ESSAY EIGHT from The Lie of Apartheid and other True Stories from Southern Africa
When I saw the 1991 Oliver Stone movie JFK which deals with an alleged conspiracy surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy, I must admit that, at the time, I thought that Stone–and by implication, the JFK conspiracy theorists–had made quite a good case. It seemed, on the face of it, that there was probably something more to the case than the public record suggested.
Certainly the odd quirks highlighted in that movie–buildings with two entrances, the peculiarities of the much vaunted “grassy knoll” shooter and other things were intriguing enough to sow a seed of doubt in my mind. Maybe there was something bigger behind the assassination, rather than just a lone nut. It was a possibility I seriously considered.
My belief in this sort of thing was completely shattered in a few years’ time due to the events which surrounded the assassination of Chris Hani in 1993. Hani was possibly one of the most senior and important figures of the African National Congress’s “armed struggle” against apartheid South Africa and certainly the most popular political leader amongst black South Africans after Nelson Mandela.
He was gunned down during the Easter weekend, 1993, by a white assassin as part of a plan to provoke wide scale unrest and to set the stage for a military coup d’état in South Africa. This would have, so the theory went, prevented the ANC from coming to power (an event which occurred the next year). It was only with the assassination of Chris Hani, the details of which I became intimately acquainted, that I experienced firsthand how mad many people are, and how they twist, distort, and even make things up when the conspiracy bug gets a hold of them.
I realized then that apparently the plain truth was too boring for many people, and that some darker instinct propelled them to seek out bizarre theories or suggestions which implied that all was not as it seemed.
Why else do people persist in saying the moon landings never happened, or that it was missiles which flew into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001?
And so it is with the Chris Hani assassination. It was unquestionably one of the most sensational political murders in South Africa since that of former Prime Minister HF Verwoerd (stabbed to death in 1966). The truth surrounding the Chris Hani assassination has obviously proven to be too “dull” (although I never experienced it as that) for both the far left and the far right.
As a result, conspiracies have abounded. I am always astonished to read of some new invented twist to the story. I have read that there was a second car with a second gunman, that there were additional bullet holes in the wall next to the assassination scene, that the assassin was actually a Communist sleeper agent working to “smear the right wing,” and (the most common one) that there was some combined conspiracy between the apartheid state and a “right-wing” faction of the ANC.
This latter conspiracy belief-that a so-called right wing of the ANC (incredible as that may sound) joined forces covertly with the apartheid security establishment to kill Hani, who was seen as a “radical,” runs rampant to this day in the ranks of the South African Communist Party. Consequently they regularly call for the case to be reopened so as to “discover the truth.”
The great thing about conspiracy theories, I found, was that people take some ordinary mundane fact, and attribute to it a meaning way beyond anything it actually signifies. From there, they build it into the overall fantasy which they seek to believe.
Small snippets of half truth have been woven together to produce what can only be best described as a tapestry of lies.
The reason for this is, I believe, twofold: firstly, it satiates this “dark desire” for conspiracy nonsense; and secondly, and far more practically, it has been used to help deny amnesty in terms of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to the perpetrators of the assassination (although, to be fair, this was not the sole reason for them being denied such amnesty).
In order to set the scene for the dramatic events of Easter 1993, it is first necessary to spell out the background in some detail. This is not done to try and provide any sort of biography, but each subsection below contains information vital to understanding the assassination itself, so I beg the reader’s indulgence for a short while.
Chris Hani–A Short Bio
Chris Hani was, without doubt, the second most popular figure in the ANC hierarchy after Nelson Mandela. Born in 1942, he had joined the ANC at age fifteen, and had devoted his life to that organization.
When the ANC was banned by the apartheid South African government in 1960, he joined the armed wing of the ANC, called Mkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”) but was arrested under the Suppression of Communism Act.
After his release, he went into exile in neighboring Lesotho in 1963, from where he was sent to receive military training in the Soviet Union. He took active part in the armed uprising against the white government of Rhodesia, and served in campaigns in the Rhodesian Bush War.
Due to his extensive hands-on military experience, he was eventually appointed head of Mkhonto we Sizwe, which he commanded from ANC headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia. There he, along with Yossel Mashel (Joe) Slovo, was responsible for running the ANC’s armed campaign against the South African state. Because Hani was recognized as the militant face of the organization, he grew in stature amongst supporters of the ANC.
When both the ANC and the South African Communist Party (SACP) were unbanned in 1990, Hani returned to South Africa. There he took part in the negotiations with the government to bring an end to white rule. He was also elected secretary-general of the now legally reconstituted SACP, replacing Slovo, who was made party chairman. The SACP had been in formal alliance with the ANC since the 1950s.
My National Service in the South African Police
While being a hero to the ANC masses, Hani was close to the devil incarnate to many whites. It was truly a case of one man’s freedom fighter being another man’s terrorist.
Although by this stage I had long realized that apartheid was a disaster and had to go, I had not forgotten that in 1987, ANC guerrillas, working under Hani’s direct command, had nearly killed me at the Johannesburg Magistrates’ Court.
