Pent-Up Pain Overflows at Inquiry Into S. Africa’s Past : Justice: Commission hears widows tell of 1985 atrocity. Testimony leaves some spectators and panelists in tears.

The woman suddenly arched back in her chair, her mouth clenched in a silent scream. Then she began to wail, sobbing loud and long in aching cries that echoed across the crowded hall.

Nomonde Calata, long-suffering widow and victim of apartheid, was finally having her say.

Her husband, Fort Calata, was butchered and burned with three other prominent black resistance leaders in June 1985. The still-unsolved mutilation and killing of the so-called Cradock Four is one of the best known and most gruesome of apartheid-era atrocities.

It is also the first major case to come before South Africa’s new Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which met here Tuesday for a second day to document the crimes of apartheid. And as three of the four Cradock widows shared their pent-up pain, several commissioners and many in the audience openly wept as well.

The common thread for the women was not just the slayings that shattered their lives. They were also cruelly persecuted for years after the deaths. Security forces raided their homes, got them fired from jobs and confiscated condolence cards and photographs.

“My children do not even have a picture of their father,” Calata sobbed as a therapist hired by the commission tenderly comforted her and provided endless wads of tissues. “They even took that.”

They tried to take more. Calata said police were waiting when she got home from giving birth to her third child, only five weeks after her husband’s slaying. “They said, ‘We are here to evict you,’ ” she recalled bitterly. “I said: ‘No, I am not leaving. Take your gun and shoot me. I am not leaving.’ So they left.”

But without her husband, her family struggled. “My children say, ‘Mama, I don’t have shoes anymore,’ ” she said. “I can say nothing. Or they say: ‘These clothes are so old. Can’t we buy new ones?’ But I have no money.”

The Cradock Four case revolves around Matthew Goniwe, a charismatic schoolteacher from the dusty farm town of Cradock. He began organizing township residents to oppose rising rents in the early 1980s, plunging the area into turmoil and drawing the wrath of the white regime.

When Goniwe was fired from his job for his politics, his students and fellow teachers organized a 15-month boycott that spread to nearly every black school in what is now Eastern Cape province. He was repeatedly detained or imprisoned, brutally beaten and targeted by white authorities.

On June 27, 1985, Goniwe and fellow activists Calata, Sicelo Mhlawuli and Sparrow Mkhonto disappeared as they drove to a political meeting. Several days later, their car’s charred hulk was found in deep woods outside Port Elizabeth. Their bodies were discovered nearby.

An inquest found that Goniwe had been stabbed 12 times, with several different weapons or by several different people. Mkhonto had been shot twice in the head and stabbed six times. Mhlawuli had been stabbed 32 times. Calata had 12 stab wounds in the head, chest, stomach and back. All had been tortured, then burned.

“I discovered his hair was pulled out,” Calata said emotionally. “His tongue was very long. His fingers were cut off. He had many, many wounds on his body. Dogs had bitten him very severely.”

The government immediately blamed rival black militants. That set the stage for then-President Pieter W. Botha to declare a national state of emergency soon after, effectively creating a police state to crush black resistance to white rule.

But in 1992, a local newspaper printed a rare piece of hard evidence that tied the security forces to the deaths. Three weeks before the killings, the regional military commander had signed a “top secret” cable proposing that the four activists be “permanently removed from society as a matter of urgency.”

Despite a second inquest, no one was charged. And like most apartheid-era crimes, the matter seemed to end there. It reopened Tuesday with an outpouring of grief and rage from Calata, Sindiswe Mkhonto and Nombuwyselo Mhlawuli. Goniwe’s widow, Nyameka, is scheduled to testify today.

All three women pleaded for help, especially in their dealings with the army and police, which last year agreed to settle a joint lawsuit for damages but have yet to pay. And all three appealed to the killers to confess.

Mhlawuli had another request as well. She said whoever poured acid on her husband’s face and stabbed him dozens of times also chopped off his right hand.

“That hand, we still want that hand,” she said softly. “We have buried the body. The hand is said to be in a bottle somewhere. We would like to get my husband’s hand.”