Gideon Nieuwoudt has been refused amnesty for the killing of Steve Biko. Peter Dickson describes the career of one of apartheid’s most ruthless killers
He is the last non-impersonator alive with Elvis Presley sideburns. His face is lined with untold stories you don’t want to know. Before the prospect of prison and the seekers of truth sucked the last vestiges of conscience from his soul, Gideon Johannes Nieuwoudt’s name was enough to strike fear into the hearts of freedom fighters.
In dungeons from Post Chalmers to Port Elizabeth, the mere mention of this grim man would induce even the most defiant to talk. Perhaps it was the phrase, “I’ll make you famous,” to men who would never be seen again. Perhaps it was the hosepipe, the wet towel or the tyre tube. Perhaps it was the photographic memory and methodical closing of paid information gaps. But to two generations of anti-apartheid activists in the Eastern Cape, Bible-basher Nieuwoudt, who would don a dog collar to visit the families of police torture victims, was the “priest” from hell.
The first man he made famous was Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko. But Nieuwoudt’s amnesty application to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)for his role in Biko’s 1977 death in detention – one hastened by being run head first into the wall of room 619 of the security police headquarters after an introduction to Nieuwoudt’s hosepipe for being “arrogant and aggressive” – was rejected by Judge Ronnie Pillay this week.
Nieuwoudt’s lawyer, Francois van der Merwe, says he and his client are “considering our options”, one of which is a review of the decision. But his client -with amnesty applications holding back a 20-year prison sentence handed down in 1996 for blowing up three black colleagues and an askari near Motherwell in 1989 on suspicion of being African National Congress spies – feels as little for the TRC as he did for his victims. The self-proclaimed counter- revolutionary, interrogation and explosives expert said last year the commission was “clearly not objective” and showed “overt bias”.
Said Van der Merwe last month, after Nieuwoudt was refused amnesty for beating Port Elizabeth consumer boycott leader Mkhuseli Jack in 1985: “They believe it is about vengeance, retribution and victimisation, not reconciliation.”
That week, Nieuwoudt’s legal team had succeeded in getting his Biko application heard by a new panel – and separately from co-applicants Harold Snyman (who died of cancer last year), Daan Siebert, Rubin Marx and Johannes Beneke – so as to avoid “a suspicion of bias”.
Eastern Cape Director of Public Prosecutions Les Roberts says he will make a decision on prosecuting Nieuwoudt once the decisions on Nieuwoudt’s fellow applicants are made known.
There are few options available for the man who started out in the police in Transkei in the 1970s before becoming a master interrogator in “black ops” in the 1980s. His Port Elizabeth-based security police branch was second only to Vlakplaas and the East Rand death squad in savagery.
Even hardened security police killer Joe Mamasela could not stomach Nieuwoudt’s textbook sadism, as revealed in his initial Section 29 interview in December 1996. Recounting the May 1985 killings at Post Chalmers near Cradock of civic leaders Champion Galela, Sipho Hashe and Qaqawuli Godolozi (the Pebco Three), Mamasela said: “Nieuwoudt beat them up with an iron pipe … they were kicked, they were punched, they were stomped, they were jumped over their heads and they were killed …. They died one by one …. It was terrible. I have never seen anything like that … it was a blazing hell on earth.”
Nieuwoudt and company, however, say in their amnesty applications for these killings that their victims’ coffee was laced with drugs and they were later shot in the head while asleep before the bodies were burnt.
Not even a wheelchair-bound cripple – his hair falling out from security police rat poisoning – was free from counter- revolutionary strategy. The amnesty application says that at Post Chalmers, Congress of South African Students leader Siphiwo Mtimkhulu and his companion, Topsy Madaka, were interrogated before a drug-induced sleep and shot in the head by Nieuwoudt and his sidekick, Cradock Four amnesty applicant Nic van Rensburg.
The bodies were tossed on to the pyre as the killers stood around eating and drinking until the bodies had been reduced to ashes. They were then scooped up into plastic bags.
Nieuwoudt was alone as he drove the remains to the Fish River and scattered the ashes in the water world of the ancestors. Alone, like now, too many lies and too many ancestors later – and very, very famous.