COVER-IUP EXPOSED - SECURITY BRANCH COPS KILLED NEIL AGGETT, JUDGE RULES

South Africa
COVER-UP EXPOSED

Security Branch cops killed Neil Aggett, judge rules

Fawu members hold up a banner with Aggett and other unionists' photos outside the Johannesburg High Cour.Photo:Ufrieda Ho
By Ufrieda Ho
4 Mar 2022

The trade unionist and doctor Neil Aggett did not die by suicide but by the hand of security branch cops, Judge Motsamai Makume ruled, calling the magistrate's findings from the original inquest 'a serious error of judgment' and his conclusions 'mind-blowing'.

The overturning of findings of the 1982 inquest into the death in detention of activist and trade unionist Dr Neil Aggett on 4 March brings to close a two-year court journey. It also sets in motion avenues to prosecute the Security Branch police officers linked to his killing.

Judge Motsamai Makume gave his ruling in the Johannesburg High Court, calling Magistrate Pieter Kotze’s finding from the original inquest “a serious error of judgment”. He also said some of Kotze’s conclusions were “mind-blowing”. Makume ruled that Aggett, who was found hanged in his police cell in John Vorster Square police station on 5 February 1981, did not die by suicide, as Kotze had ruled, and he said Security Branch police officers were responsible for Aggett’s murder in the early hours of that morning.

Neil Aggett’s nephews from his older brother Michael and his sister-in-law Mavis were in the Johannesburg High Court to hear the ruling. From left are Jonathan Aggett, David Aggett, Mavis Aggett, Simon Aggett and Stephen Aggett.Photo:Ufrieda Ho

In recapping the key evidence that came before his court on and off over the past two years, Makume was unequivocal about the Security Branch’s culture of torture and abuse of political detainees, an entrenched web of cover-ups and a still-persistent allegiance demonstrated in his court to protect its members – even those who have died in the 40 years since Aggett was killed.

The judge said it was unfortunate that Lieutenant Steve Whitehead, who was the chief interrogator in Aggett’s case and implicated in his killing, died before he could testify in court.

Whitehead died of cancer just days before the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) finally announced that it would reopen the inquest in April 2019. That Whitehead and Major Arthur Conwright, who was head of the Security Branch at John Vorster Square, never had to face questioning in a court has remained a bitter pill to swallow for activists and families of activists who died in detention. It continues to raise questions about the reasons for delays and the political interference standing in the way of bringing conclusion to cases that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommended for investigation by the NPA in 2003 already.

Fawu organiser Thabo Kota was among the union members who gathered outside court awaiting the ruling.Photo:Ufrieda Ho

Yasmin Sooka, executive director of the Foundation for Human Rights (FHR) that has supported the Aggett family to find the truth about his final days in detention, said the next step is to explore criminal prosecutions of the surviving former Security Branch police officers implicated in Aggett’s killing.

“This ruling is unequivocal and the judge has clearly set up the next phase of investigation for murder and the cover-up of murder – that’s amazing. We need to place pressure on the Hawks and the NPA to conduct investigations while Nicolaas Deleefs, Johannes Nicolaas Visser, Daniel Elardus Swanepoel and Magezi Eddie Chauke are still alive. If they do this quickly enough we may have indictments for murder,” Sooka said.

DM/MC

*This is a developing story and more in-depth reporting will be published in the next few days.

Daily Maverick
Brett Herron
30 August 2021

South Africa’s shocking jobless figures make a Basic Income Grant a social, moral and historical imperative

Appropriately funded and managed, with no wiggle room for state incompetency or corruption, a Basic Income Grant could finally lay the foundation for sustainable healing and justice in post-apartheid South Africa. To those who say such a grant is unaffordable, the obvious answer is that South Africa can no longer afford not to.

A few days ago, Statistics SA announced that South Africa’s unemployment rate had reached a record high of 34.4%, or a staggering 44% if we use the expanded definition of unemployment, which includes those who have given up looking for work.

More than 46% of young people under the age of 34 – and a staggering 63% of under-24s – are unemployed.

The simple fact is that our economy is unable to generate enough jobs to reduce and eliminate unemployment, which leaves millions of South Africans without any access to an income. It is physically impossible for any adult of employable age to live day to day, month to month and year to year without income.

Prioritising the implementation of a Basic Income Grant – or Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) – is a social, moral and historical imperative crucial to the sustainability of South Africa’s constitutional democracy.

Appropriately funded and managed, with no wiggle-room for state incompetency or corruption, the BIG could finally lay the foundation for sustainable healing and justice in post-apartheid South Africa.

To those who say such a grant is unaffordable, the obvious answer is that South Africa can no longer afford not to.

Inequality was the overarching policy of apartheid and its colonial predecessors. The fact that inequality has deepened in post-apartheid South Africa is a shameful slur on the state, the governing parties, the business sector and all South Africans of social conscience and integrity.

Among the funding mechanisms that the state is duty-bound to consider are redistributive measures recommended by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) 22 years ago.

Among the commission’s key recommendations were that those to whom it did not give amnesty for apartheid-era human rights violations should be prosecuted (all being equal before the law), and that the state should implement a reparations policy.

Recognising that funding reparations were expensive – but nonetheless imperative in contributing to narrowing the “intolerable” inequality gap – the commission proposed a number of redistributive measures.

None of the recommendations was implemented.

Commission chairperson Archbishop Desmond Tutu said later that the mood in the country created by its first democratically elected president, Nelson Mandela, was such that many businesses and individuals would have been happy to contribute to the reconstruction of the country. In a sense, it could also be a cathartic mechanism to pay something back in acknowledgement of the privilege they accrued under apartheid.

The archbishop referred to the unimplemented recommendations as the TRC’s unfinished business.

Despite government’s efforts to provide houses, security and comfort to citizens – the millions of fully subsidised homes that have been built and connections made to the water, sewerage and electricity grids – 22 years after the TRC published its recommendations, levels of poverty, joblessness and inequality have increased. Unsustainably so.

On top of deeply entrenched structural barriers to economic inclusion, the impact of the global Covid-19 pandemic has been devastating. According to the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, social scientists from five South African universities recently estimated Covid-related job losses at three million, of which two million jobs were lost by women.

Nearly half the South African population is living in poverty, a burden that is disproportionately carried by women, with 74% of women-headed households living below the poverty level.

Dismantling the deeply entrenched structures that created economic, social, spatial and environmental injustice will require all of our efforts. South Africa has a well-established social assistance programme – of cash transfers – but the programme makes no provision for able-bodied adults between 18 and 59 years, the assumed age of economic activity.

Their exclusion condemns many to live in intolerable conditions.

Section 27 of the South African Constitution guarantees every person the right to sufficient food and water and to “social security, including, if they are unable to support themselves and their dependants, appropriate social assistance”.

It is in this context that the debate about the BIG must be understood. When an economy is unable to provide enough jobs for people to earn an income and take care of themselves financially, then the state has a duty to provide relief.

It is not a gift or a handout; it is a right.

In response to the economic turmoil occasioned by the Covid-19 pandemic, the state introduced a temporary Covid-19 Social Relief of Distress Grant of R350 per month. Payment of this grant has been extended to March 2022. It’s far from perfect, and hardly sufficient to keep the wolf from the door, but it is helping nearly seven million beneficiaries.

The first step on the road to a BIG is to continue to provide the social relief grant of R350 per person per month and expand access to whoever applies for it.

But we must recognise this grant for what it is: A commendable state response in an economic emergency wrought by a health pandemic – a Band-Aid to stem the flow of blood from a gaping wound.

The next step must be finding the means to address legitimate concerns about universality, quantum and affordability. The benefit of the grant being universal – that is, available to every adult regardless of their personal financial circumstances – is that it reduces the barriers to access for those who need it most by reducing systemic errors. But extending the grant to all, including those who don’t need it, will add to the financial burden on the state.

The International Growth Center proposes that “transfers should be made universal or accessible on an opt-in basis (i.e. beneficiaries self-evaluate their eligibility), where feasible to try to reach as many in need as possible”

. It makes obvious sense to reduce unnecessary spend while securing ease of access. As a start, an opt-in system for all who are not registered for income tax, for example, could be a sensible balancing condition that would be relatively easy to manage.

The question of quantum is equally challenging.

The most recent data published by Stats SA shows the Food Poverty Line at R585 per person per month. This is the amount of money a South African needs to afford the minimum daily food required. The same report places the Lower Bound Poverty Line at R840 per person per month and the Upper Bound Poverty Level at R1,268 per person per month. These levels are a combination of the minimum daily food requirements plus non-food essentials.

