Peter Nchabeleng Dies in Detention
On 11 April 1986, while on his way home from a United Democratic Front (UDF) meeting in Mankweng, Turfloop, Nchabeleng was told that police were looking for him. He continued his journey arguing that if police were looking for him, they would find him at home. When he arrived, Lebowa police detained him. Nchabeleng passed away on 11 April 1986 at the Schoonoordt police station – 13 hours after he was detained by the Lebowa police. His passing sparked protests and condemnation throughout the country and abroad as well as a consumer boycott of white towns in the Northern Transvaal.
After his passing, his body was hidden from his family by the police until it was found in a government morgue in Groblersdal. Nine members of the Lebowa police’s Mankweng riot squad were found by the inquest magistrate to be responsible for his murder.
Peter Mampogoane Nchabeleng was born on 03 March 1928, at Apel in Sekhukhuneland, in the then Northern Transvaal. He was the President of the UDF Northern Transvaal and one of the first members of Umkhonto we Sizwe’s (MK) Sabotage Campaign in the early 1960s, as Atteridgeville Section Commander.
In the 1950s, Nchabeleng was the Pretoria Regional Secretary of the African National Congress (ANC) and an executive member of the office workers union – an affiliate of the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) – and Sebatakgomo, a peasant resistance movement which resisted the imposition of Ba
