Exhuming lost heroes for electoral gain     

By R.W. Johnson

There is something sadly predictable about the news that fresh inquests are to be held into the deaths of Chief Albert Luthuli and Griffiths Mxenge. Already we are being promised that fresh light will be cast on the iniquities of the apartheid regime, and “the real truth” will be finally unearthed about the demise of these two heroic figures. Other voices have now – as they have time and again before – demanded a similar inquest into the death of Chris Hani. Inevitably, family members connected to these great names speak of how they were never really satisfied with the public explanation of their deaths and their hope for some fresh catharsis.

It is sad, and personally I have only the greatest respect for these bereaved families, though I fear their emotions are being trifled with for essentially political reasons. Surely by now we should be used to the fact that during the run-up to important elections the ANC always tries to stage events relating to lost Struggle heroes in which the evils of the apartheid regime can be rehearsed for the umpteenth time?

This really is tired and desperate stuff. The ANC’s record in government is so appalling that it desperately wants to re-focus attention back to the heyday of the Struggle. For the one thing the ANC can still feel proud about is its opposition to apartheid, and the more it can drum the evils of apartheid back into people’s minds, the greater the chance that they can be prevailed upon, one more time, to avert their eyes from the disastrous present and support the corrupt and incompetent ANC.

Luthuli died on 21 July 1967. The inquest into his death heard that he had been struck by a goods train as it crossed the Umvoti River railway bridge, which bore a notice warning pedestrians that they crossed the bridge at their own risk. The train’s driver, seeing Luthuli walking towards the train, blew the train’s whistle to warn Luthuli and kept on sounding the whistle until the train actually hit him. The driver then told the fireman that the train had hit someone and halted the train.

The driver and the fireman left the train and attended to Luthuli, who was still alive though he had received head injuries. Luthuli was taken to Stanger Hospital and was treated by doctors for two and a half hours, receiving a blood transfusion and medication to stimulate his heart. A neurosurgeon was summoned from Durban, but Luthuli was already in a coma and died soon after. He was 69.

The ANC in London immediately alleged that he had been murdered by the apartheid regime, though of course they had no evidence for that. Nonetheless, the claim was taken up and widely repeated in African nationalist circles. Luthuli’s biographer, S.E. Couper, dismisses this claim as “a myth”.

“To say that Luthuli was mysteriously killed,” Couper werote, “is to understand that he still had a vital role in the struggle for liberation at the time of his death, that he was a threat to the apartheid regime. Sadly, Luthuli had long been considered obsolete by leaders of his own movement, and he had little contact with those imprisoned, banned or exiled.”

This is undoubtedly true. In effect Luthuli had been deposed from leadership of the ANC by proponents of the armed struggle before MK launched its first attacks in December 1961, for Luthuli was and remained a principled advocate of non-violence. He was still banned, unable to attend meetings or even visit the nearby town of Stanger, let alone Durban. So he lived a quiet and rather solitary life in rural retirement at Groutville.

The apartheid government had made no attempt to jail Luthuli, let alone kill him in the years 1961-67. It was well aware that, as a Nobel Peace Prize winner, he was widely regarded as a sort of secular saint. It suited the regime that he should live in obscurity and die peacefully. It had absolutely no motive for foul play, indeed, very much the reverse.

It is, to put it at its mildest, difficult to imagine that fifty-eight years later evidence can be produced to counter the findings of the inquest in 1967. The train’s driver, fireman and the doctors who treated Luthuli have all long since died. And the finding of accidental death makes sense. Luthuli was an old man and his hearing was doubtless no longer sharp, so he may not have heard the train’s whistle. And as far as one can see, both the railwaymen and the doctors behaved as they should have.

Family members at tombstones for Griffiths and Victoria Mxenge, erected as part of the symbolic reparations programme recommended by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Image: Benny Gool. 

Griffiths Mxenge, a Durban lawyer and ANC activist, was killed on 19 November 1981 in Umlazi, Durban. He was stabbed 45 times, beaten with a hammer and had his throat slit. For years afterwards the UDF and ANC both accused Inkatha of having killed him, so much so that this was widely regarded as an established fact until 1989 when Butana Almond Nofomela, a member of Dirk Coetzee’s (Vlakplaas security police) death squad, confessed to involvement in the murder.

Since Nofomela was only hours away from execution for a non-political murder, this might not have been treated seriously – but Coetzee later confirmed the story. In 1996 Coetzee gave full details of the murder to the TRC as part of his amnesty hearing. Despite the objections of the Mxenge family, Coetzee was amnestied and Nofomela, having had his death sentence commuted to life imprisonment, was released on parole in 2009.

On 1 August 1985 Victoria Mxenge, the widow of Griffiths and also an ANC lawyer,  was gunned down in Umlazi in front of her children. This murder too was blamed on Inkatha by the ANC but at the TRC Bongi Raymond Malinga, who had been recruited by the Security Police’s Brigadier Swanepoel, confessed to having committed the murder.

These were dreadful murders, but the ANC should have learned its lesson. For years it had passionately accused Inkatha of having committed both of them, though no evidence was offered to support that conclusion. This was purely opportunistic – it suited the ANC’s propaganda needs at that stage in its struggle against Inkatha. And in both cases it was completely wrong, though no apology or explanation was offered.

