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- Herausgeber: Jonathan Ball
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
A single moment can change a life forever… A van full of men armed with AK47s is stopped by two policemen while driving through Bethlehem in the Free State. They open fire on the policemen and, from that moment, their lives are irrevocably changed. So too for Fusi Mofokeng, resident of Bethlehem, who was not at the scene of the crime but was the brother-in-law of one of the perpetrators. He is accused of being an accomplice and tried, sentenced and jailed. Nineteen years later, in 2011, Fusi is released into a world that has changed beyond recognition, a world in which his mother, father and brother have all died. Throughout his incarceration he fought for his release, appearing before the TRC, and schooling himself in law. Even today, he seeks a presidential pardon. It is to this life that award-winning author Jonny Steinberg turns his attention in One Day in Bethlehem. In examining the life and struggle of Fusi Mofokeng, Steinberg shines a searing light on the burden of the 'everyman' in his quest for justice. In doing so, he also captures a country as it violently sheds the skin of the past to emerge, blinking, into the modern era.
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Jonny Steinberg
One Day in Bethlehem
Johnathan Ball Publishers
JOHANNESBURG & CAPE TOWN
A thing is not necessarily either true or false;
it can be both true and false.
HAROLD PINTER
Part I
One
I could have sworn that I was in my office when I read the newspaper report that triggered this book. My memory has me reading the words on the monitor on my desk, then gazing out of the window at the brickwork on the building across the road. Indeed, I cannot picture that article except on my monitor, and I cannot separate my first thoughts about it from the view of the brickwork. They are forever fused.
When I return to the article I am astonished to learn that it was published on 31 December 2011, for I was on holiday then, in southwestern France, and must have read it on my laptop, sitting on a couch in front of a log fire. Of this I have no memory at all.
Salutary, that, for those who took part in the events that follow have told and retold the story so often that none has cause to believe what he remembers.
The article I read that day recounts an immense injustice. In April 2011, two South African men walked free after nineteen years in jail. They were black and poor and on the day they went to prison they were little educated. And they were innocent. A murder had been committed, of that there is no doubt, but neither man had had anything to do with it.
The crime had taken place in broad daylight on the outskirts of a rural town called Bethlehem in the province of the Free State. Two white patrol officers had approached a bakkie full of black men and were greeted with volleys of fire from an AK-47. One of the officers, Lourens Oosthuizen, aged twenty-one, died on the scene. The other, Johannes Joubert, aged twenty-nine, was left permanently disabled.
It was 1992, and white South Africans were crazy with fear, for they were about to lose power and in their thoughts they died a thousand deaths. But they still controlled the police and the courts, and could thus inflict their wild fears on two young men without the wherewithal to defend themselves. Fusi Mofokeng and Tshokolo Mokoena were convicted of murder, despite the fact that they had not been on the scene of the crime, on the grounds of common purpose. It was said that they had beckoned the murderers from Johannesburg to the rural town of Bethlehem to rob a wealthy white man. The luckless Constables Oosthuizen and Joubert had approached the would-be robbers just minutes before they were to descend on their prey. And so Mofokeng and Mokoena were convicted of murder on the grounds that they had orchestrated a crime that had ended in a killing.
Six years later, apartheid was dead, Nelson Mandela was president, and the four surviving men who had in fact committed the crime appeared, together with Mofokeng and Mokoena, at South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The four had applied for amnesty on the grounds that they had shot their weapons as freedom fighters. They had been trained in combat by the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC), they said, and were acting under military discipline. They had been moving across the country in a vehicle full of military weapons when the two police officers had approached them. Their standing orders were to resist surrendering either themselves or their weapons. And so they had opened fire.
If an applicant before the Amnesty Committee of the TRC could show that his motives were political and if he confessed the full extent of his crime, the law bound the TRC to grant him amnesty. The four were so granted.
Fusi Mofokeng took the stand. He and Tshokolo Mokoena had no crime to confess, he said. They were not trained in military combat. They were just ordinary young men. They had not beckoned the combatants to Bethlehem. They had played no role in the events that unfolded that day. Their four co-applicants confirmed that this was indeed the case.
The Amnesty Committee expressed its heartfelt sympathy for Mofokeng and Mokoena. But it could not grant them amnesty for they had committed no crime. And so the four who were guilty of murder walked free, while the two who were guilty of nothing remained in prison for another twelve years.
It could be that I and my fellow South Africans have become hardened to travesty. For I must confess that the story stayed with me, not for the injustice it recounted but for a casual remark Fusi Mofokeng reportedly made.
‘The thing that most amazed him in his first seven months of freedom,’ the reporter Rowan Philp, wrote, ‘was not smartphones and Google, but that “a white lady actually served me at a restaurant and was very nice to me too”.’
