Harris - A Just Defiance: Bombmakers, Insurgents, and the Treason Trial of the Delmas Four

Praise for A Just Defiance:

A Just Defiance is the most wonderfully good book about South Africa I have read in a decade.... This isnt a book review, however. It is a plea to buy and read it. I absolutely promise youll enjoy every page.... [Its] 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 Krogs Country of My Skull, this book is a beautifully crafted, morally uplifting insiders story of an extraordinary time in our recent history.

Jenny Crwys-Williams,
talk show host of South Africas 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.... Its 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.

Readers Digest

It sounds like the plot for a bestselling legal thriller and its 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 Ive read this year.

Mervyn Sloman, South African Financial Mail

A masterful political thriller.

Maureen Isaacson, Sunday Independent

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 AfricaHistory19611994.

4. Anti-apartheid movementsSouth Africa. I. Harris, Peter, 1956In a different time. II. Title.

KTL41.D45H372 2012

345.680231dc23

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

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 Pauws 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 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 divisions 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 assassination: poisons made of various toxins and poison dispensers, and, of course, bombs. Parcel bombs, letter bombs, letter-box bombs, pen bombs, jump bombs, landmine bombs, car bombs, suitcase bombs, limpet-mine bombs, fire bombs, bombs powerful enough to blow up buildings and bombs designed merely to blow off your hand. Bombs in all shapes, forms, intensity and guises.

It is April 1987. Im on the Pretoria highway in the fast lane, ears pinned back, being pulled along in the slipstream of a seventy-seater school bus going like hell, the children clustered up against the large back window, pulling faces at me, smiling and waving. I am not enjoying myself.

This morning the phone rang at five oclock. Not a good time for me.

I come up from a heavy sleep, grope clumsily for the instrument on the bedside table. Alongside me my wife Caroline turns away from the noise and pulls at the duvet. Shes a journalist. Im a lawyer. Because of our jobs the phone rings at all hours of the day and night. Its something we never get used to.