Justice denied: why families of apartheid victims are still searching for answers

Struggle for justice symbolises limitations of Truth and Reconciliation Commission, whose hearings began 30 years ago

Darkness had fallen on 27 June 1985 when Fort Calata, Matthew Goniwe, Sicelo Mhlauli and Sparrow Mkonto set off on the 150-mile drive back from a meeting of anti-apartheid activists in the South African city of Port Elizabeth, now known as Gqeberha. They never made it home.

About an hour into their journey, as the road wound north from the coast towards their home town of Cradock (now called Nxuba), the four men were pulled over by three white security police officers. They were handcuffed and driven back towards Gqeberha.

Mkonto was shot after a struggle with one of the officers. The other three were hit over the head from behind. Their bodies were stabbed several times by three black officers who had joined their colleagues, to make it look like a vigilante attack. Finally, the corpses were set alight. When Mhlauli’s body was found, one of his hands was missing.

The four men became known as the Cradock Four, their murders a symbol of the cruel, callous violence of apartheid.

The advent of democracy in 1994 brought the families neither the justice they sought nor answers about whether the murders were sanctioned at the highest levels of government.

More than 40 years later, the families are still fighting, and their struggle has come to symbolise the deficiencies of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), whose hearings began 30 years ago, on 15 April 1996.

The TRC, led by the late Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu, was designed to uncover human rights violations committed by the apartheid regime and the groups that fought it. It offered or denied amnesty to perpetrators who confessed.

Successive governments led by the African National Congress liberation movement failed to pursue hundreds of cases referred to state prosecutors by the TRC. Victims’ families have accused the former presidents Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma of striking a deal with apartheid generals to bury the cases in exchange for atrocities committed by ANC members during the struggle not being pursued in court.

Mbeki, who was president from 1999 to 2008, has denied stopping the TRC cases. He and Zuma, who was president from 2009 to 2018, have tried to halt a judicial inquiry into whether there was political interference with prosecutions.

In the case of the Cradock Four, a 1987 inquest concluded they were killed by “unknown persons”. A second inquest in 1993 said “members of the security forces” were responsible but did not name any specific perpetrators.

It was only at the TRC that the three white police officers admitted to the murders, in an attempt to evade prosecution, and another three admitted to planning or ordering them. All were denied amnesty by the TRC and all have since died. The three black police officers were killed by security forces in a car bombing in 1989 amid fears that they would reveal the truth about the murders.

A third inquest into the Cradock Four killings opened in June last year, after the families had put the government under sustained pressure for years. Their question remained: why, when they had been denied amnesty by the TRC, were the killers not prosecuted decades earlier?

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The TRC’s first hearings were in East London (now KuGompo City), 180 miles up the coast from Gqeberha. For many victims and their relatives, this was their first chance to speak publicly about their suffering. On the second day of hearings, Nomonde Calata, the widow of Fort Calata, broke down. Her cries of anguish were watched by millions via the national broadcaster SABC.

After her husband’s death, aged 28, Calata had stopped herself from crying. “[I thought] the enemy will laugh at me when they see my sadness,” she said in an interview on 22 March, sitting with her son Lukhanyo in a Gqeberha hotel before a week of hearings in the third inquest. “So when I went to the TRC, I just couldn’t hold the cry in me and the pain.”

The National party came to power in 1948, enforcing racial discrimination and segregation and pushing white Afrikaner nationalism. But the TRC only covered 1960 to 1994. Nonetheless, it took the testimonies of about 21,000 victims, of whom 2,000 testified publicly. In dozens of hearings that lasted until June 1997, they spoke of torture, abduction, disappearances and killings. The process gripped South Africa.

So too did the appearances of some apartheid security police, who admitted to violations in an attempt to escape prosecution. They included Eugene de Kock, who led the Vlakplaas assassination squad and was known as “Prime Evil”.

In October 1996, De Kock was convicted of six murders and sentenced to 212 years in prison. A year later, he testified at the TRC, expressing bitterness that apartheid generals and politicians had not also taken responsibility.

The amnesty hearings lasted until 2000. There were more than 7,000 applications for amnesty and 849 were granted.

Max du Preez presented the SABC’s weekly Sunday evening TRC Special Report. An Afrikaner himself, he had exposed many of apartheid’s horrors during its dying years as the editor of the progressive newspaper Vrye Weekblad.

“We fully expected an apartheid denial after 1994. But we never had it. And I think watching the amnesty applicants confessing to all these crimes played a big role in that,” he said. “If you were any kind of reasonable person, you could not deny afterwards that apartheid was a violent, evil system. I think that was important.”

However, Yasmin Sooka, a TRC commissioner and human rights lawyer, said the commission did not properly expose the systemic nature of apartheid. “The politicians, from the outset when they appeared, made it clear, particularly Mr De Klerk [FW de Klerk, the last apartheid president], that he was not going to take responsibility for their actions,” she said. “That did mar the process. It certainly affected the questions of disclosure.”

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The TRC provided powerful moments of catharsis, truth-telling and accountability. But, as disappointment with the ANC has grown in the 32 years it has led South Africa amid persistent inequality, poverty and corruption, so too have criticisms of the TRC’s scope.

