http://www.polity.org.za/article/freedom-and-the-law-2015-06-30
Monthly Archives: June 2015
PORT ELIZABETH LAUNCH OF RECOVERING DEMOCRACY AND SEMINAR ON NON-RACIALISM, AUGUST 5-6
PORT ELIZABETH LAUNCH OF RECOVERING DEMOCRACY IN SOUTH AFRICA Continue reading
Raymond Suttner: The Bashir Affair, international obligations, freedom and the law (Polity video)
Raymond Suttner: Re-reading the Freedom Charter @ 60 (Polity)
Nomboniso Gasa: State repeats mistakes in third attempt at courts bill
Raymond Suttner: Ethical and Emancipatory leadership (Polity video interview)
Raymond Suttner: Meaning and significance of June 16 Uprising (Polity video interview)
Raymond Suttner: Bashir: South African government flouts international obligations and undermines freedom under the law
Raymond Suttner: My arrest 40 years ago, one year before Soweto uprising in 1975
My arrest 40 years ago today, one year before Soweto uprising in 1975
On 17 June 1975 I was first arrested. Below is a description of that arrest in 1975, taken from my book Inside Apartheid’s Prison, published in 2001 (available on the internet from some book outlets. The overseas publisher was Ocean press, who still market it but local co-publisher UKZN press stopped distributing it some years ago, although it is still in print).
CHAPTER 1
In Police Hands
IT WAS what every political activist dreaded, and it happened to me at about 10pm on June 17, 1975. The police had blocked the driveway of my home — and momentarily I did not realize who they were. I took out a cosh to protect myself, but after the police surrounded me and identified themselves, I threw it in the back of the car. They wanted my car in the garage, but would not let me switch on the ignition. I sat at the wheel as they pushed it into the garage.
There were about 30 of them, and they immediately set to work searching through my private belongings.
For some hours, I had been posting illegal political pamphlets in Durban and Pietermaritzburg. I was thoroughly exhausted. I just wanted to get to bed and rest — I had just been pleasantly anticipating a bath and the sleep I needed so badly.
The preceding months had been very stressful. I had been preparing a special edition of 10,000 copies of the underground pamphlet Vukani!/Awake!, including a translation of the Freedom Charter into Zulu. Each copy of the newspaper had to be painstakingly produced then inserted into an envelope. And each of these had to be stamped and secretly posted.
My routine had been to give my lectures at Natal University, Durban and then drive home to sit at the typewriter, operate my duplicating machine or prepare envelopes and put them in suitcases. I would get to sleep very late and repeat the same routine the next day.
Now, I was in police hands. This intrusion into my privacy was to become characteristic of my life as a political prisoner for the long years to follow. From the moment I was arrested, there was nothing about me that the state did not want to know or have access to. There was nothing I could shut away from the police and say this is “not your business.” The law now gave them unfettered access to every corner of my life.
One of the police present was Major Stadtler, later to become a supposed expert on “terrorism.” He seemed fairly affable and tried to engage me in discussion about my clandestine activities while the others searched.
The police clearly savored their victory. They had spent many nights tracking down the irritant who had been issuing illegal pamphlets. Now they had me. I remember they made me ask permission to go to the toilet. Even there, I was constantly under their gaze.
South Africa had laws against assault, but they provided no protection for someone in my situation. I knew I could be held for long periods without scrutiny, without access to lawyers or other people from “outside.” Numerous court cases, at every level of the judiciary, had confirmed exclusive access of the police to detainees, even where assaults were alleged. And, as I expected, and soon found out for myself, they did abuse their powers.
The events of that night marked a crucial turning point. From that moment on, I passed from being an independent person and fell under direct control of the South African Apartheid State. In the years that followed, which saw me in and out of jail and detention, I would not be free of police intrusions. Even now — when this chapter in our history is over — I have habits that persist from this period of constant surveillance.
After they searched my house for some hours, the police took me to Security Police Headquarters, then in Fisher Street, Durban. The offices and rooms were bare — because they were used almost exclusively for interrogation.
I had never been in these headquarters before — although I had seen similarly furnished offices at the so-called Commissioners of “Bantu Administration” in Durban, where baldly numbered desks were marked with government stamps.
The Commissioners of Bantu Administration were presiding officers in courts which decided cases between Africans (then called “Bantu” by the government) concerning customary law. They also implemented the notorious pass laws that made the free movement of Africans subject to severe restrictions and criminal penalties.
Everything in these functional rooms was meant to move things along as quickly as possible — with a swift conversion of accused persons into convicted offenders. The furnishings were as bare as the summary justice dispensed here. No one spent much time in these rooms.
