it off on any excuse, just so they wouldn’t have to carry it. Actually, maybe they weren’t so stupid after all, although when you got into a real firefight and needed it, the ammo was all used up.
‘The good Angolan soldiers were fighting the South Africans on the Namibian border. Besides the Urals, we had with us an even larger truck, a huge thing, which we filled with the bodies of our comrades. It was terrible. They had been surprised and slaughtered. We worked right through the night and into the next day. The flies and the stench from the bodies made us sick. It was swampy ground and thick bush with mosquitoes that ate us alive.
‘While searching for the wounded in the bush, I found my friend Jeff. He had crawled under a small bush but was in a very bad way, shot in the stomach and his right leg was broken. I tried to help him, but it was no use. He could barely speak. He said he could hear us moving in the night but did not have the strength to cry out. He died half an hour later. I was holding him in my arms as he died. I picked him up and carried him to the truck, gently laid him down on the great pile of bodies. Other bodies soon covered him. We climbed on the trucks and left that killing ground.
‘It just went on and on, from camp to camp. February 1984 I was back in Viana Camp near Luanda. While I was there, Bra T approached me and asked if I wanted to fight in South Africa. I said yes. Later, in September 1984, I went to Pango Camp in the north of Angola for specialised training in explosives and assassination. I enjoyed the training, but my instructor almost killed me there.
‘We were being trained in how to use and throw the F-1 hand grenade. You would pull the pin, the lever arm popped off in your hand and you had to wait until the instructor told you to throw the grenade. It was nerve-racking. The instructor was close to you but protected by a thick shield, so he was okay. On this one occasion I pulled the pin, the arm popped off and my instructor waited . . . and waited . . . and waited . . . until in a panic I threw the grenade, which exploded very close to us. I yelled at the instructor that he had nearly killed me. I think he forgot what was happening. Maybe he was thinking of something else, dreaming.
‘I was at Pango Camp for a full year, training and training, thinking that I would never go home. In September 1985, I got called to Lusaka where I met Jabu, Neo, Rufus and Justice. I was finally going home, almost six years after I had left.’
THE BOMB
Building a bomb for a fixed object, such as a building or an installation, has its own peculiarities but is an easier device to put together. The challenge in such instances is about what sort of bomb is most appropriate and how the bomb will be attached to the target so that it will cause the most damage.
The bombs that exploded on 27 May 1987 in the headquarters of the Congress of South African Trade Unions in downtown Johannesburg did precisely that. Experts specifically constructed the bombs to the required strength and trained saboteurs cut through the bars on the back wall of the building, gained entrance to the parking basement, and placed the explosive charges around the main supporting pillars of the building and the lift shaft. They did it in the middle of the night when no one was around, so it didn’t matter what the bombs looked like. They weren’t designed to deceive, merely to destroy, which they did, rendering an entire eleven-story building permanently unusable. Very effective.
In the case of a living target, an individual, it is more difficult. One scenario is to place the bomb at a place frequented by the target. Hence at a home, a car, a place of work, a restaurant or a street. In circumstances where the individual has no known allegiance to a place or an object, the bomb must travel to the individual or they must travel to meet each other. A meeting of coincidence, so to speak.
12
Last night was a bit of a scene at Sam’s Cafe with my partners after our monthly partners’ meeting. Always a torrid and difficult meeting with the colliding egos and stresses of running a political practice on very little money. Drinking too much at the dinner, swapping stories of State stupidity as we talk ourselves up to heights of brilliance and legal cunning.
On the highway to Pretoria, the sun knifing in through the window combines with my dehydration to launch me into a bout of mild depression, induced by a vitamin B deficiency. Generally, I never smoke during the day as it makes me feel tired, but I light a cigarette. It’s a habit, when I feel bad, to do things that make me feel worse. Pitiful really.
I’m thinking of my approach to the accused and what they will say in relation to the charges. Deciding on the nature of the defence is a difficult phase in any trial preparation. It has to be handled carefully. The accused have to be guided by the correct considerations, both legal and political, in order to construct a responsible defence. I know that conventional lawyers would decry taking political issues into account and would only consider the legal questions. But in a case where both sides are driven by power, punishment and political advantage, such concerns can never be ruled out. This is a political trial. So these matters have to be considered and the accused must come to a decision about their defence by themselves.
If I suggest they adopt the defence that would result in the lightest sentence, I would be naive and they would be outraged. I would be dismissed as their defence attorney. Similarly, I would be doing them a disservice if I advised a purely political stance towards the court and its proceedings. In all likelihood, this would result in an excessively stiff sentence. The ideal defence in a political trial has to encompass complex and sensitive considerations in order to meet both the legal and political needs of the accused. The wishes of their families must also be considered.
In some political trials, the accused have jettisoned their cause in favour of the lightest possible sentence. They admit culpability and state that they were brainwashed by the ANC. There are numerous variations on this theme of distancing the accused from the ANC. Usually, this tactic ends up a mess. Branding your erstwhile comrades sick manipulators places you forever on the political perimeter.
This is not an easy game to play, particularly for novices, and most accused are first timers. The security police are experienced and often exhibit masterful insights into the character of the accused, exploiting divisions within groups as well as personal weaknesses and insecurities. In the end, hungry, hurt and scared, most people will do anything to please their captors. If they don’t like what you’ve written, they’ll tell you to write it again. And again and again until it fits the bill, their bill. And then, back in your cell, the guilt seeps through you. You’re humiliated, sore and alone, trying to justify what you’ve done. Hoping that your comrades will understand, which, of course, they won’t. And that’s how it starts.
This is serious stuff. The one component common to most political trials is the challenging of the accused’s confession. In legal jargon, this is known as ‘the trial within a trial’. In many MK trials, most of the evidence comes from the confession of the accused, usually extracted under torture and duress. The admissibility of the confession then becomes contentious. And so battle is joined.
I approach the prison, feel the eyes of the warders looking at me through the thick glass. I bark my name into the intercom, the sun on my head shooting pain across my thin skull. The immaculate Warder van Rensburg, reassuringly exhibiting the same distance and contempt towards me, ushers me in. The clanging of the massive hydraulic doors jars my delicate senses, makes me wish that I had shown more restraint the previous night.
We go in through one door after the other until the door of the doctor’s surgery closes. I stretch out gratefully on the bed. As I lie there I wonder why the beds in doctors’ surgeries are always uncomfortable. Maybe they don’t want the patients settling in. The frowning eyes of the warder appear at the peephole in the door and I can see that he is irritated by this lazy lawyer stretching out on the starched white sheets of the prison doctor’s bed.
