1960: Phineas Tshitaundzi, the panga man
4 comments November 14th, 2011 Headsman
On this date in 1960, South Africa conducted a mass execution of 15 miscellaneous criminals (14 black, one white) in Pretoria Prison.
The headline attraction was one of the 14 blacks: Phineas Tshitaundzi, the “panga man” or any number of related headline-worthy nicknames — the panga slasher, the panga maniac. (“Panga man” can also just be any old fellow with a panga, like an agricultural worker.)
A panga is a machete, and Phineas Tshitaundzi wielded this intimidating instrument during a 1950s spree terrorizing white lovers’ lanes around Johannesburg. “He would assault the men and rape the women — to whom, it was said, he then gave bus fare home,” wrote Jean and John Comaroff in Law and Disorder in the Postcolony.* “There could hardly have been a more intense figuration of the dark, erotically charged menace that stalked the cities in the white imagination.”
The assaults were non-fatal — panga man was the only one of the 14 blacks hanged this day not on the hook for murder — but the many survivors whose affairs were on the illicit side had injuries to cope with beyond those inflicted by the blade.
Tshitaundzi was finally caught as a result of fencing some of the proceeds of his crimes, whereupon it transpired that the terrifying perpetrator had been so difficult to capture because he’d been working as a mild-mannered 40-year-old “tea boy” at police headquarters itself, a position that allowed him to stay wise to various attempts to ensnare him.
The terrible “panga man” was installed in a kitschy exhibit in the police museum opened by his employes turned captors.
* The full chapter from this anthology can be read in pdf form here.
On this day..
- 1989: Solomon Ngobeni, the last hanged in South Africa - 2019
- 2018: The Sultan of Coins - 2018
- 1879: Charles Drews and Frank Stichler, graveyard insurance - 2017
- 1738: False Tsarevich Alexei - 2016
- Daily Double: Georgia - 2015
- 1996: Larry Lonchar, bad gambler - 2015
- 1864: Franz Muller, "Ich habe es getan" - 2014
- 1888: William Showers, "pathetic soul" - 2013
- 1930: Yang Kaihui, Mao Zedong's wife - 2012
- 1963: Four Cubans as CIA spies - 2010
- 1726: The Gypsy outlaws of Hesse-Darmstadt - 2009
- 1817: Policarpa Salavarrieta, Colombian independence heroine - 2008
- 1226: Frederick of Isenberg - 2007
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Common Criminals,Crime,Death Penalty,Disfavored Minorities,Execution,Hanged,History,Mass Executions,Murder,Racial and Ethnic Minorities,Rape,Serial Killers,South Africa,Theft
Tags: 1960, 1960s, names, november 14, panga, panga man, phineas tshitaundzi, pretoria, pretoria central prison
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