Guilty and Proud: An MK Soldier's Memoir of Exile, Prison and Freedom

By Marion Sparg

In this riveting memoir Sparg traces not only her experience in MK – often as the only woman in training camps in Angola – and her friendship with Chris Hani, Joe Slovo and Thabo Mbeki, but also her secret return to South Africa, the three police-station bombs, her sudden arrest and her years of imprisonment. Guilty and Proud is the gripping tale of a woman who defied stereotypes and, at great personal cost, stood up for her beliefs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tafelberg
• Release date: May 10, 2024
• ISBN: 9780624094708

Marion Sparg

Marion Sparg was the first white woman to be convicted for membership of uMkhonto weSizwe. She spent 15 years in prison, after receiving a punitive 25-year sentence. Marion lives in Johannesburg, where she works as a media specialist. Her previous book was Bulelani Ngcuka: The Sting in the Tale.

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Introduction

Writing this book has been a challenge in so many ways. First there is the challenge of memory, since much of this book deals with events that took place decades, and some would even say a lifetime, ago. But the deeper challenge has been to achieve the balance between telling my story as a young white woman who left South Africa at the age of 23 to join the African National Congress (ANC) and its armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), and the story of those I met.

From the start I was determined to write a story that was about more than me. I had to tell the story of all those I was privileged to work with. People like Joe Slovo and Chris Hani. But at the same time I was made aware that, try as I might, I couldn’t hide. In earlier drafts of this manuscript, it was pointed out to me, in the kindest and most professional way, that I was ‘suppressing the self’. After all, these readers of my early drafts said, you’re writing a story not just describing a situation. So you will need to open up and tell the story of that young woman who left for exile in 1981 and ended up in prison a few years later, facing a 25-year sentence after pleading guilty to bombing three police stations.

Having spoken about myself, I cannot conclude this introduction without talking about those alongside whom I struggled and fought. Some were leaders, as I’ve said, but many were ‘ordinary’ soldiers whose contribution and experiences have largely been neglected as we write the history of MK.

Most of my contemporaries in MK were of a similar age to me, from the 1976 generation who left South Africa in the wake of the Soweto uprisings. There are many who are no longer with us. They died young, on the battlefield. Others were executed by apartheid hangmen. Many spent a decade or more on Robben Island and in other prisons. There were those who spent years on death row before sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. Some made it into senior positions in government, state institutions and the private sector. All of these I salute. Their journey has not always been an easy one.

However, I also salute those many MK veterans and indeed all liberation war veterans who find themselves destitute or living hand to mouth, nearly 30 years into our democracy. They continue to fight for benefits such as military pensions, decent healthcare for themselves and their families, education, housing and burials.

We owe them all a debt of gratitude.

My hope is that I have been able to shed light not only on my own experiences but also the experiences of some of these comrades and fellow combatants along the way, and pay tribute to all of them – the leaders, commanders and these ‘ordinary’ soldiers of MK.

The book is mostly chronological in sequence but includes a few chapters on some individuals such as Jack Simons, Joe Slovo, Nelson Mandela and Chris Hani as a kind of personal tribute to these great leaders. Much of the book is about my time in MK, my trial and imprisonment. I do, however, cover some of my experiences after I was released from prison in 1991 in the lead-up to the first democratic elections in April 1994. I made that my cut-off point because a South Africa for ‘all who live in it, black and white’, under a government ‘based on the will of the people’ was, after all, what I and my MK comrades had been fighting for.¹

Note to reader: Many of the scenes, including dialogue between characters, have been recreated from memory and do not purport to be actual dialogue or interviews. Some of the people mentioned in the book have two names, one being their real name and the other their MK name, which we were all required to have. I have chosen to call most people by their MK names as that is how I knew them. Where appropriate, their real names follow in parentheses. On the subject of names: since the change of government in South Africa, many names of places, towns, cities, schools, airports and the like have been changed. I have used names as they were at the time I am writing about.

Chapter One

Comfortably numb

On a sunny Tuesday morning in March 1986, I pulled the door of my Hillbrow flat shut behind me, and made my way very carefully down a flight of stairs and into the street. Because I wanted to present a ‘respectable’ image for the day’s mission, I had chosen a mauve business suit – a skirt and jacket – a white blouse and black court shoes. Slung over my shoulder was a sturdy but reasonably elegant handbag, pressed firmly against my side to prevent the Bakelite coating of the two Soviet-made mini-limpet mines it contained from knocking against each other.

