Nokuthula Simelane, an underground ANC operative disappeared in September 1983, abducted by the Apartheid government’s Soweto Special Branch. She was tortured between South Africa and Swaziland, and killed.
From the TRC Hearing.
- Coetzee: At that stage she answered the questions that we were putting to her.
- Chairperson: So basically it took two slaps in the face and then she would be sufficiently intimidated and co-operated with you?
- Coetzee: That was the beginning.
- Chairperson: What did she do? Did she cry?
- Coetzee: I cannot recall precisely.
- Chairperson: Didn’t she fight back?
- Coetzee: No, not after the arrest and not at that stage when she was seated in the car with us.
- Chairperson: Very well. So then if I understand you correctly, for the first week she was repeatedly assaulted?
- Coetzee: Yes, in my presence. I confirmed yesterday that she was assaulted by the other members as well. That this could have been possible.
- Chairperson: No, we will only discuss what you can give evidence about. In your presence during that week she was assaulted numerous times.
- Coetzee: Yes. I also addressed the possibility that I may have slapped her on occasion thereafter when the input questions were put to her but that was upon certain occasions.
- Chairperson: Yes. Those assaults during the first week, were they serious assaults?
- Coetzee: I have already stated that we bagged her, we hit her with a fist and we slapped here. There is a possibility that she may have been kicked, but at this stage I cannot recall.
- Chairperson: Yes. But was it serious?
- Coetzee: Yes, I would say to a certain degree.
- Chairperson: So it was a repeated assault?
- Coetzee: Chairperson a person had to be broken first in order to rebuild them thereafter in order to establish a situation of trust between the parties.
- Chairperson: So after that first intimidation in the vehicle she co-operated and then after that became difficult again?
- Coetzee: We handled her in various facets. She had a wealth of information with regard to persons whose photos were in the terrorist photo album, who had already been identified as a result of their external military training as well as information that she had heard, and information that she had gained from things she had seen, so there were many aspects in the table.
- Chairperson: But I am asking you what her reaction was when you had her on the farm, in the middle of nowhere in a single room, with a whole big group of you, did she not co-operate?
- Coetzee: No. She co-operated. She co-operated to such an extent that we gave her the pen and paper to write with.
- Chairperson: Very well. Regardless of that these assaults took place consistently during the first week?
- Coetzee: Yes.
- Chairperson: And they were serious?
- Coetzee: Upon various occasions in the first week of her presence on the farm, yes.
- Chairperson: And serious enough that you would be prepared to describe it as torture?
- Coetzee: I would put it that way.
- Chairperson: So you tortured her for a week?
- Coetzee: Yes. It boils to that.
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Yes, it boils down to that. I would put it that way. That is an accurate description. We had to break her. She had to be broken in order to rebuild. Yes, I would call it torture. Yes. Torture. She co-operated with us to such an extent that we gave her the pen and paper to write with.
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It is the female Moorland Hawker Dragonfly that plunges from the sky, playing dead on impact with the earth, to avoid unwanted sexual attention from males.
In the oceans, female Bottlenose Dolphins and common porpoises have developed an extra fold over their vaginal openings, allowing them to control what male dolphin penetrates and impregnates them.
We who have yet to learn this, to play at death or to ossify, to become mute or silent, we die here.
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Here the children play like they do, running through the hardness of that building abandoned and disused for years now. It’s late afternoon and the hours of day are dimming. Look how they smile, look how their arms are wild in the air, rotating propellers, mini hurricanes and happy, throwing small stones at each other. Look, something bundled in the corner that wasn’t there before. The body of a woman, pants around her ankles. No shoes but one long lace threaded around her neck. A plastic bag over her head.
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In an alleyway in Tsakane in Johannesburg, in shallow ditch close to KwaThema Taxi Rank, just down the road from Bar Lounge. 9am on a Sunday morning and we are in our two-piece outfits and floral dresses. And we’re in sharp-toed heels and we’ve combed our hair and pulled it into gelled buns. We tuck bibles under our arms, lodge them safe in the crook of our armpits and the air is stewed meat and pumpkin with cinnamon and perfumes that smell like all the seasons. Sunday morning Noxolo, and your head knocked out of shape, and your eye sockets empty, and your brain puzzle pieces. A bottle of beer, brown forced into your… and a used condom found in your… and a brick on the pavement, used to break you down.
