When they were being transported back to Durban C.R. Swart police station in Durban, Robert was in one car, Greta and Derrick in another.

Robert's hands were chained behind his back, and a balaclava was pulled over his head to stop him from seeing where they were taking him.

In the other vehicle, Greta and Derrick also had hoods covering their eyes.

Greta says the policemen who were driving them down were confused.

"They couldn't believe themselves that they were driving terrorists. It could have been for the first time in their lives."

The policemen - all white - tried to make her and Derrick feel that, as Coloureds, they were letting the side down by identifying with the struggle.

"It's as if they finally got the culprits who were bombing Durban out of its mind and they did not know who the hell it was," she continues. "They were swearing at us,: '’How could it be you people? How can you do such things and you're Coloureds? Professionals! You [Derrick] own a business. You [Greta] are a social worker!' They were out of their minds. They were shocked but excited that they've got the damn people that were doing all the bombings that were taking place."

At Harrismith, the three detainees were transferred to vehicles driven by policemen who had come up from Durban to fetch them.

By then, it was already dark.

Greta and Derrick were now separated. She had started experiencing her menstrual periods in Nigel. At Harrismith, she asked a policewoman to organise her sanitary pads.

The balaclava on Robert's head was removed.

A security policeman from Durban, Brandt Visagie, was furious with him, accusing him for having killed their "daddy", Colonel Welman - the victim of the first Chamberlain Road bomb detonated by Robert and Gordon.

The detainee was wearing an anorak he had borrowed from his Uncle Leslie because of the cold weather in Nigel. Visagie and his colleagues tried to choke him with the anorak.

"Brandt Visagie was hitting me on the way also. He was asking me questions: 'What is your MK name?' ‘Where is Gordon Webster?' I said to him, 'I don't know what you're talking about'. As he hit me, he was getting hysterical. But I think he was like softening me for the next shit that's coming. He started to choke me."

It was about nine o'clock in the evening when the vehicle carrying Robert arrived at Durban's C.R. Swart Square.

"There [at C.R. Swarts], the real shit started," he says.

Brandt Visagie was about the same age as he was.

"He's got very thick lips - he's one of the Boers with very thick lips; very big."

The policeman was one of the members of the Security Branch [SB] who were particularly brutal in their treatment of Robert. Some of other SBs were Captain Jimmy Taylor, Captain Zenardt de Beer, Captain Jacobus Vorster, Warrant Officer Koos van Rooyen and Bertie Steyn.

While Visagie was about the age as his captive, Taylor and de Beer were much older. Taylor was about forty-eight years old, slightly built and of medium height.

"He looked like [former German international tennis star] Boris Becker, but not as fit as Boris. He's a guy with a very red face. I think it's called 'ruddy'. He's got very yellow hair, and he looks very bad."

Zenardt de Beer was about the same age as Taylor. He was a very quiet, soft-spoken man.

"[Zenardt] de Beer had a slight moustache - not a very big one - and a fairly soft face. Pointy nose. He had a dark, brown hair and brown eyes. The two Captains [de Beer and Taylor] seemed like they were well-read; well-educated."

Although to Robert, Zenardt de Beer was seemingly the one in charge, the policeman didn't speak much when he was being interrogated.

"He just did his business and went away. He'd ask some questions in Taylor's presence, or he’d ask Taylor something. Or call Taylor to check something. But he never had dealings with me. You could see in his mind, he doesn't care about getting hysterical. He knows I'm going to hang, and that's how he's gonna deal with me - get me to hang in terms of the law."

Vorster, who Robert later got to learn was giving Greta a particularly bad time, was about the same age as the two other captains. Colonel Jacobus Vorster seemed "vindictive".

Bertie Steyn, on the other hand, "was hysterical, very angry, and hateful."

"He's one of the guys who was tramping on my leg (after Robert was shot while trying to escape from prison). One time he was squeezing my balls. They had a [photograph] album with pictures of people, so I didn't want to point out Rashid and them."

Steyn wore glasses and had a brownish, mouse-coloured blond moustache.

"He's the guy that you'll always meet up with in a police station."

On his first night at C.R. Swarts, Taylor gave him a taste of things to come.

"I remember Taylor. I'm handcuffed to the window; my hands are chained behind me. He sort of calmly walked towards me. I'm wondering, 'What the hell is going on?, 'Who is this guy?'. He comes and pokes me in the chest. I don't know what shit I'm telling him. He pokes me very hard. 'Don't talk shit to me! We know everything. We want to hear it from you'. Poking my chest. I remember a room full of guys."

Greta says before the police took them to C.R.Swarts, they first went to Westville prison. By then, it was already clear to her that the police viewed Robert as the catch.

"They were swarming around us," she says. "They knew I was a small fry in the whole thing. I could see in the passage [at Westville prison]. They were swearing him, and they even hit him at that point. In his face. I think I responded. I don't remember what it was, but I was shouting something to him. They came to me and said, 'You say one more word to him, we will hit you'. This man [Robert] they were going to take him down. This is the one they want to torture slowly. It was very obvious."

At C.R. Swarts, they took her and Robert to adjoining rooms on the thirteenth floor.

"Robert was taken to one office and I was taken to a different one. They were questioning us simultaneously, going in and out of the office, asking us the same questions."

Among her interrogators was a female officer. The officer was also hostile towards her.

The police did not immediately get physical with Greta Apelgren. She was on her feet as they questioned her. Sometimes all six policemen would each ask her a question at the same time.

Initially, she could fool the policemen about what she knew and what she did not know.

At some stage, the police brought a tape and played it for her. It was a recording of their interrogation of Robert.

"I said, 'This is not Robert speaking. It's someone else'. They would scream and come and want to hit me and all that. And I would say, 'It's not Robert speaking'. I was stubborn and in denial for those men. The men didn't know what to do with me."

The policemen then decided to get tough with her.

"They realised they can't get me psychologically, and they would have to get me physically. Then they started to force me to do exercises."

They forced her to do press ups; to hop from one part of the room to another; to squat and to push a coin up to the highest point on a wall. If she failed to do the exercises as they wanted her to do them, they would beat her up.

"They were hitting me; hitting me with a clothes brush - the one to dust a coat - on my thighs and on my back. I had to squat. To jump from this end of the room to that part squatting. I had to do all kinds of terrible exercises. It was squatting; it was hopping. All the time. Continuously. Then I must push a one cent piece up the wall. I think they were trying to break me psychologically."

Greta tried hard to do as the police said, but would not start talking.

"I would do anything they told me to do. The only time I couldn't do it any more was because it's hours I've been doing this thing. There's these press-ups. I could still do it, but I couldn't do it now by suspending my body - to get my whole body off the floor. In a press-up, you must not touch the floor. They would say, 'Do it'. So I had to do it.

"I would rest for a few seconds. They would say, 'we did not say stop!'. The only thing I was feeling pain, it was hurting my knees. The wrists I could feel no pain. I still didn't care."

They also put a bag over her head to starve her of oxygen.

"They put a plastic over my head - an ordinary Spar (named after a supermarket chain) shopping bag; they'd taken it and held it there. Whatever air was in the packet I finished breathing, then I screamed. It covered my eyelids and nostrils and lips. And still they won't take it off."

One policeman held the plastic over her head, another held her hand.

"I broke free and I'm now falling on the floor. And they're going with me to the floor. So they're holding it like that, and I would say, 'Do you want to kill me?'"

She had started menstruating when the police arrested them at Nigel, but the policemen did not care about that.

She says even their female colleague was not sensitive about that.

"I was wearing the same dress I was arrested with two days before. I hadn't been allowed to change or wash. It was two days like that. I was menstruating. I told the woman who was there. She was there for the first two or three days. All the time. She swore at me, 'You're just a bitch!'. She would just try to break my self-esteem."

Then she had to squat in front of her male interrogators.

"That was terrible, but I didn't feel humiliated. I just felt - I don't know how to explain it …; I wanted them to know that if you told me to do anything in an attempt to hurt me, humiliate me, I will do it because I would not allow to be humiliated or degraded."

When the policemen realised that they could not break her by getting physical with her, they decided to get to her through her kith and kin.

When Derrick and Robert did not call home for a number of days, Doris and Bonnie assumed that they had gone further. They thought maybe father and son had gone to exile; they would contact them in due course.

Bonnie was thus shocked when her father was brought to the workshop by policemen travelling in two cars.

Derrick was in his own clothes, was unshaved, and had grown thinner.

All the policemen accompanying him were white.

"They went into the workshop, and when I looked at my father, he shook his head at me. In other words, 'Don't acknowledge me - in case they realise you're my child and they take you with'. He obviously had been in interrogation and he knew the last thing he needed was for them to bring in his family."

Bonnie went against her father's subtle instructions.

"Well, it was my father. I want to know what's going on. I couldn't just sit back and just let them take him again. I had to know. The police kept telling me, 'Stay out of it! Stay out of it!'."

She was pained to see her father in chains and at the mercy of his captors.

"I knew what type of man my father was. That was killing me. He was always the man in our lives. I hadn't seen a man hit my father. I haven't up to this day; I haven't seen a man hit my father. I had to stand and watch him in chains."

She rushed to call her mother, who was teaching at a school for handicapped children nearby.

