They thought it was a fool's errand. When South Africa's Missing Persons Task Team headed to Post Chalmers, an old farm in the Eastern Cape, back in July, none of its investigators believed they would find a thing.
Security agents working for the apartheid-era government had used the farm at least twice. They brought kidnapped black anti-apartheid activists there - including, in 1982, Siphiwo Mthimkulu, 22, on crutches because he had been tortured in jail for much of the previous year - interrogated them, shot them, doused them in diesel fuel and dumped them in bonfires. Or so they told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
But 20 years had passed since the last known crime was committed there, and since then the vast farm had been used as an abattoir. What were the odds of finding any identifiable trace of the five dead men? Slim to none.
But the killings had been so savage that the team members felt they owed it to the families of the slain to find some scrap of proof of how they died, and some fragment of their remains. One of apartheid's most malignant effects was the information it denied black South Africans: People disappeared, and it could be years before their anxious mothers or husbands knew if they had been murdered, imprisoned or exiled. Some still don't know.
"At the very least we had to try," said Madeleine Fullard, who heads the team.
And so they drove 12 hours into the heart of the dry and desolate Eastern Cape, toting a miniature tractor. They shovelled off layers of gravel that covered the farm yard, and began to dig, searching for signs of a fire. On the first day, nothing. The second day, nothing. It was tedious work in an icy wind.
At the end of the third day, just as the team was beginning a morose conversation about having failed, they caught sight of a burn. When fires are made on open earth, the soil discolours and hardens like clay, an effect that can be seen years later.
Claudia Bisso, the forensic archeologist on the team, began to excavate the fire site. Soon, however, it appeared that the burn was simply the remains of a long-ago campfire.
"We were giving up - we were just about leaving," Ms. Fullard recalled. But when they took a last scrape at the site of the fire, they caught sight of a thick black seam of dense charcoal. Ms. Bisso resumed digging.
"We nearly missed it: another two centimetres and we would have missed it," Ms. Fullard recalled with a shudder.
Within minutes, Ms. Bisso had found shards of burnt bone. But was it human? Then they found a phalange, the fourth small bone of the fourth finger. Soon a vertebrae. Then a bullet. Ms. Bisso unearthed a burn area three metres square. Stunned, the team members silently carried buckets of blackened soil, charcoal, melted metal, bone shards and burnt tire fragments away from the pit.
Ms. Bisso is not superstitious. She has spent her entire professional life with bones and bodies and in graveyards; she does not spook and she doesn't go in for the unearthly.
"But I will say it: Those men wanted to be found. They were not going to let us leave without finding them."
JUSTICE UNDONE
When South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) concluded its work in 1998, it had a list of 477 people who were still missing. Their families had come before the commission and reported their disappearance, but their fates, and the whereabouts of their remains, were still unknown.
There are hundreds, perhaps thousands more cases whose families had chosen not to go to the TRC, but who have never received the bodies of their lost children. President Thabo Mbeki, for example, had a teenage son who disappeared, amid rumours he followed his father into exile.
The TRC recognized the families' desire to have, at least, the bodies back, and recommended that the new democratic government set up a team to try to solve the apartheid-era mysteries and return the bodies of those who disappeared to their families.
Ms. Fullard, 42, is a petite blonde historian who grew up in a white liberal household in Cape Town. She felt alienated and lonely until, in her teens, she discovered the coalitions of civic organizations that were fighting apartheid. She became a dedicated campaigner - she vividly remembers marching in the streets to protest the mysterious disappearance of Mr. Mthimkulu. When the TRC was founded, she got a job as a researcher, taking on the task of piecing together some of the most grim and bloody events that were committed in the name of protecting white privilege - her privilege.
She was with the TRC from its first days until the last report was written, and then she took the list of 477 to the new National Prosecuting Authority and set up shop as an investigator in a cramped Pretoria office soon overflowing with paper. Relying at first on funding from human-rights organizations, she managed to assemble a small team. She hired Tshiamo Moela, now 29, who was doing research for Khumulani, a charity that campaigns for retribution for apartheid victims. (He speaks all 11 of South Africa's official languages and is a crack logistician.) And she set out to recruit Nozizwe Mohale to join them, too.
