I grew up in I was born in Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape in 1958, which makes me 10 days short of my 50 th birthday as we speak.

Transcription

1 1 Matthew Walton LRC Oral History Project First erview : 19 th August 2008 Second erview: 4 th September 2008 This is an interview with Matthew Walton and its Tuesday the 19 th of August (2008). Matthew on behalf of SALS Foundation we really want to thank you for agreeing to participate in the LRC Oral History Project. I wondered whether we could start the interview if you could talk about your early childhood memories, growing up in South Africa under apartheid and where you think your sense of social justice and injustice developed? I grew up in I was born in Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape in 1958, which makes me 10 days short of my 50 th birthday as we speak. Happy birthday for ten days time! And I grew up, was schooled in my very early years in Port Elizabeth and then was sent to St Andrews College in Grahamstown from when I was about nine as a boarder. That experience for me, coming from a broken home, sent to boarding school, sensitive child, not good at sport, in a rough tough environment with the sons of farmers, I was desperately unhappy at school, I hated it, I was bullied, I was wimpish, I wasn t good at sport. And I think that is the formation of why I that s the reason I ended up at the LRC, because I spent, from when I was eight or nine, until I was about fourteen or fifteen, living in fear of these big boys who would bully me. And living in a school environment which was antediluvian, you know, it was like Victorian penal colony type stuff. It was just the interview isn t concerned with my schooling but it was it was a brutal, brutish, nasty, as I say, free-range bullying. We were hit with whips By teachers? No, by boys. Well we were hit by the teachers, we were caned with bamboo canes for infringements such as talking after lights-out in the dormitory, or such hideous crimes against humanity. And and those beatings would take place in public in front of all the other boys, so you d have to, as a ten year old, bend over on a cold winter s morning, expose your buttocks to the house master who would hit you with a bamboo cane two or three times, depending on the gravity of your offence. So and then there was a lot of bullying by the because there wasn t proper control of the school boys by the staff, there was a lot of bullying. And we were really, as I say, me and my friends were terrorised by the older guys. Made to run the gauntlet, hit with cricket bats, bend over naked, had darts thrown into us, that kind of stuff. So it was like kind of out near the far edge so I think I suspect that that s the reason why I had such a strong feeling about bullies. So, as to my as to my perception growing up in apartheid South Africa, it didn t occur to me for a long time. I didn t have any

2 conception. My mother was quite racist. My brothers and my father were more polite, if you like. I wouldn t say they were liberated from racism but they were gentlemanly enough not to be overtly racist. And so there was never an ethos in the home of speaking about people who weren t our pigmentation in a derogatory fashion at all. And so the two women and the man who worked in the household were treated respectfully. Probably paid a pittance but nonetheless. So I didn t grow up in a racist home. Well, not in an overtly racist home. I don t remember when I first started realising that there was like something wrong. I know what a key moment was, which was in high school in I don t actually recall all of this but what happened in that year, obviously there was at the Soweto uprising and we were given some assignment or whatever to write a poem. And I wrote a poem called Untitled. And I don t remember how I wrote it or what I was feeling at the time, but I wrote this poem and it was about Soweto. It said, you know, in Soweto there s Soweto is a word in a blustering headline, kind of thing, but our world is a completely different world of the house masters and are we going to get pudding on Sundays and isn t it weird inaudible but in Soweto, you know, the fire fell out of the sky and people are killed. So I wrote a poem like along those lines. And the reason I know that is because it happened to get into a thing called English Alive, a publication for English stuff. And so obviously then, as I say, I don t have a clear recollection because my mother died around that time and I d been kicked out of home by my step-mother and stuff like that, so there was a lot of other stuff going on but obviously by then I realised that there was there was shit happening and it was bad there was bad stuff going on and we hadn t been told the full story. So and that by the time I got to the army a few months later, I was conscripted into the infantry in early 1977, and that was the most desperate time ever, I spent fourteen months there; I was called up for twelve months and in my eighth month they extended the period to two years. So but to those who had been accepted by tertiary institution you could be released. But from my first days in the army I thought, hang on, this is seriously bad. I teamed up with a couple of guys, we called ourselves the gyppo squad gyppo being the ducking and diving and getting away with everything you can, kind of squad. And by then my I was probably racist against Afrikaners but I we had an intense dislike of the government, of Vorster, of Nationalism, of military service and the whole panoply of stuff by then. I m happy to say, I m delighted to say that I wasn t caught up in that at all, I just thought it was a load of rubbish by then. So much so that at one point, at the end of my basic training they were recruiting candidates for officer courses, in the infantry, officer courses where they sent you down to Oudtshoorn and you spent nine months learning to kill people in a variety of ways, and then they sent you to kill people, indeed. So, my mates and I thought, this is no way we re going to do this, but because we had matrics and because we could walk and talk and speak English, with our educational level we were way above the average infantry soldier. So we were told you will apply for officer training courses, and you will complete the interview you will complete the questionnaire and you will go do the interview. And that was fine, and they had a little test that you had to write and it was too embarrassing to fail the test. But the end of the test were some questions and one of which was, what do you think of the political situation in South Africa? So then we went to town. We just said, John Vorster is a lunatic, the Nats are all complete idiots, we want one I think we said one man, one vote, didn t say one person in those days we want one man, one vote, and that s the only way forward, kind of thing. And of course we didn t go on officer s course because we were politically suspect, so we got out of that. But that whole military experience with its intense macho 2

