Darran Morgan and Jason Venter
The people of Nyanyadu have become accustomed, in a perverse way, to shocking violence advocated and carried out by some farmers.
There is no quick fix for rural poverty, but there are signs that the balance of justice in this northern KwaZulu-Natal community may be shifting with the recent imprisonment of a white killer with a reputation for evading the law.
Inspector Roshan Banawo, the detective primarily responsible for making the case that sealed Piet Henning’s fate, is preparing to go to trial against Henning’s brother, Eiker, for murder. A case against their father, Zietsman, will also go to trial later this year.
Zietsman and Eiker Henning’s stock farms run adjacent to the Nyanyadu tribal reservation and are the last white farms before the tar runs out in a vast semi- rural sprawl.
The Henning properties are divided by the oSizweni road out of Dundee and it is here that, after the arrest of the two men in June, claims have surfaced of serious assaults, missing persons and a crude police cover-up of an incident where Piet Henning shot dead two alleged stock thieves outside the gate to his father’s farm.
According to Banawo: “At least four men have been assaulted and left for dead in the immediate vicinity of the Henning farms in the past few years.” The detective would also like to explore an abandoned mineshaft nearby where locals say many bodies have been dumped over the years.
In most cases victims are not prepared to lay charges for fear of retaliation by the Hennings.
One woman, however, has lobbied the Directorate of Public Prosecutions to probe her brother’s death in 1990 when Piet Henning, a member of the Glencoe South African Police stocktheft unit at the time, shot dead Mchavas Sikhakhane and Moses Khukhaze.
Princess Sikhakhane says there are glaring inconsistencies in the official version of the events surrounding her brother’s death.
“If, as they said at the time, Mchavas and Moses were running away from the police when they were shot, then why were they both shot in their heads?
“There were six bullet wounds between the two, all in the head. That doesn’t seem possible. It happened at night too. Maybe one day Piet Henning will be free to tell me why he killed my brother.”
Banawo said he would never have been able to close the book on Piet Henning before the police began its cumbersome post-1994 transformation. He would never have carried a docket where the suspect was a white man. Even today he treads carefully in the Dundee district.
When he tells the story of how Henning was brought to justice, Banawo has a refreshing approach to detection, building his cases with state attorneys in Pietermaritzburg and Newcastle. But he is quick to acknowledge the part played by a single- minded traditional healer in securing the convictions.
To the detective, Lillian Ntuli is a rare woman. Her nephew and another young man left her home at Lusitania near Normandien and went off to work with Henning in June 1996. When they disappeared, she harassed the police until she discovered the gruesome facts.
In the six months after Sipho Mkhize and Ernest Mabaso had disappeared, Ntuli spent more than R900 on taxis and hired cars to check the mortuaries and police stations at Newcastle, Normandien, Bergville, Ladysmith, Mnambiti, Dannhauser and Mtingwa, without any success until a sympathetic policeman put her in touch with Banawo.
For Banawo, the sangoma’s story of how Mabaso and Mkhize had been recruited gave insight into how Henning chose his victims – men desperate to work but without strong roots in the immediate community.
Her certainty that Henning knew what happened to the missing men struck a chord with the detective who was already closing in on Henning for the murder of Sibusiso Sibisi in November 1996.
Sibisi was brutally assaulted for hours while Henning and his accomplices drank and braaied before Henning eventually throttled him to death.
The future looks bleak for the Hennings of Nyanyadu.
Piet Henning was jailed for 45 years for killing Sibisi, Mabaso and Mkhize.
Eiker Henning is charged with assault after he allegedly chained a farm labourer to his bakkie and dragged him until he was dead.
Zietsman Henning is accused of attempting to hire a right-wing hitman to kill witnesses and detectives in son Piet Henning’s case.
Zietsman Henning’s youngest son, Johan, died after consuming tick poison at about the time Banawo and Ntuli first met. At the time there was a possibility Johan would assist the police investigation into his brother Piet. An inquest determined that it was probable the young man had committed suicide.
It was an unusual way to take his life. He had easy access to firearms and many residents of Dundee are certain the real truth has not yet emerged.
Ntuli sums up: “The community is satisfied with the manner in which I have dealt with this matter. The elders summoned me so that I might tell them what made me follow this thing in darkness so that now it has become visible.
“I told them, I was always persistent with the police and then, at last, I found Banawo and the truth was revealed.
“They joked that I was a sangoma and that special powers were responsible for revealing the killers. Now they say that one must fear Mrs Ntuli.”