Why did a white teacher turn revolutionary? This treatment for a film about John Harris reveals what happened, and why.
Johannesburg - At 18 minutes past four on the afternoon of Friday, July 24, 1964, a calm man telephoned a senior official at the Johannesburg Railway Police and said: “This is the African Resistance Movement. We have planted a bomb in a large brown suitcase 20 feet from the cubicle above platforms five and six on the concourse. On the handle of the suitcase is tied a label bearing the words Back in Ten Minutes.
“It is not our intention to harm anyone. This is a symbolic protest against the inhumanity and injustices of apartheid. The bomb is timed to explode at 4.33pm. Clear the concourse by using the public address system at once. Do not try to defuse the bomb as the suitcase is triggered to explode if it is opened.”
The man who made that call was a Roodepoort teacher called John Harris.
Quiet, unassuming, Harris had no desire to hurt anyone when he placed the suitcase on a Whites Only platform. He was driven by an overwhelming sense of despair.
Acting alone, Harris – a member of the African Resistance Movement (ARM) – had only one intention. He wanted to let the apartheid regime and the world know that there were whites in South Africa who were opposed to racism.
To avoid casualties, he also telephoned a message to the liberal Rand Daily Mail newspaper which, believing human life to be in danger, phoned the Security Police. Finally, Harris telephoned a third warning to the pro-government newspaper, Die Transvaler.
These calls were later admitted as evidence in the high court. But his warnings went unheeded and at 4.33pm, 50 years ago today, the bomb exploded, killing a 77-year-old white woman and injuring 22 white commuters.
Harris was tried, found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. On April 1, 1965, gently mouthing “We shall overcome”, he was hanged at Pretoria Central Prison – the only white South African to be sentenced to death for opposing apartheid.
But his actions have long provoked a key question: When, if ever, is the taking of a life of a non-combatant justified in pursuit of a perceived just cause? On the global stage since World World II, civilian fatalities have increasingly been factored into the strategies of war to the extent that the term collateral damage exists.
With Harris, however, this was never the intention. Collateral damage was not even in his vocabulary. But what, if anything, did Harris achieve by his actions?
There is also the question of why the station was not cleared after receiving the warnings. There is a belief that – having been warned by Harris, who had pleaded for the evacuation, the authorities took a conscious decision not to act, to allow the tragedy to play out.
The apartheid government certainly took full advantage of the atrocity and used it to whip indifferent white voters into line behind the National Party.
The incident was indeed a watershed. This was South Africa’s first taste of so-called terrorism, and by the time Harris went to trial, he did not stand a chance. Public opinion was entirely against him.
In the eyes of especially the white public, Harris was a mad bomber who had deliberately set out to kill and maim innocent men, women and children. Harris and other members of the ARM, some of whom were already behind bars at the time, were regarded as terrorists against whom the people needed to be protected.
Condemned to the gallows, Harris had one modest final request of his family and friends – that his epitaph should one day read, A True Patriot.
It took 44 years for his wish to be fulfilled.
At a ceremony held at Freedom Park in 2009, Harris’s name was officially entered into the roll of honour of those who sacrificed their lives fighting against apartheid. After the ceremony, the delegation moved to his graveside in Pretoria where a tombstone was erected with those words.
Harris had long abhorred apartheid, and his hatred of it led him to become politically active. Five months before he left the bomb at the station, he was listed as a banned person in terms of the government’s draconian security measures.
A member of the Liberal Party and the South African National Non-racial Open Committee for Olympic Sports (Sanroc), he had recently been recruited into the ARM. All were strictly non-violent movements. Even the ARM – whose strategy was to protest and make political statements through sabotage – had as its central policy to avoid civilian targets at all cost.
And when the Rivonia Trial began the same year, the ARM effected a moratorium on further sabotage attacks to prevent any increasing justification for the death penalty on those trialists. But once sentencing had been concluded there, the ARM started up its attacks again – designed to show that even with the Rivonia Trial behind it, the regime had failed to crush opposition to apartheid.
