‘Sies man,’ I exclaim. ‘That’s the car of choice of the security police.’
‘I know,’ says Ting Ting, ‘that’s why we drove it. But it didn’t help.’
We laugh and move into other areas. Family stuff. I need the details of parents and contact addresses, phone numbers, financial obligations. Girlfriends? They laugh and look at each other.
‘Do we have time for that?’ Neo asks.
I leave it there for the moment. I need to find out what we’re facing. ‘Do you have a copy of the charge sheet?’
‘No,’ says Jabu.
Typical, they have been given nothing.
‘Okay,’ I say, ‘then tell me some of the details so I can get a sense of it.’
They exchange glances and Jabu says, ‘They say we have done everything.’
I lean forward. ‘Help me to understand. “Everything” is a big word.’
‘Everything means undergoing training, possession of weapons, sabotage, assassination and murder, planting landmines and a bomb.’
Shit, I think, they are right, there is nothing else. I clear my throat, which has gone tight. ‘The assassinations,’ I say quietly, ‘give me an example.’
Masina looks me in the eye. ‘Have you heard of Brigadier Molope?’
I go cold. ‘Yes, I’ve heard of him.’
We are in trouble.
6
Driving back to Johannesburg thinking of the policeman Brigadier Molope, I am in another place, a prisoner of memory. I remember the Winterveld massacre, as it became known.
Winterveld is an arid and dusty area of mud houses outside Pretoria, part of the Bophuthatswana Bantustan. In Winterveld there is one hundred per cent unemployment, no running water or electricity. It is an empty dust bowl of hunger.
On Wednesday 26 March 1986, the people of Winterveld protested against the detention and torture of their children by the Bop police. There was speculation that the chief of police would come to the soccer field to speak about the detainees. Some residents said they had heard the police announcing the meeting the day before on loudhailers.
The people, mostly women and children, gathered slowly on the gravel soccer field in the middle of the settlement. There were a few men, but most had gone to Pretoria looking for work. A tattered barbed-wire fence surrounded the field. It was a windy day and dust swirled across the field and the surrounding houses. In some of the tiny gardens people had sparse vegetable patches but the soil was too hard and dry to produce much greenery.
By nine o’clock, the crowd numbered more than five thousand, their ranks swelled by curious schoolchildren. Also people from adjacent settlements and some of the youth had come from the nearby township of Garankuwa. Trucks arrived and police and soldiers dismounted. More police arrived in armoured vehicles. They wore full riot gear and were armed with R4 combat rifles. The mothers and elders realised that the situation was explosive and tried to calm the crowd. Opposite them, the police formed a defensive line.
The area police commander arrived and conferred with his subordinate. The police were now facing the crowd, rifles at the ready but pointed down. The commander admonished the gathering through a loudhailer and a rumble of annoyance went through the people. The commander shouted louder that he ‘would leave them lying all over the field like ants’ and bulldoze their houses. The crowd’s voice rose in anger. The police raised their rifles. Some of the protesters sensed danger and tried to get away but those at the back were pushing forward. A stone sailed out and landed close to the police. They watched. There was more shouting as mothers and fathers appealed to the police for information about their children. More stones. Suddenly the police opened fire. The harsh bang bang bang of semi-automatic rifle fire. The shots, sporadic at first, escalated to a crescendo, the bullets smashing into soft flesh. No more stones now, just the police target shooting.
Chaos. A wild rushing panic as people ran for safety, snagging in the barbed wire. Screaming. Dust in the faces of the fleeing crowd, blinding them, blurring the scene in a red-brown haze. The shooting died out. The people had disappeared, leaving only the wounded and dead on the ground and hanging on the fence. A silence, then the bawling of children and the groans of the wounded.
Eleven people, mostly women and children, died that day. Two hundred were injured and more than a thousand people arrested, loaded with kicks and swinging rifle butts onto the police armoured vehicles and driven to neighbouring police stations.
By the time we lawyers got there, called in by the Catholic Church, all that was left were mounds of clothing dotted across the field and scraps of material flapping on the barbs of the fence. Dark patches of blood swarmed with blue flies. And scattered in the dust were shoes, lots of them.
We based ourselves in the church of Father Smangaliso Mkhatshwa in Soshanguve, a Catholic haven with outbuildings that could serve as a makeshift medical station and from which we could work to take statements. Through the rest of that day and night and all of the next day, teams of doctors and nurses treated the wounded brought to the mission. Had these people gone to any hospital, they would have been arrested and interrogated. Social workers spoke with the families of the dead, while foreign camera crews filmed the scene.
Gathering evidence of the atrocity and trying to trace the missing became a desperate time of hoping against hope that they had been detained, and were not lying dead in the police or hospital morgues. It would take many visits to the sparse concrete cold rooms of the mortuaries to identify all those who had died on that day.
The massacre was followed by mass arrests in the area, and the random torture continued. The Winterveld massacre, as it became known, became an infamous incident, not least because Bénédicte Chanut, a white French doctor from Médecins du Monde, was also arrested and viciously sjambokked. Chanut had been working at a clinic run by the Catholic Church and Médecins du Monde near Winterveld and, on hearing the shooting, had grabbed her medical case and driven to see if she was needed. She ran straight into the Bop police, who concluded that if black people were causing trouble, there had to be a white person behind it. Not knowing that she was a French national or that she was a doctor, she was arrested and brutally flogged. The French government intervened and she was released.
The Winterveld massacre received considerable media exposure. The Bophuthatswana government called a commission of inquiry and Norman Manoim and I ended up representing the Winterveld community with the brilliant pair, Wim Trengove and Bob Nugent, as our counsel. The commission went nowhere. During May 1986, while the commission was still under way, the two senior police officers commanding the police responsible for the massacre were promoted. It was a clear signal to the people of Winterveld. The commission had become a farce.
The policeman whose promotion got the most publicity was the officer in charge of the entire area, Brigadier Molope. He had been in command on the day of the Winterveld massacre and had given the order to fire. He was known to be leading the offensive against the youth and many of those who survived the torture and thrashings talked of how he would use a wire whip on their backs.
Brigadier Molope was a giant of a man who wore black reflective sunglasses and drove a black bullet-proof Mercedes Benz with tinted windows. Gliding through the bleak townships of Garankuwa, Soshanguve and Mabopane, Brigadier Molope became the source of an almost mythical horror.
THE BOMB
Bombs, like most things in life, are best kept simple. The explosive must be durable, malleable, depending on the vehicle, not volatile and unobtrusive. The vehicle or casing is critical, particularly when