Human Rights Violation Hearings — Lusikisiki — 1997-03-26

RODNEY GOBA KESWA: Thank you.  The afternoon of the 27th May, 1981, marked in most parts of Transkei the beginning of an unseasonal snow storm which was accompanied by gusts of wind and torrential rain.  Snow fell on hills and mountains, where for years it had not fallen before.
 It was bitterly cold at Inqobo.  As I groped around in my dark cell, looking for the prison mat and blankets, I felt an icy gust of wind which I thought came in through an open window.
 As I tried to find the window, I discovered the window with no glass.  As the snow storm intensified, it blew into my cell through this window, sprays of rain and ice.  I tried to shield myself from the rain the wind and the snow, by squatting directly below the glassless window, but the gusts of wind which came in through the window, hit the opposite wall and spiralled inside the cell in a whirlwind which blew up choking dust as it also crept up inside my trousers.
 Slowly but surely first my toes froze, then my ankles.  As the numbness crept up my legs, I spent the night rubbing
vigorously with  my hands, my hands or jogging around and around inside my cell in an effort to wipe off the cold.
 When the cocks crowed  for the first time, I was so cold my legs so wobbly, that it was difficult for me to move around my cell.  When the birds began to chirp and sing, I was still making attempts to prevent my body from freezing.
 When dawn eventually broke, I had the first opportunity of looking around my cell.  What I saw still haunts me to this day.  The wall on the one side of my cell was smeared with faeces, the spot where the night soil bucket stood, was a pool of urine.
 The metal night soil bucket was old and rusty, it obviously had never been cleaned in years.  The blankets were old, threat bare, smelly, dusty, coarse with tell tale signs of perverse sexual acts.  I tried walking towards the door, but I staggered about sick to the bottom of my gut.
 I crest to the floor and hit my back against the iron grill door.  I wanted to scream or shout, but I could not because my voice was hoarse.
 As I pulled myself up from the floor by holding onto the iron bars of the iron grill door, I remembered stories I heard when I served in the South African Prison Services about tactics of killing someone without laying a finger on them.
 This was it, I concluded.  This was such a tactic to kill me.  I resolved there and then that I would not die that way.  Whoever wanted me dead, would have to kill me physically.  With a peculiar and to me familiar clang and rattle of prison keys, the door of my cell swung open.  All I saw was a hand, shovelling into my cell a dish of prison mealie porridge for breakfast.  I almost dived for the dish,
not to eat the porridge, but to use it to warm my legs.
 The porridge was ice cold.  Later that morning I was led out of my cell to the offices of the Security Police.  I was staggering all over the place because my legs were numb.  The Security Police Officer who had come to see me, gave me some paper and pen and ordered me to write down the so called charges against me as he dictated them.
 My fingers could not hold the pen, the were stiff with cold.  The police officer asked me to warm my hands at his paraffin heater.  As I did so, my hands hurt like hell.  Eventually I wrote down the charges as dictated to me.
 There were about 20 and they ranged from accusing me of being a terrorist, a communist, a traitor of being against the institution of Chieftainship in Transkei, of having travelled overseas meeting Russian Generals and other such ridiculous nonsense.
 The Security Police Officer advised that I respond in writing to each allegation and that - for good measure gave me some more paper to write my "confession" and to plead for forgiveness so that I could be released soon from detention.
 I was returned to my cell.  Later the same day I was moved to the police cells in Tsolo.  At Tsolo I was locked up in a cell behind which was the station's diesel electric generator.  Every day after sunset, the diesel generator was started up and its noise made sleeping very difficult for me.
 This was obviously another attempt to disorientate me by denying me sleep and perhaps cause me to confess and "I could be released from detention."
 The blankets I was given at Tsolo were infested with lice of all sizes, big ones, small ones.  I reported this to
my guards and requested to be allowed to purchase insecticide from my own pocket to kill the lice.  I was laughed at.
 I was denied ablution facilities for two months.  For two months I couldn't even wash my face, let alone have a bath.  I was given "food" worth 45 cents a day, that is I was allowed 15 cents worth of food each of the three meals per day.
