Читать книгу Truth, Lies and Alibis - Fred Bridgland - Страница 10

Mrs Mandela’s physician pays a visit

Give a child love, laughter and peace.

Nelson Mandela

Dr Abu-Baker Asvat was a radical, politically committed South African of Indian descent with a medical practice in Soweto, who had first met Winnie Mandela in the late 1970s. He was very popular in Soweto. The gregarious son of a Muslim shopkeeper, he was fiery when confronting injustice. Outside surgery hours, he and his wife, Zhora, drove into squatter camps towing a caravan packed with medical supplies to treat the poorest of the poor who had no access to medical care, charging no fees for their drugs or time.

Asvat was known in Soweto both as “the people’s doctor” and also as Hurley, because as a young man his favourite soccer player was Charlie Hurley, a famous centre half for the northern England club of Sunderland, where fans revered him as “The King”. Dr Asvat, well over 1.9 metres tall, was renowned for his personal warmth and his sharp and bawdy sense of humour, especially when shouting taunts in Gujarati across cricket fields. He was mischievous, sometimes phoning close friends at crack of dawn and growling in fluent Afrikaans: “This is John Vorster Square [the notorious Johannesburg police headquarters]. You must report to us immediately.”

During the 1976 Soweto Uprising by black schoolchildren against apartheid rule, Asvat organised the transport of wounded and dying students to his surgery for treatment in complete disregard for his own safety. He was sometimes taking care of more than a hundred patients a day during the revolt, never refusing to see those who could not afford to pay. On one occasion his surgery was flooded with so many children wounded in battles with the police that he resorted to teaching patients in his waiting room how to remove buckshot from the backs and scalps of screaming victims. Like all prominent anti-apartheid activists, Asvat endured police harassment for years. In January 1978 he filed an affidavit after a Special Branch major beat him severely and threatened his life while under detention in a Soweto police station.

After Winnie was exiled to Brandfort, Dr Asvat used to visit her there between 1977 and 1985. His mobile clinic became so successful in Brandfort’s Phathakahle that he in effect became the township’s doctor, building a small cabin behind Mrs Mandela’s house as an examination cubicle and waiting room. On each trip he left behind medical supplies and maize meal for Winnie to administer and distribute.

Asvat’s radicalism had several roots. His father, a prosperous shopkeeper in Vrededorp, an Indian inner suburb of Johannesburg, urged his sons to do something more interesting with their lives than selling rice, lentils and detergents. Get a profession, he urged them in the days when most vocations in South Africa other than medicine, the law and teaching were closed to non-whites.

Abu-Baker’s elder brother, Ebrahim, opted for medicine and left to study in Pakistan. His younger brother followed. Abu-Baker entered the Department of Medical Studies at the University of Rajshahi in former East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, before transferring to Karachi University, whose medical degrees were recognised in South Africa – unlike Rajshahi’s. He returned home deeply radicalised. His anger intensified when in 1973 his parents were forcibly removed from their doublestorey, colonial Victorian house with delicate ironwork and wide verandahs in Vrededorp to a new Indian township location, Lenasia, more than thirty kilometres out of Johannesburg. “We got peanuts for our property, and then the government broke it down,” Ebrahim Asvat told me in one of many interviews I conducted with him.1

Coronation Hospital in Coronationville in Johannesburg, and Natalspruit Hospital, in the township of Katlehong, where Abu-Baker first worked after his return from Pakistan, served coloured and black communities respectively. But all the senior staff were white: their salary structures were higher and their leave entitlements were better than those for Indians and coloureds, whose own salaries were in turn better than those of blacks. The whites’ tea and rest rooms were separate and their conditions were superior to those for non-white personnel. Abu-Baker fought constantly with the hospital authorities about these discriminatory practices. He was disciplined several times and was eventually reported to the provincial authorities and sacked.

Abu-Baker bought Ebrahim’s private practice in Soweto. He hired as his surgery nurse and receptionist Mrs Albertina Sisulu, wife of Walter Sisulu. Albertina was a courageous and disciplined woman; she was patient and unpretentious. While Winnie Mandela was far more glamorous and openly confrontational, Albertina had a calmness and composure which drew people towards her for support and solace in tough and distressing times. Out of trust and respect, they affectionately called her “Ma”.

Ma Sisulu had been imprisoned several times for defiance of apartheid laws. She had been tortured, held in solitary confinement, banned and put under house arrest for ten years. Her three children had also been detained at various times. In late 1958 she and Winnie Mandela were imprisoned together for defying the notorious pass laws.2 It was the first time that Winnie, then only 24 years old and pregnant with her first child, Zenani, had been arrested. Winnie started to bleed on the stone floor of the cell in Johannesburg’s Old Fort Prison. Ma Sisulu, a trained midwife, took charge. She removed her own overcoat and covered Winnie to keep her warm while making her eat some food. The haemorrhaging slowed and eventually stopped and the threatened miscarriage was averted.3

The episode should have bonded the two women who had so much in common, but thereafter they grew apart, and their mutual disapproval became outright hostility. During Winnie’s internal exile in Brandfort, the United Democratic Front (UDF) was formed in 1983 to take up the work of the banned ANC. Ma Sisulu helped found the movement and was appointed its co-president.

The honour paid Albertina seemed to infuriate Winnie. It appeared that she resolved on return from exile in Brandfort to have nothing to do with the UDF and to act as a free agent without seeking any mandate from the community. It also seemed to reinforce her resolve to form the Mandela United Football Club.

