JONNY STEINBERG: The other Ace Magashule story
In an archive the other day I stumbled across an interview an oral historian conducted three decades ago with Ace Magashule, who is now the ANC secretary-general. He had recently fled into exile, the police at his heels. In the interview he describes a seven-month spell in detention in 1985. Reading his testimony requires a strong stomach.
It is not so much the physical assaults — the beatings, the waterboarding. More harrowing are the mental aspects of his experience. A teenage activist had recently died in the cell where he slept and the scribblings the dead boy had made on the cell wall remained. Those scribblings drove Magashule nearly insane...
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