Now, however, it is proposed to re-open the case of Griffiths Mxenge, 44 years after his death. This seems equally opportunistic. Given that both Nofomela and Coetzee confessed to this murder and that this was accepted by the TRC, it is difficult to see how our view of the case could be altered by re-treading this ground.

All that can really be done is to emphasise yet again what dreadful crimes were committed in the name of apartheid. And that is no doubt the intention. But it would be equally valid to re-open all the cases of torture and murder in the ANC camps in Angola. The truth is that the whole era was stained with blood, and there were no fully innocent participants. If one wishes to honour these dead heroes, one should not try to make cheap political propaganda out of their deaths. They were and are worth a lot more than that.

However, the ANC can hardly boast about what it has achieved since 1994. It has only the Struggle and its dead heroes to offer to its electorate. And there is a pattern here. Think of the death of Samora Machel in October 1986. Again, the ANC was quick to accuse the apartheid government of responsibility for the air crash on South African territory in which Machel and 33 others died on their way back from Zambia to Maputo.

Again, there was a full inquiry by the South African authorities which was fully explanatory, and the ANC offered no detailed refutation of that. And, of course, South Africa had no reason whatsoever to wish Machel harm, for he had just signed the Nkomati Accord, forcing the ANC to leave Mozambique for Tanzania. Indeed, Machel’s death was quite a blow to P.W. Botha’s government. The pattern is that the ANC seizes on each of these tragedies in turn, hurls accusations without the slightest thread of evidence, and ignores the contextual factors that make their accusations improbable.

Of course, Machel’s widow, Graca, continually demanded a fresh inquiry, for she very much wanted to see the apartheid regime found guilty of her husband’s death. Every now and again the ANC government has looked as if might grant her wish, but it has always backed off. Wisely, one feels, since the original inquiry was conducted by real aviation experts and there is little prospect that they can be successfully contradicted. Moreover, the nine people sitting at the back of the plane all survived, emphasising the sheer bad luck of those who, like Samora Machel, were sitting in the front.

Many of these cautionary remarks apply to the oft-repeated demands for a fresh inquiry into Chris Hani’s murder, though there is more real mystery to his case. There is no doubt that Janusz Walus actually shot Hani but there was extensive evidence that there was a far wider and complex conspiracy. I looked into this when I wrote South Africa’s Brave New World. The Beloved Country Since the End of Apartheid (2009) and I also interviewed both Walus and his backer, Clive Derby-Lewis, in Pretoria Central Prison.

There was clear evidence that both the old apartheid intelligence network and ANC Intelligence knew all about the assassination attempt well in advance, and that it suited them to let it go ahead, for Hani was a threat to elements within both. In particular, Joe Modise, who had earlier tried to have Hani killed, was a prime suspect. (For those who want fuller details, see Chapter 2 of Brave New World, “Godfathers and Assassins”, pp.13-51. ) When I interviewed Walus’s elder brother, Witold, he cautioned me that Janusz was naive and something of a boy scout, quite unaware of the full complexities of the situation and this was, indeed, my own impression of Walus too. Clive Derby-Lewis was older and shrewder: he may have known more.

What does seem clear is that these hidden accomplices made quite certain that Walus would be found guilty and that all the focus would instantly be on him, thus obscuring their own role. A white Afrikaans woman was positioned so that she could immediately report to the police that she had seen the assassination and could give a full description of Walus, his red Ford Laser car and its registration number. Within minutes of this, the police pounced on Walus before he’d had any chance to get rid of his gun, a stunningly unusual display of police efficiency.

Mandela was deeply impressed that a white Afrikaner had played a key role in securing justice for Hani and praised the white woman, but when journalists tried to interview her she had vanished into thin air and was never heard of again. She was clearly an intelligence agent. and her mission had been completed.

Naturally, the SACP and ANC don’t want to know anything about these complexities. Instead they keep insisting that there was a wider right-wing conspiracy, though they have no evidence for this and when the TRC looked into this possibility they found nothing at all. In other words, the usual ANC tendency to try to make propaganda usage of such events by hurling evidence-free accusations against their opponents has merely clouded the picture.

A proper inquiry into the Hani assassination would not start by concluding in advance that a wider right-wing conspiracy was involved, nor indeed would it start from any other pre-conceived notions. While the SACP and others keep barking up that tree, they will get nowhere. They probably don’t care for of course the agitation for a further inquiry into Hani’s death has some propaganda value on its own. Meanwhile, it is now 32 years since Hani’s murder and the trail is extremely cold.

One can only feel sympathy for Hani’s widow, Limpho Hani, clearly a woman of courage and principle who was dissatisfied with official accounts of his death. She has remained loyal to her husband’s memory but she too is now a victim since his death has effectively become a political football, with nobody making any serious effort to get to the bottom of this murky affair. Instead these rather bogus “inquiries” set out not to find the truth but to play upon the emotions to help shore up the ANC’s sagging appeal. It’s tawdry.

The key point is that one has to respect history. One does so by extensive reading and enquiry and by understanding the full context of people’s actions and circumstances. Luthuli, Mxenge, Machel and Hani were all very brave and committed men. The least one can do is to show them proper respect and one does not do that by making cheap electoral propaganda about them, using them as an occasion for hurling evidence-free accusations. If you’re not satisfied with the official account of their deaths, do the work, dig out the facts and scrupulously respect them. There’s no other way.

FEATURED IMAGE: The Luthuli Museum in Groutville, KwaDukuza.