Guest writer Pippa Green watches the truth commission catch fire
THERE is a monument outside Pretoria’s vast municipal complex, a broken arch of triumph. Its dedication reads: “To all victims of terrorism.” It stands on the corner of Munitoria, a distinctly Pretorian name in a city where names like Cartoria for a major vehicle dealer are common.
On the night of the great fire that all but destroyed Munitoria this week, the two- metre-high block of granite and steel provided a convenient place for police to cordon off the pavement to provide a kind of holding area where the steady stream of firefighters could regroup.
That day in Munitoria, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s amnesty committee had heard evidence from a white Afrikaans man who provided instant delight to the pens of foreign journalists. If you want to fuel a stereotype, look no further than Colonel Marthinus Ras, the man who gave the orders to the death squad to kill a black Mamelodi policeman, Sergeant Richard Matosi.
Ras is thick-necked and tight-mouthed – adjectives when juxtaposed with the noun “Afrikaner”, as they were recently in an American magazine, made me chastise the writer who’d put them on paper. But there he was, looking like that, telling an incredulous amnesty committee that he’d ordered Warrant Officers Jacques Hechter and Paul van Vuuren to “eliminate” Matosi without so much as shuffling the paper on his desk, or looking in a file to see what evidence there was that the Mamelodi policeman was an African National Congress agent. And, he says, when Matosi’s wife, Irene, was killed, he didn’t even ask why.
It was the day when the lawyer for the five policemen asking for amnesty reluctantly dropped the word “terrorist”. There was little mistaking his disingenuous tone when he asked ANC MP, Moss Chikane, whether Dr Fabian Ribeiro, another victim of the Hechter-Van Vuuren team, had treated “freedom fighters”.
And then that night outside Munitoria, as blue and orange flames exploded the aluminium window frames on the north side of the building, intelligence agents of the new government gathered around the Victims of Terrorism monument without noticing it, wondering perhaps what kind of terrorism they were dealing with now. The documents of the truth commission, they asked, where exactly are they?
As they watched the flames leap and curl, Gerrie van Niekerk, a young man from the Pretoria Fire Department, was battling his way through thick smoke up to the fifth floor on the northern side of the building to make sure the flames did not jump across to the part where the amnesty committee was sitting. While he was there, in swirling grey smoke that blinded him, a roar rumbled through the building – like an earthquake, he said afterwards, and he didn’t know where it was coming from.
Gerrie van Niekerk, like Ras, speaks Afrikaans as a home language. His neck is not thick. His mouth is not tight. His eyes are a wide-open blue, of the sort that people admire in children. What he does, he says, he does for the community, and he’s proud to do it. But that night he trembled, as much as a man can tremble in a sweltering fire-suit, and thought of his baby daughter, as he realised the “earthquake” was the floors above him collapsing.
The broken arch of triumph outside the Munitoria Building represents humanity, human life cut short, or so says its explanation. Ras was the last to give evidence before the amnesty committee in Munitoria that afternoon.
As the light outside paled, Ras explained how his superior, the divisional commissioner of police, a Brigadier Stemmet, had told him to order the Hechter- Van Vuuren duo to cut short the life of a man the state called an enemy. It wasn’t so much the act of the elimination – to use a police euphemism – that directed the questions from Brian Currin, the lawyer for the families, or the amnesty judges – but the fact that he had given the orders on one scrap of hearsay evidence that Matosi was an ANC agent.
Currin put the question: “If you’d been given that sort of information about anyone else, you would have been quite happy to say, that’s fine, eliminate?”
Ras answered in Afrikaans: “I would have, but I myself would have made sure that he was an enemy of the state, and then I would have executed the operation.”
“But you were a police officer, not a judge and not an executioner.” Currin puts this as a statement.
“That is so, but we did not live in normal circumstances, Mr Chairman.”
“You get asked on a flimsy bit of information to provide a hit squad and kill a man,” says Judge Andrew Wilson to the large man in the witness chair who is showing only the slightest prickling of sweat. “No written instructions, no other information. How is it that a policeman of your standing can act in this way, Colonel?”
“Such snippets of information came often to the security branch, and I saw this piece as one .”
“You gave the instructions to kill this man,” says an impatient Wilson, his voice rising. “You are responsible for the death of this man and his wife.”
Ras sighs, a long heavy sigh. “That is so, Mr Chairman. I’m responsible because I said to them that there’s a request from the divisional commissioner that this man must be killed and they [Hechter and Van Vuuren] must do the work.” After the job, the matter was not spoken about again.
The Matosis’ young son, a boy who had just passed babyhood at the time his parents were killed, wailed all night beside the bodies of his dead parents. When Ras is done, the amnesty judges go home. So do the victims’ families, the truth commission officials, the policemen, the lawyers. Everyone except my indefatigable radio colleagues go home. They settle down to work on Ras’s testimony, and Antjie Samuels, my colleague, has just finished her script when the fire alarms go off.
