside the magistracy expecting victory, but the city prevailed. While the lodgers were found guilty of non-payment, press coverage of the case exposed the inequity of the levy. It became clear that government should have raised revenue from better-off homeowners rather than poorer tenants. In November, the council dropped the 2-shilling charge on renters in favour of a 15-shilling tax on landlords, a constituency of the ANC old guard.Footnote 23 This was a major win for the Youth League, which, in the span of six months, discredited trusteeship, attracted a larger following, and showed the power of African nationalism to achieve key objectives (Mager and Minkley Reference Mager, Minkley, Bonner, Delius and Posel1993: 232–4).Footnote 24 The mayor feared this development, linking it to South Africa's paramount menace, communism, and ‘[i]f we take a charitable view, and omit the charge of communism, we could say it is nationalism, that is inspiring them. Whatever it is, it constitutes an extreme threat to European civilisation in South Africa … The future of the white man is at stake.’Footnote 25
In early 1952, the ANCYL seized another opportunity to contest apartheid law when the state announced national commemorations for the ‘founder’ of white South Africa, Jan van Riebeeck.Footnote 26 In Apartheid's Festival, Leslie Witz shows that ‘the three hundredth anniversary of Jan van Riebeeck's landing in 1952’ enabled the National Party ‘to construct a history and identity of whites as whites’, with the Dutch founder portrayed as the father of Afrikanerdom, ‘the initiator of farming in South Africa, the bearer of Christianity to the sub-continent, and the [British] colonial founder’ (Witz Reference Witz2003: 15). Between March and April, the municipality prepared for this high-profile tercentennial. The ANC responded with an appeal to embargo the celebration and stop Africans (offered city transport at no cost) from going to the dedicatory events.Footnote 27 To broadcast the boycott, Youth League orators regaled audiences in Bantu Square during April and May with tales of heroic frontier wars and kings Hintsa, Macoma and Makana killing white invaders in defence of Xhosa sovereignty. Prominent activists at the time remembered these fiery speeches establishing ‘the first phase of politicisation and nationalism … [by] defin[ing] the enemy’ and introducing township youths to a dramatic history of primary resistance to settler oppression.Footnote 28
When the Defiance Campaign began in June 1952, township residents were primed to play their part and get arrested.Footnote 29 Youth League activists contested racial injustice in the heart of East London.Footnote 30 Detained marchers were thrashed by warders in the downtown Fort Glamorgan gaol. The ANC complained about this harsh treatment. After incarcerated protestors were released from jail, they reported their beatings to crowds at Bantu Square, embittering Defiance Campaign volunteers and eroding their loyalty to civil disobedience. Township youths started hurling rocks at police vehicles. They relentlessly stoned one constable walking the beat, forcing him to seek safety in the Duncan Village charge office.Footnote 31 In October, the press and its white readers increasingly feared ‘Mau Mau’ subversion, which was then beginning to imperil colonial Kenya as the Kikuyu Land and Freedom Army fought for territory taken by British settlers who claimed it was the ‘white man's burden’ to develop Africa.Footnote 32 East London whites had grounds to worry: some Duncan Village activists believed that their Mau Mau moment had arrived.Footnote 33 The official preparations for the van Riebeeck festival merely sparked African anger. As the municipality touted the tercentennial, township people remembered their long oppression. Anti-colonial sentiment, refurbished for the Defiance Campaign, was intensifying. By the end of 1952, the liberation song on everyone's lips in Duncan Village had come from the musical oeuvre of Port Elizabeth dockworker Vuyisile Mini, a gifted ANCYL organizer and composer.Footnote 34
Thina Sizwe se-Afrika We the African nation
Sikhalela Izwe Lethu are crying out for our land
Elathathwa Ngabamhlophe which was taken by the white man
Mabameyek’ Umhlaba Wethu. they must leave our land alone.Footnote 35
In lyrics and movements, the script of anti-apartheid violence was being written with a big production in mind.
