Shepherds & Butchers

I spent the lunch hour with Labuschagne in Cell 6. I knew we had another heavy session ahead. We both needed a break from the prepared line-up of topics and in any event I could not speak to Labuschagne about the evidence he had already given. The Bar’s rules of ethics prohibited that.

I had to make peace first. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘Don’t get anxious about my questions. I have to ask them, and we are doing alright. Just don’t give up. We are doing alright.’

I moved to change the subject altogether. ‘Tell me about Tsafendas,’ I said. Dimitri Tsafendas had been a mystery to all of South Africa since that day in September many years before when he had stabbed the Prime Minister in the heart in front of a packed House of Parliament. Very little was known about him.

He did not speak for a while and appeared to be oblivious to his surroundings. He ignored me even when I looked straight at him. I took the time to study more of the graffiti:

Next I was looking at a crude drawing of a handgun and a penis below it pointing in the same direction. Suddenly he spoke behind me.

I was standing in front of another incomplete message trying to decipher the last word, but the damp had obliterated its tail.

‘You can’t know,’ he said. I turned around to find Labuschagne studying me. ‘How could you know unless you’d met him and spent some time with him?’

It was a good point. I thought of a response as I studied another entry on the wall, one of many on the same theme.

The message was incomplete. I wished I had the conviction of the anonymous scribe that victory was certain in my young client’s case.

‘We were not allowed to speak to him, but he wasn’t afraid to speak to us. After Wessels was hanged I stopped paying attention to the Warrant Officer’s rules.’

Labuschagne did not say any more, but I had the impression that he was looking for an opportunity to unburden himself.

‘What happened between you and Tsafendas?’ I could not bring myself to call him Mr Tsafendas yet.

‘I can’t help you if I don’t know what happened to you,’ I said. ‘Talk to me, Leon.’

After we had buried Wessels and Scheepers, we came back to Maximum. The two escorts who had gone off to bury Moatche and Mokwena arrived back at the same time. They were laughing and joking, and I suddenly couldn’t stand being in their company any longer. There was no place where I could be alone except in the chapel.

As I was walking towards the chapel, there was a noise behind me. It was Mr Tsafendas. He was making a racket. He called me over. He was very angry. He said someone had taken his newspaper clippings. He was the only prisoner who was allowed to receive newspapers and we all knew that he studied all the political news and took cuttings from the papers. He kept everything in a box under his bunk. I said I would get them later. He said, ‘No, I want them now.’ I said, ‘No, later,’ and started walking again. Then he said, ‘I know what you are doing there.’ He was pointing in the direction of the chapel and the gallows building.

I was surprised, because he was supposed to be mad and he usually didn’t talk much. You’d get punished for talking to him, but I asked, ‘What do you mean?’ and he said, ‘You kill people. That’s your job.’ I shook my head, but he said, ‘I know, I can hear the voices in your head. You kill people and they talk to you. And now you are going to the chapel to pray that they should leave you alone.’ I said it was nonsense and that he was crazy, but he said that he could see more than other people because he had a special gift.

I decided to walk away, but he then said, ‘You don’t like killing, that’s why you pray and sing with them in the morning and that’s why you have come here now, to pray some more.’

I felt like he was seeing right through me when even I did not understand what I was thinking. I also became angry with him because I didn’t want to talk about what I was doing. So I told him to shut up and went into the chapel. I tried to pray. I waited for the tension and the guilt, perhaps it was sorrow too, to go away, but it wasn’t working. I could feel something building up and building up inside me until I felt as if I was going to burst open. All this time Mr Tsafendas was making such a racket next door that I couldn’t concentrate. I told him to keep quiet and went to look for his clippings.

I saw the Warrant Officer in his office and asked him if he knew anything about the clippings. He asked me how I knew and I said Mr Tsafendas had told me. Then he said I had no right to be in that section and that I should have known better than to speak to Mr Tsafendas. He threw a shoebox at me and a heap of newspaper clippings fell out. ‘You can take his precious clippings to him!’ he shouted, ‘and for talking to a prisoner you can do catwalk duty tonight when your shift ends.’ While I was on the floor picking up the clippings he stomped around swearing at me, saying that I had betrayed his trust. ‘That man killed the Prime Minister,’ he shouted, ‘and you feel sorry for him.’ I then got very angry with him.

I looked at Labuschagne, surprised. He was serious. For a moment I thought I had misunderstood, but then I realised that he was talking about the Warrant Officer, not Tsafendas.

I waited for him to tell me more, but he relapsed into his uncommunicative mode. I felt that he had more to tell and prompted him. ‘Did you have catwalk duty that night?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you speak to Tsafendas again?’

‘Yes, I was locked in his section, up on the catwalk, alone with him all night.’

