Johannesburg - Like most residents of Mshenguville, outside Kagiso in the West Rand, Michael Mahuma was fast asleep in the wee hours of Sunday, May 12, 1991 before he was rudely awakened by a ruckus outside his shack.
The screaming people were begging for mercy and the others calling out were dishing out orders for the killings to be swift and thorough, he recalls.
He survived because one of the men on the attack, a hostel dweller like all the attackers, had lied to his kinsmen that Mahuma’s shack was his. In the heat of the moment, there was no time to ask how.
On that morning, 28 people died, 37 were injured and just over 100 shacks were burned down.
Mahuma escaped by the skin of his teeth and, at 72 today, he has lived to tell the tale.
The story of Swanieville, which they repeated to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is that residents woke up to an orgy of violence as a group of men, armed to the teeth with an assortment of weapons, including pangas, knives and spears, ran amok.
The attack was carried out by a 100-strong group of men speaking IsiZulu, who were hostel dwellers from Kagiso 1 and were later identified as supporters of Inkatha.
Their ordeal at the hands of their attackers was harrowing as many relate accounts of seeing loved ones hacked to death.
Police complicity was always alleged, even before the TRC as residents testified that the night before, they were told by the police using loud hailers to go to bed early.
One witness told the TRC: “"I went to check what was happening. On opening the door I saw an Afrikaans-speaking policeman pointing a firearm at me. I also saw a huge bright light and realised that a nearby shack was on fire.”
The witness told the TRC he grabbed his family and they ran to find refuge. "Along the way I saw a lot of corpses. I removed six bodies to make way for us.”
After the attack, the singing and chanting mob was safely escorted out of the township to the Kagiso 1 hostel by armoured police vehicles.
On Thursday when we visited Swanieville, the hustle and bustle of everyday township life continued unabated. People were going about their business with nothing to suggest they appreciate the significance of May 12.
Philani Mndiya is 22. He says he knows of the fateful attack through anecdotes relayed by his now late father. “I was not born when the killings took place, but I know about the events of that day.”
After the attack, the surviving residents moved further south – the distance of a can being kicked down the road, and soon they were on a farm owned at the time by a Mr Swanepoel.
To part with the past, the area was then called Swanieville and this is the name it has carried since it was officially promulgated as a township.
There are the usual long queues at the local Eric Ndeleni Clinic, children at school and their younger siblings playing on swings at the several creches in the area. But nothing points to the blood-letting of 1991.
Unless of course, one speaks to Mahuma and his group at Khulumani. We had missed their Wednesday meeting by some 24-hours, Mahuma says. “We meet here,” he says, referring to his house.
“Just last Tuesday we met with the Mayor (of Mogale City Local Municipality, Tyrone Gray) and we briefed him about our wish to be granted reparations. He said as he was new in office he needed some time to consult about our matter,” Mahuma says.
He adds that only nine people were awarded reparations by the TRC: “They got R30 000 each.”
Mahuma says Khulumani is a support group of the survivors of the 1991 massacre “among other things we do”.
We were not able to meet with members of Khulumani, but one lady recalls that many people she knew had lost their husbands.
At the TRC hearings, another Swanieville resident, Thelma April, told the Commission that “Inkatha members killed her boyfriend, Joseph Makhubalo, on the night of the squatter camp attack”.
Perhaps this is an aspect of their past the residents now seem indifferent to, and want to forget, but Mahuma says “I will not forget that cold morning”.
Attempts to get in touch with the mayor on what he knows about the plight of the survivors, drew a blank.
But townships like Swanieville remain the bedrock on which the new South Africa was found.