The Faded Memory of the 1994 Bree Street Bombing

Bree Street after the bomb. Photo: Annika Langa

30 years ago, on Sunday the 24th of April 1994, right-wingers planted bombs near the ANC offices in down town Johannesburg and in a taxi rank in Germiston. 21 people were killed and 92 injured. The aim was to disrupt our first democratic elections that were to start in 48 hours. 

Although this was, and still is, the largest act of bombing terrorism in Johannesburg´s history, not much has been said about it. In many ways, it feels like a faded memory. An internet search doesn´t give a whole lot of hits either. 

I was there that day with my husband Paul. We had worked almost the whole night and slept unusually late. In fact, I was woken up by the loud bang at 09:50, but it wasn´t a sound that I recognized. Still half asleep, I assumed it must have been thunder. It wasn't. It was 200 pounds of explosives that had been packed under a beige Audi. My husband Paul immediately realized that something was wrong. He got up and threw on a blue workers overall and a sun hat, an outfit he wore when going into to troubled areas and situations. The Apartheid security forces had no time for gardeners. 

We stayed in a flat in Yeoville. It didn´t take us long to get to the city. The police and army had started to put up crowd control barriers. Paul didn´t slow down. He jumped over and continued running towards the ANC regional office in Von Wielligh street (where he worked as an organizer). I stopped and climbed over the barrier. The next thing I knew, a soldier pushed a rifle muzzle into my back. 

"Take one more step and you're dead", he shouted. 

I turned around and our eyes locked. He was a young white male, about the same age as myself. I made up my mind in a split second. He´s not going to shoot me, a white woman, I thought, and I ran, faster than I´ve ever ran before. 

More than a dozen stores and shops were gutted, and windows were shattered for several blocks. Survivors were screaming. Smoke billowed from burning buildings, and water poured from burst mains. If I remember correctly, there wasn´t much left of Herman Mashaba´s hair saloon Black Like Me. 

The ANC Regional PWV-office was in tatters. There was glass all over and furniture laid scattered over the floor. In a corner, a friend of mine, Safoora Sadek, an anti-apartheid activist and human rights campaigner was writing on a desk top PC with a broken screen. From what I could see, it wasn´t working. I gathered that she was shell shocked. I put my hand on her shoulder and asked her if she was okay. 

"They are not going to stop us. We are going to vote on Wednesday", she said. 

That was the mood of the early 1990´s in South Africa. So many people: Comrades, anti-apartheid activists and civilians lost their lives in the lead up to the country´s first democratic, all-race election. Amnesty International estimated that about 20,000 people were killed in state sanctioned violence. The Nationalist Party government and other conservative groupings within the white society fought against every step of the way towards a free South Africa. 

There are many of us who carry untold stories about Apartheid and South Africa´s transition to a democracy. We live in sinister times where there´s so much racial hatred and sophisticated dishonesty, it's easy to be deceived by their lies. If we don't share our experiences, we leave the door wide open for "white" myths and history revision. Our children and grand children will be told that Apartheid wasn´t that bad; that Apartheid president FW de Klerk dismantled Apartheid hand in hand with Mandela; that both sides, the ANC and the Apartheid government, committed mistakes on the same scale; that social ills like corruption is as bad, or even worse than Apartheid. 

Or actually, in fact, that´s what they are already being told. Write, talk, South Africa. Make sure that our future generations know your struggle and our past. 

This was the most deadly campaign of terror bombings in the history of Johannesburg. But few would recognize it as such - why?