The bus stop was around the corner from my flat. I didn’t have to wait long before the double-decker bus pulled up and I found a seat for my journey. I don’t recall if I sat next to anyone as the bus made its way from Hillbrow through Braamfontein and into Johannesburg’s CBD.

John Vorster Square is at the bottom of Commissioner Street – No. 1. I got off the bus some distance away and walked the last few blocks to the ten-storey concrete monolith that was my target: John Vorster Square, headquarters of Johannesburg’s uniformed police but, more importantly, also the national headquarters of the security police. It was now just before 11 am. I had calculated my timing carefully: I wanted the explosion to take place at noon, and had inserted the lead fuses into the detonator with an hour’s time delay. I hitched the handbag more firmly over my shoulder.

I was feeling fairly calm at this point, focused on the task at hand. I had done this before at Cambridge police station in East London a few weeks earlier, so the routine was becoming familiar.

The approach to the front entrance was protected by a metal palisade; the gate stood open, and guarding it was a very alert black policeman with a pistol strapped to his belt. Can I help you, he asked politely. Yes, I said. I’ve come to apply for a firearm licence. He gestured for me to step closer. ‘I need to search your handbag.’ My heart sank. No one had searched me when I carried out a reconnaissance of the target a few days earlier. There wasn’t even a layer of feminine clutter to cover the limpets in the bag: if he merely opened it, he would see them. In my most business-suit voice, I protested: not too loudly, but loudly enough for the policeman’s white colleague, who was lazily paging through a newspaper in the guard hut nearby, to hear. ‘Is that really necessary? It’s my handbag …’ The white policeman did hear. ‘Hey, what you doing? You can’t search a white woman.’ Gripping my handbag even more tightly now, I strode past the very frustrated black policeman and into John Vorster Square. With my precious limpet mines.

Ironically, the colour of my skin resurfaced eight months later, in a totally different context, when I was being sentenced for arson and high treason. ‘If a black South African were in your position his or her acts could be understood, although not excused,’ said Judge Pieter ‘PJ’ van der Walt. ‘The fact that as a white South African you have espoused the cause of revolution I regard as an aggravating feature.’

So aggravating that he felt compelled to sentence me to twenty-five years in jail.

* * *

Given my background, Van der Walt could have been forgiven for perhaps wondering why I became what he described as a ‘dedicated and unrepentant terrorist’. I was, in a sense, a child of apartheid, born in September 1958 exactly ten days after Hendrik Verwoerd took the oath of office as prime minister of South Africa. Verwoerd was the architect of formalised racial segregation in all its pettiness and its gross horrors. He believed that apartheid was God-given and that the Bible justified the subordination of black people. ‘What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when he cannot use it in practice: there is no place for him in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour,’¹ he had declared five years earlier.

I grew up in Verwoerd’s ‘European community’ as what I can in retrospect describe only as a typical middle-class, English-speaking, white South African. I was the fourth of six children born to Esther and Wreford Sparg, who ran a trading station – a general dealership – called Makwababa, in an area of the same name near Cofimvaba in the Transkei ‘homeland’. The ‘homelands’ were enclaves set aside decades earlier for various ‘tribal’ groupings, the Transkei being one of two territories allocated to the Xhosa. ‘This land will be folded like a blanket / Till it is like the palm of a hand,’ the Xhosa academic St John Page Yako wrote in a poem published in the year I was born. White people had managed the folding in such a way that they ended up occupying 87 per cent of South Africa’s land surface.

My parents were both of German settler stock: our surname was an Anglicised version of the German ‘Sparr’. Both were themselves children of Transkei traders: the Makwababa store had been acquired by my grandfather Julius Sparg in about 1930. Incidentally, the main wave of German settlers had arrived in the wake of the cataclysm of 1856 in which the prophet Nongqawuse led the Xhosa people to believe that if they killed all their cattle, their ancestors would rise and defeat the colonisers. Instead, the Xhosa were left weak and starving literally to death, which made it easy for the colonists to occupy vast tracts of their land.

