Rian Malan
Crossfire
Before we take off the gloves here, let us pay tribute to Piers Pigou for having the courage to defend the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s finding with regard to the infamous Boipatong massacre, or at least attempt to deflect attention from its real nature (A Second Look, May 21 to 27). It is true, as Pigou says, that the Vaal Triangle violence of the early 1990s is a morass of riddles, and that all manner of plots might lurk beneath the surface of what little we know.
So what? The truth commission did not find that Boipatong was an unsolved mystery. On the contrary, its finding was bold and decisive: on the night of June 17 l992, Boipatong was ransacked by an army of hostel-dwellers acting in open collusion with police (who ferried them into battle in Casspirs) and mysterious, white third force elements (who blackened their faces and participated in the killing of innocents.)
This is, of course, the version put forth on the day after the massacre by the African National Congress and its allies in the “independent” violence monitoring racket, Peace Action and the Human Rights Commission. I did not accuse these people of lying. I simply noted that the massacre took place in the midst of a faltering mass action campaign, and that the ANC had reason to hyper-amplify charges of police involvement with a view to demonising its enemies.
I also noted that these charges seemed implausible from day one, and that three exhaustive investigations subsequently rendered them ridiculous. Why would white policemen, three months after Captain Brian Mitchell was sentenced to death for his role in the Trust Feed massace, risk everything by participating in an open-air slaughterfest with a horde of muti-crazed hostel-dwellers whose antagonism toward the ANC was so ferocious that they would have done it anyway? And why would hundreds of black people lie to protect them?
All the accomplices who testified against their brothers during the marathon criminal trial in l993 said there were no Casspirs, and no whites present. The victims of Boipatong – 120 of them – told much the same story, as did Eugenius Mnqithi, a hostel-dweller who cast himself upon the mercy of the ANC after the massacre and was brought to the trial under threat of subpoena by Shell House officials. His version was confirmed in its essence by such key state witnesses as Elias Nyokong, who shadowed the impi all the way across the township, and civic leader Ishmail Mahasela, who acknowledged that even he had been unable to find anyone who had actually seen police assisting the attackers.
In l996, a certain Victor Mthembu, sentenced to 200 years for his role in the Boipatong atrocity and other political murders, electrified third force investigators by announcing that he wanted to come clean. But he too said there were no whites and no Casspirs, and when the rest of the convicted killers applied for amnesty, they followed suit. By October l998, there was a monolith of evidence indicating that the grand conspiracy of June l992 was a figment of someone’s imagination. The truth commission ignored it entirely.
Or perhaps I should say, Vanessa Barolsky ignored it entirely, for ’tis she who actually wrote up the finding. A former Peace Action activist, she simply repeated her own organisation’s original accusations as if nothing had happened in the six years intervening. The amnesty applicants’ denials of police complicity weren’t even mentioned. The trial and the Goldstone commission were glossed in a single paragraph. Large chunks of ancient Peace Action and Human Rights Commission propaganda were regurgitated verbatim, along with a stray sentence from The Weekly Mail of June 26 to July 2 1992. This pottage of half-truth, error and leftist superstition was laid before the commission, and, without any further investigation, adopted as fact – an act, I submit, of preposterous arrogance.
“I cannot agree,” says Mister P, whose logic escapes me. If I follow his argument correctly, that fact that Eugene de Kock chose to arm Inkatha somehow proves that the Boipatong impi was ferried into battle in Casspirs, while the destruction of eight doppies by a suspect policeman establishes the third force connection. Says who? And on what grounds should Andries Nosenga be regarded as “an enigma” whose evidence deserves reconsideration?
Nosenga is the mystery witness who came out of nowhere in the midst of last year’s amnesty hearings to back up the commission’s otherwise shaky findings. Nosenga, we were told, would not only expose a far-flung third force conspiracy, but name the man behind it – Sergeant Pedro Peens, a notorious detective who, it turns out, brutalised Nosenga during a string of arrests for juvenile deliquency. It was Peens, said Nosenga, who supplied the guns, arranged for “four to six Casspirs” to be present and brought some white colleagues along to participate. To ice the cake, he claimed the butchers of Boipatong were taken to Ulundi after the massacre and congratulated by Mangosuthu Buthelezi for a job well done.
Needless to say, SABC TV turned out to film his sensational evidence-in-chief on May 3, but his subsequent annihilation was largely ignored by the media. Shy, illiterate and easily confused, Nosenga cut a pathetic figure on the witness stand, struggling to understand even the simplest of questions. He denied his own birth date, couldn’t remember his relatives’ names, and repudiated the contents of his own statements.
Shown aerial photographs of Boipatong and surrounds, he misidentified the route followed by the impi as it left the hostel, and claimed that Peens’s Casspirs were waiting in full view of a four-lane motorway. He got into one, drove 100m, and got out again. Then he walked into the nearest house and started shooting people.
Asked to point out approximately where this happened, Nosenga indicated a section of Boipatong where no houses were attacked at all. He proceeded to deepen his own grave by claiming all the houses he shot up were close by.
Finally, he insisted he’d blasted his victims at close range with an AK-47, but none of the people killed by gunfire in Boipatong proper had corresponding entry or exit wounds. After six days of cross- examination, one came to the inescapable conclusion that Nosenga’s entire story was fabricated.
So then – how and why did he appear in the Boipatong tableau? Nosenga entertained the amnesty committee with a story about being picked up on a stolen car charge in 1993 and taken to Vereeniging, where police grilled him about a series of drive-by shootings by the Inkatha Freedom Party- linked Vaal Monster gang. “They tortured me to admit I was involved,” said Nosenga.
But court and police records offer a startlingly different story. According to these documents, Nosenga walked into Sebokeng police station in February l993 and told nonplussed detectives that he wanted to go to prison. He was around 17 at the time, and at dangerous odds with both the ANC and the IFP-aligned residents of kwaMadala hostel, who gave him refuge when the comrades turned against him.
“The accused was clearly anxious,” said
Constable Janus Ferreira, the investigating officer. “He wanted to be locked up and in custody.”
According to Ferreira’s sworn statement, Nosenga immediately volunteered that he had committed many political murders, but “he was very vague as to dates and places”.
It was only when Nosenga recognised a photograph of a comrade slain in a drive-by shooting just around the corner from his own Evaton home that Ferreira was able to connect him to an unsolved case.
Nosenga immediately made a confession in which, by his own admission, he implicated “completely innocent” people. For Pigou to claim that a cover-up ensued is painful. Within five months, all the big-name IFP gunslingers mentioned in Nosenga’s various statements had either died under police torture or been arrested on mass-murder charges.
As for Nosenga, he achieved his wish, and went to prison. Three years later, he contacted the ANC truth desk, and again confessed to a crime of which he was not accused – this time, the Boipatong massacre. His story was punted to third force investigators, who dismissed it out of hand.
The ANC’s own estimation of Nosenga’s credibility was so low that they didn’t even bother to have him sign the affidavit in which he made his Boipatong claims before sending it off to the commission, which promptly lost it. But lo, it was rediscovered in the nick of time, and Nosenga became a key player in what initially struck me as a rather transparent attempt to save the commission’s face. I am assured, however, that my nasty suspicions are unfounded, and being a reasonable man, I accept this.
Pigou is also a reasonable man. He knows in his heart that the commission’s finding was at best premature, and at worst horribly wrong and totally indefensible. To suggest otherwise is “inaccurate, dishonest and contemptible” – the very qualities he attributes to me.