THE outrage, the bile, the hatred that comes bubbling to the surface the minute Robert McBride’s name swims into the public eye is all too predictable. He is the man white South Africa loves to hate more than any other.
This time, as we know, it is because he has been endorsed as the new head of the police watchdog body, the Independent Police Investigative Directorate, Ipid.
The chattering classes were outraged, social media went into overdrive, and the more excitable sections of our media dressed up their copy with pictures of McBride at a braai where he may or may not have been drunk, and resurrected every detail of his past.
The outrage around the nomination of McBride stems from four incidents:
First, his charges on drunk driving and obstructing justice. The North Gauteng High Court found him not guilty on appeal on all the charges. Yes, all of them.
Second, his 1998 arrest and subsequent five-month detention for alleged gun-running in Mozambique. He was released without charge, and he has always maintained he was investigating arms smuggling on behalf of the National Intelligence Agency. The NIA has never denied this.
Third, his being charged with assault (it never went to court) after he and gang boss, Cyril Beeka, who was gunned down in March 2011, were involved in an altercation at a city escort agency in 1999. The chattering classes were outraged that he should a) be in an escort agency and b) be consorting with a shady underworld character.
Actually, that’s exactly what cops should be doing (and journalists – we also consort with shady characters in shady places). It’s known as intelligence gathering.
That leaves the June, 1986, bombing of Magoo’s and the Why Not bar on Durban’s beachfront that left three (white) women dead and 69 people wounded. The bomb blast was, figuratively, heard around the world. It was pretty much the first time that the war in South Africa had been taken right into the heart of white suburbia, so to speak.
Strategically, it was a horrible miscalculation. But it was perfectly in line with an ANC policy decision taken at the Kabwe Conference a year earlier, which blurred the line between “hard” and “soft” targets and resolved to take the war to the white civilian population.
Although McBride selected the target, he was acting under a chain of command. With his old comrade, Gordon Webster, he was in charge of an MK cell belonging to the ANC’s Special Operations Unit commanded from Gaborone by Aboobaker Ismail, who went on to head up security at the Reserve Bank. Ismail reported to Joe Slovo who reported to OR Tambo.
McBride spent five years on death row until he was pardoned and released on the same day, and as part of a package deal, as “Wit Wolf” Barend Strydom who had gunned down seven (black) people and wounded 15 more in Pretoria in 1988.
It is because of Magoo’s, then, that Robert McBride will forever remain an object of hatred in the psyche of white South Africa. But do those same people who hate McBride for a second pause and think of, for example, Jeannette Schoon and her six-year-old daughter, Katryn, killed in 1984 in Lubango by a letter bomb from Craig Williamson? Or sweet, gentle Jackie Quinn, murdered by the SADF in Lesotho in 1987? Or the 42 people who died, 12 of them citizens of Lesotho (including five BaSotho women and two children) in the SADF raid on Maseru in 1982?
There were thousands, tens of thousands, of innocent civilians who died at the hands of the apartheid security forces. Part of the deal we signed to end apartheid and to bring peace, truth and reconciliation to our country was to forgive.
William Butler Yeats, in his ode to Irish martyrs, Easter 1916, wrote the following about Robert McBride’s ancestor, the Republican hero, John MacBride, who fought in South Africa for the Boers:
“He had done most bitter wrong/To some who are near my heart,/Yet I number him in the song;/He, too, has resigned his part in the casual comedy;/He, too, has been changed in his turn,/Transformed utterly:/A terrible beauty is born.”
Yeats could well have been writing about Robert McBride: he may not be the right man for the Ipid job, he may not be a very nice person – I don’t know, I have only met him once.
But for heaven’s sake, give the man a break, and let’s stop seeing a Zuma conspiracy behind every tree.
tonyweaver@iafrica.com