Boipatong was a Black township in the Vaal Triangle, the heavy-industry belt around Vereeniging and Sasolburg where steelworks and power stations drew migrant labour from across the region. About a kilometre away stood the KwaMadala Hostel, a workers' residence attached to a steelworks. It was from there, on that June night, that the attackers came. They were supporters of the Inkatha Freedom Party, locked in a bloody rivalry with the African National Congress that had turned the townships of the early 1990s into killing grounds. The violence was often cast as tribal or factional. For the people of Boipatong, it arrived as terror in their own streets and homes.

The timing could hardly have been worse, or, to some, more deliberate. South Africa was in the fragile middle of negotiating its way out of apartheid through the multiparty talks known as CODESA. Within days of the massacre, the ANC accused the South African Police of having helped the Inkatha attackers carry out the raid, and pointed to the possibility that it formed part of covert state operations meant to destabilise the transition. The ANC walked out of the negotiations. The whole painstaking project of a peaceful settlement now hung in doubt. President F.W. de Klerk's visit to Boipatong on 20 June, under heavy police escort, was met with fury by residents who held the state responsible for their dead.

Who was truly behind the killings became one of the most contested questions of the transition, and the answers kept changing. A 1993 criminal trial, hearing testimony from 120 Boipatong residents, convicted Inkatha supporters but found that the police had played no part. An independent inquiry by the British policing expert Peter Waddington, commissioned by the Goldstone Commission, likewise found no evidence of police collusion. Yet the Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded in 1998 that the police had in fact been involved, before its own Amnesty Committee reversed course in 2000 and found they had not. The contradictions have never been fully resolved. What is certain is that real people died, and that the survivors were left to carry both their grief and the maddening uncertainty of never being told, definitively, why.

The massacre drew the attention of the world; it was named in a United Nations Security Council resolution that July. And though it nearly derailed the transition, it did not, in the end, stop it. After a second atrocity, the Bisho massacre that September, the parties found their way back to the table, and the negotiations that resumed would lead, less than two years later, to South Africa's first democratic election and the end of apartheid. That outcome can make Boipatong sound like a hurdle that history cleared. It should not. The forty-five who died here, the baby and the child and the pregnant woman and all the rest, were the cost of how close the country came to losing the peace it was trying to build, and they are remembered each June as the people, not the statistics, that they were.