By Kotie Geldenhuys
Photos courtesy of Rawpixel and Pixabay
The hitman struck shortly after midnight. His bullet shattered a window, struck a four-year-old boy, then hit his grandmother, who was sleeping beside him. The victim, Ntombenhle Mchunu, a soft-spoken 75-year-old National Freedom Party (NFP) town councillor in Nongoma, a small town in KwaZulu-Natal, had been targeted due to her position (Houreld, 2024). Ntombenhle’s murder in late July 2023 marked the onset of months of terror leading up to the National Elections in May 2024.
South Africa has a longstanding history of political unrest, marked by a pattern of violent service delivery protests and incidents of local government officials being killed. The legacy of violence from the final years of the apartheid era and the transitional period into the democracy continue to shape the present landscape (Matamba and Tobela, 2024). The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), established by Prof Clionadh Raleigh of the University of Sussex in 2005, highlights the intense violence during the four years prior to the first democratic elections in April 1994. During that time, more than 14 000 people were killed as apartheid security forces used violence to suppress uprisings and ethnic and political tensions between the African National Congress (ANC) and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) which escalated from KwaZulu-Natal to Gauteng (Deetlefs and Serwat, 2023).
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[This is only an extract of an article that is published in Servamus: August 2024. This article is available for purchase.]