The two 'trained terrorists' arrived back in South Africa in July 1975. For me departure from Britain was not easy as I was leaving Robin behind. At first I repeatedly had to remind myself that the job we'd been entrusted to do was more important than any personal suffering I would have to put up with. Apartheid caused mass suffering on such a scale that feeling sorry for myself was pathetic and selfish. But private sorrows were closer to the bone and no amount of virtuous thought was able to stop the pain and loneliness of separation; only time would lessen it.
Robin and I had exchanged false names and safe addresses so that we could keep in contact, but neither of us knew when or if we'd ever see each other again. We had agreed that we could not maintain a proper relationship from such a distance and in any case I had been instructed to lead as 'normal' a life as possible - and this included trying not to be celibate.
Everything looked different when we got back; it also looked so much the same. While we had been away changing our lives so that we could help bring an end to apartheid, people we had known were carrying on with their lives in much the same way as before. They were doing the same old things in the same old places and bore the same old attitudes - they had kept their heads firmly buried in the ground. People who had been close to us, our relatives and friends, were now the enemy, and we found ourselves living in their midst as 'traitors'. Our own parents, sisters, brothers were on the side which stood against everything we were fighting for and for everything we were fighting against.
The full horror of apartheid was clearer than ever. It angered us intensely and made us more determined to do something about it than before. But no longer was there any question of feeling guilty about having to live the lives of white South Africans in apartheid South Africa; we would be doing so in order to end doing so.
Our first task was to sort out our mundane above-ground affairs, such as finding ourselves jobs and places to live. Within a few weeks I found work at the segregated University of the Western Cape, for those whom the regime had classified as 'Coloured'. The job was in a sociological research institute attached to the University, with the pretentious name of the Institute for Social Development (ISD). My job was to enquire into various matters affecting the 'Coloured' community - with what purpose I never really found out.
The job proved to be an ideal cover, for any whites who worked at such places - known as 'bush colleges' or 'tribal colleges' - were usually regarded as supporters of the regime. The facilities at ISD were immensely useful for our purposes. It received and kept vast quantities of information on all subjects, including a newspaper clippings library. After a while it became my responsibility to organise the marking, cutting, pasting and filing of the clippings and it does not require too much imagination to guess how the library was adapted to provide us with the information we needed for our ANC work.
Not only were the facilities useful but the research took me right into the townships and into black people's homes where I was able to feel their mood and begin to understand what it meant to live under apartheid. I got to know every township in the Cape Town area inside out. This was important as I was still living the life of a white person and the whole exercise could have become academic if I had been confined to my secure little white suburb.
There were no strict hours of work at ISD and you could even 'work at home' if you wished - they were only interested in results. The freedom to come and go as I pleased was the most valuable aspect of the job, without which participating in an underground cell would have been much more difficult.
Stephen was not so lucky in finding work but as ISD had just been set up and was looking for more staff I suggested he apply for a job there as well. He was given employment but could not see eye to eye with the boss and resigned after a few months. This was a great pity as he was not able to find another job after that and eventually had to leave Cape Town to earn a living.
At ISD I met Daphne, who was also working as a researcher. Correctly I shouldn't have developed a relationship with her as she was 'Coloured' and therefore unsuitable as a girl-friend for someone who was meant to be working underground and attempting to appear normal while doing so. But what could I do? I felt attracted to her. Was I supposed to reject friendships with people with whom I worked every day because of their colour? That would have appeared even less normal.
Daphne and I got on well but she couldn't help thinking that I was a very secretive person. I'm certain she believed I was having an affair with another woman because I kept disappearing for long periods with only feeble explanations. Whenever our conversations led onto political matters I would attempt to steer them away from the subject, leading her to think that I was totally apathetic and cynical. At times my lack of conviction about the awkward situations our 'mixed' relationship led us into drove her to desperation and she would walk out on me. I found it extremely difficult to maintain a close relationship without being able to talk about the most important things in my life. Personal ethics crumble on a relationship of lies.
After a couple of months Stephen and I began to grow restless. There had been no signs of police surveillance and any further delay in getting on with the job of setting up our cell seemed to be overcaution. Both of us began to collect newspaper clippings of current events and carefully pasted these into scrap books for use when we got going. I went to a number of estate agents to see what sorts of premises we could hire to set up 'shop'. There were three possibilities: small flats, offices and garages. Most agents advertised all three but only garages were within our meagre budget at that time. I noted the addresses of a few and went to see if they would be suitable. Most weren't as they were just fenced off parking bays at the bottom of blocks of flats, but some looked OK.
Towards the end of the year we found a garage in a huge block of flats in Green Point, a suburb of Cape Town, and took out a lease for six months. The garage appeared to be suitable as it had thick walls and a strong door to contain the sounds of printing. Its position allowed us to reach it in such a way that we could tell if we were being followed.
