Apartheid Confessions

APARTHEID CONFESSIONS

Jacob Dlamini Princeton University, USA

..................It has been eighteen years since the South African Truth and Reconciliation apartheid Askaris collaboration confessions ethics history TRC

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Commission delivered its final five-volume report to President Nelson Mandela. Yet South Africans are as much in the dark today as they ever were about a remarkable feature of apartheid rule: collaboration. While the commission did force a number of apartheid agents and collaborators (notably novelist Mark Behr) to confess their misdeeds, such confessions proved to be the exception rather than the norm. This essay examines some of the few apartheid confessions we have. It raises questions about the kinds of ethics that should guide those who believe that South Africa would be better off if it allowed for a full-frontal confrontation with the phenomenon of apartheid. How are scholars to deal with known and suspected collaborators? How are they to treat the tainted apartheid archives that point to the widespread nature of collaboration under apartheid? These are just some of the questions raised by the essay.

In July 1996, novelist Mark Behr, about to be unmasked as an apartheid spy, confessed to having been an ‘agent of the South African security establishment’ for four years while a student at the University of Stellenbosch. Behr said a ‘probably well-meaning relative who was a high-ranking officer in

....................................................................................................... interventions, 2016 Vol. 18, No. 6, 772–785, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2016.1222300 © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

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the South African Police Force’ had recruited him in 1986 to spy on antiapartheid activists on campus. He agreed to his recruitment for mercenary and ideological reasons: the secret police paid for his studies while he, having served proudly as an officer in the South African Defence Force, identified politically with apartheid at first. Behr said he knew from the moment he signed on to work for the security police that what he had agreed to was wrong: ‘One had to be either an idiot or a psychopath not to be aware of that.’ Behr said nothing about the impetus behind his confession, delivered as a keynote address at a conference in Cape Town on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He said it was with the ‘profoundest imaginable regret’ that he was acknowledging his past. He had lacked the ‘moral courage’ to stop his spying and to speak out earlier about his actions – even though he had realized the ‘moral decrepitude of working for the state’ right from the beginning of his career as a spy (Behr 1996).

Behr said he accepted full responsibility for his support for a ‘system that not only denied people’s most basic rights and freedoms, but a system which divided, tortured, murdered and assassinated human beings, backed by precisely the security system I was involved in.’ Behr said the system he had served had also gagged the media and lied to the public in order to hide its activities. ‘While I have not murdered or tortured, and while it is unlikely that my activities on a campus like Stellenbosch led directly to any such atrocities, I must and do take responsibility for my contribution to making “the system” work. There cannot be, and will not be any justification for this’ (Behr 1996). Behr’s confession, in which he did not once refer to any of his targets by name (not an impossible task considering the small size of the anti-apartheid community that he spied on at Stellenbosch), sought to minimize the extent of his collaboration. Behr drew a line between his spying and the brutality that – as even he acknowledged – defined apartheid. He said that while he had willingly served a violent system, he himself had not committed any violence.

This enraged commentators, including Guillermo O’Donnell, the Argentinean political scientist famous for his studies of authoritarian rule in Latin America.

O’Donnell, who had taught Behr at the University of Notre Dame while the latter was a graduate student there, said Behr’s confession was less than candid and that his efforts to downplay the extent of his collaboration nullified his apology. O’Donnell said Behr refused to come to terms with his ‘deeper responsibility’ to his victims: I say this because you and I know that informers of cruel regimes do not ‘directly’ torture and kill; this particularly dirty part of the work of the ‘security establishment’ is done by others. We know, too, that informers, torturers, murderers, and their bosses (who, like informers, do not ‘directly’ torture and murder) are all integral

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parts of a cruel chain of events [in which] those who did not touch the bodies of the victims are no less responsible than those who did. (O’Donnell 1996)

Regarding Behr’s claim that one reason he accepted the spying job was to have his studies paid for, O’Donnell said the baseness of Behr’s motives called to mind Hannah Arendt’s claim about the banality of evil: ‘so much infamy for so little!’ (O’Donnell 1996).

