Donald McRae, The Guardian
Darkness falls early on a cold afternoon in London as Jill
Burger remembers how detention and death in Johannesburg changed her life for
ever. The last shadowy strands of daylight seep from a room where she describes
how Neil Aggett, her younger brother and a quietly spoken but uncompromising
doctor, was detained by the South African security police. Thirty-two years ago
this month, on 27 November 1981, Neil and his girlfriend, Liz Floyd, who was
also a doctor and an anti-apartheid activist, were seized.
They never saw each other again – but Liz was haunted by the
thought that she had heard Neil being tortured in an adjoining office in
Johannesburg's notorious John Vorster Square police station. A team of
policemen led by Lieutenant Stephan Whitehead and Major Arthur Cronwright
regularly covered his head with a wet towel. They tied the towel so tightly
that Neil struggled to breathe. He did not know if they planned to suffocate or
electrocute him to death – just because he worked as an unpaid organiser for
the black trade unions.
The shocks made him scream compulsively as electricity lit
up his body in flaring sheets of pain. After 70 days in detention without
trial, Neil Aggett was driven to suicide on 5 February 1982. Aged 28, he was
the only white South African to die in detention. He became one more icon of
the struggle against apartheid – until his name slipped away into obscurity.
Yet the three of us here – Jill, her cousin Beverley Naidoo
and me – now feel so full of hope and light that we forget to turn on the lamp
in an increasingly murky room. The progress made this week by the Neil Aggett
Support Group, sparked into existence by the recent publication of Beverley's
biography, Death of an Idealist, is significant. Defying threats to their
personal safety and supported by South Africa's most powerful trade unions, the
group have announced their readiness to lay a private criminal charge of
culpable homicide against Whitehead as Neil's primary torturer. Next Wednesday,
on the anniversary of Neil's detention, they will formally lodge their legal
action at the Johannesburg Central police station, where Neil died.
The group is also liaising with the Hawks – the Directorate
for Priority Crime Investigation – who are re-examining the 6,000 pages of
evidence from the 1982 Aggett inquest. Whitehead and Cronwright (whose
whereabouts are uncertain) were found to be directly responsible for Aggett's
"induced suicide" after the huge body of evidence against them was
upheld by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 1998.
Ignoring the opportunity to admit his culpability and
receive amnesty from future prosecution, Whitehead kept on working as a
security consultant, even supplying services to the post-apartheid government.
He appeared to have become a successful businessman until, last year, South
Africa'sMail & Guardian exposed his work. Scrutiny of Whitehead will now
intensify, because all those pursuing him believe this case presents "a
litmus test" for restorative justice in South Africa.
We each have our own reasons for believing we are moving
beyond a dark past. Jill and her family have lived with the trauma for more
than three decades. Beverley, a former detainee herself, has given up much of
the last seven years to research and write her compelling biography.
.
Neil's sister, Jill Burger (seated), and cousin, Beverley
Naidoo. Photograph: Martin Godwin
My life was turned inside out the day I heard that Neil had
died. I was 20 and in conflict with my parents because I avoided military
service in South Africa. We knew that, if I kept refusing conscription, I'd
face jail if I did not leave the country for ever. My father was soon to become
chief executive of the state electricity company which supplied the volts of
torture used by the police.
Black South Africans had been detained and killed for
decades – but it took the death of a young white man to awaken me. My dad,
meanwhile, did something heroic. He secretly began to work with the banned ANC
to electrify the black townships. I eventually wrote a book, Under Our Skin, in
which this strife is set against Neil's death.
"It's very important to me," Jill says of
Beverley's book and the campaign to bring Whitehead to justice. "I was
with my dad on the day he died and he said: 'I wish we could get those
bastards.' That was his last thought. That's why it sickened me to see that
smug face when I googled Whitehead and saw he was doing remarkably well,
working for the government. At least he's now taken his name and face off the
internet. He must be feeling uncomfortable."
The two women, who have lived in England for decades, talk
in vivid personal detail. "Before his detention I had no idea Neil was in
danger," Jill says, "and so I'd get quite cheesed off with him. He
was too busy to see us much. A year before he was detained, I phoned Neil and
said, 'Mom's broken her ankle … you really should call her.' He said, 'Jill,
I'm so busy, but I'll see what I can do.' I thought, 'For goodness sake, Neil,
this is your mother!'"
Outraged by the conditions of life and the prevalence of
death in the townships where he worked as a doctor, Neil committed himself to
trade unionism. Simply helping the black unions organise themselves became a
fiercely political act – and seemed more important than medical work. "But
then," Jill remembers, "Neil was detained. He was allowed just one
phone call – and he called me. I kept asking him, 'Can I get you a
lawyer?'"
Yet the security police could detain anyone without charge
or recourse to legal advice. "Neil said, 'No. Just tell Mom and Dad. I'll
be fine, Jill. Don't worry.'"
Jill was a young mother drawn into a Kafkaesque world of
detention without trial. She travelled to weekly meetings of the Detainee
Parents' Support Committee. "I was a little Pretoria housewife who had to
farm out the kids before these very distressing meetings. I never forget how
the father of Auret van Heerden [an Afrikaans detainee in the cell opposite
Neil] came in with a plastic bag. He pulled out Auret's shirt. It was covered
in blood. You felt your own blood turn cold. I had really bad nightmares after
that and lost lots of weight. I was in turmoil. But, as a group, we pressed for
a visit. They said we could come on New Year's Eve. Mom and I went but Dad
wouldn't come. He said, 'Oh, Neil doesn't want to see me.'"
Neil's relationship with his father, Aubrey, had broken
down. On the surface, Aubrey and his wife, Joy, were incensed by Neil's
"hippy" beard – but his sister and cousin are more convincing in
outlining the political conflict that cleaved father and son apart. When they
left Kenya for South Africa, Jill remembers, her parents "were very
right-wing. They were very different to Neil."
