Sunday Times Literary Awards shortlist: Beverley Roos-Muller talks ‘Hunting the Seven’

Non-fiction Award

Criteria: The winner should demonstrate the illumination of truthfulness, especially those forms of it that are new, delicate, unfashionable and fly in the face of power; compassion; elegance of writing; and intellectual and moral integrity.

We asked Beverley Roos-Muller author of Hunting the Seven: How the Gugulethu Seven Assassins Were Exposed (Jonathan Ball Publishers) some questions about her book, which is shortlisted for the non-fiction award.

You make several references to “hunting” throughout the book, including in its title, your prologue (“I, too, hunted the Gugulethu Seven for years ... How does one grasp such depravity? By hunting it.”), and in a chapter titled Hunting the Reporters. Please elaborate on how you employed the definition of the term in relation to the act of seeking, pursuing and killing wild animals, and its meaning within a journalistic context (“hunting a story”).

Yes, I used the term “hunting” deliberately. These seven young men, innocent of the “terrorist” accusations against them, were selected and hunted down like animals by security police trained to be “Hunters of Men”. The police hid on the outskirts of Gugulethu on that morning in 1986 and waited for their prey to be delivered to them in a van by an undercover Vlakplaas askari. Those who were not killed immediately as they stepped out of the van, fled, only to be pursued and slaughtered in a wild, armed shoot-out. All were shot in the head, meaning at close quarters. Then the event was filmed as a trophy scene; policemen bakgat as the bodies were filmed being dragged; shown on television (and the Cabinet).

I cannot think of another instance in which such an event happened so publicly; their impoverished families — none of whom were informed about the killings — only discovered why their sons had vanished when they saw bullet-riddled bodies on TV that night or searched the hospitals and morgues. It was an act of extreme depravity planned by Vlakplaas during their only visit to the Cape, ostensibly as a deterrent to activists who opposed apartheid (but another, more secret reason, revealed much later in this book).

So, decades later, I decided to hunt down the full truth, for there are many ways of describing a narrative. I had met their families before and at the funerals, and knew that the story we had been fed was fake. Nothing really added up until I began to finally connect the many dots together. I remembered that old saying, that the pen is mightier than the sword, and that it must therefore also be a good weapon for hunting a story!

Other than writing as a journalist, you were writing as a mother. Did you find it challenging at times to report on, and listen to, the grieving mothers during the TRC hearings?

I didn’t write it in a journalistic context (my earlier newsroom training), but through the lens of an activist while lecturing at UCT, who also had a child potentially at risk because of the work I was doing in the townships. The skills I had learnt, however, were invaluable.

Being a mother, a woman, is a vital part of how I see the world.

Also, as a mother, I’d had to cope with phone threats against my own young daughter Nandi, 10, after those huge funerals, for my presence was noted and filmed by the police and published in newspapers. The security police would ring up in the small hours of the morning, laughing, about where she went to primary school, giving her full name, and so on. As a politicised household, we had to be on guard. Every parent wants their children to be safe; these mothers of the seven had lost that comfort, forever.

Yet, it was the mothers of the seven who “kept the faith”, who hung onto the belief they might one day get to the truth. The hearings of this first Cape TRC case no: CT/00100 were incredibly moving — almost everyone in the room was crying, especially when the police video of the bodies was shown. I saw anger in the bereaved women — of course — but also relief that they were finally being heard sympathetically.

Cynthia Ngewu, mother of Christopher Piet, was a woman of faith who compassionately forgave the only killer who asked for it, the Vlakplaas constable Thapelo Mbelo. I last saw Cynthia about a year ago in her Gugulethu home before she died; she said she’d let go of bitterness, but still did not understand why they never got compensation. I then went to the grave of Christopher and wept at the tender tombstone she and her family had erected. They had lost a greatly loved son and brother. We forgot that aspect while trying to decipher the bullying story that was hurled at us by those brutal hunters of men.

In your epilogue, you write, “Apartheid in the fullness of its cruelty must be remembered and recorded.” Comment on the necessity of a book of this nature in contributing to the archive of the full breadth of apartheid, with an emphasis on the atrocities committed by Eugene de Kock’s Vlakplaas unit.

I worry all the time about “historical amnesia”. I am often asked to speak about the awful past. Everyone under the age of 50 is too young to remember how apartheid actually felt, as a lived experience. If we don’t record it, such generational trauma will be forgotten, or dismissed, or downplayed. There are many who are invested in ignoring the past.

De Kok took the fall for the politicians and generals who paid him and his Vlakplaas unit to kill and torture for them, while they walked away with full pockets and carefree hearts. I examine the disgrace of that in this book: of how much money changed hands from the secret “cash cow” of Vlakplaas. Its killers were employed with the full knowledge of the “inner Cabinet”, to murder and torture, to poison and otherwise eliminate opponents of apartheid. We are obsessed with corruption today, without acknowledging that it had become entrenched in the “business” of politics way back then. Atrocities were the price that others paid for apartheid to work.

In what way do you think the book “illuminates truthfulness”?

While the TRC was being televised, it eviscerated the entire, nonsensical narrative of apartheid wasn’t that bad. But time has passed, people have forgotten, or were too young to remember it, and the TRC was abruptly ended by Thabo Mbeki before its task could be completed. So I wanted to write Hunting the Seven as an illuminating story of real people and events, so that at least one case was exposed in its entirety and can never be dismissed: that’s why it is so evidence heavy. It includes formerly unpublished hard evidence, for the integrity of this story needed to be paramount.

This book also tracks the wider story of ongoing apartheid violence at the time and of how hard it was to tell the public about it. Journalist friends were arrested and even tried. Many younger journalists who interviewed me about this book said that they had not known how terrible it was.

What impression do you want readers to take away with them after reading the book?

That these human rights atrocities did indeed occur, in a deliberate, gruesome form, to support the ideology of white superiority and also greed, and were paid for in blood, pain and imposed poverty. There is some urgency in this, for if we avert our eyes, history shows that such events may repeat themselves; we see this today in global events. We can do better, if we have the will and the information to do so. South Africans have shown that despite our past horrors, we are also capable of greatness.