 In contravention of Transkei's own Security Laws, I was kept locked up 24 hours per day, I was denied the prescribed half hour's exercise in the open, before and after midday each day, as required by Transkei's own legislation at the time.  As was to be visited at least once a month by a Magistrate and or a senior police officer, to ascertain my wellbeing in detention, this was not done.
 After two months, my endurance crumbled.  The cold cement floor, the lack of exercise in the open, the loneliness, the brutality of it all took its toll.  I had suffered from haemorrhoids before my detention.  In detention the piles got worse and started to bleed.
 At one stage I passed out and came to in Dr Mbekweni's consulting rooms.  I don't know how I got there, but after the doctor had treated me, I was returned to my cell.  One night during July 1981 I noticed that all the doors of my cell were not locked.
 The wind was blowing rather strongly and the doors were banging on their frames as they swayed on their hinges.  I got up and tested the doors, indeed, they were not locked.  Immediately I recognised the trap for what it was - an attempt to lure me out of my cell and ambush me as I walked out.
 I would then have been shot "while trying to escape from custody", and that would have been the end of my life.
 I stayed in my cell till the following morning and told my guards about the clumsy attempt to lure me to my death.  After I had been interrogated several times by the Security Police, it became obvious that the so-called terrorist, communist charges against me, would not stick.  A fresh set of criminal charges ranging from theft of use of a Government vehicle, mark not theft of a Government vehicle, theft of use of a Government vehicle to fraud, were trumped up against me.
 These also failed and eventually I was acquitted by the Supreme Court in Umtata.  To understand and see it in its proper prospective, this sordid and manifestly evil campaign, I would like to give the Commission a background of a series of incidents which culminated in my eventual detention.
 Incidents which earned me the attention of the Security Police in both South Africa and Transkei, the first incident I want to refer to: some time after the Sharpville massacre, the leader of the PAC was imprisoned in the then Potgieter Street Prison in Pretoria, where I worked as a young prison warder.  Because meals given to Black prisoners were the most inferior in South African prisons, it was mostly mealie pap or incubi, boiled mealies, we - I and together with other youngsters at the time, worked out a scheme of swapping Sobokwe's midday meal of boiled mealies for mealie rice which was a ration given only to Coloureds and Indians.
 This swapping of meals was discovered, unfortunately for us by White warders and reported to the authorities.  
 Secondly, when the ANC leadership was rounded up
through out South Africa and sent to Pretoria for detention, Chief Lethuli, then President of the ANC, was on his admission to prison assaulted by a White prison warder - one Gouws, whom the Transvaal Attorney General refused to prosecute for the assault.
 This refusal did not go down well with particularly the Zulu speaking prison warders, who were in the majority of Black personnel at the prisons' barracks where we stayed.
 We the youngsters in this group, tried to persuade those of the Zulu personnel who had witnessed the assault to go to the police and make sworn statements.
 These attempts leaked out and as I was among the group that was branded agitators.  
 Thirdly, whenever opportunity presented itself at that Pretoria Prison, we smuggled coal from where it was stored inside the prison, to a small kitchen in the section of the prison where ANC detainees including our present State President, were kept.
 This enabled the detainees to prepare their food brought to them from outside the prison.  Again, our smuggling activities were discovered.  
 Fourthly in the 60's, I registered with the University of South Africa for the Bachelor of Arts Degree.  I was then the first Black member in the history of the South African Prison Service to do so.  One of my majors was a discipline called Native Administration.  
 Among the recommended works for study were books such as The Reverend Nabaningi Sithole's book, African Nationalism and Chief A.J. Lethuli's book Let My People Go.
 This field of study earned me the wroth of the South African Security Police.  My residence was raided and
searched on numerous occasions.  
 Fifth, just before the Transkei State was created, I was transferred from South Africa to Transkei.  After my arrival in Umtata, I was approached by the then Head of BOSS.  BOSS, was the Bureau of State Security in Transkei, a certain Mr Brown, who tried to recruit me to join BOSS with a promise that eventually I would be its head in Transkei.
