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

WITNESS:   Okay, my name is Marie Odendaal Magwaza, I am a South African citizen, born on the 4th of April 1951.   And I married a fellow South African, Humphrey Pagado Pax Magwaza in March 1990.   We have three children:  Delane, who is 15, he is my husband's first child;  Maboya is 10;  and Nsikilelo is 6.  My parents were Johan Frederick Odendaal, born in 1913 and Dorothy Lorraine Odendaal, and they are cousins, born in 1920.   My parents married in 1945, across a social divide between Afrikaans and English speaking white South Africans.   And my father was a policeman in the South African Police Force and my mother a teacher.  My father also served several terms as an elder of the Dutch Reformed Church in Richmond, so we grew up in a home where we spoke mostly Afrikaans, although us children went to school in the English medium of the Richmond Primary School.   I am the third of four children.  I have two older brothers:  Willem, who was murdered in 1989;  and Pieter;  and a younger sister, Francis.  I would like to give a little bit of background to try and make sense of my submission and to explain the basis on which I am making the submission, because I realise fully that it is black people in South Africa and especially African people who have borne the brunt of gross human rights abuse under the system of apartheid and racial capitalism.   And I realise, and that is reinforced by the stories I have heard this morning that there are millions of people who have suffered much worse treatment than I have at the hands of security forces, the police, and the agents of the system.   And that made me to really hesitate whether my story was appropriate in terms of the commission's terms of reference about gross violation of human rights.   I also felt afraid to tell the story because it will be digging into old wounds.  My own and my family's especially.   But my friends have encouraged me and also I believe that the TRC's records would - they would not be complete somehow if they did not also reflect the ways in which the whole apartheid system created havoc in the lives of ordinary white people as well though people who were supposed to be benefitting from this system of power and privilege.   And it is because I had struggled to make sense of my own experiences that I thought that maybe it is important to try and say these things publicly.   And I would like to say that I am not telling this story to lay blame on anyone or to accuse anyone, because I think all the people  that I will speak about, we were all victims of the system in some way.   I think whites in particular, myself included, we were really overwhelmingly encouraged by the social system to see other people, and especially black people as being inferior to ourselves, less than human and to the extent that we were sucked into the system, perhaps in part through not being exposed to different values.  We became alienated within ourselves and alienated from our fellow human beings.   And that's a very painful condition for human beings, especial if those other people that you are alienated from are your own family.   I am not trying to say that I think white people had no choices, and that they were just totally determined by the apartheid system, but I am trying to understand how a system can take a family who loved it each and that they can be torn apart as a result of that system.   And when I was young, I was the apple of my father's eye.   But we were so torn apart that we could not reconcile before he died.   And recently I have reflected on the fact that when the Nationalist Government came to power and became to legislate apartheid, just after the Second World War, my father had recently returned from Italy, where he had been a prison of war.   When I see the trauma that my husband went through as a result of his experiences of being in the MK and being in the war in KwaZulu-Natal, then I think my father also went through that kind of trauma in wartime, and he didn't want to talk about the war.  I think for him and for many others, this must have created a climate in this country where there was very deep personal and social instability and that made really fertile ground for apartheid ideology to take root in people's minds.   So, I grew in a social system in which apartheid was just ingrained in the fabric of our every day lives, at home, in the relations with the servants, in the use of language at home, in the village.   My mother didn't like to rub shoulders with African farm workers in the streets.   And I was like a fish in water, I couldn't recognise that water that I was swimming in.   I was living in a small country village, I attended Dutch Reformed Church and Sunday School services.  My father worked in the police force.  He had control over African labourers on his farm.  I didn't really know what apartheid was all about, I just lived it, experienced it.  I didn't like the harsh treatment of servants.   I would hear the siren at night, it was sa curfew for African people, but I didn't understand what that meant.   And I also remember things like if we were travelling from Pietermaritzburg back to Richmond, sometimes little black children would be standing by the side of the road with little bowls of blackberries, bramble berries that they have picked, that they wanted to sell people, and my father would stop the car and they would come running because they thought that we wanted to buy those blackberries, and my brothers and my father encouraging them, they would jump out of the car and chase those little children, and those little children would just run and the blackberries would go flying.  And it was when I asked my father, "Why are you doing that?", he said, "No, they are breaking the law and they are danger to the traffic".   But it was like a sport, and I hated that thing.   So, that is just a little illustration of the kind of experiences that I grew up with.   And my school education gave me no critic of apartheid.  I still remember when Dr Verwoerd was assassinated, I was in about Standard Seven or Eight, and I have a diary recording in which I wrote how sad I was, what a loss it was to our nation that this gentleman, because I can see his photograph, colour photograph in the newspaper with his blue eyes smiling, he was like the father of South Africa, and that what a loss it was that he had been killed.  I think my English teacher tried to signal some how that this was not really the real picture, but she was not allowed to discuss politics and so still I did not have a clear picture.  It was only later student politics and when I was studying at university that I began to be exposed to information about apartheid that enabled me to begin to see the system for what it was.   And I think I am very grateful to those students who did have the courage to stand up and oppose apartheid at that time.  I also went on overseas travel on an American Field Service Scholarship, and that helped me to begin to develop a different perspective from the other members of my family, who did not have these same opportunities.   I remember before I went there was a dominee from the Dutch Reformed Church who came to visit me and he took me out to tea and I think maybe he was a member of the Broederbond, but he tried to persuade me not to go to America because it was not going to be in the interest of the country.   But, you know, to my credit I think - to their credit, my parents encouraged me to go, although I knew they had misgivings about it, and later my mother said, yes, she should not have allowed me to go because I had changed so much when I came back.   When I was elected on to the university SRC, in 1972, I was visited very soon after that at home in Richmond by an agent who tried to recruit me as an informer for BOSS, the bureau for State Security that was operating at that time.   I think again it was to his credit, my mother would not leave me alone with that man, he sat in the lounge with us, and then he said to the man, "But, tell me now, you say you are working for BOSS and you show me your card, and you want my daughter to work for you to be an informer, but can you be sure that she is not already working for the security branch?", because at that time BOSS and the security branch were not having good cooperation and he said, well no, he can't be sure about that.   So, my father said, "Then I don't think you can try to recruit my daughter to work for you", and at the time I didn't appreciate his strategy because I didn't want in any sense to have it implied that I would be working for security branch or BOSS or anybody else.  But I can see now it was quite a clever strategy and it was to my father's credit because he did not want me to be sucked into that system.