Marion Edmunds
President Nelson Mandela last year considered sending Dr Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri to Burundi as a special envoy, to dispense advice and represent South Africa in the Great Lakes crisis. Instead, he sent her to a trouble-spot nearer home – to the Free State as premier, to pour oil on the troubled waters there.
Matsepe-Casaburri confirmed this week there had been discussions about her becoming special envoy to Burundi but ‘”national need” had dictated that she go to the Free State. She said she might not necessarily have retired as chairman of the South African Broadcasting Corporation board if she had taken on the special envoy posting.
The job is currently being done by South Africa’s representative to the Organisation of African Unity, Walile Nhlapo.
The revelation about Burundi is an indication of how much faith top African National Congress leadership have in Matsepe-Casaburri’s peace-keeping abilities, and possibly explains why she was first in line for premiership of the troubled Free State government.
It is also an indication of the extent to which Matsepe-Casaburri’s fortune has been made by top ANC leadership, casting doubts about her political neutrality while she headed the SABC board and her independence from the party line.
The Department of Foreign Affairs has denied that she was ever in the running for the position of special envoy.
Laurie Nathan of the Centre for Conflict Resolution this week praised Matsepe- Casaburri’s ability and potential as a peace-keeper, saying that he had been impressed with her input at recent conferences on defence.
Democratic Party leader Tony Leon said, in contrast, that her possible deployment to Burundi confirmed she was nothing more than an ” ANC apparatchik in drag” .
“This whole concept of redeployment between so-called independent organisations and ANC posts is completely destructive to the notion of an independent civic society taking root in this country. It makes a mockery of the byzantine selection processes we go through, as in the case of the SABC board,” he said.
@ They speak up, and let revenge take care of itself
Solace in solidarity: An East Rand community is finding ways to forgive and forget utlast the truth commission that will
Eddie Koch
DOWN in Duduza there is a lot of talk about the “one-armed bandit”, the “spy’s sister”, the police informer, the mother whose daughters were “fried like chickens” and the sister of a dead urban guerrilla.
Every now and then this motley group of women and men get together to search for the truth behind the terrible events that racked the tiny township on the East Rand 10 years ago.
In the process, they are creating a new moral order in a place where evil once reigned – and finding ways to forgive and forget that are probably more effective, and will last much longer, than the official procedures set up by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
When I first met them, at a meeting organised by the Duduza branch of an organisation called Khulumani (isiZulu for “speak out”), Humphrey Tshabalala thrust the stump on the end of his arm into my palm, clasped my hand firmly with the only finger he has left, and said: “You’re welcome.”
He is a surviving member of the “one-armed bandits” – the name given by police to a group of student militants who were infiltrated and given booby-trapped hand grenades – and he has come to explain how he dealt with the aftermath of the explosions that resulted.
“In prison, after I recovered from my wounds, a shrink gave me some sedatives. Later I saw a psychologist who helped me with hypnosis. But it is really I who made myself live with what happened. I said, ‘Look, I have no fingers, my friends are dead, but I have to carry on,'” he says.
“I knew I had a strong cause. I wouldn’t give in, and that’s what made me heal myself. But if we have groups like these of Khulumani, they help us to find ways to be strong. This is very important because even if you try to heal, it comes back … it comes back to break our hearts.”
Next to Tshabalala is the “informer”, Nicholas Shada. He was one of the young students recruited by police agent Joe Mamasela. Thinking they were members of Umkhonto weSizwe, they set out one night to blow up the homes of a local government councillor with hand grenades that exploded in their hands.
Shada gave state evidence in a court case that sent Tshabalala and the other survivors to prison for 18 months. “I want to know why they [the police and the prosecutor] used me,” says Shada.
“My colleagues have never held a grudge. But I feel small because the community has turned against me. People in the street look badly at me. I want to see Steenkamp [the investigating officer] and Scott [the prosecutor] so they can say why they did this to me.”
Puleng Moloko comes to the Khulumani meetings for a different reason. Her sister, Maki Skosana, was accused at the funeral of some of the booby-trap victims of being a police spy, before an enraged mob battered and burnt her to death.
“My family fled Duduza after that. We even had to bury Maki in secret in Soweto because the youths said they would take her body out of the coffin and burn it again. I was the only one who stayed. But I spent a lot of time being alone, because even my close friends were afraid to come and visit me,” says Moloko.
“So I was surprised and afraid when Mama Thobela came to my home and said, ‘Look, you are also a victim.’ She was very kind, so I came and after the first meeting, I felt like a weight had been lifted from me. I didn’t know what they thought of me. Now I know what they think and we have found each other again.”
Not everyone has accepted Skosana’s sister back into the community. Many of those who were convicted of the murder and sent to prison for a few years refuse to attend the Khulumani meetings.
“But I have a feeling they do feel sorry. One of them brings her daughter to the pre- primary school where I teach. Sometimes we talk about how her child is progressing. And she pays her fees very well and on time,” says Moloko.
“But I want them to explain why they did it. Whose idea was it? And why did they do it like that? [Skosana had broken bottles stuffed up her vagina and was battered with a rock before being burnt alive.] We, as a community, need to know.”
Ntombi Mosikari is the office co-ordinator for Khulumani and a founder member of the Duduza branch. Her brother, Ngungunyane Mashabane, was among those who died in the hand-grenade incident.
“I heard the rumours that Maki’s family were informers, and I hated them for that. But when we came to form Khulumani, Mama Thobela insisted that her sister was also a victim and she must join us. I was so relieved to meet her and now I say, ‘Thanks, because you have united us.'”
Mosikari is helping Moloko’s family find a psychologist for Maki Skosana’s son. He was five at the time of the necklacing and has never been told what happened. “He’s now 15 and is hearing these things for the first time. He has never really been told about it. But he’s a quiet and worried child,” says Moloko.
“Another family member once gave him a version of why he has no mother, and he went around saying he was going to shoot the people of Duduza. After I appeared on television saying I needed to know why Maki was killed like that, his teacher said he performed very badly. Khulumani is arranging for us to find a proper way to expose him to his past.”
Zodwa Thobela is the gentle old woman who broke the culture of violence and recrimination that racked Duduza in the 1980s and replaced it with this kind of mutual support and kindness. Why?
“My two daughters were killed when police threw a hand grenade into our house in 1985. The corpse of one of them was taken by police to an open garage and the police invited passers-by to come in and ‘see how we have fried these Cosas [Congress of South African Students] chickens,'” she says. The other daughter died of her injuries the next month.
“My husband was detained. He got ill and died soon after. The police who did this are still getting paid. They have their wives and their daughters. I have none of that now. But when I speak about it, I get healed. I get better. And I knew Puleng [Moloko] needed that too.”
Five security policemen have applied for amnesty from the truth commission and have included details about the Duduza incident in their confessions.
Mamasela, an agent of the police death squad at Vlakplaas, has admitted that he infiltrated the group and supplied them with the grenades. The squad’s commander, Eugene de Kock, has explained in court how his men made jokes about “one-armed bandits” long after the event.
General Johan van der Merwe, former police commissioner, has claimed that the booby- trapped hand-grenade operation was sanctioned by President PW Botha.
It is a truism that the objectives of evil men will always be resisted by people who cherish kindness and basic human decency. The extraordinary group of people who meet under the banner of Khulumani in Duduza are testimony to these values.
They do it with dignity and a poignancy that is epitomised in the words of Humphrey Tshabalala: “What use is it to send the people who did this to prison? We have learnt to live with what happened. The people who are living with their unjust cause will not find such peace. That is their punishment. It is why we do not need revenge.”