EFF STATEMENT COMMEMORATING THE 1992 BOIPATONG MASSACRE

Wednesday, 17 June 2020

The Economic Freedom Fighters remembers the Boipatong Massacre in which 45 black lives were lost, and many other black people maimed after a brutal and violent crusade by 300 Inkatha-Freedom Party-aligned hostel residents. The Boipatong Massacre, which was orchestrated by an Apartheid government led by F.W De Klerk represents one of the many instances of violence and bloodshed that characterised the transition to democracy which many distorters of history want us to forget.

The loss of black life in the Joe Slovo Informal Settlement in Boipatong happened in the midst of CODESA negotiations between liberation movements and the National Party. The National Party led by the murderous De Klerk, funded and supported the massacre in order to undermine negotiations and paint a picture of black on black violence in South Africa which would suggest that black people were not ready to govern their own affairs.

We remember the lives lost in Boipatong as a result of De Klerk’s political ploy to retain power and sow division amongst black people. It shatters the untruthful and racist narrative that the transition to democracy in South Africa was peaceful, simply because there was no loss of white life. Black people died in the tug of war between liberation movements and the National Party from the 1980s which were characterised by State of Emergencies and the suppression of black people to the early 1990s that saw state-sponsored black on black violence.

We reiterate our call for De Klerk to be stripped of the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the crimes against humanity against the people of Boipatong and black people in general during the last days of Apartheid. De Klerk plays no significant or progressive role in the freedom of black people and to honour him is to spit on the memory of the lives lost in Boipatong and in the faces of the families who identified him as central to the murder of their loved ones.