Boy whiz who found meaning in a bomb
Fifty years ago this month, Frederick John Harris planted a powerful bomb in the whites-only concourse of Johannesburg’s Park station which killed one elderly woman and injured 22 other commuters.
So 77-year-old Ethyl Rhys became the first civilian to die in the resistance campaign. And, nine months later, Harris himself became the only white man executed for political activities.
Chairman of Sanroc, the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee, John Harris telephoned the railway police to warn them the bomb was primed to detonate at rush hour that afternoon. He claimed the policeman he spoke to laughed and put the phone down.
But, ironically, it was a member of the railway police who was responsible for Harris’s arrest. Just before the bomb exploded, he had noticed a man frantically trying to start a small car near the station entrance. His offer of help seemed to send the man into a greater panic. Suspicious, the policeman made a note of the vehicle’s registration number.
At the time of the atrocity, the mood around South Africa was strangely muted. The Rivonia trialists had been sentenced exactly a month earlier, casting gloom over black opponents of apartheid.
The Spear of the Nation, Umkhonto weSizwe, was effectively blunted. Poqo, the military wing of the Pan-Africanist Congress, had been crushed the previous year, mainly through police informers.
Encouraged by its Pogo tactics, the security police decided that infiltration was the way to go. Also in 1963, a group of frustrated liberals had established an underground organisation they called the African Resistance Movement (ARM). Most of the members were white – academics, lawyers and journalists.
And most of them were arrested in July, 1964, on the evidence of Gerhard Ludi, a police spy who infiltrated newspapers.
John Harris, a teacher, was also an ARM member. He came incensed when fellow members were arrested. He knew where the group kept the explosives it had used against soft targets like electricity pylons. And he had been taught how to make a bomb.
The force of that explosion rattled the windows of our newspaper office, six blocks away. Three of us rushed to the station.
The huge glassed edifice was filled with smoke. The damage was immense. A child’s toy handbag lay in a smear of blood. Police were spreading sawdust over what looked like a human hand.
The area around the bench under which the bomb had been placed was cordoned off. There the smell of burned flesh was even stronger. Several of the injured, including Ethyl Rhys’s grand-daughter, were being treated in the railway canteen.
Three ARM detainees were escorted in by security police. They appeared shocked and dishevelled. One had bruises on his face. Another was a balding, middle-aged man. A policeman asked him roughly, “Well, what do you think of it?”
“I’m just as horrified as you are,” the detainee replied. “I don’t know why you brought me here.” There was no doubt Harris’s action would add years to whatever sentence that man faced.
I had met John Harris as chairman of Sanroc. His appearance belied any link with athletics or, for that matter, murder and subversion. He had a large moon face on narrow shoulders. He looked like an overgrown schoolboy and was, in fact, well-known while a schoolboy. For years he took part in a national radio quiz show as a member of a team called the “Quiz Kids” and was one of the brightest.
During his trial, his defence team highlighted that achievement, as though it might make Harris less of a monster in the public eye. That defence, indeed, was not dissimilar to the defence in the Oscar Pistorious case: A terrible mistake. “I did not mean to shoot my girlfriend.” “I expected the police to defuse my bomb.”
The case, three months after his arrest, took place in the same building as the Rivonia Trial, but in Pretoria’s main Supreme Court.
High in the roof was a four-bladed fan, swinging precariously on a buckled shaft. That week, it hung like a sword of Damocles over John Harris as he sat in the witness box, sallow and red-eyed.
Harris was perched on a typist’s chair, but he might just as well have been stretched full-length on a psychiatrist’s couch.
Where Oscar Pistorious has endured a month of inspection in a mental hospital, Harris’s examination happened right there in court. From a table a few feet away, two state doctors watched him intently throughout his evidence. Across the courtroom, a third psychiatrist crouched over a foolscap pad, writing furiously.
For three days, they recorded and classified his moods, his response to the many questions, the way he gesticulated when he spoke.
Harris’s lawyer asked if he had cause to seek medical help before the day of the station explosion.
Harris nodded extravagantly. “Ja,” he said. “I went to see my doctor. That was in June. I was having headaches and not feeling well generally.”
