South African diaries of the 1980s (1st volume)

 

A poem from Pietermaritzburg, from  December 21, 1984

 

Where is freedom?
Did freedom ever exist?
Or was it just a trick, a strange, unknown promise
ready to break it at any time.

 

It's hot. Freedom melts in the crucible of power,
while the normal hero moves on, killing and laughing,
the South African people are awakening.

 

In the street, there is a dead man, a second bloody one next to him,
Flies swarm around the place without life,
this callous place,
Screaming and wailing, it was murder. It was murder!

The death of freedom goes around like a dark, unfathomable ghost,
is it the love of freedom that leads us to believe in it?

 

Marinella Charlotte van ten Haarlen

 

The "bogeyman" named Pieter Willem Botha

The Song is you - Jack Denny 1932

Kroonstad, Oranje Vrystaat, Republiek van Suid Afrika

 

Now I am sitting in this horrible hotel with thousands of mosquitoes on the road to Bloemfontein. Literally in the middle of nowhere. And I have to go further. The journey on the back of the pick-up yesterday was arduous.

I just called Harold at the office. Usually, the call went through the switchboard; probably the censor was listening. The line was cut several times. It's about 80 degrees Fahrenheit outside.

Harold told me to come right over. He can hardly believe I'm here. Harold's happy as a clam. If he even knows what a snow king is. Everyone speaks Afrikaans here; it's easy for me. Thank God, I learned. The coloureds speak isiXhosa, Bantu dialects and Fanagalo, which the whites here call KafferKitchen. That's pretty disrespectful. Subhuman is still the friendliest thing the hardliners here think and say about the majority of the population. Many locals seek shade under the trees along the road.

The Department van die Binnelandse Sake casts long shadows not only in the morning sun.

Moment of calm

I've never seen a breakfast like this morning in my life.

Must have been six eggs and a large sausage ring. It's called Boerewors. The meat was delicious, unlike in Europe. Better. Much better.

It was served with fried tomatoes, bacon, toast with salty butter, deliciously bitter jam, over which I drizzled a lime.
It can't be bitter enough.
The moon I saw last night is the same all over the world.

The black woman sat down with me, at the table by the kitchen. The black girl is alone; otherwise, it would not be possible. It is forbidden. Something like fraternizing, after the war. "Slegs vir Blanke!"
Whites only!
Because of Apartheid.
She comes from the town of Pietermaritzburg. In Natal on the Indian Ocean. The air conditioning hums and rattles. On the radio are ancient songs like Bert Lown - Loving You The Way I Do

 

Jambok

 

It's like a colony here. A pretty lovely but evil settlement. A bad colony. White men in blue uniforms are everywhere with their yellow emergency vehicles. There was sometimes the riding-whip pulled, but not against horses, but the black passers-by on the road.

In the night tanks rolled past in front of the window. Army for hours in earth brown cars until the dawn over the Kalahari. I listened to the radio, music, Springbok radio.

The woman who spoke Afrikaans, sometimes whole sentences in Fanakalo, with me, of which I understood only half, meant something like this:
"If you want to start a new life, you have to be strong." I was somewhat ashamed to have the right skin colour for South Africa from fate. It is a lousy dictatorship; I realized that after a few hours.

 

I probably drank a litre of lychee juice for breakfast and a large cup of very bitter, but delicious coffee. And this incredibly beautiful music, which is like honey in my ears.

After my adventure yesterday, I was quite happy that I could listen to music in the morning. This music from Jack Denny never goes out of my ears.

Yesterday I was still in Johannesburg, Egoli, city built on gold. Burning barricades on the road to Vanderbijlpark. Men lying in the street, dead. They were dead. They couldn't have been more dead. Brains and blood everywhere. Bone fragments. The Hiace's windshield shot out. There was a lot of ammunition and casings in the street. Poor guys' bodies were so twisted you'd think rubber men were lying around. Death is omnipresent here.

The almost hour-long approach to Johannesburg, to Germiston (Jan Smuts Lughawe), was gigantic. One could see the spoil heaps. Huge mountains, white and they shone in the sunlight—rays in the middle of the red, very sandy earth of Africa.
Now I am here. The fan buzzed in the same deep sound as the tank engines. It's a frightening noise in the middle of the night.

