he ‘would leave them lying all over the field like ants’ and bulldoze their houses. The crowd’s voice rose in anger. The police raised their rifles. Some of the protesters sensed danger and tried to get away but those at the back were pushing forward. A stone sailed out and landed close to the police. They watched. There was more shouting as mothers and fathers appealed to the police for information about their children. More stones. Suddenly the police opened fire. The harsh bang bang bang of semi-automatic rifle fire. The shots, sporadic at first, escalated to a crescendo, the bullets smashing into soft flesh. No more stones now, just the police target shooting.
Chaos. A wild rushing panic as people ran for safety, snagging in the barbed wire. Screaming. Dust in the faces of the fleeing crowd, blinding them, blurring the scene in a red-brown haze. The shooting died out. The people had disappeared, leaving only the wounded and dead on the ground and hanging on the fence. A silence, then the bawling of children and the groans of the wounded.
Eleven people, mostly women and children, died that day. Two hundred were injured and more than a thousand people arrested, loaded with kicks and swinging rifle butts onto the police armoured vehicles and driven to neighbouring police stations.
By the time we lawyers got there, called in by the Catholic Church, all that was left were mounds of clothing dotted across the field and scraps of material flapping on the barbs of the fence. Dark patches of blood swarmed with blue flies. And scattered in the dust were shoes, lots of them.
We based ourselves in the church of Father Smangaliso Mkhatshwa in Soshanguve, a Catholic haven with outbuildings that could serve as a makeshift medical station and from which we could work to take statements. Through the rest of that day and night and all of the next day, teams of doctors and nurses treated the wounded brought to the mission. Had these people gone to any hospital, they would have been arrested and interrogated. Social workers spoke with the families of the dead, while foreign camera crews filmed the scene.
Gathering evidence of the atrocity and trying to trace the missing became a desperate time of hoping against hope that they had been detained, and were not lying dead in the police or hospital morgues. It would take many visits to the sparse concrete cold rooms of the mortuaries to identify all those who had died on that day.
The massacre was followed by mass arrests in the area, and the random torture continued. The Winterveld massacre, as it became known, became an infamous incident, not least because Bénédicte Chanut, a white French doctor from Médecins du Monde, was also arrested and viciously sjambokked. Chanut had been working at a clinic run by the Catholic Church and Médecins du Monde near Winterveld and, on hearing the shooting, had grabbed her medical case and driven to see if she was needed. She ran straight into the Bop police, who concluded that if black people were causing trouble, there had to be a white person behind it. Not knowing that she was a French national or that she was a doctor, she was arrested and brutally flogged. The French government intervened and she was released.
The Winterveld massacre received considerable media exposure. The Bophuthatswana government called a commission of inquiry and Norman Manoim and I ended up representing the Winterveld community with the brilliant pair, Wim Trengove and Bob Nugent, as our counsel. The commission went nowhere. During May 1986, while the commission was still under way, the two senior police officers commanding the police responsible for the massacre were promoted. It was a clear signal to the people of Winterveld. The commission had become a farce.
The policeman whose promotion got the most publicity was the officer in charge of the entire area, Brigadier Molope. He had been in command on the day of the Winterveld massacre and had given the order to fire. He was known to be leading the offensive against the youth and many of those who survived the torture and thrashings talked of how he would use a wire whip on their backs.
Brigadier Molope was a giant of a man who wore black reflective sunglasses and drove a black bullet-proof Mercedes Benz with tinted windows. Gliding through the bleak townships of Garankuwa, Soshanguve and Mabopane, Brigadier Molope became the source of an almost mythical horror.
THE BOMB
Bombs, like most things in life, are best kept simple. The explosive must be durable, malleable, depending on the vehicle, not volatile and unobtrusive. The vehicle or casing is critical, particularly when the bomb has to travel. Bombs that will be on the move and have to deceive the recipient take careful consideration. The key in this case is that the intended target must not know that he is about to flick the switch on his own life. This is where the bomb manufacturer’s real cunning comes in. Japie Kok is an expert in this field.
7
The few months after the Winterveld massacre were good to Colonel Molope. With his promotion to Brigadier in May 1986 had come more responsibility in terms of his command. In charge of all police and security operations in the massive ODI area of Bophuthatswana, his reputation instilled total fear. The fear was based on a brutality that was unpredictable and often irrational, although not without calculation of consequence. As far as the citizens of Winterveld were concerned, for Molope there was no way back, no redemption. Not after the massacre. Merely to maintain the status quo in the area and protect his own policemen, Molope had to increase the use of force and violence.
When Molope’s large Mercedes Benz drove through the streets, people looked away, afraid that he might stop if they stared. Everyone speculated about his eyes, always invisible behind the sunglasses. No one had seen his eyes. It was rumoured that even when beating suspects in the cells he wore his sunglasses.
Molope always travelled with bodyguards and at least one police escort car. Any bystander who attracted attention stood a good chance of being taken to police headquarters in that escort car for interrogation and sport. Such misfortune was a matter of fate.
It was luck that Selina, a friend of Ting Ting’s from Winterveld, introduced him to the woman who was Brigadier Molope’s mistress. A sheer coincidence to which Ting Ting feigned indifference. Selina didn’t know Ting Ting’s real identity. In effect, she was unwittingly part of his cover. Molope’s mistress lived in the ‘Beirut’ section of Mabopane. The section had been named ‘Beirut’ and the area adjacent to it ‘Lebanon’ after extreme fighting there some years earlier between police and residents.
Over the next few weeks, Ting Ting and Selina met the woman from Beirut several times. Molope had bought his mistress a house and often on a Friday or Saturday night his black car would be seen parked beneath a shade-cloth lean-to.
Slowly Ting Ting pieced together details about Molope’s daily life. On one occasion the mistress wanted to invite Selina and Ting Ting to her house but was worried that Molope would discover that she was entertaining guests. She could lose the house for such an indiscretion, she told them.
The house in Mabopane where Molope lived with his wife and family had extensive security, as did another house he owned in Mafikeng. Yet he visited his mistress alone, without his bodyguards. Ting Ting duly briefed the unit.
The following Friday night, Ting Ting waited near the mistress’s house. He parked the unit’s green Audi 500 (bought from a second-hand car dealer on Bloed Street, Pretoria) some blocks away and walked back. The black Merc wasn’t parked under the shade cloth awning, and although he waited some hours Molope didn’t arrive. Eventually, concerned that the woman might spot him loitering in the street, Ting Ting decided to leave.
He was back the next night. Lights were on in the house but no sign of Molope’s car. Again he waited. Again it was wasted effort. He realised this was going to take time.
The following Friday, 20 June 1986 at six o’ clock, Ting Ting again drove past the house. This time the
