The COSAS Four and the Callous Askaris
On the morning of 16 February 1982, at approximately 08:00, police arrived at an old pump room in the mining premises near the Kagiso cemetery, where an explosion had occurred, and found bodies of three young men who were maimed by an explosion, and another who had survived by the name of Zandisile Musi. He was trying to open his eyes but couldn’t.
According to Zandisile, “I was taken to Leratong Hospital. After getting treatment, some stitches and some plaster on my leg, even my face, it was burnt, and they gave me treatment for that. And they took me out of the hospital.” Zandisile Musi, the sole survivor of the planned assassination of the ‘COSAS 4’ by the apartheid Security Branch on 15 February 1982, passed on in 2021. Musi spent nearly a year in hospital. He had to have an operation to connect the bones in one leg, and an operation to try to fix the explosion damage to both his ears. He could not continue with his schooling, as his hearing was badly damaged.
In the evening of 15 February 1982, Congress of South African Students (COSAS) members, Zandisile Musi, Fanyana Nhlapo, Itumeleng “Ntshingo” Matabane and Eustice “Bimbo” Madikela were waiting by the road near Leratong Hospital in Kagiso, next to Krugersdorp. A minivan arrived with two people inside. The driver, Joe Mamasela, was a man with a scar on his face, and Musi knew the passenger, Ephraim Tlhomedi Mfalapitsa, as a friend of his elder brother, b
