Killer of youth activist faces reckoning for his crimes

On September 23 2019 Johan Marais sat himself down in a “grave” he had dug for himself in the beach sand at Winklespruit on the KwaZulu-Natal south coast, and downed a handful of painkillers, then he washed it down with a litre of antifreeze. 

The ghosts of the past had caught up with the counterinsurgency operative whose experiences in the bush war in the former South West Africa and Angola had so traumatised him that he was kicked out of Koevoet by his commanding officer as a danger to his fellow policemen. 

But, even though he was transferred closer to home, to the SA Police (SAP) Reaction Unit in Dunnottar on the East Rand, the phantoms that chased Marais were not about to let him go and in the middle of the escalating, bloody insurgency against the apartheid state in the late 1980s, as the bodies piled up, so the ghosts multiplied. 

It was an intensely brutalising environment. Communities burnt suspected impimpis (police informants) to death with the horrific necklace method, a burning tyre around the shoulders, as children danced and cheered; plain-clothes police death squads prowled at night looking for activists to kidnap, torture, and if unable to turn them askari, murder them. 

Marais is able to speak to Business Day because his suicide attempt failed: the antifreeze backed the pills up, and though he staggered off and lay down on a railway line in a second attempt, he was found by a fisherman and he wound up in a psychiatric ward in the Prince Mshiyeni Hospital where two weeks later he confessed his sins to a Rapport journalist and to the police.

It was the reopening of the inquest in 2017 into the death of Ahmed Timol, the communist activist tortured and murdered by the Security Branch in 1971, that had broken the dam in his mind and inundated his imagination with his own ghosts. 

One in particular haunted Marais: a slender youth of 23 usually pictured these days in an old family photograph as lost in thought with his right index finger on his cheek, wearing an open-necked grey checked shirt, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, the first blush of a moustache on his lip, and a poster of Michael Jackson behind him on his wall. 

Caiphus Nyoka was a leader in Daveyton on the East Rand of the ANC-aligned Congress of South African Students (Cosas), which was at the centre of the uprising sweeping the country for more than two years at that point. The authorities tried to snuff out the flames with a nationwide state of emergency and the deployment of troops in the townships. 

“The day before I shot him,” Marais, 66, told Business Day, “police captured two guys with limpet mines and hand grenades. Under interrogation, they confessed they were planning to blow up the Daveyton Police Station and the mayor’s house. They were taking the explosives to Nyoka’s house.” 

So that evening, August 23 1987, the East Rand Security Branch under Maj Leon Louis van den Berg allegedly swiftly arranged a pre-emptive assassination of Nyoka by the Dunnottar Reaction Unit No 6.

“In the early hours of August 24 1987, about 2.30am,” Lumka Mahanjana of the National Prosecuting Authority recalled in the Pretoria high court last November, “Marais, together with Sgt Pieter Stander, Sgt Abram Hercules Engelbrecht and other members of the reaction unit who are also charged separately, arrived at Nyoka’s homestead” at 999 Lemba Street, Daveyton, “and stormed his room. They found him with three of his friends sleeping. After identifying him, they removed the friends from the room and thereafter proceeded to shoot him nine times. He died on the scene.”  

Police claimed at a 1988/89 inquest that Nyoka had had a concealed knife, but Marais now admits that was a lie. 

The murdered youth’s sister, Alegria Nyoka, told Business Day the corpse she had seen had 12 bullet wounds. “We can’t say we [as a family] don’t appreciate Marais coming forward, but not everything is answered.” In particular, it has never been clarified whether a “Hands of Death” death squad executed her brother. 

Marais was born out of wedlock and was adopted by his maternal aunt whose husband was “a strict, religious man, who could be violent and aggressive”, clinical psychologist Kirsten Clark told the high court in mitigation of sentence last week. Ill fortune followed the family: one adopted brother hung himself with a sheet, while the other gassed himself to death in his bakkie; in later years, Marais’s first child, a girl, was stillborn. 

He grew up on various smallholdings and farms, as he told Business Day: “I grew up on the farm with the klonkies (black children),”, “the usual story,” a happy childhood despite the domestic violence. 

He joined the SAP aged only sixteen in 1976, during the height of the student insurrection, but took a discharge in 1981, then worked in a pulp mill briefly before joining the Rhodesian Light Infantry for a year, then returning to the SAP, with the Riot Unit in Benoni. 

That experience lead him into Koevoet where he served four three-month tours of duty on the border where he engaged in active firefights with insurgents. In Koevoet, he at one point took shrapnel in his knee, and on another hit his head hard when the Casspir armoured car he was travelling in struck a landmine. He often had to clear up the bodies of people killed in the war, once having to carry the head of a defence force member killed by a mine. 

Transferred to the Reaction Unit, he was exposed to about 30 necklace killings in Katlehong that he described to the psychologist as “the worst” as the victims were sometimes still alive and begging to be killed. He also had to deal with bodies hacked into piles of gore in internecine hostel and train killings, or torn apart after having been tied to train tracks, or dive to recover corpses from the Vaal. 

“He stated that he was seeing and touching dead people almost daily and he did not receive treatment or debriefing for these incidents,” Clark said. One colleague shot himself in the head at a get-together, another hung himself and a third killed himself and his son by parking his bakkie on a railway line. Marais drank excessively as a result. 

Yet in 2003, when Marais said a doctor had diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and prescribed three months of incapacity leave, his police commander talked him out of it, arguing he would probably be retrenched as “unfit for duty” and lose all his benefits. 

Public prosecutor Esther Kabini argued that Marais is malingering and that his display of remorse in telling Clark, “I know I was wrong; I wish I could undo it” is false. She is asking for a life sentence, which at his age is 15 years, while defence counsel Sanet Simpson is asking for corrective supervision, stressing that Marais, who suffers from probable untreated PTSD, came forward and pleaded guilty to murder.

These arguments will be heard on July 7, after which judge Mokhine Mosopa will pass sentence.

Van den Berg and Marais’s other former co-accused are standing trial separately for murder.