Jaspreet Kindra
Johannes van Wyk clutches his crutch firmly for support each time he rises from a chair as he goes about his household chores. Certified disabled, he has lost the use of his left leg.
His cheekbone is also shattered. His scars bear testimony to his three-year incarceration in African National Congress detention camps in Zambia, Angola and Tanzania.
Although he received R4 530 as interim reparation from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1999 for that ordeal, Van Wyk is bitter that he was never called to put his side of the story before the commission.
At the Quatro detention camp he claims he was shot in the hip and stomach in a bid by his torturers to extract a confession that he was responsible for the assassination of anti-apartheid activist Dr Fabian Ribeiro and his wife, Florence, in 1986.
Van Wyk cuts a battered figure, looking older than his 44 years. He is unemployed; he lives on a R700 monthly pension as a former Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) soldier, sharing a two-roomed mud house with his Tanzanian wife and three children in a settlement outside Kwaggafontein in Mpumalanaga. Otherwise, his wife tends a vegetable garden, growing sweet potatoes and pumpkins to provide food for the family.
An ANC and South African Communist Party member, Van Wyk says, “Now that someone has confessed to the killing, the ANC should clear my name.”
Van Wyk is among the 9 771 members of MK and the Azanian People’s Liberation Army who did not join the South African National Defence Force (SANDF). These members will not benefit from the government’s recently announced R500-million pension plan for former MK veterans. The pension plan the details of which are yet to be released will benefit only those former guerrillas who entered into an employment contract with the Department of Defence.
An angry Thandi Modise, chair of the parliamentary defence portfolio committee, says she has asked the question: “What happens to those who were injured, disabled and did not join the SANDF?” She says Van Wyk is fortunate to be in a position to receive at least R700 a month. “There are others who receive nothing.”
The defence department said the authority to redress the grievances of those veterans who did not join the SANDF falls outside its jurisdiction. The Mail & Guardian was advised to approach the MK Veterans’ Association (MKVA). The MKVA national chair Deacon Mathe said the organisation runs projects which address the grievances of all the MK veterans. He claimed they will be initiating projects which will reach out to those who have not been covered, but was not forthcoming with details.
A former Mamelodi resident, Van Wyk volunteered to work for MK in Zambia in 1988 under the code name Bongi Zembe.
He says within three months of his arrival in Zambia he was accused of being an apartheid government agent and sent first to the SRC prison, and later Quatro in Angola, where he claims he was tortured.
“My Afrikaner surname caused suspicion,” he adds, after he was adopted by one of his aunts, who was married to a coloured man.
He claims he was released after a short stint at yet another prison in Tanzania and made his way back to South Africa with his Tanzanian wife Elizabeth in 1992.
“I don’t want anything for myself I just want to give some opportunities to my children” aged 18, seven and three years. He indicates torn clothing piled on top of a heap of broken furniture, and school shoes without laces placed in the corner. “That is their wardrobe,” he says.
Van Wyk says he has written several letters to President Thabo Mbeki’s office. In one of these letters he poignantly notes: “… I still love the river [the ANC] that nearly took my life …” All he wants is someone to clear his name.