Unearthing The Past

For most South Africans, the 29th of March is an unremarkable date, a day like any other. Few recognize the name Dulcie September, or know of her brutal murder in Paris on this day. September was the ANC chief representative for France, Luxembourg and Switzerland in the 1980s, and was the only high-profile ANC member to have ever been assassinated outside of Southern Africa. As Rasmus Bitsch and Kelly-Eve Koopman write in Africa Is A Country, “Her murder has never been solved and September is not a household name in South Africa. Neither of those things are coincidental.”A new documentary, Murder in Paris, makes a notable contribution to undoing the silence around September. Directed by Enver Samuel, whose most recent films include Indians Can’t Fly in 2015 (about the death in detention of anti-apartheid activist Ahmed Timol), as well as Someone To Blame in 2017 (about the eventual inquest into Timol’s death), the film, which features investigative journalist Evelyn Groenink’s quest to get to the bottom of Dulcie’s murder, adds to a body of work that seeks to relook unresolved and buried apartheid traumas. This week on AIAC Talk, we are pleased to be joined by Enver and Evelyn, author of Incorruptible: The Story of the Murders of Dulcie September, Anton Lubowski and Chris Hani. There are many families – like that of Ms September’s – who until now don’t know who took their loved ones, or where they disappeared to. For many, the scars are still fresh, the anger still deep. In our last segment we talk to Madeleine Fullard, who leads the Missing Person’s Task Team, an organization that emerged from the TRC and which is responsible for finding the remains of murdered anti-apartheid activists.