Cover Story Black History Month
that this was an impression accidentally created by the photograph. But the experts’ observations also raise some new and unexpected
questions. How did the belief develop that Hammarskjöld was found leaning against an ant-hill? Where was he actually found, before being placed on a stretcher? Why was no photograph taken of his body in situ, for the purpose of the investigation? Mr Franks was struck by the anomalies in the presentation of
the firearms and ammunition; he was concerned, too, that the secretary general’s body was close to the burnt aircraft, but not at all burnt itself; also that his briefcase and cipher machine were not even charred. “I could speculate forever on this,” he commented in a note to
his conclusions. “It does not feel right – it smells of either a cover- up (for whatever reason) or just simple incompetence.” Dr Vanhegan suggested the possibility that two of the photo-
graphs were airbrushed to conceal detail. “It is beyond reason,” he noted in a discussion of the findings in his report, “that exactly the same sort of artefact would appear on exactly the same feature on widely separated frames (of film); and, again, even less likely had cut film or plates been used as negatives.” If it is the case that the photographs were “doctored”, then it
follows that an attempt was made to conceal some detail. But if so, what kind of detail? Tere is no mention in the medical report of any injury in the
right orbit of Mr Hammarskjöld’s face. But on the basis of the information provided by the medical report, the secretary general was killed by the impact of the crash – so why would there be any need to kill him? Was the evidence in the medical report altered too? Why was it decided not to include the full autopsies in the medical report? Who made these decisions? Did any person or group of people, or any organisation or po-
litical party, have a reason to want Mr Hammarskjöld out of the way? What was the political background to the sudden death of the secretary general and the other passengers and crew on that moonlit night in the centre of Africa?
Eye-witness accounts Officially, the wreckage of Hammarskjöld’s plane, nicknamed Albertina, was found at 15.15 local time on 18 September 1961. But in fact, it was sighted and reported in the morning, many hours earlier. According to an interview given 18 years later by Timothy
Jiranda Kankasa, the board secretary of Twapia Township in Sep- tember 1961, he told the Northern Rhodesian authorities about the burning plane at least six hours earlier. (After Zambian independ- ence in 1964, Kankasa became a minister in the new government and later ambassador to Congo.) Kankasa explained in the interview that some charcoal burners
had come across the burning plane in the morning and, in great concern, rushed over to tell him. He immediately went to the site of the crash and then returned to contact the police, between 09.00 and 09.30. Te men had reported the crash to him, rather than to the police, because they mistrusted and feared the white authorities. In addition, before independence, Africans were not even permitted inside the Ndola airport perimeters. According to Kankasa, in the interview conducted in Lusaka
in October 1979 by Ettore Botta, a Swede working for Gunnar Mollestedt, who was producing a television documentary: “Tere
64 | October 2011 | New African Susan Williams’ new book, Who Killed
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michael@hurstpub.co.uk. Website:
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were no police at all, no police, no one from the army, nobody at all until the afternoon. It was not until between two and three, when at last we heard the sound of the ambulances and other ve- hicles going there.” Even when he told the police the exact crash site, he said, “they
still insisted on going around the Mufulira roads to reach the site. In our opinion, it would have been easier to go by the Kanranchia site, Lotsobe, which is nearer.” Te fact that charcoal burners went to the scene of the crash
in the morning was recently confirmed by Margaret Ngulube, a resident of Twapia who was living there in 1961, when she was 23. Speaking to the Times of Zambia in 2005, she recalled the night: “It was a terrible experience. I saw a ball of fire in the sky and
later on heard a loud bang. When I saw the fire in the sky, I real- ised something was wrong. Most of us thought the plane was shot or faulty somehow.” Twapia residents, she added, “were not allowed to rush to the
scene by the then township secretary, Timothy Kankasa”, and it was not until morning that several people went to the scene of the crash. “We found bodies mutilated,” she told the Times of Zambia. “Only Hammarskjöld’s body and that of his other counterpart was intact, but the rest were cut into pieces.” On first reading Kankasa’s interview with Botta, I wondered
why he did not include this information in his testimony to the Rhodesian inquiry in Ndola. Botta asked the same question, to which Kankasa replied that he had indeed included it. “I am repeating exactly what I said in my testimony.” Kankasa
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