Invictus - Carlin [24]
“ There was no time to stop and think. There was no rational choice made. It was pure emotion,” Justice remembered.
The fact that Sethwala still had the gun in his hand and Justice carried no weapon, that Sethwala turned around as he ran down the road and fired at Justice, showed just how irrational Justice’s response was. But the shots missed and Justice caught him, forced the gun out of Sethwala’s hand, and beat Sethwala over the head with it. He only hit him twice, but twice was enough. He lay still, dead. Justice got up and kept running, but the group behind him, who had celebrated Sethwala’s capture and pummeling with a cry, did as black South African crowds ritually did too often in such circumstances. They kicked Sethwala’s inert body and then someone ran off to get a can of gasoline. Justice did not see this; he was told about it later. About a hundred people gathered round the body, whooping with delight. It was a victory at last, or something that in the madness of the moment felt very much like it for Paballelo. They doused the body with gasoline, scratched a match, and set it alight.
Justice fled across the border to Windhoek, the capital of Namibia. But then it was not yet an independent country; it still belonged to South Africa. Six days later, on November 19, he was arrested and brought back to Upington, where he and twenty-five others were jailed and charged with murder. The law of Common Purpose, as it was called, allowed for the prosecution not only of the person or persons directly responsible for a crime, but also of all those who might have shared in the desire to commit it, who had lent their moral support. Given such a loose definition, the police could have rounded up two people, or five, ten, twenty, or sixty-two. They opted for twenty-six, charging them all with the murder of the one man. Among the defendants was a married couple in their sixties who had eleven children between them and no criminal—or even mildly political—record. The police investigators made no effort to distinguish between the old couple’s degree of guilt and Bekebeke’s. They didn’t know that Bekebeke had been the one who had administered the decisive blows. Nor would they find out in the course of the long trial that followed. If found guilty, the “Upington 26” would face the same sentence Mandela had prepared for when he had stood at the dock in Pretoria twenty-one years earlier: death by hanging.
CHAPTER IV
BAGGING THE CROC
1986-89
Kobie Coetsee had succumbed more quickly than either he or Mandela would have expected. But Mandela doubted his next target would roll over quite so easily. His ultimate goal—a meeting with Botha himself—could only be attained after, or if, he won over the man guarding the presidential door, the head of the National Intelligence Service, Niël Barnard. Barnard, who had studied international politics at George-town University in Washington, D.C., acquired a reputation in his twenties as a boy genius. Botha first heard about him when Barnard was a lecturer in political science at the University of the Orange Free State. Impetuously, Botha hired him out of the university, aged thirty, to head up the NIS. That was on June 1, 1980. Barnard was to remain in the job until January 31, 1992, serving Botha for nearly ten years and his successor, F. W. de Klerk, for two.
No one in the apartheid state apparatus knew more about what was going on in