Hello and thank you for downloading the podcast of witness history from the BBC World

Service with me, Alex Collins. Today I'm bringing you the story of a British

communist who was sent on an extraordinary mission halfway across the world.

It's August 1971, Bob Nuland is 21, unemployed and looking for a major adventure. But what

happened next seemed unreal. He was hanging out with his communist pals when one of them

took him aside. One night one of the comrades I stayed with tapped me on the shoulder and

said we need to talk. It was very strange and he just sort of seemed not to me to come

outside and we crossed the road into the park which was opposite. Insighting much the ducks

going around this little duck pond and he said you've been selected for a very special

task. You've been selected to help the ANC. Doing a propaganda exercise, distributing

leaflets on a grand scale to keep the name of the ANC alive, to ensure that the people

of South Africa were aware that we are there fighting and organising to defeat apartheid.

Handing out leaflets, that doesn't sound like much of an adventure, but Bob was asked

to become a bomb maker. But with a difference, his bombs weren't intended to kill or injure.

The leaflets would shower like confetti onto the streets of Black South African townships.

It's totally impossible in apartheid South Africa, a very repressive society with strict

controls over everything that went on and all public spaces monitored, blacks denied

all rights. There's no way anybody could stand on a street corner and hand out leaflets.

So the idea was to find a way to get a large number of leaflets to the maximum number

of people. And so the devices were created, most amazing creation really in order to do

that.

The African National Congress, which organised the campaign, recruited only white people

...