12
REVOLUTION
If he is alone, don’t mind him;
If there are two, they are just discussing their own affairs;
If there are three, they are planning something;
If there are four, they are communists. Shoot them.
Bophuthatswana homeland President Lucas Mangope’s alleged instructions to his security forces after a failed ANC-led coup.
044
March 1994
In the twilight of the great apartheid experiment of trying to make South Africa’s black population legally non-South African - by assigning them to ten ethnically-based homelands - Bophuthatswana was the most Frankensteinian of its issue. The homelands were the culmination of a disastrous philosophy to separate white- and blackowned land - to the detriment of black people. Some 3.5 million people were often forcibly uprooted and dumped into the patchwork of ‘independent’ and self-governing states - the homelands. By the time Mandela had been released, and the ANC unbanned, the homelands were in the process of being reabsorbed into South Africa, but Bophuthatswana’s leader was refusing to relinquish its dubious sovereignty. The black Tswana homeland’s repressive and illhumoured president, Lucas Mangope, had over the decades proved himself the ideal puppet to the apartheid state. Cloaked in the make-believe garments of independence, the lucrative fantasy realm was to prove maddeningly difficult to disassemble.
His subjects, the Tswana, were traditionally a farming people. From the 50s onwards, their land had been incorporated piecemeal into a homeland that resembled an unfinished jigsaw-puzzle. Entire communities were forced to leave their villages and farms in ‘white’ South Africa, victims of ‘black spot removals’, the technically legal South African version of ethnic cleansing, and been resettled in distant tracts in the middle of the bush.
Bop - as Bophuthatswana was frequently called - lay west of the climatic divide where drought shifts from a periodic hazard to an ever-present menace. Which was, of course, precisely why it been located there. The fertile bushveld thins as one follows the afternoon sun. There, driven by a nostalgic desire for the days of self-sufficiency, the displaced peasants planted crops that withered on the stalk in postagestamp fields and kept stock beyond the carrying capacity of the land.
The previous decade had been one of particularly severe drought. Every blade of grass had been devoured by the herds of emaciated animals roaming from mud-brick village to bone-dry field in search of nourishment. The thin layer of topsoil blew away at an alarming rate. In an effort to halt the erosion, the Bop government had ordered the sale or destruction of the numerous donkeys which were used to pull the four-wheeled carts. Unable to get a decent price in an overwhelmed market, the peasants hid their donkeys and waited for the storm to pass, but police teams were sent to locate and shoot the beasts. The donkey became one symbol of Mangope’s rule and his subjects said that the donkey massacres would return to haunt Mangope. But it was the avocado pear which was to be adopted as the symbol of resistance.
A village meeting, held in the late 80s to oppose the forthcoming forced incorporation of the two tiny black farming communities of Braklaagte and Leeufontein into the homeland, was broken up, unsurprisingly, by Bop police. But, instead of the usual one-sided cakewalk, a villager threw a hand-grenade into an armoured personnel carrier. Several policemen were killed in the steel casket and the inevitable crackdown followed.
Months later, at another tense meeting held under the mistrustful eyes of the police, a departing villager lobbed a dark green avocado through the open hatch of an armoured vehicle. The panicked policemen dived out of the vehicle without thought of retaining their dignity. The humble avocado had become a weapon, as well as a lunch favourite among tickled activists.
In March of 1994, just over a month before South Africa’s first non-racial elections were due to be held, Mangope was still insisting that the ANC was a banned organization, four long years after South Africa proper had legalized the liberation movement. Aware that a fair poll would see him unceremoniously dumped, he announced that there would be no general election in his fiefdom. Bop residents, emboldened by the new-found freedoms across the ‘border’, rioted against the decree. Mangope was nervous and his notorious policemen seemed less than enthusiastic about quelling dissent, perhaps eyeing the changes next door and worrying about their futures.
