Bail ruling for Ditebogo's murder accused
Pelia Maeko is among the three men charged with shooting and killing Ditebogo before stealing his father's car in May last year.
Maeko, Ali Sithole, and Nido Gumbo allegedly shot the child during a hijacking at his home in Soshanguve.
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The Citizen
an hour ago
- The Citizen
KZN man sentenced to 55 years in jail for raping five women
The man preyed on the women by attacking them in their homes at night while they were sleeping. A 55-year-old KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) man has been sentenced to 55 years in jail for the rape of five women between February 2017 and August 2023. Thanduxolo Manganyela appeared in the Mtubatuba Regional Court where the sentence was handed down. Prison He was also convicted of theft for stealing a cellphone belonging to one of his victims. Manganyela was sentenced to 55 years imprisonment on the rape counts, and two years for theft with the court ordering the sentence to run concurrently. He was also declared unfit to possess a firearm, and the court ordered that his name be entered into the National Register for Sex Offenders. ALSO READ: 'Rats as big as cats': Louis Liebenberg sent to psychiatric hospital [VIDEO] Charges National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) regional spokesperson Natasha Ramkisson-Kara said Manganyela's victims were adults, and that the offences took place in the Emakhowe, Hluhluwe and KwaMsane areas. Manganyela and the complainants were unknown to each other. He was charged and convicted of four counts of rape, where the minimum sentence for the offence was 10 years' imprisonment. 'The fifth count of rape carried the minimum sentence of 15 years imprisonment. In all these charges, the court sentenced him to the minimum sentence for the offences,' Ramkisson-Kara said. Trial During the trial, state prosecutor Phumlani Khoza led the testimonies of all the women as well as the evidence of the J88 forms. Ramkisson-Kara said Manganyela was linked to all the women via DNA, and evidence was handed in to the court. 'In addition, Khoza handed in Victim Impact Statements facilitated by Court Preparation Officer Sthembile Cebekhulu and compiled by some of the complainants. One of the complainants mentioned that her boyfriend had left her after he learned that she had been raped. 'She said that she now fears for her girl child, following what happened to her. Another complainant said that she feels useless and does not feel like a human being anymore. One other complainant said that she is unable to sleep with the lights off. She said that she has become moody, and she is always angry,' Ramkisson-Kara said. Rapes According to the NPA, Manganyela preyed on the women using the same modus operandi by attacking them in their homes at night while they were sleeping. 'In one instance, he raped an aunt and niece who were living together, while in another instance, he raped a mother in the presence of her minor children. Following the rapes, he would ask the complainants to cover themselves with blankets, and he fled the scene,' Ramkisson-Kara said. 'The complainants reported the offences to the police, and buccal swabs of DNA evidence were taken from them. Manganyela was eventually arrested when one of the complainants saw him walking around in her neighbourhood and alerted the police.' Ramkisson-Kara said the NPA remains committed to the fight against the scourge of gender-based violence. 'We will continue to ensure that justice is delivered swiftly and decisively.' ALSO READ: Four sentenced to life for murder of Alfred Duma Municipality employee
Daily Maverick
3 hours ago
- Daily Maverick
Searching for the mysterious ‘Rooikop' in the Boipatong Massacre, and did he die in Iraq?