THE ANATOMY OF VIOLENCE
In an essay titled ‘Reaping the whirlwind’, Anne Mager and Gary Minkley explore the 1952 riots as a pivotal moment of East London social history at the dawn of apartheid, focusing particularly on the ‘modern, urban phenomenon’ of ‘tsotsism’ (youth criminality). In addition, they link the radicalization of Africans in the East Bank, the other name for Duncan Village, to youth disorder and government–ANC embroilments during the Defiance Campaign (Mager and Minkley Reference Mager, Minkley, Bonner, Delius and Posel1993). Their path-breaking scholarship is corroborated by archival and oral sources that reveal the mindset of municipal authorities and township dissidents on 9 November. Expecting strife from activists and gangsters alike, city leaders had summoned army personnel and called in constables from Natal.Footnote 36 Influential Youth Leaguers Gwentshe, Fazzie and Lengisi were also banned ‘by the Minister of Justice from attending any meetings’.Footnote 37 The reinforced security forces that initially stormed the township encountered youths with home-made weapons. When Captain Pohl and his police unit arrived in Bantu Square at around 4 p.m., he commanded the 1,500 worshippers to disband; young activists responded by hurling rocks (Figure 2).Footnote 38 Next, Pohl ordered his baton-wielding policemen, a Zulu unit from Natal, to rush the crowd. Once more stones rained down on the captain and his men. A second baton charge ensued. The protestors absorbed the blow and stood defiant. Then Pohl gave the order to use live ammunition. An observer at the scene, Afrika Mahashe, summarized the sequence of violence: ‘black people called amatshaka’ (meaning Shaka Zulu's warriors) brandished ‘sticks’ while ‘the white guys … just started firing bullets at us’. Ronnie Meine, an onlooker in the confrontation, recalled that ‘people were beaten and charged, then shot. I remember … mamas with big legs where the bullet went in on the back side of the leg as she was running away and it made a tiny little hole but on the front there was [a] terrible hole with blood.’Footnote 39 The barrage killed six people and injured scores more. No ambulances assisted the victims. Private vehicles removed the casualties, an eyewitness, Busisiwe Mohapi, remembered, for ‘[e]veryone who had been shot would be thrown inside a van. I was also thrown inside that van and I was covered with blood.’Footnote 40 Some wounded Africans ended up in Frere Hospital surgery, where by ‘6 p.m. two theatres were being used to operate … [and by] 7 p.m. five theatres were being used’, with oxygen supplies dwindling.Footnote 41
Figure 2 Bantu Square, Duncan Village, 1950.
Within an hour of Pohl's onslaught, Sr Aidan drove her car along Bantu Street, her route skirting the site of the rally. She was a doctor at Mater Dei Hospital in East London and at a clinic in St Peter Claver Church, where she knew her patients from Duncan Village. Dispersed protestors stopped the nun in front of a house owned by Mr Ntoni. Her windscreen was broken; she was repeatedly hit and stabbed. She cried for help, dropped down, and was seen praying. Afrika Mahashe went to Sr Aidan's aid but was thrown aside. A mob set her car alight while people allegedly sliced the nun's body. A police patrol passed by, according to Duncan Village resident Jim Bente.Footnote 42 He also recalled youths ‘stok[ing] the flames’ of the car. At around 6 p.m., the authorities found the vehicle tipped on its side with the burned victim next to it; her limbs had been hacked and pieces of flesh carved off. Investigating officers heard from onlookers that the fat from her thighs had melted into the gutter. The images below were taken by a police photographer; debris and ashes outlined Sr Aidan's body (Figures 3 and 4).
Figure 3 Sister Aidan's car, front view, observed by the police (left) on Bantu Street, November 1952.
Figure 4 Sister Aidan's car, side view, Bantu Street, November 1952.
In Thulandeville section on the far side of Duncan Village, police discovered the first white corpse at 5.30 p.m. It was the insurance salesman Barend Vorster. The widowed breadwinner of his family, Vorster had ignored police warnings to leave the township and continued collecting premiums door to door.Footnote 43 Shortly after the shootings in Bantu Square, he was spotted by a group of men who chased him through the streets. Vorster detoured into the home of an African minister, pleading to be spared. The preacher in turn implored the pursuers to desist. They pushed him away, then clubbed and stabbed the salesman to death. There was no evidence that flesh was taken from his body. Vorster was loaded into a morgue vehicle, half an hour before the authorities retrieved Sr Aidan's corpse.
Near these scenes, teenagers razed local businesses and municipal facilities, including the Model Dairy as well as St Peter Claver mission and church.Footnote 44 The incendiary crowd exclaimed: ‘Burn the Romans! We must kill the Romans because they are Dutch!’ (Mager and Minkley Reference Mager, Minkley, Bonner, Delius and Posel1993: 230). Youths engaged in running battles with the police that lasted until midnight.Footnote 45 Soldiers stabbed their adversaries with bayonets; police holstered revolvers for high-calibre rifles. The wounds to the victims were said by one victim to be horrendous (Figures 5 and 6).Footnote 46
Figure 5 Combatant who faced the police in Bantu Square, with wounds.Footnote 49
Figure 6 Combatant who faced the police in Bantu Square, with wounds.Footnote 51
The next morning the government announced that nine people, including two murdered whites, had perished in ‘riots’. Hastening to apprehend the culprits, the police formed a dragnet and detained 178 Africans on charges of public violence, arson and murder; many of the suspects ranged in age ‘between 14 and 21’, with ‘opinion, both white and black’, deeming them ‘tsotsis’ (Mager and Minkley Reference Mager, Minkley, Bonner, Delius and Posel1993: 3). With the Minister of Justice's approval, the mayor declared ‘we will not tolerate lawlessness by irresponsible native youths’ whose ‘burning, pillage and murder is something which must be handled’.Footnote 47 Meanwhile, labour migrants in Duncan Village streamed back to their homesteads in search of ‘country refuge “till the troubles in town should be over”’ (Mayer and Mayer Reference Mayer and Mayer1971: 82–3).
