Anti-apartheid activists laid to rest in peace, 50 years on

Pulane Koboekae looked pensively at the seven nooses suspended over a trap door in Pretoria Central Prison where her brother Richard Motsoahae was hanged by South Africa's apartheid regime in 1964.

Then she pulled out a white tissue and sobbed silently.

"It has opened up old wounds. I'm feeling mixed emotions. I feel sick, but also relieved," said Koboekae, 66, a retired nurse, her lips trembling.

"We've long been waiting for this," she said, on the day in August last year when her brother's remains were finally disinterred, 54 years after he was buried unceremoniously in an unmarked grave.

Motsoahae was an activist for the Pan Africanist Congress, an anti-apartheid movement which split from the African National Congress (ANC) in pursuit of a more radically "Africanist" agenda.

Motsoahae and three others -- the so-called Krugersdorp Four -- were hanged for killing a policeman -- among 135 political prisoners executed by the whites-only apartheid government that ended with the country's first democratic elections 25 years ago this month.

Those executed at the gallows were hastily buried, often anonymously, sometimes in mass graves.

Koboekae remembers the day of the execution of her 23-year-old brother "like it was yesterday". She was just 13.

"I was left alone at home and I was not allowed to come and visit" him in prison, she said softly. "I was sent to school and when I came back, I was all alone."