South Africa helps families find apartheid dead

SOWETO, South Africa, Jan 29: Daphney Makhubela had to wait over 20 years to bury her brother Schoeman Ramokgopa, who never said goodbye before leaving South Africa in the 1970s to train as a soldier in the anti-apartheid movement.

Ramokgopa was killed in a 1983 battle with apartheid forces on the border with Botswana, where he was stationed as part of an exiled military force opposed to white minority rule.

He was given a pauper's burial by the apartheid government without the knowledge of his family, denying them a chance to perform the important rituals associated with African burials.

His fate was shared by hundreds of fighters who, like Ramokgopa, were members of the African National Congress (ANC) which led South Africa to its first all-race elections in 1994.

Now post-apartheid South Africa is trying to help such families track down their relatives or their remains, to soothe some of the wounds left by one of the most brutal periods of repression in South Africa.

At a recent ceremony attended by a few hundred people, including senior government officials and mourners wearing T-shirts bearing his picture and singing freedom songs, Ramokgopa was at last laid to rest in Johannesburg.

Clutching a green, black and yellow ANC flag as her brother's coffin was lowered into the ground to the sound traditional ANC dirges, Makhubela's emotions were mixed.

''I'm very, very happy to find my brother's remains because I've lost my parents,'' she said at the ceremony in the Soweto black township outside Johannesburg, which was a hive of political activism and a symbol of suffering under apartheid.

When she learned the authorities had discovered her brother's original grave in mid-2005, ''I cried a lot. I didn't believe it.'' He was buried alongside his comrade Bushy Swartbooi, killed with him in 1983. Swartbooi's mother wept quietly as her son was buried.

SHATTERED FAMILIES

Ramokgopa and Swartbooi had left South Africa in the wake of the June 16, 1976 Soweto riots when police shot down dozens of defenceless black youths, many of them still in school.

News images of that massacre shocked the world, reviving opposition to the racial segregation that had been legalised since 1948. But while their activism eventually helped overthrow apartheid, it also shattered families like Makhubela's. More than a decade after the end of racial segregation, many South Africans are still desperate to know what happened to relatives killed because of their anti-apartheid activism: officials believe several hundred died in this way.

Around 1,500 families were left not knowing what happened to their sons, daughters and other relatives. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was set up after 1994 to investigate apartheid crimes and to offer some answers.

But many felt let down by it and instead, South Africa's Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA) is helping seek these fighters' bodies and passing on to a specialised missing persons unit any information that could help locate them.

It hopes to pick up where the commission left off, but some families still find it hard to get help.

There is, for instance, no policy on how to repatriate the remains of fighters who died abroad -- which could leave many waiting even longer to close the chapter on their past.

Makhubela and her father had approached the TRC for word about her brother but Makhubela said it offered little help.

T-SHIRT President Thabo Mbeki's government in 2004 set up a unit to track down those who disappeared during apartheid, and last year unveiled a monument honouring the fallen in South African conflicts, from the British colonial era to apartheid.

It was unveiled on December 16 -- a date once marking the white Afrikaners settlers' 19th-century victory over Zulu warriors.

Ramokgopa is among 70,000 fighters' names engraved on the monument, a wall in the capital Pretoria. But Makhubela's wounds are still raw.

''I can't even look at his picture because they made a T-shirt with his face on it but I don't want to wear it,'' she said.

Reuters