Читать книгу Truth, Lies and Alibis - Fred Bridgland - Страница 6

A brave woman journalist and a frightened man

An alibi is a lie by which criminals escape punishment.

Anonymous

One day, ten months after Winnie Mandela was tried in connection with the murder of Stompie Moeketsi, a young South African journalist stumbled upon a huge and frightening story about the woman known to many black South Africans as the Mother of the Nation.

Dawn Barkhuizen’s reputation was that of a hard-working and courageous reporter dedicated to truth-telling no matter how painful the consequences. On that day in March 1992 she was driving through Soweto with Joe Sefale, her photographer colleague at the South African Sunday Times, in pursuit of a story totally unconnected to the Winnie–Stompie issue when she spotted from her car John Umuthi Morgan, Mrs Mandela’s senior driver at the time Stompie was killed.

Barkhuizen had sat in the reporters’ gallery on every day of Mrs Mandela’s months-long trial in the Rand Supreme Court in 1991 and had got to know Morgan. In sworn evidence he had asserted that Mrs Mandela was away, in Brandfort, throughout the three crucial days – 29 December to 31 December 1988 – on which Stompie Moeketsi was assaulted and then murdered in her Soweto home. She could therefore not be guilty of having hurt the boy, Morgan testified.

“I asked Morgan how he was getting on and he immediately said he was in a very bad state,” Barkhuizen told me when I interviewed her for this book. “He went quiet and said something in isiXhosa to Joe, who reassured me he had replied to Morgan, again in isiXhosa, ‘Dawn’s OK, you can trust her.’

“Unprompted further, Morgan said to me in English that he had lied in court to protect Winnie. He said the alibi was fraudulent, a complete invention.”

Barkhuizen was totally taken aback. If true, this was sensational and shocking news. At that time, Nelson and Winnie Mandela were together being feted as the likely future head of state and first lady of South Africa. Together they visited Cuba and the United States, where Winnie addressed ecstatic crowds of mostly black Americans in New York’s Harlem, which Winnie hailed as the Soweto of America. “The Big Apple went wild,” said one observer. “One million lined the streets as the Mandelas were accorded New York’s ultimate honour, a ticker-tape parade.”1 Julia Belafonte, wife of the singer and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte, lauded Winnie as “a wonderful role-model for women” and one newspaper described her as looking like “a latter-day Boadicea in a Xhosa caftan”.

Barkhuizen asked Morgan to tell her more. “He said, ‘Winnie said she would look after us [if we supported her alibi], and now she’s dropped us completely like red hot coals.’ He was obviously very hurt.

“Like a good reporter, I asked, ‘Can we write this?’ He said, ‘No, it’s too dangerous.’ He said he would be unsafe because he lived very near Mrs Mandela’s house in Diepkloof Extension and that her guards watched everything that happened there. His life would be at risk if it was known he was speaking out to the press.

“I said I’d talk to my editor, Ken Owen, to see what could be done to reassure Morgan.”2

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Barkhuizen returned immediately to the Sunday Times headquarters in central Johannesburg to brief Owen about the sensational disclosure by Mrs Mandela’s driver. Owen, fully realising the magnitude of Morgan’s admission, said he would provide a relocation fee to allow him to get away from Soweto for a while if he agreed to be interviewed by Barkhuizen. Morgan would be sheltered under an assumed name in a hotel while she listened to his story.

Morgan agreed to talk.

“I think more than anything that he wanted to clear his name because he said he had been wrongly labelled a child-beater in Soweto after Mrs Mandela’s trial, in which evidence was led of ferocious beatings of Stompie and three other youths by Mandela and her Football Club vigilantes,” said Barkhuizen. “I’d say he had found himself tangled up in something that horrified him and that he argued was contrary to his nature.

“Joe went to fetch him from Soweto with me lying on the floor of the car so we didn’t draw attention to ourselves. We picked up his suitcase from a different part of the township. The first hotel he stayed in was in Johannesburg. But word got out in Soweto that John Morgan was ‘gone’. He began shaking with terror when he learned this, so for security we moved hotel every two days.