I shall never forget the haunting voices in Boipatong that day, calling out 'Rooikop! Rooikop!' — trying desperately to bear some witness to what had happened and to who they believed was responsible. At about 9pm on the cold winter's night of 17 June 1992, a petrol attendant was working late at night at the garage on the edge of the township of Boipatong in the Vaal Triangle. He saw hundreds of heavily armed IFP supporters crossing Frikkie Meyer Boulevard, heading down Nobel Boulevard. They had come from Kwa Madala hostel inside the Iscor steelworks and were carrying assault rifles, spears, knobkerries and pangas as they advanced. From there, brutal and bloody pandemonium broke out. The attackers raged through the township and into the neighbouring informal settlement of Slovo Park, hacking, stabbing and shooting as they went. In those terrible hours of winter darkness, some 45 people were killed and more than a score injured, some of them crippled and maimed for life. The attackers were Zulu men from Inkatha, but from the beginning, many residents said that there were white men among the killers – members of a shadowy 'Third Force' drawn from police and army units, a network used by right-wing extremists to derail South Africa's transition to democracy. In the outcry and political chaos that followed the massacre, the police and the National Party government denied these allegations, blaming the killing instead on ethnic tensions between Zulu and Xhosa speakers. At the time, it was hard to get at any semblance of truth. The day after the massacre, Cyril Ramaphosa and other ANC leaders went to Boipatong and accused the police of being involved. The next day, Desmond Tutu visited with other church leaders, and on 20 June FW de Klerk attempted to visit. He was driven out by the angry crowd, and the police fired on the people, killing one person. I was working as a young soundman and fixer for the BBC news crews at the time. I remember so vividly the long hours we worked in the office editing footage of the massacre for the first two days afterwards. It was harrowing to see the carnage, even viewed through the distance that the TV monitors provided. It was shocking to spool through the images of bodies of the victims, houses broken into, two babies killed, one even cruelly speared, a pregnant woman hacked to death, police firing as De Klerk retreated. The smoke from the barrels rising into the crisp winter sky, the people screaming with rage. I kept a diary of my thoughts and feelings, and here is what I wrote after I had been to Boipatong on the day Nelson Mandela arrived and gave an angry, uncompromising speech: Sunday 21 June, 1992 A burnt-out car lies on its roof just on the edge of Zone 7 in Sebokeng. The road into the township is littered with barricades of boulders, tree stumps, and concrete sewer pipes. We have to swerve from side to side across the road to negotiate our way through them. Any trouble and it would be easy to be trapped by these roadblocks. There are more burned-out cars abandoned along the sides of the road – evidence of outbreaks of violence in the recent past. People are streaming past us on their way to a rally to hear an address on the Boipatong massacre by Nelson Mandela. The atmosphere is tense, but not explosive. A few people wave at us white press people, but most just stare as we drive past. Two Casspirs are parked down a side street, fifty metres or so away. People walking past them jeer and wave their fists. The Casspirs withdraw, reversing clumsily back down the dusty streets. At the rally, there are tens of thousands of people listening to Mandela speak. They are disciplined and orderly, many of them sitting on the grass of the sports field itself. The crowd is sullen and angry, though, 'Give us arms', they were chanting earlier. And now, while Mandela is speaking, they hold up posters for the cameras of the foreign TV crews to film: 'Mandela Give Us Permission To Kill Our Enemies', 'We Want Guns'. A young boy holds up a homemade replica of an AK-47 and pretends to fire into the press circle gathered in front of the podium. Mandela is angry too. His words are deliberate and filled with rage. He has judged the mood of this well. These are people for whom the 'new' South Africa has become a sick joke. The reality is that the police have become part of the problem, their reputation under the present dispensation cannot be rehabilitated. Perhaps we need an international peacekeeping force. By Sunday afternoon, KwaMadala hostel had still not been searched. We are standing at the entrance to the hostel, a few men are milling around just inside the gate. There is suspicion, but no overt hostility. We manage to speak to one of the hostel dwellers through the fence. 