We bought a second-hand typewriter and duplicator, as well as the stationery needed to print and post pamphlets. Our first purchases were made with obsessive attention to the rules of conspiracy that we'd been taught: only small quantities bought at a time so as not to attract attention, no names given and appearances changed so that salespeople would not remember us.
We produced our first pamphlet in early December 1975 - about the South African invasion of Angola. It was not a long run as we had only managed to collect about a hundred names to whom we could send them. The ANC had promised to send us a list of names as soon as we got going, but I suppose they wanted us first to prove that we were going to use the training and money they had given us for the agreed purpose before taking the risk of sending us a mailing list through the post.
The garage proved to be absolutely unsuitable for the job. It had no light and ventilation when the door was shut. To provide light we had to use a gas lamp, but coupled with the mid-summer heat it became unbearably hot. Unfamiliarity with the duplicator meant that there were more dud than good copies and there was nowhere to dispose of the bad ones. There was also nowhere to wash our hands which got covered in ink. The surplus leaflets we later took up the side of the mountain and burnt in a sacrificial bonfire, but the wind, of course, blew bits of charred leaflet all over the place. We were learning.
That one experience convinced us that we would have to find a more suitable place from which to operate, so it was back to the estate agents. A few weeks later I found a small room in an annexe to a block of flats in the Gardens area of Cape Town. It was not ideal but all we could afford and far better than the garage. It was a small, sparsely-furnished room but with a window for ventilation, a light for working at night and a handbasin for washing ink off our hands. There was also a bathroom and toilet down the passage which were shared with the other tenants in the block. The only drawback with the place was the other inhabitants: they were too friendly and kept knocking on the door for a chat or to invite us around to their rooms for a drink. They must have found us very unfriendly and thought it strange that we were hardly ever there and even more strange that two blokes should occasionally spend time together in a small room!
Stephen was still without work and getting desperate. The two of us were sharing a flat with his sister in the respectable suburb of Rondebosch and this was costing a lot of money. He was beginning to think of going to Johannesburg to look for work. This was tragic as it meant that our cell would be split and that in effect I would be working on my own. The ANC wanted us to work together and would not finance two sets of equipment. But he had to live.
In February we produced our second pamphlet and our first in the new place. Like the first it was about the South African invasion of Angola, but we produced it in far greater numbers as the ANC had just sent us a list of five hundred names and addresses. As we had no addressing machine at that stage we had to laboriously type these onto the envelopes.
The room proved to be much more suitable than the garage. We could type the stencils and envelopes in it rather than at home and do the printing at leisure with genuine tea breaks. The spoilt copies, of which there were far fewer, we disposed of down the toilet after first soaking them in water and tearing them into shreds. Best of all we could wash ourselves and emerge from the room with clean hands.
There was one problem we had not considered before: how to post six or seven hundred envelopes without exposing ourselves. The dilemma was whether to post them all at once or over a period of time, a problem we were never to resolve satisfactorily. If we posted them all at once the post collecters or sorters would notice the sudden flood of letters in the post and intercept them for inspection. If we posted them over time in small batches the post collectors and sorters would not notice anything unusual but we would increase our chances of being seen posting the envelopes, especially if the police were watching post-boxes after intercepting some. Obviously, whichever method we chose, it was important to vary the appearance of the items as much as possible by using different sorts of envelopes, addressing systems and stamps. Uniformity was what the cops looked for.
In March Stephen decided to go to Johannesburg to look for work. Conveniently the ANC had sent us a draft for a leaflet that they wanted dispersed by leaflet bomb in Johannesburg on or around the 21st of March - the anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre in 1960. So we decided to kill two birds with one stone by combining his search for work with our first leaflet bomb mission.
I had been experimenting with some new-style leaflet bombs and had developed a much more compact version of what had been demonstrated to us in London. The ones we'd been shown and which had previously been used by other operatives were of a very complicated design. They had been used camouflaged in buckets and had thus become labelled by the media as 'bucket bombs'. This seemed a peculiar way of disguising them, for nothing would appear more abnormal than someone walking around town with a covered bucket. The new design fitted inside a cardboard box and could be placed in an ordinary plastic carrier bag. This alteration was essential as the 'bombs' had to be transported inside our suitcases to Johannesburg by air.
Stephen left for Johannesburg a few days before I did and booked himself into a hotel. He went to a few places to look for work, and while doing so sought out the best locations to place the bombs, such as railway and bus stations around the centre of Johannesburg. I took a plane to Johannesburg the day before we were due place the devices, having left word at work that I would be 'working at home' for the next two days.
Stephen had taken three leaflet bombs with him and I brought another three. He met me at the airport bus terminus and took me to his hotel. Fortunately he had been given a double room so there was a bed for me too. Under normal circumstances I would never have thought of staying in a hotel without paying, but under the extraordinary circumstances normal ethics had to be put aside.
