IN MEMORIAM: JB VILAKAZI – FIFTY YEARS ON, A LIFE STILL MOURNED, A LEGACY STILL HONOURED

This month marks fifty years since the violent and unresolved death of Jabu Bernard Vilakazi, a man whose life was as generous as it was tragically cut short. As we pay tribute to this atypical liberation struggle hero, we remember a life that defied the odds and took a stand to be a protector of the people by any means necessary.

A beacon in dark times, extinguished by the brutality of apartheid’s Robbery Squad under the pretext of an alleged robbery, and being falsely branded a gangster by the apartheid media. The strategy was to destabilize the illegal apartheid system by taking from it and giving back to Black people, who were disenfranchised. He selflessly committed himself to the cause without expecting much back.

For his family, his community, and all who knew him as a ‘Black consciousness’ operative, this was never just a case. It was a murder. A silencing. An injustice still unaccounted for. For fifty long years, his family has lived with unanswered questions, with the weight of state silence, and with the bitter knowledge that the apartheid system often criminalized Black success and weaponized suspicion against those who dared to rise. JB, as he was affectionately known, was such a man.

A successful businessman with deep roots in Soweto, Vilakazi was not just a provider for his own family, he was a benefactor to many. At a time when Black excellence was suppressed and punished, he built a thriving business and used his success not as a pedestal, but as a platform for service. He fed the hungry. He clothed the poor. And most memorably, he saw to it that scores of children, many orphaned or from impoverished homes were able to go to school. He paid their fees, bought their uniforms, supplied their books, and gave them dignity.

This was not charity. This was justice through love. He believed in education as the cornerstone of liberation, and he practiced his values without needing applause or recognition. In the townships where despair was often louder than hope, Vilakazi made hope visible. His reach was wide, his generosity legendary, and his motives pure. He believed, deeply, that no child should be left behind because of poverty.

Someone once said about Vilakazi’s legacy: “He ran a ministry of welfare (feeding the poor and assisting with funerals), education (paying school fees and buying school uniform) and health (providing transport to hospitals). It was a code that principals would not chase children away because they couldn’t afford school fees.”

That he was killed by the very system that feared the rise of men like him is a tragedy too familiar in South Africa’s long night of oppression. His alleged involvement in a robbery was never tried, never proved, and remains deeply suspect. Many believe, and rightly so, that his murder was not about what he had done, but about who he was, what he represented, and how powerfully he disrupted the myth that Black men were incapable of achievement, dignity, and leadership.

Vilakazi came from a noble lineage, one that straddled the realms of business and academia. The Vilakazi’s are a name long etched into the intellectual and entrepreneurial life of South Africa. From classrooms to boardrooms, the family has stood for excellence, commitment, and community upliftment. His father Dr Benedict Wallet Vilakazi, a novelist, poet and linguist, was the first Black South African to earn a PhD from a South African university (Wits University). 

Vilakazi carried that legacy with pride and added his own powerful chapter, a man who understood that real leadership is defined not by what one gains, but by what one gives. To remember him is to also remember the thousands of others whose lives were stolen or shattered by the violence of the apartheid regime. His death, like that of Steve Biko, Ahmed Timol, and others, must not be filed away in forgotten archives. It must remain a scar on our conscience and a call to truth.

His family’s decades-long call for an inquest is not merely personal. It is national. It is a plea for justice to be pursued even after half a century. It is a demand that we account for the lives extinguished without cause. To correct the false narrative perpetuated by the apartheid media that Vilakazi was a gangster. We cannot build a just society on foundations that deny the truth.

We must ask: what kind of society lets a man like Vilakazi be accused, killed, and erased, without ever facing the facts of what truly happened? What kind of freedom have we inherited if we are too afraid to reckon with the past, even when justice still knocks at the door?

Vilakazi’s story is one that should be taught in schools, spoken of in town halls, and engraved in the memory of a nation still struggling to reconcile its contradictions. He was a man who rose in the face of systemic oppression. A Black entrepreneur who built not only a business but a community under very challenging circumstances of apartheid. A man whose dignity challenged the logic of apartheid. That made him dangerous.

Yet he was not seeking martyrdom. He was seeking progress. He wanted, like so many, to live in peace, to provide for his people, and to build a life of meaning. His crime, if one can call it that, was to rise too high, love too much, and give too freely.

Today, Vilakazi would have been 89 years old. We say to him: we remember you. We remember your kindness, your vision, and your fight. We remember the dreams you enabled, and the lives you transformed. You were more than a businessman. You were a nation-builder long before the term entered the national lexicon.

To his family, we offer our deepest respect. You have borne the pain of silence with unmatched dignity. You have stood tall in the face of indifference. And you have continued his legacy through your insistence on the truth. The country owes you answers. The country owes you justice. And it must come.

Let this memorial not be an end, but a beginning. Let it stir the conscience of our institutions, ignite the commitment of civil society, and bring about the long-overdue inquest that Vilakazi and so many others deserve. Let us find the courage to uncover the truths still buried beneath the rubble of the old regime.

And to the people of Soweto, and South Africa at large: may we continue Vilakazi’s work in our own lives. May we lift each other. Feed each other. Educate one another. Honour the lineage of those who gave all without asking for anything in return.

Jabu Bernard Vilakazi may have been taken from us, but his example remains. His light was not extinguished. It was scattered, like seeds, in the hearts of those he helped, in the children he educated, in the family he built, and in the freedom that was still to come.

We will not forget.

We will not be silent.

We will say his name.