At a Glance
Bonteheuwel, the Cape Flats, and the Making of a Generation
The Cape Flats — the low-lying, wind-exposed expanse of sandy ground stretching southeast of Cape Town that the Group Areas Act had transformed from agricultural land into a collection of Coloured townships — was, paradoxically, one of the most politically productive spaces in South Africa during the 1980s. The apartheid government had created it as a mechanism of racial control: by removing Coloured families from inner-city Cape Town suburbs under the Group Areas Act and relocating them to these distant, underserviced townships, it had simultaneously expressed its racial vision and created the conditions of concentrated poverty, shared grievance, and community solidarity from which organised resistance grows.
Ashley Kriel grew up in Bonteheuwel — one of the older and more established Cape Flats townships — in the particular community that the Group Areas removals had produced: a community that had been displaced from elsewhere, that carried both the trauma of that displacement and the organic social networks that had survived it, and that was navigating the complex identity politics of Coloured South Africa in the apartheid system. The system classified Coloured South Africans as a separate racial group, accorded them slightly better treatment than Africans in some respects while subjecting them to the same fundamental exclusions, and used the category to divide the non-white population and prevent the unity that the liberation movement was working to build.
The youth movement that developed on the Cape Flats in the late 1970s and through the 1980s was shaped by the legacy of the 1976 Soweto uprising, which had demonstrated that student and youth activism could challenge the apartheid state in ways that previous generations of the movement had not managed to do, and by the influence of Steve Biko's Black Consciousness philosophy, which insisted that the psychological liberation of Black South Africans — including the deliberate rejection of the racial categories and hierarchies that apartheid imposed — was a precondition for political liberation. Many Cape Flats youth activists took from Black Consciousness the explicit rejection of the "Coloured" category and its associated politics of separateness, identifying instead as Black in the political sense that Biko had articulated: as members of the oppressed majority regardless of the apartheid state's racial classifications.
Student Activism, the UDF, and the Decision to Go Underground
Kriel became politically active as a student at Hewat Training College in the early 1980s, at a moment when the Cape Flats's youth organisations were being drawn into the United Democratic Front — the coalition formed in August 1983 that brought together hundreds of civic, youth, and community organisations in a common front against apartheid. The UDF's Western Cape structures were among its most active, and the Cape Flats townships were central to that activity: student organisations, civic associations, youth congresses, and religious bodies all fed into the UDF's network and gave the Western Cape resistance a breadth and depth that made it particularly difficult for the security forces to suppress.
His participation in this movement brought him into the community of young activists whose commitment to the liberation struggle was deepening from above-ground civic organisation toward a willingness to consider more direct forms of resistance. The mid-1980s state of emergency — declared in 1985 and renewed in 1986, imposing detention without trial on thousands of activists and authorising security force operations in the townships that killed hundreds — created the conditions in which many young activists concluded that above-ground activism was no longer viable and that going underground, crossing the border for MK training, and returning as operatives was the only meaningful path remaining.
Kriel made that decision and crossed into exile for MK training — joining the stream of young South Africans who left the townships for the ANC's camps in Angola, Tanzania, and elsewhere during the 1980s. The decision to return to South Africa as an underground operative, rather than remaining in the relative safety of exile, was one that not everyone made: the internal work was more dangerous, the exposure to security police attention more immediate, and the consequences of arrest or discovery more severe. He returned nonetheless, committed to the struggle inside the country, and spent his final months moving between safe houses on the Cape Flats and in the surrounding area.
9 July 1987: The House in Athlone
The exact circumstances of what happened in the house in Athlone on 9 July 1987 have never been fully established to everyone's satisfaction, and the dispute about those circumstances is itself part of Kriel's story and part of the story of what the apartheid state did. The security police's account — that they had located Kriel at the house, that he had attempted to escape or resist, that in the struggle for his weapon the gun had discharged and killed him — was the account that Jeffrey Benzien, the security policeman responsible, maintained before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission when he applied for amnesty for the killing.
His family's account, and the account supported by the evidence that activists and journalists assembled in the years following his death, told a different story. The physical evidence at the scene, the wounds on his body, and the testimony of people who knew the circumstances suggested strongly that Kriel had been found, that he had not been in a position to resist effectively, and that Benzien had shot him deliberately — an extrajudicial execution of the kind that the security forces conducted regularly against MK operatives and suspected activists during the 1980s emergency. The apartheid state's security apparatus was systematic in its use of extrajudicial killing: the death squads of Vlakplaas, the C1 unit run by Eugene de Kock, and the security police units that operated across the country maintained lists of targets and used murder as a routine tool of political suppression.
The TRC process, through which Benzien applied for amnesty, brought these questions into the open but did not definitively resolve them in the way that criminal prosecution and conviction would have. Benzien received amnesty for Kriel's killing — the TRC's amnesty process required full disclosure of politically motivated acts but did not require a finding of guilt before granting amnesty — and the unanswered questions about exactly what happened in that house in Athlone remained unanswered.
The Image and the Iconography of the Lost Generation
Ashley Kriel's photograph — the image of a young man that his family and the movement circulated after his death — became one of the most widely reproduced images of the liberation struggle's human cost. There is something about the face in the photograph that captures what the apartheid state destroyed when it destroyed him: the openness, the youth, the specific individuality of a particular human being rather than an abstraction. The liberation struggle produced its share of abstract martyrs — names on walls, names on streets — and it is a constant risk of commemorative practice that the specific person disappears behind the symbol. His family's documentary film was an explicit attempt to prevent this: to insist on Ashley Kriel the person, the brother, the son, the young man from Bonteheuwel who had a life and a personality and relationships and a future that the apartheid state took from him when he was twenty years old.
The Ashley Kriel Youth Movement, formed in his memory, represented the movement's response to his death: not only mourning but the transformation of mourning into continued commitment, the use of his name as a rallying point for the youth activism that his death was intended to suppress. This practice — of naming organisations and buildings and streets after fallen comrades, of insisting that the dead continue to have a presence in the struggle — was one of the liberation movement's most important ways of maintaining collective memory and of refusing the apartheid state's attempt to make its killings disappear into silence.
Legacy
Ashley Kriel represents the generation of young South Africans who came of age entirely within apartheid, who had no memory of a political order other than the one they were fighting, and who chose — at an age when most people are still forming their basic understanding of the world — to commit their lives to the liberation struggle. Some of them, like Mandela and Sisulu, survived to see the democracy they had fought for. Others, like Kriel, did not — killed by the state at twenty, before they had lived enough of their lives to know what living a full life felt like.
The post-apartheid South Africa that he died for has not fully honoured what he died for — the inequality, the poverty, the continued concentration of economic power that the constitutional transition left largely intact are real failures of the democratic project. But the constitutional framework that the transition produced, imperfect as its realisation has been, is the framework within which South Africans continue to demand better, and Ashley Kriel's death — like the deaths of all the young people the apartheid state killed in the 1980s — is part of the price at which that framework was purchased.