Purple ribbons tied to the fence flutter gently in the wind at Westdene Dam in Westdene, Johannesburg, their soft movement the only sound near a memorial stone etched with the names of the 42 children who died there on March 27 1985.
It was a hot Wednesday afternoon — the final week of school before the Easter holidays — when a yellow double-decker bus carrying pupils from Hoërskool Vorentoe veered off the road and plunged into the dam. Of the 78 children on board, 42 died.
It’s been 40 years, and fresh sunflowers have been laid at the memorial. On the other side of the dam, a gold-coloured shoe floats in the brown water, half-submerged, forgotten. At the edge of the dam, where the grass meets the concrete ledge, it bobs gently, like a quiet echo.
In 1985, when the school bus sank, shoes were the first things to float. Chantal Parkin remembers losing hers. She also lost her best friend, Inalize Kruger.
Parkin was 14, in standard 8 (grade 10) and only on the bus that day because netball practice was cancelled. The dam is about 1km from the school. This week, Parkin vividly recalled the day that changed her life.
We were in the dam
She heard a loud bang, but didn’t realise how serious it was. “I didn’t realise we were in the dam until I saw the water. I also didn’t realise that I could die — and I didn’t realise there were people already dead,” she says.
Children had been warned about the dangers of the dam, but on one occasion they’d ignored the warnings and swum in it. So when Parkin realised they were in the water, she though it would be like that time. “We’d swam at the dam before. I thought we’d just walk out with our suitcases. But it wasn’t [like that] ... I was gasping for my last breath.
“I saw a yellow light and thought it was the sun. It was far away, and I told myself to just keep swimming towards the sun. When I got to the top of the roof, I realised it wasn’t the sun — it was the bus I was seeing.”
There were screams — piercing screams that could cut glass. And then, as the water reached the top, silence. Just silence. Then came the panic.
— Marcelle Wilsnach, survivor, Westdene dam bus disaster
Parkin surfaced and saw the bus driver, Willem Horne. He had white foam coming from his mouth, and his eyes were open, glazed. The ripples from the impact had created waves, so she lifted his head out of the water and placed a book underneath it. She took off her shoes to make it easier to swim towards help.
People had gathered at the edge of the dam. Several jumped in to pull children from the murky water. Parkin doesn’t remember who pulled her out, only that someone used a spade to help her up the wall.
She ran home — barefoot and soaked — to tell her family about the accident. When she reached home, her brother first laughed at her when he saw her; he thought children had thrown water on her.
After she told him what had happened, they ran back to try to help her friends and retrieve her school bag. But they were too late.
The next day, she was sent back to school. Her shoes were gone, lost in the dam. Three days later — on the same day as the mass funeral — she turned 15. “It was sad, and then all these people were coming to me and hugging me. That was the worst birthday ... my birthdays since then have never been nice,” Parkin says.
The guilt lingered longer.
“I felt guilty. Everyone hated the bus driver and I was the one who lifted his head out of the water. So I thought that I was the one who had maybe saved him. For years, I asked myself, why didn’t I just grab her [Inalize’s] hand. Maybe she’d still be alive if I did. For a long time, I wished I could have saved her. Why did I help the bus driver? Why didn’t I go back for my friend?” Parkin says.
Inalize and Parkin had been friends since the age of three. They went to primary school together, then high school.
Willem Horne was a coloured bus driver in apartheid South Africa. At the time of the accident, Horne, 41, lived in Eldorado Park with his wife and five children aged between 10 and 18. Media reports at the time said he was taken to JG Strijdom Hospital [now Helen Joseph Hospital], where he was under police guard due to the racial tension at the time.
He received death threats. Several parents of the children who died believed Horne drove the bus into the dam to kill white children — claims that were fuelled by racial animosity at the time.
Horne was charged with 42 counts of culpable homicide, but the case was dismissed for lack of evidence. He later moved to the Western Cape, where he became a councillor for the Independent Democrats (ID) in the Bree Rivier municipality near Worcester.
He was affectionately known as “Oom Philip”, using his middle name to maintain anonymity. Horne reportedly died of cancer in 2010. More than a decade later, questions still ripple beneath the surface for those who survived.
According to Parkin: “He was never rude to us; he always greeted us. Yes, he drove fast.”
Another survivor, Marcelle Wilsnach, remembers how fast the bus was going that day. It was a sound she knew well — when the driver picked up speed, the old double-decker would start to shudder.
