Before we had the two red cats I wrote about before, we had also two other cats. My father named them Marx and Lenin. Because, he said, one had marks on him. And the other, well when we went away, we could lenin to the neighbours. My sister and I thought these were jolly good names and we loved our cats very much. Lenin was a bit friendlier than Marx, but he died sooner. The vet said it might have been from eating dog food.
These cats were born to a cat that lived in a house in Bellair, Durban. It belonged to a man called Rick and his wife Foszia. The house was done out in a quite a different style to our house. There were long, dangly, rattling grass curtains that you could burst through. And there were lots of photographs of beloved people on the walls of the kitchen. In this kitchen there was always food cooking. Quite different to English comfort food. I was ashamed to say out loud that I found the food too hot. Even though I was only like about four. And it was Apartheid. So we weren’t meant to be used to eating the meals that Other People cooked. Rick and Foszia were not meant to be living in Bellair together. None of us were meant to be together at all.
My parents used to talk about philosophical and political issues for hours with Rick and Foszia and the other people at the house. I found this incredibly boring. Mostly I didn’t understand what they were talking about, though I did listen. But there were often other children to play with, sometimes Rick’s daughters, Jann and Kim would be there. Sometimes Medina and Bruno would be there. Sometimes Medina’s dad would take us all to the circus, and he was very understanding when I became terrified of the crocodile scene, and then we would just abandon the circus and go home. And apart from the adults and the children that we were not meant to be with, and the cats and kittens, there was also a sunny garden at this house in Bellair, with rabbits in it. There were vegetables and fruit you could pick and eat straight-away.
Then one night, when I was six, my father went to the house in Bellair. Not to have a dinner party. He went because Rick had been killed. Rick had read his daughters a bedtime story and said goodnight. He had heard a noise, he had gone to the window. He was shot in the chest. Jann rushed to him and cuddled him while he died. He was 57. She was 13.
After that I spent much of my childhood awake until my dad came home at night. Jann has spent much of her adult life looking for the man who killed her father. She still doesn’t know.
It is believed that Martin Dolincheck, a former Bureau of State Security operative (BOSS) was involved. BOSS was responsible for countless hits on activists, torture, burglaries of Anti-Apartheid and Amnesty offices, spreaders of disinformation. In 1981 Dolincheck was also part of mercenary-led coup attempt against the Seychelles' socialist government. Led by Mike Hoare, a former mercenary, living in Hilton at the time, working as a stockbroker. Some of Hoare’s team disguised as rugby players and claiming to be members of The Ancient Order of Froth-Blowers drinking club chartered a plane to the Seychelles. They filled their baggage with golf-clubs and toys to supposedly distribute to orphanages, but really just to hide their AK47s. They were caught at customs, had a great big gun fight in the airport and took everyone hostage. Then they hijacked an Air India flight to take them back to Durban. (For more you can check wikipedia, but that is what I can remember.)
And then there is Eugene De Kock, otherwise known as Prime Evil. A photograph by George Hallett of Jann and Prime Evil posted a few days ago, in honour of Hallett’s death is the reason for this story. Because since then, I have not been able to think about anything else. Such is the power of Art. To elicit, on viewing the photograph, a six-year-old’s perspective, forty years on. Hallett was well known for his photographs of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
At the TRC hearings Prime Evil admitted to hundreds of acts of torture, extortion and murder. in 1996 he was tried and convicted on 87 charges, sentenced to two life sentences plus 212 years in prison, for crimes against humanity. He was released after 20 ‘in the interests of nation-building’. There is debate among psychologists as to whether he has ever shown remorse. But in all accounts I have read, many say he never lost any sleep.
There were more suspects. “In the decades after Turner’s assassination, a sad story unfolds of the attitude of South Africans to the murder of those who paid the ultimate price in the struggle for a free, democratic country - Biko, Neil Aggett, Matthew Goniwe, Sparrow Mkhonto, Ashley Kriel, Turner and many others. Quite simply, far too many people didn’t give a damn. In Turner’s case, it was Jann who did the digging, asked all of the questions and travelled thousands of kilometres following up tip-offs. But all to no avail.” (Sunday Tribune, January 7, 2018).
I don’t remember Rick well, just flashes. For me, he was the man who gave us the kittens and was kind to rabbits and vegetables, and took photographs. And whom my parents loved immensely. And as Jann wrote about the night he died, “a man who was thinking about going for a walk on the beach tomorrow with his daughters, if only the rain would let up.”
You can find out all about his work on the internet if you want to, and I recommend you do. Because now that George Floyd has reminded us that the world is still as shit as it was during Apartheid, despite being white, Rick would have done what we need to do.
“We are born into a society, and we adopt its behaviours and values; we come to be the person that makes sense within that context,” he wrote. “But at the same time, we are not doomed to accept the world view we developed through our upbringing. We have the capacity to decide who we are, what values we believe and the structure of relationships that we want to be part of.”
But perhaps most prescient, given the South Africa of today, was his observation that “freedom is not something which can simply be guaranteed by a declaration of human rights”. (Sunday Tribune, January 7, 2018).
Thanks for the photographs, George Hallett. RIP.