The Knock on the Door: The Story of the Detainees' Parents Support Committee

By Terry Shakinovsky and Sharon Court

The Detainees’ Parents Support Committee (DPSC) was started in 1981 in Johannesburg, South Africa. It was set up by the parents, spouses and families of activists who were detained and had no recourse to legal intervention. Many in this movement had not been politically involved.
Members of the DPSC stood on street corners with placards calling for the release of their children. They organised food, clothing and legal representation for detainees across the country, and they supported the detainees’ families. DPSC activists marched, petitioned, argued, wrote and protested for the release of all detainees. They made public the brutal operations of the security establishment.
The DPSC helped to draw international attention to the atrocities being perpetuated against children – some as young as nine – by the apartheid state. And the evidence amassed by the DPSC helped to lay some of the groundwork for South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).
The Knock on the Door tells the story of the DPSC and of how the anti-detention movement became part of the mass uprising that brought down apartheid. It is an inspiring account of ordinary people coming together to stand up against racism and the abuse of power.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Picador Africa
• Release date: Feb 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781770105805

Terry Shakinovsky

Terry Shakinovsky is a journalist who has been deployed across the world. She holds a postgraduate degree in History. A former student and United Democratic Front (UDF) activist who worked with the Detainees’ Parents Support Committee (DPSC), she is now the publications coordinator at the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection in Johannesburg.

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INTRODUCTION

‘My son is missing … taken from our home … Policemen beat him and took him away … At the police station they said I must go away.’

– Edith Dlamini, New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, 1985

‘We had to share food from one plate. We were given porridge and tea for breakfast, porridge and soup for lunch, porridge and coffee for the evening meal. We slept on mats on the floor. We were very, very cold. I did not see my parents at all in the first two months.’

– Statement from detainee, aged 13, Soweto, 1985

‘They put a bag over my head and made me hold two wires. They switched on the current and I screamed and screamed but they did not worry …’

– Godfrey Mohuje, aged 14, KwaThema, 1986

These are fragments from the thousands of letters and statements in the Detainees’ Parents Support Committee (DPSC) archives at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. The archives yield a picture of an organisation at the very interface between a brutal apartheid state and a nation fighting for freedom.

The archives do not only hold testimonies of torture. They are filled with accounts of families whose loved ones had been detained, and who had little recourse to challenge the state. Many were illiterate and lacked the most basic resources. ‘My parents have not visited me in prison because they do not have the money,’ says a 22-year-old detainee from Katlehong to his lawyer. The lawyer’s notes record that the detainee is still wearing the T-shirt in which he was arrested some months earlier.

The DPSC fought the ways in which the extreme poverty of apartheid magnified the horrors of detention, feeding families whose breadwinners had been detained; offering legal assistance for parents seeking their children; channelling funds for visits, food and warm clothing for detainees whose families could not afford these supports.

The scope of the DPSC’s work is telling, not only about the hardship of life under apartheid. It is revealing too about the shift, in the 1980s, in the terror used to crush resistance. The earliest archive boxes hold lists of detainees handwritten by one of the DPSC’s founding members, Max Coleman. These lists grow longer and longer until they give way to printed lists, many pages long.

At first the DPSC meetings are about the detention of particular political activists. Soon, the minutes reveal, the exchanges are about groups of activists being taken in from the townships. By 1986, and after the declaration of two states of emergency, the archives hold descriptions of entire classes of children being loaded into hippos (armoured vehicles) at gunpoint. Targeted assassinations give way to indiscriminate shooting on the streets; accounts of petrol bombs lobbed at particular activists’ homes are superseded by statements about the police and army torching several homes in a block.

As the terror becomes more widespread and indiscriminate, so the DPSC steps up its attempts to counter it. The organisation mobilises South Africans against repression on a scale not seen before. Together with other mass-based organisations around the country, the DPSC turns one of the apartheid state’s most powerful tactics – detention without trial – into a site of struggle to help bring down the regime itself.

As one reads through the thousands of handwritten and typed documents, a story emerges of courage, endurance and a longing for human dignity in the face of vicious racism. It is a tale of healing in the face of savagery; of how determination and meticulous organisation by a group of ordinary people helped to bring down a powerful enemy. This book tells the extraordinary story of the DPSC.

