Book review: Chris Hani’s murder – the plot sickens

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6pm Johannesburg 

They came for Clive Derby-Lewis as the sun was setting, in a flurry of police cars that surrounded his home in the West Rand town of Krugersdorp. There were 20 policemen, led by Mike Holmes and Colonel Ivor Human. Human knocked on the front door. It opened, and Derby-Lewis stood in front of the two men. “Hello, my name is Colonel Ivor Human. You are under arrest for the murder of Chris Hani and …” Human could not finish the sentence. Derby-Lewis went pale, keeled over, and lost consciousness. […]

After a while Derby-Lewis, moustache twitching, came to. The police searched every room in the house and removed documents and two computers. Six hours later they took Derby-Lewis to the Benoni Police Station, where Janusz Walus was being held. It was 12.35am when they booked him into the cell. Within an hour they took him into an interrogation room where two computer technicians were working on his and Gaye’s computers.

Derby-Lewis was in a bind. Early on, forensic tests had established that Hani was murdered by the Z-88 pistol from Derby-Lewis, found on Walus. Blood that matched Hani’s and cordite residue had been found on Walus’s clothes and shoes. The detective, Holmes, had established the gun trail from the South African Air Force armoury and how it went to Cape Town for a silencer to be fitted and how it then came back to Derby-Lewis and then, ultimately, to Walus. 

[…] At 8.15am Derby-Lewis was brought back to the interrogation room. Then he was returned to the cells at 11.50am. This to-ing and fro-ing continued for 24 hours until he started telling stories. 

The lies Derby-Lewis and his associates told are many and varied. They lied and admitted their lies almost immediately to their interrogators. They lied and admitted to their lies in court later on at their trial in 

October 1993. 

Given a chance to walk free if they disclosed everything to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1997, Clive Derby-Lewis and Janusz Walus still did not convince the body — or pretty much anyone else in South Africa — they were telling the truth. Three decades after Hani’s murder, it is still difficult to unravel the truth because they have given so many different versions of what they did. 

The lies started that Sunday, April 18, as Derby-Lewis began to “sing like a canary” in Holmes’s words. The lies ranged from the mundane to the meaningful aspects of the case . […]

It is worth stopping here, dear reader, and rounding off the many curious tales spun by Walus and the Derby-Lewises over the past 30 years about the assassination of Chris Hani. These stories were told in the Supreme Court … in October 1993, when the three were charged with murder in a sensational trial marked by racial acrimony. More stories appeared in the Appeal Court of South Africa when Walus and Clive Derby-Lewis launched their appeal in November 1994. 

Then, over weeks of testimony, when Clive Derby-Lewis and Walus applied for amnesty at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1997. In October 1993, the Rand Supreme Court burst into ululation, singing and hugs from ANC supporters when an Afrikaner judge, Fritz Eloff, found Walus and Clive Derby-Lewis guilty of murdering Chris Hani. 

Conservative Party MP Clive Derby-Lewis. (Photo by WALTER DHLADHLA / AFP)

At the time South Africa had no black judges. Eloff sentenced the two men to death for murder, saying: “I want to send out a message loud and clear to those who contemplate the assassination of political leaders.” 

Gaye was acquitted of charges that she conspired with the pair by compiling the hit list. […]

Ironically, the two men’s death sentences were commuted to life when the ANC came to power in 1994 and repealed the death penalty, meaning the men would serve life sentences with the possibility of parole. 

To help heal the wounds of apartheid, in 1995, South Africa set up a new body, headed by antiapartheid clerics Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Alex Boraine instead of judges, to find the truth about apartheid atrocities. Those who came forward and fully disclosed their political acts under apartheid were offered amnesty from prosecution and those who had been convicted would receive full pardons. 