A 2014 documentary of the Bantu Square violence by Koko Qebeyi disputes the death toll of Black Sunday. After consulting dozens of eyewitnesses in East London, among them township elders and retired policemen, Qebeyi calculated that there were more than 200 African fatalities.Footnote 48 The former activist Meine confirmed this figure. ‘These people were shot and loaded into cars,’ he said, as ‘there were no ambulances’ and thus no corresponding hospital or clinic statistics.Footnote 50 With regard to the nine official casualties, the mayor told his council that District Commandant of Police Major Prinsloo would not hand ‘the bodies of the non-Europeans killed in the location rioting, to the A.N.C.’, instructing the Native Administration on the ‘disposal of the unclaimed bodies … [and] any pauper burials … [which] should be done as anonymously as possible’.Footnote 52 Oral sources detail other recovery efforts. A wagon with bodies was seen going to King William's Town; other makeshift morgue vehicles crossed the Kei River to reach rural grave sites.Footnote 53 It was alleged that the police covertly tracked these casualties in an exercise book.Footnote 54 Now lost, this log was never made public. If the revised number of deaths is credible, the bloodshed of this Defiance Campaign action exceeds that of the infamous Sharpeville pass protest, believed to be the worst one-day massacre of the apartheid era.
It is a stirring development that gross injustice, long hidden in plain sight, is being recognized. It is equally dramatic that, in the present day, little has changed in accepted views of the ‘1952 riots’. There is one intervening reason: the gruesome nature of the nun's murder has created a veil of secrecy over those who know most about Black Sunday. Until Qebeyi initiated his film project, few in his township were prepared to talk about Sr Aidan lest they be implicated in the ‘strange things [done] to her’.Footnote 55 The most unutterable details refer to her corpse and the wrath it evoked. For example, during the 1953 trial of fifteen suspects accused of killing the nun, two women from Duncan Village testified that they saw flesh being cut from her. When they left the courtroom and boarded a bus home, the driver goaded passengers to kill the female witnesses, saying they were traitorous informers, impimpi, who had given false evidence.Footnote 56 The women disembarked at the next stop. Discussion of Sr Aidan became taboo, as the state and township turned away from Black Sunday. Policemen who may have had a hand in killing upwards of 200 people were never formally questioned, not even by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in its crusades to uncover ‘human rights abuses from all sides’.Footnote 57
SILENCES AND SECRETS
Within a year, the ‘riots’ had receded from popular consciousness into scholarship and biography.Footnote 58 During the mid-1950s, the sociologist Desmond Reader sought to discover the transgressive trends that caused Black Sunday. His study, The Black Man's Portion, blamed Defiance Campaign violence on ‘passions which had lain dormant since the Kaffir wars’ of the 1800s (Reader Reference Reader1961: 28–9). For him, the Youth League chant, ‘Bring Back Africa’, echoed the cry of Xhosa regiments fighting British soldiers during the Cape conflicts of yore. This national struggle to preserve autonomy ended with the dispossession of African land, the erosion of traditional authority, and the proliferation of townships plagued by lawless youth. ‘[T]hese children’, by which Reader meant ‘the dagga [marijuana]-smokers and shebeen-frequenters, a few sub-mental cases, several with previous conviction[s] … were swept’ into the ANC fold. On 9 November, they ‘distilled in their moment of frenzy all the bitterness felt by their community at large against those who appeared to crush and exploit them’. The repercussions were dreadful: ‘Any white person, however well loved … [such as] a dedicated woman doctor [who] happened to be there’, became targets ‘because their skin colour represented … autocratic oppression that appeared to … engulf their lives’ (Reader Reference Reader1961: 28–9; Dubb Reference Dubb1976: 123; Lodge Reference Lodge1983: 60).Footnote 59
Another explanation of the East London ‘riots’, formulated in their aftermath, similarly obsessed over errant youths and their homicidal compulsion that fed the ‘frenzied Africans’ who ‘could not be stopp[ed] … until blood ha[d] been spilled’. The author of this horror story, John McFall, was a journalist on the city paper, Daily Dispatch, covering the ‘writhings of African nationalism’ in the Defiance Campaign. McFall took leave from the newsroom to complete a book about Sr Aidan's murder with the title Trust Betrayed. His publisher, Nasionale Boekhandel, a South African press with ties to Afrikaner Nationalists, promoted Trust Betrayed as an ‘objective appraisal’ of the ‘benefactress who dedicated her life to the spiritual and physical welfare of Africans [before she] was stoned, stabbed, and burned; and then the mob resorted to cannibalism’ (McFall Reference McFall1963: frontispiece). One of McFall's chapters speculated that godless Mau Mau terrorists had incited young copycats in Duncan Village. This perspective was shared by one township resident who wrote an editorial urging youth in his community to stop posing as ‘Mau Mau’. His letter suggests that the revolt against Kenyan colonialism fascinated Defiance Campaign activists. It should come as no surprise that opponents of apartheid would invoke an existential threat to white supremacy in Africa. Foreign journalists alluded to a similar connection. On 10 November 1952, the Chicago Tribune listed columns in its international section, one reporting Sr Aidan's shocking murder from East London, while the other bylined Nairobi, detailing an operation of ‘police and troops … [to] ferret out members of the Mau Mau anti-white cult from their hideouts’.Footnote 60 Like the press, Reader and McFall attributed the ‘1952 riots’ to an impulsive, inscrutable fury. In contrast, this article identifies cultural messages in violent social acts that communicated meaning to intended audiences, probing the ideas of corporeality and vengeance circulating in Duncan Village. Were the mortal remains of the nun seen by township combatants, with their neighbours slaughtered by the police, as a source of ritual strength and protection? What customary scripts decided the bodily fate of white victims of racial retribution? And were targeted people viewed by their enemy as worthy of appropriate treatment in the circumstances?Footnote 61
