GALLERY: Bradley Steyn launches book on city massacre

The book is based on Steyn’s eyewitness account of how Barend Hendrick Strydom, better known as the ‘Wit Wolf’, shot and killed seven people on 15 November 1988, during the Strijdom square massacre.

June 14, 2019

Rekord Newspaper 1 minute read

Peter Morey and Bradley Steyn. Photo: Eliot Mahlase

The new book Undercover with Mandela’s Spies: The Story of The Boy Who Crossed the Square was launched at Exclusive Books in Brooklyn mall on Thursday night.

Written by Bradley Steyn and Mark Fine, the book is based on Steyn’s eyewitness account of how Barend Hendrick Strydom, better known as the “Wit Wolf”, shot and killed seven people on 15 November 1988, during the Strijdom Square massacre.

Steyn recalled how Strydom had stormed at him and lowered his firearm when he saw Steyn was white.

“The Wit Wolf asked me what I was doing on Strijdom Square after I had asked him why he was hurting all the innocent people. He answered that he was doing it for their future.”

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He said moments later Strydom had shot another victim, whom Steyn had helped to hide when the Wit Wolf began his shooting spree.

“I have been writing the book for 14 years . . . in notebooks and scrap papers and then one day I decided to get the book published,” Steyn told Rekord.

Steyn, formerly from Lyttelton, left school in standard 8 to join the SA navy in Cape Town.

He was soon kicked out of the navy and worked as a bouncer at a night club in Cape Town before joining the ANC’s Umkhonto we Sizwe military wing and infiltrating State Security at the age of 20 in 1991.

He now calls Los Angeles home after he emigrated overseas in 1995.