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Country of My Skull
Antjie Krog
(First published 1998)
‘I stand before you – naked and humble. I have decided to stop apologising for Apartheid and to tell the truth. With this I will betray my people and I will betray myself. But I have to tell the truth. I have made peace with God and the time has come to make peace with the people of KwaZulu-Natal. To make peace with myself. It is this audience which haunts me in the back of my head. Maybe among you are those whom I assaulted, whom I left behind for dead in the field.’
Constable William Harrington testifies about the Seven Day War in the area around Pietermaritzburg in the early nineties, when two hundred people died, hundreds of houses were burned down and thousands of refugees left homeless. He admits that he assaulted more than a thousand people during his short service period of two years and eight months in the police force. This works out to more than one person every day.
Harrington was eighteen years old and had been out for the Police Training College for barely a week when he was sent to track down ANC combatants in the dark.
‘Richard said I should stick close to him. I was so afraid. We entered an ANC/UDF area. Rick pointed out Dallies – he was fired at by the ANC the previous week. When we descended into a dark valley, whistling started 200 metres from us – it was echoed into the valley. "They know we are here," whispered Rick. I tried to run, but it was difficult – with the haelgeweer and belt around my waist, trying to prevent the flares and bullets from falling out of my pocket.’
In the darkness they came across a group of men, down on their knees to keep out of sight, and signalling to one another by making clicking sounds with their tongues. The unit Harrington was in crouched down silently and crept closer, making the same clicking noises. Five metres from them someone suddenly shouted, ‘Amapoyisa!’ [‘The police!’] and everybody started to shoot in all directions.
‘It was like a movie imprinted on my memory. Flares were fired, people tumbled as they were shot … it was like a herd in flight.’
After this baptism Harrington learnt quickly. At night, disguised in balaclavas, his unit sowed destruction in ANC areas. They went from home to home, searched for weapons, demanded to see IFP membership cards. If the house was without one, it was burnt down. ‘I fired on any ANC house or group from my vehicle, I distributed weapons to IFP chiefs, I transported Inkatha members and ammunition. It was days of death and blood.’
‘It was my war, my personal war against the ANC. My superiors told me: "You act as if you are a little God." And they were right. I did exactly as I pleased. At the age of twenty I made my own choices as a constable. I aligned myself with the IFP and up to this day I never had a lecture, letter or pamphlet informing me the ANC is no longer a lot of terrorists.’
Harrington’s hero was Major Deon Terreblanche – notorious for his killing sprees. ‘He was actually like my father. He was interested in my work. He always wanted to know how I was. He told me I personally have to fight against the ANC, because they were communists. He said he would see to it that I never get into trouble.’
But a kitskonstabel with ANC sympathies killed Terreblanche.
‘A few days before the Seven Day War we buried Major Deon. I cried constantly. I drank to forget. I grieved for that man. I carried him at his funeral – how could I not have loved that man? But when I look at what he did, then I know I should not have loved him, but when I think of him with my heart, then I know that man was my father … that man I loved.’
And his mother?
‘At that stage she was dying of cancer.’
The camera picks up the thin line flowing from the corner of Harrington’s left eye over his cheek. He raises his right hand stiffly and tries to wipe it inconspicuously from his face.
‘I grew up in jail. I was just 21 when I was sentenced. But my fear now belongs to the past. As I leave this stage here today I will be a marked man for the rest of my life. I have just betrayed the police motto: One for all and all for one. I will be stigmatised as a traitor because I have named every individual who worked with me – and when you fight like that, the only thing you have is trust. You trust on each other for your life. And I have betrayed them – all of them … but I beg you for forgiveness and peace.’
When Harrington leaves the stage he bursts uncontrollably into tears. He is immediately taken to a special room for psychiatric support.
William Harrington was refused amnesty.
Amnesty application of policeman Hendrik Johannes Petrus Botha
Under the pretext that he had toilet paper in his backpack, Laurie retrieved his backpack with the weapons and black bag from the combi. The five of us walked through the thick bushes to an opening on the Tugela River bank. Laurie put down his backpack and whilst Laurie, [Mbuso] Shabalala and Charles [Ndaba] were urinating at the river bank, Sam and I took the two silenced weapons out of the backpack.
In the meantime Laurie had made Charles and Shabalala sit flat on the ground facing the direction of the river. Laurie told them we were taking them to a safe house in northern Natal. Sam and I came from behind and shot them in the back of the head. After they had fallen we each shot a second time into the body. I shot Charles and Sam shot Shabalala. Sam and I removed their clothes, while Laurie returned to the vehicle to get concrete poles, hessian and wire.
