ON THIS DAY : June 16 Soweto Protest

25 Years After Magoo’s Bar Bombing

On this day 25 years ago in the ANC and Robert McBride’s bomb attack on civilians at Magoo’s Bar on Durban's Marine Parade, three young white women were killed and many bar patrons were wounded when former MK (Umkhonto we Sizwe - the former armed wing of the ANC) operative Robert McBride planted a powerful car bomb outside Magoo's on June 14, 1986

Apart from the three women ‒ Angelique Pattenden, Julie van der Linde and Marchelle Gerand ‒ who died in the bombing, 73 people were wounded in the explosion outside the popular Durban beachfront Magoo's Bar.

In June 1986, McBride taped together more than 100 pounds of explosives, attaching a mine with a 15-minute timer as his trigger, and swaddling this propulsive charge with bags of machine-gun bullets and metal scraps for shrapnel. He secreted his lethal contraption in the spare-wheel well of a powder-blue Ford Cortina, which he parked one Saturday night on a crowded beachfront esplanade in Durban.

The bomber was out of earshot when his device exploded into two busy white bars.
Magoos bar and the nearby "Why Not" bar were targeted because they were believed to be frequented by apartheid security force personnel, who were regarded as legitimate targets in the ANC's armed struggle against the former government. Few, if any, of the victims were members of the security forces.

That was not the first time the ANC had used car bombs and it was not the last time.

McBride and a companion were convicted of the bombing, and McBride was sentenced to execution three times for his part in the attack. A pardon negotiated by Nelson Mandela saved McBride from death row. In 1999 McBride was released and granted amnesty for the Magoo’s Bar terror attack by the TRC due largely to the fact that the ANC claimed it had ordered McBride to attack the pubs, contrary to its initial denials that it was involved in the bombing.

McBride, one of the most famous saboteurs in the furtive military underground of the ANC, then became a diplomat in the new SA government, then was recalled for sexual indiscretions (he sexually abused white female staffers at the Malaysian embassy where he worked). His reward was to be appointed as Police Commissioner for the second largest Urban Metropolitan police force in South Africa... a position from which he was suspended for four years due to a drunk driving charge.

Yet another fine example of a black history maker....

The Constitutional Court recently ruled that 'Bomber' McBride may be called a murderer because of the cold-blooded multiple murders which he committed although he had received amnesty for the incident. But he still stands by the bombing, saying that if he was in the same situation, he would do it again.

So, on this sad anniversary, our thoughts are with the next of kin of those victims who died and the 73 innocent victims who were injured in the deadly blast that night 25 years ago.

The total number of people killed or injured in the 30 years of MK's campaigns is not known exactly. MK launched its first guerrilla attacks against government installations on 16 December 1961 and was subsequently classified as a terrorist organization by the South African government and the United States, and banned. Ten leaders of the ANC were tried for 221 acts of sabotage in the Rivonia Trial.

Details are not available, but it is estimated that the MK High Command co-ordinated over 190 acts of sabotage between October 1961 and July 1963. A study by Tom Lodge of the University of the Witwatersrand estimated that there were 150 MK attacks between 1976 - 1982.

SEE HERE FOR List Of MK Operations

MOB JUSTICE - Innocent Man Bludgeoned to Death

Warning: This video contains graphic scenes of violence.

Surrounded by a jeering mob, a 26-year-old Zimbabwean man was bludgeoned to death in Diepsloot, his horrifying ­final moments captured on a video that thrust South Africa's violence back into the international spotlight. This footage has never been released in South Africa, but made headlines in one of the world’s most influential newspapers.



Farai Kujirichita was still alive when a man in a white cap methodically destroyed his face and skull with a heavy wooden plank. He was probably dead or dying when another man grasped his belt and punched him repeatedly in the groin and a grinning teenage girl raised a large chunk of cement above her head.

His "crime"? - Being Zimbabwean!

His murder in January this year in Diepsloot - a community of 150 000 in northern Johannesburg, where ­instances of mob violence are ­commonplace and growing ever more so - was quickly forgotten. It would have remained that way but for a New York Times Magazine cover story last weekend and the grainy cellphone video of his final moments, excerpts from which were published for the first time on the paper's website.

The article appeared just days after UN special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, Jorge Bustamante, highlighted xenophobic attacks in South Africa and called on the government to implement more stringent hate crime legislation. The story of Kujirichita's killing made international headlines last week, including in newspapers in Zimbabwe, Taiwan and New Zealand.

