Revisiting the ruins of justice denied – is it ever too late for restitution?

As a teen, I hated October. 

It is funny that I have not thought about my aversion to the month until recently. The memory was triggered by a powerful discussion about the injustices of South Africa’s turbulent past during the I3rd International Conference on Social Justice and the 4th Social Justice Summit 2022 in October. 

It took me back more than 30 years. 

As a political activist and a human rights lawyer, my father was an enemy of the apartheid state. In October 1988, when I was in Standard 6 (Grade 8), my father’s luck ran out and he was arrested for the second time. The first time I was too young to remember. The only way I could see him after his second arrest was to accompany my mother to court. In gruesome detail, I learnt about the torture suffered by my father and his co-accused. 

The second event that made me loathe October was the burning down of our home by a political militia the following year, October 1989.

Our house was torched when my father was in prison, while my older sister and I (the second of four girls) were at boarding school. My mother was taking care of my two younger sisters and my cousins on this particular Sunday. There had been rumours that some houses of “amaqabane” (those affiliated to the United Democratic Front and/or the ANC) would be torched. 

My mother was in church when she heard the news. She made the young ones leave while she stood her ground and prayed the Rosary as our home burnt to a cinder. She was a fearless woman, my mother. I grew up in a rural area of KwaZulu-Natal and we didn’t have easy access to telephones. In the immediate aftermath, my mother had no way of letting my sister and me know what had happened.

We were called to our dormitory matron’s house on Monday night (funny how every detail is still crystal clear in my mind) and told that our home was no more. It had made newspaper headlines, and my mother had managed to contact the school to prepare us in case we saw the article. Severely distressed, we were housed at the small campus clinic for the night and missed school the next day. 

My mother came the next morning, and she was very upset to find us in bed when we were not sick. She reminded us that we were Mades, and Mades do not fold at the first sign of adversity.

She told us that she had confronted the militia after their rampage, and reminded them what she, my father and my grandfather before them had done for our community. My grandfather built the first primary school in the area and the second primary school, which I was the first member of my family to attend, was named Dr Made Primary School.

As we did not have easy access to water in our village, my mother made arrangements with the water board, which had a water treatment plant in the area, to provide standpipes around the village. She must have been magnificent in her anger; she literally stood over these traditional Zulu men and made them recognise her for the force she was.

What triggered these childhood memories was the 3rd Annual International Conference on Social Justice and the 4th Annual Social Justice Summit in Stellenbosch on 11 and 12 October 2022. The theme was restitution. Particularly, it was the presentation by journalist and author Lukhanyo Calata, the son of Fort Calata, one of the so-called Cradock Four anti-apartheid activists who were brutally killed in 1985. 

His story resonated with me because we lost too many friends and families without answers and restitution. He articulated what I could not. How the victims of apartheid and their families were never given the answers other than those that came out of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

An honest conversation