In April 1999, the Amnesty Committee of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) refused amnesty to Derby-Lewis and Walus. It said both men failed to make a full disclosure and show political motivation in their acts. One cannot blame the TRC for its decision. Full and meaningful disclosure from the two men is rare — and questions about their conduct are numerous. Here are some of the questions that still have to be answered for South Africans, and the Hani family and their friends and comrades, to perhaps consider whether disclosure has been truthful and meaningful enough.

wife Gaye Derby-Lewis. (Photo by WALTER DHLADHLA / AFP)

Was Walus alone on that day, just an amateur who got caught — or did he give himself up for capture to let bigger fish escape? His actions were decidedly not those of a man who wanted to evade arrest. At the amnesty applications for both Walus and Derby-Lewis at the TRC in 1997, Judge Bernard Ngoepe asked: “What worries me … was that [in] broad daylight [Walus] goes to Mr. Hani’s place, he shoots him, he walks away, gets into the car, drives away, the weapon is left in the car and he just  normally joins the traffic as if nothing has happened. What assurance did he have, did he have some kind of assurance that, don’t you worry, you can do it, even if I do it you can be covered somehow, don’t you worry?” 

Derby-Lewis and Walus claimed that no one else knew about the Hani murder plot. Yet the same set of people kept on cropping up again and again before and after the murder with surprising regularity. Arthur Kemp, the “journalist” who admitted to fleshing out the hit list with addresses, was reportedly a former member of the SA Police and the Security Branch.

He had insisted on handing the list to Gaye Derby-Lewis in person at the Rotunda bus station in Johannesburg, where she was departing for Cape Town on January 29 1993. Edwin Clarke drove Gaye from her house in Krugersdorp to Rotunda that day to get the bus. The three met. The list of names was handed over. Kemp complained about working at the Citizen. The three parted. 

Just a week later, on February 6, 1993, SAA flight 232 took off from Johannesburg en route to London. On board was Chris Hani and, unknown to Hani, Arthur Kemp. Was Kemp monitoring Hani? Clarke was again at the Derby-Lewis home on April 6, 1993, when Clive handed over the gun to Walus. The three men claimed Clarke was doing “computer work” and was not involved in the conspiracy. Walus had also met Edwin Clarke at the Derby-Lewises’ house several times, ostensibly over barbecues. In testimony to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Clarke said if Derby-Lewis had approached him to kill Hani, “The answer is that I would seriously have considered it and quite possibly I would have said yes.” 

Johannes Visser, who was well known in right-wing circles, later claimed that Clarke tried to provide about R360 000 in stolen money for Derby-Lewis’s defence. Clarke denied Visser’s claims. Gaye Derby-Lewis testified that after receiving the hit list from Arthur Kemp, she left it lying on the desk of Dr Ferdi Hartzenberg, the deputy leader of the Conservative Party in South Africa between 1993 and 2004, to use it in parliamentary questions. 

He did not use it. According to Gaye, he gave it back to her, no questions asked. Gaye brought the list back home in March 1993 and left it lying on her filing table in the study of her Krugersdorp home. Her husband helped himself to it and gave it to Walus, she claimed. 

Janusz Walus, Chris Hani’s killer during his amnesty hearing at Benoni Town Hall. (Photo by Gallo Images/Oryx Media Archive)

Then, later, she admitted she lied at the trial, saying she was protecting her husband. On that trip to Cape Town [in] 1993, Clive (who had flown earlier) had with him the gun he had acquired from Faan Venter. It was then fitted with a silencer in Cape Town. Yet these two purportedly never spoke about the items they had in their possession despite being, as the Hani family lawyer and Mandela friend from the 1950s George Bizos was to ask, “a loving couple”.

The players in this saga seem to run into each other at key moments. Faan Venter, the gun provider, and his wife, Maureen, just so happened to be entertaining the Derby-Lewises at their home on April 10, at the exact time that the gun was being used to kill Chris Hani. Could they have been waiting for news of the kill?  Why did the Venters’ son feel the need to call them that day to deliver the news about the murder of Hani? 

Venter said he delivered the gun to Lionel du Randt, another rightwing acquaintance, on March 10, a full month before the murder. The Du Randts said that was not true — it was in the second half of February.

They knew this because they delivered it to the Derby-Lewises on their way to their daughter’s birthday celebration on February 25. But Lionel du Randt’s original police statement said he had received the gun on March 31. Then Du Randt changed his story and said yes in fact he had received the gun on March 10. Then he contradicted his wife and said his daughter’s birthday was February 28. 

