Special Hearings — Mandela United Football Club Hearings — 1997-11-24

MURPHY MOROBE: Chairperson and honourable Commissioners, to the extent that I got to know about some of the issues that were raised in your invitation in respect of which I was asked to appear before this Commission, I should mention that our primary source from and MDM perspective at the time was the Crisis Committee that had been constituted by leading members of the community resident in Soweto to try and help in what was clearly being experienced as a major crises affecting not only the Mandela family but also the broader Soweto community.  At the time when many of the events under consideration by the Commission and the sitting were taking place I was either in prison or overseas.  In June of 1987 together with Mohammed Valli Moosa was I was then the acting general secretary of the UDF.  We were detained by the security police in terms of the then prevailing general state of emergency.  I was at the time the acting publicity secretary of the United Democratic Front because as you know that the key leadership of our organisation were at that time facing charges for high treason.  It should however be recalled that that was a period characterised as my colleague Cachalia has mentioned earlier by heightened struggles against the then National Party government, which in response had also unleashed a ferocious counter campaign against the Mass Democratic Movement and many of our key activists were in detention at the time.  Our organisations which were an important source of stability for our community was generally restricted in terms of the state of emergency and most of the community leaders who were not in jail had been slapped with restrictions on their political and other activities in terms of the state of emergencies and I might add here that those who were not restricted, like Reverend Chikane were either poisoned or almost killed out of detention.  Thus making communication and effective involvement at all levels and at all times difficult and at times impossible.
 After a brief detention spell at St Albans Prison in Port Elizabeth in 1987, myself and Mohammed Valli were then transferred to Diepkloof Prison in Johannesburg where we were incarcerated until our escape from prison in 1988.  It was indeed while I was still in Diepkloof Prison that I first began to hear reports about the activities of the Mandela United Football Club.  Here I'm talking about the adverse reports that are a subject of this inquiry.  
 Of course, having been involved myself in youth activities myself from the early '70's, this initiative of a Football Club appeared to me as an initiative to be welcomed.  I come from Orlando East, the home of Orlando Pirates and football is just part and parcel of our existence.  So it is understandable. However amongst some of us in prison at the time serious reservations were being expressed about whether the Mandela United Football Club will be able to maintain a direction.  And here I'm talking about a direction which essentially is one which that would be seen to want to inculcate a particular demeanour among young people in our townships at the time.   I'm raising this because at the time of the state of emergency Chairperson, in our prisons where I was in Diepkloof there were hundreds of us and many of them were 13 year olds, 14 year olds, 15 year olds.  Many of them were just picked up in the streets and dumped into prisons with us.  Now the key question for us, especially those who were senior comrades as we were called in prison was what do we do with those young people in prison with us because we knew that idleness in a prison situation is very dangerous.  And then we actually went about creating an environment where we could have political classes where you could at least try to inculcate one kind of political perspective for them to appreciate their situation.  At least that was the least we could do and contribute toward ensuring that our environment in prison does not continue to contribute to what was what we believed was precisely the intention of the state that demoralisation of our youth and eventually in fact the subjugation of our people according to the dictates of the regime.  This anxiety was indeed heightened later on when about June or July, I think it was July but it doesn't matter, I think the Commission has a record of the actual date in 1988 when we received the disturbing reports in prison of the attack by pupils of Daliwonga High School on the Mandela residence in Soweto.  After our escape from prison, that is in September of 1988, our preoccupation continued to be about what it was to pull our structure together giving the debilitating effect of the state of emergency.  Even our escape if you are to think of it, was premised upon an approach that sought to execute actions that would begin to challenge the State of Emergency and eventually lead to its collapse.  
 As you'd know subsequent to that escape there were several hunger strikes that took place in prison where people demanded to be released and which eventually as you would recall, led in fact to the events in '89 and subsequent years.  A few weeks after our escape myself and Vally went overseas to visit a number of the anti-apartheid groups and individuals who had supported us during the struggle. For 1989 our major concern as we were looking at then was about how to get the major campaigns of the Mass Democratic Movement, like the Defiance Campaign which we launched then and this trouble took us the most part of December '88 and January 1989.  And while we're overseas, now the importance of what I'm telling Chairperson is that I am a living soul in this environment, I'm actually, I wasn't a politician. I was an activist, I wasn't being paid for doing the things that I was doing. It was a commitment of the struggle.  Now even as we're going about doing what we're doing, we constantly tried to keep in touch with what was happening and the point here is that my interface with the events surrounding the Stompie Seipei case and others was not something that happened when I landed at Jan Smuts Airport towards the end of January.  It was something that I was interfacing with that was impacting as well on my own thinking about these issues and we continued then to get reports about the goings on of the Mandela United Football Club and by that time the major story was about the abductions and brutal assaults on some youths in the Mandela homestead.  Pardon the spelling error there, and when we returned to the country towards the end of January 1989 we found, and certainly I going to my home in Orlando East, found the air in Soweto thick with the tension arising from the recent events surrounding the death in fact of Stompie.