Both of us were absolutely terrified at having to carry out the mission. We'd never done anything like it before and were only too aware of the consequences of being caught. Neither of us slept a wink that night, lying awake wondering where we'd get the courage to do it.
The next morning Stephen took me on a tour of the centre of Johannesburg to point out the places he'd chosen for the bombs: the black entrance to the main Johannesburg railway station, a bus station, a narrow market street, the Rand Daily Mail newspaper office and Faraday Station - a station from where many blacks caught trains back to Soweto.
I booked into another hotel and then we divided the targets between ourselves, planned routes to get to them and worked out a plan of action. We would each first take one bomb from our respective hotels, set them off, and then return for the other two if the first ones had been a success. The time chosen was the afternoon rush hour.
At midday we bought a large bottle of wine in the hope that the alcohol would give us Dutch courage, but the stuff was totally ineffective against the torrents of adrenalin our hearts were pumping out. At about four we separated and went to our respective hotels to prepare the bombs. We had agreed to meet after it was all over on the observation floor at the top of the Carlton Tower - Johannesburg's tallest building.
I took one bomb out of my suitcase and placed it on the dresser to make sure everything was in order. The device consisted of a wooden base about the size of an average book. Mounted vertically on the base was a piece of aluminium tubing. Sitting on top of the tube and fixed to a plunger made from a piece of broomstick that fitted inside it was a platform the same size as the base. On this I placed five hundred of the leaflets we had brought with us. An ordinary kitchen timer gave the time delay and a battery fired the home-made detonator inside the tube. The whole device was placed in a topless cardboard box, put inside a plastic shopping bag and then covered with newspaper to disguise it.
I walked out of the hotel as nonchalantly as possible but couldn't help thinking that I was transparent and that the people sitting in the lobby knew what I was carrying. They were all laughing inside because I was soon about to be caught. 'Terrorists' had no chance!
I had been allocated the black entrance to the Johannesburg railway station. First I went into the station toilet - the 'whites-only' toilet of course - to prime the bomb. In a cubicle I removed the leaflets and lifted off the platform so that I could pour the ready-mixed explosive powder down the tube. Then I set the timer for twenty minutes, enough time, I thought, to get around to the other side of the station and get away. My heart was pounding so violently that I was certain people could hear it. I felt faint, sick with fear.
With my shopping bag ticking away I emerged from that toilet feeling quite ridiculous. Surely everyone could hear the ticking? Surely they could all see the guilty look on my face? I just knew I would bump into some long-lost friend who would want to stop for a chat and then the bomb would go off in my hand.
I walked around to the rear-side of the station where the black entrance was located. For the life of me I could see no suitable place to deposit the bomb. Some distance from the entrance I spotted a rubbish bin - it would have to do. Fortunately it was nearly empty, so I dropped my bundle in it and made off as quickly as I could. There were hundreds of black people walking by, so even if it was not as close as it could have been it was a good place. I continued walking past the black entrance and disappeared into the bustling crowd of homeward-bound commuters heading for the station.
I rushed back to my hotel without waiting to hear if the bomb had gone off. Back in my room I primed the other two, set the timers for half an hour and placed them next to each other in a very large shopping bag. This time I was feeling more confident. Some of the fear had subsided and I was beginning to feel defiant instead of feeling that I was just doing my duty.
It took longer than I'd calculated to reach the bus terminus where I was to place my second bomb. As soon as I reached it I took one of the bombs out of the bag and deposited it next to some rubbish bags on the pavement. It was in its own bag so did not look out of place; I just hoped some curious person would not come and look in it.
There was less than ten minutes left to get to the next place, a narrow, busy shopping and market street. The ticking of the timer seemed to be in unison with my heart; both would explode simultaneously if I did not get to the place in time. With what I thought was about a minute to spare I reached the place, dropped the bag and ran. As I turned the corner I heard a loud bang - it had been less than a minute. I raced from that place as fast as I could without breaking into a sprint, and headed for the Carlton Centre, top floor.
Stephen was already there and looking through one of the telescopes at the flashing lights of police cars outside the offices of the Rand Daily Mail where he had placed one of his bombs. Multitudes of cops were milling about investigating the remains of the bomb and picking up the remaining leaflets that were still blowing about in the street. We turned the telescope to Faraday Station where he'd placed his other two. There we could see hundreds of leaflets in the street but no sign of cops or of the bombs. Someone must have scooped them up and made off with them.
We congratulated ourselves on our success and felt a sort of defiant pride in having pulled off the operation and brought out the police. We treated ourselves to a lavish meal in downtown Jo'burg that night and felt no guilt in using our ANC money to pay the bill - the perks of the job.
