For some people just telling their story is a comfort, but the truth commission is finding it harder to solve some of the other problems, writes Eddie Koch
TWO very different people walked into Johannesburg’s Central Methodist Church this week and, beneath the stained-glass images of Christ on the way to Calvary, sat to tell harrowing tales which tested to the full the truth commission’s offer of comfort and catharsis.
George Dube’s story begins with a relentless diet of fish and beans in an Umkhonto weSizwe training camp in Angola. He explained how, fed up with the meals that were upsetting his ulcers, he sold some belongings to an Angolan soldier for a bus fare to Luanda where he would explain the problem to his commanders.
On the way to the bus stop some Angolan policemen stopped him. Dube could not speak Portuguese. They could not speak English. He had old Angolan currency on him. And he had grown a beard. The Angolans deduced he was one of Jonas Savimbi’s foreign mercenaries and took him to a nearby prison.
Dube spent three years there during which time he was joined by another 11 ANC members suspected of being spies. He says there were regular beatings by the Angolan warders and one of his friends, Tom Mabinda, was shot dead in front of him by the guards.
His account of prison conditions deviates into an account of the appalling food. People in the audience giggle at the cranky man who has clearly become obsessed with the workings of his stomach.
It is around 4pm and the hearings are running two hours late. One of the commissioners, Bongani Finca, tries to hurry him up.
Dube says the group was transferred to an ANC rehabilitation centre after staging a hunger strike. There they were forced to do hard labour. “I was beaten every day. It would be your lucky day if you were not beaten … I have seen movies about slavery and they way we treated it was like hell,” he claims. “I prayed that I would wake up being dead … that they would separate my soul from my body.”
There were regular torture sessions to extract confessions from the spies. “I didn’t know what to tell them because I have never been a spy.”
Three years later Dube and some of the others were released and sent to a camp in Uganda. “The commissar said ‘Congress sometimes makes a mistake’.” And the detainees were told they would be sent back to the camp if they told anyone of their experiences.
Is there anything else he would like to tell the commission, asks Finca. “Listen my friend they used to make us run to the toilet. There was no walking there. And then you couldn’t sit there and reflect. It was half a minute and you were out.” And when he asked for stomach pills he got headache pills and headache pills when he wanted stomach pills.
More giggles from the gallery.
Finca asks if there is any request Dube would like to put to the commission. He explains he had tried courses in bricklaying, farming and cooking at the ANC camps but failed all of them. “I still want to learn to be a chef because I like cooking. I was asking them to send me to a school like this very school for cooking which I wanted.”
Dube appears to be a lonely and confused man unable to find any coherent explanation of the trauma he has been through other than that he complained of eating too much beans and fish. Psychologists describe the condition as shattered cognition.
And when he walked out of the church it was clear that, unlike the man depicted in the beautiful windows above him, Dube had not found the meaning and understanding that would be his first step on the road to healing. Nor is he likely to find any place in a school for cooks.
For Hawa Timol it must have been very different.
The ailing old lady on crutches, flanked by caring and nurturing sons, explains in broken Gujerati how the security police broke her heart when they came to say her son, Ahmed Timol, had jumped from the 10th floor of John Vorster Square.
“I told the man he should go home and ask his wife what it means for a mother to rear a child and never see him,” she says.
Later, after repeated raids and interrogations, they came again to say her other son, Mohammed, would only be released from detention if he agreed to work as an informer. “I told them that if my body had a zip they could open it and see how I was aching inside.”
This time there is no laughter in the gallery, only tears and a lump in every throat.
Mohammed Timol, who survived his term in jail after the brothers were arrested in 1963, explains how his brother had worked in the underground of the South African Communist Party and the ANC.
For him and his mother, it is intensely gratifying that Ahmed is receiving the recognition he deserves. “He was one of the many South Africans, young and old, to bring about a democratic dispensation in South Africa.” He asks that the school in Roodepoort where he taught be given the name Ahmed Timol.
They know why he died and, to use chairman Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s words, their appearance at the commission is an exquisite example of how just being given the chance to tell it “brings Christ’s ointment into their hearts and souls”.
The commission is like a treadmill of truth. There is a tension between the need for succinct and well-organised information and the patience and time needed to help victims reorganise their basic understanding of what happened to them.
Sometimes, when there is a yawning gap between the need for caring on the part of commissioners and pressure to speed things up so the distressing business can get done for the day, its cathartic intent breaks down. So the Dubes of the struggle present the truth body with a formidable challenge.
“One needs to separate out the different needs and wants that victims have and also have a finer understanding of the various types of victims who appear before the commission. They are people with very different expectations,” says Brandon Hamber, a psychologist at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation.
For some, reparations will be more important than the public hearings. Various groups have raised different requests for compensation at the commission. Some have asked for welfare grants. Others want symbolic recognition in the form of tombstone or a moument. In the Eastern Cape there was a common call for help with the education of young victims.
“The most profoundly worrying group is young people from the twilight period in the 1990s. Many of them probably played the role of victim, witness and perpetrator during the violence of the time. They are young and resentful and face a bleak future. It is hard to say how the commission will respond to their needs,” says Hamber.