It was late on a sweltering summer evening at Temba on the outskirts of Hammanskraal north of Pretoria in the then Bophuthatswana bantustan on Tuesday December 1, 1987 when death came knocking at the door of Tumelo and Busisiwe Motasi.
Unaware of the danger, Busisiwe answered the door of their humble four-roomed home. There stood a tough-faced black man with googly 1980s’ spectacles and a gap in his front teeth, saying he was a friend of Tumelo, who worked as a sergeant based at the Hammanskraal Police College, and asking if he was home.
Busisiwe must have been nervous, for though a policeman himself, Tumelo had filed a civil damages claim for R10,000 against a white superior, Col WP van Zyl, for assaulting him in the early 1980s, causing permanent damage to his eardrum.
Van Zyl claimed he had hit Tumelo as the black policeman had drawn a firearm on him during an argument. The rancour against Tumelo among his white colleagues simmered for years. Five months earlier, Tumelo had warned his attorney, Brian Currin, that they aimed to kill him for his effrontery.
But Busisiwe stood talking with the stranger for a while, unaware that he was a former black consciousness SA Student Movement leader and then MK member who had, according to his own later version, been broken and turned askari after he had been betrayed to the Security Branch (SB) by his commanders in Botswana.
His name was Joe Mamasela and as an askari, he was armed with a handgun and attached to a shadowy counter-terrorism SB unit called C1, the existence of which only became known to the public two years later, gaining notoriety under the name of its primary base on the Hennops River south of Pretoria: Vlakplaas.
Unknown to Busisiwe, waiting around the corner in the shadows listening to her conversation were three men disguised in balaclavas, two armed with AK47s. They were SB policemen Capt Jacques Hechter, Capt Phillipus “Flippie” Loots, and WO Paul van Vuuren — and along with Mamasela had only that evening formed a scratch death-squad with Sgt Tumelo Motasi as their target.
The three policemen claimed at their Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) amnesty hearing on March 3 1997 that they had been informed earlier that day that Tumelo was passing information on to the Zimbabwean intelligence service that put SA agents in that country in danger. Currin strenuously denied the sergeant had been a spy, suggesting instead it was the lawsuit against Van Zyl that triggered the decision to kill Tumelo Motasi.
Bush-whacking a colleague
On the fatal evening, Mamasela returned to his hidden colleagues to inform them Tumelo wasn’t home. The men decided to enter the house and wait for his return. “Mamasela once again knocked on the door,” Hechter recalled at his amnesty hearing.
“She [Busisiwe] once again opened the door and he then pulled out his handgun and took her, forced her back into the house to one of the back rooms. We did not want her to see what we looked like.”
Mamasela never testified, but in an exclusive interview, has now told me that the couple’s five-year-old son Tshidiso had been fast asleep in the small bedroom.
“We then entered the house,” Hechter stated, “and to make things appear as normal as possible, we put the lights off, but switched the television on. I cannot remember how long we waited, but it was a considerable time. Then a vehicle stopped outside. It was a small Mazda vehicle.
“The front door had been locked again and whilst he [Tumelo] was busy trying to open the front door with his key, as he was starting to open the door, I pulled open the door from the inside and dragged him into the living room.”
Though Tumelo Richard Motasi was a slightly built man, Hechter admitted “he put up quite a fight. We were wrestling with each other and eventually I started throttling him and so gained control over him. I then placed a pillow on his head. WO Van Vuuren shot him four times with the AK47 rifle. The pillow was to deaden the sound of the gunshots so that it could not be heard far away.”
It is at this point that the white policemen’s version diverges from that of the black askari.
Hechter testified that the killers then made their getaway, but that before exiting the house, Mamasela, against orders, shot Busisiwe Irene Motasi dead. “When I asked him why he had done so,” Hechter recalled, “he said that she had seen his face and would be able to identify him ... and that that would cause problems for him later.”
But Mamasela, now 71, told me that sitting in the main bedroom with Busisiwe, “I heard a machine-gun rrrr-rrrr... Now an eerie silence prevailed. Irene asked me ‘why are they killing him?’ I said ‘maybe they shot him by mistake,’ just to tell her something, and went to see ... and asked Hechter, and he said why am I leaving this woman?