At that time I was halfway through fulfilling my national service. At the time, all white males of military age in South Africa were conscripted into the army or the police. I was conscripted into the police, and served in the uniform branch attached to John Vorster Square (now Johannesburg Central Police Station).
There I first did patrol work in the city, and later with Unit 19, the mobile Reaction Unit which dealt with the all too frequent flare-ups of unrest and insurgency around the country.
It was common for many policemen working at John Vorster Square to walk the three blocks to the Johannesburg Magistrates’ Court canteen for lunch. ANC guerrillas had reconnoitered the Magistrate’s Court and had seen that at 12:30 each day a number of policemen walked past the western side of the court building. The ANC men set two explosives: a small limpet mine to draw even more policemen in as they cordoned off the area, and a larger device hidden in a car which was designed to inflict casualties upon the policemen.
The plan worked well, from the ANC’s point of view. Three policemen were killed outright by the blast, including my personal friend, Weyers Botha, who, despite his Afrikaans-sounding name, was, like myself, an English speaker. I had known Weyers since we were both in the same platoon at the Police College in Pretoria in 1985, and had befriended him as the only other Englishman around at the time.
I would no doubt have been there as well, had a colonel not sent me on an errand for him at 12 o’clock exactly. The errand, I recall, was one which made me angry: it was to go and hand in his membership renewal forms for his tennis club. I, as a lowly sergeant, could not refuse the order even though it blatantly breached private use of state vehicle regulations, because it would have caused trouble for me later. I stalked out of the station fuming, because I knew that I would be late for lunch and in all probability miss it that day.
I was right: I did miss lunch–and the bomb. It was the luckiest errand upon which I have ever been sent. I would have been walking with Weyers, and unquestionably would have been killed with him.
So, to be honest, I was hardly sympathetic to Mkhonto we Sizwe, even though I knew apartheid had to go. The Johannesburg Magistrates’ Court bombing always remained fresh in my memory, and the loss of a friend in such a manner was quite stressful.
Working at The Citizen Newspaper
I suppose I was not too bad a policeman. As I neared the end of my period of national service, I was asked by my commanding officer to join the force permanently. I refused, and bought my discharge on the exact day that my national service ended. By then, I had realized the game was up, and that as powerful as the state was, it could never hold out indefinitely against the ANC.
I went to work as a journalist at The Citizen newspaper in Johannesburg. I suppose I was not too bad a journalist either, because within a very short period of time I was given major stories to cover, more often than not writing the front page lead story. It was much better than walking the beat as a policeman, and certainly a lot safer than Unit 19’s dangerous counterinsurgency work, but it was quite poorly paid.
After a while, the chief photographer on the paper, a good friend of mine named Wessel Oosthuizen, approached me and asked if I was interested in working for the Conservative Party.
That party was a breakaway from the ruling National Party, and opposed the handover process to the ANC. Although I was uncomfortable with the pro-segregation or petty apartheid policies of the Conservative Party (CP), I was strongly against the looming ANC handover so I accepted the job offer, which had come through Wessel directly from the party secretary, Andries Beyers. Maybe, I thought, the handover to the ANC could be politically averted.
Working for the Conservative Party
So it was that I moved to Pretoria to work in the CP head office. As the only English speaker in the entire building, I was a bit of an outsider, even though my colleagues never made me feel such.
It was, however, refreshing to meet Clive Derby-Lewis, another English-speaking South African. Although he was born in South Africa (unlike me), he was the image of a stereotypical upper class Englishman, complete with handlebar moustache.
Clive was a tireless CP campaigner, and was ably assisted by his Australian-born wife, Gaye. Together they virtually ran the party in Johannesburg, and were much used in the more English-speaking parts of the country such as Natal and the Western Cape to try and entice more non-Afrikaners to join.
I got on particularly well with Gaye, finding her to be ultra-intelligent and outgoing, and a refreshing change to the other staid and highly conservative women activists in the party. Also, she wrote the four page English supplement to the party’s weekly newspaper, Die Patriot (“The Patriot”).
I was helping to write the rest of the paper (which was in Afrikaans, under the editorship of ZB du Toit), and I used to work quite closely with her on a number of projects.
One of these which we discussed at length was an exposé on the fabulously rich lifestyles of the ANC leadership now that they were back from exile. Gaye had, in fact, written about what she called the “Gucci revolutionaries” for nearly a year prior to this in various articles in the Patriot.
Mandela, for example, once released from prison, spent less than a week in his old Soweto house before moving into a fabulous mansion in northern Johannesburg. Communist Party guru Joe Slovo acquired a distinctly middle-upper class house in the fairly plush eastern Johannesburg suburb of Observatory, well away from the masses for whom he claimed to tirelessly work.
Chris Hani, for his part, bought a house in Dawn Park, out on the East Rand. Although nowhere near as ostentatious as Mandela’s palace or Slovo’s luxury dwelling, it was still a nice, large property, and more importantly, smack bang in the middle of what was then a largely white Afrikaner suburb in the CP controlled town of Boksburg.
