Exhumed bodies reveal S.Africa's deep apartheid wounds - AFP

[TomSea]

Exhumed bodies reveal S.Africa's deep apartheid wounds
[AFP]
Béatrice DEBUT
AFP December 16, 2016

Pretoria (AFP) - After 52 years, Mncedisi Tyopo finally stood beside his father's grave, looking down at remains being exhumed as part of South Africa's attempts to come to terms with its painful past.

Tyopo's father Bhonase Vulindlela was an anti-apartheid fighter who was hanged along with 11 comrades in 1964.

Their bodies were crammed into four unmarked graves on rough ground in a bottom corner of cemetery beside a road in the capital Pretoria.

The exhumation will allow Tyopo to give his father a proper ancestral burial -- one small attempt at healing the wounds of decades of state violence and repression that marked South Africa until the end of white-minority rule in 1994.

"For so long we didn't know where the body was. We had no information. I feel happy," Tyopo, who was just four when his father was hanged, told AFP.

His father Vulindlela was one of a group of 12 activists from the Pan-African Congress (PAC), an anti-apartheid party that was banned by the segregationist government.

Read More At: https://www.yahoo.com/news/exhumed-bodies-reveal-africas-deep-apartheid-wounds-062038608.html