Thami Mnyele Coldheartedly Murdered: 40 Years On
On 14 June 1985, Thami Mnyele was shot dead by apartheid South African Defence Force (SADF) soldiers outside his home in Gaborone. He had planned to move to Lusaka the following day and the SADF stole large collections of his works that were packed into a portfolio. A week later, apartheid security policeman Major Craig Williamson displayed the portfolio and the works in it on the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) television, as evidence of Mnyele’s “terrorist” activities. To date, these works have not been recovered from the security police.
Thamsanqa “Thami” Mnyele was born the third of five children, on 10 December 1948, in Alexandra Township, near Johannesburg. His father was a minister of religion and his mother a domestic worker. In the sixties, his father and mother separated, and Thami was sent to live with his brother, and later his uncle. By the late 1960s, his mother sent him to a boarding school in Pretoria. He loved art from an early age but there were no art classes. He used pens, pencils and paper material to draw at the age of 14. In his last year of school (Matriculation), his mother could no longer afford school fees, so he left school.
In 1971, Mnyele joined Mhloti Black Theatre, and by then he decided that his personal direction lay with the visual arts. In 1972, Mnyele secured a grant to the Evangelical Lutheran Church (ELCSA) Art Centre, in Rorke’s Drift, in the then Natal