 I refused the offer and I am positive BOSS did not take kindly to my refusal.  In March 1978 I was transferred from the Transkei Prison Service to the Transkei Defence Force as its Commander.  Within a matter of two or so months of my assumption of command of the TDF, the Transkei Government broke diplomatic relations with South Africa.
 This left the Transkei Defence Force in a quandary.  We could not train our soldiers in South Africa, neither could be obtain military stores, we had to look elsewhere for training and ordnance, ordnance being military stores.  I had to design and launch a strategic plan to seek help from the international community.
 I labelled this strategy plan code "Operation Lullaby".  Now each letter in that Lullaby stands for a specific purpose, which I will gladly explain if you so request.  Operation Lullaby was amazingly successful.
 I want to pause here and say what I am going to say next might just have international repercussions, is the first the very first time I disclose it.  Transkei soldiers were trained by the United Nations Organisation.
 They are living examples, I sent them to the United Nations on Transkei passports and the attended courses there and they came back with certificates bearing the United
Nations Code of Arms.
 I was able to send for training in other countries my officers and men and I was also able to purchase in a variety of countries overseas, military stores.  This success did not endear me to the Security Police in South Africa and Transkei and neither did it win me friends in the Transkei Public Service.
 Seventh, after the break in diplomatic relations between South Africa and Transkei, both NATO through the United States of America and the Warshaw Pact Countries through Poland, showed an interest in Transkei's coast line.
 The Poles sought the TDF's assistance to obtain permission from the Transkeian authorities to operate a ship along Transkei's coast, "to study fish shoals".  We assisted the Poles and the permission was granted.
 The Americans were keen on recommissioning a Second World War landing strip at Msikaba - they spoke to me about this and before we could ... (tape ends) ... over sensitive areas in South Africa, with cameras fixed on its belly, the persons concerned were declared non grata in South Africa, and were repatriated to the USA.
 This was the end of the American interest in Transkei's coast line.  Again these operations were picked up by the Security Police and they did not endear me to the Security establishments in South Africa and Transkei.
 Early in 1980 Intelligence reports warned me of my impending detention because when the Transkei Defence Force was established in 1975, sons of Chiefs in the first intake of recruits to form the nucleus of the Transkei Defence Force, were promised that only them would in future command the Transkei Defence Force.  Surely as things turned out
after my detention and removal from the Transkei Defence Force, only the princes in Transkei and in the Defence Force have succeeded one another as Commander of the TDF.
 Finally, when I was detained, the Black officer who had succeeded as the Head of BOSS had become Commissioner of Transkei Police and Head of the Transkei Security Police when I was detained.
 After my acquittal by the Supreme court in Umtata, I instructed a firm of attorneys to suit the Transkei Government for the blatantly illegal things it did to me while I was in detention.
 In stead the Transkei Government passed legislation to indemnify itself from such action.  I could not do anything more.  It is my submission Chairperson, and your Honourable members, that jointly of severally the nine incidents I have mentioned, amongst numerous others, convinced the powers that were in Transkei that I deserved this most abominable and vicious sadism that I was made to endure.
 I believed in 1976 and still believe today, that the politics of the proponents of separate development did not reduce the people of Transkei to sub-humans or lesser people, we deserved a place in the sun that shines over all the peoples of the earth.  Operation Lullaby proved this point of view if proof were needed.
 But because of my dedication to the service of my people, because of my unswerving loyalty to them, I now know the pain, the grief, the anguish and the agony of such loyalty.
 I also request this Commission to assist me recover those things the Security Police seized from me when I was detained.  I had newspaper cuttings which I pasted on empty
file covers, particularly newspapers of cuttings of members of the old South African Police pointing their revolvers at gym dressed school children, the police were pointing revolvers at school children who were wearing gym dresses during the 1976 Soweto riots.  I also had a newspaper cutting showing Hechter Petersen being carried away after he had been shot by the police.
 I also had a collection of flags I had collected during my tours overseas which I had provided with a nice stand.  I used to hoist this in my office and these were also taken.
 I would like them returned to me please.
 And that this Commission must investigate who the person was who ordered my detention.  That person must appear before it to explain why I was detained and treated in this sub-human manner.
 I feel very bitter about what was done to me and the experience still haunts me to this day.  I thank you.