He was a fierce opponent of the apartheid government, and was assassinated by Janusz Waluś, a Polish immigrant and sympathiser of the Conservative opposition on 10 April 1993, during the unrest preceding the transition to democracy.

His father Gilbert Hani was a mine union worker and political activist who left the country to go into exile in 1962 and returned to South Africa in 1991.

[3] In 1959, at the University of Fort Hare in Alice, Eastern Cape, Hani studied English, Latin[3] and modern and classical literature.

[4] Because of Hani's involvement with Umkhonto we Sizwe, he was forced into hiding by the South African government and changed his first name to Chris.

The Luthuli Detachment operation consolidated Hani's reputation as a soldier in the black army that took the field against apartheid and its allies.

As head of Umkhonto we Sizwe, he was responsible for the suppression of a mutiny by dissident anti-Communist ANC members in detention camps, but denied any role in abuses including torture and murder.

[4] Many MK female operatives, such as Dipuo Mvelase, adored Chris Hani for having protected women's rights and caring about their wellbeing at military camps.

Clive Derby-Lewis, a senior South African Conservative Party MP and Shadow Minister for Economic Affairs at the time, who had lent Waluś his pistol, was also arrested for complicity in Hani's murder.

Nelson Mandela addressed the nation appealing for calm, in a speech regarded as presidential even though he was not yet president of the country:[12] Tonight I am reaching out to every single South African, black and white, from the very depths of my being.

A white man, full of prejudice and hate, came to our country and committed a deed so foul that our whole nation now teeters on the brink of disaster.

Both men's sentences were commuted to life imprisonment when the death penalty was abolished as a result of a Constitutional Court ruling in 1995.

[14] Hani's killers appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, claiming political motivation for their crimes and applying for amnesty on the basis that they had acted on the orders of the Conservative Party.

[16] Following several failed attempts, Derby-Lewis was granted medical parole in May 2015 after he had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer; he died 18 months later, on 3 November 2016.

The final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission said it "was unable to find evidence that the two murderers convicted of the killing of Chris Hani took orders from international groups, security forces or from higher up in the right-wing echelons".

In 2009, after extension of Cape Town's Central Line, the new terminus serving eastern areas of Khayelitsha was christened Chris Hani.