The moment I read those lines, I wanted urgently to meet Fusi Mofokeng. I wanted to borrow the eyes of a person who had walked into 2011 from the past. For I had it in mind that we’d forgotten what had changed and what had not since the end of apartheid; that it would take an insurmountable effort to distinguish the old from the new. What an opportunity, I thought: to consult a person who has been as if asleep all these years.
I wrote Fusi Mofokeng a letter. I wished to get in touch while the world around him was still surprising.
Two
Between the sending of that letter and our first meeting, five months passed. Fusi Mofokeng was not one to proceed on impulse, it appeared; he had felt it necessary to take advice before acting upon correspondence from out of the blue. And, besides, I was living in the United Kingdom and some time passed before I could make it to South Africa.
Having set aside a day and a time many weeks in advance, I finally phoned him on the afternoon of 18 June 2012, on the road from Johannesburg to Bethlehem, to ask for directions to his house.
‘You will get lost in the black township,’ he said, the voice in my ear deliberate and courteous. ‘Even myself, I am still getting lost.’
And so, at rush hour, at an intersection in the very centre of Bethlehem, a middle-aged man in a golf shirt waved to me from the other side of the street. I crossed and went to him and shook his hand and he invited me into the passenger seat of his car, an old red Toyota Camry.
He drove out into the traffic with great caution, his body bent towards the windscreen, his shoulders a little hunched. We exchanged pleasantries – about my drive from Johannesburg, for instance, and about his day at work. He had spent much of it under the bonnets of various Bethlehem municipal vehicles.
‘I like to be alone with a broken machine,’ he said. ‘You concentrate hard. You look at your watch and are surprised because the day is done. If, by then, you have fixed the machine, it has been a good day.’
From out of the blue, on the open road leading out of town, he gasped suddenly and ducked his head, his hands still firm on the steering wheel. I swivelled instinctively to see if a missile had been thrown into the car.
He recovered his composure and smiled at me, somewhat embarrassed.
‘There is a speed camera in this spot,’ he said conspiratorially, pointing a finger at the side of the road, ‘right as you descend the hill and pick up speed. They have caught me here three times. I have learnt to slow down. But now I was chatting to you and not paying attention. I think I was doing sixty-five kilometres per hour.’
A forgotten feeling came over me. I took in his shaven head and cheeks, his even-tempered face, his maroon golf shirt and his polyester slacks, the gentle bulge of his soft stomach and the smell of soap. I felt I had met him many times before. He was a middle-aged workingman who doffs his cap at strangers and on Sunday mornings sings in a steady baritone in the church pews.
I was transported back nearly a quarter of a century to the days when I met such men every Tuesday evening, at the Congress of South African Trade Unions Johannesburg Shop Stewards Local, during the dying days of apartheid. These modest men more than twice my age, men who seemed to shuffle rather than to walk, and who greeted me with a decorum so deep and so strange that they seemed to come from another world.
Bohlokong, Bethlehem’s black township, was as labyrinthine and hard to navigate as Fusi Mofokeng had suggested. We zigzagged through a warren of dust roads crowded with pedestrians: men and women returning from work, boys and young men huddled in circles, their backs to the world. At his house, Fusi Mofokeng told me, Tshokolo Mokoena, his fellow innocent, the man who had walked out of prison with him the previous year, was waiting.
Fusi Mofokeng, Tshokolo Mokoena and I met that evening and the next. We sat at a table in the house the government had built for Fusi’s mother while he was in prison. In the same room, his sister, Victoria, watched a Sesotho-language drama on television. The house was tiny, thirty-one square metres in all, identical to three million other houses the government had built for the poor since coming to power in 1994. As we sat there talking, some twelve million human souls sat in precisely the same house, most of them, I imagined, watching television.
I confess that I struggled to connect with Tshokolo Mokoena during that first evening. He spoke in short bursts of what seemed to me self-pity and accusation, his words collecting in a heap on the table before us. Looking at the notes I made, they are filled almost entirely with Fusi Mofokeng’s words. During his years in prison, he said, the world outside slowly emptied of the people he loved: first, his beloved brother Amos, then his father, then his mother. He was not permitted to attend any of their burials, he said, and could thus not truly comprehend that they were no longer out there in the world.
For nineteen years, he said, you fight to get out of prison. Finally, a fax comes from on high authorising your release. The day draws near. You dress up in a borrowed suit and walk out to cameras and politicians – for the two of you are now famous for your innocence.
‘My main feeling was sadness,’ Fusi Mofokeng said. ‘I thought to myself: I am walking on the streets of Bethlehem, but my father and my brother and my mother are no longer here and so are they still my streets? I wanted my brother to see my release. Everyone was shaking my hand and slapping my back. But what was I thinking was I must go as soon as I can to my brother’s grave. I wanted to see it. He had been gone eighteen years and six months but I had not yet accepted that he was dead.’
Later in the evening, he suggested again that the world had become unfamiliar in the profoundest of ways.
‘People we had known were dead,’ he told me. ‘Others who greeted us had not yet been born when we were last here. People from the past came to see us but I did not recognise them. Others were nearly familiar, but not quite.
