Neil Aggett truly believed that he would walk out of police detention | IOL News

“It was such a terrible contrast,” remembered Jill Burger, Neil Aggett’s sister and the only surviving member of the medical doctor and trade unionist’s direct family.

Burger was recalling the afternoon of New Year’s Eve in 1981 at John Vorster Square police station, where after paying what would turn out to be their last visit to her brother, she and her mother Joy found themselves in a lift in the notorious police station. In the lift with them were members of the Security Branch, laughing and joking as they made their way to a New Year’s party, oblivious to the pain and uncertainty that Burger and her mother were feeling after their brief visit to Aggett.

Burger was giving evidence on the third day of the reopened inquest into the death of her brother in courtroom 8F of the South Gauteng High Court on Wednesday 22 January. She told Judge MA Makume that she had accompanied her mother by train from Cape Town on 31 December 1981 and they had made their way to the police station at which Aggett was being held.

There they were met by Warrant Officer Danvey Maphophe, who took them to an office on the ninth floor and sat with them during their brief meeting with Aggett. Burger described for the court how her brother had looked thin, had some untreated eczema above his eye and was not wearing any shoelaces, belt or other item of clothing with which he may have been able to do himself any harm.

Aggett did manage to break this rule long enough to tell them that he did not expect his detention to last more than another six months. Based on what she’d heard about other political detainees and her interaction with members of the recently formed Detainee Parents’ Support Committee, Burger felt this was not too bad. She could not know then that her brother would be dead in less than a week, his body found hanged in his cell in the early hours of the morning of 5 February 1982.

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