N`WA-MUKANSI (first names not given)

Sipho Mutsi knew that beating and torture were in store for him. What he couldn’t know was that this time the [inaudible] than routine. // On this day, the 4th of May, it was just after breakfast, I saw comrade Sipho passing by the door. It was this steel door. The door was still open but the ...

With the birth of the Truth Commission last year a voice was finally given to the thousands of South Africans who’d been brutalized during the conflict of the apartheid years. For months people from every part of the country poured their hearts out before the TRC’s Human Rights Violations ...

When we look forward we want a monument to be erected whereby all the names of those who were shot in 1960 must be written on it, including the committee members so that children and their parents can know about the fight for freedom by their great grandfathers and this is where they’re ...

The blast happened in the first few hours of Friday morning. By that afternoon it was on the front page of the daily news. The crime reporter didn’t have the names of the dead but wrote that the three were believed to be responsible for a recent spate of blasts in the Durban area. The SABC said ...

Hello. Our focus this week is entirely on prisons. The Truth Commission held a special hearing on prison conditions over the last three decades in the Old Fort in Johannesburg this past week. We also bring you a profile on a rather forgotten hero of the 1960s, Bram Fischer. It is often been said ...

From late-1982 and well into 1983 he’d passed top secret information from the South African military to their sworn enemy, the ANC. // Some part of the information which I conveyed to the ANC ultimately landed up on the president of Mozambique’s desk. It appears that the president of ...

We know what unbelievable mechanisms of repression, of forgetting, of distortion perpetrators use of justification in order not to remember what they have done. When the victims come and tell their stories it reminds, it can remind the perpetrators of what they have done and it is a very difficult ...

That’s the area that I am finding a little bit difficult in giving a one and definite answer. I can only say, since I say also in my affidavit, that this is not new to me. I’ve just been handed in, in fact, from my office I’ve had it faxed. In 1992 there is a press statement which apparently ...

The full story has not been told. All records of police communication that evening have been destroyed. The names of the 17 men who had been convicted were kept secret to protect their families. The Goldstone Commission’s report on Boipatong was never publicly released. Former Vlakplaas commander ...

One of the central issues in the complicated story dished out to the Amnesty Committee is that of a so-called hit list. The list contained the names of many prominent people, including that of Chris Hani. The list have been obtained from Derby-Lewis’ wife and given to Janusz Walus. The Committee ...

The Truth Commission has got a mission to unearth the truth, whether the truth be in the offices of Government or in the graveyard. They have a responsibility to unearth that truth and the families which are here today are very happy that they know the truth about what happened to their sons. And ...

Reference book, pass book, dompas, stinker, different names for the same thing. The hated document that determined the life of every black South African for decades, where they could sleep, live, work, visit and for how long. The main aim of the pass laws was to control the movement of black South ...

Monstrous times, monstrous deeds. State violence brought violence in reaction. The ANC’s explanation that they fought a just war against apartheid is probably acceptable to most South Africans. But sometimes one wonders if the guerrillas remembered that the people they killed were more than enemy ...

Daluxolo Luthuli, once an MK guerrilla who served ten years on Robben Island but then switched allegiances to Inkatha was the political commissar of the Caprivi group. // Training was not police training; it was military training, because if it was not military training there was no need for a ...

The Naidoo’s of Doornfontein have been involved in the struggle for four generations of their family. Their involvement in politics dates as far back as the 1920s. // Our family has actually been involved in struggle for well over a century. My grandfather already in the latter part of the last ...

This is the Vaal Triangle, home of Eskom, Sasol and many other big industries. Also home to millions of people who work at these industries and their families. They live in grim townships such as Sebokeng, Sharpeville, Bophelong and Boipatong. For some, mostly men from KwaZulu-Natal, this is only a ...

June, 1986 in Mamelodi. The township a stone’s throw away from the seat of apartheid power, Pretoria. The big men who make and break the laws had just declared a state of emergency across the land. Ten days after the state of emergency ten young men disappeared from Mamelodi. It is known only ...

The names of some policemen keep coming up during the Commission hearings. This is warrant officer Joe Mamasela. He’s already confessed to being part of the murders of three Port Elizabeth community leaders and Durban lawyer, Griffiths Mxenge. He was mentioned again by the relatives of three ...

When Chris was abducted at Zone 12 the people I had mentioned were Hunter, Zandi as well as Themba. And when the people saw those people, these names were mentioned – three people – but Khetisi was not mentioned.

Only four months after the assassination of David Webster the most prominent white member of the Namibian liberation movement, Anton Lubowski, was shot and killed in front of his house in Windhoek. One of the men who conspired to kill him, Irish citizen Donald Acheson, was arrested soon after the ...