Maseru: The Certainty of Their Defeat Drives Them to Massacre

Just before daybreak on December 9, 1982, South African Defense Force (SADF) officers crossed the border into Maseru, the capital of Lesotho, to raid homes where members of the African National Congress were staying. The SADF killed 42 people, including 30 South Africans wrongly accused of being terrorists. Judy Seidman modeled this poster’s drawing of bullet holes and an outraged crowd after newspaper photographs documenting the aftermath of the attacks. Among the rarest of Medu’s posters, this work was never mass produced or distributed because of unresolved disputes within the collective about the ambiguity of the figures’ hand gestures.