A Just Defiance: Bombmakers, Insurgents, and the Treason Trial of the Delmas Four

By Peter Harris

Both a riveting courtroom drama and a real-life thriller, A Just Defiance tells the story of four young black South Africans who were arrested for a string of political murders in 1987. In gripping prose, Peter Harris—the white lawyer who defended the men—describes how he came to understand, while constructing the case to save the defendants from the death penalty, the chain of events that led them to undergo training at ANC camps in Angola and return to their homeland to execute some of the apartheid regime's most notorious collaborators. The shocking twists and turns of the high-profile trial kept the public in suspense during the dying days of apartheid.

Harris’s account of the trial is intercut with flashbacks to instances of the cold-blooded brilliance and deadly efficiency of the squad's operations. We see Nelson Mandela recently released from Robben Island as he begins negotiations that will eventually lead to the assumption of power by the ANC. We read about bomb-making and assassination attempts by both the ANC and the South African police. A critical and popular success in South Africa, this book is a tale of people driven to extremes by injustice and repression, and of ordinary citizens caught up in extraordinary events. Finally, it is the story of a country’s search for reconciliation, one that captures the moral vertigo of South Africa's violent apartheid years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Aug 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9780520953703

Peter Harris

I joined GRID-Arendal as Managing Director in 2014. I am a native of the USA, citizen of Australia and resident of Norway; I describe myself as a “professional foreigner”. I am a graduate of the University of Washington (Seattle USA), completed a PhD at the University of Wales (Swansea UK), married an Australian and have 3 children. I have worked in the field of marine geology and science management for over 30 years and published over 100 scientific papers. I taught marine geology at the University of Sydney and conducted research on UK estuaries, the Great Barrier Reef, the Fly River Delta (Papua New Guinea) and Antarctica. I worked for 20 years for Australia’s national geoscience agency as a scientist and manager. In 2009 I was appointed a member of the group of experts for the United Nations World Ocean Assessment. Apart from managing all of GRID-Arendal’s amazing activities, my interests include new methods for the conduct of environmental assessments (the expert elicitation method) and the use of multivariate statistics and geomorphology to provide tools to manage the global ocean environment. I also enjoy sailing and playing the bagpipes.

Book preview

THE BOMB

The man leaning over the bench is focused on his work – a study in concentration, as you should be when constructing a bomb. His name is Japie F Kok and he works for the mechanical department of the technical division of the security branch of the South African Police.

The division’s workshop is located at Rebecca Street in Pretoria West. Security around the workshop is tight, for this is the place where the ‘unofficial’ devices are made: the special phone taps, the booby traps, silencers, timing devices, detonators, grenades without the time delay. Here too containers are specially constructed to carry carefully designed weapons of assassination: poisons made of various toxins and poison dispensers, and, of course, bombs. Parcel bombs, letter bombs, letter-box bombs, pen bombs, jump bombs, landmine bombs, car bombs, suitcase bombs, limpet-mine bombs, fire bombs, bombs powerful enough to blow up buildings and bombs designed merely to blow off your hand. Bombs in all shapes, forms, intensity and guises.

1

It is April 1987. I’m on the Pretoria highway in the fast lane, ears pinned back, being pulled along in the slipstream of a seventy-seater school bus going like hell, the children clustered up against the large back window, pulling faces at me, smiling and waving. I am not enjoying myself.

This morning the phone rang at five o’clock. Not a good time for me.

I come up from a heavy sleep, grope clumsily for the instrument on the bedside table. Alongside me my wife Caroline turns away from the noise and pulls at the duvet. She’s a journalist. I’m a lawyer. Because of our jobs the phone rings at all hours of the day and night. It’s something we never get used to.

My voice is a croak when I answer.

‘Is that Peter Harris?’ says someone I don’t recognise.

‘I’m afraid so,’ I reply.

‘This call is from Lusaka. Please visit Jabu Masina, Ting Ting Masango, Neo Potsane and Joseph Makhura in Pretoria Central Maximum Security, they need to see you urgently. Please see what you can do to assist them.’

I have notepaper and a pen beside the phone. I scribble down the names. ‘No problem,’ I say, but the caller has cut the connection.

‘What is it?’ mumbles Caroline.

‘That’s what I’ve got to find out,’ I say, heading for the bathroom.

Maximum Security means ‘political’, nothing else. Serial killers, sadistic rapists, wild psychotics, mass murderers never make it close to Maximum Security. Maximum Security is for the ‘politicals’, my clients.