Ms. Mohale is also a veteran of the fight against apartheid. She followed her father, a guerrilla, into exile in Swaziland; as a teenager she joined the armed wing of the African National Congress - Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the Spear of the Nation - and rose through the ranks of the guerrilla movement until she was privy to much of its intelligence against the apartheid state.
After the transition to democracy, Ms. Mohale headed an office in the ANC tasked with helping fighters integrate into civilian life. Ms. Fullard went repeatedly to see Ms. Mohale seeking information on this mission or that operative, until she persuaded her to join the team.
Ms. Mohale understands why Ms. Fullard needs her, for her connections and her credibility. Otherwise, she said, "The families say, 'It is the whites who killed our children and now the whites who are investigating.' " But Ms. Mohale has, in her 18 months in the job, come to an intimate understanding that these cases are not always as straightforward as black victim, white perpetrator. These days, she finds herself asking probing questions of the very people she once trusted with her life. Her probing is not always welcome.
DIRTY WORK
The day after the team found the first remains at the Post Chalmers farm, their supervisor arrived at the site - Anton Ackermann is one of South Africa's leading prosecutors, and a veteran of trials of former state agents. He took one look around and said to the team, "I know how these guys worked. Check the septic tank."
Ms. Fullard was astonished; she had not even realized they were working near a septic system. But they quickly traced the farm sewage system and dug out the top of the tank. When they pried off the lid, they were hit with the stink of sewage - and the powerful reek of 25-year-old diesel.
Over the next several weeks, they scooped out 20,000 litres of raw sewage in buckets, sieved through it for solid matter and dried the material. Again, they found burnt bone fragments, plus pieces of charred tire, a bunch of keys and a watch strap.
They invited the victims' families to come and see the work, and soon the elderly mothers and now-grown children of the five dead men had joined in, gently fingering through the dried sewage to find the teeth and bones of their sons and fathers.
In the end, the team amassed more than 250 kilograms of burnt material, and Ms. Bisso began the long, painstaking process of separating it into charcoal, metal, soil and human remains. She could tell from the shape of the vertebrae that most of the remains are those of young people; she could not tell, yet, how many. "There are definitely three, and very probably more."
The team was shaken by their discovery at the farm, by the evidence of how horribly the dead were treated. Burning them would have been a hectic job, said Ms. Fullard: "Why not take them out into the hills and bury them, or let the animals eat them? To roast a body you've got to turn it - the smell, the popping, the crackling, and my God, the smoke." She shuddered.
The primary goal of this team is humanitarian, to return the missing to their families. But the bones and teeth they found at Post Chalmers are more than lost human remains. They are definitive evidence of lies. The security agents who committed the murders at the farm told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in their amnesty applications that they burnt the bodies and scooped the ashes into sacks, then dumped them in a nearby river.
As soon as Ms. Bisso read the TRC transcripts, she was suspicious of that claim: "I read the testimony and I said, 'No, you would not have ashes.' It takes a long time to burn a body and overnight you don't get just ashes, you have chunks of bone. And it would be too hot to put it in plastic bags the next morning."
Now, in the boxes of burnt matter, she has proof: The bodies were burnt with tires, not just wood. They were broken up with a metal implement. And the ashes were never taken to a river, but dumped in a septic tank.
"I have waves of real fury around the septic tank, real clenched-teeth moments of anger," Ms. Fullard said, with the quick rage that is fed by her work, and often leaves her lonely these days. "I do have fantasies of taking [the agents]and dunking them in the septic tank: 'Tell the truth!' But at the end of the day all we can do is curse their fates, show they were liars and make sure the families get the remains."
FRAGILE PACT
In fact, she can do more than that. The condition for amnesty from the TRC was total, truthful disclosure. Three of the security agents who were given amnesty in the first set of Post Chalmers killings have since died, and the fourth is ill. The team has sent an emissary to ask if he would like to make a true disclosure of what happened before he dies. Behind that invitation lies the threat of revoking his amnesty, and possible prosecution.
