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

WITNESS:   Thank you.  So, after that even though I was not very politically active in a direct way, my contributions were more through education through offering teaching in night schools in Edendale and through working in voluntary organisations to build a clinic at Msinge(?) and so on.  But my political views began to be a source of division between myself and my parents and my brothers and sister.  If I offered a different viewpoint or I challenged people's racist attitudes at home, then I was the one who was in the wrong, I was rocking the boat.   Why didn't I just keep quiet instead of causing conflict at home?  After that I started teaching in Greytown and I recall some minor harassment, probably it was the security branch.   Friends and I were seen as lefties on that staff and there were Broederbond members on the staff, I realised later.  So, at night, unknown people would come and throw stones on the roof of the farmhouse where we lived.   And one day they tampered with the engine of my car, so that I couldn't start my car.   I remember, I got a speeding fine after that.   Well, in 1978 they then legislated a national register of teachers, which white teachers were supposed to sign on to and I decided not to sign up, because I believed that we should have just one single education system in the country, we should not be divided in that way.   And I saw the register as being a way of exercising political control over teachers.   So, at the end of 1978, I resigned.   I taught for a year without signing, then I resigned, and I went overseas.  And I was overseas for about four and a half years and that was really the first time that I saw film footage of what happened to young people in the Soweto Uprisings of 1976, and it was really terrible.   It was very shocking and very disturbing.   So, after I had come back to South Africa in 1983, that was when I met my husband.   I did not want to go back into the education system, so I started doing freelance acting in Durban, and ironically we were both cast in the play Romeo and Juliet.  It was a matric set book at that time.   The play was touring township schools and I was Juliet and he was Romeo, but we used the South African situation as a parallel for the story, and we used our own names as well.   And everywhere we went, the school students just used to wait for that moment when a black Romeo kisses a white Juliet, because this was still forbidden fruit.   Pax and I used to talk a lot and he told me about what was happening in his township, and then he took me into Lamontville and that was when I discovered what it was like for township people to be living in a state of siege and war, with army and police vehicles on every corner, roadblocks and vehicle searches.   On more than one occasion my car was searched and I was often subjected to the soldier's attentions, they would either assume that I was not safe in the company of a black man, or else I was there for suspicious reasons.   Lamontville was in chaos and we heard something about that this morning.   The beerhall and the houses of the councillors who were hated for being corrupt were just burnt out, they were black shells.   I was really horrified by the stories Pax was telling me about suspected informers being attacked and killed by township people, and again township people just being shot at randomly on the streets at night by the police and the army.   It was like a nightmare in that time.  It was real, but it wasn't real somehow.   And I didn't know at that time that Pax, besides trying to challenge the system through drama, through the play, "Asinamali" that he was doing, he was also a member of the MK, but I was not aware of that.   And he was busy with underground activities all the time.   My own beliefs were in non-violence.   But around me was just violence everywhere.   And if I had known at that time I sometimes wonder whether our relationship would have persisted or not.   I didn't tell my family about my relationship with Pax.  When we became intimate, we had to be quite secretive about it, because the Immorality Act was still in force, although the State had much bigger things to worry about, so they weren't really spending a lot of time chasing people like us.  The security branch came one night and searched the communal house that we were sharing with friends.  They refused to identify themselves properly and I was very angry when they took a friend away, so I followed them in my car and they went into KwaMashu and dodged and dived in the streets and lost me.  So, I thought I am not just going to let it rest there, and I went to the police station and reported that my friend had been abducted.  And they even sent a police van out with me, but of course we didn't find anyone.   And later, fortunately, that friend was released.   Then in 1984, Pax was arrested.   At that time there was political upheaval in Lamontville, after Mzizi Dube had been assassinated.   Mzizi Dube had been leading popular resistance to corrupt councillors and rent increases in Lamontville.   These rent increases were seen as an attempt to force the residence, who had section 10 rights, to get out of Lamontville and move into Umlazi, which was controlled by KwaZulu and Inkatha.   Pax was a follower of Mzizi Dube and he was a key actor in Mbongeni Ngema's play, "Asinamali".   And he was largely responsible for the scripting of that play.   The play itself, he used the rent boycott slogan as its title, and it was really exposing the police brutality and the other political realities of the set up in Lamontville.   After Mzizi Dube's assassination, many people who were seen as spies in Lamontville, were attacked and some were killed.  And Pax was arrested while he was engaged in a performance of "Asinamali" in a church hall at the time, and it was in connection with one such an attack.   When he did not appear at the Upstairs Theatre for one of our school shows, I had to start hunting to find him, and I had to hunt a lot, because each police station they sent me to another police station.   Then he was released on bail.  And when his case came to trial, I was pregnant.  In February 1985, when I was three months pregnant, Pax was found guilty as an associate to murder.   And he was sentenced to an 8 year term of imprisonment.   He, and others, would have been defended by Mrs Victoria Mxenge, but at the last minute this support was withdrawn, there was some kind of internal thing around funding or whatever, and instead he was defended by an inexperienced pro Deo advocate.   And at that time the case was not really argued as a political case as such.   When he was convicted and sentenced, I was stunned because I had thought his chances of acquittal were reasonably good.  