When did South Africa become an independent country?
History of South Africa
In the mid-1980s, police and army death squads conducted state-sponsored assassinations of dissidents and activists.[148] By mid-1987 the Human Rights Commission knew of at least 140 political assassinations in the country, while about 200 people died at the hands of South African agents in neighbouring states. The exact numbers of all the victims may never be known.[149] Strict censorship disallowed journalists from reporting, filming or photographing such incidents, while the government ran its own covert disinformation programme that provided distorted accounts of the extrajudicial killings.[150] At the same time, State-sponsored vigilante groups carried out violent attacks on communities and community leaders associated with resistance to apartheid.[151] The attacks were then falsely attributed by the government to "black-on-black" or factional violence within the communities.[152]