We Are Not Such Things (37 page)

“What kind of man are you?” one of the victims asked his torturer. “What kind of man uses a method like this one of the wet bag, on other human beings, repeatedly listening to those moans and cries and groans, and taking each of those people very near to their deaths?”

“I have asked myself that question to such an extent that I voluntarily…approached psychiatrists to have myself evaluated, to find out what kind of person I am,” the policeman answered politely. Later, he added that he was still proud of his work.

APLA members who had been convicted of massacring churchgoers just before Amy’s death in 1993 announced that they had wanted everyone to “feel the pain of the children of Azania.” A man whose wife they had killed wanted the men to turn and face him. The moment, broadcast across the country, was unnervingly intimate: Did the killers remember his wife? he wanted to know. She was wearing a long blue coat. Did they remember shooting her?

“What are we doing here?” he asked nobody in particular, trembling. “The truth, yes, but—how on earth are we going to be reconciled?”

In one hearing, the mothers of men known as the Gugulethu Seven were led into the room, most in traditional African-print dresses. In March 1986, their activist sons had been lured by double agents into a trap and killed in a hail of twenty-five state bullets. The mothers sat, bewildered, in the audience, large headphones resting on their fabric-wrapped heads so that they could hear a Xhosa translation of the proceedings. For much of the time, they were sedate, concentrating. But then, suddenly, video evidence of their children’s murder was played before the room. One by one, the images of the dead men, taken in grainy police video, were shown on a large TV, and one by one, the mothers began to wail.

Later, the women gathered around a table, and a black policeman involved in their sons’ deaths sat before them like a child, quiet, welcoming their punishment. He was so much worse than the white perpetrators, the mothers said. He’d betrayed his own blood, “working for the boers.” One mother would not look at him, her body stiff with disgust. But then another mother, a woman named Cynthia Ngewu, fixed him with a stare. She cocked her head.

“Your name, it means prayer?” she asked. He nodded slightly. They regarded each other for a moment.

“This thing called reconciliation…if I am understanding it correctly…if it means this perpetrator, this man who has killed Christopher Piet, if it means he becomes human again, this man, so that I, so that all of us, get our humanity back…then I agree, then I support it all,” she reflected before the commission.

Face-to-face with her son’s killer in the private room, she spoke again. “I forgive you, my child,” she said. “You and Christopher were the same age. I forgive you.”

Cynthia Ngewu and several other mothers embraced the policeman. That act of forgiveness and mercy was not widely discussed, not like the Biehls’. The women returned to their lives in Gugulethu.

Because of moments like this, many considered the TRC an imperfect success, arguing that it humanized people, offered closure, and, most critically, created a basis on which the country could move forward; in addressing its terrible, discriminatory past, South Africa was able to move toward a potentially brighter, more inclusive future. After apartheid, there needed to be some institutional reckoning, a sort of national catharsis. Many believed that the TRC worked, despite its flaws.

Others believed that the TRC was a spectacle that showcased smaller, personal crimes while hiding larger, institutional ones.

“Oh, the hurt and the harm of black people were commoditized and on display,” Amy’s mentor Rhoda Kadalie once said to me. “People vented and cried, but the atrocities themselves were behind closed doors.”

One common complaint was that the commission largely ignored the complex issues of systemic abuse—not dramatic or sudden, but sustained and life-altering. Had Easy’s grandfather Melvin stood before the TRC and announced that he had been separated from his children for years, his ancestral land stolen, his job prospects destroyed even as he worked himself to the bone so that white men could get rich, there would have been no recourse for him. Had Wowo stood before the TRC, announcing that he had only first attended school at age eleven because there was no education available to him in the homelands, there would have been no answer for him either. In this way, there was no answer for a 101-year-old black man who had been intermittently thrown in jail for political reasons all his life, the final time when he was eighty. Over a century, he had watched as his land and livestock were confiscated. In 1997, he announced to the commission that he wanted his trees back. The powers-that-be had taken his trees, and he wanted them returned, or he wanted reparations for their theft. The commissioners, abashed, looked at each other and at the man; he didn’t fit into any legislated category of suffering.

