‘Tom, you got your willing witness, I’ll say anything you want.’
I laughed, partly to dispel the sombre atmosphere. ‘No, Pissy, for once in your life just tell the truth. That’s all we’re going to need.’ I glanced towards the door of the private sitting room. ‘Now, do you want me to go and do what you asked?’
He shook his head. ‘No, Tom, already I’m feeling a lot better.’
‘And you’ll take him to a hospice?’
‘Hospice?’
‘A place, a hospital, where he can die in peace.’
‘Ja, I promise.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Love Comes Full Circle
WITH PISSY VERMAAK a willing and cooperative witness, Exhibit A in our possession, Frikkie’s notes transcribed and carefully cross-referenced and annotated, together with the original scraps of notepaper all signed and, a month before his death, formulated into a sworn affidavit, I felt we had sufficient evidence to proceed. This information, together with the police files compiled at the time of the murder, was about as good as it was ever likely to be.
I appointed Janine De Saxe, a young lawyer who had a reputation for tenacity and determination, as my junior and assisting barrister. Before going into private practice she’d worked as the assistant to Judge Franz Rumpff, one of the three judges appointed to conduct the Treason Trials. She was English-speaking, but she spoke Afrikaans fluently and had worked in the High Court in Pretoria and knew her way around the capital city. While I was worried about any political overtones in the trial, Janine assured me that she knew most of the High Court judges, and in her own words insisted, ‘These High Court judges don’t generally play politics.’
I duly filed an indictment for murder against the seven accused in the High Court in Pretoria and received notice that two days had been set aside for the hearing on 4 and 5 June 1964, scheduled for courtroom No. 13. I am not an overly superstitious person, but as a man of Africa and coming from the high mountains, no matter how pragmatic one pretends to be, there inevitably remained a tincture of superstition in a backveld boy that still dwelt deep within my psyche. The adjective ‘darkest’ is not conjoined with the name of the continent for no reason.
Then came a big shock: Judge Joe Ludorf was appointed to preside over the trial. Despite Janine’s assurances that High Court judges don’t play politics, I was worried. You may remember the name Robey Leibbrandt; the Nazi ex-boxer trained in Germany and sent to South Africa to organise sabotage. At his trial for treason he was famously defended by advocate and former National Party official and now judge of the High Court, Joe Ludorf. I was caught between a rock and a hard place. If I asked for a recusal and gave my reasons the case would immediately take on political overtones. To make matters worse, Ludorf, originally appointed as one of the three judges for the Treason Trial involving Nelson Mandela among others, had stepped down after pressure from the defence. I had an inauspicious courtroom number and a judge who, in his mind, might have translated the Van Schalkwyk brothers’ sentences for treason into the two words ‘freedom fighters’ but, of course, I had no way of knowing. Janine, who knew him from her time in Pretoria, claimed that he was a pretty pragmatic character and pointed out that of the three judges the defence had objected to at the commencement of the Treason Trial, only Ludorf agreed to step down.
‘You’re overanxious and you’ve been working on this case in your head for too long, Tom. Ludorf is as good as we’re going to get and that doesn’t in any sense mean he’s the best of a bad lot.’
We decided to remain silent and hope for the best and I was to be grateful, on more than one occasion in the ensuing weeks and during the trial, for Janine’s calm and sensible advice. She also pointed out that the court had agreed to two assessors rather than a jury. ‘If we’d gone into this trial with a Pretoria jury, that’s when we would have needed to be worried,’ she declared.
Both assessors were Afrikaners: Hansie Bekker and Tertius Viljoen. They’d been around for a while and were thought to be highly competent lawyers, and said to be close to being appointed to the judiciary.
However, we were in for one further surprise.
The subpoenas were served on the seven members of the Van Schalkwyk family by a court official from Pietersburg. The idea was to keep Lieutenant Van Niekerk uninvolved, except as a witness for the prosecution, though, of course, the defence was almost certain to call him to the stand as well.
