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Butana Almond Nofomela
Butana Almond Nofomela (born 1957) is a former South African security policeman. In 1989 when under sentence of death for murder, he confessed to membership of a police assassination squad that killed and terrorized opponents of apartheid. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and he was released on parole in 2009. Death sentence Nofomela was sentenced to death in 1988 after being convicted of the murder of a white farmer, Johannes Lourens."Nofomela a free man"
News24 Archives, 11 September 2009


Confession

On the evening of 19 October 1989, Nofomela made a confession from his death row cell in Pretoria, just hours before he was due to go to the gallows. He announced that he had information to disclose about his membership from 1980 in a death squad ope ...
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Security Branch (South Africa)
The Security Branch of the South African Police, established in 1947 as the Special Branch, was the security police apparatus of the apartheid state in South Africa. From the 1960s to the 1980s, it was one of the three main state entities responsible for intelligence gathering, the others being the Bureau of State Security, Bureau for State Security (later the National Intelligence Service (South Africa), National Intelligence Service) and the Military Intelligence division of the South African Defence Force. In 1987, at its peak, the Security Branch accounted for only thirteen percent of police personnel, but it wielded great influence as the "elite" service of the police. In addition to collecting and evaluating intelligence, the Branch also had operational units, which acted in neighbouring countries as well as inside South Africa, and it housed at least one paramilitary death squad, under the notorious Section C1 headquartered at Vlakplaas. It is also well known for recruiting ...
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Apartheid
Apartheid (, especially South African English: , ; , "aparthood") was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia) from 1948 to the early 1990s. Apartheid was characterised by an authoritarian political culture based on ''baasskap'' (boss-hood or boss-ship), which ensured that South Africa was dominated politically, socially, and economically by the nation's minority white population. According to this system of social stratification, white citizens had the highest status, followed by Indians and Coloureds, then black Africans. The economic legacy and social effects of apartheid continue to the present day. Broadly speaking, apartheid was delineated into ''petty apartheid'', which entailed the segregation of public facilities and social events, and ''grand apartheid'', which dictated housing and employment opportunities by race. The first apartheid law was the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages ...
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Life Imprisonment
Life imprisonment is any sentence of imprisonment for a crime under which convicted people are to remain in prison for the rest of their natural lives or indefinitely until pardoned, paroled, or otherwise commuted to a fixed term. Crimes for which, in some countries, a person could receive this sentence include murder, torture, terrorism, child abuse resulting in death, rape, espionage, treason, drug trafficking, drug possession, human trafficking, severe fraud and financial crimes, aggravated criminal damage, arson, kidnapping, burglary, and robbery, piracy, aircraft hijacking, and genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes or any three felonies in case of three-strikes law. Life imprisonment (as a maximum term) can also be imposed, in certain countries, for traffic offences causing death. Life imprisonment is not used in all countries; Portugal was the first country to abolish life imprisonment, in 1884. Where life imprisonment is a possible sentence, there may als ...
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Vlakplaas
Vlakplaas (trans. "shallow farm") is a farm 20 km west of Pretoria that served as the headquarters of counterinsurgency unit C1 (later called C10) of the Security Branch of the apartheid-era South African Police. Though officially called Section C1, the unit itself also became known as Vlakplaas. Established in 1979, by 1990 it had grown from a small unit of five policemen and about fifteen askaris to a unit of nine squads. The unit functioned as a paramilitary hit squad, capturing political opponents of the apartheid government and either "turning" (converting) or executing them. Vlakplaas farm was the site of multiple executions of political opponents of the apartheid government. The unit is known to have carried out the murders of Griffiths Mxenge in 1981 and the so-called " Chesterville Four" in 1986, among many others. C1 officers were also notorious for allegedly routinely defrauding the state, siphoning off government funds to pay agents or for their personal use. ...
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Dirk Coetzee
Dirk Coetzee (15 April 1945 – 7 March 2013) was co-founder and commander of the covert South African Security Police unit based at Vlakplaas. He and his colleagues were involved in a number of extra judicial killings including that of Griffiths Mxenge. Coetzee publicly revealed the existence of the Vlakplaas death squads in 1989, making himself a target of a failed assassination attempt. Early life Coetzee was born in April 1945 in Phokwane Local Municipality. His father was a postal worker. The younger Coetzee also worked for the postal service before becoming an investigator in 1969. Career Starting out as a constable in 1972, he rose through the ranks, and advanced his cause on secondment with the Rhodesian Armed Forces. He was promoted to captain in the security police and, in 1980, became the first commander of the secret police base on the Vlakplaas farm near Pretoria. In 1981, he was "assigned" to the murder of Griffiths Mxenge.
