The Suitcase Bomb on Johannesburg Station
He was elated when he received his National Citizen Force call-up papers He always dreamt of going to the army. His excitement was, however, short-lived. Rocket and bomb attacks on crucial Government installations were occurring all over South Africa. The terror group, Umkhonto we Siswe, the military arm of the African National Congress had become very active. The SAR&H’s was regarded as a Key Installation, cancelling all call-ups of its members. He knew very little about the ANC and only that this Organization banned after the Sharpeville incident in 1960. This first acts of sabotage occurred on the 16 December 1961. (Day of the Covenant)
Posters appeared on lamp posts declaring that “Umkhonto we Siswe” was a new organisation established by the natives of South Africa to fight violently for Freedom through acts of sabotage on Government installations. Posters were also received in the post from Umkhonto we Siswe imploring the white man to listen;
Posters professed that:
1. That five whites killed in the Transkei
2. Another white chopped to pieces in Langa.
3. Whites had become panic-stricken because of sabotage taking place daily all over South Africa and that South Africa will, within two years, be caught up in a more bloodier and intenser war than the war in Algeria.
The flyer also claimed that acts of sabotage had doubled since 1962 and that the white man must prepare himself for a long unspecified future of terrorism, diminishing power and uncertainty.
The white man will carry a gun but will not know who to trust — the sweeper may be a saboteur, the tea maker may carry a firearm. The flier also warned the white man that he will be insecure, that he will never be safe and fight a war that he cannot win!
Whatever the originators of this flier thought it had an opposite reaction from whites of, ‘Let them come, we will show them!’
What struck him at the time was that all the whites, not only the Afrikaner, were in the same boat.
He could not help to think about the phrase so often used by the Portuguese people, ‘Para o Inglês ver — for the English to see.’ He especially hoped that the English writers, with their sickening negativity and hate about South Africa, could see the flier.
He could not understand why the Natives and some Liberal Whites in South Africa were opposed to Apartheid. What the whites wanted was a State of their own and the whites were prepared to give, what they wanted for themselves, to the Natives as well.
Verwoerd envisaged a separate white state living in harmony side by side with several African countries resembling a Union of European nations, for instance, Germany living side by side with France, Portugal and Spain.
Discussing with his Dad, this trait of black people, gave the most plausible reason for the natives not wanting to accept Apartheid. ‘You must think like a detective. If the natives don’t want to live separate from the whites, it means that they want to live with the whites. Now you may ask, but why? Is it because they like or love the whites? The answer is no! The reason is that they want what the whites have and all of it and they know that they can get it through the ballot box in a one man one vote system in a Unitary State. And once they have it all, they will marginalise or absorb the whites as a minority.’ Wow! That made sense.
His Father looked at him in ridicule as he fired off his next question. ‘Dad, do you think the government knows about what you just told me? You are exasperating me. Of course, they know about it. Why do you think they want to be separate from the Africans?’ He felt a bit sheepishly for being so slow on the blatantly obvious and left it at that.
When the news came about the damning evidence, incriminating the ANC, of planning to turn South Africa into a bloodbath through terrorism, it shocked white South Africa. The Transvaler, a morning daily newspaper, carried the first tidings of the ANC leadership arrests and document cache at Lilliesleaf Farm, Rivonia on the 12 July 1963. The proverbial bubble burst that same afternoon when the full impact of Operation Mayibuye became known, aerial photos of the farm Lilliesleaf in Rivonia and the details of the cache was splashed all over the newspapers and on posters. Mayibuye derived from an ANC slogan Mayibuye Africa which means ‘Come back, Africa.’ About a month later, on the 6 August 1963, the police discovered a second place near Krugersdorp on a farm called Travallyn and on the 5 September, the third place in Terrace Rd., Mountainview, Johannesburg.
He followed the Court case that began on the 3 December 1963 with interest. When he was away on long distance trips doing his job, His Dad kept his newspapers so that he could catch up on the developments at the trail.
The presiding Judge was Quartus De Wet and the State Prosecutor Dr Yutar. The legal team for the defence consisted of Lawyer J. Joffe. Advocates V.C. Berrange, A. Fischer, A. Chaskalson, G, Bizos and J. F. Croaker. Both Fischer and Berrange have been listed Communists. The accused were Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Dennis Goldberg, Govan Mbeki, Ahmed Kathrada, Lionel Bernstein, Raymond Mhalaba, James Kantor, Elias Motsoaledi and Andrew Mlangeni. Adv. Bob Hepple had turned state witness but had skipped the country because he feared for his life.
The latter gentlemen (accused) charged with having received money from Communist Governments to overthrow the legitimate government of South Africa and having committed sabotage. Documents found at Rivonia and elsewhere proofed that most of the accused were communist but that they were wearing two hats. The one that they wore for the Western Powers was a disguise to hide their Communist leanings to get sympathy and money from the west. During the case, Dr Yutar proofed that Mandela and his cohorts were bent on setting South Africa on fire and killing innocent civilians.