3 3 rubbish, and its intense it s like a climate of hardness and hatred, and always being told: your job is to kill kaffirs. Kill kaffirs. That s what we re going to do. The terrorists and the kaffirs you ve got to kill them. And learning how to do that and practising shooting them and practising enfilades and ambushes and helicopter assaults and that sort of stuff. And I was on my way to go and kill people. They were going to send me up to the border between Namibia and Angola and they were going to send us out to shoot people. But fortunately I was offered a reprieve that they d put together a thing called Sake or Civil Action, to teach: win the hearts and minds of the local population in Namibia, in a variety of ways including teaching. And this was a godsend for us. So we applied for this, were accepted and we were sent to the Caprivi Strip to go and teach in a local school there. And I ll never forget, we had to teach in our uniforms and they we had no training in how to teach, they would just assume because we had got a matric, I could teach English. So I was sent right at this place, which was appalling on the banks of the Zambezi, we were sent to this school, three or four of us, in our uniforms with our rifles, and we were ushered in by these you know, the permanent staff at the school were, you know, wizened Afrikaners who were at the desperate dead-end of you can imagine, if you were a teacher in those days and you were posted to Katima, what a place to be. Am I talking too long? No, not at all. Um I walked into the class and it had this sea of very black faces, sort of fifteen, sixteen year olds, and on the board, on my first day, one of the kids had chalked up there in big letters, SWAPO. So I was, now what am I doing here? And all this stuff was for me very formative and I I thought, I mean, I m now like seventeen, maybe eighteen, I forget like I was a kid, I was a child, and I m with a bunch of other children and they re taunting me, you know, I m the racist oppressor there with my uniform, with my gun, and what am I going to do? So I thought I thought I ve got to try and relate to these people as a person. So I said, ok, you see this thing, this is a gun, I m going to go and put it in the corner, I m forced to carry it around there. So what I m going to do now is I m going to ask what we ll start off by doing is each person will have a chance every day to clean the blackboard for us. So I said, would you be so kind as to clean the blackboard and we can start talking. And that s what we did, we talked. A lot. Tried to get through the curriculum which was completely unsuitable and very Anglo oriented, and stuff like that. I ended up teaching an extra matric class, people who were doing matric part-time rather, and I had to teach them English, and I was sent in the middle of the night, I can t believe it, back from the camp to the school, and this is when there s you know, there d been SWAPO guerrillas were everywhere, people had been killed, and I just like went out there it s weird to think that I nowadays, I d never do it. I would walk across the veld to the school and meet these three or four adults who were desperate to get a matric, and I was to teach them English. And what did I have to teach them, I had to teach them T.S. Elliot s Murder in the Cathedral. I mean, sorry, fuck me man, but really sorry about that, I mean, can you imagine, these folk had lived there all their lives, and some idiot, somewhere, has prescribed to them that they ve got to read T.S. Elliot s Murder in the Cathedral. So I started saying, well of course, perhaps we should discuss the background to this thing. You know, the socio-political and historical context of the play. So I m getting them my minute knowledge on England in that period I don t even remember what the period is and it occurred to me after

4 4 about ten minutes that these folk are being very polite, but they don t know what I m talking about. So I say, ok, you guys know where England is? We re talking about England, we know where England is. No, they didn t know where England was. These folk had had no they hadn t had the opportunity to be exposed to the outside world at all, so we tossed out Murder in the Cathedral and we did stuff like, I showed them pictures of Johannesburg and said, you know these tall buildings, you know, lots of people live in these places, and they re called flats or apartments, stuff like that. So we did basic kind of skills stuff, as far as I could as a seventeen year old. So that was a formative and that was there that I you know, we got it was my absolute hatred of the Nationalist government was entrenched in that period up there, seeing people being sent down out there was one time um hey, ya that they we were on the banks of a river, our place where we were was a place called Katima Morela. It was half a click away from the river, and the river was one of the access points that SWAPO guerrillas used to cross into the Caprivi. And across the river from us was a town I forget its name a Zambian town and at the end of every month, the Zambian soldiers got paid and they got drunk, and then they would mortar us. They would fire mortar shells across the river and usually they didn t hit anything. But, one day, they zeroed in on the camp and the mortar shells were falling thick and fast in the camp and the commandant of the camp gave the order to retaliate and there were batteries of heavy guns and there were tanks and they were all holed up and took positions across the river and they blasted that town, they blasted it. You never heard of stuff like that in the newspapers. I watched them, I watched these things called Elands with 90mm cannon, going to pre-prepared emplacements and firing across the river into this town with women, children, innocent civilians, they blasted it, for half an hour. And I thought and watching all these boys, my age, exulting in this, in having done this, I thought, this is poison, this is just so bad, it s appalling. And it was just, I thought I ve got to get out of here, just got to get out of here. So when I got a ticket out to go to university, when that opportunity came to go, to leave the army if I was accepted by a university, I just I got a mate, I said, please send me up an application for UCT. Because I d been to Cape Town once and I d decided that was my spot. And um and then I didn t have a clue what to study, so I didn t choose law out of any I didn t have a calling to be a lawyer. It was a complete fluke. Because I was sitting in the army, I had to get out of there, and I got these prospectus books from UCT and I thought, now what can I study that I can actually do something? That I ll understand. I looked at the commerce courses and stats and everything. I had maths for matric but I thought, hey that s not me. And this other stuff looks alright, it s got like English and Sociology, and a bit of law. Law sounds like it could be the right ok literally it was like that. Filled in the application form frantically, sent it off, got accepted by UCT, gave the stuff to the authorities, and waited. And waited and waited and waited and waited. And eventually one day we were told you can rock and roll. And so we left. Flew out on what they called the Flossie in those days. There was nothing better in a troopie s world than what we called the Flossie which was the Hercules troop carrying plane, and they flew in, and you got on board and they flew out. Back to where people wore jeans and where you could buy hamburgers and stuff. Ya so so that s how I came to study law. At UCT?

