Kameraad Mhambi

The BBC recently featured Bishop Tutu in a Tutu-for-Dummies style documentary. I got wind of it because Tom, a friend  saw me in it. Gerrie, another friend captured the bit about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in which I feature (see if can spot me around 20 seconds), and here it is below.

One thing struck me most when seeing it was the posh words of TRC Commissioner and the ex Head of Black Sash, Mary Burton.

“Everybody that worked for the Truth Commission was changed by it, to some extent.”

Posh yes. True – oh yes. Particularly in my case.

Alot of things have been said about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, most of them positive.

To me the TRC was a bitter disappointment and the moment I first thought, against hope, that the new SA won’t work. It was the impetus behind my leaving South Africa at the end of 1998.

But I almost never joined its hallowed ranks.

When I finished my LLB at Tukkies I had my sights on touring Europe. I had, like many of my friends, never been outside of Africa. (I had toured Africa after 1994 extensively, but never left the continent.)

I would not be denied the world any longer.

I was due to fly to London on a working holiday visa in less than a week’s time when I got an unexpected phone call. It was from the TRC. They wanted me to come for a job interview! I was gob-smacked.

My lecturer at University – Prof Christoff Heyns – with whom I had done my final year thesis on the TRC Act had sent it to them. They liked it.

The position was for a statement taker. That is to say noting down people’s stories. It was the kind of opportunity one could not say no to.

I supported the idea and the embodiment of the TRC in its legislation whole heartedly. As a student I had vigorously campaigned for the end of white rule. I was a member of Students for Human Rights and had helped organize the first Pan African Human Rights Competition.  This was a dream job.

In a way I was an affirmative action choice. The only white statement taker in our region (that covered the whole of the old Transvaal and parts of the Northern Cape and Free Sate). Some regions didn’t even have a whitey.

Working at the TRC first felt unreal. Surrounded by powerful and well known people like Bishop Tutu, Dumisa Ntsebenza, Alex Boraine, Wynand Malan one felt very important.

We had policemen at our bid and call, and we were backed up with some of the most powerful legislation ever given to a South African investigating body. Before the TRC we could even revoke a person’s right to remain silent. Before us truth will out, or so we thought.

Part of the TRC mission was to record gross human rights violations – defined as murder, torture, or serious assault – that were committed with political animus. As a statement takers my colleagues and I were required to take three to five statements, by hand, per day.

It was fascinating, exhausting and harrowing. We were listening to violent tale and then a tragic one, and then both in one story. It was infuriating, and quite often it made me feel deeply ashamed of being an Afrikaner.

I met prime evil Eugene de Kock. A man that looked unremarkable, like an accountant, albeit a big one. Soft spoken, bespectacled, unassuming except for his size. He was bright you realised when he spoke, he chose every word very carefully. I met a dozen or so other killers.

I took some auspicious statements. Like that of the mother of Ahmed Timol. Ahmed was the first political detainee to die at the infamous John Vorster Square police station (There was 9 that died there), when he “jumped” from the 10th floor. Despite signs of torture an inquest by magistrate de Villiers agreed that Timol had committed suicide, rather then divulge information. He was after-all a communist, trained at the Lenin School in Moscow. Police referred to the 10th floor at John Voster Square as Timol heights.

I also saw a report by physiotherapist of another victim of John Vorster square – Stanza Bopape. The security police had taken Bopape to one while he was held in detention. When I saw the physiotherapists name I saw he was a good friend of my father. Why did the police take him to the friendly oom? Bopape was torture to death, and then dumped into a river. Me and my kin were on trail, and we were getting away with murder.

Sometimes of our own. Jurgen Grobbelaar was a brilliant student in Krugersdorp. The best in his class. My father’s wife – a teacher – knew him well. But in his first year at Tukkies, where I met him, he got involved with the far right. They stole automattic rifles from a military base and in an attempt to get more weapons killed a woman. He died in the desert in a police chase close to the Namibian border.

His mother came to see me a few years later at the TRC. I saw the police docket. I saw what they did with him. They claimed he had shot himself. Impossible. Both his arms were utterly broken. The police did not bother to get out of their armoured vehicle me thinks. Using a technique from the Borderwar they simply drove over him. And then they shot him at point blank range in the face to make it look like suicide. At least that’s my theory.

And then the obfuscation and obstruction that was often the case when the police were suspected of fowl play, followed. His body had been sent from pillar to post and the post mortems delayed.

I often left the TRC office in a daze.

As I drove home I saw South Africans go about their everyday tasks, and I thought to myself, how is this ‘normal’ South Africa possible? Why are black South Africans so forgiving? Why is there no civil war? (Since then I feel I have answers to some of these questions, but that is not the subject matter of this post.)

I also got really frustrated.

Luckily I had befriended Thulani Granville-Grey, our friendly dreadlocked in-house psychologist. With him I shared lunches and got issues of my chest at the Sanlam Center at the same time.

Rather that – informal therapy – than attend statement taker group therapy. On the one hand I had grown up in a Apostolic Faith Mission and Charismatic Christian tradition, I was no stranger of public displays of emotion and admitting weakness. On the other I was a South African male, a boertjie. I disliked spilling my guts in front of others intensely.

Thulani reckoned that my distress was because all I’m doing is documenting losses. I’m not in the research or investigation, reparation or amnesty teams, who at least in some ways try to ameliorate cases. I’m not feeling I’m making a positive difference.

There was a solution. Make a difference!