I’ve got the easy job. They get charged, I represent them, and then they go to jail, usually for lengthy periods. Then I visit them. In places like Pretoria Central or the ‘snakepit’ in Kroonstad, on Robben Island or at Diepkloof prison, otherwise known as ‘Sun City’ after the fantasy pleasure dome built by Sol Kerzner in Bop. Bophuthatswana to the apartheid architects.

‘Are they guilty?’

Well, yes, they are . . . mostly. At least the ones who end up in those kinds of places are, if guilty is the right word. Sadly, I suppose, I don’t have that many innocent clients. Not many lawyers do. Worse still, my clients are generally accused of the big things like treason, murder, conspiracy, trying to overthrow the State, sabotage, crimes which carry the death sentence. This is why these people are hard to defend, particularly if they are, in fact, guilty.

Even worse, my clients often don’t want to deny the charges against them; they’re not interested in their own innocence. This is in stark contrast to most people charged with criminal offences. Most people protest their innocence, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Murderers holding a smoking gun proclaim their innocence. Try it for yourself: walk – or run – through your average prison on any day of the week and ask the prisoners convicted of criminal offences which of them are innocent and were wrongly convicted. Every hand will go up.

What distinguishes my clients is that they are politicals. Ask them if they intended to overthrow the State and you will get a strong yes. Unfortunately, though, even if they are separated from the criminals, they still end up in the same place, prison. This is depressing for a lawyer, demoralising.

Since this morning’s phone call I have made some enquiries about Jabu Masina and the Three Others, as we refer to our clients in legal parlance. I’ve found out that they were part of an African National Congress special operations unit that had been on a mission in the country for about ten months before they were caught. This in itself is interesting as a lot of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) operatives are caught a lot sooner. Askaris (captured and turned MK guerrillas), now in the employ of the security police, are deployed at all railway stations, taxi ranks, border posts and potential entry points looking for their ex-colleagues who, once identified, are quickly arrested. The border patrols and perimeter farm commandos take care of those who jump the fence.

The arrest of a unit like this will have been kept a secret so that the police could run their ‘investigation’ without the irritation of lawyers wanting to see their clients. That would have interfered with the careful construction of the State’s case. Depending on the circumstances of their arrest, their families tend to learn of their detention only much later.

There is a pattern in the way the State handles arrested MK soldiers. Generally, once arrested, they refuse to talk. There are threats of torture and then some talk, which, frankly, is precisely what I would do in that position. I would sing an aria if it helped. Others will not talk. So they are tortured according to the creativity and inclination of the security policeman involved. They talk and give a ‘confession’. Most talk in the end. For the brave it’s a matter of how long you can last and how complete your confession is.

Once there’s a confession, they are taken before a magistrate who, in all seriousness, asks the battered and exhausted accused if they have been tortured or if they have given the confession ‘freely and voluntarily’. The accused, avoiding the eye of the security policeman who has tortured them, reply that the confession was freely and voluntarily given. The magistrate attests to this and, hey presto, the primary building block of the State’s case slots into place. ‘Investigative technique?’ you ask. ‘Tip-offs and torture.’ Not too subtle, but effective. Betrayed by their bodies, the accused are dragged back to their separate cells in a mist of pain, shock and regret.

Now accomplices are arrested, the interrogation process is repeated and the investigation completed. Only when the case is virtually ready for trial are the accused brought to court for their first appearance. Of course, if there are decent channels of communication with other MK units or with headquarters in Lusaka, then word would have got out about their misfortune, particularly if a reporting date was missed. In Lusaka’s books, if a unit goes quiet for too long they are assumed arrested and the appropriate steps are taken to protect other groups. In most cases, however, MK guerrillas operate in small, discrete groups with little or no contact between them, particularly on special missions. Generally, the first court appearance is the first time that the outside world knows of their arrest.

Often, this appearance coincides with a front-page exposé in the Sunday papers. The story will have been leaked by the police to the newspaper’s friendly crime reporter who has no problem firing the opening salvo for the security police in the impending battle.

By 1987, the government’s use of ‘unofficial’ methods has become accepted practice and the use of torture in interrogation is not the worst of it. We’re ten months into the second state of emergency and the townships are literally under military occupation, many cordoned off by barbed wire and patrolled by soldiers and dogs.