****

Abu-Baker Asvat and Albertina Sisulu became very close. Together they visited squatter camps, where he was addressed as “father”. Albertina helped distribute old clothing and food parcels collected by the Asvat family to the aged, sick and destitute. Ma Sisulu admired the humanity and commitment of a man who at times provided shelter in his own Lenasia home for as many as twenty dirt-poor people at a time.

“My brother had real compassion for people,” Ebrahim Asvat told me. “He treated anyone, regardless of ideology. Once someone was referred to hospital he would visit them there regularly until they were discharged. If he was called out at midnight, he would always go and come back as late as three or four in the morning. Sometimes the police would detain him, or he would close the practice for a week or two and go into hiding. The security police constantly harassed him, making threatening phone calls or searching his home for documents, usually in the early hours of the morning. He persuaded our family to raise money to put black people through college.”

Despite Ma Sisulu’s aversion to the post-Brandfort Winnie Mandela, Abu-Baker maintained his close relationship with the younger woman. He remained Winnie’s personal physician, and she was so close to the doctor that on return from Brandfort she used to dine regularly with him and his family on Friday evenings in Lenasia, together with the Mandela daughters, Zindzi and Zenani, and, occasionally, Football Club members. Mrs Mandela almost always left the Asvat household with the gift of half a freshly slaughtered lamb.

Although Ma Sisulu loved Dr Asvat, she refused to attend the Friday night dinners because of Winnie’s presence there.

Zhora Asvat, too, was uncomfortable with Winnie, especially since she sometimes arrived drunk, which is completely taboo in traditional Muslim households. But in the face of her husband’s long-term commitment to the Mother of the Nation, Zhora was powerless to caution him effectively.

****

Abu-Baker’s loyalty was so great that when on Friday, 30 December 1988, John Morgan drove Mrs Mandela, Xoliswa Falati and Katiza Cebekhulu to his surgery in the Soweto suburb of Rockville, Winnie was sure of a warm welcome.

While Morgan stayed outside in the minibus and Falati waited in the reception area with Ma Sisulu, Winnie and Cebekhulu entered the consulting room to be greeted by Asvat, who, according to Cebekhulu, laughed and asked: “What have I done to deserve a visit by big people like this?”

“We’ve come with a very big problem,” Winnie replied. “This young boy has been sodomised by Paul Verryn.”

The smile, Cebekhulu recalled, disappeared from the doctor’s face. Asvat knew Verryn well and regarded him as a friend. He said he did not believe what Mrs Mandela was telling him, but she demanded that Abu-Baker examine Cebekhulu and issue a signed medical report confirming homosexual rape the previous day.

Dr Asvat ushered Cebekhulu into an examination booth, and after asking him to describe the rape he took an anal smear with a cotton swab. He also took a blood sample, checked Cebekhulu’s heart and pulse, and measured his weight. Back in the consulting room, he asked Winnie why she had not brought the youth earlier. He told her the smear would not prove anything because Cebekhulu had since been to the toilet and bathed following the alleged sexual assault. He told Mrs Mandela to return in two weeks for the results of the lab tests on the samples. John Morgan drove Winnie back to her house without the medical report she had sought.

Ebrahim Asvat told me in several interviews that the routine medical visit card filled out that day by his brother showed that Winnie Mandela could not possibly have been 360 kilometres away in Brandfort between 29 and 31 December 1988. The medical card clearly showed the date of Winnie Mandela’s visit to the surgery with Cebekhulu to have been Friday, 30 December 1988. The date was to become of critical importance at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearing into the activities of Mrs Mandela’s Football Club in November–December 1997, helping the commission establish that Mrs Mandela’s alibi was false. Details from the date-stamped medical card were duplicated in the meticulous double-entry logbook maintained by Ma Sisulu and her assistants. The date on the medical card and that in the logbook were the same: 30 December 1988.4

On the card Cebekhulu’s name was entered in handwriting and his address was given as Paul Verryn’s at the Methodist church in Orlando West, Soweto. Next to the stamped date there was additional writing, identified by Ebrahim Asvat as Abu-Baker’s, which made no reference to Mrs Mandela’s allegation that Cebekhulu had been raped by Verryn. Instead, Abu-Baker wrote only that Cebekhulu was mentally confused, tearful and hysterical and that he was suffering from insomnia. The doctor prescribed sleeping pills, paracetamol and multivitamin tablets.

****

That same evening, following the visit to the surgery, Thabiso Mono said Stompie was subjected to another savage beating. Gybon Khubeka, one of the Football Club’s main “enforcers”, accused Stompie of being a police informer and asked him why he had sold out people who were fighting for liberation. Stompie could not answer because he was so badly injured, and Khubeka reacted by kicking him, just like a piece of rag, saying: “I’m not going to use my hands. If I use my hands, I can kill you.” The more frustrated Khubeka became with Stompie’s failure to answer, the more heavily he kicked him.

The next morning – Saturday, 31 December – Stompie’s condition was worse. A huge lump had risen on the side of his head. He was still unable to speak and every time he tried to eat he threw up and was forced by Football Club members to clean up his own vomit.

Mono described to me how he felt he was living through a nightmare as he watched Khubeka assault Stompie. “Gybon was a very big and tough guy. He kept saying Stompie was an informer and he couldn’t live with informers. He kept kicking Stompie against the wall. He kicked him very heavily. Stompie was in a terrible state afterwards. The whole of the following day [Saturday] he was vomiting and he couldn’t eat.”

Later, the state would prepare a case against Khubeka for the assault on Stompie. But before he was brought to trial, Khubeka fled the country to an unknown destination in East Africa.5