I was four years old when we left Transkei, so I don’t remember much about Makwababa. I have vague memories of a large rambling house surrounded by tall gum trees. Of the shop itself, I remember only how dark the interior was, and that there were massive wooden counters with plenty of space behind them to crawl into and play. My father’s cousin Garnet Richter, who worked at Makwababa for some time, remembers spending hours packing bulk dry goods such as sugar, flour and mealie meal (maize meal) into small paper packets. He has also described the ‘ochre room’ where the ochre was stored and packaged for sale, having arrived from overseas in wooden barrels.² Ochre was used by the Xhosa people for face painting – ‘umchokozo’ – which plays an important role in their culture: women decorate their faces with white or yellow ochre, and use dots to make patterns on their faces. Initiates also apply it during and after the circumcision ritual.

Cofimvaba is in Thembuland in what was known as Transkei and was probably established in about 1877. It derives its name from the Xhosa words ‘cofa’, meaning to froth, and ‘mvaba’, a goatskin bag for milk. This is the name of a nearby river which, after a heavy rainfall, is said to become swollen and frothy like a bag of milk.³

I didn’t know during my childhood days what a revolutionary hotbed that area of the Eastern Cape was, although I do recall my father, a great storyteller, telling us when we were very young about the Poqo and the Pondo uprising of the 1960s.⁴ As young children, we were oblivious to the political context and were gripped instead by his dramatic, and probably exaggerated, accounts of the nights he and other traders spent guarding their homesteads, rifles in hand. Cofimvaba was one of the areas in which Poqo concentrated its activities in the early 1960s. I would discover much later, when I got to know anti-apartheid stalwart and MK leader Chris Hani, that Cofimvaba was also his birthplace. The area has since been renamed the Chris Hani District Municipality.

By the time I was ready to start school my family had moved about 200 km south to King William’s Town in the Eastern Cape. This frontier town was founded as a missionary station in 1826 and later served as the British military headquarters during their war with the Xhosa people. My older brothers and sister had started school while we still lived in Cofimvaba and attended a boarding school in nearby Engcobo. I started my schooling at Kaffrarian Girls Primary School in King William’s Town. My parents were once again in the trading business, this time with a small supermarket in the main street of the town. We lived in a flat or apartment above the supermarket.

Both of my parents were fluent in isiXhosa. I was too young to have learned much but from the time we started talking the only words my younger brother and I knew for some animals, such as cows and sheep, were the Xhosa names. I have vivid memories of how angry and confused I was in my first year at school when I spoke about iigusha (sheep) and inkomo (cows), only to be told by my teacher I was talking ‘nonsense’.

Halfway through my primary school years, my family moved again, to East London about 50 km away on the coast, where I finished primary school at St Anne’s Convent and then moved on to Cambridge High School.

East London, like King William’s Town, was established to provide for the British army. It began as Fort Buffalo in 1847, taking its name from the river that runs through it. It was formally annexed by the British as part of the Cape Colony in 1848 and named East London, serving as a supply port for the British army headquartered in King William’s Town. The town was occupied by both British and German settlers, but had a distinctly British ‘air’ about it, with the main road named Oxford Street.

In East London, or eMonti as it’s known by its Xhosa name, my father once again ran a small trading store in Amalinda on the outskirts of the town, but when this didn’t work out, he took up employment as a travelling salesperson for cash register machines and other office equipment, while my mother worked as a bookkeeper and legal secretary.

I was very much aware that I was living in a ‘whites only’ world but at this point this all seemed the way it was meant to be. We lived just outside the CBD in the suburb of Southernwood, a ‘whites only’ area, except for two Chinese shopkeepers on each end of the street and a few Indian shopkeepers who also lived in the area. I went to a ‘whites only’ school, travelled on ‘whites only’ municipal buses, swam in ‘whites only’ public swimming schools and at ‘whites only’ beaches, played in ‘whites only’ public parks with separate benches for white people and the few black domestic workers accompanying their white charges, and went to ‘whites only’ cinemas.

There were very few restaurants in East London in the 1970s and, with a family of six to support, my parents couldn’t often afford them anyway. When the Wimpy Bar opened on the beachfront, we were occasionally treated to burgers and chips, again in a ‘whites only’ establishment.

I was aware also that most of the labourers and workers I encountered in everyday life were black, with the exception of cashiers in stores, shop assistants in clothing stores and tellers in the banks and building societies, who were white. Black people were not employed in these establishments at the time, except to clean and pack shelves in supermarkets.

When the time came, both my older brothers were called up and went off to do their military service, one in the air force and the other in the army.⁵

The only black people I ‘knew’ and interacted with on a regular basis worked in our home and my parents’ shop.

