Shepherds & Butchers
Shepherds
& Butchers
Chris Marnewick
Publication of this book was aided by funding from the
National Arts Council of South Africa.
Published by Umuzi
an imprint of Random House Struik (Pty) Ltd
Company Reg No 1966/003153/07
80 McKenzie Street, Cape Town 8001, South Africa
PO Box 1144, Cape Town 8000, South Africa
[email protected]
www.randomstruik.co.za
Copyright © Chris Marnewick 2008
Chris Marnewick hereby asserts his right
to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or be stored in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.
ISBN 978-1-4152-0044-5 (Print)
ISBN 978-1-4152-0327-9 (ePub)
ISBN 978-1-4152-0328-6 (PDF)
Cover design by Sally Swart
Cover photograph by Sean Wilson
Design and layout by William Dicey
Shepherds & Butchers is fiction. Names, characters and incidents, other than those reflected in court records or official documents, are the product of the author’s imagination.
To the great loves of my life, Ansie, Jacques, Michel
Il faut, dans le gouvernement, des bergers et des bouchers
– A government must have shepherds and butchers
VOLTAIRE (1694–1778)
Contents
Opening
1: Palace of Justice, Pretoria
2: Maximum Security Prison, Pretoria:10 December 1987
3: Supreme Court, Grahamstown
4: Old Johannesburg Road
5: Court C, Durban
6: Magistrates Court Holding Cells, Pretoria
7: Magazine Hill, Pretoria
8: Palace of Justice
Day one
9: Maximum Security Prison
10: V3208 Simon Ramoatshe Moatche
11: Palace of Justice
12: V3421 Joseph George Scheepers
13: Palace of Justice
14: Palace of Justice
15: V3615 Johan Christiaan Wessels
16: Palace of Justice
17: V3695 Jim Kgethang Mokwena
Day two
18: Maximum Security Prison
19: V3473 Kanton Klassop
20: Palace of Justice
21: V3564 Willy Jacob Mpipi V3565 Johannes Mohapi
22: Palace of Justice
23: V3574 Johannes Stefanus Delport
24: Palace of Justice
25: V3680 Jomyt Mbele V3681 Case Rabutla V3682 Clifton Phaswa
26: Maximum Security Prison
Day three
27: Mamelodi Cemetery
28: Palace of Justice
29: V3506 Ishmael Mokone Marotholi V3507 Zacharia Molefi Kodisang V3508 Richard Busakwe
30: Palace of Justice
31: V3747 Stanley Allen Hansen
32: Palace of Justice
33: V3768 Nicholas Prins
34: Palace of Justice
35: V3769 Sizwe Goodchild Leve
36: Palace of Justice
37: Michelle Davi37:V3770 Stanley Smit
38: De Villiers Residence, Pretoria
Day four
39: Maximum Security Prison
40: Palace of Justice
41: Palace of Justice
42: Palace of Justice
43: Palace of Justice
44: V3625 William Harris V3626 Brian Meiring V3627 Christoffel Michaels
45: Palace of Justice
46: Palace of Justice
Day five
47: Maximum Security Prison
48: Evening Flight to Durban
49: V3541 Khuselo Selby Mbambani V3721 Siphiwo Mjuza
50: Durban
51: V3663 Joseph Gcabashe V3664 Mnuxa Jerome Gcaba
52: Pretoria Zoo
53: Palace of Justice
54: V3752 Andries Njele V3753 David Mkumbeni
55: Palace of Justice
56: Palace of Justice
57: V3771 Willem Maarman
Closing
58: Palace of Justice
59: Magazine Hill & Maximum Security Prison
60: Palace of Justice
61: Voortrekker Monument
62: Palace of Justice
Glossary
Authors Note
Acknowledgements
OPENING
Preparation: May-October 1988
Execution: 10 December 1987
Palace of Justice, Pretoria
1
The Judge’s scarlet robes signified that this was a capital case, that he had the power of life and death. I watched the serious figure in the centre of the bench as he moved his high-backed chair slightly forward and picked up his reading glasses. His two Assessors, elderly gentlemen dressed in sombre suits, leaned back in their chairs. Their first task had been completed, helping the Judge to arrive at a verdict on the question of guilt or innocence. It remained for the Judge to announce the outcome and to explain the Court’s reasons.
‘The defendant may be seated,’ said the Judge. ‘The judgment will take some time.’
Leon Labuschagne sat down and almost disappeared behind the wood panelling of the dock where Nelson Mandela had stood trial on a charge of high treason more than twenty years earlier, his life similarly at stake. Mandela had escaped with his life, and is due to become our new President in a month’s time. The preparations for his inauguration brought back these memories.
It was October 1988, and it was spring in Pretoria. I was tired. The trial had run for only two weeks, but they had been hard weeks and there had been many anxious moments, long stretches of concentrated action, dark hours of nightmares and despair. I was exhausted; physically and emotionally drained by the effort. I turned slightly in my seat to look around.