Before judgment giving judgement in the Rivonia Trial, Council for the Defense called on Alan Paton to give evidence in mitigation on behalf of the accused. Alan
Paton had written a book in 1946 ‘Cry, the beloved country’ which had pushed him to prominence in Europe and America. He was also the leader of the Liberal party in South Africa.
Giving evidence, Alan Paton described his background and that he was the Headmaster of Diepkloof Native School for delinquent boys, a post that he held until 1948. Paton described his contact with the accused and gave a rundown of their grievances and said that he did not doubt the sincerity of the leaders of the ANC. Paton added that nobody in the world could expect that a nation, he briefly referred to the history of the Afrikaner, would accept the situation in South Africa under British Rule passively and gave this as the reason why Afrikaners committed acts of terrorism in desperation.
Judge De Wet reprimanded Paton, pointing out to him that nobody had the right to take the law into their own hands, no matter how good their case may be. Paton agreed.
Under cross-examination by Dr Yutar, it revealed that Alan Paton had as early as 1960, before the first bomb exploded on the 16 December 1961, been actively involved in propaganda to overthrow the South African Government. Paton, interviewed by a Mr Leiterman, had made certain remarks on a Canadian television talk show, incriminated him not only of high treason but also of working together with communists to overthrow the government.
Paton made a fool out of himself. A Newspaper Editor referred to this cross-examination as follows; ‘
‘It was a duel between a man of law and a man of letters, and it soon became obvious who was going to win. He went into the box to plead for mercy and found himself on the defensive. He left the witness box flushed and angry….’
Posters commented that Alan Paton, most probably unaware of it, was a useful idiot for exploitation by the communists to gain western world support.
The Rivonia court case came to an end on the 12 June 1964. The defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment, not on High Treason but on a lesser charge of Sabotage and Conspiracy to overthrow the government!
World reaction was shockingly in favour of the terrorist. The hatred that was smouldering against South Africa in the United Nations had burst open like an infected sore. The UN and governments all over the world tried to save the Rivonia Terrorists, pleaded that amnesty granted to them and all other people who were on Death Row because of their opposition to Apartheid. John Vorster seized the opportunity to point out to the world that the Rivonia Terrorists were not on Death Row, that they not sentenced to death and that there was nobody else in jail for being in opposition to Apartheid.
To be against Apartheid was not a criminal offence in South Africa.
Verwoerd addressed the nation on the 24 June 1964. He spoke about the threat and tyranny of world communism to South Africa and the Western World. He did not spare the western world either and blamed them of double standards when it came to comparing South Africa to Communist and African States where members of the opposition sentenced to death without being given or receiving a fair trial.
Verwoerd concluded his address by stating that if certain Western Powers say to him that they are glad that Mandela did not get the death sentence, because he may, like Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, still become the leader of South Africa in the future, then I pray, God forbid!’
A month after Verwoerd’s address, on the 24 July 1964, a terrible incident of sabotage occurred in South Africa that shocked the nation and the outside world. He and the senior driver were waiting at a red signal to turn green, in their Diesel Locomotive, adjacent Platform 9, attached to a goods train destined for Bloemfontein.
A suitcase bomb, placed in the passenger hall of the Johannesburg Station, exploded at 4.33 pm. The bang of the explosion was scarcely audible above the throbbing diesel engines. People ran to and threw like headless chickens, shouting inaudible words. The worst commotion appeared to be on Platform’s 5 & 6. He would later found out that Platforms 5 & 6 were the platforms just below the passenger hall where the explosion occurred. It was the busiest time of the day with passengers returning home after work. Twenty-three people were severely injured and burned. Many remained on the critical list for days. The doctors were unable to save the life of the 77-year-old Mrs Rhys. Mrs Rhys was holding in her arms the twelve-year-old girl, that was severely scared for life. The photo’s of the burnt teenager was shocking. She was the daughter of Cornelia Koekemoer.
The Johannesburg Star reported on the 27 July 1964 that the station bomb has forced the country to reflect on the land they are living in and continued as follows;
‘People previously inclined to regard the police with some disdain were now full of praise.
People, who previously criticised the implications of the 90-days detention clause, were now quiet.
They looked at the picture of the 12-year-old Cornelia Koekemoer, burned in the explosion, and they looked at their children, and they were silent.
People among those who previously declared: “It doesn’t affect us” — even during the Rivonia Trial — suddenly found them talking about the things they should have considered and discussed years ago….’
Harris, the African National Congress trained saboteur, was soon caught by the Police and sentenced to death. This act of terrorism so more quickly after the Rivonia Trial vindicated Verwoerd, the SAP, and the South African judicial system. Mandela and his co-accused got what they came begging! The South African government could not have asked the ANC for a better error in judgment.