"I was at school, and then Bonnie came by the window," Doris remembers. "Because my window was onto the side of the road,.she knocked on the window, and she said to me, 'They've got Daddy and he's in chains. You must try to come.' I was in the classroom. So fortunately, these children that I teach, they didn't even know what was being said. I didn't answer. I didn't say nothing. I just went out of the door and said to the principal, 'I'm going. I'll come back if I can'. I walked out."

That was the last time Doris would ever be at the school.

When she got to the workshop, she found that Derrick had been joined by Robert and many more policemen.

"Derrick and Robert were just standing in chains there. The police were searching the workshop, climbing up stairs and were in the roof. There were about ten inside. Around the place, I don't know how many hundreds of them. They were all white. There were no blacks or Indians. They were all white."

She was livid when she saw Robert bleeding because his handcuffs were cutting deep into his wrists.

"I told this one man - one of those in charge, 'Can't you see his hand is bleeding? That handcuff is cutting him!' They said the key is not there, then Derrick said he can take it off. He can cut it."

Bonnie had a sense that he and their father were sizing up the situation to see if they could maybe escape.

"Robert was very calm. You could see they had him chained up like they had him, but they had to. I know my brother. In those days I really knew him. His eyes would tell you a lot. He stood there in the corner. They went into the ceiling and, as they brought out all the ammunition, I knew they are in big shit."

Doris looked on helplessly.

"I know my family," Bonnie continues. "I thought for some moment we gonna try something as a family. I thought so, and I was waiting for it. I kept on watching my brother's face and my father's face."

Though her father was very tired, he was still looking for a way out.

"But the more I watched Robert, I could just see that he's already summed up the situation and seen it's better for him to stand because if he made a move, they'd shoot him."

Gwyneth, Robert's youngest sister, was at the time at Catholic boarding school in Ixopo, Little Flower High.

"My mother wanted me to be out of the area because you find that most of the girls once they reach Standard 6, 7 or 8 [Grades 8, 9or 10] fall pregnant," she says. "She thought it would be better if I'm away from all that funny business. Maybe it was just the motherly instinct to keep me out of mischief."

The McBrides' last born child was informed of the arrest of her father and elder brother by her boarding mistress, Sister Jo-Anne. The nun from America was in her early forties.

"She had very big blue eyes. Her features were more Italian, and she was big. Hefty. I think somebody had said while she was in America, as a student, to get through her studies, she drove busses."

Sister Jo-Anne told her that Derrick and Robert had been arrested, but did not tell her why. Up to then, she had been ignorant of her brother's MK activities.

"When my mother and Bonnie pitched up, I wanted to know. 'Where's Daddy? Where's Robert?' Then my mother told me. Only then did it hit me. Before that I didn't know - or should I say, I was not really interested because I was at boarding school. You'd come home after three months and only spend two days with Robert. Robert always said, 'Ask me no questions and you'll hear no lies. Stop nagging with your questions'."

When some of Greta's father's people emigrated to Australia in 1975, one of her brothers, Lenny, had left with them.

The members of the Security Branch got to know that she had relatives overseas.

"I don't know how they discovered that. They'd say to me, 'We know you've got family in Australia. If you confess and also turn state witness, we can give you a new ID and a new life. We can protect you. As far as we're concerned, you know quite a lot'. I said, 'I don't need another life. I've done what I've done and I'm going to pay my price. If you say I'm guilty of murder and I'm going to hang, I'm prepared to hang'."

The police also knew that, at the time, she was a staunch Catholic. They would try get her to co-operate with them by making her feel what she had allegedly done was against her Christian principles.

"They'd say to me, 'You used to go to church so often. You were involved in this church structure and that. How could you kill innocent civilians. And innocent women too. How did you get it right?' I'd say - up till then I was stubborn, 'I didn't kill nobody. I haven't killed a soul'. They only could break me when they started to go on this line: they would say to me, 'We know your family. We know your sisters. We know your sisters' children. We are going to go to your family and kill this one'."

She got particularly anxious when the police said they threatened to harm her three year old nephew, Christopher, son to Cicely - one of her sisters.

"At that time I was very close to most of Cicely's children. 'Ja, we are going to get Christopher. You see that window there?' - they are on the thirteenth floor - 'We are just going to drop him out of there'. By that time I realised I am too much bravado for them, and they would now have to go to other people. They don't have to torture me any more. They would torture others to break me. Then it would hurt me."

The interrogators were also threatening to use electric shocks on her.

"The threat of electric shock scared me because I used to suffer from epilepsy. Epilepsy is an erratic flow of current to the brain. With electric shock, if something terrible happened to me I would have no control. I would have no control over my body when I go into spasm, and what they do to my family I would have no control over. I realised that then, I'd be at my weakest."

On the other hand, Robert realised very early after their detention that the die was cast. He saw escape as his only chance of avoiding the looming noose. Therefore, he did not take long to confess to many of the activities he had engaged in as a cadre of MK. But as he was now and again taken out of prison to point out "DLBs" and other relevant locations, he was looking for a way to evade his captors.

"As long as I am speaking about myself [to the interrogators], then it's fine. I don't mind," Robert says of his attitude while in detention. "I had no anxiety. It was difficult when I was to speak about somebody else."

He says that although he was prepared to co-operate with the interrogators, he was not prepared to let them humiliate him. Nor was he prepared to confess to his involvement in the first attack on the Chamberlain Road sub-station, which took the life of Colonel Welman.

Because he knew that Gordon Webster was out of the country, he said his comrade had told him that he had attacked the electricity sub-station alone.

"I didn't want to lose my dignity, so I never broke down in front of them, never cried in front of them and never asked them not to beat me. Not once. I accepted that I was gonna die, and that was cool. It's not that I'm extra strong, It's just that I had difficulty reacting normally to a situation because of all the dynamics there, and the anger of knowing that I was right gave me strength. I said, 'Whether I live or die, it doesn't make them good'."

His interrogators sometimes took him on intellectually, trying to make him doubt the correctness of his cause. He relished the debates.

"I told Taylor once, 'You guys are very professional. You're very good. You've got a lot of information, but you are on the wrong side'. He said he doesn't think so, I am on the side of communist domination. I said, 'I never read a communist book in my life. You are on the wrong side'. Then we debated. 'What's gonna happen tomorrow when it [the political system] changes? Will you support the other side?' I never once thought it will come so soon; so they said, 'Firstly, the kind of freedom you want, it's gonna take sixty years to come'. That's what Taylor says."

From the time he was arrested and taken down to Durban in a police vehicle to his time on death row, white policemen and warders often expressed surprise that, as 'Een van ons' - "one of us" -, he should have got involved in the anti-apartheid struggle.

"All the time, always. That ('one of us' talk) even went into death row. They would say, 'As jy was 'n kaffir ons kon verstaan, maar jy is een van ons. Jy is 'n Kleurling' - 'If you were a 'kaffir' we'd understand, but you are one of us. You are Coloured'. I couldn't understand how these guys could be so hypocritical. I just couldn't understand that. If I was 'van ons' [one of us] as they were saying, why was I oppressed in this country? And do they want me to be party to the oppression also?"

When Robert was arrested, the inquest into the death of the Wentworth gangster he had shot while on his way home after working at his mother 'Day 'N Nite’ tea-room had still not been held.

"The funny thing is the inquest happened when I was in detention. The guys came there to ask for me. I was detained under Section 29 of the Internal Security Act. The cops from the Wentworth, Oliver and Peter George came to ask for me. They wanted me to testify. They came right to the thirteenth floor [of C.R. Swart Square] and they said they needed me. Jimmy Taylor says to them, 'Can you see he is handcuffed to the chair? It's because he is dangerous. I can't give him to you to take away. He won't come back'."

The inquest continued in his absence. The finding was that he had shot the gangster death in self-defence.

Doris McBride was also thrown into jail after she was detained under [State of] Emergency regulations. The police were investigating a number of charges against her, including harbouring a fugitive from justice, Gordon Webster.

Subsequent to that, she was detained a number of times.

"For the first time I think I was detained for about a week," she says. "They were just saying mostly about Gordon Webster. Where is he, and to try to see if I've been in contact with him. They said they could do what they want with Robert and Derrick if I don't talk to them - tell them what they want to know. I said to them, 'Then Derrick and Robert have to suffer just because I'm covering for Gordon. I don't know where he is'."

When Doris was detained for the first time and was not released after spending a number of days in prison, Girly, her younger sister, got concerned. She had found out that her elder sister had not taken her blood thinning tablets with her when she was taken by the police.

"I couldn't find out where they had my sister," says Girly. "I phoned different police stations, and every time they would move her. They played games with me. One day, I said to Bonnie, 'They've got her locked up there and all her tablets are here. Doris had a blood condition that needs her to take a certain tablet every day to keep her blood thin. She's had it for many years."

She asked Bonnie to take her to C.R. Swart Square. At the police station, she instructed her to remain in the car as she went in to look for Doris.

"I don't even know where I was going to, I just got into a lift. I asked somebody, I think it was Captain Taylor. The person said to me, such and such a floor."

As her aunt got into the lift, she noticed her niece behind her.

"I said to Bonnie, 'I told you to stay in the car'. She says to me, 'I can't let you go alone'. When the lift stops, I walked in. There they've got my sister! You should have seen the way they jumped - they wouldn't let her even look at us. But she saw us. And she heard me."

The police told the two ladies to get back into the lift and escorted them down.

"I thought to myself, 'They want to kill her by not giving her medicine'. I got back into the lift and went up again."

