“They Were Soldiers”
Masechaba Matsela on Healing
the Vaal’s Deepest Wound

SHARPEVILLE, GAUTENG — She had not planned to tell this story. Masechaba Matsela, founder of Nation Peace Tranquility and the Charity Family Trust, joined JustGospel Radio’s Carlett Badenhorst on the morning of Friday 27 February 2026 — just hours before her community healing day — and the conversation that followed was one of the most quietly powerful this station has broadcast.

It started simply enough. When news of the Vaal Triangle tragedy broke, Matsela wanted to do what she could. She wanted to buy a wreath. To donate from her company. To contribute something to an enormous grief. What happened next she had not expected at all.

“I just wanted to buy a wreath when I heard about the accident — to donate from my company’s side. And as I was busy doing the wreath, I was taking my cousin’s status. I found out I was related to this kid that was in the accident. And funny enough, I bought four of the wreaths — and four were directly related to me.”

— Masechaba Matsela, Founder, Nation Peace Tranquility

Two were women she had been praying with. One was a young child. And one — the fourth — was the driver. The young person whose name the community had been quickest to judge. And Masechaba Matsela, in that moment, chose something different: she chose to help all of them.

A Tragedy That Echoed Fifty Years Back

As she spoke, Matsela drew a line across history. In 1976 — fifty years ago — the children of South Africa took to the streets of Soweto and the country was changed forever. Half a century later, young people as young as fifteen were losing their lives on the roads of the Vaal Triangle. In Sharpeville. The same Sharpeville that already carries so much of the country’s pain.

“God said — this cannot happen. Not again. Not on this watch,” she told Badenhorst. It was not a dramatic statement. It was simply the truth of what she felt, spoken plainly by a woman who had run out of ways to stand by and do nothing.

Project CBNews’s original article reported thirteen young lives lost. After publication, another young person passed on. The number now stands at fourteen. Fourteen families. Fourteen sets of empty chairs at dinner tables across the Vaal.

The Driver’s Family Deserves Healing Too

One moment in the interview stood above the rest. It came when Matsela spoke about the driver — the young person whose name the community has carried with blame, with the particular cruelty of public grief that needs a target. Matsela would not give it one.

With the same quiet authority she brought to every word of the conversation, she said what many had not been willing to say out loud:

“I am very careful to say that the driver is also going to be having a very tough time — and the family of the driver is going to have a really tough time. Because our society does not have empathy. We need to have empathy in this situation and heal as a society.”

— Masechaba Matsela

It was an act of courage to say it on air, to every JustGospel listener who was tuned in. And it set the tone for everything Saturday is built around.

Party Pegs and Remembering With Joy

Saturday’s healing day is not simply a fundraiser, and it is not simply a memorial. Matsela was deliberate about both distinctions. When she described the stalls, she mentioned something unexpected: party pegs.

“Party pegs are associated with parties and good times,” she explained. “We are saying: let’s remember them when they were happy.” A small and profound choice — to insist, in the middle of grief, on also holding joy.

At a Bengali funeral before the event, Matsela said she saw a side of the children that moved and unsettled her. “I saw another side to our children that I was horrified — horrified to the extent that we do not know our children as a community,” she said. “And it is about time that we build a better relationship with our children. This is the first step to doing that.”

“There will be hampers and packages and party pegs — symbolising children that are having fun. We are saying: let’s remember them when they were happy.”

— Masechaba Matsela

Road Safety Is a Community Responsibility

Road safety was not a secondary theme for Matsela — it was urgent and personal. In the two months before the event, she told Badenhorst, there had already been three to four accidents on Vaal roads involving children. Too many. Too quickly. In too short a time for a community still processing the first.

She was specific about what needed to change: fire extinguisher kits in every school transport vehicle; questions asked when taxis carry more passengers than permitted; eyes on the children crossing roads in the wrong places. And she handed the responsibility not to government, but to every person within reach.

“If a child is crossing the road at the wrong place — you need to stop and say: my child, this is not how you do it. We need to take that responsibility as a community and as parents and teachers.”

— Masechaba Matsela

On mental health, Matsela said she would speak from personal experience. “I will talk from experience of mental illness,” she told Badenhorst. “When everything is shut down and you are looking for a light.” That kind of honesty — not clinical, not academic, but lived — is what makes Nation Peace Tranquility something different from an awareness campaign. It is a community that has already walked through its own darkness, reaching back for those still in it.

The Greater Vaal Needs to Heal

Matsela’s vision extends beyond Saturday. By end of April, she plans to return with the community to the accident site itself — to lay flowers, to say a proper farewell. To close the chapter that grief has not yet allowed to close.

“We will go to the accident site and spread flowers on the children’s side — just to say farewell to our soldiers,” she said. “That is how deep it was to me.”

She is open to sponsorship. She is open to suggestions. She wants the community to say, as she put it: “We claim this — it is ours.” Because the greater Vaal taking ownership of the safety of its children, she said, is not a nice idea. It is a necessity.

JustGospel Will Be There — And So Can You

JustGospel Radio will be on the ground at the Sharpeville Exhibition Centre from 08:00, broadcasting the event live. For those who cannot be there in person, Matsela extended a direct invitation to tune in at www.justgospelrtv.co.za and share the broadcast with family and friends.

A YouTube recording is planned so that everyone who wanted to be part of the day but could not attend will be able to watch what unfolded. The community will be able to see it. The country will be able to see it. Because this is not just Sharpeville’s story — it is South Africa’s.

At the end of the interview, Badenhorst asked for a parting word. Matsela gave not a slogan but a statement — heavy with everything the community has been carrying and light with where she believes it is heading.

The greater Vaal has to take ownership of the safety of our children. That begins Saturday. That begins here. That begins with us.