Again I let him speak without interruption:

The old man didn’t sleep well that night and I watched him put his clippings back into order. He kept rearranging them, first in one order and then in another. He asked me why they had been messed up and I told him the Warrant Officer had done it because he was angry. ‘What have I done to him?’ he asked. ‘You killed Dr Verwoerd,’ I said. He laughed and said, ‘That was before you were born. What do you know?’ I said I had read about it in school. He said, ‘Make yourself comfortable and I will tell you the whole story.’ When I didn’t reply, he banged on the wall and said, ‘Hey, are you still there?’ I said yes. Then he started talking. He talked all night.

‘There are two kinds of people,’ he said, ‘no, make that three. There are those who make history. They are the first and the most important. Then there are those who write history. And last there are those who read history.’

‘So what?’ I said. ‘Who cares?’ I was tired and didn’t need a lecture from a prisoner. But I was curious at the same time.

He answered immediately, ‘Only those who make history know the truth. Those who write it down rely on second-hand information. And those who read it have no way of knowing whether what they read is the truth or not. They are doomed to be forever uncertain, which is worse than being ignorant.’

I was getting sleepy, so I made myself more comfortable on the catwalk. I sat down with my back against the wall and the rifle across my knees. There is a rule that the rifle may never touch the ground. The rifle just got heavier and heavier.

‘My boy,’ he said, ‘it’s a long story, but we have all night, locked in here together for our punishment.’ I don’t know how he knew I was on punishment shift, but he somehow knew. ‘Let me tell you what really happened,’ he said, ‘and in the morning, if you believe me, maybe you could ask the Medical Officer for some pills for this worm I have inside me before it kills me.’

I said nothing. I had heard the story about the worm before, from my history teacher. He taught us that the Prime Minister had been a very good man, like a prophet who would lead the Afrikaner nation to greatness. Then a madman killed him in Parliament with a knife, a man who believed he was told what to do by a tapeworm inside him. So when the old man spoke of the worm I just let him ramble on.

‘You know we Greeks are the world’s greatest seamen. We got the biggest shipping companies,’ he said. ‘I was just an ordinary sailor, a seaman,’ he said, ‘and I had sailed on many ships and to many places around the world.’ He said that was how he learned a few new languages, English and Portuguese and so on. And he said he also got into trouble sometimes.

Then he told me how he came to Cape Town. ‘Do you know how difficult it is for an immigrant to get into South Africa?’ he asked, but I had no idea. ‘It is ten times more difficult for anyone with a record as bad as mine. And for an immigrant who is not white and has a record? Almost impossible. You know what they do? They take your fingerprints and they check your previous convictions in every country whose stamp is in your passport. And I had many stamps and many convictions everywhere.’ He sounded proud of this.

‘So how did you get in then?’ I asked. ‘Oh, so you are still awake? Well, they came for me.’ He said it like this, They came for me. He also said that they had even given him money to come in and had promised him a job in Cape Town.

‘Who’s they?’ I asked.

‘Two men from right here in Pretoria,’ he answered. He said they had come to his ship in Lourenço Marques, two men who had recruited him for an important job in Cape Town. ‘They said they had been authorised by a man called John Vorster and a man called Rhoodie,’ he said.

I had heard of Vorster, but not of Rhoodie. ‘That is because I made Vorster the Prime Minister,’ he said, ‘and Rhoodie was always working behind the scenes.’

I was beginning to see what job it was they had for him, but to make sure I asked, and he answered, ‘To kill Verwoerd.’

I told him, ‘It doesn’t make sense. Why would they get a non-white Greek sailor with a bad record sitting on a ship in Lourenço Marques to come and do something like that in Cape Town? How did they even know that you were there?’

‘It was the perfect scheme,’ he said. He had applied for a visa to come to South Africa many times before and they had been delaying it for years while they investigated his past. He said, ‘I was in Lourenço Marques, waiting for the visa.’ They’d refused his application seven times before and had even put him on the banned list. Then suddenly they gave him a visa while he was still on the banned list. ‘So they found me, a coloured foreign sailor who knew how to handle a knife, who had once taken part in a communist party protest, and who wanted to live in South Africa. Don’t you see? It was the perfect scheme. A mad communist non-white foreigner kills the Prime Minister!’

I didn’t think it was all that obvious.

‘But wait for the whole story,’ he said. ‘My best point,’ he went on, ‘is that I was there. I was part of the conspiracy. I made it happen. I made history. No one can take that away from me. I was there.’

‘Or made it up,’ I said. ‘You have had all this time to work out a story.’

‘Well, what about this then?’ he said. ‘Who became the Prime Minister when Verwoerd was dead? It was Vorster, of course. And what did he do? He made Rhoodie, who was just a little whippersnapper, the Goebbels of the National Party, the propaganda man. So there is the motive, or at least part of it.’

