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

CHAIRPERSON: ... Fowzia Turner Ciliano, Kim and Jan Turner.  Could you tell me, are all four of you going to speak today?

ALL: Yes, we are.

CHAIRPERSON: Then, could you all please stand.
OATH ADMINISTERED AT THIS STAGE

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very much, please be seated.   Could you give me some indication of who would like to start?

MRS FOWZIA TURNER: I will be starting, Dr Boraine.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very much, Fowzia, then I welcome you and I will be leading the evidence for the four of you.  And would ask you to please start, tell the story in your own words, and know that you are among friends, with nothing to worry about.  Thank you.

WITNESS:   I was married to Richard Turner at the time of the assassination.  We were married according to Islamic rights, at the home of Fatima and Ismail Meer in Durban, in 1971, a year after we met.   It was a very different time, I want to take you back to that time, so you can have some feeling about the climate in which we were living.   We were aware in our personal lives how events in the present - can I just start again?

CHAIRPERSON: In the 1980s South Africa was in the throes of a radical and irreversible upheaval, one which redefined all political activity that had gone before.   We were aware in our personal lives, we are aware how events in the present shape, colour, re-interpret events in the past.  So is it with history. Not only do past events provide the lengths through which we see and interpret the present, but the present special momentous events rolls over the past almost like waves breaking onto the shore, creating new patterns.   Many people today don't understand quite what it was we were working through in the late 60s/early 70s.

CHAIRPERSON: I want you to let me take you back to the time to that pattern, to those patterns, those institutions, the laws that created the climate in which we lived, and against which we were reacting.  This is the time after Rivonia, after the imprisonment, the banning, the house arrest of the 60s.   The presence of the apartheid state was pervasive.   It did everything it could to ensure its own survival within the framework of its self-defining laws, self-protecting laws.  Those who stepped out of line were dealt with swiftly and unequivocally.   Leaders were quickly and effectively removed from their areas of influence.

CHAIRPERSON: This was the time before mass action.   This was the time too of the then infamous and now incomprehensibly silly Excelsior trials, in which various members of the Afrikaner elite were having to defend their furtive transgressions across the colour line.

CHAIRPERSON: When Richard and I decided to share our lives, this decision, joyous as it was, was not taken easily.   We were all too aware of the consequences of breaking three different laws:  the Morality Act, the Group Areas Act, and the Mixed Marriages Act.   But we were clear that we would live a life compatible with our beliefs, moral, social and political.   We were equally clear that we would not hide, not be part of the furtive immoral shadows.   We would not separate the political from the personal.

CHAIRPERSON: Friends of ours, when they learnt that we were going to share our lives, were very worried.   They were worried for two reasons (1) that our political activity would be rendered ineffectual because we would be - the police would be looking to imprison us under the Immorality Act;  or that because of that we might be tempted to leave the country.

CHAIRPERSON: Richard said to this friend that as far as pressure from the police and so on was concerned, it seems to me that we must just do our best to handle situations as they arise.   People were worried about the politics of the situation.   He said, "It seems to me that one's life should conform to one's beliefs, but not to love one another through fear" would contradict the basic principles that we talked about.

CHAIRPERSON: He became a lecturer at the University of Natal in 1970.   I met him at the University of Natal, at the Medical School, where he came to talk on black power.   He was one of the best minds, one of the most articulate debaters that South Africa has produced.   Natal University was privileged to have had him.   It was hard to forget conversations held with him, they opened up your world.

CHAIRPERSON: As a lecturer he was popular, he was effective, his arguments persuasive.   He was also empowering.   Walking away from an encounter with him, whether in tutorials, or in a lecture hall, or at student protest meetings, and there were many during those times, you will recall those of you who are as old as I am and older that there was the 22 - the campaign about the 22 detainees and it was the charge or release campaign, and Natal was very much alive during those days, protesting against that.

CHAIRPERSON: With him you found the source of your own part make meaningful changes in the world.   His teachings helped bring the students down from the hill into the town and into the factories.

CHAIRPERSON: He was one of the forces helping the rebirth of the democratic trade union movement.   His analysis of the Durban strikes in 1973 brought a new understanding to the press, to the public, and to the business community in particular.

CHAIRPERSON: Then came the bannings.   We were IN Bolton Hall which was then the centre of Denysson(?) trade union activities in Durban.   We were in Bolton Hall with Harriet Bolton and various other people from the university and the trade unions at the time there, when we heard BJ Vorster read out his recommendations from the Schlebusch Commission Report.

CHAIRPERSON: The security police were pervasive, they followed us openly to ensure that the banning orders were adhered to.  Their groupies harassed us, we were fire-bombed, our cars and the people who lived with us in the house at Dalton Avenue, they were tampered with.

CHAIRPERSON: Chief Buthelezi will remember the time when there was a seminar at the Natal University at which Richard was and Lorrie Schlemmer were, they were organizing it.   A bunch of flowers arrived for Buthelezi, supposedly from Dr Turner, and luckily somebody had the sense to look through the flowers and there was a bomb in it.

CHAIRPERSON: There were many other acts of intimidation that were visited on us.   We discovered - we would wake up in the mornings and find fires lit under the petrol tanks of the cars.   Our car had the wheels, the bolts of the wheels undone.   It became an expensive life, not because we were living expensively, but we were always having to replace things that were being tampered with, that were being broken, that were being burnt.

CHAIRPERSON: For eight years we lived under the State's watchful eyes, and knew our telephone conversations tapped.   We suspected that our house was bugged.   Ironically, this was confirmed by Colonel Dan Mathee, of the Durban CID, a few days after the murder, when he led me out of the house into the garden and explained that he didn't want to talk inside because the house was bugged by the security police.

CHAIRPERSON: We were not, during that time, to lead private lives.  There were people we had never met, never spoken to, who could quote back to us conversations we had had with in earnest discussion within the privacy of our bedroom.

CHAIRPERSON: In 1977, Richard was granted the Humbolt Scholarship, a prestigious scholarship in Germany, to do research in Germany.   Having been effectively cut off from the academic life-stream, it was important for him to re-enter in some way the stream from which he - the milieu that was exceedingly important to him.