5 5 At UCT. Because I liked I loved Cape Town, I d been here once in a school play and I loved it. And I became a lawyer entirely by accident. There was no preplanning, I hadn t given it any real thought, not that I can recall, and I ended up at UCT studying law. One of the things that did attract me to it is that I d done Latin for matric and Latin was one of the requirements for law, I said well I can do that subject, so maybe this is what I ought to do. I just knew I had to get out of there and because I knew I wouldn t get family support, I wouldn t get any you know, I had to earn a living somehow. And so I had to get a qualification that I could use. And the lawyer sounded like a good idea at the time. And at UCT I wasn t an activist. So you weren t involved with NUSAS? No. Not at all. I was there was one incident where I became, in inverted commas, politically involved, but I wasn t at UCT it was the red level, the big political activists were the red level guys, Tony Weaver and the boys, they were the big politicos, RAG, radical, now and then the socialist stuff that was going on at the time. And me I wanted a girlfriend, I wanted to get a car, I wanted to have sex with girls, I wanted to rock and roll really. I loved music, I love, love I don t play anything but I love music, I wanted to go dancing and listen to music and do what studying I had to do. So hey, I mean, I wasn t politically involved at all. In my third year, I was three years in res, a res called Leo Marquard Hall, in my third year the house committee, the resident s committee for students, decided to invite to the annual res dinner a guest speaker and they decided to invite the State President, P W Botha, as the guest speaker. I was aware enough and in tune enough (laughs) to know that I was never going to go to the same eating establishment as a as someone like that. So we tried to organise me and another couple of other guys tried to organise a boycott of this dinner by the students, and it failed dismally, there were like fifteen of us, maybe twenty who didn t go, as an act of boycott and then we later organised an alternative annual dinner where we served the staff, the kitchen staff I know it sounds a bit twee but that s what we did. And that was our form of protest. And around that there were a couple of mass meetings on campus and I suddenly found myself thrown into addressing one of these mass meetings about why we were doing this, and I didn t really know what to say except to say, we think this is a bad dude and we don t like him (laughs) so, I m not going to have supper with him. And then that experience is another reminder because campus life was very much a micro, an unreal microcosm in the greater scheme of things, and occasionally the outside world would intrude. There d be boycotts in the townships, you d see sometimes smoke of disturbances or riots going on elsewhere, and some of my friends were some of my classmates were very activist and were always encouraging us to boycott, go out in sympathy, spend time doing this and that and the other thing, join this committee or anything. And I remember having a discussion with one of them, who s still a good friend of mine, and I just said to him, I said: you know, it s all well and good for you but what are you going to do in December? He said: I m going to my family on holiday. I said: yes, I know, but I ll be working, I ll be looking for a job to pay my way. No-one is paying for me to do this stuff. I m going to stay. Then so I qualified at the end of 82 am I going on too long? No, please go on

