‘Were you ever involved in the hanging of a woman?’ I asked, thinking of what Pierre de Villiers had told me.
Labuschagne answered with a nod and reached for the glass. It was empty and I waited as the usher filled it. I watched as he drank.
‘Tell the Court about it,’ I said. I kept the question deliberately vague. I wanted him to give the details that had left an impression on his mind, and I wanted the Judge and the Assessors to imagine an eighteen-year-old involved in such a macabre ritual.
‘In December we had to hang a woman. The women are not kept at Maximum. They come in for their V-numbers and then they go to the women’s section of Central. She was brought over early in the morning. Women are always hanged separately. We hanged them at about twenty to seven and the men at seven o’clock. She came in and …’
Labuschagne froze in mid-sentence. I waited for him.
‘The matrons from Central pleaded with us to take her up. They were crying with her. The Warrant Officer told them to wait in his office and we had to take her up, but we did not go down into the pit room. The doctor went alone and then the matrons from Central came in and took over. They had to be quick because we still had to hang some men after that, I remember, and we had to pull the trapdoors up again and set them for the next drop. I had to bury the woman later that day in a different cemetery from where the men were buried.’
I had busied myself with the register and looked up when Labuschagne added, ‘I don’t know what to say.’
The entry in the register did not tell the full story either:
SERIAL NO NAME V-NO PLACE SENTENCED DATE JUDGE OUTCOME DATE
4397 Roos de Vos V3528 Springs 30.5.86 Stegmann Executed 12.12.86
‘Which hangings were the worst for you, speaking generally?’ I asked, as if one hanging could be better than another.
‘When we have to hang more than one.’
The Judge intervened. ‘What is the most you’ve had to hang in a day?’
‘Eight.’ When no one reacted, Labuschagne went on. ‘We take one up first and then the other seven.’
‘What was the problem you experienced with the multiple hangings?’ I asked.
‘If one of them starts crying or wailing, they all start. And then you can’t stop them. And then we have to carry them up.’
‘What other problems did you have?’
‘It was difficult to hang prisoners who were my age or my father’s age,’ he said.
He hadn’t answered the question, but I had decided to change topics in any event. I could introduce the pit room evidence later.
‘What was the prison policy with regard to the use of violence to restrain or discipline prisoners?’
Labuschagne lowered his eyes before he answered. ‘We use violence when we have to.’
‘How was that policy implemented?’
‘We start with the new ones. We make the prisoners strip down naked and search them. All their personal stuff is taken away and they get prison garb – trousers, shirt, socks, shoes without laces, underpants and pyjamas.’
He was stalling, I thought, so I interrupted and asked, ‘No, we went through this yesterday. Please return to the issue of violence. I want you to tell the Court about that.’
He did not answer.
‘Were you given any specific instructions about how you were to deal with the prisoners?’ I asked.
This time Labuschagne was more forthcoming.
‘Yes. The Warrant Officer said that the only language these prisoners understood was violence. They had committed violent offences. They didn’t feel anything for anybody. He warned me always to be alert when the prisoners were out of their cells and to have another warder with me at all times.’ I thought I saw him glance at the man sitting behind the two prosecutors again.
‘What did you understand the Warrant Officer to mean when he said these prisoners understood only violence?’
Now he looked openly at the man behind the prosecutors. ‘He said if a prisoner stepped out of line I should knock him down there and then. We had to break them in quickly or we would always have trouble with them. I asked him to give me examples and he said that if a prisoner did not stand up when I spoke to him I should kick him in the face where he sat. And if a prisoner spoke to me without calling me sir I should hit him. I could use my fists or a baton, he didn’t care what injuries the prisoner got. He said it would make it a lot easier for everyone if all the warders treated the prisoners the same. Then we can all walk around in our prison without any fear of being attacked. He said that we had to prepare the prisoners for the day of their hanging. He said they had to get used to following orders, because we want them to walk to the gallows without any trouble. He told me to watch what the other warders did and follow their example.’
‘Did you have any questions about anything that might not have been clear to you?’
