After a South African massacre
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The following story comes from chapter 2 of No Enemy To Conquer
The Heidelberg Tavern massacre was described by the Amnesty Committee of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as “brutal.” On New Year’s Eve 1993, the Azanian People’s Liberation Army (APLA), the armed wing of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), carried out this attack on a Cape Town restaurant on the orders of APLA’s director of operations, Letlapa Mphahlele, now PAC president. Many were particularly shocked as it happened at a time when the date for democratic elections had already been set for April 1994.
One of the four people killed was twenty-three-year-old white student, Lyndi Fourie, who was just finishing her civil engineering degree. Her mother, Ginn, a university lecturer, says of Mphahlele, “If I had met him then, I could have killed him with my bare hands.”
Yet today Ginn Fourie and Letlapa Mphahlele share platforms in South Africa and around the world, speaking of reconciliation after tragedy through the Lyndi Fourie Foundation.