The worst man Jacques Pauw ever met – and he had a nasty pile to pick from – was Pieter Botes, who masterminded the car bomb that crippled Albie Sachs in Mozambique; he continued to describe the deed over and over again in gleeful, even triumphant, tones to Pauw.
A chance photograph, much published, of the blackened body of Sachs trying to rise, his arm like a broken stick, from the tarmac is one of the defining images of the “dirty tricks” campaign of the apartheid era and one that catapulted many of us into activism. Presumably that was the opposite effect of its intention, but then brainstorming was never the defining strength of the butcher boys.
Pauw, slightly more than fashionably late, arrives breathless and apologetic for an interview I’ve been trying to arrange for more than a year – ever since the publication of his only novel, Little Ice Cream Boy, a book so forceful that it went on to my annual list as one of the “novels of the year”.
Little Ice Cream Boy was Pauw’s fictional attempt to rid himself of the demon of Ferdi Barnard, whom he had frequently interviewed, an assassin who is in jail for life.
Some have suggested that Boy is too gruesome, overly sensationalist. It is not. For an accurate and even more harrowing account, consult his non-fiction Into the Heart of Darkness: Confessions of Apartheid’s Assassins. Expect to be horrified.
Boy is the tough-talking narrative of an apartheid “monster”, Gideon Goosen, whose life dwindles away in Pretoria Central as he recalls the unlikely chain of events that led him to his incarceration, not far from where he used to torture “terrorists” and where he, ironically, is now protected from such treatment by the very culture of human rights he once mocked.
Pauw has rubbed shoulders with some of Africa’s most notorious killers and been much commended for his investigative work, being chosen twice as CNN’s Africa Journalist of the Year. He talks of days of madness: of sitting in an hotel near Krugersdorp listening to the “rough blokes and their rough language: the whole bar was painted red, obviously to conceal the blood”.
Does he miss those extraordinary experiences? No, is his response.
“I found the characters fascinating, but I do think I’m harder. Less shocks me. I’m a less trusting person. When I grappled with the corruption of people who were so inherently evil, I wondered: ‘Could I have done this?’ I don’t think so but thank God I was never put in that position.”
Of Pieter Botes, who liked to boast that he had made a “sousie” (sauce) of Albie Sach’s arm, Pauw recalls: “I remember as if it was yesterday, the relish with which he described it, for days. He was a deeply damaged pyschopath.
“But when you deal with these people, after a while they all seem incredibly normal. They don’t carry their derangement on their foreheads. People would be disappointed if they met them.”
Among the many telling passages in Boy is the one where Goosen muses that “it has long been known that a policeman is more likely to commit a felony than an ordinary citizen and that the force is the definitive university of crime”.
This is a reflection of, among others, Eugene de Kock, aka Prime Evil. one of the CCB officers Pauw came to know well (“He still phones me, many of them do”).
It was Pauw’s outing of Vlakplaas, along with Max du Preez while they worked on the investigative newspaper Vrye Weekblad, that revealed to an outraged world and an embarressed regime just how rotten that dark heart had been.
“I have mixed feelings about De Kock,” he says.
“He applied for amnesty and more than any other person he unravelled the past, including Vlakplaas. He got six life sentences. He said he was remorseful and requested that he be allowed to meet the families of those he had murdered, and he asked them for forgiveness. His plea for a pardon contains the signatures of many of those families.
“But some of his killings were not political. He was stealing money all the time; patriotism mixed with profit. Victor Frankl, survivor of Auschwitz, wrote of how some guards were more humane, while others actually volunteered for the ghastly stuff – that is the interior world of good and bad.
“At any one time there were about 80 policemen at Vlakplaas, but Eugene de Kock’s inner circle, the ones who participated in the killings, were only about 10.
‘He’s never going to commit a crime again if he gets out, but…” Pauw pauses and shakes his head. He is not in favour of a pardon for De Kock even though we both agree that “the generals” got away with it. “The only person I have respect for is (former NP deputy minister of law and order) Leon Wessels. He offered to testify (at the TRC) and basically said: ‘Of course we knew.’ “
Pauw has also produced television coverage and reports of Rwanda/Kenya and Darfur, and is now writing a book about a “translator” he met during those travels, “Kennedy”, who managed to survive a walk down to South Africa and who now holds a law degree from the University of Pretoria.
But, he adds, it is not entirely a book of hope. “He is a damaged person.”
“I don’t have children,” Pauw says, disarmingly, “so writing books gives me meaning. I get completely obsessed.”
That means we have access to the right to know, though it strips us of innocence. As it should be.