The National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) on Thursday started digging up an unmarked grave at Mamelodi West cemetery, near Pretoria, in search of the remains of an African National Congress (ANC) liberation fighter who died in detention 44 years ago.
The family of Looksmart Ngudle was at the site of the digging — a roughly cordoned-off square of empty ground about 13 m by 17m in the middle of the cemetery.
”I feel happy but I pray to God that this work must be successful,” said Ngudle’s younger brother Zithobile Ngudle, who wants to take the bones to Middledrift in the Eastern Cape for reburial.
”We want him to rest in our family graveyard.”
Ngudle’s son, Siyanda Ngudle, was about six when his father died. He remembers his father as a kind man who taught his two sons freedom songs and loved his family.
”I think I’m happy that finally it looks like we will get my father’s remains so we can give him a proper burial,” said Siyanda.
He said the family were still unsure of the circumstances of Ngudle’s death and nobody had applied for amnesty in connection with it through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
”There’s no one who came forward and said: ‘I’m responsible for his death’. That doesn’t make me happy because people were given a platform to tell South Africa and say who did what.”
About 100 people gathered at the site in the hot sun, some of them singing, watching as a team used a pick and spades to carefully dig a coffin-sized hole.
Ngudle was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave.
Within hours, the team had reached a depth of about 1,5m and the frame of a coffin.
”The grave, according to information, will have three skeletons and supposedly the skeleton in the middle belongs to Ngudle,” said Argentine forensic anthropologist Luis Fondebrider, who is heading the exhumation.
The head of the NPA’s missing-persons task team, Madeleine Fullard, said cemetery records indicated that three coffins were stacked on top of each other in the grave, a technique the government used in paupers’ burials to save space.
The two others are a woman who was buried first, and a man who was buried after Ngudle on the same day. Neither were political activists.
The team are expecting the coffins to have largely disintegrated and will dig by hand with small tools to try to keep the bones of the three bodies separate.
A unionist, Ngudle was also the Western Cape commander of the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto weSizwe, when he died in detention in September 1963.
His family was told he committed suicide.
The site was identified through records dating back to the 1960s at the cemetery’s office.
Ngudle is believed to have been one of many who were buried in unmarked paupers graves after dying in custody during the apartheid era, either as detainees, as condemned prisoners who were hanged or others who died in jail while serving sentences.
The exhumation is expected to take most of the day.
Any remains found are to be removed to a laboratory for tests in an attempt to confirm identity. — Sapa