Explosive: Mark Shaw’s book tells the story of Pagad, an anti-crime community organisation which became a vigilante group.
It was the day of the celebrations marking Guy Fawkes’s gunpowder plot, which in hindsight seems portentous. Friday 5 November 1999, a comfortable early summer evening in Cape Town…
South Africa had been a democratic state for five and a half years. A kilometre or two away from parliament, the seat of this fledgling democracy, was the Blah Bar, another venue that in the conception of its owners — and as its name suggested — was also meant for talking, even if only for friendlier exchanges.
The Blah Bar was as much a testimony to the new democratic order as the transformed parliamentary precinct, located as it was in an area known as Cape Town’s “pink district”. Green Point was an increasingly safe and welcoming space for the gay community. The new constitution promised equality for all and the pink district was a vibrant manifestation of that.
On that Friday evening, as the weekend beckoned punters to the district, a young man gingerly entered the Blah Bar, where he had been told homosexual men hung out
The man’s surveillance team had told him the bar would be quiet and that in the absence of moonlight he would be able to get in and out of this place of “iniquity” discreetly. But the timing still had to be right: before the bar became crowded but not so early as to attract undue attention. Enter, deposit the bomb bag, linger for a moment, then leave — act like someone who has changed his mind and decided to go somewhere else.
Demons and an angel
By 9pm, there were about 10 customers inside and the Blah Bar looked rather empty. A couple were sitting on stools next to where the dark blue bag had been placed. Kevin Engelbrecht and his then partner, whom I will refer to as Brian (he asked not to be named), debated whether to go out that night.
Brian said it was a good way to end the week, so they set off from their flat in Green Point, not imagining their lives were about to be irrevocably changed. There was to be life before the bomb and life after it.
There is still some doubt as to the precise time the Blah Bar bomb exploded. By some accounts it was 9pm, which could explain the small number of people in the bar, but by others it was around 11pm or shortly after midnight. I could not locate the police file and interviews were contradictory, but in the end it does not really matter.
The pipe bomb lay innocuously under the table waiting to be activated by a cellphone…
When phone contact was made with the detonator, the explosion caused a deadly shock wave followed almost instantaneously by particles of lethal shrapnel. A large fish tank on the bar shattered, sending water, fish and shards of glass flying across the room.
Ian Martin was standing at the top of the short flight of stairs at the back, commenting to some customers how quiet the bar seemed to be for a Friday night. He remembers a loud crack, “then it was a bit of a blur”.
He was only about a metre from the bomb and was buffeted by the shock wave: “I don’t know how long I was out but it could not have been long. It was one of those things that felt like an eternity but was probably seconds. I came to and it was pandemonium, with fire, blood, glass and flames. Total, utter hysteria.”
Martin was badly injured. A large piece of metal entered his leg, fracturing his tibia. It left a large, bloody hole. Another piece of shrapnel cut clean through an Achilles tendon. He could not walk. “There was a shitload of blood,” he told me calmly.
As the smoke and dust cleared, he looked around the shattered room: “In the midst of all the chaos — and it sits with me as one of the strangest things in that situation of sheer trauma — all the faces looked like demons. It was like watching a horror film, with special effects making everyone’s faces demonic — whether that was out of my own fear or whether they looked like that out of sheer terror.”
Engelbrecht said the explosion was deafening and the shock wave was like nothing he had ever experienced: it picked him up and threw him three or four metres across the room.
“I remember getting up, and the sights and smell. It was smoky and my ears were ringing. I remember staggering to get out the front door.
“I ran up the road and people were staring at me weirdly, and I didn’t know why. When I got to Bronx [the bar across the road], the doorman said, ‘What happened to you, where are your clothes?’”
The shock wave had torn off most of Engelbrecht’s clothes except for his shirt and what remained of his jacket. His hair was singed and he was covered in blood. In panic, he ran back to the Blah Bar to look for his partner.
Brian, who was sitting next to Engelbrecht, took the full force of the blast and the deadly shrapnel that followed milliseconds later. He had sustained multiple injuries but was still conscious. He recalled how three people picked him up and placed him by the door. As he lay there for what seemed like a few minutes, Engelbrecht reappeared and began singing to him, slowly and unsteadily at first but then more clearly as they waited for help.
Brian spoke at length about the bombing and his injuries. It’s hard to fathom how people whose lives have been so dramatically transformed by the trauma of an explosion, followed by months of debilitation and pain, conveyed no bitterness, no desire for revenge. Brian felt only gratitude for being alive and for how the incident brought him and his family closer. Those sentiments came later, though.
In the moments after the bombing, he understood the consequences of what had happened. He also knew he would not be able to stand up. But he was resolute:
“Now that I am alive, I am going to survive,” he told himself. A fire had started and Brian could feel its heat.
His arm was hanging off to one side, his leg badly damaged, and he had multiple shrapnel wounds in his abdomen. He recalled how three people came into the bar — he does not know who they were — gently lifted him away from the fire and placed him near the door.
Then, as several survivors recalled, an angel emerged. To this day, it is not clear who he was, and although none of the victims can describe him in detail they agree he was a doctor. He appears to have been driving past and stopped to assist the injured. The ambulances took an age to come, something like 45 minutes. In the interim, the doctor stepped in.
Martin recalled: “I was crawling across the floor surrounded by people running, with the sprinklers going off and the fire around me. The glass was cutting my chest while I was dragging myself across the floor to get out. And then this guy came in, a big man who was a doctor. He picked me up, took me outside and put me on a table. He took his T-shirt off and put it against the hole in my leg, which was gushing blood, and told me to hold it while I waited for the ambulance.”
Brian also remembers the doctor. “It was an Indian guy,” he said. “He looked at me, went to his car and came back with a silver foil rescue blanket. I was really cold and in shock. I felt much better then.”
Then Engelbrecht heard the ambulance sirens. “I said to the doctor to look after Brian and make sure he didn’t go to sleep or close his eyes. I ran to the ambulance … and told them to take one person and one person only and that was Brian because he was injured the worst.”
The “angel” then disappeared, as quietly as he had arrived.
Breaking the Bombers is published by Jonathan Ball.