“To further reassure him I stopped taking notes. I’d find an excuse every fifteen minutes to go to the bathroom, and then I would sit in the bottom of a broom cupboard remembering and writing down what he had said.”

As Barkhuizen got deeper into Morgan’s story, she grew more and more alarmed by what she was hearing. “I found it all very traumatic,” she said. “Remember that at that time Winnie, in public at least, was still very much the darling of the world, a kind of South African Joan of Arc.

“Morgan was just plain terrified, and I too became frightened because of this. I don’t think I had a moment of doubt about the truthfulness of what he was telling me. He was a simple man: he so obviously needed help but didn’t know which way to turn or who to turn to. He had suddenly found himself very alone and frightened, but he had not come looking for me and I didn’t go looking for him. He described to me how, many years back, he had been in love with Winnie. Like lots of black youths in Soweto, he used to go to the local train station just to see her because she was so beautiful.

“I had to drag the story out of him. He was very hesitant, conflicted and worried, but he was clearly unburdening himself. He was an unsophisticated man caught between a rock and a hard place. Winnie had apparently not cared for him after he lied in court to save her, and he was scared that the community might take revenge on him for being a child-beater. I think he thought that somehow by talking to me he might clear his name.”

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The most important allegations made to Barkhuizen were that Winnie Mandela’s trial alibi was a fabrication; that Morgan had personally seen her beat Stompie Moeketsi to within an inch of his life; and that she had ordered him to dispose of Stompie’s corpse on the morning of 1 January 1989. “As we moved from one hotel to another in Johannesburg and Pretoria [over a period of nine days], he told me Stompie was so badly beaten that Winnie said he would have to be ‘got rid of’,” said Barkhuizen. “A Sunday Times lawyer came and listened while Morgan said Mrs Mandela had ordered him to ‘pick up the dog and dump him’. He kept repeating that Stompie was already dead when he was asked to remove the boy from Mrs Mandela’s home: Stompie had been stabbed and had blood on his neck.

“Morgan said he refused to remove Stompie’s limp body and told Mrs Mandela he would never do anything like that. I believed him,” said Barkhuizen.

Morgan told the journalist that an original sworn statement he had made to the police on 21 February 1989, after his arrest with other Mandela United Football Club members in connection with Stompie’s “disappearance” – his body was only found later – was the real truth. In that deposition he had said that Winnie Mandela was in Soweto throughout the period from 29 to 31 December 1988 and that she had led the assaults on Stompie and three other youths. Furthermore, he said that before the group assault began, he saw Mrs Mandela slap Stompie and say to him: “Such a little person, do you sleep with Paul Verryn and let him fuck you up your arse?” Morgan also quoted Winnie as saying “This thing speaks shit” after Stompie denied having had sex with Verryn, a Methodist Church minister based in Soweto. Morgan, in his police statement, said he left the room where Winnie assaulted Stompie because he could not bear to watch what she was doing.

But at Mrs Mandela’s subsequent trial in 1991, Morgan told Barkhuizen, he reversed his story and lied on Mrs Mandela’s orders and in concert with others, to a Supreme Court judge by placing her in Brandfort on those crucial dates at the end of December 1988. Judge Michael Stegmann accepted Winnie Mandela’s alibi.

Morgan told Barkhuizen it was true that he had participated in the kidnap of Stompie Moeketsi from the manse of Verryn, whose church was in the Soweto suburb of Orlando West and who was accused by Mrs Mandela of homosexually violating Stompie and other young black activists when they sought shelter in the manse while on the run from the apartheid police. Jerry Vusi Richardson, Mrs Mandela’s right-hand man and the Football Club’s so-called chief coach – in fact its chief enforcer – had told Morgan to drive her minibus to the manse to snatch Moeketsi. “Mummy said you must go,” Richardson ordered him. “Mummy” was the term Richardson used to address Mrs Mandela and he insisted that all members of the Football Club also did so. Morgan said that as he left with the kidnap party, Mrs Mandela was sitting in her living room watching a soap opera on television.