Excavations and the Memory of Landscapes

In March of 1997, six formers members of the security police applied for amnesty for the murder of, among others, Phila Portia Ndwandwe—who became “the most senior woman commander ever of Umkhonto we Sizwe” (Du Preez 203). She had been kidnapped in October 1988 from Swaziland with the help of two former comrades-turned-askaris (police collaborators); the security police had hoped to turn Ndwandwe herself into an askari, but in the words of one of her captors, “She was brave this one, hell she was brave She simply would not talk” (Krog, Country 128). She was killed and buried on Elandskop dairy farm near Pietermaritzburg in KwaZulu-Natal, where nine years later the amnesty applicants would lead investigators to her remains. The TRC Report quotes Commissioner Richard Lyster’s description of her death and exhumation:

She was held in a small concrete chamber on the edge of the small forest in which she was buried. According to information from those that killed her, she was held naked and interrogated in this chamber, for some time before her death. When we exhumed her, she was on her back in a foetal position, because the grave had not been dug long enough, and had a single bullet wound to the top of her head, indicating that she had been kneeling or squatting when she was killed. Her pelvis was clothed in a plastic packet, fashioned into a pair of panties indicating an attempt to protect her modesty. (Truth and Reconciliation Commission II: 543)