6 6 Then I qualified passed I managed to pass everything. Not gloriously. Because I had to pay my own way and the way I did that eventually was to run a mobile disco. So we, you know, got the gear and played parties and stuff. And functions and that. But that period of my life at university was again another, I think, another formative period because I had to live by my own wits, not having any safety net and not having anyone looking after you is a salutary experience. And to know what it s like to have I don t want this to sound like a big deal I mean, but it just gave me a tiny little sip of taste of what it s like to be not to have things, because we were running this disco and we lived from weekend to weekend because most of the gigs were on the weekends, me and my mate who was doing it with me, and then we were doing it for the princely sum of sixty rand a gig. And you d obviously have to put money aside; we had this little fund we were both paying for varsity so we had this like little box we put money in for fees and stuff and then we had some money left over for like food and accommodation and then we had money left over to buy records and bulbs for the lights and stuff like that, and petrol for the car. And it was often that we didn t have money for food. We d come to like Wednesday or Thursday and then there s no more money left for food. And then there s no option, you just don t eat. And we had that for about a year and a half or two. And then you d wait for the gig on the weekend and at the gig it was fantastic because there was always food at these gigs (laughs), so you could just pull in and fill your plate and eat three or four plates full of food. So I think I had a tiny taste of deprivation, nothing like of course what your ordinary South African had, but it was it sharpened my sense just a bit. So, I then got a job straight after I d finished Was it Articles? Ya. I got Articles I decided I wanted to get out of Cape Town, for a while anyway. So I went to the big smoke in Johannesburg and I managed to get a job through as an old school tie connection I knew that the senior partner of one of the firms there had been to the same school as me and I wrote to them and I got in. They gave me a job. There was nothing there that taught me any political oh there was! Ya, there was, man, there was a thing there, which was another there was it s interesting now that you ask, these things were incremental, these awarenesses happened. Because after about three months there, this guy called David Dison, he was one of the partners, or one of the PAs at the time there, said to me, I ve got this client who s a big businessman in Soweto, he owns and runs shebeens or bottle stores there, he comes from this community down in the southern Transvaal and one of the guys in that community has been arrested and charged with a pass offence, and you are going to go down there with one of the members of the family, and this guy knew them, and defend him. So I ended up standing in Commissioner Street one afternoon at five o clock, waiting for this dude to come and fetch me and take me off to who knew where, to go and fight a case I knew nothing about. And this Ford Grenada, three litre, pulls up amazing what you can remember pulls up and there s this black dude there in the car, and he was like this cool oke from the townships, you know, and I got in the car with him and said hello to him and he drove us down he drove for a while and he d obviously been drinking before he got in the car, and then eventually he said, he s too tired, I must drive, so I drove. Drove us down to I forget the name of the town even, it was somewhere in the southern Transvaal arrived there late at

7 7 night, he took me to the Holiday Inn, walked into the Holiday Inn, him with me, obviously in the context where black people in the Holiday Inn was a no-no. He walks up with me to the desk and these two tight-assed Afrikaans women sitting behind the counter, behind the reception desk, just like look at us. So this dude says: how much does it cost to stay for the night? And you can see they re just wondering what to say. So they say, it was, I don t know, about two hundred rand, or a hundred rand or something, this guy just pulls, reaches in his pocket, pulls out this roll of money, cash money, peels off cover for the night, puts in down on the counter and says to me, I ll see you in the morning. Next morning he drove me to this dusty rural township where one of the old guys in the community, who was obviously being anti-government or anti the administration in those days was I think was the administration board that ran the townships. And this administration board official had arrested this guy for defacing his pass book. So it s a pass offence and there were quite severe penalties for that. I d spoken to this guy, the accused guy for like five minutes and it was obvious what had happened: his photograph was in the front cover of his pass book, and because the pass book was flexible and the photograph wasn t, the photograph had broken through the cellophane and was just lying loose in the book, and because they were looking for a reason to harass him, they arrested him for this. So that was my first taste of like a public interest human rights case. And it was fantastic! Because I just nailed these guys. Even though I was completely inexperienced it was an unlosable case, and I spent I kept these guys in the witness box for the whole day. And then at the end of the day the official who was hearing the matter, because they had their own special courts, he said, how much longer is this going to go on? I said: well, you know, I ve got a lot of questions for these guys and I want to see this officer and that officer. So then he said: well, perhaps we should adjourn. And then he dismissed the charges. He said it was clear that by then I d revealed that this photograph was the thing. So I cooked them alive and it was so much fun, and I loved it, it became a huge kick. And I kind of just stored that away, it didn t like change my course. Finished a year of Articles in Johannesburg with this firm called, Bell Dewar & Hall. That was the firm, by the way, who did that Steve Biko inquest. They were progressive? Ya, good people then. Lovely people, nice people, I really liked them, but decided I wanted to come back to Cape Town, came back to Cape Town, got my second year of Articles with a firm called Herold Gie attorneys, who are a staid, pleasant enough bunch but they were never going to do public interest work of anything. And then was my formative, the tipping point for me, was um did my Articles, passed my exams, am now en route to becoming I m now professional assistant at Herold Gie Attorneys, en route to what was said to me was an early partnership and that I can get the B and that s cool. I was then given responsibility for doing work for an insurance company called Guardian National and my job involved what they called crash kind of stuff. Guardian National insures vehicles, the vehicle has a crash with another vehicle. If the other vehicle is at fault then Guardian National steps into the shoes of the insured driver, their client, and in the name of that insured person issues a summons against the driver of the other vehicle, or claims back the money they paid out. So it s just straight insurance company, mindless work. And it was good for me in the sense that I was learning how to I was learning the procedures and getting familiar with appearing in court and all that. Until one day and I was I was issuing