It has been twenty-two years since the formal end of apartheid and twenty years since Behr confessed. Yet South Africans know as little today about collaboration under apartheid as they did when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission held South Africans spellbound with its tales of murder and mayhem. For all its shortcomings, Behr’s admission remains one of the few confessions South Africans have from a former apartheid collaborator. Why is that? Why the dearth of confessions? Why the silence about collaboration when we know, not least from the Truth Commission itself, that apartheid depended on collaboration by black and white South Africans for its operation?

Despite its official and rhetorical concern with racial purity, apartheid was in truth a messy and inefficient system of political rule and social control that needed collaborators to function. Even in those instances where prominent anti-apartheid activists were unmasked as apartheid agents, there has been reluctance by South Africans of all stripes to deal fully with the implications of this unmasking. Why? Peter Mokaba, the fiery African National Congress (ANC) youth leader who was as well known for his denunciations of apartheid as he was for labelling political rivals sell-outs, was allowed to move seamlessly into the New South Africa, despite evidence and his confession to the ANC that in fact he had been an apartheid collaborator. He served in Parliament during Nelson Mandela’s presidency and in government under both Mandela and Thabo Mbeki as a deputy minister. Mokaba died in June 2002; and the following year, then-President Mbeki conferred the Order of Luthuli, one of post-apartheid South Africa’s highest civilian honours, on Mokaba for his ‘contribution’ to the struggle against apartheid. Gavin Evans, the anti-apartheid activist who led the investigation into Mokaba’s double life, says Mokaba’s tacit rehabilitation came about as a result of divisions within the ANC (Evans 2002, 14– 16). Finding Mokaba more useful as a comrade within the ANC than as a pariah cast to the political wilderness, certain ANC factions chose to ignore Mokaba’s career as a double agent.

Tellingly, for a country such as South Africa, what few direct confessions we have about collaboration under apartheid come from whites. In addition to Behr, there is Vanessa Brereton, a supposedly anti-apartheid lawyer from Port Elizabeth who was in fact working for the apartheid security police. Brereton would likely not have confessed but for the pioneering work of activist and journalist Terry Bell. Bell confronted Brereton in London and got her

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to admit to her past as an apartheid spy after the official identity number assigned to her by the apartheid security police was wrongly linked to Bulelani Ngcuka, then National Director of Public Prosecutions, by Jacob Zuma and his allies, Mac Maharaj and Moe Shaik.

Of the many black South Africans who collaborated with the apartheid security forces, virtually nothing is known. What does this mean for a South Africa still struggling, more than two decades after the formal end of apartheid, with the legacy of apartheid? If confessions are in part about accountability and about accepting responsibility for one’s actions, what does it mean that so few South Africans have shown a willingness to be accountable for their past actions? Should we be concerned about the potential for blackmail and corruption of those who have yet to confess to their past as apartheid collaborators? As Antjie Krog (2013) asks, what is the connection between collaboration under apartheid and corruption in post-apartheid South Africa? With so few black confessions to go with, we are left with voices such as Behr’s for a reckoning with collaboration under apartheid.

By downplaying his complicity – telling his audience that he had only spied and not killed or tortured – Behr was using one of the oldest tricks in the betrayal business. It is revealing, for example, that not once in his confession did Behr confess to what he did exactly. Not once did he say what he did to whom, when and how. But he wanted his audience to believe that it was ‘unlikely’ that his targets came to harm because of him. As O’Donnell asked: ‘Have you tried to find out what happened to the individuals on whom you reported? Why do you not tell us about this, in a text in which you – just you – are the only human being who apparently matters?’ (O’Donnell 1996). Collaborators like to say their betrayal was not that important as it did not cause direct harm to their targets. Some collaborators like to point out that they only shared gossip with their handlers, nothing that could hurt those on whom they informed. Others offer different justifications for their actions. Luz Arce, a Chilean socialist activist who worked for Augusto Pinochet’s secret police after she was turned through torture, claimed she always tried to protect the leaders of the underground opposition (Arce 2004; Lazzara 2011). Arce said she only gave up low-level activists, prompting the relatives of some of those killed on account of her betrayal to question how exactly she had measured the worth of the lives of those she betrayed.

