The impudent truth commissioner
Stefaans Brmmer
Truth commissioner Dumisa Ntsebeza is impetuous, arrogant (or very confident, depending on your vantage point), ambitious and fiercely independent. Add to that an almost naive openness and you have someone asking to be beaten up on, leaving his guard way down when the knock-out punch is thrown.
By Monday Ntsebeza was all but floored when allegations levelled by Guguletu rags-to- mysterious-riches gardener Bennet Sibaya – that the commissioner had driven a getaway car for the Heidelberg tavern killers – refused to go away. He was saved by the proverbial bell when Sibaya retracted his earlier testimony even as Ntsebeza’s fellow commissioners were discussing his future.
The claim that Sibaya was set up by old- guard cops to implicate Ntsebeza, and so get at the commission itself, appears a non sequitur in light of the evidence that Sibaya first implicated Ntsebeza immediately after the December 1993 tavern attack, two years before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established.
Then again, apartheid’s securocrats had every reason to frame Ntsebeza at the time. Largely unsung as a hero of the struggle, probably because he refused to join the mainstream, he nevertheless was an irritant of considerable proportion to the powers that were. He suffered detention, trial, banishment and dirty tricks. Using an earlier frame-up against Ntsebeza to get at the commission may just have come as a bonus to Ntsebeza’s old enemies.
He grew up in the Transkei in what his younger brother, Lungisile Ntsebeza, calls a “fairly middle-class family”. Both parents were teachers and it was not an overtly political home. Yet both brothers were drawn to resistance politics, which the younger ascribes to their father encouraging them to “read and know what was happening around us”.
Around them in Cala, where they spent much of their youth in the Fifties and Sixties, politics was certainly what was happening. Kaizer Matanzima, paramount chief of the area and later ruler of “independent” Transkei, targeted Cala for attack as its people were not sympathetic to him as in neighbouring Comfimvaba, the Matanzima stronghold.
In 1968 Dumisa Ntsebeza, then a second year BA student, was expelled from Fort Hare University for his role in a student strike. He became a teacher, but his struggle CV followed a less traditional route.
The Ntsebeza brothers and Matthew Goniwe, among others, formed a body based on study groups which explored alternatives to apartheid. Says the younger Ntsebeza: “We called ourselves ‘the Front’ and the aim was to bring together opposition.”
The Front was not Congress and, while there was a “healthy engagement” with Black Consciousness, members were critical of that as it was “not an effective strategy for change”. And while most members were Marxists, they remained critical of Stalinist and Trotskyist tendencies.
Shortly before Transkei independence in 1976, the Ntsebeza brothers, Goniwe and other Front members were arrested by the South African Police. After six months in detention they were presented with the usual suppression of communism charges, a prosecution Matanzima’s independent Transkei was happy to pursue.
They were sentenced to four years in prison, during which time the elder brother completed a BProc through Unisa. They were released in 1981, but only in 1982, after a spell of banishment by Matanzima to Cala, could he join the law firm Sangoni Partnership to do his articles.
But the Ntsebezas were not ready for a middle-class existence. Soon Lungisile Ntsebeza was selling “subversive” literature and Dumisa Ntsebeza became Sangoni’s star defender of the politically persecuted.
While Dumisa Ntsebeza earned the label “PAC” for his high-profile defence of Pan Africanist Congress members, his brother insists he stayed neutral. “Dumisa has never been a member of any of the existing political organisations. He took a resolve to defend all political prisoners … I doubt whether his position has changed.”
Harassment of the Ntsebezas mounted, and in 1985 their cousin Bathandwa Ndondo was assassinated in the younger brother’s house in Cala. When the wrong suspects were arrested they cried “cover-up”, earning themselves a renewed spell of detention and banishment. They now believe the murder was one of Vlakplaas’s early hits.
In 1992 Transkei lawyer Joseph Miso was allegedly abducted from Umtata by “white men” who thought he was Dumisa Ntsebeza. Only after they had taken him across the border and beaten him up did they realise their mistake, and release him.
By then police were portraying the Ntsebezas as involved in Azanian People’s Liberation Army training. Lungisile Ntsebeza acknowledges “there were stories”, but says: “From the time Dumisa became a lawyer, he was sucked into his legal practice. I doubt he would have been involved in underground activity … Training, he wouldn’t do that.”
As truth commissioner, Ntsebeza has met with mixed reviews. A journalist who covers the commission’s activities confirms his openness: “Dumisa is accessible to the media, always willing to talk, eager to give information even if it is not allowed to be given out yet.” But, he says, Ntsebeza has learned to temper his “impetuous statements”.
Yet, his habit of shooting from the hip seems to have been the final straw that broke his relationship with Glen Goosen, head of the commission’s investigative unit. Ntsebeza accused Goosen of “sinister” motives, a slur he retracted too late to mend the rift.
A friend of Ntsebeza’s notes that the Goosen affair echoes the acrimony that surrounded Ntsebeza’s departure as founder president of the National Association of Democratic Lawyers (Nadel) only a year after it was formed in 1988. Ntsebeza objected when Nadel, which was supposed to represent lawyers in the wider liberation movement, adopted Congress’s Freedom Charter.
How Ntsebeza will ride out the latest storm, and how long his reconciliation this week with Sibaya will last, remains to be seen. Says his brother: “He’s open, perhaps too open … At the same time he’s easily annoyed, particularly if you betray him.”