This was just how it was.

Apartheid and all its horrors were a daily reality for millions of black South Africans, but I and most of my school friends had been shielded. Our lives were about discotheques, crushes on boys and matric dances. We were not brought up to question white privilege.

This all started to come crashing down for me in 1976, the year in which I matriculated. On 16 June 1976, the day of the Soweto uprising, I arrived at school along with my classmates. Our Afrikaans teacher, Jack Visser, walked into the classroom and stood looking at us in silence. After a few minutes, he asked:

‘Do you know what’s happening in Soweto?’

No one responded. Soweto was a place few of us had even heard of until that day. I remember how he fought with his impatience. It rippled across his face. He said very quietly: ‘They’re shooting children on the streets.’

Then he turned abruptly and walked out of the classroom into the small office he had next door, closed the door and stayed there for the rest of the lesson.

What was happening in Soweto is vividly described by journalist, Duma ka Ndlovu:

There was fire, there was smoke, there were bullets and there were police. There was excitement. There were students throwing stones and there was bravery. It was as if the world was coming to an end, not only apartheid … There were machine guns and helicopters. There was a revolution in the streets. White people came and started shooting left, right and centre. You did not know if they were going to come back with bombs. It was crazy. It was crazy. ⁶

We were white matriculants, about to enter adult life and were ‘comfortably numb’, oblivious to all of this. No other teacher at school spoke to us about Soweto that day and yet it was a day that changed the course of South African history forever.

Years later, it struck me as a great irony that it was our Afrikaans teacher who had brought the events of 16 June to our attention, particularly when it was the use of the Afrikaans language as a medium of instruction that had sparked the uprising. Jack Visser loved the Afrikaans language. He knew of my love for writing and would often call me into his office to talk about Afrikaans poetry and writing. He would speak about a particular group of writers, the ‘Sestigers’ (Sixtiers), a ‘dissident’ grouping of Afrikaans writers from the 1960s started by author and academic André Brink and others. One of the writers whose work he introduced me to was the young Afrikaans poet Ingrid Jonker. While it is significant, with hindsight, that he chose to talk about writers such as Brink and Jonker, I don’t recall having any political discussions with him. One of Jonker’s poems that he introduced me to, which she wrote after a child was shot by police in Nyanga, Cape Town, during the aftermath of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, is the same poem that South Africa’s first democratically elected president, Nelson Mandela, would read so many years later at his inauguration in 1994:

The child is not dead

the child raises his fists against his mother

who screams Africa screams the smell

of freedom and heather

in the locations of the heart under siege.⁷

In my matric year, I was asked by our headmaster, Tony Viljoen, to launch and edit a school newspaper. We wrote about the things that mattered in our world – music, sports, movies – nothing political. The only time I got into trouble was when I wrote and published an article about the film The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which was taking South Africa by storm at the time. My science teacher objected and asked why I was publishing pictures of men in women’s underwear! He wanted me disciplined but Tony Viljoen defended our ‘editorial independence’ and said I would not be disciplined.

Despite my interest in languages and writing, my school studies were focused on mathematics and science. I had given up history in Standard 8 (Grade 10) when we were asked to memorise and draw the map of the vegetable garden that the first Dutch commander at the Cape, Jan van Riebeeck, planted at the newly established fort back in 1652. I decided then that if this was what history was, there must be more important things to learn about and so pursued the sciences instead. I had registered for a Bachelor of Science in physiotherapy at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Towards the end of the year, just before matric exams started, I decided that I wanted to study journalism and politics at Rhodes University in Grahamstown. I don’t know what prompted this about-turn and cannot recall discussing the matter with anyone at the time.

Soweto had come and gone but it was at Rhodes University that I was confronted with my ‘whiteness’ and what it meant.

Chapter Two

Biko’s death changed my life

These were the front page headlines the Daily Dispatch newspaper in East London carried on 14 September 1977 with a full-page, colour portrait of Steve Biko, founder of the Black Consciousness movement. He was murdered on 12 September 1977, the day before my nineteenth birthday.

I had registered earlier that year at Rhodes for a journalism degree with political science as my second major. The university was not the seat of student revolution that many, including my father, were led to believe, but it was the time and place where I began to realise that I did not belong in the world into which I was born. My parents raised me and my brothers and sisters to treat everyone with respect. However, the only way I related to black people until I arrived at university was as a child of a white employer. This small, sheltered world was shattered at Rhodes.

