By June 1986 hundreds of black South Africans had been killed, many of them amidst the throb of dancing feet, the shrill of jeering voices and the sordid mixture of clouds of dust and fatty, acrid smoke. On 23 June Solwako Maphanga, who lived with his commonlaw wife and family in the village of Mananga Trust in Mpumalanga, close to the Swaziland border, became one of their number. His crime was that he was suspected of having called the police to the village to arrest ‘people in connection with a certain crime’.

The focus in this chapter is on significant highlights rather than substantial details of the court proceedings that followed the murder. Reasonable steps were taken to stay as close to the trial record as possible. Two themes are discernible. The first touches on the trial proper, the phase during which the guilt or innocence of the accused was adjudicated. The second concerns the evidence I advanced in mitigation of sentence.

On 30 June 1986 Richard Ntuli, Joseph Lukhele and Mishack Mathebula Magagula were arrested and charged with the murder of Solwako Maphanga. They would be represented during their trial by the Nelspruit law firm Posa, Mojapelo and Associates, led by advocate Bernard Ngoepe, then a Pretoria-based junior counsel.

The trial started more than two years later, on 19 July 1988, with Judge Louis Harms, assisted by two assessors, on the bench. After the standard preliminaries the first witness, Ennie Mkhabela, Maphanga's common-law wife, took the stand to describe the horrifying events of the day, identifying Magagula as the man who had gone off with her husband. She never saw her husband again.

Zodwa Ntuli, a 28-year-old female resident of Mananga Trust who had witnessed the murder, was the second witness to take the stand. She recounted how young people in the village, popularly known as ‘comrades’ (young activists), had gone from house to house telling people to join the crowd that was in the making. Many villagers, young and old, had heeded the call. Characteristically, there was loud singing of freedom songs, sloganeering and toyi-toying.89 After a critical mass of villagers had joined the crowd, everyone moved towards an open field in the vicinity.