Wonder Hlongwa
A former policeman turned KwaZulu-Natal farmer was sentenced to 30 years imprisonment this week after he shot, drove over and chopped off the heads of two black farmworkers before burying them.
What began as a festive afternoon for Ernest Mkhize and Sipho Mabaso in June 1996, ended in a gruesome death, according to their friends.
The farmworkers had been invited to a braai by their employers, Pieter Henning and Johan Potgieter. Henning and Potgieter began shooting empty beer cans with a rifle.
Mkhize, who was obsessed with guns, asked Henning if he could try shooting cans.
Apparently under the influence of alcohol, Mkhize called Henning ”Piet” when he made his request, instead of ”baas” as the farmworkers usually did.
This week, the Dundee Magistrate’s Court heard how the enraged Henning began hitting Mkhize and chased after him in a bakkie when Mkhize tried to escape. Daniel Ackerman, a state witness who was at the braai, explained how Henning grabbed Mkhize, threw him under his bakkie and drove over his head.
Another witness, Ndabikhona Mabaso, told the court he was instructed by Henning to get an axe and chop off Mkhize’s head. Then Mkhize’s corpse was thrown on to the back of the bakkie.
The group went back to the campsite where they had the braai. There, Henning and Potgieter began assaulting Sipho Mabaso. They threw him into a dam, beating him when he tried to get out of the water.
Eventually he was dragged out, Henning sat next to him and strangled him. His head was also chopped off and both men were buried.
The bodies of the two men were exhumed late last year on the banks of a river.
During sentencing, Justice Jan Hugo said the community must be protected from people like Henning, a former South African Defence Force soldier. He said although there was a chance that Henning could be rehabilitated, the court was not prepared to take such a risk.
Judge Hugo said he would not order that the 30-year sentence be served concurrently with a 23-year sentence imposed on Henning last August. Henning had been convicted for strangling another labourer, Sibusiso Sibisi, in 1996.
State psychologist Richard McMahon, describing Henning’s state of mind to the court, said the former soldier had been exposed to too much indoctrination while he was in the army. ”He was exposed to a situation where lives of black people were not respected.”
McMahon’s report adds that Henning’s upbringing also contributed to the kind of person he became. Henning comes from a conservative Afrikaner family where the attitude towards blacks was paternalistic.
Henning resigned from the South African Police Service’s stock theft unit in 1996 and became a forest planter. The psychologist’s report said he was constantly ”infuriated, suspicious and angry at black workers”.
Henning is not the only one in his family in trouble with the law. His brother Eicker – who is currently out on bail of R20 000 – has been charged with beating to death Khepisi Mgaga, also a farm labourer.
Henning’s father also faces charges of conspiracy to murder. In an attempt to thwart an investigation into his sons, Mr Henning Snr allegedly hired a Bohemian (one of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging’s highly trained assassins) to murder the investigating officer and the witnesses. He is also out on R20 000 bail.
Suspecting a trap, the Bohemian handed himself to the police together with the money and the map he had been given by Henning Snr.