Hermanus Loots: MK member who exposed truth behind ANC’s Quatro prison
HERMANUS Loots, who has died in Johannesburg at the age of 79, was a senior member of Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) who was appointed by ANC president Oliver Tambo to investigate the causes of a mutiny by ANC troops in Angola in 1984 that rocked the leadership to its core.
The mutiny, at Viana camp, outside Luanda, was a fairly tame affair amounting to not much more than shots fired in the air and demands for a meeting with the leadership, but it triggered a brutal crackdown by the muchfeared ANC security department, Mbokodo.
The MK high command, including Chris Hani, Joe Modise and national commissar and former Fort Hare lecturer Andrew Masondo, were convinced it was orchestrated by the apartheid regime and wanted those involved to be summarily executed.
In February 1984 Tambo sent Loots, known then by his MK name James Stuart, to Angola to head a five-man commission of inquiry into the mutiny. After interviewing troops held in Quatro prison camp and in the state maximum security prison in Luanda, his commission refuted the claims of Mbokodo that the mutiny had been organised and led by “enemy agents”.
Instead it found that it was a spontaneous eruption of anger by MK members who were sick and tired of enduring appalling conditions in the camps while their leaders supposedly lived in relative luxury in Lusaka. They also bitterly resented being thrown into battle against the Angolan rebel army Unita instead of being allowed to fight the apartheid regime back home in South Africa.
The Stuart report unflinchingly exposed the horrendous brutality of the ANC security department towards the guerrillas. It essen- tially supported the arguments of the mutineers and thereby saved their lives. Members of the socalled “Committee of 10” elected to present their demands had no doubt that there would have been mass executions if Loots had not had the courage and integrity, in the face of considerable pressure, to report the truth.
His report was so unpalatable to the national executive committee of the ANC that it was kept a closely guarded secret for nine years.
Its shocking revelations, together with supporting witness accounts of returning exiles, spurred Nelson Mandela into appointing two further investigations into human-rights abuses in the camps, one in 1992 headed by Judge Thembile Skweyiya, and another in 1993 headed by business leader Sam Motsuenyane.
It was only in 1993 that the ANC released the Stuart report to the public along with the report of the Motsuenyane commission.
No mention of the mutiny or the Stuart report was allowed at the national conference of the ANC at Kabwe in Zambia in 1985, held while leading participants in the mutiny were still incarcerated in Quatro camp, where they remained until all ANC personnel were required to leave Angola in late 1988.
However, such was the respect for Loots that he was elected to the ANC national executive at the Kabwe conference and remained a member until 1990.
In 1986 he participated alongside Tambo, Thabo Mbeki and other senior ANC figures in one of the first meetings of the ANC-in-exile with eminent white South Africans.
He was an ANC MP from 1994 to 1999, and nonexecutive chairman of the ANC front company Chan- cellor House Holdings until not long before his death. A heavy smoker, he died of lung cancer.
Loots was born on July 19 1936 at Tamboekiesvlei on the banks of the Katrivier near Fort Beaufort in the Eastern Cape. He matriculated at the John Bisseker high school in East London and was studying for a civil-engineering degree at the University of the Witwatersrand when he was recruited into the Luthuli detachment of MK in 1961.
From 1964 to 1973 he did stints of military training in Odessa, Kishinev and Moscow.
He was secretary in the office of Tambo and was the ANC’s chief representative in Madagascar from 1979 to 1983, where he married his wife Nosulo, known in the ANC as Josephine.
He spoke English, Afrikaans, French, Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho, Russian and Malagasy. He returned to South Africa in 1991 and served as a member of the ANC national elections commission.
He is survived by Josephine. They had no children. — Chris Barron
There would have been mass executions if Loots had not had the courage