Shepherds and Butchers

by Chris Marnewick

  I looked at Labuschagne, surprised. He was serious. For a moment I thought I had misunderstood, but then I realised that he was talking about the Warrant Officer, not Tsafendas.

  I waited for him to tell me more, but he relapsed into his uncommunicative mode. I felt that he had more to tell and prompted him. ‘Did you have catwalk duty that night?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you speak to Tsafendas again?’

  ‘Yes, I was locked in his section, up on the catwalk, alone with him all night.’

  Again I let him speak without interruption:

  The old man didn’t sleep well that night and I watched him put his clippings back into order. He kept rearranging them, first in one order and then in another. He asked me why they had been messed up and I told him the Warrant Officer had done it because he was angry. ‘What have I done to him?’ he asked. ‘You killed Dr Verwoerd,’ I said. He laughed and said, ‘That was before you were born. What do you know?’ I said I had read about it in school. He said, ‘Make yourself comfortable and I will tell you the whole story.’ When I didn’t reply, he banged on the wall and said, ‘Hey, are you still there?’ I said yes. Then he started talking. He talked all night.

  ‘There are two kinds of people,’ he said, ‘no, make that three. There are those who make history. They are the first and the most important. Then there are those who write history. And last there are those who read history.’

  ‘So what?’ I said. ‘Who cares?’ I was tired and didn’t need a lecture from a prisoner. But I was curious at the same time.

  He answered immediately, ‘Only those who make history know the truth. Those who write it down rely on second-hand information. And those who read it have no way of knowing whether what they read is the truth or not. They are doomed to be forever uncertain, which is worse than being ignorant.’

  I was getting sleepy, so I made myself more comfortable on the catwalk. I sat down with my back against the wall and the rifle across my knees. There is a rule that the rifle may never touch the ground. The rifle just got heavier and heavier.

  ‘My boy,’ he said, ‘it’s a long story, but we have all night, locked in here together for our punishment.’ I don’t know how he knew I was on punishment shift, but he somehow knew. ‘Let me tell you what really happened,’ he said, ‘and in the morning, if you believe me, maybe you could ask the Medical Officer for some pills for this worm I have inside me before it kills me.’

  I said nothing. I had heard the story about the worm before, from my history teacher. He taught us that the Prime Minister had been a very good man, like a prophet who would lead the Afrikaner nation to greatness. Then a madman killed him in Parliament with a knife, a man who believed he was told what to do by a tapeworm inside him. So when the old man spoke of the worm I just let him ramble on.

  ‘You know we Greeks are the world’s greatest seamen. We got the biggest shipping companies,’ he said. ‘I was just an ordinary sailor, a seaman,’ he said, ‘and I had sailed on many ships and to many places around the world.’ He said that was how he learned a few new languages, English and Portuguese and so on. And he said he also got into trouble sometimes.

  Then he told me how he came to Cape Town. ‘Do you know how difficult it is for an immigrant to get into South Africa?’ he asked, but I had no idea. ‘It is ten times more difficult for anyone with a record as bad as mine. And for an immigrant who is not white and has a record? Almost impossible. You know what they do? They take your fingerprints and they check your previous convictions in every country whose stamp is in your passport. And I had many stamps and many convictions everywhere.’ He sounded proud of this.

  ‘So how did you get in then?’ I asked. ‘Oh, so you are still awake? Well, they came for me.’ He said it like this, They came for me. He also said that they had even given him money to come in and had promised him a job in Cape Town.

  ‘Who’s they?’ I asked.

  ‘Two men from right here in Pretoria,’ he answered. He said they had come to his ship in Lourenço Marques, two men who had recruited him for an important job in Cape Town. ‘They said they had been authorised by a man called John Vorster and a man called Rhoodie,’ he said.

  I had heard of Vorster, but not of Rhoodie. ‘That is because I made Vorster the Prime Minister,’ he said, ‘and Rhoodie was always working behind the scenes.’

  I was beginning to see what job it was they had for him, but to make sure I asked, and he answered, ‘To kill Verwoerd.’

  I told him, ‘It doesn’t make sense. Why would they get a non-white Greek sailor with a bad record sitting on a ship in Lourenço Marques to come and do something like that in Cape Town? How did they even know that you were there?’

  ‘It was the perfect scheme,’ he said. He had applied for a visa to come to South Africa many times before and they had been delaying it for years while they investigated his past. He said, ‘I was in Lourenço Marques, waiting for the visa.’ They’d refused his application seven times before and had even put him on the banned list. Then suddenly they gave him a visa while he was still on the banned list. ‘So they found me, a coloured foreign sailor who knew how to handle a knife, who had once taken part in a communist party protest, and who wanted to live in South Africa. Don’t you see? It was the perfect scheme. A mad communist non-white foreigner kills the Prime Minister!’

  I didn’t think it was all that obvious.

  ‘But wait for the whole story,’ he said. ‘My best point,’ he went on, ‘is that I was there. I was part of the conspiracy. I made it happen. I made history. No one can take that away from me. I was there.’

  ‘Or made it up,’ I said. ‘You have had all this time to work out a story.’

