Dulcie September
Still the killers walk free
Dulcie September was the ANC representative for Luxembourg, Switzerland and France before she was assassinated in Paris on March 29 1988. Her murderers have never been caught.Now a new documentary, Murder in Paris, tracks the investigations of veteran Dutch journalist Evelyn Groenink, who has doggedly tried to identify the truth behind her death.Are we any closer to exposing the anti-apartheid stalwart’s killers?
Before she left for exile in 1973, Dulcie September was a schoolteacher. A serious one. She cared about her kids, cared so much that one of the reasons she left was that she had been banned from ever teaching in SA again. One of the reasons she joined the struggle against apartheid was what Bantu education was doing to her country’s children.
Dulcie never stopped being a schoolteacher. In exile, her syllabus became the Freedom Charter, and she would consistently remind everyone, inside and outside the ANC, what that syllabus prescribed. SA was to belong to all who lived in it, with learning, culture and comfort accessible to all. There would be human rights and social justice for all. To achieve this was the task, the job, the homework, for all in the movement. Several ANC members in exile told me how they were in awe of Dulcie’s seriousness in that regard. She should not catch you doing a shoddy job, neglecting your homework, or knocking off at 4pm to go jol in a pub somewhere in London or Toronto, not when there was still unfinished business on your desk. She would give you an earful.
But, as with any good teacher and educator, she was sweet, too. A young employee in her office in
Paris told me he saw her as a mamie confiture, which loosely translates as an aunt who bakes jam tarts for you. Conny Braam, the chair of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Holland, told me that when she visited Lusaka, highly pregnant, and was part of a group travelling on the back of a truck, Dulcie held her tummy tight to protect it from all the bumping and shaking.
Dulcie cared for kids, for the young generations, for SA and for the struggle, and for doing your homework and delivering on the job you were tasked with. That is probably why she would not, as another ANC diplomat once told me, close her eyes when she came across illicit military and nuclear collaboration between Paris and Pretoria, shortly before she was assassinated — five bullets to her face, in her own office in Paris, on March 29 1988, with a lot of unfinished business on her desk.
I was part of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Amsterdam at the time and I decided to do a story on her and the murder. I was — we all were — simply shocked. We were living in Western democracies. Our governments were against apartheid. We had sanctions. How could this happen? In Paris, 500km from Amsterdam? She was murdered in our back yard.
I went to Paris. I did not expect that the article I then intended to write would take me more than 30 years to almost complete. But, slowly, Dulcie’s unfinished business became mine.
It started with the weird, slowly dawning awareness that the Paris I found in 1988 was not the Paris I had expected. France had a socialist president, François Mitterrand. We lefties liked him a lot. When he was elected in 1981, a friend brought champagne to my front door.
Mitterrand was a friend of the struggle and the ANC. His wife Danielle ran a foundation called France Libertés, dedicated to human rights worldwide. Their party, the Parti Socialiste, had its own anti-apartheid movement. Surely the state of France should be on our side, not on the side of those apartheid death squads the papers were talking about? Why would anyone in civilised France protect die-hard white supremacist extremists running around shooting black activist women?
After trying for months to find these apartheid death squads, rumoured to be out to attack ANC members everywhere in Europe, I discovered three things.
One: they did not exist. At least not in Europe, not in the way they were portrayed. Dulcie remained, and still remains, the only ANC member ever killed in Western Europe.
Two: the French police were not serious about catching the killers. They arrested some refugees, had to let them go, then did nothing after that.
Three: all the newspaper reports that talked about these apartheid death squads could be traced back to sources in the French secret services.
Indeed, the only suspicious activity I found in the aftermath of the assassination was that of the French secret services.
As I went around Paris asking questions, strangers became interested in me. I was photographed in the streets. Individuals wanted to “help” me. My hotel room was searched, my metro card with my ID photograph went missing. A new French magazine wanted to publish my entire story in a single article, but it ceased to exist after I gave it to them. It was never published.
Slowly, however, a picture started to emerge. Sources close to foreign affairs dealings between France and SA let on that Dulcie had been unwise to raise certain issues.
“She was stupid, she was fighting with everybody,” a French international journalist told me. “Here, you must have a bottle of wine and go with the flow.” One secret service report I got hold of referred to a
“woman who had to shut up”. A source in the interior ministry admitted the police did not, and would not, do their work in this case.
Thanks to her secretary at the ANC office, Joyce Tillerson, who had at first been cautious about talking to me but over time shared her former boss’s diary and occasional comments, I learnt what Dulcie had had to shut up about.
The schoolteacher who hated shoddy work had gotten wind of illegal and dangerous military nuclear collaborations between France and SA. She had investigated the issue, for that was her job as she saw it: to represent the people of SA and keep the world from collaborating with the apartheid regime. She had gone about it methodically. Had done her homework. Had uncovered maybe not all, but a large part of it.
It was the opposite of what her predecessor in Paris, Neo Moikangua, would have done, Moikangua told me later, explaining that investigating these things was simply not what a diplomat should do. “If they would show me a cupboard full of weapons,” he told me, “I would close the door and pretend I’d never seen anything.”
Maybe Dulcie was not a diplomat.