The heaviness and trauma of Ras’s testimony is quickly forgotten in the hysterical jollity that often surrounds disasters.We stand on the street as flames from the northern block of the building lick their way through it, crumpling metal windows, collapsing concrete, exploding the methane gas in the air-conditioning system.
Samuels and another radio reporter, Angie Kaplianis, are street celebrities. The local newspaper takes their picture. The head of the buildings’ security, a carelessly cheerful Brian Williams, says that they can move the hearings and then, when the intelligence agents rush in with cellphones and worried expressions, they want to talk to them, too.
The focus of attention is on those outside and on the flames that are beginning to leap across from the block where they have eaten up the licensing and water and electricity departments to the main block where the amnesty committee is sitting.
No one, though, seems then to notice the steady lines of firefighters entering the building, half of which is now a great red and blue wall of flame. Dark figures holding hosepipes stand on the roof of the burning section of building, aiming water jets, in seeming futility, against sheets of flames that are at least two stories high. A pisdraatjie (a piddle), says Williams cheerily. Actually the firefighters say they used 50 000 cubic litres of water a second. Over the 15-odd hours they battled the flames, that’s nearly 50-million cubic litres. A thousand swimming pools-worth for those who live in the suburbs, a dam for those who don’t.
Other fire departments screech in to help the embattled Pretoria firefighters: from Midrand, from Sandton, from the air force and the army. By the next morning, fire departments from the East Rand are also there. The firefighters – young men just out of their teens for the most part – traipse into the milky white smoke of the southern block which is not yet burning. One falls off the collapsing roof as he struggles up with a hose and hurts his back. Several lie on the roadside, quietly gasping for breath, but no-one except ambulance men talk to them. Two soot-faced spluttering firefighters, battling to get the smoke out of their lungs, ask Kaplianis for her last two cigarettes. She hands them over. “Thanks,” they say. “Ons soek asem. (We need breath).”
After midnight, we follow a train of thirsty-looking people down the steps of an escalator. We step off on to the edge of beachsand and a mural of swaying palm-trees with a sign saying, The Coconut Club. A lithe – but I mean lithe – dark-haired girl in a silver bikini walks out of the club, filled with fake swirls of smoke and throbbing red lights, to see the real thing across the road. The Pretoria patrons jump and jive to a doof-doof version of Alanis Morissette: “And I’m here to remind you, of the mess you left when you went away …” Thinking the ever-helpful Williams needs a break, we tell him about the girl in the silver bikini in the club, and he says, no, he’s not “lus vir meisies in costumes nie [He does not fancy girls in swimming costumes]”.
Just before two in the morning, the wind comes up and the fire leaps the barriers that the fire-soldiers have battled to place in the southern block. It sweeps in a zig-zag through the top floor, then the next one, then the one after that, like a sharp knife cutting through canvas.
Van Niekerk is on the fifth floor, three floors below the fire. The truth commission’s documents are six floors below. Misjudging the firefighters’ ability, I assume they’re gone. I do not know then that there are still firefighters on almost every floor of the burning building.
In the light of the next day, when the flames are doused, but the smoke is still billowing, I see the truth commission’s Koki Mpshe walk out of the building in fireman’s overalls carrying two briefcases full of documents. The transcripts of the amnesty hearings are in there, safe. Ras’s words have not burnt.
I see also Van Niekerk, who is now into the 33rd hour of his shift. Van Niekerk has been a fireman since the age of 17. He feels proud, he says, to be a fireman, to do something for the community. This was a towering inferno, he says, and it was just great to be here. You have to be cool to be a fireman, he says, even in a hot fire-suit that sends your heartbeat up from 80 to 150 beats a minute. And then there’s the 19kg oxygen pack and the tramping up and down stairs dragging fire hoses.
But things aren’t quite as simple. He recalls what happened when the roof above him collapsed. the smoke in front of him was white-grey. The heat was intense – some say up to 50000 degrees. He had one vision when the roof collapsed above him. “I saw my child’s face,” he says. A girl, he says, crying openly, five months old, and then he can’t say any more. His eyes are reddened by smoke and tears. He talks about his colleagues, about the new councillors that have thanked them for doing their duty, about the adrenaline that pumped through him the night before. He does not keep any silences.
A young, white Afrikaner, he stood his ground on the fifth floor and helped save at least part of the new government’s infrastructure. There is little glory, and little wealth either. I ask him whether they pay him a fortune for what he does. Not a fortune, he says, but enough to keep a home, to feed his wife and five-month-old baby, a little girl, called Bianca.