Barbara Miller says that in the former East Germany, ‘Stasi informers were primarily engaged in the amassing of vast amounts of seemingly trivial pieces of information which could potentially be used to demobilize the enemy’ (Miller 1999, 4–5). Miller disputes claims by informers that their work did not amount to much. She says the Stasi ‘could never have functioned as it did if it had been constantly fed erroneous and fabricated information’ (14).

Informers might have convinced themselves that their work did not matter in the greater scheme of things. It did. The trivia, about people’s affairs,

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drinking problems and suchlike, that informers fed into the Stasi system, mattered. Miller says: ‘It was … precisely this sort of seemingly trivial and banal personal information which could be extremely useful to the Stasi. Such information could potentially be used to blackmail others, and it also helped construct a comprehensive personality profile of designated state enemies, which would facilitate the creation of plans to dispose of them’ (54).

Miller says the tidbits, gossip and salacious detail provided by informers were, in fact, ‘like fragments of a mosaic and often only became meaningful when combined with information from other informers’ (55). There was a ‘pervading atmosphere of banality’ that contributed to informers thinking that what they were doing was less harmful than it actually was (56). For example, according to Tina Rosenberg, Knud Wollenberger, a Stasi informer who spied on Vera Wollenberger, his wife and the mother of his children, claimed he protected his wife and their dissident friends from the Stasi, stating: ‘I had a feeling for what was harmful and what I should keep back’ (Rosenberg 1996, 378). Yet he could not explain why, if he had tried to protect his wife, her Stasi file was ‘filled with personal details and information about secret trips that under East German law could have landed her in jail’ (379). He gave the Stasi that information. The Stasi files did not, in the end, save East Germany from collapse. One reason for this, says Rosenberg, is that their very exhaustiveness ‘stripped them of meaning’ (180). With files on six million of East Germany’s seventeen million citizens, the country could not, shall we say, avoid getting buried in all sorts of trivial details about the messiness of people’s lives.

It is easy to see, when reading a South African security police file on Glory Sedibe, an apartheid collaborator whom I write about in the book Askari: A Story of Collaboration and Betrayal in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle (2014), why informers would consider their work less harmful than it actually was. Sedibe’s 152-page file is full of personal details – so-and-so is missing two front teeth, so-and-so walks with a limp, so-and-so plays for this soccer club, so-and-so likes his drink a bit too much, so-and-so had an affair with so-and-so – that make it hard to believe that this trade in salaciousness was in fact the substance of security police work under apartheid.

David Gill, an East German dissident who led a citizens’ committee charged with preserving the Stasi files following the collapse of East Germany, said the following about the files he was asked to protect and make available to the public: ‘The biggest surprise was the banality of the files. A lot of it was information you could get from the phone book. A lot of information about family, personal problems. They knew so much, but they just couldn’t work with it in the end. There was so much bureaucracy. Most of the information never left the office’ (Rosenberg 1996, 294). We should be careful, however, not to dismiss the files because of their banality. We should not ignore what the files, as objects in themselves and as repositories

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of information, mean simply because they are so mundane. At the same time, we should be careful about believing that the Stasi files or Sedibe’s file ‘hold the keys to historical puzzles’ or that ‘documents reveal the truth’ (180). This raises the question of how we should read documents such as September’s security police file.