‘On my first night home, I could not sleep. I lay listening to the wind. I imagined the empty street outside. It was my home street now, but it seemed foreign and dangerous.’
As Fusi Mofokeng spoke, I turned away and looked at Victoria. In retrospect, I see that something must have drawn my attention: a glint, or a flash, as the overhead light caught the moisture on her face. She was gazing at the television screen, exposing her profile to me. A tear was running down her cheek and her eyes were blinking.
Fusi clocked that something in the living room had captured my attention for he turned in his chair. On seeing his sister crying he stood up and drew the interview abruptly to a close.
‘I am sorry we didn’t speak longer,’ he said, as he drove me back to my car. ‘You have come a long way and were maybe expecting to speak for a long time. I noticed while we were talking that our discussion had upset Victoria. I did not want her to keep listening to things that made her sad. And in any case, I have had flu for the last week. I think I should get an early night.’
I was very happy with the evening, I said, and did not think that the discussion had ended too soon. And I asked him how he had dealt with having flu when he was in prison.
‘I was never sick in prison,’ he replied. ‘I was always healthy. Except for stomach ulcers. I was told that I got them because I was depressed.’
We drove in silence for some time.
‘I was depressed,’ he continued, ‘because I was struggling alone. Tshokolo could not help me; he only has a Standard 3. I was struggling on our case and I was alone and it made me depressed. In prison, I finished high school, I did it by correspondence. The subjects I did for matric were mainly law subjects. I had to understand why we were in jail. Tshokolo could not write. I didn’t want someone else to write for me because they would have got what I was saying wrong. I wanted to express my own feelings.’
‘It is amazing to me that you are not angrier,’ I said.
He stared straight ahead, about his mouth the vaguest hint of a smile.
‘I was very angry,’ he replied. ‘I realised that if I did not stop being angry, I was going to die. It was a slow thing, to come to understand that my anger was making ulcers inside me, that the ulcers would turn into something worse, that I was busy dying.’
‘Do you remember how it came to you?’ I asked. ‘The connection between your anger and your health.’
‘I was shown the connection,’ he said, ‘by a warder, a very good man, a white man. His name was Steyn. One morning he came to me and said, “Fusi, I am watching your face. It is grey. You need to accept what has happened to you. If you do not, you will get very sick and you will not recover. I can see it in your face.”
‘I started to learn to step away, to watch myself from the other end of the room. I am still learning. It is an ongoing process. Even tonight, when I saw that Victoria was upset, I grew very angry. You maybe could not see it because I speak softly, but underneath I was wondering whether I will ever properly learn to control my anger.’
We did not speak again on that journey. I stared out of the window at the yellow and white lights of Bethlehem, the pulse in my temple pumping swollen feelings into my head. I was rehearsing how I might ask his permission to write this book.
Three
The way Fusi Mofokeng remembers it now, he was woken that day, 2 April 1992, when his brother-in-law, Sikhalo Ncala, knocked on his front door. It was late to be in bed, about 7:45 a.m.; but Fusi had booked himself off work sick and had no reason to tear himself from his blankets at dawn.
Bethlehem was unseasonably hot that day – by early afternoon the temperature would have climbed to thirty degrees – and when he opened the front door, a warm breeze must have washed over his face.
The two men greeted. Sikhalo lived outside Johannesburg, a good two-and-a-half-hour drive from Bethlehem. He said that he had left home before dawn, that he was on his way to Inanda in what was then still called Natal (today’s KwaZulu-Natal) and had stopped in Bethlehem to see Amos, Fusi’s elder brother. But Amos was gone. He had left for work at least an hour earlier, and would not be back until late afternoon.
Sikhalo stepped aside and nodded at the driveway to reveal a bakkie, its cargo area covered by a white canopy. It was full of men, he informed Fusi: one in the front seat, two behind, and another four in the back.
‘I must see Amos,’ Fusi remembers Sikhalo saying, ‘even if we must wait all day.’ And so Fusi invited them in.
From the moment the men climbed out of the bakkie, it was clear that something was not right. Each greeted Fusi furtively, absently, brushing past him with barely a word. Once they were in the house – eight grown men crowded into a small home – Fusi smelled their unease.
I am telling the story as Fusi first told it to me – we were sitting opposite each other at a chain fish restaurant in the centre of Bethlehem, a plate of hake and chips in front of each of us, at the surrounding tables white people who had come to eat from the surrounding suburbs. I think of that evening now as one of innocence, both mine and his. For in the coming years I would take him back to that morning often and his account would shift and buckle.
But a truth certain beyond doubt is that the men who walked into Fusi’s home that morning had come from a civil war.