The next day it was headlines in all the papers. That was the time when a small thing like a leaflet bomb made big news. It was a time when the ANC was not, on the surface, very active. Three months later all hell broke loose in Soweto and from that time on the ANC has never looked back.
That first round of leaflet bombs was successful in that all went off and the message got spread. It also taught us a number of valuable lessons. The most important of these was that we needed to devise some form of triggering mechanism so that we did not have to walk through the streets with the bombs ticking away in our hands. Anything could go wrong: you might not be able to deposit your bomb at a chosen place (a cop at the spot, perhaps), you might meet someone you knew, there might not be the anticipated crowd, there might not be a suitable dropping place, and so on. Altogether it was too risky to be walking around with a 'live' device.
The solution was very simple - a triggering pin to hold the timer at the desired timing. On location the pin could be pulled out to set the timer going. I tested this innovation two months later on Cape Town's Grand Parade, which becomes a market area on Saturdays. The triggering mechanism gave me such confidence that I was able to walk around with the bomb for a long time in search of the ideal dropping place. I didn't wait to see if it had gone off but reports in the papers later in the day confirmed that it had.
Stephen by this time had secured a job as a careers' adviser at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg - his period of job-seeking had given him a unique qualification. His departure left me in control of the cell and finances - if you can call a one-person operation a 'cell'. As there were insufficient funds to set up another cell in Johannesburg, Stephen was effectively prevented from taking part in most of our ANC activities.
Running the 'cell' on my own was the most thoroughly lonely experience in the world. Everything took twice as long to do and there was nobody to discuss things with. While friends were going camping, to movies, parties, and the beach I was buried in that dark little room like a hermit mole.
Many people have the impression that underground work is romantic and exciting. This is far from the truth. It is laborious, lonely, monotonous work with no immediately observable rewards. My average day, after work, consisted of reading through three or four newspapers in fine detail, dating the important articles, cutting out and pasting them, and then writing articles for the next pamphlet. I had to do these time-consuming tasks out of sight of friends and on top of all the other daily tasks, such as making small purchases of stamps and stationery. Weekends I would invariably spend at the room preparing leaflet bombs, typing stencils, duplicating leaflets, shoving them into envelopes and licking stamps. Postings usually took me a whole night as I had to drive at least 200 kilometres to spread the load as thinly as possible in the post-boxes of Cape Town and its environs.
There was so much to do and it had to be done with such meticulous care that the distinction between underground life and normal life became increasingly blurred. Yet life had to be lived and people convinced that I was not involved in anything suspicious. Living became a complete lie - a double-sided existence in which I was often unsure which side I was living on. Such a schizophrenic existence was hard to maintain; at times I thought I was going mad. What normal person spent hours cutting up newspapers, rushed about buying fifty stamps here, a packet of envelopes there, or hid themselves in secret rooms on sunny weekends to duplicate leaflets? What normal person had to tell lies constantly to explain periods of disappearance from the real world?
In May a letter arrived from the ANC requesting one of us to come over to Britain for a special purpose. As Stephen was in no position to take leave from his newly acquired job, the duty fell on me. I flew up to Johannesburg on the way to London early in July, with a suitcase full of leaflet bombs. It was barely two weeks after the start of the 'Soweto uprising' and the police were shooting schoolkids in the streets as if they were shooting rabbits. No better time to set off a few leaflet bombs.
I told no one, apart from Stephen, that I was going to Europe. To friends, family and employer alike I said that I was taking a holiday with friends in the Northern Transvaal. To back up my story I left a batch of postcards, dated a few days apart, for Stephen to post to Daphne and my parents telling them what a wonderful holiday I was having. The precise purpose of the visit cannot be divulged: all I can say is that it was to receive some special training related to certain tasks the ANC had in mind for us.
While in London I read in the papers that a number of leaflet bombs had gone off in central Johannesburg early in July. Later Stephen told me that he had found the triggering mechanism a vast improvement. By the time he had placed the fourth leaflet bomb that day he'd become so blas that he simply put the bomb down, stood back a distance and watched it go off. He experienced none of the terror that accompanied us during our first operation in March.
The overseas visit was not all work: I was able to see Robin again. My sudden appearance came as a complete surprise to her as she had not been told that I was coming. In the year that I'd been away she had become fully involved in ANC work in London, to the extent that she felt it would not be wise for her to return to South Africa. I did not get much time to see her but promised that if I could save up enough money I would make a special trip over the next year to come and see her.
At the end of July, shortly before I was due to return to South Africa, four ANC operatives were arrested in Cape Town for engaging in more or less the same kind of work that Steve and I had been doing. Their names were David and Sue Rabkin, Jeremy Cronin and Anthony Holiday. Steve and I were not to know it then but we were to meet Dave, Jeremy and Tony in prison two years later. Their arrests came as a shock to the comrades in London as they had been involved in the training of the four and had considered them a proficient and valuable team. The arrests altered the plans the ANC had in store for us, the plans connected with the special training I had just been given. Steve and I were now to take over from the four arrested and become the main propaganda cell in the Cape.
