Special Hearings — Children's Hearings — 1997-05-22

ANTHONY THOZAMILE NTONI: Mac told me that this ANC representative in Zimbabwe, Joe Gqabi, had been shot and that he was implicated in the assassination.  They were also accused of killing other people.  So I was surprised when I heard that Mac had also been arrested and he was told to sign a statement admitting that he was involved in the murder on Joe Gqabi.  So I wanted to know how was that possible, because Mac and I had left South Africa three months apart.  He would attend meetings and he was not even at school while we were here.  What I knew was that Mac worked at Duens Bakery and what happened there was that he had a fallout with a coloured person and he hit that person with an iron bar on his head and that person collapsed and he then ran home.  When he got home he found ...

MS GOBODO-MADIKIZELA: Excuse me one second.  As I said, you are rushing your story a bit.  I understand that it is difficult.  While you are speaking Xhosa giving your testimony there is someone that is trying to interpret everything you are saying and we would just like to ask you to slow down a bit so that what you are saying can be interpreted.

ANTHONY THOZAMILE NTONI: So I am saying that the way I knew Mac we could, from the way we knew Mac we assumed that he was running away from the police in connection with this matter and apparently this coloured that he had assaulted had suffered some internal bleeding and had, in the meantime, recovered in hospital.  So I said, look, let us go to the Security Department.

MS GOBODO-MADIKIZELA: Of the ANC?

ANTHONY THOZAMILE NTONI: Yes, and try and clarify this matter, because he said to me that he had been there for six months.  Ever since he arrived and my understanding of it was that we told ourselves we were not going to spend more than a month there.  So spending six months there made us think of a lot of things.  So I went to the Security Department and said, look, there is a certain person that you have got incarcerated here.  I know him and if there is anything, any clarity you want on him, Mac is not involved in politics and he is not involved in these things and they said, no, leave that, because you just got here.  You do not know what is going on here.  So do not come in and involve yourself in what is happening here and I said, no, I know this person.  If there is anyone else that can say anything about him then you bring that person, but we grew up together and I know him best.  They did not want to listen to me and dismissed me saying to me that I should leave and never speak to Mac again.  That was the last time I saw Mac at the Viana Camp.  They would keep taking me from the camp to go and work in Ruanda and come back at night.  So I also eventually left Viana Camp hoping to meet Mac somewhere in the future.
 I think after two or three months people came from the Viana Camp.  It was another group who we were trained with.  They came there before we could start training saying that Mac had been bitten by a snake and killed and said that Mac was in Viana and I was never going to see him.

MS GOBODO-MADIKIZELA: At which camp were you by then?

ANTHONY THOZAMILE NTONI: We were at Caculama Camp.  We were at the training camp, but we had not started training there.  We were at this camp, because it was non-functional for a long time.  We were told that Mac had been bitten by a snake and died.  I said how is that possible, then they said, no, Mac had been bitten and he fell and when they tried to wake him up he was not waking up and he was foaming at the mouth and his eyes were upturned and I asked them what kind of snake it was.  They said they did not see it and I asked them where did the snake bite him, where was the wound.  They said they did not see any wound and I said how is that possible, there were 30 or more of you.  How can you not know, did the person not scream when he was bitten by the snake and they said no.  Somebody said to me, why do you not just keep quiet and they wanted to know, I said I wanted to know how could somebody just keep quiet when being bitten by a snake and they said to me that I should keep quiet.
 Nobody came to confront me about Mac's story and when I went elsewhere I had to write a report and I wrote a report saying that I knew Mac.  If you want to know anything about Mac, come and ask me, because we grew up together in the township.  No one was interested enough to call me and ask how I had met Mac and the same thing at the camp, still Mac's name was mentioned and nobody came to ask how I had met him or how I know him.  What annoyed me even worse about Mac's story is that I was hoping that at least at his funeral they will say why he was being held at Viana Camp.  They said, at his funeral they said that he was a hero and he wanted to be a communist and there was nothing to say why he was held in Viana.  It was just said that Mac was a hero and then he was buried, that he wanted to become a communist.

MS GOBODO-MADIKIZELA: How did this matter affect you since you were defending Mac?  How did it affect you at Caculama or your stay at the camp?

ANTHONY THOZAMILE NTONI: I had a problem, because since we all arrived together, Mac was approximately a year older than I was and we all grew up together in Langa and most of the time the people whom I associated with, Mac was one of them, and I saw him as an exemplary person and he tried to get people out of the rough way of life, smoking and getting involved in wrong matters.  So I was very confused as to how I was going to carry on, because the one person that I knew that led a good life, an exemplary life, was Mac and if they could do this to him they could do this to me any time.
 As soon as I went to confront them lots of other things started happening such as them taking me while we would be sitting there, they would call me and into the administration and there was someone, there was, known as, who was working at Armscor, was Dasaai and he was informed that because he was working it was seen that since he was working at Armscor he was a sort of spy and they would give us firearms to take to the other section.  So I do not know what it was all about, but I was never directly accused of being an informant, but they did things like that.  Sometimes at the camp where we were training whatever went wrong and they never did anything like that like waking me up in the middle of the night and trying to get me to run away and accuse me of doing anything.

MS GOBODO-MADIKIZELA: Sir, I would like you to explain to us that Lusana is a place where Umkhonto we Sizwe female cadres stayed?