MONDAY, 1.15PM:
MAMELODI activist Stanley “Stanza” Bopape was given three electric shocks by police before he died in detention in 1988, according to testimony heard by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Monday.
“His head fell forward, and I realised there was something wrong with him,” said former policemen Lieutenant-Colonel Adriaan van Niekerk to the TRC amnesty committee, convened at Vista University in Mamelodi. Van Niekerk said electrical shocks were used because Bopape refused to co-operate.
“We wrapped the ends of the electrical wire in cloth to prevent any burning marks on his skin.”
Police subsequently learned that Bopape, who was “questioned” at Johannesburg’s John Vorster Square headquarters, had had a heart condition. Bopape, an African National Congress activist, was thought to have been involved in several Pretoria bomb attacks, including one at a creche in Proes Street, and another at a Juicy Lucy restaurant in Vermeulen Street.
Van Niekerk is one of 10 former policemen, including retired police commissioner Johan van der Merwe, seeking amnesty for offences arising from Bopape’s death.
In their application for amnesty for Bopape’s murder, five of the 10 applicants say he was arrested in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, taken to John Vorster Square on June 10, 1988, and detained without trial under Section 29 of the Internal Security Act. There he was tortured and killed.
Two other applicants, Brigadier Schalk Visser and Captain Leon van Loggerenberg, have applied for amnesty for helping dispose of Bopape’s body, while Van der Merwe — once national commander of the South African Police — and two other former police generals, Gerrit Erasmus and Petrus du Toit, seek amnesty for covering up police involvement in Bopape’s death.
Meanwhile, former security police captain Johann Martin van Zyl has told the TRC’s amnesty committee in Port Elizabeth that police killed United Democratic Front activist Matthew Goniwe in 1985 because they were desperate to stabilise black areas, then controlled by UDF structures.
Van Zyl said on Monday that Goniwe was identified as the most effective activist in the region. “We had to chop off the head of the destabilising forces in the area,” he said.
Van Zyl is one of seven former security policemen applying for amnesty for killing Goniwe, Sparrow Mkhonto, Fort Calata and Sicelo Mhlauli, known as the Cradock Four, on the road between Port Elizabeth and Cradock in June 1985.
Van Zyl said after discussing the police’s impotence in the townships with former security police General Nic van Rensburg, it was decided that the only way to stabilise the situation was to eliminate “Goniwe and his lieutenants”.