Barbara Ludman
JOSEPH SEREMANE sat with the audience all day on Tuesday during truth commission hearings at the Old Fort, the former prison in Hillbrow.
The commission was running well behind schedule, but still Seremane, the chief land claims commissioner, sat hour after hour, a spare, dignified figure, his back barely touching the back of the plastic chair.
When it was finally his turn, he seated himself at the witness table with its white cloth, and in firm, angry tones demanded that the African National Congress – his party, his movement – tell him how his brother was killed in one of its camps in Angola, and why.
“I want to ask for the true records of the Quatro camp,” he said. “I want someone to come and tell me why my brother was shot and put down like an animal, and so brutally disfigured so that his … best friends could not recognise him.
“Why do you cheat me of my brother’s bones? Why do you think my contribution is worth nothing? Why do you think we risked our lives calling for your safe return?
“I’ve been on the [Robben] Island. I’ve been through hell. I’ve been tortured and nearly lost my life. But when I think of [my younger brother] Chief Timothy and compare the way he died … my suffering means nothing.”
He had found his brother missing when he was released from Robben Island, but his efforts to find out what had happened to him were unsuccessful. “Suddenly nobody had come across this youngster. Nobody had ever known him.”
It was only a decade later, in 1994, that two men who had been with his brother told him he had been shot to death at Quatro.
Seremane said he had copies of affidavits in unsigned form from both men, one now in the police service and the other in the defence force. He had tried to see President Nelson Mandela to ensure their safety, but was denied access by the president’s staff. Already an attempt had been made on the life of one of the men.
Now he was testifying before the truth commission, even though his family had warned him he would be endangering himself by challenging the government and the ANC.
“I had to make the same decision that I made when I faced the system [under a previous government],” he said. “If it is for the truth that I must die, so let it be. Questions have to be answered. Without this, the weaker ones are going to go back and do it again …
“Why did people like me have to risk my life for the ANC to be treated in terms of the Geneva Convention, but the ANC couldn’t treat their own that way?”
There were records of his own trial, but no documentation of his brother’s. “Was he defended, was he not defended? Where was their accountability that they couldn’t account to his people?”
He reminded the commission what it had been like in the 1980s: “People were being destroyed out of sheer suspicion, sheer rumour. You could be labelled anything and you died the next day.”
He did not believe his brother had been guilty of any wrongdoing. “How can a young boy go from the schoolroom to an MK camp and for five years be such a clever spy that he eludes all their security?”
During the special two-day session. the commission looked into conditions in prisons, in the country and outside. For a day and a half, commissioners listened to harrowing testimonies of abuses in prisons inside South Africa: on maltreatment and torture of political prisoners in Port Elizabeth, Pretoria, Johannesburg, on Robben Island.
On Tuesday afternoon, the commissioners’ attention turned to Angola. Seremane’s testimony followed that of Diliza Mthembu, an Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) cadre who was imprisoned at Quatro.
Mthembu – now a staff sergeant in the defence force – described himself as “a victim of commissions”. The truth commission was the fifth he had testified before, and still no action had been taken to name those responsible for his ordeal.
“I’m very much bitter. I have great hatred,” he said, and as the audience murmured, shocked, he repeated it: “Hatred.”
Recruited into MK by his father, founding member Abel Patrick Mthembu, he had gone into exile in 1976, straight to Angola. Two years later his father was accused of being a sellout; a colleague tried to recruit him to assassinate his father. “A week later I heard that my father had been killed.” The ANC claimed responsibility.
He said his father’s fall from grace was often used against him, but all the same he rose in the hierarchy. By 1982, he was an ANC chief of staff, ANC representative in Benguela province and commander of a training camp.
The camp’s only transport was a bicycle and a wheelbarrow, he said. When the camp acquired two Land Cruisers he was ordered to take them to Luanda. He refused. “I tried to be disciplined,” he said, “but I couldn’t take it.”
A few days later he was taken into custody, beginning a six-year nightmare in prisons all over Angola, from Luanda Central Prison to a set of windowless freight containers at a transit camp, to Quatro, where he spent four-and-a-half years.
At night, he said, prisoners were safe, but beatings began in the mornings. He was beaten, tortured with electrodes, continually humiliated. After the ANC conference in 1985, improvements were instituted: windows were set into cell walls, food was improved. He was released in 1988 and returned to South Africa two years later – and began his search for justification.
“I don’t have any problems with members of the ANC,” he said. “I don’t have any problem with my colleagues in the defence force.
“But I have a problem with the leadership. No one has come out and said `I’ve done this’.”