Throughout the world Dirk Coetzee is credited with blowing the whistle on Vlakplaas, but the secret police unit’s activities were first revealed by Almond Nofemela to a fellow inmate on death row. Gomolemo Mokae spoke to Sibusiso Masuku about his role in the affair
It is not difficult to get to the home of former death row inmate Sibusiso Masuku in the Pretoria township of Soshanguve. However, you have to know who you are looking for.
Masuku’s nickname, “Mantolo”, is the password. He got the name at Soshanguve High School, when he used to play softball.
Then the former African National Congress cadre was known to be very argumentative whenever his team was losing, wanting to win by hook or by crook. “Mantolo” is derived from tsotsitaal – “om te tol (to tell a convincing lie)”.
During the fiery Eighties, he assumed legendary status in the township as a fearless “comrade” who had taken to heart the ANC’s message to the youth to make South Africa ungovernable.
Masuku’s activism landed him on death row after he was found guilty of the murder of a black policeman at a comrade’s funeral in the township. The policeman, Jonas Lehutso, had gone armed to the funeral of the activist, John Matlala.
Masuku and Matlala were childhood friends. Masuku had just returned to the country from exile when he heard about Matlala’s killing by the police.
“He was in a taxi,” Masuku relates. “He was very active politically. The details were not very clear, but it seems the policemen saw him board the taxi. I don’t know what happened inside the taxi. Then they shot him dead.”
Ironically, Mantolo’s father, Napthal Masuku, was also a policeman. Mantolo and his equally politically conscious elder brother, Bheki Themba “BB” Masuku, often clashed with their father over their involvement in the struggle.
“BB” was one of two influential people in Mantolo’s political life. Another was an activist who stayed in the house opposite to the Masukus in Soshanguve, Alpheus Mogopa Masilo. After spending many years in exile, Masilo returned to the country as theatre director Phakiso Biko.
In 1977, “BB” Masuku was always in and out of detention because of his political activism. When his younger brother found fault with him, it was Masilo/Biko who told Mantolo: “Your brother is on the right course. It’s your duty too to fight for our people’s freedom.”
On the Saturday we have agreed to meet at his home, the 36-year-old former activist is late for our appointment. His younger brother tells us he is attending a funeral in the township.
We readily forgive him because, while on death row, he was twice saved from his scheduled date with the hangman at the last minute. Then he would have been buried like a pauper, his family only given his grave number afterwards.
After his sojourn on death row, he appreciates even more that it is important that when someone is being committed to the ground, there should be friends and relatives to comfort the bereaved.
The frail, short Mantolo Masuku vividly recalls his first meeting with Butana Almond Nofemela on death row. He had spent a few months there when the tall, fair-complexioned inmate met him in the shower. Nofemela knew “the password”.
“On death row, everyone knew me as ‘Sibusiso’, but he called me ‘Mantolo’. I was taken aback. I wondered where he knew me from. When he saw how surprised I was, he laughed.”
The former policeman had landed on death row after murdering a white Brits farmer, Jan Hendrik Lourens. Of course, then Masuku did not know this. Nor did he realise that his association with Nofemela would lift the lid on apartheid death squads.
“He told me, ‘Actually, you are lucky – we had long been hunting you down while we
were outside.’ There was a shebeen in Soshanguve called Leks. He asked me, ‘Do you remember that day when there was a stokvel at Leks? You went into the yard, but somehow we lost you. You went in, bought three pints, but we could not figure out how you then went out of the shebeen.'”
Nofemela and his colleagues in the security branch were on a mission to execute the activist.
“Then I remembered that, on that day, my girlfriend had come over and I had followed her out of the shebeen. We went out through another exit, but then I was unaware that I was actually dodging them.”
One of the political prisoners Masuku found on Pretoria maximum security prison’s death row was former ANC guerrilla Robert McBride. At the time, McBride’s partner, Paula Leyden, was waging a battle to save her lover’s life. She later broadened the fight into an assault on capital punishment. She also interested Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) in the plight of inmates on death row.
