14

 

‘I cannot tell you how dirty I feel’

After his criminal trial Eugene applied for amnesty at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The TRC investigated apartheid-era human rights abuses by all parties with a view to bringing about reconciliation. Members of the security forces were requested to come forward with information about apartheid offences and were given the opportunity to seek amnesty from the TRC for political crimes.

Eugene’s numerous TRC amnesty sittings took place between October 1997 and April 2000 in Pretoria, Durban, Port Elizabeth, East London, Pietermaritzburg, Cape Town, George and Johannesburg. ‘I testified constantly,’ he told me.

When he thinks back to his trial and his testimony before the TRC, one thing is evident: he was completely alone. But this was not the first time he had been on his own.

Eugene’s speech impediment had taught him from an early age what it felt like to be an outsider. I only became aware of his stutter myself after reading about it in A Long Night’s Damage, which was quite some time after my first visit to the prison. In the four years I have known him, he hasn’t stumbled over his words once.

We spoke about this during one of my visits. The previous night a group of prisoners had tried to escape, and the warders were vigilant. We had been searched thoroughly; the brusque warders circled like brown hawks in the visitors’ area. The tension seemed to sweat from the walls.

‘I’ve known how it feels to be ostracised since childhood,’ Eugene said.

‘How so?’ I asked.

‘You know, I really wanted to see the movie The King’s Speech, but when I eventually got the chance to I had to keep switching it off. It was so “me” that I almost couldn’t watch. The king’s experience – his helplessness in communicating because of his stutter – was mine too. School was hell. The hell just got worse later.

‘The humiliation, the teasing, the powerlessness, the inability just to be normal. The fear of having to ask for something over the café counter. Just greeting people was torture. But giving up was not an option.’

He also firmly believes that the police generals were hoping that his stutter would inhibit him during his court case and his testimony before the TRC. ‘But then I lost it and decided bugger them! For the first time in my life I fucked them over. I shoved their authority and superiority down their own throats. They waited for the stuttering, the swallowing, the sideward glances that make people bow their heads in pity. When it didn’t happen I saw only one thing on their faces – doom. For days this expression remained on their faces.’

‘But how did you manage to stop stuttering all of a sudden?’ I wanted to know.

‘A stutter can never be cured, of course, but as a child I went to the University of Pretoria to learn a few techniques to control mine. When my court case started, I decided not to be dismissive of the proceedings; it was important to me to add value and dignity to it. People tend to doubt the credibility of those who stutter. So, I harnassed all the resistance, focus and intensity I had to apply those techniques and to do my best.’

Top: For his testimony at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Eugene mostly attended the hearings at the Idasa Building (Institute for Democracy in South Africa) in Visagie Street in the Pretoria CBD.

Top: One of the many photos taken of Eugene during his testimony at the TRC.

In his book No One to Blame?, Advocate George Bizos writes that Eugene’s announcement that he was going to reveal all to the TRC forced many individuals to seek amnesty who would otherwise not have done so. ‘He did not want to be in this alone, he wanted all to come forward, and, in particular, he wanted to implicate the politicians and the generals who had abandoned him … They suspected that they might have been implicated and could not afford to take the chance and the applications flooded in.’1

Each day, Eugene was driven – under heavy guard – from C-Max to the Idasa building in Pretoria where most of the TRC sittings were held. In his application for presidential pardon, he wrote of his experiences at the sittings:

My legal representative and I worked day and night to complete my amnesty application, which ran to a thousand pages. What interested me was that my legal representative was approached almost daily by those representing some of the other perpetrators, asking if they could see a copy of my amnesty application before submission. It forced others to think very carefully about their applications …

I have no doubt that my approach assisted the TRC and the government enormously in uncovering the truth. It essentially obliged perpetrators to lodge applications for all of their operations and atrocities. At that stage I felt I would do everything in my power to support the TRC process as much as possible. I definitely took the correct approach; it definitely had the desired effect.

The TRC acknowledges the effect of my decision [to keep my application secret] in its interim report – more specifically, in volume 5A, page 202, paragraph 32 – which reads:

‘In reviewing its efforts to uncover the deep truth behind the violation of the apartheid era, the TRC frankly acknowledges that much of its success is due to the fact that large numbers of security police members grasped at the possibility of amnesty in exchange for full disclosure. The commission is not, however, so naive as to believe that it was this alone that had persuaded them to blow the whistle on their past actions. The fact is that they would have preferred the cloak of silence.

