Child of apartheid meets Prime Evil

When Anemari Jansen first met Eugene de Kock at Pretoria Central in 2011, she had no idea that it would change her life. It brought her face to face with the horrors of apartheid and forced her to reassess her identity as an Afrikaner Here is an extract from her book…

It is mid-winter and bitterly cold when, on that day in 2011, I first drive into the parking area of the notorious Pretoria Central Prison, the prison known today as Kgosi Mampuru II Correctional Centre.

On just the previous weekend, political scientist Piet Croucamp had told a group of mutual friends at the Full Stop Café in Johannesburg of his close bond with Eugene de Kock. He had spoken of his own visits to the prison, of Eugene’s razor-sharp intelligence, of thinking it unjust that Eugene was the only person still sitting in jail for doing the apartheid government’s dirty work.

To be honest, like most of the people at that crowded table, I hadn’t thought about Eugene de Kock for years. To me, he was the man with the spectacles we used to see on TV. I do remember hearing, shortly before his court case in 1995, that he was one of the most highly decorated policemen in the old South African Police (SAP).

Dinner conversation turned to how, as one of the founder members of the notorious police unit, Koevoet, he had survived hundreds of contacts on the border, to how he had ruled the infamous Vlakplaas unit with an iron fist. My curiosity was immediately piqued.

While the conversation had likely been coincidental, it happened at a personal turning point. That year, I found myself in the no man’s land of an unlived life and resolved to challenge myself. That same evening I asked Piet whether I could accompany him to Pretoria Central one Sunday. A one-off visit, I had thought: just to see what a jail looks like inside.

Piet agreed. On the very next Sunday, he met me in the parking lot. There was row upon row of wooden benches in the reception area, swarms of visitors queueing to fill in visitor forms, and prison warders – men and women – in brown uniforms. I recall the strange experience of being signed in and passing through the inspection point.

After being searched, we waited at the back of the reception area for a small bus that transported us some 500 metres to Medium-B. There we waited for another half an hour and were searched again. Eventually, we moved through the final gate into the biting cold of a quadrangle under an awning.

And suddenly he appeared: the man with the spectacles. Or, to be more precise, the man without any spectacles, who now preferred contact lenses. He walked towards us from the holding area where the prisoners waited for their visitors: a tall, well-built, upright man. He looked different, moved differently, from the prisoners around him. Purposeful. Resolute.

He sat down. Piet quickly introduced him, and off he went. The words poured out of him. There was no chance of interrupting his stream of stories and remarks with questions. He told of events in prison, of Koevoet memories, and remarked on the politics of the day, interspersing everything with his unique humour.

In a blink of an eye, our allotted hour was over. Exhausted and overstimulated, I sank into my car. I recalled virtually nothing of what he had said, but burnt into my memory is how the left corner of his mouth tightened bitterly when he spoke of certain things.

I drove back home to my husband and children, to a safe, warm house, and it hit me like a thunderbolt that I knew nothing about the times and events that had clattered like gunfire from his mouth. Had I been fast asleep in the 1980s and the early 1990s? Born in 1964, I had grown up in apartheid’s zenith. Thinking back to my youth, I am surprised and shocked at how uninformed and naïve I was. Did I not want to know why our country was burning or was I just blind?

Each year, on December 16 (Geloftedag, or Day of the Vow), us children sat in Old Alberton’s muggy Voortrekker Hall between people who smelt of talcum powder and silk stockings and tight suits. We were told to pray and thank God: we were His chosen people.

With most of my friends, I had been committed to the Dutch Reformed Church. At night, the streets were safe. Even our garage party gatecrashers were harmless. During assembly in the Hoërskool Alberton quadrangle, the matric boys would sometimes sing, “Hey hey hey, he’s a wanker”. It took me years to find out what a wanker was.

We had a domestic worker who lived in a maid’s room behind our house. Nesta cooked, cleaned, washed and ironed for all the Venters of Fleur Street. It shames me that I can’t remember her surname. Samuel looked after the garden. They both drank their coffee from tin mugs and had their own plates and knives, stored under the sink. We called them by their names; they called me and my sister nonna Anemari and Annette and my brother kleinbasie Hennie. My father and mother’s word was law.