Historian Peter Jackson says intelligence documents cannot be treated as if their contents are the gospel truth. He says such files should not be read literally: ‘Not only do intelligence documents not speak for themselves, some may also dissemble and some may even lie … Deception, deceit and manipulation are central elements in many of the day-to-day practices of many intelligence agencies’ (Jackson 2008, 3). How did Sedibe’s file survive what Terry Bell and Dumisa Ntsebeza called a ‘paper Auschwitz’, meaning the systematic destruction of files by what we might call, after Mark Behr, the South African security establishment (Bell and Ntsebeza 2003, 9)? For about six months in 1993, the National Intelligence Service alone destroyed about 44 tons of files, microfilm, audiotapes and computer disks. The archival purge took place at an Iscor furnace in Pretoria and a facility in Johannesburg (Bell and Ntsebeza 2003, 9). The destruction sought to ‘eradicate all evidence of the nightmare memories of the tortured and the living dead, to obliterate all trace of those victims whose physical remains lay scattered countrywide in unmarked graves’ (9). But that was not the only reason: Into the flames too went the files of the frightened ones, their craven acceptances of compromise and collaboration etched in dry officialese, but still sweating fear from every syllable. There were also the records of the venal individuals whose greed had driven them to verbal betrayal and beyond. The pasts of thousands of part-time whisperers of secrets and betrayers were turned to ashes. (Bell and Ntsebeza 2003, 9)

The National Intelligence Service was not the only outfit to destroy its archive.

So too did the military and the security police, starting in 1989.

Sedibe’s security police file is in fact a debriefing report compiled on 19 February 1987 by Sergeant Eugene Fourie, based at Security Police head office in Pretoria. The file is divided into six sections. The first section gives a brief description of his arrest; the second provides a biographical sketch of Sedibe; the third lists Sedibe’s noms de guerre; the fourth talks about when and how he went into exile; the fifth gives a breakdown of where he lived and the countries he visited while in exile, and the last is entitled uitkennings – Afrikaans for ‘identifications’. The last section refers to Sedibe’s identification of each of the estimated seven thousand portraits of known and suspected activists in exile. The portraits were in a security police album. The album, in which an exile’s race was marked by number – with 1 for whites, 2 for Indians, 3 for coloureds and 4 for blacks – was made up of pictures

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taken from various sources, including family albums, the Bantu Identification Bureau, school yearbooks, sports clubs, and informers.

Breyten Breytenbach, who spent seven years in prison for treason, compared the album and its accompanying manuals to a pornographic stash.

The album and manuals contained ‘photos and curriculum vitae of the South African “terrorists” and “trainee terrorists” abroad’ (Breytenbach 1984, 27–28). Speaking of the security police, Breytenbach said: ‘And their knowledge of “the enemy” was quite astounding’ (28). The ANC knew about the album and warned its members about it in 1984. In fact, for many prisoners, the identification of portraits in the album constituted their first acts of collaboration. The captive would have to tell the police everything they knew about the person in the picture: who they were, how the prisoner knew them, where they lived, what sort of training they had received and where, who they were sleeping with, and whatever quirks and weaknesses the person might have. Prisoners talked. It was often the only way to gain some respite from torture or to save oneself. As Luz Arce, the Chilean collaborator said, ‘Not all survivors collaborated, but certainly more did than people admit’ (Lazzara 2011, 92).

We should not discount the fact that one reason why the police were interested in mundane details about people’s lives was because such knowledge enhanced their sense of omnipotence. It allowed them to pretend they knew their enemies better than they knew themselves. Breytenbach, for example, was astounded by what the police knew about him (Breytenbach 1984, 27–28). Mwezi Twala, an ANC member who defected to the security police in the late 1980s, was also astonished by the breadth of knowledge displayed by the South African security officials who debriefed him after his defection: ‘It was mindboggling to listen to their exposition. They knew more about me than I did’ (Twala 1994, 149). Hugh Lewin, who spent seven years in prison for sabotage, said this about his police interrogators and torturers: ‘And they began telling me all [his emphasis] about myself, precisely so. It was eerie’ (Lewin 1981, 25). That is precisely the effect the security police wanted to achieve. They wanted their captives to believe they were in the clutches of an all-knowing power. They wanted to make their captives feel helpless, small and powerless.