“He took his AK47 and handed it to Loots and took my .38 special, the one they gave me, and said ‘this woman is intelligent, a nursing sister, she can talk; why didn’t you shoot her?’ He went to the bedroom; I followed him and the woman was still on top of the bed. He took a pillow of this woman and put it over her face, and fired four times. And the light was on and you could see blood mixed with brains on the bedsheet.
“He said ‘there are two bullets left’. He said I must go and shoot the boy, otherwise he’s going to testify against us. His bedroom door was slightly ajar and he was not wearing pyjamas, but in school khaki shorts and a blanket, sleeping facing up. [Hechter] gave me the gun [but] I can’t shoot small boys [though] I know I’m a killer, a tsotsi, a crook. I went to the door and I shot in the wall, da! And the other bullet, da!”
Now a 42-year-old with his own sons, aged six and 15, Tshidiso told me: “I remember nothing of that night. I only realised about two years ago that I think Mamasela tried to shoot me too, because there were two bullet-holes in the wall that they could not explain,” indicating the shots must have whizzed close by him.
“But when the sun came up the next morning, I remember everything in clear detail... I went to check on my mother; I saw that she was not responding, and then I quickly, because there was blood in the corridor, went and checked my father was lying there on the floor... I tried waking him up; I even felt the hole here,” he indicates his left temple, “saw the brains, everything.”
‘The policemen killed them’
The neighbours heard Tshidiso’s pitiful crying the next morning, and when it had not stopped, they went to the house and found the traumatised little boy with his murdered parents. Gloria Hlabangane, Tshidiso’s grandmother, had to travel from Johannesburg — and was met by utter horror, as she later told SABC’s TRC Special Report on revisiting the scene.
“I found Tumelo sleeping in the lounge here on the floor. His head was right here, he was shot in the ear and pieces of his skull they were on the floor and some of his brain was on the floor. So I left Tumelo again, rushed to the bedroom, looking for Tshidiso. I found that Tshidiso’s bedroom was upside down. Everything was, the trunks, the big police trunks were quite open, all the documents were out.
“I look for Tshidiso; I thought maybe his corpse is underneath those things. I couldn’t find the child. When I turn around I hear the child saying ‘gogo baba bulayile’. That means they’ve killed them. I said who? He said the policemen. I said to him how do you know? He said, ‘Keba bone with kadi jerseys ne ba apere dijersey tse tswanang letsa papa waka.’ It means they were wearing the jerseys that look like my father’s.”
Tshidiso told me that, compounding the trauma, his grandmother was forced by callous police detectives to clean up the gory crime scene.
Tshidiso Motasi’s horrific story forms part of the largest constitutional damages claim in SA. It was filed by 25 applicants last week for R167m against the government for obstructing justice and denying closure for the families of those killed and disappeared and survivors of atrocities and gross human rights violations in the apartheid era — by sabotaging attempts to prosecute perpetrators across the political divide in the 20 years since the TRC ended.
Loots and his former superior, Gen Marthinus “Martiens” Dawid Ras, were granted amnesty by the TRC’s amnesty committee on January 23 2000 as both killings were ruled to have been “associated with a political objective as envisaged in the [TRC] Act and that the applicants have made a full disclosure of all relevant facts”.
Mamasela did not apply for amnesty because, he told me, that as he had broken ranks by “coming out” as an askari to investigators after C1 was shut down in 1990 — he claimed an outraged Vlakplaas ex-chief Col Eugene de Kock ordered him killed — he was instead forever after used as a section 204 state’s witness against fellow perpetrators. This was his get-out-of-jail-free card.
The officer from whom, in TRC testimony, the Motasi kill order originally emanated, former Northern Transvaal divisional commissioner Gen Jacob Gabrielle Roux Stemmet, and Col Kobus “Koos” Klopper, former provincial investigative unit chief, also did not apply for amnesty; both men are still alive.
