Digging up the dirt on apartheid’s secret war
CASE CLOSED: The ‘Pebco 3’ — Sipho Hashe, left, Qaqawuli Godolozi and Champion Golela, far right — were abducted and killed by apartheid security forces. With them are Henry Fazzie and Edgar Ngoyi
TWO decades after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), as we critique its processing of our cruel history, debates rage over whether forgiveness flowed too abundantly. Yet one aspect is often forgotten — the years of patient poring over dossiers, the slow sifting of soil and the dusting off of old bones.
The painstaking search has continued to find anti-apartheid activists who disappeared at the hands of the previous regime between 1960 and 1994.
It has taken a team undeterred by history’s tangled undergrowth and dirty secrets to achieve this. The task is backbreaking and grim, bearing testimony to the psychological pathologies of the apartheid project — its theatre of torture, sadomasochism and murder.
Historian and TRC researcher Madeleine Fullard heads the National Prosecuting Authority’s Missing Persons Task Team, modelled on its Argentinian counterpart which recovered 12 000 bodies of people who had vanished in the “dirty war”.
Experts there had used forensic anthropology — the study of skeletonised human remains — to uncover human rights abuses. And when one of the forensic archaeologists, Claudia Bisso, moved to South Africa, she was snapped up by the task team to train it in this approach.
“We follow a model which involves the families,” Fullard says. “It’s not just a technical, forensic exercise of recovering the bones. It’s actually about making the family’s experience more central.”
Fullard’s team consists of forensic anthropologists Dr Kaviatives. ta Lakha and Kundisai Dembetembe, and investigators who include Deborah Quin, a former TRC researcher whose sister was killed by Vlakplaas operatives in Lesotho in December 1985, former activist Billy Motsileng, policeman Sipiwo Pahlane, and three former members of the ANC’s armed wing Umkhonto weSizwe — Ambrose Ndhlovu, John Mailane and Brian Ndhlovu.
Fullard says: “They actually work on cases of people they knew. It’s very personal, very intimate. They now work with former security police to recover remains. That’s quite a shock for them. But they understand that a family wants to bury their loved one.
“You get two kinds of cases,” Fullard explains. “When people are abducted and secretly buried, you can’t really find them without assistance from the perpetrators. At other times, people are killed but their body goes to a mortuary and there’s a paper trail — a police docket, the mortuary books showing a cause of death, the place, and cemetery records. We patch together old newspaper reports of an incident or a body found.
“We’ll try to locate the body at the cemetery, excavate the grave and check to see if this person is physically consistent with what we’re looking for in terms of age, height and injuries. If we’re confident, we’ll close the grave and invite the family to attend the exhumation.”
Fullard emphasises that it’s not just about recovering remains. “We’re also about recovering the facts and the story of what happened. We may take a DNA sample — a tooth, a small bone fragment — which we compare to the missing person’s rel- If we get a match, we know we’ve got the right person.”
Photographs accelerate cases and often satisfy the families’ need for pictorial evidence. “Sometimes in the mortuary photographs, people’s injuries make them unrecognisable. But information was concealed from the families deliberately and it’s not up to us to be a further censor. Usually, they want copies because it’s the last thing they have — it’s proof of what happened.”
The Mamelodi 10 were a group of teenage activists driven into the bush near Zeerust in 1986, sedated, put back in their minibus and burnt to death.
“We recovered photographs of the burnt bodies inside,” says Fullard. “The security police had staged it to look like they’d PIECING THINGS TOGETHER: Missing Persons Task Team forensic anthropologists Kundisai Dembetembe, Colonel Laché Rossouw, who now works for the police, and Kavita Lakha examine a skeleton to determine the age and sex and find signs of trauma
It’s not just a technical exercise. It’s about making the family’s experience more central
crashed into a tree. The mothers had been looking for their children for about 20 years. It was a triumph that we’d managed to find the photographs. They were harrowing. But this was what was done to their children.”
Fullard regrets that not all the Mamelodi 10 could be laid to rest.
“The worst is when we have to tell a family that we can’t possibly find their relative, as in the case of Sizwe Kondile — Vusi Pikoli’s best friend in exile. Kondile was abducted, interrogated and driven to Komatipoort, where he was drugged and shot dead. His body was set alight by Dirk Coetzee and others while they braaied nearby.
“This terrain is now a sugar plantation and the ground’s been ploughed so often we can’t recover any remains. We’ve got six families whose members were killed or disposed of in that area. We’ve taken them to Komatipoort, held ceremonies there and let the families do a symbolic repatriation of the remains in which they could talk to the spirit of the person. Their child died and we can’t recover their remains, but perhaps we can offer some recognition of their struggle.”
Fullard remembers participating in marches around the disappearances of the Pebco 3 in 1985, as a student. “They’d been taken to an abandoned rural police station just outside Cradock where they were killed and burnt. When we excavated the yard, we found marks in the soil that told us there’d been a big fire there. And we found a pit which contained the bone fragments of the Pebco 3. These were people who paid the ultimate price, yet we march on into the future leaving them behind unrecognised, unnoted. Unlike the Pebco 3, most cases involve people who’ve never been spoken about, but their stories are just as tragic and horrific.”
The team has recovered the remains of 102 people, (two of them women) out of about 1 000 thought to be missing in South Africa. Ninety have been identified through forensic anthropology or DNA testing. But there are obstacles. “We’re mostly working in paupers’ graves in old municipal cemeteries that are closed,” Fullard says. “No markings, no numbers. We just have to open up grave after grave, site after site. It’s sometimes boiling hot, at other times it rains. There are snakes and spiders. It’s very hard physical work that sometimes has to be done by hand.
“In Mahikeng and Umtata, the soil is so rocky, just the physical act of digging almost defeats us . . . People also tend to think DNA’s like a magic wand, but in very old cases we’re unable to get DNA from the bone itself. You have to match two close family members and sometimes you only have a half-sibling, the parents are deceased and the person died before they had children.
“A couple of years ago, we recovered all the detailed postmortems from the Durban mortuary. They were held in shipping containers at a police station. We stripped down almost to our underwear while sorting them because it was about 50°C in those steaming-hot containers. But when we came back to re-
Information was concealed from the families deliberately and it’s not up to us to be a further censor
trieve them a few months later, someone had taken them to be pulped. State documents are easily destroyed by the passage of time, the elements and rodents. There’s a constant attrition and loss. It’s devastating to find the sources we wanted to use have been destroyed.
“All over the world we see forensic teams working to identify the victims of conflict. We saw the excavation of mass graves in Bosnia, where nearly 20 000 bodies have been identified. After 9/11, every single little fragment of bone and tissue recovered qualified for DNA testing. That’s the value placed on their lives, their deaths.
“And here in Africa, we have mass graves, piles of skulls and skeletons that reflect a racialised, global citizenship that says the dead in Africa have less value. And we want to ensure that victims of conflict on this continent also qualify, and work is done to recover and identify their remains. The recovery of remains is a form of symbolic reparation,” says Fullard.
Debora Phato’s son, Mzwakhe, was an MK member, one of a group of four killed in a skirmish with police in 1986. Although his three comrades were identified, Mzwakhe was buried as an unknown pauper at Tshikota cemetery in Makhado until Fullard and her team identified his body.
“I was happy when they found my child’s remains,” Phato says. “It was hard for me not knowing where he was. I couldn’t sleep when I thought about him. I lost hope they would ever find him.
“I later watched them exhume his bones and it hurt me. But they gave him a proper burial and I thank them so much.”