South Africa, I believe, is not in a good place. In fact, black people contend that it has been in a shocking place for some three hundred and thirty-five years.

The figures of the mass detentions vary. Depending on whom you talk to they are as high as thirty thousand and as low as ten thousand. If ten thousand is low! Each day resistance by the United Democratic Front (UDF) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) gathers force in every corner of society, from the workplace to the schools. Increasingly, anti-apartheid activists are assassinated, disappear, or are booby-trapped and bombed. This is not official policy, but we know it’s happening. We just can’t prove it. And a lot of people don’t want to know for fear of what they might hear and the personal consequences of that truth.

This is all below the surface. Above it, there is a legal and judicial order that provides, within the narrow confines of the security laws, for the representation of political organisations and political prisoners. The government, caught between its urge to deal violently with all opposition and its strange, desperate pursuit of international credibility and legitimacy, has left the legal door ajar. It’s a door into a small room. But people use the opportunity. As you do when you have nothing else.

It is in this context that political trials have become public contests between the government and the resistance organisations. A courtroom battle for the moral high ground, legitimacy and credibility. This is ‘hearts and minds’ stuff, and exposure is key.

I am one of those defence lawyers who get called in, purveyors of the meagre legal meals. I have been doing this for some years now, and, at the age of thirty-three, I alternate between spikes of energetic commitment to my clients, anger, exhaustion and a laconic cynicism that I try to disguise. Alarmingly, I sometimes experience a number of these states simultaneously. I see my clients at their weakest and most vulnerable. They speak to me of their fears and frailties, their relationships, childhoods, prejudices and insecurities.

Try visiting detainees who are in solitary confinement once every two weeks for years and you end up discussing very little law – not much point when they are detained under draconian security legislation that allows little room for legal movement. We spend the time talking about politics, family, how they feel, their conditions. I give them some idea of what’s happening outside and verbal information gets relayed. I understand it from their point of view. I know how I would behave: with double their vulnerabilities and half their courage.

When they are finally released, there is often a sense of embarrassment when we meet ‘outside’. Is it me or my client who becomes distant? Or do we both withdraw to our secret places, neither of us digging too deep, the revelations never mentioned? Perhaps it interferes with their reconstruction. You never want your therapist at your party.

Uncomfortable thoughts as I hunch over the steering wheel at high speed driving to Pretoria Central to meet four new clients, worrying that I might not have the energy to stay the course.

2

It was close to midnight when Jabu Masina jolted awake, the glare of headlights filling the room. The car slowed and stopped in front of the school classroom where Jabu hid. He checked his handgun, a Tete pistol, and stuck it back in his belt. His shirt was wet with sweat. Surprise was his only ally against a man like Orphan ‘Hlubi’ Chapi.

This was the second time he had come back to get Chapi. He’d tried a month ago but Chapi was too well protected and always alert. He’d followed him for two weeks and never got close enough, eventually returning to base in Swaziland shortly before his Swazi passport expired. A passport supplied by his commander, Solly Simelane.

After completing basic military training in the Funda camp close to Luanda, Jabu had been taken to a safe house in that city. There he was told he would be posted to Swaziland to join a unit that would specialise in assassinations – the ‘Icing Unit’, as it came to be known.

Before Jabu left for Swaziland, Oliver Tambo, the president of the ANC, visited him at a safe house in Luanda. The two men met alone in a sparsely furnished room. Jabu felt honoured to be sitting with a man he revered so much. The president asked about his training and where he’d grown up. Jabu spoke of his home in Rockville and life in South Africa before he left. The meeting ended with Oliver Tambo shaking his hand and wishing him luck.

On 11 June 1978, Jabu was given two hundred rand and a passport, with a visa valid for fourteen days, by his commander Solly Simelane. He was instructed to enter South Africa and ‘sanction’ Chapi, a policeman notorious in Soweto for atrocities against his own people. Jabu knew of Chapi. The man was a legend in Soweto and boasted that he had killed a number of students. Always armed, he rode seemingly invincible through the township in the company of his fellow policemen. Bullet proof.

There had been previous attempts on Chapi’s life. All had failed. People were terrified of him. Quick to use his gun, he had the reputation of being an outstanding marksman.

Crossing through the Oshoek border post, Jabu arrived in Soweto at seven the same evening. Again, he spent his days and nights tracing Chapi, but with little success. Although he knew where Chapi lived, he did not want to be seen too close to the house. On those occasions he ran a stakeout, the man was nowhere to be seen.