‘Yes, sir. I asked the Warrant Officer if I wouldn’t get into trouble if I hit a prisoner. He said that there’s no such thing as assault on a prisoner, it doesn’t exist in a prison’s vocabulary. He said we only act in self-defence or to prevent violence between prisoners or to stop escapes. He said we all stand together. He said there are four rules. First, the prisoner is always wrong. Second, warders do not rat on each other. Third, always go to the assistance of another warder when he’s in trouble. Last rule, keep your mouth shut.’
‘And how did you implement the prison policy with regard to the prisoners?’
Labuschagne looked at me reproachfully, but I had a job to do even if it displayed him in a bad light.
‘We had to pay special attention to the new arrivals. They had to be broken in before they could get into bad habits. They had to learn the prison culture.’
‘What culture are you referring to?’
‘To obey orders.’
Wierda and I had a long list of examples but I decided to leave the rest to the imagination.
‘Tell the Court how you dealt with difficult prisoners.’ I caught myself tugging at the shoulder of my robes again. I glanced at the Judge. He was watching Labuschagne intently now. Did he, like me, sense that we were not getting the whole truth?
‘Well, as I said, we were very rough with them the first few days after they arrived. We had to break them in quickly. Then we would keep up the pressure until they went into the Pot.’
‘Did it always work like that, with all the prisoners you had to hang?’
‘No.’ I waited for more information but Labuschagne just stood there looking at me. Perhaps he was taking Wierda’s instruction not to volunteer information too seriously.
‘In what way did some prisoners behave differently?’
There was no answer.
‘Let’s talk about those who were difficult on arrival,’ I suggested. ‘Give us an example of such a case and how you dealt with him.’
Labuschagne did not answer immediately. ‘There was a terrorist who gave us trouble. He wouldn’t look down when we said not to make eye contact. He walked slowly when we said walk faster. He ran when we said slow down. He spoke when we said shut up and when we asked him something he refused to answer. He even threw …’ He was looking for the right word. ‘He threw shit at some of the warders.’ Labuschagne didn’t have a softer word.
He looked at me and I nodded for him to continue.
‘When the next round of hangings came up the Warrant Officer called him out and put him in the Pot with the others. He even took his weight and his neck measurements. The prisoner said that he still had an appeal pending. The Warrant Officer said the appeal had been dismissed. The man said he wanted to see his lawyer. The Warrant Officer said his lawyer was overseas. He put him in the centre of the cells in the Pot, right in the middle of the singing and crying and praying. For the whole six days we treated him like the other prisoners in the Pot, except we did not allow him to receive any visitors. We took his order for his last meal, just like we did with the others, and gave it to him to eat the night before the execution. The
next morning we lined up behind the Warrant Officer. He opened the cell doors one by one and called them out. Dit is tyd! Trek jou dagklere aan, geen onderbroek, skoene of kouse nie.
‘The Warrant Officer went into the cell. I was escorting the prisoner in the cell directly across and saw the man sitting on the bed, dressed and wearing his prison shoes.
‘The Warrant Officer said, Uit met jou skoene! Then he stood and watched as the man took his shoes off. I watched. He was very pale and moved slowly. Then we took all of them into the passage where their fingerprints had to be taken. Then the Warrant Officer pulled him out of the line and took him to the section chapel.
‘The Warrant Officer told us to wait. He went back in and I heard him say to the prisoner, Sit jou hande hier, teen die muur, palms oop, vingers uit. En bly hier tot ek sê jy mag roer. Verstaan? We then moved through to the main chapel with the others.
‘Later, after we had cleaned up in the pit room and had taken the coffins to the main chapel, the Warrant Officer called me and we went back to the chapel in A1. The prisoner was still standing there with his palms against the wall. His eyes were red and puffy. He was shaking. His pants were wet. Het jy gevoel? asked the Warrant Officer. The man nodded. Presies sewe-uur? the Warrant Officer said. Yes, said the prisoner. Then the Warrant Officer told me, Vat hom terug na sy sel toe. And when we were ready to go, he said to the prisoner, Ek wil nie weer kak van jou hê nie, verstaan? We never had any trouble with him again.’
