Category Archives: South Africa

1669: Susanna One-Ear

Posted on by

On this date in 1669, a slave of the Dutch East India Company named Susanna was sewn into a rock-weighted sack and tossed into Table Bay as punishment for infanticide in the Cape Colony (present-day South Africa).

The spare narration of the company’s journal describes Susanna’s speedy progress from the (not further explained) strangulation of her “half-caste” infant girl — reported on December 11, tried on December 12, and executed on December 13.

December 11th. — In the evening meeting the Fiscal [Cornelis de Cretzer] reported that a female slave of the Company, named Susanna of Bengal, lying stiff and stinking of the small-pox in the slave house, had not hesitated to strangle her infant, a half-caste girl; he likewise submitted the sworn declaration of the surgeon, which mentioned that the poor innocent child had died in consequence. The Council having considered this serious affair at once, ordered that the murderous pig should be placed in confinement in order to be punished according to her deserts.

December 12th. — This evening the Council decreed that the female slave, above mentioned, should be tied up in a bag and thrown into the sea. The minister [Adrianus de Voogd] and sick comforter [Joannes à Bolte(n)] were accordingly sent to her, to admonish her to repentence [sic] of what she had done, so that she might in a Christian manner prepare herself for death to-morrow afternoon.

December 13th. — About 11 o’clock the sentence was read here on the square in presence of the murderess and the public, and afterwards carried out on the roadstead in the presence of all the slaves. For the maintenance of justice it was executed with death [by drowning?].

Unsurprisingly we know little else about Susanna … but we do know something.

A documentation project on the first decades of the Cape Colony features a series called “Uprooted Lives”, by Mansell Upham focusing on the lives of slaves and aboriginals affected by the settlement has a fantastic article (pdf) on “Susanna van Bengale” or “Susanna Een Oor” (Susanna One-Ear). It’s a highly recommended read, not only illuminating the judicial perspectives on infanticide that would have informed her judges, but tracing other, fleeting glimpses of Susanna supplied by the documentary record and illuminating the context of her case in view of two other important trials of mothers that preceded it.

It’s worth the click to read it here.

On this day..

1883: Mampuru, Sekukuni rival

Posted on by

On this date in 1883, the Boer South African Republic hanged Bapedi chief Mampuru.

Sekukuni

Mampuru is notable as the half-brother and rival — eventually murderous rival — of Sekukuni (also rendered Sekhukhune), the chief of the Pedi or Bapedi people. Their backstory is significant: Mampuru had been the intended heir of their shared father, King Sekwati, but the warlike Sekukuni had seized rulership instead when Sekwati died in 1861.

While Mampuru skulked in exile with the neighboring Swazi, it was Sekukuni who led his people’s resistance to the incursions of the Dutch Boers settling the Transvaal.

In 1876, he successfully fought off the Boer Transvaal Republic — which contributed to it becoming in 1877 the British Transvaal instead, at least according to the British.

Less successful was Sekukuni in the war soon prosecuted against him by the British. Extensively narrated here (also see part 1 of this same article sequence here), the upshot was that the British eventually trapped Sekukuni’s last defenders in a rocky hill remembered as the “Fighting Koppie” and captured him. The Swazi, with that displaced rival Mampuru, fought in this war with the British.

Sekukuni and his surviving family would be marched to Pretoria and imprisoned there until 1881.

In the intervening years, power was rebalanced all around among the players. Mampuru had been able to re-establish himself among the Bapedi with no small help from his British allies — but those British allies had been defeated by a Boer rebellion in the First Boer War.* One article in the settlement ending the Boer-British conflict permitted Sekukuni’s release.

As might be expected the ex-chief’s return to his homeland was scarcely welcomed by his brother. After some months of political acrimony, Mampuru settled the feud by having a team of assassins stab Sekukuni to death in his sleep, on the night of August 13, 1882.

For Mampuru, the sibling rivalry win was as Pyrrhic as it surely was satisfying, for he was immediately branded an outlaw by the Boer Transvaal and himself obliged to flee from the countrymen whom he meant to rule. When the Boers captured him, they had him condemned a murderer and hanged him stark naked for an audience of 200-plus white men in Pretoria. As an added indignity, they botched the hanging and dropped Mampuru to the ground on their first go, when the noose snapped. (In 2013, the jail where he hanged was renamed for Mampuru.)

Cowardly murderer or anti-colonial resistance martyr? That’s still up for debate.

* A result to be avenged/reversed 20 years on.

On this day..