It is a frightening sound amid the silence.

And the song is in my ears again.

Tea in the shadow of Steve Biko

 

The editor took his time. He tells about the 1950s when he travelled across Europe. It's almost noon, we eat sandwiches with mayonnaise-chicken and drink coffee, lemonade, with lychee juice, which cures everything here. Then rooibos tea with milk and sugar. Nobody in the newsroom trusts anybody.

There's something in the air.

He spoke to me for a long time and gave me a phone number. A black woman served us tea with lemon afterwards.

A serious man who thought I should arrive first. The mistrust is all about Muldergate. -I'm supposed to call him in the next few days. He invites me to a Braai. And the Boerendans.

The Boer is a chain smoker of the worst kind. He smoked Lexington, 30 cigarettes was enough for half a day.

They say he's not getting on with the government in Pretoria.
There's a climate of fear. It's deliberate.

Which sane person can get along with Nazis who made skin colour the criterion of their politics?

He was arrested several times. I was warned that at any moment a jamboree unit could descend on the newsroom. Some wacko kept coming forward.

And, please?

My youthful recklessness amazes me. But it's an honour to fight against the Nazi edge.

SAP came and took away plenty of unpopular editors.

On the street, everything seems peaceful. SAP patrols.
Why not, thought the man with the riding-whip in his hand. The right hand was always sitting loosely on the holster of his pistol. Ever since the Potgieter Commission, the police's behaviour has been more like that of an informer.

"The murder of journalists is not unusual here when we think of Steven Biko."

I didn't know much about Biko. The editor gave me a folder with articles, Afrikaans and English.

Pieter Botha was like the bad man who came for you and nobody else.

I sit for hours at the Wawiel Bridge, reading, at the monument from the Anglo-Dutch Boer War.
There were concentration camps here that the British set up during the Boer War.

Here are still Nazis.

What do people do to themselves?

Living mummies are coming back from Angola. Soldiers who are only alive because they eat, breathe and drink and sleep, their eyes are blank. A few minutes ago, some of them passed me in a wheeled tank called "Casspir". Direction Welkom, Thabong, which sounds like a swearword to the soldiers.

It gets dark over the thorny bushes, which form the end of the Karoo at the edge of the city.

 

Lourenço Marques (Maputo)/ Cape Town )

 

1979 Treacherous brother kiss between Samora Machel and Erich Honecker

 

It is the year 1984.

The prehistory to the attack on the GDR development helpers of the socialist state farm Unango was long and owed to the crisis in southern Africa since the independence of numerous states from colonial rule in the 1960s and 1970s, which also resulted from the block thinking of the African states and the Cold War.

 

Ultimately, this lack of transparency by the new masters in African governments led to the devastating terrorist attack at Unango. The endless civil war, Apartheid and the slow collapse of the Comecon economic system also created a situation in which the attack on the GDR   development workers was never resolved.

Maybe the involved countries didn't want to solve the crime either.

Such a starting point was the calculation of the former Minister for State Security, Erich Mielke, in Berlin.

An admission of the socialist state, which was in chaos, into the then economic union of the Eastern Bloc Comecon was rejected by its members, Mozambique turned away from its alleged brother states already in the mid-1980s.

 

From Federal Archives, Picture 183-R0522-177 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, Link

A very bad guy: Erich Mielke, Minister for State Security in East Berlin

Even at that time, secret negotiations were underway with South Africa, which was interested in removing Mozambique from the list of front states against the Apartheid State of Pretoria. Thus, as early as March 1984, a real politic treaty was signed between Mozambique and South Africa at Nkomati Bridge.

From Federal Archives, Picture 183-1983-0303-423 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, Link

 

  

Samora Moises Machel with friends when they were still friends Margot Honecker, then wife of the dictator Erich Honecker

Mielke could not like that: The corrupt Samora Machel moved behind the front line and cashed in on both sides. Thus, Mielke conducted foreign policy with his Stasi apparatus. And yes, actually Honecker was no longer the first man in the state, but Erich Mielke.

 

Terror simply swept under the table

It sounds like a grotesque reference to the international community.