In the ideal circumstances, we should be able to provide social security that meets, at the very least, the upper-bound poverty level of R1,268 per month. This could eliminate poverty in as little as three years. But it would cost the fiscus about R415-billion per year.

If we lower our initial expectations and set the quantum at the Food Poverty Line of R585 per month, the amount of money required drops to R197-billion. This number could be further reduced to R157-billion by restricting payments to unemployed people only. Reaching 60%-80% of this group, which is likely in the initial period, would further reduce annual costs to around R95-billion.

How does the country afford it?

If the new minister of finance follows through on the plan to introduce zero-based budgeting – a budgeting process aimed at reducing wastefulness and identifying absolute spending priorities – then this would free up significant cash. Correctly implemented, it would place the BIG into the budget as a non-negotiable expense and build the rest of the budget around it.

Secure access to sufficient food and water is the most basic of needs of every human being. It should be budgeted for before anything else.

According to the Institute for Economic Justice, eliminating government waste would save about R20-billion. This is a very conservative figure when you consider that State Capture is said to have cost the South African people about R500-billion.

If properly prioritising the budget falls short of the BIG funding need, tax mechanisms must be considered. It is here that the TRC’s recommendations come into focus. The Institute for Economic Justice estimates that a wealth tax of 1% on the top 1% of earners in South Africa would bring an additional R63-billion in revenue.

South Africa has the resources to fund this. It is a question of priorities.

Finally, it should go without saying that economic growth that creates jobs is the pathway we are all looking for. Championing and supporting a BIG does not equate to giving up on an economy that grows inclusively and gives every adult, of employment age, the opportunity to earn a decent wage and experience a life which is fulfilled by meaningful employment.

The money spent on the BIG will not be lost to the economy. It will be spent by the recipients in the economy and contribute back to our revenue through VAT and taxes. DM

MARIKANA - ONE OF THE WORST POST- APARTHEID ACTIONS OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN GOVERNMENT

DM168 COMMEMORATION - Daily Maverick

Marikana: The unfolding of a never-ending tragedy

By David Forbes• 14 August 2021

Mine workers gather at the Nkageng informal settlement on 15 August 2012 in North West, South Africa, to plan a way forward following violent clashes at Lonmin's Marikana Platinum Mine. (Photo: Gallo Images / Foto24 / Felix Dlangamandla)

For nine long, tortured years, the grieving families of the slain at Marikana have sought justice – in vain. Alone, they suffer a suppurating and very wicked wound, for both themselves and the entire South African nation. First published in the Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper.

On 16 August 2012, in a terrifying act of police revenge for the killing earlier of two of their colleagues, the SAPS vowed to “end this thing today”, then went out and cold-bloodedly shot dead 34 miners out on a wildcat strike. Many were shot in the back with military assault rifles, the culmination of 10 days of mine violence that left 47 dead.

At the time, it was the bloodiest massacre in post-apartheid South Africa, fourth to three prior apartheid-era massacres, the hardly known 1952 “Sunday Bloody Sunday” in East London, in which 80 to 200 people were killed; the infamous Sharpeville Massacre on 21 March 1960 (69 dead); and Soweto’s 16 June 1976 Uprising (176 to 700 killed).

What came to be called the Marikana Massacre at the Lonmin platinum mine near Rustenburg in North West was a direct result of a betrayal by Lonmin mine management, police incompetence, union rivalry and the insufferable indignity of migrant labour, a highly exploitative practice that no-one post-apartheid has seen fit to end.

Those who have escaped consequences (but not blame) include President Cyril Ramaphosa, former president Jacob Zuma, then minister of safety and security Nathi Mthethwa, then police commissioner Riah Phiyega, and (at the time) North West provincial commissioner Lieutenant General Zukiswa Mbombo, their subordinates, key union representatives from the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu), and Lonmin senior managers Jomo Kwadi, Barnard Mokwena (a paid State Security Agency spy), Abey Kgotle, security manager Graeme Sinclair, and the top triumvirate of Lonmin executives, Ian Farmer, Ben Magara and Simon Scott.

For nine years, the families have slept every single night holding the pain of their loss. They filed a civil case in 2016 to compel a recalcitrant Zuma presidency to act on their promised R1-billion-plus compensation, still largely delayed.

Key breadwinners are gone. Some widows live in shacks.

Nine years later, not a single police officer has been convicted.

It took nearly five years for the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID) to identify 72 police officers in connection with the incident on 13 August 2012, which left five dead just days before the massacre. It took another year for the first six officers to appear in court.

William Mpembe, then deputy North West provincial commissioner and now head of security at Tharisa Minerals in Marikana, was charged in 2018 with four counts of murder, five of attempted murder.

He and former air wing commander Lieutenant Colonel Salmon Johannes Vermaak face counts of defeating the ends of justice.

Vermaak allegedly instructed officers Nkosana Shepherd Mguye, Collin Masilo Mogale, Katlego Joseph Sekgwetla and Khazamola Phillip Makhubela to hunt down and shoot fleeing mineworkers. The State has 140 witnesses. That trial is ongoing.

Striking mine workers meet to discuss their wage demands outside the Nkageng informal settlement on 16 August 2012 in North West, South Africa. (Photo: Gallo Images / Foto24 / Felix Dlangamandla)

Mpembe earlier faced separate charges in the Mahikeng High Court, with officers Jacobus Gideon van Zyl, Dingaan Madoda and Oupa Pule, for failing to report that mineworker Modisaotsile Van Wyk Segalala had died in the back of a police truck. They were acquitted in March 2021.

For nine slow years, this litany of injustices over Marikana has lain like a ghoulish incubus on our nation’s soul, with the government failing to apologise, the police refusing to accept responsibility, and the mines putting money over life while the lives of the victims decline.

In the icy Highveld winter of 2012, the ANC-aligned NUM was being challenged for organising rights by the non-aligned Amcu at the Nkaneng platinum mine, owned by British company Lonmin plc, formerly the mining division of global miner Lonrho plc. (On 10 June 2019, Lonmin was finally sold to Sibanye-Stillwater.)

Many miners felt the NUM did not represent their interests and was “too close to management”. The rock drill operators, who work long hours at the rock face in conditions that are incredibly uncomfortable and dangerous were being paid a cost-to-company of between R8,000 to R10,000 a month, including a “live-out allowance”.

Some migrant miners support families of up to 13 members, mostly in the Eastern Cape, Lesotho, eSwatini and Mozambique.

The “migrant labour system”, instituted about 100 years ago, has contributed greatly to the enormous wealth that built South Africa’s infrastructure but returns very little to the people themselves.

“The truth is that we live like pigs while the mine smiles when we dig that platinum and make them rich,” Thobisile Jali tells journalist Thanduxolo Jika later.

On Thursday 9 August 2012, after a meeting, the rock drill operators go out on a wildcat (unprotected) strike, demanding basic pay of R12,500 a month. Tholekile Mbhele tells Jika: “We decided to do things ourselves.”

The following day, they demand to see the bosses at the Lonmin offices. Management refuses. That night, in the Wonderkop mine hostels, there are assaults and clashes.

Striking mine workers run for cover after police officers open fire outside the Nkageng informal settlement on 16 August 2012 in North West, South Africa. (Photo: Gallo Images / Foto24 / Felix Dlangamandla)

Men in a Lonmin bakkie shoot and wound Thando Mutengwane and Bulelani Dlomo. The strikers gather at a nearby koppie to avoid hostel intimidation.

They will spend nearly a week on the mountain, peacefully demanding that management come and talk to them. Management will consistently refuse and 34 of those miners will go home in wooden boxes.

On Saturday 11 August, about 2,000 strikers march on the NUM offices, carrying traditional weapons. Stones are thrown at the NUM men, and three shots are fired at the strikers. Bongani Ngema and Vusimuzi Mandla “Zulu” Mabuyakhulu are wounded.

The next day, about 3,000 strikers again march on the NUM. Despite earlier orders that Public Order Policing (POP) units be deployed there, no police are seen. It’s Sunday. Senior police cannot be reached.

Two Lonmin guards try to calm the angry crowd, which hacks Hassan Funi and Frans Mabelane to death, steals their phones and a pistol, and burns both them and their Lonmin vehicle.

That night, strikers march to shaft K-4, set nine vehicles alight and kill Thapelo “Eric” Mabebe and Julius Langa. The violence is escalating beyond the control of the elected strike leaders led by Mgcineni “Mambush” Noki, 30, a popular miner from Thwalikhulu in Pondoland. On Monday 13 August, police set up an interim joint operations centre at the mine management offices. The managers claim the protesters are “faceless” but they have pictures in their HR files.

