TRUTH INTERRUPTED
Almost three decades since the TRC was established, the victims of apartheid atrocities are still waiting for justice
Nothing prepared anyone listening to SABC radio that day for the utter desolation and despair of the hair-raising howl of pain from the woman in the flameorange dress.
“For me,” wrote poet Antjie Krog whose recording carried Nomonde Calata’s fathomless anguish to the world, “this crying is the beginning of the Truth Commission — the signature tune, the definitive moment, the ultimate sound of what the process is about ... that sound, it will haunt me forever.”
Calata had broken down when recounting the terrible moment in 1985 that she, barely 20 years old and six months pregnant with her third child, had realised that her husband, political activist Fort Calata, had been murdered.
But the legacy of South Africa’s Truth & Reconciliation Commission (TRC) itself looks set to be forever haunted by the dogged reluctance of the governing ANC to prosecute perpetrators.
Former TRC advocate Howard Varney recalls that on June 7 1985 Brig “Joffel” van der Westhuizen, the South African Defence Force (SADF) chief in the Eastern Cape, recommended to a State Security Council subcommittee meeting, chaired by deputy police minister Adriaan Vlok, the “permanent removal from society” of activists Fort Calata, Matthew Goniwe, and Goniwe’s nephew Mbulelo.
Twenty days later, Fort Calata, Goniwe, Sicelo Mhlauli and Sparrow
Mkhonto were apprehended on a deserted road and butchered to death, becoming revered as the “Cradock Four”.
“All the killers,” Varney sighs, “have since died.”
All that intimate recounting of the horrors of the past at the TRC, so poignantly captured in Krog’s harrowing book Country of My Skull, seems to have been for naught.
In March 2002, the TRC Amnesty Committee under former anti-apartheid detainee advocate Dumisa Ntsebeza SC recommended about 300 prosecutions of perpetrators of all political hues. The National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) determined that about half were triable, and that 21 cases were, with some further investigation, ripe for immediate prosecution.
But unknown to the TRC commissioners and the NPA, a cherry-picked group of ANC leaders, first under former president Thabo Mbeki and then under former president Jacob Zuma, had from 1997 to 2003 during the TRC process run an ultra-secret series of negotiations with the apartheid war chief sunder SADF generals Magnus Malan, Jannie Geldenhuys, Kat Liebenberg and Constand Viljoen.
The aim? To prevent any post-TRC prosecutions on either side. With all but one of the generals involved in the talks now dead, the talks organiser, former deputy army chief Maj-Gen Dirk Marais, confirmed to the writer in detail that they had taken place. Mbeki and Zuma have refused to comment. A parallel set of talks between police minister Sydney Mufamadi and former Security Branch chief Gen Johan van der Merwe (also since deceased) was aimed, Mufamadi claimed, rather at trying to get the police to co-operate with the TRC.
Marais recalled that the talks between Zuma and the old SADF generals fell apart in February 2003, when the generals declined draft legislation that would allow additional amnesties to those granted by the TRC. Yet even with the generals out of the picture, the ANC remained committed to protecting apartheid-era war criminals: a year later, the department of justice established an Amnesty Task Team to drive the process, behind closed doors and with no access for victims’ families.
NPA chief Vusi Pikoli later famously argued in a high court affidavit that justice minister Brigitte Mabandla and several cabinet colleagues had pressured him to settle for plea-bargained suspended sentences for three Security Branch poisoners of cleric Frank Chikane, plus their commanders, former police minister Vlok and Van der Merwe.
Mbeki has only this year angrily denied Pikoli’s accusation of cabinet interference in the statutory autonomy of the NPA. Yet Pikoli was suspended in September 2007 after criticising the Amnesty Task Team’s work, and the following year the NPA withdrew all TRC cases.
It took the concerted effort over decades of victims’ families, notably Fort Calata’s son Lukhanyo and murdered activist Ahmed Timol’s nephew Imtiaz Cajee, and of outfits such as the Foundation for Human Rights (FHR) to try to force the state to uphold its statutory and ethical obligations flowing from the TRC.
The tide appeared to have turned with the reopening of the inquest into Timol’s 1971 death-plunge in police custody; in October 2017 it ruled his death was murder. But the last surviving of three Security Branch officers who interrogated Timol at the time of his death, João Rodrigues, died in September 2021 while facing the charge of murdering Timol.
While other inquests into the deaths in custody of anti-apartheid activists have since proceeded — and several murder trials are in the offing — scores of elderly alleged perpetrators and their political masters have been dying off: former president FW de Klerk passed on in 2021, and Vlok died last year.
FHR director Yasmin Sooka tells the FM that she was “the person who switched off the lights at the TRC, then had to take care of the drafting of the final two volumes, which would include the report of the Amnesty Committee”. She asked former president Nelson Mandela’s chief of staff, Chikane, “at what point will the courts deal with prosecutions, and he said there is a real fear that if they pursue [cases] against the generals, [the generals] will come for them”.
Today, she says: “We’re looking at a very small window of opportunity because at the end of the day, on both sides, people are dying ... I don’t believe they [the ANC] have either the will or the political inclination to deal with these matters; they think these are cold cases, and why should they bother?
“The question South Africans have to ask, and I don’t really have the answers [to it], is: why has an ANC state, the ruling party ... left victims who were part of the struggle without any form of justice and accountability?”
Lukhanyo Calata tells the FM: “In the Cradock Four matter, all of five people who could have been held accountable for my father’s death are dead, and they are dead because the government and the ANC interfered politically in ensuring that justice for my father and his comrades was denied.
“There are so many others, Simelane, the Mxenges; families still today sit without any justice about 30 years later ... This for me is really what breaks my heart ... here in South Africa, black lives don’t matter; they never mattered under apartheid and don’t matter now under a democratic government.”
Last June, he says, when he heard the NPA had confirmed the death of Hermanus du Plessis, the last survivor of the Cradock Four perpetrators, he “physically fell ill”. His doctor ran tests and told him “physically you are OK, but there’s a hole in your soul that needs to be healed”.
Here in South Africa, black lives don’t matter; they never mattered under apartheid and don’t matter now under a democratic government
Lukhanyo Calata
Yasmin Sooka