At a Glance
Two Lawyers, Two Murders, One Deliberate Policy
The murders of Griffiths and Victoria Mxenge were not isolated incidents. They were part of a deliberate and systematic policy of the apartheid state to eliminate the most effective leaders of the liberation movement through extrajudicial killing — to go beyond banning orders, detention, and imprisonment to the final tool of political repression: murder. The Civil Cooperation Bureau, Vlakplaas, and the other death squad structures that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission documented in the late 1990s were not rogue elements operating outside official policy. They were instruments of state policy, directed by senior officers of the South African security forces, accountable to structures that reached into the highest levels of the apartheid government.
The targeting of lawyers was a specific dimension of this policy. Anti-apartheid lawyers performed functions that were essential to the liberation movement's survival and effectiveness. They defended activists facing criminal charges, securing acquittals or reducing sentences that would otherwise have removed movement members from active work for years. They documented torture and abuse, creating records that the movement could use for international advocacy. They challenged the legality of detentions, banning orders, and other security force actions in the courts. They provided the movement with a connection to the formal legal system that gave its resistance a legitimacy — a claim to operate within the framework of the law even as the apartheid state systematically subverted that framework. And they were difficult to silence through the normal tools of repression because their professional status gave them a degree of protection and public visibility that ordinary activists did not have.
The decision to kill Griffiths and Victoria Mxenge was the decision to eliminate two people who had made themselves indispensable to the liberation movement in Natal — whose legal work, political organising, and community connections had made them too effective to be dealt with by lesser means. It was a decision that reflected the apartheid state's increasing desperation as the resistance movement grew in the 1980s and as its previous tools of repression proved insufficient to contain it.
Victoria Mxenge's Legal Work and the Defence of Liberation Movement Activists
Victoria Mxenge qualified as an attorney and built her legal practice in Durban in the context of the liberation movement's growing need for legal support. The 1970s and early 1980s saw an enormous expansion in the number of anti-apartheid activists facing criminal charges — under the Terrorism Act, the Internal Security Act, and the various security legislation that gave the apartheid state broad powers to detain, charge, and imprison political opponents. The legal community that served these defendants was small, overworked, and itself subject to harassment and repression from the security forces. Mxenge was part of this community, taking on cases that many other lawyers were unwilling to handle, representing activists who had been detained, tortured, and charged with offences that carried the death penalty.
Her work was not merely professional. She was herself an ANC underground activist, working within the liberation movement's clandestine structures while maintaining her public practice. This combination — the professional legitimacy of the attorney's office combined with the clandestine work of the underground — was central to the movement's strategy in the 1970s and early 1980s. The ANC's internal networks needed people who could move between the world of professional respectability and the underground, using their professional connections and access to maintain links with imprisoned activists, pass information, and sustain the movement's organisational capacity through the years of repression.
The murder of Griffiths in November 1981 — found at Umlazi Stadium with twenty-seven stab wounds — was intended to break the Mxenge network and deter others from similar work. It did neither. Victoria continued and intensified her work, taking on her husband's cases as well as her own, maintaining the legal practice, and throwing herself more deeply into the UDF's formation as the internal mass movement began to coalesce in 1982 and 1983. The apartheid state's calculation had been wrong: killing Griffiths produced not withdrawal but intensification, not silence but louder resistance.
The United Democratic Front in Natal
Natal was one of the most politically complex regions in South Africa in the 1980s. It was the heartland of the Inkatha movement, which Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi had built as a Zulu cultural and political organisation but which, through the 1980s, moved increasingly into violent conflict with the ANC and UDF-aligned communities in the townships. The state of emergency violence in Natal was not simply a conflict between the liberation movement and the apartheid state — it was also a conflict between different strands of African nationalism, a conflict in which the security forces actively supported Inkatha against the UDF through what the TRC later documented as a strategy of covert support for anti-ANC violence.
