Justice for Nathaniel Julius!

2 September 2020

With grief and anger, Eldorado Park residents took to the streets last week to demand justice for the brutal murder of 16-year-old Nathaniel Julius, slain by the police.

A community-wide revolt erupted early Thursday morning last week against the police for the brutal execution of the youth and dumping of his lifeless body at a hospital, as a “victim of gang violence”. Nathaniel was affectionately known as Lokkie and was a junior at Don Mattera High School.

Last week, Tuesday evening, after finishing dinner, Nathaniel went next door to get biscuits. Fearing neighborhood boys would harass him for the biscuits, Nathaniel hid behind a truck to avoid conflict. Police patrolling the area spotted Nathaniel and started interrogating him. With Down Syndrome, Nathaniel struggled to explain why he was hiding.

According to eyewitness accounts, a policeman then got out of his car, approached a by now clearly terrified Nathaniel, and shot him once in the chest. Later, at Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital, doctors pronounced him dead on arrival. Police officers allegedly told hospital staff that Nathaniel was shot in a gang fight. 

Once this was made known to the community, people came out in support of the family’s call for justice and outrage at the world in which the poorest, most vulnerable, the working class and their families continue to face the violence of armed forces, and are at the mercy of unrelenting suffering because of socio-economic deprivation.

Young Lokkie has now joined the cruel killing of Collins Khosa, Petrus Miggels, Sibusiso Amos, Adane Emanuel and many more at the hands of the police during this Lockdown! In fact, since lockdown earlier this year, rather than invest in getting food to people and improving the dilapidated healthcare system, the state is investing more and more into its violent band of thugs. The huge amounts of money spent on private security companies deployed by the state to exercise violent armed evictions is but one example. Combined with Bheki Cele’s blood lust, such an unholy marriage between the state and private capital is a lethal combination against the working class. 

Police repression and systematic violence post-1994

Eldorado Park is but one instance of the horrific persistence of the racist colonial and apartheid mentality of the police and army in South Africa, post 1994. An escalated militarisation of the police has worsened this apartheid attitude of the police to black working class communities. 

Brutal forms of policing against the black working class have defined South Africa since its inception. From resisting forced removals from the land they owned from the advancing colonial and racist White population and its financial backers, to the post 1994 savage evictions of Black working class and poor people, and to how working class strikes and protests of all kinds have been policed – it is clear that together with the continuing racist and colonial capitalist economy, the post 1994 South African police remains equally untransformed. 

Over the last two decades, there is a long list of incidents in which the police have met the just cries of the working class masses with brutal and deadly violence in our communities. 

In April 2011, Andries Tatane, on national television, was mercilessly murdered by police when the community of Ficksburg in the Free State, took to the streets together with an estimated 4000 people demanding access to better social amenities which were denied to them by the neoliberal ANC government. 

When mineworkers in the platinum belt in Marikana downed tools to demand a living wage of R12, 500 at the time, a toxic collusion of the state, the mine security, the mine bosses and Cyril  Ramaphosa answered their demand through the barrel of a gun. 34 mineworkers were massacred on live national television and many injured in the process. 

Lest we forget, it is the very same police who notoriously gunned down Sikhosiphi Bazooka Radebe in March 2016. Radebe together with the people of the Amadiba Crisis Committee in Xolobeni waged an unrelenting struggle against the private Australian mining company which wanted to extract 364 million tons of ilmenite, titanium and other heavy minerals in the area.

AbahlalibaseMjondolo in KZN have consistently been on the receiving end of police brutality, in its alliance with private security forces deployed by the state. Not only have our comrades been brutally evicted from their home, they have watched their building materials and possessions being burned. Acts such as this happened most notoriously under the leadership of Zandile Gumede, now infamously embroiled in a multi-million rand corruption scandal.  

Recently, the whole world watched in shock when BulelaniQolani and his comrades were viciously kicked out of Empolweni in Cape Town in their quest for shelter and dignity. 

Apartheid socio-economic arrangement continues

Like all Black working class communities in South Africa, since its creation under the Group Areas Act, and now after the so called “democratic breakthrough” in 1994, Eldorado Park has seen no fundamental social and economic development: it remains a township of the working class and poor, extreme poverty, homelessnes, unemployment and inequalities define the lives of the majority of the working class. 

“Democratic South Africa” of post 1994 has not destroyed the racist apartheid geography of South Africa. On the contrary, by not uprooting and throwing into the dustbin of history the White dominated economy, the ANC government has further worsened the racist divisions, especially among the South African working class. There is a growing open feeling among “coloured” and “Indian” workers and their apartheid defined communities that the ANC has prioritised “Africans” above all other races, especially with the ANC government housing and BEE policies. 

This has served the interests of capitalists of all races, by guaranteeing that the mighty formidable force of a united working class in South Africa necessary to defeat the abominable system of racial capitalism which keeps all workers in chains cannot come into existence. This, as the working class continue, 26 years after 1994, to be quarantined and isolated into their apartheid racial ghettoes. 

The Covid-19 pandemic has simply worsened an already dire situation in our working-class communities, especially with mass unemployment now throwing more than 3 million extra unemployed workers into the streets. In such circumstances, the apartheid stereotyping of “coloured working class communities” as “guns, drugs and gangs infested” and “African working class communities” as “violence, petty crime and GBV infested” informs the psychology of the police. And so innocent Nathaniel was simply a gangster hiding from the police! 

Against this economic system of inequality and its brutal armed apparatus

We condemn the assassination of Nathaniel Julius, a defenselessworking class child! We condemn the evil system we live under, which sees no value in the lives of poor people. We condemn all those who perpetuate its deep levels of inequality and cruelty! 

Though two policemen have been charged for his murder, we support the community's call for the complete overhaul of the police. A true overhaul however, can only happen when we eliminate the very logic of capitalism, of economic segregation, marginalisation and underdevelopment that Eldos was founded on. Justice can only served we dismantle the deep structural impoverishment that allows for police to treat human beings, disabled children, like nothing more than disposable bodies! 

Throughout the world, this period of the coronavirus pandemic has exposed the savage, brutal, racist and exploitative underbelly of the world capitalist system. Countless Palestinians are killed on a daily basis in the most arbitrary circumstances, and no legal action is taken against the thuggery of the Zionist armed forces of Israel. Mass protests across the United States continue to demand justice for the police killings of black, working class people. In addition, Donald Trump is demanding the deployment of the US military against US citizens! 

There is a rising awareness throughout the world that the global capitalist system is the true source of all our miseries. There are mass protests in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Australia, the USA, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Mali and many other countries. Some governments like Mali and Lebanon have actually fallen!

It is time for the working class of all ages, sexes and genders, races and in all countries of the world to learn from what the coronavirus pandemic has revealed about the capitalist system: it is the source of all our suffering and the destruction of our Planet; we must unite and liberate ourselves from capitalist bondage. 

We, the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party, will do our part in this struggle to educate ourselves and organise the working class for the struggle against our bondage to capitalism. 

Issued by Vuyolwethu Toli, National Spokesperson, Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party, 2 September 2020