8 8 summonses like confetti, I issued several a day. Until one day the receptionist at the firm, one morning calls me and says: there s a man for you in reception. So I said: ok, what s his name? She says: um, he s a black man (in a whisper). Ok, fine, go through and there s this African man of about 40/45, can he come and see me? So I said: sure, come through to my office. We sit down. Sitting across the table from him and he says: ya, I m so and so. And I say: Oh ya, I issued a summons against you. Ok. And he says yes, cause the bakkie he was driving crashed into the B owned by my client. So then he says to me: look, the thing is here, I m very sorry about this but what happened was I ve been saving for a long time to start my own little vegetable thing whereby I can buy vegetables and then travel around selling vegetables off the back of the bakkie. And I ve been saving for a long time, ten years, fifteen years, to buy the bakkie and eventually I could. And of course this is 1985/1984, where for an African man to own a car, let alone drive one, is just, you know, highly unusual. The whole context, this is like what this guy s done represents a phenomenal achievement for a human being in that context and with what he had to face. And saved, and bought a vehicle, he d actually got it on a licence, and he said, ya, but you know, of course I got my licence but I wasn t very experienced so I made a terrible mistake, I banged into the back of this car, I know it was my fault and I m sorry, and then he started crying. He started crying. Hey, fuck so I just said and then and there, I said that s it, party s over, everybody s out the pool, the next time I m in a room with a guy like this, I m sitting his side of the table, I m not sitting this side, I m sitting the other side, I m not fucking doing this anymore. And that was it. I said: go home. I ll tell the insurance company something, I ll tell them a lie, told them I couldn t find you or something. Just disappear, I m not going to make you pay for this. And I just thought, here s this dude, you know, who s life has been one long struggle, and what s happened? Some guy barely out of his teens has gone and got a law degree and is making his life even more difficult. I said, no, ok, that s it. So then I really was now looking, now what am I going to do? Because everywhere you look around, everyone is doing this kind of thing, and all the lawyers are only looking to make money and don t give a shit about what s happening. The reality of what s happening. And then I saw an ad, about a week later actually, saw an ad in, I think it was in De Rebus, I don t remember where, anyway it was an ad saying there s this thing called the Legal Resources Centre, it offers a public it s a public interest law firm offering a free service to indigent people and it s looking for a lawyer and it s got an office in Cape Town and knowledge of Xhosa would be an advantage, or fluency in Xhosa. And of course I couldn t speak a word, still can t speak a word, but thought, hey these guys look like the guys. So I wrote an application and said, I m desperate, I d love to, please I went and and then I got asked to come in and go for an interview and I was interviewed by Shehnaz Meer, who s now a judge in the High Court, by Lee Bozalek, who s now a judge in the High Court, and by William Kerfoot, the three of them were in the room. And to me this was a whole different thing now because I had an Asian woman interviewing me. I was asking her for a job, and it was another thing, it was I thought and I went in there and I felt like at home, like that. I just thought, this is my place, this is the kind of vibe I saw Wallace Mgoqi walk down the passage and what s his name the guy who s a silk now at the Bar? Ismail Jamie?

9 9 Yes, Ismail Jamie. I saw them I knew Wallace (Mgoqi) from varsity vaguely, and I didn t know Ismail (Jamie), but I thought, this place looks like it s there was a buzz there. Anyway I sat down, had an interview and they said they were very nice to me and polite to me and they said: well, we interviewed you really out of courtesy and to have a look at you, but we don t really want you, we want someone who s black and someone who speaks Xhosa. So I said: no, I understand that, but I m telling you and they said, also you must understand you have to go and work in Port Elizabeth. Because we re opening a new office in Port Elizabeth and whoever gets the job is going to have to train here for a month or two and go to PE. So I said: I don t care, if you give me the job I ll go anywhere, I ll do it, just I really, really, really, really, really want this job, I can t do the other stuff anymore. But they said: sorry, we can t give you the job. So I left. And then I didn t know what I was going to do. Then I just carried on doing what I was doing and thinking I don t know what I m going to do. I can t do this anymore, I can t do this big firm lawyering, I ve got to do something else. And then they phoned me. Lee Bozalek phoned me and said: will you come and see me? I went to see him, he said: we couldn t find anyone else. The only other applications they got for jobs at the LRC then were from retired magistrates or people who didn t have law degrees, they just I was the only like walking, talking attorney that they got. Full stop, none! (laughs) They didn t have any option. They had to give it to me. They needed a lawyer (laughs), so I got this job only because I could like walk and talk and speak English and I d managed to get a law degree. It was awesome. So you went off to PE? No Ok. I decided I don t want to go to PE, I ll go if they send me but I thought what I m going to do is I m going to do so much work and take on such a case load that they ll never send me to PE, because then come the day when they have to send me to PE, I m going to say to Lee, here are my files, who must I give them to? So that s what I did. I took on any case I could find, anyone who wanted anything done I took it on. I just worked day and night and it turned out as I wanted it. I don t think Lee even knows that I did that. I deliberately did that as a policy, and time came and I stayed. (Break) So you were saying you took on so many cases that you didn t end up leaving. Tell me about what you did at the LRC? You were there for nearly ten years Almost ten years. Um I did really one thing at the LRC. I did the KTC case which you must be familiar have you heard about this? Well, I know that you worked with Steve Kahanovitz on this. Could you talk about it because it s an important case?