But in answer to the next question, he said: “I’ve had memory lapses, but I’ve been entirely in my sound and sober senses.”
He insisted: “There has never been any need for me to get a doctor’s opinion on my mental state. There’s nothing wrong with me. Nothing.”
He was asked how he felt:
About the bomb: ”It was the main thing in my life . . . such a good idea, so beautiful . . .”
His emotions after placing the bomb: “I felt as if I was sitting in a glass ball . . . like an amoeba under a microscope. I’ve had the feeling of being part of the world before, but this time I felt a tremendous understanding of the world.”
Schooldays: “Right up to Standard 9 I was called the fat boy. Like the fat boy in the William books. I tried to get thin, but it didn’t work.”
Himself: “I’m lazy, selfish, inconsiderate . . . Sometimes I felt I wasn’t getting ahead. It worried me and I was taking a course on how to be more positive . . . “
Marriage: “I never really felt responsible. I don’t think even the arrival of the child gave me a feeling of responsibility . . . I had a happy relationship with my wife. I hope she was happy with me.”
The trial: “They (his attorneys) told me if I stuck to the truth, I wouldn’t be convicted of murder because I had not intended to kill anyone . . . (Wearily) Now I just want to get away from everything.”
The defence psychiatrist’s conclusion was that Harris had a fluctuating cyclothymic personality of manic depressive psychosis. He suffered from grandiose fantasies and delusions. He could not have acted otherwise on the day of the bombing.
The state psychiatrist dismissed that evidence. Harris was sane. He acted as any normal man would have.
Harris appealed against his sentence. When the appeal was turned down, his wife Ann made a plea for clemency to the then Minister of Justice, John Vorster.
I interviewed her in Pretoria. She was staying with the parents of Peter Hain, later to become a British Labour Party minister. She seemed entirely overtaken by events and torn between the foolishness of her husband’s action and the thought that people seemed not to believe it was all a horrible misunderstanding.
Their son, barely a year old, gurgled in a playpen, blissfully unaware of the drama that was to change his life.
In the early hours of the morning John Harris was hanged, I drove to Pretoria and walked through a labyrinth of warders’ cottages to the massive wooden door of the old jail where executions were still carried out.
I don’t know what I expected to see – what mood there might be to write about. Perhaps an official might emerge, afterwards, and nail a notice of execution to the door.
Someone did emerge, but out of the darkness next to me. It was the brother of a death cell warder, who proceeded to give me a graphic description of the process being carried out behind the jail walls.
The newspapers, my informant said, would claim (and they did) that Harris had sung freedom songs on the way to the gallows. But that was impossible, because he would be so heavily sedated he would almost have to be carried to the scaffold.
“And relatives of the whites,’ he added, “are asked to bring their bathing trunks.” It made less of a mess, you see.
Such callousness by the Prisons Department should have shocked me, but didn’t.
A judge’s registrar once told me of a case in Grahamstown where a young black man found guilty on a minor felony escaped while awaiting sentence, killing an orderly. He was later traced and found guilty of murder.
One the eve of the execution, a prisons official going through the man’s file discovered that his first sentence of six strokes had never been administered.
So they caned him in the afternoon and hanged him in the morning.
Sunday Times, July 20, 2014.
Extract from John Ryan’s “Spy story” (Amazon.com, Kindle direct publishing
Otto Steiger, commander of U 160, stared out through binoculars at the small bay where the submarine’s dinghy was headed. Overhead, the Milky Way blazed with a billion stars.
Anyone with a less jaundiced eye might have been enthralled at the sight. But Steiger had other things on his mind.
Immediately, he was worried that the dinghy might be too visible from the shore in that starlight. And, from behind the hills, the moon would soon be up. He would much have preferred cloud cover. He worried also that the contact vehicle had not yet arrived. Above all, he worried about the war and his own plight.
Below Otto Steiger, as he stood at the top of the conning tower, was the emblem he and his crew had decided on when the vessel was commissioned more than two years earlier. It was supposed to be a rabbit’s foot, a symbol of luck, but the member of the engine room crew who had volunteered to paint it had overstated his artistic talents. So, instead, what he eventually achieved looked rather like an overweight lily or, some thought, a leek.
