Human Rights Violation Hearings — Venda — 1996-10-04

MR LYSTER: And do you know what was discussed at the meeting, do you know, were they talking about people who were disappearing at the time, what were they concerned, is it people who were being arrested and detained by the police or what sort of disappearances were you talking about?

ELELWANI VIOLET MUGUVHELA: I am not clear.

MR LYSTER: You said that people attended that meeting, or called that meeting to talk about people who were disappearing.  Are you talking about people who were being arrested by the police when you say that they were disappearing?

ELELWANI VIOLET MUGUVHELA: Mainly the objective was about the old man because he was not somebody who could be arrested by the police, since he was old.  It had been said some other time that he could not be able to.

RUSSELL ALLY: We'd just like to ask you a few more questions and we hope that you'd help us to understand a little bit more about the contents.  If you at any stage don't understand the question, please say so and then we'll repeat it and try and get the questions as clear as possible.
 If you can't answer the question, it is also okay but if you will just be a little bit patient with us because we really want to understand what exactly was going on.  Because from the little bit of research that we have done in this area, round about that time, late 1980's, the 1990's we know that there were a number of accusations about ritual 
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murders, a lot of concern that people were disappearing and the suspicion was that these people were being murdered and that there was some witchcraft associated with that.
 And in fact in the last of Vele's Government, who took over when Mbepo died, the last of his Government, he actually appointed a Commission to look into this question of ritual murders, which was the person who was in charge of that Commission, was a Judge Le Roux and he made certain findings.
 Now we hope that by speaking to you and others like you, we will be able to get another side and maybe compare what Judge Le Roux was saying about this and what people who had direct experience of this, so if you will just bear with us a little bit.
 It seems and you can tell me if I'm incorrect, that when this old man went missing, Mr Magadaghela went missing, the village that he went missing in, where was that?

ELELWANI VIOLET MUGUVHELA: Tsangane.

RUSSELL ALLY: From another village, which village was he from?

ELELWANI VIOLET MUGUVHELA: Yes, it was another village called Tsizeng.

RUSSELL ALLY: Was there tension between these two villages, was there any conflict between the Chiefs or the Headmen of the villages?

ELELWANI VIOLET MUGUVHELA: No, I don't know about that.

RUSSELL ALLY: When he went missing from the one village where your husband was to the other village, did people believe that he had been abducted, that he had been murdered, that this was a ritual murder?  Is that what people believed happened?

ELELWANI VIOLET MUGUVHELA: No, I didn't have any views about it.

RUSSELL ALLY: So then the people of the village that he lived
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in, they then got together in order to go to the other village to speak to the Chief there to find out about this man, is this what was actually happening?

ELELWANI VIOLET MUGUVHELA: Yes.

RUSSELL ALLY: Do you know whether your husband was shot on the way to this other village or was it at the actual village itself that your husband was shot, in other words what I am asking you is did that meeting with the Chief of the other village, did that meeting ever take place?

ELELWANI VIOLET MUGUVHELA: There was only one Chief.  These other people were sub-Headmen.

RUSSELL ALLY: Now did the meeting ever take place with the sub-Headmen of that village to ask what had happened to that old man, or was your husband killed on the way to that village, do you have any idea?

ELELWANI VIOLET MUGUVHELA: He had already arrived, because the corpse was found there at the school.

RUSSELL ALLY: What the police are giving is that they were protecting those other villages, that the people who were coming, were perhaps going to be violent, that there might be a confrontation.  Do you know anything about that?

ELELWANI VIOLET MUGUVHELA: I didn't get that clearly.

RUSSELL ALLY: The police when there was an inquest about the death of your husband, the police said that they were only doing their job.  What they meant by that is that the people from your husband's village who was going to this other village, that they feared that those people may perhaps be violent, now I'm asking, do you perhaps have any views about that, what was the atmosphere, the spirit of the people who were going to find out about what happened to this old man?

ELELWANI VIOLET MUGUVHELA: Are you referring to the village where my
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late husband died?

RUSSELL ALLY: The people who were with your late husband, okay, who were going to this village, what was their mood like?  When they were going to find out about this old man, was there any indication that they wanted to be violent or that they had weapons with them, or were they just going to try and find out about what had happened to this man?  Do you have any knowledge of that?

ELELWANI VIOLET MUGUVHELA: Well, according to my view I think these people were painful, they didn't want the disappearance of anybody.

RUSSELL ALLY: And after the Magistrate said to you that the police were only doing their work and that's why they shot your husband, did anything ever happen again?  Was that the end of it, did you never hear anything again about this case?

ELELWANI VIOLET MUGUVHELA: It ended there, like that.

RUSSELL ALLY: Thank you very much Mrs Muguvhela for coming.
 As I was saying to other witnesses, we are really struggling to try and put all the pieces together and particularly when you have a situation like this, where there are so many different things happening where there were these accusations and then counter accusations, disappearances, people being accused of various things, but we hope that by the end of our work here, we will have found some answers to some of these questions which can obviously never bring back your husband, okay, but hopefully by some understanding of what happened, you would be better able to deal with some of your pain.
 I am sure that the most difficult thing for you really is not having answers, not knowing and some of the things 
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which you speak about, about your children and the difficulties now after the death of your husband, that those things, I am sure are things which the Commission is also listening to.
 Thank you very much for coming and as I say once we've put these things together, we hope we will be able to come back to you and give you some of the answers which you so 
desperately want, thank you very much.
 I am going to ask if you will all please stand while the witnesses leave, we will then break for lunch and if we can come back here promptly at two, or just before two, so that we can start at two o'clock because we've got four witnesses, five witnesses after lunch and we'd like to finish before five o'clock, thank you.