The murder indictment was front-page news in the Zoutpansberg Nuus where they’d dug up details of the original enquiry. In a highly inflammatory editorial the newspaper pointed out that nobody at the time had established a motive for the murder or named any suspects, and that ludicrously, the indictment was being brought eighteen years after the so-called lynching of Mattress Malakoani [sic], a pig boy at The Boys Farm, the orphanage on the outskirts of Duiwelskrans. The charge of murder was being brought by a thirty-year-old Johannesburg lawyer, Tom Fitzsaxby. They pointed out that the murder indictment against the six brothers, whom many people in the district regarded as Afrikaner Volk heroes, appeared to be politically motivated. As a clear indication of this they asserted that while the police enquiry at the time had found no evidence to suspect the Van Schalkwyk brothers, their subsequent imprisonment for treason made them ideal victims. Was this, the newspaper asked, the beginning of some sort of communist-inspired and ANC counterpoint to the Rivonia Treason Trial presently underway in Pretoria? Perhaps, they suggested, the forthcoming murder trial concerning a black pig boy was intended to discredit the Afrikaner people by making them out to be a barbaric and savage people. After all, Fitzsaxby was a graduate from Oxford, an English university well known for its communist leanings and ANC sympathies.
The writers then selected Mevrou for special attention. They pointed out that white English-speaking women were also detained in the Treason Trial. Then they asked, ‘Is Johanna van Schalkwyk, now retired to the family farm, but at the time of the murder the much-loved and respected matron at The Boys Farm, to be the Afrikaner female sacrifice?’
Lieutenant Van Niekerk reported that the whole district was up in arms. That Saturday morning following the newspaper report the Van Schalkwyk brothers had come into town in a bakkie. The giant Frans van Schalkwyk sat behind the wheel and beside him was a hugely obese Mevrou, with the five brothers standing up at the back waving a large Transvaal republic vierkleur flag. A long length of rope tied to the rear bumper of the bakkie was a defiant token of their contempt. They’d driven repeatedly up and down the main street, tooting the horn, and were soon joined by at least thirty other vehicles, bringing the little mountain dorp to a standstill. In the following week, several hundred vehicles belonging to townspeople and farmers in the district sported a length of rope trailing from the rear bumper.
And then the bombshell! Of course, I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t; Gawie Grobler accepted the brief to defend the Van Schalkwyk family. We read the news in the right-wing Die Burger, one of the two major national Afrikaans-language newspapers. They had been the first of the national newspapers to pick the story up from the Nuus and run with it, at first with only a couple of columns, but rapidly increasing as the furore spread from the sleepy little mountain town into the rest of the Northern Transvaal. In the weeks following the initial story, hundreds of motor vehicles in all parts of the province carried a makeshift length of rope attached to the rear bumper.
But it was when Die Burger picked up the story that the rope hit the big time. Inspired by the initial gesture of contempt by the Van Schalkwyk Seven, as they were now dubbed, Doctor Dyke, the erstwhile vet and Rhode Island Red blue-ribbon winner and notorious Boys Farm horse-pliers dentist, came up with a way to fund the defence of the accused. Now retired and the mayor of Duiwelskrans, he conceived the idea of the Bloedtoufond, the Blood Rope Fund. For a donation of fifty cents the donor received a short length of rope that clipped around and hung from the rear bumper of a motor vehicle, almost touching the road surface, with
about four inches at the end of it dyed crimson. Soon enough, with the mounting publicity, blood ropes were selling like hot cakes. Within weeks, a cottage industry creating, packaging and posting the mordantly grisly items had been created by the ever-opportunistic Patel & Sons, who charged twenty-seven cents for manufacture, returning twenty-three cents to the fighting fund.