Historian Istvan Rev says: ‘It cannot be denied that the informer is the collaborator of the historian. The informer’s reports are invaluable sources for the historian … The secret police archives are gold mines for the historian who, nevertheless, cannot be unambiguously grateful for the help provided by the informer’ (Rev 2010, 206). Rev’s warning is important for thinking about how we approach Sedibe’s file. There is the question of ethics. How must we, for example, deal with the fact that many of Sedibe’s victims, meaning those named in his file, are still alive and likely to be hurt further

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should the dirt Sedibe dished on them be exposed? While I would agree with Rev that the informer and historian are collaborators, the historian alone bears ethical responsibilities that cannot be avoided. These responsibilities include, for example, the protection of the privacy of those named in Sedibe’s file when sharing that file with the public. So, except where the people named are dead or so famous and the information about them so safe as to obviate the need for privacy, I use pseudonyms for the people whose lives I am about to mention below.

The entries in the identifications section of Sedibe’s file follow a certain format. The file is arranged in alphabetical order and there are two identifying numbers. One is a security police number for the suspect; the other refers to the suspect’s picture. Then comes the suspect’s name and, next to it, an indication of where in South Africa the suspect comes from. A line saying which organization the suspect belongs to follows. Then comes a section entitled opmerkings – Afrikaans for ‘comments’ or ‘observations’. This is the section that contains trivial details about people’s lives. Take, for example, the entry on a man we shall call Andrew Anderson. After listing his political career, the places where Sedibe knew him from, and Anderson’s activities in exile, the entry gives the following details: Andrew Anderson was involved in a car accident in a southern African country sometime in the 1980s and lost two front teeth. Anderson’s wife works for a financial institution in a southern African country. Anderson is a heavy drinker and lacks discipline.

One man, let us call him Hunter Bernard, is nicknamed after a water bird because he once killed said bird in an ANC camp in a southern African country for the camp’s administrators to feast on.

Bavumile Malan, not his real name, is a married trade unionist but is in love with his secretary. Malan is a tribalist who favours recruits from the Eastern Cape, where he comes from. He always steers recruits from his province away from MK and towards study opportunities. Mandla Tshabalala, not his real name, is a heavy dagga smoker. Dambo Sgebengu, not his real name, once stabbed his wife with a knife. She went to hospital; he went to jail in an east African country. Dibi Tsempe, not his real name, is from Soweto and was once detained in an ANC detention facility in southern Africa following suspicion he was an apartheid agent. David De Jong, not his real name, is a white member of MK who keeps his hair short and wears an earring. He speaks a smattering of an African language and has the demeanor of a skollie – Afrikaans for ‘hooligan’. Brian Gibson, not his real name, is also a white member of MK. He once had an affair with the wife of a colleague.

Tshontsha Dikoloi, not his real name, is part of a two-men car thief racket and he and his partner-in-crime are known as Rum-and-Maple. Thuto Sfundiswa, not his real name, is a mathematics and English teacher. He is haughty and speaks such hoë Engels – high English – that people often cannot understand what he is saying.

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In a case of history repeating itself, except both times as tragedy, Sedibe says the following about Ebrahim Ebrahim, a senior member of the ANC: He will read any book he can lay his hands on. This is similar to an observation made in 1966 about Ebrahim by Bruno Mtolo, one of the first ANC insurgents to defect to the security forces. Mtolo, whose state witness testimony against Ebrahim sent Ebrahim to Robben Island for fifteen years in the 1960s, accused Ebrahim of being a ‘lazy chap’ who ‘wanted to lie on his back, reading novels and selected works of Lenin without doing anything’ (Mtolo 1966, 118–119). Among those identified by Sedibe are Jonas Gwangwa, the world-famous trombonist and a member of the ANC in exile. According to Sedibe’s file, Gwangwa was involved in a car accident in a southern African country in 1981. Gwangwa has one stiff leg as a result of steel put in the leg after the accident. Not all entries are as detailed as Gwangwa’s. There is, for example, little personal information in the entry on Joe Modise, the commander of MK, other than that he lives with his wife Jaqueline Molefe in a house in Lusaka, Zambia. The file says one E. S. Zikalala was arrested by the ANC in 1981 on suspicion of being an apartheid agent but was cleared and released. Jacob Zuma lives on Julius Nigere [sic] Avenue in Maputo, Mozambique. He lives with a wife whom he married in 1985. The wife works as a hostess at the airport in Maputo. Zuma is also married to a medical doctor named Nkosazana Zuma, who lives in Swaziland.