Court C of the Palace of Justice was tattered, its furniture and fittings in dire need of refurbishment. Large flakes of paint hung from the high walls. Some of the bulbs in the antique light fittings lining the walls needed to be replaced. The once plush carpet was threadbare and worn through in areas of heavy traffic, its once sombre ox blood-red now faded to a dull pink. The wood-framed windows above the architraves bore the stains of many years’ worth of accumulated dust and grime and the droppings of the ubiquitous pigeons.
The Judge was Mr Justice J P van Zyl. He tested his voice by coughing softly behind his hand before he opened his bench book. Spectators in the back rows of the public gallery craned forward to hear. I sat at counsel’s table with my Junior on my left. The prosecutors were within whispering distance from me. A door slammed elsewhere in the building, its sound muted by the thick stone walls and the carpeting as the Judge started reading in measured tones.
‘The extraordinary defence in this case has its origins in a process of which very few details have been known until this trial – the execution of a condemned criminal by the State.’
I felt my concentration begin to wane as the performance stress started to abate. I had played my part in the trial. There was nothing more I could do, in any event. They were either going to find Labuschagne guilty and sentence him to death, or they were going to acquit him. Either way, my job was done. For once I could afford to let my thoughts run free.
I thought of my childhood friend Oupa Venter. We were sitting in the shade of the camel thorn tree behind the kitchen of Welgedacht Primary School, taking a break from our sw
ord and shield battles, Oupa playing the Roman centurion to my Spartacus. I never told him that according to the encyclopaedia we had on the farm the centurion was supposed to win and Spartacus was supposed to end up on a cross, broken and dehydrated. We were flicking seed pods, floating them in the air like pebbles on water. The only constant in our games was Oupa’s smile, his white teeth flashing in the light – whether he was on the winning or losing side, always that dashing smile.
I remembered the blond hairs on Oupa’s arms, bleached even whiter by exposure to the sun and contrasting with the tanned skin underneath. I felt my facial muscles tighten as I thought of his battered body, lying in his bed, with his blood spattered on the walls and the ceiling of his grandmother’s house in town. His sister and his grandmother had been murdered during the same frenzied attack that took his life. By then I was in high school, and had been overcome with curiosity. I went to look at the murder scene, a house in a dirt road on the poor side of Potgietersrus.
As I sat in Court C I could still see in my mind’s eye the photograph of Oupa’s murderer on the execution notice. It had been posted on the public notice board at the Magistrates’ Court. It was still there when I went for a job interview after I had finished school four years later. The photograph showed the murderer, a smiling man in his thirties, in a prison jacket. There was a number pinned across his chest – 1266. The notice said that Johannes Buchling had been executed for murder. I wondered if he was still smiling when they put the rope around his neck.
My father also appeared unbidden from the recesses of my memory, another smiling face in his thirties. I remembered the journey from Johannesburg to Pretoria in the car many years earlier, with my father driving and acting as tour guide at the same time. I had never been to Pretoria.
‘That is the place where they are going to hang van Buuren,’ he had said as we entered the city from the south. He pointed at the corner of a large building complex on the left. The words over the entrance gates were long for my not yet nine-year-old eyes, but I just managed to get them all before we passed the windowless corner of the last brown building.
PRETORIA SENTRAAL GEVANGENIS
PRETORIA CENTRAL PRISON
I remembered van Buuren, a suave, handsome young man wearing sunglasses, staring arrogantly at me from the front page of the Sunday paper. How could I have known at that time, during that miserable Johannesburg winter when I was racked with croup, that one day I would be the public prosecutor in the very same courtroom where the photograph had been taken?
I glanced up at the Judge – he was still dealing with preliminary matters – as I paged through the register on the table in front of me. I found the right year and scanned down the pages, one by one. There he was, immediately after Gideon Sibiya:
NO. DATE NAME JUDGE PLACE OUTCOME DATE
517 28.2.57 Clarence Gordon van Buuren Broome, J Durban Executed 10.6.57
As I turned more pages of the Capital Cases Register, my eye fell on another name I recognised:
537 20.5.57 Roland Roberts (EM) J T van Wyk Cape Town Executed 12.8.57
He had even made it into the Law Reports and I later had to study his case in Criminal Law 1 under the heading INSANITY.The letters EM next to his name intrigued me. I looked more closely at the other entries. There were other similar codes, and I deciphered them quickly. NM appeared the most frequently, Native Male. There were also lots of CMs, for Coloured Male. Occasionally there would be an EM, a European Male. I started looking into the register from a different angle. Why are there no IMs, Indian Males? I wondered. Yet I found one quickly. I also found two NFs on one page, Native Female. The search for an EF, European Female, did not take long either:
592 25.11.57 Margaret Elizabeth Rheeder (EF) A G Jennett Port Elizabeth Executed 6.5.58
Rheeder was hanged for poisoning her husband. I remembered the case well. The hanging of a woman always made the headlines, and my reading skills had advanced by one year since van Buuren. Before I could find a CF or an IF, Judge van Zyl started to describe the execution process. I had to pay attention once more. The Judge turned a page and stared at the skylight above our heads briefly before he spoke. The clouds had returned for the judgment, great banks of them rushing over Pretoria in waves, their effect felt in the courtroom as alternating sheets of light and gloom as the judge read in and out of the paragraphs of the judgment. It was a judgment crafted for inclusion in the Law Reports. In the pages of the Death Sentence Register I found an escape from the tedium of words that were read and not spoken, of ideas that were emasculated by legalese and precedent.
