National Insurrection Spreads to Cape Town
On 28 August 1985, at around 09:00 in the morning, close to 3 000 youthful protesters marched down Klipfontein Road in Gugulethu, in the Western Cape, towards a so-called Coloured township of Athlone. Along the way they set two cars alight and defied policemen who fired teargas to prevent them getting to their intended destination of Athlone Stadium.
The stadium had been earmarked as the marshalling point for a planned march to Pollsmoor Prison, where Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Raymond Mhlaba, Andrew Mlangeni and Ahmed Kathrada were incarcerated since 1982. On 23 August United Democratic Front (UDF) patron Dr Allan Boesak announced plans for a mass march to Pollsmoor prison, on 28 August, to demand the release of Nelson Mandela, but was detained under Section 29 of the Internal Security Act shortly before the march took place. Thousands of marchers set off from different points in Cape Town to Pollsmoor prison to demand the release of Nelson Mandela. The marches were violently disrupted by police.
In a separate development, the new violence erupted as officials in Pretoria, announced that they had decided to outlaw the country’s largest organisation of black high-school students. The group, the Congress of South African Students (COSAS), was an affiliate of the United Democratic Front (UDF), the country’s major opposition group. The apartheid government’s announcement, which called the congress an undesirable organ
