Raids, Resistance, and Retribution: South Africa's Cato Manor Killings, 1960–1

Abstract

On 24 January 1960 nine police were killed in the African settlement of Cato Manor when residents turned on officers conducting a liquor patrol. On 5 September 1961, nine men convicted of the killings were hanged in Pretoria's Central Prison. These deaths produced contrasting narratives, one by the apartheid state and then decades later, another by the current African National Congress government. Apartheid police and judicial authorities vilified the accused as the worst kind of killers who wantonly slaughtered the representatives of law and order. Sixty years later, these murderers of the apartheid period were resurrected as martyrs and their remains were interred at Heroes Arch, a resting place for many antiapartheid activists. Moving past these binary versions allows us to consider a more mundane story that underscores the South African state's commitment to a model of policing that generated an unmatched degree of persecution in colonial Africa.