Human Rights Violation Hearings — Durban — 1996-10-24

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you, Fowzia, very much.   It is very difficult talking about things that are so close to you, even though they happened a very long time ago.  And we appreciate your courage, thank you.
/CHAIRMAN

CHAIRPERSON: Perhaps you could indicate who is going to follow on.   Okay.   Kim.
KIM TURNER

MS K J TURNER: Do you want me just to start?

CHAIRPERSON: Please go right ahead, I am sorry.

WITNESS:   Okay.    I was nine and a half years old when my father was killed.   Although a lot of time has passed since then, I still find these memories very painful.

CHAIRPERSON: You see, we didn't see very much of our father during the last years of his life.   Jan and I lived in Cape Town and he was confined to Durban by the banning order, so we only saw him when we went to Durban twice a year during the school holidays.

CHAIRPERSON: The last visit began in December 1977.   We arrived in Durban on Boxing Day and we were looking forward to a whole two weeks with our father.   There was nothing unusual about this trip, except that Durban had one of the wettest summers on record, and halfway through our stay my father's wife, Fowzia, had to make a trip to Botswana.  My sister, Jan, and I were quite keen to go with her.  Our cousin, Patrick, lived in Gabarone, and we would have loved to have seen him.   And on top of that, I had never travelled outside of South Africa before.

CHAIRPERSON: But we didn't go.   Our recently applied for passports were not ready and Jan and I stayed in Durban with our father.

CHAIRPERSON: On the night of January the 7th, we went to bed as usual.   Our father always read to us before we went to sleep, but I don't remember what he was reading to us that

CHAIRPERSON: night.   Our bedroom is at the front of the house, looking out onto a large stoep, and I woke just after midnight on the morning of January, the 8th.   The room was quiet and Jan's bed empty.   The door to the hallway was open and from the bed I saw what I thought was a large pool of water.

CHAIRPERSON: I lay in bed for some time and all kinds of childish scenarios were going through my head.   I imagined that my sister had woken up and asked Daddy for some water to drink and then dropped it in the hallway, and that was the pool of water that I saw.

CHAIRPERSON: When I finally got and went through to the livingroom, a very different scene confronted me there.  My father was  lying on the  floor, just  near the entrance to the kitchen, and there was blood everywhere, too much to see what had happened, or where he was wounded.  My father was already unconscious and Jan was desperately trying to revive him.    She had  roused Cathy Thompson, an American journalist who was living in the cottage at the end of our garden, and Cathy had come to help us.

CHAIRPERSON: We were all very frightened that night, unable to comprehend what had happened.   I later learnt that Jan had been awake when just after midnight she heard our father go to answer the front door.   He had asked, "Who's there?" several times, and when he received no reply, he had walked into our bedroom and drawn back the curtains to look out onto the stoep.   It was then that the shot was fired.   Jan saw the flash, watched our father fall in the doorway of our room.  He then picked himself up and ran into the livingroom, where he fell again.   This time he didn't get up and it was there that I found him a few minutes later.

CHAIRPERSON: It was very lonely in that house that night.  We all had a sense of being a long way away from everyone.  I sat on the chair in front of where my father lay dying.  I think I must have been in shock as I sat there, rigid, unable to move, even when my sister begged me to hold my father while she got up to go to the loo.   It is hard for me to recall the exact sequence of events that night, but time passed.  The phone was dead and we waited for someone to come.

CHAIRPERSON: The police arrived over an hour after we had made the one call to them before the phone had stopped working.  And it was only when I talked to the ambulance men that I let myself realise what I knew that was true and that my father wasn't going to be all right, and in fact he died some time before.

CHAIRPERSON: Over the few days following his death, I managed to rationalize the events of that night.   I had always known about his political activities and knew what it meant to live under a banning order.

CHAIRPERSON: However, I had never sensed any real danger.   The rather farcical efforts made by the police to intimidate us did not seem dangerous.    I had not expected to lose my father.   But in my nine year old mind I knew that South Africa was governed by people who murdered school-children for refusing to learn a language that was alien to them, and I remember my sister and mother attending Steve Biko's memorial service, and accepting that it was the police who had killed him whilst he was in their custody. Putting all these things together, I could see the political motives behind my father's killing.  He had died for daring to disagree with the government, and for me the man who had pulled the trigger became irrelevant, and I felt that I knew who his killers were.

CHAIRPERSON: I would now like to put a face to that killer, in the hope that we can finally close the section of our past.   I am afraid I cannot let that killer have forgiveness.    I feel that  murder is  unforgivable.   And, although  we can  perhaps reconcile  ourselves to what happened, I think it is  very important to remember my father and his life.   He was a happy, peaceful man, with a life that he wanted to live.   He did not deserve to die as he died.    He did not  deserve to have that life  ended so brutally in front of his two young children.

CHAIRPERSON: The night of my father's death has never really left me, and I imagine it will never really will.   We all carry these psychological scars and on top of that I have had to live without a father for 18 years.   I hate to think of all those things that he has missed in those years.   From the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990, to South Africa's first democratic elections, as well as the birth of his first grandchild in 1993, and the fact that he never got to see Monty Python's "Life of Brian", a film I know he would have loved.   And that is all I have to say.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very much.

WITNESS:   My mother, Barbara, will speak next.

CHAIRPERSON: /BARBARA FOLLETT

CHAIRPERSON: BARBARA FOLLETT

CHAIRPERSON: Barbara, just start when you want to.

WITNESS:  My name is Barbara Follett, I am a British politician, and an academic.   And I left South Africa in April 1978, shortly after my first husband was killed.

CHAIRPERSON: I married Richard Turner in 1963, and we were divorced in 1971.   I am the mother of his two daughters, Jan and Kim.

CHAIRPERSON: Before I left South Africa I worked with an organisation known as the Nutrition Corporation of South Africa, Kupegani.   I was head of the Women's Movement for Peace, and I was very active in the Black Sash.

CHAIRPERSON: Richard and I were subject to the general kind of harassment that people had in those days:  telephone tapping, mail opened, being followed.   But we came to accept it as part of our lives.

CHAIRPERSON: However, this is a human violation, a human rights violations hearing, and I would like to go through briefly how I think our human rights were violated in that time from a person point of view.   First and foremost, our rights to privacy.   I think his death was probably caused by the violation of this right to privacy.

CHAIRPERSON: Fowzia and Kim have told you that the children came up to visit Fowzia and Richard on Boxing Day, 1977.  Fowzia was going to go and see my brother in Botswana and I had recently applied for British passports for Jan and Kim.