‘It still feels like yesterday’: A sister’s grief 40 years after Westdene bus tragedy

She watched her sister drown that fateful day in 1985 when a school bus plunged into the Westdene Dam – and 40 years later it still feels like yesterday.

“This time of the year is very bad,” says Annette Labuschagne, 58, then a first-year student at the then Randse Afrikaanse Universiteit.

She had gone to her grandmother’s house in Westdene and was waiting for her 16-year-old sister, Rita Botha, to come back from Hoërskool Vorentoe.

‘I waited for Rita’

“I just arrived at her house and she asked me to go to the shop to buy milk and I remember saying that if I waited a little longer Rita would be back from school and then she could walk with me…”

Labuschagne said she remembers hearing a noise and running to the scullery window to get a glimpse of the dam, and saw something in the dam.

“I ran to the dam but when I got there the bottom part of the bus was still sinking into the water. I just stood there and watched.

“I will never forget that feeling, I just knew my sister was on that bus and so were our other friends. I could feel it.”

Labuschagne said she watched how they started retrieving the bodies from the dam.

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“The street was cordoned off and there were ambulances everywhere. They were giving families of the victims sugar water.”

Identifying loved ones

Families started going to the JG Strydom Hospital and mortuary to look for their children.

“The families waited in the hospital reception for a nurse with a list of names to be called out, but my sister’s name wasn’t on that list,” Labuschagne said.

They found her sister’s body at the mortuary at 6pm that night.

“When my mother arrived at the mortuary, a teacher waiting for her simply said: ‘Ritatjie is in there.”

‘Rita is not coming home’

Labuschagne’s mother took her child’s death badly because there weren’t psychologists to help deal with the loss, she said.

“My mother went through a deep depression and even dished up Rita’s dinner at night after her death. We then had to remind her Rita wasn’t coming home, but she would argue, saying my sister was practising athletics and was on her way.

“We had to tell her, Rita is not coming, Rita is dead.”

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Arnel Coetzee was in standard 7 (Grade 9) and lived on Motor Street, close to the dam, and saw how the bus sunk with her school friends.

“That afternoon my aunt called my mother to say the bus fell into the dam with my niece, Anne Lize Botha, inside the bus,” she said.

Bodies pulled out

Coetzee remembers running to the dam. “When I got there, I froze and watched how they pulled out one after the other body out of the dam. Some of the volunteers carried the children over their shoulders,” she said.

Coetzee remembers seeing the rows of bodies covered with blankets.

“I phoned my boyfriend, who is my husband today, and said come to the dam, I think my friend is dead,” she said. When she got home there was a plastic bag with wet school clothes, socks and shoes inside.

“I will never forget that plastic bag, I can still smell it… ”

How the accident happened

The driver of the double-decker bus, 41-year-old William Horne, lost control and the bus crashed through barriers into the Westdene Dam.

A witness said it appeared that a tyre had blown out, sending the bus swerving into another car before it plunged into the reservoir.

The bus was transporting students, aged 13 to 17, from Hoërskool Vorentoe.

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