Many years earlier, Sikhalo had left Bethlehem with his newly wedded wife, Fusi’s sister Victoria, and settled on the East Rand of Johannesburg; he had found work in the building industry and, after some time, established a modest construction business of his own. Having lived for several years in the backyards of other people’s homes, he and Victoria erected a shack in a newly formed shantytown called Phola Park and were living there when the apartheid government unbanned its foe, the ANC, in 1990. In the uncertainty, fear and sheer malice the interregnum unleashed, the East Rand descended into warfare, armed civilian against armed civilian, one side supporting the ANC, the other the Zulu nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), the apartheid police and army playing a murky and by no means impartial role in between.
Sikhalo was among the residents of Phola Park who chose to fight. By day he ran a construction business; by night he was a member of a self-defence unit (SDU) aligned to the ANC. He had become a soldier-workingman whose military training consisted of learning to assemble and fire an AK-47 in secret in the dead of night.
When his brother-in-law arrived in Bethlehem that morning, Fusi assumed that it was the civilian Sikhalo who had come.
‘He had done construction work in Natal before,’ Fusi told me. ‘I thought that the ones with him were the labourers he had employed.’
Only once the men had filled the house with their aggression and their fear did Fusi begin to suspect that it was the soldier Sikhalo who had come to his house.
Normally, Fusi would have been out of the house by 7:45 a.m. He would have been at work behind a cash register at Checkers, one of the large supermarkets in the centre of the white town. Sikhalo would have knocked on the door of an empty house, prowled around for a while, and then left to make other plans. But Fusi was ill and he had taken time off.
There was no food in the house; some of the Phola Park men took the bakkie into town to buy breakfast. Where exactly they went and why, precisely what was in the sausages they brought back to cook on Fusi’s stove: these questions would linger for years.
Fusi left, too, to visit his father, who was also sick, and to shop. He returned in the early afternoon.
Several people came to see him during the course of the day and each of these visits would come to matter; each would be contorted to tell a story. First, a young man called Thabo Motaung arrived. Fusi’s father had sent him to see if his ailing son required attention. He was warmed by his father’s thoughtfulness; he had remembered that his son was ill.
Two women visited in the early afternoon: Amos’s girlfriend and another. They idled away an hour or two, drinking tea, talking about nothing in particular. In the mid-afternoon, shortly after they had gone, the Phola Park men, who had been hanging about the yard, prepared to depart. Fusi was not sorry to see them go. He washed the dishes they had dirtied and swept the house.
The dying sun brought Tshokolo Mokoena, as it had done every day since Fusi had been ill. Mokoena sat down and rolled a joint out of newspaper.
‘He was a great dagga smoker,’ Fusi recalled. ‘He was a welder. He had a job at a workshop in town. He knocked off at 4:45. He would walk across the fields straight to my house. By 5:15 he would be sitting next to me, smoking his dagga.’
They had met about a year earlier. Opposite Checkers was an establishment where people bet on horses. During his lunch hour one day, Fusi had eyed a young man heading into the betting store, his jaw clenched, the tips of two bank notes protruding from his fist. The tension in the young man’s face and in his gait had amused Fusi. He had waited for him to come out, stepped into his path and introduced himself, his eyes full of mirth.
Now, Mokoena sat in Fusi’s yard on an upturned crate, smoking his joint. The sound of police sirens filled the two men’s ears, first from far away, then very close, then far again. As they sat there talking, Mokoena smoking, their conversation was stopped short by a deafening noise, mechanical and unfamiliar, and before they had time to register what it might be an aircraft flew over Fusi’s yard, so low that he glimpsed the crown of the pilot’s head. It was a crop-sprayer, Fusi noted, but the nearest wheatfields were several kilometres away.
Fusi left Tshokolo Mokoena on his upturned crate and went out into the street. People had shot the police somewhere – that is what Fusi heard: he does not remember now who said it. In the twilight, army trucks began rolling into the township and disgorging one soldier after another. By nightfall, Bohlokong, Bethlehem’s black township, was swarming with uniformed men and their guns and their machines.
The sight was not unfamiliar. For the last seven years, ever since young people had taken to the streets, marching, throwing stones, enforcing boycotts of white businesses, armed personnel had periodically swept the township. Sometimes they came at 5:00 on a Friday morning, hundreds of them, knocking on every door. Any young man sixteen years or older they dragged from his home, threw into a van and drove to the police station in town. There, the young men of Bohlokong would be crammed into holding cells, only to be led out one by one, their fingerprints taken, some of them pushed and slapped, before being sent home.
When news came that a raid had begun, young men would bolt from their parents’ homes. Some went to hide in the township graveyard, others in churches and schools where they would lock the doors. On one of these raids, the police had marched into the house, ordered Fusi from his bed and threatened to take him away. His aunt, who was living with Fusi at that time, had stood between him and the police, her hands on her ample hips.
‘This boy works at Checkers,’ she had shouted. ‘He must be at work at 8:00 a.m. If he is late he will be fired. You can take him, but then you must pay his wage.’