Judge van Zyl stepped in. ‘I trust this is going somewhere,’ he said. ‘This is a murder trial.’
‘Indeed, M’Lord,’ I said. ‘We intend to lead expert evidence about the effect of the culture of violence on the breakdown of the defendant’s psyche to explain the events at the reservoir.’
‘Go ahead,’ said the Judge, ‘but remember to keep the prisoners’ names out of it.’
‘As M’Lord pleases,’ I acknowledged. ‘You heard that,’ I said to Labuschagne. ‘Don’t mention the prisoners’ names in your evidence, unless I ask you to.’
I waited for him to nod.
‘Were there any other cases like that?’ I asked.
‘Yes, there was a white murderer who had shot some black people. He needed to be broken in too.’
Before Labuschagne could explain, James Murray objected. ‘M’Lord, do we really have to listen to more of this?’
The Judge stopped me as I was about to reply. ‘Yes, I agree, one is enough. Move on, will you?’ he said. I had to acknowledge the ruling.
‘As M’Lord pleases,’ I said and turned to Labuschagne. ’What was the idea with all this violence and intimidation?’
‘Sir, the idea was that we had to soften them so that we could get them up the staircase to the gallows chamber and onto the trapdoors with their feet on the marks.’
Judge van Zyl looked up from his notes when Labuschagne stopped. I pretended to be preoccupied with something in the brief. After a pause the Judge asked, ‘What was your own attitude to this culture of violence you have described?’
It took a long time before he answered. ‘I don’t know what to say. I did what I was told.’
I took control of the questioning again. ‘How did the prisoners behave, generally speaking?’
‘Most of them behaved, but some of them were difficult.’
‘How were they difficult? Give us examples please, and tell us how you dealt with them,’ I asked.
‘Some go berserk and we put them in isolation. When they fight we break it up.’
‘What is the worst experience you had with a prisoner who went berserk?’
He thought for a while. ‘When a prisoner rushed at me and smeared … uh … shit on me.’
‘What happened to the prisoner?’
‘He was put in the padded cell for a week.’
‘How did this incident affect you?’ I had to ask.
Labuschagne shrugged. ‘It was tense in there.’
‘I’ll return to the matters you have mentioned later, the suicides and the shooting, but for the moment I would like to ask you how the violence affected you, as far as you are or were able to see that yourself.’
‘I don’t know what to say.’ Then, after another pause, ‘Do you mean in the beginning or at the end?’
‘I mean in the last six months or so, the last six months, say, before the tenth of December 1987.’
‘I don’t know what to say,’ he said for the third time.
I stood still, facing our client, and asked softly, ‘Did you at any time sense or feel that something was not right?’
He spoke for a long time; we had been through this three or four times in our preparation. I picked listlessly through one of the registers as he spoke. I found that twenty-two prisoners had been hanged on one day thirty years earlier. I scanned their Zulu names:
Mandolozana Ndaba, Matshweshu Mdluli, Bhobolwana Mdluli, Kamu Hlongwane, Mganda Mdladla, Mhlonzana Mdluli, Mgolobane Dlamini, Nhlangwini Hlongwane, Xhegu Mbhatha, Tlela Dlamini, Dlayedwa Hlongwane, Magangweni Kubheka, Nsingisi Mthembu, Mdolomane Hlongwane, Mshudeki Mhembu, Babalane Hlongwane, Nhlansi Hlongwane, Ndoboka Mdluli, Ham-bawodwa Mdladla, Mantongomane Mdluli, Mbulali Mdluli, Mandlakayise Nzimande, Jubhela Mahlobo.
Twenty-three of them, all condemned by Judge Kennedy in Pietermaritzburg on the same day, 9 August 1956. And all executed on 21 March the following year – all exept Mandlakayise Nzimande, whose appeal succeeded and who was released four months later, on 3 August 1957.
I tried to imagine the scene. The place must have been like an abattoir. The logistical arrangements must have approached those of a small military operation. If for seven condemned the chapel was crammed I couldn’t see how twenty-two coffins and all the relatives, two per prisoner, could have fitted into the chapel for the traditional funeral service.