The TRC also homed in on the extreme acts of a relative few white citizens (torture, murder, attacks, bombings) and largely ignored the more mundane acts of many (subtly exploiting employees, ignoring or welcoming violence and oppression perpetrated by the government, profiting from businesses built by underpaid and disenfranchised black workers, simply casting a vote for the National Party). Most whites therefore never saw themselves reflected as perpetrators, and, with enough mental effort, were able to escape guilt—self-imposed or otherwise. Ten years after the end of apartheid, a poll conducted by the Institute of Justice and Reconciliation, a Cape Town think tank, showed that one in five white citizens would prefer to return to the old regime; another poll revealed that less than a third of whites believed that they had benefited from apartheid.

“
How
did I benefit from apartheid?” Ilmar Pikker once asked me over tea. He had struggled so much in his own life that he was confused by the suggestion that he had ever enjoyed a leg up. In fact, the bloated apartheid bureaucracy was especially advantageous to lower- and middle-class whites with little education, who were almost guaranteed jobs in the civil service if they couldn’t find other work. But Pikker shook his head vigorously. “No, I don’t see how.”

“Life in this country was far better back then,” an older white man who once drove me to the airport explained.

“For you,” I offered. “Not for anyone else.”

“Yes, I suppose it
was
worse for them.”

Political parties, too, were largely excused for their roles in apartheid. The National Party wanted blanket amnesty for apartheid, and the TRC was in part a compromise: amnesty granted on a case-by-case basis. Still, the National Party was reluctant to appear before the committee, with many senior figures echoing the cry of a famous colonel: “Me, apply for amnesty?
Se moer!
” Like hell!

When senior party officials appeared before the commission, there was a taking of overall responsibility and apologies for many of the horrors inflicted by apartheid. While these are no small concessions, it also meant that specific transgressions committed by the state and its security apparatus were left unclaimed.

But then a man named Eugene de Kock stepped forward and proved that the state-sponsored agents responsible for the worst abominations were not merely bad apples, but were in fact deployed for that very purpose. De Kock had headed Vlakplaas, a shadowy extrajudicial death squad that operated out of a sprawling farm with the same name on the outskirts of Pretoria, the capital city. The squad was made up, largely, of hard-line white cops, as well as key black and colored operatives. These policemen and their assets, on state salaries, carried out assassinations, and caught and tortured activists to only two possible ends: death or life as a double agent. Murder was a day’s work at Vlakplaas. Security officers once abducted, assaulted, and shot a black operative and then burned his body on a diesel fire, a seven-hour process conducted in the bush.

“In the beginning, it smells like meat braai, in the end like the burning of bones,” Dirk Coetzee, de Kock’s predecessor, told a journalist. But they didn’t dispose of bodies that way too often, he later added, because it was a drag: who regularly had seven free hours to just stand around, burning human beings to ash?

De Kock had been imprisoned in 1996 and was serving 212 years for crimes against humanity when the TRC got going. With nothing left to lose, and amnesty to gain, he testified before the TRC that—contrary to the denials of top-ranking apartheid government officials, who claimed that Vlakplaas was a deviant force operating on its own—he had acted on the orders of police generals, who in turn had acted on the orders of cabinet ministers, who presumably had the ear of the president. The nation watched agog as de Kock sat before the TRC and spilled all in his flat, Afrikaans-accented English.

“I do not deny that I am guilty of the crimes, many of them horrible, of which I was accused,” he announced. “But we at Vlakplaas, and in the other covert units, are by no means the guiltiest of all. That dubious honor belongs to those who assembled us into the murderous forces that we became, and which we were intended to be all along. And most of them, the generals and the politicians, have got off scot-free….And so it would seem that justice has been sufficiently served by turning me, a mere colonel, into a lone demon to explain all the evil of the old regime.”

