The message came early on a Wednesday morning. It was from Howard Varney, a lawyer representing the families of the Cradock Four. “Would you possibly be available to come to PE this Friday?”
It was a long-awaited summons. He had asked me to testify on behalf of the families more than a year ago, but there had been various delays, until, finally, came the opportunity to bear witness to the little, but significant piece of the hidden secrets I had uncovered of those terrible, violent murders 40 years ago.
On 27 June 1985, four anti-apartheid activists, Matthew Goniwe, Sparrow Mkonto, Sicelo Mhlauli and Fort Calata were returning from Port Elizabeth (Gqeberha) when their car was stopped at a roadblock.
The four were taken into the nearby bush, brutally assaulted with steel pipes and knives, shot and killed. The bodies and the car were doused in petrol and set alight.
It was one of the worst murders by apartheid police hit squads, and two previous inquests, in 1987 and 1993, found no specific individuals to be guilty of the murders, although the second inquest did find that these murders had been committed by the police.
Six former apartheid policemen appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 1999, but they did not disclose the full details of their crime and, crucially, who had ordered them to kill the activists. They were not granted amnesty.
However, the policemen never came to trial, and now they have all died. Still, the families of the victims have pushed for decades for these crimes to be fully investigated.
In 2021, I was the field producer along with filmmaker Naashon Zalk for a documentary for
Al Jazeera on the struggle of Lukhanyo Calata – the son of Fort Calata – to reopen the case and find justice for his father and his comrades.
At issue for Lukhanyo was, of course, the criminal liability of the actual murderers – particularly one Eric Taylor, a lieutenant in the Security Police at the time, who admitted to killing Fort Calata by hitting him on the back of the head with a steel pipe and then watching as other policemen stabbed him multiple times before setting the body alight.
Eric Taylor confessed to all this at the TRC, but he was not granted amnesty, partly because he refused to fully outline who had given him orders, and exactly what those orders were.
For decades, Lukhanyo pursued the case against his father’s killers, hoping that they and, in particular, Eric Taylor, would be brought to justice.
In the course of our investigation and filming, we discovered that Eric Taylor had died in 2016. With him died a vital source of information about who actually ordered men like Eric Taylor to carry out this brutality.
There was however, one crucial piece of evidence that clearly illustrates the active involvement of the apartheid authorities in ordering the killing of the Cradock Four at the highest level of political leadership, and that is a notorious military signal sent from the State Security Council networks calling for Matthew Goniwe, Mbulelo Goniwe and Fort Calata “as a matter of urgency [to] be permanently removed from society”.
Adriaan Vlok’s halting admission
Adriaan Vlok, who was then Minister of Law and Order, chaired the meeting that called for this action.
In 2021, I asked Vlok about the Cradock Four and about this signal. I have written about this interview before, but the conversation bears repeating:
Read more: Adriaan Vlok – the old man and the dark shadow of the past
‘‘I really had no authority to do these sorts of things,” Vlok said. “I went to these areas. I asked the security forces to give me a briefing, what is going on, what is the situation? But I could not give them instructions to kill people. My authority stretched. As far as I said, to lock them up.”
“But,” I asked. “There was definitely an order that found its way into the state Security Council saying they must be permanently removed from society. What did that mean?”
He hesitated and looked at me very carefully. “To remove a person from society…”. He stumbled over his words. “You know, we in the Security Council, we were very careful not to tell, not to say and to make a note and to have in the minutes to kill anybody. So… we would say, uh, remove a person from the society, remove him. And, you know, never, nobody said killing. But we – I thought probably it was meant if you can’t solve the problem by removing the guy, then you could kill him.”
I could barely believe the admission, halting as it was.
“You thought that then?” I stammered out.
There was an openness in his eyes as he answered: “Not consciously, but afterwards, thinking back, I must admit that I realised this was a possibility.”
There it is: an admission – at least a partial acceptance of responsibility, for the first time ever. It remains slippery, unrepentant even, an admixture of sincerity and duplicity – a cunning twist of open contrition and something still of old practised political and legal sophistry – aimed at not being sufficient to have him jailed; but it is certainly never enough to atone for his victims’ pain.
Adriaan Vlok died in 2023. He spent much of the last decades of his life in acts of repentance for his cruel past. From what I saw of him, I think they were genuine, but the moral value of his remorse, whatever it might have been, is of no consequence in determining his actual guilt, nor in uncovering the brutal truths of the apartheid state machinery.
Testifying in court
Being asked to confirm the truth of this conversation, under oath in court, was an important commitment for me. It is only one small fragment of the story that Lukhanyo and others are trying to get to the bottom of, but it is an important piece of evidence, as Vlok’s admission strips away the cynical, dishonest, and now decades old, defence of “we didn’t know” that too many white people take refuge in when talking about our apartheid past and its racist cruelty.
I arrived in Gqeberha on the Thursday night and met with Howard and the legal team over a late supper in the hotel. I was nervous about the next day, wondering what the judge and the opposing counsel would make of my testimony. I had nothing to hide, but the natural human anxiety of facing the might of the legal process was something that made me feel uncertain. I worried that my answers might be too speculative, too philosophical, perhaps even legally irrelevant.
