Chris Hani, one of the first guerrillas who rose to be commander of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the military wing of the ANC, and then became general secretary of the Communist Party of South Africa, was a great popular hero. He went jogging during Easter break in the period when we were still negotiating a new Constitution. As he got to his home, somebody got out of a car, put a pistol to his head and gunned him down. It turned out that his killer was an extreme right-winger from Poland who had been living for some years in South Africa, working with a far-right grouping in the country. A neighbor gave the identity of the motorcar, the police caught him and almost literally, a smoking gun was found. One of the ironies of our history is that it was the ANC-92s opposition to capital punishment that saved him and a co-conspirator from execution and enabled them subsequently to apply for amnesty.
Albie Sachs