Mbombo instructs Mpembe to “disperse and disarm” the (3,000) protesters and marchers, confiscate their weapons, arrest everyone involved, and “enhance strategic deployments”. After setting her deputy this Herculean task, she leaves.

Police units pour into Marikana: the Special Task Force, the Tactical Response Team, the National Intervention Unit, the POP, Air Wing, Mounted Unit, K-9, Visible Policing, Planning.

That afternoon, 25-year career cop Mpembe and 70 officers intercept 100 to 200 strikers returning to the koppie. The strikers sit down quietly when they see the police.

Police officers open fire on striking mine workers outside the Nkageng informal settlement on 16 August 2012 in North West, South Africa. Violence broke out in the area as workers downed tools during an apparent wage strike at the Lonmin Marikana Platinum Mine. (Photo: Gallo Images / Foto24 / Felix Dlangamandla)

Mpembe tells them to surrender their weapons

With impeccable logic, Noki replies they are not fighting. Their weapons are only to defend themselves. They are returning to the koppie to report back, and may the police escort them safely? Mpembe demands they lay down their arms. Noki rises and says: “We have spoken enough now. We are leaving.”

As one, the miners begin to move. The police accompany them, but about 200m later, Warrant Officer Daniel Kuhn fires a teargas cannister (contravening Standing Order 262). In the mayhem that follows, officers Hendrick Tsietsi Monene and Sello Hendrik Lepaaku are stabbed and hacked to death, and a 9mm pistol and an R5 rifle stolen.

Officer Shitumo Baloyi is stabbed and hacked, but survives

Looted weapons are fired at police, who return fire. Phumzile Sokanyile and Semi Jokanisi are killed. Four strikers are wounded. Thembelakhe Mati is found dead later.

The police regroup and agree they have “insufficient resources” to disarm the miners. They draw up a plan to “negotiate a peaceful solution”.

At 6pm, National Commissioner Phiyega arrives. She instructs Mbombo to “continue to try and bring the unions to negotiate” and urges management to “do everything in their power to ensure that the situation is normalised”. She then returns to Pretoria.

On Tuesday 14 August, Noki tells journalists they are not fighting, they just want an audience with their employer. The miners behind him on the koppie are extremely disciplined and peaceful.

The police arrive to negotiate in an armoured Nyala. Lieutenant Colonel McIntosh, a police negotiator, is too afraid to get out. Noki and four others come forward and kneel down. Noki then goes to the front window of the Nyala to talk to McIntosh.

McIntosh says the police cannot force management to negotiate. It’s late, so Noki says management must come the next day. That evening, Mpembe asks NUM president Senzeni Zokwana and Amcu boss Joseph Mathunjwa to try to resolve the impasse.

The body of Lonmin mine worker Mafolisi Mabiya is carried up a mountain to his village before his funeral on 2 September 2012 outside Dutywa, Eastern Cape, South Africa. (Photo: Gallo Images / Foto24 / Felix Dlangamandla)

The next morning, Wednesday 15 August, Nyala-style negotiations resume. The police say calling management “is not part of their duties”. Noki asks them to go. It’s hard to negotiate with an armoured vehicle.

Meanwhile, Mpembe has called Zokwana, Mathunjwa and mine management to a meeting. He says the situation is “explosive”.

The two union leaders, no love lost between them, agree to talk to the strikers. They are taken down separately, Zokwana first. They are not allowed out of the Nyala and use a loudhailer.

It’s now late afternoon. The strikers refuse Zokwana’s urgings to return to work, singing and stamping. McIntosh nervously pulls the Nyala back. Then Mathunjwa. He is also not allowed out, but is received warmly.

Mohammed must come to the Mountain. The strikers are implacable. Noki suggests management come the next morning. The union bosses return to the meeting, and debrief separately. Mpembe is impressed. Mathunjwa says: “Everyone is positive.”

Unknown to Mathunjwa, four police mortuary vans are ordered that same night at Phiyega’s executive meeting, where, ominously, the term “D-Day” is used.

Mathunjwa asks Lonmin’s Kwadi and Kgotle to meet him at 8am the next day. They agree. But at the 6.30am joint operations meeting the next morning, informer intelligence says there will be “no laying down of arms”. Things get tense. At 8.20am, Mathunjwa arrives but management reneges and refuse to negotiate. It is a betrayal of tragic magnitude.

Mathunjwa then discovers the police and Lonmin are holding a press conference. At 10am, Provincial Commissioner Mbombo tells journalists in the Lonmin boardroom: “We are ending this today; don’t ask me how, but today we are ending this.”

SSA spy Mokwena allegedly has turned the police against Amcu. Mbombo insults Mathunjwa. Management’s turnaround is “not her problem”. Then she leaves to attend a ceremony with North West Premier Thandi Modise.

Mpembe tells Mathunjwa that Mbombo (who has now gone) has replaced him as police commander. No one will engage with Mathunjwa. At 1.40pm, under a cold, steel-blue sky, Noki tells the police he can see they are “preparing for war”.

Noki tells McIntosh: “We must sign a paper so the world can see how we kill one another today”

The cops refuse to take Mathunjwa to the strikers. He uses his own car, and begs the strikers to avoid violence. He falls to his knees. “You are going to be killed here,” he pleads. Noki thanks him. The strikers will stay, he says calmly, and if police or management want to kill them, so be it.

A memorial service at the koppie in Nkaneng behind the Lonmin mine in Rustenburg. (Photo: Felix Dlangamandla)

Then Noki warmly welcomes SA Council of Churches president Bishop Jo Seoka and requests him to ask management to come. Noki says they will return to work as soon as their demand is met. The bishop says Lonmin’s Kgotle had told him earlier they would not negotiate with “those criminals”.

As the sun sinks lower, the Special Task Force uncoil long rolls of shiny new razor wire. Police tell journalists to leave. A chill falls as the light begins to fade.

Then the shooting begins

Noki leads a group of miners cautiously towards an escape route but is cut off by police. A striker fires a pistol in retaliation to police stun grenades and teargas.

In 12 seconds, 284 bullets rip bone and sinew to shards and shreds. This bloodbath is later called “Scene 1”. A commander calls: “Cease fire.” There is a stunned, very loud silence.

Bodies lie motionless in the dirt and thorny scrub. Blood soaks the thirsty earth.

Dust swirls, as if moved by spirits of the dead. It’s all in slow motion. Death has descended.

Then the police begin shouting, regrouping, moving towards the 17 dead strikers. A helicopter clatters overhead.

Other police formations pursue strikers running, literally for their lives, towards another little koppie several hundred metres away. Out of sight, a lengthy bout of shooting echoes sporadically for 11 minutes.

This is “Scene 2”, where 57 police fire 295 bullets, killing a further 17 miners.

These sinister details are revealed in a report by independent researcher David Bruce, based on photographs, statements from police and surviving miners, and ballistic and forensic evidence.

Multiple miner statements accuse the police of shooting defenceless strikers. A police witness later tells how a cop shot a miner with his hands up. Police put weapons into the hands of dead miners. Some bodies have their hands tied.

Bruce concluded that most of the murders were motivated by a desire to punish the strikers for killing two police officers earlier in the week.

One miner was shot 12 times. Four others die later. Police arrest 270 and charge the strikers with murder under the apartheid-era “common purpose” doctrine. Years later these murder charges will be dropped.

Meanwhile, in faraway villages, hearts crack and the wailing begins as news comes of the death of breadwinners, husbands, sons, brothers, and colleagues. The nation goes into rigid shock. Headlines shudder around the world. Marikana is a new pin on the map, for all the wrong reasons.

Phiyega congratulates her officers, saying they “did nothing wrong”. Zuma appoints the Farlam Commission of Inquiry, but it becomes a whitewash. Political principals are exonerated, the police shootings justified, the miners blamed for “violent behaviour”, and Lonmin partially blamed for “reckless actions”. The charge of “toxic collusion” between Lonmin and the SAPS is dismissed.

Phiyega later faces the Claassen Inquiry into her fitness to hold office. It leads to her suspension on full pay, until the end of her term. During her suspension she earns R3.2-million. She also takes the Farlam Commission report on review, but on 18 June 2021 the High Court dismisses her bid to overturn the report, with costs.

Violence continues sporadically until 18 September 2012, when the strikers, assisted by the unions and the SACC, finally win a 22% increase. Strikers had not slept at home. Police were kicking in doors and beating people. The miners remain haunted, traumatised.

