Antjie Krog’s Country of my Skull is one of those haunting books one never gets used to. Brilliantly written, it fleshes out the pain and suffering that was the mainstay of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). In graphic detail the horrors of the evils of apartheid; the smashing of women’s breasts against drawers, electrocution of genitalia, brains blown out, bodies burnt or dismembered bleed profusely off the pages. So gory the witness testimonies that one must steel oneself almost throughout.
I’d read it a few years ago and never figured I’d have the stomach to do so a second time round. That is until our colleagues at Toverview mentioned a name hitherto I’d never heard of: Sandile Dikeni. Mr Dikeni, who passed away in 2019 was a fellow plattelander and a journalist, editor and poet. As an anti-apartheid activist, he also found himself a political prisoner and, like many of the grim, harrowing stories in Krog’s book, his is right up there amongst the more brutally chilling.
‘Sandile Dikeni’s comrades and friends,’ writes Mark Gevisser in the Mail & Guardian, ‘necklaced his grandmother — one of the matriarchs of the tiny community [of Victoria West] — because she told them what she thought of them.’ This gruesome episode and that Dikeni’s father underwent a ‘year-and- a-half of imprisonment and torture, and a trial that rent the black community in two by turning it into “the victims and the betrayers” left an indelible impression on the young Dikeni. These lines from one of his poems are as about as anguished and powerful a thing as you’ll ever read:
‘My comrades and friends killed my granny with fire…
But before that, they sucked her breasts dry … so that she could burn well‘
The personal turmoil notwithstanding, Dikeni would go on to earn a diploma in journalism through the Peninsula Technikon. As a student activist, his poem, Guava Juice, a refrain to the petrol bombs anti-apartheid activists hurled in the fight against the apartheid system, elevated his name in political circles in the Western Cape.
Soon, he found himself ‘arts editor of the Cape Times, editor of Die Suid-Afrikaan and political editor of This Day South Africa’ according to South African History Online. At some point there was a month-long stint as the Reverend Allan Boesak’s media person. Common of the earnest revolutionary artist, there was a tendency to eschew the spindoctor fluff and through his column, Behind the Grape Curtain, call it as he saw it.
Gevisser writes that leading up to the May 1996 local government elections Dikeni would comment that the ANC in the Western Cape region ‘is going to lose because [it] is a naive little organisation peppered with foolhardy Stalinists who cannot learn.’ Despite such unabated lunges at an organisation not known to turn the other cheek at criticism, Dikeni would find himself serving as spokesperson for then Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu. No one, however, was spared from Dikeni’s sling, not even writers as prestigious as Rian Malan, author of the critically-acclaimed My Traitor’s Heart.
‘White confessional literature,’ he says of Malan’s book. ‘The Europeans love it. It pushes the moral high-ground back to white people, forces me to accept that they’re not entirely bad. They feel sorry, man! We’ll kill you if you don’t forgive. They’ll hug you to death, and you don’t have an option. And I hate it.’ But Dikeni was also often inclined to side with and show empathy to those who found themselves on the foul side of public opinion.
One of those was ANC stalwart, Tony Yengeni. His testimony before the TRC against police captain Jeffrey Benzien who had tortured Yengeni using the dreaded ‘wet bag method’ would send shockwaves throughout the country. ‘As a Member of Parliament,’ writes Krog, ‘Yengeni’s voice has become known for its tone of confidence – sometimes tinged with arrogance. When he faces Benzien, this is gone … He sounds strangely different – his voice somehow choked.’
In the course of his testimony Yengeni would insist on Benzien physically demonstrating the technique for all to see. ‘But for this moment,’ continues Krog, ‘Yengeni has to pay dearly … with one accurate blow [Benzien] shatters Yengeni’s political profile,’ when he asks: “Do you remember, Mr Yengeni, that within thirty minutes you betrayed Jennifer Schreiner? Do you remember pointing out Bongani Jonas to us on the highway?” Needless to say Yengeni was branded as some lily-livered impimpi, an informer and a weakling who couldn’t endure pain like a man. Not Dikeni. In the aftermath, he would write (as quoted by Krog):
‘And so continues the torture of Tony Yengeni. Yengeni broke in under thirty minutes, suffocating in a plastic bag which denied him air and burnt his lungs, under the hands of Benzien. In the mind of Benzien, Yengeni, freedom fighter and anti-apartheid operative is a weakling, a man that breaks easily…
I said I am not gonna write no more columns like this, but the torture of Yengeni continues, with some of us regarding him as a traitor to the cause, a sell-out, a cheat and, in some stupid twist of faith and fate, his torturer becomes the hero, the revealer, the brave man who informed us about it all.
‘Tony Yengeni in my eyes remains the hero. Yengeni is one of the many people in the ANC executive who stood by the TRC, knowing that certain issues about the ANC would be revealed in the most mocking and degrading way by their torturers. In my eyes, Yengeni of Gugulethu is one of the people who still gives me hope amidst the caprice of the present. And not only Benzien, but many of us owe him an apology. And now, as I look at Yengeni, yes, I see blood, his own blood on the hands of Benzien and the apartheid state. I see blood. The blood of Yengeni’s friends and comrades crushed and sucked out of their lungs by the heroes of Apartheid – in under forty minutes, says the torturer, in his clinically precise ‘full disclosure’.
I said I am not gonna write no more columns like this.
I made a mistake.’ (Cape Times)
Although he doesn’t seem to be as widely known as he deserves in his native Northern Cape, with such catchy prose, it’s no wonder that Dikeni’s Love Poem for my Country found its way into President Cyril Ramaphosa’s inaugural speech at the Union Buildings last month. An online search of this dreadlocked son of the Karoo turns up some interesting finds. My reflexive reaction was, ‘Wow!’ followed by self-flagellation as to how is it I’d never heard of him? Except I think that I had, years ago from a certain Dr Sipho Mbuqe now a Psychologist based in the US. Dr Mbuqe, you’d recall, was the PhD student who submitted a dissertation – Political Violence in South Africa: A Case Study of ‘Necklacing’ in Colesberg – documenting the necklacing incident that continues to haunt members of Colesberg’s Kuyasa Township.
Going through the few items one is able to get hold of, Dikeni, one finds, was a born storyteller; a gallant voice that so beautifully articulated the struggle of his generation. How about a taste: With poetry dancing on our tongues/ we wiped the blood from our mouths /…/ we petrol- bombed our angry past/ we blasted our martyrs out of our brains/ and we made shrines out of their graves.
At the time of his untimely death, he was still hoping to write a novel about his father with the hope that it ‘will provide the truth that will lead to the reconciliation of his community.’ Sadly, fate dealt him and those who admired the man a heavy blow in 2019 when Dikeni passed away at the age of 53.
////////////////////////////////
Postscript: In light of gifted people like Dikeni who come from isolated spaces like our Karoo, the Editor-In-Chief of Toverview, who also happens to be the one who keeps the lights on here at eParkeni, Maeder Osler, hopes to get youngsters who are interested in writing, communication or journalism to show him what they are made of. He’d like to cast such people under our modest spotlight. So, if you’re an aspiring wordsmith, he’d like – No! wants! – to hear from you. And, he said to mention, that if you’re feeling a little intimidated, don’t be. This small-time writer right here felt the same way when he entered a small-time short story competition earlier this year. A few months later his amateurish scribblings are in the latest Publish’d Afrika Magazine anthology of short stories. It’s a negligible rag and no reason to uncork the bubbly, but we’ve all gotta start somewhere.
