| Time | Summary | |
| 16:35 | There’s more than one South Africa. There is the South Africa of the cities and towns and then there is traditional South Africa, the areas formerly called homelands, like most of the Northern Province where the Human Rights Violations Committee sat this week. | Full Transcript |
| 16:50 | In GaMatlala in 1979, the former government people came there to come and take our animals. They took donkeys and goats and cattle. After that only after two weeks, they came back to burn our huts. They burned our huts, and all our property inside. Everything that was inside the house was burned, there’s nothing which was left. My father and others were assaulted and the reason was because of the apartheid government and they were members of the African National Congress. They were assaulted by the people of the traditional chiefs. They were sent by our chief called Matlala. | Full Transcript and References |
| 17:57 | Sydwell Rammotla’s story shows that rural South Africa was not untouched by apartheid inspired conflict and violence. GaMatlala in the Northern Province, ruled at the time by the Lebowa government witnessed intense feuding between anti-apartheid villages and traditional chiefs in support of the South African regime. By the late seventies and eighties the feud developed a hard ugly edge. The main conflict was over chieftaincy. Chief Ben Matlala, a member of the Lebowa government angered by the lack of support by the GaMatlala community went on the attack. The result: forced relocations, confiscations of cattle, burnt houses, and inevitably mutilation and death. Rosina Cholo lost her six month old granddaughter in such an attack. | Full Transcript |
| 18:46 | What happened, happened in my house. I was in my house with my granddaughter and her mother. When they came, they came by storm. They told us to leave and we went with them. We found a car full of people. And we wanted to hear why we were being called, because they didn’t tell us when they took us at home. And then they chopped my granddaughter and we heard my granddaughter crying. | Full Transcript and References |
| 19:56 | I was in the field with my animals, with the cows under a tree. While I was sitting there relaxing, and the cows were grazing, I just saw something like a car and when I looked at it I saw a group of people. I started to run away. I tried to, but they beat me and the others were screaming at me, shouting. And they fetched me back. They beat me again and I ran away. I ran to the field and I never came back. And at the same time the houses were burnt. | Full Transcript and References |
| 20:45 | They assaulted him, they removed his brain, they removed his eyes and was taken to Kalafong Hospital in 1980. This feud started at GaMatlala. When he came back from Kalafong he stayed for two years, he was paralysed, he could not walk; he could not talk. He could not do anything. | Full Transcript and References |
| 21:34 | Witchcraft is a particularly serious problem in the Northern Province. The widow and son of northern Transvaal UDF leader Peter Nchabeleng testified about his death in police detention in 1986. But Peter Nchabeleng was far more than just a political leader in Sekhukhuneland land. He was also an outspoken critic of witch burning practices. He and his sons played a significant role in trying to curb witch hunting by the youth and this according to his wife and son made him enemies beyond the South African Police. But what role did witch craft really play in this province during the struggle and how did witch craft beliefs influence politics of the time? Some say it was politics, specifically youth politics that changed the age old practices linked to witch craft in the area. | Full Transcript and References |
| 22:21 | Why is it that form the 1980s young people began to be actively involved in violence concerning witch craft? It was largely political. There were people who wanted to see the country ungovernable, so they used young people to do what they wanted to see accomplished. | Full Transcript |
| 22:52 | And therefore each one fighting for political turf looked for excuses where they can degrade others, or destroy others and therefore one of the objects they could use was witch craft. But in reality they were fighting for political turf. And most of them claimed to be ANC, others claimed to be PAC, but they did things that ANC was against like necklacing. | Full Transcript |
| 23:23 | Death by burning was not widespread in the province before the eighties. Traditional methods of dealing with witches rarely included killing them. Banishment from villages was the most common form of punishment, but in the rare cases where killing did take place witches were drowned or thrown down ravines. So why this deviation from traditional ways during the turbulent years of the struggle? | Full Transcript |
| 23:45 | The problem was, the communities, the people themselves felt they’ve been oppressed by the apartheid government. At the same time, when they go back to their place of living, they are now under threat from the witches. So you can see that in the course of that struggle, people have two opponents and now it became clear they needed to crash their opponents. So it happened, it might be a coincidence that this thing of witch hunting became very rife later around the 80s when we had the state of emergency, riots at schools, and so on. But basically it became more popular because of the extent of unity amongst the youth in our provinces. | Full Transcript and References |
| 24:43 | The burning of witches went hand in hand with the necklacing in the PWV, in the Gauteng region. People in Gauteng were necklaced because the authorities were doing nothing, when maybe those perpetrators were brought in to court. I think even it’s the same with witchcraft. You find that the courts cannot even come with a description on how to deal with those cases, so people are told not to believe in those things. | Full Transcript |
| 25:20 | And you’ll find that with people knowing that it is possible to burn a person. I mean, that kind of coverage developed psychologically in the minds of other people whereby people felt now that it is a good strategy, it’s a more popular strategy to burn your enemy and in these rural areas most of the enemies were not sell-outs but were the alleged witches. | Full Transcript |
| 25:49 | But what precisely is a witch? And what do they do that people fear them so? // Although we are speaking of one province here each area has got a large number of certain ethnic groups. If you take Northern Sotho speaking people many people were accused of having caused lightning, whereas if you go to a place such as Venda it was perhaps the traditional witchcraft. In other words, somebody is accused of having killed a certain person through witch craft practices, not necessarily lightning. Some areas of Venda also adopted this issue of zombies. Now it is mostly in Northern Sotho speaking areas where you find that the zombie issue played a very important role. But then of course, Western Venda and some parts of Ngiyani also fell into that category. In other words, very often if a person is wealthy, a person such as a farmer, people began to question, why is he doing so well on this farm? Who is working on his farm? So very often out of jealousy somebody will spread the gossip that when ...more | Full Transcript |
| 27:57 | We talk of witchcraft, we don’t even talk of wizard craft, there’s nothing like that. It’s always witch craft. And the victims in the north have been mostly women, old women. // More than 200 people have died at the hands of witch hunters in the Northern Province. Belief in witchcraft remains strong. // It is a mythological thing I think it’s no different from religious belief, spiritual belief; therefore it is something that you cannot wish away within the community. It’s going to be with us for a long time. It’s a belief which you cannot prove, you don’t have to prove, just like in religion one does not have to prove that God exist or that Jesus really died and rose up again. In the Northern Province I think where it began to go wrong is when it was used for political purposes. | Full Transcript |