In fact, the council ward which included Dawn Park was represented in the city hall by a CP man. The Boksburg town council was the main prize in the Conservative Party’s quest for power at local government level. It was the third largest single council in the entire country (only Johannesburg and Pretoria were bigger) and flew the Boer Republic flag from its flagpole in front of the city hall. It was, therefore, a strange place to choose to live for someone who was leader of both the ANC’s armed wing and the Communist Party, and it would doubtless make a fine story, as Gaye and I both agreed.
Gaye had also, through a contact of hers in the tax office in Pretoria, acquired a complete printout of Mandela’s tax returns since being freed from prison, which showed that although he was now mysteriously worth millions, he had paid no tax at all. This, we thought, contained the elements of a really powerful story, and we fully intended to make a real splash of it.
Expelled from the Conservative Party
As so often happens, fate then intervened while we were planning our exposé. After the CP had won a by-election in the southern Transvaal town of Potchefstroom (the winner was none other than Andries Beyers, who had originally employed me), the government called out a referendum in March 1992 to ask the white voters if they supported the reform program or not. The results of that referendum, and its causes, are the subject of an earlier essay in this book. Suffice it to say that over two thirds of the white voters endorsed the reform program, and only a third opposed it.
In practical terms, this meant the end of the road for white parliamentary politics. It was clear that there would not be another election for the white parliament, and that the reform process would proceed until there was a one-man, one-vote election. This would inevitably result in an ANC government.
The CP leadership was aghast. I remember seeing the leader of that party, Dr. Andries Treurnicht, on the morning after the referendum, in his office. He asked me, in all sincerity, if the whites had gone mad.
I answered that it seemed so–I just did not feel like telling him that because the party had fought the campaign on a pro-apartheid platform, when it was obvious to all and sundry that apartheid was an unworkable disaster, defeat had been guaranteed.
I was not the only one in the party to feel that way. My good friend, ZB du Toit, the party newspaper editor; Andries Beyers, the party secretary; and a small number of Conservative Party members of parliament, all agreed that apartheid had failed and that a new policy was needed if the Afrikaners were not to be drowned in a unitary state.
That new policy was to stop trying to dominate all of South Africa, and instead, by whatever means possible, create a smaller territory, majority inhabited by Afrikaners. This was called, in Afrikaans, the “Volkstaat” concept, or the “Peoples’ State”–it translates horribly into English.
A clear internal split then developed within the Conservative Party: those, under the leadership of Treurnicht, who still believed in apartheid, and those who believed it was an idiotic policy and had failed utterly. I was amongst the latter.
A month and a half after the referendum, I was the guest speaker at the May 1992 annual meeting of the Coburg, Germany, branch of the Deutscher südafrikanischer Gesellschaft (DSAG, the “German South Africa Society”). The DSAG was a body funded by the South African department of Foreign Affairs which was designed to foster good relations with Germany (difficult in the time of apartheid).
Because some members of the DSAG in Coburg were also members of the more overtly (but separately organized) right-wing Hilfskomitee Südliches Afrika (HAS: “Help Committee for South Africa”), extremist leftists later seized upon my appearance at this function to claim that it was some type of right-wing “extremist” event, which it was not.
Speaking to a hall full of Germans eager to know what was going to happen to South Africa after the referendum, I told them that apartheid was finished, and that unless the CP changed its policy to support a Volkstaat, it would vanish from the pages of history, along with all white politics in South Africa.
Members of the visibly shocked audience then asked me what about the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) which had won worldwide notoriety with its quasi-swastika flag and parades of brown shirted men. Would the AWB, I was asked, not fight a handover to the ANC?
I answered that although the AWB had, in theory, sixty thousand men in its “armed wing,” it was my prediction that only a tiny handful would ever do anything, and the rest would vanish if it came down to a fight.
I predicted that a small number of AWB activists would resort to violence, but that this would be short-lived and the whole thing would peter out after they had all been arrested. I was completely correct in all the predictions I made at this conference. I was later given credit for this by people who at the time were less than impressed, including Clive Derby-Lewis, who remained firmly supportive of the apartheid policy. (An interesting aside to this DSAG meeting was that my speech, which was delivered in English, was recorded and translated into German. The overenthusiastic translator took my words which “predicted AWB violence” into meaning–in German–that there “must be AWB violence.”
It was a translation error which would allow me to be accused of encouraging violence, something I certainly never did, especially in a foreign country which has very strenuous laws on those things.)
Upon my return to South Africa, I found that news of my speech which called for a change in CP policy had sped back faster than myself. The pro-apartheid faction of the party, still by far the largest segment, took action against all of us. They expelled a number of members of parliament, including Andries Beyers, who had won the Potchefstroom seat by overtly campaigning on a non-apartheid platform. ZB du Toit, editor of the party paper, was also expelled.
