When Alberton businesswoman Anemari Jansen first met Eugene de Kock at Pretoria Central in 2011, she had no idea it would change her life forever. It brought her face to face with the horrors of apartheid and forced her to reassess her identity as an Afrikaner. this is an excerpt from her book on the man
‘It’s here, somewhere,” said Larry Hanton, bolt upright like a meerkat while scanning the surrounding area. “I remember the Hennops River.”
Larry, an old friend of Eugene de Kock and former police task force member, had taken the Erasmia off-ramp on the outskirts of Pretoria and was driving up and down a dirt road looking for the farm entrance. There was no sign trumpeting “Vlakplaas”. After a while we stopped at a building site.
“Do you know where Vlakplaas is?”
The workers immediately knew what I was talking about. “Dikoko’s place?” One of them remembered De Kock. “It’s that way. Where the cattle are.”
We followed two herders who were rounding up some cattle and calves, and stopped right in front of the main entrance. The farmhouse was small, half hidden behind tall trees and overgrown shrubs.
We got out, peered through the wire fence. The homestead looked deserted; the metallic taste of blood settled in my throat. I felt nauseous and dizzy.
“Let’s just get out of here,” I said to Larry.
“Wait, let me take a photo of you at the gate.”
Two scraggy dogs ran up, barking hesitantly; a 4x4 and a bakkie were parked under a large lean-to. The Hennops River murmured in the background. The wind played softly through the long grass and the trees.
Photos taken, I got behind the steering wheel with unsteady legs. It was 2012, my first visit to Vlakplaas, the headquarters of Section C1 – the SAP’s death squad, as it became known in the media.
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Vlakplaas fell under the jurisdiction of the security police. This unit, known as Section C, was earmarked for the founding of a South African equivalent of the Rhodesian security forces unit. The unit had three divisions: Section C1, the operational wing at Vlakplaas; Section C2, tasked mainly with identifying and interrogating activists and deciding which terrorists to recruit as askaris and which to prosecute; and Section C3, involved in compiling statistics about acts of terror.
Having read everything about Vlakplaas I could lay my hands on, my awareness now teeters on the brink of understanding. I may know the facts about the history of Vlakplaas, but a true understanding of the violence of apartheid and the abuses by the security forces still evades me.
My fingers may have meshed with the fence around that farm, but I cannot comprehend the physical pain, torture and fear of death that Section C victims must have experienced. I have to force myself over the edge of innocence into the abyss of this inhumanity.
“There’s another entrance behind the house. The chopper pad is there too,” said Larry. “Maybe we can enter there.”
We found the small two-track through hip-high grass to the second entrance. The helipad was a few hundred metres from the fence. A large wooden cross had been erected beside the helipad; I photographed Larry next to it. A man unlocked the gate and allowed us to look around and take photos. He behaved like the owner of the farm; I wondered who would want to live in a place like Vlakplaas. Suddenly it looked like just an ordinary, neglected farmstead.
“The living quarters of the askaris were here, on the left,” Larry explained as we walked in – a brick building with a long row of rooms. We also went to the rondavel that was Eugene’s office, the farmhouse and the undercover entertainment area. It looked like a braai area you’d find on any South African farm.
The building that was once the canteen was locked. I peered through the window – no sign of pool tables, bearded men or bottles of leeutande: “lions’ teeth”, a mixture of liquor dregs and garlic that newcomers to Vlakplaas had to drink. The voices of the past no longer even whispered here.
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Vlakplaas is about 20km outside Pretoria.
It was purchased in 1980 and registered as state property.
Section C1 was established to convince members of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the ANC’s military wing, and other struggle organisations to work for the Security Branch. These men would be used to identify and capture their former comrades who had infiltrated the country.
The captives would then have to choose between co-operation with the Security Branch, which included a salary and benefits, or imprisonment. Those who decided to work for the Security Branch were called askaris, a Swahili word meaning “fighter”.
In his application for presidential pardon in 2002, Eugene refers to a memorandum called “Die stigting van Vlakplaas en die Teen-Terroriste Eenheid” (The establishment of Vlakplaas and the Counter-Terrorism Unit), compiled by General Johan Coetzee, a former police commissioner.