In the early 2000s, the nun's murder was also revisited by Donald Card, a constable in Duncan Village in the 1950s whose autobiography sensationalized the incident. Formerly a detective, security policeman and mayor of East London, he was tasked with apprehending suspects in Sr Aidan's killing. While Card was not at the crime scene, he intimately recreates the manner in which the victim ‘was stopped by a mob in Bantu Street’ and assaulted ‘through the broken window’. He describes the driver's door being opened, her stabbing, and the ‘sticks and stones … thrown at her. She appeared to be dead when the mob turned the car on its side with her in it and when petrol ran out they set it alight.’ His subsequent details of cannibalism rely on dubious testimony. When the vehicle ‘cooled down slightly’, he writes, ‘the burned body of Sister Quinlan was dragged out’ by people who ‘walked down the street eating … [her flesh], with blood running down their chins’ (Thomas Reference Thomas2007: 36–7).
DIGGING DEEPER
Before assessing African memories of the nun's death, Card's recent murder narrative should be compared with the older legal record. In a 2012 interview, Card said that Sr Aidan's attackers excised her private parts and chewed them with ‘blood running down’ before searing her body. This grisly rendition and others like it in his autobiographical accounts contradict Card's prior court statements. In 1952 he was a junior policeman barred from Duncan Village on 9 November.Footnote 62 His superiors arrived at the nun's car an hour or so after the victim died. Almost no one in Duncan Village gave police investigators verifiable information about the unfolding scene. The next year, during the trial of the fifteen suspects linked to the nun's homicide, Card delivered his proof of cannibalism under oath. He referred to the statement of a female witness who went missing, making her testimony inadmissible.Footnote 63 Then he said that Sr Aidan was mutilated after being burned. His stance was corroborated by defendants who saw another accused woman carrying a handkerchief containing human flesh ‘burnt on one side’ and by post-mortem reports.Footnote 64 In particular, the Assistant District Surgeon of East London, Dr Sachs, examined Sr Aidan's remains, or more precisely her ‘head and trunk, the upper portion of the right arm and the stump of the thigh’. He concluded that the victim had not been tampered with before being burned.Footnote 65
The legal system also heard from Mavis Mkonebi. On 19 November 1952 she told the police of her involvement in Sr Aidan's murder. Mkonebi was promptly charged. Her isiXhosa statement was given to an interpreter and transcribed into Afrikaans by Mr Synman, the Assistant Magistrate in East London. Mkonebi admitted to seeing flesh removed from the nun's arm with a table knife. The question at trial was whether this operation was lethal. Defending Mkonebi, Joe Slovo, the attorney for all the accused, acknowledged that ‘after the initial assault … a number of people attempted to obtain flesh from the deceased’, but suggested that the cutting happened after Sr Aidan had died. In addition, the prosecutor struggled to resolve the allegations of Card's fellow constable, who saw the nun's blazing car, protruding ‘naked arm’ and ‘fingers contract’, but could not tell ‘whether any other contracture took place … [after] the flames became worse and the hand disappeared from view’.Footnote 66 The prosecutor summoned experts to give an opinion. Dr Sachs confirmed that the contraction could have been ‘caused by the flames’ while Dr Stevenson, an independent specialist, said that fire produced uncertain outcomes and incinerated clues. Deciding that the nun may have died from the initial blows, the presiding judge did not consider the issue of ritual homicide. Instead, the verdict asserted that Sr Aidan was caught in a ‘revenge murder’ orchestrated by those who vowed that ‘they killed us, the white lady must die’. Without conclusive evidence of their guilt, the court acquitted Mkonebi and nine other defendants; these included Clements Karools, who had danced around the victim performing liberation songs and waving a sickle. According to court records, seven defendants were convicted, among them two men, Vumile Nonqobo and Albert Mgxwiti, who were sentenced to hang. Nonqobo was found to have stopped the car and battered Sr Aidan, and then stabbed her. For his part, Mgxwiti apparently boasted in a beer tavern that he had killed the nun. The prosecutor placed him at the crime scene through the eyewitness testimony of Ethel Dlabantu, who said that Mgxwiti knifed the victim seven times.Footnote 67 If the nun's vital body was ever mutilated, the judge decided, it was never proved.Footnote 68
The Daily Dispatch photograph taken in mid-March 1953 (Figure 7) shows men and women accused of participating in the killing of Sr Aidan. Suspect number 3 was Agnes Bewana. The man holding a number 6 placard was Tolwani July. The woman signed number 7 was Ivy Plaatjies. Suspect 12, obscuring his identity with hat and hands, was Obbie Mgcoxa; he was soon released from custody. Bewana, July and Plaatjies escaped capital charges. Instead, the Solicitor-General tried them ‘under increased jurisdiction … [for] despoiling or violating a dead body'. On the far left of this image a man standing and looking at the window may have been either Nonqobo or Mgxwiti.Footnote 69
Figure 7 Suspects in the murder of Sr Aidan lined up before the magistrate of East London.
