On July 16 1987 Harold Sefolo was taken from his family’s business — a supermarket in Witbank — and killed on the banks of the Pienaarsrivier near Pretoria. His body was then transported to Bophuthatswana and blown to pieces.
Why was he killed? The apartheid authorities believed him to be a member of the then banned ANC. How was he killed? To this day his family does not know. What his widow, Lizzy Sefolo, does know is that former Vlakplaas commander Eugene de Kock gave the instruction to get rid of him.
De Kock, currently serving two life sentences and 212 years in Pretoria Central Prison’s C-Max, has asked President Jacob Zuma for a pardon. The request has reopened wounds for survivors of the apartheid security forces’ brutality and the relatives of those who didn’t make it. Their reactions to the news varied widely.
For Lizzy Sefolo, meeting De Kock in 2004 through the Khulumani Support Group, formed in 1995 by survivors and families of victims of apartheid, was a double-edged sword. He confessed to knowing about her husband’s death but couldn’t answer the questions that had tormented her for almost two decades: how exactly did Harold Sefolo die and where do his bones lie?
“In our culture we are meant to see the grave, so not knowing where and how he died made it even more difficult to accept,” Lizzy Sefolo told the Mail & Guardian.
Relief of a kind came a year later when an investigation by the National Prosecuting Authority led to the discovery of Harold Sefolo’s remains in Winterveld.
Lizzy Sefolo’s meeting with Adriaan Vlok, former minister of law and order, was more helpful. She was one of nine families who met Vlok after a public confession of his part in apartheid crimes and his dramatic bid for redemption.
Recalls Lizzy Sefolo: “He said sorry to us and he sometimes sends sugar and mealie meal” — food, she says, that helps to keep her family afloat.
However, she is not against De Kock receiving a pardon. “They [the perpetrators and the president] can’t bring the dead back.”
Surprisingly, Lizzy Sefolo is not the only person who thinks that perpetrators like De Kock should be pardoned and released.
Indeed, Dr Marjorie Jobson, national director of the Khulumani Support Group, says the former Vlakplaas commander has been one of the project’s “greatest assets”.
“From early on in his sentence, he reached out to Khulumani. He asked us to meet him and said he was willing to meet and talk to any victims.”
Jobson’s view is that De Kock has taken responsibility for, and understood, the consequences of his actions. “It’s too easy to point a finger at one human being,” she says.
On December 24 1996 Olga Macingwane was on her way to Shoprite in Worcester in the Western Cape. She remembers taking out money to give the cashier for her groceries — and then waking up in hospital five hours later. The Shoprite bomb was planted by 18-year-old Stefanus Coetzee, a member of the apartheid security police.
Now Macingwane has trouble standing up and hasn’t been able to work since she was injured in the bomb blast. She has met Coetzee and says she has forgiven him. “When I arrived at the prison I saw a young man. I asked him why he did what he did and he said he hated black people.”
Macingwane says she prayed on the way to the prison and asked God for strength. “My last words to Stefanus were: I’m going and I’ll pray for you so that the people of Worcester can also forgive you.”
Ferdi Barnard, the apartheid hitman who assassinated David Webster on May 1 1989 outside his home in Troyeville, Johannesburg, did not apply to the Truth And Reconciliation Commission (TRC).
Webster’s partner, Maggie Friedman, believes that Barnard’s refusal to apply was cynical and that he is not the only perpetrator not to take responsibility.
“A very generous offer of amnesty was held out to perpetrators and if they did not take it up in the spirit that it was offered, no further latitude should be afforded to them. Inconsequential reparations were given to victims and it will be regarded by them as treacherous if more concessions are given to perpetrators after a process that is already seen as one-sided.”
Friedman accepts that it is unfortunate for the perpetrators that they are carrying the can for their superiors and that the system has not been able to punish those higher up the chain of command. “But now that they are sentenced and in prison, they should fall under the normal parole process and not be offered any further special treatment.”
De Kock and Barnard, Friedman believes, “were, of course, supported by a government and structures that enabled and encouraged their actions, but this does not make them victims, nor is it a reason to pardon them. It should rather stand as an example of how people have to carry responsibility for their own actions.”
Friedman believes that if De Kock was interested in helping investigations into other apartheid-era atrocities and has information he has not yet disclosed, though he should have done so at the time of the TRC, there is nothing to stop him from doing it even now: “I don’t see this as a bargaining tool for a pardon.”