He was the Butcher of Bisho. Brigadier Oupa Gqozo earned that ugly epithet after his troops opened fire on a group of about 80 000 ANC-led protesters who tried to enter the former homeland to force him from power. That was in September 1992 in the dying days of apartheid, as the last vestiges of that inhumane and cruel system were being taken apart.
Twenty-nine people were killed and more than 200 others injured in what became known as the Bisho Massacre. With that action, Gqozo cemented his status as one of the most loathed leaders in the country. By the time I met him in 2004 he was a shadow of the arrogant and imposing military leader he had once been. In fact, he couldn’t even speak properly — his tongue had been cut off in what was alleged to have been a tavern brawl.
To mark 10 years of democracy, I’d been dispatched to King William’s Town to track down Gqozo as part of a “where are they now” series.
I found him at a dilapidated and derelict farmhouse a few kilometres outside the town. It was one of the few spoils of apartheid that he had managed to retain. Surveying the sprawling land as I drove through the farm gates, it was clear that this had once been prime farming land. The house itself must have been a jewel in its heyday.
But when I was there it was in a state of ruin — broken windows, bird droppings in the kitchen, peeling layers of paint.
I took in all of this while I waited for Gqozo, whom I’d been told had gone to tend his cattle and would soon return.
Amid the dilapidation of his house, I was struck by two large photographs that held pride of place in a room that was otherwise in a serious state of neglect.
There was a framed picture of Gqozo in full military regalia in what must have been his glory days as the head of the Ciskei government. The second was one of him in the same attire, this time locked in a comradely handshake with someone who would have been his boss: General Magnus Malan, one of apartheid’s arch enforcers.
My stomach turned and I was tempted to flee. But I stayed put, transfixed by the proud manner in which these pictures were displayed. It was clear that 10 years after Gqozo had been forced to cede power, he still viewed his involvement in the killings and oppression of his own people as an achievement, something worth framing and displaying on a lounge wall for visitors to see.
Even though he testified at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and asked for forgiveness from the families of the 29 people who were killed in the massacre, it seemed he still treasured his association with apartheid’s military rulers and didn’t acquiesce to the widely held view that he had been a puppet, used by his masters for their own nefarious ends.
When an ashen-faced, elderly looking man in tattered clothing ambled into the room a short while later, he barely resembled the strapping, confident young military man in the pictures on the wall. But it was indeed Gqozo, ravaged by time and a shooting incident in 2001, a bizarre accident involving a heater in which he burned his hands and face — and, most peculiarly, the missing tongue that made his speech difficult to understand.
I explained the reason for my visit and his response was firm and resolute. What’s done is done. He didn’t want to talk about the past. He was now a simple farmer and he wished we would leave him be. Any talk of the past, he explained, brought back painful memories and that broke his heart. He simply didn’t want to talk about it.
I was reminded of this chilling encounter with Gqozo while listening to Ariel Dorfman when he delivered the eighth annual Nelson Mandela Lecture last weekend. He wept as he wrapped up his emotional address, titled “Whose Memory? Whose Justice? A Meditation on How and When and If to Reconcile”.
He recalled how he had his own moment of reckoning with a fanatical supporter of the repressive regime of Augusto Pinochet by speaking to her and saying he understood her pain at the time of Pinochet’s death, despite the deep ideological differences that divided them.
I drove away from Gqozo’s farmhouse that afternoon feeling sick. He cut such a pathetic and isolated figure that it was easy to feel sorry for him and I did. But I couldn’t reconcile that with the anger I felt — he seemed to feel no shame about his past. Those were his memories and he was entitled to them, wasn’t he?
That was his recollection of what had transpired, but as Dorfman reminds us: “For one memory of resistance to persevere, it needs — to eventually belong to a savannah of commonality. It cannot prevail against violence and censorship if it does not join a vast archive of other forbidden memories.” I wonder whether Gqozo still has those pictures on his wall.