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African National Congress
The African National Congress (ANC) is a Social democracy, social-democratic political party in Republic of South Africa, South Africa. A liberation movement known for its opposition to apartheid, it has governed the country since 1994, when the 1994 South African general election, first post-apartheid election installed Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa. Cyril Ramaphosa, the incumbent national President, has served as President of the ANC since 18 December 2017. Founded on 8 January 1912 in Bloemfontein as the South African Native National Congress (SANNC), the organisation was formed to agitate, by moderate methods, for the rights of black South Africans. When the National Party (South Africa), National Party government came to power 1948 South African general election, in 1948, the ANC's central purpose became to oppose the new government's policy of institutionalised apartheid. To this end, its methods and means of organisation shifted; its adoption of the techn ...
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Swaziland
Eswatini ( ; ss, eSwatini ), officially the Kingdom of Eswatini and formerly named Swaziland ( ; officially renamed in 2018), is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. It is bordered by Mozambique to its northeast and South Africa to its north, west, south, and southeast. At no more than north to south and east to west, Eswatini is one of the smallest countries in Africa; despite this, its climate and topography are diverse, ranging from a cool and mountainous highveld to a hot and dry Veld, lowveld. The population is composed primarily of ethnic Swazi people, Swazis. The prevalent language is Swazi language, Swazi (''siSwati'' in native form). The Swazis established their kingdom in the mid-18th century under the leadership of Ngwane III. The country and the Swazi take their names from Mswati II, the 19th-century king under whose rule the country was expanded and unified; its boundaries were drawn up in 1881 in the midst of the Scramble for Africa. After the Second Boer W ...
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Griffiths Mxenge
Griffiths Mlungisi Mxenge (27 February 1935 – 19 November 1981) was born in KwaRayi, a rural settlement outside of King Williams Town, Eastern Cape. He was a civil rights lawyer, a member of the African National Congress (ANC) and a South African anti-apartheid activist. Early life Griffiths Mlungisi Mxenge was the eldest son of Johnson Pinti and Hannah Nowise Mxenge. His parents were farmers in KwaRayi. He began his high schooling at Forbes Grant Secondary school in Ginsberg but matriculated from Newell High school in Port Elizabeth in 1956. ona G.V. New Dictionary of South African Biography Mxenge, Griffiths Mlungisi. Online. Accessed 17 August./ref> In 1959, he received a bachelor's degree from Fort Hare University majoring in Roman Dutch Law and English. He joined the African National Congress Youth League while he was studying. The Defiance Campaign and the Congress of the People in Kliptown contributed to his political consciousness He enrolled for an LLB degree at ...
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Lamontville
Lamontville is a town in EThekwini in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa. Township south of Durban, on the Umlaas River and next to Mobeni. It was laid out in 1930 and named after the Revd Archibald Lamont Archibald Lamont (21 October 1907 – 16 March 1985) was a Scottish geologist, palaeontologist, Scottish Nationalist writer, poet and politician. He named the trilobite genus '' Wallacia'' after William Wallace. Life Born on 21 October 1907 a ..., then Mayor of Durban. References Populated places in eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality Townships in KwaZulu-Natal {{KwaZuluNatal-geo-stub ...
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John Dugard
Christopher John Robert Dugard (born 23 August 1936 in Fort Beaufort), known as John Dugard, is a South African professor of international law. His main academic specializations are in Roman-Dutch law, public international law, jurisprudence, human rights, criminal procedure and international criminal law. He has served on the International Law Commission, the primary UN institution for the development of international law, and has been active in reporting on human-rights violations by Israel in the Palestinian territories. He has written several books on apartheid, human rights, and international law, in addition to coauthoring textbooks on criminal law and procedure and international law. He has also written extensively on South African apartheid. Education John Dugard attended Queens Collage, Queenstown passed Matriculation in 1953 and later earned his BA (1956) and LLB (1958) degrees at Stellenbosch University (South Africa) and a second LLB (1965) and LL.D. degree, a Diplom ...
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University Of The Witwatersrand
The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (), is a multi-campus South African Public university, public research university situated in the northern areas of central Johannesburg. It is more commonly known as Wits University or Wits ( or ). The university has its roots in the mining industry, as do Johannesburg and the Witwatersrand in general. Founded in 1896 as the South African School of Mines in Kimberley, South Africa, Kimberley, it is the third oldest South African university in continuous operation. The university has an enrolment of 40,259 students as of 2018, of which approximately 20 percent live on campus in the university's 17 residences. 63 percent of the university's total enrolment is for Undergraduate education, undergraduate study, with 35 percent being Postgraduate education, postgraduate and the remaining 2 percent being Occasional Students. The 2017 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) places Wits University, with its overall score, as the h ...
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Chesterville, KwaZulu-Natal
Chesterville is a town in eThekwini in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa. Village between Cato Manor and Westville, some 13 km west of Durban. Named after T J Chester, a former manager of the Native Administration Department of Durban. The writer Nat Nakasa was reburied in his Chesterville, his childhood home, after his body was returned from the United States, where he died in exile. References WhatsApp WhatsApp (also called WhatsApp Messenger) is an internationally available freeware, cross-platform, centralized instant messaging (IM) and voice-over-IP (VoIP) service owned by American company Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook). It allows use ... Populated places in eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality {{KwaZuluNatal-geo-stub ...
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