He arrived in shackles holding a miniature soccer ball and dancing slightly. He would not raise his right hand to take the oath, saying he preferred to put it over his heart. Once that was settled, he promptly refused to testify at all until he had had a chance to talk with his family.
But when Jerry Richardson, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s chief bodyguard in the late 1980’s and one of her closest confidants, finally began talking today, his story was chilling.
”My hands are full of blood today because I would be instructed to kill and I would do like I was told,” he told South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Mr. Richardson, 48, who is serving a life sentence for the killing of 14-year-old Stompie Seipei, described beating, torturing and killing people whenever ”mommy” (his name for Mrs. Mandela) asked him to do so. He was officially the coach of a soccer team she sponsored, the Mandela United Football Club. But the team rarely played, he said.
”She would say we would have to be attending funerals or torturing and disciplining people,” he explained.
Indeed, in the last few days testimony from several witnesses seemed to indicate that her household was heavily infiltrated by the police.
Mr. Richardson said he became an informer in 1987. In the fall of 1988, he said, he arranged for two anti-apartheid guerrillas to be ambushed in his own home.
But Mr. Richardson said that he only beat and killed people under specific instructions from Mrs. Mandela. He said he had participated in four killings she ordered, saying that when he returned from one such killing, she embraced him and said ”My boy, my boy.”
The Truth Commission, which is charged with investigating apartheid-era atrocities, has been holding hearings on the role of Mrs. Mandela and her football club in 18 cases of murder or assault in the 1980’s. The commission does not have the power to prosecute, but it can submit its findings to the police.
Mrs. Mandela was convicted in 1991 of kidnapping and assaulting Stompie Seipei and was fined $3,200.
Stompie was kidnapped along with three other youngsters from a church mission as part of an elaborate plot to ruin a young white minister by getting the young men to say he had sexually abused them. All the boys were beaten until they agreed to make these accusations, but Stompie was beaten most severely because he was also suspected of being a police informer.
Later, Mr. Richardson said, he and Mrs. Mandela decided the boy was so badly beaten it was best to ”dump” him — that is kill him and dump his body where he could not be found.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/1997/12/04/world/winnie-mandela-s-ex-bodyguard-tells-of-killings-she-ordered.html