Farlam clears Cyril Ramaphosa, deputy president, a Lonmin shareholder and board member at the time, of possible culpable homicide, despite a chain of emails showing he had pressured the police minister to send reinforcements, and leaned on then mineral resources minister Susan Shabangu, saying the strikers were engaged in “a dastardly criminal act” and her silence was “bad for her and the government”.

Despite being a skilled negotiator and former NUM general secretary, Ramaphosa had refused to talk to the strikers. He has never been to Marikana. He didn’t visit the widows. He has not apologised. He calls his words “unfortunate”.

Striking mine workers meet to discuss their wage demands outside the Nkageng informal settlement on 16 August 2012 in North West, South Africa. (Photo: Gallo Images / Foto24 / Felix Dlangamandla)

Police Minister Mthethwa was cleared of accusations of murder

Farlam said the police at Scene 1 had “reasonable grounds” to believe they were under threat. But Phiyega’s claim that miners attacked police was shown on video to be false. Despite evidence of multiple failures in SAPS record-keeping, withholding of documents, fabrications, deceiving the commission and altering evidence, Farlam inexplicably clears the police

. Human rights lawyer George Bizos says senior police made a “deliberate attempt to defeat the ends of justice”. There are no findings about the 17 deaths at Scene 2 because there is “no clarity”, despite clear witness statements. Farlam’s recommendations are ignored to this day.

Greg Marinovich, author of Murder at Small Koppie, an investigative book on Marikana, concluded that “heavily armed police hunted down and killed the miners in cold blood”.

Turning to the culpability of Lonmin and its managers, the commission called the living conditions for 13,500 miners “truly appalling” and found Lonmin had reneged on its legal obligation to phase out the single-sex hostel blocks by September 2011 and replace them with 5,500 houses.

Lonmin built three houses. They could not explain why. Farlam said Lonmin “created an environment that created tension, labour unrest, disunity” and “harmful conduct” among its 28,000 employees. Lonmin’s failures were “inexcusable”.

Lonmin’s 2012/13 annual report recorded an after-tax profit of $198-million, calling the massacre a “production disruption”. The two top executives, Ian Farmer and Simon Scott, earned R13.6-million and R6.2-million, respectively, in 2011. Lonmin had 3,000 rock drill operators demanding R12,500 a month. It would only have cost 14% of Lonmin’s after-tax profits to pay their demand.

The widows filed a civil claim in 2016 to compel the government to pay compensation. In December 2017, the government announced it would pay R1-billion. In 2018, at least 320 claimants who sued the state were paid R69-million for loss of support.

The families have yet to settle for emotional damages. DM168

Remembering those murdered at Marikana: This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper which is available for R25 at Pick n Pay, Exclusive Books and airport bookstores. For your nearest stockist, please click here.

LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI, AMERICAN POET, BOOKSTORE OWNER, PUBLISHER, AND INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM FIGHTER

Beat movement’

By J Brooks Spector• 25 February 2021
Lawrence Ferlinghetti. (Photo: Flickr)

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, American poet, bookstore owner, publisher, and intellectual freedom fighter died at the age of 101 on 22 February after a long, influential and personally creative life.

San Francisco’s informal poet laureate, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, died this week at the age of 101. Yes, 101. He had been around so long that he while he had been a kind of spiritual leader for the “Beat poets” of the 1950s and ’60s, he often preferred to describe himself as one of the last of the bohemians from an earlier age, rather than one of those Beat poets he had done so much to support. Perhaps he saw himself sipping absinthe in the Les Deux Magots in Paris with his fellow bohemian writers and artists, with other US expatriate writers looking on from a nearby table, and maybe EE Cummings, or even Walt Whitman watching with interest.<.p>

Describing Ferlinghetti’s unease with being pigeon-holed so easily as a leading light of the Beat generation, The Guardian noted Ferlinghetti said he “disliked being associated with the Beats, though he benefited from it and, despite his love of Ginsberg, was apt to lament the commercialisation of the Beat Generation. Ginsberg, he said, ‘fabricated the whole thing out of his imagination’. But, happily contradicting himself, he could add, as late as 1996, ‘It’s still the only rebellion around’.”

But commenting on Ferlinghetti’s impact on US literature and society, The New York Times summed up his life, saying, “The spiritual godfather of the Beat movement, Mr. Ferlinghetti made his home base in the modest independent book haven now formally known as City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. A self-described ‘literary meeting place’ founded in 1953 and located on the border of the city’s sometimes swank, sometimes seedy North Beach neighborhood, City Lights, on Columbus Avenue, soon became as much a part of the San Francisco scene as the Golden Gate Bridge or Fisherman’s Wharf. (The city’s board of supervisors designated it a historic landmark in 2001.)

“While older and not a practitioner of their freewheeling personal style, Mr. Ferlinghetti befriended, published and championed many of the major Beat poets, among them Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Michael McClure, who died in May. His connection to their work was exemplified — and cemented — in 1956 with his publication of Ginsberg’s most famous poem, the ribald and revolutionary ‘Howl,’ an act that led to Mr. Ferlinghetti’s arrest on charges of ‘willfully and lewdly’ printing ‘indecent writings.’

“In a significant First Amendment decision, he was acquitted, and ‘Howl’ became one of the 20th century’s best-known poems. (The trial was the centerpiece of the 2010 film ‘Howl,’ in which James Franco played Ginsberg and Andrew Rogers played Mr. Ferlinghetti.)”

To describe his political feelings, Ferlinghetti could point to his personal support for aspects of left ideas, right along with a sometimes-idiosyncratic, anarchic vision, all coupled with his intolerance for any regulation of free expression.

As The Guardian noted, “Ferlinghetti expressed disappointment in other Beat writers for their unstructured approach to politics. He decided to travel to Cuba to see the Castro regime for himself and later wrote One Thousand Words for Fidel Castro, which ends, ‘Fidel … I give you my sprig of laurel.’ Another political poem evoked a surrealistic scene by Goya, showing ‘freeways 50 lanes wide’, with ‘fewer tumbrils / but more maimed citizens / in painted cars’. In 2012 he declined an award from the Hungarian Pen club, in protest at the policies of the prime minister, Viktor Orbán.”

Talking with my wife, I was somewhat surprised to learn that Ferlinghetti’s fascination with Goya’s horrific images through poems with lines like:

“In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see
the people of the world
exactly at the moment when
they first attained the title of
‘suffering humanity’…”

had sometimes had a deep effect on artistically inclined young black South Africans back in the 1960s. Ferlinghetti would almost certainly have been pleased to have learnt that bit of information. Lawrence Ferlinghetti at Caffe Trieste, in 2012. (Photo: Flickr / Christopher Michel)

Ferlinghetti’s place in literature remains secure through his own free-form, multi-layered, allusion-filled, often-sensual ballads. But there was also his creation of the legendary City Lights Bookstore and the pathbreaking New Directions Publishers, with its vastly popular, still-ongoing, “Pocket Poets” series. And Ferlinghetti was also a prolific painter with a kind of expressionism that drew on the names of poets and their works.

His successful defence of his publishing and distributing Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems against obscenity charges became a major milestone in defence of free speech and freedom of the press in the US and made him a nationally recognised figure back in the 1950s.

Ferlinghetti had a difficult upbringing. His father died at about the time of his birth, his mother, unable to care for their large brood of young children, passed him along to an aunt, who then emigrated back to France where he was raised for years, until they returned to the US. By that point, French had actually become his first language. His aunt then passed him along to the family where she had been working as a maid, for them to care for the young Ferlinghetti. When he entered university, he selected the University of North Carolina because that was where novelist Thomas Wolfe, whose work he now idolised, had also studied.

After combat service in the navy during World War II in both the Pacific and European theatres of war, he returned home to do an MA at Columbia. Then it was back to France, to the Sorbonne, for a PhD where his thesis was on the symbolism of the city of light as a character in literature.

His return thereafter to the US in the early 1950s carried him to California where he took up residence in San Francisco’s North Beach, back then, largely a working class, predominantly Italian-American neighbourhood. Soon Ferlinghetti was busy establishing his bookstore and publishing company, New Directions. The original business plan called for only the stocking of paperback books (then still a new approach to publishing) to make the store’s stock more easily accessible to readers. It was, in fact, the first bookstore in the country to take that approach. Ferlinghetti had signs put up encouraging browsers to take their time and read books in the store if they wished to, thereby turning book buying into an experience rather than a simple purchasing pit stop.

That bookstore, and a group of art galleries in the city soon became gathering points for poets, musicians, other writers, and would-be writers, where live readings became an increasingly important part of the avant garde cultural life of the city. Within just a few years, New Directions was carrying an authors’ list that included authors such as Charles Baudelaire, Jorge Luis Borges, Gregory Corso, Gustave Flaubert, André Gide, Hermann Hesse, Christopher Isherwood, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Denise Levertov, Carson McCullers, Ezra Pound, Henry Miller, Boris Pasternak, Arthur Rimbaud, Kenneth Patchen, William Carlos Williams, and the Buddha, among numerous others.

