Chris Hani: The Assassination That Nearly Broke South Africa's Transition

Martin Thembisile “Chris” Hani was born June 28, 1942, in the village of Cofimvaba in the Transkei, one of six children of a migrant-worker father who was himself an ANC member. He joined the ANC Youth League at fifteen, studied Latin and English at the University of Fort Hare and later graduated from Rhodes University in 1962, and joined the underground South African Communist Party in 1961, the same era in which the ANC turned to armed resistance after being banned. He became a founding member of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC’s armed wing, fighting alongside Zimbabwean guerrillas in the 1967–68 Wankie Campaign against Rhodesian and South African forces, one of MK’s earliest and most dangerous combat operations. He rose steadily through the movement’s ranks in exile over the following two decades, becoming MK’s deputy commander in 1982 and its chief of staff in 1987, and survived multiple assassination attempts by South African state agents during those years in exile, including a car-bomb plot in Lesotho.

Hani returned to South Africa in 1990 after the ANC’s unbanning, and in 1991 he stepped down as MK chief of staff to become general-secretary of the South African Communist Party, succeeding Joe Slovo. In a political landscape of cautious, older negotiators, Hani’s directness, personal charisma, and working-class appeal made him one of the most popular Black political figures in the country, by some polling second only to Mandela himself, and gave him particular credibility with the militant township youth who felt increasingly frustrated with the pace of negotiations toward democracy.

On April 10, 1993, a Saturday, Hani was shot dead in the driveway of his home in Dawn Park, Boksburg, in front of his daughter, by Janusz Waluś, a Polish immigrant with ties to the far-right Conservative Party. Investigators established that Clive Derby-Lewis, a Conservative Party member of Parliament, had supplied Waluś with Hani’s address and the murder weapon. Both men were sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment after South Africa abolished capital punishment; the Truth and Reconciliation Commission subsequently denied them amnesty, ruling they had failed to show the killing was genuinely politically motivated rather than simply an act of racist violence intended to derail the transition.

The assassination briefly pushed the country to the edge of the civil conflict its architects had hoped to provoke, triggering riots and a surge of unrest that alarmed negotiators on all sides. Paradoxically, it also broke the deadlock that had stalled the multi-party talks for months: Mandela’s calm public appeal for restraint, paired with intensified pressure on F.W. de Klerk’s government, pushed negotiators to finally commit to a firm election date. On June 1, 1993, seven weeks after Hani’s death, South Africa’s first democratic election was set for April 27, 1994, a timeline directly attributable to the urgency his killing created.