Yes, I would call it torture. We gave her the pen and paper to write with.
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“I’m not sorry,” says Themba Mvumbu after being arrested for his participation in the gang rape and murder of Banyana Banyana footballer Eudy Simelane. Gang-raped repeatedly, stabbed twelve times before she died, succumbing to her injuries. Taking turns, they say, like they waited politely in line to force obliteration in her, and then drain it out with twelve uneven puncture points.
“I’m not sorry.”
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In one of the pictures that circulate on social media, she has her hair back in cornrows with a braided pony, sunglasses resting on top of her head. Her eyes look down, to a phone, to a book, away from scrutiny.
Former Lover says he disposed of her body. Not kill, he says, just dispose. Former Lover says he burnt her using a tire and petrol and pool acid. Former Lover says, “I was not thinking straight at the time.” The time being when he threw her body into a wheelie bin, doused her in acid and petrol and stuffed her in a tire and set her alight in ditch in Bramley where her charred remains would be discovered by a passer-by.
Smoke. The smell of black rubber melting. Fibre catching alight, singed and spreading burning holes in … and hair contracting into one mass until it becomes skin and skin becomes bones and becoming becomes…
Not Sorry.
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Tladi, Soweto. Obscured partly by a large rock, a woman half-naked and dead in an open veld, discovered by community members who had gathered to cut the long, over-grown grass sprouting along the railway line. Three weeping gashes in her neck. Three large stones near head. Bloodied. Lerato Moloi wears a gown, there by her rock. A patterned thing in three colours; red, black, blue.
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Also Tladi, Soweto. A man, 37, turns gun to self, puts nozzle to temple, pulls trigger, blows brains over house, over a 31 year old girlfriend held hostage for hours, wounded by fist, by bullet. A bed and other furniture blocks the entrance. Residents, police, ambulances pile up outside, bullet pyrotechnics rattle throughout the house. The windows shatter and the doors take on different meaning.
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At the Springs power station of a government parastatal, a woman is found dead in her office after friends and family report her missing. For two weeks they look, her car still parked in the lot outside Eskom.
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Farm labourers on the way to work in the early hours of the morning. The body of woman, between the ages of 25 and 35, lying on the side of a road near the Kameeldrift Plot in Tshwane. The _______ woman has two gunshot ______ to her upper ____, ripping holes bordered in red through a black shirt and a blue jacket.
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Mpumalanga. A young cattle herder leads his cows through an open veld at Manyeveni Trust, Kabokweni, when he detects a smell, putrid, putrefying, and follows it to its source. The smell gets stronger as he nears it, the cows behind refusing to get any closer and he sees protruding from the ground, something that appears to be human body parts. Thembelihle Base is 24 years old when she is reported missing, and in the picture that is published along with the news reports she’s in brown and yellow school uniform, standing in front of a fence made of logs and stones. After the boyfriend is arrested, his house is torched and the roof collapses and the walls fall and crumble until…
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The Sydenham SAPS have opened a ______ docket after the body of 30 year old _____ is found on side of the N2 North, Spaghetti Junction by a passing truck driver. The body has a single gun-shot _____ to the upper torso.
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The decomposing body of a woman – believed to be the much lauded _______, __________ – has been found on Table Mountain, crumpled away from the main trails. She disappeared two months before the discovery of the body while hiking up the mountain with her family on Human Rights Day.
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Appledene Road, Athlone Cape Town. The body of 18 year old Leah Merchant is found in the back of a house, mouth stuffed with sand and pants pulled down, bunched around _____ . The 23 year old man arrested for the crime; raping, strangling and murdering her will later be released due to lack of _____.
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Khayelitsha, Cape Town. The naked _____ of 19 year old Sinoxolo Mafevuka is discovered _____ and spread- eagled, head stuffed into the bowl of a public toilet one hundred metres from her home. Last seen heading to the toilets in Blowey Section. Clothes found crumpled, torn, stuffed there. A jersey, long-sleeved and powder blue found at the scene links two _____, 21 and 28, to the crime. The accused, cousins of Sinoxolo’s boyfriend, went on a rampage two days before her _____, threatening to assault her for allegedly seeing another man. An informant in the case is recovering in Tygerberg hospital after being stabbed in the neck by Sinoxolo’s boyfriend.