10 10 Have you interviewed Steve (Kahanovitz)? I have, but I think this is something that I d like you to talk about on tape, if you don t mind Sure. Um How did it come about? Why was it such a long case? What were some of the complexities? It was one of the defining experiences of my life. It was in late May, 1986, after I d been at the LRC a few months, the South African police, aided by the army and a group of shack dwellers called the Witdoeke under the leadership of a warlord called Johnson Ngxobongwana, collectively attacked three other sections of shack dwellers on the Cape Town township flats, at places called New Crossroads and others, and over a course of three days burned the place to the ground and killed quite a few people. Why did the police orchestrate this? Because those shack those shanty towns were regarded as, and probably were, a hotbed of anti-government activity in the form of UDF, ANC, etc. The leaders of a nearby camp, called KTC, came to the LRC and said, we re next, we know these guys are going to attack us. At which point, Lee Bozalek said, alright, then we have to try and bring an interdict in what was called the Supreme Court in those days, to stop this. So me and Steve (Kahanovitz) and no, Steve (Kahanovitz) wasn t even down there yet Leanne de la Hunt was there, Wallace Mgoqi, Ismail Jamie, William Kerfoot, Shehnaz (Meer), we just threw ourselves into them, we were interviewing. The office, it was those old offices in Church Street, which were charming but cramped, now had 50/60/70 people in them, refugees from this burning. for me an image I ll never ever forget. I saw this woman with a baby sitting on the stairs, because the folk were sitting up and down the stairs, in the boardroom, everywhere, and we were interviewing them, it was like barefoot lawyering of the best kind. This woman was sitting on the stairs and her baby was crying and she had a bottle and in the bottle was water and the only sustenance in the bottle were crushed mealies. She d taken some sweet-corn, or corn on the cob, and put a few of them in and was trying to feed that to the baby. This was the person who had reached the end of the rope. And the rope stopped at the LRC. And it was we took statements and took statements and took statements, through interpreters, obviously, because all of us with the exception of none of us with the exception of Wallace (Mgoqi), spoke Xhosa. And we in the course of a harum-scarum three or four days, assembled about forty, maybe fifty affidavits. And all of them spoke of the Witdoeke coming with and there was a legendary policemen Barnard, that was his name, Barnard who everyone reported seeing Barnard shooting things into houses that burst into flame, shooting at people, ushering the Witdoeke in to come and burn and pillage and hack with pangas, it was that sort of story. We had that time after time after time. And we got in other sympathetic attorneys from firms around town to act as Commissioners of Oaths, and we signed up affidavits, we made this bundle of about forty or fifty affidavits all under the leadership of Lee (Bozalek) co-ordinated the whole thing, Lee Bozalek. And then it was like I think Friday afternoon, we now

11 11 had to decide, ok, we need to fire up a senior counsel who s going to come and argue this matter, remembering of course that it s 1986 in the middle of a State of Emergency, when free-thinking lawyers are not thick on the ground. And he phoned a guy called Sam Aaron, a silk at the Cape Town Bar, who came up to our office, which is very unusual because advocates aren t meant to visit attorney s office, but he obviously said, sod it, I m coming. He came up there and I remember sitting, and we were all like, the junior guys like me were sort of hanging around the fringes watching the great man at work reading this pile of affidavits, what s he going to say? Is he going to say, we ve got a case? Have we not got a case? Because obviously what we wanted to do is we wanted to go to the court against the Minister of Law and Order and the Minister of Defence and Johnson Ngxobongwana and ask the court to order them not to attack KTC. And I remember watching Sam (Aaron) sitting there reading and reading and eventually looks up and he says, ok. Just said, ok, we ll do it. And we flew Chris Nicholson, the guy who s now doing the Zuma trial, he was an advocate at the Durban office, and he flew down to be second seat to Sam Aaron in the application before the Cape Supreme Court. And I remember he stayed with my wife and I in a flat, and he was so nervous in the morning of the thing, of the hearing, that he draped his towel over the shower curtain rail and when he pulled his towel down he pulled the whole shower curtain down (laughter) and that was his that was how his day started. And we ended up, I don t know how it happened because the judge present was obviously an arch racist and should have put one of his arch racist buddies in as the judge hearing the matter, but somehow we got a guy called Judge Howie, who was actually a human being, and he gave us our order. Sam Aaron argued the matter and the other side huffed and puffed, I forget even I think they fired up Dick Griessel as their counsel plus a battery of other acolytes and their argument was basically how could this this is a bunch of affidavits from a bunch of inaudible people, these are ludicrous allegations. There s no substance in this, how can you possibly order us not to break the law like this. (Judge) Howie s riposte was beautifully simple, he says, you suffer no prejudice if I make this order against you because I m just telling you to do what you can t do anyway I m telling you not to do what you can t do anyway. And he gave us the order, he gave an order directing the cops and the army and the Witdoeke not to attack KTC. And we thought we d like won the World Cup, we thought we were the greatest thing since ever. And we were incredibly chuffed. It was a huge victory for us, for such a fledgling office. It was a huge thing, and it was it was just so exciting. I mean, I tell you, to be there in those times was it was the most pulsating exciting thing because you were dealing with real issues all the time. Every case you dealt with, every person you saw was life and death stuff, people living on the edge and you could actually do something, not always, but ya, they were like halcyon days. And the issues were so clear. We were the good guys, our clients were the oppressed, we were on the side of justice and truth and the other guys were just the bad guys through and through. So there were no greys, it was just absolute clear. And so we got our order, and then on the morning of the 9th of June, 1986, a few days later, got a call at the office and then Lee (Bozalek) came through to my office, he said, they re attacking KTC. They meaning the Witdoeke? Ya, or it was just they. We ve had a report they re attacking KTC. So we drove out, we hopped into Lee s (Bozalek) ageing Beetle, and drove out along the N2 trying to