Yet, up to now, the emblem had brought a fair deal of luck to U 160. The fact that it was still intact after two years and some months, particularly in the seas off Africa, spoke for itself. But that had been the time when the war was running in Germany’s favour, as detailed in regular bulletins from naval headquarters to the U-boat fleet. Since then, the bulletins had dried up, younger and younger men were being conscripted into the services, and Steiger was enough of a realist to know what all of that indicated. During his last furlough, just a month earlier, he had heard that the German navy was losing submarines at the rate of twenty a month.
Whether or not the information was right, it sent a chill up Steiger’s spine. He just hoped luck would not abandon him and his crew in this outlandish part of the world.
How had the mighty fallen! Steiger remembered the day he had been offered a transfer from destroyers to the elite submarine corps. It was hardly an offer, more an order he could not refuse, but the role of the submarine in modern naval warfare had been so romanticised that he was elated at the chance.
Of course, they never told you the truth about submarines. They never told you how precarious it was to command a vessel not much more than half the length of a football pitch in combat against ships of much greater size, speed and strike power.
They never told you – or maybe they never knew, those admirals, those toffee-nosed relics of World War I – the dangers of diving in the Indian Ocean. These waters were so clear that you could not hide from the bombs and depth charges of enemy aircraft. Yet, deep down, they concealed rocks and coral sharp enough to penetrate any submarine’s inner hull. And, when the weather turned around, they could produce waves that made the North Atlantic look like a millpond.
Instead, what naval bosses tried to instil in you was an entirely false sense of security in the one facility the submarine had that the other naval craft did not – the ability to submerge and thus, allegedly, become invisible.
In reality, submarines spent most of the time on the surface, plodding along on their diesel engines at the pace of tramp steamers, pitching and rolling, forcing the crew to grab at any possible appendage in the interior structure of the vessel to stay upright.
They never told you, although they surely did know, those old admirals, what it would be like sharing such cramped quarters with fifty other males, breathing the same polluted air, day after day, week after week, bumping against one another in the narrow gangways. Sardine cans, the other naval men had begun to call submarines, and they weren’t far out.
As Otto Steiger scanned the coast around the river mouth, he caught a flash of headlights from the contact area and signalled back with the Aldis lamp. So the dinghy should be back within the hour, with the jerry cans of water they desperately needed and possibly some fresh meat and fruit, bananas or paw paws.
Exactly what the contact could supply didn’t really matter. In the end, it would all taste of diesel fumes.
The man who cried wolf
When Nick first saw the dinghy, he thought it must be fishermen, possibly seine-netters. Then, as it edged into the bay below him, he heard the sound of a vehicle’s engine and a dark shape moved towards the shore.
The dinghy disgorged two figures. They stood for a while on the beach. Nick saw the flash of headlights, outlining a large car or a truck, and the figures began to walk towards it.
At the same time, another light appeared from beyond the surf line, flashed a message and repeated it. Dot, dot, dash. U. Pause. Dash, dot, dot, dot. B. After that, the same again, in quick succession.
U and B? UB? Unterseeboot! It had to be, thought Mostert.
He felt the hair stand up on the nape of his neck. And as he continued to watch, willing his eyes to get accustomed to the gloom, he could make out the silhouette of a conning tower and a hull swinging on an anchor.
Nick heard thumping noises, the sound of wood on wood as though boxes were being loaded and then the swish of oars as the dinghy began to move out to sea.
He turned and ran, down and along the path, back to the ferry. The rowing boat was there, the oars laid across the stern, but the man who had rowed him over was not to be seen.
Mostert had spoken many times about his prowess as an oarsman, but had never actually tried to row. Now he did, clumsily, in a mild state of panic, catching crabs and going nowhere.
He slowed down, concentrated on a task that he thought had to be really quite simple, dug the oars deep and began to make progress. Reaching the other side, Nick dragged the rowing boat as high as he could up the bank and ran to his hotel. Brian Eayrs, the Needles Hotel owner, was in the bar with two customers.
