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Foreword by Nkosinathi Biko

This book will make your stomach turn. Do not avert your eyes.

Our efforts to understand and document exactly how wide the footprint of apartheid’s atrocities stretched, how far its violence travelled within and beyond our borders, have not gone far enough. Death Flight shines a much-needed light on some of the darkest corners of a regime waging a desperate and dirty fight against the inevitable. It is the first detailed exploration of the horrendous practice of flinging murdered prisoners into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean.

By following the thread of apartheid’s violence into Namibia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Angola, Swaziland, and Zambia, Death Flight elucidates the transnational nature of this crime against humanity. In so doing, it raises fascinating questions about the role of international law in the attainment of hitherto evasive justice.

The general callousness with which apartheid’s henchmen treated human life is an assault on one’s senses. In the process, the book demolishes the supremacist argument central to apartheid, that at its core lay a desire to bring enlightenment to a ‘backward’ people.

I found it disturbing that most of the death flight victims in the book could not be identified because the interviewees chose ‘not to remember’ details. It is unimaginable that a system ostensibly operating on the basis of security intelligence would have disposed of people without knowledge of the risk (real or imagined) that they presented and, most importantly, without knowing their identities – the basic construct of the world of intelligence.

One hopes that the names that did make it into the book will bring some closure to many a family who, to date, may have had little idea of what happened to their beloved.

And for those whose identities remain unverified, one hopes that, by turning the light on this hitherto ‘concealed’ class of victims, Death Flight will invite further scholarship and activism probing this issue. It appears that this important task escaped even the TRC.

Adding to the contemporary relevance of the book is the disturbing revelation of a covert, post-TRC process of exemption for perpetrators, as well as an inexplicable (if not unconstitutional) change to the policy of the National Prosecuting Authority. One hopes that this may provide impetus for the wheels of justice to once again start turning.

This part of the book resonates with the recent progressive judgment handed down in the Ahmed Timol matter by Judge Billy Mothle. The case has re-energised the efforts of many families in South Africa seeking justice for the unresolved political killings of their loved ones. The court proceedings, aimed at ensuring that João Rodrigues is held accountable for the murder of Timol, have exposed the conniving role played by some structures of the democratic government in protecting the perpetrators of apartheid.

The recent denial by former president FW de Klerk that apartheid was a crime against humanity triggered an outcry and a national debate about our past. The contents of this book make an irrefutable case confirming the commission – in the most brutal of ways – of such a crime. Furthermore, it raises serious questions about the role of members of the State Security Council, which at one stage included De Klerk himself, along with a broad network of other senior members of government.

Death Flight is a daring mission to salvage the ghosts of those who were thought to have been eternally dissolved, by apartheid Special Forces, deep in the oceanic waters off our shores. It is destined to become an invaluable tool, connecting the dots in the quest to ensure that no victim of the deadly hand of apartheid is left unaccounted for.

Nkosinathi Biko

May 2020