THE RAW AND THE COOKED
Even with fading memory, senior citizens of Duncan Village vividly recall Black Sunday. Their testimonies illuminate crucial cultural explanations for the violence on 9 November 1952, including the nun's murder. Without hesitation, many oral sources refuted the cannibalism claim, labelling it a lie thrust into the mouths of township residents. Ronnie Meine explained: ‘Sister Aiden [sic] came at the time when black people were provoked by the police because the police were shooting people … The following week the white police picked up people whom they tortured and … [w]hile we were in detention we heard screams of tortured people admitting to things which they had not done and some would say “Sorry my white man, sorry my white man, I did do it” [i.e. consume the nun's flesh].’Footnote 70 Duma Qabaka echoed these sentiments, if ambivalently: ‘As far as I know, no one ever attempted to eat the flesh of Sister Aiden [sic]. I wouldn't like to say much about that, you see, because these things always go along with what we call mob spirit, you see; that is, heresy, that sort of thing … but my belief is, you see, no one can ever eat or [be] seen to be eating human flesh.’Footnote 71
Qebeyi's research reveals why suspects remanded in custody signed affidavits professing that they had eaten Sr Aidan; they had done so under severe duress. Card not only denied the coercion in this instance but also refuted the idea that his counterparts were routinely forcing confessions from accused blacks.Footnote 72 Qebeyi tackles this contention by tracing allegations implicating the former constable. In 1997, Card was accused of human rights violations as an operative of the security branch known for torturing activists. The documented charges were so serious that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission invited him to a hearing; he attended with counsel.Footnote 73 Qebeyi says that Card fabricated the cannibalization of Sr Aidan in his 2007 autobiography to avenge the injury ten years previously to his reputation as a man of ‘law and order’. Moreover, Qebeyi contends that township people at the murder scene would not have openly consumed the nun. However, he does allow for the probability that someone handling the assaulted victim could have taken and disseminated pieces of her body to make muthi thought to shield people from an attack. Whatever the case, Qebeyi suggests that the nun's mutilation stirred dormant rumours that fuelled street quarrels. He recalled a memory of the outspoken J. J. Matotie, an ANC firebrand who later joined the rival Transkei Independence Party of K. D. Matanzima. Matotie's defection marked him as a ‘collaborator’ in the eyes of the ANC guerrilla wing, which assassinated him in 1963. A decade previously Matotie had been a Youth League organizer in East London banned by the Suppression of Communism Act 1950, along with other Defiance Campaign stalwarts in Duncan Village. Under penalty of imprisonment, Matotie could not go to Bantu Square on Black Sunday. Afterwards, he criticized ANC leaders for mismanaging the prayer meeting.Footnote 74 As a boy, Qebeyi heard Matotie wrangle with one lady suspected of Sr Aidan's murder. They shouted at each other about treachery and muthi, Matotie from the verge, the woman from her veranda. She accused him of being an ‘apartheid stooge’. Matotie retorted that at least he ‘did not shame the Xhosa nation by eating the flesh of a white nun’.Footnote 75
The oral testimonies evaluated in this article reveal a great deal about betrayal and secrets, especially the taboo subject of muthi. While African sources emphasized that Sr Aidan was never eaten as it was ‘against their culture to do so’, they acknowledged that European flesh – ground, cooked, and lubricated in human fat, amafutha – was coveted by izinyanga or healers. These izinyanga purified muthi in ceremonies that involved burning and mixing human flesh with other sacred elements.Footnote 76 In particular, amafutha-infused medicine was said to neutralize threat or harm by enhancing personal luck, bestowing supernatural power, and turning someone invisible.Footnote 77 Above all, the human ingredients of muthi armoured people against ruinous and lethal misfortune, isinyama, invasively delivered, particularly the superior firepower of an oppressor. Indeed, they said that this belief was shared by African neighbours far and wide. Decades ago in Natal, muthi made from human flesh was coveted by Zulu opponents of white rule. During their defiance of unjust law – in this case an onerous poll tax that triggered ‘Bhambatha's Rebellion’ in 1906 (Marks Reference Marks1970) – they culled the flesh of a slain settler to boost their protective muthi. An idiom circulating at the time summoned protestors to hunt and slaughter white buck (antelope), inyamazane emhlophe, a metaphorical term for the embodiment of colonial power.Footnote 78 In one skirmish, mounted government forces reconnoitring for a larger colonial army equipped with Gatling guns was ambushed by anti-tax rebels led by inkosi (chief) Bhambatha kaZondi. Four white policemen were stabbed to death, among them Sergeant E. Brown (Stuart Reference Stuart1913: 172; Carton Reference Carton2000: 105–6). Several of Bhambatha's men quickly skinned (bacwiya) Brown, cutting away his fatty tissue and genitalia, for an inyanga identified in archival documents as the war doctor Dakakwesuthu. This inyanga apparently burned and concocted an extraordinary version of shielding medicine called intelezi, which promised to turn bullets into water.Footnote 79 In Dakakwesuthu's concoction, Brown's amafutha was the vital sealant of muthi and absorbed the ‘proximity’ – to use Joost Fontein's term – of destructive dominance that spear-wielding protestors planned to unleash on their enemy, who had far more lethal firearms (Fontein Reference Fontein2011).