Mostert took him aside. ‘I need to use your telephone,’ he said.
‘Not tonight, Nick, I’m afraid,’ said Eayrs. ‘The main exchange closed at six. Come and have a drink instead.’
Nick finally had three, wondering as he drank them if he should tell these people what he had seen, and became more convinced with every passing moment that he could not. Nick Mostert, well known in recent Transkeian lore for seeing a U-boat that never was, claims another sighting at Port St Johns.
He decided it was too late anyway for anyone to achieve anything that night, went off to bed and slept badly, his stomach burbling.
Extract from Spy story (Kindle direct publishing, Amazon.com).
‘They couldn’t run a bath’
In Lusaka, leaders of the African National Congress were returning from exile. In four years, they would be in charge of South Africa.
With the party was a member of the anti-apartheid movement who had been close to them for several years. I asked him what sort of government he thought they would make.
“They are good people,” he said. “But right now they couldn’t run a bath, let alone a government. They’ve got some quick learning to do.”
The man explained, “The ANC has never really prepared itself for this. Before sanctions seriously began to bite two years ago, many members had come to believe that change would not happen in their own lifetime.”
Evidence of that unreadiness (and immaturity) came early, with the announcement of free health care for children under six and pregnant or breastfeeding mothers.
One effect of that has been to clog queues at hospitals and clinics with youngsters and mothers suffering from minor ailments, while chronic patients are delayed or even denied treatment.
Another is much more serious and even tragic. Teenage girls, many of them still at school, have become pregnant in order to get the grants on offer. And hundreds of those have abandoned their babies because they lacked the will or the proper funds to carry on as mothers.
Just a few weeks ago, a two-year-old boy was dumped by his mother in the traffic on a motorway. Fortunately, a truck driver was able to brake as the child ran into the path of his vehicle and the police were on hand to contact the welfare authorities.
Babies have not only been abandoned. They have been battered too. And not only by young mothers driven to their wit’s end by constantly crying infants. There seems to be a boyfriend or partner syndrome in some cases: “If you don’t shut that child up, I will!”
Introducing these grants may have been an honest mistake by honorable men but they have become a point of corruption ever since. Old age pensions continue to be claimed long after the death of the original recipient. Many thousands of rands in social security funds have been embezzled by officials down the line.
The incompetence of civil servants has been another major problem in the 20 years of democracy. A recent independent report showed that less than 20 per cent of municipalities were properly managing the funds allocated to them. Hence all the protests over the non-delivery of services.
Mismanagement is rife at province level too, particularly in the education departments. Witness the scandal in Limpopo a few years ago where hundreds of pupils had to go without school books for most of a year because a consignment had simply been dumped in the veld by the company contracted to deliver them.
Another issue has been the quality of teachers appointed. If they are appointed at all, for there are instances where posts continue to go unfilled, year after year.
This is particularly true in the rural areas where pupils have to write exams on work they have never been taught.
Where money is there, yet no one is sure how it should be apportioned, major corruption can readily flourish. And that in turn is fed by a sense of entitlement that has almost become endemic. If you don’t know where that cash should go, just help yourself! You deserve it, after all, after apartheid.
And that path leads us right to Nkandla, and to a shameless president we legally may call a liar now.
Political commentators differ on how much Jacob Zuma will suffer at the polls through the folly of his R246-million homestead. I believe it will be considerable.
More than a million of the “born free” generation (whom Zuma and company must have come to regard as their party’s voters-in-waiting) are so disillusioned they haven’t bothered to register. Julius Malema’s EFF group should attract a fair number of the former ANC Youth members. And Ronnie Kasrils’s “don’t vote” call to ANC voters at large must be a barometer of how many of the older leaders feel.
If the new ANC leaders had any common sense, they would have called for Zuma’s impeachment ahead of the Democratic Alliance. But then common sense seems to be a commodity in short supply among the present ANC hierachy.
As are honesty and integrity.
Green light to a dead end
So the president is cock-a-hoop about the matric results. And playing the race card again by accusing the Opposition leader of not being able to accept that blacks are able to pass exams.
