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

WITNESS:   Yes, I must say I have been listening for the last two days to the truth and reconciliation commission and it is very difficult, almost impossible, not to have arrived here this evening feeling an enormous amount of anger.   I would also like to thank you for the dignity which this panel has conducted the proceedings of today and I would like to thank Makhosi for being here next to me.   My anger is partly also one of outrage that I believe that everything that we have heard today and yesterday and whatever has happened for the last 50 years in this country has been done in the name of my culture.   I was born in Stainsburg in the Karoo in 1941 and I grew in Malmesbury, where my father was principal of the Swartland Laerskool.   So, I had an Afrikaans upbringing with the Dutch Reformed Church dominating the town, with cousins in the Broederbond who for the 30 years after I became political severed all ties with my family. As an adolescent in the early 1950s I moved to Port Elizabeth and I think it was the contrast with Malmesbury that crystallized for me my hatred of poverty and injustice that I saw around me.   It was also in the Eastern Cape/Port Elizabeth that I heard Nkosi Sikelele sung in my school around in the background.  It was also the time when SACTO(?) was producing newspapers selling them in the streets of Port Elizabeth. By the early 1960s when I was at the University of Cape Town, studying physiotherapy I had come to the painful realization that the poverty, that Sharpeville and detention without trial were ways in which my own people were trying to claw their way into white privilege in our country. I never spoke Afrikaans again until my return from exile in 1990. At UCT I sought and found radical students, and more importantly I became involved in a committee of the defence and aid fund, at a time when the 90 day law providing for detention without trial was introduced.  This work brought me in touch with an older generation of women stalwarts, like Ray Edwards, who was to become my mother-in-law later on, Dora Alexandra, Sara Khanisan and her husband Fred.  I was recruited into the South African Communist Party and almost simultaneously before I understood the rapidly unfolding political process around me, I was also recruited into a sabotage unit of the ARM.   On June, the 18th, 1964, sentences were handed down in the Rivonia trial.   Death sentences seemed possible leading up to that date and probably were averted by the massive international campaign for the release of South African political prisoners.   We, in the sabotage unit that I was involved in, carried out various acts of sabotage to coincide with these sentences.   For me those four and a half years in Cape Town were one of increasing cultural isolation, they were frightening and they were bewildering years.   On the 4th of July 1964, there were country wide security clamp down, with many arrests in terms of the relatively new detention without trial laws.  I was arrested a week later.   I was help first in Maitland Police Cells and interrogated two or three times a day.  I must point out that my arrival and my attempt to make a home in Durban is new.   I am not really a Durban or a KwaZulu-Natal person, but I have chosen to come here and I felt very good to be part of this community of women here today.   After about three weeks after my detention I was transferred to Caledon Square Police Station in central Cape Town.   Interrogations continued, verbally, rough, but I could hold my own.   In all this time I never saw a woman.   There were teams of special branch men.  I was in solitary confinement, guarded by uniformed men and seeing only males on the rare occasions that I saw other prisoners.   Then a bomb exploded on the Johannesburg Station.   In detention in Cape Town, all I knew was that there was a sudden outpouring of aggression from the interrogators.   A woman of 77 died soon after the bomb and her four year old grandchild was badly injured.  I have recently heard mention of this child who is now a woman in her 30s.   I heard that she has continued to suffer from this experience and I feel a very deep grief for her, although I was not directly involved in what befell her.   On the day in question, the 1st of August 1964, I was taken upstairs from the cells in Caledon Square to a small room, a storeroom it seemed, with packing cases and a table.  I was told to remain standing and throughout the day special branch rotated through to interrogate me.   I remember Captain Rossouw, who was in charge;   Lieutenant van Dyk;   Sergeant Spuiker van Wyk, who was already notorious and implicated in the death of Luke Sowandle Legudle, who was a commander in Ukhonto we Siswe in Cape Town.  There was also his side-kick, Van Wyk's side-kick, Sergeant Theo Sandberg.   Standing and sleep depravation were new methods and I was not aware that later comrades like Fred Khanisan would be kept awake for a week on end.   I stood from the morning through the day and into the night.  The Cape Town special branch was soon joined by Lieutenants Fichter and Van der Merwe from Johannesburg, fresh and rampantly triumphant, boasting that they had arrested John Harris for the Johannesburg Station bomb and smashed his jaw, getting him to sing like a canary, a favourite phrase of the special branch at that time.   John Harris was subsequently charged and he was hanged in Pretoria on the 1st of April 1965.  He was a 27 year old teacher, with a wife, Anne, and a four year old son.   I didn't know John Harris, but when he was hanged in Pretoria I happened to be held in the death cell reserved for white women in Pretoria Central Prison.  All night I heard the prisoners signing, "God be with you till we meet again".   In the morning a 19 year old wardress with uncommon sensitivity took some risk in coming to the spy hole of my cell to tell me John Harris had been hanged.   Since then on the 1st of April every year, I have almost unwillingly recalled John Harris and relived the pain of that hanging.   But before that, on the 1st of August, my interrogation went on.   Fichter grew increasingly impatient with my recalcitrance, I was small fry, he resented that I was holding out.   Then in the early hours of the following morning, the 2nd of August 1964, Captain Rossouw came in again and said that his men were treating me too well, that this was a war.   Rossouw said he was very sorry that we had used women, but if I wanted to behave like a man, he would treat me like a man.  Spuiker van Wyk came in and pleaded with Rossouw to allow him to be alone with me.   In retrospect it was clear that he was seeking permission to use violence to break me.  Rossouw hesitated while Van Wyk wined on like a school boy wanting a chance to prove himself.   Eventually Rossouw got up and left.   Van Wyk from then on was crowing with glee and anticipation.   He stood close in front of me, the door shut.   He kept saying, "I know you hate me and you are going to hate me even more".   I was exhausted and said,"Yes, I hate you".   Then he started hitting me across my head.  He grabbed my hair, which was long, and pulled me down to the floor and started battering my head on the floor.  I lost consciousness.   I came around, there were other people in the room.   Someone shouted, "Get up" and I pulled myself over a chair on to my knees.  I was retching, I was shaking violently.  I heard somebody saying, "That won't help you".   Van Wyk was gone and Fichter was back alone with me in the room.   Clumps of my hair were strewn all over the floor.   He kicked some hair under the table.   He demanded that I make a statement.  I was completely incoherent.  But in that atmosphere Fichter chose to reprimand me for calling him Fichter and said I must call him Lieutenant Fichter.  I quote from a statement that I recently found which I had made soon afterwards to my attorney, Hymie Bernhout(?), in which I said that