The days passed. Jabu became desperate. On the morning of the fourteenth day, while waiting at a traffic circle near the Anglican church close to Chapi’s Rockville home, the policeman’s brown Ford Grenada pulled up close to him. Two women got out. Jabu walked quickly towards the vehicle, reaching for the pistol tucked into the front of his pants and covered by his loose blue shirt. Suddenly a police van turned the corner and stopped next to Chapi’s car. Jabu paused. This was too dangerous. Moroka police station too nearby. He walked away slowly. From a distance he watched the Ford Grenada drive off. The hit would have to be that night. He would need cover of some sort.

In the late afternoon, Jabu returned and checked the area around Chapi’s house once again. The houses were bigger here, not the small matchboxes that dotted Soweto. The property was larger too, and Chapi’s house had a drive-in garage. Comparing it to his own house fuelled Jabu’s resentment, justified his intention. This man was enjoying the fruits of collaboration, and everything had a price. Jabu made his plans.

The Ndondo school opposite Chapi’s house would provide good cover while Jabu waited. Once night fell he entered the school and took up a position in a classroom facing the street. Previously he’d avoided this option, thinking it too obvious. But this was his last chance. Because of the tension, the waiting was long and tiring. Eventually Jabu sat down, propped himself against a wall, and drifted into sleep. He would jerk awake, chide himself, but a heaviness behind his eyes sent him back to sleep.

Then the headlights flooded the classroom. It was Chapi’s Ford Grenada. Now he had to make his move. The car stopped opposite Chapi’s house and a man got out, walked towards the yard gate and opened it. In the dull orange light cast over the township by the ‘Apollos’ on their tall masts, Jabu realised that the man was Chapi. Quickly, he left the classroom, keeping to the shadows. Chapi’s house was on his left, the Grenada on his right. Chapi was opening his garage door. Jabu hurried towards him. Hearing footsteps, Chapi spun round, his gun in his hand. So fast, Jabu knew he wouldn’t make it. He staggered drunkenly and lurched across the road towards the policeman. He was close now, level with the car. Chapi lowered his gun, asked if he was okay. Jabu slurred a reply. Simultaneously, he drew his pistol and shot Chapi high in the body on the right. Chapi fell to a crouch and lifted his gun. Jabu squeezed the trigger again. It jammed. Chapi levelled his weapon. Jabu cursed, dived over the Ford’s bonnet, trying to fix the gun. Chapi was firing now, six shots or more. At each explosion Jabu expected the shock of metal tearing into his flesh. He scrambled to the front of the car as the wounded Chapi moved to the rear: the hunter suddenly become the hunted. It was true what they said about Chapi: he couldn’t be killed. The shots were deafeningly close. This is it, thought Jabu, the end. And then silence. He raced wildly down the street. Alive. Once round the corner, he walked slowly up the street behind Chapi’s house and, jumping a fence, hid in a garden.

He pushed the gun into his pants. To think that such a small weapon could take the life of a man, although the indestructible Chapi would surely survive only one bullet. And then the police would hunt him down. Yet Jabu couldn’t move. The night was filled with sirens as police vans accelerated from Moroka police station. Anyone on the streets would be stopped and questioned. He wouldn’t stand a chance. He knew that no one would leave their houses. The brave might peep out a window, but no one would go further than that. This was Soweto and what you didn’t know couldn’t hurt you. An hour passed. Another. Until early in the morning, cold and scared, he was finally able to creep away.

The next day Jabu made preparations to get out of the country. His passport had expired. He would have to jump the border. This presented dangers of its own. Another possibility of arrest. To add to his anxiety he still knew nothing of Chapi, of whether his mission had been successful.

Jabu decided to cross the border into Botswana as he had been instructed to do if something went wrong. Mozambique was out of the question as it would be an embarrassment to the Mozambicans if he were caught.

At Johannesburg’s Park Station that afternoon, the Sowetan’s billboards proclaimed the death of Chapi. Jabu bought a copy. He read that the residents of Soweto had ‘danced in the streets’.

That night he slipped through the fence into Botswana and made his way to a refugee centre. Refusing to speak to anyone at the camp, he demanded to see a senior ANC official. Two days later he received a visit from Joe Modise, to whom he told his story.

Afterwards, exhausted, aware of the finality of his act, he wondered why he felt no regret, why he was infused with a sense of victory.

