Forty years ago this week, an ANC car bomb exploded outside the headquarters of the South African Air Force in Pretoria, killing 21 people. MK’s deadliest attack marked the moment the ANC brought the struggle close to home.
On May 19, 1983 Hélène Passtoors, a Belgian linguistics lecturer employed at the University of Maputo, drove a cream Colt Galant from Swaziland to Mamelodi. Passtoors was a close friend of Joe Slovo and a member of his MK special operations unit. Though she knew the car had been “primed with explosives”, by her MK superiors Aboobaker Ismail and John Mnisi, according to the minutes of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission , “she did not know the target at which it would be used”.
The next day, ANC members Freddie Shongwe and Ezekial Maseko were seen working under the bonnet of the Galant with an angle grinder . Soon after 3pm they left Mamelodi — Maseko in his combi and Shongwe in the Galant — and drove to Pretoria. Shongwe parked in Church Street, outside the South African Defence Force directorate of military intelligence and across the road from the Nedbank building, which housed the headquarters of the South African ...
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