Luckily, Girly and Bonnie met up with Doris again at another floor. The police were moving her elsewhere. Girly cleverly passed the tablets over to Doris.

"All I did was say, 'I'm glad I saw you', and, as I went, I put my arms around her and put the tablets in her arm."

At the time, Girly was privy to a secret of Bonnie's which her detained mother did not know yet: Doris's elder daughter was pregnant.

After Doris was detained, she had started helping in the ‘Day 'N Nite Diner’. It was while working in the tea-room that she began to suspect that Bonnie was pregnant.

Robert and Derrick met a few times before they went to trial.

One of their times was when the two, as well as Greta Apelgren were taken to Johannesburg.

The members of the police's Security Branch wanted to search the flat which they used to share in Hillbrow.

Greta remembers how Robert taunted their captors then.

"Robert was back with his bravado again by then," she laughs. "He would like make jokes, and would sort of unnerve these men quite a lot. He'd say things to them like, '’Look as much as you want, but I've got AK47s just there', and yet there was nothing there. Just to aggravate [annoy] them. He'd say, 'Look at those paintings there. Better look carefully, there's a secret safe'. He'd make them fools and laugh at them. He was mentally too superior for them once he sort of got himself back again."

However, the policemen got their revenge. During their time in Johannesburg, Robert, Greta and Derrick were held at John Vorster Square.

When the police finished searching the flat at Hillbrow's Claim street, they made Robert walk all the from there to John Vorster Square. The sight of this tall, fair-complexioned activist walking down the street in chains elicited curious stares from pedestrians and motorists in the city.

When Robert got back to Durban, he could deduce from his interrogators' line of questioning that Nazeem Cassiem was "singing".

"At one stage in detention, four cops were interrogating me. They said to me, 'We must kill the dogs. It's for the cause. You must do it'. They then said to me, 'Do you remember that statement?' I remembered the statement because I had said that to Nazeem when I was giving him political classes; trying to motivate him that we are going into war. Nobody likes war, but that had to be done."

He could make out that Nazeem had told the police about that statement.

"Then one of the cops said to me, 'Now there's four 'dogs' in the room here with you.' I started sweating because I knew trouble was coming."

Like his son, Derrick was always thinking about a way to escape from prison. The SBs tried to dispirit him by repeatedly telling him that it was a foregone conclusion that his son is going to hang. He would not let them get him down.

"My attitude was - it came out when I spoke to Brandt [Visagie], when he said, 'Your son is going to the gallows'. I said, 'You as a Christian should know why in this life there's hope. I'm telling you there's a lot of things you don't know. But you are not going to have my son. If you kill my son, you start a new revolution. You hang this person, you make him a martyr'. I had this attitude of 'parmantigheid' – “stubbornness” - still, even though deep down I knew the only way out was to escape."

The police tried to thwart the McBrides' plans to escape - especially Robert's - by always moving them from prison to prison.

One of the prisons where Robert would sometimes be taken to was Bellair, near Congella.

One day, while at Bellair, he was taken to an identification parade. Among the Coloured youths in the ID line-up was a boy from Wentworth. Robert carefully passed a message to the youth, asking him to inform his folk in the township that he was being held at Bellair.

He expected his mother and sisters to do their best to help him escape from prison.

Bronwyn expected her brother to try to escape from prison.

"I know my brother's spirit," she says. "I know how he thinks. He is Robert, my brother. I know that he's not just gonna lie there and die - accept that he's gonna die and just lie down. If I know I'm going to die, I might as well die trying something."

Later, she heard from inside information that Robert was indeed trying something at Bellair police station. She enlisted the support of her cousin Melanie, and tried to help Robert.

"There was a time when we heard Robert was at Bellair prison. She made my daughter dress in black," Girly relates. "They gonna break Robert out. That was Bonnie! She loved her brother too much. That first child of Bonnie's that she got, I don't think one day she even realised that she was pregnant. Her whole mind was with Robert."

The two cousins drove to Bellair at night a number of times and parked outside the prison. The car was full of petrol.

On her person, Bronwyn McBride was carrying a lot of banknotes.

"When he gets out, he must see there's a car, there's enough petrol and money because I know he'll know where to go. All I've got to do is just get myself back home. He'd know how to disappear."

She shares her brother's passion for reggae.

In the middle of the night, she sent out a signal to him by playing the music loudly from the car.

When her brother was first taken to Bellair police station, he was in defiant mood. This was during the early days of his detention. He was being interrogated at C.R. Swart Square.

After each interrogation session, he would be taken to Bellair, where he was held in solitary confinement.

Robert's captors showed him a statement supposedly written by Matthew Lecordier, implicating him in a number of sabotage activities, including the 'Magoo'/'Why Not' car bomb.

They also played him a tape of Greta Apelgren crying.

He agreed to give the policemen his version of events, and they provided him a blue 'biro' [ball point] pen and paper to write his statement.

Instead, when he got to Bellair, he scrawled political graffiti on the wall of his cell, denouncing the Nationalist Party government and extolling the virtues of a number of leaders in the freedom struggle.

Some of the slogans read: "VIVA ANC", "ROBERT McBRIDE ANC FREEDOM FIGHTER 1986", "STATE OF EMERGENCY? MY ARSE!", "PEOPLE'S HEROES UNDER MY COMMAND: DERRICK, GRETA, JEANETTE, ANTONIO, MATTHEW. WE SALUTE YOU".

On 10 September 1986, Robert was being transported to Bellair police station after the umpteenth interrogation session at C.R. Swart Square. From inside the police vehicle, he saw a newspaper poster announcing the execution of ANC cadre Andrew Zondo at Pretoria death row the day before. He knew that he was destined for the same fate.

Time was not on his side. He would have to devise an escape plan very fast.

At Bellair, his cell was within sight of the guard on duty; a young white policeman of about his age.

The policeman usually did not have the keys to Robert's cell.

"I'd listen to the news sometime. They had a small radio. The guy [a young white policeman] would talk nicely to me. The keys for my cell stayed in the charge office. The keys for the courtyard, this fellow keeps. He could open his side, come to the courtyard and come see if I'm alive or haven't or escaped or whatever."

Somewhere along the line, discipline broke down. The political detainee felt he could take advantage of that.

"I knew that the guy could open for me in the night to go to shower in the courtyard, when he comes on duty. It means both keys [to Robert's cell and to the courtyard] were there."

That evening, at around half-past seven, Robert asked to be let out to go and brush his teeth. He had a pair of tracksuit pants and a T-shirt on. On his feet, he was wearing tackies [trainers].

"When I walked across the courtyard to go and wash and brush my teeth, I looked on the (policeman's) table and saw a bunch of keys. It seemed to me all the keys are here. Normally, these guys are locked up themselves - they had to be opened up. There was another gate in the end, before you go to the charge office. They could only leave when these guys come up and open for them. All the keys were there."

The officer did not have a gun on him.

"No, no gun. You're not allowed guns there. If he had a gun, it was a different story. I might have stood a better chance - take him hostage or something."

He asked the policeman to let him out so that he could go and brush his teeth.

" He is very careful. He opens there [for Robert to go out of his cell]. He's not supposed to have my cell key. He stands. I go there [to the bathroom]. I do my business."

As he approached the policeman after brushing his teeth, Robert smiled, trying to chat him up.

The policeman was alone in his office.

"I'm coming back and am going back to the cell. He steps out of my way, so there's no reason to come towards him. I know I just have to go through. I say something, and I hit him. I never hit him with a hard blow, but he anticipated it and fell."

The moment the policeman fell, Robert rushed out.

"I ran. I picked the key at the table and I went out. By the time I reached the charge office, he was blowing a whistle already. I should have made sure he [wa]s unconscious. I come out and I'm moving out."

His obstacle to freedom was a three metre high gate outside the police station.

"I did a silly thing. I jumped over the high gate. I bust my ankle when I came down."

On the other side of the gate, the escapee fell into an overgrown patch of grass.

Some distance from him, under a street lamp, he could see a black policeman with a shot gun.

"He's looking towards me. Either he's pretending not to see me, or he can't see me. I wait about three seconds for him to shoot. There's a big street light. It's shining into his eyes and into mine."

When Robert saw that the policeman was not shooting, he decided to run towards the white residential area of Bellair.

"There's houses where whites live. I reach the other side and I walk down. Already, these guys are alerted now."

When he got to a corner, there were some African people standing [around].

"I think they work for the whites. They're talking. As I'm approaching, the police van comes down. I should have turned back and pretended as if I'm part of the crowd talking. They were expecting me to be in a complete tracksuit."

Luckily for him, the van drove past.

"He doesn't even stop while I'm pretending to be talking to these people. Then I'm going."

About fifteen metres down, there was a guy in a parked car.

"I think he's waiting for his lady, who is a domestic worker or something."

He [Robert] knocked on the window.

"He opens it slowly, and I say, 'Please help me, I'm in trouble'. I tell him everything - I'm an ANC guy and all that."

The black gentleman in the car shook his head and wound up his car window.

Robert decided to walk on.

"I walk across the road. I hear the van coming - it's a small area, a lot of turns. He can't really get into third gear easily; I hear the van coming. As I hid under the hedge, about ten metres away, there's like a veranda. There's people drinking tea and talking on the veranda. They were talking about cricket - there was some tour or something going on at the time."

The van went past again.

Then he met up with a young African girl. The girl showed him which way to go.

