the first press conference of apartheid killer Dirk Coetzee.
Zuma was Coetzee's ANC keeper and protector. The story of Coetzee and how he got to the ANC is the subject of books but, in short, I was at the time a journalist at the Afrikaans anti-apartheid newspaper Vrye Weekblad (Free Weekly), which maverick editor Max du Preez, I and four other journalists had started.
Coetzee was once a golden boy in the police and a member of the feared Security Branch. In 1979, he set up a secret police unit on a farm called Vlakplaas, just west of Pretoria. The farm was manned by a few security policemen and so-called askaris – captured ANC and Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) guerrillas who were “turned” into killer cops. They were tortured until they agreed to work for the police. Once at Vlakplaas, they were dispatched to hunt down and assassinate their former comrades and ANC and PAC members.
After less than two years as commander of Vlakplaas, Coetzee had a falling-out with the generals and was transferred to the dog unit as a dog handler. He lamented at the time: “I don't even have a fucking dog!” Embittered and disillusioned, Coetzee embarked on a campaign to get back at the generals who had engineered his demise. He spoke to top Progressive Federal Party (PFP) politicians (the political party to the left of the ruling National Party) and a newspaper editor. He told them of his murderous missions; of how his unit had poisoned captured “terrorists” who refused to become askaris and then burned their bodies on pyres of wood and tyres – while gorging themselves on brandy and Coke at their own braaivleis-vuur (barbecue) a few metres away. He explained how they slit the throat of a well-known lawyer, Griffiths Mxenge, in 1981 because they suspected that the ANC was channelling money through his bank account. He mentioned the names of three generals and several brigadiers who ordered the assassinations. He also exposed a colonel who succeeded him at Vlakplaas: Eugene de Kock. De Kock acquired the nickname of Prime Evil and was eventually sentenced to several life sentences for a host of murders and other serious crimes.
Nobody believed Coetzee (or wanted to believe him) and he eventually found his way to me as a young reporter at an Afrikaans Sunday newspaper. The paper supported the government and would never have published the story. I kept in contact with Coetzee, and when we founded Vrye Weekblad, it was time to expose the existence of the police death squads.
Coetzee demanded that we arrange a haven overseas and look after his family back home. We didn't have money and decided there was only one option: Coetzee must join the ANC in exile and the organisation must undertake to protect him. In return, they could debrief him and use him for whatever propaganda purposes they chose.
Max du Preez and I embarked on secret negotiations with the ANC's head of intelligence, Jacob Zuma. His name meant nothing to me. A go-between flew between Lusaka and Johannesburg to deliver messages. Eventually the top command of the ANC agreed to our proposal, and in early November 1989 Coetzee and I flew to Mauritius, where I conducted the interview with him and took down a statement.
When he left the island to fly to London, where Zuma was waiting for him, he asked me: “So what do I call him when I greet him?” I wasn't sure myself and said: “Comrade, I suppose.” From then on everyone was comrade.
Two weeks later, Vrye Weekblad pasted a big photograph of Coetzee on its front page with the words “I am Captain Dirk Johannes Coetzee. I was the commander of the SA Police death squad. I was in the heart of the whore.”
Zuma, sporting a beard, endearingly greeted me in Harare and said: “Aha, so this is the unguided missile! You gave us almost as much trouble as that comrade sitting over there,” he said, bursting out laughing and pointing to Coetzee.
After Coetzee was in ANC hands, Zuma tried to delay our publication of our article because the ANC wanted more time to debrief the killer cop. We ignored his request. Coetzee said afterwards that his interrogators wanted to know if he would be prepared to return to South Africa to conduct military operations for the ANC. That might be why Zuma wanted more time.
When I spoke to Coetzee in Harare, he predicted a big future for Zuma. “I'm telling you, he's going to be president one day. I've never seen anyone with such a sharp brain. He is a supreme strategist.”
It was at the time a bizarre prediction. Nelson Mandela was in prison and the ANC was banned. That was until the next day when President F.W. de Klerk announced the release of the ANC leader and the unbanning of the organisation. Zuma scurried back to Lusaka and the host of journalists who had waited for Coetzee's appearance rushed to the airport to fly back to Johannesburg.
Coetzee added: “And I will be the new commissioner of police.” I told him it was impossible.
“You are wrong,” he said. “Zuma has promised me the commissioner's post.” Coetzee frequently made lists of what his police top structure would look like. Most of his generals were white and from the old order. What about your new ANC comrades? I wanted to know. Where are they going? “To the army,” he replied. “They will run the army. Leave the police to me.”
I don't think Zuma ever made this promise. Coetzee's delusions of grandeur came to an end when he returned to South Africa in 1993. He got a lowly position at the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) and was dumped in the archives. “How many fucking newspapers a day can you read?” he bitterly lamented. He was also convicted of the murder of Griffiths Mxenge although the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) granted him amnesty and expunged his record.
Coetzee's hero worship of Zuma eventually turned into aversion and he blamed him for all his ills and misfortune. “Why do I have to stand in court but no other comrade is on trial for all the things they have done?”
After he retired from the NIA in the mid-2000s, he looked after security for an ANC-linked company, EduSolutions. He flew with the managing director to France in 2007 to attend the final of the rugby World Cup between the Springboks and England. Here he bumped into Zuma, who greeted him heartily.
Shortly before Coetzee's death in 2013 and on his sickbed, he said to me: “Can you believe that Zuma never even phoned to ask how I am? Not a word. Nothing. And to think I gave my life for them.”
By then Coetzee had reverted to being a rabid racist. “That man is a snake. He's like all of them. You can never, ever trust any of them. Be very careful.”
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Little is known about Zuma's years in exile, but there are enough hints and evidence of a darker past that should have undermined his rise to the top. He doesn't talk about the 15 years he spent with the ANC in exile. He didn't even take his biographer, Jeremy Gordin, into his confidence. He is quoted as saying that details of the “operational events of those days” were the property of the ANC, not his to disclose.
It is often said that Zuma is proof that anyone, even from the humblest beginnings, can rise to the top. A son of a domestic worker mother and policeman father who died when he was a young boy, Zuma was chiselled from the land north of the Tugela River in KwaZulu-Natal. Called the land of hills, honey and cobras, it is an area tormented by poverty and stands in stark contrast to the rolling sugar estates and “white monopoly capital” on the other side of the Tugela.
Zuma had hardly any schooling because he had to support his mother by finding odd jobs. He taught himself to read and write. “I used to polish the veranda, you know, jobs like that,” he said in an interview. He followed his brother into the ANC in the late 1950s and attended informal liberation schools which the organisation had set up across the country. A few years later, the apartheid government banned the ANC and PAC following the Sharpeville massacre. The ANC adopted the armed struggle and formed an armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) – the Spear of the Nation.
Zuma and a group of more than forty MK recruits were arrested in 1963 when attempting to skip the country for military training. He was convicted of conspiring to overthrow the government and sentenced to ten years' imprisonment. He served his sentence on Robben Island alongside leaders like Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki.
He was released without ever receiving a single visitor. He returned to Nkandla, got married and worked in ANC underground structures. In 1975, he evaded arrest and went into exile. He returned to South Africa only in 1990 after the unbanning