Christmas visits … ‘Don't worry’

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Whitehead, Affidavit, 19 Feb. 1982, Docket 1.47, Record of Inquest. 2. The South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) was allied to the African National Congress (ANC). Although not prohibited, it was effectively crushed by its leaders being banned, imprisoned or forced into exile. 3. Breytenbach, Affidavit, 18 June 1982, Docket 2.1021, Record of Inquest. 4. Six Christmas cards – six in and six out – were negotiated two weeks earlier by the Detainee Parents’ Support Committee with Col. Muller, along with weekly (Friday morning) acceptance of food parcels and clothing, plus books, games and puzzles approved by the commanding officer. Dirty washing could also be returned. See Minutes meeting DPSC & Col. Muller, 10 Dec. 1981 in Emma Mashinini, Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life, London: The Women's Press, 1989: 139. 5. Whitehead, Affidavit, Record of Inquest. 6. Whitehead, Affidavit. 7. After a ‘near-death’ experience of torture, Auret van Heerden has made a statement and is now being allowed to recover. Neil's close friend and comrade, Gavin Andersson, who was detained and released, escaped to Botswana before the security police came to re-arrest him. 8. This is the same Special Branch interrogator who, in 1964, claimed that the detainee Babla Salojee had deliberately jumped to his death out of a seventh storey window in The Grays, Johannesburg's former police headquarters. Those who survived Swanepoel's ‘standing torture’ included my husband Nandha, whom he threatened with having his body dumped down a mine. One of their people would investigate, he added, and that would be ‘end of story’. By 1966, Major Swanepoel commanded the new security police camp in South West Africa's far north and the counter-insurgency squad that became the notorious ‘Koevoet’. Death was integral to Swanepoel's repertoire. He is said to have commanded the policemen who, in 1976, open fired on black school children in Soweto and Alexandra. 9. Van Heerden Statement, 16 Sept. 1982, Docket 4.1B, Record of Inquest. 10. Van Heerden Statement, 16 Sept. 1982, Docket 4.1B, Record of Inquest.