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The 22 Bergville community members who made a living by trading in marijuana and were sentenced to death about 60 years ago for protecting their trade from the apartheid regime police will be posthumously vindicated following efforts by the Ukhahlamba local municipality in Bergville to establish a cannabis industry on a scale capable of offering thousands of jobs to the villagers.
The deceased were arrested in 1956 and sentenced by the apartheid high court in Pretoria for killing five apartheid special branch police officers whom they claimed had unjustifiably killed two villagers – Gojela Mthembu and Sjumba Kubheka – who were “allegedly illegally trading in marijuana”.
Legend in the area has it that when the special branch police pounced on the two villagers and shot them to death for selling marijuana, the 22 slain villagers were livid and willing to avenge the killing of their fellow villagers – and like raging bulls went for a kill, if only to defend their marijuana trade.
Mayor Vikizitha Mlotshwa said the municipality was in the process of having the bodies of the 22 slain men exhumed and repatriated to their ancestral home of Bergville.
The feeling among the villagers is that they will be returning home not as “convicted murderers: but as heroes and pioneers of the trade that will in the final analysis benefit communities and provide job opportunities to alleviate poverty in rural areas surrounding Bergville.
Mlotshwa, in an interview with Sunday…
MMP News Author
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