Payi, Xulu and Zondo Judicially Murdered by the Apartheid Regime

Payi, Xulu and Zondo Judicially Murdered by the Apartheid Regime

On 9 September 1986, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) cadres, Clarence Lucky Payi, Sipho Brigitte Xulu and Andrew Sibusiso Zondo were hanged at dawn at Pretoria Central Prison by the apartheid regime for the killing of Benjamin Langa on 20 May 1984, and for the Amanzimtoti bombing on 23 December 1985, in which an explosive device was detonated in a rubbish bin at the Sanlam Centre, resulting in the death of five people and over forty being injured.

The three young African National Congress (ANC) and MK operatives, Lucky Payi (aka “Sihle”), Sipho “MaChina” Xulu (aka “Mpisekhaya”) and Andrew Zondo (aka “Dumisani”), were so young and yet they brought hope to the inmates on death row, making their fellow “criminal” inmates conscious of the political challenges facing their country and the atrocities committed by the illegal and racist apartheid regime. According to their fellow death-row inmate, the late Duma Joshua Khumalo, they sang revolutionary songs as they went to the gallows, as they passed his cell with their chains as condemned men to be hanged “by the neck until you are dead”.

Despite facing death in the face, they remained dedicated revolutionaries until the end of their young lives. Khumalo made them a promise, that if the Sharpeville Six were released, he would tell everyone what happened on death row. Speaking to Khumalo, his fellow comrade and actor, Bobby Rodwell said, “We all journeyed together and now your journey has come to an untimely end. Perhaps your heart was too heavy to bear anymore, perhaps you had simply had enough pain, I do not know. What I do know is that your spirit is with those three young comrades, Zondo, Xulu and Payi.”

Clarence Lucky Payi and Sipho Brigitte Xulu were executed for the killing of their fellow comrade, Benjamin Langa, on 9 September 1986. During their trial, Payi and Xulu claimed that they had been led to believe that Ben Langa, an active ANC member, was a police informer and killed him on orders they believed came from the ANC. An amnesty application by co-perpetrator, Joel George Martins, indicated that they were acting on the instructions of Cyril Raymonds (aka “MK Fear”, “Ralph Mgcina”, or “AG Lawrence”), who was an MK Chief of Operations in Swaziland. Subsequently, Raymonds was uncovered to be a Security Branch agent. On 26 February 1985, Payi and Xulu were convicted of murder and terrorism. In passing the sentence the judge refused to consider either the youth of the two accused or their backgrounds. He then sentenced them to death.

In it’s first submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the ANC maintained that “In a few cases, deliberate disinformation resulted in attacks and assassinations in which dedicated cadres lost their lives. In one of the most painful examples of this nature, a state agent with the MK name of ‘Fear’ ordered two cadres to execute Ben Langa on the grounds that Langa was an agent of the regime. These cadres – Clarence Lucky Payi] and Sipho Xulu] – carried out their orders. This action resulted in serious disruption of underground and mass democratic structures in the area and intense distress to the Langa family – which was the obvious intention of Fear’s handlers…”

According to the ANC submission, “Xulu and Payi were arrested and executed: a triple murder had been achieved by the apartheid regime without firing a single shot themselves”. Furthermore, ANC President Oliver Tambo personally met with and apologised to the Langa family for this action. In his application for amnesty in respect of the case of Benjamin Langa, George Martins claimed that he supplied information about Langa’s movements to the two MK members. Before they undertook the operation, Xulu came to George Martins’ brother’s apartment in Edendale, Pietermartizburg, that he was back in the country and that he sought assistance. Xulu also introduced Lucky Payi as a fellow guerrilla, who was the comrade he would be operating with in the country.

In December 1985, the South African security forces launched a raid into Lesotho, killing nine people. Three days later, MK members in Durban, including Sibusiso Andrew Zondo, retaliated by placing a bomb at the Sanlam Shopping Centre, in Amanzimtoti killing three adults and two children. Zondo was arrested on 29 December 1985 and charged with 5 counts of murder. The main state witness in his trial was Thembinkosi Mofokeng who, as Zondo’s alleged accomplice, was granted immunity from prosecution. Mofokeng admitted to providing the limpet mine and to accompanying Zondo to the shopping centre. Zondo claimed that he intended to telephone a warning to the shopping centre but could not find a vacant telephone booth.