Inside the ominous police station at John Vorster Square,
Jill says, "A bunch of security policemen in shiny suits came out the
lift, laughing. They were off for a jolly good old New Year's Eve's knees-up. I
felt sick seeing them. We found Neil sitting with a policeman. We tried to sit
near him, with our knees touching, and held his hands. He looked OK. But little
things strike you. I thought, 'My God, they've taken his shoelaces away.' We
spoke for 15 minutes … but touching him was more important. That was my last
sight of him – shuffling away in shoes without laces."
On that last afternoon of 1981, Neil requested a copy of
Grey's Anatomy from Jill, for he planned to specialise in surgery once he was
freed. "Neil thought he'd be OK," Beverley says. "Whitehead
hadn't really interrogated him. It was only in the new year that Whitehead went
to work."
Late one night, in February 1982, just hours before Jill
learned of his death, "Neil was on my mind all the time and I went to see
my daughter Katy because she was restless. I settled her, and as I turned to go
back to bed, I looked out at this beautiful moon. It made me think of Neil. I
thought it strange that this same moon could shine down on him. I wondered:
'What's Neil thinking right now?' I had no idea he had been tortured [for 62
consecutive hours].
"I was woken by a phone call at 6am. It was my old
neighbour. She said, 'Jill, the police have just knocked on the door of your
old house and they're coming to you now.' I stupidly thought that they'd tell
me Neil was being released. But the bell rang and this policeman said: 'I've
got something to tell you.'"
Jill's voice fades to a whisper. "I said: 'Why have you
done this to him? Why? Why?'"
She pauses before, dramatically, talking loudly like the
policeman. "'It's not me, madam. It's them!'"
Jill has spoken for two hours with such composed restraint
that it feels shocking when her voice breaks. "From then on my world just
came apart," she says, her words crumpled by tears.
We take a break and Beverley turns on some lights. It's as
if we've broken a terrible spell as the darkness is obliterated. Beverley even
makes us laugh as she revisits her own detention. "I was detained in 1964,
in the mass arrests after Rivonia [and the life imprisonment of Nelson
Mandela]. But I was a little fish. My brother was more deeply involved. I was
just doing things like leafleting and sign-painting. I was only 21 and I was
the lookout – some lookout! I didn't even see the Security Branch watching us
in the grass!"
Beverley hoots with laughter before remembering a more
sombre moment. "Swanepoel [an infamous security policeman] said: 'You tell
us you did nothing – but we have this.' It was a statement from my brother
Paul. I had an image of a rock cracking – because Paul's another uncompromising
man. I knew there was no way they could have got him to write this without torturing
him."
Detention must have been a grim ordeal for her? "I
regarded it as a real education. I learnt a huge amount. We also went on a
hunger strike. I managed 10 days. The day I started eating again was the day
they moved us. I was released after 56 days."
Like Aubrey and Joy Aggett, Beverley's parents "didn't
want trouble. So they compromised – like most white South Africans. My mother
was Jewish and I'd say: 'Can't you see the connections [with Nazism]?' But
people turned the other way."
Neil's funeral, in contrast, transfixed the country. As Jill
remembers, "the cathedral was absolutely packed. It was a wonderful
service from the moment the black nurses started singing and ululating. They
then picked up the coffin and carried it out. And they wouldn't let it go into
the hearse. We followed in our car on a blazing hot February day. We went at
walking pace for eight miles and there were policemen everywhere. They knelt
down with guns aimed at us. The black people put the coffin down and faced the
police. Eventually, the police moved away. The people picked up the coffin
again and we continued. Thousands of people were still singing.
"My dad, basically, had a nervous breakdown. He hunched
himself up all day, every day and just wept. This was my father – a big, strong
man. But we felt overwhelmed by the people organising the funeral. They wanted
to tell us what to say about Neil on the tombstone. My parents kept saying,
'But he's our son … ' They said, 'No, he died for us.'"
Beverley reiterates that, "The TRC found Whitehead and
Cronwright to be directly responsible for the conditions in which Neil took his
life. He went in as a healthy young man, and so they must be held accountable
for Neil's death. But the support group stress that it is not just for Neil:
it's a case that can answer the question as to how we offer restorative
justice, because Neil represents a strand of ethics and morality that is
desperately needed in South Africa. This was also a groundbreaking case because
[Beverley turns to Jill] your parents allowed the lawyers to argue that this
was induced suicide. This meant the case had wider ramifications than just
Neil. It meant, for the first time, they could ask for other detainees to come
and give testimony under oath in a court of law."
Jill leans forward. "This might just be me talking as a
sister, but Whitehead was very ambitious, registered as a law student and
working his way through university, which is tough. He then met a boy not much
older than him in Neil – who had a medical degree and high principles.
Whitehead was living in a miserable police flat, and I think Neil got up his
nose. I think he just wanted to beat the hell out of Neil because he had
everything that Whitehead could ever want, and has subsequently got. But Neil did
not take advantage of apartheid. He fought it. It became very personal – and
that's why I am so passionate Whitehead should sting, that he should feel the
heat."
We fall briefly silent. Another Friday night settles over
north London – a different kind of Friday night to the one when Neil and Liz
Floyd were detained. Unlike the three of us, Liz remains in South Africa –
showing an unbroken commitment to the country where she is the director of the
Aids programme in Gauteng. I ask Jill one last question: would the pain of 32
years be washed away if Whitehead was brought to trial?
"I don't have vengeance in my heart," she replies.
"But it would give me enormous satisfaction. I could just say at last,
with half an eye looking up to my father, 'They've done it. They've got
him.'"
