Hawke's Bay lawyer Satchie Govender, formerly the head of an investigation team for South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, shown with former presidents FW De Klerk and Nelson Mandela. Photos / Supplied, Getty Images
Hawke's Bay lawyer Satchie Govender, formerly the head of an investigation team for South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, shown with former presidents FW De Klerk and Nelson Mandela. Photos / Supplied, Getty Images
Criminal defence lawyer Satchie Govender may be in his 70s but he’s still hard at work, although these days it’s in the District Court - a long way and a far cry from his former job, opening the graves of people killed during the apartheid era in South Africa. The former lead investigator with the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission talks to Ric Stevens about his 50-year career, the difficult memories that will never leave him and how he ended up representing people in New Zealand.
Satchie Govender has seen and done a lot in 50 years in legal practice, but what he found in Phila Portia Ndwandwe’s grave was particularly “sinister”.
The woman’s skeletal remains wore a plastic bag as a skirt – an attempt at maintaining some dignity in the days she was kept naked and interrogated before being executed by South African security forces.
Ndwandwe had been a member of the armed wing of the African National Congress, the anti-apartheid organisation that was instrumental in ending white minority rule in South Africa in 1994.
In 1988, Ndwandwe was abducted in Swaziland by two comrades who had turned informants, and brought back to South Africa to be interrogated at a remote farm by members of the Port Natal Security Branch.
After 10 days, they were not getting anywhere with her, and they could not “turn” her to become an informant herself.
She was executed and buried in a grave they had made her dig herself.
Thirty-seven years later, Govender is sitting in a room at the Hastings courthouse on a sunny and peaceful Hawke’s Bay morning when he recalls his investigation team opening up the grave.
There were animal bones in the grave as well as Ndwandwe’s remains.
“You know when you eat a chop, the bone in the chop, when you finish, you discard that,” Govender said.
“They were having a barbecue while she was digging her own grave. They confessed that.”
And after they had eaten the barbecued chops, the woman’s killers threw the bones into the grave with her.
She was found in the foetal position, with a hole in the top of her skull.
Govender is now 73 but still working as a criminal defence lawyer in the Napier and Hastings courts.
But in the 1990s he was head of the KwaZulu-Natal investigation team for South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, digging into the republic’s troubled past, and holding people to account for human rights violations.
Ndwandwe’s body was the first exhumed by the commission, in 1997, almost a decade after she went missing.
She was given a state funeral, attended by Nelson Mandela. The members of the security forces who killed her received amnesty.
That was how the commission worked. It aimed to get at the truth of South Africa’s human rights abuses during the apartheid era, offering amnesty to perpetrators who came forward with what they knew.
For Govender and his team of 15 investigators, including senior police officers seconded from Sweden and Norway, that sometimes meant literally digging up the past.
He also recalls the effect on his staff.
“I had to get psychological assistance, counselling for them, every second Thursday, because of the trauma of what they saw.
“We dug up graves all over the place.”
Another victim suspected of sabotage was killed by some railway tracks - blown up by a bomb. The intention was to make it appear he died while setting the bomb on the tracks.
The corpse was heavily mutilated, but found with a distinctive sheepskin vest.
“We dug him up and he was still in that coat,” Govender said.
It was used to identify the victim and help his family find closure.
Studied law in Ireland
Govender was born and grew up in South Africa, the grandson of a man brought over from India by the British as an indentured servant - “inverted commas, slave”, he says - in the 19th century. His grandfather became a market gardener and lived to the age of 107.
Govender’s father owned a general store and later became a land agent, and was able to support his son through his first year of law school at Trinity College, Dublin. After that, he had to work to support himself through his studies.
Hawke's Bay lawyer Satchie Govender, on a visit back to Trinity College, Dublin, where he first studied law. Photo / Supplied
Many South Africans of Indian descent chose Ireland because it offered them the opportunity to study medicine – something that was next to impossible in their homeland in the apartheid era.
Govender, however, chose law. He stayed 11 years in Ireland studying and working, becoming a pupil to a Dublin barrister and working for six months in Northern Ireland at the time of the Troubles.
He met his wife in Dublin and they became involved in South African groups interested in bringing about change in their home country, but always discreetly.
“We had a strong anti-apartheid movement in Dublin, but we never joined that organisation because it would lead to exposure.
“So, as soon as you got back home, the Special Branch would be waiting for you and you’d be arrested.
“Strategically, we never ever became open about our politics.”
Investigators from South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the 1990s, examining human remains retrieved as part of their inquiries. Satchie Govender is second right. Photo / Supplied
When Govender did return to South Africa, he found his Irish law degree was not recognised, and he had to spend another two years studying to become a lawyer all over again.