Four other agents were involved in the second killings. They were denied amnesty because their accounts differed too much to be judged truthful, but they were never prosecuted. Now, the South African government may have evidence to have them tried for the crime, 20 years later.
That idea may appeal to the families of the murdered activists, and there is a vocal community of apartheid-victim groups in South Africa keen to see more trials for crimes under white rule. But there are just as many voices raised in warning against reopening these cases.
"It is a serious thing - we have two rights, as it were, competing," said Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who oversaw the TRC, in an interview in his office in Cape Town last week. "The families want to know what happened, why and so forth, and they have a perfect right to that knowledge. And then there would be those on the other side who would say, 'This thing is fragile, be careful.'"
Thirteen years after the end of apartheid, South Africa is a nation transformed, and yet the gulf between black and white remains enormous. The bulk of land, wealth and resources remain in white hands; unemployment is still more than 50 per cent and many black citizens, living without electricity, piped water or solid roofs, feel the promise of black rule has been hollow.
"What has changed? For the average, ordinary citizen, very little," said Yasmin Sooka, a former TRC commissioner who now advocates for victims. "Reparations have been miniscule and from a very small group of people. In terms of real meaningful redistribution, what's actually happened? Almost nothing."
At the same time, whites feel shut out of government, and are dismissed as racists if they complain about the outrageous rates of violent crime.
When Adriaan Vlok, the former minister of state security, was convicted in August of trying to assassinate a former guerrilla, now a cabinet minister, there was a national uproar. Many people, particularly Afrikaners, said that revisiting these cases would undermine whatever steps had been taken toward reconciliation. They called it a "witch hunt" and accused the ANC government of undermining the interim constitution that guided the transition to democracy.
The risk inherent in these prosecutions, say critics such as Archbishop Tutu, is not of violence or civil unrest, but rather a more amorphous but disquieting threat that the brittle pact that has allowed South Africa to move forward - the deal, in essence, that whites would cede power, blacks would forgive and there would be no excessive probing into the past - may crumble, with unpredictable results.
This pact, which formed the basis for the TRC, remains profoundly controversial. Four apartheid victims' groups are now suing the government to deny it the right to grant perpetrators any further indemnities. In the decade since the TRC, the concept of international justice has taken strong root globally: It is no longer the fashion to turn the page on crimes against humanity, but rather to prosecute, even long after the fact.
But the Archbishop and others warn that in South Africa, at least, this would be a mistake. "The raison d'être of the TRC was, 'Let's look at enough of the past so that we can form a thumbnail sketch of it," he said, "but that we mustn't dilly-dally too long, because that could jeopardize [peace].'"
DETECTIVE JOB
Ms. Fullard, Ms. Mohale and the rest of the team are looking not to jeopardize peace, but to restore it. They know that families are haunted by not knowing, and it is the desire to be able to give answers that fuels them through lengthy and complex investigations.
The process relies on a mix of skill and luck. It starts when Ms. Mohale interviews former comrades and commanders of the missing. "I ask them, 'What do you know about where this person went, who were they with? This is their [code]name - do you know the real name?'" Now 44, warm and quick to laugh, Ms. Mohale has a natural ease with the families, and gets considerable pleasure from working her networks.
Armed with these first, vague recollections, the missing-persons team goes to the archives of the state-security agencies. The surviving pockets of the perversely well-ordered bureaucracy of apartheid provide a rich trove of information. The government, for example, kept a photo album featuring every suspected guerrilla who went into exile - 9,000 pictures by the time white rule ended. When security officers killed or imprisoned an activist, they crossed the picture out, so the team turns to those albums first.
They then look for police dockets on arrests or attacks with dates that correlate to the intelligence Ms. Mohale has gathered. If they find a report of "terrorists killed," they look for inquest records and post-mortems, which suggest to them where to hunt for possible graves. This is often the most complex step in the process, because the local authorities buried the guerrillas they killed as "paupers" in unmarked graves, in open patches of the cemetery for which no records were kept.
