Students at the University of Swaziland did not this year
mark the anniversary of the campus invasion by armed soldiers known as ‘Black
Wednesday.’
According to the Swazi
Observer, a commemoration was called off at the last minute because
present-day students were protesting that colleagues had been barred from
taking examinations because school fees had not been paid.
It would be a pity if these events stopped people
remembering the events of 14 November 1990.
It happened during what the Inter Press Service (IPS) news
agency called a ‘rebellion’ that ‘became a seminal event that signalled a new generation's political
consciousness’. It was, IPS said, ‘a dawning political awareness born from a
confluence of historical forces then sweeping the world and the Southern
African region’.
The
IPS report said ‘armed soldiers pushed police aside and forced students out of
the library where they had barricaded themselves’.
The
day began as a ‘disorganised demonstration’ against campus issues such as poor
food ‘but soon turned into demands for democratic reforms in Swaziland's
government’.
The IPS report quoted Manzini lawyer Lindiwe Khumalo-Matse, a university student
at the time, saying, ‘The reason why soldiers were called in was because
government saw our protest as a political uprising.’
Khumalo-Matse
is further quoted by IPS, ‘This was because of the involvement of Sabelo
Dlamini, who was a member of the People's United Democratic movement (PUDEMO).
Sabelo was prominent in the Students Representative Council,’ he said.
In
1990, one of the Swazi Government’s most draconian measures, a 60-Day Detention
Law, was still in force, permitting authorities to lock up anyone they saw as a
threat to public order. All political protestors were designated as such
threats.
The
violence that ensued after soldiers swept through campus has been a sensitive
subject with government ever since. A commission of enquiry had its report
secreted away for years, with a bowdlerized version finally released to the
public in 1997.
Two students who were seriously injured sued government for damages, and their
cases were settled out of court.
IPS
reported that not only was the traditional leadership’s fear of democracy
revealed on ‘Black Wednesday’, but also a proletariat attitude of resentment,
displayed by the soldiers, was shown against the educated student ‘elite’. The
military's code name for the university invasion was ‘Operation Tinfundiswa
(educated ones).’
‘It
was a time of wild rumours,’ recalled Khumalo-Matse. ‘We heard that government
feared we would burn down the library, which belied common sense because we
were inside and would have incinerated ourselves.’
The army officials in charge gave students a five-minute warning, and then
unleashed what one onlooker later told an investigating committee was a
‘military riot against civilians’.
Students were beaten as they emerged from the library to escape teargas
canisters hurled through windows, and had to run a gauntlet of soldiers. Other
soldiers chased students until they cornered them along fences. As they beat
students with batons, the soldiers informed them they were being ‘punished’.
People
in Swaziland were shocked by the brutality. Particularly offensive was one
newspaper photo depicting a young woman carried out of the library between
soldiers ‘like a slaughtered pig’, according to a letter writer to the Times of Swaziland.
Following the events, Michael Prosser, a professor from the
United States who was working at the University of Swaziland at the time,
posted a personal eye-witness account online. This is what he wrote.
BLOODY WEDNESDAY IN SWAZILAND
November 14, 1990, ‘Bloody Wednesday’ in Swaziland still lingers as a most
important moment in my life. It was the only day that I thought I surely might
die. I was a Fulbright Professor at the University of Swaziland in south east Africa
that year.
University students began boycotting classes on November 12 in protest of a
lack of faculty lecturers, poor food conditions, and the suspension of a
popular young sociology lecturer for promoting democracy in Swaziland.
Early on November 12, all 1 600 university students held a protest meeting and
boycotted all classes. At noon, they dumped their plastic wrapped lunches at
the administration office door. The Swazi radio, and tv stations, Swaziland’s
newspapers gave extensive coverage to the dumping of the lunches. Many Swazis
were subsistence farmers who often went to bed hungry; thus this student
decision reflected very badly on them. All students received a University
notice demanding the end of their class boycott on November 13. They decided to
continue it. The University Council demanded their return to classes on
November 14, or be considered in defiance of the twenty-three-year-old King
Mswati III.
Another student meeting on November 14 continued the boycott. About 500
students peacefully barricaded themselves in the two-storey university library.
Several hundred students left campus or stayed in their student hostel area. At
about 5pm, armed Swazi soldiers entered the high fenced campus.
A university official drove through the campus announcing
the immediate campus closure. Five young women rushed to me and asked for
emergency protection in my home. I took them there immediately.
A fifteen-hour rain and thunderstorm had just begun. The
young women were quite terrified.
The young soldiers broke into the library and the student hostels, dragging
students out, beating both men and women with their night sticks on their arms
and legs, and forcing them to run a gauntlet toward the front gate while the
soldiers gave them sharp blows.
The soldiers taunted the students: ‘We’ll beat the English
out of you.’ They were especially vicious toward the women. The soldiers had
been stationed that day at the high school next door to the campus and drank
lots of beer before they attacked the campus, making them even more violent
than otherwise so likely.
A neighbor warned us that at 10pm, soldiers would search our
houses and arrest any students found there or on campus. Two Canadian families
and I, in a caravan of three autos, took 11 frightened Swazi students in the
three cars to the front gate to take them to safety.
With a gun pointed the first driver’s cheek, he got
permission from the guard to leave the campus with the students. In the
swirling rain, lightening, and thunderstorm, we took the students to safe
shelters. When we returned to campus late in the evening, two soldiers were
posted all night in the back and in the front of our houses.
With some students, I drove to the nearby hospital where
more than 120 students had received emergency treatment. We visited more than a
dozen badly injured students. We learned that soldiers possibly had injured as
many as 300-400 and had killed perhaps as many as two-four students.
The Swazi radio and tv stations gave no information about
what had happened after the students had dumped their food. However, the two
Swazi newspapers did give the event considerable coverage over several weeks.
They also printed many letters to the editor decrying the incident and called
for a national judicial enquiry. Reuters News Agency and the South African
press gave it some coverage.
Amnesty International cited it in their 1991 Annual Review.
The University remained closed for two months, reopening on January 14. A
national judicial enquiry, more heavily critical of the student boycott than
the hostile military response, began on March 14, 1991 and ended on May 14. The
enquiry panel never released any details to the public.
The print media called the incident ‘Black Wednesday’ but my students and I
attempted to have the newspapers rename it Bloody Wednesday since so much
innocent student blood had been shed.
I always recall that day as my worst and best day in
Swaziland when much evil occurred but many good people at the campus, the
hospital, and nearby clinics generously helped the students. Do these former
African students, now in their thirties, still remember that day? I assume so.
I certainly always do.