The file’s attempt at exhaustiveness means that no detail is too insignificant, no aspect of biography too small. In with the foot soldiers are leaders of the revolution: people like ANC president Oliver Tambo, and South African Communist Party (SACP) bosses Moses Mabhida and Yusuf Dadoo. Of Tambo, Sedibe’s file says: he is the president of the ANC and Sedibe has seen him in Angola and Maputo on numerous occasions. Of Dadoo, it says: he visited the Teterov military training camp in East Germany in 1977. Sedibe ‘believes he is dead.’ Albie Sachs, an ANC lawyer, has a house on Julius Ngere [sic] Avenue in Maputo that the ANC uses to lodge its leaders for a day or two. Edward Joseph, not his real name, is separated from his wife after she had an affair with Jonathan Solomon, a senior member of the organization. The wife now lives in Europe. Ivan Pillay, a senior member of the ANC underground, lives with his wife in Swaziland, and drives a white Ford Escort. Nomvula Madikizela, not her real name, received her military training in East Germany, where she was section leader of her group. She moved to a southern African country after her training. She had a relationship with Simphiwe Nzama, not his real name, a senior MK member in 1979. When she got pregnant with his baby, she went to an east African country to deliver the baby. She suffered a nervous breakdown in 1980 when she found out that Nzama had married another woman in the meantime.

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It is tempting to see this as ‘harmless prattle’ by Sedibe (Ash 2009, 91). It is also easy to assume from his file that the security police were interested in nothing more than the obvious and the banal. However, to do that would be to miss the menace hidden in Sedibe’s file. The file did more than titillate the voyeuristic tendencies of the security police. It also provided them with information that they could and did in fact use to deadly effect. Take the entry on one Job Tabane. Sedibe describes Tabane’s military history and the positions he occupies in the ANC and MK. He says that Tabane and his wife – whose name he gives – live in Leballo (sic) in Lusaka, Zambia, with their two children and that Tabane drives a beige Peugeot 504.

A South African police death squad killed Tabane, Sello Peter Motau and a Mozambican woman named Ellisa Tsineni Augusto on 9 July 1987 in Swaziland. Tabane and Motau had flown into Matsapha Airport aboard a Lesotho Airways flight from Maputo and were in a taxi with Augusto, who was Motau’s girlfriend and had organized the taxi, when men travelling in a white BMW with South African plates ambushed them under a bridge (Times of Swaziland, 10 July 1987). Tabane, who had made ANC history in 1985 by becoming the youngest member of the organization’s national executive committee, was head of MK’s Ordnance Department, while Motau was a senior MK commander in the Transvaal. Kevin O’Brien says the assassinations came from information provided by Sedibe as well as other South African agents within the ANC and MK (O’Brien 2001). South African security penetration of the ANC in Swaziland was indeed extensive.

While it would have been easy for the South Africans to track Tabane and Motau’s movements between Mozambique and Swaziland – there were, for example, only two flights into Matsapha Airport on the day of the assassination, a Royal Swazi Airways flight from Johannesburg, and the Lesotho Airways flight from Maputo – they still needed the cooperation of accomplices on the ground to effect their plan.

Taxi driver Sipho Boy Gamedze, the only person to survive the assassination unharmed, was at first praised by the Swazi media for his ‘miraculous’ escape and for the promptness with which he raised the alarm at the nearby Lobamba Police Station. Sandile Mdziniso, a spokesman for the Swazi police, told the Times of Swaziland: ‘We are pinning our hopes on the driver to give us clues on the BMW and its occupants’ (Times of Swaziland, 10 July 1987). On 13 July 1987 the Swaziland police arrested Gamedze, with a police spokesman telling the Times of Swaziland that ‘Gamedze may hold the key to the mystery which has puzzled and horrified’ (Times of Swaziland, 14 July 1987). Gamedze did indeed hold the key. He had, it turned out, been paid by South African security agents to drive Tabane, Motau and Augusto to a designated spot under the Usutshwana Bridge on the Lozitha road. The plan was for Gamedze to drive to the bridge and, using the pretext that he needed to urinate, get out of the taxi. He did as planned and

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the assassins pounced, killing their three victims on the spot. But the breach in Tabane and Motau’s security did not come only from Gamedze. An investigation by the Times of Swaziland found that before travelling to the airport with Gamedze, Augusto had been involved in a ‘heated argument’ with another woman, who also claimed to be Motau’s girlfriend, over who would drive to the airport to fetch Motau and Tabane. The altercation, witnessed by a number of people, had taken place in a block of flats (Times of Swaziland, 14 July 1987).

Still, Archie Whitehead, one of September’s ANC and MK colleagues, insisted that Sedibe ‘had a hand’ in the deaths of Tabane and Motau. Their deaths were among eleven assassinations of ANC members in Swaziland carried out by the security police in the year after September’s defection (O’Brien 2011, 50). The assassinations prompted Peter Mokaba, president of the South African Youth Congress and a member of the ANC underground in South Africa at the time, to call for a blockade of Swaziland so that ‘Swaziland will stop being a killing ground of opponents of apartheid’ (Times of Swaziland, 17 July 1987). Mokaba’s call was ironic considering that the ANC had unmasked him as possibly a South African security agent.

Speaking about the relationship between historians and intelligence files, historian Peter Jackson counsels against the seductions of novelty, the belief that there is a ‘hidden history’ out there that will ‘transform our understanding of past events’ (Jackson 2008, 9). Jackson says: ‘The special importance placed on turning up new information for its own sake can sometimes overshadow the scholar’s responsibility to provide a systematic analysis of what this new material tells us about the dynamics of policy-making and politics more generally’ (9) What, for example, does Sedibe’s file tell us about the workings of the South African security forces? What does his possible involvement (however indirect) in the assassination of Tabane, Motau and nine others tell us about how the South African policy-making and political machinery operated? Scholars such as Kevin O’Brien and institutions such as the TRC have shown that under apartheid political assassinations were a tool of state policy. O’Brien says: ‘While South Africa is not, by far, the only “democracy” to have used assassination as a tool of state policy, in comparison with other industrialized states, it did have the most effective and structures [sic] programme for the elimination of its opponents’ (O’Brien 2001, 108).

O’Brien says that in order to understand how political assassinations came to be a tool of state policy in South Africa, ‘one must understand the nature of the national security architecture and composition which supported and implemented that use’ (108). O’Brien says that, starting in the 1970s, there developed a ‘mechanized and systematized process, whereby problems were reported, targets were selected and operations implemented to remove those targets … [seen] as a threat to the state’ (109). This process was driven by a

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‘national security state’ and maintained by a ‘security architecture run by the State Security Council’ (109). The council, established in the 1970s, was responsible for the development and implementation of a national security strategy through something called the National Security Management System. The system, in turn, drew on the strategic and tactical work of the various security organs of the state, from the National Intelligence Service (NIS) to the foot soldiers who carried out assassinations. O’Brien says that, by one count, ‘more than 50 opponents of apartheid’ were assassinated between 1977 and 1989 (109).

Collaborators such as Sedibe were the foot soldiers of the National Security Management System. Sedibe operated as a mix of informer, double agent, bounty hunter, intelligence analyst and assassin. O’Brien says that one of the ‘prime techniques used to “turn” guerillas was by forcing them to kill an ANC or SWAPO member, either through capture or assassination, in order to implicate them and prevent them from returning to their comrades’ (37). We know from the assassination of Tabane and Motau that, even though Sedibe was not the only source of the intelligence used to kill them, he was probably one of the key sources. We know, in other words, that beyond the blandness of his security file, lay deeper truths about the workings of the security police. Peter Jackson says: ‘The historian must develop a feel for how papers moved within and across departments, as well as a sense of the institutional cultures of these organizations in general and prevailing attitudes towards intelligence information in particular’ (Jackson 2008, 9).

The connection between Sedibe’s file and the assassinations of Tabane and Motau, as well as the role of political assassinations in South Africa’s security architecture, give some sense of how papers, meaning information, moved within and between departments in South Africa’s national security state.

