Introduction
My interest in telling the Robert McBride story dates back to my medical school days in the late eighties. In those days, I used to dabble in freelance journalism whenever I got a break from my studies at the University of Natal Medical school (now the Nelson Mandela School of Medicine). The first McBride I got close to was Mrs Doris McBride, Robert's now deceased mother. Doris undertook the lonely, 200 km trip to-and-fro between her home in Wentworth (Durban) and Pietermaritzburg each day to attend the concurrent trials of her son Robert and husband Derrick. She was a good subject for a human interest story for the magazine I wrote for.A short while before the McBrides' trials, another high-profiled trial was held in Pietermaritzburg. A number of the accused in the “Durban 12” trial were activists connected to the Medical School. Among them was an Indian post-graduate student, Dr Vijay Ramluckan. There were also two medical students, one of whom had been my classmate in second year. During the trial of the “Durban 12”, bus-loads of activists from the Medical School and non-medical students from the university's Howard College would routinely be transported to Pietermaritzburg to lend support to the accused ... READ MORE