Book extract: Murder at Small Koppie

This excerpt from Murder at Small Koppie: The Real Story of the Marikana Massacre has been published with permission from Penguin Random House South Africa and is available from all leading stores.

Tholakele ‘Bhele’ Dlunga is impassive as he pulls the plastic shopping bag over his head to show the torture he endured.

His hands do not tremble as he mimics how police officers clamped their hands over his nose and mouth when they thought he was somehow managing to get enough air to breathe despite the black bag.

That was just the start of the beatings and torture that would last for days.

The terror began when five plain-clothes policemen broke down the door to Bhele’s one-room shack at dawn on 25 October 2012, a little more than a month after the strike ended.

After suffocating and beating him, they found the pistol that he kept next to his television. Arrested on charges of possessing an unlicensed weapon, he was taken to Phokeng police station, where the assault continued throughout the day.

He was then transferred to another police station, where he was again tortured.

In a voice raspy and constrained from being choked, Bhele claimed he had not used the pistol, but kept it with him as he feared for his safety in the dangerous mining settlement.

The police’s interest in the firearm, with its distinctive red-coloured slide on top, had been fuelled by their secret informer from among the strikers known only as Mr X.

As his testimony would later show, Mr X worked with the police to fabricate evidence about many of the strike leaders, woven with incidents that he had perhaps witnessed or that police had gleaned and fed him from other sources.

The police also had hours of video of the strikers shot by police cameramen and Lonmin security, as well as publicly available news material.

In the aftermath of the massacre, and the launch of the Marikana Commission of Inquiry the month before, the police and the state were frantic to shift attention from their actions onto those of the miners.
The information that Bhele’s tormentors sought was the whereabouts of other strike leaders, and those who had guns. The police, he says, had photographs of ‘everyone’.

Bhele expertly prepares scrambled eggs on bread and a pot of tea for his guests, showing no hint of resentment at sharing the little he has. He then puts the kettle back on to heat his bath water.

When it has boiled, Bhele strips off and steps into a plastic basin to wash. His small frame while clothed belies the musculature of his body, his powerful buttocks and thighs. It is the physique of a man who lives by the sweat of his brow, drilling at the rock face deep underground hour after hour.

Still in pain from the beatings a week before, Bhele washes gingerly. The men, now finished with their breakfast, unabashedly watch him, now and then making a joke about his discomfort. Drying off, he slips on boxer shorts and then mops the floor. While setting up his ironing board, he speaks gently to the young miner, encouraging him to tell the tale of his arrest. Anele Zonke, twenty-six, was arrested by plain-clothes cops two days before Bhele.

The young man appears dazed, his face trembling from time to time. He is in obvious discomfort as he sits on a plastic chair that has lost its back, shifting to relieve unseen pain. He too was beaten and suffocated.

The other men keep their eyes on Bhele as he meticulously irons his grey wool trousers, even though their creases are already perfectly sharp. They are all, however, listening attentively to Zonke. The young man tries to gloss over some of the details of his torture, but Bhele gently prompts him from the ironing board.

It was while being suffocated by a plastic bag that Zonke lost control of his bowels and soiled his clothes. He was unable to get other clothes, as police played hide-and-seek with the men, keeping them away from their lawyers.

He washed his reeking trousers in the basin and waited, naked, for them to dry. He did not wash his underpants – keeping them in the hope they could be used as evidence of his torture. When Zonke finally appeared before a magistrate, he wore his still-stinking trousers without underwear.

The court ordered Zonke released, yet as he emerged from the doors, he was rearrested by the same policemen. He is unable to say exactly what he was charged with. Murder and a few other crimes, he stammers uncertainly. He also can’t specify whose murder he was charged with.

Zonke is experiencing pain deep within his abdomen, and he says that his bowels work constantly. He is just a husk of the energetic, bright young man of two weeks before.

The torture he suffered has left him ashamed. Ashamed that he was rendered powerless, at the mercy of his tormentors; ashamed that he undoubtedly gave the police many of the answers they sought, and more besides.

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