Hunting the Seven

Never have seven people been so hunted. By assassins. Then by journalists, lawyers, activists and TRC investigators in search of the truth for the victims’ families. In 1986, seven young men were shot and killed by police in Gugulethu in Cape Town. The nation was told they were part of a ‘terrorist’ MK cell plotting an attack on a police unit. An inquest followed, then a dramatic trial in 1987 and a second inquest in 1989 that again exonerated the police. Finally, ten years later, Eugene de Kock’s Vlakplaas unit was exposed at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for having planned and executed the cold-blooded killings. Yet their real agenda remained a mystery. In Hunting the Seven, Beverley Roos-Muller reveals her own decades-long connection to the case and her search for the truth of their deaths that has been shrouded in lies and mystery. Sifting through the evidence, and interviewing many of those involved, Roos-Muller reveals that it was Vlakplaas’s only operation in the Western Cape and behind it lay a shocking secret.

Dr Beverley Roos-Muller is a veteran journalist, broadcaster and former academic lecturing in humanities at the University of Cape Town. She was an antiapartheid activist in the 1980s, including spokesperson for the multi-organisational Open City campaign opposing the Group Areas Act. She is the author of Bullet in the Heart.