In 1988, elements in the military had staged an abortive coup under the leadership of a man optimistically called Rocky Malebane. Mangope called on Pretoria, which sent in the South African Defence Force to crush the mutiny. But in 1994, he could no longer rely on the apartheid government, which had its hands tied in the uneasy transitional power-sharing with Nelson Mandela’s ANC.
Ken, Kevin and Joao were in Bop to photograph the unrest that had started at the university on 10 March and spread through the captial. The end of Bophuthatswana was clearly imminent. That afternoon, Joao and Kevin had to take film back to Johannesburg; Ken had a transmitter, so he did not also have to make the journey. Joao and Kevin were planning to return early the next day, but both were replaced by more senior agency photographers. Kevin was furious that a Reuters staffer had been sent to Bop when he felt that the story rightly belonged to him, and he decided to go back the next day anyway. Joao was pissed off because he had been assigned to shoot a Mandela gig in the morning. Brauchli, as the more senior AP photographer, had been assigned the job, while Joao had to cover the more mundane event, before being able to return to Bop.
Heidi and I had woken very early on 11 March to leave for Bop. We were on the last stretch of the 300-kilometre drive from Johannesburg to the twin towns of Mafikeng and Mmabatho and a cool dawn picked out the thorn trees along the road. I was watching the fuel gauge drop faster than the signposts could count the kilometres down. Something was wrong with the car, which was finally rebelling against the punishment of following the election campaign and years of abuse while I chased pictures. I tried to keep the revs as low as possible, but the chances were good that we might not make Mmabatho without refuelling.
The rural petrol station-cum-trading-stores we passed, spaced progressively further apart as we headed deeper into the dry west, were all shut. In desperation, I turned into a mine-housing compound in search of someone to sell us fuel. A hastily-dressed Afrikaans women showed us the home of the foreman. He could help, she assured us. Despite the early hour, the little community was abuzz with activity. Inside the small, over-furnished house, the foreman’s wife was talking excitedly on the phone; ‘Everyone’s been called up,’ she said into the receiver.
I was startled. The situation in Bop, just a few kilometres away, must have worsened if the army was calling up reservists. Perhaps the South African government had decided unilaterally to take the homeland back under its control in an attempt to quell the unrest and ensure that next month’s poll could take place. Her husband wiped shaving-cream from his throat and nodded a curt greeting to me, then disappeared back into the bathroom to finish his toilet.
‘There are people coming from Rustenburg, Ventersdorp, even Witbank,’ she continued in Afrikaans, her voice trembling. I realized that she was not talking about the South African Defence Force, but white supremacist militias, raised in those predominantly right-wing towns. Bop was plumb in the middle of the Western Transvaal, heartland of the white right, and there would be no shortage of armed volunteers. Without waiting for an answer about the fuel, I got up, smiled and discreetly left. We had to get into Bop before the right-wingers, or the army, or whoever, sealed the border. Sure enough, on a level stretch of road just before town, a pair of civilian pick-ups were parked alongside the road. A bearded man in khaki shirt and shorts was on the gravel shoulder. As we approached, he stuck his hand out for us to halt, but I kept going, neither accelerating nor braking, and waved. He couldn’t quite decide if we were of his ilk or not. It was enough of a hesitation for us to get past them and into Mafikeng.
Mmabatho is a new town, built specifically to house the government of Bop, and Mafikeng was the old African town and mission that had gained fame during the Boer War of 1899-1902 for resisting a 217-day siege. It should have become infamous instead, as the British and other white defenders had eaten well every day of the siege, whereas its black inhabitants had starved. Mafikeng also became the site of a notorious British concentration camp for captured Boer civilians.