During the Defiance Campaign, the muthi in demand among Duncan Village residents contained amafutha.Footnote 80 Herbal muthi infused with the heated fat of a white person, amafutha ephumalile, was made into a paste that could be daubed on eyelids or the forehead, or smeared into skin incisions that drew blood and created a booster reaction.Footnote 81 The term phumalile refers to an erect person walking through a doorway, a sign of influence. In contrast, black flesh, sothamlilo, was less potent and more ordinary (symbolically implying the same for disenfranchised residents). Sothamlilo referred to ukhota, the usual practice of sitting around the homestead hearth or stooping through the threshold of the ndlu, a round house. Given the importance of adipose tissue in concocting muthi, it is not surprising that township residents who say that the nun was mutilated make reference to her ‘fatty thighs’.Footnote 82 One oral source, Mr Nginza, reported that during the evening of 9 November he was visited by ‘some guy called Bethwell, also known as Gcwanini, [who] came over with his girlfriend … [She] said: “Yho, yho, yho, the nun was so fat, people are cutting her flesh from her thighs, yho, yho, yho, that scene is so bad, they burnt her car there at Bantu Street.”’ Nginza contended that he saw:
Sister Aidan … kneeling down as she was burnt praying … [while her] fat was running down the street … [and] a guy I grew up with by the name of Tototo … [using] a bayonet and eating some [of her] meat. He thought I craved what he was eating and then he said: ‘There she is, cut some meat there.’ [This alleged bystander] asked: ‘What should I cut?’ And he [Tototo] replied by saying: ‘It's her, go and cut there.’ I then realized that it was the arm that he was eating with a knife.
Such accounts refer to amafutha procured from Sr Aidan's seared body.Footnote 83 If she was mutilated, Card's assertion that the victim was cut into raw bloody chunks is contradicted by eyewitnesses who saw the condition of the nun's body.Footnote 84
Most African interviewees insisted that there was no moral justification, certainly in Xhosa cosmology, for consuming uncooked human flesh. At the same time, historical records reveal that Xhosa and other indigenous fighters in South Africa's nineteenth-century frontier conflicts sliced body parts from enemies at the behest of ‘war doctors’ seeking human flesh for fortifying medicines (Peires Reference Peires1989: 24–5; Murray and Sanders Reference Murray and Sanders2005: 299; Crais Reference Crais2003). In light of the archival evidence, it is possible that Sr Aidan's body bore characteristics of this kind of ritual killing for muthi, which was still occurring in rural Xhosa communities riven by feuds over scarce land and traditional authority.Footnote 85 At the same time, Basutoland, a British protectorate and African kingdom neighbouring the Eastern Cape, was experiencing a spate of ‘medicine murders’. Colin Murray and Peter Sanders (Reference Murray and Sanders2005) investigated more than fifty such cases that took place between 1945 and 1955. These crimes entailed targeted killings of villagers by chiefs who sought advantage in the political allocation of land and authority, using ‘war doctors’ to make strengthening muthi from human sinew and bone.Footnote 86
BaSotho residents lived in Duncan Village. It was said that one of them cut the nun to manufacture muthi. Rumours also circulated that a dreadlocked Bhaca healer, inyanga, was positioned over Sr Aidan, carving, distributing and concealing her flesh. He apparently beckoned people to take a slice of the nun, who may have been breathing her last.Footnote 87 Bhaca lineages were concentrated in a region of Natal that supported Bhambatha's muthi-driven insurgency. Oral testimony also explains the preference for culling tissue from a mortally wounded victim; with Pohl's barrage escalating into outright war, township residents reverted to dynamic custom that took on new forms, and later regretted it. The inyanga simulated an evolving nineteenth-century battle ritual in the Cape that African regiments enacted when harvesting flesh from freshly assaulted enemies to forge martial muthi (Peires Reference Peires1989: 24–5; Crais Reference Crais2003; Mda Reference Mda2016).Footnote 88 The judge and prosecutor in the Sr Aidan case did not consider these cultural histories of muthi in conflict zones; nor did the defence attorney, iconic ANC strategist and leading communist Joe Slovo.
