Worcester residents had widely different opinions of the truth commission which visited their town this week. Marion Edmunds reports
DOWN at the Brandwacht Hotel, in the saloon bar, a Worcester prison warder sat glowering over his brandy and coke. It had been a pleasant enough afternoon, until two journalists had come in for a drink and asked him what he thought of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which had held hearings about police and prison atrocities all week down the road.
“Hond se ….,” he muttered into his glass, and scowled. But then, suddenly contrite, he turned and said:
“It’s not that I am lelik, jy weet, maar wat is verby is verby and you should not go and dig it up. And half of what they say is not true. I work with these people in the prison, and I know that three- quarters of the staff feel the same way as I do.” Another sip.
“You know, it’s not the waarheidskommissie, it’s the huilkommissie, the traankommissie, it’s an advertisement for bleddy Twinsavers — you have to cry to be on it. A person stands behind the guy speaking and if he’s not crying enough, he pokes him with a needle to make him cry more.”
The joke about the Twinsavers and the traankommissie cheered the prison warder up greatly. It’s the current joke in white Worcester. Wally the barber tells the same joke to his clients as he trims their beards. And it was cracked by Dr Kallie Ndaba, a white Afrikaans herbalist, who treats the community’s ills with herbs he gets as nearby as Montague and as far afield as Singapore. His specialities are “malkopsiekte, swangerskap, huweliksprobleme and hofsake”, but not the past or collective guilt, truth or reconciliation.
While many whites had seen the Worcester hearings on the TV news, comparatively few had gone down to the teachers’ training college to listen to the three- day hearings which targeted Worcester and surrounding Boland areas, nor seemed to feel the need to do so. In fact most of the people who had gone to the hearings were from the communities who had first-hand knowledge of suffering under apartheid rule.
Many witnesses wept as they told their stories of relatives shot dead by police, of beatings and of torture.
Saraline Joseph, harrowed and gaunt, leaned her forehead against the edge of a desk and sobbed when recalling the day, six years ago, when she heard her son, Johannes Jones, had been shot by a policeman in Robertson. All the policeman had said to her on the day was: “I am sorry, auntie, that I shot your son.” Later, an inquest reported that nobody could be held responsible for the shooting.
“I miss him … My son was industrious, he worked to our benefit. I would appreciate any assistance that comes my way because of the difficult circumstances under which I raised him,” she said.
In wrapping up the hearings on Wednesday, commissioner Pumla Gobodo thanked Saraline Joseph for her testimony. She thanked all who had given evidence, she thanked all who had come to listen, she thanked the translators, the caterers, the janitor and the police who had guarded the door. She thanked the media. She thanked mothers for bringing their children. She thanked people for sharing their grief. With the stage full of potted ferns and flower arrangements, it was like a school prize- giving ceremony.
`We can never fully comprehend … we are not able to comprehend the extent to which these people have suffered. These are very special people who can relate this suffering, people who come from the little Boland town which is meant to be the back of beyond …We are humbled and share the pain that all of us have suffered,” she said in her finale.
Gobodo’s tone did not please everybody. Harold J Baxter, who works now for the Worcester Civic Rights Advice Office and was an African National Congress activist in the struggle years, said on Wednesday: “Very irritating … The witnesses are strong people, they do not need to be patronised by the commission and the commission did not really take us nearer to justice. It was not on a proper scale. The oppression was so much bigger than we have heard. The lives of these people who testified and others have been taken away from them by what happened. What justice can be done for them by the commission?”
Baxter said that he wanted to hear evidence from the policemen who had tortured and shot his comrades. He wanted to know what the other side was thinking now.
“That would have been interesting. Now that we, the ANC, are in government, how do they feel about what they did? Nee man, it’s a huilkommissie, it’s a biegkommissie.”
Forty-year-old Johannes Hendricks believed that the commission had introduced a measure of reconciliation between the white and black communities in Worcester. He said he had been touched to see a high-profile white businesswoman wiping her eyes, while listening to the hearings.
“So it does help. You see those people can learn if they see what happened … and you think while you are listening, this could be my mother on the stage, this could be my son, this could be me.”
Hendricks was an activist in the Seventies and Eighties. In 1980 he participated in a June 16 protest and was knocked down by a police car, and had his legs driven over.
“They put me in the back of the car, and I dived out the other door, and then I saw a policeman standing with a gun, and I thought, `hey, I’m too young to die’, so I let them handcuff me. I spent 10 days in prison before my grandmother found me and bailed me out. Then I was convicted for public violence and had to spend every weekend in jail for six months.”
He paused when asked why he had not applied to give evidence at the hearings.
“I don’t want to go on the stage. I don’t want to go before the people.” His voice trailed off. “Because when I think about the Eighties, when I talk about it — it makes me cry.” He turned his head away to hide the tears.