Unknown to us then, Mangope had called on the right-wing Afrikaner leader General Constand Viljoen to come to his rescue. Viljoen, a former chief of the army, had formed the Freedom Front, a coalition of right-wing Afrikaner groups that were pushing for an independent white volkstaat, that were allegedly the sunny face of racism. Viljoen’s white paramilitaries were to assist the Bop security forces regain control of the streets. But within the ranks of Viljoen’s right-wing army were the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (known by its Afrikaans acronym AWB), a bunch of neo-Nazis led by Eugene Terre’Blanche, a corpulent drunk who liked little more than riding a stallion at militaristic rallies, where he would mesmerize audiences with his brilliant, often hypnotic, rhetoric. Despite his propensity for falling off his horse, he was still regarded as an intrepid figure by a minority of whites.
In farm pick-ups and dated cars, thousands of white South Africans heeded the call to defend apartheid and reinforce their claim to a white homeland. But the bottom line for most of the white supremacists was an opportunity to kill blacks. They had long visualized a fight to the bitter end against black communist revolutionaries, and the negotiated settlement that De Klerk had reached with Mandela was, to them, a betrayal. Their country and heritage had been signed away without a battle being fought on South African soil. The black liberation movements had never mounted a serious military campaign against the potent white state. The armed wing of the radical black Pan-Africanist Congress, APLA, was widely derided as two men and a fax machine despite some ugly acts of racial terrorism, including an attack on a church packed with white worshippers that clearly demonstrated their refusal to distinguish between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ targets, civilians or soldiers.
We joined a handful of cars waiting in vain for a petrol station to open. There were nervous whites and their families wanting to fill up so that they could leave town, as well as the newly-arrived right-wingers. No one paid more than cursory attention to the body of a black woman in her forties crumpled against one of the walls.
‘Ons is op ’n kaffirskiet-piekniek (a kaffir-shooting picnic),’ a man told me. He and his girlfriend were sitting on plastic chairs set up on the back of a pick-up and drinking beer, icy from the coolbox between his knees. For him and his kind, this was a potential orgy of racist, white trash goonery. They had chosen the right place to enact their violent fantasies: Bop was by far the most surreal of the ten homelands that had made up the phantasmagoric landscape of apartheid.
For white South Africans, Bop had for years been their vacation from the Calvinist restraints of their own society. In the homeland’s luxuriously kitschy Sun City resort, they came to gamble, carouse with black prostitutes and watch pornographic movies. Vast sums of cash brought in the Miss World pageant, international golf, world title boxing fights and musicians, all of whom, with a nod and a wink, finessed the sports and cultural boycott of pariah South African by visiting ‘independent’ Bophuthatswana.
Despairing that the petrol station would ever open, we pushed on towards the town-centre and found dark-green-uniformed Bop soldiers patrolling the streets. Alongside them were white men, most dressed in camouflage or khaki uniforms garnished with the three-legged swastikas of the AWB.
We wandered around nervously, until one of the Boers told us that he would put a bullet through our heads if we came within 300 metres of them. These were not my favourite people. They were concentrates of hatred, aggression and fanaticism, cloaked in Christian and Old Testament righteousness. Perhaps it was the way I walked, dressed, or some kind of psychic power that allowed them to pick up my antipathy, but they could smell that I was a Kaffirboetie, ’n kommunis, a word which can be delightfully hissed through tightly-drawn lips.
We decided to forgo valour and check out the black residential areas where we would most likely find ANC supporters. I was not sure where to go, since I used to avoid Bop like the plague. To me, it was a place imbued with evil. The irony of the AWB’s arrival to help prop up Mangope’s tyrannical reign was that I had years previously dubbed the Bop security forces ‘the black AWB’.
Lost, we wound our way aimlessly through the suburbs, with the fuel gauge showing empty, when we happened across a petrol station that was being plundered by a black mob. I decided in favour of the blunt approach and parked right in front of the pumps. The looters stared at us as if we were insane. I saw flickers of greed pass from eye to eye. A car full of cameras and who knows what other treasures had just rolled into their hands. I got out and announced that we were journalists and desperately needed petrol. A couple of guys, bare-chested, with shirts tied around their waists, looked at each other. ‘No problem,’ they said in unison. The pumps had been ripped right off the wells, and a bucket was lowered into the reservoir. We all laughed and joked, and suspicious characters asked for money for the petrol. ‘Just a donation,’ they assured me. I paid up, probably more than the value of the petrol, but on that day, the fuel was priceless. I had just looted a tank of fuel, and I could certainly identify with the pleasure looters took in the pastime. As Heidi and I continued cruising, we came across a group of black civilians gathered under a large willow tree. They were fearful and showed us patches of blood soaked into the sand, holding out cartridges they had found nearby. It seemed that the right-wingers had been driving around town shooting at any black they saw.
