4
Jabu and Ting Ting moved from house to house in Mamelodi. Jabu, from Soweto and less likely to be recognised in Mamelodi, occasionally went out during the day to meet their contacts. Ting Ting stayed indoors, only venturing out at night. The two men hadn’t been in the country long and were nervous of being identified.
First they stayed at the home of Dr Fabian Ribeiro. Dr Ribeiro was their initial contact and he spent time briefing them on the situation in the country and in Mamelodi. While still in Botswana preparing for their mission, they had decided that they would carry out their first action in Mamelodi. They had chosen Mamelodi for a reason. Six months earlier, in November 1985, police had fired on a crowd in the township, killing thirteen people and wounding nearly eighty. As trained soldiers, they felt acutely the unfairness of police firing on an unarmed crowd in the very place where Ting Ting had grown up and which was now under army occupation. Driven by a hot rage, they decided that this would change. Whatever the cost, their first attack would be on the security forces occupying Mamelodi.
The township was crawling with police and soldiers, as Mamelodi was regarded as a flashpoint. It had become an occupied zone. There were roadblocks daily. Once a week, a section of the township was cordoned off and every house searched. The police and soldiers showed little regard for the occupants, smashing doors and windows and breaking crockery and ornaments. Young girls and women were pulled out of bed in the middle of the night in their nightdresses and made to stand with the men and shivering children in the small sitting rooms of the matchbox houses under the scrutiny of soldiers with R4 combat rifles, while the rest of the search and seizure team moved from room to room tipping out drawers.
Jabu and Ting Ting knew that they couldn’t stay long in the area. They also had a strong chance of being caught in their first few weeks and were determined to carry out an ‘action’ before that happened. They could not wait for the other members of the unit to arrive; it was time for the mission to start.
The two men buried most of their weapons beneath a pile of rubble and stones close to a dumping ground, not far from the house of an ANC contact, Harold Sefula. They each kept a 9 mm Makarov pistol and a Russian F-1 defensive hand grenade. These were easy to conceal and provided an element of reassurance should they run into trouble.
Jabu and Ting Ting made contact with an activist called Moss Morudi who supplied information about a military observation post on a hill overlooking the township and the regularity of patrols. He also told of a dirt road leading to the hill station. The two MK soldiers decided to mine this road.
On the night of 15 February 1986, Jabu and Ting Ting retrieved a TM-57 landmine (designed to trigger beneath heavy vehicles) and its detonator from their cache. This they carried back to Morudi’s house in a sports bag which in turn they hid in a bedroom cupboard. The two comrades had dinner with Moss and his family.
The next afternoon, wearing overalls similar to those worn by municipal road workers, they set out with the bag and a spade. They were both armed with a pistol and a grenade. The operation was risky. There was a strong possibility of being apprehended. But they were both convinced they needed to make a move.
At the designated spot, Jabu stood watch while Ting Ting dug. The ground was hard and compacted and the spade bounced off the surface. Fortunately, at that time of the afternoon, the army’s movements were infrequent. Ting Ting laboured quickly, a hole opening up. When it was deep enough, Jabu laid the mine and Ting Ting inserted and tightened the small MVZ-57 detonator cap. The mine was armed. Jabu covered the device with gravel and they both sprinkled white surface dirt over the area they’d disturbed. The tip of the detonator was invisible among the stones.
The two men walked slowly away, the spade slung casually over Ting Ting’s shoulder.
Back among the houses, they wiped the spade clean of prints and left it standing up against a house wall, knowing it would not be there for long. The whole operation had taken ten minutes.
Jabu and Ting Ting moved from Morudi’s home to another safe house in the township.
At six thirty the mine was detonated by a Casspir. By then it was dark. Moss Morudi heard the explosion and left his house to visit the site. Soon the area was swarming with soldiers taking up defensive positions. The shouts of the men were interrupted by the sound of a helicopter coming in low overhead. In the darkness, he saw the great swirls of dust, murky in the white searchlight of the chopper as it briefly landed within the cordon of soldiers before clattering off over the township. Later that night Morudi saw a heavy-duty army truck towing a long trailer. On the trailer was a large vehicle covered by a brown tarpaulin. The convoy of vehicles slowly left Mamelodi.
In the weeks that followed, the landmine attack was the main topic of conversation in the Pretoria townships. Surely an MK unit was operating in the area?
As far as Jabu and Ting Ting were concerned, their message to the authorities was clear: ‘We are here.’
5
You really have to admire these guys for their attention to detail. They occupy the lowest level of the security apparatus and they wear a mud-brown uniform. But the buttons shine, the boots gleam and the belt buckle is a beacon. There are, incongruously, three straight lines ironed across the middle of the back of their shirts. Having done my military service in 1974, conscripted at the tender age of seventeen and ending up a platoon commander with the rank of lieutenant, I know that these lines, so painstakingly ironed into the back of the shirt, serve no purpose whatsoever other than to indicate that some cretin, wishing to impress his superiors, has spent a precious extra two hours ironing them in. Welcome to the logic of South African military life.
To me, these men with their chests puffed out and their brown shirtsleeves rolled the regulation three fingers above the elbow, when the arm is extended, are familiar animals. Warder van Rensburg is in good shape. Tall, broad shouldered and fit, he regards me as dirt. I am used to this. He nods and ushers me to a yellow line one metre inside the room. I move quickly and stand on the line, knowing that if you don’t step smartly, you run the risk of being crushed to death by the massive steel door as it silently swings closed. What a mess. Sometimes, they close the door while you’re entering and when you curse they fake irritation with their colleague who is operating the system but they never apologise. This is all part of the game.
As the door shuts behind me, the barred steel door in front of me opens. Cameras mounted high on the wall watch as my briefcase goes into the metal detector. I follow Warder van Rensburg through the doorway, pick up the case, wait for yet another barred door to open and enter a brick-lined passage with steel mesh walkways above it. Warders patrol the walkways. At roof height are triangular windows of bottle-green glass behind which sit more warders. It always makes me think of those advertisements for luxury resorts, which claim to offer great service by virtue of having five staff members for every guest.
I have been to this prison many times and should be inured to its charms. But I’m not. The cold hostility of the building and the warders depresses me. This place is not about rehabilitation, this is confinement, a fortress in a war with no foreseeable end. And that is a lonely thought.
Warder van Rensburg carries that most essential item of equipment, a large bunch of keys, attached to his belt by a length of olive-green nylon cord. He uses the keys to unlock a succession of steel-barred doors as we go deeper into the prison and finally reach the consulting room. In fact, it is not a proper legal facility: it’s the prison doctor’s consulting room and surgery. I go in and the door slams shut behind me. Warder van Rensburg and I have not exchanged a single word.
I am alone, except for the small square window in the door at which the head of my host, like Banquo’s ghost, appears periodically. He stares at me intently.
This is what is called an ‘in-sight but out-of-sound’ consultation. It will be some time before they bring my clients. These warders are in no rush, and why should they hurry? Prisons are about spending time.
It