Fifteen years ago Roger Price witnessed an event he will never forget. Today he is seeking answers to what he saw. Eddie Koch reports
ROGER PRICE arrived in our office last week loaded with guilt, and a grey plastic bag under his arm filled with the paraphernalia he uses in a quest for the truth behind the ugliest thing that ever happened in his life. The bag contains detailed diagrams, contour maps and aerial photographs with a cross near the site of what could be a shallow grave.
Price has always suffered from a bad memory, but he recalls the cause of distress began 15 years ago on the second Thursday of October in 1982, while he was cruising down the hot macadam between Middelburg and Loskop Dam with his four- year-old son on the seat next to him.
“My pick-up could cruise at 160km/h and go anywhere, but I was doing 144km/h when a bakkie and a Cortina, both of them painted sand brown, came screaming past me. The bakkie had a black man in it and the Cortina had two white men, and they disappeared down the track I was planning to drive down.”
Price was a geologist working for Anglo American’s prospecting division and he was heading for some cliffs next to the Klein Olifants River, looking for valuable sandstone deposits.
He turned down the dirt road and, after less than a kilometre, found the men at a bend in the river. They were standing around a barefoot man who had been pulled out of the boot of the Cortina and who was sitting on his haunches, arms hand-cuffed behind his back and a canvas hood over his head.
“In those days black men and white men didn’t get together for the fun of it. I knew they weren’t there for a picnic. I had pistol in my lap, old American army issue that was sold off to the South African army after the Korean war, so I drove straight up to them and asked what was going on.”
The white men were wearing pistols tucked into the right-hand side of their belts – apparently a sign of a specific subculture. One of them with a pock-marked face said: “Fuck off or we will charge you for pointing a weapon.”
Price did a U-turn – and has lived with the remorse ever since. “I drove back to Middelburg wondering what to do. I knew it was no use going to the police, so I went to the local magistrate. He looked at me blankly and said there was nothing he could do and that I should go to the police. I went to the station commander. He said he would send somebody around to have a look.”
After that Price said nothing about the incident to anybody, not even his wife. But every day – “to be accurate, probably every second day” – the geologist has wondered about what happened to the man in the hood.
“I was terrified. For a few days after that, I thought they would come for me. Once I even saw a car parked near my house for a few hours but, with hindsight, I think the driver was probably just waiting to pick up his daughter [from a nearby house] … I was angry and I was scared, and I have felt guilty.”
What Price witnessed that day, simply because he had the misfortune to drive down a dirt track in search of some sandstone sediments, was probably nothing out of the ordinary in those days.
Middelburg was the former Eastern Transvaal’s headquarters of the South African security police. And, as reams of affidavits and evidence about torture in the apartheid years show, security policemen had a habit of driving out of the office to a place in the bush to beat their victims – maybe even throw them into a river and half-drown them – and then have a braai after a hard day’s work.
It was all probably just a routine police interrogation.
But Price, an ordinary citizen who does an honest eight hours work a day and has a basic sense of human decency, refuses to accept he was just an innocent witness of a minor event in an era that involved far more serious abuses of human rights.
This week, armed with the same bag of maps and diagrams, he took a team from the Mail & Guardian to the spot where the hooded man was dragged from the boot of the Cortina. The area has since been stocked with wild game and declared a nature reserve by Middelburg Town Council, so it involved clambering down sheer cliffs of compacted sandstone to reach the site.
There were no shallow graves to be easily found. In fact, while Price was sitting on the edge of the gorge looking for probable grave sites on the river bank, I suggested to him that the men from the security police tended to be cowards.
If there was even the faintest chance that a member of the public had witnessed their deeds, they would have probably abandoned their mission and returned their detainee to his cell. Prices’s intervention that day had probably saved the hooded man’s life.
“Maybe the man will read about you in our newspaper and call you to say he is alive,” I said.
Price refused to be mollified.
“If that happens, I will apologise for doing so little.”
The next stage in his personal quest for the truth involves hiring a light aircraft or a helicopter so that he can take low- level aerial photographs of the river bend. These will be of a much better quality than the ones he has now. They will show where the earth has been disturbed, signs of unnatural vegetation, and will probably tell if there is a grave there.
Why is he going to all this trouble? “Because,” he says, “it is no use having morals unless you are prepared to stand up and shout the odds.”
That, even though he won’t admit it, is what Price did on that summer’s day 15 years ago, and it is what he is doing now.
We will acquire the culture of decency this country needs if everyone who was complicit in the treatment of that hooded man – the men from the security branch, the magistrate, the station commander, the residents of Middelburg who knew torture was rife outside their town – did they same.