Praise for A Just Defiance:
“A Just Defiance is the most wonderfully good book about South Africa I have read in a decade. . . . This isn’t a book review, however. It is a plea to buy and read it. I absolutely promise you’ll enjoy every page. . . . [It’s] one of those rare creations that helps [change] one isolated but hitherto divisive experience [into] a new patch of common ground for us all.”
Peter Bruce, Business Day
“Harris has succeeded brilliantly in authentically capturing the sense of the heroic politics of the ANC of the eighties. . . . [An] important and riveting work.”
David Dison, Sunday Independent
“As gripping as John Grisham and as moving and heartrending as Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull, this book is a beautifully crafted, morally uplifting insider’s story of an extraordinary time in our recent history.”
Jenny Crwys-Williams,
talk show host of South Africa’s Jenny & Co
“Do whatever it takes to read this book: borrow it, spend your book club allowance on it, or sit in a bookstore-coffee shop everyday for a week. It should be mandatory reading for all of us.”
Julia Denny-Dimitriou, The Witness
“The book is fast-paced and absorbing, the detail intriguing and the book beautifully written. . . . A Just Defiance is a must-read.”
Makhudu Sefara, City Press
“This is not a worthy book. It is that better thing, a worthwhile book.”
Jennifer Crocker, Cape Times
“A Just Defiance breaks the mold in every possible way. . . . It’s a compelling story in and of itself.”
Kevin Ritchie, Diamond Fields Advertiser
“A painful, thought-provoking, and hope-inspiring read.”
Lindsay Slogrove, The Mercury
“An unputdownable book that deserves to become a classic.”
Reader’s Digest
“It sounds like the plot for a bestselling legal thriller and it’s written like one. A Just Defiance is a page-turning account of a little-known South African drama.”
James Mitchell, The Star
“One of the best books I’ve read this year.”
Mervyn Sloman, South African Financial Mail
“A masterful political thriller.”
Maureen Isaacson, Sunday Independent
A JUST DEFIANCE
Bombmakers, Insurgents, and the Treason Trial of the Delmas Four
PETER HARRIS
for my mother
University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
© 2012 by Peter Harris
First University of California Press edition 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Harris, Peter, 1956–
A just defiance : bombmakers, insurgents, and the treason trial of the Delmas Four / Peter Harris. — 1st University of California Press ed.
p. cm.
“Previously published 2008 by Umuzi, an imprint of Random House Struik (Pty) Ltd, Capetown, South Africa under title In a different time.”
ISBN 978-0-520-27364-1 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Trials (Political crimes and offenses)—South Africa. 2. Umkhonto we Sizwe (South Africa) 3. South Africa—History—1961–1994.
4. Anti-apartheid movements—South Africa. I. Harris, Peter, 1956–In a different time. II. Title.
KTL41.D45H372 2012
345.680231—dc23
2012005963
Manufactured in the United States of America
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100% post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.
Cover designer: Sandy Drooker | Compositor: Star Type, Berkeley
Printer and binder: Maple-Vail | Cover printer: Brady Palmer
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a story that has never left me. It has visited and haunted me from the very days on which the events took place. My challenge was to write it, a task that took me, intermittently, about ten years. It is now finished and I have many to thank for their support and assistance. Ivan Vladislavic for his faith in the book and for his advice and assistance over the last five years. Stephen Johnson, the MD of Random House, for taking the time to read my manuscript in November 2007, and for liking it. To Annari van der Merwe and Frederik de Jager of Umuzi for bearing with their first-time author.
My thanks particularly to Mike Nicol who sacrificed his entire December 2007 and early January to undertake an outstanding edit of the manuscript in an utterly professional manner. I must acknowledge Jacques Pauw’s books In The Heart of the Whore and Dances with Devils, which were a valuable source of information.
My gratitude goes to Helen Seady for her input on the text, and Norman Manoim for advice on some of the long-forgotten legal issues.
Finally, to Caroline who has been a constant source of support and provided invaluable advice in relation to all of the many drafts of the book over the last ten years, drafts which she painstakingly read and on which she provided meticulous comment. She has been central to the writing of this book and, with my beloved children Simon, Isabella, Dominic and Luke is, of course, central to me.
P H
April 2008
I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas
– from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot
THE BOMB
The man leaning over the bench is focused on his work – a study in concentration, as you should be when constructing a bomb. His name is Japie F Kok and he works for the mechanical department of the technical division of the security branch of the South African Police.
The division’s workshop is located at Rebecca Street in Pretoria West. Security around the workshop is tight, for this is the place where the ‘unofficial’ devices are made: the special phone taps, the booby traps, silencers, timing devices, detonators, grenades without the time delay. Here too containers are specially constructed to carry carefully designed weapons of