Special Hearings — Trojan Horse Hearings — 1997-05-20

MAPULE RAMASHALA: Thank you very much.  I want to take you back clearly you had the benefit of shooting - what a pun -  shooting before the truck came, now you say that there was one person sitting in the front?

CHRIS EVERSON: One person who was apparent yes.  You could only see the driver as I recall.  You could only see the driver and his passenger who was armed, was ducked below the dashboard of the vehicle.

MAPULE RAMASHALA: Okay.  And when the shooting began, the passenger emerged from under the dashboard?

CHRIS EVERSON: And fired out of a window.  And fired out of his window and I didn't initially see the others because Ii was looking through the lens of my camera and I was pretty tight on the windscreen.
 It was only after I heard a lot of shots being fired, that I zoomed out with the camera and the other policemen became apparent to me.

MAPULE RAMASHALA: ; Were the police so ensconced with the operation that they didn't realise that you were shooting?  I mean not literally, that is you taking pictures?

CHRIS EVERSON: I've often thought about that myself.  I thought that was very strange.  It was quite early in the political activity in that area at that specific time, it was quite early in 1985, October of 1985.  Things were really getting bad, but hadn't gotten to the stage where we were really considered to be absolutely public enemy number 1.  We were probably only two or three at that stage.
 I can recall them, I remember thinking how strange it was that they had clearly seen me on the side of the road, I was standing with a tripod, the driver must have been able to see me.  The others wouldn't because they were hiding in their little boxes, but the driver must have been able to see me as he drove down, and yet he turned around and came straight back.  He couldn't have cared or maybe he didn't notice me  initially for some strange reason.
 But I was standing right on the side of the road in clear view and he still drove back down that road into that situation.

MAPULE RAMASHALA: May I ask what happened to - did you make copies of the footage or do you have it?

CHRIS EVERSON: I don't own that footage, that footage is owned by the network that I am employed by, so the original video tapes were sent to Johannesburg and the original video tape I should think, is in the archives in New York somewhere.
 A lot of copies were made I am quite sure, because BBC used the footage, so did ITN - people who weren't directly competitors of ours.  I think all used it, so there must have been a number of copies made, but I don't have any copies, no.

MAPULE RAMASHALA: May I ask what made you do this, what foolish idea made you walk in where brave men wouldn't dare?  I mean it was a risky business, I mean what were your own other than the fact that you were working for CBS, what was your own adrenalin in doing this?

CHRIS EVERSON: There were a lot of people like me.  There are people sitting right here now, I think, that were Louise Gub, she used to one her own, a White female go running around areas where angels would have feared to tread, taking pictures that were covers all over the world, there were many of us who were involved.
 You know, it wasn't just a job, it was really more than that, it was a sense of history in the making, it was also - we were remarkably privileged in a lot of ways  as well as White South Africans. 
 I am a South African you know.  As White South Africans being in a situation where you could go into any area, well most areas, where other Whites couldn't go.  We could walk around areas in the middle of the night in total safety and Black areas, Athlone and other areas where others couldn't go.
 We were immensely privileged from a certain segment of the society any way.  I  had also been a cameraman for many years before that, I grew up in Rhodesia in those days and I worked for Rhodesia TV and I got involved in a peripheral way in the international press up there and I made connections up there, it was - never intended when it all started out here, that it would become such an all encompassing job, but once you were in it, it was very hard to leave. My sound recordist on the very first day, in fact the sound recordist who I work with now, in those days were Wim de Vos' sound recordist, Anton van der Merwe, who is a young Afrikaans boy as you probably can tell.
 His very first day on the job, his very first job in life he was in a situation where he was blown up by a hand grenade and ended up in hospital, picking out bits of metal out of his leg and it blew holes in his brand new pair of jeans that he was so proud of, so there were a lot of people who got involved in it and once you were involved in it, it was the adrenalin I suppose, it was also the sense of something really important happening, as it was, as it turned out to be and it was also the privileged position that we were in.

MAPULE RAMASHALA: I don't mean to trivialise this, but I am taking the cue from you that often when you went back to the other side you had your beer.  I am asking this question out of concern about what happened to you at the end of the day?  You were taking pictures of this gruesome actions and you were actually standing on somebody's hand,you didn't know whether they were dead or alive, what happened to you at the end of the day when all of this ... (tape ends)

CHRIS EVERSON: I mean there was some moments where you just didn't want the next day to start, it was unwinding at the end of the day was very difficult, particularly because it was so false.
 You know staying on the one side under certain circumstances and then getting into your expensive car driving across to this side, where people had so little and becoming part of their lives as well and relying on them largely for your security.
 And it was very difficult at the end of the day to unwind and then in the mornings, getting out of bed and getting back in that car, was terribly difficult a lot of the times, but the emotions at the end of the day were very intense, it was a very difficult time to live through.
 All we know colleagues of us were killed you know and we saw a lot of death, we saw a tremendous amount of death.  Youngsters, usually youngsters, it is very sad and we attended so many funerals.  We went through a cycle of months where each Saturday was spent down in Port Elizabeth and Saturdays would be the day when people were buried and Saturdays would be the day when the police would kill more people.
 And the more people that they killed, would be buried the following Saturday.  And the cycle just went on and on and on.  And it didn't seem as though it was ever going to end.  And it was so difficult.  I mean you're talk about living from day to day, but we used to live at that time from weekend to weekend, hoping the next Saturday would never come.  We would pray for the end of that Saturday, hoping that nothing would happen, no one would get killed, but they always did, they always did somehow or other.  Saturdays was the day for killings down at that part of the world, and it was a very emotive thing.
 It was very emotional - I think that I am quite hard too, I went through a lot during the Rhodesian war and things like that and I never experienced emotions like that, like here where it was so many innocent people being hurt and such seemingly callousness so often.
 I can recall on one occasion being in a church service, a church called the AME, a church in New Brighton in Port Elizabeth and it was full of people.  Once again, mourning their dead and the police just fired into the church with tear gas, into an enclosed area.  A lot of old people as there would have been, it was just mindless, it was just very hard to comprehend that people would behave like that at all.
 Very strange behaviour.