  ‘Well, what about this then?’ he said. ‘Who became the Prime Minister when Verwoerd was dead? It was Vorster, of course. And what did he do? He made Rhoodie, who was just a little whippersnapper, the Goebbels of the National Party, the propaganda man. So there is the motive, or at least part of it.’

  ‘What’s the other part?’ I asked.

  You know that all of this was long before my time, so I’m telling you what I understood from Mr Tsafendas’ story. So he said Vorster thought that Verwoerd was too soft and too much of a professor, and that South Africa needed a man of action, a strong, hard man who did things. Like himself. Vorster said that in 1945 while Verwoerd sat around writing in his newspaper he got thrown in an internment camp for his principles. He said that the world was changed by men of big actions, not men with big ideas.

  I heard Mr Tsafendas get up from his bed and a short while later he flushed his toilet.

  When he sat down again he said, ‘So that is what I have here in the box, in all these newspaper clippings. This is the proof that Vorster and Rhoodie killed Verwoerd. All their reasons and their plans.’ And he said that he found more of it in the papers every day, so that he could tell the world what had really happened.

  ‘So are you going to write history now?’ I asked. I was sorry that I had not taken a closer look at those newspaper clippings when I had the box.

  ‘I can write it because I was there,’ he said. We sat like that for a long time into the night. I could hear a man sobbing in C Section, otherwise the place was quiet. It must have been between two and three in the morning when I woke up. I don’t know how long I had been asleep and how much I had dreamed, but the old man was still talking.

  The duty sergeant arrived and asked if I had been sleeping on the job. I said no and asked him for the time. It was just after three. He looked down into the cell and saw Mr Tsafendas at his table. ‘Why aren’t you in bed?’ he shouted. ‘Get into bed immediately!’ The old man quickly lay down. Then the sergeant said, ‘And stand up when I speak to you!’ The old man got up again and then the sergeant walked off.

  ‘Now who’s crazy?’ the old man said as soon as he was gone. ‘He tells me to get into my bed and when I do it he tells me to stand up while he is talking to me.’

  I thought he had a poi
nt there.

  Then he asked, ‘If I am crazy, why am I here?’

  He had me there. If he was mad he should be in a hospital like Weskoppies. And if he wasn’t mad, he should have been hanged.

  ‘I am here because I know why Verwoerd was killed,’ he said. ‘They are afraid I will tell.’

  ‘Tell what?’ I asked.

  ‘Tell everyone that Verwoerd had told me that Nelson Mandela was going to be the first black Prime Minister of the country,’ he said.

  I thought about that for a while. It had always struck me as odd that he had two cells to himself. One had even been fitted out as a bathroom. His cell had been turned around so that its door opened onto the passage between B and C sections, not into the passage inside B Section like all the other cells there. When I thought about it more it became obvious. That way he would never get into contact with any of the other prisoners and he would also never be able to talk to the visitors who came into the visiting rooms in B Section.

  When he spoke up again I could hear that he was getting tired. ‘They went for the insanity angle so that no one would ever believe me. So when the Court declared me insane they locked me away in the death cells.’

  He kept repeating that he wasn’t crazy, but that he thought they were trying to drive him crazy so that no one would believe him.

  I tried to work out how many times he must have heard the trapdoors banging against the stopper bags and made a rough calculation; say three hangings every two weeks for fifty-two weeks of the year times fifteen or so years that he had been there equalled about eleven hundred times. And if you counted the six years he had spent in the old prison in Potgieter Street, it was nearer fifteen hundred.

  Labuschagne and I sat looking at each other for a while. Wierda was slow in arriving and, when he did, we went up to the robing room and started picking at the next case.

  I had only half my mind on the case. The other half was searching for a way to put the Tsafendas prophecy before the Court. I was getting a little desperate. We were halfway through the examination-in-chief with Labuschagne and we still lacked the evidence that would lend credibility to his version of the events at the reservoir. We had expert opinions but expert opinion is no good without a factual foundation.

  I looked at my watch. We had ten minutes before the Judge and Assessors would return.

  I thought of Marianne Schlebusch, a calm and efficient woman who had a calming effect on me. I had been trying to find out if there was a foolproof way for us to determine whether Labuschagne would be caught out in a lie, that his whole defence was built on falsehood, and that he was really a mass murderer of the worst kind.

  ‘I don’t think he is lying,’ she had told us, ‘but I would have to concede that we can never be sure. My tests have built-in lie detectors and if he had lied to me the tests would have exposed that. But there is a small group of subjects who can defeat those traps, and he fits the profile perfectly. He is way above average intelligence and he can concentrate for a long period without losing focus.’

  ‘And he may be a psychopath,’ I ventured.

  ‘No,’ she had said, ‘but he doesn’t have to be to do what he did.’

  ‘So what am I to do with him?’ I had asked her.

  ‘You are going to have to make him talk about the events at the reservoir and face up to what he has done. Until he talks about it and admits what he has done, you won’t know whether he is telling the truth and I won’t be able to begin with a cure.’

  Wierda was waiting for me in court. He told me he was ready to give me a summary of the next case.