Admitting during his amnesty hearing that he had strangled, burnt, shot, kicked and blown up 35 people during his bloody career, Hechter, who was amnestied for Tumelo’s murder but not for Busisiwe’s, died without any fear of prosecution on July 20, 2023.
But Paul van Vuuren, who was also amnestied for the sergeant but not for his wife, attempted to make amends for executing Tumelo, meeting a 16-year-old Tshidiso Motasi more than a decade after their deaths and telling him: “If I look back at what happened, at apartheid and so on, then I’m sorry about what happened to your parents and to you because it was a waste of human life.
“I’m sorry for that. I know that you must hate me. I know if somebody killed my parents maybe I would have been much more hateful than you. I can’t really say how would I feel, I can just imagine how would I feel.”
Tshidiso told his father’s killer: “I don’t have parents. My granny can die any day, because she’s old now. So, if she dies who’s going to take care of me?” To which the policeman responded: “Yes, that’s a difficult question. You can come live with me, I’ll look after you.”
Van Vuuren, who retired to farm near Bela-Bela in Limpopo, is since deceased. Tshidiso recalled: “I don’t think he meant it, because if he meant it he would have tried something, like maybe contributing towards my education... It was like I was thrown under the bus; I was not prepared for it psychologically.”
At that tender age, he had already had to absorb another awful emotional shock: “My uncle had told me when I was 15 that my mother had been five months pregnant — and it nearly killed me, it nearly killed me. Everyone agrees she was pregnant but they were too afraid to tell me until then. So there were three murders that day.”
When I informed Mamasela for the first time that Busisiwe was pregnant, he let out a cry of despair: “Aaaaagh man! No-no-no-no, shame! I would like to meet the boy, but I am going to depress him more. He was a child, if you can see my second child, he looks like him. He was wearing the same khakis as my own child.”
Surviving on hope
Another of the constitutional damages cases concerns the unsolved murder of anti-apartheid academic Dr Richard “Rick” Turner, shot through the window of his Durban home on January 8 1978, two months before his banning order was about to expire, by assassins suspected to have been members of the Durban SB. He died in the arms of his daughters, 13-year-old Jann and eight-year-old Kim.
Evidence emerged during the reopened inquest into the Durban SB assassination of Dr Hoosen Haffejee — whose sister Sarah Bibi Lall is also an applicant in the damages case — that the Turner house was being monitored around the clock until the day before the murder. Capt James Taylor of the Durban SB, who did not apply for amnesty, died in 2019.
And therein lies the rub, for with more than two decades having been allowed to slide by since the TRC released its final report in 2003, most perpetrators have lived out their retirements in peace and many have gone to their graves with their grisly secrets — and in most cases, it seems, no regrets for the damage they inflicted on so many people.
The secret negotiations between cherry-picked cabinet ministers under first Thabo Mbeki then Jacob Zuma and apartheid generals such as Gen Constand Viljoen and Gen Kat Liebenberg from 1998-2003, intended to prevent any prosecutions, across the political spectrum, emanating from the TRC built a culture of seemingly impenetrable impunity.
At each step, the attempts of surviving victims and bereaved families to achieve justice and closure were blocked. The National Prosecuting Authority was suborned, its chiefs hounded from office, and even when the Hawks appointed investigating officers to pursue TRC matters, it was subsequently discovered that at least one officer was a former SB member, and in the Motasi case, one of the investigators was none other than Van Zyl, whose beef with Tumelo Motasi may have precipitated the couple’s murder.
In 2011, Mamasela shot dead his landlord, Lali Joseph Nhlapo; he claimed self-defence, but witnesses said Nhlapo was unarmed. Tshidiso recalled the incident: “He’s a very dark son-of-a... He shot his landlord a block away from me, you understand; I live in Jabulani, he lives in Zola”, in Soweto. “Can you [imagine] as a kid fearing that someone who shot your folks has just shot another person? That person can come to you at any time and do whatever.”
Tshidiso said his grandmother was now 92 and was holding on because she simply “wants justice. Even today she told us ‘go with God; everything’s in God’s hands,’ that she hasn’t lost hope”.
• Schmidt is an investigative journalist and author of books including ‘Death Flight’ (2020).
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