Fleshing out the skeletal facts of SA’s dark and troubled past
The release of the TRC’s ‘closed’ Section 29 records won’t expose any new apartheid secrets, writes Robyn Leslie, but it will help to illuminate the brutal truths of our history
ACCORDING to his mother, Lungile Tabalaza was identified by his uncle. His body lay on a heap of corpses at Port Elizabeth’s Mount Road police station on July 10 1978.
Tabalaza had been detained earlier that day by security police, and had allegedly committed suicide by leaping from a fifth-floor window. He was 19 years old.
In 1996, Tabalaza’s mother appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s human rights violation committee. He was a quiet boy, she said; his family didn’t know he was “distributing papers” supposedly linking him to the liberation struggle. She scorned the suggestion her son was suicidal. She’d seen the cuts and bruises he’d suffered before his death — and she had begged the TRC to find out who murdered him.
The TRC, it emerged recently, did take up her plea — utilising the little-known but powerful Section 29 of the Promotion of National Unity Act of 1995, or “TRC Act”. This allowed the TRC to hear evidence in camera, an incentive to full disclosure free from prosecution — and the threat of other possible reprisals.
This introduced an interesting dynamic to the TRC; unlike other hearings, these were closed to the public. No judgment was passed on matters at the Section 29 hearings.
Former TRC commissioner Yasmin Sooka explained the importance of this “confidential” tool: “In some instances it allowed the commission to create a safe space in which to question witnesses with potentially useful information on the cases it was dealing with. In other instances it was used to target potential amnesty applicants into filing amnesty applications.”
The South African History Archive (SAHA), an independent activist archive with a long-standing interest in TRC records, recently won an 11-year battle with the Department of Justice regarding the release of these Section 29 records.
Since 2001 the history archive has maintained that these closed hearing records be publicly accessible. Over the years, it has submitted numerous requests under the Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) towards this end.
The Department of Justice has, however, consistently rejected such requests, claiming the TRC’s confidential Section 29 hearings were never meant to be released to the public, and that the content of the hearings, if released, could be harmful to those who had been guaranteed confidentiality at the time. It also argued that the release of these records could hamper prosecutions that were being investigated and undertaken by the National Prosecuting Authority.
This was finally overturned by proving that the Section 29 hearings assured confidentiality only at
ONLY THE BEGINNING: Dr Alex Boraine and Archbishop Desmond Tutu during the first hearing of the TRC the time of the hearings and that, subsequently, the TRC could lift this confidentiality. The SAHA proved that commissioners had previously discussed allowing Section 29 hearings to be released, and secured supporting affidavits from past commissioners, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
The release of the Section 29 hearings into the Helderberg disaster, as well as excerpts from hearings involving Winnie MadikizelaMandela, put paid to the notion of blanket confidentiality.
The courts finally granted the SAHA access to Section 29 documents late last year. The archive’s director, Catherine Kennedy, said the eventual release of these records after so many years was both a victory and an indictment.
“That the Department of Justice has persistently blocked access to these, and other TRC records . . . speaks volumes about [its] apparent lack of commitment to paying anything more than lip service to their obligations as government’s lead agency on the implementation of PAIA,” Kennedy said.
“And as the home of the TRC unit, the department is arguably undermining one of South Africa’s greatest memory initiatives, and by extension, the country’s ongoing reconciliation agenda.”
More than 150 transcripts of secret hearings were now available to the SAHA — and, in terms of the PAIA, they will soon be made available to the broader public.
However, it would be wrong to imagine that the Section 29 transcripts offer closure or expose the many secrets that still lie in South Africa’s murky past.
Rather, the Section 29 transcripts place flesh on the bones of existing facts. They contextualise the decisions and strategies of both the state and the liberation movement: a policeman rages against those who petrol-bombed a house where three young children were sleeping; two ANC activists describe their torture in detail, explaining how sometimes it would be a clothes brush they were hit with and sometimes the palm of their interrogator’s hand; a security branch operative comments on the quality of alcohol and braai meat at the Vlakplaas death farm.
And a Port Elizabeth police officer describes the last time he saw Lungile Tabalaza alive.
On December 3 1996, Captain Stanford Mene told a Section 29 panel that, on July 10 1978, two “boys” had been brought to the Sanlam building — police offices — for theft from a bakery truck. Mene was instructed to take one of them, Tabalaza, to a magistrate to make a statement.
Upon their return, Mene gave this statement to a Major De Jong, who got very angry after reading it, and — bizarrely — poked Tabalaza forcefully in the eyes, drawing tears.
In his statement, Tabalaza had claimed the bakery truck theft was a trumped-up charge, and that he was forced to make this statement by Mene’s superior, a Major Nel. After Nel had also read the statement, Mene was instructed to leave Tabalaza in Nel’s fifth-floor office.
Minutes later, Nel entered Mene’s office. “Where’s the boy?” he asked.
Mene was surprised. “How can you ask me, I’d left the boy in your office?” he said.
Tabalaza’s body was then discovered outside the building.
Some may argue such details are unnecessary; they offer no answers, they’re hurtful and irrelevant, or that the information at our disposal should be enough to understand our past. But South Africans have a right to as complete a picture as possible of past abuse. Without these Section 29 transcripts, we fall woefully short in this regard.
What happened to those like Tabalaza must be known and acknowledged for South Africa to learn from it — yet the possibility of such full disclosure regarding the apartheid years is unlikely.
The mass destruction of documentation, alongside the attitude of untouchability from some perpetrators, and the post-traumatic stress of victims, has made truth recovery complex and difficult.
And yet, such knowledge is the cornerstone for acknowledgement of hurt — and hopefully, both accountability and reconciliation.
The TRC’s mandate to paint as complete a picture as possible of past violation reinforces the views of commissioners: that the TRC was the beginning, not the end, of attempts at truth recovery. South Africa must continue to fill in the gaps, learning more about both atrocity and healing as we probe our past.
Knowledge is power — and those who don’t understand their history might well be doomed to repeat it.
The Section 29 transcripts will be released by the SAHA to the public over the coming months.
Leslie is a researcher at the South African History Archive
The TRC’s view was that it was the beginning, not the end, of attempts at truth recovery
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