"I go up the road. There's a couple that works in the garden in the night. Just as I reach them, I hear the revving coming up again, so I go under a tree. The tree sort of casts a shadow on me. I sit still. The van comes and stops. They ask those people. I can hear them say, 'No, we didn't see anybody'. I know if I can get to the freeway, I can get down Mhlatazana canal on the other side of the railway line, and I'm safe."

He was about two kilometres from the canal now.

"I go down. At some stage, my leg is very sore. It's swollen. I go to the freeway. I wait till there's no cars, then I cross and I go up to just check around, and this leg is giving me trouble."

The railway line was across the freeway, hidden by a grassy embankment.

He had a pair of nail clippers on him.

"It was the only steel thing I had with me. I cut the shoe laces with the nail clipper[s]. After a while, I saw nothing happening, and I went down again. As I get down onto the freeway and moving south, I see some cars coming again."

He hid behind a crash barrier on the side of the road. In the light of the cars, he saw two hitch-hikers walking past.

"They don't see me. I am in the dark, behind the lights. The cops come and stop next to these guys, about eighty metres down, but it's seemingly very close. They talk to them. I can hear them talking. I can hear the [police] radio and the whole conversation. The door is opening, and it closes."

He was thinking that if he could get to the canal, the police would not be able to catch him.

"But then another van comes and they stop. This van comes, and they take a dog out. I can hear a dog barking. The two cars are parked next to each other on the freeway. I feel I'm being closed because I know how good dogs are with smell. I say 'No, I'm in shandis [trouble] now, I must go back'. I start crawling back."

The trains moving on the line were sometimes passenger trains, but mostly, they were goods trains for industrial supplies.

"My mind was fixated on the train line," he says. "That's what I'm thinking."

He was about to go under a railway bridge. Ahead of him, there was complete darkness.

"Then I heard a two-way radio. I waited. The radio was switched off. There was silence."

On one side, there was the freeway. On another, a steep, grassy bank.

Then Robert heard voice say in the dark, "McBride, stand still!"

On top of the bank, he saw a policeman - Warrant Officer Posthumus – point[ing] a gun at him.

Posthumus was coming closer. Robert was in a crouched position.

"He's coming closer, but he's not sure about himself. Of course I don't know, but later on I find out he's a sharpshooter. I wait for him to come closer. I know if he comes too close, I'm definitely dead."

He glanced in the direction of the freeway.

"I see cars to my left, and I'm facing him. I'm thinking, 'If I'm directed towards the cars, he wouldn't shoot me because he might hit the people in the car'. I go and run towards the car."

The car hit him, and he landed over the bonnet before falling over.

"I'm not shot yet. He's shooting. I get up and then run. Then he shoots me - it's after the car that he shoots me, because then I run in a different direction."

Robert felt his other leg go numb; the one that was not affected by the fall when he jumped over the high gate at the police station.

"After maybe twenty steps, I fall down. I crawl down the bank, and I'm going under a hedge. The dog is going for me. Like the dog knows exactly where I am. They come out again - I just hear the car stopping on top."

Someone shone a torch in Robert's face, and a policeman put a foot on his chest.

"He said, 'Ja [yes], McBride! Do you remember me?"

The policeman's face rang a bell with the recaptured detainee. He was Warrant Officer Koos van Rooyen, one of the policemen who met up with him at Harrismith and brought him down to Durban after he, his father and Greta Apelgren were arrested at his uncle's place in Nigel.

"Then Posthumus comes running. He starts kicking me, and the other old man - I'm not sure what's his name - he starts kicking me too. It's next to a house now, where the white people live. They are dragging me and I'm handcuffed and can hardly walk."

After the detention of Derrick, Robert and Greta, the Webster brothers feared that they were next.

"We were worried because we were expecting Robert not to come back," says Trevor. "We hoped he wouldn't come back, but he did. It was about 20 July 1986 when we heard that Robert and his father and Greta have decided to leave South Africa but were caught somewhere in Jo'burg [Johannesburg]. They were on their way to Durban."

At the time, Trevor was then living in Lamontville with his seven year old son by Pam Cele, Keith.

"I got a message that Victor and George (eldest and second brothers, respectively) had been taken by the cops and apparently, the cops had gone down to 3 Rossdown road [Trevor's house in Wentworth] and waited for me. I think they waited until about midnight."

Five white policemen came to pick him up from the place of safety that very day.

George Webster, a lawyer, was detained a few days before Trevor. He too was taken to C.R. Swarts [prison]. The policemen seemed to know that his Mercedes had been used in some of the MK activities carried out by Gordon and Robert. [They] also [seemed to know] about his involvement in the Edendale rescue mission. But they could not charge George of anything because the only witnesses could have been Robert and his [Trevor’s] brothers. However, charges were formulated against Victor and Trevor Webster.

"The full scale - belonging to the ANC, promoting the interests of the ANC, harbouring a prisoner," says George.

Selby Baqwa, one of George's partners [and "new" South Africa's first Public Protector] represented the Webster brothers when they had to appear in court.

At C.R. Swarts, Trevor was at one stage in a cell located in the same block as that of Nazeem Cassiem.

"I heard this guy singing in the morning; the Muslim guy making the 'Azaan' [the Muslims' call to prayer]," he recalls. "Well, I knew a little bit about these prayers. Later on, we started talking. Some guys were talking, and I overheard and I mentioned that I was in cell 25."

Sam Makhanya, the boyfriend of his sister, Margaret, was also in the same block. Trevor had not known Sam before they got to the prison.

"I also started talking to the other guys. These two guys were from Kwa-Mashu. They had been arrested for possession of firearms. Later on, there was a guy by the name of Sam. He would transport Gordon when he got to 'Maritzburg. I started talking to this guy Sam, and he constantly talked about his involvement with the guy by the name of 'Gordon'."

He felt there was something fishy about Nazeem.

"I don't know if it was his birthday or Eid (a Muslim religious festival); he was brought cake, and I was given a piece of the cake in my cell. This made me very suspicious. He knew everything about me, but I didn't know very much about him. He knew that I lived in '3 Rossdown Road', but he didn't know I also lived in Lamontville."

Outside, it was also apparent to Robert's aunt, Girly, that Nazeem had turned against his former comrades.

"We knew straight away that he was selling Robert," says Girly. "Because the Muslims have a prayer mat. We were not even allowed to give Robert anything - not even underpants or a deodorant, but these people [Nazeem's folks] were allowed food, a prayer mat and everything. That's how we knew that this boy is selling Robert."

Robert returned to C.R. Swart Square with both his legs in plaster. The ankle on one foot [had] fractured when he fell as he jumped over the wall around Bellair police station; the other leg broke when he was shot.

As the police carried him into the station, he was surprised to see Welela Khumalo; the MK cadre who was recruited by Gordon. It was clear to him that the police would have preferred him not to see Khumalo.

"I look at him as a comrade and he just looks me up as if he doesn't want to see me, then looks down. Of course I start becoming suspicious of him and I was surprised because I didn't know he was arrested."

He was taken to the cell which Welela had just vacated.

"In the morning, I heard people talking to each other through the walls. They called each other by numbers. It's Trevor Webster, it's Sam - Margaret Webster's boyfriend - and Nazeem. Nazeem is far away."

Robert was excited to re-establish contact with Trevor; albeit in prison. Trevor advised circumspection.

"Robert and I did speak, but we did say probably this is a trap, so we [are] not gonna talk much. We [are] not gonna say anything about what we know, but we would just talk about anything else. He highlighted things like the Fairvale incident and asked me if I remember that incident. I couldn't really, because it was five-six years down the line."

In Robert's memory, however, the "Fairvale incident" was indelibly imprinted. This was the time when Trevor had come to his defence as a gangster wanted to stab him at Wentworth's Fairvale high school.

A day after Robert's failed escape attempt, a policeman came to tell Doris at her house that her son was shot in the ankle.

Bonnie was devastated. After she had been going to park outside Bellair prison over many nights expecting her brother to escape, he had indeed escaped. But she was not there when he needed her.

Robert recognised Nazeem by his devoted singing of the Azaan - every morning.

"The cell is dark and cold," he remembers. "It's nice because the sun would come up on the east and the cell is facing the east. Nazeem I would hear every morning doing the Muslim call to prayer. Dedicated comrade and Muslim!"

Greta, who had been at the prison for about three months, heard that he was around and started smuggling letters to him. Robert's spirit was lifted when re-established contact with his lover-cum-comrade.

"It was just nice to have contact; the people around. In my mind, I'm thinking, ‘I'm writing letters to her; what time is the guard on duty?' I'm thinking what side her cell is. She drew a map for me where her cell is. Already, I'm thinking of escaping again and that I would walk past her and pull her out of there. That's what I'm thinking. She drew her cell. I think her cell was number 27."

Greta was in the ground floor cells. Robert's cell was leading into a courtyard which was fenced with vertical concrete slabs. The shower was in the courtyard. He detected a defect in the concrete slabs.

"The slabs are not parallel. Some parts are wider than others. Bad workmanship. There's space more than normal. Maybe I can squeeze through."

He was not deterred by the plaster casts on both his legs.

"I'm very strong in my arms, so I could pull myself up. I knew that. But how to get out; because climbing up a rope directly is difficult."

He decided to make a rope out of a blanket. He knew that the warders did not change blankets often. The sheets they used to change after a while, too. He started tearing the blanket.