His first mission was over. He had committed murder.

3

Getting to Pretoria Central Maximum Security Prison takes you through the massive military complex of Voortrekkerhoogte, the headquarters of the South African Defence Force. Army camps lie on the right and left, uniform brown barracks matching the dry, brown veld. The largest military complex in Africa. This is an ugly place. Behind the grey walls of the camps lies an alien terrain of numbing rules and soldiers, sad people who find comfort in the camaraderie of procedure and the invigoration that the distant prospect of death brings. I know, I have been there. Very often, I see the air force’s C130s taking off: dark olive green birds with bulging stomachs of bile, heading for Angola, Mozambique, Namibia (still called South West Africa at the time) to fuel dubious and unpublicised wars. These conflicts in the north, on which we quickly turn the page, are never real until someone we know does not come back. And most of us know someone.

I have to admit that I am prejudiced against Pretoria. I have never been able to distinguish the pretty purple of the jacaranda trees that line every avenue from the suffering that is planned and implemented from this city. I have been involved in too many trials and made far too many visits to a prison that smothers all within it for me to appreciate the jacarandas in blossom. There is little beauty in Pretoria. The city streets are always filled with bureaucrats, police or soldiers scurrying between great concrete blocks – the massive government departments that administer the country – the heat rising from the tarred roads in the city centre visible and choking.

Another reason I dislike Pretoria is because bombs go off there. The ANC’s military struggle, focused originally on ‘hard targets’ like military and security installations, has intensified over the past few years. Greater numbers of units come into the country and the line between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ targets has blurred. I suspect that Pretoria is regarded as a hard target and the ANC doesn’t know or care if I am visiting. The thought of leaving this world in pieces along with people I dislike is not only sickening, it scares me. A lot.

Even restaurants are targeted. I don’t particularly like Wimpy Bars, but now they’re being blown up, and hamburger-eating civilians are dying. This bizarre choice of target makes me wonder about the mind of the bomber and fills me with unease and fear, for both the burger and the bomb. The lines are hazy out there. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time can get you killed.

The prison is squat and square, the interior courtyards surrounded by high yellow walls and steel walkways. Successive, impenetrable steel doors lead through the sections into the depths. The outer section facing the street houses the common criminals. One of the busiest roads in the country goes right past the white windows of the biggest prison in the country. Passing by, you see hands waving imploringly at you. It’s uncomfortable. Disconcerting. Not the best entrance to our capital city, but then Pretoria is a city without manners. From the monolith of the Voortrekker Monument, visible from twenty kilometres away, to the rifle design of the University of South Africa that looms above the road into the city, and the clammy embrace of the massive prison, you get the message, and the message is a crude one: power.

I drive down Potgieter Street, turn onto the bridge and suddenly I’m in the ‘secure’ complex. To my left, the officers’ club and other headquarter buildings. Left, and left again, and I’m facing the neat and ordered houses of the prison warders. No shortage of gardeners for their green lawns and clipped hedges. Serious criminals serving out their last days at Pretoria Central manicure these pathways. They know that cutting blades of grass, even one at a time, in the sun with soil beneath your feet, cannot compare to the concrete vacuum of the prison.

I feel the trim lawns and pathways of the houses, made more clinical by the scarcity of flowers, mirror the minds of the occupants. Their stoeps gleam, red, polished. Children play and laugh on the grass, while sprinklers lazily loop a glittering silver spray over the austerity. The lace curtains at the windows hang in the stillness. These houses are all the same, the difference lies in the gardens, the cars and the cut of the hedges, but all is dwarfed by the great yellow-brick prison towering above them. In that shadow, the complex seems invulnerable.

On the hill above the prison squats Death Row, a separate prison for those sentenced to death. It is where the hangings occur, a frequent occurrence in these times. I have never been there.

The cheap facebrick of the prison, almost white in the sun, contrasts with the bottle-green bullet-proof glass of the protruding observation posts. I see movement behind the glass as I squint up at the tower: the boy at the gates of the castle waiting to be let in. Two cameras swivel in an arc and I know that the warders are watching me. The game begins.

I don’t get angry, because there are rules to this game. They set them and I obey them, but they also know that they can’t go too far. Even if we both misbehave, we respect the boundaries and act within them. If they go too far, I will report them and someone senior may act on my complaints. It’s the least you can do when you hold all the cards. So they are rude and I am, I hope, contemptuously professional.

