 |
News | Sport | TV | Radio | Education | TV Licenses | Contact Us |
|
News | Sport | TV | Radio | Education | TV Licenses | Contact Us |
people's warExplanation Since the first white people from Europe set foot on the beaches of the Cape of Good Hope 350 years ago race has been at the heart of most of the conflict in our country. Colonialism and later apartheid meant the subjugation of darker skinned people by light skinned people, but this week the Truth ... You know when you heard it you thought it was absolutely impossible, here she was ready to come home in two days and of all the times she’s been in and out of Africa the last four or five years that this happened. And I think, you know, we were totally devastated… // What Linda says is true. If ... By early 1987 brutality of a different kind faced the Bongulethu community. // Something that stood out as quite horrific from this area, apart from many cases of police torture that were reported - in some cases, Supreme Court action was instituted; the large scale detentions without trial that ... Mtimkulu spent months in hospital recovering. In April 1992 he sued the minister of police for torturing and poisoning him. Two weeks later Siphiwo Mtimkulu and a friend, Topsy Madaka disappeared, they were never seen again. Mtimkulu must be dead, but he left something behind: a set of diaries. // ... ... that the tip of his penis had to be amputated as a result of torture by the police and a Free State farmer. // This white policeman said - he was a warrant officer, I was able to identify him as a warrant officer. Then he said. This ‘kaffir’ is pretending to be dead. // Khuthezile Thele was ... The first wave of horror came in May 1986. Over three days the ‘fathers,’ or witdoeke systematically burned three satellite squatter camps around Crossroads to the ground. The security forces then stepped in. They encircled the area with barbed wire to prevent the 30 000 left homeless by the ... I gave the instruction for them to flatten the huts with a caspir and that we would open fire at the same time. It’s the overkill situation that was typically Koevoet. We would shoot as much concentrated fire into a space as possible. We didn’t know how many people might be in there with them, ... The day after the Sebokeng night vigil massacre the house of Emma Kheswa and her son, Khetisi Kheswa, was burned down. It was retaliation. Many believed that Khetisi was responsible, not only for the death of Christopher Nangalembe, but for the killing of 38 people at the vigil one week later. ‘Any changes which are to come can only come as a result of a programme worked out by black people. And for black people to be able to work out a programme they need to defeat the one main element in politics which was working against them and this was a psychological feeling of inferiority.’ Look your position if I understand it correctly is that Vlakplaas is an aberration like a lot of these other things that were debated this morning. And the explanation, as I understand it, that you were proffering was that it must have been an officer or two or whatever, lower down the hierarchy, ... Komape Molapo is a survivor of another grenade attack at the hotel in the Namakgale township in the same month. He believes that soldiers from the same unit were responsible. // Three shots were fired and after that hand grenade, hand grenade, hand grenades were thrown in. It got me on the soldier ... This week, for the first time ever in the life of the Truth Commission a policeman voluntarily took the stand to give supporting evidence. Capt Peter John Clayton had been on duty the night Adri Faas was shot. He told the Truth Commission what had happened that evening. // I cannot remember ... And this is exactly what many black people did. The passport out of the hardship of being black was trying to be Coloured. Many took on a Coloured identity or an Afrikaans sounding surname, usually both. // Yes, they called it turning your jacket inside out. You put the inside outside and the ... My mom was approached by some people, some Zulu’s and they were telling her that your child who is a comrade has been shot and he’s going to die. And already he has died. Joe Mamasela was not at the amnesty hearing and he’s not scheduled to appear before the Commission. We asked Amnesty Committee spokesman Cocky Mpshe, why not? // Joe Mamasela is not here and Joe Mamasela may not be here because he is presently what we call a section 204 witness. That simply means ... Mister Froneman, when were you born? // I was born 19 June 1974 in Pretoria. Harmse told me that the BWB told him that they would have a coup d’état and that at various power stations they had people on duty who were ready to cut the power and he told me that the officers had also been ... ... were of torture and abduction, rumours that became reality. // ‘This is Siphiwo’s hair, this is the scalp’ // They spoke about massacres and wars; they spoke about death of a single child and about the killing of whole families. // ‘I heard their voices, no one screamed twice, each one ... ... to even feel that we may have failed the victims by saying that there is an atmosphere in this country where reconciliation could take place. I am aware that our role as a Commission and with the presentation of the report to the president, how the president deals with the report is really ... As the life of the Truth Commission comes to an end we have to ask ourselves what role its activities have played in reconciling our nation. Throughout this programme you have seen amazing moments at hearings where people reached out to each other, forgave each other, embraced each other, moments ... So that when I was born at Mzimkulu on a farm, I grew up there, I schooled there but my father was interested that we must not lose touch with Natal. So, most of my father’s children, including me, did most of their schooling in Natal so that we could not lose touch with our roots. That is why ... |
