Wednesday March 13, marked 52 years since South African Airways Flight 406 plummeted into the sea in 1967 on its approach to East London, killing all 25 people on board.
What caused the Rietbok air disaster remains a mystery and continues to trouble the surviving relatives of the doomed passengers. The failure to recover the victims’ bodies and the presence of two high-profile figures onboard fuelled speculation about a nefarious cover up by the apartheid government.
The official inquiry, headed by judge Cecil Margo, suggested the captain, Gordon Benjamin Lipawsky, might have suffered a heart attack, resulting in him losing control of the the Viscount, and that his first officer, Brian Trenwith, was unable to regain control before the Rietbok crashed into the sea.
However, in his book Final Postponement, Margo pointed to structural failure as the reason for the crash. Margo died in 2000.
Navy diver Malcolm Viviers in 1998 suggested the wreck had in fact been located soon after the crash and claimed that via a video monitor on the SAS Johannesburg, he had seen the bodies of passengers still strapped into their seats in the plane.
Dr David Klatzow, an imminent Cape Town-based independent forensic scientist who pointed out flaws in the investigation of the 1987 Helderberg air disaster, was approached about 15 years ago by some relatives of victims of the Rietbok disaster.
Klatzow told the Daily Dispatch he could not recall the names of these family members but remembered that they had told him they had been called to the state mortuary to identify the bodies after the crash.
However, when they arrived at the mortuary, no bodies were to be found.
“But I was also shown a post-mortem report showing that one of the family members had died of multiple injuries,” Klatzow said. “So there was a post-mortem report without a body.”
He said there was no question that the investigation into the Rietbok crash had been a “sham”, and said Margo was notorious for having covered up for the apartheid regime.
“I called him a crook, even when he was still alive,” Klatzow said.
JP Bruwer, at the time the vice-rector of the then University of Port Elizabeth and acting chair of the Broederbond, was on board the doomed plane.
Bruwer’s eldest daughter, Griet le Roux, 75, told the Dispatch about the aftermath of the crash. “My brother and his wife got a phone call on the night of the crash.
“At the time they were living in Pieketberg in the Western Cape. The mortuary asked them to drive to East London to identify the bodies,” Le Roux said.
“So they drove to East London, but when they got there, the people at the mortuary told them there had been a mistake and there were no bodies.”
Bruwer was en route to Johannesburg, catching the connecting flight from East London. He was due to be picked up by Le Roux at Jan Smuts International Airport (now OR Tambo) in Johannesburg.
“We found out later that somebody else had booked his flight from Port Elizabeth to East London. We don’t know who,” Le Roux said.
In 1998, families of victims approached the Truth and Reconciliation Committee asking for the government to reopen the case, a request that was not met. This was the first time Le Roux had the opportunity to meet members of other victims’ families.
“There was one lady who told us how she had also been called by the mortuary workers, who even described the dress her daughter was wearing and the ring on her finger. But again, when they got to the morgue, there were no bodies,” Le Roux said.
“What I want to know is what happened to the bodies, where did they bury them?” she asked.
Le Roux said her brother had a pilot’s licence and wanted to fly over the area where the Rietbok had gone down.
“They [people at the airport] told him at the airport that the air space was blocked.
“But he was allowed to hear the final tape recording from the crew’s communication to East London airport. He said there was nothing funny in the voice of the pilot, that all seemed normal. He had a friend with him, and he wanted his friend to also listen to the tape recording. But when he asked the airport officials to hear the tape again, they said there was no tape recording.”
She said the mystery deepened about a month after the crash when officials paid a visit to her late mother, Cora, demanding she sign a letter stating that she would not talk about the crash to anyone. Another strange incident occurred several weeks after the crash, Le Roux said.
“My younger brother, Johannes, who was in Standard 10 at Pearson High School in Port Elizabeth, had two secret service officers [state security] coming to the school. My brother and some other pupils had dropped off my father at the airport, and so they asked him if he had seen my father boarding the plane with his own eyes. It was like they were making sure it was the right person who was dead.”
Prior to his death Bruwer had begun to draw attention from hard-line, right-wing elements in the ruling National Party, and had begun to form good relationships with leaders of recently-independent states, such as Malawi’s Hastings Banda.