But Helen Zille has good reason to be sceptical about the statistics. Her own province, which regularly has had the best results, is suddenly fourth behind certain ANC strongholds. Also (surprise! surprise!) Limpopo has registered a 71.8 per cent pass rate, although pupils in the province were denied text books for most of the year!
Almost as bad as this clear manipulation is the news that some provinces have been culling numbers before the exams, telling Grade 11 pupils who might fail that they will not even get a chance to write matric. How cynical is that?
The biggest problem with our education, of course, is that many thousands of the pupils who have been allowed to write, and successfully, will merely have been given a green light into a dead end.
That problem will persist until the country as a whole comes up with a better programme of job creation. To that end, the government could help by looking to develop the state land it has appropriated over two decades, setting up and training youngsters on community farms.
The Israeli government would be able to assist, and might be pleased to do so. Its kibbutzim were at the heart of that country’s own agricultural development and still employ many young citizens.
But then Jacob Zuma and his acolytes are unlikely to approach Israel. For them it is a state non grata for a couple of reasons. While they will accept the Chinese, despite their poor record on human rights, they will not readily forget that Israeli scientists provided nuclear power assistance to the old Nationalist government. Or that Israel continues to be beastly to the Palestinians.
Oh, well.
Encounters with an Icon
Nearly 26 years separated my first and second encounter with Nelson Mandela.
The first time, the African Nationalist Congress leader was in the dock in Pretoria facing a strong chance of being executed for treason. He had already spent a year in jail for incitement and for leaving the country illegally. I was a young reporter in the Press gallery, taking notes.
The second time was when Mandela was on an excursion into Africa after his release in 1990. In Lusaka, Zambia, a BBC colleague told him there was someone in the media party who had covered his treason trial.
Mandela sought me out and we chatted. I told him we in fact had other links. We had been born within 50 miles of each other. After that, he called me “my fellow Transkeian”.
For a while I felt special. Then I realised Madiba was exercising one of his greatest talents: His innate ability to relate to people, to make them feel at ease.
He had done it with his prison warders. In the future, he would do it with the widow of Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid, and with dyed-in-the-wool rightwingers.
Much more than that, he would do it with a nation.
These are extracts from my reports on those rather different occasions:
Sunday Chronicle, June 14, 1964
FRIDAY, 7.30 a.m. The clock in the Pretoria Raadsaal strikes the half-hour, sparking a domestic crisis in Church Square’s pigeon colony. Outside the locked door of the grey-stone Palace of Justice, a handful of journalists and lawyers’ clerks page through their morning newspapers.
A No 2 bus circles leisurely on its way to Brooklyn.
7.55: The crowd around the palace entrance has grown to the size of a rush-hour bus queue. Among the newcomers is a bearded university student who claims to have heard on the best authority that at least two of the eight men will get the death penalty.
As the doors swing open, a young white woman says, “I hope they hang the lot.”
8.30: Winnie Mandela, dressed all in black, enters the packed courtroom. Behind her is an aged relative whom the papers have identified as Nelson Mandela’s mother from the Transkei. A blanketed woman in the third row moves on to the floor to make room for them.
Across the room, an orderly yawns noisily.
9.45: Twelve plain-clothes warders take up their positions behind the dock. With the defence is Cry, the Beloved Country author, Alan Paton, who is to give evidence in mitigation.
The stage is set and the doors are barred. A late-comer brings the news that the court precincts have been cordoned off by a force of police. The man on my right observes, “They’re taking no chances.”
10.00. Mr Justice Quartus de Wet takes his seat and the countdown of more than eleven months is about to end.
Headed by Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, the accused file into the dock. They wave cheerily to their relatives and Sisulu blows a kiss to his wife.
The eight men seem composed and in unnaturally high spirits. There is the usual surprise to find they are all dressed in well-cut lounge suits, not prison garb. All are clean-shaven.
10.30: Unexpectedly, a game of thrust and parry has developed between Alan Paton and Percy Yutar, head of the prosecution team. It is a battle between a man of words and a man of letters and it becomes obvious where the advantage lies.