Following de Kock’s whistle-blowing, many former apartheid-era security personnel came forward. Mostly, these were men who, having seen de Kock locked away, feared prosecution. They comprised a mere sliver of the security state, but they admitted to burning down thousands of homes. They had shot fathers in front of their children. They had sodomized detainees with broomsticks. One pair of security police applied twice for amnesty, initially confessing to sixty murders and later bringing forth nine additional murders that had slipped their minds. Nearly all of the men swore that they had acted under the orders of or with the knowledge of top leaders. Most of them got amnesty. The rest still avoided jail—they were either never prosecuted, or their cases were dismissed. Only de Kock remained in prison; though they amnestied him for the majority of his crimes, the commission decided a handful of them did not qualify as political in nature. Nonetheless, even de Kock was granted parole in 2015, and walked free after twenty-one years.

But the security police were really just glorified triggermen, violent cogs in the machine. Those in the upper echelons of power—the ministers, the presidents—didn’t seem to fear prosecution in the least, nor were they sorry. P. W. Botha, de Klerk’s predecessor, refused to testify before the TRC. He stood before a group of journalists and angrily announced: “I’ve said many times before that the word ‘apartheid’ means good neighborliness. I honor the soldiers, I honor the police of the past! I salute them!”

During the TRC process, the large-scale suffering of women—especially black women—was often pushed to the side or ignored outright. A black rural woman, say, who had been born into poverty, confined to a shack in an overcrowded homeland, provided with, at best, a low-level state education, who had married an absent migrant laborer and bore a child who had died early for lack of adequate healthcare, had no role at the TRC. For that matter, neither did Easy’s mother, Kiki, raised in an “emergency camp,” pregnant by thirteen, her only employment option to work as a maid.

Moreover, sexual violence was almost never discussed. There were nearly eight thousand submissions on mistreatment put before the TRC, but in fewer than a dozen did a woman mention being raped. On the apartheid government’s part, warders often failed to provide black women prisoners with underwear and sanitary napkins. Some women gave birth in front of laughing male warders. Black female detainees, even teenage girls, were summarily beaten and shocked, and one woman was interrogated by a police officer who dangled her baby out of a window of a moving vehicle to coerce her into providing information. Another had her bare breasts slammed repeatedly in a desk drawer until her nipple split open.

I would like to see ANC training (death) camps exposed for what they were and the commanders brought to book,
Pikker once wrote me in an email, after I mentioned Vlakplaas’s unorthodox law enforcement methods.
I’m sure Vlakplaas will pale in the light compared to what atrocities occurred in these camps.

Pikker was not incorrect when he pointed out that the ANC’s behavior during the Struggle was hardly exemplary—a point de Klerk also made in his testimony before the TRC. Their military wing, in particular, seemed to have taken on the brutal habits of their enemy.

In the 1970s, following the Soweto Uprising, many idealistic young black South Africans slipped over the borders to attend ANC military training camps in Zambia, Tanzania, Angola, and other African countries sympathetic to the liberation cause. But the camps could be brutal outposts with their own sets of laws. The military wing of the ANC was steeped in paranoia about infiltrators, informers, and apartheid agents—and for suspected traitors, punishment was unyielding and inhumane.

Torture and assault were widespread at ANC prison camps. Even the smallest infractions by loyal male comrades were met with disproportionate and often fatal punishment. When some members protested the conditions in which they toiled at training facilities in neighboring countries, they were sent to Angolan state prisons or to the infamous ANC Quatro prison camp (officially called a “rehabilitation facility”), a filthy, lice-infested collection of dark, sweltering cells. There, according to a 1992 report by Amnesty International, the accused were beaten on the soles of their feet, hit with long sticks, and scalded with boiling liquid; stoned by guards, pushed onto nests of red ants, denied medical attention, and allowed meager rations of inadequate food and sometimes only one cup of water a day in the unyielding tropical heat; forced to defecate and urinate in a rarely emptied bucket in a crowded cell, allowed to wash with dirty water only every few weeks, and required to work hard labor on 110-degree days.

“A place where if they give you bread, you think it’s cake,” one survivor testified.