I press the intercom button. No answer. If someone were to respond immediately, I would be surprised. I wait for two minutes and press again. Wait some more and press again. Third time lucky. I know we are close to the limit now. A response from the box: ‘Ja.’

I give my name. Say I am an attorney on a legal visit to Jabu Masina, Ting Ting Masango, Neo Potsane and Joseph Makhura.

Silence.

‘Hello?’

Silence.

I swear, unable to contain myself. I know they are listening. I can hear sniggering through the crackly intercom.

I turn around. There must be other ways of doing this. What the hell am I doing here anyway? How can this childishness amuse them? They are bored and I am angry, not a good cocktail. In the glare of midday, the dry heat bounces off the tar, and cooks my brain as my anger rises.

A voice says, ‘You didn’t make an appointment.’

‘Yes, I did.’

Silence. I had once tried to break the impasse by being nice, asked how they were, were they having a good day? They stayed mute, stared at me, as I probably would if I worked in Pretoria Central and someone asked me the same question. Ever since, I’ve understood that mutual enmity is the natural order. Suits me. Sometimes I like being disliked, which concerns me. But today it is all too much. A friend, Karel Tipp, with whom I worked some years ago once told me, when he was in the middle of a huge and complex case, that all he really wanted to do was to work on one of those old tugboats that never leave Durban harbour, look out to sea and polish the brass. At times like these, I slowly polish the brass, the rolling sea clear and pure.

Suddenly with a whoosh of hydraulics, the great black steel door in front of me opens. Warder van Rensburg beckons me in.

THE BOMB

The commander of the technical division of the Security Branch is Colonel W A L du Toit, known as Waal to his friends. Colonel du Toit is highly regarded within the police and respected for an uncanny creativity when it comes to the construction of killing instruments. As one of his former colleagues once put it, ‘Waal made the most beautiful little devices.’

Colonel Waal du Toit has given his blessing for the bomb to be made in the mechanical department. Influential people in the police have asked that a bomb be specifically constructed for a critical target. As Japie Kok is one of Colonel du Toit’s most innovative technicians, he has been assigned the job.

Japie has been briefed on the concept of the bomb. Consequently, he has spent a considerable amount of time thinking about the specifics of its design and construction. This bomb has to last a long time and survive much wear and tear. The target of the bomb is an individual.

4

Jabu and Ting Ting moved from house to house in Mamelodi. Jabu, from Soweto and less likely to be recognised in Mamelodi, occasionally went out during the day to meet their contacts. Ting Ting stayed indoors, only venturing out at night. The two men hadn’t been in the country long and were nervous of being identified.

First they stayed at the home of Dr Fabian Ribeiro. Dr Ribeiro was their initial contact and he spent time briefing them on the situation in the country and in Mamelodi. While still in Botswana preparing for their mission, they had decided that they would carry out their first action in Mamelodi. They had chosen Mamelodi for a reason. Six months earlier, in November 1985, police had fired on a crowd in the township, killing thirteen people and wounding nearly eighty. As trained soldiers, they felt acutely the unfairness of police firing on an unarmed crowd in the very place where Ting Ting had grown up and which was now under army occupation. Driven by a hot rage, they decided that this would change. Whatever the cost, their first attack would be on the security forces occupying Mamelodi.

The township was crawling with police and soldiers, as Mamelodi was regarded as a flashpoint. It had become an occupied zone. There were roadblocks daily. Once a week, a section of the township was cordoned off and every house searched. The police and soldiers showed little regard for the occupants, smashing doors and windows and breaking crockery and ornaments. Young girls and women were pulled out of bed in the middle of the night in their nightdresses and made to stand with the men and shivering children in the small sitting rooms of the matchbox houses under the scrutiny of soldiers with R4 combat rifles, while the rest of the search and seizure team moved from room to room tipping out drawers.

Jabu and Ting Ting knew that they couldn’t stay long in the area. They also had a strong chance of being caught in their first few weeks and were determined to carry out an ‘action’ before that happened. They could not wait for the other members of the unit to arrive; it was time for the mission to start.

The two men buried most of their weapons beneath a pile of rubble and stones close to a dumping ground, not far from the house of an ANC contact, Harold Sefula. They each kept a 9 mm Makarov pistol and a Russian F-1 defensive hand grenade. These were easy to conceal and provided an element of reassurance should they run into trouble.

