BOOK REVIEW | Waking up sleeping apartheid dogs who got away with murder

Steve Biko was neither the first nor the last activist to be murdered by the apartheid state.

Not only men were tortured by the apartheid state. Not only big cities were sites of struggle against it. Yet, in the popular imagination, we often reinscribe the idea of gallant famous men as the most important actors in the fight for a liberated and just SA. Which is why, chances are, you have never heard of Mapetla Mohapi, the subject of an intriguing book, Now You Know How Mapetla Died, by Zikhona Valela. We have a chance to respond to our ignorance by grabbing the opportunity to expand our knowledge about our shameful history, one we have yet to fully reckon with.

Mapetla was murdered the year before Biko. Yet the statement I just typed — Mapetla was murdered the year before Biko — is not a legal truth. That conundrum, and the pain it occasions, lies at the heart of this sensitive and thoughtful work. The brutes employed within the special branch of the SA Police Service claimed that he had hanged himself, that they had even tried to resuscitate him but to no avail, and that he had left a suicide note.

Much of the second half of this book chronicles an attempt by Nohle, his wife, to use the legal system to declare the claim of suicide a falsehood. In the end, and unsurprisingly, neither an inquest nor a civil case succeeded in getting justice for Nohle and her family.

Valela does an excellent job in using archival material, plus extensive interviews with contemporaries of Mapetla, to show up the fiction of the apartheid state’s claim of apparent suicide for what it was, a patent, painful and harmful lie. Nohle was not so naive as to say that she had great odds of succeeding within the wicked apartheid legal system. But it was important to have the system’s intrinsic anti-black racism put on display, and to let it archive its own evil in law books and elsewhere for future researchers, such as Valela, to eventually dig up. The book is therefore also about how the apartheid state worked from a systems point of view. Police did not operate within a vacuum. They were callous and violently immoral precisely because they knew that the whole legal and political system legitimated their violence.

We often render small towns and cities invisible in the larger narratives about the struggle against colonialism and apartheid.

Valela must be commended for deciding to write about a relatively unknown historical figure coming from a small town in the Eastern Cape. Perhaps that is what partly appeals to me, not least as someone who comes from that part of our country. But from a knowledge production point of view, the more serious reason why this is important is that we often render small towns and cities invisible in the larger narratives about the struggle against colonialism and apartheid. They may get a passing mention — “so and so was captured outside this or that little town while travelling to Johannesburg” — but we seldom dive into the detailed histories of these towns and cities and the people who inhabit them, and the resistance work that happened there too. King William’s Town is one such example. This book invites us to pay attention to places the names of which may not be answers to questions at your local pub quiz.

The same is true of the people we remember as the heroes of our struggle. For every Biko, there is a Mapetla that is forgotten. This does Biko a disservice, as Valela rightly argues, because it locates him outside a collective within which he had located himself. And, more obviously, it does Mapetla an injustice because his story is rendered invisible. This is why one of the bigger questions that emerges in this book is whether we have really excavated anything approaching a comprehensive account of our past. Such work is necessarily ongoing, of course, but the point is that we often fail to acknowledge and to reduce the glaring gaps in our knowledge about the past. One reason is that the subtext that came with the completion of the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is that we are supposed to let sleeping apartheid dogs lie.

While I like the title and cover of the book, once you start reading it you realise that, in some ways, this is not a book centrally about Mapetla. Or, rather, it is certainly not only about him. It is also very much a book about Nohle, and many other women in the struggle more generally, fighting against the trope that sees wives or lovers or female companions and co-workers of men as extras in the stories of the lives of men.

The torture suffered by Nohle and other women is vicious in ways you could not imagine unless you were as evil as apartheid cops. Knowing, for example, that society burdens women more than men with child rearing, some of the interrogation methods involved the psychological torture of lying to mothers about their children being dead or missing in wicked attempts to get them to leak information about other activists. As men, we never say anything about menstruation because we do not menstruate. Apartheid cops often deliberately disallowed women such as Nohle from accessing sanitary products, knowing what the feeling of shame would do to a woman who is menstruating and not able to access such products nor shower or otherwise clean herself.

Just like Biko and Mapetla, many of these women were strangled and physically beaten, but it is not common knowledge that women were as viciously targeted as men. When ANC struggle veteran Thenjiwe Mtintso was tortured, for example, the officer who did so explicitly told her that he was doing to her what was done to Mapetla. In some ways, this thematic focus of the book is even more important than letting the world know how Mapetla died. Of course, we are fortunate that we need not reduce the book to one single moral and so all these takeaways, taken together, render the book important.

The first half of the book constructs something of a narrative arc of Mapetla’s life, showing how he accidentally got involved in politics, and in the Black Consciousness Movement specifically. He came from a well-resourced family compared to other black children but life under apartheid affected everyone regardless their class positionality. The apartheid government did not fully realise that its legislation designed to create a higher education system based on ethnic and linguistic identities would simply birth many more anti-apartheid heroes.

Mapetla started his social work studies in 1970 at Turfloop. There was already a strong Black Consciousness ethos on campus. This, combined with exposure to what apartheid policies did to black people when he was doing his practical work during holidays, politicised Mapetla, and led to his inevitable involvement within the structures of the South African Students’ Organisation, which was based on the principles of the BCM. The BCM understood the importance of black self-reliance as a necessary part of self-actualisation, and it was wary of the paternalism of white liberal allies. It is this basic commitment to racial justice for black people that would ultimately lead to Mapetla being murdered by a state that did not have the guts to own up to what it did.

Sadly, many families like Nohle’s feel let down by the post-apartheid ANC-led state. It is not clear whether truth or justice have been achieved, despite Nohle being one of the first people to testify at the TRC hearings. One is almost made to feel like a party pooper when one dares ask whether inquests should be opened to pursue unfinished business — after all the truth is what we were after, right? — and whether apartheid’s executioners who did not get amnesty should yet be prosecuted.

Valela’s book has two ultimate virtues. First, it constitutes a form of epistemic justice in response to the legal nonsense that Mapetla died by suicide. The book also rightly invites us to consider waking up the sleeping apartheid dogs who got away with murder.