Thirty years ago, on the morning of September 7th, 1992, in the midst of South Africa’s transition from apartheid to liberal democracy, 80,000 demonstrators gathered at the Victoria Grounds in King William’s Town in the Eastern Cape’s Border region. Mobilized by a broad coalition of local organizations, under the banner of the African National Congress (ANC)-led  Tripartite Alliance in the region (which included trade unions and the Communist Party), the demonstrators would march to Bisho, the capital of the nominally independent Ciskei “homeland.”

The protesters planned to hold a “people’s assembly” and to demand the removal of Brigadier Gqozo, whose military regime was waging brutal repression despite the unbanning of the political organizations in 1990. This march was a remarkable performance of mobilization but the events are best known for the tragedy that unfolded at the homeland’s border after the Ciskei Defence Force (CDF) opened fire on unarmed demonstrators, killing 29 people and injuring more than 200.

Once a collection of colonial reserves, the Ciskei bantustan was reinvented as an ethnic-national unit under the apartheid government’s project of self-governing bantustans or “homelands.” Granted nominal “independence” in 1981, the small and scattered Ciskei was always overshadowed by the larger and more powerful Transkei; both regimes were established as ostensible Xhosa “homelands.” The pseudo-ethnic structures on which the Ciskei regime rested were defunct and illegitimate: by the 1980s, Lennox Sebe’s regime relied on intense military repression and was rampantly corrupt.

Sebe’s replacement in early 1990 by Brigadier “Oupa” Gqozo, brought to power in a bloodless coup by senior officers in the CDF, was initially celebrated by the liberation movement. But Gqozo’s initial nod to democratization quickly unraveled: free political activity was prevented by repressive security laws, violent policing, and a murderous campaign by the so-called African Democratic Movement (ADM). Developed under the influence of South African Military Intelligence and modeled on Inkatha (Buthelezi’s Zulu ethnonationalist movement, supported by the government in its war against the ANC), the ADM was employed to enforce the reintroduction of headmen in Ciskei, in the face of resistance by civic organizations whose authority the regime intended to displace.