The killing of Elifas, by Gavin Cooper

The killing of Elifas. The Enigma surrounding the Murder of Chief Filemon Elifas, by Gavin Cooper. Reach Publisher's Services. Wandsbeck, South Africa 2022. ISBN 9780620850667 / ISBN 978-0-62-085066-7

The killing of Elifas. The Enigma surrounding the Murder of Chief Filemon Elifas, by Gavin Cooper.

The 1970s was the period in the history of apartheid when the Nationalist Party was emboldened in enacting and implementing legislation that pervaded the lives of all South Africans. The notorious governmental policy of apartheid affected the country politically, socially, economically, medically and psychologically. Insulting and humiliating to the black people, it was inclined to incite arrogance and a sense of superiority, even omnipotence, in many whites. As a teenager, it was similar to observing objects through binoculars the wrong way around with life not being in normal perspective, none more so than on 4 January 1978 when I climbed onto a railways bus at Cape Town Station for the journey to Saldanha to begin National Service in the navy. The small West Coast town was a place I was familiar with, having visited it a month before while holidaying at Langebaan, just across Saldanha Bay. However, that afternoon as I commenced my two years of compulsory military service, it had morphed into a place from which I was completely detached. In 2014, when writing the life story of my father, Wilfrid Cooper, delving into the history of the time and researching the trials he had acted in, the binoculars were reversed with events of four decades before brought into stark relief. One of the significant trials he participated in, and which particularly enthralled me, was the now almost forgotten "Swakopmund Trial" held in the first half of 1976. My father was a senior defence counsel, and, as with many of the trials he appeared in at that time, he acted for people opposed to the apartheid regime. When he came home during the trial, he spoke little of it but looked harrowed, especially after finding evidence that an unknown person had entered our home. We had been out for dinner on a Saturday night and had returned to see signs of desk drawers having been opened and papers moved. Nothing of value was missing, so, for all intents and purposes, not the act of a burglar. To prepare for writing what became the 33-page chapter of my book, Under Devil's Peak: The life and times of Wilfrid Cooper, an advocate in the age of apartheid, I drew on his file, as well as material from the book Political Trials: Gordian Knots in the Law by Ron Christenson, a professor of political science at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota. The third chapter of this volume - The SWAPO Trial: A Partisan Trial-was written with Ralston Deffenbaugh, a young law student who had been an observer for the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) for the duration of the proceedings. Shortly after the trial ended, Deffenbaugh released preliminary notes, an excellent overview of what had happened in Swakopmund. The next step towards a fuller understanding of the proceedings' minutiae was to pore over the trial record and appeal application with these primary sources. The trial record is a piece of history in its own right; over one thousand typed pages on flimsy onion paper - many annotated with my fathers handwritten notes - held together with string. Furthermore, while most of the witnesses' testimony was in Oshiwambo, the trial record is mainly in Afrikaans, with some English being my father's addresses to the Court. The task of fully understanding the proceedings in 1976 presented many challenges, the first being my fluency in Afrikaans. [...]

This is an excerpt from: The killing of Elifas, by Gavin Cooper.

Title: The killing of Elifas
Subtitle: The Enigma surrounding the Murder of Chief Filemon Elifas
Author: Gavin Cooper
Publisher: Gavin Cooper
Reach Publisher's Services
Wandsbeck, South Africa 2022
ISBN 9780620850667 / ISBN 978-0-62-085066-7
Softcover, 17 x 24 cm, 512 pages with colour photography