Boipatong now a monumental mess
● The Boipatong massacre in June 1992 saw 45 township residents slaughtered as 300 Kwa Madala hostel dwellers from the nearby Sebokeng township stormed their homes.
The attack occurred during political manoeuvring by the IFP — aided, it would come to light, by the police using soot to blacken their faces.
Some 32 years before that, neighbouring town Sharpeville was witness to the first violent demonstration against apartheid, when a 7,000-strong crowd marched on the local police station without their passbooks. Police opened fire, killing 69 people and seriously wounding 180 more.
There are two memorials in Sharpeville, one marking the spot where people lay, having been shot in the back as they fled, and another where the victims were buried.
But 4km away in Boipatong, residents still await access to their massacre monument.
Instead, Boipatong’s people still live among the stench of raw sewage running through their streets.
A report last month by the South African Human Rights Commission found the Emfuleni municipality, by allowing effluent to stream into the Vaal River, had violated the human rights of about 19-million people who depend on the river for drinking water and commercial use. The commission asked the government to intervene urgently.
Residents of Boipatong, in the Emfuleni local municipality in the Vaal Triangle, still suffer from the trauma they witnessed in 1992. Despite admissions at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1998, residents say they have not found peace. A memorial is one thing but the Emfuleni municipality, now under administration, can’t afford infrastructure to keep the town running.
There is no waste removal, water and electricity are scarce, and sewerage pipes have not been maintained.
Josephine Motholo has lived in Bakoena Street since the 1970s and remembers when, on June 20 1992, FW de Klerk came to show “sympathy” and was sent packing by residents who blamed his apartheid government for the massacre.
A month ago sewage spewed from the drain in her yard and extended along the street to outside no 121, where Jenina Malefatse, 84, lives with her grandson.
“Once they fix this, the drain around the back of the house will overflow. Then it will start again at [Motholo’s] house,” said Malefatse.
“The government won’t help fix my house; they make promises but they never come,” she said.
Gladis Mofokeng, 43, and her two children use an outside toilet that has spewed sewage for the past seven months. She dug a trench to stop sewage coming into her home.
Modise Molefe, who also lives on Bakoena Street, set up the Reliable Environmental Protection & Care Agency to help people report sewage leaks.
Last week even the local police station called on Molefe’s agency for help.
A policeman, who did not want to be named, said the station had been flooded with human waste. When he called the municipality, he was told to join the queue.
Molefe said there was an attempt to heal the suffering of Boipatong in 2016 when the monument was opened by the late Sedibeng mayor Busisiwe Modisakeng and MEC Faith Mazibuko. The monument includes a museum, youth consultancy centre and a workshop area where people can make arts and crafts to sell.
But no-one has access to it and some windows are broken.
Molefe is not surprised. “Why would tourists want to come here? Besides the monument, what is there to see besides sewage and waste, hunger and poverty?
“It’s not like [the Hector Pieterson memorial] in Soweto, which has Vilakazi Street and other attractions. We have nothing. Our youth don’t even know what happened here.”