And it also meant that I was left on my own to face a situation without Pax' support.   And for him, the though of him to be in prison for eight years, it was like a huge void.   So, of course, my family did not know about my situation at that time.   When I was pregnant I then started travelling long distances to visit Pax in prison.  At first they put him in Standerton Gaol, which is far away.   I left home at 4 o'clock one morning with some friends and some of his family, my sister-in-law, and we drove six hours to Standerton, and when we got there they refused to let me see him.   They would only allow the others to see him.   I had a big fight with the prison commander and I told him that I was going to report him to Pretoria.   Straight after that they transferred Pax to ... (inaudible) ...  and the commander there was a black officer.   And the irony of it was that there it was apartheid working in our favour, because I was an "mlungu", I was allowed to have contact visits with him.  So, instead of us just talking through the bars, we used to be able to have contact visits.  But our letters to each other were censored, anything political in the letters was taken out.   This was a very lonely time of life for me, because my relationship with Pax was still in quite a formative stage, and I wanted to share my pregnancy with him.   I wanted us to be able to face the world together, but we could not do that.   My parents and brothers and sister didn't know anything about this aspect of my life.   They didn't know that Pax was in gaol.   I had by then told my sister that I was pregnant.   It was only many years later that I told my sister about Pax being in gaol, and all those things.   Where my pregnancy was concerned, my brothers and sister did not stand by me at all.  They didn't want my parents ever to know about my pregnancy, they were just - they believed that my father would have a heart attack, because he had one when I was in the States before, and he was a very excitable man.  So, they pressured me to have an abortion, or to leave the country, or to go very far away without explaining anything to my parents, and I refused to do those things.   Then after Maboya was born, I hoped maybe some how my brother and sister would try to mediate things in a way with my parents, to try and soften the blow for them, but they didn't do that.   Maybe it was asking for too much.  And anyway maybe mediation would not have helped, I think the situation was a traumatic one for them as well.   Pax was still in prison when Maboya was born in 1985.   It was Pax who gave him the name and the name is expressive of our wish that Pax would be able to return and we could be together again.    I was very lucky to have the support of a close friend when he was born.   I told the doctor at Addington Hospital that Pax' parents would visit me, because they had welcomed me into their family and they were very supportive of me.   And I didn't want them to experience any unpleasantness if they came to visit me in hospital.   So, I was put in a room on my own, near the ward entrance, and the nurses some how, I think they tended to forget about me.   One of the nurses later told me that there had been a big debate amongst all the nurses, some of them saying I had no right to bring this baby into the world because he was an outcast, and others saying that the fault was with the system and I was not to blame.   And this made me to wonder whether the mix up with blood samples that happened after Maboya was born was just an accident and carelessness, or whether it was actually something deliberate.   I have an A minus blood group, and Maboya is positive, which means that I should have an anti-D injection within 72 hours, so that my next baby would not be born a rhesus baby.   But what happened was that when Maboya was three days old the doctor examined him and said he was healthy, he could be discharged, he could go home.  I still had to stay in hospital a bit.   Then I noticed that he had a running eye and a rash and I asked the nurse to check it.   And she took him to a different doctor and that doctor came back to me and he said, "Your baby has got very very serious anaemia, we can't discharge him, we must give him a blood transfusion and antibiotics".   This was just within a few hours of him having been said he was fit to go home.  And it was only when they checked my blood and checked his blood to give him the blood transfusion that they discovered that he didn't have a negative blood group which is what the file said he had, he had a positive blood group.  So, I then had the anti-D injection, but it came later than I was told it should have been.  So, those are the kinds of things that just made me ask whether it was just carelessness, because I had heard a lot of horror stories about hospitals, or whether it was something worse than that.   Pax' parents visited me in hospital, they were very supportive, and many of my friends were very supportive, but I had no contact with my own family, except for my sister, who came to visit me after I had left hospital.   And I think she was - she came to be able to go and report to my mother, does this baby look a bit white or does he not look a bit white, because my mother had hidden the whole thing from my father.   She didn't want to tell him anything.   Then after Maboya was born, I took him to visit Pax and he saw his son for the first time in gaol.   My father took the news about his grandchild really very badly.   I went home without telling them that I was coming and I took the baby with me.   And after that I realised I would not go home again without being invited.   After that my parents moved from Richmond, where they were living, to their farm near Hella Hella.  It was my impression that they were trying to move away from people who might hear about the situation to avoid the social stigma which they felt.   My parents never accepted my choice of Pax as a partner, they never once met him, or spoke to him, except for the odd accidental telephone call my mother would phone and he would happen to pick up the phone, and then she would say, "Can I speak to Marie Odendaal" and if she didn't know who he was and I think she was trying to deny the existence our relationship.  They just could not overcome their apartheid beliefs which were also so strongly promoted by the Dutch Reformed Church.   I think they thought that what I had done was wrong, it was disgusting, it was shameful, it was disgraceful, and it was also still illegal at that time, because the Immorality Act had not yet been repealed.   And they felt that I had brought shame and disgrace on them and that was made visible in the person of my child.   My father particularly rejected me.