Special Hearings — Prison Hearings — 1997-07-22

THERESA RAMASHAMOLA: This personal life problems, you see if a person says to you I would take you and you will work for me until you have done enough, then you would tell me whether you want to resign or not, I would not let you resign.
 But now it is very difficult, you are facing reality now.  And you lose your job on the other side.  It is a very painful experience.  You don't understand how you lose your job, what is the problem surrounding that.  There is no explanation there.  You just lose your job and there is no money.
 It is a difficult thing.  If I was not alive now, I would not have a lot of debits to my name, owing anybody.  If they said we are going to release you if there was nobody who was going to give you a job, I wouldn't have a problem.
 I would have lived in that prison for 25 years.  Not that they take me and said I will work there.  Now on my release there is nothing.  The kind of live I am living now, our fellow people are leading us in a very harsh way than before.

THOMAS MANTHATA: You are not referring here to problems more like the problems you had in jail?

THERESA RAMASHAMOLA: I put them all together in one basket.  I haven't had counselling up to so far and there is nobody who is telling me how to go about receiving counselling.  Maybe I am asking people who are quite down.

THOMAS MANTHATA: At the time of your arrest, did you have a baby?

THERESA RAMASHAMOLA: No, I did not, but people say so.

CHAIRPERSON: Mr Ntsebeza?

MR NTSEBEZA: Since you are here, and you are indicating the sort of problems that you have, now if the Commission were in a position to assist and I am not promising anything, what would you like to be assisted by?

THERESA RAMASHAMOLA: It is a difficult question for me to address.  I cannot say I request of the Commission to do one and two and three for me.  Maybe it can assist me to continue my studies and undergo counselling, that might help me.

CHAIRPERSON: Theresa, we thank you greatly for having come here to tell us about your experiences.  We are very sympathetic that you prefer that you would have died when you look at the problems you are facing now.
 Whilst we would be grateful about your release, we never thought that there would be a person who would say it would be better if I was hanged or served my jail sentence term, but I say to you, please have strength.  There is God for us all.
 And I would just like to just give you a small paragraph from Theresa's biographical information, which struck me as very interesting for me.  Theresa was born in Sharpville in 1960 and that is when the Truth Commission has been mandated to start examining the gross human rights violations and actually it says her mother was in that group that was protesting and she happened to be pregnant with Theresa and fortunately she was amongst those who were not injured.
 So 24 years later, in Sharpville, on September the 3rd, her daughter was struck on the head by rubber bullets and the rest was history and which she is sharing with us now.
 Theresa has told us that she wasn't as lucky as Duma who had the privilege of working, of being helped by warders like Mr Steinberg who had just been testifying.  She has shared with us that her perpetrators were women and they were not sympathetic.
 We shall be having our women's hearings next week, on the 28th and 29th and some of the things the women requested, was that we should not only consider the White people who were perpetrators to women, we should also look, consider Black women as perpetrators as well.
 And it is very sad that Theresa in death row, should have had those sad experiences from her own people and from women, for that matter.
 Thank you Theresa for sharing with us.

THERESA RAMASHAMOLA: Thank you.