In response to its renewed campaign of blowing up electricity pylons, radio masts, railway signals, post offices and state buildings, the government began a systematic sweep of arrests of all known anti-apartheid activists on July 5, 1964.
One of those detained on July 9 was journalist Hugh Lewin. An active member of the ARM, Lewin had recruited Harris into the movement six months earlier.
One of the last people to be picked up by the police was a man called John Lloyd, who had been with Harris up until the Thursday afternoon when Lloyd was detained. After that, Harris was on his own – one of the few not picked up.
After the blast, as the injured were still being taken away on stretchers, the Security Police mounted a massive comb-out of all known political activists and, during the next six hours, no mercy was shown. Every person picked up for questioning was first beaten, then interrogated.
But of the hundreds held, only two – Harris and Lloyd – knew about the plot.
Lloyd was already in detention and talked within seconds of being kicked and punched by interrogators. By the time Lloyd broke, Harris – who had studied philosophy and economics at Oxford – was being interrogated in the same building.
Harris was interrogated by the notorious security branch captain, JJ Viktor.
Gordon Winter, a self-confessed undercover security police agent and friend of Viktor, has told what happened.
Viktor first sat Harris down in the middle of the room. Then he said: “Look, John, you are a member of the Liberal Party, so I know you are not the type of man to go round blowing people up with bombs – so I’m not going to waste time trying to interrogate you about the station blast.”
Viktor said Harris thanked him. The captain then reassured him further by saying they should rather discuss sport because Harris’s file showed he was a leading figure in Sanroc.
“When I asked him to name his favourite sport, Harris said he preferred cricket and tennis,” Viktor related. “I told him I was mad about rugby but that I always made a hash of my drop kick.
“Harris said he was a keen student of rugby, but didn’t actually play the game as it was too rough for him.”
Viktor then said this gave him a good idea. He picked up a newspaper, crunched it into a ball and walked back to the far wall with it. He ran forward three or four steps and drop-kicked the ball of paper.
“Harris told me he knew at once why my kicks went wide and said I swung my foot out as I kicked, which took the ball off course. I thanked him for his advice, picked up the ball of newspaper and carried it back to the wall. I ran forward again and delivered a massive kick. Not at the ball but right on John Harris’s jaw.”
Harris hurtled backwards and somersaulted over the back of the chair. As he lurched to his knees he swayed dizzily, cupped his chin in both hands, and blood spurted from his mouth as he coughed.
Viktor said he did not waste any more time and as Harris knelt there coughing, he kicked him on the jaw again saying: “And that’s how I take a penalty.”
Viktor then walked back to the far wall, ran forward screaming and kicked Harris in the stomach. As Viktor returned to the wall and took up his pre-kick stance once more, Harris managed to mumble: “I’ll talk, I’ll talk, but for Christ’s sake don’t kick me again, you’ve broken my jaw.”
He made a full verbal confession and repeated it before security police officer lieutenant WJ van der Merwe.
As he stood in his death cell, spymaster HJ van den Bergh is said to have offered to let Harris escape if he agreed to spy for South African intelligence from Britain.
Harris told him: “You are wasting your time. I’d rather hang than spy for you.”’
On April 1, 1965, after the hanging, Harris’s body was taken to the Pretoria West Cemetery for cremation. There, a boy aged 15, whose parents were banned and could not attend the ceremony, stood up with a farewell message to Harris. Reading from Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3, he said: “A time to kill and a time to heal; a time to break down and a time to build up.”
The boy and his parents had been friendly with Harris and they knew, without any doubt, that he had been a gentle, peace-loving man who would never have planned to harm anyone with his misguided bomb of protest.
That boy was Peter Hain, who also became a prime target of Pretoria when, years later in exile in London, he headed the anti-apartheid movement’s international sports and cultural boycott campaign against South Africa.
* Multi-award-winning filmmaker Kevin Harris (no relation) is the producer of A True Patriot, the personal story of the life and times of John Harris – a film which goes into production early next year. Go to www.kevinharris.co.za for more.
The Star