The notorious Vlakplaas askari assassin Joe Mamasela, implicated in so many apartheid-era murders that — apart from the horror stabbing and bludgeoning to death of lawyer Griffiths Mxenge in 1981 — most are known simply by collective numbers, has built a shiny new narrative around his dark trajectory.
Mamasela struck a casual attitude recently outside the Johannesburg High Court to which he had been summonsed by the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) to be the key state’s witness among 16 in the ground-breaking crime of apartheid trial of two former colleagues.
Gone was his trademark pencil moustache, microphone hair, and googly 1980s spectacles. Chiskop and with a gold chain around his neck, he resembled a relaxed taxi boss.
But evidence before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in the late 1990s linked him directly to group killings such as that of the “Pebco Three”, who were abducted and strangled in Gqeberha on May 8 1985, and of the “Mamelodi 10” — 10 youths from Mamelodi outside Pretoria who were drugged and burnt alive in their minibus by Special Forces in Bophuthatswana.
Astoundingly, standing quietly alongside Mamasela as he lounged on a court bench was Nomsa Hilda Mashaba, 56, who had been an 18-year-old girl on the night of June 26 1986, and the 11th person in the fated minibus.
She told Business Day she had become suspicious because the minibus was being tailed by a grey Ford Sierra “that used to torment us at home”, containing two white men and one black man. When Mamasela, who she knew as “Comrade Mike” stopped the minibus at a petrol station at Zeerust for the passengers to have a chance to eat, Mashaba hid in the bathroom — and so escaped the grisly fate of her comrades.
Mashaba said she had hired a lawyer to find Mamasela, who told her last year that he had died, and had been brought to court by Col Jason Naidoo of the Hawks’ TRC unit so she could be assured he was in fact alive.
“So, I went there and greeted him, ‘Comrade, how are you?’ and he said ‘Hey, I am fine. Long time, man, and I am trying what-what-what.’ But I just turned my back and cried. Tears were running down my face, but I wiped them quickly so that no-one would see.”
Although Mamasela was denied amnesty by the TRC’s amnesty committee, he has never been charged, and today seems to be making a new career for himself as a state’s witness on apartheid-era offences committed by Vlakplaas.
“Apartheid lead to genocide,” he claimed, speaking to Business Day. “But white people were killed also; there were doctors murdered. I don’t think we should divide the victims of apartheid by black and white. I want to build a memorial with all the names; I don’t want to make it a black thing or a white thing.”
On the evening of February 15 1982, Mamasela had driven a VW Kombi with fellow former MK guerrilla turned Security Branch section C1 askari Ephraim Mfalapitsa and four youths of United Democatic Front affiliate the Congress of SA Students (Cosas) to a remote mine pump-house outside Krugersdorp.
The youths — Zandile Musi, Eustice “Bimbo” Madikela, Peter Mataboge (aka Ntshingo Matabane) and Fanyana Nhlapo — were under the impression that Mfalapitsa, MK’s number three in Lusaka after commander Joe Modise, was going to induct them into the clandestine ranks of MK.
But Mfalapitsa had been captured and turned askari only weeks previously. Ermelo Security Branch police officer W/O (later colonel) Christiaan Siebert had rigged the pump-house with explosives.
Mamasela waited in the Kombi while Mfalapitsa showed the youths hand-grenades. Claiming he was returning to the Kombi for more weapons, Mfalapitsa walked out into the night and Siebert blew the pump-house, killing all but Musi who was badly wounded.
Three of the Security Branch chiefs involved in authorising the murders have died in the 23 years since the TRC amnesty committee refused them amnesty, apparently because of illegal ANC presidential and ministerial interference in the NPA’s prosecution of apartheid perpetrators. Musi died in 2021 without being able to testify.
But now, advocate Shamila Batohi’s revived NPA is not only charging the surviving Mfalapitsa and Siebert with kidnapping, but in a legal first for SA, of murder as a crime against humanity (alternately as a common crime), and in a world first, of the crime against humanity of apartheid.
On one day, the public gallery was partly filled with old-time Krugersdorp Cosas members who were comrades of the murdered youths in 1982, all wearing Cosas 4 T-shirts with the legend “Justice Delayed is Justice Denied.”
Ironically, that’s exactly what Rorich, supported by Mfalapitsa, has argued, claiming that the Criminal Procedure Act’s 20-year statute of limitations has long expired, and that the two crimes against humanity charges do not fall within the Act’s exclusions on limitations. In a supreme irony, the former askari has also claimed that the government’s interference with the NPA denied him a speedy, and thus fair, trial.
Wearing his white collar — he became a pastor after Vlakplaas was shut down — Mfalapitsa told Business Day: “Justice was denied [me] but we have to balance that with the fact that people died. I want a judgment — and the families also want a judgment.”
Yet on the crimes against humanity charges, he quipped: “That’s nonsense, because you can’t take what I did out of its context of fighting a war,” saying both the state and its opponents had “committed errors”.
Judge Dario Dosio will rule on the admissibility of the crimes against humanity charges during court recess over the holidays, and the trial proper will begin, whether on those primary charges, or on the common-law alternates, on April 14.
• Schmidt is an investigative journalist and author of books including Death Flight (2020).
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.