Police display South Africa’s crime history in a museum that is brought to life by actors, writes Donald GMcNeil
“Yaaaaaaaaa!” Bursting out of the darkness at the end of the corridor, the screaming man charged right into the crowd, his razor-sharp machete flashing above his head. People slammed back against the walls, screaming too.
Captain Charlotte Kotze giggled. Who says the South African police have no sense of humour?
They have, but it’s a macabre one, and nowhere is that made clearer than on the monthly night tour of the national police museum.
It begins with a bomb scare. A squad car roars up, siren wailing, and a sergeant and dog jump out. Some visitors quail – South African police dogs have a fearsome reputation.
“Don’t worry, he’s an explosives dog,” said Kotze. “He won’t hurt you.”After the two found a Soviet limpet mine – once the weapon of choice among guerrillas, but never mind that – the visitors stepped inside.
“We’ll be going into the murder room now,” the captain said.
The blend of mannequins and real evidence in these rooms is why the night tour is adults-only. There is the sewing machine with which Marthinus Esterhuizen beat his room-mate to death in 1987, with the blood still on it, and the mummified hand of a child killed by a witch-doctor to make medicine.
There is the hank of arsenic-laden hair that convicted Daisy de Melker, who killed three husbands for their insurance by poisoning their coffee.
There, practically still jerking, is Ronald Burch electrocuting himself at his mother’s house just as detectives arrived to ask him who threw a third of his wife into each of three lakes near Johannesburg. One of his suitcases is on display.
And there is the Panga Man – a psychopath who terrorised Pretoria in the 1950s, preying on couples parked in lovers’ lanes, raping the women and slashing the men with his machete. He was hard to catch because he worked in police headquarters and knew when traps were being laid.
To liven up the night tour, about 25 actors play supporting roles. Some have non- screaming parts: one plays a corpse that visitors must squeeze past as blood trickles from her mouth, another a junkie silently shooting up.
Some have only one line – the Panga Man, for example, and the woman next to the Daisy de Melker exhibit who says, “Coffee?” while proffering a cup. Some, like the attractive policewomen who play prostitutes in the mock vice den, have a real talent for ad-libbing.
All are volunteers from the force. Some bring their children, who play glue- sniffing urchins pawing the visitors for handouts.
There are two shootouts, one in darkness, and Kotze smiles benignly at the shaking visitor who has been relieved of her purse.
But the most startling moment on the tour involves no actors, no screams and no fooling around, and it offers an insight into the new attitude of the force. In the middle of all these shrines to murders the police solved is one to a murder they committed: Steve Biko’s.
In a brightly lit glass case is a statue of the anti-apartheid activist as he died: naked, his hands cuffed, sprawled in the back of a police van.
In September, on the 20th anniversary of his death, four police officers told the truth commission how they had rammed Biko’s head into an interrogation room wall, inflicting the fatal blow.
“We have this here because we know the police did things wrong in the past,”Kotze says, “and we hope that will never happen in the future.”
The Biko exhibit was the idea of the museum’s commanding officer, Superintendent Leone Wagner. An amateur artist, she was also the sculptor. “It was very difficult,” she said. “I did it from one photo and the newspaper reports. I have no idea of Steve Biko’s build. I hope it’s right.”
Biko’s body is made of brown wax, his manacles of a twist of an inside-out Coca- Cola can. The neck has begun to sag, she said, and she wishes the department would come up with the money to cast the work in bronze.
Asked about the reactions of black visitors – there were none on this particular tour – she said, “I think it brings people closer to the police.”
That, she said, is the idea. The Biko statue is in a room that tries to even- handedly discuss 30 years of battle between the law and anti-apartheid demonstrators.
One case holds police bullets taken from victims of the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, when the police opened fire on demonstrators, killing dozens. Another contains homemade axes and gear seized from rioters and an officer’s bulletproof vest pierced by an AK-47 round.
The message is the same one symbolised by the department’s new insignia, a flowering aloe. “It’s a healing plant,” Kotze said.
Underneath the wax-style gore and horror- movie clowning (and the truly silly, like the drug room’s LSD trip stimulated by a tunnel of fluorescent lights with a spongy rubber floor), the police are trying to say that they are a new department whose mission is to protect the people, not to crush them.
Even the ersatz urchins and drunks begging from the visitors are not meant to symbolise quality-of-life punks who need to be arrested. Wagner said:”They indicate social problems that underlie crime and must be solved.”
Still, even with their new goody-to- flatfoot attitude, the police in this museum don’t plan to lose their Twisted Sister sense of humour.
“We’re renovating soon, and we’ll put in a small restaurant,” Wagner said. “And what do you think? We’re going to serve Daisy de Melker coffee.” – New York Times