The following is an extract from one of Chabani Manganyi's early testimonies, which was published in Die Suid-Afrikaan in December 1987 under the title ‘The Final Choice’. Following the conviction of Robert McBride and Greta Apelgren, Manganyi presented expert evidence in mitigation for the accused. He was Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the African Studies Institute of the University of the Witwatersrand at the time.

The result of the trial was that Robert McBride (23) was sentenced to death three times for the murder of three women who died in the car bomb blast outside Magoo's Bar on Durban's beachfront. Additionally, he was jailed for 67 years for 16 other counts of terrorism and attempted murder.

Greta Apelgren (30) was acquitted on all charges relating to the bombing but found guilty of five counts of assault with the intent to do grievous bodily harm, assisting a prisoner to escape, harbouring a terrorist and terrorism. She was jailed for an effective one year and nine months.

Derrick McBride was jailed for 12 years for his involvement in assisting the escape of ANC guerrilla, Gordon Webster, from a hospital in Edenvale, Johannesburg in May 1986 where a policeman and four people were injured in the incident.

Robert McBride, the man who stands accused in this court, is a man with a most singular and complex history. He is the first person of mixed racial origin in South Africa to have accepted and used terror as a method of struggle against oppression. This in itself does not make him a hero, but it does deepen the mystery surrounding the sources and reasons for his actions.

From their personal histories, both Robert McBride and Greta Apelgren are young South Africans (somewhat typical of the post 1976 black generation) with hardened sensibilities. The acts and beliefs for which they are charged are serious, but they could hardly qualify for the appellation of hardened revolutionaries.

Some of the world's leading experts on genocide and the social psychology of political violence would consider South Africa to have become, in recent years an atrocity-producing environment. It is common cause that Wentworth is one of the most violent urban communities in the country. Both McBride and Apelgren grew up in this dehumanising environment in which very little value was placed on individual lives.