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.
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.
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.