The most serious allegations, however, stemmed from the activities of her personal bodyguards, the so-called Mandela United Football Club. Winnie Mandela also maintained a gang of enforcers: There was also the matter of an opulent £125,000 house built in one of the poorest areas in the country. In 1986 she made a speech in which she talked about achieving liberation from apartheid by using “necklaces” – a reference to the brutal murder of suspected collaborators by putting tyres round their necks and setting them alight. The following five years were increasingly controversial. She continued on, seeming to endorse a particularly brutal tactic known as “necklacing.”
Mandela’s tenure in prison softened him and he turned away from violence, but so not his wife. Several other bombings occurred, with smaller numbers of casualties. Wimpy were specifically targeted because of their perceived rigid enforcements of many Apartheid-era laws, including excluding people of colour from their restaurants. A multitude of bombs in “Wimpy Bar” fast food outlets and supermarkets occurred during the late 1980s, killing and wounding many people. At the Ellis Park rugby stadium in Johannesburg, a car bomb killed two and injured 37 civilians. Also in 1988, in a bomb detonation outside a magistrate’s court killed three.
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The bombing campaign continued with attacks on a series of soft targets, including a bank in Roodepoort in 1988, in which four civilians were killed and 18 injured. In 1987, a bomb exploded at a military command centre in Johannesburg, killing one person and injuring 68 personnel. In 1987, an explosion outside a Johannesburg court killed three people and injured 10 a court in Newcastle had been attacked in a similar way the previous year, injuring 24. Although the subsequent Truth and Reconciliation Committee called the bombing a “gross violation of human rights”, McBride received amnesty and became a senior police officer. Robert McBride received the death penalty for this bombing which became known as the “Magoo’s Bar bombing”. In the 1986 Durban beach-front bombing, a bomb was detonated in a bar, killing three civilians and injuring 69. In a submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the ANC stated that Zondo acted on orders after a recent SADF raid in Lesotho. In the 1985 Amanzimtoti bomb on the Natal South Coast, five civilians were killed and 40 were injured when MK cadre Andrew Sibusiso Zondo detonated an explosive in a rubbish bin at a shopping centre shortly before Christmas. During the next 10 years, a series of bombings occurred in South Africa, conducted mainly by the military wing of the African National Congress. In 1983, the Church Street bomb was detonated in Pretoria near the South African Air Force Headquarters, resulting in 19 deaths and 217 injuries. Landmark events in MK’s military activity inside South Africa consisted of actions designed to intimidate the ruling power. The African National Congress has a message of freedom for all who live in our country.” We are not racialists, as the white oppressors are. We are fighting for a South Africa in which there will be peace and harmony and equal rights for all people. We are fighting for democracy-majority rule-the right of the Africans to rule Africa. “Our men are armed and trained freedom fighters not terrorists.
Mandela is reported to have written an MK manifesto including the following: Mandela was co-founder of the MK, or “Tip of the Spear”, an organization created to conduct guerilla warfare against the South African government. That could not have been envisioned in 1961, when Mandela helped persuade the ANC that violence was necessary to get whites to share power with South Africa’s black majority. Mandela was instrumental in the use of violence in South Africa:Īn irony of Nelson Mandela’s life is that the African National Congress freedom fighter will forever be remembered as a man of peace. JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first black president, is a giant in the world of liberation heroes, up there with Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.īut unlike Gandhi, who said that nonviolence and truth were inseparable, and King, who famously declared that violence was immoral, Mandela embraced armed struggle to end the racist system of apartheid. Unfortunately, 1990 is where Mandela’s history begins and in 1999 is where it ends for most people. “As I walked out of the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew that if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.” Nelson Mandela wrote about his feelings when he left prison in 1990: