Nongqai_Vol_12B

CHAPTER 4.

WHO WERE THE SAP-SB OFFICERS TYPICALLY? The men who led the SAP-SB at the height of South Africa’s internal conflict during the seventies and the eighties, had joined the South African police force mostly before the National Party government came to power in 1948. Many of them had joined the police out of economic necessity in those financially difficult years of the 2nd World War and its aftermath, when the effects of war and the Great Depression were still felt – there wasn’t money for them to go and further their studies at university. Most of them were thus sworn in as young policemen, still under the British crown. They were schooled in the custom of serving their country, enforcing the laws that parliament had placed on the statute books, doing so without party-political motives. This they did through the change of government in 1948, the transition from the British crown to the Republic in 1961, and eventually, the transition from the white-ruled state to the non-racial state from 1990 – 1994, thus ensuring the stability that was so sorely needed.

As stated at the outset, my knowledge of who and what these men and women were, comes not from book research, but was obtained very much first-hand (as the son of a security policeman, who became divisional commander for Port Natal, meaning Durban and Coast, and later commanding general of the entire SAP-SB: Major-General Frans Steenkamp; secondly, as myself the husband of a female SAP-SB member). They were not ignorant, brutish “rock spiders” with no knowledge of the wider world (my wife, for example, was the dux scholar of her school in her matric year).

Economic hardship had meant that my dad, like many others during and immediately after WW2, had to leave school prematurely to join the police, but he then obtained 5 matric distinctions through home study. In his chosen profession he first came to the fore as a top young detective, having solved the Joy Aken murder that had gripped the public imagination (Chris Marnewick recently wrote a noted book about him and that case).

I recall how, as a young student during those Durban days, I was often awed by our dinner guests – the West German consul, for example, had once come round with his portable home-movie projector and had shown us a film about the Munich Olympics. The Israeli consul general I remember as a charming man with an almost infinite stock of Jewish jokes (which resonated with us, because the Israelis and Afrikaners share the same kind of humour, joking about their own people). Another dinnertime raconteur of note was the then Natal attorney-general, Mr. Cecil Rees.

My father and mother (she was a very accomplished athlete) were well integrated into local social circles, i.a. as club presidents (my father of the angling club, my mother the tennis club). My dad was well known and appreciated by local industrialists and captains of business. As a fluent Zulu speaker who had grown up in Eshowe in Zululand, knowing the culture, he had made a point of trying to understand the evolution of politics in black leadership circles – he had invested long hours of amicable conversations with Chief Albert Luthuli (Nobel peace laureate and ANC president) who had shared with him his concerns at the time about the “Johannesburg communists” who had manipulated the ANC into embarking upon armed resistance.

Also, with Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who had been an ANC Youth League leader and then had split from the ANC, to form the Inkatha movement.

During his later years in Pretoria, my father obviously had many more engagements with international representatives, as well as with senior colleagues from the military, the South African Foreign Ministry and the National Intelligence Service. Clearly these policemen like my father who 47 Nongqai Vol 12 No 12B : SAP-SB / ANC-MK