Outrage Over Grisly Cop Killing of Mozambican

South Africa

The following article was printed with two accompanying photographs.

The horrific killing of 27-year-old Mozambican taxi driver Mido Macia by cops in the Daveyton township outside Johannesburg on February 26 has sparked outrage in South Africa and beyond. The video still at left shows Macia shackled to the back of a police van. Charged with a parking violation, he was dragged hundreds of yards to the police station, where he died of head injuries and internal bleeding. “They killed one of our brothers like he was a dog,” said one of those protesting the killing in Daveyton two days later (photo at right).

This gruesome killing by black cops shows yet again that the role of the police under the bourgeois African National Congress (ANC) is the same as under apartheid, when mainly white cops were notorious for such barbarity. With this latest atrocity exposed to the world, eight Daveyton cops have been charged with murder. But the same police commissioner, Riah Phiyega, who sheds crocodile tears over Mido Macia’s killing told cops who slaughtered striking platinum miners in Marikana last August, “Don’t be sorry about what happened.” The ANC-led capitalist government has increasingly given the cops free rein against striking workers, immigrants and the township poor. As part of the struggle against police terror, class-conscious militants must demand: Cops, prison guards, security guards out of the unions!