Extract I went to court this week, for the first time in a very long time as a journalist, and sat in Courtroom 11F as a case that I – and you, readers – am paying for was heard before a full bench that included august judges Seun Moshidi, Jody Kollapen and Ingrid Opperman.
Joao “Jan” Rodrigues – the 79-year-old former policeman alleged to have murdered anti-apartheid activist Ahmed Timol 47 years ago – was meant to be in the dock (but was not) as his counsel applied for a permanent stay of prosecution.
An aside … want to know why you, the taxpayer, is paying for this trial? Well, because the 29-year-old Rodrigues was a state employed policeman in 1971 and therefore he is entitled to have his defence paid for by the national director of public prosecutions.
Going back into that courthouse building that was “home” for a chunk of my young journalist life felt familiar and strange at the same time.
All that has changed is the ratio of black to white men and women in their black gowns with white bibs. The number of darker skinned lawyers and attorneys and advocates and judges has gone up exponentially to reflect, at last, the demographic of our country.
Among things familiar were the punishingly hard wood benches even more uncomfortable than my young back from long ago days remembered them.
And, like in the protest days of old, the rows were filled with earnest troops of civil society organisations, there in statement making T-shirts.
They’re older, for sure, but the fervour of old remains.
The Foundation for Human Rights was there, with member Valerie Sebastian handing out Power In Truth T-shirts.
Timol was pushed or dropped to his death from the 10th floor of the John Vorster Square Police Station in downtown Johannesburg where he was being interrogated.
Chris van Wyk wrote a poem, In detention, about it.
This was printed into the cotton T-shirt fabric: He fell from the ninth floor He hanged himself He slipped on a piece of soap while washing He hanged himself He slipped on a piece of soap while washing He fell from the ninth floor He hanged himself while washing He slipped from the ninth floor He hung from the ninth floor He slipped on the ninth floor while washing He fell from a piece of soap while slipping He hung from the ninth floor He washed from the ninth floor while slipping He hung from a piece of soap while washing.
I don’t think anybody really believes Rodrigues murdered Timol, even though he might have been in the room when the young activist died.
To date, he has never been made to face the full might of the law because, legal experts say, there really was no case to be made against him.
For this very reason, this insignificant policeman who, it seems, was a bit player in what was a horrific Security Branch torture horror show that ended with the death of a young man falling out of a window, was not brought before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
On the other hand, Judge Billy Mothle found in October 2017, that there was evidence that the two men behind Timol’s brutal interrogation – captain Johannes Van Niekerk and captain Johannes Gloy – were responsible for his death.
Too late. Both those men are now dead.
But Roderigues is alive, and being defended by advocate Jaap Cilliers, the man who defended SA’s own Dr Death; the man who had Dr Death acquitted!
Wouter Basson was the former head of the country’s secret chemical and biological warfare project, Project Coast, during the apartheid era. With Cilliers as his counsel, Basson was acquitted in 2002 of 67 charges, after having been suspended from his military post with full pay in 1999.
I was in court with my dear friend Maggie Davey whose play about the Basson trial, Coast: Scenes from the trial of Dr Wouter Basson, chillingly tells of testimony given about plane trips to drop the bodies of Swapo prisoners into the sea, the bodies of people who died from poisons and toxins administered on the instruction of Basson.
Cilliers got Basson off.
Seeing Cilliers gowned, standing in his authority and power in front of a full bench, you could smell the smarts coming off him. There is no doubt that he is an astonishingly clever man, with a fine legal brain.
His style is deliberate, he’s thoroughly prepared, he has all the facts at his fingertips. He’s impressive.
I wondered out loud how, in the face of so much damning evidence, Basson had been acquitted. An old journalist friend who covered that trial whispered: He (nod to Cilliers) wore them down.
Halfway through the morning, a large group of old men and women arrived, hot and sweaty as they crammed their way into already full pews.
These were Khulumani members, the men and women who are survivors and victims of apartheid gross human rights violations, whose denial of reparations has resulted, they say, in their continuing poverty.
Dressed in white #TimolAhmedInquest T-shirts (listing the names of all detainees who died in apartheid police custody on the back) they were there to lend support.
A small man with a twisted spine and rheumy eyes sat down in my pew, took off his shoes, went to sleep and snored throughout the morning’s proceedings.
An old man, tired out from having journeyed to this courtroom, in his T-shirt, in the hope that his being there would make a difference, would help people remember.
And an image flashed into my mind – of the day 47 years ago when I first heard that Timol had died while in police custody.
It was somewhere around the end of October 1971, a month before my 13th birthday.
My lovely dad had just heard the news from one of the teachers on his staff that was related to the Timol family.
My parents were shocked by how close it had gotten to us. They talked to each other in hushed tones, not wanting us to hear. My mother thought it was protecting our innocence.
Looking back on it, it seemed like a kind, but utterly useless thing to do.
We were surrounded by it – this racial corralling. We were kept in our designated compounds, never allowed to get to know our blacker and browner neighbours in anything more than a perfunctory way.
It would all come tumbling down on their heads, but not for a very long time.
For now, there’s a long way to go before Rodrigues learns of his fate.
Timol’s family, and friends are happy to wait. They’ve already waited 47 years.
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