Back in Johannesburg I found that Stephen had only sent off one or two of the postcards I'd left with him and people all over were wondering what had happened to me. Normally I was a good letter-writer so it was understandable that my parents were growing frantic, especially after Stephen had told them some cock-and-bull story that I had been sick or was in hospital or something. Daphne was phoning for news every day and my boss was also under the impression that I had been overcome by some dire misfortune.
I had been instructed by the ANC to do nothing until further instruction when I got back to Cape Town. No word came for months and I grew increasingly frustrated and frantic. Something had to be done: the townships were in flames, the people were demonstrating in Cape Town's central business area, the whites were smelling teargas for the first time and seeing with their own eyes the brutality of the apartheid police. I wanted to break discipline, to do something, anything. I was a revolutionary, I couldn't just sit around like everybody else and watch events going by. To contain my impatience I churned out leaflet bombs for the moment the signal was given.
During September the trial of David and Sue Rabkin and Jeremy Cronin took place in Cape Town. I followed the proceedings with close interest but could not take the risk of attending the court sessions. It was clear from the newspaper reports that the three were exemplary operatives and had done a good job in spreading the Movement's literature during their three year period of operation. They were charged with producing and posting 14 different pamphlets. What they had done was certainly inspirational and spurred us on to even greater efforts. But it made us angry that some of our comrades had been captured and that the enemy was using their trial as an opportunity to demonstrate to the public that 'seditious' activity gets nowhere.
After being convicted the prosecution called on the judge to consider the death penalty because of the seriousness of the case. There would have been a massive outcry had he resorted to it as whites are only sentenced to death in the most extreme circumstances. David Rabkin was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment and Jeremy Cronin to seven. Sue Rabkin was sentenced to 12 months with 11 months suspended: she was pregnant and gave birth while in prison. The judge explicitly stated that he was imposing such harsh sentences because he wanted them, above all, to act as a deterrent to others. It had exactly the opposite effect on us.
Tony Holiday's trial took place separately in Pretoria in November and had the same effect upon us as the earlier trial. He was charged with producing and distributing 12 different leaflets and pamphlets, of recruiting people and receiving financial assistance from the ANC. He was sentenced to six years' imprisonment.
Now we knew the price of commitment.
Instruction finally came from the ANC in the form of a draft for a leaflet to be disseminated by means of leaflet bombs on or around 'Heroes' Day' - the 16th of December. Stephen fortunately was going to be in Cape Town at that time as his university was closed over the Christmas period. As the 16th was a public holiday - a day celebrated by the whites as the day of a major victory over the forces of black resistance last century - we chose to do the job on the 15th.
Stephen placed two bombs in central Cape Town at around midday and I did two after work at a railway station and bus station in the suburbs. Headlines again.
It might seem that we did these things because of a secret desire for fame and publicity, but this was not the case. The newspapers by reporting the incidents were spreading the message that the ANC was alive and active. The actual message on the leaflets, important as it was, was not as important as the fact that the ANC had done it. It is because of the propaganda effect that these actions had that there are now restrictions on giving prominence to them. Unless the authorities can use such incidents to their own benefit - if there has been a failure, for instance - very little gets reported these days. The more that happens the less people know; the whites bury their heads further into the ground.
At the end of 1976 I abandoned the secret room for a new place. I had found the perfect premises: a small flat in a quiet area of Cape Town on the side of Table Mountain. The flat was around the back of a block of flats and had originally been used for housing a caretaker, but for some reason was no longer used as such. It was separate from the other flats in the block and did not use the same entrance. It had a bedroom, kitchen and small bathroom. Our finances had improved somewhat so I fitted it out to look like a normal habitation. I brought in furniture, a small cooker, a fridge and other paraphenalia of living. While most of these luxuries were superfluous to the job in hand, they made the work more bearable as I could carry on late into the night, fix myself meals, have a shower, stay overnight and then go to work the next morning.
Not only did I change our premises but I changed our equipment too. I bought an addressing machine and a new typewriter, and buried the old one in a deep hole in the dense bush of the Cape Flats. We had been taught that it was essential to make regular changes of equipment - typewriters especially - as the police could only prove that you had produced a particular pamphlet or leaflet if they could link it to specific items of equipment in your possession.
Changing premises, purchasing equipment and just doing what we were doing made us realise what an advantage it was to have a white skin while running an underground cell. No one suspected a white person of being engaged in subversive activities against the state - whites were never 'terrorists'. A white skin was a passport to places where blacks would automatically be under suspicion. A black person could not, for instance, walk into a shop and buy a duplicator without questions being asked; go to an estate agent and rent a flat to set up a printing factory or to hide arms. In the overcrowded housing in the townships where could a black person hide to produce revolutionary literature or make weapons for the armed struggle?