Despite the university’s liberal reputation, only a handful of black students had been admitted – in 1977, a total of nine African and fifteen coloured students. In subjects like journalism and political studies there was Zubeida Jaffer, Neil Williams, Charmain Naidoo and Dorothea Thorne.¹ We were not close friends and I was still removed from the struggles they faced, such as being banished to separate residences – or like Dorothea, who boarded with Dr Nancy Charton from the politics department, having to pretend to be ‘the maid’ and put on her best ‘coloured’ accent when a stranger came knocking at the door. This was in case the visitor turned out to be a security policeman; they were always on the lookout for anyone ‘harbouring’ black people in ‘white man’s land’.

Black students were at first accommodated along with their white colleagues, but when the university declared that black students would have to live in separate residences, many, such as Zubeida, rejected the offer and found their own accommodation. While in the ‘white’ residence, she says she was confronted by a white student from Pretoria who told her she was surprised that black students were sharing accommodation with white students and that they were at university at all, since she had been told that black people had a low IQ.

The irony of the situation, says Zubeida, was that this particular white student was registered for a diploma in pre-school education because she hadn’t qualified to complete a degree. The black students of whom she spoke, on the other hand, were doing journalism and law degrees, with one doing honours in mathematics. ‘But we were the ones considered to have the low IQ and not to be treated as full students on this campus.’²

After completing her degree, Zubeida worked as a journalist and was arrested in July 1980 after the Cape Times published her investigation into police shootings on the Cape Flats. During her detention, she found herself ‘being beaten into the walls of the Sanlam Centre in Port Elizabeth’. She was also taken to the sixth storey and told she would be thrown out if she did not confess.³ The security police wanted her to admit to being an ANC member or to give them the name of one she knew. She wasn’t a member and didn’t know one. In the end, Zubeida was charged and acquitted of being in possession of three banned books, one of them being Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.

* * *

Rhodes University had played a key role in shaping Steve Biko. It was his experiences on this campus that convinced him of the duplicity of white liberalism. Biko had gone to Rhodes in 1967 to attend a congress of the student organisation, the National Union of South African Students (Nusas), which was open to all races, and was outraged when he discovered that the university would not allow black delegates to stay on campus. When he put forward a motion to adjourn conference until a non-racial venue could be found, it was defeated by the white-dominated congress.

It was a particularly bitter blow for Biko since he had defended his allegiance to Nusas and their non-racial approach. This incident played a major part in black students eventually breaking ties with Nusas in 1968 and forming the South African Students’ Organisation (Saso), which adopted a black consciousness ideology. Although Nusas had taken on an anti-apartheid stance, it nevertheless accommodated both left- and right-wing forces and there was growing scepticism about the white-dominated union’s commitment to non-racism, a scepticism that Biko had tried to counter. His colleagues, he said, believed that white people were ultimately satisfied with the status quo and were not going to move away from this. However, he didn’t agree, and felt there were committed individuals who wanted change.⁴

After his experience at Rhodes, Biko said he ‘began to feel that our understanding of our own situation in this country was not coincidental with that of these liberal whites’.⁵ Two years later, in July 1969, Saso was formed at the University of the North, otherwise known as Turfloop, and Biko was elected president. The final break with Nusas was made in 1970 when Saso withdrew its recognition of Nusas.

The heyday of Nusas had come and gone by the time I arrived at Rhodes in 1977. Rhodes students had voted in 1976 to disaffiliate from the union, the only English-speaking university to do so. A referendum about rejoining was held the following year and once again, students voted against joining Nusas. Nicholas ‘Fink’ Haysom, national Nusas president in 1976, described Rhodes as an ‘insulated, parochial campus’.⁶

Reflecting on when he was a student there, media specialist Guy Berger says most white students were ‘too busy drinking or doing academics. They did not know, and nor did they want to know’.⁷ His contemporary Devan Pillay, one of the few black students at Rhodes at the time, says, ‘We were a tiny minority on the campus, and felt like colonial subjects in a white world … The buildings, halls and images made you feel that you might be in England, and indeed this was the intention: the university was established primarily to cater for the needs of English-speaking white students in the colony.’⁸

The character of the campus reflected a pervasive attitude in the Eastern Cape. Against this backdrop, the Daily Dispatch headlines on 14 September 1977 sent shockwaves through the white community. Not so much because it announced the brutal death of a political leader at the hands of the apartheid security police but because it hailed him as a hero of the nation. To most white residents of the province, the front page of their rather ordinary daily rag suddenly resembled a revolutionary poster hailing a dead black hero.