In Diepsloot, the killings continued.

Two weeks ago, two Zimbabweans were kicked and beaten to death after being accused of robbery. In another incident, a suspected thief ­narrowly escaped with his life when police arrived just in time to prevent a mob from killing him.

See full story here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/magazine/watching-the-murder-of-an-innocent-man.html?_r=2&ref=magazine
http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Horror-of-a-mob-murder-20110612
http://www.news24.com/Galleries/Video/Videos/South%20Africa/Mob%20murder%20in%20Diepsloot/0210ab51d67e469f9b3cbae65c6d7394/Mob-murder

Farm Murders South Africa

Farmers in South Africa are being murdered at the rate of 313/100,000, and they often suffer violent deaths after being tortured for hours. That's 2 farmers every week! 90% of farms that have been redistributed have failed and are NOT producing any food. Farm killings have increased since Julius Malema - leader of the ANC Youth League - has started singing the banned song "Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer".

Brutal Truth about Black People

My guess is that had the following been written by a white journalist, he would have been sacked from the newspaper. As it is, this is a black reader's letter that appeared in 'The Namibian' on 08 April 2011.

"ALTHOUGH hard to swallow, us black people despise everything that looks like us. To prove my point, not so long ago fellow blacks who had run away from atrocities in their own African countries were beaten, burned and some even killed by fellow blacks in South Africa.

In Namibia, black supporters of the ruling party Swapo and the opposition parties clashed in 2009 and we still hear of such quarrels or violence just in the name of politics. Through studying history, I have come to learn that we actually disliked one another before colonialism, hence fierce tribal fights during those years. Colonialism united us all in the fight against a common enemy and after colonialism, we saw the rebirth of things we thought were buried a long time ago, like tribalism, regionalism, favouritism, etc.

Although we do not like others from other tribes, we all love things that we do not produce. We love fine branded clothes from Europe, we love American and German-made cars, we love expensive wines and whiskeys, yet no African person brews any of them.

All we own, unfortunately, are thousands of shebeens where we drink ourselves to death, stab each other with knives/bottles, infect each other with the HIV virus, make lots of unwanted babies and then blame others for our miseries. We love all sorts of expensive foreign made items and show them off yet we look down at our indigenous products that we fail to commercialise.

As blacks, we know very little about investments, whether in stocks, or in properties. All we know is how to invest our money in things that depreciate or evaporate the fastest like clothes, cars, alcohol and when we are at it, we want the whole world to see us. I know some brothers driving BMWs, yet they sleep on the floors and don’t have beds because nobody will see them anyway.

This is what we love doing and this is the black life, a life of showing off for those who have. A black millionaire tenderpreneur living in Ludwigsdorf or Klein Kuppe in Windhoek will drive to the notorious Eveline Street in Katutura where he will show off his expensive car and look down on others.

We sell our natural resources to Europe for processing, and then buy them back in finished products. What makes us so inferior in our thinking that we only pride ourselves when we have something made by others? What compels us to show off things that we don’t manufacture? Is it the poverty that we allow ourselves to be in? Is it our navigated consciousness, our culture, or just a low self esteem possessing us? For how long are we going to be consumers or users of things we do not produce? Do we like the easy way out, such that we only use and consume things made by others?

Do designer clothes, expensive wines or changing our names to sound more European make us more confident in ourselves?

Our leaders scream at us how bad the Europeans are yet they steal our public money and hide it in European banks. We know how Europeans ransacked Africa but we are scandalously quiet when our own leaders loot our countries and run with briefcases under their arms full of our riches to Europe. The Europeans took our riches to Europe but our African leaders are doing this too.

Mubarak of Egypt, Gadaffi of Libya, Mobutu Sese Seko of the then Zaire, all had their assets allegedly frozen in Europe. Why do our African leaders who claim to love us run to invest ‘their’ money in Europe? Again when they get sick they are quick to be flown to Europe for treatment, yet our relatives die in hospital queues. Don’t our leaders trust the health systems they have created for us all?

Why are we so subservient, so obedient to corruption when committed by our very own people? Nobody can disagree with me that in this country that we are like pets trained to obey the instructions of their masters.

I am sure we look down when we think of our broken lives but what do we see then? I wonder if we realise how we sell our dreams to our leaders for corruption, misery, poverty, unemployment, underdevelopment and all other social evils affecting us.

How long are we going to let our manipulated minds mislead us, from womb to tomb?"