Emotional testimony by Calata’s widow at Cradock Four inquest

Coming face-to-face with the former policeman who admitted to killing her husband did not bring Nomonde Calata any closure.

In fact, 40 years after his murder, she is still struggling to come to terms with the violent and untimely death Fort Calata and his three compatriots, known as the Cradock Four, suffered at the hands of state security services in June 1985.

And despite the late Lieutenant Eric Taylor’s efforts to apologise to the families of the slain political activists in 1997, in the lead-up to his amnesty hearing before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1998, Nomonde refused to accept his apology.

“I never had the opportunity to say goodbye to my husband.

“Even when his coffin was there in front of me I could not see him because of the condition of his body.

“I could not, and I will not, forgive that man.

“He robbed me and my family of a husband and a father,” she said, before breaking down and crying in the witness box at the Gqeberha high court on Monday.

Nomonde was testifying in the inquest into the deaths of Matthew Goniwe, Sparrow Mkhonto, Sicelo Mhlauli and Calata.

According to the versions put forward during previous inquiries, as well as submissions to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the Cradock Four had attended a meeting in June 1985 with the United Democratic Front (UDF) in then Port Elizabeth.

They left the meeting, but never made it home to Cradock.

It is believed they were detained at a roadblock, held hostage and tortured.

Their charred remains were found near Bluewater Bay in the days that followed.

Giving evidence on Monday, Nomonde recounted how she and Calata had met when they were young and grew up together before becoming romantically involved.

She described him as a kind person who was well-known and loved in the Cradock community.

She remembered when he and Goniwe met for the first time, after he became the principal at the school where Calata taught, and recalled her husband’s excitement because they shared similar opinions and values.

The two men soon became inseparable and started organising and unifying the youth in Lingelihle township.

“From that time, we had no rest from the state security services,” Nomonde said.

She recounted constant harassment at the small shop she ran from their home, the police trying to bar her from visiting Calata when he was detained in Johannesburg and the threats to her safety.

She recalled that a month before their disappearance, Calata had been in Johannesburg when the police came to their house looking for him.

The head of the police security branch in Cradock at the time, Eric Winter, had sat on their bed and asked her where her husband was.

“He told me: ‘You can hide him from us, but when we get hold of him he will s**t’.”

She last saw Calata alive on the morning of June 27 1985, when they left for their meeting in Gqeberha.

When he had not returned home by 9pm, she became worried.

She could not sleep and her concerns grew when there was still no sign of him the next day.

The next day, she had seen a picture of Goniwe’s burnt car on the front page of the daily newspaper.

She had become scared, but still thought her husband might have managed to escape police custody, maybe even found a way to flee the country.

Even when they received news that Mkhonto and Mhlauli’s bodies had been found, she had still held onto the hope that Calata and Goniwe were in hiding.

However, not long thereafter members of their church had come to her to break the news that their burnt remains had also been found.

“My life changed,” she said.

“I was 26 years old, I had two young children and was seven months’ pregnant with our third child, and I was unemployed.

“My hope was taken away from me.”

She recalled an encounter in October the same year when security branch members had come to her home again.

Her baby daughter, Tumani, had been sick and she had kept a heater on in the house.

“When the police members came in they asked why the house was so warm and I told them my baby was not well.

“They said: ‘It is not that your baby is unwell. That baby needs a father.’ And they laughed at me,” she told the court.

Later, she shed light on the meeting with Taylor and how she had refused to believe him when he told her that Calata had “died peacefully”.

He had explained that they had hit him with a heavy object on the back of the head and he had already been dead before he was repeatedly stabbed and set on fire.

When she asked him why they had killed him rather than just detain him, and why he had to be mutilated and murdered so violently, Taylor had simply told her: “We were following orders.”

The Cradock Four families’ advocate, Howard Varney, told the court that a postmortem report detailed various injuries but made no mention of Calata ever suffering blunt-force trauma to the back of his head.

“I cannot tell my husband to rest in peace knowing that we are still waiting for justice after his death,” Nomonde said.

The inquest continues.

The Herald