Whoever gave Harris instructions to explode the bomb so soon after Rivonia must have been a total idiot.
This incident was terrible and left a scar on the victims and the health of Glynnis Burleigh.
53 Years later, the following story about the event was narrated to Johanna Moorhead (BBC) by the son of John Frederick Harris, David Wolfe. The Author leaves it up to the reader to reflect on David Wolfe’s narrative and his view of the incident.
My activist father hanged
What happens when you discover that your father, fighting Apartheid, killed and hurt innocent people by planting a bomb? David Wolfe tells Joanna Moorhead.
Sat H13 Aug 2016 06.00 BSTLast modified on Tue 20 September 2016 10.37 BST
When David Wolfe was 16, he found a document in the loft at his family home that contained two extraordinary revelations.
One was that he had a sister, born before him, who was adopted.
The second was that his father — whom he knew had died when he was not quite a year old — had been executed for murder.
All David had known was that his father had died fighting for African freedom. His mother, Ann, had mentioned that one day in passing when he was about twelve (12) after she overheard him talking to one of his friends about his father. But she didn’t elaborate, and David didn’t pursue it: Ann’s attitude had always been to look forward, never back; to seize the day, and the opportunities it contained. Like all children, David instinctively knew that this was his family’s way of dealing with things; he made it his way, too.
But now, at 16, the moment had come to find out the facts. On 24 July 1964, David’s father, John Harris, a member of the African Resistance Movement — an anti-apartheid organisation that had until then confined itself mainly to blowing up electricity pylons — walked into the whites-only section of Johannesburg railway station and left a suitcase there that contained a bomb. It exploded just 13 minutes later, injuring several people seriously, in particular, Glynnis Burleigh, 12, and her grandmother, Ethel Rhys, 77. Mrs Rhys died three weeks later from her injuries. Glynnis, who had 70% and third-degree burns, was left with life-changing injuries.
Harris — who appeared to have acted alone, since most of his fellow ARM members had either left the country or imprisoned — was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. On 1 April 1965, he was hanged — the only white person to be executed in South Africa for a crime as a result of murder. Harris not killed for his feud with Apartheid!
Today, David is 52, a lawyer in London, and the father of teenage twin girls. As they have grown older, they have become more interested in the unusual events surrounding their grandfather’s death. John’s story is a Channel 4 documentary screened in which he revisits Johannesburg; he left as a small child and talks to his mother (who has died since the programme made) and others who were there at the time — friends of John who remember what he was like and what happened. And, most crucially, to Glynnis, the girl so severely injured.
But the film is not — David is adamant — his journey or his assessment of what happened. He agreed to collaborate with the film-maker, Simon Finch. They visited the railway station in Johannesburg, and the wall in Freedom Park in Pretoria, where his father’s name inscribed with those of hundreds of others who sacrificed their lives to end Apartheid, he also combed through his family’s cine archive.
The home movies that came to light allows the film to flesh out the larger-than-life, passionate man who was John Harris. And that must have been difficult for David, who seems like someone who favours a rational rather than an emotional approach to life. One of the most moving moments in the film is when he reads out the messages his father wrote to him and his mother from the death cell.
However rational you are, and however much you try to transcend the baggage of your history, there are times when it wouldn’t be human not to be touched; especially when it’s your own story, and especially when your account is so moving.
The question at the heart of the documentary is this: what should David feel about John’s crime? Are the sins of a father visited on his son? Does David feel — and should he feel — guilt for his father’s actions?
When we meet near his office, David weighs up these questions with even-handed detachment. On the issue of guilt, he is clear: he feels none. “None of us is responsible for our parents’ actions. And in the same way, I can’t take credit for anything my father did. Before the bombing, he was instrumental in organising the sports boycott that ultimately helped bring down Apartheid.
I make no more credit for that than I take any blame for his catastrophic mistake in thinking the railway station cleared.”
It all rests, in fact, on this. And while David may not feel guilt, he does feel it is essential to defend his father’s case. After leaving the bomb, John telephoned two newspapers and the railway police. “There’s no doubt he gave those warnings, and there’s no doubt he expected them heeded,” says David.
So why wasn’t the station cleared?
Glynnis Burleigh with her grandmother, Ethel Rhys, on the beach, in the days before John Harris planted the bomb in 1965.
“There’s some evidence they took a calculated decision to do nothing,” he says. Even if they did, though, 13 minutes seems a very brief time in which to avert a tragedy.
The bombing and even Mrs Rhys’s death played into the hands of the South African authorities, as did Harris’s trial and execution; they wanted an anti-apartheid outrage to undermine the movement’s credibility.