‘The ironic truth is that what brought them to the TRC was the fullness of the disclosures made by an individual often painted as the arch villain of the apartheid era, Mr Eugene de Kock. Whatever his motives, the TRC acknowledges that it was … he who broke the code of silence.’2

In his book Unfinished Business: South Africa, Apartheid and Truth, TRC commissioner Advocate Dumisa Ntsebeza writes that many of the initial tip-offs for TRC investigations into apartheid offences came from Eugene: ‘De Kock, probably correctly, saw himself as being set up as a scapegoat, the sacrificial lamb for all the ills and brutality of apartheid. He is still widely regarded as probably the only perpetrator to have come clean.’3

Eugene is outspoken on the issue: ‘I always felt the way in which the ANC leadership accepted responsibility for the actions of their foot soldiers stood in stark contrast to the cowardly conduct of senior officers in the police and army, and the ministers in the former cabinet – our former superiors.’4

In his application for presidential pardon, Eugene quotes from Dr Alex Boraine’s A Country Unmasked, in which Eugene’s testimony in the court case against former state president PW Botha is described. According to Boraine, Eugene entered the small courtroom with a stern expression on his face. Botha glanced quickly at De Kock, then turned away to sit with his back to him.

If Botha imagined that De Kock would in any way be intimidated by being only a few feet away from him when the former colonel read his statement, he was in for a shock. De Kock came out with all guns blazing. I watched him as he passionately described the politicians of the National Party as cowards who sold out the police and the army: ‘They wanted to eat lamb but they did not want to see the blood and guts.’

De Kock went on to say that he and his colleagues had been told by politicians on the highest level that they, the security forces, were fighting for the protection of their fatherland. But, he said, they were only fighting for the ‘incestuous little world of Afrikanerdom’. De Kock went on to say: ‘We did well. We did the fighting. Politicians do not have the moral guts to accept responsibility for the killings.’

He described himself as a lowly colonel, but affirmed: ‘I am also an Afrikaner.’ However it was as cowards that God would deal with the politicians. I watched Botha carefully as this vitriol was spewed out by De Kock. He was unmoved; he stared ahead and never looked at De Kock again.5

Another challenge for the TRC was that the old South African Defence Force (SADF) had no desire to participate in the proceedings and instructed its members not to submit amnesty applications. However, Eugene had been involved in a number of joint operations with the SADF and decided to make information about these public too.

He went on to write: ‘In this regard I referred to the co-operation between Vlakplaas and the directorate of covert intelligence, with which we launched an attack in Botswana in which the Chand family died. I revealed all the information I had about the operation against the former Transkei government of Mr Bantu Holomisa and the operation against the former Ciskei government of Mr Oupa Gqozo. These operations were executed in co-operation with the intelligence forces of the army.’6

Eugene received amnesty for almost all of his submissions, but not for the murder of Japie Maponya and the Nelspruit murders.

He told the TRC amnesty committee: ‘There are times when I wish I had never been born. I can’t tell you how dirty I feel. I should never have joined the South African Police. We achieved nothing. We left only hatred behind us. There are children who will never know their parents and I will have to carry this cross forever. I am a very private person and don’t like to show emotions, but I sympathise with my victims as if they were my own children. That is all I can say.

‘I have since met … the family members of the Motherwell Four and they have accepted my sympathy and apology. I have also expressed my regret to Mr Joe Slovo’s children, which they accepted. One of the children said to me: “At least you have faced your demons and come clean, which is far more than can be said for the other perpetrators.”

‘The proceeds of my book A Long Night’s Damage [his story as told to the journalist Jeremy Gordin] have been donated through the Presidential Reparations Fund to the victims of apartheid and their families.’7

During Eugene’s TRC amnesty hearings, two very different women featured in his life: clinical psychologist Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela and Finnish journalist Katia Airola.

