Where were you when the pamphlet bombers struck?
A filmmaker is looking for witnesses to the work of the ANC’s ’London recruits’, writes
WERE you in Johannesburg at Faraday station on Thursday August 13 1970 during rush hour? Did you hear an explosion and then see hundreds of pieces of paper flying into the air?
Did you take a closer look and see that these pieces of paper were leaflets reminding the government of BJ Vorster that the ANC, in spite of what you may have been told, was alive and well and still fighting for an end to apartheid?
Perhaps, like Mongane Wally Serote, you picked one up, being careful not to be seen, and took it home to read later. Or perhaps you heard, shortly after the explosion, the sounds coming from a tape recorder nearby declaring “This is the voice of the ANC”, followed by the strains of banned freedom songs sung by the ANC London choir.
Maybe you are the woman who worked as a cleaner at a Durban hotel in 1971 and walked in on two young British men surrounded by thousands of leaflets and the paraphernalia needed to make the nonlethal bomb, which would explode the pamphlets onto the streets. You looked at these two “working-class blokes”, who quickly handed you a leaflet, which you read before telling them “You are fighting for us”, and not reporting what you had seen.
If you are any one of these people, then the makers of a documentary about the men and women who carried out those leaflet bombings want you to be part of telling the story of the “London recruits”.
The two men in the Durban hotel room, Denis Walshe and Graeme Whyte, were among a group of sympathetic young white Londoners who had been recruited under instructions from Oliver Tambo by Umkhonto weSizwe commander Ronnie Kasrils to infiltrate South Africa posing as tourists to plant leaflet bombs.
“If you look back in history under any form of tyranny, what is the first thing that people do who are being suppressed? Slogans on walls is the time-honoured form of defiance,” Kasrils says.
“Today you have to be a Banksy to attract that kind of attention, but at that time it was a real poke in the eye to the authorities.”
Between 1967 and 1971 Kasrils sent two-person teams to detonate leaflet bombs simultaneously in five cities in South Africa. For many years the London recruits had no idea of the extent of the operation and no knowledge of each other’s existence. Kasrils recalls that two of the women worked in the same office together for 10 years and had no idea that they’d both been participants in leaflet bombings in South Africa.
The work of the recruits was an important part of reminding the people of South Africa and the international community in the years following the Rivonia Trial — when most of its leaders had been arrested or had gone into exile and Vorster proclaimed that opposition to apartheid had been crushed — “that the ANC is around”.
“We don’t know where but somewhere,” as Serote puts it in an interview for the film.
In 2012 former recruit Ken Keable published London Recruits: The Secret War Against Apartheid and several recruits visited South Africa where they were recognised by the ANC for their contribution to the struggle.
Filmmaker Gordon Main came across the story a few years ago when a friend told it to him “over a pint . . . in an oldfashioned working-men’s pub in Cardiff, with a boxing gym upstairs and pictures of local boxing heroes from the ’30s and ’40s peering down on us”.
He says: “It was a memorable evening — such a great story and yet so little known. I immediately went home and bought the book online — then my friend and I made contact with Ronnie.”
Of course it may be easy with hindsight to regard stories of young Brits carrying leaflets in false-bottom suitcases and then building bombs and laying down joke-shop tarantulas around them to discourage people from approaching as a little “boy’s own adventure”. And although, as Main admits, “there were near misses,” and “almost hilarious moments where things went badly wrong as well as the obvious elements of any good thriller”, it helps that “this is a story set against the obvious wrongs of apartheid-era South Africa”.
The stakes were high for recruits. As Kasrils recalls, he would tell them: “These guys [the apartheid police] are really ruthless people and you have to do everything to avoid capture.” He says: “We would prepare them for the possibility.”
Two, Sean Hosey and Alex Moumbaris, were discovered in 1972. Hosey spent eight months in solitary confinement and five years in a Pretoria jail cell. Moumbaris was sentenced to 12 years in jail but escaped after seven and a half years.
Having already filmed interviews with recruits, Kasrils, former president Thabo Mbeki, Serote and other figures, Main and his team are now in the last phase of looking for witnesses to the bombings.
“There should have been hundreds, if not thousands, of witnesses over the years of the bucket bombs being deployed across South Africa’s cities,” Main says. “We are looking for anyone who remembers these incidents and actually saw them happen or were passed on one of the leaflets. This could be workers waiting to go home at one of the targeted railway or bus stations, police attending the scene or passers-by. If you saw it, we want to hear from you.”
If you were a witness to a leaflet bombing, visit isawit.co.za or e-mail witness@ isawit.co.za
Today you have to be a Banksy to attract that kind of attention