Owen Ndlovu is being buried today at Westpark Cemetery after a funeral service in Lenasia South, nine days after he was found shot dead beside a road in Thokoza. The tributes have been warm, and he earned every one. But I keep circling one uncomfortable thought. South Africa is very good at burying its activists with full honours and very bad at finishing what they started.
Ndlovu was 54. Sports presenter, producer, community radio pioneer, and founder of Artists United, the organisation that spent years hammering SAMRO over royalties owed to musicians who died waiting for their money. He was also, in the plainest sense, a family man, killed on a Tuesday night while doing something as ordinary as fetching his wife Portia from a church service in Katlehong.
The broadcaster who came from the community
Before the SABC, before Soccer Zone, there was community radio. He cut his teeth in Soweto and later Jozi FM, and colleagues spent this week insisting he proved something the industry long resisted. A community station could produce sports journalism the big broadcasters had to take seriously. When he crossed to the public broadcaster, shows like Soccer Zone on SABC1 made him a familiar face in living rooms across the country.
Two details from the past week stayed with me. He insisted, through his production company, that the Song of the Year vote across SABC’s 18 radio stations was his idea. Whether that’s ever settled, it tells you his mind ran to ownership, not just airtime. The quieter legacy is the pro-bono legal help he gave artists chasing royalties going back decades, in an industry where everyone from struggle-era veterans to the Mi Casa generation is still fighting to be paid properly.
The memorial at Walter Sisulu Hall in Randburg on Tuesday is where the personal side came out. His sons spoke, one crediting his father with keeping him off a criminal path. Warona Owethu’s birthday fell on the day of his father’s memorial, a coincidence the family had to carry through their grief. Eugene Mthethwa, family spokesperson, Artists United chair, EFF MP and Trompies legend, set the tone with a line already doing the rounds. In Owen’s death, we multiply.
What we know, and what we shouldn’t guess
Here’s the established timeline. On the evening of 15 September, three men, one of them armed, forced Ndlovu into his Ford Raptor outside St John’s Church in Katlehong. The bakkie was later recovered abandoned in Walkerville. The next morning he was found beside a road in Thokoza with gunshot wounds. Katlehong police and the Germiston trio unit are still hunting the suspects, and the post-mortem hasn’t formally confirmed the cause of death. For everyone in Gauteng, it’s also a painfully familiar story. A hijacking, a kidnapping, a bakkie dumped on a roadside, a family’s worst morning.
Now the part that has everyone theorising. A bag recovered near his body contained SAMRO documents, and he was due in the Booysens Magistrate’s Court around the time he died. That’s a tidy motive on paper, and plenty of people have run with it. But police haven’t confirmed any link between his murder and his activism, and voices at the memorial pushed back hard on the idea of a hit from within the industry. Portia suspects her husband was being monitored before the abduction. That fear deserves proper investigation. Suspicion isn’t evidence, though, and letting an unproven theory harden into fact could drag the manhunt down the wrong road.
Then there’s the thing nobody wants to say at a funeral. While the family was frantically searching for him, graphic photos of his body were already spreading across Facebook. His sons saw their father dead on their own feeds. The family begged for the images to be removed. Every share was a choice, and grieving children shouldn’t have to relive it in their notifications.
What should happen after today
The service in Lenasia South, then Westpark. Mthethwa pushed for a Heroes’ Acre burial, though nothing I’ve seen confirms that’s where Ndlovu actually ended up. The family described a colourful, vibrant, energetic life, and anyone who watched him on screen knows that wasn’t eulogy inflation.
Three things matter from here: whether the manhunt produces arrests before the trail goes cold, what the post-mortem settles, and whether SAMRO’s condolences turn into anything concrete. Condolences are cheap. Royalties aren’t.
My own view is that the honest tribute isn’t a wreath or a moment of silence. It’s finishing the royalties fight he carried for decades, the unpaid cases he took on for artists who couldn’t afford lawyers, and doing it without needing another body beside a road to get moving. I keep thinking about the son who said his father kept him off a criminal path. That’s the legacy worth protecting, and it deserves better than a hashtag.