That France did not want the full extent of its nuclear interests in apartheid SA to be known was to be expected. What I had not expected was that the ANC itself appeared not to want to know about it.
Before her death Dulcie had phoned the London office, her liaison with headquarters, several times, increasingly worried, increasingly terrified about the pressure and intimidation that had escalated as she continued her investigations.
But her superiors had not wanted to entertain the issues she raised. Solly Smith was sent to replace her after her assassination — at a time when it was an open secret that he was an apartheid agent. He would later admit to me, drunk and crying, that “she had phoned us so many times, asked us to come to Paris, and we did not go”.
When I asked Aziz Pahad, the ANC’s main international liaison officer for Western Europe, based in London, about this, he said: “We thought she was a bit of a drama queen.”
But that, of course, was not all there was to it. The late 1980s were a time of change, of intense negotiations, of talks both between Pretoria and Western governments about SA’s future. The ANC was about to take power. Pahad was, next to Thabo Mbeki, one of the principal negotiators for the ANC.
“Changes, changes, changes,” was the buzz phrase, indeed often said in that way, with emphasis and plurals. Amid all these changes, Dulcie was a woman making trouble.
She was, in fact, a woman who had to shut up.
Was it perhaps indeed ill-advised to keep thinking of the struggle, the Freedom Charter, nuclear sanctions and the like, as Dulcie kept doing, in the late 1980s? Should she maybe have shut up, now that power was in sight? Maybe one shouldn’t alienate possible allies at a time when top posts and postings are being discussed.
One needed to get to know the scene, the big shots in one another’s countries; one needed to become a big shot oneself — or at least an ally or friend of a big shot. There were contacts and contracts in the making, deals to be worked out. If that last bit sounds familiar in the here and now, that is intentional.
But I don’t think Dulcie was wrong to keep worrying about all the homework that still needed to be done, especially in 1988, when there was still an actual war being waged on the ground in SA. Activists were being murdered by gangsters, police, Witdoeke, Inkatha ...
Underground operatives were disappearing, freedom fighters were being kidnapped and murdered in Swaziland. Children were being tortured and killed in the umpteenth state of emergency. And now weapons were being developed that could eradicate an entire township. It was important to sit back and discuss what it all meant. To get the classroom in order, so to speak.
It was in that context that she wanted to engage with the ANC, her movement. But she was waved away. A bit of a drama queen.
We thought Dulcie September was a bit of a drama queen
AZIZ PAHAD
Former deputy minister of foreign affairs
Maybe the ones who refused to take her calls and refused to take her seriously did not know in detail what she had discovered; they clearly did not want to know. But they would have had an inkling, because she did let on it was about the arms trade: she wrote a note to Abdul Minty at the World Campaign Against Military and Nuclear Collaboration with SA, saying she had information to share.
But in 1988, perhaps even something about arms was not worth the trouble. After all, those arms, like those gangsters and those police, were going to be all ours now.
As I overheard Pallo Jordan saying — typical dry, tongue-in-cheek Pallo Jordan — at a conference in Paris a year after Dulcie’s assassination: “Of course, when we are the government, we will buy your weapons.”
After she was killed, it was easy to simply blame apartheid death squads.
It is still the easiest narrative, even now, and still the dominant one, too. “We were all on hit lists,” the narrative goes. “We were all looking over our shoulders for those agents, those murderers. Apartheid was targeting all of us.” They were bad, we were good. What the heck, we are good.
As a single story it is an exquisitely simple and useful one. If we keep pointing out how bad the enemy was and, remarkably, apparently still is, we are automatically good. We don’t have to do anything to prove it. We can do whatever we want: jostle for positions, focus on big deals and contracts. Do trillion-rand nuclear deals with the Russians. Ruin the Free State and Mpumalanga and leave people without water and medicines.
So what if we knock off on Friday at 4pm, or even Thursday, with unfinished business on our desks? What if we spent some time at the Saxonwold shebeen instead? As for our homework, that apartheid dog ate that too.
I imagine Dulcie alive now. How would she respond to leaders who are fine with learners passing matric with 30%? To police shooting students? To the looted billions that could have funded not just university bursaries, but teacher training, textbooks, roofs, water, lights and functioning toilets for schools? How would Dulcie respond to activists being murdered when resisting polluting, exploitative projects in their communities?
I can’t help thinking that if Dulcie September were alive today, she might be killed all over again.
But I imagine her now alive, a schoolteacher in a class called South Africa. I imagine some of the class bullies waffling on about the struggle and the heroic ANC, while stealing others’ lunch boxes. I imagine her grabbing such bullies by the neck and telling them to bring a five-page essay on “How I must do my job” and then tasking them to construct a project out of it. I imagine her marking them, firmly failing all those wavering around 30%.
And I hope that others will start to imagine, and continue to imagine her, again, too.
✼ This is a transcript of the Dulcie September inaugural lecture delivered last Saturday in Freedom Park.
Tonight at 7.30pm SABC3 will premiere the first part of Murder in Paris, based on the life of Dulcie September. The documentary is directed by award-winning filmmaker Enver Samuel. See LifeStyle for Tymon Smith’s review