Earlier this month I was reminded that 25 September is the anniversary of the granting of an urgent interdict against the minister of law and order, and nine others, instructing them (to put it very basically) to stop the torture and abuse of State of Emergency detainees being held in prisons and police lock-ups in the magisterial district of Port Elizabeth (now Gqeberha).
The founding affidavit on which the application was based was mine. The matter, heard in the South Eastern Cape Local Division of the Supreme Court by Judge Ecksteen was titled “Wendy Pauline Orr and others vs The Minister of Law and Order and others”. It was 1985, which is 40 years ago (I had to double-check my maths because I couldn’t believe it was that long ago). I was barely 25 years old.
In 1985, Port Elizabeth and the surrounding areas were incendiary. The Eastern Cape (which was still part of the Cape Province, as it was then) was known for its highly organised, resilient and persistent anti-apartheid movements, which met with a particularly brutal response from security police.
On 21 March 1985, 20 people returning from a funeral were shot dead by police in Langa township outside Uitenhage (now Kariega); troops were in the townships; the Pebco Three disappeared in May 1985; so-called “black-on-black” violence between Azapo and UDF supporters escalated (it was later revealed that this had been instigated by the security forces); the Cradock Four were brutally murdered; the consumer boycott hit white businesses hard and then, in July 1985, a State of Emergency was declared.
I was a medical doctor, first year post-internship, working in the District Surgeon’s Office (DSO) in Port Elizabeth to pay back a government-sponsored bursary I had received for the last three years of my studies at UCT. The job had two main components – providing clinical healthcare services to prisoners and detainees, and providing forensic services to the South African Police. I hated it, but I had no choice. When the limited State of Emergency was declared in July 1985, police were given the authority to detain anyone who they believed might be a threat to the safety and security of the state for 14 days (which could be extended by the Regional Police Commissioner if he thought it necessary).
Hundreds of people (the vast majority of whom were black men) were detained and brought to North End and St Alban’s prisons, and so the healthcare services provided by the DSO had to be extended to these detainees.
From the first day of seeing detainees it was obvious to me that many of them, if not the majority, had injuries of some sort and when I asked them what had happened to them they would report that they had been assaulted by the police at the time of their detention, or, during their detention, taken to Louis le Grange Square (police headquarters) and interrogated and tortured. One case, detailed in my founding affidavit, is illustrative.
Sinqokwana Ernest Malgas was detained and brought to St Alban’s Prison on 9 August 1985. He did not have any injuries or complaints on admission. On 15 August 1985, I saw him as part of the daily sick parade that I conducted at the prisons.
He was very severely injured. In my affidavit I state: “When I saw him, he was severely injured. His injuries included large areas of severe and deep bruising on the lower back and buttocks. The bruising was not merely sub-epidermal, but was intra-muscular. The muscles were very swollen and very tender. The bruises were prominently purple, red and consistent with a particularly violent assault with a blunt instrument. His condition was such that I was unable to take a history from him.
“I asked the nursing sister whether she knew what had happened to the man. She told me that the South African Police had taken the detainee to the Louis le Grange Building for interrogation the previous day. Upon his return, he was severely injured, and complained that he had been assaulted by the police.”
Mr Malgas gave evidence at the first Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in East London in April 1996 and told the commission that the injuries which I saw and documented that day had been inflicted during a particularly brutal form of torture called “the helicopter” and he had, indeed, been subjected to “a particularly violent assault with a blunt instrument”.
I was deeply disturbed by what I was seeing and by the blasé attitude of the prison staff, who seemed to think that torture and abuse of detainees were “business as usual”, and by the equally laissez-faire attitudes of the other medical professionals employed by the DSO. I believed that my role as a medical professional went beyond just treating the injuries, I felt I had an obligation to reveal what was happening and to attempt to stop it.
Through a serendipitous confluence of events, I was put in touch with Halton Cheadle, a human rights lawyer, and we agreed that he would lead a legal team (and get the funding) to put together an urgent application, based largely on the evidence that I would provide, to interdict the police from assaulting and torturing detainees.