It struck us as a great pity that so few whites were prepared to participate in the struggle for a free and democratic South Africa.
In January 1977 I carried out the first major job in our new role. It was to produce and distribute Vukani! - Awake!, the underground journal of the 'ANC Support Group'. Pamphlets under this title had been produced and distributed by several groups before us - Dave Rabkin's and Jeremy Cronin's being the last. Our mailing list had grown very long by this stage so the job took me many days to complete. How I wished Stephen were there to help me.
In February a draft arrived for Inkululeko - Freedom, No.20, the underground journal of the South African Communist Party. It was pages and pages in length and it took so long to produce that I developed sores on my backside while sitting on an upended bucket turning that duplicator handle.
In early June Stephen rang to tell me that some right-wing outfit at his university was organising a sociological conference at the university and were so desperate for delegates that they were dishing out free air tickets. I understood him to mean that I should take advantage of the offer to bring him some leaflet bombs to be set off on the anniversary of the start of the Soweto uprising on 16th June. I felt no compunction in doing so as the organisation in question had clearly demonstrated its antipathy towards the liberation struggle, and the ANC had said that we should try to set off some leaflet bombs around that date.
So off I flew to Johannesburg, free of charge, with a suitcase full of bombs for Stephen. I attended one token session of the conference and then returned to Cape Town. Stephen did a marvellous job with the bombs on the 15th and 16th of June, the incident receiving wide coverage in the press.
Leaflet 'bombings' had become our stock in trade and we no longer regarded placing them as any big deal. In fact we looked at them as routine operations and enjoyed watching their effects. From the half hour to which we'd set the timers on the first occasion we had reduced the timing to three minutes. That gave us plenty of time to get out of the immediate vicinity of the blast and to a suitable vantage point. The packaging of the bombs was such that they never aroused suspicion and no one ever took any notice if you dumped one next to a pile of rubbish or in a bin. We could not help thinking how easy it would have been to carry out acts of sabotage in the same way, for the leaflet bombs were, technically speaking, the same as real bombs. This, probably, was why the cops took them so seriously.
In June 1977 I went to Britain again but this time openly and at my own expense. The objective was to see Robin and spend some time with her. But, as I should have expected, my holiday turned into a work session for the ANC. This was largely because the ANC was reluctant to let me return after I reported a number of suspicious incidents which had occurred shortly before leaving for Britain: several letters written in invisible ink that I'd received had not developed properly, leading them to suspect that they had been 'pressed' by the security police to make a copy of the cryptic message before being sent on; a card containing a list of names on microfilm appeared to have come apart, revealing the film. In addition, on the day of my departure for Britain there had been a strange phonecall allegedly from South Africa to one of my secret postal contacts in London. On checking with the exchange the comrades found that there had not been any long-distance calls to the number, meaning that it must have been made locally.
I had only meant to stay for two weeks but ended up staying six. At the end of that time I was given clearance to return, but only because of the pressure I'd exerted. Prison, I insisted, was preferable to spending the rest of my life in exile in London. However, I agreed that if there were any more signs that could be interpreted as police surveillance both Stephen and I would leave immediately.
On return to South Africa everything appeared normal. To make sure, I did nothing for a month. There were no signs that I was being watched and no more strange happenings. Either they police were playing a game or their investigative skills were better than I'd given them credit for. The episode made me angry: The cops can go to hell. If we allow ourselves to be intimidated by our own imaginings then we'll get nothing done. Let's get on with the job. If they're going to pounce let them do so, but after we've done something big.
This line of thinking prompted our next action, the one of which we are the most proud. To coincide with a visit by Stephen to Cape Town in September I made two leaflet bombs and a large banner to hang from a high building in the centre of Cape Town. The banner was huge: about 10 metres long by 1 metre wide with the words 'ANC LIVES' painted on it and at the bottom the black, green and gold colours of the ANC flag. It was rolled up with hundreds of leaflets inside and fitted with an exploding release-device set to go off after five minutes of being hung up. With a loud report it would unfurl and drop the leaflets into the street below.
At lunch-time on the chosen day I fixed the banner to a railing on the top floor of the outside of a parking garage in the centre of Cape Town by means of a steel chain and a huge padlock. To prevent the cops simply cutting the chain to remove it I'd threaded electrical wire through the chain to make it appear as if the device was booby trapped. And on the box containing the timer and battery I stuck a label with the words: 'Danger!/Gevaar! Do not remove. Explosives inside'. The timer controlling the explosive release-device was started in the same way as the leaflet bombs by pulling out a triggering pin.
At the same time as I fixed the banner, Stephen placed the two leaflet bombs in the street below. All went off more or less simultaneously, creating a tremendous effect with leaflets cascading to the ground from the banner above and rising to the sky from the blasts below. Leaflets were blowing around in the air for a long time afterwards.