Laurie cut the wire into lengths and Sam rolled Charles and Shabalala separately in hessian after the concrete pole had been placed over their chest and legs. The wire was then tied around their bodies to keep the hessian and poles in position. Laurie and I then threw Charles’s body into the river from the bank. I then assisted Sam in doing the same to Shabalala’s body. We put the clothes into the black bag. Branches were broken off the trees and the bloodstains wiped away. We spent about an hour making sure that the area was clean and that the bodies had sunk.
Extract from Darren Taylor’s radio interview with Lourens du Plessis
‘What is of utmost importance is to examine the backgrounds in which we grew up. I mean that’s where we were moulded. I’m not accusing anybody, but people were placed on a pedestal … not, I think, by intent, but is was carried over from the family conversations … What I would have liked to have done is to follow my conscience, because I really did have … the knowledge that we were doing wrong. I could figure it out for myself … those who never experience a prick of conscience, haven’t got a conscience. I would really like to have the courage … to live according to my convictions, because during the seventies, I started feeling uncomfortable about things. I said on many occasions to my colleagues: "You know, we’re wrong! We’re oppressing these people." But this is as far as it went. I must say that I had a family to feed …’
(Du Plessis is a former SADF colonel. His name appears on the ‘death signal’ calling for the permanent removal from society of the Cradock Four.)
Extract from Darren Taylor’s interview with Gerrie Hugo
‘An experiment was done to test the strength of motherhood with a baboon, a female baboon with a baby … where it was put in confinement and the floor started heating up, so as to test how strong motherhood is, to check how far it will go before the baboon drops the baby … and gets on top of the baby to get away from the heat. In the end, the baboon couldn’t take the pain anymore and dropped the baby and got on top of the baby to get away from the heat. And I feel this is happening within the rank and file of the security forces … where the baby, being the operative, honestly believes that he will be protected by the powers that be, but the powers that be, the designers of the system and the planners, are starting to feel the heat and eventually … they drop the baby … and the operatives must take that in mind, that that is going to happen to you. And the only way you can protect yourself is to come forward now and come clean.’
(Hugo is a former Military Intelligence operative in Namibia and South Africa.)
Shame strangles the remembrance of you
It was different before. Victims told their stories to the Truth Commission. In another hall, at another time, in front of another committee, perpetrators explained their deeds. But the amnesty hearing of police captain Jeffrey Benzien seizes the heart of truth and reconciliation – the victim face to face with the perpetrator – and tears is out into the light.
Never before had the double-edged relationship between the torturer and the tortured been depicted as graphically as it was that week in the small, stuffy hall of the Truth Commission in Cape Town. Initially the body language of the tortured was clear: no one else counts, not the Amnesty Committee, not the lawyers, not the audience – what counts today is you and me. And we sit opposite each other, just like ten years ago. Except that I am not at your mercy – you are at mine. And I will ask you the questions that have haunted me ever since.
But it isn’t that easy.
The first indication of the complexity of the relationship between an infamous torturer and his victim is the voice of Tony Yengeni. As a Member of Parliament, Yengeni’s voice has become known for its tone of confidence – sometimes tinged with arrogance. When he faces Benzien, this is gone. From where I sit taking notes, I have to get up to make sure that it really is Yengeni speaking. He sounds strangely different – his voice somehow choked. Instead of seizing the moment to get back at Benzien, Yengeni wants to know the man.
‘… What kind of man … uhm … that uses a method like this one with the wet bag to people … to other human beings … repeatedly … and listening to those moans and cries and groans … and taking each of those people very near to their deaths … what kind of man are you, what kind of man is that, that can do … what kind of human being can do that, Mr Benzien? … I’m talking now about the man behind the wet bag.’
At Yengeni’s insistence, Benzien demonstrates the wet bag method. ‘I want to see it with my own eyes.’ The judges, who have come a long way from meticulously sticking to court procedures, jump up so as not to miss the spectacle. Photographers come running, not believing their luck. And the sight of this bluntly built white man squatting on the back of a black victim, who lies face down on the floor, and pulling a blue bag over his head will remain one of the most loaded and disturbing images in the life of the Truth Commission.
But for this moment, Yengeni has to pay dearly.
Back at the table, Benzien quietly turns on him and with one accurate blow shatters Yengeni’s political profile right across the country.
‘Do you remember, Mr Yengeni, that within thirty minutes you betrayed Jennifer Schreiner? Do you remember pointing out Bongani Jonas to us on the highway?’
And Yengeni sits there – as if begging this man to say it all; as if betrayal or cowardice can only make sense to him in the presence of this man.
