Adriaan Vlok – the old man and the dark shadow of the past

I have been haunted by this image for months: an old man in an ill-fitting, pale blue shirt and flapping khaki pants, wearing a grey woollen beanie on his head at the height of summer. He is walking down an uneven brick driveway cautiously feeling each step with a three-footed aluminium cane.

He draws behind him a dark past, its heaviness bearing down on his frail body as he hobbles toward me. I have seen him often in my own past, but I have never actually met him before. I know much about his outer public and political life – as does all the world. I know, too, something about his inner life to have seen that he has spent the second half of his life trying at least publicly to atone for the horror of what he decreed should be done to others.

He was one of the most powerful and terrifying protectors of white privilege in the dying days of apartheid. As deputy and then minister of law and order, he was one of the inner circle, one of the merciless anointed, who had the power to condemn anyone in the country to imprisonment, torture or, often – death.

He ordered the clandestine bombing of the headquarters of Cosatu and of Khotso House, the seat of the South African Council of Churches. In 1989, while early talks between the ANC and the apartheid government were taking place, he gave a clear order to murder. He instructed secret agents to place underwear laced with a deadly nerve toxin in the luggage of the Rev Frank Chikane, who was very nearly killed by the poison and only survived through specialised medical treatment in the US.

In 1986, while Adriaan Vlok was deputy minister, 10 activists from Mamelodi near Pretoria were tricked by a security policeman into believing they were going into exile, injected with a drug that made them unconscious and then burned alive in a minibus.

Some years after the end of apartheid, Vlok spoke out about his evil career. In 2007 he pleaded guilty to the attempted murder of Chikane and received a 10-year suspended sentence. He also talked publicly of apartheid as a sin and how he had sinned against God and against the people he had ordered brutalised and killed. In 2006 he even went so far as to visit Chikane and wash his feet in an open gesture of repentance. He also washed the feet of the widows and mothers of the “Mamelodi 10”.

He then went on to do extensive charity work, feeding children in the townships around Pretoria, funding much of it with his government pension money.

But all of Vlok’s efforts at penance will never be enough for Lukhanyo Calata. He was only three years old when, in 1985, the car carrying his father, Fort Calata, and three fellow activists, Matthew Goniwe, Sparrow Mkonto and Sicelo Mhlauli was stopped at night by the police at a roadblock on their way home to Cradock from a meeting in what was then Port Elizabeth. They were never seen alive again. Their grotesquely mutilated and burned bodies were found days later scattered in the bush of the Eastern Cape.

In 2021 I spoke to Lukhanyo as part of a team making a film for Al Jazeera on the fate of those responsible for the murder of the Cradock Four. He has spent most of his adult life trying to bring them to trial.

“The government banned the funeral,” he tells me. “That is my first memory of my dad, his funeral. Later that afternoon, the government declared a State of Emergency.”

He gestures towards a huge pile of documents he has collected over the years. “These files are the base documents that prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that my father was killed by the apartheid government. On 5 June 1985, Adriaan Vlok takes a drive to where we stay and my mum remembers thinking, ‘Oh, that’s Vlok,’ because she was looking through the window.

This violence is layered deeply into the present. Lukhanyo cannot hold back the tears as he tries to make sense of his father’s murder and what it has meant for his life.

“My son knows absolutely nothing about his grandfather. I struggled to raise my son until today. There are many days when I have no clue as to whether what I’m doing in raising my son is the right thing as a father.”
He wipes the tears from his eyes as his anger rises. “Everyone who had anything to do with my father’s death, they must all be investigated. They must all be prosecuted, and they must all be convicted for taking my father away from me.”
But the law has never taken its course in this case. All the men who actually did the killing have died, but Vlok is still alive. Last year I interviewed Vlok about his involvement in the killing of the Cradock Four.
He lives in a modest suburb of Pretoria. Unlike at most homes of the South African middle classes, his gate is unlocked. People, both black and white, come and go. As we are setting up for the interview a migrant from the DRC comes in. Vlok has given him shelter in his home. A young black woman slides the gate to go out. She, too, lives on the property.

We settle into our chairs for the questions to begin. There is the sound of an engine outside. A white man in a bakkie comes to pick up a load of food to be distributed in the nearby townships, despite Covid restrictions. Another once homeless white man is packing the freezers in Vlok’s front rooms with food for the needy.

Today Vlok lives the biblical adage that faith without works is dead. What is happening here this morning is part of an ongoing way of empathetic living far different from the cold, utterly ruthless and privileged existence of an apartheid Cabinet minister.