Through McBride and Leyden, Sibusiso Masuku got to know an LHR official who was to help him get Nofemela to talk, Aubrey Lekwane. Masuku and Lekwane quickly clicked because the LHR official had once attended school at Soshanguve’s Technikon Northern Transvaal (TNT)- now Technikon Northern Gauteng.
Lekwane’s involvement in student politics on campus led to him being detained. Brian Currin, an attorney who was then in private practice in Pretoria, had represented the young student leader when he was charged for the role he played in the protests. Lekwane had been subsequently expelled from TNT.
In 1987, when Currin was setting up LHR, he recruited Lekwane to become the organisation’s Johannesburg regional organiser.
At about the time Leyden and the LHR activists were joining forces against the hangings, Nofemela was playing “the riddler” with Masuku.
“One day, when we were quite used to each other, he asked me, ‘Do you know who killed Griffiths Mxenge?’ I said yes. He asked who. When I replied ‘The Boers,’ he laughed his lungs out.”
The callous murder of the Durban human rights lawyer in November 1981 was still a mystery. Mxenge was kidnapped while on his way home in Umlazi, coming back from his office in central Durban. When his body was found, it had 30 stab wounds, his throat had been cut and his stomach slit open.
As Masuku tried to probe Nofemela, the former member of the police’s security branch clammed up.
Masuku noticed that Nofemela enjoyed privileges which other inmates did not have, like contact visits. Among his regular visitors were two white men whom he now knows were Dirk Coetzee and Eugene de Kock.
“The SBs [members of the security brach] used to have contact visits with him,” says Masuku. “He could go to the office of the head of prison to play with the phone. He was not forced to cut his hair and he only shaved when he felt like it.”
McBride could also see that Nofemela was some kind of a special prisoner.
“There was a time, I think I was going to a visit, and I saw him there with white people,” says McBride. “He said it was students from university, studying. I’m sure it was De Kock and them coming to see him. I’m sure of that.
“It was very funny when the story came back, because they were not young whites. The way it was, you’d see this strange thing and just forget about it. I asked Masuku, ‘Who are these people?’ If I remember correctly, my thinking was maybe they were trying to get me. I wasn’t thinking about any other story.”
Then Nofemela – “Kaizer” to his fellow inmates – began telling Masuku about the many missions he used to carry out outside the borders of the country, hunting down and killing activists associated with the liberation movement.
Masuku shared this information with Lekwane, who was now a regular visitor on death row. “I said to him, ‘Get more from this guy,'” says Lekwane. “And I felt bad – a guy was on death row; I felt I was using him. So I also started to ask Sibusiso Masuku about his trial.”
It was just as well Lekwane began familiarising himself with Masuku’s trial because, as he was busy trying to get Nofemela to reveal more of what he knew, Masuku was given a notice of execution.
Once a prisoner on death row received a notice of execution, that he was going to be hanged within the next seven days, he was moved into a section called “the pot”. In the pot the inmate could shout as loudly as he wanted and talk as long as he wished, unlike his colleagues in other sections of death row.
On the last day, he was served a deboned roast chicken. “I was given the ‘last meal’ twice,” Masuku sighs, shaking his head. “I gave the roast chicken to my fellow inmates. The first time I was in the pot, I was saved by the fact that I had not yet applied to the state president for clemency. The LHR helped me, and I was given 14 days to apply.”
On May 17 1989, he was informed that his application for clemency had been rejected. He was then put in the pot for the second time.
While Masuku was back in the pot, Lekwane traced two witnesses who had given evidence for the state in his trial.
“I went looking for these witnesses and recorded them. They were shocked because they thought, ‘It’s over – that guy is probably dead.’ I was busy trying to build a case to create hope for him because I was now using him to get information on [Nofemela].”
