PHAKAMISA MAYABA / Antjie Krog’s Country of my Skull is one of those haunting books one never gets used to. Brilliantly written, it fleshes out the pain and suffering that was the mainstay of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). In graphic detail, the horrors of apartheid — the smashing of women’s breasts against drawers, electrocution of genitalia, brains blown out, bodies burnt or dismembered — bleed profusely off the pages. The witness testimonies are so gory that one must steel oneself almost throughout.
I’d read it a few years ago and never figured I’d have the stomach to do so a second time around. That is until my colleagues at Toverview mentioned a name I’d never heard of previously: Sandile Dikeni. Dikeni, who passed away in 2019, was a fellow plattelander and a journalist, editor and poet. As an anti-apartheid activist, he was also political prisoner, and his harrowing story is right up there with those in Krog’s book.
‘Sandile Dikeni’s comrades and friends,’ writes Mark Gevisser in the Mail & Guardian, ‘necklaced his grandmother — one of the matriarchs of the tiny community of Victoria West — because she told them what she thought of them.’ This gruesome episode, and the face tjat Dikeni’s father underwent a ‘year-and-a-half of imprisonment and torture, and a trial that rent the black community in two by turning it into “victims and the betrayers”’, left an indelible mark on the young Dikeni. These lines from one of his poems are as about as anguished and powerful a thing as you’ll ever read:
‘My comrades and friends killed my granny with fire …
But before that, they sucked her breasts dry … so that she could burn well.
Personal turmoil notwithstanding, Dikeni would go on to earn a diploma in journalism from the Peninsula Technikon. As a student activist, his poem ‘Guava Juice’, a reference to the petrol bombs thrown by anti-apartheid activists the course of anti-apartheid demonstrations, elevated his name in political circles in the Western Cape.
Soon, according to South African History Online, he found himself arts editor of the Cape Times, editor of Die Suid-Afrikaan and political editor of This Day. At some point, there was a month-long stint as the Reverend Allan Boesak’s media person. As befitted the earnest revolutionary artist, he sought to eschew the spin doctor fluff and through his Cape Times column ‘Behind the Grape Curtain’, call it as he saw it.
According to Gevisser, in the lead-up to the May 1996 local government elections, Dikeni commented that the ANC in the Western Cape region was going to lose because it was a ‘naive little organisation peppered with foolhardy Stalinists who cannot learn’. Despite such unabated lunges at an organisation not known to turn the other cheek at criticism, Dikeni would find himself serving as spokesperson for the minister of housing, Lindiwe Sisulu. But no one was spared from Dikeni’s sling, not even writers as prestigious as Rian Malan, author of the critically acclaimed My Traitor’s Heart.
‘White confessional literature,’ he said of Malan’s book. ‘The Europeans love it. It pushes the moral high ground back to white people, forces me to accept that they’re not entirely bad. They feel sorry, man! We’ll kill you if you don’t forgive. They’ll hug you to death, and you don’t have an option. And I hate it.’ But Dikeni was also often inclined to side with and show empathy to those who found themselves on the wrfong side of public opinion.
One of those was the ANC stalwart Tony Yengeni. His testimony before the TRC about the security police captain Jeffrey Benzien who had tortured him using the dreaded ‘wet bag’ method sent shock waves throughout the country. ‘As a Member of Parliament,’ writes Krog, ‘Yengeni’s voice has become known for its tone of confidence – sometimes tinged with arrogance. When he faces Benzien, this is gone … He sounds strangely different – his voice somehow choked.’
In the course of his testimony, Yengeni would insist on Benzien physically demonstrating the technique for all to see. ‘But for this moment,’ continues Krog, ‘Yengeni has to pay dearly …’
Bensien ‘shatters Yengeni’s political profile’ when he asks: ‘Do you remember, Mr Yengeni, that within thirty minutes you betrayed Jennifer Schreiner? Do you remember pointing out Bongani Jonas to us on the highway?’
Needless to say, Yengeni was branded as a lily-livered impimpi, an informer and a weakling who couldn’t endure pain like a man. Not Dikeni. In the aftermath, he would write (as quoted by Krog):
‘And so continues the torture of Tony Yengeni. Yengeni broke in under thirty minutes, suffocating in a plastic bag which denied him air and burnt his lungs, under the hands of Benzien. In the mind of Benzien, Yengeni, freedom fighter and anti-apartheid operative, is a weakling, a man that breaks easily …
‘I said I am not gonna write no more columns like this, but the torture of Yengeni continues, with some of us regarding him as a traitor to the cause, a sell-out, a cheat and, in some stupid twist of faith and fate, his torturer becomes the hero, the revealer, the brave man who informed us about it all.
‘Tony Yengeni in my eyes remains the hero. Yengeni is one of the many people in the ANC executive who stood by the TRC, knowing that certain issues about the ANC would be revealed in the most mocking and degrading way by their torturers.
‘In my eyes, Yengeni of Gugulethu is one of the people who still gives me hope amidst the caprice of the present. And not only Benzien, but many of us owe him an apology. And now, as I look at Yengeni, yes, I see blood, his own blood on the hands of Benzien and the apartheid state. I see blood. The blood of Yengeni’s friends and comrades crushed and sucked out of their lungs by the heroes of Apartheid – in under forty minutes, says the torturer, in his clinically precise ‘full disclosure’.
I said I am not gonna write no more columns like this. I made a mistake.’ (Cape Times)
Although — with such catchy prose – Dikeni doesn’t seem to be as widely known as he deserves to be in his native Northern Cape, it’s no wonder that his Love Poem for my Country found its way into President Cyril Ramaphosa’s inaugural speech at the Union Buildings last month. An online search of this dreadlocked son of the Karoo turns up some interesting finds. My reflexive reaction was, ‘Wow!’ followed by self-flagellation as to how is it I’d never heard of him.
Except I think I had, years ago, from a certain Dr Sipho Mbuqe, now a psychologist based in the US. Dr Mbuqe, you’d recall, was the PhD student who submitted a dissertation titled ‘Political Violence in South Africa: A Case Study of ‘Necklacing’ in Colesberg’, which documents an incident that continues to haunt inhabitants of Colesberg’s Kuyasa Township.
Going through the few items one is able to get hold of, Dikeni, one finds, was a born storyteller; a gallant voice that beautifully articulated the struggle of his generation. How about a taste:
With poetry dancing on our tongues
we wiped the blood from our mouths …
we petrol- bombed our angry past
we blasted our martyrs out of our brains
and we made shrines out of their graves
According to Gevisser, at the time of his untimely death, he was still hoping to write a book about his father, with the hope that this would ‘provide the truth that would lead to the reconciliation of his community’. Sadly, in 2019, fate dealt Dikeni and those who admired him a heavy blow when he passed away at the age of 53.
His death of tuberculosis is poignant: he lost Phri, one of his brothers some 15 years earlier from the same terrible illness. His poem ‘Track of the Tracks’, mourns the immensity of the loss of this beloved sibling.
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Editor’s note: In 2005, Dikeni was the sole survivor of a bad car accident. He sustained brain injuries, and was cared for by his sister, Nomonde, until his death in 2019.
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FEATURED IMAGE: An earlier image of Sandile Dikeni. Picture: Twitter, via Daily Maverick.