Pretoria - The images of panes of glass falling from a multitude of windows, which exploded into bursts of blood when it hit the ground on Church Street 32 years ago, will never leave the mind of then 19-year-old Lydia van der Merwe.
The young woman had just knocked off from her work near the Bosman-Church streets intersection in the Pretoria CBD and was sitting in the bus when she felt and heard the loudest explosion of her life.
“I got off and ran in the direction of the sound, and when I turned into Church I was met by a sight so horrific it couldn’t have been real,” she said.
The windows from the high-rise buildings on both sides of the street had been blown out by a massive car bomb that had just detonated outside Nedbank Square building, falling onto the busy rush-hour street below.
“There were so many people along the street that each glass shrapnel hit a body and drew blood,” she said.
There was blood everywhere. The confusion of the moment – mixed with the sounds of wailing, injured people, the glass and the bomb – created a scene so horrific it belonged to a war zone, Van der Merwe added.
A powerful bomb, made of military explosives, had been set off outside the Poyntons Building on that Friday afternoon, May 20, 1983. Its target was SA Air Force headquarters.
It was an Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) explosive.
Nineteen people were killed, among them seven members of the air force, while 84 of the 117 injured also worked for the force. It was one of the largest attacks engaged in by the ANC during its armed Struggle, and it was commissioned by MK commander Aboobaker Ismail, who had been invited to the commemoration of the event by the Front National (FN) on Wednesday.
“That he did not come is a slap in the face, for both us and the black victims of the blast,” FN’s Wessel Basson said.
Basson spoke to those gathered for the commemoration at the site of the bomb blast on Wednesday morning, where speakers included family and friends of the injured and killed.
He said they had invited Ismail in the spirit of unity and togetherness as prescribed under the new South Africa.
“We were hoping for an apology from him and the ANC, an indication of remorse and reconciliation, but he did not come. The ruling party does not care, and in doing this they go against the legacy of former president Nelson Mandela,” Basson said.
Controversial Afrikaans singer Steve Hofmeyr told those gathered that the ANC chose to be the only victims of the ills of the past, ignoring what they as white people had endured.
“I am disgusted and forever will be,” he said. After wreaths had been laid in memory of the dead, singer Sunette Bridges led the singing of Die Stem, the apartheid anthem.
Van der Merwe had travelled from Mokopane to be at the commemoration. She said no care had been given for the psychological well-being of people like her, who had witnessed the immediate horrors of the explosion.
“A public apology would make such a difference,” she said.
FN and the AfriForum Youth have called for the erection of memorial stones in remembrance of the dead.
Basson said: “We want a memorial stone to be put up right on the sight of the detonation.
AfriForum Youth said it would approach the South African Air Force for the construction of a wall of remembrance of the 19 South Africans who died.
AfriForum national chairman Henk Maree said: “The one-sided telling of history by the ANC, in which ANC leaders are portrayed as untainted heroes, is wrong.”
Efforts to reach Ismail for comment proved futile.
Pretoria News