Chris Hani’s Death Protests Result in Election Date
On 12 April 1993, two days after Chris Hani was shot and killed, millions of Black South Africans took to the streets to protest against the killing of Chris Hani, former Chief of Staff of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC) and General Secretary of the South Africa Communist Party (SACP). The protesters called for country-wide armed uprisings, but leaders in South Africa urged them to remain calm.
Hani was killed a year prior to South Africa’s first democratic elections, by two right wing associates Clive Derby-Lewis and Janusz Waluś. Janusz Waluś was arrested in Boksburg minutes after the assassination. An alert neighbour took down the registration number of the vehicle involved in the shooting and informed the police. The suspect was then apprehended in the car, and two weapons were found in his possession. Further investigation by the apartheid police had revealed a ‘hit list’ in Waluś’s home. The weapon used to kill Hani was one stolen from the SA Air Force on 14 April 1990 in Pretoria.
The Communist Party maintained that “Comrade Chris, as an individual, is irreplaceable. He had emerged in the past months, according even to the opinion polls of our opponents, as easily the second most popular politician in the country (after Comrade Nelson Mandela, of course). But the shots that killed comrade, unwittingly mobilised a huge army of liberation across the f