Staking his claim to the power of poetry, Ferlinghetti had written on the back cover of his vastly popular volume, “A Coney Island of the Mind”, (my own well-thumbed copy was purchased way back in the mid-1960s while I was still in high school), “The printing press has made poetry so silent that we’ve forgotten the power of poetry as oral messages. The sound of the streetsinger and the Salvation Army speaker is not to be scorned.” The impact of public readings on their audiences by poets like Yevgeny Yevtushenko in the Soviet Union or South Africa’s Sipho Sepamla, Wally Serote, and Oswald Mtshali could similarly imbue much of the same power to their words recited to eager audiences.

A number of Ferlinghetti’s own books of poetry were sold with vinyl recordings of him reading his own works, such as one of his most frequently enjoyed, popular works, Underwear.

Or in the printed version:

Underwear
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I didn’t get much sleep last night
thinking about underwear
Have you ever stopped to consider
underwear in the abstract
When you really dig into it
some shocking problems are raised
Underwear is something
we all have to deal with
Everyone wears
some kind of underwear
The Pope wears underwear I hope
The Governor of Louisiana
wears underwear
I saw him on TV
He must have had tight underwear
He squirmed a lot
Underwear can really get you in a bind
You have seen the underwear ads
for men and women
so alike but so different
Women’s underwear holds things up
Men’s underwear holds things down
Underwear is one thing
men and women have in common
Underwear is all we have between us
You have seen the three-color pictures
with crotches encircled
to show the areas of extra strength
and three-way stretch
promising full freedom of action
Don’t be deceived
It’s all based on the two-party system
which doesn’t allow much freedom of choice
the way things are set up
America in its Underwear
struggles thru the night
Underwear controls everything in the end
Take foundation garments for instance
They are really fascist forms
of underground government
making people believe
something but the truth
telling you what you can or can’t do
Did you ever try to get around a girdle
Perhaps Non-Violent Action
is the only answer
Did Gandhi wear a girdle?
Did Lady Macbeth wear a girdle?
Was that why Macbeth murdered sleep?
And that spot she was always rubbing—
Was it really in her underwear?
Modern anglosaxon ladies
must have huge guilt complexes
always washing and washing and washing
Out damned spot
Underwear with spots very suspicious
Underwear with bulges very shocking
Underwear on clothesline a great flag of freedom
Someone has escaped his Underwear
May be naked somewhere
Help!
But don’t worry
Everybody’s still hung up in it
There won’t be no real revolution
And poetry still the underwear of the soul
And underwear still covering
a multitude of faults
in the geological sense—
strange sedimentary stones, inscrutable cracks!
If I were you I’d keep aside
an oversize pair of winter underwear
Do not go naked into that good night
And in the meantime
keep calm and warm and dry
No use stirring ourselves up prematurely
‘over Nothing’
Move forward with dignity
hand in vest
Don’t get emotional
And death shall have no dominion
There’s plenty of time my darling
Are we not still young and easy
Don’t shout

This writer has loved that poem since he first read it back in the early 1960s, savouring the conjoining of humour, political satire, acid-tipped social criticism, and the use of rhythm and references to other well-known works.

Discussing Ferlinghetti’s poetry, The Guardian explained that the writer’s “own poetry is irreverent, cajoling, casual and loose-limbed, sometimes excessively so; his models were Whitman and William Carlos Williams. In partnership with [another contemporary, poet Philip] Rexroth, he took part in many poetry and jazz events on the West Coast, and the two made a record together. However, he later became disillusioned with the poetry and jazz combination – ‘The poet ended up sounding like he was hawking fish from a street corner,’ he said. His verse on the page, though, suggests a spoken origin….”

Indeed it does, never sounding like it was written to be read quietly by the fire.

Years ago, at an outdoor festival of US literature in Indonesia, I had also chosen to read Underwear to an audience of poets, students, university lecturers, and anybody else who could squeeze into a large outdoor courtyard. I’m still not sure what possessed me to do this, but because a translation was helpfully provided to audience members, attendees laughed at the right moments, and it was great fun to read aloud, alone on stage in that gentle tropical evening.

But beyond his own poetry (and his good business sense with that bookstore and publishing house) it was Ferlinghetti’s vigorous and successful defence of free speech and a free press, early on in his career, over his publication of Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems that made Ferlinghetti’s name known nationally, well beyond admirers of the new and experimental in literature. Howl, itself, began with Ginsberg’s apocalyptic vision:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz….

As the Shaping San Francisco Digital Archive explained the events:

“Allen Ginsberg’s Howl was written in the summer of 1955 in an apartment at 1010 Montgomery Street. His first public reading of Howl was in October, 1955 at the Six Gallery in North Beach. After this eventful performance, publisher and fellow poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, borrowing from Emerson’s message to Whitman a century earlier, wired Ginsberg: ‘I greet you at the beginning of a great career. Please send manuscript.’ City Lights published Howl in 1956 and soon the poem, the poet, and the San Francisco Renaissance, or the Beats, were known throughout the country.

“When U.S. Customs released the paperback version of Howl that had been printed in London, Ferlinghetti and his partner, Shigeyosi Murao, were arrested by San Francisco police on obscenity charges. One newspaper headline read: ‘Cops Don’t Allow No Renaissance Here.’ After a long trial (covered in a ‘Life Magazine’ picture story) in which poets, critics, and academics testified to the redeeming social value of Howl, it was ruled not obscene and City Lights was exonerated. The decision that was handed down in the Howl obscenity trial led to the American publication of the previously censored Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The trials publicity brought the San Francisco Beat Movement into the national spotlight and inspired many would-be poets and seekers to make their way out to the West Coast.”

As The Guardian noted of Howl (and Ferlinghetti’s) success with it, “…but after a failed attempt by the police to prosecute the bookseller for peddling obscene material, the reprints could not come fast enough. Ferlinghetti joked that the police ‘took over the advertising account and did a much better job’. Howl remains the bedrock of City Lights’ publishing success and has gone through well over 50 reprints, often more than one a year.”

Seventeen years before his passing, San Francisco renamed one of its streets: Via Ferlinghetti, in honour of the poet/publisher. It matched the reward to one of Ferlinghetti’s literary colleagues, Jack Kerouac, who has also had a street named after him, Kerouac Alley. And that street, naturally enough, adjoins Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore.