Then, when he got to court, he had to enter by a different doorway.
“Even when I practised in South Africa, all the judges were white, middle-class Afrikaner and they had their community morality, that justice could only be dispensed by white people,” Govender said.
“When you got to court, you’d feel the difference.
“Your white colleague would turn up and speak absolute nonsense, with confidence.
“When you got up and talked sense, they knock you down. They’d cut you down all the time.
“It was the mentality that, you know, ‘How could you be better than the whites?’
“Because they’ve always been led to believe psychologically that they were superior.”
Through his legal practice, Govender began pushing back against aspects of the apartheid system, working at a legal resources centre, and advocating for non-whites who had been disadvantaged.
That included making habeus corpus applications to free people who had been arbitrarily detained.
“You’re working in the advocacy area of the law, you’re working on behalf of people who have, for whatever reason, fallen foul of the authorities,” he said.
It was potentially hazardous for Govender himself. He was arrested once but never detained, although he said he was being watched by the authorities all the time.
But the apartheid system was beginning to crumble under pressure from international sanctions and grassroots movements in other countries, including New Zealand.
Inside South Africa, Govender was also working to change the way people thought.
“We organised youth from all the races, brought them together in a situation where they would interact with each other and develop a sort of an understanding of each other,” he said.
But things did not always go well.
As a civic leader, Govender organised a meeting at a school and was addressing parents when they were surrounded by Special Branch and riot police, who came in and started arresting people, including him.
Another time police were looking for him and told his 3-year-old son over the phone that they would slit the boy’s throat if he did not say where his father could be found.
Under investigation - a lot
“I was under investigation a lot.
“They’d speak to my colleagues and friends and stuff like that, but I wasn’t imprisoned.
“A lot of other people I know spent days in solitary confinement or in detention without trial.
“Some of them died in prison. Some of them were murdered in prison.”
Members of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's investigation team, including Satchie Govender, second left, with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, fifth from right at the back. Photo / Supplied
Govender recalled the case of Dr Hoosen Haffejee, a friend of his, who died in custody in 1977 after being betrayed by an ex-girlfriend and found with socialist revolutionary tracts in his possession.
The security forces maintained he had committed suicide.
“When I was in the [Truth and Reconciliation Commission], the people who were involved in this killing came forward because they wanted an amnesty, and I interviewed them and they told me the story about what happened.
“They interrogated this guy naked for hours on end and he wouldn’t crack.
“Finally they took his head and they put it into the toilet pan... and he knocked it a couple of times, [that] gave him some sort of haemorrhage and he died in prison and they said he killed himself.”
Govender looks back on his time with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission with satisfaction, particularly recalling the thanks he received from the mother of the man in the sheepskin coat for finding out where her son had ended up.
He met Mandela once and had a lot to do with Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who was his boss as chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Govender came to New Zealand when his wife was offered a medical job in Hastings.
Although appointed a Senior Counsel and at times an acting judge in South Africa, he had to do more study to work as a lawyer in New Zealand. He was admitted to the New Zealand bar in Napier in 2010.
Today, he works mainly in criminal defence law and acknowledges that the law he is practising now is “completely different” than that of his former life.
“I did human rights law, civil law, employment law - everything. I did all law. Company law, I used to work for the government ... against the government. I was very busy in South Africa. Very, very busy,” Govender said.
“I was young. I could handle it.”
New Zealand’s legal landscape has less variety. He practised civil law and employment law when he first arrived, but said there was not much demand for it.
“New Zealand people are not litigious people in a sense but if they have to, they go to legal aid. Some of them get legal aid, some of them don’t. It’s only the wealthy people who can afford it.”
Govender said he had received some requests for civil matters and had turned them down - it was hard and protracted work, and payment would come much later when the matter was finalised.
Govender plans to stay in New Zealand, even though he retains a “deep connection” with South Africa.
“From the point of view that I’m old. I’m living in New Zealand. I am used to New Zealand society. It is safe, in many respects, because of the nature of the society. I’m thinking of retiring soon.”
Govender said some New Zealanders had not been exposed to the traumas people in many other countries had suffered, be it famine, riots, revolution or apartheid.
“They have had a comfortable life,” he said.
“Fine. That’s good. Human beings should have a good life.”
Ric Stevens spent many years working for the former New Zealand Press Association news agency, including as a political reporter at Parliament, before holding senior positions at various daily newspapers. He joined NZME’s Open Justice team in 2022 and is based in Hawke’s Bay.
