Amnesty Hearings — Thohoyandou — 1999-07-12

UNKNOWN: I must be honest here, I did not make an individual study about this case, so it will be quite wrong on my part to give a general statement.

ADV DE JAGER: Thank you.

CHAIRPERSON: Mr van Rensburg.

MR VAN RENSBURG: Mr Chairman I see that it's close to 1.

CHAIRPERSON: Are you going to be longer than 5 minutes?

MR VAN RENSBURG: Yes, I presume so.

CHAIRPERSON: Okay, then we can adjourn till 1.45p.m.
COMMITTEE ADJOURNS
ON RESUMPTION

UNKNOWN: (s.u.o.)

CHAIRPERSON: Mr van Rensburg.

MR VAN RENSBURG: Thank you Mr Chairman.

MR NDOU: Perhaps before Mr van Rensburg can come in I just thought maybe to complete the record, at the beginning we didn't try to put forward to the Committee about Prof Ralushai's experiences and his qualifications and all that and I thought maybe that would be quite vital for the Committee, so I though we could just put that in.

CHAIRPERSON: Let me just find out.  Mr van Rensburg do you have any questions on the professor's credentials?

MR VAN RENSBURG: I have no questions on that, I accept that he's an expert in this field of witchcraft, thank you Mr Chairman.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you.  Proceed.

MR VAN RENSBURG: (cont) 	Professor, if we can go and start at the beginning when you gave your definition of a witch, you basically said that a witch is defined as a person who can cause damage or even death or ill fate to another person.  What I want to know is, would that definition of a witch and even then seen in a broader sense possibly include a person which, through certain actions that he has taken which boils down to witchcraft or rituals, prosper himself and if compared to the rest of the community, would such a person perhaps also be qualified as a witch?

UNKNOWN: Let me explain more about my definition.  I should have said a witch is a person who is believed, not that who can do that and that and that and so on.  It is a person who is believe to be endowed with powers that can cause evil to other people, but in wondering what I'm saying about this, if he can bewitch, he is a witch to such an extent that he can be compared with a snake, then here they say now he's like a snake that can kill a human being and yet he doesn't eat flesh.  So in other words that is saying that a witch might just be a jealous person, but he himself does not benefit from his evil acts, he only enjoys seeing that particular victim gone.  He does not directly gain.

CHAIRPERSON: The question is, is someone able in terms of this belief and definition, do the people believe that someone could employ witchcraft in order to enrich himself?  Is that how I understand you?

MR VAN RENSBURG: Thank you Mr Chairman, yes.

CHAIRPERSON: And put himself up higher than everybody else in terms of finance.

UNKNOWN: No Sir.

CHAIRPERSON: Is there no such belief?

UNKNOWN: No Sir.

MR VAN RENSBURG: I must admit and confess that I do not know a lot about the subject, but what I've read from the documentation that has been supplied and also from my report, I got the impression that the reason why the political leaders and thereby also include the chiefs, were so unfavourable at the time, or viewed to be unfavourable, is because they had the power to use the rituals and the witchcraft to empower themselves.

UNKNOWN: It is not as simple as you are putting it.  You have to separate first of all the muti murder from witchcraft.  Why and when do they kill a person ritually?

CHAIRPERSON: I think Professor, maybe I can put it easier or more succinctly, I hope.  With this belief that the majority of people in the area have a respect and popularly regard people who indulge in witchcraft, Pretoria, as you put it, were able to connive and placed these chiefs or witches or whatever you want to call them, in high ranks so that they were liable for political manoeuvring.

UNKNOWN: The people do not usually respect a witch.  When Pretoria chose chiefs, they chose them as traditional leaders.  Pretoria wrongly believed that traditional leaders were very popular among themselves, when in fact they were not.

CHAIRPERSON: Yes, that is the point.  Pretoria wrongly believed that these people were able to sustain the power, the political power, and therefore do the job of Pretoria.

UNKNOWN: Correct Sir.

CHAIRPERSON: Did I understand you?

MR VAN RENSBURG: Yes, thank you Mr Chairman.

ADV SIGODI: Sorry, just to get some clarification on one aspect.  Was there a belief that people could make it possible for themselves to be richer and more powerful through the use of muti, not necessarily by means of witchcraft per se?  Was there such a belief amongst the people?

UNKNOWN: Those who practised muti murder, one of the reasons of doing that is to enrich themselves and if you do research on the average person here who was involved in ritual murder cases, it was a business man.  You will find that he did that because of the decline of his business, so he thought that if he could get certain parts from a human being then he could revive his own business.

ADV SIGODI: So there is a difference between people who would kill or would perform ritual murders for the purposes of getting muti in order to enrich themselves and those who were believed to be witches who were practising the supernatural, that which could not be seen by the people.  Is there a distinction between those two people?

UNKNOWN: There is a distinction in that a witch does not kill his own victim because he wants to be rich, whereas a ritual murderer, he kills a person because he wants to gain out of that.  In any case traditionally ritual murder was committed with the approval of traditional leaders, no commoner was allowed to kill another person.  We only find commoners now because of businesses, but otherwise in the past when there were no shops, ritual murder was secretly committed with the approval of a chief.

CHAIRPERSON: What is a ritual murder?

UNKNOWN: Muti murder, in other words killing a person ritually, in other words you don't just get a gun or a knife, you kill this person, when he's alive, when he's struggling, cutting part by part and that is why mortuaries are very, very safe.  Dead bodies found in mortuaries are usually not used for that.

CHAIRPERSON: I see.  Now who would advise such people to go and get another human being?

UNKNOWN: In some cases, if things aren't going very, very well at the royal family, the traditional healer will say that if we get a person of that rank, of that sex, if you use his parts, mixed with certain drugs, you can attain our goal.

CHAIRPERSON: Those are not witches, those are traditional healers.

UNKNOWN: Well of course, put in this way, in our old South Africa, native doctors were all labelled witch doctors,
but they strongly resent that term, they want to be called traditional healers, but otherwise if you check, almost every muti case in this area, there was one or two traditional doctors.

CHAIRPERSON: I'm quite aware of the historical definition of a traditional healer and who and why they were called witchdoctors before, but we are busy with a case or a hearing that involves witchcraft and I'm just trying to ascertain for myself whether the belief amongst the youth, there was any difference between a traditional healer which was known as a witchdoctor before and the people who indulge in witchcraft, that you've described.

UNKNOWN: As I said earlier the youth was just influenced by some local people who were trying to settle old scores with their own enemies.

CHAIRPERSON: I accept that but I'm asking you about the belief that the youth had at the time.  Did they make a distinction between traditional healers and those who employ witchcraft, or did they regard them as the same lot?

UNKNOWN: Correct.

CHAIRPERSON: What is correct?

UNKNOWN: Regard them as just the healers, doctors.

CHAIRPERSON: And witches were all the same?

UNKNOWN: But not that they regarded a witch as somebody similar to a healer.