DM
had sometimes had a deep effect on artistically inclined young black South Africans back in the 1960s. Ferlinghetti would almost certainly have been pleased to have learnt that bit of information. Lawrence Ferlinghetti at Caffe Trieste, in 2012. (Photo: Flickr / Christopher Michel) Ferlinghetti’s place in literature remains secure through his own free-form, multi-layered, allusion-filled, often-sensual ballads. But there was also his creation of the legendary City Lights Bookstore and the pathbreaking New Directions Publishers, with its vastly popular, still-ongoing, “Pocket Poets” series. And Ferlinghetti was also a prolific painter with a kind of expressionism that drew on the names of poets and their works. His successful defence of his publishing and distributing Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems against obscenity charges became a major milestone in defence of free speech and freedom of the press in the US and made him a nationally recognised figure back in the 1950s. Ferlinghetti had a difficult upbringing. His father died at about the time of his birth, his mother, unable to care for their large brood of young children, passed him along to an aunt, who then emigrated back to France where he was raised for years, until they returned to the US. By that point, French had actually become his first language. His aunt then passed him along to the family where she had been working as a maid, for them to care for the young Ferlinghetti. When he entered university, he selected the University of North Carolina because that was where novelist Thomas Wolfe, whose work he now idolised, had also studied. After combat service in the navy during World War II in both the Pacific and European theatres of war, he returned home to do an MA at Columbia. Then it was back to France, to the Sorbonne, for a PhD where his thesis was on the symbolism of the city of light as a character in literature. His return thereafter to the US in the early 1950s carried him to California where he took up residence in San Francisco’s North Beach, back then, largely a working class, predominantly Italian-American neighbourhood. Soon Ferlinghetti was busy establishing his bookstore and publishing company, New Directions. The original business plan called for only the stocking of paperback books (then still a new approach to publishing) to make the store’s stock more easily accessible to readers. It was, in fact, the first bookstore in the country to take that approach. Ferlinghetti had signs put up encouraging browsers to take their time and read books in the store if they wished to, thereby turning book buying into an experience rather than a simple purchasing pit stop. That bookstore, and a group of art galleries in the city soon became gathering points for poets, musicians, other writers, and would-be writers, where live readings became an increasingly important part of the avant garde cultural life of the city. Within just a few years, New Directions was carrying an authors’ list that included authors such as Charles Baudelaire, Jorge Luis Borges, Gregory Corso, Gustave Flaubert, André Gide, Hermann Hesse, Christopher Isherwood, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Denise Levertov, Carson McCullers, Ezra Pound, Henry Miller, Boris Pasternak, Arthur Rimbaud, Kenneth Patchen, William Carlos Williams, and the Buddha, among numerous others. Staking his claim to the power of poetry, Ferlinghetti had written on the back cover of his vastly popular volume, “A Coney Island of the Mind”, (my own well-thumbed copy was purchased way back in the mid-1960s while I was still in high school), “The printing press has made poetry so silent that we’ve forgotten the power of poetry as oral messages. The sound of the streetsinger and the Salvation Army speaker is not to be scorned.” The impact of public readings on their audiences by poets like Yevgeny Yevtushenko in the Soviet Union or South Africa’s Sipho Sepamla, Wally Serote, and Oswald Mtshali could similarly imbue much of the same power to their words recited to eager audiences. A number of Ferlinghetti’s own books of poetry were sold with vinyl recordings of him reading his own works, such as one of his most frequently enjoyed, popular works, Underwear. Or in the printed version: Underwear by Lawrence Ferlinghetti I didn’t get much sleep last night thinking about underwear Have you ever stopped to consider underwear in the abstract When you really dig into it some shocking problems are raised Underwear is something we all have to deal with Everyone wears some kind of underwear The Pope wears underwear I hope The Governor of Louisiana wears underwear I saw him on TV He must have had tight underwear He squirmed a lot Underwear can really get you in a bind You have seen the underwear ads for men and women so alike but so different Women’s underwear holds things up Men’s underwear holds things down Underwear is one thing men and women have in common Underwear is all we have between us You have seen the three-color pictures with crotches encircled to show the areas of extra strength and three-way stretch promising full freedom of action Don’t be deceived It’s all based on the two-party system which doesn’t allow much freedom of choice the way things are set up America in its Underwear struggles thru the night Underwear controls everything in the end Take foundation garments for instance They are really fascist forms of underground government making people believe something but the truth telling you what you can or can’t do Did you ever try to get around a girdle Perhaps Non-Violent Action is the only answer Did Gandhi wear a girdle? Did Lady Macbeth wear a girdle? Was that why Macbeth murdered sleep? And that spot she was always rubbing— Was it really in her underwear? Modern anglosaxon ladies must have huge guilt complexes always washing and washing and washing Out damned spot Underwear with spots very suspicious Underwear with bulges very shocking Underwear on clothesline a great flag of freedom Someone has escaped his Underwear May be naked somewhere Help! But don’t worry Everybody’s still hung up in it There won’t be no real revolution And poetry still the underwear of the soul And underwear still covering a multitude of faults in the geological sense— strange sedimentary stones, inscrutable cracks! If I were you I’d keep aside an oversize pair of winter underwear Do not go naked into that good night And in the meantime keep calm and warm and dry No use stirring ourselves up prematurely ‘over Nothing’ Move forward with dignity hand in vest Don’t get emotional And death shall have no dominion There’s plenty of time my darling Are we not still young and easy Don’t shout This writer has loved that poem since he first read it back in the early 1960s, savouring the conjoining of humour, political satire, acid-tipped social criticism, and the use of rhythm and references to other well-known works. Discussing Ferlinghetti’s poetry, The Guardian explained that the writer’s “own poetry is irreverent, cajoling, casual and loose-limbed, sometimes excessively so; his models were Whitman and William Carlos Williams. In partnership with [another contemporary, poet Philip] Rexroth, he took part in many poetry and jazz events on the West Coast, and the two made a record together. However, he later became disillusioned with the poetry and jazz combination – ‘The poet ended up sounding like he was hawking fish from a street corner,’ he said. His verse on the page, though, suggests a spoken origin….” Indeed it does, never sounding like it was written to be read quietly by the fire. Years ago, at an outdoor festival of US literature in Indonesia, I had also chosen to read Underwear to an audience of poets, students, university lecturers, and anybody else who could squeeze into a large outdoor courtyard. I’m still not sure what possessed me to do this, but because a translation was helpfully provided to audience members, attendees laughed at the right moments, and it was great fun to read aloud, alone on stage in that gentle tropical evening. But beyond his own poetry (and his good business sense with that bookstore and publishing house) it was Ferlinghetti’s vigorous and successful defence of free speech and a free press, early on in his career, over his publication of Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems that made Ferlinghetti’s name known nationally, well beyond admirers of the new and experimental in literature. Howl, itself, began with Ginsberg’s apocalyptic vision: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz…. As the Shaping San Francisco Digital Archive explained the events: “Allen Ginsberg’s Howl was written in the summer of 1955 in an apartment at 1010 Montgomery Street. His first public reading of Howl was in October, 1955 at the Six Gallery in North Beach. After this eventful performance, publisher and fellow poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, borrowing from Emerson’s message to Whitman a century earlier, wired Ginsberg: ‘I greet you at the beginning of a great career. Please send manuscript.’ City Lights published Howl in 1956 and soon the poem, the poet, and the San Francisco Renaissance, or the Beats, were known throughout the country. “When U.S. Customs released the paperback version of Howl that had been printed in London, Ferlinghetti and his partner, Shigeyosi Murao, were arrested by San Francisco police on obscenity charges. One newspaper headline read: ‘Cops Don’t Allow No Renaissance Here.’ After a long trial (covered in a ‘Life Magazine’ picture story) in which poets, critics, and academics testified to the redeeming social value of Howl, it was ruled not obscene and City Lights was exonerated. The decision that was handed down in the Howl obscenity trial led to the American publication of the previously censored Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The trials publicity brought the San Francisco Beat Movement into the national spotlight and inspired many would-be poets and seekers to make their way out to the West Coast.” As The Guardian noted of Howl (and Ferlinghetti’s) success with it, “…but after a failed attempt by the police to prosecute the bookseller for peddling obscene material, the reprints could not come fast enough. Ferlinghetti joked that the police ‘took over the advertising account and did a much better job’. Howl remains the bedrock of City Lights’ publishing success and has gone through well over 50 reprints, often more than one a year.” Seventeen years before his passing, San Francisco renamed one of its streets: Via Ferlinghetti, in honour of the poet/publisher. It matched the reward to one of Ferlinghetti’s literary colleagues, Jack Kerouac, who has also had a street named after him, Kerouac Alley. And that street, naturally enough, adjoins Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore. DM

HAROLD WOLPE: SOUTH AFRICA TODAY IS A BETRAYAL OF MY FATHER'S FIGHT FOR RIGHTS AND JUSTICE - BY PETA WOLPE

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Harold Wolpe: South Africa today is a betrayal of my father’s fight for rights and justice

By Peta Wolpe• 18 January 2021
Fom the Daily Maverick

Harold Wolpe photographed in 1995. (Photo: Sue Kramer)

Harold Wolpe led his life from a moral code not just in rhetoric, but in his work and actions. This code was not borne out of greed and power, but from honesty, integrity and a deep-seated belief in equality – traits that seem largely forgotten in today’s South Africa.

Today, 19 January 2021, marks 25 years since the death of my father, activist, lawyer and acclaimed academic Harold Wolpe. It’s perhaps a fitting anniversary to reflect on the kind of person he was, his life’s work, the sacrifices he made and where we are today.

In recent years I have often wondered what his analysis would be, how he would have made sense of the corruption that has beset our country, the disappointments and the failure of government to right the wrongs of the apartheid era.

Certainly, he would recognise that there have been certain changes for the better since 1994. But it is likely that he would have the same deep concerns he raised in 1995 when he criticised the RDP policy – that the changes are not systemic or sustainable, do not go far enough and have fundamentally supported a pre-existing economic order which ultimately served only a few.

At the heart of what drove people like Harold was the determination to create a better life for all citizens without lining their own pockets and without the need for power.

“One-thousand Africans are imprisoned and convicted every day because of the pass laws and this causes untold suffering to the individual and their families and it enrages one.” He made this statement after his escape from prison in August 1963.

This rage and striving for equal rights and justice for all underpinned his very being. He led his life from a moral code not just in rhetoric, but evidenced by his work and his actions. This code was not born out of greed and power, but from honesty, integrity and a deep-seated belief in equality – traits that seem largely forgotten in today’s South Africa. As James Blignaut said in a recent Daily Maverick article, we are living in an institutionalised neo-fascist world where “statesmanship based on leadership, justice, kindness and respect is now an ancient artefact”.

