Standerton memorial to be re-inaugurated

The Great Trek memorial stone - a large concrete slab with the tracks of an ox-wagon set into it - was erected in front of the Standerton Town Hall in 1988 as part of the 150-year commemoration of the Great Trek. In 2007 it was dug up with a trench excavator, on the instruction of the then mayor the Lekwa municipality, Queen Radebe-Khumalo. The stone was seriously damaged and tossed onto a scrap heap.Radebe-Khumalo’s action and a subsequent statement that the memorial “means nothing to us, it’s just a piece of cement with tracks’ caused an uproars in sections of the Afrikaans speaking community.

Afriforum and the Standerton Action Committe lodged a court action against Radebe-Khumalo, claining that the destruction was “wrongful and infringes upon the Afrikaner’s cultural and constitutional rights to dignity and equality”. The court instructed the mayor to personally pay for damage to the memorial and issued Radebe-Khumalo and the municipality with an order prohibiting them from destroying a memorial commemorating women and childrenwho died in the Alnglo Boer war concentration camps which was considered to be “in the line of fire in terms of a decision taken by the council.

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