Back with The Citizen Newspaper
Beyers went off to start a new short-lived party–the Afrikaner Volkstaat Beweging (AVB) which went nowhere and dissolved in short order. ZB du Toit managed to get a job with the Afrikaans Sunday newspaper Rapport, while I managed to get my old job back with The Citizen newspaper.
Doubtless that paper’s editor, Johnny Johnson–who was conservative, but not CP supporting–felt some sympathy for me. Not only did he give me my job back, but he also paid me what the Conservative Party had been paying me, which was three times the salary at which he had first employed me only a short while before.
Although I had, therefore, politically speaking, fallen out with Clive Derby-Lewis and his colleagues, I remained friendly with Gaye, and would meet up with her from time to time on a purely social level.
I had been branded a “rebel” who did not believe in the perfectness of apartheid, so that more or less finished any political activity for me in CP circles. I quickly rebuilt my journalistic career with The Citizen, and it was there where I was introduced to another character who would bizarrely feature in the Hani drama. Gerry Pieterse was an affable chap who had previously worked as a subeditor on The Citizen.
One day while sitting at my desk with a story (the details of which dealt with the arrest of an ANC activist by the police) which the paper’s editor had refused to run (not uncommon in newsrooms), a colleague sitting next to me told me to “phone Gerry and ask him if he wants to buy it.”
Baffled, I asked who Gerry was. I was told that he was an ex-journalist who ran a press wire service and who regularly bought stories “spiked” by news editors. I checked it out with my old friend Wessel Oosthuizen, who still worked at the newspaper, and he confirmed that he not only knew Gerry Pieterse, but that he had also sold him stories, particularly on the AWB, which Johnson had refused to run. (Wessel was personal friends with the AWB leader, and was also a founding member of the CP and hence had personal contacts in the leadership of both groups.)
I gave Gerry Pieterse a call, and lo and behold, he snapped up my otherwise rejected story for, I think R200, which was a going rate at the time for freelance stories.
It transpired that Gerry Pieterse’s wire service, International Press Services, had stringers, or part-time journalists, supplying it with copy from all over the country.
He bought stories from journalists from almost every newspaper, including The Citizen’s parliamentary reporter, and, much to my (later) interest, Anton Harber, who was also the editor of the Johannesburg Mail and Guardian–formerly The Weekly Mail–which was subsidized by the left-wing Guardian newspaper in Britain.
I got to know Gerry quite well, and would fairly regularly sell him stories which either were too controversial to appear in The Citizen, or which would appear later. The latter was a trick that Wessel Oosthuizen taught me: write a story, sell it to Gerry on Monday, and then hand it in for publication in The Citizen on Tuesday. Gerry never seemed to mind, happy with the fact that he had the story first.
The List Is Made
After a while, Gaye asked me, during one of our periodic chats, if I could supply her with any addresses of ANC leaders. We had earlier discussed the much postponed exposé story again, and I said this would not be a problem. She then faxed me a list of names, about nineteen in total, I recall, when I was in The Citizen newsroom one day.
Apart from the ANC leaders, the list included some well-known left-wing journalists who I presumed would be subject to the same exposé treatment. From my journalistic contact book I had the details for nine of the names straightaway.
The one address I did not have was Joe Slovo’s. This was simply because I had never interviewed him in the course of my work, and not for any other particular reason. I did, however, find a description of his house as published in The Star daily newspaper, which I copied out, adding a remark that with a “bit of legwork” the house could easily be identified from the street. I never for a minute thought how this would later be interpreted, of course, but had merely meant that if Gaye wanted to walk around the relatively few streets of the suburb of Observatory, the house should be easy to spot.
The Citizen newspaper itself had earlier run a feature on Mandela’s huge house in the suburb of Sandton, and had included a photograph and description of the gates. I cut the picture out of the paper and included the description of the gates and guards, thinking this would be perfect for an exposé showing how the ANC president was effectively shielding himself from his followers, and, more importantly, that this would highlight the crime wave for which South Africa has become famous. Chris Hani was also on the list–but his address was well-known, being listed openly in the East Rand telephone directory.
I distinctly remember not being surprised that Thabo Mbeki (later to be vice president under Mandela and then afterward president in his own right) was not on the list, even though he was a very senior ANC member. The reason was, I concluded, that he lived very modestly in a somewhat decrepit block of flats in Hillbrow, central Johannesburg, and could hardly be accused of being a highflier.
Compiling all this data into a printout on my computer, I then gave the list to Gaye at the Rotunda bus station in central Johannesburg.
A few weeks later, I wrote a story for Gerry Pieterse, saying that the right wing was collecting the addresses of well-known ANC people and left-wingers with the intention of holding demonstrations in front of their houses to highlight the discrepancies between their lifestyles and that of their followers.
The Flight of Coincidence
In February 1993, I flew to London on a South African Airways flight as a part holiday and part expedition because I was considering immigrating to the UK.
