Robert McBride's transition from ANC bomber to police chief was eased by the truth and reconciliation process, he tells Susan McKay
Robert McBride isn't sure about his Irish ancestry. The South African police chief has been told that Major John McBride, who led the Irish Brigade against the British in the Boer War and then took part in the Easter Rising, is his great-grandfather.
"But there is no certainty," he says. "Maybe our family were the domestic workers." What he does know is that the Irish connection probably saved his life.
A former ANC bomber, McBride was convicted of murder and was on death row in Pretoria in 1991 when the then South African president, FW de Klerk, was invited to visit Ireland. The late film-maker, Tiernan McBride, organised protests against the planned execution of his name-sake, and two days before the Irish visit, de Klerk announced a reprieve.
Last Friday, McBride delivered the annual Bobby Sands memorial lecture in Belfast, on the 25th anniversary of the IRA hungerstriker's death in the Maze prison. He spoke of how the 1981 hunger strike inspired Nelson Mandela to lead a protest about conditions in South African prisons. McBride took part in hunger strikes himself.
"The code word for resistance through hunger strike in prison was 'doing a Sands'," he says, adding that when Terence MacSwiney died on hunger strike in 1920, the ANC general secretary sent messages of support to Sinn Féin. "At the time, both were fledgling organisations."
The ANC respected both the IRA campaign and Sinn Féin's politics, he explains. "Maybe we are simplistic and naive, but it is in our political DNA to support anti-colonial struggles." He has been talking with Sinn Féin and with former IRA activists about the way forward now that they have ended the "armed struggle". Sinn Féin has refused to take its place on the Northern Ireland Policing Board, maintaining that the PSNI needs further reform.
"Republicans have to get involved in policing," McBride says. "In a democracy, you can't pick and choose. The assembly will make laws. Who is going to enforce them?"
It is a message to which the Sinn Féin leadership is highly receptive - and indeed McBride made similar comments when he visited Ireland two years ago.
On that occasion one former IRA man, who was against the Belfast Agreement, wrote that for republicans "to wear the uniform of a British police force is as incongruous as wearing the prison monkey suit/criminal uniform during the H Block/Armagh struggle for political status". McBride says there is still work to be done on police reform but the Belfast Agreement has made change possible and necessary.
"Reality doesn't go away because you close your eyes," he says. "I have been encouraging republicans to see the contradictions in their position. The police they imagine is the one they experienced. I've asked them to seriously consider looking at what the police could be like now."
In his lecture, he said there were opportunities for a new beginning and warned against allowing "the pain and the hurt of the past to blind us". Last weekend, graffiti painted onto the window of a Sinn Féin advice centre in south Belfast suggested that some remain to be persuaded. "PSNI station," it said.
McBride is proud of his record as the chief of police for Johannesburg's East Rand district. "It is recognised as one of the most effective and well-motivated police services in the country," he says. "We deal with high levels of serious and violent crime, including rape, domestic violence and armed robbery. A society that goes through a conflict becomes sick. One needs to go right back to the principles of policing. New laws aren't worth the ink they are written in if they can't be implemented. We need the support of the people and to get it we need to be independent, fair and transparent, and have a culture based on human rights."
These are not, he insists, just fine words. "There has been a dramatic decrease in crime. We are beginning to get control." South Africa is in a better state than ever before, he says. It is the most stable economy in Africa, and millions of people have houses with water and electricity now who hadn't before.
"Under apartheid, this society was meant for 10 per cent of the people, so there were no services for 90 per cent." Apartheid meant black people were "treated like animals". McBride's response was to join Umkhonto we Sizwe, the military wing of the ANC. The son of two Durban schoolteachers, he carried out many bombings but became notorious for two 1986 car-bombings in the city which killed three white civilians and wounded many others. He was sentenced to death, and spent four years on death row before his reprieve.
Released in 1992, he rose rapidly under the new regime, becoming an ANC MP in 1994, and then spending eight years as a senior official in the department of foreign affairs. He studied diplomacy and international affairs in Malaysia. "Then in 2003 I changed careers and I joined the police force," he says.
It was hard to put on the uniform at first, and building trust with old enemies was at times painful and even humiliating. But he did it, "and the sun still rose the next day," he says. He is well respected by black and white colleagues and community leaders alike, and is frequently invited to address international conferences on policing. He has met several high-level PSNI officers at such gatherings in South Africa.
His experience of taking part in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission made the transition from freedom fighter to police chief easier to manage, he says. He was given amnesty for full disclosure of his activities during the war.
"I found it a very humbling experience and a very re-humanising one," he says. "It was a cleansing period to bring closure. As an activist, my position was: we were oppressed and we fought back. In conflict, horrible things are done. You can justify what you did but the truth is, when one human being hurts another, it can't be right. There was one police officer who had a facial injury and it was very moving for me to encounter him. I had caused this person injury. He was from a racist police force but, face to face, it didn't matter. It was very moving and it made me remorseful in a very real way which you cannot explain politically."
He quotes the Zulu saying, "Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu" - a person is a person through other people.
"In South Africa we have this philosophy and we call it ubuntu," he says. "I am dignified because I treat you with dignity. It is about the equality of our humanity."