We stood around to watch the effects. People ran from all directions to snatch up the leaflets, others in the opposite direction to escape the scene. Some civic-minded citizens (white of course) gathered up as many leaflets as they could to hand to the police. But there were so many leaflets in the street that there were enough for all. People stood in bewilderment at the spectacle. One pedestrian even asked Stephen what was going on: 'Some bloody terrorists have put a bomb in the street', he replied agitatedly.
In no time police vehicles with sirens blaring and lights flashing arrived on the scene. Even an ambulance arrived - to create an effect no doubt. The banner remained in position for at least half an hour as the police struggled to remove the lock. Clearly the fake wires had acted as the deterrent they were intended to be. A cop told us after our detention six months later that they went through half a dozen hacksaw blades trying to cut the hardened steel hasp of the padlock.
While Stephen was in Cape Town he indicated that he could tolerate Johannesburg no longer and that he was thinking of chucking in his job at the university and returning to Cape Town. He realised that he would be out of work but had decided that unemployment was preferable to doing no ANC work. To survive he could get a grant to do a master's degree in sociology at the University of Cape Town. This would have to be paid back at a later date but the imperatives of our underground work were more important than any future financial problems he'd have to face. He could only return to Cape Town at the end of the university term in December, however.
After the banner a Vukani! - Awake! was produced every month until February 1978. The October, November and December issues I produced on my own but the two 1978 issues were produced together. Producing the pamphlets - you could call them newspapers - was a mammoth task as each consisted of about six typed foolscap-size pages. The articles were thoroughly researched and carefully written and covered a range of topical subjects. Vast quantities of paper, envelopes and stamps had to be bought; our mailing list had become as long as we could handle.
Several amusing but frightening incidents happened while out posting the Vukanis. On one occasion when I got out of my car to post a bundle of letters across the road, the door slammed shut and I was locked out with the engine still running. I had no choice but to smash a fanlight window. The street was busy and I'm sure a passing pedestrian took my number. On another occasion I was stopped for speeding. On the back seat were two suitcases full of unposted Vukanis. When the cop jumped out in the road to flag me down I did not know it was for speeding and thought it was a roadblock. When he did not search my car or arrest me for subversion and only presented me with a speeding ticket I actually thanked him gratefully. He thought I was weird.
The most frightening incident happened, of all places, about 100 metres from the headquarters of the security police in Cape Town. As I pulled away from a set of traffic lights I smelt burning. Suddenly a cloud of smoke poured through the dashboard. The car was on fire and on the back seat were thousands of leaflets in suitcases. I quickly stopped at the side of the road, opened the bonnet and saw that the battery lead was shorting against the bodywork - the sparks had set alight the oily gunge on the side of the engine compartment. Fortunately I had some old rags in the boot and was able to smother the flames. If the car had burned out at that spot I would undoubtedly have been in hiding that night.
At the end of the year Stephen handed in his resignation and moved back to Cape Town. As my two flatmates, Heri Hirt and Klaus Hartmuth, German students at the University of Cape Town, were away on holiday, Stephen temporarily came to stay with me. When he started his course he would move to his parents'.
It was good to have comradeship again: to be able to work together and plan our operations collectively. On my own I had tended to become a bit anarchic. There was no one to observe whether I stuck to my programmes or even if I had any. Hardest of all was maintaining discipline. I tended to work too much as there was more certainty in my underground life than in my above-ground one. This resulted in endless personal problems and family complications. Daphne broke up with me a number of times but I could never tell her the reasons for the tensions in our relationship; my family thought I was the most uncommunicative person in the world.
Our first action as a reconstituted cell was also our last leaflet bomb action. We planned it for the 16th of December, Heroes' Day, again. But acting on a premonition we decided at the last moment to postpone it for a week. Since we'd carried out most of our actions around commemorative days we reckoned it would be safer to avoid them for a while. And we can thank our lucky stars that we did, for the security police, as we later found out, had sent one of their big-shots to Cape Town to witness the expected 'bombings'. This particular cop later told us that he was 'damn annoyed' that he had to come all the way to Cape Town for nothing and then as soon as he got back to Pretoria he saw on his television that a spate of leaflet bombs had gone off in Cape Town.
Over a period of two days we set off ten leaflet bombs targetted at crowds of Christmas shoppers in the centre of Cape Town and other suburban shopping areas. So that we could watch the fireworks, we set the timers for a mere two and a half minutes. They certainly were spectacular. The leaflets would spray into the air about 15 metres high but if there was any wind they would be lifted much higher. A cop later told us that they found leaflets on the tops of buildings 75 metres high and up to half a kilometre away.
