‘Scene 4: Measuring tape (or string), briefcase, cigars, detonators, fuse, raw goose.’

During these years, violence – in whatever form, whether riots or police brutality – rarely intruded on white suburbia. Just like Biedermann, the majority of the ordinary ‘upstanding’ white citizens of South Africa relied on the newspaper to learn about the events going on around them. The English-language media in particular offered a vital lens through which citizens could gaze upon their own country, but always at a remove, and only if they wished to do so. For them, as for Biedermann, this strategy spared the senses, but also made it difficult to see the atrocities playing out closer to home, such as the dissolution of black family life that enabled the labour of their domestic workers and gardeners, to name but one example.

Just like Biedermann, then, many white South Africans were wilfully blind to the evil around them for the sake of their own comfort. After all, ‘seeing’ would have entailed taking a painful and honest look at themselves and the system they voted into power. This is also why it is possible today for many white South Africans to plead ignorance, claiming that they simply didn’t know the full extent of what was going on during the apartheid years. This type of blindness was facilitated by the one-sided intellectual environment experienced by most white Afrikaners in their families, their churches, their schools, and their universities. Finally, most whites, including English speakers, were so accustomed to the status quo that change was hard to fathom. Like Biedermann, who had become accustomed to the stench of petrol, ‘so reeds gewoond aan die slegste van reuk’ (‘already so accustomed to the worst of smells’), that he was paralyzed when called to action, white South Africa looked the other way.4 Frisch, ‘Jan Alleman’, scene 3:22.

But there were exceptions. One of these was Frederick John Harris, a school teacher and one of the last members of the African Resistance Movement (ARM) not yet arrested by the security police when, on 11 July 1964, he collected suitcases from an acquaintance’s office cupboard at the University of the Witwatersrand. They contained dynamite, fuses, detonators, batteries, watches, electric wire, and manuals on how to manufacture a bomb. He kept the explosives in the left luggage room at the Johannesburg railway station, but later moved them after a former classmate consented to having them stored in her cellar at 33 Oxford Road. Harris bought a suitcase at OK Bazaars in Eloff Street and began to assemble his bomb inside. Completed after three days, it consisted of eight sticks of dynamite, two detonators, a pocket watch, and a cordex fuse taped to the side of a jerry can filled with gallons of petrol. ‘I felt things had reached a stage in South Africa when they are just ready for the push, and then they will be changed’, Harris would explain during his trial. ‘And I felt this is the push.’5 S v Frederick John Harris, vol. III, 459 at 10–13.

On Friday, 24 July 1964, Harris left the suitcase in the glass cubicle waiting room above platform 5 and 6 in Johannesburg railway station’s concourse for whites. Between thirteen and six minutes before the explosion, he telephoned the railway police and two prominent newspapers to warn them of his bomb, mentioning only that it was placed ‘in the centre of the concourse’.6 S v Frederick John Harris, vol. II, 309 at 18. In court he would testify that he believed this sufficient notice for the authorities to clear the area. It also emerged that he imagined, somewhat improbably, that his instructions would result in a throng encircling the epicentre of the blast, close enough to witness his act, but not too close to be hurt. But when the bomb went off at 16:33, it was in a still-crowded concourse.

‘The White waiting room section was enveloped in flames’, eyewitness Johan Smit recalled.7 ‘Girl in flames sat on floor and wept’, Rand Daily Mail, 25 July 1964. ‘People were lying on the floor with their bodies cut open by glass. All I can really remember was pools of blood, the shattered glass, and the terrible burning smell.’ What Smit could also remember was finding a young woman sobbing on the floor. She had been flung about seven metres from the cubicle and her hair was on fire. All told, the petrol bomb injured twenty-two people, many of them children, and killed seventy-seven-year-old Ethel Rhys.

It soon became clear exactly how badly Harris had read the political landscape. Planted in the imagined service of black liberation, the bomb had the opposite effect. Most significantly, it enabled a re-enactment of the age-old creation myth of colonial South Africa, of a white minority fighting for its survival against the ‘violent black hordes’ of Africa. By 1964, standing up to threats of black-inspired violence fit rather neatly into the Afrikaner Nationalist playbook. Ironically, instead of pushing the country in the direction of universal franchise, the bomb was used to justify the state’s draconian security apparatus in the fight against local communist-inspired terrorism, ‘a devastating political effect’ from the perspective of the anti-apartheid movement.8 Hugh Lewin, Stones Against the Mirror: Friendship in the Time of the South African Struggle (Cape Town: Umuzi, 2011), 116.

It’s not surprising that several publications have since alleged that the chief of the Special Branch, Hendrik van den Bergh, and the Minister of Justice (and eventual Prime Minister), John Vorster, had allowed the disaster to unfold so that the apartheid state could reap maximum propaganda benefit.9 For a detailed and critical discussion of these sources, see Kobus du Pisani, ‘“Assassin” or “patriot?” John Harris, Hendrik van den Bergh, John Vorster, and the Johannesburg station bomb, 24 July 1964’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies 51, no. 3 (2018): 435–58. Yet it is hard to imagine that the authorities had sufficient time to prevent the ensuing loss of life. Shortly before the explosion, eyewitnesses also reported seeing railway policemen searching nearby dustbins, making it likely that they had been mounting a reaction, however inadequate it would prove to be.10 ‘“Mail” reporter on spot to help blast victims’, Rand Daily Mail, 25 July 1964.

It is also no surprise that Harris has over the years been remembered both as a ‘true patriot’, as his epitaph reads, and as a ‘miscreant’ with delusions of grandeur and ‘callous disregard for human life’.11 Du Pisani, ‘“Assassin” or “patriot”’, 448; H. Lever, ‘The Johannesburg station explosion and ethnic attitudes’, The Public Opinion Quarterly 33, no. 2 (1969): 180; ‘Graaff, Steytler condemn “outrage”’, Rand Daily Mail, 25 July 1964. In the psychologically damaging environment of apartheid South Africa, he was most likely just an idealistic young man – only twenty-seven years old at the time – who, without fully thinking through the consequences of his actions, played with fire.

Harris was arrested at home later that day and taken to the security police headquarters where he was brutally assaulted by Warrant Officer Erasmus.12 See Hugh Lewin, Bandiet Out of Jail (Johannesburg: Random House, 2002), 26–7. Charged with one count of murder and two counts of sabotage, he was found guilty. Harris was hanged on 1 April 1965, leaving behind his wife and their nine-month-old baby. He became the only white person executed for crimes committed in resistance to the regime. It was less than three years after the actor Braam Cilliers, as Biedermann, had proclaimed on the stage of Pretoria’s Little Theatre: ‘’n Mens moet hulle eenvoudig ophang! As ek dit nou al eenkeer gesê het, het ek dit al duisendkeer gesê. Al weer ’n moedswillige brandstigtery!’ (‘One should simply hang them! If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times. Again a deliberate arson attack!’).13 Frisch, ‘Jan Alleman’, scene 1:2.