Ms. Fullard looks for aerial photographs from the suspected year of burial to see if she can tell what part of a cemetery was being used, while Mr. Moela tracks down retired municipal workers or hearse drivers, to see if anyone remembers transporting the unclaimed bodies.
Once they have located the likely site, the team brings its small tractor and "trenches" the area until they find graves. Then the work is handed over to Ms. Fullard's final recruit, Claudia Bisso, a weathered 45-year-old Argentine with bleached, cropped hair and a permanent squint.
Ms. Bisso is part of the collective - legendary in humanitarian circles - of forensic experts formed after Argentina's truth commission on the dictatorship that ended in 1983. They set out first to find Argentina's 10,000 disappeared, but soon realized there was a desperate need for their skills in other countries, and began to send team members to other developing countries to offer training.
That's what first brought Ms. Bisso to Africa. She has looked for bodies after the civil wars in Sierra Leone, Angola and Zimbabwe, and at evidence of massacres in Darfur in Sudan. Now, she stays because she has fallen in love with an Afrikaner, an ex-soldier and mine-removal specialist, whom she met at a mass grave in the former Yugoslavia. Ms. Fullard wanted Ms. Bisso to handle the exhumations because South Africa has no homegrown tradition of human-rights forensics - people with those skills here work mostly with police.
They trench the paupers' section of cemeteries, opening shallow lines until they catch a hint of crumbled coffin. Then they use scoops and shovels that look like children's beach toys to dig away the dirt until they expose a skull. Looking at brow bone, jaw and teeth, Ms. Bisso and her students can quickly assess the gender and age at death of the skeleton. If it could be someone whose remains they seek, they look also for injures, such as bullet holes in the back of the head, that match the post-mortem report.
If they can confirm a likely identity, they rebury the remains and leave them until they can contact the families and arrange to bring them to the cemetery for the exhumation. They have done 38 of these digs so far, recovering the remains of 44 people, and returned 19 to their families.
"Families always ask, 'Did he suffer a lot?' " Ms. Bisso mused, while she sifted through shards of bone and charred tire. "And the secret is to always tell the truth. Are you going to lie and say, 'He had a very peaceful death'? They have the right to know."
BIG BROTHER'S BONES
Ramodiehe Waisi's femurs were too big for the bags. The knobby ends of the bones, yellowed and crusted with dirt, stuck out of the paper sacks prepared for them, the sort of bag slid over a baguette at the corner bakery. Morungwa Mosothwane could not fold the bags neatly closed, and instead stood them up in a cardboard box, frowning a bit at this untidy solution.
"He was a very big guy," said Neo Waisi, Ramodiehe's younger brother, as he watched the archeology student gently slide bones into bags, one for the radius, one for the calcaneus, one for the vertebrae. When he saw how big the bones were, he was sure he had found the answer he had been seeking for 23 years: These, he was sure, were his big brother's bones.
Ramodiehe left the family home in Bloemfontein in 1980 and went into exile in Botswana, joining the MK. He was sent back into South Africa on a mission in September 1986, and he and his comrade-in-arms got as far as Mafikeng, a town near the Botswana border, in the parched, scrubby north of South Africa. He was never seen alive again; his family, all this time, had only rumours of his death.
The Missing Persons team found Mr. Waisi almost by accident: They were searching for the remains of eight MK fighters, reported missing to the TRC, whom they suspected had been buried here, close to the border.
Poring over police dockets one day, they found a case in which police had spotted MK men and hunted them down. This case was not reported to the Truth Commission, and so the team added it to their list. In Mmabatho cemetery, they opened 29 graves looking for their MK veterans, and found a skeleton that matched the post-mortem injury descriptions of Mr. Waisi.
Ms. Mohale made the phone call: We think we found him. And so, a few weeks ago, Mr. Waisi's elderly mother Jeanette got on a plane for the first time in her life, and flew here from Bloemfontein in the centre of the country.