The windows were open, the wind howled through the vehicle and the children had to yell to hear each other. But they were high on holiday anticipation, swapping sarmies, making plans — and talking about futures that would never happen.
“There were 78 of us,” Wilsnach recalls. “I was sitting on the top deck, chatting to a girl who wanted to study dietetics in Potch [university] after school. She didn’t make it.”
There was no screech of brakes. No swerve. No warning. Wilsnach says the driver simply turned left, into the water.
She describes it as a surreal, almost cinematic moment — watching the road get smaller, further away. The bus slipped beneath the surface within seconds. From the moment the wheels hit the dam to the top deck being submerged, it took just one minute.
“There were screams — piercing screams that could cut glass. And then, as the water reached the top, silence. Just silence. Then came the panic. It was extremely cold, and for a moment it took my breath away. It was dark, silent and I was feeling hands on my body because people were trying to find a way out,” Wilsnach says.
In the darkness, the only sensations were freezing water and frantic hands. Someone else’s fingers on her shoulders, her arms, legs — not to hurt her, but to feel a way out. Her window wouldn’t budge. She opened her eyes underwater, her brain still lagging behind the horror unfolding in real time.
Then a sliver of light — a small window had shattered. She squeezed through it, slicing her hands. Several shards stayed embedded for years. The scars remain.
Wilsnach remembers trying to kick out the back windows with schoolmate Pieter Koen (one of those who died that day), as panic spread through the sinking bus. She was one of the first to make it out, crawling onto the roof where a teacher was desperately performing CPR on a girl who had turned blue.
Around her, people were jumping into the dam, smashing windows with hammers, trying to pull children out. Spectators stood helplessly on the banks, while others waded into the freezing water.
Wilsnach couldn’t feel her legs and sat on the roof, trembling, waiting for feeling to return; when it did, a stranger helped her out of the dam.
She ran — dripping wet — to the nearest primary school and called her father. Then she ran home. She returned to the dam with her stepmother to look for her stepbrother, who had been on the lower deck of the bus.
Later, at the hospital, she joined those waiting as nurses read aloud the names of those who survived, and those in the hospital.
And then, no more names.
Those whose names were not read out were in the morgue; her stepbrother — who was in standard 6 — had died.
“Those who died are forever young, but nowhere is there a list of those who survived. People forget there were survivors; everyone who survived had a measure of survivor’s guilt,” Wilsnach says.
“There are times that I think back to what could have been. The fact that we survived, it took our childhood, we lost our childhood. We became quieter. It also made us stronger; you know that the worst has already happened.”
Less than 4km from Westdene Dam, at the Westpark Cemetery, black granite headstones gleam in the sunlight. These are the graves of the children who died in the disaster — a solemn, heart-wrenching corner of the cemetery. Many bear a photograph of a child who will be forever 16.
An inscription in Afrikaans reads: “Hier rus ons liefling” (Here rests our darling). Another: “Geen laaste woord, geen laaste groet, maar in die hemel sal ons weer ontmoet” (No last word, no final goodbye, but in heaven we will meet again).
Wilted yellow blooms slump in the heat — an echo of lives once so bright, now stilled. There is no sound here, only stillness and the heavy silence of lives cut short.
Stay away
For Belinda Kleynhans, it’s a day she’ll never forget. Her sister Tanya Pieters was 15. Kleynhans was 11. The children at her primary school children were told to stay away from the dam because there was an accident.
She ran home to tell her father about the accident and they raced to the dam. Kleynhans still vividly remembers how her dad stepped over corpses to jump in to save his daughter.
“This year has been extra difficult with the 40-year anniversary. I took a walk by the pond with a bunch of flowers. I sat at the monument and then at the cemetery at my sister’s grave.
“It’s still so fresh in my mind. It’s a day I’ll never be able to forget. Even though I was just a child myself, I remember every moment of that day — and the time after — like it was yesterday,” Kleynhans says.
Now, 40 years later, Wilsnach is writing a book about her ordeal and the trauma that followed, to give the survivors a voice.
A new investigative documentary, directed by Gerrie Janse van Vuuren and independently produced by Silo art motion stills, is in production — looking to uncover hidden truths, digging into untold stories and the lingering questions that haunt that tragic day.
Four decades later, questions hang in the air — quiet and unanswered, like the ribbons tied to the fence, the names on the stone and the shoe in the water.
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