'They always accuse us of attacking them,' he says, 'but it is not us. We never attack people.' And what about the accusations that police helped you? 'How can that be true?' he replies. 'Here, the police are keeping us still locked up, how could they be helping us?' We hang around for a bit longer. Two army Buffels and a car with senior police officers pull up to the gate. The soldiers climb down from the Buffels and mass around the gate. The police officers open up the boot of their car and take a bolt cutter out. It looks like they are going to search the hostel. We move nearer, hoping to get some shots of the hostel being searched. We notice that one of the policemen has a box of brand-new locks in his hand. The policemen go inside the gate of the hostel. We are not able to get close enough to hear what they are saying, but there is a flurry of negotiations between the police officers and what appear to be leaders in the hostel community. The box of locks is handed over to the hostel leaders. It seems bizarre that the police should be handing over a new box of locks to the hostel dwellers before the hostel has even been searched. The cameraman and I move closer to try and get a shot, to see what is happening. One of the officers, a police captain, looks up and sees us. He swings the gate open and stomps up to us: 'Get out of here!' he orders. 'Take these men away from here,' he tells three of the constables. We are escorted away from the gate. We leave the scene with the inexplicable image of a box of brand-new locks being handed over to the hostel dwellers by a police officer. **** Those are my impressions, over 30 years old now, but reading them again, they are as fresh as when I wrote them. And yet, there is one more important memory to recall. An image that has never left me. It is what I finished my diary entry with. I called it one of my Postcards from the Edge – one of those things I saw in the township conflicts that were difficult, if not impossible, to explain to white people in the suburbs: 'I remembered hearing people in the crowd saying to us as we stood among them filming: 'Rooikop, Rooikop,' talking about one of the perpetrators and then seeing an Iscor security guard outside KwaMadala – red hair, bandage around wrist… carrying an R4 rifle.' I have carried that memory with me for decades. I was a junior member of the team, and only the cameraman and I spoke Afrikaans. We were a news crew, not investigative journalists, and events were moving fast then. Shortly after Boipatong, I went on assignment to cover the famine and civil war in Mozambique and then the Bisho Massacre happened. The ANC had withdrawn from negotiations after Boipatong, but they resumed after Bisho, and the urgency of the news cycle carried us relentlessly onwards. Still, over the years, Rooikop haunted me. I wondered if the people in Boipatong had been referring to that white Iscor security guard. He would have, of course, been a low-level operative, but I wondered if perhaps he had been one of the white men among the attackers so many of the survivors had talked about? I had almost given up on Rooikop, but recently I was going through some old notes, and I found my diary entry. The rawness and the fear of that time came back to me powerfully, and I wondered if it would be worth trying to find him, or at least, discover his identity. I doubted that I would find him, but I felt that the search itself would be somewhat illustrative of the search for the truth of what actually happened that night in Boipatong, as murky as it remains still today. The accepted consensus around the massacre today is clear – there was no evidence of police complicity in the attack. It was carried out by IFP-aligned hostel dwellers who attacked in response to ANC-aligned assaults on their members in the days before the attack. Eighteen of the IFP members were convicted, and those same IFP members who applied for amnesty for the attack claimed there was no police involvement. The Waddington Commission, an independent body from Britain that was established days after the massacre, the Goldstone Commission and the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that there was no evidence of police complicity in the killings. Perhaps one of the most disturbing facts is that the tapes recording all the police radio traffic from that night were discovered to have been recorded over. The Goldstone Commission was told the recording devices had been used 'incorrectly' – and it was left at that. This is the public narrative we have lived with for over a quarter of a century, but the memory of those voices calling out 'Rooikop' haunted me. Their now barely remembered echoes would not let me go. I wanted to find out what the meaning behind them might be. **** My first steps on the road to finding Rooikop were tantalising, but frustrating. I went to Boipatong and spoke to some of the survivors of the massacre. Memories over the decades have faded and grown unclear. The first survivor I met was Elias Mathope, who was 12 years old that night. Today, he is a healthy 45-year-old whose appearance belies the trauma he carries. He remembers the attackers breaking into his family's shack. 