The two witnesses confessed that they had lied in court. Lekwane recorded their statements, made them sign, then prepared an accompanying affidavit.
“We had to actually go urgently to get the stay of execution on the basis of new evidence which we felt could be tested,” says Lekwane. “It was very subjective; it was the tape recorder, which could have been forged, but it wasn’t, it was very real. And then we had my own affidavit, corroborating what happened. Advocate Jack Unterhalter led the appeal in Bloemfontein.”
On the morning of his scheduled execution, Masuku was woken at five o’clock so that he could go and have a shower. At six o’clock, he and six other condemned prisoners who were about to be hanged attended a church service. As a Muslim, Masuku was ministered to separately by an imam.
At half past six, when each of his colleagues had contact visits with two relatives, Masuku was all alone. The next of kin who would have been there to comfort him before he left this world were in detention. The two, his brother Dumi and aunt Martha Vilakazi, had been arrested the previous day at a demonstration at the Union Buildings against the impending executions.
There are over 40 steps which lead from the cells on death row to the gallows on the upper floor. “We were in leg-irons and handcuffs as we went up the steps,” Masuku remembers. “I had given up hope. About 20 white warders escort the inmates as they go to the gallows. The prisoners who are about to be hanged are beaten up viciously and abused as they go up.”
Masuku and six other inmates were on the 10th step when the head of the prison, a Captain Cronje, stopped them. Cronje informed Masuku that he had once again cheated death. Masuku and another Umkhonto weSizwe activist who was about to be hanged, Oupa Mbonani, had got stays of execution. Unfortunately, the other five condemned men had to go on and ascend the steps to heaven.
Not long after Masuku survived the pot for the second time, what Nofemela thought impossible happened. The former security branch member received his notice of execution. He was transferred from his cell to the pot.
“Dirk Coetzee told him that his colleagues wanted him to be hanged because he knew too much,” says Masuku. “He called me and said he now wanted to talk. He wanted me to arrange that the people from LHR should come and see him.”
Up to that time, the only information Lekwane had got from Nofemela related to the assassinations of activists in frontline states. He did not have an inkling that the inmate could help solve the case of the mysterious death of Griffiths Mxenge.
Brian Currin, then the national director of LHR, was overseas when Nofemela was given his notice of execution.
“At that time I remember saying to Sibusiso Masuku, ‘Look, this guy, the only way it seems he can be saved is when there’s something he has done inside the country,’ not all these daring stories he related to him about Swaziland, Mozambique and Angola. He has to say something that he did inside [South Africa],” Lekwane recalls.
“He didn’t think it was important to mention his involvement in killing Griffiths Mxenge. Sibusiso related the message to him. He asked to meet the LHR urgently because he has something new to reveal.”
The meeting with Nofemela would be a contact visit. Lekwane could not go because he was not a lawyer, and Currin was abroad. It was then decided that an LHR paralegal officer who had studied law, Shucks Sefanyetso, should go and meet Nofemela to take down his statement.
The LHR then represented the condemned prisoner when he applied for a stay of execution. The grounds were that it would be a travesty of justice to execute Nofemela when he had information which was crucial to the solution of other crimes.
In an affidavit submitted to the Pretoria Supreme Court on November 21 1989, Nofemela confessed to his involvement in the brutal murder of Mxenge. He claimed to have been acting under the instructions of his boss in the security branch, Dirk Coetzee.
Coetzee had reportedly told him, “Get rid of Mxenge, but make it look like a robbery.”
Nofemela had then kidnapped and murdered the eminent lawyer, helped by a number of his colleagues: David “Spyker” Tshikalanga, Joe Mamasela and Brian Nqulunga.
He further alleged that a radio-tape that had been stolen from Mxenge’s car had subsequently been installed in a police brigadier’s car.
The application for a stay of execution was granted.
