Beverley Roos-Muller, Hunting the Seven: How the Gugulethu Seven Assassins were Exposed (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2024)
THE ATTEMPTED ambush of a police van in Gugulethu on 3 March 1986 resulted in the deaths of seven MK terrorists. Heroic security forces suffered barely a scratch even though only one of them was kitted out for a gunfight. According to the authorities each terrorist was killed by a single officer and the captured weaponry was immediately displayed by jovial police. An inquest, all in Afrikaans, ensued at Wynberg court since South Africa subscribed to legal formalities. Police statements were formulaic with all the signs of being authored by one person. And the number of weapons had mysteriously multiplied. The finding that there was no criminal liability was a foregone conclusion as magistrates worked hand in glove with the police whose narrative was invariably believed, evidence notwithstanding. A cowed press generally accepted such verdicts without demur. But one obvious question did remain: since the ambush had self-evidently failed, why were arrests of the terrorists not made? Why were the terrorists all dead? And why was the operation apparently commanded by a relatively junior officer from Pretoria?
In this skilfully compiled narrative, Beverley Roos-Muller uncovers the truth in a process akin to peeling an onion. The full story took over ten years to emerge: everything claimed by the police was total fabrication although some of it endured. This was a Vlakplaas death squad mission. Under the command of Riaan Bellingan, operatives and a white van with a stash of arms were transferred to a base at Koeberg. Suitable locals were recruited from the murder and robbery squad, sidelining the local security police. An askari lured a group of young men from Gugulethu into the van, probably with job promises, and drove it into a police ambush triggered with a dud grenade.
Orders were to eliminate everyone and maintain secrecy. The obvious aim was to deter growing UDF activism in the Western Cape. But there was another motive: to create and record an impression of ruthless anti-terrorist efficiency to attract increased funding. And those funds would be subject to large-scale embezzlement. This exercise in murderous deception was so successful it became a template for Vlakplaas operations elsewhere; what Roos-Muller describes as monetised murder from the heart of darkness of apartheid South Africa.
The truth might never have emerged; another poorly documented engagement, a footnote from a low-level civil war. But shortly after the faked anti-terrorist action a Cape Times crime reporter appeared on the scene. Chris Bateman, a fluent Xhosa speaker, interviewed three eyewitnesses from adjacent hostels. Other witnesses were later identified from a school bus. All had seen cold-blooded murder and their information cast grave doubt on the police version. And the Cape Times had an editor and news editor in the two Tonies ‒ Heard and Weaver ‒ prepared to risk publication of an alternative view. Weaver went so far as to broadcast it via the BBC World Service. His insight had particular resonance: he had covered the depravity of Koevoet in Namibia and was familiar with their brand of black ops; and Vlakplaas under Eugene de Kock was an offspring of that culture.
Nonetheless, the State held all the aces; but then it made a major and needless error born of over-confidence and vindictiveness. It charged Weaver with the clear intent of intimidating journalists into silence and accused him under the Police Act of spreading false information. The implications of this caused widespread concern in the anti-apartheid movement and some heroic characters emerged in Weaver’s defence: the Progressive Federal Party MP Tian van Merwe, pathologists Johan van der Spuy and David Klatzow and lawyers Jeremy Gauntlett and Gordon Rushton. They had a mountain to climb because all the ballistic evidence including lab reports had been destroyed. But they did have inquest records and photographs plus incredibly brave eyewitnesses, so the two pathologists were able to piece together a remarkably accurate picture of the action correlating injury and location. There was a high incidence of head wounds and shots delivered at close range. The bodies were silent witness to the massive lie that seven police had killed seven terrorists in a shootout. It had simply been mass murder, an act of terror. Slow-witted, lying police with stories that began to unravel, some fingering weapons in court, were now pitted against agile legal minds backed by forensic skill. It became clear there had been no terrorist ambush and that pictures of bodies with weapons were contrived.
And this backed up Weaver’s defence: he was broadcasting the well-founded beliefs of the victims’ families. His acquittal in September 1987 was a rare triumph for those opposed to the apartheid regime. But South Africa remained a police state and Heard had already lost his job. The Weaver case led to a second inquest with a result barely different from the first: events in Gugulethu in March 1986 had been an anti-terrorist operation for which no one was culpable.
It was, however, the first case to appear before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Cape Town in 1996 as befitted the only foray of Vlakplaas into the region. The police subpoenaed to appear were supremely confident and stuck to their story of self-defence. However, investigators had uncovered a stash of hidden documents that included encrypted messages referring to section C suggesting a link to De Kock. The clinching proof came when one of its operatives, Thapelo Mtolo, successfully sought forgiveness from mothers of the Seven. He confirmed that the latter had not been armed, although there remains doubt about one of them, and were random victims. Then a police video was unearthed including footage of a car registered to Bellingan with a boot-load of weapons identical to those connected to the alleged terrorists.
Bellingan appeared before the TRC, arrogant and angry and showing no remorse, although he received amnesty. The Cape police involved simply melted into history. A monument to the dead was erected at the entrance to Gugulethu, but it has weathered badly and been vandalised.
It has taken this excellent book to remind South Africa of a grim episode. But it also speaks to a bigger picture, a government that used terrorism to maintain power; and which was supported by a vast majority of white South Africans. Few of the perpetrators, politicians or security forces, faced any sort of reckoning. The failure of the TRC to take matters to a logical conclusion weakens South African democracy significantly.