One of the most serious terrorist attacks against Germans remained completely without consequences for the perpetrators, who were not to be found in Mozambique but in the former GDR, due to the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The once so good relationship between the respective leaders of their states Erich Honecker and Samora Machel had been clouded for months. 

Since 1979, many ships had left the legendary Delagoa Bay. Mielke wanted to sell weapons through the KoKo and no longer import coffee from Mozambique. He preferred to take it from West-Germany.

Mozambique, on the other hand, was once again approaching South Africa after years of the bush war. A consensus was needed and the socialist leadership in Maputo sought a balance with Pretoria. Mielke could not like that.

Eight Germans were murdered just like that.

But who murdered Wolfgang Smardz, Uwe Wriedt, Günter Skibbe, Manfred Lindner, Klaus Einecke, Helmut Liepe, Hans-Dieter Wagner, Jürgen Michel, the Yugoslavian development aid worker Branko Vujovic and who injured Klaus Pohl so badly in the long stretched curve in the bushland?

It was December 6, 1984, on a dusty African dirt road leading to the fields of the state farm. About 45 men, partly armed with bazookas and MPs, sneaked to the track under the protection of the surrounding bushes.

Another 10 kilometres to Unango, the convoy came to a standstill. Shortly afterwards, the assailants approached the Multicar from behind and executed the victims with targeted shots to the head. Three are found in front of the truck, four in the truck. One of the development workers was seriously injured, he died shortly afterwards. The Yugoslavian is also dead. One of the development helpers survives, but even he could not contribute much to the enlightenment.

 

The perpetrators escaped unrecognised within minutes, the guard fled to the other side of the slope, Mielke in East Berlin raged.

Whilst the decades passed by this history was completely forgotten, the attack faded out.

After the reunification of Germany, the case was again taken up by the public prosecutor's office in Gera and finally handed over to the visibly uninterested authority in Maputo in 2009.

Smokescreens in the bush

The "truth" rewritten by the Ministry for State Security and the alleged mastermind of the attack, Erich Mielke, was used to describe gangs that at that time were caught between the lines of the Mozambique civil war, who were identified as the perpetrators. None of the alleged gang members could ever be located. There were arms dealers, mercenaries and desperados who sought their fortune between the lines.

The incompetent regime of Samora Machel was a great help to them, endless strikes kept the socialist version of Mozambique in suspense. Nothing worked anymore. Also, several hundred trucks from the GDR, which had already been delivered and were intended for the deal between the GDR and Mozambique, rusted in the ports.

The reflection within the socialist brother states of the Cold War was one of the greatest disasters.

To cultivate agricultural land outside of the GDR to harvest tropical fruits and coffee and to provide development aid to the Mozambicans, who were plagued by civil war, through about 100 reconstruction workers was within the framework of the possibilities of the former GDR.

This socialist fraternal support for the FRELIMO regime by the then ruler Samora Machel ended in death for one Yugoslavian and eight German reconstruction workers.

Simple, they were murdered.

While the GDR still existed, no reconnaissance activities were developed.

Samora Machel hamba khale (Walk safely)

Mozambique also got into considerable, further difficulties after the death of the "revolutionary leader" Samora Machel.

The already curious crash of the Tupolev Tu-134A-3 over Lebombobergen, South Africa, near Komatipoort, in October 1986, exposed even the international investigation commission to countless puzzles arising from the facts of the crash.

Margo Commission 

During his lifetime Machel had maintained a corrupt and perfidious regime that turned to either side if it only served to maintain the diminish power. The RENAMO supported by South Africa was no better.

Machel's death left a political vacuum in that it was also very difficult for the South African judge Cecil Margo to determine what had happened when the crash occurred. In this environment, the clarification of the death of the GDR citizens was quickly forgotten.

The state GDR, a militarily active band of robbers

As early as July 1984 there were rumours that the GDR had entered into a political and military engagement in Angola to obtain important foreign exchange through the international diamond trade. Mielke also sensed a profitable arms business in Mozambique, even if the desired development boost did not come from Mozambique, as the GDR leadership expressed itself after the attack. Mielke spoke of "capitulatory behaviour of the Mozambican forces" 

2.Part Traces to the Oranje Vrystaat