TRC Final Report

Volume 4

Chapter 7

Subsection 9

Reporting on prisons

55 The Commission heard evidence from Harold Strachan, about whose experiences in prison the Rand Daily Mail managed to publish three articles in 1965 before he was banned and charged with perjury. The Strachan articles broke an almost fifteen-year silence about prison conditions and resulted in the beginning of wholesale reforms in the prison system. However, the prisons department manufactured a perjury charge against him and the newspaper. Numerous warders and prisoners were used to deny ‘a fraction’ of his descriptions, and he was again sent to prison.

56 Benjamin Pogrund, the journalist primarily involved in the Strachan articles, described the cases against Strachan and the Rand Daily Mail as a “series of frame-ups and concocted evidence and mass perjury”. The “Nationalist newspapers and the SABC engendered an atmosphere of fear and threat in the public, so that very few people were willing to assist us with further information, let alone testify for us”.

57 Pogrund pointed out that, following the court cases against Strachan and the newspaper, “a blanket of silence descended on the prisons for years to come”. The consequence was a “totally absurd situation that information about jail conditions could only safely be published if the Prisons Department approved publication in advance”.

58 The effect of the Strachan prosecutions rippled far beyond prisons. It effectively tied up the resources and energies of the Rand Daily Mail for more than four years while the case dragged on. Moreover, the success of the prosecutions sent a sharp warning to journalists to lay off prison stories. The onus was now on the defendant to prove that the published information was correct; in other words, defendants were deemed guilty until they could prove themselves innocent.

59 This affected not only stories on prisons, but was later extended to the army and police, placing an effective ban on any adverse reporting of the security forces. It created the climate in which the secret operations of Vlakplaas, for instance, could be initiated and carried out with little fear of exposure.

60 The use of the Prisons Act to restrict media coverage of conditions in prisons enabled the authorities to maintain a system of control that could not be monitored by outside society. This allowed abuse and injustice to continue.

The ‘camps’

61 Two witnesses gave evidence about the African National Congress (ANC) detention camps in Angola - particularly Quatro, apparently named after the Johannesburg Fort (‘Number Four’) itself. Both testimonies told of severe ill treatment and abuse in the camp, and of continued difficulty in getting satisfactory information from the ANC about what happened there.

62 Mr Diliza Mthembu, himself a one-time ANC representative in Benguela and now a sergeant in the South African National Defence Force (SANDF), described his experiences in the “hell” of Quatro. He spoke of his current feelings of being “helpless and hopeless” and of having received no satisfaction from his appearances at previous commissions of enquiry into the camps. He reserved his censure for the ANC leadership:

For the young guys who were working in Quatro, I don’t have any grudge, because maybe myself, if I was in their boots, I would do the same because they were very young. You know, sometimes using very, very young people to run an establishment of such magnitude is very dangerous.

63 Mr Joe Seremane, whose younger brother was executed in Quatro, gave remarkably moving testimony about his feelings of betrayal and his inability to reach ‘closure’ because of being unable to obtain clarity about the reasons for his brother’s death.

I have seen what it means to be tortured. But when I think of [my brother] Chief Timothy and compare the way he died to my suffering, my suffering is nothing, and I have decided not to say anything about that. It is just pointless. It is useless. The system [(meaning the previous government]) in a way resembled accountability because when they were finished with me, they threw me on the lap of my people and said “There is your rubbish. We are through with it.” And my people (of the ANC) can’t come and dump those bones (of my brother) and say “We are through with those bones”.

I can ask for my court records and find them and go through the trial today, from the system; but my movement can’t offer me a piece of paper to show me how they conducted the trial ... We still want the truth. It is going to be hard to forgive when you don’t know exactly what has happened.