Human Rights Violation Hearings — Soweto — 1996-07-23

SOPHIE THEMA: Well, my experience was that questions were actually being put to me.  I was not given the opportunity to express myself like I am doing now.  I had to respond to the questions that were being put to me, but I was quite happy because here and there I managed to sort of, you know, add what I felt that people needed to know.

YASMINE SOOKA: You know that in terms of the findings of the Cillier's Commission, they found that it was just the SRC making trouble and they did not think that Afrikaans was the real problem.  What was your opinion of that?

SOPHIE THEMA: My opinion is that Afrikaans was just the last straw that broke the camel's back.  I can site one incident, you know, that during my career as a journalist really hurt me and this was when a woman's husband died.  That woman had reached the end of the road of her livelihood because she was not entitled to own a house.  If a man married a woman outside Johannesburg and she did not have the right qualifications that was either Section 10(1)A, B or C, that man was not allowed to stay with his wife.  That woman would be given 72 hours to leave the area.  Children who had lost their parents, often children were not allowed to have homes.  Our parents were sometimes woken at about four o' clock in the morning by what we use to call Gokasambe, those were called the black jacks, the henchmen of the township
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superintendents because they were in arrears with their rents.  Those township superintendents were a law unto themselves because they would wait for the very, very cold months like June and July and then they would start evicting people, throwing them onto the streets, locking them out of their houses.  
 If I might just mention, more often than not, I would find some of these people who had been evicted from their homes because they were in arrears with their rents and I would appeal to the Institute of Race Relations, at that time, where Mrs Ina Pearlman was employed.  I must Ina Pearlman did a lot to get many of those people back into their homes by paying their rent arrears and that gave rise to the formation of Operation Hunger because Ina had a problem.  She said to me, Sophie, it is all well and good me getting these people back into their homes, but what do they live on, what do they eat?  They hunger and starve and that is how she got the idea of starting Operation Hunger.

YASMINE SOOKA: You also mention in your statement that the community and, particularly, woman, mothers came out in support.  Will you tell us a little bit about that, but also about what you said once when we were taking your statement, that there were efforts made by the community to get the community leaders to meet with Treurnicht, to discuss the situation before June the 16th.

SOPHIE THEMA: Okay.  Now let me start with the efforts that were being made by the community to get Treurnicht to, sort of, have a change of heart.  I remember, I with the now editor of the Sowetan, Andre Klaaste, we were colleagues at that time and working for Weekend World.  Before June 1976 we knew, we had a suspicion, we had that gut feeling that if
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Treurnicht was going to go on with his proposal of introducing Afrikaans as a medium of instruction, there was going to be problems in this country.  We then went around at night and tried to get hold of people of integrity, people who we thought, you know, were being recognised by the community as leaders.  We tried to say to them cannot you people get a delegation or send some kind of message to this man to tell him that once he introduces Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in our schools, there is going to be chaos, but many of our leaders, I would not say were not prepared, I think they were scared and I do not blame them because at that time anybody who stood up to oppose any policy from the Government was silenced brutally.

YASMINE SOOKA: And a little bit about the support group in the community.

SOPHIE THEMA: After June 1976 there were a number of mothers who came together.  Mrs Khuzwayo who gave information yesterday was one of them, I was one of them.  Most surprisingly was that most of those mothers who were involved did not have children in jail, they had none of their children killed, but those were the mothers who actually stood up and we were not surprised because we knew that those mothers who had children in jail, who had children killed they had been so traumatised that they did not want to get themselves involved any further.  So the parents, the woman who actually stood up were those who were not effected in any way, but who felt the pain and who felt that we need to support those mothers who lost their children, whose children had been imprisoned.
 We use to meet at night, different venues.  We made sure that the police never found out where we met and we 
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sometimes got some of the mothers to smuggle into prison food for the children because they were not allowed to get food from their families.  Those were some of the things that we were doing.  We actually tried to get money to get some of them across the border.  Those are the things that we did.

YASMINE SOOKA: Sophie, you also mention that a story that you wrote helped Tietsie to escape from the country.  Could you give us more information on that?

SOPHIE THEMA: Yes.  Soon after June 1976 the police were on the lookout for Tietsie and I was just doing my daily work.  I went around my work as usual as a journalist.  This particular day, again, I do not know, he sort of had, I think, a liking for me, I do not know.  All the students had a liking for me, but they sent me another letter.  In this letter they actually told me that Tietsie had skipped the country and he was in Botswana.  We all got very excited, I wrote the story and on Sunday the story was on the front page of Weekend World that Tietsie had skipped the country.  I did not know until Tietsie was safely in London and he came onto a TV and radio programme in which he actually told them how he had asked the students to write a letter to the Press to say that he had skipped the country.  After we had published the letter, the story in the paper the police removed all roadblocks and that opened up the way for him to get to Botswana.

YASMINE SOOKA: Sophie, one of the problems or, in a sense, it seems that the black journalists were a window to Soweto in a white world and initially they were the ones who took the photographs, they were the ones who wrote the stories and yesterday we had many accounts of how those transitions took SOWETO HEARING GAUTENG PROVINCE
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place from people doing messengaring and making tea and suddenly they were taking photos, but the other effect of what happened was that they were harassed by the police.  Did this happen to you?