Unholy massacre or military mission?
A commemoration of the 1993 slaying of congregants in a Cape Town church by Apla guerrillas was held this week. For some, it was a time to try and make sense of the bloodshed, which stunned SA
On Wednesday night, more than a thousand people filed into the St James Anglican Church in Kenilworth, Cape Town, to commemorate an event etched into the minds of many South Africans.
Under an unseasonably warm sky, they entered through the church’s several doors, which open onto quiet streets.
Exactly 25 years ago, this church was a scene of such horror that some will never forget the red lights of the ambulances splintered by the pouring rain as 11 bodies were taken out of the church, dismembered limbs were removed from the floor, and 58 seriously injured people were rushed away.
Earlier on Wednesday, Mark Seymour entered the church for the first time in 25 years, when nobody else was there.
As he opened the door, he stepped inside a memory he has kept firmly locked behind the screen of the past.
In 1993, aged 25, he and fellow engineering student Adrian Stone attended the evening service on Sunday July 25.
“We were not part of the congregation,” he says, “we were still exploring.”
Just a few years earlier, aged 17, he was conscripted into the army and trained as a medic.
He was then sent to Angola, without a choice, and was exposed to the unimaginable horrors of war.
But, he says, none of those experiences were as overwhelming as what happened in the church — because it was the last thing he expected.
He retraces his steps, walking through an experience that began in one of the pews close to the back. “We were sitting over here,” he says. “The first guy came through the door next to the stage. I thought he tripped and dropped something. There was a second guy there too.”
That “something” was the first hand grenade, which exploded halfway down the aisle where it landed.
“The whole section exploded. I don’t recall seeing it but I remember hearing it.”
The attackers quickly backed out, and then came back in holding automatic rifles and began spraying the congregation with bullets.
Seymour remembers thinking: “I am a medic. I must help.”
He retraces his steps to the front of the church, where a state of carnage had awaited him.
“These pews were at all angles, completely blown apart . . . A woman lay on her back with a hole in her chest. A man — a loved one — was tending to her and I looked at her and she was gasping. I said to myself: ‘I can’t help you. You are dying.’
“It was just death,” he says. “And people crawling around and bleeding and messed up.”
Begging for help
A man came up to him “begging for help”.
He looked down and saw that the man’s hand had been blown away.
“I had been trained for this, but I felt ineffectual,” he recalls, remembering the state of shock he felt.
“I feel like I had a serious dance with death in Angola. I had been there to save lives. When this happened, I said: ‘How can this follow me around?’ ”
Coming back to the scene for the first time this week, he says: “I knew I would feel emotional. But it is quite therapeutic. For the first time I have had a chance to relive the moment.”
The woman with the hole in her chest was possibly victim Myrtle Smith, a woman of colour who — like the four Russian sailors from a poor community in their homeland — did not fit the profile of white oppressors that the Azanian People’s Liberation Army had hoped to target.
On Wednesday night, a video clip of Myrtle’s husband, Lorenzo, showed a man with sadness still etched all over his face.
He remembers the surreal experience of the grenades exploding and the gunfire.
“My brother-in-law Raymond said to me: ‘There is something wrong with Myrtle.’ I lifted her and opened her blouse and there it was — a hole in her heart.”
Like many survivors and those who lost loved ones, Lorenzo has made sense of the tragedy through his religion.
“It was like a war zone, but there was peace,” he says, tears welling up in his eyes.
Craig, Myrtle’s son, says one of his most enduring memories is “the love that was displayed”.
Marilynn Javens, whose husband Guy died that night, says: “The doors banged open and I still thought: ‘Gosh, it’s the wind.’ ”
She then saw Guy “on all fours crawling out of the pew” and then dying.
The massacre is like an invisible thread that still runs through the congregation a quarter of a century later. It has sewn the worshippers together in their ideals of forgiveness and predestination.
But for Stone, who remembers Seymour pushing him to the ground and covering him, the attack confirmed what apartheid and its ensuing parlous settlement had shown him.
“I am free of any illusion about ideology or religion,” he says. “I see how the world works.
“The experience of the massacre largely belongs to that congregation. I feel guilty for being there. Then, and now, I feel like a bystander.”
But, he adds: “Anyone who was there was profoundly affected. It was the denigration of a sacred space — a huge violation.”
A week or two after the attack, “my mom came into my room one night. I was asleep but I jumped up and threw her to the ground.”
After that, the experience of the massacre “retreated into silence”, away from family conversation.
“I have thought about it a lot over the years, but it doesn’t play on my mind as much as the everyday life of relations between the races in that era. These events, while less dramatic, involve more personal culpability.”