Now, with a plane flying overhead and the soldiers in the township, Tshokolo decided to chance the streets and go home, leaving Fusi to prepare food for Amos, who arrived several minutes after Tshokolo had left. Before Fusi could serve dinner, there was a quiet rapping on the door. It was Sikhalo’s younger brother, a shy, stuttering man whom Fusi had known for as long as he could remember.
His message was so strange that at first Fusi did not understand what he was saying.
‘My brother is here,’ he kept repeating. ‘He wants to talk to you.’
‘Where exactly is your brother?’
‘Here. Outside. On the street. He will not come in. You must go and talk to him.’
They went outside and the young man pointed down the street. Sikhalo was standing there on the corner. Fusi looked at him and Sikhalo looked back; they stood that way for some time before Sikhalo finally came.
In the safety of the house, in a murmur they could hardly make out, Sikhalo told the brothers his news. On the outskirts of Bethlehem, he said, a police van had stopped him and his comrades; two patrol officers had approached the bakkie, which was full of AK-47s, for the men were on their way to fight a battle against the IFP in Inanda. Under instruction from their commander, they had assembled one of their weapons and opened fire and hit both officers. Later, as they were fleeing, they had shot a farmer.
The way Fusi remembers it now, Sikhalo recounted his news in a voice so quiet that one had to strain to hear him. He was sitting at the kitchen table, his body very still, his hands fiddling with a fork.
The men had split up, Sikhalo explained. Five had stayed with the bakkie and were now on the road to Natal. But Sikhalo and the remaining two had made their way, on foot, to Bohlokong, and the others were somewhere out there now. Unlike Sikhalo, they knew nobody in the township; they would never find their way to Fusi and Amos’s place and there was no safe house in which they might hide.
‘They will be caught,’ Fusi remembers telling Sikhalo. ‘And they will be tortured. It will not be long before they give you up.’
Sikhalo shook his head slowly. ‘They are highly trained,’ he replied. ‘It will not be so easy for them to get arrested.’
Amos and Fusi consented to hide Sikhalo. They were hardly going to turf him out into the night. In the morning they would assess what to do.
They made Sikhalo a bed and he promptly went to sleep. Fusi, who knew by now that he was not going to sleep at all, listened to the Sesotho news. It was first item: two members of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC, had been arrested in Bohlokong, the township of Bethlehem.
Fusi woke Sikhalo. He told him that his comrades were with the police now; he was in great danger.
‘They are highly professional,’ Sikhalo said. ‘They have been trained how to handle interrogation. They will say nothing.’
He climbed back into his bed and laid his head on the pillow: in less than a minute his breathing had slowed and deepened. That his brother-in-law could simply lie down and sleep in these circumstances astonished Fusi. He himself sat on a chair and waited.
It was about 11:00 p.m. when they came and although he had not yet given up expecting them, their manner of announcing themselves shook him to the core: a heavy knocking on the front door and all of the windows simultaneously, as if a creature with many arms had wrapped itself around the house and was banging with its many fists.
He got up and looked out of the window. A long barrel of a rifle was pointed at him. Habitually, he went to the kitchen to fetch a knife from the drawer. The handle on the front door had come loose weeks earlier and nobody had bothered to fix it. To open the door, one had to slide a knife into the mechanism and push the lock aside.
As he made his way to the door, knife in hand, it burst open, slammed against the kitchen wall and fell to the floor.
They were a great many of them, and they filed into the house, one after the other after the other. They pushed Fusi aside and stopped before Sikhalo, who had now got up and was standing in the middle of the house.
‘Hier’s hy,’ one of them said, and they descended upon him.
Sikhalo is no more than five foot six, a slight, narrow-chested man. He now has a modest paunch, but I imagine that back then he was quite scrawny.
The way Fusi remembers it, one of them stood behind Sikhalo, hooked his forearms under Sikhalo’s armpits and lifted him up into the air, his bare feet scrambling to find solid ground. Taking turns, the others laid into him with the barrels of their guns: in the stomach, in the crotch, in the ribs, in the chest. He was screaming for them to stop. The one who was holding him dropped him hard onto the floor and he rolled up in a ball.
Fusi does not remember how many policemen were in his house that night. He recalls only the three whom he would come to know well. Captain Colin Robertshaw, a striking man, tall and strong. His Afrikaans was stilted, his accent English. Warrant Officer Johannes Steyn, a more nondescript white man who belted out abuse in rapid Afrikaans. And Sergeant Mapalala, a towering oaf of a black man, the bottom of his trench coat dancing around his heels. They were all members of the Security Branch, he guessed, the political intelligence arm of the South African Police.
They searched the house. Everything they laid their hands on, they damaged. They tore open the backs of speakers and ripped up the bottoms of drawers. Fusi was made to stand up against the wall with his hands in the air. Mapalala guarded him. He put the barrel of his gun inside Fusi’s mouth, right inside, so that he gripped it between his teeth.
The search took no more than an hour. At about midnight, Fusi, Amos and Sikhalo were loaded into a van and taken to the police station in town. Through the wire mesh at the back of the van Fusi saw that the soldiers were piling back into their trucks; the search was over; they were going back to barracks.
