‘My feisty hero’: daughter of slain anti-mining activist pays tribute to her mom

Editor’s note: This story was originally published in Sunday Times Daily earlier in 2020, and is being republished as part of the editors’ choice edition.

A mother, a friend, a hero.

This is how 30-year-old Lungelo Xakaza described her mother, Fikile Ntshangase, the 63-year-old anti-mining community activist who was brutally gunned down in her northern KwaZulu-Natal home two weeks ago.

Xakaza, a strong, independent woman — affirmative in the way she describes her family’s and community’s plight — bears characteristics one imagines could have only been inherited from her mother. And it makes sense, because her mother was everything to her.

Ntshangase was gunned down in cold blood, six bullets ripping though her chest, shoulders and abdomen. One shot was fired while she lay face-up on the floor of her Somkhele home.

Her crime? Standing firm against the expansion of coal-mining operations by mining giant Tendele in her community of Ophondweni in Mtubatuba.

There is a “culture of intimidation” for those who oppose the mine, lawyers representing the community say, even though Tendele denies knowing of such a climate.

The three men who came in and shot my mom had asked my son to look after the dog because they wanted to enter and greet my mom.

—  Lungelo Xakaza

Sunday Times Daily visited Ntshangase’s home on Wednesday, six days after her brutal assassination. In the rural village of Ophondweni, it borders the Somkhele mine she so vehemently opposed.

Bullet holes in her lounge floor and wall remain as markers of where her lifeless body lay in a pool of blood on the night of October 22.

In the lounge some community elders and her family gathered as the retired teacher’s body was brought home on Wednesday ahead of her burial and funeral, which took place on Friday.

“If I could describe her in one word it would be ‘feisty’,” said Xakaza. “She was very outspoken and she made sure that what she felt, or what she thought, was heard. If she thought it, she said it. That’s just who she was.”

A deeply religious woman, it would seem almost ironic that Ntshangase had been listening to a gospel song just moments before her killers walked into her lounge. Her last words, according to a friend who was talking to her on the phone as the first shot rang out, were cries to Jesus.

Xakaza, an only daughter who is still reeling from the loss of her father in June to cancer, said she received a call from frantic neighbours on the night her mother was shot.

“I was at my boyfriend’s place when they called me. It was around 7.30pm. They called and said my mom was found dead after they heard gunshots. My son was at the house and ran to the neighbours, who called me and arranged transport so I could come here. I got here at about 8pm and the police and my neighbours were here.

“I saw her lying there where she was shot. It was very difficult, especially because I wasn’t allowed near her because the police were busy with the scene,” she said.

Xakaza said her 13-year-old son was instructed by the killers to look after the dog as they wanted to speak to his grandmother.

“My son was not in the sitting room where my mom was. He was outside in the kitchen’s veranda,” Xakaza said.

The teen was at the home when Sunday Times Daily visited. He was too traumatised to speak.

Two younger boys had been with Xakaza’s son at the time. They had come to buy sweets from Ntshangase, who ran a tuck shop from her home.

“While the three boys were outside they were looking after the dog because these guys had asked them to do so. When they heard the first shot they thought it was the main power switch going down. But when they heard the second my son said: ‘No, these are gunshots. Let’s run.’

“So they ran to the neighbour’s house and that’s when they told people they heard gunshots,” Xakaza said.

Some of the young boys from the community were the first on scene. They alerted other neighbours. Three men were seen running from the house, across a road and into the distance. They ran to an unoccupied house nearby.

“We don’t know if there were vehicles or not, but people saw them running on foot.” 

She said about a month ago her mother became concerned about the way committee meetings against the planned mining were going. 

“She began feeling uneasy. That’s how intense the meetings were getting. One night she heard the dogs [barking] in the wee hours of the morning and footsteps around the house. She started feeling uneasy and telling all the committee members of the MCEJO [Mfolozi Community Environmental Justice Organisation] that she feels unsafe and could they please make arrangements to get a fence for her,” she said.

She added that her mother had also received threatening phone calls.

“They were from a private number, so we couldn’t trace or know who was threatening her,” she said.

Xakaza said she wanted to clear the air of rumours that her mother’s family had a hand in her murder due to an inheritance battle.

“People are talking all over the place about different things. What I’d like to make very clear is that it’s not about money. It is definitely not about money because if the family had a problem with my mom maybe inheriting anything from my father’s passing, they would have done that three months ago because he passed away three months ago,” she said. 

She would forever remember her mother as a woman who stood up for the plight of others and a who revered God, she said.

“Her father was a priest and she loved singing, especially choir music. Baking, she loved it. She would even watch baking shows on TV and fashion designing. She loved that because she would design her own clothes and then get a seamstress to make it,” Xakaza said.

Environmental lawyer Kirsten Youens, who is representing MCEJO against the mine in the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) this week, described Ntshangase as “incredible”.

“She was a feminist, which is rare in that rural setting. She was the one who always came to the meetings, she was the one who sat in the front row, she was the one that said: ‘You lied, you shouldn’t have said that, I don’t trust you.'

“She was the one who called people out, in public, over and over and over again. She was the one who was always trying to push for her community to be better. She wanted to harvest gooseberries and make gooseberry jam. She had an entrepreneur’s spirit. She was a perfectionist. If you sang the hymn wrong, you’d have to stop and sing the hymn again.

“She spoke for justice and she spoke for truth, regardless of how hard it was. She would even say to other committee [MCEJO] members that they were being untruthful. Incredibly outspoken, incredible courageous, incredibly brave and incredibly aware of what was right and wrong,” said Youens.