At the time, Gobodo-Madikizela worked for the TRC and was present at Eugene’s first testimony before the commission on the Motherwell incident. In his testimony he asked to meet the widows of the murdered policemen so he could ask for their forgiveness. Gobodo-Madikizela then decided to conduct a series of interviews with Eugene in prison to find out more about the inner workings of the man she had come to know as ‘Prime Evil’.

The result was her book A Human Being Died that Night, based on her meetings with Eugene: ‘From one point of view De Kock was simply … a criminal found guilty in a court of law of gross acts of inhumanity. But he represented much, much more. He was the embodiment of hundreds of years of conquest, the hitherto sacrosanct aggressor acting in the name of a higher power, even the Higher Power. And now he was disgraced. He stood for every white man with a whip or torch or gun … and now he was defeated … abandoned.’8

Gobodo-Madikizela is an attractive woman whose singularly beautiful features radiate compassion. It is easy to feel comfortable in her presence.

On a spring day in 2014, I had an illuminating discussion about forgiveness and reconciliation with her and Candice Mama, daughter of Glenack Masilo Mama, one of the victims of the Nelspruit killings. The youthful Candice is a striking example of the healing power of forgiveness and reconciliation. The Mama family met Eugene in October 2014 and forgave him for the death of their husband and father.

Gobodo-Madikizela told me that after her book was published she advocated reconciliation in various ways, especially in media articles in which she explained why it was time for Eugene de Kock – the face of apartheid-era transgressions – to be paroled. When an offender like him shows sincere remorse, she believes it paves the way for forgiveness and the possibility for reconciliation. ‘Showing remorse is the recognition of deep human brokenness and it is also the possibility – the place where it becomes possible – for the perpetrators to reclaim their rights to belonging in the realm of moral humanity,’ she writes in one of her articles.9

For Gobodo-Madikizela, moral responsibility is critical. An article by author Karina Szczurek pinpoints the importance of Gobodo-Madikizela’s work: ‘[she] identifies what is missing in our democracy: a spirit of human solidarity that transcends the commitment to membership of one’s racial group or political party. Her plea is for a shared humanity, for the understanding and acceptance of our diverse grievances, traumas and complicities, and crucially, for the triumph of moral responsibility.’10

During one of my visits Eugene suggested that I contact Katia Airola, whom he had met during his TRC hearings. ‘We are still friends today and she visits me without fail twice a year,’ he explained.

Eugene’s friendship with Airola is an improbable one. Born in Finland, she is a leftist journalist who, from 1984 to 1998, worked at the Angolan government’s Press Centre. Today she divides her time between Cape Town, Portugal and Angola.

I met Katia at the Kia-Ora Backpackers Lodge where for the past fifteen years she has stayed whenever she is in Pretoria. The guesthouse is opposite the leafy Burgers Park in the city centre, a stone’s throw from the old Idasa building where many of the TRC sittings were held. Our initial meeting was slightly confusing: we first had to explain how and where we fitted into Eugene’s circle of friends. The next day I picked her up for a visit to Eugene. I kept a low profile. She wanted all of Eugene’s attention and drank in the conversation with every fibre of her being. I laughed when the two of them got hot under the collar during a heated discussion about politics and China’s influence in Africa. I got to observe Katia closely. She is an attractive woman with generous features, a mop of light hair and smooth skin. I could see why men would like her. The visit was over too quickly.

‘Come and have a beer with me,’ she said as we stopped at Kia-Ora. It was a Saturday morning. Jacob Mare Street was filled with pedestrians.

I asked her to tell me about meeting Eugene, their friendship, and her impressions of the TRC. No matter how much I read about it or how many broadcasts I watched, it was not the same as talking to someone who had been there.

After resigning as a journalist at the Angolan Press Centre, Katia found herself in Cape Town with nothing much to do and the sickening feeling that she wanted to crawl into a hole and die. That is until she discovered the bookshops. After the war in which Angola gained its independence no bookshops survived and consequently she was starved for books and also very interested in South African history.

‘How did your and Eugene’s paths cross?’ I asked.

‘The first time I became aware of Eugene de Kock’s existence I was chatting to a friend with one eye on the TV news. Then I suddenly sat bolt upright: a man with absolutely fascinating hands and long, elegant fingers was arranging papers on the desk in front of him. Not only the hands, but the way he moved them, caught my attention. Who was he?

