FOREWORD BY GEORGE BIZOS
Foreword
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
The Aggett inquest was a mirror held up to reflect the unimagined depths of depravity, brutality and destruction employed by the Security Police.
The vast propaganda machine of the State creates a situation in which people do not know their own history. For instance, we have lived through the period in which Neil Aggett died. What steps have we taken to ensure that the lessons of today will be taught to our children?
BEVERLEY NAIDOO’S DEATH OF AN IDEALIST IS AN IMPORTANT contribution to the history of the struggle for freedom in South Africa. Dr Neil Aggett, who died in detention on 5 February 1982, was a socially conscious young man. His dedication to his medical and trade union work, his commitment to labour activism, his uncompromising principles and his tragic death make him a very worthy subject of the insightful tribute offered in this book.
Under the apartheid regime, those with close links to African trade unions were closely scrutinised. From the mid-1970s there was a surge of trade union activity by the African workforce. Students across the country, both black and white, became involved in what was known as the ‘Wages Commission’, a euphemism for trade union work used by labour activists to avoid the regime’s scrutiny. The National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) was at the forefront of a campaign for the recognition of trade unions and the release of political prisoners. Charles Nupen and Karel Tip, two NUSAS presidents, Glenn Moss, the president of the Wits Students’ Representative Council, Cedric de Beer, a student leader, and Eddie Webster, a Sociology lecturer at the same university, were acquitted of charges that they were furthering the objects of the ANC and the Communist Party. The trial, in which Arthur Chaskalson, Denis Kuny, Raymond Tucker, Geoff Budlender and I acted as counsel, lasted ten months.
From the perspective of the regime, certain English-speaking universities were more than a mere irritant; they were a veritable anathema. Neil Aggett was a student at the University of Cape Town, where he completed a medical degree in 1976. Aggett worked as a physician in black hospitals in Umtata and Tembisa, and later at Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto. He was appointed organiser of the Transvaal branch of the Food and Canning Workers’ Union. He lived with Dr Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Floyd, his companion (who shunned the term ‘girlfriend’), in the depressed area of Jeppe in Johannesburg. Both Neil and Liz had black friends in the trade union movement. In the eyes of the security police, what better proof did one need that they were communists, terrorists and traitors? The fact that Neil Aggett avoided reporting for the regime’s military service put the matter beyond any doubt.
The catalyst for Neil Aggett’s arrest followed the arrest of ANC activist Barbara Hogan, whose list of ‘Close Comrades’ (those sympathetic to the struggle) was intercepted by the security police (through no fault of Barbara’s). Over 60 students, young graduates and others involved in trade unions were detained. Many of the detainees were white. The detentions were triumphantly announced by the regime. The parents of the detainees reacted quickly, and, under the leadership of Dr Max Coleman and his wife Audrey, an organisation called the Detainees’ Parents Support Committee (DPSC) was formed. They demanded access to their children and started a release campaign. No charges were brought against most of the people detained.
Neil Aggett was on that list, as was Liz. They were both detained (but not charged with any offence) on 27 November 1981. During that time, detention without trial was an integral part of the regime’s strategy. The Rabie Commission had been established to placate critics of the detention system. Chief Justice Rabie was charged with reporting on the internal security of South Africa. The biased report was published on 3 February 1982. That same day, the Minister of Police Louis le Grange, when questioned in Parliament on the treatment of detainees, said,
… the detainees in police cells or in prisons are being detained under the most favourable conditions possible … All reasonable precautions are being taken to prevent any of them from injuring themselves or from being injured in some other way or from committing suicide.
Just two days later, Neil Aggett was found hanging from the bars of the steel grille in his cell in John Vorster Square. He had spent 70 days in detention. He was the 51st person, and the first white person, to die in detention. He was 28.
The death of the first white detainee was more than an embarrassment to the regime. There was an outcry among the local and international press led by the Rand Daily Mail in South Africa and The New York Times. Two outstanding reporters, Helen Zille, current leader of South Africa’s opposition Democratic Alliance political party, and Joseph Lelyveld, a future Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, who became executive director of The New York Times, regularly reported on the inadequacy of control over the security police who tortured detainees. The regime described the media’s conduct as a ‘frenzy’ that was becoming too much to bear.
Neil Aggett’s father retained William Lane, an attorney, who in turn asked me to handle the inquest into Neil’s death. Also involved were attorneys David Dison and James Sutherland, as well as advocates Denis Kuny and Mohamed Navsa. We worked very hard to produce nearly 20 statements from former detainees. Our experience told us that if we accepted the police’s version that it had been a suicide, we could open up a wider inquiry into the general treatment of Neil Aggett than if we argued it was a murder. Our hope was that we could convince the magistrate that the security police could still be held responsible for driving Neil to suicide.
It is never easy for a relative to believe that their deceased loved one committed suicide. Neil Aggett’s family members were no exception. But after discussions with a medical doctor, the probabilities tended to show that suicide was a distinct possibility. There was another reason that led me to this view. On the floor of Neil Aggett’s cell was Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek, open at page 246, dealing with the suicide of the young man whose passionate love for the widow had been rejected:
Every minute death was dying and being reborn, just like life. For thousands of years young girls and boys have danced beneath the tender foliage of the trees in spring – beneath the poplars, firs, oaks, planes and slender palms – and they will go on dancing for thousands more years, their faces consumed with desire. Faces change, crumble, return to earth; but others rise to take their place. There is only one dancer, but he has a thousand masks. He is always twenty. He is immortal.