'They came inside the house. Some of them were having spears, some of them having knobkerries. Then they started killing people with the spears.' His testimony is slow and hesitant, and he looks at me as he speaks. The truth of it is almost impossible to bear. His father and he fled, but the attackers caught his mother, Rebecca, and his baby brother Aaron and shot them. 'Those people,' Elias goes on, 'you must remember, they were working with police. They were there during that night.' 'Did you see police?' I ask. 'Yes.' 'Who did you see? Black police? White police?' 'Mixed. It was mixed. Black and white.' 'Were they in uniform?' 'Yes. 'In their blue uniform or camouflage uniform?' 'Camouflage. The police were protecting the people. The attackers were people from KwaMadala. Inkatha Freedom Party. Those people [the attackers] they were in the Hippos. The vehicle that the police was using during that time was the same vehicle they were travelling in.' 'Did you see any white guy with red hair attacking?' 'No. I don't know. Because the people all were screaming. They were shooting all the people.' The woman who was helping translate turned to me: 'The rooikop that they were referring to is the red band that the Inkatha Freedom Party were tying on their heads. So that they are able to identify themselves among the group.' That seemed to clear things up immediately; perhaps that was all there was to it – but then, another survivor, Zamile Zakes 'Diamond' Latha, spoke up. He is a tall man, impressive in his bearing, and laconic in his speech. 'There was a policeman here by the name of Rooinek (red neck). A white guy, he was a policeman here with Mr Peens, who was so famous because when coming to the comrades, he was extreme. He was a policeman, the toughest one.' I was taken aback. I knew that Sergeant 'Pedro' Peens had been implicated in the massacre, some even saying that he was the mastermind who had supplied weapons to the IFP men in the hostel. He had admitted that he was in Boipatong that night, although he was adamant he had nothing to do with the massacre. However, no findings of guilt had been ultimately made against him. 'But did you see white people there?' I asked Latha. 'White people were there, and, as you can know, people wore balaclavas. Some white people, they took black polish. Many people identified them by their hands. White people were here, policemen were here, the massacre of Boipatong was well planned.' I returned from that first trip to Boipatong, fascinated but a little confused. Red headbands, Rooinek… it was all unclear. And then I found an article from the Mail & Guardian in 1999 confirming that Peens had admitted to being in Boipatong that night and also briefly outlining Andries Nosenga's testimony to the Truth Commission. He was an IFP member seeking amnesty for his involvement in the massacre. Nosenga claimed that KwaMadala hostel was the base for launching the attack on Boipatong, that police were involved in the attack and that Peens had indeed been there that night. Peens, Nosenga said, had supplied weapons to Themba Khoza, a radical IFP leader 'via a third policeman identified as 'Rooikop'. (The names of these policemen are known to the Mail & Guardian.)' The M&G report was bylined 'Staff Reporter' and try as I might, after a dozen or so phone calls and emails I simply couldn't find who that reporter was and what Rooikop's name was. I had established one thing, though. Rooikop was not that young Iscor security guard armed with an R4 rifle whom I had seen that afternoon outside KwaMadala hostel. He was someone much higher up the chain of command, but his identity at this point remained elusive – for me at least – but the search itself, 33 years later, remained worthwhile. It illuminated something of that almost forgotten time and of the forces that were active in the Vaal Triangle then. I turned to Piers Pigou to help me. He was an investigator with the TRC team back in the 1990s and has written extensively about Boipatong. 'I can't stress this enough,' he told me. 'There was no proper investigation done around Boipatong. If you look at whether it was Waddington, whether it was Goldstone, whether it was the Truth Commission or indeed whether it was the trials that took place, none of these processes actually specifically looked into the role of the police.' And Rooikop? He had no idea but said he would ask around. He put me in touch with some people, and I made more phone calls, and there were more dead ends, some of them that seemed deeply revealing, but ultimately led nowhere. Until I got a WhatsApp sent to me from Hennie van Vuuren from Open Secrets on an activist group called Unfinished Business TRC. 