At the subsequent Harms commission inquiry into police hit squads in June 1990, the former policeman made further stomach-churning allegations about the exploits of the Vlakplaas unit.
Among other things, Nofemela shed light on the mysterious death of a Krugersdorp man, Japie Maponya. The brother of ANC activist Dan Maponya, he had gone missing in September 1985. The former SB on death row related how Japie Maponya had been savagely tortured to death by the policemen who were demanding that he lead them to his brother.
Nofemela also testified about the death of Brian Nqulunga – one of the co- conspirators in the killing of Mxenge – at the hands of their white bosses. Nqulunga was evidently threatening to go public about the activities that were directed from Vlakplaas. His grave still lies at the notorious farm where the murderous schemes were hatched.
“After Nofemela came out of the pot, he opened up,” says Masuku. “He told me that De Kock and Coetzee had given money to askaris who were HIV-positive to go and sleep around with girls in Soshanguve. ‘That’s why Aids is so rife in your township,’ he told me. He said in section M [in Soshanguve] there are many houses belonging to askaris – that my township is full of askaris.”
There is a school of thought which has it that Vlakplaas commander Coetzee is “the good guy” who, bothered by his conscience, decided to make a clean breast of his crimes. Aubrey Lekwane disputes this view. “Of course when [Nofemela] revealed more in detail and mentioned Dirk Coetzee, Dirk Coetzee basically reacted to that process and fled,” he submits. “I remember there were suspicions that Dirk Coetzee spilled the beans. I can tell you that he didn’t. He fled.”
However, Lekwane did not mind the projection of Sefanyetso as the LHR officer who made Nofemela talk, whereas Lekwane was actually the one who had done the spadework. He was still planning on doing further investigations into apartheid death squads. A high profile in the press, he felt, would hurt that mission.
Sefanyetso later died in a car accident. “When Shucks died, I actually wondered if that was just an accident because Shucks was seen as the main guy who got things going,” says Lekwane. “But I think even the security police were not quite sure how it happened.”
The former LHR activist shifts the credit for getting Nofemela to talk to Masuku, the unassuming activist from Soshanguve. “This guy really prepared him. I think he was able to help him tell the story to the public. Sibusiso Masuku was the person who passed that crucial message, ‘Think of what you’ve done inside the country,’ and we know how some of these people forget the information. It took Nofemela a while – even before he got the notice of execution. He was slow to actually apply his mind to what had happened inside the country.”
Almond Nofemela is still in jail, serving a 30-year sentence for the murder of the Brits farmer.
He has appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, applying for amnesty for the crimes he committed while he was attached to the security branch. He could not be indemnified for the murder of Jan Hendrik Lourens because it was felt it was not politically motivated.
Aubrey Lekwane was, until recently, working for the National Economic Development and Labour Council.
In 1998, he was in the news when he provided an affidavit which cleared Department of Foreign Affairs official Robert McBride of allegations that he was on a gun-running mission when he was arrested in Mozambique.
Sibusiso “Mantolo” Masuku’s death sentence was commuted to a 40-year sentence at the same time Paula Leyden McBride’s husband, Robert, was handed a reprieve.
After a protracted struggle to get recognition as a political prisoner who had been left behind when others were released as per agreement between his organisation and the Nationalist government, Masuku was released from prison in 1994.
For five years, he battled to make ends meet, every one of his attempts to get a job proving futile.
However, things are looking up for him as the year 2000 begins. In October last year, a contact arranged a meeting with his former fellow unit member in Umkhonto weSizwe, and now head of the South African National Defence Force, Siphiwe Nyanda.
“Siphiwe was shocked to see me,” Masuku relates. “He thought I had been hanged.”
Thanks to Nyanda’s intervention, Masuku attended a three-month bridging course in the SANDF and will soon be assuming duties at army headquarters.
This article is based on interviews Gomolemo Mokae conducted for a biography he is writing on Robert McBride, entitled Robert McBride: A Coloured Life