Robert McBride – The Struggle Continues

Robert McBride – The Struggle Continues

By Bryan Rostron

Tafelberg. $22

Not many get to meet their future biographers on Death Row. But this is how, in 1989 at Pretoria Central Prison, author Bryan Rostron came to meet condemned inmate 3737, Robert John McBride, who was then just 26. McBride, along with Gordon Webster, had led an MK Special Operations Unit in KZN, commanded from Botswana by Aboobaker Ismail, who reported to Joe Slovo who in turn reported to Oliver Tambo. At the time, McBride had insisted he was some sort of ‘maverick’ bomber who had acted impulsively, placing a powerful car bomb outside the Why Not and Magoo’s bars in June 1986. Titled Until Babylon Falls, the biography was first published in 1991, a year before McBride’s release from prison, orchestrated by Nelson Mandela. Rostron’s remarkable 1991 book has been republished and updated and is titled Robert McBride – The Struggle Continues. It reads like a political thriller, biography and historic record all rolled into one. The updated biography covers McBride’s later life, his stint in the Department of Foreign affairs where he became involved in Irish and East Timor peace talks. It also tracks how McBride begins to become a focus of rogue intelligence networks serving ANC leadership tussles and not the country, and how finally, after his appointment in 2014 as the executive director of the Independent Police Investigative Directorate, criminal elements inside the state turned on him (and others rooting out compromised officials in high places).