'Hi Hamilton, Rooikop's legal representative at the TRC identified him as Gerhardus Johannes Greeff.' And included a link to the relevant testimony on line 964. So done. Yes, this time for certain. I had googled 'Rooikop' along with 'Truth and Reconciliation Commission' any number of times, and it hadn't come up, and instead I had used an old-fashioned journalistic search to try and find him, but he had been there, hiding in plain sight, all along. Many people today have scant regard for the TRC and its legacy, but the search for Rooikop proved to me the immense value of this record of our terrible past, despite its flaws and omissions. It stands as an open reminder that these memories haven't all just disappeared into a vortex of forgetting. But, of course, within the tens of thousands of pages of testimony remain unanswered questions and unsolved mysteries, Rooikop's possible involvement in the actual massacre being one of them. Rooikop, or Gerhardus Johannes Greeff, had been implicated, along with Pedro Peens and another policeman named Tickey Sydney Chaka as having been involved in the massacre by Nosenga, who claimed to have been in a Casspir with the police on the night of the attack (line 115). 'When we got out of the hostel onto the road, we were picked up by a police Casspir driven by a white man whose name I don't know. In the Hippo there was Shaga [Chaka] of the security branch; a white policeman known to me as Rooikop who had red hair; Peens and our driver. There were 14 or 15 IFP members inside the Hippo.' The problem is that Nosenga's testimony was confused and contradictory. While he said he remembered Rooikop being there, he couldn't remember what clothes he was wearing (the issue of a police uniform might have been crucial testimony). Strangely, he also at one point said Rooikop had blonde hair. It is beyond the scope of this article to outline the unreliable nature of Nosenga's testimony – there are thousands of words of it on the TRC website. But clearly, there was no definitive evidence on which to be certain that either Peens or Rooikop had been there that night, or that they, or any other policemen, were guilty of any crime at Boipatong. This is the moment where the official recorded history ends, and the search for Rooikop becomes a search for what remains unknown about our cruel history. It shows up in stark relief the shadowed lacunae that exist in our memories of that past. There was, and is, so much that is unclear about what really happened that night of 17 June that I still felt the broader claims of police complicity could not be so easily dismissed. As Piers Pigou said to me, 'we have no smoking gun about police involvement. We know that. But what we do know is that there's all these unanswered questions that relate to the police's behaviour, their actions and their inactions.' So, I went back to Boipatong and talked to Diamond Latha again. I wanted clarity on his testimony. He was part of an ANC Self Defence Unit (SDU) in Boipatong and Slovo Park. They heard rumours that day that the hostel dwellers would attack them that night, so he and his family were nervous, as the police were patrolling the township while he was meeting his wife, who was returning from work. 'A Casspir was there. And I saw the people around from 8 o'clock to 9 to past 9. I saw the people running towards the location. I took cover because they were shooting a tear gas canister. People ran back, the comrades, they ran back into the location.' This squares with what is known from the TRC Final Report: 'At 21h00 police arrived in the township and patrolling youths were ordered to get off the streets. Those who did not were allegedly teargassed. The police reported that they fired birdshot when a police patrol was petrol-bombed on three occasions. The police denied using tear gas.' The police were clearing out the SDUs, or, at least, appeared to be. Still, Latha and his family went to sleep in their shack that night, despite seeing the police and the Casspirs in the township. 'Twenty, 30 minutes later I heard that sound. Kaka kaka kaka. Shooting. Starting from there, from the top at Slovo Park. Till I hear when they come near. I said to my wife 'we're being attacked!' So we closed the door and just kept quiet. 'They come, they come. We hear them. They come. Next to my place they enter the shack.' Latha pauses, his voice growing soft. 