The new warders who were coming on duty were not then locking the inter-linking door to the courtyard. He attached a bar of soap to the blanket that was made into a rope so that he could throw the rope up.

"I went into the shower. I was hopeful. I remember that night it was raining. I went into the shower and took everything off. I threw the thing (the blanket made into a rope); it took me a long time to throw it with the soap. I think I had done it a couple of times with a bandage tied onto a soap, through the slips. It goes up and comes down again."

Like a mountaineer, he was trying to give the rope something to anchor on so that he could then pull himself up.

"Sometimes it would go up and the soap would hang there, about three metres up. It took a long time before the soap could come to the right length where I could catch it and put it down. Anyway, I'm climbing up. I battle to get [to] that level where, near the shower, the wall starts. About two metres up. I put my legs in there."

Then the "rope" started tearing after it was cut by the concrete slab.

"The concrete has a sharp edge on top. It starts cutting, and I fall down. That was painful."

The pain was more emotional than physical.

"The [physical] pain was not important. I just felt disappointed."

On that night, at about the same time he was trying to escape, there was an earthquake which was just into the sea.

"People sat up as they felt the shake. It was off the Mozambique/Natal coast, and was accompanied by heavy rain. I sat there in the rain and started to cry because of the disappointment."

The Webster brothers - Victor, George and Trevor - were released from C.R. Swart Square after spending four months in detention. Charges against Trevor and Victor were withdrawn after they had appeared in court three times.

Although her boyfriend was now out of detention, both Trevor and Pam felt it was unsafe for her to return home. Therefore, when she [had] completed her studies in London, she moved on to the United States to seek political asylum.

Back at C.R. Swarts, as Robert was working hard at devising a plan to escape, Greta was doing likewise. A few days after his failed attempt to escape, she wrote him a letter detailing the plan. She also included a map of the prison. Greta used the usual smuggling route she had used before to get the letter to Robert - one of the common law prisoners who cleaned out the cell corridors. The letter, in part, read:

"...A miracle occurred yesterday (Tuesday, 04.11.86). In the morning, I prayed that I could be taken out of C.R., so that I could get a better picture of the surrounding C.R. bldg.

After lunch, 3 SBs (not my usual interrogators) came to fetch me & took me for a drive to La Lucia beach!

Their motive: 'to give you a break from the cells.' (probably plotting something for me in the future). Hence the new layout of C.R. sketch!

God is on our side - we are His oppressed people. I still pray daily for you: 'Father deliver (i.e.save) R. McB. from prison into exile, for thine is the kingdom (i.e. S.A./Africa), the power (i.e. successful escape) and the glory (i.e. victory for the oppressed masses)!'

You must say 1 Our father daily in the morning.

That 'connection cop' (Indian) - I think his name is George; he is very likely to be on duty tonight (5.11.86) - I will encourage him to make a plan to see you.… My main contact among the robbers was transferred to Westville for the past two weeks; his name is Bongani, from Chesterville (robbed a bank in Maydon Wharf).

However his brother (also in no. 17) told me that Bongani got bail of R7000 and is to be released today: further, he may be coming to see his brother here today.

This same Bongani was keen to assist me in escaping, hiding in Inanda & taking me across to Zimbabwe (he has relatives there!) Bongani has many police 'connections' here at C.R.

If the door is opened for you, I suggest you take the two sheets with you & leave them somewhere on the roof or anywhere on C.R. premises, so as to give the impression that you escaped via the roof bars.

Remember the problem of eye-witnesses: speak to Bongani alone or to George alone.

Unfortunately, the letter was intercepted.

It fell into the hands of Captain Zenardt de Beer and was later on used as part of the state evidence against them at their trial.

The trial itself, held at the beginning of 1987 at Pietermaritzburg's Supreme Court, was preceded by an appearance at Durban Magistrate's Court. Robert appeared with Greta, his father Derrick with Antonio du Preez. Both Robert and Greta were very relieved when they were informed that they were going to appear in court.

They were now out of the hands of their interrogators.

The couple appeared first, during the first week of November, 1986. The charges against them, including three of murder, were twenty four.

"I am just in jeans," Robert remembers. "The day before, they told me I am going to appear in court. They gave me the whole right to remain silent bullshit and I started laughing. Because it's madness, they never told me about the right to remain silent when they first detained me.

"I can't wait going to court. I just can't wait. I just want to come out and see the world. See the world. I just decided, 'Ah, oh no, these ones are gonna hang me'. I was happy to go to court."

When Doris saw her son at Durban's Magistrate's Court, she had last seen him at her husband's workshop in July when the police brought him and Derrick along to search the place.

"I remember he appeared with Greta; they were together. When I looked, he had the same pair of jeans that he was in when he went away. He was so dirty, but he was smiling at all the people in court 'cause most of the people were from Wentworth that he knew."

She was accompanied by her younger sister Girly and Jean Manning, a Wentworth activist.

"I could see that the child had been beaten up," says Girly. "His nose was broken, and now they didn't want us to get near him. There was a hell lot of soldiers with guns pointing at us. We mustn't come near him. When I looked at my sister, I could see that she's a broken woman. I could feel this lump that is here in my throat for this child. I knew now what he has been through. But when I saw my sister, I knew that her hurt was worse than mine."

The son tried to cheer the mother up by greeting her and making a joke.

"All the defiance and shouting of slogans in the court," Robert reports. "I think that helped her morale. I could see when I looked at her that she was not happy."

Derrick McBride and his co-accused, Antonio du Preez, appeared in the same court a month later, in December.

Derrick was facing one charge of murder (for the person who died during the Edendale rescue mission), four counts of attempted murder, aiding a prisoner to escape, concealing or harbouring a terrorist and terrorism.

Gwyneth was back from boarding school. She went with her mother to her father's trial. The McBrides' youngest daughter mistook her father's co-accused for her brother.

"I didn't know Antonio from before," she says. "From the back, he looked like Robert, because Robert had lost a lot of weight. I said to ma, 'Why is Robert so small?' Ma said, 'No, it's not Robert. It's Antonio'."

The young girl's interest was aroused.

"'Antonio? Who's that?'. 'Turn around. Let me have a look at you'," she giggles. "And they were going down to the cells now after their appearance."

When Derrick and Robert were asked which lawyer they wished be represented by at their trials, they were in different cells. However, almost as if they were in telepathic communication, they mentioned one name: Roshan Dehal.

Antonio du Preez was about to opt for pro deo counsel when Derrick dissuaded him.

"I told Antonio, 'Don't take pro deo counsel'. I knew a lot about cases. I said, 'We'll get a lawyer that side', and I said, 'I want Roshan Dehal'. They [the police] said, 'What is Roshan Dehal to you people? Your son also wants Roshan Dehal'. I said, 'We have confidence and faith in Roshan. He's handled a lot of our matters'."

Roshan was certainly not one of the celebrated anti-apartheid lawyers who often handled high profile political [cases]. However, such was their confidence in him that they influenced both their co-accused, Antonio and Greta, to opt for the Indian lawyer.

Roshan's wife, Indira was also a lawyer. She and her husband alternated between the trials of father and son when they started at Pietermaritzburg. They kept each other abreast of developments.

Before the start of Robert's trial, Roshan started explaining to him how the legal system works.

"I remember the thing that struck in the most was the issue of the death sentence," says Robert. "'What is the test of extenuation?' I heard for the first time. Remember, we were not legally trained. 'Extenuating circumstances'; what it was. Then he gave me documents of past cases. I remember going through past cases; what was argued in those past cases. What the courts found and what was argued throughout those trials."

He realised that the most important mission in his trial would be to look for extenuating circumstances. To that end, he later on claimed in court that he had not received any instructions from the ANC to plant the car bomb outside the popular bars at Durban's beach-front.

This turned out to be to advantage of the ANC, which was receiving a lot of heat from the white press and the international community for its shift from the policy of avoiding hitting "soft targets". However, taking the heat off his organisation was not the main reason why he decided to claim he had not received any instructions.

" I knew that, basically, I'm on my own," he explains. "What was primary was self-preservation because, the longer you live, the more damage you could do to the regime. The ANC never released a statement confirming or repudiating the car bomb."

Through the documents supplied by his lawyer, he learnt about the tests of extenuation.

"'Is there something that could have led you to do what you did?'; 'Did this thing in fact influence you to do what you did?'. The third test of extenuating circumstances was, 'Does the fact that these things existed to make you do what you did lessen your moral blameworthiness?' Those are the three tests. There had to be consistency in what you were saying."

Robert found that a similarity in almost all the cases where ANC guerrillas who were being charged for murder and or sabotage said they were acting under the instructions of their commanders.

The cadres were sentenced to death.

Often, the courts would find that there were no extenuating circumstances because the acts were, in a sense, pre-meditated.

One of the cases he studied was that of the so-called Amanzimtoti who was executed a day before he tried to escape from Bellair police station, Andrew Sibusiso Zondo. He obtained further information on Zondo and his trial from Professor Fatima Meer, a University of Natal's sociologist who was taken on board as of one the defence's expert witnesses.

Meer had also given evidence at Zondo's trial.

She was then writing a book on Zondo; "The (mis)trial of Andrew Zondo".

The Indian professor with "struggle" connections made the manuscript of the book available to Robert.