She, her three surviving children and the family of David Takalani Nambaye, who died with Ramodiehe that day, came to the graveyard in the grey light just after dawn, as pools of rain rippled in the wind. Ms. Mohale showed them the graves, and a minister led them in a brief prayer, asking for strength for what they would see in the day ahead.
Within a few hours, a crowd assembled, and the family took seats in the front row of chairs laid out under a vast white tent. When the team exhumes a fighter, the liberation movements come to pay belated respects: Choirs sang freedom songs, and former MK commanders recalled the days of struggle. When there are survivors of the incidents in which fighters died, Ms. Fullard invites them to come and speak, although "it can be incredibly painful for them to tell the story, and for the family to hear it."
She tries to make sure someone tells the family how their child died. Often it is ugly information: In one case it was the dead man's aunt who tipped police off when he snuck back in from exile. More often than the team ever expected, they learn that people died after betrayal by an informer of one kind or another in their own communities. Then there is the cold, vicious language of the police reports and the inquests, so contemptuous of black lives. And often, grisly police photographs. Ms. Fullard gives it all to the families.
"They were denied information in the past," she said. "It's their right to know as much as possible. It's not our task to censor."
The families invariably want to take remains home for reburial that day. The Waisis were no exception. "We will take him home and bury him properly," said Neo Waisi. (In fact they will have to wait for DNA analysis to confirm whether they really are his brother's bones.) "My mother was always counting her kids and saying, 'But one is missing.' She was distraught. Those wounds were not healing. It is better now to know."
But there was slim comfort in what they had learned - that an informer recognized Ramodiehe Waisi getting into a minibus taxi, that he was relentlessly hunted down by police, first by road and then in a helicopter, and that when they closed in, rather than be captured, Mr. Waisi killed himself with the hand grenade he carried.
Ms. Mosothwane, one of Ms. Bisso's student archeologists, explained all this to Mrs. Waisi, leaning with her over the edge of one of the graves. She pointed to the missing bones of the right hand of one skeleton, which matched the description of grenade injuries in the police post-mortem. The family stood grim-faced, starting down at the exposed bones. Finally Mrs. Waisi led the way back to her seat, looking even smaller and older than she had moments before.
Provincial premier Edna Molewa, her head elegantly wrapped in bright orange cloth, stepped forward to address the families. "Thank you so much indeed for giving us your children," she said gently to the two mothers, who sat holding their cardigans tightly closed. "You may not have known they were joining the fight to liberate South Africa - we are who we are today in a South Africa that is liberated because of you."
Then she turned to Ms. Mosothwane and the others, labouring in the graves. "We do indeed have confidence that you will restore dignity to those who are missing - help us find all of our missing."
AWKWARD QUESTIONS
But just who are the missing? Many of the cases reported to the TRC are people such as Mr. Waisi, members of the liberation movements, particularly the ANC, who disappeared at the hands of the apartheid security forces.
But of the 25,000 people killed between 1960, the start of the armed struggle, and the transition to democracy in 1994, an estimated 15,000 died in civil unrest - in "intracivilian" violence, killed by their own communities as collaborators, or in fighting between ANC supporters and Inkatha, the Zulu party then used as a "third force" by the white government. Many Inkatha members are still missing.
The missing-persons team has also been asked to help with the case of white-government soldiers killed by guerrillas in South Africa's proxy war in Angola.
Ms. Mohale would dearly love to take on the few cases of white soldiers whose remains the state did not recover - "to show we will do anyone's case" - but those in the old forces remain mistrustful of the new government and won't ask for their help, she said.
Perhaps most delicate of all, there were the extra-judicial killings committed by the liberation movements themselves. The ANC provided the TRC with a list of nearly a hundred people who were killed in its military camps in exile as suspected spies or for other transgressions. There may be many more.
For Ms. Mohale, these cases strike particularly close to home. "I have a brother who died in an ANC camp in Angola," she said. "And every time I see my ailing mother, she says to me, 'When are you going to bring my baby back home?'" Her younger brother had followed her into exile and into the movement. All she knows of his death is that it was the result of some kind of disciplinary measure that went too far. There are others in the ANC who know more. "But they say, 'We won't tell you the name [of his killer]. We don't want you to overreact.' But I pray every day I will meet up [with that person]."
