TUESDAY, 8.00AM
WINNIE MADIKIZELA-MANDELA left the Truth Commission last night and went straight to a police station to lay charges against Tuesday’s chief witness, Katiza Cebekhulu. The decision to wait until last night to lay charges against Cebekhulu, is presumably a warning shot — the charges relate to allegations he made in a TV programme and a book some months ago.
Meanwhile, former Mandela United Football Club manager Jerry Richardson has applied for amnesty for the murder of three youths also named in the Madikizela Mandela hearings. But Richardson may have opened a gap for Madikizela-Mandela by describing the murder of child activist Stompie Seipei quite differently from other activists.
Richardson claims that he and another man took the badly beaten boy to open land near a railway line, then cut his throat with a pair of shears ”as if slaughtering a sheep”. Two other witnesses, one of them Cebekhulu, say Seipei was murdered inside Madikizela-Mandela’s house, with her active participation.
TUESDAY, 4.00PM
In the continuation of the hearing on Tuesday morning, Madikizela Mandela’s former confidante and co-accused in her kidnapping trial, Xoliswa Falati, accused her former protector of being power mad and a drunkard. Falati also corroborated previous testimony that Madikizela Mandela ordered and participated in the beating of four young activists, some of whom died as a result.
The afternoon session, ongoing at present, features long-awaited testimony from Katiza Cebekhulu, who was abducted by ANC agents and imprisoned in Zambia to prevent him from testifying against Madikizela Mandela at her kidnapping trial.