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The death of Stompie Moeketsi

Real news is something that someone somewhere doesn’t want us to know.

Jeremy Paxman

Stompie Moeketsi was killed the same night, after Dr Asvat had examined the boy’s wounds and driven to Reggie Jana’s warehouse to share what he had seen over a stiff whisky and then on from Reggie to the Mandela Crisis Committee. Early the next morning Winnie Mandela ordered John Morgan to remove the dead Stompie from her home, according to evidence he gave Dawn Barkhuizen and later to the TRC.

The only person to claim to have witnessed Stompie’s murder was Katiza Cebekhulu. In testimony to the TRC and in interviews for my own biography of Mrs Mandela1 and a BBC Television documentary for which I was the writer and narrator, Cebekhulu said he heard Jerry Richardson say to the badly injured Stompie on the evening of 31 December 1988: “Pack your things, you are going home.”

Cebekhulu went to his bed in one of the detached cabins at the back of the courtyard of Mrs Mandela’s house, beyond the open-air jacuzzi and behind a hedge of flowering bushes. At some later point, either just before or after midnight, he woke and went outside to go to the toilet next to the cabin. Cebekhulu said that as he walked he saw movements beyond the hedge, which made him crouch low and freeze instinctively. “Richardson was carrying Stompie in his arms and Winnie was with him. Richardson laid Stompie flat next to the jacuzzi. I heard Stompie murmur, but could not understand what he was saying. Winnie had something pointed in her hand. It glinted but I could not make out whether it was a knife or a pair of scissors.”

I was there when Cebekhulu took the stand on 25 November 1997 at the TRC public hearing in Johannesburg – nine years after Stompie’s death. He pointed at Winnie Mandela and accused her of killing Stompie. In his testimony he said he saw her stab him twice but could not tell precisely whether she hit him in the neck or the chest. Then, Cebekhulu testified, Winnie Mandela and Jerry Richardson together held the boy in the water of the jacuzzi. “I believe Stompie probably died as I watched,” he said.

After that Cebekhulu moved as stealthily as possible back into his room. He was terrified, but knew he had not been seen by either Mandela or Richardson. He said he could hardly believe what he had witnessed and his whole body was shaking and trembling. He lay down, covered his head with a blanket, and heard a Toyota in the driveway hired by Winnie from businessman Richard Maponya start up and leave.2 The TRC established that Stompie’s body was carried away in the boot of that particular car.

Cebekhulu heard the Toyota return about an hour later. Richardson, who drove the car when Morgan refused to do so, came into Cebekhulu’s room, switched on the lights as if checking that he and other Football Club members were asleep, and put them off again before going out. Cebekhulu, pretending to be asleep, testified that he opened his eyes slightly, peeped beneath the blanket’s edge and saw tiny spots of blood on Richardson’s shoes. Thabiso Mono, who slept in the other cabin, also gave evidence that he saw specks of blood on the chief coach’s shoes.

Unable to sleep, Cebekhulu was the first person to rise on the morning of Sunday, 1 January 1989. Richardson’s khaki work trousers were lying on the toilet floor with blood on them. The jacuzzi, full the previous day, had been drained of water, but there were faint blood smears as though someone had hurriedly tried to rub them away.

When Cebekhulu went into the cabin where Stompie slept, he established that the boy was no longer there. His fear intensified when he heard that Mrs Mandela was telling the household that Stompie had “run away”. Cebekhulu said he knew that had to be a lie.