Audacious operation that shook SA

FOR over three decades, the remarkable story of Umkhonto we Sizwe's Special Operations Unit has remained largely untold.

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Formed under the direct command of ANC president Oliver Tambo and senior ANC and SACP leader Joe Slovo, this elite unit executed some of the most daring and high-profile attacks against the apartheid state in the 1980s. In this groundbreaking book by ANC and SACP activist Yunus Carrim, the history of Special Ops is brought to life through the voices of its surviving participants. This is an account of the unit's daring attack on the SADF's military fortress Voortrekkerhoogte.

BETWEEN 22:30 and 23:00 on 12 August 1981, five 122-mm rockets from a Grad-P rocket launcher, used for the first time in South Africa, hit Voortrekkerhoogte, the main SADF base in the heart of Pretoria.

The blasts were heard all over the city's southern and eastern suburbs.

A resident described the loud noise as “a grinding sound, like the sliding door of a panel van being opened”. He rushed outside to see rockets “streaking through the night sky”.

Zora Ahli saw “four streaks of flame, one after the other, rising from open ground to the west, flashing right over her house moving eastwards. She likened the phenomenon to four shooting stars.”

It’s not clear exactly what was hit. A rocket certainly hit the house of a domestic worker. The other rockets hit a pillar of the military college, an ablution block, an open field, and one or two houses. One rocket seems to have failed to explode.

Another cut through the corrugated-iron walls of a garage, went through a storeroom, passed between the storeroom and the domestic worker's room, struck the ground, and detonated. The force of the blast dislodged the roof of the room, burst the windows and toppled furniture.

“All I could see was fire ... I just heard ‘bam’ and saw fire all over my room,” said Elsie Sekanka, the domestic worker. She scrambled out of the burning room and climbed through a broken window.