The Hector Pieterson Museum has launched a research project aimed at exclusively studying the life and time youth struggle icon Mbuyisa Makhubo and what happened to him.
Makhubo is popularly known from a photograph showing him carrying a dying 12-year-old Hector Peterson, with Peterson’s distressed sister Antoinette Sithole running alongisde him.
Makhubo’s whereabouts remain a mystery till now.
The research project has been commissioned by the City of Johannesburg.
The Museum’s curator Prince Dube says the initiative will involve researching Makhubo’s life story with Dube saying all materials collected from research will be displayed in an art exhibition at the Museum.
“We as a Museum, we have a picture of Mbuyisa Makhubo but we don’t have a story of who Mbuyisa Makhubo is. So when people visit the museum, they do not get the whole of Mbuyisa from birth to the day he disappeared in Nigeria. So that information we going to get through the research if we get objects like letters that he wrote, books and photographs we are going to add in our exhibition,” he says.
Meanwhile, Makhubo’s sister, Nontsikelelo, says she remains hopeful that the research will help her family find closure.
“I would say as a Christian, this is the day that the Lord had made because, after 48 years, somebody was brave enough to say come let’s talk and pave the way of finding your brother. So it’s a very big day for me. I’m very happy and I’m grateful to all the people that prayed for us because it’s a prayer that takes us from A to B. Yes, I’m very grateful to everyone who prayed for us,” she explains.
Speakers at the exhibition included a retired nurse Khutsafalo Mothai who wrote a book titled: “Nurses Were There”.
The book consists of anecdotes by Mothai about her own perspective on what transpired on June 16 inside Baragwanath Hospital.
Mothai says it was horrific to see young people perish in that way.
“You know, when a Putco bus driver told me that some casualties were admitted at the Baragwanath hospital, I said I had to get to work. I have to get to work so I decided to go through casualty. The place looked like a battlefield with young scholars, some lying on stretchers and some on the floor. Some (lay) on chairs with bandages. It was overwhelming. We had to transfer some patients to other wards,” she recounts.
Museum authorities in the meantime say his Makhubo’s narrative will be preserved there.