“A few weeks before the crash, a minister who was in charge of ambassadors paid a visit to my parents at their home. He wanted to appoint my father as a roving ambassador for African countries,” Le Roux said.
“This was one of the reasons that my father was flying that night. He would also be addressing a meeting of university students while he was there.”
Le Roux claims her father was targeted because he had the ear of the then leader of apartheid South Africa, Hendrik Verwoerd, and was trying to persuade him to soften apartheid policies.
“My father wrote the speech Verwoerd was due to deliver before he was assassinated. We think Verwoerd was killed to prevent him making that speech.
“My aunt told me that after my father attended Verwoerd’s memorial service, he told her, ‘I’m the next one’.”
Ian Boyd, himself a commercial pilot, is the son of the late James Boyd, who at the time the Rietbok crashed was a pilot for SAA.
On Tuesday, March 14 1967, James Boyd and fellow crew members arrived in East London from Johannesburg as part of the salvage operations.
According to Boyd, his father had flown over the crash site and also went onboard a minesweeper dispatched to look for the wreck.
“They located the wreckage. It was about 130 feet below, easily accessible to divers,” he said. My father remained in East London for the rest of the week, but on the Friday he was found dead in his hotel room at seven o’ clock in the morning. My question is who goes sneaking around other people’s hotel rooms at seven in the morning?”
Boyd’s mother was told that her husband had died of a heart attack.
“My father was 51 years old. He was healthy. He was a Springbok golfer. The odd thing is that there was no post-mortem. That weekend they flew his body back [to Gauteng] and he was cremated in Springs on the Monday. We were never shown the body. It was even announced on the radio that a pilot had died of a heart attack. We only had the memorial service on the following Tuesday.
“Before he died, my father phoned my mother to tell her that he thought there were shady things going on. And then he died.
“So you had two SAA pilots, Lipawsky and my father, apparently dying of heart attacks in the space of a week.”
Another curious aspect is that although his father died in East London, the death certificate was signed by a doctor in Benoni.
East London resident Ralph Morgan contacted the Dispatch with another intriguing piece of information.
“In 1967, I was a member of the Rover Motorcycle Club in Port Elizabeth. Four of us were going to drive up to the grand prix in Johannesburg, and one of the chaps wrote a letter to his family in Johannesburg asking if we could stay with them,” Morgan said.
“Some months after the Rietbok crash, the chap received the letter back from the post office. The post office apologised for the state of the letter, but explained that it been involved in the Rietbok crash.
“The chap brought the letter to the club, and I saw it myself. The ink was smeared and it wasn’t in a good state.”
Capetonian Emlyn Brown has spent more than two decades searching for the SS Waratah, a cargo liner steamship that disappeared between Cape Town and Durban in 1909 with 211 people on board.
Years back he was contacted by family members of the Rietbok victims to track down the wreckage.
In September 2000, the vessel the Ocean Stroom, which was equipped with a high-tech oceanic profiling system, was in the vicinity of East London. This technology allowed sonar signals to look “under” the sand bottom.
Brown was not able to be on board himself but his colleagues searched a19km² area off Kayser’s Beach.
The expedition came across two debris fields and fragments of wreckage were found. These ranged in size from a few metres to 57m.
“One large object appeared to be a wing, although smaller fragments were difficult to identify. The main fuselage was not located and it was thought most likely buried, due to general oceanic forces dispersing the wreckage over a thirty-four-year period,” Brown said.
Because the wreckage was inconclusive, it was almost impossible for them to say exactly what happened to Flight 406.
East London author and investigator Alan D Elsdon, a former policeman who wrote a book called The Tall Assassin, posits that a bomb was placed on the Rietbok by a member of the Bureau of State Security (BOSS).
While his book is billed as fiction, Elsdon insists it is “95%” true.
On board the doomed Rietbok was a sworn enemy of apartheid – American Audrey Rosenthal.
The late Martin Legassick, a left-wing professor of history at the University of the Western Cape, had recruited Rosenthal to work for the International Defence and Aid Fund (IDAF), which provided a clandestine financial lifeline for relatives of ANC and PAC activists in jail or exile.