I had no idea my father was a Broederbond member. He worked for Armscor and was overseas for months on end. My mother got a pistol and kept the safe key in her dressing-gown pocket. She attended shooting practice organised by local reservists. At school, we attended Youth Preparedness (“jeugweerbaarheid”) classes. On Fridays, the boys wore cadet uniforms and marched on the rugby field.

In history class, we spent hours discussing European history and “natural segregation” that appeared to be a solution for South Africa.

Boys… now that was all my friends and I were really interested in. We had endless discussions about relationships, about the party we would attend on the weekend and how meaningful it would be to have a guy “close dance” with you.

Some of our friends went to the army, called up for two years of national service. When Arthur Froneman and Neville Schoeman died during basic training, death was suddenly among us.

Eugene de Kock’s 1981 was a completely different world. That year he was involved in a number of bloody fights. As one of the founder members of the SAP’s covert Operation Koevoet, he had killed more people than he can – or wants to – remember.

By 1982, our group of school friends had scattered far and wide. Some of us went to university. Life got exciting; scholarships were plentiful. There were politically active students, but I did not move in those circles.

Life went on. I got married and, by 1989, I was playing house with my firstborn, a boy. We lived in rural Venda, then in the sleepy backwater of Louis Trichardt. I had no political awareness.

In October 1989, Butana Almond Nofomela was on death row for the murder of a white farmer. He would be hanged. His security police colleagues refused to save his skin, so he decided to speak out about Vlakplaas. The very next month, Dirk Coetzee, a former Vlakplaas commanding officer, dropped the bomb about the Vlakplaas death squads in interviews with the Vrye Weekblad’s Jacques Pauw.

My husband is a civil engineer. We moved to Shinyungwe in the Caprivi; the Golden Highway, which links Rundu and Katima Mulilo, was to be upgraded. From 1992 to 1994, a prefabricated structure in a road camp was home for me and my two sons, aged four and one.

A few years previously, the Border War had still raged there. We had no radio or television. That’s not an excuse, I know. But I had no political awareness.

We moved again – for the 10th time in as many years – to another rented house. We came back to South Africa just in time for the first democratic election in 1994. In 1995, after the birth of our daughter Carina, we moved yet again – this time to Salt Rock on the KwaZulu-Natal north coast.

Then, the move to Alberton. I became ensnared in suburban monotony, the comfort zone in which the right friends, church groups and activities, and the achievements of your primary school children, determine your status. I became bored, didn’t fit in. For years it felt as if I were in no man’s land.

Until the visit to Eugene de Kock in June 2011, when something shifted in my consciousness. Our blood-soaked past punched me in the stomach. I began to wish that I had known, thought, done more. Thirty years later, I want to recoil in shame over my ignorance, my apathy, my blind acceptance of the illusion of normality while a low-intensity war raged in our townships and we fought a full-scale war in what was then South West Africa.

By my fourth visit, I had decided I wanted to learn more about Eugene as a person. I hoped that in the process I would also get to know more about the era in which he had worked as a policeman.

The hour-long visits were always intense. One talked quickly, focused acutely, breathed shallowly. Then it was time to say goodbye again. Who is the real Eugene de Kock? He is a complex individual. It didn’t take me long to realise there is more to him than the media’s label of Prime Evil. I began to read up on the Bush War and the apartheid era.

I collected information from the handwritten notes he had compiled for the psychologists and a criminologist during his trial, and read the diaries he made available to me, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) reports, and newspaper clippings. And I listened to family members’ and former colleagues’ recollections and anecdotes.

Twice a month at visiting time, for three years, I would make notes of our conversations on my arm – paper was prohibited. Back in my car, the first thing I would do, would be to recall our discussion and, using the key words on my arm, write down parts of it.

I am not a psychologist, a historian or a journalist. What I am is a child of apartheid. One who wanted to understand how certain things could have happened.
So, I began to travel the country, following in Eugene’s footsteps and trying to reconstruct his history, piece by piece. On a quest for greater comprehension.

Eugene de Kock: Assassin for the State by Anemari Jansen is published by Tafelberg at a recommended retail price of R250.
– The Star