‘The execution process can only be described as a dramatic and traumatic experience for everyone involved.’
The stress of the trial lingered in my robes as a sweaty mix of fear and apprehension.
Maximum Security Prison, Pretoria: 10 December 1987
2
An hour is a long time on Death Row, but on the day of an execution it is an eternity. Yet for some it may pass too quickly.
The seven men in the Pot waited anxiously for the footsteps they knew would come soon to the doors of their individual cells. They had slept fitfully during the night. Even the nights of the previous week were by now a dim memory of bleak images from their childhood days, of black nightmares, their vain illusions of escape or reprieve shattered by the regular beat of the warder’s boots on the catwalk above their cells. All through this last night the man on the catwalk had marched up and down slowly. Each time he approached the end of the cell-block the prisoners’ hopes would light up as the warder’s footsteps dimmed; then he would return and peer through the barred windows of their cells and extinguish the candle of hope again.
At exactly six o’clock the reveille bell signalled the start of the day in the cheerless complex known as Maximum Security Prison. The seven prisoners and the seven warders assigned to them shivered, mentally rehearsing what lay ahead of them in the next hour. The rest of the prison went into standby mode and no sound or movement signified life in any form within the grey walls. The nearly two hundred prisoners were usually roused from their bunks at the first sound of the bell, but they were left alone on hanging days until the gallows machine had done its work.
In the other sections of the prison the prisoners turned their worry inwards, knowing that the hour to seven o’clock would be a long one for them too. They were eager for the hour to pass so that they could return to the relative comfort of the tedium of prison routine. They did not want to think of the main business of the morning, the execution of their fellow prisoners, seven men who until a week ago had occupied cells among theirs.
The seven warders of the day shift who had reported for duty early faced the Warrant Officer in Charge of Security outside his office. By title this man was in charge of security, but the prison was so secure that such a job would have been boring in the extreme. In reality he was the man in charge of executions, which, in any event, outranked security as the most important pursuit of the prison.
The warders were to be the day’s gallows escorts, their duty to accompany the condemned men through every phase of the carefully planned activities of their final hour. The escorts, young men in khaki green, watched the Warrant Officer in silence and waited for the countdown to begin.
After checking their names against his duty roster, the Warrant Officer read the names of the prisoners to be executed that morning from an alphabetical list on his clipboard and allocated a warder to each prisoner.
‘Gcaba!’ The Warrant Officer pointed to a warder. The warder nodded.
‘Gcabashe!’
‘Maarman!’
‘Mbambani!’
‘Mjuza!’
‘Mkumbeni!’
‘Njele!’
One by one the warders nodded as they received their allocations.
They received their allocations patiently; there were no new warders on this watch and they knew full well what was expected of them. These seven men, some barely into their twenties, were gallows
escorts, the men who would accompany the condemned men on their last journey, from the cells to the gallows, and from the gallows to the grave.
The escorts followed the Warrant Officer to the security grille at the entrance to A1 Section and paused behind him while the door was being unlocked. The door was locked behind them again, even though they were to return within minutes. The clatter of the keys and the tumblers in the lock were the only sounds to be heard.
The seven condemned men waited. They had been in these special cells for a week now, and twice they had heard the footsteps approaching at this hour, only to hear the warders stop at adjoining doors and take away other prisoners, seven on each occasion. Twice their minds had played games with them, suggesting that the footsteps were for them, that they were to be called out, and twice they had watched through the barred windows in their doors as others were taken away.
The agony of the wait was worse than anything, for some it was worse even than the prospect of death.
Exactly a week earlier a different set of footsteps had stopped at their doors while they were still in the general cells. It had been a hanging day, the third of December, and after the hangings had been completed the cell doors had been opened as usual at seven o’clock for the prisoners to clean their cells and be given breakfast. Later in the morning the whole prison had been put in lock-down mode again and a roll call was taken. The prisoners knew what that meant. Then, as now, they waited, but on that occasion there had been uncertainty. At whose door would the footsteps stop?
They had stopped at the doors of the men now waiting for their appointment with the Executioner.
‘Pak!’
The single most feared word in the whole of the prison’s vocabulary. The prisoners who were told to pack their belongings would not return to the general cells of Maximum Security Prison. They would be taken away to await execution or to leave Maximum for total freedom or to be taken to another prison to serve an alternative sentence. The Sheriff would tell them which, but first they would have to accompany the warders and the Sheriff to the admin office.
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