Former East London mayor and apartheid security police officer Donald Card said a briefcase Rosenthal had been carrying was of great interest to the apartheid government.
“We were given instructions to look for that briefcase. We wanted to see if there was information about who she had contacted in South Africa. She was on the communist list, so we were keen to get the information,” Card said. Another former policeman, who spoke on condition of anonymity, remembered that he too had been instructed to look for the briefcase in case it washed up in the surf at Kaysers Beach. One of the last people to speak to Rosenthal was the late and revered Eastern Cape journalist, Jimmy Matyu.
Matyu later recalled meeting Rosenthal at Court Chambers in Port Elizabeth – only hours before the crash.
“I had received a call from our Golden City Post-Drum office in Johannesburg that she was coming to Port Elizabeth and that I was on the list of people she wanted to talk to. But her visit to this country coincided with the height of the draconian apartheid era when the special branch, a wicked security wing of the Nat regime, terrorised black townships,” Matyu wrote in the Dispatch’s sister paper, The Herald.
“On the afternoon of March 13 1967, Rosenthal, who had taken a taxi, walked into my office carrying a light brown briefcase. She was young, beautiful, full of life and we instantly became friends.”
Matyu described the woman before him “a revolutionary with a probing political mind, humble and with a keen sense of humour”.
“Rosenthal told me that she came from the University of California, was on a six-week information tour to South Africa and had a doctorate in philosophy. She mentioned some ANC exiles she had met and who I knew were working for the United Nations. “Among them were Aubrey Nkomo from Uitenhage, and Themba Mqothha and Thami Mhlambiso, both from Port Elizabeth. She had been to the ANC offices, both in London and Lusaka.”
As a “precautionary measure”, Matyu and Rosenthal chose to say little in the office as they suspected it could be bugged by the state. “We decided to do much of our talk by taking a slow stroll to a cafe at the bottom of Theale Street and Main Street [now Govan Mbeki Avenue]. She took along her briefcase.”
Matyu gave Rosenthal the names and addresses of families (of activists) and also filled her in on the political situation in Port Elizabeth. Rosenthal told Matyu that she was aware she was being followed.
“Our stroll did not escape the curious stares of passers-by as it was not common at the time to see a black man and a white woman walking and holding hands amicably and laughing. But walking together and laughing was not breaking the infamous Immorality Act nor could we be arrested for conniving to contravene the Act as we were walking in a public street.” As the pair walked, they noticed that there were people watching them through binoculars from the second floor windows of New Law Courts.
“We assumed without doubt they were from the security branch. We returned to the office where she took down some names of local political activists who were imprisoned on the island. It was sometime late in the afternoon when Rosenthal left in a taxi to board a plane to East London.”
That was the last Matyu saw of her, and it was only the next day that he learnt she was on board the Rietbok.
“I became more angry and sad as she had died with a promise to organise a scholarship for me to study at her university. I cursed the special branch whom I suspected to have had a hand in the disaster.”
Prior to her death, Rosenthal had been best friends with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz at the University of California.
Today, Dunbar-Ortiz is an award-winning and celebrated American historian who has been active in the international indigenous movement for more than four decades, and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues.
In 1966, the two women were PhD candidates at UCLA, but Dunbar-Ortiz abandoned her dissertation after Rosenthal was killed.
The women became close due their anti-Vietnam War activism and advocacy for women’s rights.
The Dispatch made contact with Dunbar-Ortiz, who gave permission for the Dispatch to refer to her book, Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960–1975, which is dedicated to Rosenthal’s memory.
In it Dunbar-Ortiz recounts learning of Rosenthal’s death two days after the Rietbok was downed.
She writes that those close to Rosenthal knew she would not have been in South Africa for a holiday, as there was a boycott of the country by activists.
“…so if she had been there, it would have been part of a political mission. None of us were willing to believe she was dead until we had heard it from Martin [Legassick]. He had taught us not to trust a word from the South African government.
“Finally on the fourth day a letter arrived from Martin telling us that we, Audrey’s friends, must know that Audrey had died committed and for a cause. I wondered if Audrey had been sent on a suicide mission.”
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