Ferial Haffajee
As former law and order minister Adriaan Vlok came clean before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission this week, a smaller act of absolution was happening in Potchefstroom.
Willem Boshoff, a destitute 58-year- old, has apologised to journalists Laurence Gandar and Benjamin Pogrund for his role in a trial which chalked up a dark age for media freedom. He was a key witness among a score of white prisoners who perjured themselves to discredit the media – with the result that for the next 10 years, no newspaper in South Africa was prepared to report on prison conditions.
Pogrund, a Rand Daily Mail reporter at the time, wrote a 1965 expos on a prison system so decrepit it would not have been out of place on the set of Midnight Express. It also lifted the lid on the torture of political detainees.
The state trotted out white prisoners like Boshoff who claimed that conditions were good, that the toilets were clean and that training and rehabilitation opportunities were available to all prisoners. Their whitewash worked and Gandar – Rand Daily Mail editor at the time – and Pogrund were found guilty.
Earlier this year, Pogrund appealed for these sentences to be expunged from court records.
Today Boshoff is a sad and lonely figure whose conversation is peppered with the names of Afrikaner icons he claims were close to him in other times. He spends his days looking for Joffel van der Westhuizen (a former defence chief) and Louis Luyt (former rugby supremo) to see if they will help. “I need a new set of dentures … and maybe a couple of hundred rands.”
But the decision to apologise and make public his role is spurred, apparently, by a higher calling. Boshoff is a frustrated journalist who spends his days penning news stories for a knock- and-drop newspaper in Potchefstroom and writing flyers for local butcheries. He regrets his role in the fall of fellow scribes.
“I wish it was possible to turn the clock back 33 years. It could have saved lives … like that [Steve] Biko chap. As my life is coming to an end, I want to darem [at least] leave a clean copy behind. I want to tell them I’m very, very sorry.”
Boshoff and his companion, Bruce Manthey, live in a room in somebody else’s house. Their kitchen – a table, a paraffin stove, a selection of tins, enamel mugs and plates – is hidden behind the door. Their two beds are covered with threadbare blankets and the washing hangs from a line strung across the room.
Their dreams are contained in boxes and Tupperware containers: Manthey’s felt- tip markers; the religious pictures and poems he sells. Boshoff’s plans for stories he will write and sell fill three boxes.
The two have been caught in the crosswinds of change. Sheltered employment and the welfare net provided by apartheid is not available any more. Boshoff’s apology is part of making a space for himself in the new South Africa.
In the 1960s, Boshoff was a member of the Afrikaner Jeugbond. He ended up in Pretoria Central prison on fraud charges and served as a clerk because he was a white and educated inmate.
“One day, Kallie de Haas, a life-long friend, brought me a personal message from John Vorster. He wanted me to assist the state. He said it was my National Party and Afrikaner duty to testify against the Engelse pers [English press].”
And he did, taking the stand for two days under the watchful gaze of Helen Suzman. She doesn’t remember Boshoff specifically, but she does remember the troop of prisoners who came to lie about the conditions she had witnessed and which had formed the basis of the Rand Daily Mail’s investigation.
“I twisted the truth,” acknowledges Boshoff. “Prison was bad enough for whites. It was worse for blacks, but it was utterly miserable for white political prisoners like Bram Fischer and Harold Strachan.”
Boshoff got three years knocked off his five-year sentence. He was also given generous credit facilities after Vorster’s aides put in a word with his bank manager.
The bespectacled old man drifts back to a different time. Before he asks for some money for his story, he says: “I want to apologise with deep regret for siding with the wrong side.”
Row over Ntsebeza’s B&B
Andy Duffy
The University of the Transkei (Unitra) has paid nearly R530 000 to a guesthouse owned by the university’s council chair, Dumisa Ntsebeza.
The White House Bed and Breakfast charged Unitra up to R50 000 a month to provide rooms, meals and laundering for foreign doctors who work at Unitra’s medical school.
Ntsebeza’s wife, head of the Film and Publications Board and a former Unitra lecturer, Nana Makaula, organised the guesthouse contract with university officials on his behalf.
The Umtata inn’s room rate – R250 a night for a couple sharing – would buy a double room in Cape Town in the holiday season, according to the Cape Tourism Authority.
Ntsebeza, chief investigator at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, denies any conflict of interest. Other university officials have also played down the issue, but it has widened the rift between Ntsebeza and various groups on the campus; a rift opened by Unitra’s cost-cutting and Ntsebeza’s relationship with embattled principal Alfred Moleah.
Ntsebeza has told the Unitra council he plans to sue Toto Magwentshu, the council representative from the National Education Health and Allied Workers Union (Nehawu) for defamation. Magwentshu allegedly claimed on radio that the White House contract had “compromised” Ntsebeza’s position as head of Unitra’s council.
Ntsebeza has also accused Nehawu and the Student Representative Council of distributing a personal letter he wrote to Moleah.
Moleah’s administration is already the target of a government investigation. Moleah and Ntsebeza are shouldering much of the blame for unpopular cost-cutting policies.
“There is a persistence here to develop a story that suggests I’m a person of no integrity, that I’m corrupt, that I’m not the sort of person who lets an opportunity go by if I can profit therefrom,” Ntsebeza says. “It was an annoyance but now I need the protection of the law.”
The doctors who stayed at the White House are some of the 24 Cubans working at Unitra and Umtata General Hospital. They came to South Africa last year under the Ministry of Health’s programme with Cuba to shore up rural health services.
Dean of the medical school, Professor Lizo Mazwai, says Unitra subsidises their accommodation. The ceiling on such subsidies is normally R2 000 a month. But he says few houses were available, so the Cubans were put up at hotels and guesthouses. Five are still living in a hotel.
The university received quotes from various guesthouses, Mazwai says, and the White House quote was among the lowest. At the time Ntsebeza was the academic staff association representative on the council. He took over as chair in April 1997.
“I knew the White House was owned by [Ntsebeza] … but it is of no consequence. The bid was an open thing,” says Mazwai.
However, Makaula, former acting director of Unitra’s financial aid bureau and an associate professor, ensured that the White House was high on the medical school’s accommodation list. As Ntsebeza’s representative at the White House, Makaula briefed its former managers, Darene and Theresa Puttergill, and introduced them to the official responsible for ordering the accommodation, FN Potelwa.
The Cubans stayed at the White House from March 1997 to January 1998. An invoice for 16 days in May 1997 totalled R25 864. That month, Potelwa drew up a requisition for R665 000 to pay for a year’s stay at the White House.
Unitra accounts show it was still paying the White House last month, bringing its total payment to R527 671. The management and owners of the White House fell out over the spoils of the contract, however. The Puttergills paid Ntsebeza R7 500 rent a month and a variable cut of the profits.
Makaula says the White House did Unitra a favour. “I wouldn’t say it was a conflict of interest,” Makaula adds, “Dumisa was certainly benefiting from it, but he could have rented that place out to anyone.”
Ntsebeza says he has “no regrets” about the White House contract. “I’m not going to let [the house] stand empty just because [Nehawu] says no one linked to the university can stay there because it is a conflict of interest.”
Moleah, Potelwa and Magwentshu could not be reached.