My affidavit narrated, in exhaustive detail, everything I had seen and been told over the preceding six weeks (my memory was much better then than it is now!).
I concluded the 41-page document as follows: “It ultimately became clear to me that, unless I made a stand and did something about the plight of the detainees, I would be compromising my moral beliefs and my perception of my professional responsibility. My conscience told me that I could no longer stand by and do nothing… I respectfully submit that this application is very urgent. The police are apparently engaged in a pattern of daily assaults upon detainees. For every day that goes by, those apparently unrestrained assaults continue.”
The papers were lodged on 24 September 1985. The police, taken completely by surprise, did not oppose the application. The matter was heard in chambers on 25 September, and Judge Ecksteen granted the urgent interdict, and all the reliefs sought, that same day.
My life changed dramatically and irrevocably. I was headline news all over the world, flung into the role of activist, praised and vilified, received bouquets and death threats. My action in 1985 set me on the path to being appointed a commissioner on the TRC in 1995, which in turn led to my decision, when the TRC closed, to change my career path and leave clinical practice. My life would have been utterly different if I had not blown the whistle so publicly in 1985.
Looking back, from my 2025 vantage point, I think about everything that has happened since then and wonder why the sacrifices made by each of my 1985 detainee patients, and so many others, have been squandered.
We had such high hopes (perhaps some would call them fantasies) for a free and democratic South Africa. As Yeats so eloquently put it, “I have spread my dreams under your feet. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams”. Our dreams have been stomped and trampled on by corrupt, self-seeking and incompetent leaders, and it leaves me desperately sad. I was angry for a long time (and I do still get angry), but above all I am sad.
One of the hearings I helped organise for the TRC was the hearing into the role of health professionals in human rights violations during the period under review, and also the context, environment and circumstances which enabled and allowed healthcare workers to be overtly or complicitly involved in abuses.
The 1977 death of Steve Biko loomed large as we prepared for the hearings (and in an ironic twist of fate, the two doctors – Benjamin Tucker and Ivor Lang – who were found guilty of negligence and misconduct for their failures in provision of care to Biko, were my bosses in 1985).
As part of the preparation for the hearings, I was given access to Biko’s file, still kept at that time in the Department of Justice in Pretoria. The file contained many, many forms and reports (the apartheid bureaucracy was obsessed with paperwork), one of which was a report completed by a doctor (detainees had to be seen by a magistrate and a district surgeon at least every two weeks) in August 1977, well before he sustained the injuries that led to his death.
The report has a specific section where the detainee’s complaints can be recorded (“die aangevangene het die volgende klagtes geopper” it read). On this form, neatly typed up in quotation marks, were Biko’s words: “I ask for water to wash myself with, and also soap and a comb. I need money to buy food, I live on bread only. Is it compulsory for me to be naked. I am naked since I came here?”
No matter how often I read these words, they chill me to the bone and make me weep. Because they speak of the absolute denial of Biko’s humanity. No one, not the magistrate nor the doctor, did anything to address Biko’s requests (the whole process was actually a farce). And all Biko was saying was: “Please, I am a human being, I need to wash and eat, I need to cover my nakedness. Please allow me some basic human dignity.” Less than a month later, Biko was dead at the hands of the security police. Apartheid dehumanised us. It dehumanised black people by subjecting them to treatment that denied their humanity, and it dehumanised white people by allowing, even encouraging, us to treat black people as less than human.
And I ask myself whether we are living with that legacy of failing to see our shared humanity now. Which is not to exonerate the corrupt leaders and officials who don’t care that their greed impacts human beings, who are not getting the healthcare, education, social services, housing, water, transport services (the list is endless) they need and deserve. But it does make me wonder how we deal with the “knowledge in the blood” (as Jonathan Jansen calls it) that makes us a deeply damaged society that sometimes seems to lack basic human decency. I wish I had an answer.
I am often asked if I would “do it again” (bring the urgent application), and my answer, even 40 years on, is “yes, in a heartbeat”. I feel fortunate and privileged to have been able to make a contribution, no matter how small, to the anti-apartheid movement. I have no regrets. DM