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Truth is a Strange Fruit:
A Personal Journey through the Apartheid War
David Beresford
Publisher: Jacana (South Africa) 2010
Paperback – 193 pages - 24 colour photos
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One of the most shocking stories of the anti-apartheid era may have been uncovered by a Guardian Newspaper correspondent. It is the disclosure that former South African Prime Ministers, Hendrik Verwoed and John Vorster, and the former head of the security police, General Hendrik van den Berg, were co-conspirators in a crime which led to another man being sent to the gallows. The man who was hanged was John Harris, the so-called mad bomber executed for bombing Johannesburg's Park station in 1964. Harris was the only white man hanged for a political offence during National Party rule. It now appears that the three most powerful political figures in South Africa at the time - Verwoerd, Vorster and Van den Bergh - knew that the bomb had been planted and had plenty of time to stop it, but chose not do so. The reason was that they anticipated - and were proven right - that the bomb would deliver a hammer blow to the anti-apartheid movement. Harris was the chairman of Sanroc (the South African Non-racial Olympic Committee) which was leading the campaign against apartheid through sports boycotts. The bomb, which went off at 4.33 pm on Friday 24, 1964, also destroyed the Liberal Party. The allegations about Harris, Verwoerd, Vorster and Van den Bergh are made by David Beresford a Guardian foreign correspondent in Johannesburg, South Africa for 26 years. Beresford has spent more than 10 years on the book, while at the same time battling Parkinson's disease which he contracted while covering the first Gulf War.