As the aircraft’s passengers lined up at passport control at Heathrow, I was surprised to meet an old acquaintance of mine, Phillip Powell. I had met Phillip while he was a student at the University of Pietermaritzburg, and I at the University of Cape Town. Phillip had, I knew, later joined the Security Police, and had worked in Natal against the ANC. After leaving the police, he had joined the Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party, and had allegedly married a nonwhite girl. I had long since lost contact with him and thinking (probably correctly) that he would misinterpret my politics, had not bothered to try and contact him again.
As I was chatting with Phillip, he remarked what an amazing flight it had been, as between us the “entire political spectrum” had been present on the aircraft. I didn’t know what he was talking about until he motioned to the front of the line, where the first class passengers were standing. There stood Chris Hani. I laughed and said that it was an interesting flight indeed. I then asked Phillip for his contact number and said I would call him. I never did.
The Assassination
I was at home in Benoni on the East Rand on Saturday morning, April 10, 1993, when I received a call from a friend who breathlessly gave me the news that Chris Hani had been shot.
It was quite shocking news, and I immediately saw the potential political implications: if the ANC masses rioted, the security forces would be forced to intervene and an all-out civil war might then ensue.
As evidence later transpired, Hani was gunned down in the driveway of his home at 10:20 a.m. He had just returned from a local corner store to buy a newspaper and had got out of his car when a red Ford Laser driven by a white male pulled up behind him in the driveway.
Only calling out his name, “Mr. Hani”–at which Hani turned round–the man then stepped out from his car, pulled out a 9mm pistol and shot Hani once in the body. The assassin then stepped forward very close to Hani and shot him a further three times in the head. He calmly got back into his car, reversed out of the driveway, and sped off in the direction of the Boksburg city center.
However, a neighbor, an Afrikaner woman by the name of Retha Harmse, just happened to pull out of her driveway at the instant that the shots were fired, and managed to note down what she thought was the assassin’s license plate number. She ran back into her house and telephoned the police, giving them the number. Although the number she had noted down (PBX 137T) was not the number on the assassin’s car (PBX 131T), it was close enough to provide the vital clue which enabled the police to arrest him ten minutes later on the main road passing the Boksburg city hall. Alert policemen on patrol spotted the car moving through traffic and pulled it over.
Inside they found Janus Jacub Waluz, a Polish immigrant. They also found a pistol, a silencer, and adhesive numbers which were used to make temporary number plates. It was later established by the police that Waluz had used one of the adhesive numbers, a seven, on the last number of his license plate, changing it from PBX 131T to PBX 137T during the actual assassination.
I knew none of this at the time, and was sitting at home contemplating the bare details of what I knew, when the phone rang again. This time it was my old friend ZB du Toit, who was working in Rapport’s Pretoria offices.
He asked me if I had any idea who had shot Hani. By that stage, the assassin had already been arrested, but the police were not releasing any details. All of the newspapers were scrabbling to try and find out who it was.
I truthfully told ZB that I had no idea who had done it. ZB told me that all they knew at Rapport was that the assassin had been driving a red Ford Laser car. That rang a bell with me: I knew that a Polish immigrant right-winger, who I just knew as “Kuba” drove a red Ford Laser, and he seemed pretty militant.
I had met Kuba three or four times previously, never getting to know him well enough to learn his surname. I knew little more than the fact that he was one of Clive Derby-Lewis’s friends.
I told ZB that I would make inquiries and get back to him if I found out anything. I then called another old friend of mine, Willem Olivier. Amongst his exploits, Willem had been the private secretary to the National Party Prime Minister HF Verwoerd.
More importantly, Willem had been secretary-general of the AWB and was, I knew, friends with “Kuba.” I was lucky to catch Willem at home. I asked him if Kuba drove a red Ford Laser, just to check if my memory was correct. He confirmed I was right. I then told Willem that I suspected it was Kuba who had shot Hani, as I knew him to be militantly anti-Communist. Willem confirmed that it would not surprise him.
I then asked Willem what Kuba’s real name was. He told me it was “Jan Waluz.” Armed with this information, I called ZB back and said I suspected that it was a Polish immigrant in Pretoria named Jan Waluz. ZB thanked me for the tip, and asked me how I had found it out.
I did not want to tell him that Willem Olivier had provided the information, so I invented a story saying that I had called up an old policeman friend of mine who worked on the East Rand police and he had told me.
ZB promised that if the information was correct, I would get a tip-off fee from the paper–and one for my “policeman friend.” I did not have the heart to tell him there was no policeman but that it was just a good guess on my part, based on the most circumstantial of evidence.
As it turned out, one of the photographers working at Rapport’s Pretoria office was also Polish, and as émigré communities tend to be tight-knit, she knew almost all of the Polish community in that city personally. Much to ZB’s surprise, she knew Jan Waluz and was able to take him straight to his residence, an apartment in the city. There they found the apartment already cordoned off by police. It was him.
Obtaining a photograph of Jan Waluz from his immediate family, ZB was able to scoop the world’s media the next day by publishing a photograph of the assassin. ZB later told me that this was the journalistic scoop of his career, and that he “owed me one.”
I told him not to bother, as by then Rapport had already paid me the substantial “tip-off fee” times two, once for me and once for the mythical “policeman” friend.