Even if Roshan's consultations with his client were taped, the police could not accuse him of 'pre-cognising' him - 'programming' him. He gave Robert a number of "hypothetical" scenarios and the likely judgement in each case. Among others, he referred Robert to the trial of ANC activists who were sentenced to death after attacking Moroka police station, in Soweto.

Policemen had died during the attack.

During their trial, the MK cadres testified that they were acting under the instructions of their commanders in the ANC's armed wing.

"The guys were hanged," says Robert. "There was quite a lot of cases where people were hanged for saying they were given instructions or a prior decision to kill. So whether you killed policemen like in the Moroka police station [case], or you killed civilians like Zondo, you will hang. If you kill people in the ANC, you will hang. That is as simple as that. Your only way out of this is to look for extenuating circumstances and put some sort of psychological profile - build it up in your instructions to these guys [the defence team]."

Most of Robert and Derrick's meetings with members of their family were cold and business-like. At some stage, father and son were allowed to be adjoining cells at Westville prison, and they had planned their defence together.

"We had decided that they way we would work, every time we go to a visit, we must bring a book and pen," Robert remembers. "We start business. We start fighting now."

When Doris, Bonnie and Girly visited, they would get instructions on who to contact, who to phone, what to do with the tea-room, the welding workshop etcetera.

"So in a sense, I would say it distanced us from the rest of the family because they visit[ed] us only about business," Robert acknowledges. "The emotional part of the family being neglected. I felt myself moving away from the family."

The McBrides were experiencing a lot of hostility from some members of the Wentworth community.

"Some people would stop and say they are sorry to hear," Doris relates. "Others would spit when they saw us - people that you had known all your life would spit at you. They would swear at us. So we really had a tough time on this thing. We were called 'murderers'. The would shout, 'murderer!'"

The Senior Counsel for the defence at Robert's trial was a Jewish man, Advocate David Gordon. His assistant was an African man related to the ANC's then head of International Relations, Thabo Mbeki - now president of the republic of South Africa. The junior counsel, Advocate MTM Moerane - commonly known as "Boysie" - and Mbeki are cousins.

David Gordon SC had been on the bench as acting judge a number of times before, so it was an advantage to have him as leader of the defence team because he knew how a judge's mind works.

Also, he had been President of the Natal Bar Council.

During Robert's first meeting with David Gordon at Westville prison, the advocate struck him as being full of himself.

"Arrogant, but he is sharp. He is always in suits and ties. Over fifty already. Tall; about my height, I think. Slim, but has a big pot belly."

Gordon wore glasses only when he was reading, and had balding hair which he parted on the side. His nose was long, with a slightly big mouth.

The two men started feeling each other out. Robert intimated to Gordon that he might decide not to participate in his trial. He argued that, as a soldier, he had to be tried by a military tribunal.

"He says, 'Okay, let's take it on those grounds'. As a soldier, you shouldn't have to recognise this criminal court. That's a good thing. One day they might change Wentworth and re-name it 'McBride', but you will be dead. You must decide now what you [are] gonna do. Do you want a statue built for you after freedom or do you want to live?' That was the issue. He says, 'The next time I come here I want you to have decided on the issue'. I don't think I really meant it. I was just running off my mouth."

David Gordon says his decision to defend Robert did not go down well in his social circuit.

"I did it [defended McBride] on a proper basis," says the advocate with a taste for expensive cigars during an interview in his posh offices in Durban's 'Salmon Grove Chambers'.

"I was paid fees for doing it, and I did it professionally - properly instructed with a very good junior. And I treated it like any other case - in as much of a professional manner as I could. Obviously, as a person who has a social life, there were many people who said to me before the trial - and during the course of the trial - how could I do it, and questioned the fact that I defended terrorists. (But) I regarded it as my duty. I don't think that for one second I ever said I wouldn't do it - ever contemplated (that)."

He remembers his verbal battles with his client when they first met. Then he sometimes deliberately "goaded" Robert McBride.

"I think that what I wanted to do - and this was a deliberate decision - I wanted to get all of Robert's venom out at me during the course of our discussions because I didn't want him in the witness box to reveal and to say some of the things that he was saying. I can remember that I sometimes deliberately goaded him into reacting, and I can remember arguing with him. I was doing it in order to allow him to get it all out of the system."

Up to the time of his meeting with Advocate Gordon, Robert was thinking his trial was going to be more of a last political stage before he was sentenced to death than a place to fight for his life.

Gordon gave him another perspective.

"He says to me, 'There is an outside chance that you could get extenuating circumstances'. He says, so it means if I want to live, I must start fighting for my life. David Gordon gave me the sense that now I must forget about theatrics and melodrama surrounding this issue; I must focus on saving my life. That was the most important contribution that he made at that stage. He brought me down to reality. All the hullabaloo of me coming into the papers and being the focus of attention was irrelevant."

As time went on, the advocate grew to like his client.

"It is correct that I grew to understand Robert quite well, and it is also correct to say I actually liked him," he admits. "I liked him as a personality. I found him an intelligent fellow - I found him [to be] a decent sort of a guy. It became harder for me as the case progressed because I did like him. I will also say this: that I felt sorry for Robert because in many respects I thought that he was victim of influence. I think his father influenced him enormously. I don't think anyone has ever really been able to express in words the enormous influence which his father had on him; which was not always a good influence."

David Gordon was not Roshan's first choice to become senior counsel for the defence.

"There were lots of trepidation that we had," Roshan says about the early days of preparing the defence of Robert and that of his father. Not regarding Robert or Derrick. Or about the political struggle or about the political nature of the trial. Trepidation relating to the difficulty with which you could get senior counsel. David Gordon is a white man. I had nothing against him - he gave no doubt his best in the trial - but we would have preferred a more prominent, black-inclined, pro-active, pro-ANC senior counsel."

The first name that came to Roshan's mind when he contemplated "a silk" - senior counsel - for Robert's impending trial was [then] Advocate Ismail Mohamed SC. Mahomed, now deceased, went on to become South Africa's first black Chief Justice.

"The problem we had was that there were so many political trials going on at that time that all the 'silks' of choice were taken," Roshan continues. "I called Ismail Mohamed, and he was just not available. He was busy with another trial. I called a host of other persons, who also weren't available. The only person then available was David Gordon."

After consultations with a number of individuals whose opinion he respected, the attorney decided that "it would not be incorrect to have David Gordon."

"And I did not regret it," he adds.

Robert's trial at Pietermaritzburg Supreme Court started on 2 February 1987. He was accused number 1, Greta accused number 2. The couple were appearing before Justice Douglas Shearer, and the assessors were Mr Brian Leslie and Professor John Milton. The prosecutor was Mr Ian Slabbert, assisted by his junior, Messrs Schaup and De Wet.

Derrick and Antonio du Preez started appearing before Justice Kriek in another court on 1 April 1987.

A month before Robert's first appearance at the Supreme Court, on 30 January 1987, his younger sister broke her waters and had to be rushed to hospital to deliver her baby. She named her child Derrick Robert McBride. The child was a blessing to the McBrides.

The pitter-patter of little feet would often break the melancholy in Robert's home as Doris, Girly, Bonnie - and sometimes, the McBrides' last born Gwyneth - brooded over the trials of the head of the family and his only son.

"Many a day we'd sit and we'd talk about what happened at the trial, or maybe I heard something that the other two missed out," Gwyneth remembers. “Or, 'Did you hear that?' or whatever. Things like that. Then we'd sit and we'd discuss little things - what's the next move; who can we report to; who can be contacted to help. But what kept us going, to be honest, was little Derrick. He kept the spirit there. Because many times we'd sit, like, all of a sudden it's quiet. He just comes in, then all of us would start laughing at whatever he did. He was like crawling; just at that cute age where they just do funny things."

Robert remembers that, one the first day of his trial, there were more policemen in court than other people.

"They were sort of giving me the eye, like they were saying, 'I could see this guy is really bad'. Also, the court was light - the [Durban] magistrate's court was very dark. This other court was well-lit; you could see other people quite easily. I remember journalists sitting right in front, with very pinched faces, the white journalists. I'm not sure what's going on in their minds. The journalists seemed to himapprehensive, anxious. I was relaxed."

There were no blacks among the policemen guarding the two MK guerrillas.

Nazeem Mo[h]amet Cassiem was the first of Robert and Greta's former comrades to be called to give evidence against them. He had previously given evidence for the state during the trial of Alan Pearce on 4 December, 1986. This related to the arson attack on the Fairvale high school, in Wentworth.

Robert's friend from Bechet teachers training college, Gordon Webster, featured prominently in Nazeem's evidence. He testified that Gordon had given him, Welela Khumalo and other recruits military training at New Hanover. This was after he was introduced to Webster by accused number 1: Robert John McBride.

Although he never took part in other operations like the attack on the house of Labour Party member and former police reservist, Mr Klein, the Edendale rescue of Gordon Webster, and the Chamberlain road sub-station sabotage, Nazeem Cassiem seemed well-informed about them.

The brains behind all these operations, he submitted, was Robert John McBride.

When it was the defence's turn to cross-examine the former comrade of McBride and Apelgren, David Gordon and his colleagues decided that it would be strategic that he be examined by his junior counsel, MTM Moerane.

One of the weapons in the defence's arsenal was to attack the seeming deviation from his professed "guiding principles" by a staunch anti-apartheid activist and radical Muslim. Being cross-examined by a black man would hopefully make the witness much more uncomfortable about his "selling out".