12 12 get into the area and everywhere we went, every entrance we tried to use, every road in, was blocked off by a police roadblock. No, you can t go there because there are disturbances there, and Lee (Bozalek) would say, but they re our clients, we need to go in there. No, you can t go in there. Why can t we go in there? And then at the one roadblock we stopped and we saw this gang of Witdoeke, African men with white rags tied on their arms trotting along the road carrying pangas, sticks, and what looked like petrol bombs, heading off in the direction of KTC. And they sailed through the roadblock while we were stopped there. So Lee (Bozalek) said, but why are you letting these guys through? Those guys are going to burn the camp there, you should stop them, what are you doing? And the guy says, if you don t turn around now I m going to arrest you. A year or two later I would have said, well fucking arrest me then. But in those days we were a little bit more tentative. And so, we backed away, and we went to near where there s a graveyard near KTC and there s a ridge along running along that graveyard. We stood on top of the ridge and we watched the camp burn for hours. Me and Lee (Bozalek), and I think it was Wallace (Mgoqi) who was in the car with us, I could be wrong the three of us And people were aware? Did they evacuate? Were there people there? Oh, they were fighting. You could hear people fled, most of them. You could see the people streaming out of the camp, they fled the camp. But the kids, the youth and every now and again you d hear gun fire. And every now and again the distinctive tac tac tac tac sound of an AK47, it makes a particular sound that the automatic weapons that the police and army make and you could hear an AK47 every now and again going off, and I thought ya, someone s out there, someone s unearthed their weapon and is shooting somebody. And we actually saw much later on in the proceedings some camera footage from a news guy who d gone in and filmed this thing. And filmed this guy with an AK47. So it was just too appalling, it was like Armageddon, it was just the most sinking feeling watching these this thing going on and we were powerless; the sense of powerlessness was overwhelming. Um there were obviously massive police headlines and it was then apparent that a lot of press got in, photojournalists, TV news people, foreign news crews and there was a lot of footage and a lot of coverage that the cops had organised this, they d aided, abetted organised it, and it was a planned government move. But then now what? The camp s been destroyed in three days. Our offices are now jammed to the ceiling with another bunch of people from the camp. So we just like fell into the routine of taking affidavits from everybody, which by that stage it was now getting very stressful because the ordinary routine work that we d been doing was now completely subsided and I caused Leanne de la Hunt to scream at me one day because she called a client in from the townships on a pension matter, I think, and she d booked one of the interpreters for that and her client was late and I just in fact, no, her client arrived and I said to the client, sorry, you must go away and come back another day because I need the interpreters to take statements from these people. And she quite naturally had a fit about it. She yelled and yelled at me (laughs). So it was that, there was like a huge take on our resources. And after a few days of this Lee (Bozalek) had obviously been talking to Arthur Chaskalson, he was the National Director at the time, and they d decided, well what are we going to do? Because we had this interdict, the camp s been burnt, we ve got a lot of evidence, and we were interviewing and taking statements already from residents, but more importantly in a

