SHOUTING AT THE CROCODILE: POPO MOLEFE, PATRICK LEKOTA AND THE FREEING OF SOUTH AFRICA, Beacon Press, Boston, MA, 1990.

I Introduction: In the jaws of "the Big Crocodile"

On the morning of November 15, 1988, a young ex-policeman, Barend Hendrik Strydom, drove past Church Square. He was looking for someone to kill. Someone black.'

Outside the Palace of justice where ambassadors and church leaders, television crews and celebrities, lawyers and family members were gathering to hear the judge deliver his verdict on those accused in the Delmas Trial, Church Square was full of policemen and Strydom saw few blacks. He drove on, looking for more. Two blocks from the court, he found some. He parked, taking care to pay the meter. He did not want to do anything illegal. Then, laughing, he shot an eighty-eight year old woman, an Indian storekeeper, and another woman waiting in a hospital bus. He shot twenty-two people. Seven died.

A week before, he had practiced at a squatters camp, shooting two women, "to see if I was physically capable of killing people." One died.

At first most people thought the rampage had nothing to do with the Delmas Trial, but at Strydoms trial another picture emerged. Strydom had come to Church Square looking for friends of the Delmas defendants. He hoped to kill Allan Boesak, President of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and a patron of the United Democratic Front, the organization the trial was designed to crush.

Strydom, son of a policeman and an ex-policeman himself, belonged to a political party, the AWB, that admires the Nazis and holds rallies displaying three-legged swastikas. He said he was head of a secret society called the White Wolves, which has claimed credit for bombing the headquarters of the South African Council of Churches, the Southern African Catholic Bishops Conference, and other buildings housing anti-apartheid organizations. (The police had been noticeably unable to bring to court people responsible for violence against anti-apartheid institutions and people. Some believed the police themselves were responsible.)

Strydom explained, "Each black person threatens the continued existence of whites, even an eighty-eight-yearold woman. They are known to breed very fast." He added, "Scientists have shown that oxygen is decreasing. They are threatening the life of the entire planet."

Strydom is not alone. Supporters attended his trial wearing the nineteenth-century dress of the Voortrekkers, the forebears whose penetration of the interior sets the patterns of Afrikaner myth and identity Another supporter, inspired by the trial, threatened to shoot black workers at the plant where he works as a supervisor. When Strydom was found guilty, newspapers received letters calling him a 11 martyr of the third freedom war," and demanding that his death penalty be commuted.

On the morning of the Delmas verdict, while Strydom was doing his bloody business nearby, a few minutes before the defendants went up to the courtroom crowded with observers and police, Lekota, one of the prisoners in the holding cell under the courtroom, was writing a letter to a friend.

Today we are receiving judgement. Earlier on I had some anxiety for my family. All my years are going to our struggle, and the question must cross their minds as to whether I still remember my obligations toward them. But now, all that has suddenly changed into unbridled rage with this system of South African law. This past week, an Afrikaner bully, Jacobus Vorster, was fined [ $1,200] for tying an African laborer to a tree and beating him to death. He was then released to go back to his farm with an order that he pay the widow [ $431 per month for five years. The laborer (deceased) had accidentally killed Vorster's one dog and injured another one ... African life remains extremely cheap in this country.

That "system of South African law" was about to pronounce on him and eighteen -others tried on capital charges of treason and other crimes listed in an indictment of more than 360 pages. Charges against three defendants originally included in the indictment had been dropped.