Incredibly a number of posts were still open after 3 months in the Johannesburg Investigative Unit. I was the only statement taker with an LLB so I thought I’d chance it to become a TRC investigator. I had been editor of the student newspaper of Tukkies. I knew I had a nose for leads. It took me about a month to convince them, and then I was appointed investigator.

My frustration did not lift. It turned into desperation.

The Johannesburg Investigative Unit was run by an oddball called adv Andre Steenkamp. Andre jumped – like his prickly mustache – from issue to issue and argument to argument. Energetic, fidgety, aggressive.

He – along with some really talented policemen – had left the Transvaal Attorney General Jan D’Oliviera’s very successful Unit (They had investigated and prosecuted Eugene de Kock amongst others) to join the TRC. It was clear that he was ambitious and out to prove he was better than Jan.

Either that or he was an National Intelligence spy and an extremely good actor out to sabotage the process . I however doubt it.

But he was also very disorganised.

In the context of the TRC he was not out of the ordinary. The whole organisation was disorganised and racked with spams of infighting, particularly in middle management upwards.

One month after joining the investigating unit, I had still not been given anything to investigate.

Our unit had some pillars I could depend on. One of them was Piers Pigou. An Englishman who had worked with NGO’s like the Human Rights Commission during the 90′s township war. I decided to ask Piers where I should start investigating.

Piers had little hesitation and pointed me at the troubles in the Vaal triangle area. He sent me documents and put me in touch with people. And off I went into our heart of darkness.

Almost half the casualties of political violence from 1948 to 1994 happened in the last three years of white rule. A big chunk of these in the Vaal.

The Vaal is home to some of the most vicious battles, massacres and murders during apartheid SA’s death throws. I’m talking the Sebokeng massacre, the night vigil massacre, the Vaal monster, and the Boipatong massacre.

The latter changed the course of South African history.

At the time – June 1992 – the Nationalists were still riding their new found wave of goodwill. A wave generated by ubanning the ANC, releasing Mandela and negotiating. Their wave had just got new oomf with the succesful white referendum of 1992.

Importantly they were holding out at Codessa for a number of constitutional guarantees for the white minority.

Rian Malan argues that the ANC cynically used the Boipatong massacre and the condemnation that followed to scupper the talks, not return to them and pile pressure on the Nats.

Eventually, in September 1992 they did give in. South Africa’s constitution was to be modeled on that of a run of the mill western liberal democracy.

Here I was, a 24 year old with virtually no experience, the self appointed and only investigator on a crucial part of South African history, with only Piers to ask for political advice, and the practical helping hand of police investigators Fanie and Johannes.

So why was I unhappy?

The TRC eventually included findings on these crucial incidents in their report, but none of which is based on the reports I gave them. I am not sure where they got there information from, but it would seem that the Commission leaned heavily on material published by NGO’s like the Human Rights Commision (HRC) before the TRC came to existence. It’s important to note that the HRC never investigated these incidents either, but merely repeated allegations made at the time.

The findings over Boipatong in particular caused quite a stir, with Rian Malan accusing the TRC of bias. There was no proof that the police directly assisted in the attack on Boipatong like the TRC report stated insisted Malan.

He was right. There was no proof that the police or whites were at the scene at the time as the TRC report claimed, and as the ANC and some members of the local community had claimed after the massacre.

But Malan was also wrong.

It’s highly unlikely that they were present, but there was ample proof that the police, or at least elements in the police, had close links with the attackers, had supplied the weapons and had interfered with investigations. If one looked at the bigger Vaal picture it was clear that it was a vipers nest of very nasty characters, some of them in or protected by the police.

In fact I had handed a box full of evidence to the TRC when I Ieft. In it is enough concrete leads to start further investigation and prosecution of a number of senior (and not so senior ex policemen), for Boipatong, Sebokeng, and other incidents.

Nothing has ever happened. I’m not sure if that box still exists.

There were other incidents that made me disalusioned with the TRC. Like when some staff turned up late for work. Or did no work. Or the racism displayed by some of its members. There was the day during the 1998 World Cup of which I shall blog sometime.

There was the breaking of law in the name of a cause like the case of police killer Brian Mitchel. He should not have been given amnesty in terms of the Act. He had attacked civilians. But he was given amnesty in the hope that others would be encouraged to apply. And their was the ignoring of the law in the case of Clive Derby Lewis and Janus Walluz, they were the text book case for amnesty because their target was not only not indiscriminate but highly political. But they never got it, because they had killed the crown prince of the ANC.

There was the death threats to investigators, including to Liela Groenewald, who investigated Winnie Mandela. There was the day when Albertina Sisulu and the might of the ANC refused to confront Winnie Mandela over the murder of two boys.

But the biggest incident that pricked the little bubble that was my middleclass and cosseted upbringing was this.

Once a week I took a pile of files to Joyce Seroke, a TRC Human Rights Committee member. One of the senior TRC members I found most friendly and approachable. Warm even.

I would go through the cases with her, and she would make findings on whether those persons in the files qualify as victims of gross human rights abuse in terms of the Act.

What happened that day shocked me to the core. But today most South Africans would probably commend her.

As was my habit I came back from lunch with a copy of The Star underneath my arm. The story on the front page caught Joyce’s eye, it was about the horrific car hijacking in which a father lost his daughter. But it said, the police had caught the culprits.

Good said Joyce, now they should torture these bastards to find out whose behind these hijackings.

I saw lights, blood hummed in my ears, my mouth was dry. My mind was spinning.

It was a profoundly confusing experience.

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