'I hear my sister Nomvula. Coming running and knocking [and calling] 'Boetie, Boetie' and when I open up I see a big hole here.' Latha touches his chest to show me where the gunshot wound was. 'She fell. I carried her to the bed. When I checked her in the back, there was a small hole.' He laid her bleeding body on the bed, where she died almost immediately. Next, he rushed outside, through the attackers who were surrounding his shack, to see what was happening at his parents' house close by. His sister Lindiwe and his uncle Ncokotho were dead, shot through the window of the shack. He rushed to a neighbour's house where there was a telephone. At the gate, a shot rang out and hit him in the leg. Finally, hours later, an ambulance arrived. Diamond survived, but the other members of his family were dead. Despite the pain of his memories, I had to ask. 'When you saw the attackers, did you see white people?' His response surprised me. 'I didn't see white people. Because it comes out later that those people were in balaclavas.' 'But you didn't see anyone wearing balaclavas?' 'I didn't see.' 'So you can't be certain that there were people with balaclavas?' 'No, I can't be certain. But the police were inside the location. I know that.' 'How do you know that?' 'I saw them.' 'But weren't the police trying to stop what they thought was going to be a riot?' 'They can say that now. But that's not what everyone knows.' So, despite the horrific suffering Latha endured, he was not an eyewitness of whites during the attack. His later interview contradicts his earlier one, and so his evidence is not clear about police complicity. And yet we cannot simply discard all his testimony. To be fair, these are the tricks memory plays after three decades. We remember some things clearly – others become confused. Time moves on, but our minds are too often frozen in pain and uncertainty that we carry with us from our past. There is also the evidence of others: Elias Mathope, for example, and that of a humble, softly-spoken survivor, Florence Molete. A small woman who carries herself with a determined, powerful air, she remembers how she, her sister Mirriam, her husband, Thomas Lekabe and their young child, Mitah, were attacked. 'It was about 10 o'clock. My sister was there, and her husband and the child. So I said to them they must sleep in the bedroom, and I sleep in the kitchen on the floor. 'That night, I was finished praying and I heard banging at my door. Within a few minutes, the door fell down.' The attackers flooded into the house armed with rifles, pangas and spears. 'There was many people in the kitchen. They broke the bedroom door and went in. So I started to scream, my sister was screaming, and the baby was crying. The father was also screaming. So because I was screaming, they stabbed me.' Florence hesitates as she is speaking. Her speech is softer as she continues. She saw Mirriam trying to protect Mitah's head. 'My sister was crying, holding the baby. But they chopped her hand and chopped the baby.' In the utter confusion, Florence remembers them shooting 'with an AK-47'. There were so many attackers rampaging through her shack, she can't put a number to them. But, of one thing she is certain: 'There were blacks and whites in my house.' 'There were whites in your house?' 'They were wearing balaclavas and camouflage. The others were wearing red [head] bands. They were carrying spears and pangas. They threw me on the floor and they said 'the dog is dead'.' Florence, Mirriam and Mitah survived their injuries. Mirriam died in 2018 from illness, but Mitah still lives in Boipatong and is confined to a wheelchair. She doesn't remember what happened, but she carries the story her mother told her. 'They came into our house and then attacked us. I was hit on the right side of my head with a panga, and that is how I lost my ability to walk.' Mitah is angry about the barely remembered legacy of that horrifying night that left her crippled and so many people dead. 'I feel like we are ignored by the government and then they don't want to help us. They should come here to Boipatong and have a look at what happened, and who are the families that are affected and then start from there to help us.' This testimony cannot simply be discarded. After all these years, Florence remains adamant that there were whites among her attackers. And I was still on the trail of Rooikop himself. Some searching led me to a business in Vanderbijlpark that had been registered in the name of Gerhardus Johannes Greeff – a butchery, to be specific, the Parkview Slaghuis, located at 439 Frikkie Meyer Boulevard. I dimly remembered some minor, almost irrelevant detail in some of the TRC transcripts at an amnesty hearing at Vanderbijlpark in July 1999. Advocate Kobus Lowies asked that 'regarding Mr Greeff, I had been requested to request you that he be