Extracts from the carbon-copy daybooks in which the DPSC recorded

stories of torture and missing family members. These accounts are from

June to October 1986.

detainees’ parents support committee (dpsc) collection,

historical papers, university of the witwatersrand

PART ONE

THE KNOCK ON THE DOOR

Chapter One

TWO ARRESTS

‘He blindfolded me. Then I was kicked from my chair

and there were many rubber shoes and I realised it was

more than one person kicking me. They were beating me up, dragging me and kicking me.’

– Connie Seoposengwe, activist, detainee

‘They came for me. That was the worst day of my life. They were banging everywhere, the lights were all over and the dogs were barking,’ says Connie Seoposengwe, former activist and current Speaker of the Northern Cape Provincial Legislature.

The security policemen who detained Connie in 1986 in Galeshewe, Northern Cape, were triumphant. They bore her to jail, but not yet to a cell. ‘They took me to a boardroom. There was lots and lots of alcohol and they said, You know what, we’re celebrating the whole night, knowing we have a big fish now.’

Connie recalls: ‘The oldest man said, You think you’ll get this land? You won’t get this land.’ She was then left alone with the security policeman who had raided her home and harassed her for some years, Gideon Nieuwoudt. ‘He put a pen and paper down and said, You write everything. Don’t leave anything out, and he left. I just sat. He came back. He grabbed my hair and he hit me. You’re a kaffir! I must say after him that I’m a kaffir. By the time he let go, my hair was in his hands. That’s why I don’t have long hair any more.

‘He blindfolded me. Then I was kicked from my chair and there were many rubber shoes and I realised it was more than one person kicking me. They were beating me up, dragging me and kicking me, my nipples, everywhere. I was screaming and screaming because the police station is close to the taxi rank and I wanted people to know that I had been taken. I was scared they were going to kill me.’ Although Connie did not know it at the time, she had to contend with more than the pain and fear. Later in detention, she would realise that she was pregnant when she was arrested.

Fuelled by the alcohol around them, the police continued the verbal and physical assault all night. Connie was pushed, still blindfolded, into a car, and once again she was afraid that she was being driven to her death. Instead, she was taken to a different jail where she was subjected to an all-over body search, ‘… including my private parts. It was de-humanising. I was so humiliated.’

Much of Connie’s experience on her first night in detention was replicated in jail cells across South Africa. Thousands of political activists were subjected to early morning raids on their homes and to the terror of what was to come: emotional and physical assaults, the mental torture of solitary confinement, the fear of being killed. Some young women, like Connie, had to endure sexual humiliation or being pregnant, or even giving birth, in jail. And like Connie, on her release, tens of thousands of these detainees turned to the DPSC for help.

When Connie emerged from jail, she had faced the trauma of solitary confinement, abuse, medical neglect and poor nutrition. She was released from Kimberley Prison shortly before 11 pm, and presented with a legal restriction that confined her to her home in Galeshewe, Kimberley. ‘I went home and I was so scared, firstly because it was very dark and I was under a light, night and day, in prison. But I was scared that they were going to kill us at night. That was always on my mind. Four days after my release, I gave birth to my son … with fear of everything, I just jumped the restrictions and came to Joburg … I went to the DPSC office to get counselling and R40. They used to give a R40 grant for a while.’

Connie used a taxi to make the roughly 470-kilometre journey to Johannesburg. She was deeply traumatised and afraid, not only because of the after-effects of her detention, or the need for support with a newborn baby, but also because she feared the police would take a family member in her place if they could not find her at home. She arrived at the DPSC offices very early in the morning. One can imagine her relief when Daphne arrived to open the DPSC office.

The DPSC that Connie turned to was established partly in response to a different detention. Keith Coleman was a young white activist who co-edited an anti-apartheid newspaper, SASPU National. His arrest was unique in that he turned himself in. It fell to his father, Max Coleman, to drive him to the Johannesburg Central Police Station known as John Vorster Square, a feared icon of apartheid brutality.

Keith explains how the decision to go voluntarily to John Vorster Square came about. In the early hours of 22 October 1981, the security police raided his home. They could not find Keith, who was sleeping at his girlfriend’s house, but they detained Keith’s close friend, housemate and co-editor of SASPU National, Clive van Heerden. They had also, separately, arrested Clive’s brother, Auret. Keith explains: ‘If I ran away, it would cast doubt on Auret’s and Clive’s innocence. The police were bound to ask, What have you guys done that made Keith run? I decided that if I went and said, Here I am. What do you want me for? it would appear that I had nothing to hide.’

