Freedom was not free, it was hard-won
THE moving tribute to Bernard Gosschalk by his son (Cape Times, April 28) understates the Special Branch torture that was routine during the 1960s-1980s. Special Branch (SB) was the universal nickname of the secret police, the political police, under apartheid.
The SB detained without trial Bernard during 1966, in solitary confinement, incommunicado. They interrogated him non-stop for four days and nights. The SBs refused to let him use the toilet or wash, so he remained in his soiled clothes, smelling and dirty, during this time.
Years later, an aunt told me that her and her husband’s letters were intercepted and their phone tapped for some months. The reason was that our family surname was only two letters different from Gosschalk, so they were suspected of the crime of being relatives of Bernard Gosschalk.
At the time of Bernard’s torture, my fearful mother summoned me to emphasise that if anyone asked if we were related to Bernard Gosschalk, I should immediately and emphatically deny this.
This shows the level of fear among whites that the SB’s reputation caused.
Freedom Day and May Day are appropriate dates to commemorate the commitment of generations of leftist and liberal veterans to win our democracy.
Decades of apartheid propaganda on the SABC and speeches against the “swart gevaar” (black peril) and “rooi gevaar” (red peril) whipped up hatred and fear among whites.
Ruth Carneson recalled her earliest childhood memory. When she went to neighbours’ houses to play with their children, the mothers would chase her away, saying their children will never be allowed to play with a “communist”. Communism and liberalism became swear words.
Year by year, the Afrikaner nationalist regime intensified its vengeful and vindictive persecution of communists, those it smeared as “fellow-travellers”, and liberals. Throughout the 1960s the regime hardened its notorious Suppression of Communism Act. They made it a crime for anyone gazetted as communists to be quoted or prepare anything for publication. So communists lost their jobs as journalists.
Next the SB got the power to serve anyone with a banning order, unchallengeable in the courts. This also enabled the SB to ban their prey from being in the presence of more than one other person, so partying and socialising were criminalised.
The banning order would ban a worker from entering any factory; ban a stevedore from entering any harbour; ban a teacher from entering any school; ban a nurse from any hospital except as a patient. The idea was to get all communists and some liberals fired from their jobs, in an attempt to starve them into submission or emigration.
A year later Balthazar Johannes Vorster, the architect of the apartheid police state, passed laws allowing the SB to impose house arrest or detention without trial, for five years at a time, on anyone. It became a crime, punishable by jail, for a person under house arrest to step outside his own home, except to commute to and from work. If you were under 24 hours house arrest, the state paid you a minimal grant to buy food and pay rent.
The first detention without trial allowed the SB to lock you up for 90 days. When the 90 days were up, the SB let Ruth First walk one metre – then rearrested her. The handpicked crony judges of apartheid ruled this quite lawful. Ruth First was detained 117 days under this “90 days” law.
The following year Vorster passed the detention without trial 180 days law – under which Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was detained for 491 days without trial. Her interrogation included torture such as pulling her hair out.
During the 1985 State of Emergency, I was one of a thousand persons detained overnight. Pollsmoor Prison gave me a piece of cardboard on which they wrote “M4/85”. This was jailspeak for “manlike no 4 of the 1985 State of Emergency”.
I was locked up for 23 hours a day in solitary in Pollsmoor cell C 250. Speaking in whispers when the warders patrolled at the other end of the passage, I made the surreal discovery that all those detained in cells alongside mine were ordained clergymen from most churches in Cape Town, plus a teacher at a Catholic private school.
That gives you an idea of what the regime called “kommunisme”.
As little as a fortnight in solitary confinement triggered off post-traumatic stress disorder in me. The worst symptom of this was three months of insomnia. I would lie awake throughout the night, and could only get to sleep at 5am. I later came to realise that this was the exact time of my detention.
uMkhonto weSizwe veterans reading this might comment how fortunate I was to be hit by only the soft edge of the apartheid police state. An SB interrogator kicked John Harris, breaking his jaw, and crushing his testicles, as part of getting a confession out of him. Beating, kicking and electric shock were routine against ANC detainees.
When the US CIA “enhanced interrogation” included waterboarding, the SBs who invented this as the wet sack over the head torture must have wished they could sue for copyright damages.
The father of the famous Cape Town poet, Sandile Dikeni, was detained on suspicion of being a PAC member and involved in Poqo. His interrogator pulled out his father’s teeth to try to get him to sign a confession to crimes punishable by hanging.
About a week after my release from detention without trial I was at an Uruguayan diplomatic reception. As the guests circulated, I literally rubbed shoulders with the minister of police. A few weeks later, I attended a Cape Town Symphony Orchestra function. A fellow guest was the judge who inspected detainees to ask if they had been tortured.
Such a surreal revolving door – from detainee in the dungeons one week to suit and bow tie receptions with the oppressors the next week – can have few precedents in history. Maybe there were cases of dissenting aristocrats in Tsarist Russia who were also detained one day in Ochrana jails, and the next evening were in tuxedos at an imperial reception in palace ballrooms?
Part of my relative privilege was that I was white and middle-aged. Part was due to the fact that even the SB did not suspect me of crimes. I was never given a reason for being detained, nor for being released from detention. I had merely annoyed the baas: people who annoy the baas get punished.
The moral of this story? A happy ending. On Freedom Day, and on May Day, let us renew our life commitment to defend our Bill of Rights, chapter 2 of our constitution. Freedom was not free – we must always be active citizens to build up our hard-won democracy. l Gottschalk is a political scientist from the University of the Western Cape