Jabu and Ting Ting made contact with an activist called Moss Morudi who supplied information about a military observation post on a hill overlooking the township and the regularity of patrols. He also told of a dirt road leading to the hill station. The two MK soldiers decided to mine this road.

On the night of 15 February 1986, Jabu and Ting Ting retrieved a TM-57 landmine (designed to trigger beneath heavy vehicles) and its detonator from their cache. This they carried back to Morudi’s house in a sports bag which in turn they hid in a bedroom cupboard. The two comrades had dinner with Moss and his family.

The next afternoon, wearing overalls similar to those worn by municipal road workers, they set out with the bag and a spade. They were both armed with a pistol and a grenade. The operation was risky. There was a strong possibility of being apprehended. But they were both convinced they needed to make a move.

At the designated spot, Jabu stood watch while Ting Ting dug. The ground was hard and compacted and the spade bounced off the surface. Fortunately, at that time of the afternoon, the army’s movements were infrequent. Ting Ting laboured quickly, a hole opening up. When it was deep enough, Jabu laid the mine and Ting Ting inserted and tightened the small MVZ-57 detonator cap. The mine was armed. Jabu covered the device with gravel and they both sprinkled white surface dirt over the area they’d disturbed. The tip of the detonator was invisible among the stones.

The two men walked slowly away, the spade slung casually over Ting Ting’s shoulder.

Back among the houses, they wiped the spade clean of prints and left it standing up against a house wall, knowing it would not be there for long. The whole operation had taken ten minutes.

Jabu and Ting Ting moved from Morudi’s home to another safe house in the township.

At six thirty the mine was detonated by a Casspir. By then it was dark. Moss Morudi heard the explosion and left his house to visit the site. Soon the area was swarming with soldiers taking up defensive positions. The shouts of the men were interrupted by the sound of a helicopter coming in low overhead. In the darkness, he saw the great swirls of dust, murky in the white searchlight of the chopper as it briefly landed within the cordon of soldiers before clattering off over the township. Later that night Morudi saw a heavy-duty army truck towing a long trailer. On the trailer was a large vehicle covered by a brown tarpaulin. The convoy of vehicles slowly left Mamelodi.

In the weeks that followed, the landmine attack was the main topic of conversation in the Pretoria townships. Surely an MK unit was operating in the area?

As far as Jabu and Ting Ting were concerned, their message to the authorities was clear: ‘We are here.’

5

You really have to admire these guys for their attention to detail. They occupy the lowest level of the security apparatus and they wear a mud-brown uniform. But the buttons shine, the boots gleam and the belt buckle is a beacon. There are, incongruously, three straight lines ironed across the middle of the back of their shirts. Having done my military service in 1974, conscripted at the tender age of seventeen and ending up a platoon commander with the rank of lieutenant, I know that these lines, so painstakingly ironed into the back of the shirt, serve no purpose whatsoever other than to indicate that some cretin, wishing to impress his superiors, has spent a precious extra two hours ironing them in. Welcome to the logic of South African military life.

To me, these men with their chests puffed out and their brown shirtsleeves rolled the regulation three fingers above the elbow, when the arm is extended, are familiar animals. Warder van Rensburg is in good shape. Tall, broad shouldered and fit, he regards me as dirt. I am used to this. He nods and ushers me to a yellow line one metre inside the room. I move quickly and stand on the line, knowing that if you don’t step smartly, you run the risk of being crushed to death by the massive steel door as it silently swings closed. What a mess. Sometimes, they close the door while you’re entering and when you curse they fake irritation with their colleague who is operating the system but they never apologise. This is all part of the game.

As the door shuts behind me, the barred steel door in front of me opens. Cameras mounted high on the wall watch as my briefcase goes into the metal detector. I follow Warder van Rensburg through the doorway, pick up the case, wait for yet another barred door to open and enter a brick-lined passage with steel mesh walkways above it. Warders patrol the walkways. At roof height are triangular windows of bottle-green glass behind which sit more warders. It always makes me think of those advertisements for luxury resorts, which claim to offer great service by virtue of having five staff members for every guest.

I have been to this prison many times and should be inured to its charms. But I’m not. The cold hostility of the building and the warders depresses me. This place is not about rehabilitation, this is confinement, a fortress in a war with no foreseeable end. And that is a lonely thought.

Warder van Rensburg carries that most essential item of equipment, a large bunch of keys, attached to his belt