The Pretoria Church Street Bombing: Apartheid Retaliation
On 23 May 1983, just before 07:30, in the morning, apartheid South African Air Force (SAAF) Impala and Canberra planes were flying over the Bay of Maputo, where they ploughed rockets into an orange grove next to an old Portuguese Villa on Rua Ingineira Pinto Texeira. The SAAF carried out these aircraft bombardments as a revenge raid against the African National Congress (ANC) targets in Maputo, Mozambique, following the Church Street explosion in Pretoria on 20 May 1983.
The shrapnel from the explosions wounded a young girl at a crèche who had nothing to do with the 20 May 1983 attack. Just behind the building, was a state-run Somopal grapefruit and jam factory, where rockets bombarded the outer walls of the crèche and blew two holes out of the foot of the breeze-block walls surrounding the property’s grounds. Further on, a whitewashed Spanish-style house had its living room devastated by a rocket fired from the planes, as well as at a property just beyond the same house, two children who went to look when they heard the planes approaching were hit by shrapnel splinters.
At the Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) Transvaal Urban Machinery’s former headquarters in Liberdad, rockets fell in a garden but did little damage to the building itself. Of the six houses that were attacked, some had been vacated by the ANC up to a year earlier. The apartheid South African Defence Force (SADF) claimed that 64 persons had been ki