1989: Solomon Ngobeni, the last hanged in South Africa

Posted on by

South Africa conducted its last execution on this date in 1989: that of Solomon Ngobeni, for robbing and murdering a taxi driver.

Apartheid South Africa had long been one of the world’s most prolific users of capital punishment. According to Wikipedia it had logged nearly 3,000 executions over the 30 years previous, including a one-year count of 164 as recently as 1987.

But the policy was about to see a sudden reversal — along with the policy of apartheid itself.

Earlier that same year, the South African presidency had been assumed by F.W. de Klerk. Much to everyone’s surprise, the copper-bottomed Nationalist Party conservative set about dismantling the entire white-rule infrastructure. Once he’d secured his term de Klerk moved with alacrity, immediately permitting some anti-apartheid marches that his security services wanted to shut down and proceeding apace to more dramatic reforms that within a few years saw off apartheid altogether.

Shuttering the Pretoria Central Prison gallows was one early gesture in this same campaign, considering the many martyrs that platform had made of regime opponents down the years. In 1990, de Klerk pronounced a formal moratorium on executions and he never lifted it; in 1995, the first politically weighty ruling of the post-apartheid Constitutional Court abolished capital punishment.

However, Ngobeni has no assurance of maintaining his milestone distinction in perpetuity. In present-day South Africa, blighted by a great deal of violent crime, reinstatement of capital punishment enjoys the support of several political parties and a sizable majority of the public.

On this day..

1829: William Maxwell, the last hanged for sodomy by the Royal Navy

Posted on by

On this date in 1829, boatswain William Maxwell became the last British Navy sailor ever hanged for sodomy.

He’d been condemned only two days previous by a bare-bones Admiralty court at the Simon’s Town naval base at the Cape of Good Hope; his charge was buggery upon one of the ship’s boys of the 28-gun frigate HMS Tweed. This accuser, William Pack, was supported by four other boys from the Tweed alleging “uncleanness and other scandalous actions in corruption of good manners” which certainly described Pack’s experience as well.

“On the third daay after he joined the Tweed, he summoned Pack to his cabin on the larboard side of the lower deck,” we find in B. Burg’s Boys at Sea: Sodomy, Indecency, and Courts Martial in Nelson’s Navy, which has an extensive narrative of the case* —

and, as the boy explained, “he then throwed me down on the deck. He then hauled my trousers down … He then turned to put his pintle into my backside. I felt him do all this. He hurt me very much.” … The boy continued his testimony by detailing four additional instances when he had been sodomized by Maxwell. The occurrences were all much the same. Pack added only that the boatswain neither used alcohol nor offered him money after he forced his attentions on him.

In an affecting detail that doesn’t appear to have carried any special legal import, Pack had diligently tallied his assaults in chalk on a mainmast hoop.

The other four boys’ allegations fell a bit short of violent rape but still followed a pattern of aggressive approaches by Maxwell shortly after the youth came aboard, with pretty obvious intent. The boatswain wanted to “do a dirty trick with me,” one said. Another euphemized the deed as “poking him about.” Citing fear of flogging or doubt that their claims would be believed, these boys hadn’t reported Maxwell — and indeed the panel pressed all of the witnesses on whether they’d been receiving gifts from Maxwell, suggesting a more reciprocal arrangement.

These private and unmentionable acts formed a difficult class of crime for the judiciary, and Maxwell knew it.** Much of his defense is taken up attacking the credibility of these boys — their questionable and perhaps interested testimony, and legal scholars who by 1829 counseled as one to err heavily towards caution in such difficult-to-prove cases.

He impugned Pack’s testimony, honing in on inconsistencies between different statements during a direct cross-examination that must have been dramatic for all involved. It didn’t work.

The youth of the victims, according to Burg, didn’t particularly exacerbate the crime in the eyes of Maxwell’s judges nor in general throughout the Navy; he wasn’t being read as a pedophile, but as a sodomite who happened to find the ship’s boys the easiest prey. This indeed they commonly were, occupying the very bottom of a ship’s hierarchy, but the same vulnerable stature also cut against their credibility as accusers since it made them liable to threats or cajoling to supply false accusations, or simply to the impetuosity of childish malice. Absent sterling character testimonials from other mariners, they carried scant weight as witnesses even in multiples; in an 1805 case, the judges who convicted a man named Barrett Ambler had put into the Admiralty for a pardon because they disliked “condemn[ing] a man to death, upon the evidence of four boys, the eldest not more than thirteen years of age.”

