Johannesburg - Former apartheid police minister Adriaan Vlok was an ordinary MP in Cape Town when the news broke over the radio that schoolchildren had gone on the rampage in Soweto on June 16, 1976.
Vlok, who recently symbolically rejected apartheid by washing the feet of ANC heavyweight the Reverend Frank Chikane, was approached by The Sunday Independent with the aim of finding out just what went through his mind on that fateful day.
The short answer, according to Vlok, was that he was a National Party parliamentary back-bencher at the time, and picked up the news on a transistor radio that black students in Soweto were gathering for a protest march.
The news was brought to the Vlok household by yesteryear’s SAUK Afrikaanse Nuus Diens (news service), today known as Radio Sonder Grense.
Vlok and his late wife, Corrie, lived at Cape Town’s Akasia Park parliamentary village.
“In the bus to Parliament everybody was talking with hushed tones as to what was happening in Soweto,” he said.
When pressed to trace back what went through his mind at the time, Vlok was surprisingly forthright: “Hell, I was convinced the students were troublemakers who were doing the work of the communists.”
Ahead of the parliamentary sitting, he said MPs huddled in small groups sharing what information they had about the uprising.
“If memory serves me well, I think then-police minister Jimmy Kruger did a brief and assured MPs that the police were in control of the situation and there was no need to worry. But grave concern was written all over the faces of the parliamentarians.
“I worried all the same about my children left behind in Verwoerdburg (now Centurion) with my parents, but I was able to make contact with them and was assured everything was fine. Luckily, in Verwoerdburg, we did not have a township nearby.
“But still people from my constituency (Verwoerdburg) did make contact with me on the phone to find out what the hell was happening,” Vlok said.
Asked if he contacted Kruger personally about reports of the police opening fire on the students on the fateful morning, Vlok said he was a junior backbencher who did not have direct access to the minister.
“Seriously, I was never interested in politics,” Vlok said against the backdrop of the majestic Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, a heartland of the most painful memories of the Anglo-Boer War.
Contrary to his father’s racial “integration” politics, Vlok moved with remarkable ease up the ladder into the upper echelons of the National Party.
When Vorster was elevated to the position of prime minister, he took along with him many of those who worked with him at the Justice Department.
It was around this time that Vlok was offered and accepted the plum job of being Vorster’s private secretary.
In 1974, Vlok was offered the opportunity to become a member of Parliament, but had to answer the million-oxen question: his political party membership, or lack thereof.
“When I told my seniors I did not belong to a political party, they told me I needed to join the National Party before I could be considered for a seat in the National Assembly, and then one thing led to the other,” he explained.
Vlok has since attracted massive local and international interest, after condemning apartheid as an “evil” system, which militated against his Christian doctrine.
Vlok said he was spending Thursday, June 16, watching the commemoration services on television.
If his health had allowed, he would have joined Chikane and the broader South African Council of Churches for a day of prayer and forgiveness in Soweto.
Sunday Independent