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Jouberton Extension 7, Klerksdorp. After noticing the “strange actions” of a stray dog, a neighbour dumping garbage finds the charred _____ of Nombuyiselo Nombewu two hundred and thirty-six steps from her home. The Friday she disappears is grey, wet. The 15 year old walks through the icy chill to borrow R50 from a _____ for electricity. A few hours pass and doesn’t return, so her grandmother sends her twin siblings to look for her. 8pm and still nothing, so Gogo sends an older sibling who while looking, will have a conversation with the man who will later be arrested for Nombuyiselo’s murder.
Incinerated. Smouldering markers in a field. Her hair plaited straight back. Her earring. The remains of the umbrella she’d been carrying. “They burnt my granddaughter like a dog”.
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After boarding a taxi on a Friday evening, friends Bongeka and Popi disappear only to be discovered _____, one woman in Tladi and the other in Naledi. Both appear to have been raped and the _________ gun shot wound to _____ parts of the body. Tladi residents claim to have witnessed a suspicious _____ following a woman and the blasting of a _____ being fired. In a photo published by a news site, a woman in blue skinny jeans and green top lies face down,Avuyile half on her body in a ditch, long black hair obscuring the ______ her head.
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8pm on a Friday evening. A 13 year old girl is abducted at gunpoint while walking down Robert Sobukwe Road, Nyanga. Ten men took turns raping her in at least three different locations over four days, taking turns assaulting her and holding her down. That’s what the newspaper report states “ taking turns”. As if they waited politely in line, please and thank you’s while battering effacement into her _____, and then ______.
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A 26 year old man was arrested after his girlfriend and mother of one, Avuyile Jamjam was found _____ to death and _____ in a field in Athlone. She had previously ____________.
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Police are still in search of the killers Zandile Sandlana who was found _____ in a field in the TR Section of Khayelitsha. Stripped down to only her bra, one shoe; she had a broken bottle lodged in her mouth.
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A 72 year old _____ has been found _____ in her Germiston home; her nose, ears and eyelids cut off. _____ half-naked when discovered, leading police to suspect that she had also been _____. No arrests have been made in connection to this murder and mutilation.
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A 23 year old _____ has died in hospital after murdering a 35 year old _____ and devouring her flesh. The woman was abducted from a main road and dragged to his home, near an Engen Garage, where he killed her by slitting her throat. The woman’s mother witnessed the abduction and called the police, found the man bent over on all fours and eating her raw flesh.
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In Sedibeng, Vaal. The body of a 34 year old woman is found wrapped in plastic bags and stashed under_____. Evaton, a 22 year old man is arrested for the murder of a 16 year old girl after he is caught with a heater and tire, attempting to burn down the shack where _____. Police investigating the Missing Person’s Case of Carmelitta Baadjies found her body under a _____in the home ________ husband in King William’s Town.
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A principal and _____ teachers have been arrested after gang-raping _____ learners in the coastal province of KwaZulu-Natal after a video of the rape went viral. Boithithong High School, 30 learners _____ impregnated by their educators. 17 year old school girl found deceased, drenched in blood from multiple stab wounds to her upper ____ in her home in Mchoncho Village, just outside Libode in in the Eastern Cape. 19 year old Lekita Moore _____ along Tuna Road in Nooitgedacht. Stabbed several times in the stomach and throat. _____ nipples and parts of her vagina had been cut off. Qondile Mhlanga, 21, missing from Kamdladla near Tonga in April. _____ body found covered with tree branches and dumped in a _____ a week later. British woman has died after robbers broke into a house in the fishing village of Dullstroom and _____ her with a blow torch _____shooting her _____ plastic bag down her throat. South African athlete _____ arrested _____shooting her through a closed bathroom door.
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Appendix of Missing Words
mutilated, sharp, foreign object, with a blunt object, stolen, woman, women, drugged, bed, fractured and haemorrhaging, asphyxiation, trachea, meridian response, hacked into pieces and set alight, gagged, married and pregnant, mother of three, acquitted of all charges, bleeding out, neighbour heard the screaming, exsanguinate, teenager, public, dead, broken bottle shoved, rupture, gun shot wound, smiling, mutilated and disfigured, dislocated, missing, lost, exuberance and joy, amputated, sanguine, vagina, cavity, for over three weeks, decaying and decomposing, beautiful, screaming in the night, side of the road, ditch, dam, damning, 3 large rocks, spinning on the tip of a candle-flame, a piece of skull and hair