The only mistake had been in the spelling of the name: ZB had used the name I had given him in the story, “Jan Waluz,” when in fact the correct spelling was Janus Waluz.
No one noticed in the flurry which followed, although during the later trial, the advocate general, Klaus von Lieries und Wilkau, tried his level best to find out how Rapport had got hold of the name. I was present when Von Lieries demanded one of his subordinates to find out. I volunteered no information.
The Trail Leads to Clive Derby-Lewis
When Janus was taken into detention, he initially denied all knowledge of the assassination, and of how the weapon and other items came to be in his car. He then, however, made a verbal confession of his actions to a policeman who he thought was a right-winger.
In this verbal confession he told the police that although he had committed the act by himself, Clive Derby-Lewis had helped by providing the weapon. The policeman to whom he told this was no right-winger, and he promptly reported Janus’s conversation to the investigating officer in the case.
Forensic tests established that the fatal bullets had indeed been fired from the gun found in Janus’s possession. Cordite was found on a pair of gloves which were in the car, indicating that he had just fired some shots; and blood, the group type of which matched Hani’s, was found on his clothes.
A search of Janus’s apartment found a printout list of names, which had been numbered by hand in an apparent order of priority–with Hani listed as number three.
Once Janus’s name had been publicised by Rapport, the other newspapers immediately set their investigative reporters on the case. They dug up all the information they could about him, and soon discovered the close association with Clive Derby-Lewis. More importantly, they also announced that a “hit list” had been discovered at Janus’s apartment.
I began to get a bit worried. Given the fact that Janus knew the Derby-Lewis’s so well, what if the list to which the police referred was the one I had earlier given to Gaye? I needed to know.
I drove out to the Derby-Lewis’s Krugersdorp home on the Monday following the assassination to ask them. I suspected the answer, but it was still a bit of a shock when Clive confirmed that it was.
“Don’t worry, Kuba won’t say anything,” Clive said to me. I had my doubts, but was determined not to say anything to anybody, and to wait and see what happened.
As I later found out, an informant within right-wing circles in Cape Town had provided information which indicated that a man named Keith Darrol had fitted a silencer to such a gun for Clive.
Based on this information and what Waluz had said, the police, after a six-day investigation, managed to link the gun, the silencer, and the list to Clive Derby-Lewis, and arrested him on the evening of April 17, 1993. The police took his and Gaye’s computers, as well as a number of personal documents and papers.
I am Arrested
Although Clive was advised by his legal representative not to make any statements, he did make an oral statement to a warrant officer, Beetge, in which he named four people: myself as the person who had drawn up the list which had been found in Waluz’s possession; Faan Venter and Lionel Du Randt (two right-wingers from the West Rand) who had provided the firearm, and Keith Darrol from the Western Cape who had provided the silencer.
Although Clive provided our names to the police, he did stress to Warrant Officer Beetge that none of these people knew anything about the plan to assassinate Hani or anybody else.
Nonetheless, we were all detained by police for questioning along with two more people–Gaye, and Edwin Clarke, a computer engineer friend of the Derby-Lewis’s-early in the morning of April 21, 1993. Keith Darrol was detained shortly thereafter.
At first, I said I knew nothing, in accordance with my earlier decision not to say anything. However, the police had seized my computer and printer, and had already shown through forensic analysis that the list found in Janus’s apartment had been printed on my printer.
They then showed me Clive’s statement, naming me, and his direct statement that I knew nothing of the assassination plot (which was true). Faced with all of that, I then agreed to confirm the accuracy of Clive’s statement–that I had provided Gaye with a list of names, as outlined earlier, which I had presumed to be part of the exposé about which we had often talked.
The police seemed perfectly happy with this, and I was told that I would be released shortly and just issued with a subpoena to confirm Clive’s statement. Almost as an afterthought, the policeman questioning me asked me if I had told anyone else about the “list.” As they had already seen the contents of my computer, and thus had found the story I had written for Gerry Pieterse, I told them I had written a story about the possibility of demonstrations by right-wingers outside ANC and left-wingers’ houses, as outlined above.
At the mention of Gerry’s name, the policemen who were members of the Security Branch became quite agitated. I began to wonder what was going on. The policemen then told me that Gerry actually worked for the National Intelligence Service (NIS), the state spy agency. I found this claim incredulous, but nonetheless provided them with his contact details. The police then called Gerry, and asked him to come in for questioning. I was not concerned in the slightest, convinced they were barking up the wrong tree. After a few hours, Gerry duly presented himself at the Benoni police station where I was being questioned. As I found out later, he denied outright that he worked for the NIS, claiming that he ran a bona fide wire service which collected stories and disseminated them worldwide to newspapers.
Nothing the police could say or do could convince him to say anything otherwise, and, in the hope that he would break down, they locked us all up that night, Gerry included. I was moved to Kempton Park police station, where I spent an uncomfortable night in a cell shared with a post office robber, a rapist, and a murderer.
