Truth
Truth
Truth
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POST CHALMERS<br />
10 February 1997<br />
Post Chalmers is a disused and desolate<br />
police station off the national road some<br />
twenty miles from Cradock. A convenient<br />
rural jailhouse. The sign which announces<br />
Post Chalmers as a Holiday Farm is the first<br />
untruth. Barbed wire runs the course of the<br />
property which is scattered with African<br />
thorn trees. It was here that brutal tortures<br />
and murders took place. The Pebco Three<br />
Qwaqwahuli Godolozi, Sipho Hashe and<br />
Champion Galela, leaders of the Port<br />
Elizabeth Black Civic Organisation were<br />
murdered. Joe Mamasela, a security<br />
policeman at Vlakplaas, told the <strong>Truth</strong><br />
Commission that the three had been led<br />
into an ‘animal shed’ at post Chalmers<br />
where they had been interrogated. He said:<br />
“It was brutal. They were tortured<br />
severely. They were brutalised. I<br />
strangled them. They were beaten with<br />
iron pipes on their heads, kicked and<br />
punched. They were killed, they died one<br />
by one. I have never seen anything like it<br />
in my life. It was blazing hell on earth.”<br />
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