A few days before I left South Africa in 2005, I spent two days in the Winterveldt cemetery, a Black cemetery (under Apartheid…and arguably still) located about 45 minutes to the north west of Pretoria.  I drove there with some members of the South African Disappearance Project Team, jointly run by the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR), the Khulumani Support Group (a victims-rights group struggling to raise national consciousness regarding victims of Apartheid-era abuses), and the National Prosecuting Authority [a government branch set up to investigate, among other things, outstanding missing persons cases of people that were forcibly disappeared (killed) during the political struggle in South Africa].  On the days that I visited the cemetery, we were also joined by several Argentine forensic anthropologists, whose expertise in exhuming and identifying remains of the many victims of that country’s dictatorship, it was hoped, would help us in our task of finding several members of the Mamelodi 10.

The Mamelodi 10 were a group of ten strugglists that were eliminated by the Apartheid regime in September of 1987.  African National Congress (ANC) fighters, they had received word that they were going to be caught by the police.  They got in to a kombi (one of those big 12-15 person vans) and planned to escape South Africa over the border into Botswana.  Though instead, they were turned in by their driver, an undercover informer for the authorities.  They were then driven to a secret location and drugged.  Their bodies were loaded back into the van, and beside each one was placed an AK-47 to make it appear as if they were part of the violent struggle against the government.  As their bodies lay limp in the vehicle, the van was driven at a very high speed toward a large tree.  The driver allegedly jumped out leaving a brick on the accelerator.  The van inevitably crashed, probably killing all that remained alive.  But just in case, and to cover up the rest of the evidence, the killers (government sponsored) blew up the remains of the remains with grenades, so that all that were eventually left of the bodies were legs, toes, fingers, feet, and other parts that somehow managed to remain somewhat intact.  Talk about away to get rid of someone!
 
As macabre as it may seem, going to the cemetery is somehow serene, but we are not just here to dig.  There are multiple tasks, and our teams split up into groups to take care of what we have come to do.  I and three others are to do the grave-mapping.  Winterveldt being the rather disorganized cemetery that it is, the graves are mostly in rows but not really.  While some graves in the cemetery actually have tombstones with the name of the deceased inscribed, most of those buried in the cemetery come from families that were not able to afford a proper tombstone at the time of their deaths.  And although the cemetery provides 6-inch metal spikes with numbers on them to mark the graves of everyone within, most of these have been stolen by scrap metal collectors for South Africa’s thriving (and illegal) scrap metal industry.

To complicate things, bodies were not necessarily buried in chronological order; although they may have started this way, over the years lack of space demanded that nearly every available inch be filled with a body.  Former footpaths, spaces under trees and bushes and even spaces between graves that were far enough apart to take another body became filled with the dead, so locating bodies by date becomes an even huger task.  For lack of tombstones, most families have taken to putting shards of broken dishes, mugs, flower vases, bent forks, aluminum cans, coke bottles, beer bottles, plastic containers, and other odds and ends on the graves of their loved ones to mark the spot where they are buried.  The dishes and objects are generally broken, cut in half, or destroyed prior to placement on the grave to prevent them from being stolen as well.

Our team is looking for graves that were dug in September of 1987, as the Mamelodi 10 disappeared around September 19th of that month.  As there is no proper record or map of where people are actually buried, our task is to first map the graves in the cemetery.  The process is long, and we go from grave to grave recording whether the grave is formal (such as those marked by a tombstone, dishes, and so on…) or informal.  Formal graves have some kind of marker, whether or not the name is evident.  Formal graves are those that are being cared for by family members and presumably not those we are looking for because there is indication that someone knows who is buried there.  We are focusing on the informal graves, as a sign that someone is buried there illegally or secretly would indicate that no one ever comes to take care of it.  We are looking specifically for paupers graves, which included people the city needed to bury that had no family, such as the homeless, orphans, and, if our quest is to be successful, political activists and the Mamelodi 10.  After mapping hundreds of graves, with descriptions such as broken blue flower vase and twisted fork, we locate about 15-20 potential exhumation sites.  Although I was there for only 2 days, the entire time period for this particular exhumation search lasted 2 weeks.

Madeleine Fullard, of the National Prosecuting Authority, oversees our project.  She is responsible for getting the various permissions needed to actually exhume the graves.  She also leads the investigations, meets with the families of the victims at every step of the process to discuss developments in the cases and meets with those formerly involved in the disappearances.  Family members of the disappeared for whom we search sit under a nearby tree with their packed lunches and cold drinks, waiting for news as to whether those that we unearth could possibly be the remains of their loved ones.  Three gravediggers are on hand to do most of the big digging, down to coffin level, after which the Argentine forensic anthropologists will brush away by hand for hours the remaining bits of dirt and dust surrounding the bones themselves.  All together we are 20 or so individuals, trying to get to the bottom of some of these unsolved cases.

The actual exhumation generally is the culmination of a year’s worth of investigation, interviewing former perpetrators about the specific details of the deaths of the victims and the locations of the bodies, schlepping around dusty old storage rooms of police files in obscure locations and getting the variety of permissions necessary to proceed with the digging.  On a previous exhumation three months earlier, the team successfully located two bodies of former strugglists (confirmed several weeks later after DNA testing).  In these two weeks we are lucky.  The team has found up to nine of the Mamelodi 10, and I find out only later that I was lucky enough to be in the cemetery on the day that two of them were successfully found.  This brings the total of the Mamelodi 10 that have been found to 9.  I wonder about the 10th one and remember thinking for a fleeting moment that I wouldn’t have the closure of being there for the discovery of the 10th due to the short time that I had left in South Africa.

And then I remembered exactly what we were doing, and for whom this exercise is–the surviving family members and the victims themselves–and I realize that closure is not, nor was, meant to be mine anyway.  Closure, if at all possible, is something that had been waited on for 18 years by the families and victims themselves.  I remember that I was in South Africa for 5 months, and had the amazing research opportunity to be involved in this project at all.  But closure?  No.  Closure was not to be mine.  As much as I could enjoy the research experience of being in the field and mapping and digging graves, closure, if it is to be had at all, is theirs.  And I am reminded that at the end of the day, these people were South Africans with lives, identities, families, friends and jobs, and the fact that they are now piles of disappeared and murdered bodies and bones does not change the fact that their dreams were destroyed entirely - prematurely - by tyranny and discrimination.  For me, closure would come years later in writing up my findings in a book.  For the team, closure will be in solving some of these cases.  For the families, closure will mean that they have a place to mourn, a moment to grieve and the opportunity to say goodbye.

For those who have seen the film In My Country (2005) which dramatizes one of these missing persons cases, you would be led to believe that most exhumations actually result in the Hollywood happy ending where the remains are found, given to the family, and the surviving family relatives can finally be at peace knowing that the remains have come back to them.  The reality is that about 3-4% of these cases have enough evidence to actually assist the exhumation team to find the bones.  Most of these people will never be heard from again, and that is the reality of this aspect of reconciliation work in the new South Africa.  The resources and political will simply are not available to find them.  It is a sad irony that most of those who gave their lives to change South Africa will never formally experience it, even in death.  It is a humbling experience, as we intrude in the name of social justice and research into what was meant to be the final resting place of several South African citizens who coincidentally died around the time of the Mamelodi 10.

Narratives of family members of the Mamelodi 10, Madeline Fullard, Khulumani survivor groups, reconciliation NGO workers, and other survivors of Apartheid-era abuses may be found at the author’s recent book: Wounded Healers & Reconciliation Fatigue: The Search for Social Justice & Sustainable Development in South Africa, (VDM Publishing, 28 June 2009).