In the morning, with Gerry still protesting his innocence, the Security Police, who had had time to think on the matter, then released all of us. I was given notice of a subpoena to appear in court to confirm what Clive had told the police, and then told to go home. To say I was relieved was an understatement.
The police soon realized that Edwin Clarke also had nothing to do with the whole affair, and released him within hours of his original detention. Gaye was, however, charged with the assassination, along with Clive and Janus.
The Aftereffect and Trial
The assassination of Chris Hani nearly plunged the country into a civil war. Gun sales shot up as nervous whites panicked and bought as many firearms as they could, and on the day of Hani’s funeral nearly every major city center in South Africa was ransacked by enraged black mobs.
The trial started with all three charged with conspiracy, murder, and the illegal possession of firearms and ammunition. The state’s case against Gaye soon proved to be fairly hopeless. No evidence of any kind linked her to the murder or to the illegal possession of the firearm and ammunition. The only evidence allegedly linking her to the conspiracy charge was the so-called “hit list” which had been found in Janus’s apartment.
I testified in court under a subpoena served on me. As agreed, I confirmed the contents of Clive’s evidence–that I had drawn up the list and given it to Gaye. Both Gaye and I denied that the list had been drawn with the intention of it being used as a hit list.
Janus, through his legal representative, told the court that he had obtained the list by accident from the Derby-Lewis house after he had removed a newspaper from their filing room which had contained (unbeknownst to himself or the Derby-Lewis’s) the list within its pages.
Gaye testified that after she had obtained the list from me, she had put it down in her filing room and had forgotten about it until she had read in the paper that a list had been found in Janus’s flat after the assassination. She said that she had then started looking for her list, and was worried when she did not find it.
There was clearly no evidence linking Gaye to any of the charges, and so, not to anyone’s surprise, she was found not guilty and discharged. (It later transpired that Clive had taken the list from his wife’s files and given it to Janus, but this fact was only to emerge during the 1997 amnesty application of the two men, who admitted that they had lied during the original court case.)
Clive and Janus were acquitted on the conspiracy charges as well. They were, however, found guilty on charges of murder and the illegal possession of the firearm and ammunition. They were sentenced to death on Friday, October 16, 1993, which in reality meant life imprisonment as there has been a moratorium on executions in South Africa since 1990.
Both Janus and Clive applied for amnesty under terms of a new amnesty law created with the introduction of the new constitution in April 1994. The amnesty application was finally heard by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) during the second part of 1997.
Both men fully confessed their role in the assassination, but were denied amnesty primarily because it could not be shown that the Conservative Party had committed itself to an armed struggle–an accurate technicality which allowed the TRC to deny them their freedom, even though in the broad interpretation of the purpose of the law, they most certainly qualified.
The National Intelligence Service Spied On Us
It was during the amnesty application that the truth about Gerry Pieterse was finally revealed. By then I was living in Britain, and was shocked to hear that he had indeed been working for the National Intelligence Service all along. I had the opportunity to speak to Gerry at a later date, and he revealed that he had actually been given a medal for bravery by the NIS for not breaking down and confessing despite being detained overnight by the Security Police.
Apparently Gerry’s job with the NIS was monitoring South African journalists, and then compiling reports on what they were doing. In effect, he acted as a spy service for the state on almost all journalists in South Africa at the time.
The NIS link emerged after a classic mix-up, Gerry later told me. Knowing of the amnesty application and the fact that it would dredge up the fact of his detention, his former boss at NIS had drawn up two statements. One, which was meant for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, denied outright that there was any connection at all between Gerry and the NIS.
The second statement, which was only supposed to go to the NIS internal records, revealed the truth: that Gerry was an NIS operative whose duty it was to spy on journalists inside South Africa.
In a bizarre mix-up, the wrong statement was forwarded to the TRC, which revealed his true job. It was amazing: if the correct statement had been sent, Gerry’s role would never have emerged in public. In any event, the truth did emerge, even if it was by accident. An extract from the transcript of the TRC hearing spells it out. Giving evidence, Gaye read the statement which had been handed in by the lawyer representing the Hani family, George Bizos.
“MRS DERBY-LEWIS: (reading document) “Information corresponding to the so-called hit-list found in the flat of Walus was reported to division 052 by agent Z0066 (Jerry Pieterse who fronted as a freelance reporter) who received it from sub-source 46 (Arthur Kemp) who was not aware of his link to NIS through Pieterse, nor was he a registered agent of NIS.
“Pieterse was handled as a principal agent who ran his own network of sub-sources, mainly journalists or stringers for major national and international newspapers. The sub-sources communicated their newspaper type reports to Pieterse by computer.”
In one sense, I was deeply angry that Gerry had lied to me about his true activities, and had let the truth be sprung on me in this way. On the other hand, it was almost a relief as by then the conspiracy cranks had already swung into top gear, and one of the myriad of allegations was that I had been working for the NIS.
It was good, therefore, to have it confirmed that I was the one being spied upon, and not the one doing any spying.