Gawie Grobler’s acceptance of the brief to defend the Van Schalkwyk Seven added yet another unfortunate political dimension to the upcoming murder trial. The Afrikaner Genius, long the town’s favourite son, was the logical choice as the defence barrister. Die Burger ran a feature story about him, going back to his days as an orphan at The Boys Farm. They described the hometown boy as a brilliant young advocate, educated at Stellenbosch University where he graduated with a double first in law. The article told of the early recognition of the boy’s genius and the consequent encouragement he’d received from the recently deceased Boys Farm superintendent, Pietrus Prinsloo. It talked about the special relationship the boy enjoyed with its kindly matron, Johanna van Schalkwyk, now ironically and cruelly one of the accused. ‘That boy was always thinking, even with lavatory paper,’ she was quoted as saying. It described how the Dominee, also deceased, had seen a brilliant future for the orphan boy; how he had established an annual fete run by the church elders to help young Gawie with the necessities of life when he took up scholarships to Pretoria Afrikaans Boys High School and later Stellenbosch. The article recounted the amusing story told by the town mayor, Doctor Dyke, of a special fundraising idea at the first fete: ‘Meet the Afrikaner Genuis’, where Gawie sat in an old armchair on a raised platform and answered questions from members of the audience at sixpence a question. ‘I asked him to give me the theory of Pythagoras,’ the mayor laughingly recalled. ‘He told me right off, “The square of the hippopotamus of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides”, indicating to me that he was not only a highly intelligent boy, but also a very funny one. I recall I gave him two shillings.’ Doctor Dyke was also quoted as saying, ‘We, the good citizens of Duiwelskrans, want Advocate Gawie Grobler to lead the defence in this iniquitous and misconceived trial. Not only because we believe him to be a singularly brilliant advocate and the best man for the job, but also as a much-loved native son of this town. Duiwelskrans is very proud of our very own Gawie Grobler; we are a community where even an orphan is given every opportunity to grow and blossom. As a true Afrikaner he will surely defeat the dark forces of communism and the perfidious ANC ranged against us. Justice will be granted to the Van Schalkwyk family, who have already suffered so much as freedom fighters and martyrs in the struggle for independence by the true Volk of South Africa.’
The feature story in Die Burger was syndicated and appeared in dozens of smaller Afrikaans newspapers throughout the country, and sections from it were translated into the major English-speaking newspapers, among them the Sunday Times, the Cape Argus and the Natal Mercury. It was compelling reading and caught the imagination of Afrikaners throughout the land. Vehicles in the cities and small towns in every province began to sport the blood rope and soon there were sufficient funds to hire the best advocacy money could buy. But, of course, it was always going to be Gawie Grobler, surrogaat, Third Class Rooster and Afrikaner Genius, who would be leading the case; the town simply wouldn’t entertain the thought of anyone else, no matter how big a high-up in the law he might happen to be.
It was back to the future, Voetsek the Rooinek, murderer of 26 000 women and children, versus the Afrikaner Volk. Let me tell you something for nothing, the shit squares were flying around so thick and fast in the hot wind that you couldn’t catch one to wipe your arse, even if you wanted to.
Naturally, in all this errant publicity I was often featured, though usually in a trenchant and less than complimentary manner. There were also some humorous moments, one of them when Mevrou, in an interview with Die Huisgenoot, was quoted as saying, ‘That English boy was nothing but trouble, you hear? A real little kaffirboetie! Cutting his finger all over the place and making trouble for everyone. Always answering back and never knowing his place. He had a little dog that caught some rats, that’s the only thing good I can say about that one. When he left to go to that Pope’s school my whole spirits lifted. I’m telling you, man, all of a sudden my head is going on a nice holiday!’
The story almost wrote itself and was tailor-made for the Sunday newspapers. The brilliant Stellenbosch double-first graduate versus the Rhodes scholar, the two ‘genius’ orphans with identical backgrounds are opposing young advocates in a murder trial. Afrikaner South African and English South African with the murder victim a black African.
The day of the court case arrived, 4 June 1964. Courtroom No. 13 was not one of the larger ones and the public and the press gallery was filled minutes after the High Court building opened. Many of the people seated in the public gallery wore a blood rope converted into a crude necklace. The small section of the public gallery reserved for non-Europeans was also filled to capacity. To my surprise I saw, among the darker faces present, Mr Naidoo of the Indian Curry Eatery where Frikkie Botha and I would eat on our way back to the park in the old days. Stompie from the kiosk outside Park Station, the purveyor of Pepsi-Cola, was also present. Pirrou was there, of course, as was Professor Mustafa, my old friend, the medical supervisor of Johannesburg General, and Professor Shaun Rack, my law professor at Wits. Meneer Van Niekerk of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary ‘To thine own self be true’ sat with Marie and Mervou Van Heerden. Doctor Van Heerden and Lieutenant Van Niekerk had been called as witnesses and were waiting outside the court.
