Ballots and Bloodshed: The Militarization of Local Politics in South Africa
Illustration: Chris Kindred. In the late afternoon of July 13, 2017, Sindiso Magaqa parked his black Mercedes M-Class at a local corner shop on the outskirts of Ibisi, a small village of brick bungalows clustered amid the rolling emerald hills of South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal Province, often referred to as the “garden province.”
35-year-old Magaqa and two colleagues, all elected councilors in the local Umzimkhulu Municipality, were on their way home from a political meeting in the nearby town of Kokstad. The week was almost over and the mood was light. The three councilors, who were all close friends, had stopped to buy snacks and drinks before heading to another friend’s birthday party nearby.
As they cracked jokes and laughed together in the car, two men in balaclavas stepped out of a red BMW with tinted windows on the other side of the road, brandishing AK-47s. Magaqa clocked the situation before the others—he knew there were people who wanted him dead.
“Be quiet. Don’t move. Don’t get out of the car. Things are bad. We are about to be shot,” he hissed to his passengers in a staccato burst, before a volley of gunfire rang out.
More than two dozen bullets ripped through the chassis of Magaqa’s vehicle, most of them aimed at the front door on the driver’s side where he was seated. Onlookers scattered or dove to the ground.
Sitting in the back of the car, Jabulile Msiya closed her eyes, prayed, and waited for it to all be over. She was sure they were all going to die. As the seconds became minutes and the shooting continued, she wondered if she was already dead.
Then suddenly, everything was quiet. Msiya opened her eyes and found that she was still alive, though she’d sustained a gunshot wound to her right shin and another bullet had grazed the side of her left calf. Her other colleague had also been hit in the leg and the hip, but was still conscious. In the driver’s seat, Magaqa was unconscious and bleeding heavily from multiple wounds to his lower body. It was clear he’d been the primary target of the attack.
Msiya and her colleague managed to drive their wounded friend the short distance to Umzimkhulu’s central hospital. Once Magaqa had been stabilized, his family swiftly had him transferred to Durban, KwaZulu-Natal’s economic capital. As long as Magaqa was in Umzimkhulu, they were afraid the hitmen might find a way to get past the hospital’s limited security and finish him off.
But their efforts would ultimately prove futile. Magaqa succumbed to heart failure two months later. An initial toxicology report suggested that his demise was linked to complications from his wounds, though there are persistent rumors in Umzimkhulu that he was poisoned in hospital.
Whichever is true, Magaqa’s name has been added to a growing list of assassination victims, in a place where politics is proving an increasingly deadly game: at least eight municipal officials have been killed in Umzimkhulu since the beginning of 2017. As such, the town has come to serve as a microcosm of an increasingly fragmented political landscape in a province with a long and brutal history of violence.
On a hot afternoon at the beginning of March of this year, I met Msiya at her home, perched on a steep hillside overlooking the town of Umzimkhulu, the sprawling farms that surround it, and the river from which it takes its name.
The 45-year-old is a former secondary school teacher and dogged grassroots campaigner for better state schools and public services.