We went to the one hotel that was still open, where all the other journalists had set up base. There were working phones, food, booze and armed security guards at the gate. Ken was there with Monica; they too had run out of gas and he had abandoned The Star’s car somewhere in town. No one was sure as to what would happen next.
The right-wingers had made their base at the airport on the edge of town. On our way there, we passed car-loads of them driving through town, belligerently waving their guns. Some wore balaclavas to cover their faces, others were brazenly bare-faced. Near the entrance to the airport terminal we met John Battersby, the Christian Science Monitor correspondent. His face was swollen and bleeding; he had been badly beaten by goons when he tried to get in to speak to the Afrikaner leader Viljoen. And John doesn’t even carry cameras, the usual magnet for trouble. We returned to the hotel and waited for some kind of development. The Bop military base was a little way up the road, and if they did stage a coup, as rumour said they were now contemplating, they would have to come right past the entrance of the hotel. I nodded off on the comfortable couch thoughtfully located in the reception. After a while, I started awake, jumpy that we were missing something. Heidi and I went back out for a cruise.
The streets were deserted. There were no right-wingers to be seen and the Bop security forces were also absent. In a poor residential area of town, we found a slender black man who claimed to be an ANC official of some sort. He told us that someone had been killed near the airport. Following his directions from the back seat, we almost drove straight into a column of right-wing vehicles at an intersection. The ANC guy went into silent shock. ‘Get down, on the floor!’ I yelled at him and he folded himself into the space behind the front seats. Fervently hoping they had not seen our passenger, I smiled pathetically at the menacing figures standing on the backs of their pick-ups, a variety of guns trained on us as they passed. The column stretched left and right as far as I could see. What were they up to? I had to get into the column, but there was the problem of our little secret in the back seat. ‘Com, I have to follow them. Is that OK with you?’ I absent-mindedly looked in the rear-view mirror, thinking I would see his face. ‘OK,’ his quavering voice gamely floated up from the floor.
South Africans have an old-fashioned sense of road etiquette, and so, when I caught the eye of one of the drivers and indicated that I wanted to be let into the line ahead of him, he nodded and stopped to allow me in. After a kilometres or so, we heard a burst of gunfire and then everyone was pulling to the sides of the road. We did the same and watched as dozens of these fools started firing at random into the mud huts alongside. For some reason they also peppered a water tank. I could not discern any incoming fire and I wanted to take pictures, but I was scared to step out of the car, knowing their antipathy to journalists. I could take pictures through the windscreen, but if they saw me and came over, they would find our passenger and kill him without a qualm. Probably kill all of us. ‘I’m getting out,’ I told Heidi. She looked horrified, ‘Don’t!’ but we both knew that I would. I took a few steps away from the car and began shooting pictures. Within a minute or two, they noticed me. The guns all swung towards me and they began to yell and curse.
‘But I’m showing you being attacked,’ I tried to convince them in my best Afrikaans. ‘It’s in your interest.’ No one bought that line, but it stalled them a little. The column had begun to retreat and in their eagerness to leave it looked as though they would not bother with me. I started to relax, but then I turned to my right and I saw a man standing on the bed of a light pick-up some 15 metres away. He was pointing a pistol right at my head. ‘I’m going to kill you now,’ he informed me softly in Afrikaans. I watched his index finger tighten on the trigger. Everything slowed right down. I knew he was not bluffing, that he was going to shoot. Suddenly, a tall wiry man with an ugly grimace underneath his greying moustache stepped between the gun and me. He ripped the one camera off my neck and hurled it to the ground - the other of my two cameras was hanging from my shoulder, and I used my elbow to push it out of sight, behind my back. His face contorted and he was saying something, but I could not hear for the blood rushing through my ears. I could have kissed that unattractive face - he had unwittingly save my life. Then they were all gone and we were alone.
