The workers of Mdantsane had four demands. They wanted bus shelters. They wanted tickets that could not be arbitrarily invalidated. They wanted half-price fares for students and pensioners. They wanted cushions on the cold wooden benches. The Ciskei Transport Corporation ignored all four. When the bus company then raised fares by eleven percent without warning in July 1983, the residents of this apartheid-era township -- one of the largest in South Africa, home to hundreds of thousands of Black workers who commuted twenty kilometers each way to jobs in East London -- did the one thing available to people with no political power: they stopped riding the buses. The boycott that followed lasted nearly two years, cost eleven lives at a railway station, and became one of the defining acts of resistance in the Eastern Cape.
Mdantsane sat twenty kilometers outside East London, in the nominally independent homeland of Ciskei -- a territory the apartheid government had manufactured to strip Black South Africans of their citizenship while keeping their labor accessible to white-owned industry. A 1981 government survey found that seventy percent of Mdantsane's working-class residents identified transport as their most serious daily problem. Eighty percent relied on buses operated by the Ciskei Transport Corporation, a company co-owned by the Ciskei state and the Economic Development Corporation. The buses were crowded, the benches were bare wood, and the fares consumed a significant portion of workers' wages. In 1980, the South African Allied Workers Union began holding meetings in Mdantsane to catalogue grievances. The demands they compiled were modest -- basic comfort and fairness. The CTC's refusal to engage transformed a transport complaint into a political confrontation.
On 13 July 1983, the CTC raised fares by fifty cents on the Mdantsane-to-East London route. Within days, a thousand people packed a church hall in nearby Duncan Village to organize a response. They elected a Committee of Ten to negotiate with the bus company. The CTC refused to meet them, claiming they had already consulted community leaders two months earlier. A second mass meeting drew three thousand people. The decision was unanimous: boycott. On 18 July, the commuters of Mdantsane began walking to work in large groups, crossing the Ciskei border into East London on foot -- a twenty-kilometer journey each way. By the second day, more than eighty percent of bus commuters had joined. The Ciskei government responded with force. Security forces and vigilantes set up roadblocks, hauled people out of taxis, and ordered them back onto the buses. Walking in groups became dangerous as police reinforcements arrived. So the commuters turned to the trains. The railway ran along Ciskei's border with South Africa, and the fares were slightly cheaper. The trains also offered something the open road did not: safety in numbers and a space to talk.
The Ciskei government declared a state of emergency on 3 August 1983. A night curfew was imposed on Mdantsane. Gatherings of more than four people were banned. The following morning, police and soldiers formed armed blockades at the Fort Jackson, Mount Ruth, and Egerton railway stations to prevent commuters from boarding trains. At Egerton station, a crowd of workers -- people trying to get to their jobs -- faced a line of armed men. The crowd hesitated, then advanced a few paces. The police drew their guns. The people stopped. Without warning, the police opened fire. Eleven people were killed. Thirty-six were wounded. Soldiers then blocked access to the hospital, preventing people from entering the casualty ward to find the dead and injured. In the week that followed, the government arrested seven hundred people. By the end of August, more than a thousand residents of Mdantsane were in jail. The South African Allied Workers Union was banned. Eleven of twelve schools in Mdantsane closed in protest.
The massacre did not break the boycott. It hardened it. Despite the killings, the arrests, the curfew, and the banning of their union, the people of Mdantsane continued to refuse the buses. The boycott lasted nineteen months after the massacre, finally ending on 15 March 1985 when the Committee of Ten called it off at a mass meeting. The struggle at Mdantsane was part of a broader pattern of resistance in the Eastern Cape during the 1980s -- the same region that would produce the Bisho massacre nine years later, when Ciskei soldiers again fired on unarmed civilians. On 24 September 2013, former South African deputy president Kgalema Motlanthe unveiled an upgraded memorial at the Egerton Bus Boycott Massacre site. The memorial stands where the commuters stood, at a railway station where people whose only weapon was the willingness to walk twenty kilometers were shot for trying to board a train.
The Egerton massacre site is located at approximately 32.92S, 27.73E in Mdantsane, a large township in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, approximately 20 km from East London. From the air, Mdantsane is visible as a dense urban settlement on the inland side of the railway line that once formed the border of the Ciskei homeland. The railway stations (Egerton, Fort Jackson, Mount Ruth) are visible along this line. East London lies to the southeast, with the Buffalo River mouth and harbor as landmarks. The nearest airport is East London Airport (FAEL), approximately 25 km to the south-southeast. The memorial site is at the Egerton railway station. Best viewed at 3,000-5,000 ft AGL to see the relationship between the township, the railway line, and the city of East London.