Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following persons for their assistance: my nephew and now my colleague Etienne Botha of the Pretoria Bar, for finding and copying the Capital Cases registers and the trial records of the thirty-two men who were hanged between 26 November and 10 December 1987; Johan Steinberg, once an escort in Maximum Security Prison, for sharing the secrets of the execution process with me; my friend and colleague Fanie Olivier, for reading the manuscript, then raw and unsophisticated, and for encouraging me to send it to Umuzi; Frederik de Jager, my editor at Umuzi, for his fearless editing, for smoothing the rough spots, and for his expert advice; my wife, Ansie, for suffering my pursuit of the subject matter of this book with such grace and tolerance, and for proof-reading it more than once.

CGM

6 March 2008