O’Brien calls the National Security Management System the ‘framework within which systematized assassination was developed and implemented’ (O’Brien 2011, 82). But the system was about more than the silencing, either through death or detention, of apartheid’s opponents. It was part of a ‘Total Strategy’ inspired by the work of French military strategist André Beaufre. Described by sociologist Jacklyn Cock as the ‘launch pad for the militarization of South African society’, this ‘Total Strategy’ was intended to manage South Africa’s fundamental problem, namely how to extend political power to black South Africans without changing the basic structure of apartheid (Cock and Nathan 1989, 2).

The security forces did smash growing resistance to apartheid using, among other things, collaborators. But such tactical victories could not hide the fact that no amount of killing and jailing would help solve South Africa’s fundamental problem. The South African security services were good at finding and using tactical intelligence (such as that provided by Sedibe), but they were hopeless at providing decision-makers with the kind of strategic, far-reaching,

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intelligence needed to solve South Africa’s problems (O’Brien 2011, 69). In fact, says O’Brien, South Africa’s Department of Military Intelligence engaged in activities that did more harm than good to South Africa’s political strategy (68). O’Brien says the reason South Africa’s ‘Total Strategy’ failed was because it was ‘fed by an intelligence apparatus which both misconstrued the quality of the ANC’s revolutionary warfare pursuits, and ultimately reacted to the resonating results of its own operations’ (169). The South Africans believed they were on the edge of the abyss – not realizing that they had created the abyss themselves.

Barbara Miller says: ‘Stasi files can be said to recreate the biography of a lost state’ (1999, 132). That is because the files tell us a lot about what that lost state was. They tell us something about how that state operated and how information moved within and between departments. But, as we know all too well, the files do not speak for themselves. They certainly are not innocent repositories of the truth. They are not faithful reflections of the past as it really happened. As Miller says, ‘Much is missing and, consequently, the information which is recorded may be in danger of being retrospectively judged more significant and representative of the individual biography than was the case’ (131). The same observation applies to Sedibe and how we read his file. We know that Sedibe’s file is not the sum total of his collaboration. We know, too, that the file is silent about how Sedibe came to be where he was when he started telling on his comrades. We know that while he might have chosen to collaborate, that ‘choice’ rested on a starker choice. But we also know that Sedibe’s collaboration extended beyond the contents of his file. We know that there is a lot we still do not know about his collaboration. Did he have to kill to prove his loyalty to his new masters? How many former comrades did he help recruit to the security police and military intelligence?

When Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s first democratically elected president in April 1994, he asked Neil Barnard, the last head of the National Intelligence Service under apartheid, ‘for the identities of government spies in ANC ranks’ (Potgieter 2007, 142). Barnard refused. In another telling of the same story, it is the ANC, and not the South African government, that refused to name names when it came to the spies in its ranks. According to this second telling, when it became clear that apartheid was about to become a thing of the past, officials of NIS suggested to their ANC counterparts that they share the names of spies within each other’s ranks. The ANC refused, seeing in this suggestion a tool that could be used to blackmail individuals (Sanders 2006, 138). Who knows what might have come out had Barnard agreed to Mandela’s request? Who knows what might have been revealed had the ANC agreed to share notes with the NIS about the spies in its ranks? The truth is that outed collaborators such as Sedibe, Behr and possibly Mokaba were more the exception than the norm, meaning we know a lot less

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about apartheid agents than we should, given South Africa’s history of conflict and the centrality of treachery to that conflict.

It is revealing that while Eastern Europe’s confrontation with its communist past – uneven though it has been, driven in part by an interest in lustrace (from the Latin term for ritual purification), an attempt to purge from political life and government institutions those most tainted by their association with the past – there has been no similar process in South Africa. Some members of the security forces were forcibly retired and a handful, notably Eugene de Kock, sent to jail for their crimes. But there has been no purging from the security services or from government, for that matter, of people whose past association with South Africa’s covert actions makes them, at best, dubious embodiments of the kind of accountability South Africa seeks to foster.

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