Teaching "Race" with a Gendered Edge

Chapter 2: Monumental Dresses: Coming to Terms with Racial Repression

43 CHAPTER 2: Monumental Dresses: Coming to Terms with Racial Repression Rosemarie Buikema Phila Portia Ndwandwe was a high-placed South African freedom fighter who had been missing since 1988 and who turned out to have been murdered by the security police. She was the first victim whose remains were exhumed after information was provided by perpetrators appearing before the Amnesty Committee of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa. Phila Portia Ndwandwe had been trained in Quatro camps and had functioned as the acting commander of Natal Umkhonto activities from Swaziland. She was responsible for the infiltration of the African National Congress (ANC) cadres into Natal. After the unbanning of the ANC she did not return to her family. A number of stories started to circulate, explaining for instance that she had not gone missing but had become a police collaborator (an askari). However, as the whole nation could witness in the special TRC reports dedicated to the Amnesty Committee’s exhumations and broadcasted by SABC-TV in 1997, and as we can read in the 1998 TRC report, security branch members had abducted her from Swaziland. This abduction happened with the help of two askaris, but she never became an askari herself. The case of Ndwandwe is often referred to in the post-TRC literature as proof of the rightness of the truth before justice strategy. Without the Amnesty Committee, her story might not have been told, and Phila Ndwandwe might have been remembered, informed by speculations, as a police collaborator. The truth emerged because, in order to receive amnesty, some of the policemen involved in Phila Ndwandwe’s disappearance appeared before the Amnesty Committee and told the story of her last days in prison. The security police members clearly stated that she had not been prepared to co-operate with the police. She explicitly did not want to turn into an askari. Consequently, as the policemen did not have admissible evidence to prosecute her and as they could not release her either, they killed her and buried her on the Elandskop farm. In the end, the exhumation of the remains of Phila Portia Ndwandwe took place in KwaZulu-Natal on 12 March 1997. On that occa- sion, amnesty commissioner Richard Lyster noted that this was one of “the most poignant and saddest” of the exhumations. According to Lyster: She was held in a small concrete chamber on the edge of the small forest in which she was buried. According to information from those that killed her, she was held naked and interrogated in this chamber for some time before her death. When we exhumed her, she was on her back in a foetal position, because the grave had not been dug long enough, and had a single bullet wound to the top of her head, indicating that she had been kneeling or squatting when she was killed. Her pelvis was clothed in a plastic packet, fashioned into a pair of panties indicating an attempt to protect her modesty.1 The story of Phila Ndwandwe is only one of the numerous examples of the tensions between truth and justice which were central to the process of political transition in South Africa. While dealing with the nation’s legacy of racial repression , the guiding question that preceded the holding of theTRC hearings was how something really new could be achieved. Legal vindication alone is not sufficient to pave the road towards a new community; that much is shown by the lessons of history.2 But establishing insight into the truth just might achieve this. The attempt to clear the path and enable the coming of a new era eventually led to the decision to let truth prevail over justice. Not with an eye on neglecting justice, but rather with a clear focus on a higher ambition: deterring discord, aiming for forgiveness and reconciliation. It had always been the TRC’s hope and aim that insight into the truth, the different kinds of truth, would eventually bring on reconciliation, because the belief was that something new could only flourish on the soil of reconciliation. The question of how something really new could be achieved therefore transformed into 1 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, Volume II, 1998. 2 The joint treatment of the children and grandchildren of Dutch people who had collaborated with the German occupier (NSB) together with WWII victims turned out to be impossible even for the second and third generation at the Dutch...