CULTURED AND UNCULTURED SOCIAL ACTS
Scholarly examinations of the ‘1952 riots’ disaggregate social acts: first the killing of a nun and then of the salesman, then different skirmishes between the state and the mob. This may be due to the order of importance placed on each incident in the official record. Archival documents emphasize the apartheid government's view of ‘chaotic’ law-breaking. City authorities – and by extension the press – reported that Sr Aidan and Barend Vorster died in a ‘savage’ battery, which murdered a woman of ‘mercy’ and orphaned white children.Footnote 89 Such sentiment elevated the tragedy of two ‘Europeans’, which Defiance Campaign leaders also lamented. On 11 November, the Daily Dispatch printed a Youth League statement acknowledging that ‘a riot’ had occurred and expressing ‘great regret that two European lives were lost in the disturbances’.Footnote 90 Delivering the funeral requiem for Sr Aidan, Archbishop McCann reminded mourners that ‘she gave herself under God for … the Africans particularly. The tragedy was that those, for whom in the love of God she gave herself, should have put her to death.’Footnote 91 By contrast, interviewed township elders said that Sr Aidan and Mr Vorster were enveloped in a conflict instigated by the police invasion of Bantu Square, which triggered racially motivated counter-attacks against the ‘white enemy’. As one eyewitness named Malcolm Dyani explained, Captain Pohl ordered his white men ‘to kill and we kill[ed] to warn … [so] the police would know what was in store for them if they did not stop shooting’.Footnote 92 The nun was stabbed near the prayer rally. Vorster lost his life farther away in Thulandeville section, where the assailants had seen trucks filled with constables rake bystanders with gunfire.Footnote 93
Oral sources, too, highlight how the two murders mean different things in Duncan Village. Memory of Vorster's death quickly faded from popular consciousness,Footnote 94 while Sr Aidan's fate caused anguish in East London for decades. Why? Was the nun slain by perpetrators familiar with her Catholic charity, while Vorster, the hustling salesman, stumbled into trouble? The erasure of Vorster from the story of the ‘1952 riots’ is likely attributable to his ethnic and class position in English-speaking Cape settler society as well as to his own decisions. He was a poorly educated Afrikaner who spoke isiXhosa, presumably to sell his policies for his employer, the African Homes Trust. Additionally, Vorster ignored police admonitions to leave Duncan Village, choosing to carry on making his weekend money until he reached the wrong place at the wrong time (Mager and Minkley Reference Mager, Minkley, Bonner, Delius and Posel1993: 230).Footnote 95 In contrast, Sr Aidan was killed in her adopted home. An Irish-born liberal, she emigrated to South Africa and studied medicine at the University of the Witwatersrand. Also known as Dr (Aidan) Quinlan, she treated township patients for free in St Peter Claver's health centre.Footnote 96 In sum, the nun's professional and personal qualities elevated her status and heightened her tragedy. However, distinctions between the victims end there. Oral sources entangle the fates of Barend Vorster and Sr Aidan in a social act of killing with discernible cultural meaning and turmoil. The ‘Boer’ victim embodied Afrikaner apartheid, interviewees said, and in so doing he became a legitimate target for a masculinized code of punishment learned by Xhosa boys in peer-based stick fighting. Vorster was set upon by young men of a similar age who had banded into iviyo or ibutho, a regimental cohort that herders enrolled in and represented when wielding their cattle switches to guard pastures and test their mettle against rivals. Sticks felled Vorster, although his assailants stabbed with knives as well. They smacked his arms, knees, ankles and shoulders, key spots to strike in stick fighting when a competitor seeks to disable his opponent's ability to retaliate or retreat strategically. Most importantly, Vorster was smacked on the front and back of his head, prized hits of a sporting warrior who could land decisive blows.Footnote 97 The autopsy report charts the victim's trauma: his broken bones, bruised legs, piercing injuries, and fatal wound, a fractured skull (Figure 8).
Figure 8 Dr Sachs’ sketches of the deceased Barend Vorster.