I Try to Con the London Sunday Times
The revelations of the 1997 amnesty applications dumbfounded me only for a short while. I called up Gaye from Britain to discuss the NIS story, and she and I agreed that now that Clive had been denied amnesty, I should try and make some money out of it.
I manufactured the outline of an utterly bizarre and fantastic story, implicating Thabo Mbeki (then perceived as the ANC “moderate” wing leader), the National Party’s FW de Klerk, the police, the Zulus, and whoever else I could think up. I told Gaye about it and my plan to sell this load of nonsense to the media for as much as I could get, safe in the knowledge that it would easily collapse under its own ridiculousness.
Gaye and I laughed hilariously at the audacity of it, but I still went ahead and called the Sunday Times in London, offering them an “exclusive scoop” for only £20,000. They were sorely tempted, and asked me for some type of “evidence” which would prove that I was not trying to rip them off. I had thought of this one, and fed them a “teaser” which I knew would cause a ripple of interest. I told them about the flight to London which I had shared with Philip Powell and Chris Hani–leaving it hanging as if it had somehow been prearranged.
The journalist to whom I spoke nearly burst with excitement at this lead, especially when it was checked out and shown to be true. I thought I was nearly home and dry at taking these stupid journalists and their newspapers for a very expensive ride.
Sadly, after showing initial interest, the Sunday Times obviously realized that I was having them on, and refused to pay anything. Disappointed, I called Gaye and told her of the failure of my plan. We both had one final laugh at their idiocy and left it at that.
The Conspiracy Cranks
In an ironic twist, the London Sunday Times journalist to whom I had spoken provided the details of our conversation to the Weekly Mail and Guardian (hilarious to me, given that that paper’s editor had also sold stories to Gerry Pieterse). That paper’s overeager and clownish junior reporter, Stefaans Brummer, then published this cock and bull as a major article entitled “Hani’s Flight of Coincidence” as part of a series which made all sorts of weird claims of a wider conspiracy.
So it ran: without a shred of evidence, all sorts of nonsense was invented. It was claimed, for example, that the ANC itself had taken away Hani’s bodyguards on the day of the assassination, because “they were aware that he was going to be shot.”
The absence of Hani’s usual bodyguards that day was, however, detailed in the police investigation dossier. In fact, he had been having an affair with an air stewardess and had spent the previous evening in a Johannesburg hotel room with her.
He had given his bodyguards off that weekend in order not to let them in on his affair. In addition, Hani’s wife, Limpho, was also away that weekend, allegedly with a paramour of her own in Lesotho, making a mockery of her later claims of a loving family “having been torn apart” by the assassination.
This line of conspiracy having been exhausted, the cranks then turned their attention to Janus himself. The charge was led by one Jan Lamprecht, a right-winger who runs a website from Johannesburg called Africancrisis.org. Lamprecht claimed in a bizarre set of articles that Janus was in fact a Communist “sleeper agent” sent in by the KGB to discredit the South African right wing, and was sitting in jail because of his devotion to the cause of smearing the Conservative Party.
As incredible as this line of thinking was, it became quite a common rumor, with Janus’s Polish background being used as “evidence” that he was somehow in league with not only the KGB but the ANC as well.
The theories became increasingly bizarre as time went on. Next thing I knew, I read that there were actually two cars and two gunmen, one being a military backup in case Janus missed. Photographs were produced of the wall next to the shooting scene, allegedly showing where the second shooter’s bullets had hit the plaster (the “bullet holes” were just ordinary plaster chips).
All of this fitted in with the bizarre theory that Hani was killed by a “broader conspiracy” consisting of the “moderate” wing of the ANC and the South African state security services.
The later theory is the one still most favored by extremist leftist cranks, including those in the South African Communist Party. Time and time again, the SACP has called for the reopening of the Hani case to investigate this mythical “broader conspiracy.” Although the facts of the case have been dug up repeatedly, no evidence has–unsurprisingly–ever been found to support any such “conspiracy.”
Sometimes I was mentioned as the “state security link” (because I had been conscripted into the police, or because of the 1997 NIS revelations) and sometimes I was ignored. Either way, the truth made little difference to the conspiracy cranks.
The Truth is too Boring
The simple truth–that the Chris Hani assassination was the work of Janus Waluz and Clive Derby-Lewis, acting out of what they saw as their duty to prevent an ANC takeover of South Africa, is, it seems, too boring.
Let me assure those who think so, that the truth is anything but boring, even if it is simple. There was no grand conspiracy, no wider net of people involved. Attempts to make it so are based on the most ridiculous presumptions based on quarter-truths and blatant lies.
It seems, however, that there is no end to what people will believe, facts notwithstanding. Hopefully this essay will go some way to laying these mad rumors to rest.
I don’t often — actually, if ever — respond to assorted cranks out there who have nothing better to do than to sit on the sidelines and criticise other people, but one recent article by Tom Metzger, who runs an obscure outfit called “White Aryan Resistance” simply deserves a response with which I am sure readers of this blog would be interested to see.