The notice below was sent to me by a friend. I won't comment on Peter Hain's probable motives in publishing a book on Mandela at a time when his own political career is on the wane.

But as a member of the Liberal Party of South Africa when Peter Hain was a schoolboy interested only in motor racing and soccer, I object to his description of members of the Liberal Party as "activists". We were not activists, we were law-abiding citizens pursuing a path of rational and non-violent persuasion (see the copy below of the membership form which we all had to sign when joining). 

The "activist" at whose funeral Hain launched his political career, was John Harris. Harris was a man who, while using his membership of the Liberal Party as a cover, planted a phosphorus bomb in the main concourse of Johannesburg station in 1964, in which several people were badly burnt and traumatised, one person (a grandmother of 77) was killed, and her little granddaughter (Glynnis Burleigh) was mutilated for life.

Harris was sentenced to death and hanged in April 1965 (in England he would have narrowly escaped the same fate - the death penalty was abolished in the UK in 1965, at about the time Harris was hanged). Like virtually all members of the Liberal Party, I was (and am) opposed to capital punishment, but in the case of Harris, one must concede that the law took its normal course.

It has been alleged (by Peter Hain among others) that Harris warned the Railway Police by telephone of the bomb about 20 minutes before it was set to go off. There were no cell phones in those days, and he presumably used a public phone near the station. I knew the area around the station very well (my office was in De Villiers Street, very close to the station), and I can recall that public phones at and near the station were often vandalised, and at that hour (when most people were coming off work and the station was crowded) he would not have been certain of finding a phone in time to make the call.

It is, of course, possible that he made the call before planting the bomb, but this seems unlikely. Moreover, the Railway Police (later abolished) were notoriously inefficient, and even the best police force would have been ill-equipped to deal with such a totally unprecedented call. Until then, there had been no bomb attacks on people in South Africa since the Second World War that I'm aware of.

I arrived at the station about 20 to 30 minutes after the explosion, on my way home to Pretoria (I worked in Johannesburg and lived in Pretoria at the time and commuted by train). I walked directly past the site of the explosion, and the lay-out of that part of the station concourse was familiar to me (I walked through it twice a day, five days a week).

From my own observations, I believe that Harris could not have been unaware of the grandmother and her seven-year-old granddaughter sitting where they were certain to be exposed to the full force of the blast. Glynnis Burleigh suffered severe burns on 80% of her body, and still lives with the devastating consequences of the attack - while Peter Hain continues to burnish his political career.

From conversations Harris had (with people I was or am acquainted with) before he carried out his solo act of "heroism", I know that he was obsessed with the argument that it would be right to sacrifice even (and perhaps specifically?) a child if, by such an act, thousands of lives could be saved.

I am personally convinced that in his mind Glynnis Burleigh was the child whose sacrificial death would save the country - and prove his intellectual and moral "courage" in being willing to do the unthinkable for the sake of humankind. But this is an opinion, and I may of course be wrong. Only Glynnis can tell us whether Harris had looked directly at her when he put the suitcase containing the bomb down, and I don't have the courage to seek her out to ask her. At any rate, he clearly didn't care who would be maimed or killed by his bomb - his target was not a military or political one, but ordinary people.

I only spoke to Harris once or twice and can't claim to have known him well. But from what I have gathered from others, I now believe that his was a classic case of what some psychiatrists would call "malignant narcissism". He betrayed his wife, his son and his parents. He betrayed his friends and colleagues in the Liberal Party, and he murdered and maimed innocents, to serve his delusions of grandeur.

And he destroyed the Liberal Party - the only voice of reason in the Apartheid era. The fact that our constitution embodies the ideals and principles set out in the Liberal Party's manifesto, rather than the muddled Marxist-dominated ideas of the Tripartite Alliance, can be of little comfort to the thousands who died in the PW Botha Gang and Tambo Gang's brutal struggle for power (power for power's sake): the hundreds of people necklaced by mobs incited by ANC activists and Apartheid provocateurs, the MK soldiers who died fighting the Kremlin's wars in Angola, Moçambique and Rhodesia, or were tortured in ANC punishment camps, or executed by Swapo in Namibia and Angola, for wanting to fight Apartheid rather than get embroiled in the Soviet Union's wars.

It can also be of very little comfort to the impoverished Black masses who, under the ANC's profoundly corrupt regime, are no better off than they were under Apartheid.

That Peter Hain chose to build a career on the reputation of a narcissistic murderer, tells us all we need to know about him as a human being and politician.

Sam van den Berg

A very ordinary member of the Liberal Party in Pretoria from 1959 until the Party's dissolution

Cape Town

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