Harold Wolpe was born on 14 January 1926 in Johannesburg, the youngest of four children. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. His interest in human rights and politics were evident from an early age and cemented while attending Wits University where he obtained a BA in social studies and then completed an LLB. He joined the Young Communist League and the Progressive Youth Council, was president of the Student Representative Council and a leading activist in the National Union of South African Students (Nusas).

Harold Wolpe in the late 1950s. (Photo courtesy of Peta Wolpe)

After obtaining his law degree, he practised as a lawyer and most of his work was to support political cases and protect the rights of African people. He became increasingly active in the Struggle and was instrumental in securing the purchase of the Liliesleaf farm in Rivonia, which was the headquarters of the ANC. He attended numerous political meetings and engaged in drafting and handing out political leaflets. He was active in uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), the armed wing of the ANC, and contributed to drawing up plans for Operation Mayibuye, the sabotage and military plan that underpinned MK. In short, he was an activist.

In 1960 he was detained under the State of Emergency after Sharpeville and again in July 1963 after the Rivonia arrests, when he was held under the 90-Day Act without charge. He and the other 90-day prisoners were kept in solitary confinement with no access to books. It was only during short exercise breaks that they were able to communicate illicitly with other prisoners.

The Rivonia arrests resulted in the top members of the ANC being detained and led to the well-documented Rivonia Trial in which Nelson Mandela and nine others were charged with sabotage, with eight sentenced to life imprisonment. Wolpe would have been part of that trial except that he and three others managed a dramatic escape from prison.

Rand Daily Mail front page, 13 August 1963. (Photo: Supplied)

In recounting the escape later, his elation at escaping from prison was not primarily from personal relief at his freedom. Rather it was caused by the change of mood engendered by the escape in the townships. “Subversion has been crushed and the underground has been broken, it was claimed. Then came our escape magnificently carried out by very brave men in the face of the biggest manhunt ever organised in South Africa,” he said. In place of a sense of defeat following the Rivonia arrests, the people were overjoyed and saw the escape as proof that the movement was far from dead.

Many activists talk about their imprisonment and solitary confinement almost in a matter-of-fact manner, minimising the personal trauma they experienced. Their accounts are about the Struggle and why they did what they did. Almost none speak of the personal sacrifice, of the impact of their activism on themselves or their families. This was not about them as individuals, but about a cause they felt compelled to be involved in.

Following his arrival in the UK and in response to a letter criticising his actions, my father wrote:

“I was amazed by your suggestion that I did whatever I did without due consideration to the possible consequences to other people. That this suggestion should be made to one who has striven for the past 20 years for the elimination of racialism and for the amelioration of the plight of the non-white people in South Africa is little short of insulting. Whether or not you agree with my approach to the solutions of South Africa’s problems, I think you must concede that it is obvious that I have worked in the interests, according to the way I saw things, of other people at great personal cost.

“Before you condemn so easily perhaps you should give some consideration to this and to the alternatives which face those who are prepared to risk all for what they believe to be a just cause, that is the liberation of all the people of South Africa.”

This just cause and this moral code have not been lived out in democratic South Africa. The story of South Africa from 1948 until its democracy in 1994 is remarkable in many ways and in historical terms fairly peaceful. Yet, since 1994 the hopes, intentions and promises of the ANC have not been delivered upon. The South Africa of today is built on corruption, greed and personal gain. This is a betrayal of all citizens and is not what my father and the other Struggle veterans fought for.

In The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi reminds us that “the unimaginable can happen again” and that those who chose not to see what was in front of them can do so again and again. He writes that most countries will come up against those who crave power, where economic success, racism and political and religious dominance reign. The racism that Trump incentivised as president of the US is testament to that.

“It is necessary for us to distrust the prophets, the enchanters, those who speak and write ‘beautiful words’ unsupported by intelligent reasons,” Levi wrote.

Is this not the case in South Africa since democracy? Is this what has happened to many people and our leaders of today? Is the inherent notion of a politics of humanity something of the past?

The recent documentary on the South African Rugby World Cup win of 2019, Chasing the Sun, gave some hope that something has shifted, however fragile. A commentator said the try in the final by Makazole Mapimpi was “scored by possibly the player that has come from the most hopeless situation in the history of Springbok rugby”. The coach said he was not only playing for South Africa, but that his score and our win represented a human story – a story of where we as a country have reached and where we can and need to get to. This glimmer of hope is what Harold Wolpe and many others fought for during the Struggle. This is the story they hoped to achieve and hoped would be played out in the new democratic South Africa.

DM

DEMOCRACY IN THE UK HAS COME TO A GRINDING HALT: UK GOVERNMENT REFUSES TO RELEASE INFORMATION ABOUT ASSANGE JUDGE WHO HAS 96% EXTRADITION RECORD

K

UK government refuses to release information about Assange judge who has 96% extradition record

By Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis• 31 July 2020

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange leaves Westminster Magistrates Court in London, 13 January 2020. (Photo: EPA-EFE/ Facundo Arrizabalaga) Less

The United Kingdom’s Ministry of Justice is blocking the release of basic information about the judge who is to rule on Julian Assange’s extradition to the US in what appears to be an irregular application of the Freedom of Information Act, it can be revealed.

Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis

Declassified has also discovered that the judge, Vanessa Baraitser, has ordered extradition in 96% of the cases she has presided over for which information is publicly available.

Baraitser was appointed a district judge in October 2011 based at the Chief Magistrate’s Office in London, after being admitted as a solicitor in 1994. Next to no other information is available about her in the public domain.

Baraitser has been criticised for a number of her judgments so far concerning Assange, who has been incarcerated in a maximum security prison, HMP Belmarsh in London, since April 2019. These decisions include refusing Assange’s request for emergency bail during the Covid-19 pandemic and making him sit behind a glass screen during the hearing, rather than with his lawyers.

Declassified recently revealed that Assange is one of just two of the 797 inmates in Belmarsh being held for violating bail conditions. Over 20% of inmates are held for murder.

Declassified has also seen evidence that the UK Home Office is blocking the release of information about home secretary Priti Patel’s role in the Assange extradition case.

The only known photograph of district judge Vanessa Baraitser — who will rule on 

Julian Assange’s extradition to the US — in the public domain. 

Anonymisation by Declassified. (Photo: Instagram)

Request denied
A request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was sent by Declassified to the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) on 28 February 2020 requesting a list of all the cases on which Baraitser has ruled since she was appointed in 2011. The MOJ noted in response that it was obliged to send a reply within 20 working days.

Two months later, on 29 April 2020, an information officer at the HM Courts and Tribunals Service responded that it could “confirm” that it held “some of the information that you have requested”. 
But the request was rejected since the officer claimed it was not consistent with the Constitutional Reform Act. “The judiciary is not a public body for the purposes of FOIA… and requests asking to disclose all the cases a named judge ruled on are therefore outside the scope of the FOIA,” the officer stated.

The officer added that the “information requested would in any event be exempt from disclosure… because it contains personal data about the cases ruled on by an individual judge”, and that “personal data can only be released if to do so would not contravene any of the data protection principles” in the Data Protection Act.

A British barrister, who wished to remain anonymous, but who is not involved with the Assange case, told Declassified: “The resistance to disclosure here is curious. A court is a public authority for the purposes of the Human Rights Act and a judge is an officer of the court. It is therefore more than surprising that the first refusal argued that, for the purposes of the FOIA, there is no public body here subject to disclosure.” 

The barrister added: “The alternative argument on data doesn’t stack up. A court acts in public. There is no default anonymity of the names of cases, unless children are involved or other certain limited circumstances, nor the judges who rule on them. Justice has to be seen to be done.”

Despite the HM Courts and Tribunals Service invoking a data protection clause, Declassified was able to view a host of cases with full names and details in Westlaw, a paid-for legal database. The press has also reported on a number of extradition cases involving Baraitser. 

An internal review into the rejection of Declassified’s freedom of information (FOI) request upheld the rejection. 

Identical request

On 10 April 2020 Declassified sent an identical information request to the MOJ asking for a case list for a different district judge, Justin Barron, who was appointed on the same day as Baraitser in October 2011.

This request was answered by the MOJ swiftly, within 17 days, compared to two months with Baraitser. The information officer also noted that it “holds all the information you have requested” rather than “some” in the case of Baraitser. It is unclear why the HM Courts and Tribunals Service would hold only partial information on Baraitser, but not on Barron.

