2
A TROUBLED REPORTER
Chris Bateman, a 29-year-old crime reporter for the progressive morning newspaper the Cape Times, was dawdling in the police headquarters in Parade Street in the city centre around 9 am, waiting for the usual well-scrubbed daily police briefing. Then he realised that none of his other newspaper colleagues were present, nor were the familiar police faces to be seen.
He suspected immediately that he was missing out on something big.
As he was wandering around the deserted offices, the telephone rang on the desk of Lieutenant Attie Laubscher, the police public relations officer whom Bateman knew as one of the more approachable and cooperative police officers. No one else was there, so he picked it up. It was Charl Pauw, a television reporter for the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), who asked him if he had heard about the shootout in Gugulethu.
Now Bateman knew why the building was empty: there was 'big kak in Gugulethu'.1
The journalist, who was of medium height and stocky build, with a round, fair beard and a slightly dishevelled look, quickly requested a Cape Times staff car and a photographer, Obed Zilwa, and rushed to the scene in Gugulethu. They arrived shortly before midday to find the intersection cordoned off, a large police presence and an irate though restrained crowd of local bystanders. Some policemen were throwing sandy soil on pools of blood near a large roadside bluegum tree, next to which was parked an army Casspir troop carrier. Chalk marks on the tarmac encircled bullet cartridges.
Some of Cape Town's most senior police brass - including the retired police commissioner Brigadier Chris Swart and Brigadier M van Staden - who had rapidly arrived after the shootings, were being ushered through the dramatic scene.2 Major Dolf Odendal of the Anti-Riot squad, known and unloved in the townships, had been spotted.
At least seven armoured personnel carriers now sealed off the area of the shooting, and roadblocks had already been set up, while police vehicles could be seen stationed on the highway nearby.
None of this made sense to Bateman's observant eye, for this township, like so many others in South Africa, was underpoliced; little attention was given to them, other than by Anti-Riot squads during unrest. Such a big show of police seniority was utterly out of the ordinary.
Bateman approached the PRO, Attie Laubscher, who brushed him off: 'Chris, ek kan nie met jou praat nie! Jy moet Pretoria bel.' (Chris, I can't speak to you! You must phone Pretoria.)
This was an oddly guarded statement, Bateman thought; why would Pretoria headquarters have to be contacted about a local shooting in the Cape? He tried to cajole Laubscher, who remained adamant he could not say anything.
Despite the PRO's reluctance, some reporters who were trusted by the police were indeed being briefed. Those were the first reports to hit the news, fed to the government-controlled SABC radio newscasts.
Bateman realised he was getting nowhere; he needed to find another way into this story. He focused on the nearest and most prominent building in the immediate area, the two-storey Dairy Belle hostel. Built to accommodate that company's workers, the hostel usefully had windows looking directly onto both the intersecting streets - the NY1 and NY1113 - where the shootings had happened.
Fortuitously, Bateman had grown up at a trading station in KwaZulu-Natal where many of his childhood friends were Zulu, so he was a fluent speaker; this meant he could also understand Xhosa, a closely related language more commonly used in the Cape, particularly in Gugulethu. This skill would prove vital to the breaking story and its eventual unravelling.
Slipping in through the back door of the hostel, he spoke first to Bowers Vumazonke, a 28-year-old cleaner, who readily told him of a shootout by the police aimed at a small group of black men. He had heard a big bang, he told Bateman, and, looking out of the window, had seen a man lying under the big tree at the intersection. He had run out onto the street and then saw that same man being shot in the head by a policeman. There had been two more bodies lying nearby.4
Bateman then went upstairs and spoke to 60-year-old Cecil Msutu, who had been employed by Dairy Belle for 23 years. He described having first heard a loud explosive noise (later said to have been a hand grenade going off), followed by fierce gunfire. One combatant had collapsed near a large bluegum tree, and a policeman had walked up to him and 'finished him off', shooting him in the head. Another man had emerged from the bushes - the non-indigenous wattle and Port Jackson acacias that had swallowed up much of the Cape Flats - with his hands above his head. A policeman had approached him, kneed him, and turned to another policeman for some kind of confirmation; Msutu had clearly heard a white officer shout, 'Skiet hom!' (Shoot him!) and had seen the policeman turn back and fire two shots at virtual point-blank range at the victim's head. Msutu showed Bateman a bullet hole in the hostel window: at the height of the gun fight, this witness had spent some time ducking below the windowsill.
His third witness, 39-year-old hostel dweller General Sibaca, told Bateman that he had seen a man near the bushes on the far side of the road. A policeman had walked up to him, confronted him, kneed and kicked him; then he had turned back and shot him at virtual point-blank range.5
Bateman said later, 'I remember thinking it was too much of a coincidence: the witnesses being at different places, hardly knowing each other, yet their stories being so alike. And I remember saying to them [in Xhosa], "This is a serious allegation. You realise what you are saying? What you are saying has great implications." But they were adamant that, in fact, that is what had happened.'6
Bateman jotted down this information in his small green-covered notebook, and quickly sketched a plan of the hostel, marking where the witnesses had been, as well as the bullet holes inside. Armed with so much incendiary information, he concluded that if his instincts were right, he was sitting on an explosive news story that needed to be handled very gingerly.
Chris Bateman's swift drawing in his reporter's notebook of the Dairy Belle hostel at the scene of the killings: the top strip marked 'Rd' (road) is the NY1, the main road leading directly into Gugulethu.
On news-desk duty that day was Tony Weaver, an experienced reporter who had faced plenty of dangerous conditions. When Chris Bateman called him and said, 'This thing stinks', Weaver was perfectly positioned to understand. 'His reporting that day was extraordinary,' he says of Bateman, who is a modest man, and wouldn't say it of himself.7
Weaver admits that up until that time he wasn't completely sure of Bateman. Neither of them had worked at the prestigious long-running newspaper for long: Bateman had joined in 1983, as a specialist crime reporter from the smaller Natal Witness, while Weaver had returned from a difficult stint in war-torn Namibia just a few months before. Politically connected journalists like Weaver were always watchful of crime reporters, who were inclined to become too close to the police.8 But it quickly became clear to Weaver that Bateman was of a different cut.
At 30, Weaver was tall, dark and rangy, with a self-possessed air - a man who could handle himself. Their personalities and appearances may have been quite dissimilar, but Bateman and Weaver were devoted to the same goals: to pursue the story fearlessly and accurately, and not to be intimidated into pulling back, as so many of their more prudent-minded colleagues had done to appease the authorities, and avoid potential charges about how they covered police action. These two reporters knew that their coverage differing from the official version would mean they would both come under serious pressure in the coming months - and that pressure certainly came, carrying a heavy clout.
Bateman made his way back to the office, usefully located in the city centre just a block away from St George's Cathedral. Weaver, meanwhile, began to field calls from overseas news organisations, most insistently the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), which had picked up the early police version put out by compliant media sources: that a brave band of policemen had foiled an ambush on a van ferrying policemen into Gugulethu. All seven of the terrorists had been quickly killed during a very dangerous gun battle, yet all the police had been spared. This was, the story went, a triumph of intelligence work and anti-terrorist training, highlighting the police capacity to secure the country.
Still: all seven suspects swiftly killed, stone dead, in a chaotic shootout on wide-open ground, with no injuries to others at all? This all seemed more than just lucky - and in a country riven by apartheid violence, very few who were politically acute were inclined to believe such self-serving miracles.
Weaver was a main point of contact for a host of major overseas news sources, including The Times and The Guardian in the United Kingdom (UK), The...