‘It was a TRC broadcast, but I was new in South Africa, uninformed about local news. The next day I went to Exclusive Books and bought everything I could lay my hands on about the TRC and De Kock. In under a week I had read it all and realised that, as usual after all wars and revolutions, a scapegoat had been chosen on whose shoulders everyone could heap blame. My reading material described a man who was made the scapegoat for apartheid crimes. This shocked my sense for justice. I had discovered a new field of interest.’

Chin cupped in hand, I listened to Katia. Two mechanics had arrived in the meantime and decided to occupy the bench beside us.

‘But the man, Eugene, fascinated me,’ Katia continued. ‘At that stage I really felt physically drawn to him. He sat there with an emotionless face. He has a strong appeal that speaks to most women with whom he comes into contact. I don’t think he is aware of it.

‘My next step was to attend the TRC sittings in Cape Town to find out how things worked. Then I just got on the train to Pretoria, arranged accommodation at Kia-Ora and attended the sittings at the Idasa building. Until the end of the TRC my life comprised travelling to Pretoria whenever Eugene testified, but also to Durban, Port Elizabeth and East London. Not only to listen to him, but also to others who had applied for amnesty and to see how Eugene weighed up against them.’

‘Was he different from the others?’

‘Yes, he was different. His brutal honesty made a deep impression – also his long, sensitive fingers and almost painful politeness. Back in Cape Town I began to walk, ten to fifteen kilometres a day. I lost weight; my life started revolving around Eugene and his situation. I was alive again. “I am going to meet the person behind the mask of a murderer,” I said to my family. They thought I had lost my marbles.’

I asked her how she managed to do it.

‘After about a year I asked his advocate if I could give him a book. He said it was fine since Eugene was a book lover, but that I couldn’t give it to him myself. He would give it to Eugene. The next day I took a copy of King Leopold’s Ghost to him. The following day his advocate asked me my name and said Eugene wanted to thank me.’

I wondered about Katia’s choice of book. Back at home that afternoon, I learnt that the book is about the politically and morally corrupt king Leopold II of Belgium who colonised the Congo in the late 19th century. During his rule over the Belgian Congo, there were countless atrocities; about half the population – an estimated ten million people – died.

Author Adam Hochschild devotes an entire chapter of King Leopold’s Ghost to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Conrad was a steamship captain on the Congo River during the early years of Belgian colonisation; Heart of Darkness appears to be based on his experiences there. Hochschild’s research led him to four men who could have been prototypes for the evil Mr Kurtz in Conrad’s book: all men who boasted that they could kill.11

Then I understood. Katia had a very specific message for Eugene. She wanted him to understand that she had empathy for him – that he had been a cog in the machine of an evil government.

‘I received a little yellow card, which I still cherish,’ Katia continued. ‘In the brief, polite message the word “support” was used four times and it led me to understand that he knew I had been there for his testimony. I don’t know how he knew this – we sat on opposite sides of quite a large hall; neither of us has good vision and could not see where the other was looking. I was possibly quite conspicuous because I wore African kaftans at that time.

‘Through his advocate and the prison warders I started sending him letters and sweets. He told me he could no longer receive books because the warders at C-Max took them away from him. But when I asked him what he wanted, he answered almost boyishly: any kind of chocolate. I started buying chocolates until we found out what his favourite was – Côte d’Or. He liked dark chocolate.’

The mechanics ordered rum and Coke. ‘I’ve seen you here before,’ the one with the dark hair said to Katia.

‘Mind your own business,’ she grumbled, turning her back on him.

‘The next step was to arrange a meeting. I had to be careful; people around me tried to find out who I was. I didn’t want to embarrass him either; ludicrous women who become fascinated by prisoners is an old cliché.

‘Then I had a good look at the guards, the men who had passed the correspondence between me and Eugene. I decided to flirt with the fattest and most unattractive one until he asked me: “Do you want to meet him? I could take you in during the break.”’

By this time Katia had scrutinised Eugene so many times during sittings that her impressions of him had already been formed. She found him to be shy, polite and somewhat inquisitive. ‘Meeting him for the first time, I noticed he had a strong handshake and a lovely smile.’