He recalls an event a few months before the attack. “A man I worked with and was friendly with at Eskom was denied access to the bus with us because he wasn’t white. I voiced my objection, but I stayed on the bus,” he says, still filled with regret.
“So, the St James massacre has, I suspect, percolated inside me with other events affecting my view of the world, particularly regarding politicians and authority.”
For some, healing was sought through reconciliation — bringing the perpetrators out of the shadows at the church door, and into the room face to face.
Although there were four men on the mission, only two entered the church.
One of these was Gcinikhaya Makoma, who was only 17 when he threw hand grenades into the congregation before opening fire with an automatic rifle.
Four years after the attacks, when he was in prison before receiving amnesty at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he met Liezl Ackerman, whose mother, Marita, had died in the attack, and Gillian Schermbrucker, who had been badly wounded. The meeting was filmed and shown on SABC TV as part of the TRC
Special Report series.
Their first question to him was about motive: given that liberation was being negotiated through a fragile process, and a democratic election had already been scheduled, why was the attack carried out?
He said: “There’s no one who have a right to kill anyone. Even that time I was involved in Apla operations, I know it is wrong, but the agenda is the reason.”
He said there was “an understanding that the land of the African people was robbed from them, through the barrel of the gun”.
On a more personal note, he added: “I was under command. As a soldier you have to obey orders, whether you see these people are praying or they are in a party, as long as the commander says you have to shoot to kill, that’s what you do.
“As a human being, I think what I did is really horrible. It was very brutal, but there is only one thing which I know, it was the situation in the country . . . we were in a war.”
Sichumiso Nonxuba, the commander of the group, was the other attacker who entered the church. At the TRC, one of the men under his command said Nonxuba chose a church because “whites were using churches to oppress blacks”. He was killed in a car crash before getting amnesty.
The two men who did not enter the church but helped with the attack, Bassie Mkhumbuzi and Thobela Mlambisa, got amnesty, joined the army in a democratic South Africa and faded into obscurity.
Makoma, who had escaped life in jail through the TRC amnesty, then took part in a deadly cash heist in which a man was murdered, and earned himself another life sentence.
Malose Langa, an academic at the University of the Witwatersrand and a psychologist at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, says that masculine identities formed by “serving as part of a township-based paramilitary force in the pre-democratic South Africa” are complex and somewhat intractable.
Especially for those like Makoma, who were adolescents when their masculinity was shaped by this combatant role, it is an identity that has been difficult to shake off.
But, he says, after 1994, “virtually overnight” and with no demilitarisation programme or counselling, many of these young combatants were expected to adopt “new forms of masculinity”.
Some carried their “militarised masculinities” into the new democracy, continuing to be involved in violent activities and risk-taking behaviour. Makoma, then, fits the profile.
“What it meant to be a teenager at that time is different to now,” says Langa, adding that with the St James massacre, it is likely that some of the perpetrators “had undergone just a few weeks of training before being sent out on a mission”.
In the new democracy, young men like Makoma would still “masquerade as activists but were committing crimes in the name of reclaiming what has been taken from us”.
He says that in his interviews with former combatants, they might frame stealing a car as “reclaiming our property”.
Complicated modes of masculinity have also manifested on the other end of the racial and political spectrum.
The man who fired back
Charl van Wyk, the man in the congregation who had fired back at the attackers, wounded Makoma in the hand and thwarted the attackers’ plan to follow up with petrol bombs to kill more people.
Those few seconds from 1993 have become a moment with which Van Wyk and other gun lobbyists globally have campaigned for decades.
Reflecting on the massacre a quarter of a century later, Van Wyk says: “It is a very good example of why law-abiding citizens must legally be able to defend themselves with lethal force. Those who reject selfdefence play into the hands of the criminals. They encourage the wicked to take advantage of them by creating a safe environment for the attacker.”
In words that echo gun owners in the US, he says: “That is also why all firearm owners should stand for the protection of their right to bear arms and the right to life in the womb. These two positions — among the hottest topics on the planet — are interdependent. Both require the defence of innocent life against acts of violence and evil.”
As controversial a figure is Letlapa Mphahlele, who rose to the top of the PAC after apartheid but was then expelled several years later.
He was Apla’s director of operations, who masterminded attacks on white civilians like the church massacre and the Heidelberg tavern killings shortly afterwards.
His expressed sentiments on the massacre have varied widely over the years after he failed to turn up for his TRC hearing and also evaded prosecution.
He has justified the attacks as payback for the stealing of land, but also said: “I believe that every foot soldier who killed at my command is less guilty than me, because I authorised the targets. It is I who should shoulder the blame.”