It was a Wednesday afternoon in late March 1985, and the children of Hoërskool Vorentoe were on their way home. The bus was a yellow double-decker, full of teenagers in high spirits at the end of the school day, the youngest just twelve and thirteen, the oldest seventeen. The road crossed the wall of the Westdene Dam, a small reservoir a few kilometres from the centre of Johannesburg. There the bus swerved, broke through the barrier, and went nose-first into the water. A survivor remembered that it stayed upright for a moment and then sank almost at once. The whole thing, another said, took about thirty seconds. Forty-two of the children aboard never climbed out.
Inside the sinking bus there was terror and confusion. Most of the students panicked, and in the dark, flooding interior the press of bodies trying to reach the windows made escape almost impossible. One girl forced her way out through a rear window and climbed onto the roof, which by then lay under about thirty centimetres of water. She turned back to look for her sister and her friends. She stopped when she saw their faces, pale and still beneath the surface, and understood there was nothing she could do. On the bank, would-be rescuers watched survivors break to the surface in ones and twos. After a few minutes, no more came up.
Their names fill a long, terrible list, and they should be read as names and not as a number. Anna Blignaut, thirteen. Madeleine Ludick, twelve, the youngest. Petrus Koen and Connie Pretorius, both seventeen, nearly finished with school. There were two Du Plooy sisters, Linda and Reinett. There were two Krugers, two Bothas, two Pretoriuses. Hendrik Dreyer and Francois du Toit and Charl Strydom, all thirteen. Forty-two children in all, most of them from the same neighbourhood, many from the same families. Around three thousand people gathered at the dam that evening, among them dozens of parents, weeping and frantic, as doctors and nurses worked on the small bodies pulled from the water and could not save them.
The bus driver, William Horne, was forty-one. He survived, and afterward he was charged with culpable homicide. But the court acquitted him. It emerged that Horne had been assaulted four years earlier and suffered occasional blackouts, and that he had almost certainly blacked out at the wheel that afternoon, with no chance to brake or steer. A witness thought a tyre had burst, but investigators found the tyres sound and no sign that the bus had struck anything before it left the road. Four decades on, no one can say for certain why it happened. The grief had no villain to fix on, which is its own particular cruelty. The government declared the crash a national disaster, and a fund was set up to help the families bury their children.
On the first day of April 1985, less than a week after the crash, thirty-nine of the children were buried together in a single ceremony at the Westpark Cemetery, in a plot the city set aside and called Heroes' Acre. They lie in separate graves, side by side, the friends and sisters who had ridden the same bus home. Today the Westdene Dam is calm and unremarkable, a stretch of water ringed by suburban houses, and most who pass it have no idea. But Johannesburg has not forgotten. Each year on the anniversary, survivors and bereaved families still gather, now grey-haired, to remember the afternoon the bus went into the dam, and the children who were thirteen and fourteen forever.
The Westdene Dam lies in the suburb of Westdene, just west of central Johannesburg, at about 26.18°S, 27.99°E, roughly 1,750 m above sea level. It is a small reservoir set among dense residential streets on Johannesburg's western side, close to the campus of the University of Johannesburg. The nearest major airport is O.R. Tambo International (FAOR), about 28 km east; Rand Airport (FAGM) lies to the southeast and Lanseria International (FALA) to the northwest. The site is a place of quiet remembrance rather than a visual landmark; the memorial to the children stands at the Westpark Cemetery a short distance to the north. Highveld light is clearest in the dry winter months (May to August). A low, slow pass is the only respectful way to take in a place that holds this much sorrow.