They have left the house in terrible mess, he remembers thinking. And they have destroyed many of our possessions. It will take time and money to put things right.
At 9:00 the following morning, a white man arrived at the police station clutching a briefcase. He was Amos’s employer, the owner of the Mobil petrol station in town. Amos had worked a ten-hour shift the previous day, he said. And he ought to be at work now. If he was kept any longer, his employer would take legal action against the police. Amos was released at about 10:00 a.m. By lunchtime he was back at work.
The date was 3 April 1992. Fusi had now been in jail for about twelve hours. He would be released from this very building eighteen years and three hundred and sixty-four days later.
Four
It would have been a little after midnight when Fusi, Amos and Sikhalo Ncala were led into the police station. Fusi was separated from the others and locked in a room. For how long he sat there alone he does not recall, but some time later Robertshaw and Steyn came in and shut the door behind them. They did not lay a finger on him. They did not even raise their voices. What he recalls above all is their forensic interest in the last twenty-four hours of his freedom. Minute by minute, they wanted to know what he had done and whom he had seen.
He told them of being woken by Sikhalo’s knock, of the men his brother-in-law had brought into the house, of his conviction that they were construction workers on their way to begin a project somewhere in Natal. He told of the two women who had come to visit him, of Thabo Motaung, sent by Fusi’s father, of the visit Tshokolo Mokoena had paid him after work. He had done nothing wrong. He saw no risk in sharing the anodyne information his mere existence churned out each day.
In the women the police officers took only a brief interest. But the young men who came by, Thabo Motaung and Tshokolo Mokoena, concerned them a great deal. They wanted to know their places of work, their home addresses, with whom they lived. They wanted to know for how long Fusi had been acquainted with them, how often he saw them, and why.
He answered each question as narrowly as he could and no more. They would release him within a few hours, he thought. Whether they would pay the courtesy of taking him home was another thing; probably, they would disgorge him onto the streets of Bethlehem and he would make his way home on foot. By early afternoon he would be installed in his house, doing what he could to repair the enormous damage the police officers had wreaked.
Instead he was shackled, his left wrist to his left ankle, his right wrist to his right ankle. Thus chained, he was led to a cell and locked up alone.
It was truly a grim affair. There was no bed – he was to sleep on a thin mat on a concrete floor. Nor was there a tap. To drink, he soon discovered, he would have to scoop water from the toilet, using the bowl they gave him from which to eat his porridge.
For the following month this was to be his home. He would be kept here for twenty-three hours a day, unwashed, ungroomed, not so much as a bar of soap with which to clean his body, nor a mirror with which to see his face. As for his chains, they were kept locked, always, even when he was alone in his cell. They were long enough, to be sure, to permit him to walk, but whenever he took a step, or turned in his sleep, or raised his hand to scratch his face, they would spit metallic noise.
After breakfast each morning he was led into the yard for an hour of sunlight where he would join a handful of other prisoners. He would pace the yard’s perimeter, his chains scraping about him.
Once, during exercise, whether on his second day in jail or the next he no longer recalls, a prisoner tapped him on the shoulder.
‘They have brought in another of your people,’ the man said.
‘Where?’ Fusi asked. ‘Where is this other person?’
He heard his name being called – a disembodied voice, somewhere in the courtyard. He looked around but could not find its owner.
And then he saw Tshokolo. He was standing on a raised step at the other end of the yard.
‘Why did you say what you said?’ Tshokolo shouted.
‘What?’ Fusi replied.
‘That we were planning to rob the Orsmonds. You and me. That we brought the men from Phola Park to rob the Orsmonds. You led the police to my door. You are a bastard.’
He wanted to reply, to say that he did not understand, that Tshokolo must explain further, but he had disappeared as suddenly as he had come.
Back in his cell, drinking the water into which he shat, growing increasingly aware of his own stench, he found, in a corner, a sharp-edged stone. With it, he carved a calendar onto his cell wall. Each morning as the sun rose, he would cross off a day. What exactly was he counting? The days left until he would regain his freedom, he remembers thinking. But to count the days he would have to know how many there were. And about this, Steyn and Robertshaw, who came to see him often, only confused him.
Sometimes they did little to mask their hatred for him. They did not believe that he was just an innocent boy from Bethlehem, they said. His story did not add up. By now they knew that he had spent a month with Sikhalo in Thokoza at the beginning of the year. What was he doing there for all that time? And in the company of a man who had now admitted to being a terrorist? Thokoza was awash with automatic weapons, with ANC guerrillas who had crept over the border and come to fight. He was one of them, they said. He was an outlaw.
At some point – he thinks it was a week after their detention – Fusi and Sikhalo were driven in separate cars to Johannesburg. Of the journey’s purpose Fusi was told nothing. They drove in convoy along the N3, Fusi in the back of one car, Sikhalo in the back of another.