"I think it was important because Moerane had his ear to the ground," David Gordon says of the decision. "He was also a person who had been discriminated against - he could relate a lot more emotionally to many of these things, and I couldn't because I was white - I'd been privileged. I think that I was perfectly at ease with his competence."

At some stage, the court had to adjourn when Moerane reduced the state witness to tears as he probed the reasons behind his decision to give evidence against his former comrades.

There was [also] tension between the McBrides and the Apelgrens when Jeanette Apelgren decided to give evidence against Robert and her elder sister.

Before then, her mother and Robert's mother had been united by their common plight: Mrs Margaret Apelgren had two daughters and a son (Eric Apelgren junior) in detention, Mrs Doris McBride's husband and son were also in prison.

"The relationship between the two mothers, Mrs Apelgren and my mother was quite okay because Mrs Apelgren would come and visit on a Saturday afternoon," says Bonnie. "My mother and her would sit and talk; tell stories about her daughter and my mother's son. Sometimes it would just be basically, old ladies' stories. They would talk and she'd come very regularly."

She says it was a very formal relationship.

"Not too involved. The old man, Apelgren the father, Eric senior - I don't remember him doing anything. The old lady is the one that really cared."

Although Greta was initially apprehensive when Jeanette was about to give evidence for the state, she was happy with her sister's testimony.

"When she testified, I think she knew what she was doing, because she testified in a way that helped me," says Greta. "Honestly! I would have been convicted of the 'Magoo's' incident. She convinced the court that we had this code of secrecy that you could only know a certain amount of any event that was going to take place according to what was your role. If you only needed to drive a car and provide transport, there was no reason for you to know that there w[ere] ten limpet mines and four AKs. You had to know you must pick [up] persons X, Y and Z from point A and transport them to point B; drop them off there. You could guess what they want, but you could never ask what."

Some source of comfort for Greta before Jeanette's testimony was confidence that her younger sister did not know enough.

"She knew just enough to maybe make things hard for Robert and I, but she really didn't know enough. The only person who knew a lot was Matthew."

Matthew Anthony Lecordier was arrested on the 19th of July at his home, at three o'clock in the morning. He was hiding under his parents' bed.

"Because I was scared, I didn't know what the police were going to do to me," he later told the court.

Matthew testified that he was arrested, he felt relieved, "Because I knew I wouldn't be doing things I didn't want to do."

He was examined for the state by the Chief Prosecutor himself, Mr Ian Slabbert. He was the ace up the state's sleeve. He was with two accused when they sprung Gordon Webster from Edendale hospital; he accompanied them when they planted the car bomb which had turned the trial into a cause celebre - the "Magoo"/"Why Not" car bomb - and, together with Robert, he had also committed a number of other sabotage acts.

The "Magoo"/"Why Not" car bomb had claimed the lives of three young women: Angelique Vanessa Pattenden, Marchelle Cheryl Gerrard and Julie Emily van der Linde.

During the operation to rescue Gordon Webster from the clutches of the police at Edendale hospital, a civilian, Mlungisi Buthelezi, had died.

McBride and Apelgren were being charged with, among others, "the unlawful and intentional killing" of the three women and accused number 1 with the "unlawful and intentional killing" of Buthelezi.

On May 1, 1986, Matthew and his friend Antonio du Preez - accused number 1 in the other trial involving Robert's father - attacked the home of a local member of the Labour Party and former police reservist, Mr Klein. They hurled hand grenades at the house at night, causing substantial material damage and injuries to Klein and members of his family.

They had obtained the hand grenades from Robert McBride.

Although Matthew Lecordier was now politically conscious, he told the court that he had agreed to participate in the attack[on] Klein's house "because I wanted to go to the (McBrides' shop) and speak to Robert - accused number 1 - about lending me some money."

The attack on the house of Klein featured more prominently at the trial of Antonio du Preez and Derrick McBride.

Some victory for the defence at Robert's trial was when David Gordon got Matthew to own up to the choice on the night of 14 June, 1986.

Wittingly or unwittingly, he corroborated Robert's claim that his original intended target was the tall glass building in West street: Hyperama House and Home.

Gordon Webster learnt about that Robert had been captured while in Lusaka. After he parted with Robert and Greta in Botswana, he was sent to Moscow, Russia for specialist medical treatment.

"I was fed up," he says. "When I came back from Moscow, I was sitting idling for three to four weeks, doing nothing, and I picked up a month-old newspaper. Robert had been arrested already. I said to Rashid, 'Why didn't you tell me? He's my best friend and you don't even tell me!' It was a big argument and ended up in a big fight."

He felt he should do something to help his comrade.

Among the charges formulated by the state against Robert, four were those of "intentionally and unlawfully" causing the deaths of people - the three white women who died during the "Magoo"/"Why Not" car bomb, and the Zulu young man who died during Edendale rescue mission.

The state had in its possession evidence that the man had died of bullets wounds caused by an AK-47. Some time during the daring operation, Robert had handed over the AK-47 he was carrying to Gordon so that he could be free to wheel him to freedom on a trolley.

It was thus possible that the fatal shot might have been released then - by Gordon Webster. Therefore, the defence team made an application to the court for evidence to be procured from the fugitive ANC guerrilla.

Roshan went to the capital city of Zambia, where [he] met up with ANC leaders Thabo Mbeki (now President of South Africa), Jacob Zuma (now Mbeki's deputy) and (then ANC president) Oliver Tambo.

He found Gordon was not only still alive, he was willing to give his testimony of events of the night of 4 May 1986 at Edendale hospital.

Judge Shearer then granted an order that the hearing be closed.

The commission sat at a London hotel on Saturday 21 March, 1986. When Gordon Webster gave his evidence-in-chief, he was examined by David Gordon.

Webster was asked if he could exclude the possibility that Robert may have injured the persons who were injured and killed at Edendale hospital on the evening of 4 May, 1986.

"It is quite possible that he could have killed them or I could have killed them," he replied.

During the commission's hearing at a London hotel, Webster chanced upon the home address of the judge at his comrade's trial in Pietermaritzburg. Thus was conceived his quixotic scheme to reciprocate Robert's altruism.

At his trial, Robert insisted on taking the stand. Although he would thus be opening himself to robust cross-examination by the state thereafter, he felt that was a risk worth taking.

"I said no, I want to speak 'cause I think I needed to explain Greta's role. There was a need for explanation how could she do what she did, but there was no evidence from us about the secrecy of the command structure of anything, so it was imperative on me that I should go [and] explain this. But at the same time I could get Greta off the thing completely."

The main question at the trial as regards Apelgren was whether she knew they were going to plant in town on 14 June 1986.

"Whether she knew or whether she suspected. Only I know I didn't tell her that's a car bomb. I am the commander; I'm the only one that knows. If I say I didn't tell her and only I knew, then there's no need for her to come and explain herself. She could say by mistake, or under pressure, that she suspected that it might have been something like that. Then she was 'buggered' already. That was my main reasoning."

Derrick, who was preparing for his own trial, shared a cell with him and Antonio at Pietermaritzburg prison.

Derrick was impressed by his son's gallantry. In the beginning, Derrick thought his son was naive as he burnt the midnight oil in the cell, studying previous cases like his.

"I looked at him and thought, 'Robert don't understand,’" McBride senior recalls. "Here in South Africa you can get 30 years just to hit a white man. If you kill a white woman, how can you expect to survive? I felt the only way was to escape, and Gordon wanted to take hostages and blow them up if they didn't release Robert. The only language white people and people in power understand is violence."

In his evidence-in-chief, Robert made a crucial point in favour of his co-accused: he said by the time Gordon Webster recruited him into MK he had been in love with [Greta] for a quite a while.

That he had kept his partner ignorant of his subversive activities, letting her drive them around without letting her into the secret.

The truth, of course, was that the two accused had fallen in love after their first trip to Botswana on ANC business. In other words, Greta Apelgren knew what she was getting into when she agreed to accompany him on MK missions as a cover.

David Gordon rose to address the court for the defence on the morning of Tuesday 24 March, 1987. This was three days after the sitting of the commission to hear Gordon Webster's evidence in a London hotel.

Following a number of admissions by Robert McBride, there was some convergence between the state and the defence. However, there were still a few issues where the parties were in dispute.

Gordon said the defence was approaching the case, "On the basis that it does have 'a political cast', as Milord put it."

He argued that, up to that moment, the court had only heard of the violence of the accused.

"We submit that the accused's violence must be seen against the backdrop of violence in South Africa, because our defence and our future submissions in regard to extenuation that arises or mitigation, when that arises, will be based upon asking the court to accept that South African violence is not one-sided. That the reaction of black people, the violent reaction of black people is the result of the violent conduct of white people. Or if not exclusively white people, to people who are behaving violently in furtherance of what is perceive to be the white interest and, in particular, the executive interest."

The Marine Parade car bomb, the advocate submitted, was being viewed differently by black and white people.

"It is tragic when we think that the situation has arisen that if we take what we conceive to be the most serious aspect of this trial; and that is the Parade bomb; and that if we are able at the moment to exclude from our minds the fact that three innocent people died and a hundred innocent people were injured, and we just look at the action as a violent reaction in a predominantly white part of Durban, and within the confines of our own city there would be people, predominantly white, who would condemn out of hand the Parade hotel incident and the man in the street would probably feel that the accused, because of the consequences, are not even entitled to a trial, but that justice should have been popular, swift, without the trappings of legal procedure.