Long before my own arrest, I had read and heard about various people being tortured by South African police, particularly after the banning of the ANC in 1960. When I became involved in illegal activities, I knew I faced the prospect of being assaulted, or even killed, in detention. In preparing for my life as an underground activist, I had met several people who had been brutally tortured.
An array of legislation had been developed by the apartheid regime that shielded the police from public scrutiny, and it became routine practice to try to extract information and confessions through various forms of assault. Generally, courts accepted these confessions and refused to give credence to allegations of torture.
In the period before my own deployment, I tried to prepare myself as much as possible for coping with solitary confinement and physical torture. All of this was of some assistance when I found myself in the hands of the South African Security Police. Terrifying as it was, I was nevertheless on familiar ground. I had been warned, trained, prepared. It was terrible, but nothing my torturers said or did was surprising.
Perhaps I am underestimating the impact that torture has had on me; that in “coping” with it, I do not fully appreciate its damaging effects. But what concerned me back then, apart from getting by, was avoiding the betrayal of my comrades and the liberation movement. To be successful, I had to have some capacity to determine events — even in a situation that was so singularly weighted against me. Although I was a lone captive, having some idea of what to expect — and knowing something of my fate — gave me a fighting chance, however slight.
On the other hand, there was nothing in my own life experience to prepare me for the ordeal of falling into the hands of a group of single-minded sadists who, in the final analysis, felt no glimmer of sympathy for me as a fellow human being.
Indeed, I had grown up in a family where violence had no place. And I had never personally experienced violence. But I was now in an environment that was based on, and sustained by, violence.
In 1975 I was a young, very idealistic revolutionary, and I was prepared to die for my beliefs. I felt a strong connection with all those who had gone before me, and with all those who had faced similar tortures; and I felt a responsibility to the traditions of our liberation movement. That is what gave me strength. That is what made my resistance possible. And that is why I did not simply succumb to torture or lapse into despair.
Writing this now, 24 years after my arrest, I don’t seem as single-minded as I was back then. I now tend to see myself as having been rather naïve. All the same, it remains true that single-mindedness was the weapon that got me through.
Mashatile distances from Nhleko: Maimane misses wider issues
Is there a distinction between the ANC as organisation and the ANC as government? Continue reading
Raymond Suttner: Compassion, connectedness and cowardice (Polity interview)
The summary under the video title is wrong. It relates to the voting of MPs over Nkandla and more generally to people being rooted in the needs of the oppressed and when that is ruptured
http://polity.org.za/article/compassion-connectedness-and-cowardice-2015-06-09
Raymond Suttner: Significance of change of NUM leadership for SA politics (Polity video interview)
Raymond Suttner: What type of leadership do we need to reinforce democracy and build an emancipatory project? (Polity)
Raymond Suttner: Non-violence: purely a tactic or also a principle? (Polity video interview)
Raymond Suttner: Are we handing too many political questions to the courts (Polity video interview)
Raymond Suttner: Self-respect and losing dignity: why do people cave in when the danger has passed?
[Further to my article on loss of self respect over Nkandla:]
The way I see it is that the bravery, dignity and the weight placed on self-respect in the struggle was connected with how these people related to those who experienced oppression, that they embraced their pain as their own, their connectedness. Now it is interesting that the moment when they lapse, when they cave in is not one of danger or where they are being beaten up by the ‘boers’. But this is a time when they turn their backs on the people from whom they have come, when they support money being diverted from the poor towards the benefit of the president.
They simultaneously betray that trust and lose their sense of self-respect or dignity by doing what is shameful and shameless in endorsing Nkandla. There is this simultaneity or that we see for the first time that their hearts have gone cold, that they no longer care about the people from whom they have come or with whom their lives has been so closely tied
WB Yeats in a famous poem writes that too much suffering can turn the heart into a stone. But too much gorging or the hope of gorging or the hope of getting high positions or needing to retain these can also harden people’s hearts and make them indifferent to the cries of the poor and hungry.
So the reasons why people came into the struggle was often related to dignity and self-respect, that of themselves but very often seeing the meting out of indignities to others, as in the case I cite of Matthews Ngcobo and his father being humiliated in front of the family.
The way people conducted themselves as freedom fighters was emblematic of the weight placed on self-respect and dignity. That is why they were very conscious of how they conducted themselves, their bearing and their own dignity. So the connection with the oppressed is now less powerful or broken and then it is easier to also lose one’s own self-respect and dignity and do things that are shameful and shameless. It is possible then to suspend one’s critical consciousness and simply endorse things that one knows are not right.
This is one of the ways I believe we can understand how people have acted over Nkandla
Foreigners used as ATMs by police
The headline I have put at the top is that of the Star hard copy edition