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:
“I sang of death but had I known
The many deaths one must have died
Before he came to meet his own!”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“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)
“There is the guilt all soldiers feel for having broken the taboo against killing, a guilt as old as war itself. Add to this the soldier’s sense of shame for having fought in actions that resulted, indirectly or directly, in the deaths of civilians. Then pile on top of that an attitude of social opprobrium, an attitude that made the fighting man feel personally morally responsible for the war, and you get your proverbial walking time bomb.”
—Philip Caputo (b. 1941)