I walked shakily back to the car and got in. Heidi looked at me, her face pale, stricken. We pulled off on to a side road where black residents urgently waved us to a hiding place behind the hut that the AWB had been shooting up. I feared they might follow us, not believing we had somehow managed to get away unscathed. I also had difficulty believing how stupid I had been. I knew the pictures were shit from the first frame. But there was no time to dwell on it: a woman had been severely wounded in one of the houses. They carried her out into the dusty yard, where Heidi began to dress her wounds. She looked in a bad way, blood everywhere.
The convoy we had intercepted had been trying to leave Bop. The homeland army had been unhappy with Mangope’s decision to call on the Boers, and the unmitigated racism displayed by the right-wing militia had utterly alienated them. Their disappearance from the streets was the sign that they had withdrawn their support of Mangope. Constand Viljoen had watched his attempted rescue of the homeland leader start to degenerate into a racial showdown and ordered his men to pull out.
A few hundred metres further up the road from my close call, Kevin and Jim had also inadvertently intercepted the retreating column. When Afrikaner gunmen started to take pot-shots at them, Jim had accelerated up the sand verge to get ahead, overtaking the slow-moving vehicles in the column. Within seconds, they ran into an intense gun battle between the retreating neo-Nazis and the better-armed Bop security forces.
Scrambling out of the car, they lay flat on the ground. The firing petered out and Jim looked up to see a 70s Mercedes and three AWB members surrounded by a dozen uniformed Bop soldiers. He had to get there. Holding his camera above his head to show the Bop soldiers that he was not a combatant, he slowly stood up. In the aftermath of the gunfight, the silence was conspicuous. He took a step forward - still no reaction. Jim then walked the short distance across the road and began to take pictures. Kevin followed right behind him.
One of the right-wingers was dead, crumpled face down in the dirt, blood flowing past the tripod swastika insignia on his shoulder. Another was lying across the back seat, the third crouched next to the driver’s seat, waving his pistol back and forth across the semi-circle of black men facing him. Jim tried to calm him down: ‘You’re surrounded, don’t start shooting. Stay calm.’
The bearded man, Alwyn Wolfaardt, was wounded and scared, and asked for an ambulance. ‘We can’t call an ambulance. They will do it, they will arrest you then they’ll get you an ambulance,’ Jim said, as he and the others kept shooting pictures. He had been in similar situations before and he felt that the peak of danger had passed; the presence of all those journalists should also have had a calming effect. The Reuters photographer alongside Kevin also thought that the crucial moment had passed. He wanted to get back to Johannesburg to file in time to make European paper deadlines, taking Kevin’s films with him.
Several more journalists arrived. A Bop soldier quickly walked in and pulled the pistol out of Wolfaardt’s hand and instructed his captives to lie flat on the ground. Journalists were questioning Wolfaardt. A black radio reporter asked, ‘Aren’t you sorry for what you have done?’ Wolfaardt just kept asking for an ambulance, but no one responded. It was too good a journalistic moment. Kevin could not quite believe what he was seeing. He recognized how important this scene was and tried to capture it all: the swastika-like emblem; the blood; the fear of their victorious black enemies etched on the right-wingers’ faces. The worm had well and truly turned.
A hundred metres away, CBS cameraman Siphiwe Rallo was rolling long on the scene. He watched through the viewfinder as a Bop policeman tried to fire a semi-automatic rifle into the journalists’ backs. The journalists were oblivious to the danger just behind them. The deadly weapon jammed, and the policeman struggled to clear it, but his rage and haste slowed him down - time enough for another uniformed Bop man to take it from him.