Neil Aggett’s loving father, mother and sister bravely agreed to put forward the case based on suicide, but understandably not without great reluctance.
The inquest lasted 42 days, extended over six months. The magistrate did not make it easy for us. He stopped our cross-examination on relevant matters and ruled half of the detainees’ statements inadmissable. Despite these obstacles, the graphic accounts of the systematic torture of detainees at the hands of the security police were more than embarrassing to the regime. Our argument concluded with an appeal to the court that the rule of law be observed. We argued that ‘this court’s finding will clearly show that we are all subject to the law of the land and its processes which protect the dignity of human life’. It was our hope that the police were not above the law, but we were sorely and sadly disappointed. The magistrate’s judgment of 187 pages took nearly two days to read. The security police were exonerated and the blame was cast on one of Neil Aggett’s fellow detainees, Auret van Heerden. The magistrate found that Van Heerden was not blameless in Neil Aggett’s suicide, remarking that he should have informed the police immediately when he was worried that Neil Aggett had been ‘broken’. The magistrate limited the detainee’s obligation to a ‘moral’ duty and not a legal duty.
The evidence brought to light during the inquest demonstrated the flagrant disregard for human dignity that existed in South Africa. The magistrate’s decision demonstrated the state’s wily ability to maintain a harsh and unjust system. The finding that Neil Aggett was not hanged by his captors may have been correct. But the decision that Neil Aggett was not tortured by the security police and driven to suicide was wrong. Liz Floyd asked the question that the police and the magistrate did not answer: ‘If the Security Police treated [Neil] the way the magistrate accepted they did, why did he die and why have over 50 other people died in detention?’
Where was the blame for Neil Aggett’s death to lie? The Aggett inquest had cleared the security police, but at the same time had implicitly exposed the Rabie Commission’s bogus findings, and the security police’s callous claim that they were concerned with the welfare of detainees. ‘Who would watch the watchers?’ asked a report by Lawyers for Human Rights.
South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) revealed deeply troubling circumstances surrounding not only Neil Aggett’s death but also the inquest, including state-organised mock hearings in advance of the actual hearings, evidence cover-ups and conscious decisions not to change the detention system following his death. The final report of the TRC stated that ‘troubling inquests’, such as the one into Aggett’s death, led to the regime using alternative methods of eliminating its opponents.
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About 15 000 people attended Neil Aggett’s funeral on 13 February 1982. They packed St Mary’s Cathedral in Johannesburg and lined the route to West Park Cemetery. Archbishop Desmond Tutu saw the funeral as a sign of hope for South Africa, ‘an incredible demonstration of affection and regard for a young white man by thousands of blacks’.
Noted anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, who was no stranger to the state’s detention tactics, said in an interview before his 12 September 1977 death in police custody,
You are either alive and proud or you are dead, and when you are dead, you can’t care anyway. And your method of death can itself be a politicizing thing … So if you can overcome the personal fear of death, which is a highly irrational thing, you know, then you’re on your way. And in interrogation the same sort of thing applies.
Is it possible that a hopeful and altruistic Neil Aggett had read Biko’s words, as well as those of Kazantzakis, before deciding to sacrifice his own life? There is no question that the death of heroes like Steve Biko and Neil Aggett, among hundreds of others, contributed to the struggle. They did not die in vain.
Thirty years later, we still find ourselves asking: what really happened to Neil Aggett? During the Nuremberg Trials, following the defeat of Nazi Germany, Romanian-born American prosecutor Benjamin B Ferencz said: ‘There can be no peace without justice, no justice without law and no meaningful law without a court to decide what is just and lawful under any given circumstances.’ The magistrate at Neil Aggett’s inquest had clearly never read Ferencz’s wise words.
This book is an inspired tribute to one of South Africa’s great freedom fighters, and captures the essence of a man whose name figures among the list of heroic detainees who died in the struggle. Beverley Naidoo has meticulously, accurately and painstakingly unearthed and recorded who Neil Aggett was – from his childhood to the brave decisions he made during his student days to his detention and, finally, his untimely death. She examines his principles, beliefs and values and how justice – one of the greatest values – was cheated when it was found that there was no one to blame for his tragic death. The information is carefully laid out for readers to decide for themselves what really happened.
This book is an important contribution to the literature on the struggle for freedom. We can never forget the injustice that emerged in the name of security, the injustice that persisted in South Africa for far too many years, the injustice that claimed the lives of so many brave and innocent men and women during the darkest time of South Africa’s history. I strongly encourage all those interested in the struggle and the relevance for South Africa today to read this book. Justice may have been cheated, but if we remember the tragic story of Neil Aggett, his memory and our history will not be.
George Bizos
SENIOR COUNSEL, JOHANNESBURG BAR
April 2012
In Detention
He fell from the ninth floor
He hanged himself
He slipped on a piece of soap while washing
He hanged himself
He slipped on a piece of soap while washing
He fell from the ninth floor
He hanged himself while washing
He slipped from the ninth floor
He hung from the ninth floor
He slipped on the ninth floor while washing
He fell from a piece of soap while slipping
He hung from the ninth floor
He washed from the ninth floor while slipping
He hung from a piece of soap while washing
CHRIS VAN WYK, It is Time to Go Home, 1979