Human Rights Violation Hearings — Soweto — 1996-07-23

MURPHY MOROBE: The way the march was planned, I think from the meetings that we addressed in talking about the march, we actually impressed a great deal on the need for us to conduct ourselves in a disciplined way so that we do not engage in any activities that would actually force or get the authorities to act in a way to put us in danger.  Now, of course it was early days of our own organisation as students and our experience as young people was still developing at that time.  One could not claim to have known everything about organising big marches, but we thought we
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will use the surprise element as a way of getting onto the road and doing our thing and dispersing before anything, you know, drastic would happen.  
 Now, just to give an example that because from Morris Isaacson we marched through White City, you know, Mfula, Dube, you know, on the way collecting students because from, as a tactic as we could not reach all other schools at the same time.  We had also read the Pied Piper of Hamlet and we had a vision that it might work because as we were marching on the crowd became bigger and bigger and bigger and more students joined us on the way.  It was quite a merry crowd and we were singing Senzezina, we were singing, you know, Nkosi Sikelel i-Afrika and shouting Amandhla and so on.  There was no indication that anything was going to happen that morning.  Even when we reached the Vocational Training Centre in Dube, you know, where a lone white lady happened onto the crowd in her motor car, you know, and we were amongst those that came and actually opened the way for her to move, to move through, you know, at that time.  This was about, before, just about 10am the morning of that day and we were marching at that time from Waaie past the Vocational Police Compound that time and towards Orlando West Junior Secondary School.  There was no, I mean, overt intimidation or anything on the way by students.  I think the, that for us was an encouragement, but I must say, coming from a situation where one had read a bit of history and one knew about events like Sharpeville at that time and it is something that weighed very heavily on my mind, especially the possibility that that could happen.  I had a very strong inclination to fight against that because in my understanding and recollection, it was precisely those kinds SOWETO HEARING GAUTENG PROVINCE
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of things that the Government did in the past that it wanted to use to intimidate is into not wanting to decide or consider any kind of action whatsoever.  It was an idea, that once it came to your mind, you tried to push it out before it could prevent you from deciding to do anything about your life and we did that.  Of course as the events of that morning unfolded, you know, in a way we were proven wrong.  It was still the same police, it was still the same regime and they still reacted to us in the same way they did in Sharpeville in 1960.  
 The point I am making here in response to your question is that it was, in fact, a happy crowd of students that we have and we were tense, that is for sure, you know, we were anxious, but at the same time, you know, we were quite concerned about ensuring that everything went off according to plan because our original plan was that we would march and pledge solidarity at Orlando West Junior Secondary School with that Secondary School there.  Thereafter use the subsequent days as options on which we could pursue the action if there was no response from the authorities by the first day.  It was not as if it was an action that would end on the day.  We were planning to have other actions on the Thursday and on the Friday, but once we arrived at Orlando West, that was about between 10am and 11 in the morning.  
 As soon as we arrived and started singing around the perimeter of the school a convoy of police trucks approached the area.  They actually approached from the top of the road that moves down towards the Orlando West Junior Secondary School and they parked right on top of the hill there.  They moved out of their cars and they lined across the road there.  Remember that at that time our plan was that Morris 
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Isaacson and the high schools like Morris, Sikanwatane, Naledi High and Meadowlands High and Madibane were given specific responsibility to be the leaders of the different marches that will come from different parts of Soweto to move towards Orlando West Junior Secondary School.  So it was that when we arrived at Orlando West, we all arrived at different times, there was no time at all.  I heard Sophie Thema mention the Naledi High group.  It is precisely that group that arrived just after the police had arrived and taken position facing us at the bottom of the road there.
