Elias Xitavhudzi lived around Atteridgeville, a township west of Pretoria established under apartheid's removals. He is known in South Africa as Pangaman, after the panga he used.
During the early 1960s he killed sixteen people, attacking them with a panga, a heavy machete, which is what gave him the name the South African press used, the Panga Man. Most of the victims were white women.
He was arrested, convicted, sentenced to death and hanged.
Beyond that outline almost nothing survives in accessible sources. There is no reliable date range, no victim list, no trial record available outside South African archives, and the accounts that circulate repeat one another. Atteridgeville produced two later serial cases, in 1994 and 1995, and Xitavhudzi is usually mentioned in reporting on those as a historical precedent rather than examined on his own.
He is retained here with that caveat. The figure of sixteen is what the record gives and it has not been independently reconstructed.