Policemen now before the truth commission shocked Harold Sefolo to death. His widow spoke to Stefaans Brmmer
IT was 1965 in Witbank, and Lizzie liked Harold for his looks and his humility. They got married on April 27, a date not lost on Lizzie for its later historical value. But by the time that date rung in a democratic South Africa almost three decades later, her husband was long gone – a victim of the forces that would have stopped April 27.
This week former security policeman Paul van Vuuren told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission how he had not believed Harold Sefolo when Sefolo told him the African National Congress would rule one day.
But then Sefolo, whom Van Vuuren believed to be an ANC guerrilla, asked whether he could sing Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika. Sefolo sang before Van Vuuren and security branch colleagues Jacques Hechter and Joe Mamasela shocked him to death with a water pump generator.
Lizzie Sefolo can imagine why her husband sang. “He did that. He just took off with whatever was in him at the time … He wanted to show them his power.
Sefolo’s bravery, while two comrades were being given the treatment he would shortly receive, has made for some of the most poignant testimony yet put before the commission. Lizzie Sefolo caused her own stir when she told the commission’s amnesty committee, which is considering applications from Hechter, Van Vuuren and three others, that she doubted the commission was a means to reconciliation.
“We’re still feeling the pain. These people never came to us to ask for forgiveness. The government is doing this on our behalf … It is people who should forgive each other, not the government.”
But, she told the Mail & Guardian later, it was a relief to hear the truth about how her husband, Jackson Maake and Andrew Makupe died in 1987.
Lizzie Sefolo met Harold Sefolo, a window dresser at a Witbank clothing store and an orphan who didn’t complete his schooling as there was no one to support him, in 1965. “He was 26 and I was 24, working for an optician … He was a good-looking man and humble,” she said.
Four years later the couple got a house in Pretoria’s Mamelodi township. About four months before his death, Sefolo started his own business, a caf, in Witbank. When Mamasela abducted him from there, Lizzie Sefolo had been completely unaware of any police interest in her husband. She reported his disappearance to the police in Mamelodi.
But she heard nothing until January this year, when she read in a newspaper article (presumably on the confessions of Joe Mamasela) that her husband had been a victim of the police. “All the time, we were looking for him. You can imagine how much we spent going up and down for the whole eight years.”
Van Vuuren told the commission Maake had been a police informer, but that he was suspected of being a double agent. He was taken to a remote spot outside Pretoria and shocked until he owned up to spying for the ANC. He also implicated Makupe, who, in turn, was abducted and tortured, and he implicated Sefolo as another member of the cell. So Mamasela was dispatched to pick him up in Witbank. After all three had been shocked to death, their bodies were blown up in Bophuthatswana.
Lizzie Sefolo said her husband had been a strong ANC supporter, but she doubted he had been involved in armed activities, as Van Vuuren claimed. He did travel to Swaziland and Lesotho from time to time as chair of a dancing club, but she did not know if he had been in touch with Umkhonto weSizwe there.
“There’s much I don’t know; I only know he was supporting the ANC … But I don’t think he was involved in killing … He used to like people and he was kind to everybody. He didn’t want anybody to suffer …
“If they could have shot him, it would have been better. The treatment they gave to them, it hurts. He didn’t deserve such a punishment.”
Lizzie Sefolo would like the government to erect a small tombstone for her husband, Maake and Makupe at the spot they died. It is too late for burials, but at least the children and grandchildren could know this is where the men died. And she fears her own six children will, like her orphan father, be deprived of further education. She never remarried and can hardly support them on her shop assistant’s wage. That is where the truth commission may help.
l Dennis Neer, Eastern Cape MEC for Safety and Security, is being sued for defamation by a former security policeman after giving evidence about torture he endured during detention. Luke Conway, current police commander of internal security in Port Elizabeth, is claiming R150 000 in damages from Neer in the Eastern Cape Supreme Court on grounds that the MEC falsely claimed the police officer had tortured him in the 1980s.
The Freedom of Expression Institute recently warned the truth commission that witnesses before it did not enjoy sufficient legal protection.