On this occasion, the request was not blocked. Instead, the information officer asked for further clarification about the information being sought, suggesting issues such as final hearing dates, the defendants’ names and what the defendants were charged with.

Declassified clarified that it wanted the list to include “the date, the defendant, the charge and the judge’s decision”. 

The officer eventually declined the request, stating that it “would exceed the cost limit set out in the FOIA”, but adding: “Although we cannot answer your request at the moment, we may be able to answer a refined request within the cost limit.” 

With Baraitser’s identical records, the possibility of refining the search was never offered – two “absolute” exemptions being applied to the request from the start. 

Baraitser’s record

Despite the rejection by the MOJ, Declassified has found 24 extradition cases that Baraitser ruled on from November 2015 to May 2019, discovered using the media archive Factiva and Westlaw. Of these 24 cases, Baraitser ordered the extradition of 23 of the defendants, a 96% extradition record from publicly available evidence.

Baraitser has ordered the extradition of defendants to at least 11 countries in this period, including one person to the US. Six of the extraditions, or 26% of the rulings, were successfully appealed. 
In one case, Baraitser’s decision to extradite was overturned because the appeal judge “attached considerable weight to the likely impact of extradition upon the health and wellbeing of the defendant’s wife”, who “will be left with very little support”.

Recently, Baraitser controversially refused to guarantee anonymity to Assange’s partner, Stella Moris, which led her to publicly reveal her relationship with Assange and their two children. 

The appointment of Baraitser to preside over the Assange case remains controversial and the decision untransparent. It is likely that Chief Magistrate Lady Emma Arbuthnot was involved in the decision to appoint Baraitser to the case.

A list of all the extradition cases District Judge Vanessa Baraitser has ruled on that are publicly available. (Compiled by Declassified)

 

The chief magistrate has a “leadership responsibility” for the roughly 300 district and deputy judges across England and Wales. Arbuthnot hears “many of the most sensitive or complex cases in the magistrates’ courts and in particular extradition and special jurisdiction cases”.

Arbuthnot’s role also includes “supporting and guiding” district judges such as Baraitser and “liaising with the senior judiciary and presiding judges” on the cases they are ruling on. 

But Arbuthnot’s role in the Assange case is mired in controversy and conflicts of interest due to her family’s connections to the British military and intelligence establishment, as Declassified has previously revealed. Arbuthnot has personally received financial benefits from partner organisations of the UK Foreign Office, which in 2018 called Assange a “miserable little worm”.

Arbuthnot directly ruled on the Assange case in 2018-19 and has never formally recused herself from it. According to a statement given to Private Eye, she stepped aside because of a “perception of bias”, but it was not elucidated what this related to. 

Since Arbuthnot has not formally recused herself, Assange’s defence team cannot revisit her rulings while it also could have left open the possibility of her choosing which of her junior judges was to preside over the Assange case. 

In a key judgment in February 2018, Arbuthnot rejected the findings of the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention – a body composed of international legal experts – that Assange was being “arbitrarily detained”, characterised Assange’s stay in the embassy as “voluntary” and concluded Assange’s health and mental state was of minor importance.

In a second ruling a week later, Arbuthnot dismissed Assange’s fears of US extradition. “I accept that Mr Assange had expressed fears of being returned to the United States from a very early stage in the Swedish extradition proceedings but… I do not find that Mr Assange’s fears were reasonable,” she said. 

In May 2019, soon after Assange was seized from his asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy by British police, the US government requested his extradition on charges that could see him imprisoned for 175 years. 

Lady Arbuthnot attends the Queen’s garden party at Buckingham Palace in May 2017 with her husband Lord Arbuthnot, a former Conservative defence minister with links to the British military and intelligence establishment. Anonymisation by Declassified. (Photo: Instagram)

More silence

Declassified also made a request under the Freedom of Information Act for a list of all the cases heard at Woolwich Crown Court, near Belmarsh, for 2019. Baraitser had controversially moved Assange’s hearing to Woolwich — which is often used for terrorism cases — before the Covid-19 pandemic hit. It has now been moved back to the Old Bailey, the central criminal court of England and Wales.

This request, sent on 31 March 2020, was again rejected. The MOJ officer stated: “I can confirm that the MOJ holds the information that you have requested. All of the information is exempt from disclosure under section 32 of the FOIA because it is held in a court record.”

It added that: “Section 32 is an absolute exemption and there is no duty to consider the public interest in disclosure.” 

Despite daily lists of the cases heard at Woolwich being freely available online, including names of defendants, an internal review conducted at Declassified’s request reached the same conclusion.
On 15 May 2020, Declassified sent a further FOI request, this time to the Home Office, asking for information on any phone calls or emails made or received by the current Home Secretary Priti Patel concerning the Assange case.

The Home Office replied: “We neither confirm nor deny whether we hold any information, within the scope of your request.” It added that the reason was “to protect personal data”. 

But, in January 2020, Declassified had requested the same information for the period when Sajid Javid was home secretary, April 2018 – July 2019. In this case, the Home Office responded: “We have carried out a thorough search and we have established that the Home Office does not hold the information that you have requested.”

The responses from the Home Office appear to indicate that Patel has had communications regarding Assange during her tenure as home secretary, but that the government is reluctant to disclose this information. The Assange case continues to set a legal precedent in being mired in opacity and conflicts of interest. 

Patel — who is also linked to Arbuthnot’s husband, Lord Arbuthnot — will sign off Assange’s extradition to the US if it is ordered by Baraitser. DM

Matt Kennard is head of investigations, and Mark Curtis is editor, at Declassified UK.. Sign up to receive Declassified’s monthly newsletter here. 

About Declassified UK

Declassified UK is the leading website for in-depth analysis and exclusive news on British foreign policy, investigating the UK military, intelligence agencies and its most powerful corporations.
The UK’s traditional media is increasingly acting as part of the establishment and failing to report independently and critically on Britain’s real role in the world.
By contrast, Declassified UK is independent and produces public-service journalism that informs people about what is being done in their name, without fear or favour.
As well as focusing on current policies, we also uncover historical secrets, by investigating the declassified files in the National Archives in London. And our work is also read beyond the UK—in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Latin America and the United States where UK foreign policy is often influential.

The task of uncovering Britain’s role in the world is vital given the UK’s global power:

• An arms industry that is one of the world’s largest exporters of weapons
• One of the world’s largest networks of overseas military bases, with barracks from Belize to Brunei
• A booming cyber warfare industry and hub for private military firms
• Permanent member of the UN security council and one of the world’s leading soft powers
• Among the most powerful intelligence agencies in the world in the form of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ
• Special forces currently operating in at least seven covert wars
• An unparalleled archipelago of tax havens stretching across the Atlantic Ocean
• Numerous powerful corporations in arms, extractives, mining, and finance

Our first articles revealed a secret British military unit commanded by Saudi Arabian soldiers, how the UK intelligence agencies neutralised the Guardian newspaper after the Snowden leaks, how the intelligence establishment is fortifying the repressive regime in Bahrain, and how the UK legal trial of Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange is mired in conflicts of interest.

You can follow us on Twitter at @DeclassifiedUK

Why Declassified is needed

The “mainstream” UK media is not uncovering the reality of Britain’s role in the world and the public is being largely kept in the dark. This means that governments are not being held to account for their policies.
The problem is not just with the UK’s right-wing, billionaire-owned media but also with its more “liberal” outlets and the BBC, the most popular source of news for the British public.
The British media are less and less mainstream – and are if anything becoming even more embedded in the establishment, regularly amplifying extremist policies that support war, human rights abusers and corporations contributing to catastrophic climate change.
The government publishes key information on its policies virtually every day which is often very revealing. But only a tiny proportion of this is ever covered in the establishment media. Those journalists choose not to cover it, or else don’t care. We do.
However, much remains hidden. Britain’s culture of secrecy is deeply embedded in Whitehall. This means that numerous government policies are hidden from the same public who should be able to hold a government to account in a democracy. These hidden policies often need to be exposed, and the secret state challenged.

Why are we publishing with the Daily Maverick?

Declassified is hosting its articles on the website of the Daily Maverick, a leading independent news site, begun in South Africa but increasingly global. It has a strong track record in exposing corruption and breaking major political stories such as the Gupta Leaks.
Declassified’s staff have written articles for most of Britain’s national media, but the space for independent analysis and critical investigations is ever declining. Perhaps this is not surprising. Britain ranked bottom for press freedom in Western Europe in 2019 and scored lower internationally than South Africa and Australia.
When the Daily Maverick offered to host our stories, we saw it as an ideal opportunity to team up with one of the best investigative and independent news sites in the Global South.
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