Human Rights Violation Hearings — Umtata — 1996-06-20

MR SIGWELA: It was ten months and ten days.  It went on up to 1970.  As I have said, he went on starving us.  Now, I started to have serious problems.  I had very sharp pains and I use to faint quite a lot.  I use to perspire and I was under the day that I thought now this is my, this is the last of my days.  I pressed one of the bells because I felt like I was fainting.  While I was fainting some use to say to me, no, kneel down.  They were trying to help me out.  It was Lawrence Pokanogo who use to help me out.  I pressed the bell and this man came.  I am telling you, I have never seen the devil, but on that day I saw that devil that day.  His eyes were fiery, he was not a human being.  There was no human being like him.  He was so totally distorted by upper third and he was a beast.  Then now that was the beginning of a conviction, an untaming conviction in me.  They use to say to me I am stubborn.  I know Reverend Finca was my
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Chairman, I use to say to the Reverend, Reverend we must not give in.  Come with me, we must not give in.  I said if this thing is turning human beings into this, now I have an obligation.  Now I am going to be together with you Reverends.  
 Something crossed my mind which was we do not live only on bread.  I know this is not in the scripts.  He said to me we also live on the Holy Spirit.  It is the Holy Spirit from God that kept us alive.  Now at the time I was trying to revive myself.  That is how I kept myself alive, that is how I revived myself because I was dying, but the Holy Spirit kept me alive.  When this man, should I call him this devil approached me he said to me, die you dog.  When he was calling me a dog of a devil I was looking at him and I was seeing the devil in him, but I said it is only God who will make me live and it will be only God who will make me die.  It will not be you.  Even now that will to live that I had at that time, even that scripture helped me out to live.  Unfortunately, lady Commissioner, I do not know, I do not have the details.  I do not know when the pain that I had, I do not know when it faded out.  
 Then afterwards, now I discovered that people were becoming now violent.  They started to say to me, no I am not going to die for Tambo.  Now at that time everybody now was convinced that we were dying.  I have written here somebody.  There was another man call Umdala.  He was a Senior Sergeant.  Now the black policemen were not allowed to come to our section.  This Umdala use to just tiptoe and come to us just to see if we were still alive, all of us because now he believed that we were now on the level where we were going to die.  Even now I am still surprised at 
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myself to see that there is flesh on my hands.  You could even see the skeletons on our bodies.  You could see the femes in our legs.  You could see the bones just beyond our skin.  We were only skin and bones.  You could even see the effect of the concentration camps in the Germans.  If you look back to that you would see that the treatment that we had was exactly like the concentration camps in Germany.  Sirius Magotsie use to have, he use to fall quite a lot because of the effect of this water that we use to drink and at the same time Jonga Bantoskowe started to look very pale, but nobody treated him, but he was just told he must die like that and we still lived through.  I do not blame Dalamore when he said I am not going to die for Tambo.  When he said that I was the first to speak. I said now if you have wasted your time by training in Russia thinking that you are going to come here and release Tambo, you are wasting your time.  Even if you did not come back from that training we were still going to continue and fight for our liberation.  On the other hand Linas Laminie said I do not want to die this slow death, I want to die now, now.  He said if Oukamp comes in, when he comes in I am going to grab him and I am going to ask him to please shoot me so that I can die.  He did attempt this, but we tried to stop this and we tried to talk to each other so that we must not have such spontaneity.  
 Those who were condemned to death were very worried about us.  I have never seen something like this.  Those who were condemned to die, to be worried about the ones who are alive.  They use to ask us, what have you done.  They use to say to us, we are murderers, we have killed people and we are going to be hanged and we are given food and when we die UMTATA HEARING EASTERN CAPE PROVINCE
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it is going to be quick, but what have you done?  When you arrived here you were not like this, but look at you, you are now skeletons.  You are now looking like ghosts and this is all happening gradually in front of our eyes.  These condemned prisoners even use to steal food for us because they felt sorry for us.  Unfortunately, they were caught when they were doing this and they were severely beaten.  
 I remember I was passing by another cell and it was one of these who was sentenced to death.  I could see drops of blood.  So we asked them to please ignore us.  They must not care about our problem.  We know that it is painful to us to see that they are suffering because of us.  Now until we decided that seeing that there is this feeling that there must be sudden death, the better thing now for us is to accelerate our death.  We did not like the fact that we knew that our people are going to die and then in January 1970 on the 30th of January, it was Friday.  That is when we decided.  Now we decided not to even eat that two spoons of food because after all we were on the verge of death anyway.  So we decided if now we do not eat for two days then we will die quickly.  That is when now we started our hunger strike.  We started abandoning everything that was food and we use to know that now we are all going to die together.  We will not leave anyone behind.  Then on Saturday this man shouted at us.  He said, at that time there was food already.  He said to us I am not giving anything to those dogs today.  Empty those bowls.  He said lick these bowls.  When they were, when my next door was given his food he kicked it back to them.  No, no, I think what happened was  this Warder went back to the Lieutenant who was in charge and then later that Saturday we were taken off these cells 
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only to find out we were taken to Victor Verster Prison.  Some prisoners were taken into the island, Robben Island.  Now that time they started to give us food.  Chicken and other nice foods, but we got sick.  Then we were all given, we were taken to Robben Island and everybody was shocked when they saw us.  Then we saw a District Surgeon.  He was also shocked when he saw us.

MS GOBODO: What was this Surgeon's name?