Human Rights Violation Hearings — Lusikisiki — 1997-03-24

SIMON SILANGWE: Thank you Mr Chairperson. Most of the things
he has said, they are true.  I will just add to what he has already said.
 On the day people were killed in Ngquza in June 1960 we gathered in a place called Hlangeni, we were trying to think about what we're going to do about these people, the law stipulated that a person cannot be buried if the post mortem was not conducted.  I will call them as Makegamba because that's what they were called then, the policemen, Sgt Lamketi came, he said that he wanted five men, he didn't want all of us as we were gathering at that place, there were many of us.  We then elected these five people, five men, I was one of these men.  When we arrived to him we said that people have died, are we supposed to do?  He responded, go and bury these people because there's no white man who's going to go there where these people have died. 
 At that time the doctors were white men and he thought that we would revenge ourselves on these doctors as they were white men and the story continues as mr Gxabu has already said.  I would just like to emphasise that people were arrested, many of them were injured at the time and we found Mr Swarts who was the lawyer, and one man we can mention as Reverend van Djons(?) who was in the parish of Holy Cross, he sacrificed his life because he was representing people and they were released, and the case continued.
 As I have already said, my point is we went to look for a lawyer in Durban by the name of Aresden and on the day when our case was in court, the police were denying the number of people who were buried in ...(indistinct) in Ngquza, they were denying that there were 11, they were fewer than 11.  As we were saying that they were 11, we had 
to prove that and Aresden requested one doctor to help us with the post mortem and there was no doctor available because we were told that white men cannot go there.  And Aresden suggested that we have to go there to count the 
graves there and people from Pietermaritzburg and Durban came and we all went there.  I was part of the group who went there. 
 The magistrate together with Mr Somsashlo who was an interpreter here in Lusikisiki, he's on pension now, the magistrate was Mr Harvey, when we arrived there people came from different places to observe what was happening.  When we arrived there Mr Harvey told us to go to the graves and the people said that they were not going to go there.  And then he said that we must go and dig the bones of the people there, and Mr Landu asked us to pray, and he did that, he prayed and then Mr Harvey addressed people that we came here because of your lawyer Aristen as we were arguing about the number of the people who died. And Aresden, as he was the one who suggested that the graves should be dug, he was not allowed by the government to come to this area.  And he went back to Durban and he left us alone because we had no lawyer we can trust, and we decided to look for another one, as we had Mr Swarts.  We found Tqanqa(?) who was from Idudja, who helped us when we were investigating these cases as members of Kongo, and we found another lawyer by the name of Sachs from Cape Town.  He was the one representing us in this case.
 It was the first time for us to see that a white man can be interrogated because we thought that it was only black people who were asked questions.  And as  Mr Gxabu has already explained, that there was an argument that the 
Mpondoland people were fighting against the police, and our lawyer asked them where are the people who got injured, where are the police who got injured and there was no one who was injured in the police side, and as Mr Gxabu has 
already explained, there was no white police who came up and said that any of them were injured and it became clear that we had won the case and people were to be compensated.  The families of the people who passed away had to be compensated because the people who killed us were used by the government, the government refused to compensate these people up until today.
 To save time, it emanated that why is it that the Pondo people could be so oppressed?  There was then a meeting for all the Pondos at New Prison, the new jail that was built by Kedi Matanzima was not there yet, this was a day that clarified what was a problem with the Pondo people as Gxabu had already stipulated.  There was feed-back from Abraham Somokhonco.  The fed-back was such that we could not be members of parliament in Cape Town.  The NAD, Nthabaza Bantu, we did not want them to represent us, we wanted our own people who knew our customs well.  We then decided that we would go to Umtata and get feed-back from Pretoria.  It then became clear that we could not go to Umtata because that's not the parliament we wanted.  I was then elected to be one of the people who represented our people to go to Albert Luthuli. He was banned already, he could not come to the people himself.
 I got to Leonard Mdingi and other people who were members of the struggle, these were the people who were going to channel a way for us to see Albert Luthuli as he was in jail.  Four men including myself and Mdingi got to  
this place in the evening.  As Albert Luthuli was in jail and heavily guarded, we tried to sneak in.  We left the car behind, we literally crawled into the jail.  One of us went through a pipe so that he could talk to Albert Luthuli.  We 
took him, went to a small hill where we spoke to him telling him about the Ngquza calamity.  He said to us, Comrades, there is nothing I can do and you cannot fight whilst you are outside.  You can fight a bit better when you are inside.  What he was advising us to do is for us to elect our own people and go to Umtata and fight from within the parliament there.
 These people were elected, I'm trying to drive a point home that after the court case, after we'd gone to Umtata, we were under a terrible state of emergency.  We could not just stay at home, we would have to sleep outside in the fields, only our wives left at home.  We'd get up in the morning and the village would be surrounded by police vans and you could not go anywhere.  It was during that time that I also got into trouble.  The problem was that my house was surrounded, the white people thought that I was inside.  We did not have a police station in Msosatha(?) yet, there were just tents.   Id was looking at these police from across.  They left after one (o'clock), I went home to find out what was going on, the members of my family said that they were looking for me.  I then later in the day went to find out what the truth was.  I was told to come back the next day.
 The following day, they handcuffed me.  After a short while in the tent I asked why do people get handcuffed, he then laughed and he took them off. Though I was detained I had just gone to pay Arinsen in Durban, somebody informed the police.  Unfortunately I did not know that I was going to be detained.  I had a receipt in my shirt that I had paid the attorney fully.  Arinsen was not wanted in Pondoland by the boers.  They phoned ..(end of tape) ...they took all sorts of documents from my house, I took this receipt as I 
was in van der Merwe's car, he was driving and I chewed on the receipt.  I ate it and finished it, if they were going to see it they were going to see it in my faeces.  I realised that this was going to give me a lot of problems because they did not want Arinsen.
 I was then taken to Flagstaff, from Flagstaff to Kokstad, the white men did whatever it is they wanted to do with me.  Eventually they took me to Mt Ellis, there were even more problems for me.  It was raining on a Sunday, we were detainees in a house waiting for our court case.  Mr Rhadebe had been detained, we were all in the same cell, he had been shot in the arm and his arm would be painful now and again.  Just before we were released, we had a prayer meeting with a man from Bizana.  As we were praying we were praying for Rhadebe because he was in such pain, we were asking the Lord our God to help us, so we asked that his arm will be healed so that he would be able to sleep at night.  We continued to pray even though we heard a terrible noise. We were creating problems for ourselves, so it seemed, there was a mad man.  I had already been punished for this and I was put in solitary confinement.  I was peeping through a small hole, I saw a man, this mad man that was beating up the police. He was put in a cell just ahead of me.  This man would not sleep, he would make all sorts of noise.  After a few days a white man opened my door, opened the mad man's door as well, this white man threw me into the same cell as this mad man.  This mad man was standing up.  They would  
bring him food, he would eat his food and then he would excrete on the same plate.  When I got in there I thought I was going to die because I saw this man beating up the white man.  I then realised that I must go back to the same God, 
I knelt down, I said to the Lord that he must make a way for me. A man from Bizana was also thrown in.  Fortunately the mad man did not hurt us, we were saved. After that, after six months, I was released after I had given my whole report.  I think that from Gxabu's report I just gave a fuller picture, thank you.