KwaZulu-Natal has a serious political violence problem, including assassinations. Every significant empirical study has concluded that the province is the epicentre of the plague of assassinations, political and otherwise, that has befallen our country. When assassins strike elsewhere, they are often recruited from KwaZulu-Natal.
KwaZulu-Natal is also the province with the highest number of people killed by the police. The number of police killings escalated dramatically under the authority of Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi. In most cases we have only the police’s word to confirm that they fired in self-defence. The police have a long, well-documented record of lying about killings and other abuses.
Many, if not most, South Africans have experienced police abuse and corruption in various forms, ranging from demands for bribes from traffic police to shakedowns of migrants, torture in police custody and killings. Late last year it was reported that the police had to pay out R1.7bn over four years in damages for wrongful arrests and detention, assaults in police custody, and so on.
In most instances this is not political. But as the number of successful civil cases brought against the police by grassroots activists shows, police abuses do often take political form. There is also clear evidence in the public domain of high-level police complicity in organised crime. This has been most clearly established in the excellent reporting on the looting of the Tembisa hospital and the assassination of Babita Deokoran.
These are serious matters, as are the claims made by Mkhwanazi in the media conference he called in July. In most instances though, torture or a killing by the police passes without any public attention, let alone attempts to get to the truth of what happened. This is almost always the case when the victim is an impoverished black person. This is often true of the assassination of grassroots activists.
Jeff Wicks’s dogged, courageous reporting on the assassination of Deokoran has been exemplary, and his new book is essential reading. But the crisis of police and criminal violence is mainly not adequately examined in our public sphere.
Issue of credibility
For many years Mary de Haas has been the go-to person for the media to get comment on matters of police and other forms of violence in KwaZulu-Natal. She has often been given an elevated standing as a protagonist in public affairs. This is unusual, and its implication is clear: this is a person to be trusted, to be automatically taken at their word.
Following De Haas’s recent appearance before parliament’s ad hoc committee on police corruption, there was an explosion of gleeful online cruelty — much of it disturbingly ageist and sexist — after she was unable to substantiate her claims and it became clear that she does not hold the PhD she claimed at the outset of her testimony.
This cruelty must be firmly rejected. Yet, there is an issue of credibility that requires serious reflection. In 2001 the Treatment Action Campaign waged a big campaign for access to nevirapine, a drug that can prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV. The campaign targeted the government and Boehringer Ingelheim, the pharmaceutical company that held the patent.
In the early 2000s, beginning in 2001, I taught US students visiting Durban on a programme, the International Human Rights Exchange. One year I arrived to teach my class just as the previous lecturer — De Haas — was running over time, and I caught the last few minutes of her lecture.
She was telling the students with absolute certainty that people were dying from toxic drugs and not disease caused by HIV, that there was a conspiracy by remnants of apartheid intelligence to kill black people via these drugs, and that Wouter Basson was driving this as the CEO of Boehringer Ingelheim. Of course none of this was true, and her account sat at the extreme end of the conspiracy theories that had some currency at the time. Hundreds of thousands of people suffered slow and painful deaths due to these conspiracy theories.
The key scientist driving the conspiracy theories about Aids that circulated in the early 2000s was Peter Duesberg. He denied that HIV causes Aids, and claimed that recreational drug use caused immune collapse in gay men in the West, that antiretroviral medicines such as AZT were themselves toxic and a real cause of Aids, and that what was called “Aids” in Africa was not a viral infection but a result of poverty, malnutrition and poor sanitation.
These claims have been disproved. The scientific consensus is unequivocal that HIV causes Aids, and that antiretroviral therapy prevents illness and transmission.
Yet in an article published on the Mail & Guardian website only five years ago, De Haas described Duesberg as an “outstanding scientist” whose views on HIV and Aids were unfairly silenced. She has also written in support of Gordon Stewart, who also denied that HIV causes Aids, among other conspiracy theories.
To be fair, De Haas is not the only person who bought into the conspiracy theories about HIV. Anthony Brink’s notorious Debating AZT book, published in 2000, has often been said to have been a significant reason for Thabo Mbeki’s disastrous turn to denialism. Jaine Roberts, who has been the head of research at Rhodes University for many years — the person making key decisions about research funding and other matters — wrote a blurb for that book that declared it, “Remarkable research and brilliant writing.”
Conspiracy theory
If a person takes responsibility for an error of this kind of seriousness and reflects on how they came to have endorsed a dangerous conspiracy, there is no need to consign them to permanent professional oblivion. But in the absence of this kind of reckoning, great care should be taken in assessing claims made by a person with this kind of history.
De Haas’s penchant for conspiracy theory was not hidden. Over the years she has repeatedly made emphatic public statements for which no evidence has been provided; statements that in at least some instances are either simply wrong or disputed. That in parliament and live on national television she claimed to have a PhD when she does not confirmed to the wider public that she is not a reliable interlocutor.
Many people hold eccentric or conspiratorial views but only express them in private spaces. However, De Haas’s views were repeatedly elevated by the media as if they were rare and valuable insights bravely expressed. This whole unfortunate issue is, among other things, a serious failure of our public sphere that demands careful reflection.
There should be some reflection on the part of the media, some actors in the academy and a set of NGOs that — for decades — presented De Haas as an unimpeachable expert; someone with elevated ethical standing and empirical rigour.
The crisis we face in terms of assassinations and police violence, abuse and corruption is serious and demands the most rigorous public investigation we are able to muster.
• Pithouse is a distinguished research fellow at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies in Dublin and New York, an international research scholar at the University of Connecticut, and an extraordinary professor at the University of the Western Cape.
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