By the time we sat down, Bennie, with beer in hand, was discernibly more comfortable. After Samson amplified his introduction, hinting that crucial linking evidence was at last at hand, Bennie soon began to speak freely about going into exile and his capture by the SADF on 4 May 1978 at a Swapo transit refugee camp called Vietnam at Chetequera in southern Angola. He said that the camp had been pulverised by a powerful attack by an armoured column, preceded by aerial bombardment. Heavy fighting had ensued. Several people had been killed. After about four hours of intense fighting, resistance had finally been quashed and an eerie stillness had descended. Along with about 200 other refugees, he was rounded up, taken prisoner by the SADF and brought back to Namibia.
The official accounts differ about the number of people killed in this attack.16 The network of camps around Chetequera constituted Target Bravo of the SADF’s Operation Reindeer. Target Alpha, the primary target, was a Swapo base at Cassinga. The accounts of numbers of those slain at Cassinga do not differ as much as those at Chetequera. According to the Swapo reports at the time, 615 Swapo refugees were killed at Cassinga and 100 at Chetequera.17 The official South African account puts those figures at 600 and 248 respectively. This mass slaughter is annually commemorated as a public holiday in independent Namibia, although the focus is mainly on the Cassinga massacre, with little said about those slain and captured at Chetequera.
It would appear that no one was taken prisoner at Cassinga. Several hundred Swapo refugees were left there, injured. The South African troops were ferried back by helicopter from a point near Cassinga to their bases close to the Namibian border. There was no space on board the helicopters for prisoners.
According to the South African account, 202 Swapo members were captured at Chetequera. Sixty-three of them were said to have been released on 29 May 1978 and 118 were transferred to a rudimentary internment camp at Mariental.18 These figures roughly accord with those provided to me by former detainees. I have not encountered an explanation for the 21 persons unaccounted for in this version. It is possible that some died, while others may have been released even earlier. The official Swapo version is that 270 refugees were taken prisoner.19 Most detainees put the figure at about 200, however. Presumably, several refugees were unaccounted for in the turmoil that followed the attack. Some may have been able to flee, and may even have got back home again. Others may have died; these facts were not known by Swapo at the time.
Bennie had left northern Namibia along with several other young Namibians from his area about a week before the attack on Chetequera and their capture. After crossing the border, they had made their way to the Vietnam base at Chetequera where they had met up with other refugees and been welcomed by Swapo cadres. This base, some 20 km inside Angola, formed part of a network of forward bases of varying sizes in the area, ranging from 6 km to 28 km inside Angola as supply points and as reception or transit centres for Namibians going into exile.20
Bennie had gone into exile in the hope of studying further and bettering himself. Prospects in Namibia for him at that time were bleak. He had left school early and migrated to Windhoek in search of employment. The best he could do was to become an ice cream vendor, on a bicycle, ringing his bell to offer his wares in the small city centre, the more affluent areas and at sporting events. His exile was short-lived, however, with the SADF attack on the Vietnam base occurring within a week of his arriving there. Bennie was released in the group of 63 captives on 29 May 1978. Presumably the remaining detainees were considered more hard-line; one can only speculate about the motivation, as no reasons have ever been given. Some time after his release, Bennie was employed as a driver at the Otjihase copper mine near Windhoek, a position he occupied at the time of our meeting.
Bennie dispelled the myth repeatedly put out by the South African propaganda machine and slavishly disseminated by the local media that youngsters in Owambo were violently abducted and taken away at gunpoint by People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN) fighters every time they left in droves to join Swapo. Most of those perpetrating and perpetuating this distortion (assuming they believed it) failed to understand or even consider the deep disillusionment felt by young people at massive inequality along racial lines and the lack of opportunities facing them, let alone the rapidly growing political consciousness that motivated these departures. Political consciousness had risen sharply following the national strike in 1971 directed at the hated SWANLA contract labour system, which denigrated people to mere labour units and severely restricted their mobility.
Resentment at the discriminatory education system and the regime also escalated dramatically among young people after the 1976 Soweto uprising in neighbouring South Africa. Namibians were subjected to fundamentally the same form of Bantu education that continued until independence, despite the installation of the IG by the apartheid regime in 1985. Indeed, despite its professed commitment to doing away with racism and racial inequality, the IG was party to its perpetuation by maintaining the racial and ethnic segregation in schools and the profound disparity on education spending. Ten times more was spent on the education of children in segregated white schools compared to children in Owambo in 1986.21 The discrepancy was probably considerably worse when Bennie left school in the mid- to late 1970s.
Bennie had a friendly and open disposition and spoke with ease and coherence about the events. He confirmed the capture of those in the original list of thirteen names of detainees I had obtained the previous November, initiating my inquiries, which started the case. He wanted these friends to be released, as well as the others captured with him at Chetequera. He was now prepared to come forward, assist with the challenge and make an affidavit in support of an application for the release of the remaining 118 detainees captured with him and secretly held near Mariental. He confirmed that the detainees mentioned in my November letter to the military had, in fact, been captured with him at the Vietnam base. They had been brought back to Namibia and held in a makeshift tented internment camp adjacent to the Oshakati military headquarters, surrounded by high barbed wire fences with watchtowers at intervals. Later, corrugated iron structures, which the military called the ‘hokke’ (cages), had been erected there.
Most of his fellow captives had not been released with him on 29 May 1978. He had recently heard from some of their families that they were being held at a military internment camp near Mariental after some had been permitted visits. He also said that, during his detention, he and other detainees had been tortured, including by way of electric shock treatment. He had been blindfolded for most of his detention but at one point had managed to see that one of his fellow detainees, Nikodemus Katofa, had been suspended for long periods by his arms, which were tied with wire above his head, his legs unable to touch the ground. He also spoke of frequently hearing screaming from his fellow captives as they cried out during torture sessions.
Bennie’s account represented a breakthrough in unearthing evidence of the secret detention of the remaining captives from Chetequera – then held for almost six years without charge.
The idea of challenging their secret detention had come to me while I was doing postgraduate studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the US spring of 1983 – some nine to ten months before. I had been invited to a seminar organised by the UN Council on Namibia at Columbia Law School in New York to speak on a panel about Namibia’s position in international law. My task was to make a brief presentation on the repressive legal framework and how it operated against those who pressed for self-determination, and to speak about legal practice there. I provided damning details on the former and a few brief remarks on the latter. I had only recently qualified as a lawyer.
Preparing for my talk afforded me the opportunity to look at detention laws afresh from afar. This was a fruitful exercise. The detention power principally invoked by the South African security forces was in Security Districts Proclamation AG 9 of 1977 (AG 9) enacted by the first Administrator-General (AG) shortly after his appointment in 1977. It authorised any member of the security forces (both SADF and police) of any rank to detain people without trial. They could initially do so for up to 96 hours, soon extended to 30 days. In 1979 AG 9 was amended by the AG to authorise himself to order the further and indefinite detention of detainees already in custody. This