‘A special relationship’ is what Benzien says existed between him and Ashley Forbes. Forbes, biting his upper lip, tries to get Benzien to admit to acts which had clearly plunged him into months of hell, driving him to the point of suicide.
BENZIEN: You I can remember especially because I think that the two of us, after weeks of your confinement, really became quite close … I may be mistaken, but I would say relatively good friends in a way … I assaulted you that first day … but then I took you on a trip … and I’m not saying this flippantly … you said that it is the most Kentucky Fried Chicken you’ve ever ate … and then we went to the Western Transvaal where you pointed out arms caches … Do you remember the time when you saw snow for the first time … what happened in the snow next to the N1 … and the trip to Colesberg, how you braaied with me?
FORBES: Is it true that you tortured me every month on the 16th as a kind of anniversary of when you arrested me?
BENZIEN: In the spirit of reconciliation, you are making a mistake …
FORBES: On the second occasion I was wrapped in a carpet … my clothes were removed and the wet bag method used on me … Do you remember that you said you were going to break my nose by putting both your thumbs into my nostrils, ripping them until blood came out of my nose?
BENZIEN: I know you had a nosebleed but I thought that was as a result of the smack I gave you.
Benzien reminds Forbes that he always brought him fruit on Sundays, and how at great risk he smuggled Westerns – Forbes’s favourite reading material – into the cell. The images of snow and fruit blend into the relationship of the protector and the vulnerable – a union in which both could live out fantasy and nightmare. When Forbes mentions anal penetration, Benzien purses his lips disapprovingly: ‘I deny that, and I’m deeply disappointed that you say that.’
All this time Ashley Forbes’s wife is sitting in the row behind her husband’s torturer. When Benzien mentions the kind way she greeted him that morning, he is overcome with emotion.
A torturer’s success depends on his intimate knowledge of the human psyche. Benzien is a connoisseur. Within the first few minutes he manages to manipulate most of his victims back into the roles of their previous relationship – where he has the power and they are the fragility. He uses several techniques to achieve this during the amnesty hearings. He sits alone, for three days, in the same grey suit and tie. At a press conference afterwards, the victims remark how strange it was to see him so alone. He constantly drinks water. He tells how in the past his children had to be escorted by police because he was such a hated man. How they knew about the wet blanket kept in the bath in case of a petrol-bomb attack on the house. Benzien remembers his victims’ code names, the exact words they spoke, their unique mannerisms. All of them confirm that he was feared nationally – he could get the information he wanted in less than thirty minutes.
‘Cape Town had the same potential as Johannesburg, Pretoria and Durban for shopping-mall bombs – but I, with respect Mr Chairman, did my work well.’
Gary Kruse is now a director in the police force, in command of the VIP protection unit. Neatly and professionally, he asks Benzien: ‘What happened after you arrested me?’
‘I didn’t arrest you, sir,’ says Benzien. ‘Perhaps you confuse me.’
Kruser snaps: ‘I KNOW YOU. It was you!’
But Benzien does not remember.
KRUSER: Is it not true that you and Goosen assaulted me throughout the trip in the combi … that you sat on my head … after you arrested me outside the bioscope?
BENZIEN: I cannot remember the arrest … but if you say we assaulted you in the combi then I would concede that in all probability we did … I don’t know how though …
KRUSER: Do you remember when we arrived at Culemborg you hung me up?
BENZIEN: Hung you up! What you refer to as ‘hanging up’ – is that handcuffing you to the burglar-proofing?
KRUSER: Yes … so that my feet do not touch the ground and then hitting me in the stomach …
Then Kruser breaks down and the protruding eyes of Benzien look concerned that this man, who is now his boss, is crying. Considering the whole state of affairs – Benzien’s expression might be saying – what happened to you does not seem so bad.
But for Kruser it is too much for flesh and feelings: that this experience, which nearly destroyed his life, made not the slightest imprint on Benzien’s memory.
KRUSER: (in a stern voice) Did you ever get information out of me?
BENZIEN: (snappy) No sir!
KRUSER: Was anybody ever arrested because of me?
BENZIEN: No sir!
Then Kruser sits up straight – the way he was sitting before the hearing started. Behind Bezien sit the victims of his torture – in a row chained by friendship and betrayal. Yengeni betrayed Jonas, Jonas pointed out people in albums, Peter Jacobs betrayed Forbes, Forbes pointed out caches, Yassir Henry betrayed Anton Fransch. During the tea break they stand together in the passages with their painful truths of triumph and shame. As everybody is leaving Benzien grabs the hand of Ashley Forbes tightly in both his own – Forbes smiling shyly under his thin moustache.