Du Randt, under questioning from lawyer Gcina Malindi at the TRC during the Derby-Lewis/Walus amnesty hearings, said it was of no concern to him that a gun was delivered to him at his house by Venter in a clandestine manner. “Is it because you knew why it was delivered at your house and for what purpose?” Malindi asked. “No, I didn’t know anything,” answered Du Randt. 

He also said he’d handed Derby-Lewis the gun wrapped in a sweater, but there never was a sweater. The gun was still in its manufacturer’s box, in a plastic bag. He claimed not to have seen the gun himself while it was in his possession, despite his son and wife saying they saw it; he told the TRC that his wife was a liar. 

After Clive Derby-Lewis was arrested for his part in Hani’s killing, the Du Randts visited Gaye Derby-Lewis to console her. According to Lionel du Randt, there were several such visits. Not once did he and his family inquire if the gun they had delivered was the one used to murder Hani. So the question can be legitimately asked: Were all these people who interacted on numerous occasions in the three months before Hani’s murder a terror cell? 

Police arrested Du Randt, Venter, and Kemp soon after the arrest of Clive Derby-Lewis. They released them days afterwards. Du Randt, Venter, Kemp and Clarke were not charged in the Hani case. Du Randt, Venter and Kemp testified as witnesses for the prosecution in the case against Clive [and] Gaye Derby-Lewis, and Walus in October 1993.

Was Walus an angry, ordinary man or had he had military and sniper training — a trained killer? Did he have connections to the intelligence community? On January 26, 1989, Walus read an advertisement in the Citizen recruiting men for a “dangerous assignment, approximately six months in duration” at a salary of $5 000 per month with an outfit called the South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR). The SAIMR was a mercenary group. 

The UK’s Guardian wrote about it in 2020, naming its commodore as Keith Maxwell. “Beneath the bizarre trappings lurked a powerful mercenary outfit that members claim was entwined with the apartheid state and offered soldiers for hire across the continent,” the newspaper said. 

Why would Walus apply for a position with a military outfit if he had no military training? If he did, where did he get it? Walus had long-standing contacts with South Africa’s military intelligence agents. From 1985, he was in touch with Johan Fourie, who Walus said had offered him money to be a source. Although Walus claimed not to have taken the money, he stayed in touch with Fourie over the years. In fact, although he claimed he lost touch with Fourie in 1990, phone records showed he called Fourie on March 13, 1993. Why — and why lie about it? 

The far-right former military intelligence chief General Tienie Groenewald was linked to the SAIMR. Groenewald had met Walus in QwaQwa at the family’s glass-cutting business and they met again several times after that. … What was a general doing with a down-at-heel glass manufacturer? 

Gaye Derby-Lewis’s first husband was an intelligence officer: Anton Graser. One of Gaye’s best friends was Craig Kotze, journalist-turned-apartheid-cop […] He was the police spokesman who rushed to say Hani’s killer was a lone wolf just hours after the killing — without any proof. 

We already know that Walus was a fit martial arts aficionado, a crack shot, and had often engaged in target practice … He was a plausible triggerman, but he was certainly not the mastermind. Derby-Lewis was a fanatic, but his fainting and blushing does not mark him as a mastermind, either. The big mystery of the case is that the arrest of Derby-Lewis and the court evidence was provided by Holmes and his team of detectives led by Colonel Ivor Human. 

But from Wednesday, April 14, the case was handled almost entirely by the Security Branch with Deetlefs as the point man. These murky characters, the journalist Evelyn Groenink points out, pointedly instructed Holmes and his team to stop investigating Walus’s links to Peter Jackson, the man who employed him … 

Groenink described Jackson as “a chemicals transporter with arms trade connections.” Security police captain JH de Waal told Holmes’s team “not to bother exploring [Jackson] or his arms trade and secret service contacts”. De Waal issued several such written instructions. 

Walus carried an “agenda book” or diary. It disappeared from the police docket. In the copy that remained, the pages relating to the week leading up to the murder of Hani were missing. Witnesses who claimed there was a second car, and a second man, at the scene were dismissed or intimidated. 

Most curious of all was Holmes’s defence of these lapses. He told Groenink: “We didn’t need to look at all the evidence because the security police put everything we needed in a box for us to work with.”

The Plot to Save South Africa by Justice Malala, Jonathan Ball Publishers, R320.