An argument among pupils left 15-year-old Marawaan Blackenberg dead of stab wounds after an ambush outside Ned Doman High School in Athlone in the Western Cape.
Five of his schoolmates are expected to appear in the Athlone magistrate's court on Friday. Now members of the Bokmakierie community are claiming that Marawaan's death may have had racial implications.
Marawaan was one of a number of Bokmakierie people who had moved into tents in the grounds of the Spes Bona school, after Bokmakierie people occupied the disused school hostel in a bid to keep out victims of the Joe Slovo fire.
Early on Friday, a crowd of angry parents confronted police outside the gates and complained of racial friction at the school. Thursday's stabbing followed a row between Grade 9 boys which spilled over from the classroom into the street.
Witnesses said that as many children watched, pupils had held Marawaan down and then kicked him and stabbed him three times. He bled to death. The trouble began shortly after 2pm on Thursday.
A Grade 9 pupil and friend of Marawaan's, who gave his name only as Raymond, said: "This boy came from the class next door and told us to shut up, because we were a bit noisy in the class."
Raymond said when he told the other pupil to leave the classroom and mind his own business, the other boy had smacked him in the face.
"Marawaan came to my assistance and smacked the boy across the face," Raymond said.
The argument subsided and the other boy returned to his class.
Raymond said that after school, the boys had been walking home down Bolton Road when the boy from the other class and three friends threw a volley of bricks at him and Marawaan.
"I was hit in the back by one of the bricks, and then these guys cornered Marawaan in the road.
"Three of them held his hands behind him, and pushed his head down. They then kicked him and stabbed him. I kicked one of the boys, but they just stabbed him, first in the neck, then in the shoulder, and finally in the chest," said Raymond.
Raymond and other pupils alleged that the other boys had shouted racial epithets during the attack on Marawaan. Then they fled.
A distraught Natasha Williams, a Grade 10 pupil, said Marawaan, bleeding profusely from his wounds, had stumbled down the road until she and another pupil went to his aid and laid him on the lawn of a house in Denchworth Street, where he bled to death.
"His friend Curt was still talking to him and he tried to answer him, but could not speak," said Williams.
She said the incident had happened in full view of many pupils who were walking down the road.
"It was a terrible thing to see how Marawaan was stabbed, and there were even two teachers nearby, who did not intervene."
Marawaan's family was called and they huddled around his bloodied body until the police mortuary van arrived at 5:30pm.
The boy's aunt, Ameena Rajap, has been a spokesperson for Bokmakierie "backyard" residents who moved into the Spes Bona hostel and then tents in the grounds.
She alleged the attack was racially motivated.
An overwrought Rajap shouted: "He was 15 years old, and he was brutally murdered by blacks. They think nothing about taking a life."
Marawaan's father wept as he described the "cowardly" attack. "The way they held him and deliberately stabbed him three times, as if they were trying to teach us coloured people a lesson," Riedewaan Blackenberg said.