According to the memorandum, the police rented Vlakplaas from as early as June 1979, primarily to provide central accommodation for “contaminated witnesses”, also called “makgemaakte terroriste” (literally, those who had been tamed).
According to Coetzee, the Vlakplaas project was not initially a permanent one. Little money was put into the initiative. “(The) project was somewhat disorganised as far as location and purpose were concerned and there were no clearly formulated guiding principles, especially considering that the project was initially not intended as a permanent undertaking, and was operated on rented property.”
Later, due to the escalation of “the terrorist onslaught against the Republic of South Africa”, it was decided to buy the property.
“General Coetzee’s opinion, as can be deduced from the memorandum, was that Vlakplaas’s primary goal was the fight against terrorism. The services of the askaris were used to identify terrorists, after which they were arrested and taken to court, or were persuaded to join the unit,” wrote Eugene.
In the last months of 1981, the Vlakplaas project became better organised after a directive issued on September 11, 1981 to all departments and commanding officers of the Security Branches, which announced and outlined the objectives of Special Section C1.
According to Eugene, the intention of this directive was to make the services of C1 available to other security branches of the police; it was clear that they were available for a wide variety of actions.
However, he later wrote that the amnesty hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had shown that Vlakplaas was never meant exclusively for the purpose Coetzee and others had in mind.
He went on to say:
“In my time as a commanding officer of a Koevoet unit in the erstwhile South West Africa, I earned the reputation of being a merciless hunter of terrorists. I never received any formal training as a security policeman, nor did I have any practical experience in investigative work related to security matters. I was not even trained as an ordinary detective. For practical purposes, I was a trained ‘soldier’ in the armed conflict against Swapo .
“The other police members of Vlakplaas, both before and after I took over command of the unit, were in a similar position in that they had no specific skills in this regard either. Most of the members, including myself, were used to conduct operations of a military nature.
“Many of the policemen at Vlakplaas had been involved in Koevoet, the SAP’s task force or counter-insurgency unit. They were all trained in the use of explosives and had attended intelligence courses. During these courses, a great deal of emphasis was placed on the dangers that communism, the ANC, trade unions, and so on posed to the government.
“These officers, including myself, were already used to the idea of violence, human pain and suffering as a result of the gruesome acts in which we participated and to which we were exposed during our service in the aforementioned units. I am therefore convinced that we were appointed as a result of our ability to deal with the threat of violence and because killing would be nothing new to us.
“There is no doubt in my mind that the hierarchy in the South African Police was well aware of the requirements for police officers wanting to transfer to Vlakplaas.”
During one of my visits Eugene told me about a strange experience he’d had, which had touched him deeply. It was just after he had left Koevoet in the early 1980s.
He was driving alone on the road between Vryheid and Babanango when something suddenly shifted in his consciousness. At that moment everything he looked at appeared completely surreal: the flat landscape, the sun, the feel of the wind against his skin.
“I thought: how the f*** have things reached this point? “Why the f*** did I end up doing what I do? How can this be possible?”
But a few weeks later he was part of a cross-border operation in Swaziland and everything was back to how it had been.
Without hesitation he had lifted his rifle and shot Zwelibanzi Nyanda dead. Nyanda was a commander of MK in Swaziland and the brother of Siphiwe Nyanda, later a general and former head of the SANDF.
He told me about Zwelibanzi Nyanda … an exceptionally big man.
The incident took place in November 1983 at a house in Swaziland. Eugene could not get Nyanda to go down. And he was an excellent shot.
The post-mortem showed that Eugene shot Nyanda nine times, from his left shoulder to his stomach. Nyanda still tried to get away. The fatal shots were the three Eugene fired into his back, causing Nyanda to crash through the garden gate.
A colleague then appeared from behind the fence and fired two more shots at Nyanda’s head. But he was already dead.
* Eugene de Kock: Assassin for the State by Anemari Jansen is published by Tafelberg at a recommended retail price of R250.