Andries Tatane killed again

City Press Editorial

Sometimes, Mzansi can simply break your heart.

We all witnessed Andries Tatane’s very public and brutal death.

The SABC captured for all to see Tatane’s arrest, his attempts to tear away from police, the shot fired into his chest, his fall to the ground and the red blood that gushed from his wound as life ebbed from him.

On the Murder of Andries Tatane

by Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

There are moments when a society has to step back from the ordinary thrum of day to day life and ask itself how it has become what it has become. There are times when a society has to acknowledge that it cannot go on as it is and ask itself what must be done to set things on a new and better course.

On State Violence

by Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

The sickening detail of how Andries Tatane was steadily murdered by the police in Ficksburg, shirtless, bleeding and bewildered, blow after blow after blow, has become a national memory. The television image from the next night’s news, showing Julius Malema striding into the High Court in Johannesburg with a suited private militia carrying M14 assault rifles, has also become part of the national consciousness.