The COSAS Four and the Callous Askaris

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, both once connected with the ANC’s (African National Congress) Botswana structures. The COSAS members climbed in and Mamasela drove them away. Zandisile Musi had whispered to Mfalapitsa that they wanted to leave for military training abroad, as a group of anti-apartheid activists.

At an isolated spot, Mfalapitsa walked the COSAS members to mining premises near the Kagiso cemetery. At an old pump room, Mfalapitsa took out an offensive (RGD-5) and a defensive (F-1) hand grenade, a box, as well as a pistol out of his pocket and placed them all on the floor. He then demonstrated how to connect the detonator to the grenades and pulling out the pin. Having done this, Mfalapitsa said he was coming back, as he was going to fetch some more equipment from the Combi.

When he exited the pump room, Mfalapitsa made sure to lock it from outside. He then ran to a spot where Christiaan Rorich (the apartheid Security Branch’s explosive expert), Abraham Grobbelaar, WO van Tonder and Lieutenant Jan Coetzee (who had taken over from Captain Dirk Coetzee as Commander of the Vlakplaas C-10 Unit) were looking on. Inside the pump installation, Zandisile Musi looked at the box Mfalapitsa had left behind and began contemplating what was inside it. Then, Rorich initiated the detonator, causing the box to explode, killing Nhlapo, Matabane and Madikela. Musi survived with life-long injuries.

After the June 1976 Soweto Uprising, Zandisile Musi was just a small boy when his two elder brothers joined hundreds of others going into exile. A family friend called Tlhomedi Ephraim Mfalapitsa, known to the family as “Weston”, also left the country. Mfalapitsa (aka Francis “Shorty” Tladi) was 30 years old when he went to Botswana to join Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). MK trained him in Novo Catengue, an ANC camp in Angola, and at Teterow, in the German Democratic Republic (then East Germany). When he returned to Angola, he was prepared for deployment to the front area (Botswana). He later defected from the ANC to join the apartheid security police.

Ephraim Tlhomedi Mfalapitsa, as a former Askari (an erstwhile member of the liberation movement that changed sides and joined the apartheid security forces), and Lt Colonel Christiaan Sebert Rorich, were denied amnesty for the murders of the COSAS Four. Jan Carel Coetzee, Brigadier Willem Frederick Schoon and Abraham Grobbelaar were also denied amnesty but died before they could face charges. According to Judge Stuart Wilson, with regard to Mfalapitsa, “To the extent that it may be contended that Mr. Mfalapitsa had to kill the boys because he was commanded to do so, I think the majority of the amnesty committee was right to point out that he played a critical role in taking up the threat they posed and in provoking the order to kill that he eventually received.”

The Foundation for Human Rights argued that “We believe the court rightfully upheld the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Amnesty Committee’s decision that the murders of the COSAS 4 were not proportionate to the political objectives claimed by Mr. Mfalapitsa. It was Mr. Mfalapitsa who told the boys that he would train them, escalated the COSAS 4 into a position of perceived threat, and thus created the very justification for their murder”.

The four were targeted because they were members of the Congress of South African Students (COSAS), which was an anti-apartheid students’ organisation established in 1979 following the June 1976 Soweto Uprisings and the banning of its predecessor, the South African Students Movement (SASM) in 1977. In 1982, the organisation, COSAS, adopted the theme “student-worker-action” and provided essential support to striking workers and community struggles around issues such as transport increases, rent hikes and consumer protection. With the motto “Each One Teach One”, it became an effective organisation for organising secondary school students all over the country and provided a basis for appropriate revolutionary political consciousness.

According to the Foundation for Human Rights, “Under customary international law, crimes against humanity of murder and of apartheid are prohibited and are considered particularly serious. All states are under obligation to prevent and to respond to these crimes by promptly investigating and punishing the perpetrators.” Therefore, “prosecuting apartheid-era criminals, such as Mfalapitsa and Rorich, under the crime against humanity of apartheid, honours those who gave up their lives for freedom, ensuring that the next generations acknowledge the painful costs of apartheid, the legacy of which we still live with today.”

The COSAS Four case is “the first case in South African history which has ever included international charges, and it is the first case in the world that includes the international charge of the crime against humanity of apartheid” (Foundation for Human Rights). The families of the COSAS 4 victims however were concerned about the delays in prosecuting those involved before they could pass on, since the post-apartheid SA Police Services were refusing to pay the legal costs of the accused, who nonetheless committed these atrocities as employees of the apartheid state.

Sources:
Wikipedia
South African History Online (SAHO).
South African History Archive (SAHA).
Jacob Dlamini, “Askari: A Story of Collaboration and Betrayal in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle”.
Stanley Manong, “If We Must Die: An Autobiography of a Former Commander of Umkhonto we Sizwe”.
Thula Simpson, “Umkhonto we Sizwe: The ANC’s Armed Struggle”.
Stephen Ellis, “External Mission: The ANC in Exile”.
Cape Times, “Court turns down amnesty bid in COSAS 4 murders”, 12 November 2024.
Zaid Kimmie, “Police refusal to pay legal costs of former officers means some apartheid-era cases cannot be closed”, Mail & Guardian, 8 December 2022.
Webber Wentzel, “The COSAS 4 families oppose SAPS’s attempt to delay the murder trial”, Webber Wentzel News, 22 November 2022.
David Forbes, “Time for justice for the Cosas 4: How the police blew up ‘4 kids with an idea’ in 1982”, Daily Maverick, 21 September 2020.
Zaid Kimmie, “Press Release: Trial in the Historic COSAS 4 Case”, Foundation for Human Rights (FHR) and the Legal Resources Centre (LRC), 10 May 2024.

Castro Khwela
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