"Yet within almost sight - and certainly, within earshot of any explosion - there is another community in Durban who, absent or excluding the injuries and the deaths, would applaud what was done as heroes. All within the confines therefore of one city and of one country. So Milord, we are going to lead evidence in order to put the backdrop, as the state did to their case, of what has made the young black person in South Africa adopt as a political weapon conduct such as described in this case."

The trial of Derrick Robert McBride and Antonio Arturo du Preez started on 2 April 1987.

It was held in the same building at that of Robert and Greta; albeit in a different courtroom.

Derrick and Antonio were accused number 2 and accused number 1, respectively.

By the time Derrick's trial started, the family car had broken down. Doris, Girly and Bonnie had to take taxis every morning to Pietermaritzburg.

"I always had Bonnie with me because when we reached there, I'd make sure that we get the first taxi, after six we take the taxi back," says Doris. "When we got there I said to Bonnie, 'Where do you want to go today?' I would say, ‘Yesterday when we were here Robert's trial had got to a certain level. I would like to know what happened today'. So I would go in there. 'You go in there by your father and listen, and then we'll sit together lunch time'. Then I'd go to Derrick's and then Bonnie would go in by Robert. Everyday we would switch.

When Doris and her daughter met afterwards, they exchanged notes.

"We [would] tell each other what happened. She tells me what happened by her father and I'll tell her what happened there by Robert. We would compare notes. That's how we managed. Because you want to be at both places at the same time, but we couldn't. So we had to separate."

Girly says their daily trips from Pietermaritzburg were painful.

"When we used to get home from 'Maritzburg, from the court, all the way down, there's no talking. Silence. Each person has got their own thoughts. When we got home, I used to go to the kitchen and prepare a meal for the family, and I used to try and not talk about this thing. My sister would have a bath; Bonnie would have a bath. We would talk about everything else - talk about happier times and try to get a break from the worry."

In the morning, she would wake her older sister up to prepare for the trip up to Pietemaritzburg.

"Now we'd try talk about this because there's no way now. I felt that if she had that break, of just talking about normal things, it would relax her and at least she will fall asleep. Otherwise I don't think she would have made it."

The weekend preceding the Monday of the passing of sentence was agonisingly long for Robert.

At some stage during the weekend, he played a game of soccer with his father.

"There's a small place where we hang the washing," Robert recalls. "We were playing soccer in there. Me, Antonio and my father. There were two other guys, Fana and Gasi. Funn[il]y enough, these guys I've trained. I trained them in Edendale. They were in court for something else.

"I was saying I hope this is not 'the last supper', and everybody was laughing, and my father was saying, 'Ja, it's true'. I don't remember the rest."

On Monday morning, he travelled to court with Antonio du Preez in the back of police van. The two MK activists were heavily guarded.

"I put my fist out and they whipped me with a sjambok," McBride remembers. "There was an escort car - there's a whole convoy of drivers. Then they had a rope. They put it around my neck. Then we fought. I was handcuffed to Antonio. They charged me for assault because I hit the one guy - a very nice shot. It was Monday 13 (April, 1987). You cannot fight when you are handcuffed, so they were all over us."

On that very morning, when Doris left for Pietemaritzburg with Bronwyn - "Bonnie" -, she prepared her elder daughter for the worst.

"If they sentence Robert to death, you are not to cry and make any noises. Stand there so they can see that we are not cowards."

However, throughout the trial Robert's mother had been optimistic.

"I always thought that there's hope that they wouldn't sentence him to death until the last day."

The majority of the bench, however, came to a finding that there were no extenuating circumstances to Robert's actions in denoting the car bomb outside the Marine Parade bars.

In this regard, the judge, Justice Douglas Shearer was in concurrence with one of the two assessors, Mr Brian Leslie.

The judge accepted "beyond question that accused number 1 felt himself representative of people who had been relocated to Wentworth by Group Areas Legislation, that in the course of time a sense of deprivation had turned into frustration, frustration into anger and anger into violence."

He also accepted that "the immediate spur of the actions with which we are now concerned was the proclamation of the nation-wide State of Emergency on June 12th, 1986."

But the bench was confronted with a "real dilemma", said the judge.

The dilemma was "derived from the simple proposition that according to any morally acceptable code in any civilised country you do not punish persons presumed to be innocent for the sins of those who offend you. We do not know what the political affiliations of Angelique Pattenden, Marchelle Gerrard or Emily van der Linde. To kill them for what you believe to be the sins of a government is to offend as surely against a primary code as those you believe to have offended, and to punish them for a skin presumed to be white is as racist as the very propositions that accused number 1 opposes."

Though they accepted Robert's evidence that Matthew Lecordier had made him change his original intended target for the car bomb, Judge Shearer and Mr Leslie did not feel that was enough to extenuate his sentence.

"We cannot find the blandishments of Lecordier as material extenuation. Accused number 1 was aware of the hazard to life and limb with his first projected target, before it was moved to the Marine Parade. There was ample opportunity for reconsideration. And so, sadly, we must conclude that even considered in the context of frustration and anger, the circumstances operating on accused number 1 fall short of those which would extenuate his guilt sufficiently to justify such a finding."

Judge Shearer then read Professor John Milton's dissenting, minority judgement on extenuation. Milton enunciated a number of factors which he felt had a bearing on Robert McBride's mind when [he] detonated the car bomb: his personal experience and family background; his young age; his emotional state on the day in question - "the State of Emergency, the rounding up of people including close friends..."; "the fact that he initially intended to commit not homicide but the destruction of property"; and "the fact that the decision to place the bomb on the Marine Parade was made on impulse and under the influence of the emotional …[indistinct] of Lecordier."

In his minority finding that extenuating circumstances existed to Robert's actions, he asked rhetorically: "How am I to assess the morality of this act? In a normally ordered society where every citizen enjoys the full range of civil liberties and equal access to the political process - to resort to an act of political protest of this sort would be a totally senseless act an in my view without the slightest justification. What then of a society where a citizen does not enjoy equal access to the political process, where he is denied certain rights and liberties by reason of his race, where he is in his perception of his circumstances [a] victim of oppression by a ruling class from which he is excluded by the colour of his skin? What then if he acts in the context of the sudden imposition of the State of Emergency, which drastically curtails civil liberties and involves the arrest of close friends and members of his community? ...The moral quality of an act can only be judged in the context in which it has taken place.…"

A large chunk of Greta's sentence was suspended, and she would in effect spend eighteen months in prison.

"In fact, that particular day the police occupied the first row so that no one from the audience could sit there," says Greta. "I don't know, I can't imagine why. They said it was for security reasons. And they didn't allow us to come up [from the holding cells] until the judge was ready to walk in himself. Normally, we are sitting there together with the audience and they would announce, 'Please stand, Judge So-and-So is entering the court', and then we would stand up."

She and her co-accused had to virtually run up the steps to enter the court-room once the judge was about to arrive on that Monday.

"We were in the basement. That Pietermaritzburg Supreme Court had underground holding cells with no windows or anything like that. It was more like a cave down there. So, they rushed us up those steps. Just as we got to the top, Judge Shearer walked in and all the audience were told to stand. He just got straight to business."

Now that Robert's hopes for a majority extenuating judgement were dashed, he braced himself for the worst.

"I stand up. I am relaxed. I'm dead - I'm purposefully making myself dead. The prosecutor was saying that he had no option, under the circumstances, but to sentence me to death - I would count the number of times he says that. David [Gordon] comes to me and says, 'Do you want to rest or something?' I said I was fine; just get this thing over with."

After passing sentence on his co-accused, Justice Douglas Shearer the turned to Robert John McBride.

"As far as accused number 1 is concerned, I have said it is with great sadness that the Court is forced to conclude that there are no circumstances which extenuated his guilt on counts 14, 15 and 16.

"With regard to the other counts, it is necessary for me to pass sentence on him. They involve terrorism. One appreciates the motives that drove him to take the actions that he did, but nonetheless the sentences which the Court passes must have regard to the serious nature of the charges and the consequences that flow from them."

For the other counts, Robert McBride was sentenced to a total of over eighty-two years in prison. Some the sentences to run concurrently.

Then the judge came to counts 14, 15, and 16, which related to the three deaths caused by Robert's bomb at Marine Parade.

"And on count 14 I am obliged by law to sentence accused number 1 TO DEATH. On count 15 I am likewise obliged to sentence to him TO DEATH and on count 16 I am obliged to sentence him TO DEATH, which I do."

Greta went "cold" when she heard that.

"My whole body from my waist down went to jelly. I am clutching that bar like this (demonstrates), very tight, and then as soon as he received his last sentence, these policemen moved like a swarm. My knees just went weak. I don't know why I didn't prepare for that. I suppose the way court processes were going and the way these advocates were making their assessments, I just thought him and I would get long prison sentences.”

“And the judge was such a - he was very mean. I would be holding Robert's hands and playing with [his] cheeks in the court there. That day he sat there like a damn vulture. The man changed overnight."

"Then it's like I'm mad now," Robert recalls. "I'm not worried about people. I looked at the sea of white faces; the vindictive look on their faces. That's when I stood on my bench and said, 'Amandla!'."

Robert then delivered an impromptu address to his supporters in the court-room:

"I have taken you quite a distance along the road. Freedom is just around the corner. I am leaving you at the corner, and you must take that corner to find freedom on the other side.

"The struggle continues till Babylon falls!"