Ms. Mohale does not blame the ANC: "I took it that an individual did this, not the ANC did this." But since she started asking questions, and started to work with the Missing Persons team, she has been given a frosty reception at many ANC gatherings. "I go to those offices that I set up, and they say, 'Oh it's you, you're here.' " She has little time for people who tell her - with increasing vehemence - that those who fought for liberation must not be investigated in the same way as the apartheid government: "I say, 'Those parents are waiting patiently. If their children died at the hands of the ANC, you have to tell.'"
WITCH HUNT?
Former police minister Adriaan Vlok, his police chief Johanne van der Merwe, and three other senior police officers were charged this year for apartheid-era crimes including an attempt to assassinate Rev. Frank Chikane, now a cabinet minister.
Mr. Vlok and his co-accused plea-bargained and were given a suspended sentence, but the case was significant because the previous white government had, in its past submissions to the TRC, claimed that it had no policy to commit illegal acts during apartheid. Any that occurred - such as the incineration at Post Chalmers - were the work of a few rogue officers, they said. The Vlok conviction proved that claim false.
But Mr. Vlok and his co-accused gave no sign of guilt or remorse, to the immense frustration of many South Africans, who feel the security services and the military have never come clean about the nature and extent of their activities. Instead, Mr. Vlok said he felt "deeply wronged and even embittered" by the leaders whose orders he was following when he committed the acts in question, and by the leaders today who were sacrificing national reconciliation in the name of political point-scoring by prosecuting him.
The ensuing public debate, impassioned and often bitter, included complaints about the lenient sentence and demands that other senior white-rule figures such as former president and Nobel Peace laureate F. W. de Klerk also be charged.
"The Vlok case makes a mockery of justice," said Ms. Sooka, who now heads the Foundation for Human Rights in Pretoria. No greater insight into the actions of the state was obtained, she said; victims gained nothing.
The widows of four murdered activists, backed by transitional justice groups, are currently suing the prosecuting authority itself, challenging a new law that allows it to grant indemnities to perpetrators it believes have shown sufficient remorse (or, presumably, co-operated with the state in other investigations).
Mr. Chikane himself has tried to ease the fears of an "Afrikaner witch hunt," saying the NPA is not targeting whites but simply acted against Mr. Vlok because he failed to tell the truth when he had the chance to apply for amnesty at the TRC. "I do not personally have any interest in putting anyone behind bars for apartheid crimes, nor do I know of anyone in the leadership of the ruling party who would want this," he wrote in an open letter. "All I want to know is the truth, like many South Africans."
That's what the victims' families told Madeleine Fullard, too, when they came to the Post Chalmers farm. But there they came face-to-face with the brutality of how the men were killed and the humiliating way their remains were treated. Days later, Ms. Fullard was still wondering if the knowledge "would just tip them over the edge."
This is Archbishop Desmond Tutu's fear. And yet, he said, it is probably best to know. "My inclination would be, try to find the truth, because ultimately the truth does free people. And the families of the victims are entitled to that truth.
"But you will always have a niggling question - was it okay to do that?"
WHAT REMAINS
When the day of digging and memorial tributes in Mafikeng drew to a close, the families were driven away, and gradually the crowds of gawkers moved on as well.
Eventually it was just Mr. Moela, Ms. Bisso and Ms. Mosothwane left, packing the paper bags of bones one by one into boxes. They loaded their boxes into the back to their truck, bound for a lab in Pretoria to confirm injuries and match DNA.
Rinsing the dust from her hands, Ms. Bisso surveyed the cemetery. The police who buried these men 23 years ago were no doubt sure they would remain there. So were the ones who burnt the bodies she is piecing together from Post Chalmers. But she knows better.
"A person cannot disappear," she said. "People can die, but not disappear. You're not a bubble that can pop. That's denying humanity."
Stephanie Nolen is The Globe and Mail's Africa correspondent.