During January and February 1978 a number of strange happenings took place which worried us greatly. Every few days there would be odd phonecalls. Someone would ask for 'John' and we would reply that there was no 'John' living at the number. It would always be the same voice. After a while we started to keep a diary of the phonecalls. Then one day there was a suspicious-looking character sitting on the balcony railing directly outside our front door. Another day there was someone standing on the pavement directly opposite our flat. The person looked like the stereotypical security cop: short hair, obligatory moustache, clashing outfit, mean appearance.
From all this it might seem obvious that we were being watched. But after you've being working underground for two and a half years you begin to think everybody is watching you - paranoia easily gets the better of you. The trouble is that you're never quite sure. You can't flee the country every time someone appears to be staring at you or every time you get a wrong number. In the end, when you do see someone who appears to be watching you, you tell yourself that you're just getting paranoid and that you shouldn't worry yourself about it.
But, as it so happened, these were real cops doing real surveillance and not our imaginations playing games with us. The police told us after our arrest of some of the things we'd done while they had us under observation, which indicated to us how long we'd been watched. On one occasion we had lost them by driving down a one way street. On another they had placed someone disguised as a drunkard in the graveyard opposite our flat who was able to relate how I had removed and replaced my diving equipment from the built-in wardrobe in my bedroom.
How the cops got on to us we will probably never know. I doubt whether it was the result of one particular mistake on our part; more likely the result of careful police work over a long period of time. The security police were meticulous in their investigations and followed up the minutest details. For instance, the wood I had used for the bases of the leaflet bombs I had always bought from a certain hardware dealer who sold it as off-cuts. The cops measured the wood and found it to be a non-standard gauge, left-overs from a commercial job. They were able to trace the manufacturer of the wood, who had used it and ultimately where the off-cuts ended up - the hardware store from which I bought them.
Naturally we did make mistakes - that was inevitable. But I don't believe any of them were major; mostly just the result of not being thorough enough. It was easy to take short cuts, to not take enough care; you never knew how careful you needed to be. For example, to spread the word about ANC Radio Freedom broadcasts I made up a rubber stamp giving the frequencies and times it could be received. I used it to stamp the details in telephone directories and on railway timetables but was not careful enough to do this far enough away from where we lived. It would thus have been reasonable for the police to conclude that the mystery stamper lived in the vicinity of the stampings. If the cops had investigated where most of our envelopes had been posted they would have found the heaviest concentrations nearest to where we lived.
Piecing together hundreds of unrelated scraps of evidence the cops were probably able to narrow down their suspicions to a very small number of people. Without doubt they had files on us from long before we began our work for the ANC. At university neither of us had been very circumspect in hiding our political leanings. From that starting point they would at a certain stage have been able to direct some of the evidence at us. Then it was only a matter of time if they had decided to watch either of us.
Our own manner of operation and living was not beyond criticism. After a while it is easy to become blas and let your guard slip: you stop taking the necessary precautionary measures; you stop looking over your shoulder and in your rear-view mirror; you stop being disciplined in the way you were taught. I was going out with Daphne, a 'Coloured', and Stephen was going out with an Indian woman, Feroza. This was bound to attract attention as only people with left-wing views were prepared to show open contempt for racist laws. While in Johannesburg Stephen had made friends with 'banned' people, some of whom regularly flouted their banning orders and visited him at his flat. Many of his other friends were politically involved types. Through my job I too had made a number of 'undesirable' friends - i.e. blacks - who invited me to their homes in the townships, some of which places were out of bounds for white people.
Our last act was one over which the cops must have gloated and which they used to time the moment of our arrest. We had decided to move our operating premises again and at the end of February foolishly brought all our equipment together for the move. We did this because the new place was due to become available a week after the old one had to be vacated. To span the gap we hired a garage near our (residential) flat and moved everything from the old premises into it. We also moved to it several trunks of equipment and banned books that we had hidden in other places, so that they too could be moved to new places.
The cops observed the move, which we carelessly made in broad daylight. From that moment a permanent watch was placed over us, which if we'd been alert enough we would undoubtedly have noticed. In fact we were so blind to what was happening that the cops started to play games with us. On the last Sunday before our arrest Steve and I, together with Heri, Klaus, Daphne, Feroza and several other friends, held a braaivleis (barbecue) at the side of the road running along the base of Table Mountain. While we were cooking our meat and swigging our wine the cops drove up in their car and started making their own braaivleis just 30 metres away. As we were a 'multi-racial' gathering someone from our group jokingly suggested that they were cops spying on us. To find out, Stephen in his drunken state went over and invited them to join us. Needless to say they declined the offer!
Probably thinking that the moving of the equipment signalled that we were about to cease production or scarper, they decided to close in. Convinced that we were unaware of their surveillance, the cops planned their moves carefully, choosing the worst possible moment for us.
In the early hours of the morning of Thursday the 2nd of March 1978 they moved in. Talk about being caught red handed!