excused… He's got a business, a butchery apparently, and he's got a crisis there.' It had to be the same person as in the company records. It seemed deeply ironic that his butchery was on Frikkie Meyer Boulevard, which connects the black township of Boipatong to the once whites-only town of Vanderbijlpark. As I drove along the boulevard, the red dust of winter blowing off the dry grass veld, I thought of how much of South Africa is defined by places, by who lives 'here' and who lives 'there'. From the bitter almond hedge of Van Riebeeck in the Cape to the cruel spatial geography of apartheid at its height, place has been defined by skin colour, and, in doing so, defining how we are permitted to live, and so, who we become, and what promises of life are granted, or denied, to us. Who was Rooikop, really, then? What did he believe? What did he feel about the place where he lived? And about Boipatong, where black people had to live then? Crucially, had he driven across this road, Frikkie Meyer Boulevard, on 17 June 1992 in a Casspir, as Andries Nosenga claimed, to attack innocent people in Boipatong? Or was there no truth at all to this? Certainly, the evidence the world had been given access to was indeed doubtful. Would I find him? And would he tell me the truth of what happened, and perhaps how he felt now? What promise had life shown him in the intervening years that lay between that place, that night, and now? Somewhere in the search for Rooikop, on a road between Johannesburg and Boipatong, I was told where to find someone, an ex-policeman, who 'knows a lot about those times, but he doesn't like to talk about them easily. He might not want to speak to you'. But he did talk to me, on condition that I don't reveal his identity. I didn't ask his name, and he didn't reveal it to me. He did tell me he had been an active Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) member during those days, and he talked about the 'revolution' and the betrayal of his people. He said he didn't know what happened to Greeff, but he knew him. However, he said he didn't know the nickname 'Rooikop' – and he wouldn't be drawn on whether Greeff had been at Boipatong that night. We talked in a staccato, hesitant, way for nearly an hour. He answered my questions in strange, inscrutable phrases, filled with meaning, but no truth. 'Peens betrayed us,' was one of his first remarks. How so? I wanted to know. He shook his head. I can only assume he meant that Peens did so by admitting he was in Boipatong that night. 'Just know that I would never do that to my people. But the kingpin, who knew everything, has passed on. And that's a good thing because they're trying to re-prosecute people.' I asked him first about the tapes from that night, why had they been recorded over. 'That's a good question,' he replied, looking straight at me. Was he there that night, I wanted to know. He kept looking straight at me. 'I don't remember.' Were there white policemen there that night, I wanted to know. His gaze never wavered. 'It was dark, I couldn't see.' 'War,' he told me just before we parted, 'is not a pretty thing. No one ever wins from it.' This bizarre conversation revealed very little, and proves nothing, but it's worth recalling for its lack of denial. Deliberately, it contains no evidence, but it shines dimly a light into those gaps of memory that have existed for decades. His enigmatic words are whispered hints that perhaps probe, just barely, the silence of the tapes that were erased that night. 439 Frikkie Meyer Boulevard is now an Astron Garage. I walked into the small convenience store and asked if anyone remembered a butchery there. An older black man named Stephen came out from behind the counter. 'Yes, it was Hardus' butchery. Come look.' He strode out of the shop and across the front of the building to another shop attached to the garage. It was empty. Its glass windows covered in newspaper. 'This was his butchery.' Did he have red hair? 'Yes, he did. He was once a policeman. I heard he was at Boipatong and later he opened this butchery.' But Stephen didn't know what had happened to Hardus, or wouldn't say. I went across the road to a car dealership on the opposite corner and spoke to one of the owners, who remembered him. 