COMMISSIONER
I have described this incident in detail deliberately because this was the last time any of us would see my brother alive again.  In the same month after we returned from Swaziland, January 1981, I heard a knock on my bedroom window in the early hours of the morning.  Two of my brother's closest friends, who are here today, and I want to thank them for the moral support in coming here, had come to tell me that my brother had been killed by a South African Defence Force raid into Mozambique.  I was devastated.  I didn't know what to tell my parents.  My brothers and I eventually decided to lie to them that he was injured, and that we would be going to see him.  We were afraid that they would break down and not have the strength to go to the funeral.  We went by plane to Swaziland, and from there a car took us to Mozambique, but we were delayed for more than eight hours at the Mozambique border post, and I am convinced to this day that the South African Government had applied pressure on Mozambique to block our passage.  During our long wait at the border post we met other family members of some of the other 11 comrades who were also killed in the raid.  I think it was then that my parents sensed that we had spoken a lie to them, and that my brother was in fact killed and not really injured.  I could see the tears rolling down their faces.  It broke my heart, but we never spoke a word for the rest of the journey.