Apartheid-era judges’ atrocities have yet to be exposed
WITH the deaths of prominent people in recent times it became apparent again how careful one must be about what one stood for in one’s lifetime.
There can be no better yardstick than how one dealt with the issue of life and death. Winston Churchill proclaimed that one will know how many enemies one had made in one’s lifetime by what one stood for.
The issue of life and death is what life is all about. It’s mind-boggling how subjectively judges dealt with this perennial subject that gripped man’s attention since the beginning of humankind.
Retired Judge Ramon Leon, the father of former DA Leader Tony Leon, who died recently, was the judge who sentenced ANC political prisoner Andrew Zondo to death. Yet he was opposed to capital punishment, feared as a “hanging judge”, a member of the Liberal Party and, paradoxically, a vocal supporter of the Society for the Abolition of the Death Penalty. How opportunistic and controversial is that?
All apartheid judges, except one, had atrocious track records as far as the sending of people to the gallows is concerned. Judge John Didcott of the Natal Division never sent anyone to the gallows, as a matter of principle. He was also one of our 11 eminent judges who abolished this abomination in 1995 once and for all.
In 1964 when our Father of the Nation, Nelson Mandela, and his accomplices faced the death penalty, it was only divine intervention that caused Judge Quartus de Wet not to impose it.
Other “hanging judges” were the notorious Braam Lategan, Andrew Beyers, Curlewis, Williamson, Van den Heever, Van Dijkhorst, etc. Who sentenced the other 134 political prisoners to death?
Did none of them realise at the time that some day it would be revealed that the death penalty is an inhumane, cruel violation of life, a travesty of justice? This dark cloud of our murky past must still be unravelled.
Some of them were even seconded to neighbouring states like Lesotho and Swaziland, even stillborn states like the Transkei, Ciskei. What are their track records there? They would secretly beg apartheid presidents to commute death sentences to avoid having bad “gallows legacies!”
Our country will never grow to its full fruition without all the atrocities of the apartheid and colonial eras being exposed. The souls of the 4110 people sentenced to death since 1910 will forever haunt us. Arthur Koestler said: “The gallows is not only a machine of death, but a symbol of terror, cruelty and irreverence for life; the common denominator of primitive savagery, medieval fanaticism and modern totalitarianism. It stands for everything mankind must reject if it is to survive.”