Meanwhile, the cameras and tape recorders worked on. Without warning, one of the Bop soldiers walked swiftly up to the two surviving right-wingers and executed them with rapid single shots from his assault rifle. It was over in a heartbeat. The death of white supremacy.
Kevin had finished the films he had in his cameras and was busy rewinding them when those first shots were fired. There was no way to reload fast enough to catch those few desperate seconds, and he had to just watch it happen.
Oblivious to one of the most dramatic moments of South African history being played out just a little further up the road, I was looking for the camera that my unlikely saviour had hurled into the weeds bordering the road; but it seemed that one of the fleeing right-wingers must have paused long enough to help himself to it. I was scuffing pointlessly in the grass when a television crew drove past and the cameraman yelled out of the window, ‘Some AWB have been killed up ahead!’
I ran to the car and called for Heidi. We sped up the road to find three white men sprawled against and half out of a shot-up car. They were all very dead. I saw Jim and other photographers running away. The scene caught my eye and I shot a few frames of the dead men and three photographers fleeing like culprits. I had missed the killing of the AWB men and the drama surrounding it, important pictures, but despite that professional regret, I felt a surge of elation, a bitter pleasure at seeing those corpses in the Bop dust. Kevin would later say how the cold-blooded execution of those men had disgusted him, but for me it was pure justice.
Working the scene from different angles, I looked up to see a white man in Bop army uniform charging toward us. He screamed abuse in a heavy Afrikaans accent, called us scavengers and hysterically chased us away with a shotgun. He was one of the South African military men seconded to the homeland security forces, and was clearly distraught at the murder of his countrymen. Black men in the uniform he wore had killed white men with whom he shared language, culture and probably ideology - they were the Volk, the chosen race of Africa.
We drove back to the hotel. It was a Friday, and if I could get the film back to the Newsweek office in Johannesburg quickly enough, it could still be shipped to New York in time to make the magazine’s Saturday deadline. Everyone was in a state of excitement. I entrusted my film to CBS, who were driving back to Johannesburg to feed their tape to New York.
Ken also arrived late at the battleground. Unsettled by the deserted scene around the Mercedes, he shot out of the car window, planning to move closer once he had a picture in the bag. The same white officer with the shotgun raced out of the barracks and thrust the barrel into Ken’s face. Ken instinctively shied back and pushed the barrel away from him as the man pulled the trigger, and the shotgun discharged harmlessly into the air. In the aftermath of the gun battle, the Bop army had retaken the streets. Using armoured personnel carriers, they herded the confused and fearful AWB stragglers out of town. Afrikaner militants still trapped inside the homeland feared they would be killed as they tried to leave. A group approached Ken and pleaded with him to help them escape, to safeguard them - their hatred of the press had disappeared along with their bravado. ‘Sorry,’ Ken replied, with suppressed satisfaction. ‘We’re only here to observe.’
Joao had raced to Bop after doing the early morning Mandela job, but he was too late to get anything. He was upset, because he knew that he had been forced to miss great pictures. But Brauchli somehow also missed the pictures that counted - he had arrived on the scene when it was all over. Denis Farrell in Johannesburg knew AP were going to get severely beaten world-wide unless he came up with a frame to match Kevin’s Reuters picture. Desperate, he called his opposite number at Reuters, Patrick de Noirmont, and asked for an out-take, a reject, from Kevin’s films. This was not that unusual-I had on more than one occasion snipped a neg. for my opposition when they were in real trouble on a story. The rule is to make sure you keep very quiet about it and to make sure that the picture you give is never going to beat yours. I had once foolishly allowed a Reuters photographer in Bosnia to choose his own neg. from my AP take and woke up the next morning to discover that I had been beaten by my own picture. Patrick had been in the game a long time and he gave Denis an inferior image from the scene; Kevin’s Reuters pictures dominated the play while the AP got its arse kicked.