Zanele Mji was just eight years old when hearings began, absorbing an idealised version of reconciliation as promoted by Tutu. But as she grew up, becoming an investigative journalist, she realised the TRC’s limitations. “The violence was how [apartheid] was enforced,” she said. “But what it actually was, no one was ever tried for that. Land, education, housing – all these things that still really hold South Africa back today.”

Cyril Adonis, an associate professor of psychology at the University of South Africa, has found that poverty is the biggest predictor of whether people who suffered under apartheid and their descendants experience intergenerational trauma. “The main thing is material deprivation,” he said. “Especially if you can link it to something concrete like apartheid, or my father was a breadwinner [and was] injured, tortured to the extent that he cannot work, killed, disappeared.”

For many, the TRC was damned by the lack of prosecutions. Lukhanyo Calata does not blame the TRC for his father’s killers not being brought to justice, though. Rather, he blames the ANC government led by Mbeki. “They sold us out,” he said.

He said of Fort Calata: “He was a husband, he was a father, he was a brother, he was a son, he was a teacher, he was a musician … The ANC government was supposed to affirm all of who he was, by holding his killers to account. So when they didn’t, they failed to affirm that the life of a black person in South Africa is equal to that of a white person.”

In July 2021, the FW de Klerk Foundation said on its website: “Because of an informal agreement between the ANC leadership and former operatives of the pre-1994 government, the NPA [National Prosecuting Authority] suspended its prosecutions of apartheid-era crimes.” De Klerk died four months later.

Apartheid generals separately told the authors Ole Bubenzer and Michael Schmidt they had secret talks from 1998 to 2004 with ANC officials including Zuma and Mbeki. In 1999, both leaders were among 27 senior ANC figures denied amnesty as they had not disclosed specific acts.

In January 2025, Lukhanyo Calata led 25 families and survivors in suing South Africa’s government for failing to prosecute TRC cases. In response, that May, the president, Cyril Ramaphosa, announced a judicial inquiry into potential political interference, led by a retired constitutional court judge, Sisi Khampepe.

Mbeki, Zuma and their justice ministers have refused to cooperate. On 30 March this year, the high court rejected their attempt to get Khampepe removed. They have appealed to the constitutional court, claiming Khampepe is biased as she was a TRC commissioner.

Meanwhile, the inquiry’s hearings have continued, with former prosecutors testifying that their work on TRC cases was obstructed. The final report to Ramaphosa is due on 31 July.

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Lonwabo Mkonto was six years old when his father, Sparrow, was killed at the age of 33. Now 47, he remembers his father, a railway worker who founded a football and a rugby team, surrounded by people at sports games, educating them about politics.

At 18, Lonwabo attended an initiation school, a Xhosa rite of passage. Usually, fathers provided guidance to their sons. “Other initiates are getting visits from their fathers,” he said, voice faltering. “And you just sit there and wait for nobody, knowing that your father will never come.”

The Cradock Four were each committed anti-apartheid campaigners. Calata and Goniwe in particular were at the forefront of a boycott of schools and white-owned businesses, after Goniwe was fired as a headteacher in Cradock’s black township due to his activism, in November 1983.

On 7 June 1985, Christoffel “Joffel” van der Westhuizen, a former military commander of the then Eastern province, authorised the sending of a signal to the regime’s state security council. It proposed that Calata, Goniwe and Goniwe’s nephew Mbulelo be “removed permanently from society as a matter of urgency”. Three weeks later, the Cradock Four were dead.

In 1993, the second inquest into the murders concluded that Van der Westhuizen intended the signal as a recommendation to kill. Lourens du Plessis, who sent the signal and is now dead, testified in an affidavit then: “It was clear to both of us that what was being proposed involved the killing of Goniwe.”

Van der Westhuizen said in 1993 that he never wrote or saw the signal’s contents, nor was he involved in any killings. Last year, in the third Cradock Four inquest, he repeated this, testifying via video link while the families watched from a Gqeberha courtroom.

On 23 March this year, Eugene de Kock arrived at Gqeberha’s high court for the inquest, accompanied by police officers with rifles. According to the local media outlet News24, the 77-year-old had spent the previous night in police custody for protection, at his own request.

De Kock had told the TRC that he advised the police officer who shot Mkonto how to dispose of the gun, for which he received amnesty. In March, he testified as a witness, telling the inquest that “removed permanently from society” meant murder.

Afterwards, Lukhanyo Calata shook De Kock’s hand. “He’s perhaps coming here and helping us, as the families of the Cradock Four. But he’s also the same person that had caused tremendous amounts of hurt and loss and pain to other families. So he’s not a hero by any spectre of the imagination,” he told journalists.

Nombuyiselo Mhlauli, the widow of Sicelo Mhlauli, said she hoped the inquest judge Thami Beshe would consider their decades of suffering.

Mhlauli, who never remarried, remembered her husband as a loving man, a headteacher who sang in church choirs and appreciated the smallest of things. “I don’t even have a house in Cradock,” she said. “If my husband was here, we would be having our house, reading newspapers, sharing spectacles. I hope that the judge will keep that in mind.”

Lonwabo Mkonto said he just wanted answers. “That’s the only thing we are left with, is to know the truth. And maybe why did they do it?”

He said he didn’t expect anyone to go to prison, given that a separate trial would have to follow. “I’m sure before the judgment … they will die, I’m sure.”