 They came out and the policemen with the dog then moved to the front and let loose the dog that came charging at us.  It is what one of the Commissioners referred to as a mythology.  It was not a mythology.  It was a real dog that bit some of the students there and I think that that really raised the anger of the students that we were not doing anything that we though warranted the kind of reaction from them, you know, even for a police dog to be sent charging into the students.  That dog was then killed by students who sought to protect themselves from it.  At that time the police then started opening fire, you know, and sure there was taunting of the police.  Basically we were saying they must go, you know, what do they want there because we are not doing anything that required their presence.  Once the shooting began it was at the time that the other schools were approaching from the back of the police that were perched on the hill there facing us.  That after the first volley, you know, I think there was one teargas canister that was lobbed and it was the first time that many of us had experience of teargas.  Even a shot from a teargas canister, if you are faced with a gun pointing at you, it is SOWETO HEARING GAUTENG PROVINCE
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still a gun and a shot is fired at you and some of the canisters hit some of the students.  There was a little pandamodium and we tried to rally the students not to panic.  It was at that time that the police themselves, for some reason, decided to rush back into their cars and as they rushed back into their cars, the students also, in anger, we were picking up anything that we could find there and we began throwing at the police to get them out of the area.  As they were moving, the only way out for them to move was to actually drive at high speed through the crowd, you know, because this police crew came from the Orlando Police Station.  
 One of the things that always remain a paining one was the fact that most of those policemen that came out of that van were actually black policemen.  You could see also from the pictures that were taken of the day that it was black policemen pointing handguns at their own children.  The important thing that there was a white commanding officer commanding them.  He is the person who made the orders and we have not heard much from this gentleman.  He came to testify during our trial and I do not know whether he is still alive.  It might interest the Commission, you know, to touch base with him because I believe that that crowd of policemen still have something to explain because one of the policemen who was there came to testify in our trial.  When he was asked by the Judge and the advocates as to what was his view of the crowd there, he said that he was taken aback by the order to shoot because as far as he was concerned the kids were just a merry crowd of kids.  He did not see any reason why they had to open fire.  He put this in testimony in our trial, but this gentleman, this white Commander is a 
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gentleman called Colonel Kleingeld, you know, who was in charge of the Orlando Police crowd at the time.  
 They then shot there way through the crowd and at that time Tsietsie tried to stand up on top of a scrap car that was in the area.  From that, whether it was a movement of someone climbing on top of this thing, that there were shots that were sent firing into that scrap car that we were standing on.  Fortunately, we escaped any injury at that point.  It was during that time when the police were driving down that road trying to connect to the main road that goes past Uncle Charlies that that first volley of fatal shots was actually fired.  I think it is in that area that Hector Petersen was killed because one of the students that died also from that volley was the young student who was a student at Orlando North Junior Secondary School.  His father testified earlier on here, Hastings Ndlovu, who I knew and also knew his sister who taught at the same school where we were at Orlando North Junior Secondary School a few years earlier.  
 After that volley there were a number of students injured and together with a colleague of mine we decided to ask one of the journalists who was in the area, you know, to help us because there was general pandamodium now, you know.  We tried to bring back the students, it just did not help.  There was fear, there was crying, all of the students were lying, you know, really immortalised on the floor, on the road, etc.  So we decided, perhaps, let us try, you know, myself and a colleague, Swele Sizanie from Orlando East, to use one of the journalists cars to drive to Baragwanath Hospital to try and go and see any of the students who might have been injured because at least we knew that the likely 
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response of the police was to go to the hospital afterwards and detain or arrest some of those who were arrested.  We then made our way to Baragwanath to try and see what we could do there, but on the way to Baragwanath we came across an additional convoy of police cars and in armoured cars that were driving down Potchefstroom Road towards Orlando.  At that point we decided we have to turn back and go back to Orlando West so that we can warn the other student that we think there is a bigger problem coming.  We did our best to try and disperse the students at that time.  It did not matter now about meetings or anything, we just were concerned to get students off the road.  
 We drove around the area, we went to Gibson Kanter's house in Dube to try to get hold of a megaphone and we could not get one, you know, but we still went around trying to get students to move.  At that same time the police were actually moving into the area because they set up base at Orlando East Police Station at the rugby fields there and used that as a deployment in and out of Soweto because much of the violence that was happening in Orlando West had not reached Orlando East, in fact, by the afternoon of June 16th because most of the police were concentrated there and most of the students were on this side of the railway line in any case.  So, those were the events that actually led to the shooting and the fatal killing of Hector Petersen.