South Africa: Courting Trouble

By Alain L. Sanders

First, four of the co-defendants jumped bail and disappeared. Then a key prosecution witness mysteriously vanished. Last week the two remaining witnesses to the crime refused to testify. Faced with the sudden flight of evidence, Rand Supreme Court Judge Michael Stegmann abruptly postponed until next month the start of South Africa's most explosive trial in recent years, to give the flustered prosecution time to repair its case.

The trial of Winnie Mandela was never destined to be a simple affair. It was surrounded by demonstrations and set in the context of delicate constitutional negotiations between the African National Congress and the government of President F.W. de Klerk. But last week the kidnapping-and-assault case against the wife of A.N.C. leader Nelson Mandela, for which she could face a death sentence, blossomed into a bizarre tale of fear and intrigue.

The tempestuous "Mother of the Nation" stands accused, along with several of her bodyguards, of kidnapping and savagely beating four young black men in her Soweto home on Dec. 29, 1988, because of their alleged sexual encounters with a white minister. Mrs. Mandela claims that the youths were taken to her home when she was away to protect them from the clergyman, who has since been cleared of wrongdoing by his church. She says she took no part in any assault. One of the victims, James "Stompie Moeketsi" Seipie, 14, was later found murdered in a field.

The packed Johannesburg courtroom erupted in surprise at the start of the trial when prosecutor Jan Swanepoel told Judge Stegmann that a key prosecution witness who was one of the victims, Gabriel Pelo Mekgwe, had been mysteriously "kidnapped" the night before the proceedings. Subsequently, two other victims who were expected to testify against Mandela, Barend Thabo Mono and Kenneth Kgase, refused to speak when they took the stand. Said a terrified Kgase: "I feel strongly about the obligation to give evidence, but it's my life."

Reports immediately surfaced that Mekgwe had been seen being escorted away by three A.N.C. operatives. The South African Press Association said it received a phone call from a man in neighboring Zimbabwe who claimed to be Mekgwe and refused to "testify against my comrades." Many South Africans believe the three victim-witnesses have been intimidated by the A.N.C., which has repeatedly blasted the prosecution as nothing more than "harassment and persecution" of comrades Winnie and Nelson.

Prosecutors now have to decide how diligently to pursue the matter. To let the case fold would place the judicial system on trial, but pushing it too hard could complicate the country's tentative moves toward national reconciliation.

With reporting by Peter Hawthorne/Cape Town