Keith describes the dread of the drive to John Vorster Square with his father. Now a parent himself, he looks back with admiration for the support his parents gave him on that awful day. ‘They never once said to me, Be careful. Don’t do this. Are you mad? They were calm. They never cried. What my mother must have felt I have no idea. They didn’t give me cause to worry about them. That’s an incredibly generous thing for parents to do.’

Max Coleman watched as Captain Andries Struwig, already notorious for his cruelty as an interrogator, admitted Keith to John Vorster Square. Max questioned the conditions for Keith’s detention, and was told by Struwig, ‘As determined by the law, there will be no access by lawyers or family members and he will be held until such time as he has answered the questions to our satisfaction.’

Even in these disempowering and frightening conditions, Max found a way to instil courage into his son. ‘My father said to Struwig, If anything happens to my son, I will hold you personally account­able. If you touch a hair on his head … And I believed him, absolutely. But I also saw that Struwig believed him. This big monstrosity of a human being looked at my father and at that moment he was scared.’

The security police were getting their first glimpse of the steel Max Coleman would display in his dealings with them. And the tenacity. From the time of Keith’s arrest until his release, Max went to John Vorster Square almost every day. He says, ‘When I wasn’t allowed in, I would stand outside and watch the comings and goings.’ He would take note of what he saw and would occasionally glimpse detainees who were being escorted in or out of their cells.

Max Coleman’s actions foreshadowed the fearlessness with which he would confront the security police in the years to come. However, they also reveal the much greater licence that the apartheid police afforded the parents of white detainees. The DPSC would harness both of these factors in its battles with the South African government.

The detention diary that Max Coleman kept around the time his son Keith was detained.

dpsc, historical papers, wits

White parents’ privilege could, however, prevent neither the detention nor the brutalisation of children. Fear and impotence to rescue their children brought parents of all races and backgrounds together within the DPSC.

This meant that the organisation was non-racial in make-up and character from the start. Under apartheid, South Africans of different races lived, worked and studied under vastly differing conditions and often in different geographical areas. Inevitably then, the student, community and trade union organisations that took forward the struggle tended to be racially based. But the DPSC cut across those divisions by its very nature. It fought the horror of detentions for detainees such as both Connie and Keith, despite their different backgrounds.

This non-racialism was one of the reasons the DPSC had such great impact in South Africa. By the time Connie fled to it for help in 1986, the organisation functioned as a formidable welfare and political organisation that reached into every corner, and every community, of the country. What began as a small group of shocked, frightened but determined family members, desperate to help their loved ones, had grown into a force to be reckoned with.

Chapter Two

THE EMERGENCE OF THE DPSC

‘The meetings were organised through David Webster at Wits. I tell you that little committee was vibrant … You met people from all walks of life, from the locations to Houghton … You mobilised and you politicised in that environment.’

– Khadija Cachalia, mother of detainees Firoz and Azhar

The first meetings of the group that would become the DPSC were held at Wits University. The venue was booked by a social anthropology lecturer at the university, David Webster, who would play a leading role in the DPSC.

David’s involvement began with his concern about the detention of one of his students, Barbara Hogan. Audrey Coleman remembers: ‘David was an amazing man. He had integrity and a fine brain. He was there at the beginning for Barbara. At the same time, I’m sure he had a larger vision than just Barbara because there were a lot of students detained. And he immediately said, Use the university as a base!’

Barbara Hogan’s arrest was a central part of the story of how the DPSC came into being. Barbara had been recruited to the ANC in 1977 to provide information about the political dynamics inside the country and to mobilise the white left. By 1981, Barbara was doing a Master’s thesis on unemployment and was working with a wide range of trade unions. For several months, the security police followed her. Concerned that she was becoming a danger to the people in her network, she approached her comrade in Umkhonto we Sizwe (the ANC’s armed wing), Rob Adam, for help to leave South Africa. He responded by saying that his principal had asked that she write a list of names of the people she knew were sympathetic to the ANC – potential ‘close comrades’. He had been advised that she should not waste time writing in the secret code the ANC used to conceal its activities from outsiders as the task was a matter of urgency.¹

Neither of them knew at the time that Rob’s ANC principal was a police spy and very soon the security police had what became known as the ‘Close Comrades’ list in their hands. This gave them the