On the outskirts of Johannesburg, the car carrying his brother-in-law veered onto an offramp and disappeared, taking Sikhalo to who knows where. Fusi himself was led to one police station after another: first Germiston, not far from Thokoza; then Brixton, in the heart of Johannesburg; then Newlands. At each station, he was made to stand still for some time in front of a mirror. He did not understand the purpose of the procedure; he did not know of panes of glass that were see-through on one side, a mirror on the other. Only much later did the others inform him that behind the glass were people from Phola Park, picked up from their homes that morning.
The police clearly did not believe Fusi when he said that he was simply minding his business when Sikhalo knocked on his door. They were convinced that during his visits to his brother-in-law in Phola Park he had picked up a gun and fought. Behind the one-way glass were people the police hoped would tell them so.
Towards the end of that day, Robertshaw locked Fusi in a bare room and sat down at a table opposite him. From the questions he asked, it was clear that he had retrieved all the official documentation the quarter century of Fusi’s existence had left. School records showed that he had lived in Thokoza until the end of 1982. In January 1984, he had begun school in Bethlehem. What had happened during that missing year? Where had he been? He was fifteen years old at the time, just the age at which a boy living amidst a growing insurgency might take to politics.
In a quiet voice, Fusi explained. He had in fact moved from Thokoza to Bethlehem in 1983, he said. But his passbook still recorded him as living in Thokoza and so he was not permitted to register at a Bethlehem school. It had caused the family immense anxiety. In the end, a social worker had had to intervene to secure his registration at a local school. But in the meantime he had missed a year.
Robertshaw lifted his hand as if to scratch his chin, but instead his arm flashed across the table, and Fusi found, to his astonishment, that he had been struck in the face.
‘You are lying,’ Robertshaw shouted. ‘You were with the ANC in exile. You were receiving military training.’
‘I was in Bethlehem,’ Fusi said quietly.
It was an open-handed slap, more a half-hearted exploration than an earnest attempt to cause pain. The big man folded his hands in front him and was quiet for some time. When he spoke again, it was in a soft voice.
If Steyn and Robertshaw at times condemned him as a terrorist and a liar, at others they told him that he would soon be free. He needed only turn state witness, they said. He need only tell the court what his brother-in-law and his comrades had been up to in Bethlehem that day. If he was indeed not one of them, there was no reason that he should share in their fate.
At first, he agreed to testify. But to what, exactly, it is hard to say. At this moment in our conversations, he tells a story I cannot follow. For each round of ammunition we collect, from each AK-47 we find, the police told him, your reward money will increase. They wanted him to accompany them to the scene of the crime. To count shells? I am not sure. I tell him that I do not understand. And so he recounts the same story from the beginning, about the rounds of ammunition and the reward money, about them insisting that to be state witness he must take them to the scene of the crime. I leave the subject and return to it weeks later. The story he tells is the same.
Sometimes he tells me that he agreed to testify, but not to lie. He would say that he knew his brother-in-law to be a member of the Phola Park self-defence unit (SDU). But he would not say that he saw these men’s weapons because in truth he did not; he noticed only that their shirts were untucked.
But at other times he intimates that he agreed to say much more. What exactly is buried in a wilderness to which he will not take me, and to which, I increasingly suspect, he himself will not go?
He can forgive anyone who turns state witness, he tells me, for he himself came close to betraying the Thokoza men. And how can he stand in judgment of those who did what he himself almost did?
It was sheer luck, he says, that he did not testify against the others. In our conversations, he repeats these words so often. Sheer luck.
At the heart of his explanation for his silence is a fellow prisoner. All these years later, he no longer has a face or a name.
‘He was older than me,’ Fusi recalls. ‘He was knowledgeable about the police and their ways. He warned me. “Do not agree to testify. They will want to take you to the scene of the crime and they will take a picture of you there and use that picture against you in court. There the judge will see you at the scene holding a spent cartridge, or perhaps even a gun, and you will be convicted along with the rest.”
‘I had never visited the scene of the crime,’ Fusi tells. ‘Never in my life. I was not going to visit it now. That man taught me. He taught me not to trust Robertshaw and Steyn. They would betray me. They were not talking the truth.’
Who was this cipher-prisoner? Fusi recalls only that he was an older man, a man of some experience, a man who knew what’s what.
Where did they speak? Was this man in the cell next door to Fusi’s? Did they shout to one another through the wall? Or did the conversation take place during exercise time? Winter was coming and one can imagine the two men huddled in a patch of sunlight, the elder guiding the younger from great danger.
He does not recall. He remembers only the words, disembodied, their owner and their context long gone.
One morning in early May, he was driven across the Free State to the town of Kroonstad. There, in the town’s large prison, he was placed in a cell and in the cells alongside him were Sikhalo Ncala, Tshokolo Mokoena and three of the strange men who had come to his house on the morning of 2 April. They were able to talk to one another through the bars and, at exercise time, to speak face to face.
