Human Rights Violation Hearings — Durban — 1996-10-25

MS H MKHIZE: "He ..."

MS H MKHIZE: that is Fichter -

MS H MKHIZE: /"... took

MS H MKHIZE: "... took my hand and he asked me whether I trusted him and I said I did.  He told me to regard the security police as my friends and he touched the corner of my eye which was battered and bruised.  I was incoherent and unable to make a statement.  He took me back to my cell. At 5 o'clock in the morning Van Wyk and Sandberg appeared in the cell, still triumphant.   They said they would be back at 6.00 but they never came.  Later I learnt that the pair of them then went on to a comrade and then eventually a co-accused in another cell, Allan Brookes.   They also beat him and Sandberg sat on Allan and twisted his ankle until it broke.   I had just turned 23 and I learnt them the difference between fear and terror.  There were friends and comrades outside in Cape Town.   They managed to establish clandestine contact with me.  They had heard of my interrogation and urged me to make a statement."

MS H MKHIZE: Spuiker van Wyk made a responding statement in which he admitted that he had hit me, but justified this by saying that I begged him to do so.    I started civil proceedings against BJ Vorster, then Minister of Justice, and Van Wyk.  Eventually IL was charged.  After sentence I was taken Kroonstad Women's Prison.   I was taken to many prisons, but that was one where I was.   Most of the time I was still in solitary confinement because at that time I was the only white woman political prisoner and as all else in the country the prisons too were segregated.   At Kroonstad the special branch came back, took me into the matron's office and started shouting at me.   I was only aware of a row of highly polished black shoes and my own terror.  I started screaming.   The matron of Kroonstad Prison then was a young woman called Erica van Zyl.  She rushed in and sent the special branch away.  She sat down with me and said that as long as I was in her prison, she would not allow the special branch near me. Now, 32 years later, the same Erica van Zyl is, I believe, head of the prison services in our country.   I think she is a brigadier now.  I would like to take this opportunity to thank her for her kindness then back in 1964, it was a very rare situation.  Eventually at the end of 1965, when I was 24, Vorster, who was still Minister of Justice, invited our parents to come to him to ask for our release.  My father made an appointment and saw him.  I was taken from Barberton Prison, where I was there by then, to be interrogated by the head of special branch, General H J van den Berg.   And curiously he could also not resist the temptation to ask me to hold his hands, to look into his eyes, and to swear at that time that I was not a communist.   I did so.   I was then released.  Both Vorster and Van den Berg in these interviews made it clear that they knew I had been beaten up and expressed no surprise nor protest about this.  The civil case against Vorster and Van Wyk was set down for hearing in Cape Town Supreme Court in mid 1966.  The week before the State made an out of court settlement.   What happened to me was just the beginning of a 30 years of horror which was subdued but stretched relentlessly as comrades and friends were killed in detention, hanged, bombed, murdered.   On my return from exile in September 1990, it seemed that we would sit in a meeting one day, I was then in Gauteng, in Johannesburg, and the next day comrades from the meeting would be dead.   There has been no time to recover.  I say it was subdued horror, because we lived by our own motto, "Don't mourn, mobilize".   I went into exile in September 1966 and became a stateless person.   Like thousands of other exiles I lived without my extended family.  My two sons were born in London and grew up without their grandparents, their cousins, their aunts.   They still have very little ability to form relationships within the family beyond their parents.   They learnt at a tender age not to handle our mail and not to touch parcels.  Their father was bombed in 1988 when they were 17 and 18 years old.   He does not like it when we say he was lucky, but he did survive with incredible spirit and optimism.  We were lucky.   I am honoured to have been part of the struggle and I am warmed by the remembrance of the love, support and comradeship we shared with people from all over the world, from Tanzania to Denmark, from Vietnam to the Soviet Union, and East Germany.   What happened in that police cell, in 1964, was never resolved for me as the deaths and torture, the brutality mounted against those struggling to end the scourge of apartheid, and pursued them with increasing voracity into exile, engulfing activists, those thought perhaps to have been sympathetic, their wives, their husbands, their lovers, their parents, and their children.   The growth of this murderous monster machine is perhaps typified by Lieutenant Fichter, who had interrogated me in 1964, by his growth into a colonel.   From the breaking of John Harris' jaw before Harris was hanged, Fichter went on to head the Ciskei Police, and finally to be charged for his complicity in the KwaMakhuta massacre.   Responsibility for all these acts must be laid at the feet of those individuals concerned, those perpetrators, and with the SADF and the SAP.   But I was born an Afrikaner, and from childhood we were fed, force fed if I might say on the glory of our people in the Anglo Boer War.   When eventually Pik Botha got his moment of glory at the united Nations, following the collapse of the apartheid state, he chose there to read a poem in Afrikaans to the world, by Louis Leipoldt, glorifying the suffering of the Afrikaner people.   For me the horror of the apartheid years is compounded by the loss to me through its prostitution of my language and my culture.   The direction that Afrikaner nationalism took into obliterating all in its wake now, no matter how murderously, I lay at the feet of the Broederbond, the Dutch Reformed Church and the National Party.   These bodies systematically fanned the flames and nurtured an increasingly Godless and brutalized culture.  Through the truth and reconciliation commission, and as an Afrikaner, I call on the Broederbond, the Dutch Reformed Church, EW de Klerk, and the National Party to do more than say sorry, it was a mistake, I call on them to confess and repent their seminal role in nurturing murder and mayhem in our country, based on an ideology of race superiority.  I must just end by saying that although I may seem very calm, although Makhosi knows that I am not, it has been a period in trying to write this statement that has helped me to put into perspective the pain that I felt.   Thank you.

MS H MKHIZE: Thank you very much for sharing with this commission some of the experiences that you have personally gone through.   You mentioned here in your statement that you were recruited into the South African Communist Party.  Can you just tell us a little bit about your involvement with the South African Communist Party, especially those practices which you think might have led to your detention?