Yutar, predatory veteran of the art of cross-examination, goes on the attack with all the devices of his experience – and the witness who came to plead for clemency for others soon finds that he is on the defensive himself. The prosecutor has produced a dossier with an account of the Liberal Party leader’s movements and public statements over the past four years.
Cross-examination ends abruptly and Alan Paton, red-faced and angry, returns to his seat. Mr Justice De Wet decides it is time for tea.
11.30: The accused file back into the dock but this time their smiles are tight and their gestures lack assurance. Dennis Goldberg is white-faced and even the others seem pale under their dark skins.
Defence lawyer Harry Hanson’s final address is short and deliberate. It reflects Mandela’s statement from the dock earlier this week that it is the Government that should be on trial here.
When he sits down, the judge nods and the eight men stand. Kathrada scratches nervously at his ear. Mandela clenches and unclenches his fists.
It is all over so suddenly that most of the public are not aware sentence has been passed. But jubilation spreads quickly to the black section of the gallery as Kathrada turns around and mouths the word, “Life”.
Mrs Bernstein says, “Thank God.”
Waving and smiling, Nelson Mandela and his co-accused disappear down the stairway to the cells. The man on my right says, ‘They’ll only serve 15 years.”
1.45: The Black Maria carrying the prisoners has left for Pretoria Central and the crowds have dispersed. Two riot policemen walk away from the scene, their job over. One says, “They should have hanged the bastards.”
Church Square returns to its lunch-time routine. A No 2 bus circles on its way to Brooklyn.
And 26 years later:
The Argus Africa News Service, April 15, 1990
Nelson Mandela has moved into the warm embrace of Africa with his first trip beyond the frontiers of South Africa in 27 years.
The biggest crowd ever seen in Zambia came together in Lusaka to welcome the man Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda said was “as much our leader as you are the leader of the African National Congress”.
Earlier, successive groups of ANC members – most of whom were not born when their icon went to jail – toyi-toyied before the crowd of Zambians and chanted slogans.
From there, Mandela travelled to Harare, Zimbabwe, where more than 50 000 people packed a stadium with a normal capacity of 35 000 to acclaim their reverence and wonder at his presence.
Later, the man who confessed on leaving Victor Verster Prison, that one of his greatest yearnings during his long years in jail was to be able to hug a small child, had a chance to embrace more than 30 small children.
They were the sons and daughters of ANC members in exile in Harare. Aged from about two to twelve, they came on stage at the University of Zimbabwe where Mandela received an honorary doctorate in law.
Before he did, the children indulged in an unrehearsed bout of toyi-toying that had the audience of academics and diplomats on their feet.
Nelson Mandela stooped and hugged every child. He discarded a formal speech and said: “Every day I am here, I enjoy the feeling that I am a human being.
Then his eyes flooded with tears, and he turned to look through a far window at the soft hills beyond the campus.
A party in disarray
Almost the first encouraging sign in the early Nineties that a peaceful transition might be possible after all was the relationship formed between Cyril Ramaphosa and Roelf Meyer.
The two were the chief negotiators for the ANC and the National Party in the Multiparty Negotiating Forum, whose brief was to end apartheid and steer the country towards its first democratic elections in April 1994. Public optimism grew even further when Ramaphosa offered to introduce Meyer to the sport of trout fishing and had to remove a hook from the novice’s finger.
It was almost analogous of Androcles and the lion he befriended by taking a thorn out of its paw.
There must have been the same kind of encouragement among many voters recently when Cyril Ramaphosa returned to active politics from big business and became the ANC’s deputy president. Surely, disillusioned voters would have thought, such a cool and experienced head was exactly what was needed to reform the capricious Jacob Zuma or even replace him should he be indicted or impeached.
But hopes of that kind were dashed on Sunday when Ramaphosa urged Limpopo voters to support the ANC “or the Boers will come back to control us”.
Not only was it a tired race card from a man who helped set up a non-race Constitution 20 years ago. It was a race card entirely without substance and suggests the governing party is in a state of complete panic and disarray on the eve of the elections.
John Ryan 