 Now you might ask how do I get to know that the air is thick with this tension.  I grew up in the township, I was born in Orlando East.  In the 1970's as a secondary school student, Soweto was infested with gangsterism.  Any township you knew there were gangsters there and it did not need to be a rocket scientist to know when there's tension where people live with fear, you could discern it, it becomes palpable, especially if you are part of that environment. And form the reports which we received from members of the Crisis  Committee, we were left in no doubt that unless a quick and decisive political intervention was made the likelihood between a conflagration between at least the Soweto Youth Congress members and members of the Football Club was increasingly becoming a real possibility.  The organised youth formations, labour and civic organisation, were in fact at a point where they actually were at the end of their tether regarding their reign of terror that residents were subjected to by what had increasingly become an undisciplined group of youngsters who were surrounding Mrs Madikizela-Mandela at the time.  
 Apart from the moral repugnance with which some of us recoiled at the activities of what people in the township tended to generally regard as Winnie's boys, one of our major concerns at a political level was the extent to which the activities of these boys were beginning to detract ... acting the regime and remember I said that one was and activist. It is important to understand how these things impact on us when we consider what our strategic objective as an organisation and as a movement actually is.  Our agitation increased with each report from the Crisis Committee.  We suggested growing recalcitrance on the part of Mrs Madikizela Mandela and disdainful treatment of the Crisis Committee who it must be mentioned had as one of the items on the agenda, apart from the rescue of the boys or the release of the boys that were kept there, the desire to rescue her from behaviour which was increasingly exposing not only her but the entire movement from the machination of what was clearly National Security Management System operations, but Chairperson as the Commission would also have heard from the members of the Crisis Committee, she refused to heed even advice from Oliver Tambo and Comrade Nelson Mandela.  
 It is not Chairperson my intention to repeat what members of that Crisis Committee would have submitted to you as it is now a matter of public record, which was essentially the feedback we were getting at the time. Suffice it to say that our attitude in the Mass Democratic movement had, apart from their reports, the increasingly belligerent sounds from the community of Soweto and the desperate calls for leadership to take it's stand on this matter.  That was the basis for our subsequent action.
 It was thus in that context that on the 16th of February 1989 we called for a press conference under the auspices of the Mass Democratic Movement whereat we issued a public statement on the matter of Mrs Madikizela Mandela and her Football Club.  I think it's also important for one to pause, just to give the Commission a sense of what this Mass Democratic Movement was.  At that time with all the bannings and detentions, our organisations were getting significantly affected by that and it was clear that operating in a normal situation was not possible and we than had to find various ways of operating to a point that most of the meetings, those that we managed to conduct, they had to be conducted in a secret manner as possible and I think from the evidence that has been led here, even in terms of the Dobsonville meeting of January that year, it was clear that there was a sense of uncertainty and fear in meetings whenever people that were not necessarily part of the original organisation appeared.  There was a sense of fear, there was a sense of anticipation of possibly system involvement. Now for the Mass Democratic Movement then I acted as myself from my original position as the spokes person of the United Democratic Front, continued to play that role even for what we then called the Mass Democratic Movement.  
 In one of the statements and comments I made at the time, when we ask about what is the Mass Democratic Movement, what is going to happen with the UDF and the argument we put was that the UDF might be banned but what the UDF stands for will be continue and we're able to continue operating as a Mass Democratic Movement, we're a fairly loose conglomerate of groupings, essentially made up of United Democratic Front entities and the Trade Union Movement through COSATU, and where then at the leadership level to have significant interaction such that even as we are coming up with a statement on the 16th of February, which by the way was not very long after the confirmation of the body of a young person as being that of the body of Stompie Seipei and that is the tension that began to increase in the township.  By the time we came up with a statement it was clear to us that if we do not make an act and act decisively at that point in time, we are going to be faced with a situation in the township that will be beyond our control because at that point in time, that issue of the meeting and the resolutions of the Dobsonville meeting came up.  Have they been applied, have they been implemented?  People continued what they perceived to be still the Mandela United Football Club around Mrs Winnie Mandela at the time and this confirmation of Stompie's death actually added fire to the fuel and the other way around.
 It is then Chairperson with that in mind that you would actually see the pressure and the tension that was surrounding us at the time in terms of what do we do as a Mass Democratic Movement about this issue.  Now when I listened to the testimonies of the Crisis Committee and that of the Reverend Peter Storey, you know you had the sense because I was not keeping a diary, one of the best things we had to do in case we got caught was to try to forget as much as what you are doing, so I wasn't keeping a diary but of course the Reverend Peter Storey's a priest, he wasn't on the run, he was leading a normal life and he had the benefit of keeping notes of what he was doing.  They might not be accurate in a number of respects but certainly there's a certain sense of what you get of the atmosphere at the time when you go through the sequential recording of what was happening around these issues, that was really the way in which things impacted on you.  
 My Comrades from the Crisis Committee I can understand, I mean it is a situation from where you try to recollect as much as you can because information was not generally recorded because as it was indicated earlier on, in 1989 there was no concept of a Truth Commission in 1997.  Perhaps if we thought of anything at all...(intervention)