'He was at the same church as my dad. Long time ago now, and he went to work in the Congo, somewhere there. He disappeared and no one knows what happened to him.' Somewhere there… Memory – fragile, unreliable, but it is all we have. Place… again, unknown, impossibly far away both in time and geography. He didn't know anything more about Hardus. I was surprised, but it made sense; lots of ex-policemen and soldiers from the apartheid era had worked security in the early 2000s. I had met some of them myself, covering wars in Africa and the Middle East. I stopped for lunch at a Wimpy on the road. I googled on my phone for: Gerhardus Greeff, Congo, DRC, Democratic Republic of Congo – nothing came up. And then I remembered Stephen at the garage: I googled 'Hardus Greeff.' There he was at last: staring intently at me from an old identity photo in colour, his hair short-cropped, brownish red – 'Rooikop'. I could hardly believe what I read next. He was one of the 'Baghdad Four'. Four South African security contractors who had been kidnapped in Iraq in December 2006, along with their Iraqi colleagues. The Iraqis were released a few days later, but the South Africans, Andre Durant, Johann Enslin, Callie Scheepers and Hardus Greeff have never been seen again. The Baghdad Four, including Hardus Greeff ID photo. (Image: Supplied) It was a startling revelation. I have been in Iraq, along the same type of roads that Hardus and his companions had been kidnapped. I could imagine the pale dust of the desert, the baking sun, the half-derelict buildings along the road glimpsed through the semi-transparent, thick armoured windows. It would be terrifying to be accosted on those roads, having seen the videos, or the reality, of the blood-soaked, sometimes decapitated, bodies of kidnapped victims dumped in the rubbish-strewn gutters. No one truly knows what happened to Hardus and the others. For nearly two decades, they have been presumed dead. The grief his family must feel is impossible to describe. They deserve to know what happened to their son, husband and father. Hardus' fate tells us nothing about Boipatong, but it is one more unsolved mystery in the layers of pain that cover too much of our history. He is one witness among many who are now gone, wiping out the traces of memory of people's lives taken in violence and now, too often snarled in uncertain testimony, perhaps even covered up by deliberate lies. I shall never forget, though, the haunting voices in Boipatong that day, calling out 'Rooikop, Rooikop!' Trying desperately to bear some witness to what had happened and to who they believed was responsible. Today, there are still so many unknowns and half-remembered stories about what happened that night. And, in particular, I have one unanswered question that nags at me: how did those people in the township I met know the name 'Rooikop'? Perhaps the answer to that could be, at least, a partial revelation of who actually was there that night among the attackers. I can't be certain of this, but it is a crucial question to ask. And then – as I was finishing off this article, Piers Pigou sent me this photo from a screen grab of footage shot on 20 June 1992, the day that FW de Klerk briefly visited Boipatong, taken from this video: There he is – a younger Hardus, carrying an assault rifle. His identity confirmed as Rooikop by a number of witnesses who knew him at the time. His hair is possibly bleached blond, or maybe it's natural. It certainly is an unusual colour that is somewhere between pale reddish and blond. Perhaps there is something to Nosenga's testimony after all? But if he had been involved in the massacre, why would he have been detailed to protect De Klerk a few days later? Because he knew the area? Because he was a steady, trusted cop? We just don't know. His presence in Boipatong on 20 June would certainly help to explain why the people were calling out his nickname 'Rooikop' the next day. They wouldn't have known him among all the other policemen if that had been his only visit to the township. He very probably had been in Boipatong before. When, exactly? What would he have been doing there? Hardus is almost certainly dead. He will never be able to answer questions about whether he was at Boipatong that night, and, if so, what did or did not occur. What else might he have known, or remembered, that has remained unsaid, untold and in danger now of being forgotten forever? It was the woman who translated for me recently in Boipatong who said it best. She asked not to be identified for her own privacy. 'I think if they were able to open the Luthuli case, where the witnesses are all dead, why not reopen the Boipatong case? Because we have witnesses who survived death, who are still alive, and were directly affected by that massacre.' DM
eNCA
6 hours ago
- eNCA
Parents demand answers after toddler dies at creche
CAPE TOWN - Western Cape police have launched an inquest into the death of a 22-month-old child at a crèche in Goodwood, Cape Town. Amandla Ziqubu, died last Wednesday. The school's principal says the child became unresponsive after being put down for a nap. But the family is calling for the principal to be charged with negligence, alleging that she failed to call an ambulance and instead contacted police to attend to a sick child.
