The Harare Three

On 10 January 1988, Mr Obed Amon Mwanza, a Zimbabwean, was killed and six African National Congress (ANC) members were injured when the car in which Mwanza was a driver detonated outside an ANC transit house in Bulawayo.

This was an operation undertaken by apartheid agents located in Zimbabwe. Philip Masiza Conjwayo, one of the agents was a former member of Zimbabwe’s Special Branch. Conjwayo confirmed to the ANC that he was handled by Captain Mary Baker of the apartheid security police.

Another agent, Mr Henry Thompson, paid Conjwayo Z$8 000 for this operation, to get a vehicle and to find a driver, who was hired at the Bulawayo Employment Exchange and was paid Z$20.00 to drive the car to the destination. The car was booby-trapped by Mr Kit “Barry” Bawden and Mr Michael Smith.

They then followed Mwanza as he drove to a designated address, and as he parked the car, Bawden detonated it by remote control. Mwanza did not know he was carrying a bomb, which the three men detonated while he was in it, killing him and injuring six ANC officials.

On 18 November 1988, Kevin Woods, Michael Smith and Philip Conjwayo, as well as Barry Bawden, were arrested in Zimbabwe in connection with the bombing that killed the driver of the car transporting the bomb and injured several ANC members. Woods, Smith and Conjwayo were sentenced to death and their sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment by the Supreme Court.

All three prisoners were former members of the Rhodesian intelligence and security forces. The three were recruited by the South African intelligence service after 1980 to carry out destabilisation activities in Zimbabwe.

In the 1980s Zimbabwe became an important area of operation for the ANC particularly for meetings. The apartheid government and its surrogates began attacking ANC houses and people in Zimbabwe. For instance, in May 1987, Tsitsi Chiliza a Zimbabwean citizen married to an ANC member was killed by a booby trapped television set intended for Jacob Zuma. The ANC office in Harare was hit by a rocket and in January 1988 a car bomb injured three ANC members in Bulawayo.

On 21 April 1994 Woods, Smith and Conjwayo were granted South African citizenship by the apartheid government just before the fall of apartheid. After the fall of apartheid their release became a source of contention between the South African government and the Zimbabwean government.

Nelson Mandela failed to persuade the Zimbabwean government to release them on a state visit in 1997 and on other subsequent appeals. Woods, Smith and Conjwayo had served more than 18 years of their life sentences, while Kit “Barry” Bawden had managed to evade the net of his 25-year sentence.

The citizenship of the three was a disputed issue that materially affected their chances of an earlier pardon. All three were originally Zimbabwean, but President Thabo Mbeki disclosed in parliament in September 2003 that the National Party government had granted Woods, Smith and Conjwayo South African citizenship on 21 April 1994 – six days before the country’s first democratic elections. Mbeki said the purpose was to oblige the incoming ANC government to intervene on behalf of the men.

Mbeki questioned the legality of the move, but said the South African embassy in Harare had extended consular services to the three men. Conjwayo, though, had asked for the services to be stopped because, he said, they jeopardised his status as a Zimbabwean national. Mbeki said at the time that he had raised the issue of the “Harare Three” with Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, but added that South Africa should “respect the right of the government of Zimbabwe to take whatever decisions it considers fit and proper, affecting Zimbabweans”.

In 2006 all three were released by the Zimbabwean government on humanitarian grounds. Woods and Smith returned to South Africa while Conjwayo chose to stay in Zimbabwe (died 21 February 2014).

Castro Khwela
Good day fellow Compatriots!