Down through the decades, as well as in the immediate aftermath, John Harris’s legacy has been fiercely debated by those closest to the apartheid struggle: was he a hero, was he foolish or was he a villain? He meant his actions to bring down a heinous political system but did he, in the end, hand it a gift?
The central fact, says David, was that his father never disputed what he did. “The issue in the trial was the distinction between murder and manslaughter. But there was no jury: he tried by a single judge sitting alone, a white establishment judge who was extremely unsympathetic.”
John Harris was 27 when he hanged for murder. He and Ann described in the film as inseparable; observation is borne out by a dip into a book called Truth is a Strange Fruit by David Beresford, the Guardian’s late Johannesburg correspondent, which draws on the letters Harris sent as he waited for execution in Pretoria.
Realising there was little chance that his sentence commuted, Harris asked Ann to have “the happiest, fullest life you can manage, dearest, sweetest heart. My love for you means that I profoundly want you to have as much happiness as possible for your entire life. And there is the separate (but dependent) critical point — that David must have pleasant surroundings.”
In that same letter, Harris said Ann should “not exclude the possibility of remarriage, both for your happiness and for David’s”. And this is what happened: life in South Africa complicated for Ann after her husband’s execution, and she returned to Britain where she met and married an environmentalist, Martin Wolfe, with whom she went on to have another son.
Against the odds, David says his childhood was extremely happy. “Lots of people have complicated lives, and I don’t think mine has been any more complicated than anyone else’s,” he says. “And lots of people have parents who die when they are children. What matters is not denying the past, but enjoying our loved ones, our children, our friends and family.”
Did he ever feel angry with his father for leaving him and his mother alone? Not really, he says: “Everyone’s life is full of Sliding Door moments, and I don’t do them. Of course, I feel frustration and sadness, but I wouldn’t call it anger.”
Glynnis Burleigh today.
After Harris’s execution, his widow and baby went to live with friends — the Hains, whose son Peter would later move to Britain and become a prominent Labour politician and cabinet minister. Aged 15, Peter Hain read from the Book of Ecclesiastes at John’s funeral (“There is a time to kill and a time to heal; a time to break down and a time to build up”).
David’s life was changed forever by the day his father planted the bomb at the train station in Johannesburg. But another child’s life was altered differently. Photographs seen in the documentary show Glynnis Burleigh in childhood, tanned and fresh-faced on the beach — John Harris’s bomb would leave her scarred.
When Simon Finch told David Wolfe that he had found Glynnis, David agreed to meet her. “I felt it was the right thing to do, particularly if it was going to be helpful to her and helpful in the wider understanding of the situation,” he says.
Given that he doesn’t feel he inherited his father’s guilt, didn’t feel David should apologise to her — and he didn’t. “But there is a connection between us,” he says, and their on-screen meeting is a sombre moment of reckoning. “I don’t think John Harris was a hero,” says Glynnis in the film. “He might have been to others, but he wasn’t a hero in my eyes. I see any form of terrorism as cowardly.”
When David says, his father didn’t mean the bomb to hurt anyone because he assumed the railway station cleared, Glynnis, is adamant.
“How would you put eight sticks of dynamite … next to a woman and a child and not expect it to hurt them?”
On one point, though, they agree. “You can’t answer for your father,” says Glynnis. “And I don’t expect you to.”
What, though, of that other family secret revealed by David’s rummage in the loft when he was 16?
Ann and John had met as teenagers and later had an unplanned pregnancy. Believing relatives would disapprove of them giving the baby away; they told their families that the child had died.
David Wolfe today. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian
At the time David discovered his sister’s existence, she would have known nothing of his; but in the late 1980s, after her adoptive mother’s death, she found out her history and traced her birth mother. Ann reunited with Lynn, the daughter she had given away, and today she and David are close.
One thing that comes through in the documentary is the family’s resilience: David credits his mother for that. “She had such a positive attitude to life,” he says. “ had been through a lot: her mother died when she was a child, she’d had to give her baby away, and then her husband executed. But through it all, she knew she could survive. She used to call these events in her life her tragedies, but she dealt with them — she didn’t become embittered in any way.”
David, meanwhile, seems to have been determined not to be defined by the actions of his father — and yet, in the end, it has shaped all he has gone on to become. He studied engineering after leaving school but soon realised his future was in the law.
“I think what my father’s story gave me was what I would call a healthy scepticism about the way government and society works, and about the need to be independent-minded,” he says.
While he won’t own either the guilt or the glory for his father’s fight against Apartheid, he is clear about his father’s stance. “We all like to think we would do the right thing,” says David. “But the fact is that most white South Africans were at best passive beneficiaries of apartheid.”
Whatever else he was, John Harris, who went to his execution singing “We Shall Overcome”, was not one of those.
This article was amended on 15 August 2016 to correct some personal details.
Author: Mattheus Frederik.
In homage to the more than 3000 farmers who died since 1994 in Farm Attacks