‘What’s the other part?’ I asked.

You know that all of this was long before my time, so I’m telling you what I understood from Mr Tsafendas’ story. So he said Vorster thought that Verwoerd was too soft and too much of a professor, and that South Africa needed a man of action, a strong, hard man who did things. Like himself. Vorster said that in 1945 while Verwoerd sat around writing in his newspaper he got thrown in an internment camp for his principles. He said that the world was changed by men of big actions, not men with big ideas.

I heard Mr Tsafendas get up from his bed and a short while later he flushed his toilet.

When he sat down again he said, ‘So that is what I have here in the box, in all these newspaper clippings. This is the proof that Vorster and Rhoodie killed Verwoerd. All their reasons and their plans.’ And he said that he found more of it in the papers every day, so that he could tell the world what had really happened.

‘So are you going to write history now?’ I asked. I was sorry that I had not taken a closer look at those newspaper clippings when I had the box.

‘I can write it because I was there,’ he said. We sat like that for a long time into the night. I could hear a man sobbing in C Section, otherwise the place was quiet. It must have been between two and three in the morning when I woke up. I don’t know how long I had been asleep and how much I had dreamed, but the old man was still talking.

The duty sergeant arrived and asked if I had been sleeping on the job. I said no and asked him for the time. It was just after three. He looked down into the cell and saw Mr Tsafendas at his table. ‘Why aren’t you in bed?’ he shouted. ‘Get into bed immediately!’ The old man quickly lay down. Then the sergeant said, ‘And stand up when I speak to you!’ The old man got up again and then the sergeant walked off.

‘Now who’s crazy?’ the old man said as soon as he was gone. ‘He tells me to get into my bed and when I do it he tells me to stand up while he is talking to me.’

I thought he had a point there.

Then he asked, ‘If I am crazy, why am I here?’

He had me there. If he was mad he should be in a hospital like Weskoppies. And if he wasn’t mad, he should have been hanged.

‘I am here because I know why Verwoerd was killed,’ he said. ‘They are afraid I will tell.’

‘Tell what?’ I asked.

‘Tell everyone that Verwoerd had told me that Nelson Mandela was going to be the first black Prime Minister of the country,’ he said.

I thought about that for a while. It had always struck me as odd that he had two cells to himself. One had even been fitted out as a bathroom. His cell had been turned around so that its door opened onto the passage between B and C sections, not into the passage inside B Section like all the other cells there. When I thought about it more it became obvious. That way he would never get into contact with any of the other prisoners and he would also never be able to talk to the visitors who came into the visiting rooms in B Section.

When he spoke up again I could hear that he was getting tired. ‘They went for the insanity angle so that no one would ever believe me. So when the Court declared me insane they locked me away in the death cells.’

He kept repeating that he wasn’t crazy, but that he thought they were trying to drive him crazy so that no one would believe him.

I tried to work out how many times he must have heard the trapdoors banging against the stopper bags and made a rough calculation; say three hangings every two weeks for fifty-two weeks of the year times fifteen or so years that he had been there equalled about eleven hundred times. And if you counted the six years he had spent in the old prison in Potgieter Street, it was nearer fifteen hundred.

Labuschagne and I sat looking at each other for a while. Wierda was slow in arriving and, when he did, we went up to the robing room and started picking at the next case.

I had only half my mind on the case. The other half was searching for a way to put the Tsafendas prophecy before the Court. I was getting a little desperate. We were halfway through the examination-in-chief with Labuschagne and we still lacked the evidence that would lend credibility to his version of the events at the reservoir. We had expert opinions but expert opinion is no good without a factual foundation.

I looked at my watch. We had ten minutes before the Judge and Assessors would return.

I thought of Marianne Schlebusch, a calm and efficient woman who had a calming effect on me. I had been trying to find out if there was a foolproof way for us to determine whether Labuschagne would be caught out in a lie, that his whole defence was built on falsehood, and that he was really a mass murderer of the worst kind.

‘I don’t think he is lying,’ she had told us, ‘but I would have to concede that we can never be sure. My tests have built-in lie detectors and if he had lied to me the tests would have exposed that. But there is a small group of subjects who can defeat those traps, and he fits the profile perfectly. He is way above average intelligence and he can concentrate for a long period without losing focus.’

‘And he may be a psychopath,’ I ventured.

‘No,’ she had said, ‘but he doesn’t have to be to do what he did.’

‘So what am I to do with him?’ I had asked her.

‘You are going to have to make him talk about the events at the reservoir and face up to what he has done. Until he talks about it and admits what he has done, you won’t know whether he is telling the truth and I won’t be able to begin with a cure.’

Wierda was waiting for me in court. He told me he was ready to give me a summary of the next case.

Palace of Justice

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