Apartheid in full swing

On 24 July 1964, Park Station became headline news when John Harris, a political activist and member of the African Resistance Movement, exploded a bomb on the station during the afternoon rush hour. It killed one person and injured 22 others, an act for which he was sentenced to death.

The bombing was the latest in a spate of bombings to rock South Africa since Sharpville in 1960. The move away from passive resistance to armed resistance signalled a fundamental turning point in the struggle against apartheid and the policies of the then Nationalist government. Up to 1960 black resistance movements, with their policies of passive resistance and protest, had followed in the footsteps of Gandhi. Targets were government buildings, electrical and railway installations and equipment. The station bomb was the first bomb which caused extensive civilian casualties. The poem by Sheila Fugard reflects the impact of the bomb on white South Africans.

Platform 5 (The incident of John Harris who placed a bomb in the Johannesburg Station).

A man with a suitcase blew up the world
The contents of his universe the mother the lover the children
Grieve and clutch the assassin and the god
Mating and supping and sleeping stumbling out of the door of conscience
Into the fire tapers flickering a monument of purpose
Pain only a key to images a sea a sky a tear
A sound of tornado mutes the echoes of children
Playing at future holocausts the game of kites
Flying over cities alive with pity when the voice spoke
Platform 5 four-thirty-three and from the statue armoury
Of his quest all dreams were added the thing exploded
Gelignite into the arms of an old woman and a child

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