Deaths
- 3 May – Cythna Lindenberg Letty, a botanical artist and author, dies in Pretoria
- 5 May – Sipho Mutsi (20), a Congress of South African Students member, dies in police custody
- 6 May – Andries Raditsela (29), Congress of South African Trade Unions and Chemical Workers' Industrial Union member, dies of head injuries after being violently confronted by police
- 14 May – Vernon Nkadimeng, is killed by a car bomb in Gaborone, Botswana
- 14 June – Thamsanga Mnyele, artist and activist, is killed during a South African Army in Gaborone
- August – Bill Mentoor, becomes the first person to be necklaced (a car tire filled with petrol and placed over a person's neck and set alight) in Queenstown, Eastern Cape
- 15 December – Ruben Xulu, artist, dies at Mariannhill outside Durban
Read more about this topic: 1985 In South Africa
Famous quotes containing the word deaths:
“Death is too much for men to bear, whereas women, who are practiced in bearing the deaths of men before their own and who are also practiced in bearing life, take death almost in stride. They go to meet death—that is, they attempt suicide—twice as often as men, though men are more “successful” because they use surer weapons, like guns.”
—Roger Rosenblatt (b. 1940)
“You lived too long, we have supped full with heroes,
they waste their deaths on us.”
—C.D. Andrews (1913–1992)
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)