13 way, what was more important from an evidential point of view, from photo of evidences Guy Tillem was one, Craig Matthew was another, and then there was a guy, a former Rhodesian guy I wish I could remember his name hopefully it will come to me because he s he just he gave me my best moment in a court room ever, this guy. And it was clear from the footage that they had put together that this was a killer that this, we had a massive evidence and it was incontrovertible that the cops had done it. So what did we do? The idea then was Lee s (Bozalek) idea then was, we should take twenty cases, twenty test cases. The three thousand my memory knew that about three hundred houses destroyed in KTC no, not only KTC, in total, KTC and the others, and we ve got no class action, how do we bring three thousand three hundred separate cases? It can t be done. Pick twenty. Pick ten and bring them as a sample and at least make the point. Bring a damages action against the cops. So that s what we started doing and he came to me and said: you re it, you ve got to do this thing. Bring the cases and make it rock and roll. So I said I mean, and I was, I mean, how old was I then? I don t know 1986, born in 58 what does that make me? 28? Is that 28? I was a kid, a 28 year old, what do I know really? I d been practising law for a couple of years and he said, just go and do it. And, just then, I don t know how it happened but I was contacted by Beattie Hofmeyer, who s now a senior ANC person, and she was then working at the Criminology Department at UCT, her and another woman, who s name I ve also forgotten Mickey, Mickey her name was and they said, why don t we bring cases for all of them? I said: you must be crazy! How can we bring three thousand separate cases? They said: no, there s things called computers now, you know, word processors. We do a standard summons, we do a standard letter you see the thing is in those days in order to sue the cops, you had to first issue, within six months of the thing happening you had to issue a letter or, ya within six months you had to get the letter out and you had to allow a month to elapse before issuing a summons and all of that had to happen in that six months period. And we were already now a few weeks down the track. So how were we going to make it happen? And no-one had ever done this before. And they said: we can do it. By that stage I think Steve Kahanovitz had been brought down from Johannesburg to help me in this thing, so it was Steve (Kahnovitz) and I running this thing. And we eventually said they put us under phenomenal pressure, Beattie Hofmeyer and Mickey put us under phenomenal pressure and said: you guys cannot capitulate here, you cannot pick twenty and leave the rest out, you just can t do it. So we said we basically gave in under this pressure. Much easier just to bring twenty cases, how are we going to do three thousand three hundred? We didn t know it was three thousand three hundred then, so they said, what they ll do, what Mickey and Beattie (Hofmeyer) said was, we ll organise statement-taking sessions in the townships. You and us and volunteers will go out, we ll design a questionnaire that we can capture easily onto the word processor and we will go out and we will get statements from everybody and we will prepare summonses for everybody. So that s what we did. Only the young and foolish can do something like that. That s what they did. These people, these two women, the most awesome energy and powers of organisation you ve seen. We kind of went along for the ride but they made it happen. With all their contacts in the townships, and at university and whatever, they organised these sessions out in the ruins of these camps, where they would line up desks in the dust and behind five or six or ten desks would be sitting the volunteers with a stack of forms and the word would be put out and then there d be two, three, four hundred people queuing up at these tables taking statements, taking statements. And Steve (Kahanovitz) and I would go along to these things. And it was just I 13

14 14 can t describe what it was like in I could try it was like it was I don t know it was just awesome these you could smell you could still smell the smell of the burnt shacks, and some of the stuff had been cleared away but everywhere you looked there was the litter of destruction, burnt and twisted sheet metal from the or corrugated iron from the shacks, and the debris of lives scattered everywhere, burnt buckets, clothes, dolls, the stuff that you see in movies. It was like being transported onto a desolation movie set and then setting up and working there. And we did that for a couple of weeks, and the one day we did it on a Saturday and this was the most surreal day of my life ever, bar none, because I drive out to KTC and in part of KTC you ve set up this Mickey and the other folk have set this stuff up, and the statement taking is going on and I m there, I m helping, I m advising or just being around there because it was good for them to have a white face there. And it s this open stretch of ground with all this stuff going on, and then suddenly you hear the rumble of the thing called a Buffel, which is a military armoured vehicle, armoured troop carrier, and it hovers into view and it s an army vehicle with its soldiers on top. It like parks there for a while and then goes away. And then about fifteen minutes later a Casspir arrives. And from the riot squad, two Casspirs. These aren t my pictures by the way, they belong to a client (referring to artworks on the walls ) They are beautiful They are lovely, but they re my client s pictures and he kind of lets us hang them. So a Casspir arrives and a voice with a loudhailer says: this is an illegal gathering, if you do not disperse in five minutes, force will be used against you. So I m everyone looks to me. I m the guy who s going to sort it out, I m shitting myself. So I kind of walk across to this thing, and all I want to do is run, because these are bad guys, and I ve seen what they do. And as I m walking towards the Casspir, I m about fifteen metres away, these two guys come out of the top with pump action shotguns and they go (makes sound of guns being cocked) and they point them at me. And the only thing that stopped me running in terror was the fact that all these other folk would see me do that. Literally the only thing. I mean, I really almost you know, when you re so scared your sphincter wants to release, I almost wet myself I was so scared. And this guy said, what s going on here? So with a bravado I didn t feel I just said, I m an attorney, I m consulting my clients, give me a break man, leave me alone. You can see what s going on, it s not a gathering, these people are all queuing up, giving their particulars to these people sitting at the desks. And fortunately he bought it and left us alone. After that, we spent days and days, weeks, Steve and I and Mickey and the other folk, preparing letters and preparing statements and basically particulars of claimants, and then we realised that we had three thousand, three hundred of these things and we couldn t possibly be attorneys of record for three thousand three hundred separate cases. So Lee (Bozalek) went around and asked his mates and other friends, and several friends agreed that they would take batches of his cases and issue the summonses. So we sent out all the letters, Steve (Kahanovitz) and I got all the letters served, waited a month and then distributed batches of summonses to various other lawyers we took several hundred ourselves, and then issued several hundreds of summonses and we served collectively three thousand three hundred summonses on the State Attorney. And then proceeded to get ready for trial, and my whole life was consumed with this thing now. All I was doing was the KTC case, day in, day out, weekends preparing for this thing. And it was the sharpest learning curve you