When I heard that Wouter Basson's theatre appearance had sold out, (see AfriForum's revival of apartheid legacy raises fears for South Africa's future) I stopped in my tracks.
This is the man apartheid's security establishment called "Dr Death" — the head of Project Coast, the government's secret chemical and biological warfare programme. He was there to tell his side of that story.
I actually thought about going.
I'm working on a biography of the courageous anti apartheid activist Molly Blackburn who was killed in a suspicious head-on collision in December 1985. Titled Molly Blackburn: Witness to Justice, it tells the story of her remarkable role in working with human rights lawyers and journalists to steer the course of South African history from the abyss of escalating violence and civil war to democracy.
In the course of that research, I ran into a question I would have liked to ask Dr Basson myself: 'Who poisoned Siphiwo Mtimkulu? And what do you actually know about how the security forces got hold of thallium?'
I need to be upfront. I don't know the answer. But this is why I think the question is worth asking anyway. Siphiwo Mtimkulu was a young Cosas activist in Port Elizabeth whom the security police detained for five months in 1981. He was released in October.
Very soon thereafter, he fell desperately ill — his legs stopped working, his hair started falling out. He was urgently transferred to Groote Schuur hospital for specialist treatment where professor Frances Ames figured out what was wrong: somebody had administered a potentially fatal dose of thallium when he was in hospital. She saved his life — for a while.
The TRC later confirmed the Security Branch had deliberately poisoned him with thallium. What it never established was who actually gave him the poison.
In 1985, Molly told journalist Julie Frederikse that meeting Mtimkulu was the single thing that pulled her, as a white middle-class Progressive Federal Party politician, into the middle of Eastern Cape township politics.
A priest had asked her to visit him in hospital after his release. He told her about the sleep deprivation, the electric shocks, his feet plunged into scalding water and then ice water. He'd walked out of detention seemingly unhurt, but within days he could barely stand.
After he had recovered somewhat, Mtimkulu went back to Port Elizabeth and sued the police. Then, on 14 April 1982 he called Molly's house asking her to fetch him from hospital. She got home a few hours after the message was left and assumed he'd found another ride.
He never came home.
Telling that story three years later, Molly still remembered the phone message word for word. She called him charismatic, disciplined, "mature far beyond his years". Then she said something that tells you exactly what his disappearance did to her: "Whenever I get tired or think, 'I can't be bothered'... I always think of him." And then she had to stop and ask for a handkerchief.
Listening to that recording decades on, you can hear grief that's still being worked through and maybe, buried in it, a question she could never answer herself: what if I had gone to fetch him?
We'll never know. What we do know is that Mtimkulu's story is what pushed Molly more deeply into the political struggle of black township residents. At her funeral some 20,000 overwhelmingly black township residents gathered to mourn her death.
During the TRC hearings a decade later, former security policemen Gideon Niewoudt admitted that Mtimkulu and fellow activist Tobekile "Topsy" Madaka had been abducted, taken to the abandoned Post Chalmers police station near Cradock, drugged, shot and burned with their remains eventually dumped into the Fish River. Even the men who confessed to the murder said they didn't know who had poisoned him in the first place. So that thread was left hanging.
Which brings us back to Dr Wouter Basson.
Evidence from the TRC and from Basson's own criminal trial showed that Project Coast scientists experimented with thallium as a covert poison. Dr André Immelman, research director at Roodeplaat Research Laboratories, testified that Basson had access to toxins made there and that thallium was delivered to him more than once, sometimes concealed in ordinary things like beer and whisky.
None of it proves Basson or Project Coast poisoned Mtimkulu. In fact the timing is awkward. Mtimkulu was poisoned around October 1981, before the documented Roodeplaat programme even existed. Inconvenient truths matter too, even when they complicate the story we'd like to tell. Still, the coincidence is hard to shake. Someone in the security apparatus had thallium in 1981 and used it on Mtimkulu. Years later, the programme Basson ran was demonstrably producing the same poison for exactly this kind of covert use. So, where did the 1981 thallium come from?
When I interviewed former Robben Island prisoner Saki Macozoma, who was close to Molly, for the biography, he said something that's stuck with me, that the security police were always hunting for quieter ways to eliminate opponents, ways that wouldn't attract "the noise factor that people like Molly generated".
That noise mattered. Molly, Di Bishop and the other Black Sash women used the protection their whiteness gave them to make the invisible visible — visiting detainees, sitting through inquests and court trials, recording names, talking to journalists, asking the questions nobody wanted asked. The security police watched them. But they watched back. Macozoma believes the attention around Mtimkulu's poisoning became its own kind of deterrent.
This is exactly why the sold-out Basson event matters. There's nothing wrong with letting him speak. If we actually believe in truth, we should want to hear the other side too. But telling your version of history can't be where things end. It has to open questions, not close them.
Nobel literature laureate William Faulkner's line runs through the whole biography I'm writing: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Molly knew that long before anyone was using words like "transitional justice." Violence that never gets truthfully faced doesn't just fade into history, it keeps living in institutions, in memory, in the people left behind.
Maybe AfriForum should host another sold-out night at that theatre — this time for the story of Molly Blackburn and Siphiwo Mtimkulu. I'd happily tell it. And I'd welcome Dr Basson to come and hear it. Not because I know he poisoned Siphiwo Mtimkulu. I don't. But because the evidence is clear that somebody with similar expertise as himself poisoned the promising young student, which he survived. Then the security police abducted, murdered, burned his body and tried to erase him from history. They failed because people like Molly Blackburn made sure that did not happen.
Forty-four years later, one question still hangs in the air: Dr Basson, do you know where the thallium came from?
John GI Clarke is a writer, social worker and Justice, Peace and Equality monitor. His biography Molly Blackburn: Witness to Justice. The untold story of law, journalism, courage and the ending of apartheid will be published in November.