WEDNESDAY, 8.30AM
A FORMER senior MK commander told the Truth Comission yesterday that he spent four-and-a- half years in detention in ANC camps, where he was tortured with electric probes, beaten and humiliated.
Dilizu Mthembu said he fell from grace with the ANC after his father, an MK founder, was executed for “selling the movement to the enemy”.
He was arrested after a dispute over ANC vehicles, and locked in a cargo container for 28 days. He was then held in a number of camps, including the notorious Quatro, where he was tortured with electrodes and beaten with sticks.
Other tortures devised by his guards included forcing him to climb a tree full of wasps, making him lie naked on an ant-hill, making him chop down a tree containing a bee hive, and forcing him to “make love” to a tree.
The TRC also heard evidence about the horrors of the Pretoria Central death row. Paula McBride, who campaigned against the death sentence for many years while her husband Robert McBride was on death row, said prisoners were kept in cells with the lights on 24 hours a day.
They did not know their fate until a visit from the sheriff who told them whether they would hang, or whether they had been granted clemency. They would then be taken to a holding pen where they would “boil with stress” for a week before being hanged.