He no longer recalls whether he knew by then the fate of the other four Thokoza men: that two had escaped and disappeared despite a nationwide manhunt to find them, and that two more were dead, gunned down by the police on 2 April, somewhere under the Free State sky. He is almost certain that he knew this much earlier, that the presence of five men rather than nine came as no surprise, but he is not sure.
Within hours of his arrival, he discovered that he was the odd one out. Each of the others had been through hell. On the day that Fusi had been pushed in front of the one-way glass in Johannesburg, Sikhalo had been stripped naked, the tube of a tyre squeezed over his head. They had wanted to know about self-defence unit members: who had ferried guns, who had trained new soldiers, to whom in the ANC they reported. During the course of that long day, Sikhalo had resolved to die; in the cells at Brixton Police Station, he had attempted to end his life.
As for Tshokolo, one needed only look at him to see that he had been badly hurt. During his first interrogation they had taken to his face with the butt of a gun and he had not been right since. He suffered from recurrent headaches and blurred vision. Even now, he said, when he turned his head he felt a sharp pain flash through his face.
The first few days in Kroonstad were tough, Fusi says, for the others were aware that he might testify for the state. The homes of their friends and comrades in Thokoza had been raided. With whom had Fusi been talking? What sort of information had he been sharing? Why was he the only one among them who had not been badly beaten?
Sikhalo intervened on his behalf, Fusi says. Sikhalo assuaged them. It was not long before his co-accused trusted him. He was soon to consider each one of them a friend.
But of what did Sikhalo convince them? He says that his brother, Amos, paid for the services of a lawyer, a white man named Swanepoel. But his co-accused persuaded him to save his brother’s money for the ANC had hired a lawyer for them all, a man named Denis Legodi who came all the way from Johannesburg to see his clients. What they discussed with him, what Fusi discussed with Swanepoel before Fusi dismissed him, he no longer recalls.
He remembers instead that, on their second and third mornings in Kroonstad, they were woken long before dawn and driven in the darkness to Bethlehem. They were being taken to attend their pre-trial hearing, they were told.
The hearing was convened each morning at daybreak. Fusi and his co-accused were considered very dangerous men, not just for what they had allegedly done, but for the agitation their presence in Bethlehem might cause. They were known guerrillas now and news of their crime was swarming across the black township. The presence of these men would surely draw unwelcome crowds. And so they were slipped into town on the quiet, the sun hardly risen. The proceedings were compressed and hurried; the court sat for no more than two hours each day so that the accused might be spirited away.
Of the proceedings Fusi recalls nothing at all. He remembers instead that on their arrival each morning the court building was surrounded by men in camouflage uniforms, the nostrils of their rifles facing the ground. Inside the court, glancing around, he realised with a jolt that an armed soldier was peering through each and every window, the barrel of his gun angling into the courtroom.
Sitting in the dock, he found himself thinking of a man called Gabriel Mahakoe. He had never met Mahakoe, but he had read of him and had spoken so often about him that this stranger had come to live inside his being.
Mahakoe was the son of Free State farm labourers. So was Fusi. Had they ever met, they would have fallen easily into conversation – they were of the same world.
Throughout 1991, Mahakoe had worked as a farmhand outside the oddly named village of Verkeerdevlei, ‘the wrong marsh’, in the central Free State. His employers were an elderly couple, Willie and Bettie Engelbrecht.
On a morning in December 1991, Mahakoe broke into the Engelbrechts’ farmhouse. They had left for Bloemfontein an hour or so earlier and he knew that they would not come back until the afternoon. He ransacked the empty house, found a rifle, loaded it with ammunition, lay down on their king-sized bed, and waited.
They returned a few hours later with their daughter and two grandchildren, aged eleven and twelve. Mahakoe killed them all, save for the elder child, Emily, whom he left for dead. He was arrested that same night in Bloemfontein. When asked why he had slaughtered a family, he was said to have replied: ‘I was killing apartheid.’
By the following evening, his name had passed the lips of many thousands of Free Staters. In the townships of the poor, like Bohlokong, he became a legend, this lone black man announcing with such brutal clarity a changing of the guard. In the homes of whites, he became a virus, his name spreading stories grander and more terrible with each telling. It was said that he had been trained by the armed wing of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), or by Umkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC’s army. While Nelson Mandela negotiated with the white government, it was said, his demeanour ever so genteel, his suit so very smart, his army had begun to slaughter his enemy.
Mahakoe’s trial was to start in Bloemfontein in late May, just weeks after Fusi’s pre-trial hearing. He would take the witness stand. For the first time he was to speak, in public, uncensored, to the world.
Sitting in the dock in the hush of dawn, the soldiers staring grimly through the windows, it occurred to Fusi that he had been swept into a story too strong, too deep. Despite himself, despite having done no more than wake up and answer a knock on the door, a tale was taking shape, and in that tale he was Gabriel Mahakoe.
