Event

When night fell on 3 September, the sky was illuminated by fire. Overturned cars had been turned into smouldering wrecks while houses, beerhalls, shops and buildings belonging to the Orange Vaal Development Board, councillors and other businessmen presented their hollow shells, emptied of goods and reduced to rubble. In some areas, the air was thick with smoke: the smoke of burning buildings merged with the smoke emanating from coal stoves and the vapour of the industrial plants in Vanderbijlpark. Added to the fumes and smoke, the stench of teargas made those in the streets cover their faces and reach for the buckets of water and wet cloths placed next to houses. Gunshots added to the eerie atmosphere; the presence of death was almost palpable. The air was filled with the ‘repugnant stench of death that gusted like a gale force through the Vaal’, one journalist noted. It was an apocalyptic scene that witnesses would later remember with great distress. Death had visited the townships of the Vaal Triangle once more and, for some, the actions of the police conjured up memories of the Sharpeville massacre of 1960.

Elderly women were lying on the ground, overcome by teargas. Children as young as six were standing outside the burnt shops of the mayor of the Lekoa Town Council, Esau Mahlatsi, giving the Black Power salute. One woman was seen wearing the mayoral gown of Sam Rabotapi, the mayor of the Evaton Town Council. Calling herself the first mayor, she was dancing in the street. And people were heard saying that Jacob Kuzwayo Dlamini, the councillor who had been burnt in Sharpeville, had been turned into a ‘Kentucky fried chicken’. Anecdotal as they may be, these scenes were symbolic of a breakdown of social order; hierarchies of power were turned on their head while accepted forms of sociality were suspended. The revolt signified an interregnum, where everything seemed possible and nothing was certain. Administrative structures had collapsed, the Vaal Civic Association (VCA) was struggling to maintain a sense of control, and government in Pretoria wanted to know what was happening. It was a moment of struggle in its truest sense that came with great levels of uncertainty, disdain, loss and confusion.