Nuremberg could have had nothing on this scale, not even with the spectre and spectacle of Von Ribbentrop twitching and turning on the rope for more than a quarter of an hour as a result of the incompetence of the Executioner.
The image of an abattoir kindled an idea at the back of my mind. I closed my eyes and stood very still, waiting for the mist to clear. It did soon enough. Labuschagne was still explaining something to the Judge, but I was not concentrating. Something Marianne Schlebusch, our forensic psychologist, had said reared up from my subconscious.
A small minority of people suffer mental breakdown after one traumatic experience. But only a very small minority do not suffer mental breakdown after prolonged exposure to trauma.
I thought of Leon Labuschagne, seventeen or eighteen years old, and his descent into the abyss. They might have hanged twenty-two men in one day way back in 1957, but that was one traumatic event. And the register did not disclose any other multiple hangings that year. But Leon Labuschagne had been exposed to multiple hangings on numerous occasions, and then, with the respite that the December holidays were to bring, the trauma escalated in weight and frequency. It was as if the system wanted to deal him a crushing series of blows:
four on 26 November
seven on 3 December
seven on 8 December
seven on 9 December
seven on 10 December
Take that, Leon! Smack smack smack!
I was still staring at the register when the Judge announced that we would have a half-hour adjournment. He said he had to sentence someone in the adjacent court. I wondered if it was to be a death sentence.
We went for a walk on the Square. My mind was elsewhere while Wierda recited the facts of the Delport case to Roshnee. I did not know what to make of the case. He had confessed openly and then tried to retract. He did nothing realistic to get away from the scene. In fact, he went looking for the body of his victim. It is almost as if he was so ashamed of what he had done that he co-operated with the police in order to expedite his execution. It was only when a lawyer looked at his case – the attorney must have been as baffled as I was, thinking that insanity could be the only defence – that Del
port tried to retract his confession and started to put up a struggle for his own life.
It was not a happy conclusion for me to draw. Do we, as lawyers, try to save our clients’ lives when they have decided to give them up? My own client had given every indication of having surrendered, of being quite content to receive any sentence the Court administered. What then was I doing here, reading these cases?
V3574 Johannes Stefanus Delport
23
Delport faced three charges in the High Court. He had indecently assaulted and murdered a four-year-old girl, Charmaine Opperman, in a small town called Frankfort.
Frankfort is an hour’s drive south of Johannesburg. The Wilge River flows through the town and on its banks there is a popular recreation area. Delport arrived here looking for work. After finding a position at a local firm of panel beaters, he moved in with a Mrs Elizabeth Opperman and her family, which included two small children, both girls. Within a week, on Sunday 20 October 1985, Delport asked Mrs Opperman if he could take her youngest daughter, Charmaine, to church with him. Charmaine was four years old. An arrangement was made that Delport and Charmaine would be taken to church by Gideon van Heerden, Mrs Opperman’s companion, who would also fetch them after the service, at noon. When van Heerden returned at twelve to fetch them as arranged they were not there. He returned home thinking that Delport and Charmaine might have walked home.
The pastor’s wife, Mrs Thalita de Beer, saw Delport leaving the church at about eleven-thirty. He gave her a false name when she asked if he had recently moved to Frankfort. A Mrs Henning, who lived near the river, was at home at this time. Her dog started barking uncontrollably at about a quarter to twelve. She went outside to investigate and saw Delport and Charmaine walking in the direction of the river. About fifteen minutes later she heard a small child scream and wail. Then the crying stopped abruptly. The crying had come from the direction of the river. At half past twelve a seventeen-year-old schoolboy, Frederic Buys, walked past Delport who was sleeping at the foot of the steps leading down to the picnic area at the river’s edge. A hymn book lay on the steps next to him. He saw Delport still lying in the same place later in the afternoon, at about three o’clock. Frederic saw Delport leave at about four o’clock and return within minutes with Mrs Opperman and Mr van Heerden. They were looking for Charmaine.
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