Victoria Mxenge worked in this environment. The UDF in Natal was building civic organisations, youth structures, and trade union alliances in townships where the competition between ANC and Inkatha-aligned politics was already producing tension and occasional violence. Her work as a UDF national executive member and one of the organisation's most prominent faces in Natal gave her a political reach and visibility that made her effective — and that made her a target. She was organising in communities, speaking at rallies, maintaining the legal practice, and sustaining the underground networks simultaneously. The security forces were tracking her movements.
The decision to assassinate her in August 1985 came as the township uprisings were reaching their peak intensity. The State of Emergency declared in July 1985 had been intended to suppress the rebellion, but instead it had intensified resistance in many areas. The security forces' assessment was that eliminating the most effective local leaders would break the resistance. Victoria Mxenge was identified as one of those leaders, and the order was given.
1 August 1985: The Murder and Its Aftermath
Victoria Mxenge returned to her home in Umlazi on the evening of 1 August 1985. The killers were waiting. She was stabbed multiple times and died at the scene. She was forty-two years old. Her four children — already fatherless since the murder of Griffiths in 1981 — were now orphaned.
The reaction across South Africa was immediate and intense. The murder of a prominent, publicly known anti-apartheid lawyer and UDF leader — coming three years after the murder of her equally prominent husband — was a provocation that the liberation movement could not absorb quietly. The UDF called for mass action. The township uprisings that had been building across Natal and the Transvaal intensified in the days after her murder. The funeral became one of the largest political gatherings Natal had seen — tens of thousands of mourners, UDF and ANC flags, political speeches that named her killing as a declaration of war by the apartheid state.
Internationally, the murder attracted attention precisely because Mxenge was a lawyer — a professional figure with a public identity that made the killing visible in ways that the murders of ordinary activists often were not. The international anti-apartheid movement used her assassination as evidence of the systematic brutality of the apartheid state and intensified pressure for sanctions and disinvestment. The apartheid government's attempt to suppress the liberation movement by eliminating its leaders was, once again, producing the opposite of its intended effect.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Unfinished Accounting
The TRC hearings in the late 1990s brought some of the truth of the Mxenge murders into the public record, but not all of it. Eugene de Kock testified about the connections between Vlakplaas and the Mxenge killings. Dirk Coetzee admitted to organising Griffiths Mxenge's murder in 1981 and applied for amnesty. But the full chain of command — the question of who authorised the killings at the highest levels of the apartheid government — was never definitively established in the TRC process. The amnesty applications were granted, meaning that criminal prosecution of those who had admitted their roles was barred.
The Mxenge family's experience of the TRC was, like that of many families of apartheid victims, deeply ambivalent. The process brought information — confirmed what had long been suspected about the security forces' role — but it also protected perpetrators from prosecution through the amnesty mechanism, and it could not provide full accountability for decisions that had been made at the highest levels of the apartheid state. The question of justice, as distinct from the question of truth, remained unresolved.
Legacy
Victoria Mxenge's legacy is the legacy of someone who continued working in the full knowledge of the danger she faced. After her husband's murder in 1981, she understood what the apartheid state was willing to do to people like her. She continued anyway. The legal work continued. The UDF organising continued. The underground networks continued. She did not withdraw, and she did not hide. This was not foolhardiness — it was the deliberate choice of a person who had assessed the costs and determined that the work was more important than the risk.
Her name is carried by the Victoria Mxenge Housing Development Association, which built homes for low-income communities in the Western Cape in the post-apartheid era — a form of memorial that connects her memory to the material reconstruction of the society she worked to create. Schools, streets, and community halls in Natal bear her name. The TRC's confirmation of the apartheid state's responsibility for her murder placed her killing in its proper context: not as a criminal act by rogue individuals, but as the policy of a state that had decided to murder its opponents.
She was forty-two years old when she was killed. What she might have contributed to the democratic South Africa that was then less than a decade away — in the law, in politics, in the reconstruction of the communities she had served — is a question that the apartheid state's decision to murder her made unanswerable. That unanswerable question is itself part of her legacy and part of the full reckoning with what apartheid cost.