Biko’s arrest on 18 August 1977 may have gone unnoticed by most of the white community in the Eastern Cape. But Donald Woods, the editor of the Daily Dispatch and a friend of Steve Biko, made very sure they would know about his death 25 days later, on 12 September. In the newspaper, Woods had adopted a very critical position of the apartheid government and its policies. He was initially also critical of the Black Consciousness movement but, after meeting and becoming friends with Biko, changed his stance. After Biko was killed, Woods was one of many to receive banning orders. He later fled into exile after repeated harassment by the security police and published a book entitled Biko,⁹ which served as the basis for the 1987 Richard Attenborough film Cry Freedom.

While he was vice-chancellor of UCT, the writer Njabulo Ndebele described Biko’s death as ‘one of the most imagined events in South African history – because only four men witnessed it. Yet, the rest of us, who were deeply affected by the horror of the situation, the outrage it evoked, and the bonds of solidarity and empathy that it strengthened, can still see it vividly in our minds, almost as if we were there …’¹⁰

The horror of Biko’s death was revealed years later at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The security police who killed him said they had beaten him with a hose and rammed his head into the wall of an interrogation room after he fought back and refused to stand during questioning.

They claimed he tried to hit his interrogators.

‘At this point, all three of us grabbed Biko and we took him to one corner of the room and ran with him into the wall,’ one of the officers said in his written application to the TRC for amnesty for his part in the killing.

‘His head hit the wall first.’¹¹

They said they noticed that after this, Biko was confused and that his speech was slurred.

He was nevertheless put in a standing position with his hands and feet chained to a metal door, and the security police continued with their interrogation.

Biko had in fact suffered a major brain haemorrhage.

He was kept naked, dying, alone in a cell for days and then transported, still naked and unconscious, in the back of a police van, on a 1 000 km journey from King William’s Town to Pretoria Central prison where he died. Sydney Kentridge, who led the legal team for Biko’s family at the inquest into this death, described it as ‘a miserable and lonely death on a mat on a stone floor in a prison cell’. He had been examined by three doctors before being driven to Pretoria, who all said he was ‘malingering’.¹²

These doctors had seen Biko after the assault and found evidence of brain damage but hadn’t mentioned this to the security police nor had they included it in their reports, in spite of the fact that he was in hospital by then and could not walk or talk. Instead, district surgeon Dr Benjamin Tucker, who was called in twice when Biko again collapsed, frothing at the mouth, felt that he might be faking it even though he had been told of the results of a lumbar puncture performed by a neurosurgeon. He decided Biko was fit enough to travel to Pretoria in the back of a van without medical supervision.

All this detail I would learn only much later. What affected me at the time? Well, of course I was taken in by the ‘famous front page’, which the Daily Dispatch itself later described like this:

One of the bleakest days in the life of the Daily Dispatch and the world was reflected in our front page of Wednesday 14 September 1977.

The main headline simply proclaimed in bold capital letters: ‘Biko dies in detention’ …

The headline was followed by two sub-headlines balanced in acres of solemn clear space either side of a poignant and dramatic centrepiece portrait of Stephen (Steve) Bantu Biko …

The sub-heads stated ‘Sikhahlela indoda yamadoda’ and ‘We salute a hero of the nation.’¹³

The paper went on to provide a brief biography of Biko, his standing in the Black Consciousness movement and community; and then gave shocking details of the response of the apartheid government to his death. This was in the form of a detailed statement from the government in which it claimed that Biko ‘appeared unwell’ after embarking on a hunger strike and died six days later. He had, they said, been examined by various doctors including private specialists, who could diagnose ‘no physical problem’.¹⁴

So, they were saying Biko had starved himself to death. The minister of justice Jimmy Kruger declared: ‘I am not saddened by Biko’s death and I am not mad. His death leaves me cold.’¹⁵

Kruger made this statement at a meeting of the National Party congress on 14 September, two days after Biko’s death. Another delegate, Christoffel Venter, stood up after Kruger had spoken and praised him, saying he was so ‘democratic’ that he even allowed detainees ‘the democratic right to starve themselves to death.’¹⁶

But Woods was having none of this. He boldly stated that Kruger was lying, that Biko had not starved himself to