Asanda Baninzi said the word guilty fifty-one times, and then told the court he had not shot anybody.
He was eighteen when it started. Between May and August 2001 he and a man called Mtutuzeli Nombewu, known as Wox, hijacked cars and robbed and raped and killed across the Cape Flats, the vast belt of townships and suburbs southeast of Cape Town. The reason he gave for all of it, in his own plea explanation, was money for Mandrax.
Nombewu was half the case and he never stood trial. Every rape was committed by the two of them together: the judge found that each of the four rape victims had been gang-raped by both men, and that the first had been raped twice by each. When police cornered Nombewu in a house in Gugulethu he shot himself rather than be arrested, and Baninzi answered for both of them.
Their method, as Baninzi described it, was to arrive at a house, pretend to be the police and shout at whoever was inside to open the door, then say they had come to buy Mandrax tablets. When they were told there was none, they pointed their guns.
In August 2001 a family of four were shot dead in their house in Delft South: a ten-year-old girl, her teenage sister and their parents. Baninzi and another member of the Wox gang, Shadrack Nontshongwana, were each given four life sentences for it. Court reports identified the family only by their surname, Adams. A few days before, the gang had held them at gunpoint in the house, and Mrs. Adams had begged them to take whatever they wanted and spare her family. They left with nothing. When they came back, they shot each of the four in the back of the head.
They were killed because one of them had gone to the police. The investigating officer, Inspector Jonathan Morris, told the court the family had been wiped out for informing on Baninzi's whereabouts.
He was arrested in late 2001 and was already serving those four life sentences, and a further sixty-seven years, when the rest of the case came to court nearly three years later.
On May 3, 2004 he pleaded guilty in the Cape High Court to fifty-one charges. The charges were fourteen counts of murder, five of rape, fifteen of kidnapping, twelve of robbery with aggravating circumstances, three of attempted murder, one of indecent assault and one of housebreaking. He was convicted on forty-nine of the fifty-one. Motala acquitted him of illegally possessing a firearm and ammunition, because the gun used in the killings had belonged to Nombewu, who was also known as Wowo.
And in the middle of all that he maintained that he had not fired a shot at any of the fourteen. He blamed men he described as bad people, whom he said he had befriended in 2001. When the judge asked why, if all he wanted was money, he had raped his victims, his lawyer, Hutton, answered that his client had been on an escalating treadmill.
He also told Inspector Morris that he could not sleep because of the murders.
On May 5, 2004 Judge Abe Motala sentenced him to nineteen life terms and a further hundred and eighty-nine years. The nineteen are fourteen for the murders and five for the rapes; the years cover everything else. He was twenty-one. He showed little emotion as the sentence was read, and then, as its size became clear, he lost control of his bladder in the dock. The press called it the heaviest sentence in the history of the Western Cape, and it is one of the heaviest ever handed down in South Africa.
Motala accepted that Baninzi had shown remorse and said it was far outweighed by the seriousness of the offenses and the number of times they had been committed. He said he found it difficult to understand what could drive a man of eighteen to any of it. Over nine months, he said, the two of them had gone on a murderous rampage, and not satisfied with armed robbery they had repeatedly raped women and then killed them in cold blood. He accepted that the hijackings were done for drug money, and said that explained nothing at all about the brutality of the rapes.
He also praised Morris's work on the case from the bench, and said he had no doubt the wider community shared the view.
Relatives of the dead filled the public gallery for all three days, and the judge remarked on the tears he had seen there.
The fourteen murder victims named in court were Moegamat Brand, Ryan Masetu, Mqibalo Mnisi, Nceba Faltein, Siseko Nxu, Richard Dantjies, Faith Qwelane, Ayanda Bokweni, Linda Mbabisa, Lent Ndzoto, Nolwandle Nkutshu, Vuyo Tati, Nomvuyo Mtiki and Sydney Molefe. Most were shot execution-style in the back of the head. Faith Qwelane and Linda Mbabisa, whose surname is also printed as Mbambisa, were raped before they were killed.
The span is not settled either. Baninzi's plea explanation gave May to August 2001. Motala spoke of nine months, which would reach back to about November 2000. Other accounts give June to August and describe a three-month rampage. Some also count nineteen lives rather than eighteen and four rapes rather than five, although the charge sheet carried five rape counts. His first name appears as both Asanda and Asande.
Eighteen people died in all, across the two cases. He was convicted of every one of them.
Under South African law a life sentence imposed before October 1, 2004 falls under transitional provisions, and a prisoner serving one is considered for parole at twenty years rather than twenty-five. Baninzi's sentences were imposed in May 2004, months before the new regime began, so the twenty-year threshold applied and was reached in 2024.
Whether his time in custody before sentencing counts toward that period has not been published, consideration for parole is not release, and no decision by the Department of Correctional Services on his case has been reported.