The Flogging of a Kaffir

One hot morning last January, two young Boer farmers named Petrus and Pieter Gouws drove up to their neighbor's farm on the parching South African veld. The Gouws asked for Joseph Mokwatsi, a 17-year-old Negro employed as a field hand, explaining to his master: "We think he stole two jackets, and we want him to show us where he hid them." Joseph was handed over; the Gouws tied a leather thong around his neck, threw him into their truck and drove off.

Winding Sheet. To make Joseph confess, the Gouws tied him to a tractor and beat him with a hose pipe. Then they dragged him into a tobacco shed, where watching Negroes counted 66 more lashes with the hose. "They kept lifting Joseph up and hitting him," said one witness afterwards. But Joseph persisted in his denial, so the Gouws tossed him into the truck again and drove off to consult their uncle, 69-year-old Pieter van Schalkwyk. While the family took coffee together, Joseph was left in the sun, tied to the truck with a thong around his neck. At last, Uncle van Schalkwyk decided to try his hand at making Joseph talk. "I gave him about four blows on the back and buttocks," Van Schalkwyk said. Joseph still denied stealing. Pieter and Petrus then bound his hands and feet and slung him horizontally between two automobiles. When they cut him down, Joseph fell in a heap.

That night the men of the Gouws family fashioned a rough coffin, and Mistress Katrina van Schalkwyk supplied a winding sheet. Joseph's body was delivered to his grandmother with strict instructions: "You must bury him without opening the coffin, because he died of a contagious disease." But Joseph's father, Abraham, raised the coffin lid.

Shocked Justice. Last week the Gouws brothers faced Judge Frans Rumpff in a crowded courtroom in Pretoria. Both men were charged with murder. The evidence against the Gouws was overwhelming: Joseph had died of "bruises and wounds . . . too numerous to count." But when the defendants pleaded "culpable homicide" (which made it impossible for either of them to be found guilty and punished for murder), the Crown prosecutor agreed.

Judge Rumpff was shocked. "You have committed a brutal and merciless assault on a boy who was no more than a child," he said. The court sentenced both brothers to eight years in jail and ten strokes with a bamboo cane (not to be raised higher than the shoulder of the striker). And at that the courtroom buzzed, and white women sobbed. Explained a Boer farmer: "To see white men sent to prison and flogged like Kaffirs for killing a thieving Kaffir is the deepest humiliation."

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