Later, she decided to take food for him to the prison. ‘Home cooking as a variation on jail food. Yet he said of the prison food: “The food is not bad, I had worse in the defence force.” For the Pretoria sittings I sometimes made him lunch. He developed a taste for bacalhau, dried and salted Portuguese fish.’

At the end of the TRC process, Katia asked Eugene if she could continue to correspond with him. ‘I was learning Afrikaans and told him that he could write to me in his own language. In English he wrote about two pages, but his first letter in Afrikaans was fourteen pages long. But the pen got too heavy for him; I would write, and on occasion he would phone me.’

I thought about Eugene’s wife and children having left the country in the nineties, a few years before Katia’s appearance, and the divorce soon afterwards.

I had e-mailed Katia previously to ask whether she would put something in writing about her friendship with Eugene but I had not received anything. I asked her why.

She replied without hesitation: ‘I must admit, I wrote you pages and pages about Eugene and then deleted them all, because they revealed more about me than about him. It’s just like Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s book: it’s about Pumla’s reaction to Eugene.’

The sun, and the two mechanics, had moved on; there were empty glasses and beer bottles on the table. We said our goodbyes.

Weeks after our visit to the prison, I received an e-mail from Katia who was then in Portugal: ‘Somewhere I read that during his trial Eugene was asked to outline his work. His cold – defiant – answer was: “Assassin for the state”. The media latched on to this statement as an admission that he was indeed an assassin. But they ignored the most important part of the statement: “for the state”.

‘I got the idea that he got bored during the tedious court proceedings and that he then gave confrontational answers to stupid questions. He has a sharp sense of humour and irony,’ Katia wrote.

I read into his remark a hidden message from Eugene the outsider, the branded scapegoat. Buried in it is confession on the one side, but a kind of redemption on the other. While not the sort of recognition he had craved since his childhood, his court case and the amnesty hearings that followed gave Eugene an undeniable stature. He had become well known in South Africa – in his own words, a kind of ‘icon … too repellent … to be true’. People around the world took note of him during his amnesty hearings.

As a BBC news programme said of Eugene in 1998, ‘in the post-apartheid era of truth and reconciliation he has also become something of a hero, a man of integrity in a community of denial’.12

During one of his amnesty hearings Eugene remarked that he felt defiled, dirty, that he sometimes wished he had never been born. He realised the consequences of his deeds, mostly devastating, on the lives of a number of people, that he had caused them unforgivable pain.13 For Eugene, redemption was only possible if he confessed his offences openly and honestly, faced his demons.

Eugene’s public confessions meant that as a persona he took on different meanings for different people. Some empathised: in their opinion, he was the only one being punished for the crimes of many others. Others, who could not make peace with the new dispensation, regarded Eugene as a hero for all the wrong reasons, even though he does not, by his own admission, sympathise with the rightwing. To a number of family members of Vlakplaas and Security Branch victims, he brought closure with the information he provided about how and why their loved ones had died.

His brutal honesty about his offences, his acknowledgement that it was gravely wrong, and his genuine remorse sets him apart from many other apartheid offenders. It is proof of his humanity. His confessions brought deliverance not only for the families concerned, but also for himself. I concluded, after talking to many former policemen, that only those who had embraced the opportunity to speak out honestly and openly about their offences could experience any measure of redemption.

The families of Eugene’s victims generally reacted positively to his admission of guilt and attempts to reach out to them. Felicia Mathe is the widow of Theophilus Sidima, also known as MK Viva Dlodlo, a senior MK commander who was murdered in May 1987 by the Security Branch. After Eugene’s testimony before the TRC she sent the following message to the commission: ‘Mr De Kock, during this meeting, divulged all the information pertaining to this incident to me and I left the meeting with the distinct feeling that he had been most honest and sincere in his dealings with me … I did not think I would ever be able to say this, but I am extremely grateful to Mr De Kock for his help and assistance and I wish to convey my gratitude to him for having helped me and some of the other victims of this particular very sad incident.’14

‘The families want closure,’ said Eugene when I asked him about this. ‘They want to know how their loved ones died, what they were wearing, what their last words were. I alone – as the murderer, the one who was there with them in that most intimate moment of death – can give these answers to those who are left behind. It is very important to do so.’