I was told later that a great cheer rose from the public gallery when Gawie and his junior, Herman Venter, entered and made their way to the bench for the defence. Though, I must add, the same happened, though perhaps not quite as strident an outburst, when Janine De Saxe and I entered and took our places for the prosecution. If the public gallery was not evenly divided, at least it was not completely one-sided. The court clerk entered and asked the court for silence and to be upstanding as Judge Ludorf and the two assessors, Bekker and Viljoen, entered.
Judge Ludorf, speaking in Afrikaans, opened the court proceedings by introducing the two assessors, one on either side of him. He then began his opening address, immediately creating controversy. ‘I note with apprehension that some members of the public gallery are wearing what I believe is known as a blood rope. I now order the two police officers in the gallery to confiscate these items.’ Gawie Grobler jumped to his feet. ‘Yes, what is it, Meneer Grobler?’ the judge asked, looking over the top of his spectacles.
‘With the greatest respect, My Lord, I submit that the items in question are a part of a person’s apparel, in essence no different to a necklace with a cross attached or a badge of affiliation, a statement of one’s beliefs or membership of an association.’
I grinned inwardly, it was the same old Gawie of The Boys Farm, always wanting to have the first word. His objection, in my opinion, was ill-conceived and I wondered whether he secretly felt that his case for the defence wasn’t as strong as he’d hoped, and wanted to appear confident and assertive from the first word. The judge was having none of it.
‘Thank you, Meneer Grobler, I should remind you that this is my court,’ Judge Ludorf said firmly. ‘You may sit down.’ He looked up at the public gallery. ‘Would the police officers kindly confiscate the offending items.’
Gawie seemed about to return to his feet before thinking better of it and remaining seated.
It took several minutes for the blood ropes to be handed over, whereupon Judge Ludorf resumed his opening remarks.
‘In the three months leading up to this trial there has been a great deal of regrettable publicity surrounding this case and I am therefore not surprised that the prosecution has asked for the court to appoint two assessors to work with me rather than a jury. I need not remind you that this is a court of law and only the evidence presented here will be
assessed. The gallery will remain silent throughout and I would ask the members of the press to report the proceedings accurately and to refrain from the sort of hyperbole they have indulged in over the past weeks.’ He cast a stern look at the packed press gallery. ‘Although, alas, this last request is not enforceable and to rely on your good judgement and probity is, I fear, a contradiction in terms.’ The judge had got his first laugh. He brought his gavel down several times demanding silence and then announced, ‘I now ask the clerk of the court to announce the session.’
The clerk of the court was a small, thin, pop-eyed man with several long strands of dark hair derived from above the ear on the left side of his head and combed across to the right and stuck down on his bald pate. He commenced to read out the details of the murder charge against the Van Schalkwyk Seven.
Immediately after he had completed the indictment, Gawie Grobler jumped to his feet. ‘My Lord, if it pleases the court, my clients have asked if Meneer Frans van Schalkwyk, the senior member of the family, may be allowed to answer the majority of the questions from the prosecution on behalf of the entire family.’
I stood up. ‘Objection, My Lord.’
A grin appeared on the faces of the judge and his two assessors. ‘Nice one, Advocate Grobler, objection sustained. I caution you that your request is improper, you well know that the defence is entitled to call whomsoever of the accused they require to the witness stand.’
‘With the greatest respect, My Lord,’ Gawie persisted, ‘one of my clients, Mevrou Van Schalkwyk, is too ill to take the witness stand or even to climb the few steps into it. I ask for leave to submit to the court a medical certificate from a heart specialist to this effect.’ He stepped forward and handed the certificate to the clerk of the court.
‘Your client may take the oath from where she is seated and I am sure the prosecution will not object to cross-examining her from where she feels most comfortable,’ the judge replied.
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