Sr Aidan was another matter altogether. Her murder produced lasting shame in ANC ranks and among many Africans in East London because this crime came to represent the most outrageous collateral damage of the Defiance Campaign, which aimed to be just and non-violent. While this reaction of appreciable shock and dismay is understandable, it has muted one unanswered question. Why have official accounts and scholarly explanations of the ‘1952 riots’ not delved into the cultural circumstances of the nun's murder? Men, women, boys and girls participated in her assault. Were they simply craving blood? It was revealed that a thirst had been quenched, for some attackers reeked of alcohol. The Xhosa ancestors of Duncan Village, confronting white power in the nineteenth century, had not been accustomed to do so when drunk. Oral sources evoke Sr Aidan as a good person who did not personally deserve retribution but was nonetheless killed because she was a white woman associated with the oppressor. She was a recognizable force in the community under another name, Dr Quinlan, whose clinic mediated illness, a prime source of isinyama or misfortune. Consequently, her corpse exuded ‘dominating’ power that could be absorbed through (a witch's) ‘familiar’ medicine (Niehaus Reference Niehaus, Moore and Sanders2001; Reference Niehaus2013).Footnote 98 In describing how Black Sunday unfolded, oral sources situate the nun's mutilation on a battlefield, which extended from Bantu Square and Thulandeville to the edges of Duncan Village. In this lethal zone, the white enemy's body contained potent properties for muthi that strengthened those trapped in war. During early phases of the 1906 poll tax uprising, the flesh of colonists was procured for related reasons. More recently, the ‘Marikana massacre’ at a platinum mine in North West Province exhibited similar practices. This 2012 incident began when African workers, many of them migrants from the Eastern Cape and Lesotho, walked off their jobs and fortified a hill sanctuary near the mine. After killing (black) security men sent to break the strike, the miners prepared for retaliation by summoning healers to cull the victims’ flesh for muthi that might bolster their martial resolve. In response, the state launched a ferocious attack with high-calibre machine guns, killing thirty-four men from the hill.
When Sr Aidan drove into the township on 9 November, overwhelming violence pervaded Duncan Village. She was swept into and bewildered by the police shooting. So were her attackers. As the nun lay on Bantu Street, confusion set in at the scene, with overriding emotions of despair and hatred driving the moment. Her body began to be handled in an ‘uncultured manner’, although still within the explicable context of combat. The flesh taken from her, some oral sources remarked, had not undergone a process of customary purification from its raw condition to a ‘cultured’ state in a secret ceremony requiring the combination of burned human tissue with other materials mixed and mediated by a ritual specialist. Interviewees stated unequivocally that Xhosa people did not willingly consume raw parts from the nun; to do so would be a reprehensible uncultured act condemned by God and the ancestors. Still, the dark rumours that hovered over Bantu Street made oral sources wary of discussing Sr Aidan. If there is one conclusion to be reached, it is that her flesh was cut away for the purposes of making muthi. There is no credible evidence to indicate that African cannibals ate her bloody body. Rather, violence swallowed her. The metaphor of ingesting bloodshed was well known in the Eastern Cape. One century before, Xhosa people had confronted an invading ‘monster’ called ‘British Kaffraria’, militarized white power, ‘which swallowed them up, tore them from their children’ and, in the words of Jeff Peires, compelled them ‘to make a final stand’ (Peires Reference Peires1981: 169).
CONCLUSION
After almost fifty years of silence, critical events of Black Sunday emerged again in the popular consciousness of East London, reframing collective memory of South Africa's liberation struggle. As township residents used the city's restitution hearings in the late 1990s to bear witness to white rule, their cathartic testimony focused on anti-apartheid activism. In airing and debating their shared experiences, there was one event that did not bring clarity or consensus: the death of Sr Aidan.Footnote 99 A few years ago, on the sixtieth anniversary of the Bantu Square massacre, the nun's murder again dominated public recognition of the ‘1952 riots’. Offstage, Qebeyi and the families of victims killed on 9 November sought recognition and compensation, and acknowledgement of a new death toll accounting for the many casualties. There is no indication that officials will honour these requests.
There is still an urgent need in East London – and elsewhere in the country – to develop a more nuanced, comprehensive interpretation of the Defiance Campaign and its precursor, the Youth League movement against the van Riebeeck festival. Fresh from lodger protests, militant ANC leaders radicalized Duncan Village in 1952. They orchestrated rallies in April and May that countered the van Riebeeck festival with narratives of legitimate violence against white supremacy during the frontier wars. By June, this message was inscribed in the minds of township youths. When the bullets ripped into the prayer meeting, a racial revolt erupted, propelling a succession of violent acts informed by ritual conceptions of the body and the power of muthi to repel domination and death.
To the ANC, Sr Aidan's ‘senseless’ murder and mutilation represented an appalling breach of civil disobedience. For many people in Duncan Village, the opposite was true: avenging apartheid terror by killing one or two white people was justifiable. On 9 November, a rolling police massacre gave township residents reason to draw on their repertoire of ritual resources. There is nothing in past Xhosa battle strategy that excludes the taking of flesh from an enemy in a war of survival that necessitates the making of muthi to shield combatants. What did and does not sit well in Duncan Village, however, was the ‘uncultured’ resistance witnessed by God and the ancestors. The 2002 fiftieth anniversary in the township and the hallowed city memorials a decade later, including Ndebele's elegy to the nun, touched on the spiritual wrath haunting Duncan Village. Without specifying the full circumstances of Sr Aidan's death, these ceremonies of propitiation and absolution have not explained an extraordinary act that should illuminate alternative cultural histories of a canonical episode in the liberation struggle.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors thank three anonymous reviewers for their feedback, Koko Qebeyi for sharing his documentary film, Black Sunday, Nomatshetshu Matolweni for translating Qebeyi's isiXhosa interview transcripts, and Zakes Mda, Akil Cornelius and Julia Gilbert for their editorial insights.
