The family members of Inkosi Albert Luthuli, who died half a century ago, are still grieving like the tragedy happened yesterday, and are accusing the ANC-led government of dragging its feet to bring his killers to book, which they said robbed them of the closure.
Soon after the adjournment of the inquest into the Nobel Peace Prize winner, his first grandson, Mthunzi Luthuli, said the pain still feels fresh in the hearts of his family members.
“It (lack of arrest) affects us in many ways. The first one is that it keeps this thing alive in our memories. If somebody dies, you bury them, you come to terms with what happened, you close the chapter, and you move on. But our situation is such that we have not been able to close the chapter, so the pain has lived on with the family since then,” said Luthuli, who was only three months old when his grandfather was killed.
Luthuli was repeating to this reporter what he told the reopened inquest on Thursday, which is currently taking place at the Pietermaritzburg High Court.
He shocked many when he gave his testimony before Judge Qondeni Redebe on Thursday, attacking the ANC.
One of those who was shocked said no one had expected him to turn the tide against the party that his grandfather was the president of when he was killed. Luthuli was killed on July 21, 1967, in what the initial inquest held in the same year concluded that he was hit by a goods train.
He said the political developments, which started with the birth of the democratic system in 1994, “sold the black people out”.
“The reason why it has taken so long to reopen this inquest and to investigate all of the murders that happened is because the ANC struck a deal with the National Party for the National Party to hand over power to the ANC,” said Luthuli.
He stated that the deal enabled the establishment of the democratic dispensation. “The demand was that those who committed the atrocities should not be prosecuted. There were lots of other demands such as land, economy, wealth, and all of that.”
He said the families of many Struggle activists whose murders could not be accounted for previously approached the government looking for closure.
“They did nothing for us because of a deal with the National Party.
“In fact, if you look at Ahmed Timol’s case, the apartheid era cop that was responsible for Timol’s death, Joao Rodriguez, when he was in Johannesburg High Court, he admitted, but said he should not be in court because ‘there was an agreement that we will not be prosecuted’,” said Luthuli.
He said he had evidence that “there was active suppression of the prosecution of these cases”.
ANC in KwaZulu-Natal described Luthuli’s allegations as “deeply unfortunate and regrettable” but said it appreciated that they (Luthuli’s utterances) stem from a deep-seated hurt of losing a grandfather, and seeking to make sense of the circumstances surrounding such a loss.
“Like all of us, the Luthuli family has every right to be angry at the delays in getting to the bottom of the causes of our President-General’s mysterious demise. However, we can state without equivocation that the ANC has never been part of any suggested cover-up,” said ANC provincial spokesperson Fanle Sibisi.
“We wish to place it on record that no leader of the ANC ever negotiated with the apartheid National Party government to hand over power in exchange for immunity from prosecution for crimes committed under apartheid,” he said.
In the witness box, Luthuli was followed by Dr Jabulani Simon Mzaliya, who held a PhD in political science.
Mzaliya, who testified on Thursday and Friday, said he did a lot of research about the life and death of Luthuli, who was previously a school teacher, community activist, and a dedicated Christian follower.
He said that after Luthuli’s death, the ANC distributed pamphlets saying that the apartheid death squad had killed him.
“To counter this accusation, the head of the South African Security Branch, General Van den Berg, called a press conference to refute the allegations.
“Van den Berg blemished Luthuli’s legacy by saying he was a willing collaborator and was on the verge of embracing apartheid,” said Mzaliya.
He said following Luthuli’s death at Stanger Hospital, there was a lot of propaganda aimed at covering up the real cause of his death.
“Another glaring Van den Berg’s misrepresentation was that Luthuli was about to renounce Communism,” Mzaliya said, adding that medical practitioners also participated in covering up Luthuli’s murder.
He said the initial inquest, which was presided over by Magistrate CI Boswell at Stanger Magistrate’s Court, was botched as it did not seek evidence from many people who could have shared light about the scene where he was found before being taken to the hospital and the nature of his injuries.
He gave a personal account, through his experience he obtained when he worked at a telephone exchange centre in the year Luthuli died, of what happened to prove that the goods train story was fictitious.
He said the driver of the train that was purported to have killed Luthuli gave an affidavit to Boswell saying that the accident happened at 10.38am, but an ambulance driver gave another affidavit saying the hospital received a call at 10.40am, which was two minutes after the accident.
“Now, between 10.38 and 10.40, so many things happened, which did not correlate with the two minutes.
“The train has to stop first, but the train does not suddenly stop and the train guard had to find out from the train driver why the train had stopped, which was supposed to take some more minutes, then the train guard had to stop the train by securing stoppers so that the train does not reverse, that took another time.
“The guard had to walk to the railway telephone to phone the station master at Glendale Station, and that took some time.
“Then the station master phoned the hospital through the manual telephone exchange, of which sometimes you have to hold for more time than the two minutes it suddenly took for the hospital to know that there was an accident,” said Mzaliya.
The inquest will continue on Tuesday.
