Truth, Lies and Alibis. Fred Bridgland

agitated, he told his friend that he feared for his life. He said he had just seen Stompie, who described to him how Mrs Mandela had beat him up. Winnie, in turn, had warned Asvat not to approach the police about what he had seen and heard.

      ****

      I met Reggie Jana amid aromatic scents wafting from sacks and cartons of spices in his mahogany-lined warehouse. In the course of two long interviews,1 he told me: “Abu-Baker thereafter was not the same person I had known. He was never afraid of anyone, but after the events of Stompie he was a changed person. The man had fear in him. He did not know what next to expect.

      “Abu-Baker said to me, ‘This effing bitch is giving me grief, causing problems and I fear for my life.’”

      Asvat told Jana he could not believe the extent of the brutality that had been meted out to Stompie, Thabiso Mono, Kenny Kgase and Pelo Mekgwe. He said he had warned Mrs Mandela that Stompie’s wounds, particularly those to his head,2 were so extreme that he, as a general practitioner, could not treat them; she must get Stompie to a hospital or he would die.

      Abu-Baker said that as he examined Stompie, the boy whispered to him, “Mrs Mandela and her men beat me to this pulp.”

      Jana told me he had never before seen his friend in such a distressed state. “He was so upset and disgusted. He was shocked that individuals could inflict such third-degree body injuries. They were beaten so badly that he could not understand why. And that shock remained in him [until the end of his life]. All had different degrees of injuries, on their bodies, on their legs, arms, facial, head injuries. They were in a terrible state.”

      Having seen the seriousness of Stompie’s injuries, and fearing the boy would die, Asvat said he considered going to the police. But he was frightened of Mrs Mandela, said Jana, “knowing well what a person she is and what she’s capable of doing. Winnie had the henchmen of hers [the Football Club] and they would go to any lengths.”

      Jana said Asvat told him Mrs Mandela was so worried about police intervention that she threatened him, saying, “Look, you mention nothing. You treated no one and you know nothing. Look, hey, you’re not making any statement of any nature.”

      ****

      After pouring his soul out to Jana, Dr Asvat went to the Mandela Crisis Committee and told its members that he had found Stompie so badly wounded on his visit to Mrs Mandela’s home that the boy would probably die.

      The Crisis Committee had been established secretly with the imprisoned Nelson Mandela’s approval in August 1988, with a mandate to rein in Mrs Mandela and disband her Football Club so as to end the damage they were inflicting on the ANC’s public image. The committee comprised six prominent ANC members, including Cyril Ramaphosa, then the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers; Sydney Mufamadi, then the communist leader of the ANC-aligned Congress of South African Trade Unions and later a senior minister in Nelson Mandela’s post-apartheid government; the Reverend Frank Chikane, secretary-general of the South African Council of Churches; and Aubrey Mokoena, who was national coordinator of the Release Mandela Committee, set up in 1983 to raise funds to sustain the international campaign for Nelson’s freedom.

      While alarmed by Dr Asvat’s revelations to them, the Crisis Committee never reported publicly their crucial meeting with Asvat nor the details of what he had told them.3

      Chapter 7

      The death of Stompie Moeketsi

      Real news is something that someone somewhere doesn’t want us to know.

      Jeremy Paxman

      Stompie Moeketsi was killed the same night, after Dr Asvat had examined the boy’s wounds and driven to Reggie Jana’s warehouse to share what he had seen over a stiff whisky and then on from Reggie to the Mandela Crisis Committee. Early the next morning Winnie Mandela ordered John Morgan to remove the dead Stompie from her home, according to evidence he gave Dawn Barkhuizen and later to the TRC.

      The only person to claim to have witnessed Stompie’s murder was Katiza Cebekhulu. In testimony to the TRC and in interviews for my own biography of Mrs Mandela1 and a BBC Television documentary for which I was the writer and narrator, Cebekhulu said he heard Jerry Richardson say to the badly injured Stompie on the evening of 31 December 1988: “Pack your things, you are going home.”

      Cebekhulu went to his bed in one of the detached cabins at the back of the courtyard of Mrs Mandela’s house, beyond the open-air jacuzzi and behind a hedge of flowering bushes. At some later point, either just before or after midnight, he woke and went outside to go to the toilet next to the cabin. Cebekhulu said that as he walked he saw movements beyond the hedge, which made him crouch low and freeze instinctively. “Richardson was carrying Stompie in his arms and Winnie was with him. Richardson laid Stompie flat next to the jacuzzi. I heard Stompie murmur, but could not understand what he was saying. Winnie had something pointed in her hand. It glinted but I could not make out whether it was a knife or a pair of scissors.”

      I was there when Cebekhulu took the stand on 25 November 1997 at the TRC public hearing in Johannesburg – nine years after Stompie’s death. He pointed at Winnie Mandela and accused her of killing Stompie. In his testimony he said he saw her stab him twice but could not tell precisely whether she hit him in the neck or the chest. Then, Cebekhulu testified, Winnie Mandela and Jerry Richardson together held the boy in the water of the jacuzzi. “I believe Stompie probably died as I watched,” he said.

      After that Cebekhulu moved as stealthily as possible back into his room. He was terrified, but knew he had not been seen by either Mandela or Richardson. He said he could hardly believe what he had witnessed and his whole body was shaking and trembling. He lay down, covered his head with a blanket, and heard a Toyota in the driveway hired by Winnie from businessman Richard Maponya start up and leave.2 The TRC established that Stompie’s body was carried away in the boot of that particular car.

      Cebekhulu heard the Toyota return about an hour later. Richardson, who drove the car when Morgan refused to do so, came into Cebekhulu’s room, switched on the lights as if checking that he and other Football Club members were asleep, and put them off again before going out. Cebekhulu, pretending to be asleep, testified that he opened his eyes slightly, peeped beneath the blanket’s edge and saw tiny spots of blood on Richardson’s shoes. Thabiso Mono, who slept in the other cabin, also gave evidence that he saw specks of blood on the chief coach’s shoes.

      Unable to sleep, Cebekhulu was the first person to rise on the morning of Sunday, 1 January 1989. Richardson’s khaki work trousers were lying on the toilet floor with blood on them. The jacuzzi, full the previous day, had been drained of water, but there were faint blood smears as though someone had hurriedly tried to rub them away.

      When Cebekhulu went into the cabin where Stompie slept, he established that the boy was no longer there. His fear intensified when he heard that Mrs Mandela was telling the household that Stompie had “run away”. Cebekhulu said he knew that had to be a lie.