Zondo therefore reacted in anger to the December 1985 Maseru Raid by the apartheid South African Defence Force (SADF). He was aware that civilians would be killed and deliberately acted against MK policy. In its first submission to the Commission, the ANC said that Zondo’s act was not in line with ANC policy, but it was understandable as a response to the SADF raid into Lesotho. Even then ANC President, Oliver Tambo, said that the killing of civilians was against ANC policy, and accordingly he disapproved of the bombing, but understood the reasons for its being carried out.

In March 1986, Zondo was sentenced to death five times by Judge Ramon Leon, who was the judge that originally found him guilty of the murders – after Zondo was alleged to have admitted to an accomplice that he was “disappointed in the body count, wishing it to have been higher”. The Zondo judgment of Leon is unreported, as well as the refusal by the Appellate Division to hear his appeal. During a Memorial Lecture on Andrew Zondo, ANC leader in KwaZulu-Natal, Sihle Zikalala, questioned this, saying, “And sadly, over the years, based on the evidence of this flawed witness, Thembinkosi Mofokeng, the lie has been repeated that Cde Zondo actually wished that more people had died.”

According to Zikalala, “Judge Leon simply rejected Cde Zondo’s testimony that he had planned to make a call for the shopping mall to be evacuated. Till today, an organisation like AfriForum repeats the portrayal of Cde Zondo as someone who was motivated by racial hatred, when he was in fact a victim of racial oppression and a liberation soldier. … As Meer puts it about the unjust, brutal sentence handed down by Judge Leon: ‘Two men had set out on the 23rd of December ‘carrying death’ in their bag. Together they had planted a mine… The one had claimed that he had attempted to phone in a warning; the other made no such claims. The first man was hanged, the other lives…’”

Analysing the Zondo judgement in his article on “The Myth of the Independence of the South African Judiciary”, Molao wa Batho argued that “The South African judiciary in its entirety is a finely tuned state machinery for oppression and suppression of the victims of the apartheid colonial regime and those Whites who have abandoned their privileged status and made common cause with the majority of the oppressed in the interest of the whole country. … Without exception, the South African judges have persistently implemented the most barbaric and cynical statutory provisions churned out by the various colonial regimes and have always been committed to the maintenance of white colonial domination and capitalist exploitation.”

Following the execution of Payi, Xulu and Zondo, on this day in 1986, the wife of well renowned United States Human Rights activist, the late Reverend Martin Luther King, Ms Coretta Scott King, failed to keep an appointment with apartheid President Botha, saying she would prefer to meet him on another occasion. Archbishop Tutu, Reverend Allan Boesak, and Winnie Mandela had already said they would not see her if she met with Botha. Ms King also cancelled an appointment to meet with KwaZulu Bantustan Chief Gatsha Buthelezi.

In a moving tribute to the three horoes of the national democratic revolution, Amanda Bani-Mapena, who is a leader of the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal, declared, “In paying tribute to Zondo, Xulu and Payi, and remembering how they met their death, one is reminded of the words spoken by Rosa Luxembourg, the Marxist theorist, uttered the day before she was murdered: ‘Your order is built on sand. The revolution will raise its heart again, proclaiming to the sound of trumpets, I was. I am. I shall be.’ So it be for Zondo, Xulu and Payi as well.”

“Indeed,” she averred, “few people would disagree that the martyrs carved themselves a niche in the history for fighting for justice and human rights which will last for all time. Many have learnt it is impossible to kill the revolutionary and the history, and revolutionaries die in order to continue living in our memories. In remembering, we make the past present. We recall, honour and praise the sacrifice of the three cadres, who made the supreme sacrifice for our freedom and belonged to the innumerable heroes who died for their ideals.”

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