It seems like yesterday
THE TOWNSHIPS were ablaze, thousands chose to walk to and from work boycotting the local bus company and a brilliant young man lost his life under bizarre circumstances.
Forty years have passed and yet it seems like just yesterday. Kimberley’s black and coloured areas were ablaze as its bus commuters had begun a protracted boycott of the whiteowned Kimberley Bus Company’s decision to hike fares.
I was part of the Diamond Fields Advertiser’s journalistic team that covered these unfolding events as thousands of commuters young and old, thronged the city’s streets in defiance of what they saw as yet another example of “white man’s greed”, while their mothers and grandmothers earning a paltry R40 a month as domestics in the racially demarcated white suburbs, were being asked to fork out up to R7.20 for bus fare.
After an incident involving the stoning of buses in Galeshewe village on June 27, 1977 the security police of the day in apartheid South Africa reacted in the only way they seemingly knew and detained a group of young men from Galeshewe under the General Law Amendment Act which allowed for the detention of so-called terrorists and other persons for interrogation.
As the maximum14-day period of detention loomed the DFA team interviewed the heavily built Colonel T G du Plessis, the then Head of the Security Police in Kimberley in his office in the Transvaal Road Tower block only to be told that all but one of the detainees would be released without being charged.
The one remaining would face two charges in the Magistrate’s Court under the Riotous Assemblies Act – holding of an illegal gathering and incitement of public violence. A day before this could take place, however, security police alleged the young teacher turned evangelist, Phakamile Harry Mabija, while returning from a toilet in the police station escaped his capturers, ran through an open door, lifted himself into a narrow louvered window and fell six floors to his untimely death.
Tensions in the black community boiled over.
From church and community leaders to the many mourners who turned up at his funeral listened to this narrative with absolute disbelief as it did not fit in with the over-all impression Phakamile had left in their lives.
The Vicar-General of the Anglican diocese of Kimberley and Kuruman said that Mabija’s detention had mystified the church, and his sudden death and its circumstances had caused widespread and deep concern. Mabija had been a church warden of the Parish of St James, Kimberley.
At the time of his death he was an evangelist working with a team of young people calling themselves the Nomads. He was described by acquaintances and friends as a strong character with a strong will. Known as “Harry” to his friends, he taught at the Zingisa Higher Primary School from 1972 to 1976. Subsequently he trained as a Christian Youth minister in Durban and qualified at Easter of 1977.
At his funeral on June 18, 1977 women cried unashamedly both at the church and the Vergenoeg cemetery, while clenched raised fists and shouts of “Amandla” after the singing of “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika ” climaxed the burial.
During the four-hour requiem service in St James Anglican Church, hundreds of people stood outside as Africa paid tribute to a favourite son.
Ironically, 40 years later the white-owned Kimberley Bus Service no longer drives the roads of the township, having been replaced by black-owned taxis.
Although barely 27 years old at the time of his death the young activist’s contribution to the struggle has been inscribed in Kimberley’s history by the renaming of the road in which the Kimberley police station tower stands to Phakamile Mabija Road.
Les Abrahams Former news-editor Diamond Fields Advertiser