I didn’t want to inadvertently damage the case by trying too hard.
“Have you ever testified in court before?” Zak Suleman, one of the legal team, quietly asked me.
“No,” I told him.
“Think of it as a triangle,” he said. “The judge sits at the top corner. You and Howard at the bottom two. Howard asks you questions. You look at the judge and speak to her, don’t speak to Howard.”
Court got off to a slow start the next morning. Lukhanyo and Nomonde came in and we hugged. “So glad you could make it,” Lukhanyo told me.
“It’s been a long road,” I replied.
“But we are here now, at last.”
The legal team played a video about the TRC, and then Howard called me to the witness stand.
As I took my place there, I was deeply aware of standing at the base of the triangle Zak mentioned. Judge Thami Beshe in her red robe at the podium sat to my left, and Howard stood to my right.
I remembered a WhatsApp Lukhanyo had sent me two nights before: “Don’t be nervous. Just speak your truth.”
A moral triangle
I thought fleetingly that we were all caught in a moral triangle in this courtroom – one marked out by what happened in the past, how we were dealing with it in this present, and what both would mean for our future, as people, and as a country.
Between Howard, Judge Beshe and me swirled a Bermuda Triangle of emotion, and of meaning struggling to emerge – a morass of murder and broken memories, of guilt, violent cruelty, secrecy, pain, anger, morality, accountability and, above all, hope for truth and closure. The legal process sketched out merely the boundary lines of the real truths that needed to be told.
Above all, I didn’t want to let Lukhanyo down, nor his mother and Fort’s wife, Nomonde, for they need healing from the agony that was forced upon them.
The night before, I had thought about how apartheid operated through laws, and orders given to police, but its roots were in the spiritual psychosis of white racism. The mental sickness that thought up these laws, and which so many white people actively believed in and supported at that time, must be brought to light. In the same way, the legal, criminal accountability of the system and the orders to its police to carry out the grotesque murders that it spawned must be revealed.
Those who enforced apartheid, from Adriaan Vlok down to Eric Taylor, created a society where to hate and to act viciously on that hate was without consequences.
Fortunately, South Africa proved to be greater than them and their hate, but it is still a terrible historical crime – and the foul miasma that floats in their wake is what they have left us to deal with decades later.
The witness box that morning, though, was not the place for these thoughts. Howard questioned me calmly, and I spoke briefly about my career, and confirmed that I indeed had done that crucial interview with Adriaan Vlok. He asked me why we had made this film.
“The question of Vlok and other politicians’ responsibility for the killings that took place was something that we wanted to investigate,” I replied. “We felt it extremely important to look at not only the perpetrators who by that point had already admitted to their crimes, but what was the responsibility of those in power, of those who gave the order. I think that is a global question in many situations, but in South Africa it matters tremendously.”
Then the film we had made was shown to the court. As it finished, Judge Beshe rustled some papers and wrote a few notes. It appeared our film had moved her.
There were no further questions for me, and the court adjourned for the weekend.
In the emptying courtroom, a reporter, Taron Welman, from MPK TV asked me: “There are those who are saying, ‘Why are we looking at the past? We should be focusing on South Africa's problems today.’ What would you say is the importance of doing these inquests, getting the convictions, if possible, of these perpetrators?”
“Well,” I told her. “There needs to be a balance. Of course we must look at the problems of today, but the problems of today come out of the problems of yesterday. So, if we don’t understand the problems of yesterday and we don’t hold people accountable for what happened and we allow the lies and their omissions to continue, that’s going to weaken our present and our future.”
SA’s missing dockets
That is true. But perhaps the most relevant and most chilling truth is the fact that the original docket on the murder of the Cradock Four has gone missing from the headquarters of the National Prosecuting Authority, and we couldn’t get them to talk about the case or the missing docket for our documentary.
This missing docket is a clear link between our cruel past and the growing lack of accountability in our democratic present.
Missing dockets are at the core of so many cases where justice has been denied in our country. Even today, 121 crucial dockets containing evidence about political killings being removed without correct authorisation are at the very heart of the complex web of wrongdoing being investigated in the Madlanga Commission.
In the past five years, some 5.4 million cases, many of the GBV incidents and murders, have simply been closed for lack of evidence, according to ex-police minister Bheki Cele.
If we are prepared to let this crime go unsolved because of the mere passage of time, or even worse, for political expediency, then how many other crimes might we ignore for the same reasons today? This is no way to secure a decent future for our country or our children.
The truth about the murder of the Cradock Four, and who ordered it, matters in itself. Justice must be done for the sake of our society, for healing the memory of our terrible past and, most importantly, to bring some closure to the families of the victims.
But there is another reason this inquest is so vital: it is to show those who commit crimes today, in our democratic, unhealed and sadly deeply corrupt country, that there are people, lawyers, journalists, activists and most importantly, affected families, who will pursue them, and keep pursuing them until justice is done. DM