  V3768 Nicholas Prins

  33

  Prins was a common gangster who killed another gang member on a train in Cape Town. He was a member of the Hard Livings gang and had the gang’s initials, HL, tattooed behind his left ear.

  The evidence against Prins was short and to the point. On 8 July 1986 the deceased, Joseph Moliefe, boarded a train in Cape Town with a colleague, Bernard Grootboom, and headed home. At Netreg Station they disembarked and re-entered the train at another coach. There was standing room only. Grootboom saw Prins near the door. Prins must have said something to Mr Moliefe because Grootboom heard the latter say no. Whatever he had said to Moliefe, Prins responded to this single-word reply by pulling out a knife and stabbing Moliefe once in the chest. He immediately jumped off the train, which was already in motion. Within a short time Moliefe fainted and died at the scene.

  The cause of death was a single stab wound between ribs six and seven into the left ventricle of the heart.

  A friend of Prins, Miss Tasneem Julyse, told the Court that she knew Prins well and had on 8 July travelled on the same train with him and two other acquaintances of theirs, Shanien Rich and Ronald Middleway. At Netreg Station they disembarked after Moliefe and another man, probably Bernard Grootboom, had entered the same coach. Just as the train pulled off Prins had jumped back on, quickly stabbed Moliefe and jumped off the moving train again. When Prins rejoined them she asked him why he had stabbed the man on the train and he replied that the man was ‘an American’ and that they had stabbed his brother. The Americans were a gang operating in the area. Prins also said that he and Moliefe had argued, but Miss Julyse told the Court that she had heard no quarrel between them.

  Prins gave a version entirely at odds with that of Grootboom and Julyse. He told the Court that he had boarded the train in Cape Town with Julyse and had drunk enough liquor during the journey to be intoxicated. When the train stopped with a jerk at Netreg Station he fell against Moliefe. He apologised, but Moliefe swore at him. Three other men who could have been friends of Moliefe then came towards him and told him he was full of liquor. They threw him down and kicked and beat him. He jumped up, took out his knife and stabbed blindly in their direction. He knew he had stabbed someone but did not know whom.

  The Court rejected this version out of hand. The version Prins gave to the Court differed from the one he had given to a Magistrate when he was arrested. His counsel called Ronald Middleway as a witness to support his version, but Middleway corroborated Miss Julyse’s evidence to the degree that when Miss Julyse asked Prins why he had stabbed the man on the train he said that the man was ‘an American’.

  The Court was unanimous in its finding that Prins had deliberately killed Moliefe because he thought the latter was a member of the gang responsible for the stabbing of his brother. The Court further found that there was an element of cunning in the way Prins had executed his plan. He had waited for the train to start moving, then he jumped on and quickly stabbed Moliefe before jumping off again. The slight effect alcohol might have had on his actions was outweighed by the cunning with which he had achieved his aim and the fact that he had killed a completely innocent man. Although he was relatively young his actions had been related to his gang activities and had been motivated by inherent vice.

  He was therefore convicted of murder without any extenuating circumstances and he was sentenced to death on 9 June 1987.

  Prins had spent less than six months in the death cells before he was hanged on 8 December 1987. He was twenty-three years old.

  Palace of Justice

  34

  Judge van Zyl started the afternoon’s proceedings by reading his final inspection notes into the record. He had to raise his voice against the sound of the rain pelting down on the roof and skylights.

  ‘There is not much to say about the gallows chamber and the pit room, which we have been given to understand will feature in the defence evidence. I do not intend to belabour the issue as the evidence already treats the layout to some extent.’

  He looked around the room before he continued. This time I was ready for Wierda, and I handed him a sketch I had made. It was not nearly as good as his sketches and he scoffed at it. He smiled condescendingly when I handed him my second sketch, one of the pit room and autopsy room.

  I listened to Judge van Zyl’s description with my eyes closed. The image in my mind was that of an abattoir w
ith rows of skinned beasts hanging from hooks and ready for conveyance to the butcheries in the suburbs.

  ‘Are you ready to proceed?’ the Judge asked me.

  I opened my eyes and the serious work of the afternoon session started.

  I rose and addressed the defendant. ‘Let’s go back to the gallows room, shall we?’ I said, and proceeded, ‘Was there ever an occasion when you had to use force or violence to get a prisoner onto the trapdoors or to get the noose around his neck?’

  Labuschagne stooped to speak into the microphone in front of him. ‘Sir, by the time the execution date arrives, the prisoners have been broken in so that they obey orders.’ Then he added, ‘They did that, most of the time.’

  ‘So my question is,’ I said, ‘in the time you worked there, did it really always go as smoothly as you have described?’

  ‘There were always things that went wrong.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like prisoners fainting, and then we had to carry them. Or resisting, and then we had to put them in a straitjacket, and so on.’

  I decided to be more direct. ‘What is the worst that happened while you were there?’

  He took his time trying to recollect. Judge van Zyl said something to the Assessor on his right and Labuschagne used the time to compose his answer.

  ‘It was bad a few times, like when we had to hang four white men on one day – although they didn’t resist. It went wrong badly only once.’

  I took my reading glasses off and folded my arms before asking, ‘How did that happen? Tell us what went wrong and how you dealt with it.’