Speaking notes by Minister Gayton McKenzie, MP, at the media briefing on the exile repatriation of human remains from the Republic of Angola
Freedom Park, Tshwane
Acknowledgements
Programme Director;
The Minister of Defence and Military Veterans, Ms Angie Motshekga;
His Excellency Mr João Baptista Domingos Quiosa, Ambassador of the Republic of Angola to South Africa;
South African Ambassador Designate to the Republic of Angola, Mr Thulas Nxesi;
The Deputy Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture, Ms Peace Mabe;
The Deputy Minister of Defence and Military Veterans, Mr Richard Hlophe;
The Deputy Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development, Mr Andries Nel;
The Secretary-General of the African National Congress, Mr Fikile Mbalula;
The Member of the Freedom Park Council, Ms Barbara Watson;
The Chairperson of the South African Heritage Resources Agency, Ms Elodie Seotseng Tlhoaele;
The Chairperson of the National Heritage Council, Mr Tau Masemola;
The National Director of Public Prosecutions, Andy Mothibi
Families of our fallen heroes and heroines;
Mr Dan Hatto, National Chairperson of Umkhonto We Sizwe Liberation War Veterans and other Military Veterans of our liberation struggle;
Members of the media;
Ladies and gentlemen.
Opening
There is a woman in this country who was a girl when her brother walked out of the family home. She was told he had gone to study. She never saw him again. She does not know the country he died in, let alone the ground he lies in. She has never put a stone on a grave, or swept one, or spoken to him there.
Forty or fifty years later she is an old woman, and she is still waiting.
There are hundreds of families like hers. We are here today to tell them that the waiting is coming to an end, and to tell them exactly what they must now do.
The Preamble to our Constitution instructs us to recognise the injustices of our past and to honour those who suffered for justice and freedom in our land. That is an instruction, and it does not expire.
A country that leaves its dead in foreign soil has not finished the work of becoming free. Bringing them home is not ceremony, it is the completion of a citizenship that was interrupted.
Background
In November 2019, military veterans approached President Cyril Ramaphosa and asked that their comrades who perished in exile be brought home. The President established a Presidential Task Team to respond.
Government was inundated with requests. This Department led the development of the National Policy on the Repatriation and Restitution of Human Remains and Heritage Objects, adopted in 2021. In 2023, Cabinet approved a Country-to-Country Repatriation Model and Implementation Plan.
The work sits within the Resistance and Liberation Heritage Route Project – South Africa’s national chapter of the African Liberation Heritage Programme, recognised by UNESCO in 2005 and adopted by the African Union in 2011. Our struggle heritage is not ours alone. It is recognised as being of universal value.
In September 2024, on this site, President Ramaphosa received the remains of 42 of our heroes and heroines who died in Zambia and Zimbabwe, and handed them to their provinces for reburial. He made a promise that day that Government would go back, and would keep going back, to fetch the rest.
Following that directive, this Department – working with the Department of Defence, the Department of Military Veterans and the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development – developed a Five-Year Plan for the Exile Repatriation of Human Remains. Cabinet approved it in March 2026.
Why Angola
Angola holds the largest concentration of South Africans who died in exile. It is therefore the first country of focus under the Five-Year Plan.
The South Africans who died in Angola were, in the overwhelming majority, members and cadres of the African National Congress and its military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe. Angola was the country in which the liberation movement established military camps at scale – Nova Katengue, Quibaxe, Pango, Funda and others. That is a matter of historical record, and it is the reason the African National Congress sits at this table today: it holds the camp records, the deployment lists and the institutional memory without which we cannot find these graves.
That having been said, this is a programme of the Government of the Republic of South Africa, and it includes the fallen from other organisations and situations. It is open to every South African family, without exception – without regard to which movement their loved one served, and without regard to the circumstances in which they died. We do not ask a mother to justify her grief. If your child died in exile, and we can bring your child home, your child is coming home.
From today, families may apply for the exhumation, forensic examination, identification and repatriation of their loved ones.
The application form and all supporting material are hosted and controlled by the South African Heritage Resources Agency. On that page, families can:
- complete the application online;
- watch a step-by-step video guide to completing the form;
- watch two documentaries produced by SAHRA on the first mission, to Zambia and Zimbabwe;
- download and print the form; and
- read about the purpose and the process of the programme.
Our partners – including Freedom Park, the National Heritage Council and the organisations co-hosting today – carry a link to that page.
We know who we are trying to reach. Many of these family members are elderly. Many live far from a town. Many do not have data. So the online route is not the only route. Families may also apply by telephone, or in person at SAHRA offices, Freedom Park, provincial DSAC offices, and through veterans’ structures, where they will be assisted in the language they are comfortable in.
Nothing in this process costs a family a single cent. Government will never ask you for payment, and nobody is authorised to charge you a fee to lodge an application. If a person asks you for money to bring your child home, that person is stealing from you. Report them.
Nothing proceeds without consent. Exhumation, forensic investigation, verification and repatriation happen only where the family has agreed. Families choose their own rituals. Government’s role is to make those rituals possible, not to substitute for them.
In Angola we have identified more than 400 graves for possible recovery, across Luanda and the northern, eastern and southern provinces. The conditions are among the most difficult of any recovery operation we have attempted:
- live landmines remain in several of the regions concerned;
- many burials were wartime mass burials, made without names and without records;
- others are informal – village cemeteries, bush burials, burials where people fell – now heavily overgrown and requiring clearance before any work can begin;
- road access is poor, and in places seasonal.
Demining and site assessment will need to be conducted. No South African team will enter ground that has not been declared safe. That is a condition of the operation.
Identification will rest on forensic science. Where records cannot establish identity, identification may require DNA reference samples given voluntarily by family members. Families should know that before they apply. And they should know that even with the best science available to us, some remains will not be identified, and some will not be found at all.
We will not recover everyone, but we will bring home all of those that we possibly can.
Spiritual repatriation
For families whose loved ones cannot be located or recovered, there is a second path, and it is equally important.
Spiritual repatriation is the practice of returning the spirit where the body cannot be returned – conducted at the site or in the region where the person died, according to the family’s own beliefs and rituals, so that the person may be called home and laid to rest among their people.
Every family that applies will be supported down one path or the other and no family will be left with nothing.
What happens next
This work proceeds with the Government of the Republic of Angola. Your Excellency – none of this happens without your government’s cooperation, and I want to acknowledge that directly.
Updates will be published through the Department and its entities and through the partners co-hosting today. Those posts will carry QR codes linking directly to the landing page and the application form, so that information can be shared easily from hand to hand and from phone to phone.
Closing
To the governments and people who sheltered our freedom fighters when our own country was hunting them – and to Angola above all, which paid for our freedom with its own blood too – South Africa thanks you.
To the families: we know that some of you have been knocking on doors since before this democracy existed. We know that some of you have been told before that help was coming, and it did not come.
So come forward now. Apply, and help us find them.
Our heroes and heroines left this country to secure a freedom they did not live to see. The very least this nation owes them is a grave their families can visit.
Thank you. Ke a leboha. Ndiyabulela.
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