The forgotten tragedy of Cape Town

FEW people might know this, but Cape Town has her own 9/11 tragedy. On September 11, 40 years had passed since one of the heartbreaking events of the turbulent 80s in the Mother City.

- CH ALBERTYN | Grabouw

We ironically commemorated it in the same year we celebrate 100 years of the official status of Afrikaans (the unofficial version was spoken at the Cape as a “market” tongue as early as 1595 through interactions between Dutch sailors and the indigenous Khoi people).

On this day, three Afrikaans-speaking Cape Town guys from the so-called Coloured community bizarrely lost their lives during the widespread unrest of this era.

The incident changed my political views as a white Afrikaans-speaking person to the extent that I joined a UDF march in the City two weeks later, where I also had to run from police batons and water cannons.

The story, as I experienced it through the Cape Argus and Cape Times, as well as through the eyes of some of my patients at Woodstock Hospital, unfolded like this.

Ebrahim Carelse, a clerk at a firm of attorneys in Cape Town, had been killed by the police earlier that week after visiting a friend in Salt River.

Involvement in the throwing of petrol bombs was mentioned as the reason, but many people felt he was mistaken for the wrong person. Either way, he was shot in the back of his head while running from the police.

Carelse’s funeral took place on September 11, 1985 with more than 5000 mourners in the procession from Burns Road, Salt River, to the Muslim cemetery in Observatory. The crowd were obviously emotional and carried Ebrahim’s coffin on their shoulders, swinging protest banners.