But no matter the evidence, the time for outright executing same-sexers was coming to an end in Britain. Even in the ranks of the Navy there had been no such punishment meted out since 1816. That was just weeks after (and for actions committed during) the Napoleonic Wars. But perhaps the ensuing era of peace helped more lenient attitudes take hold permanently — for until Maxwell, no Briton had swung for sodomy in the peacetime Navy in many decades.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the number of buggery trials was directly related to whether or not England was at war. After the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1713) and the Seven Years War (1756-1763), there were few trials and no executions for sodomy. Between 1756 and 1806, as Table 5 shows, fear and assiduous prosecution of sexual deviance was a wartime phenomenon. (Arthur Gilbert, “Buggery and the British Navy, 1700-1861,” Journal of Social History, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Autumn, 1976))

* I have not been able to locate the original 62-page court record anywhere online.

** He knew it because he’d previously been prosecuted for buggery — in fact, sentenced to death and then spared. Although he had no barrister at his last and fatal trial, he’d enjoyed legal assistance during his previous brush and ably deployed what he learned. It’s hard not to think that everyone’s awareness of this previous proceeding helped to shape the outcome of his second trial.

On this day..

1822: Johan Wilhelm Gebhardt, Junior, slave-slayer

Posted on by

On this date in 1822, Johan Wilhelm Gebhardt was executed at the Dutch-founded South African settlement of Paarl. His offense, unusual but not unheard-of in our executioner’s annals: killing his slave.

According to Alex Mountain in An Unsung Heritage: Perspectives on Slavery, the 21-year-old Gebhardt, who managed the farm belonging to his father, Rev. Johan Wilhelm Gebhardt Sr., had ordered a slave named Joris flogged “for not working properly.”

the flogging was done repeatedly by a slave called November who had been warned by Gebhardt, who remained present throughout the torture, that he too would be severely punished if he did not flog Joris properly. The flogging was done with a variety of instruments and from time to time salt and vinegar were rubbed into his wounds.

It was only when Joris lost consciousness that the torture stopped.

Joris died that night.

The western Cape had recently been taken under British management, and these looked with surprising hostility on the murder of Joris. Gebhardt was not suffered to plead to manslaughter in order to escape his fate.

Mountain reproduces a photo of Gebhardt’s gravestone (found “being used as a small bridge across a ditch”) with the lines

Rest in Peace
Unfortunate Youth
Your Career was short
and you were led Astray
Few were the Pleasures of your Life
And many your Sufferings!

There’s no gravestone for Joris, of course.

On this day..

1901: Willie Louw, Boer commando

Posted on by

Field-Cornet Willie Louw, a guerrilla in the Second Boer War, was shot by the British on this date in 1901.

A nephew to the Scots-descended Dutch reform minister Andrew Murray, William Hofmeyer Louw was a Colesberg farmer when that area — part of the British Cape Colony — was invaded by guerrillas from the neighboring independent Boer states.

Questions of the right allegiance out on the frontiers of empire were the very heart of the conflict. Louw sought advice from a judge, who advised him that as the Boer Republics claimed his district, he could join them on commando with a clear conscience.

British law did not see it the same way; Louw pleaded guilty to the consequent treason charge, putting himself on the mercy of a tribunal which was more keen on setting examples. The socialist politician (and future Prime Minister) Ramsay MacDonald, who visited South Africa in 1902, complained that “Willie Louw has been shot upon the verdict of a court which did not understand the first elements of justice and had not the faintest idea when a statement was proved.”

A letter from Willie’s sister to her parents the following morning, published that Christmas in the Manchester Guardian, detailed the commando’s peacable frame of mind as he faced in his last hours his “short journey to the long home.” (via To Love One’s Enemies: The work and life of Emily Hobhouse compiled from letters and writings, newspaper cuttings and official documents)

When we got home we heard that a sentence was to be promulgated on the market square at 11.30. All were eager to know who the prisoner was and we watched to see the procession pass. Bravely like a man he walked, erect with firm and steady step, his face ruddy and beautiful. It took a very few minutes to read the sentence and when he walked back the colour had not left his face nor the vigor his form — he was unchanged.

…

At about 2 o’clock we were there (at the goal) and found him quietly putting a few little things he had used together to be borne home on a tray by Boezak. The tray away, I put my arms around the strong neck while he bent over me and with his head on my shoulder I said, ‘Als ging ik ook dal der schaduz des doods ik sal geen kwaad vreezen, want Zyt met my, U stock en U staf die vertroosten my.’ (When I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff comfort me.) We then sat down, my husband at his right side and I at his left. All that was spoken by him bore unspeakably sure evidence of his trust in Jesus’ merit, of his preparedness to meet his God, of his hope of glory. He told us how thankful he was that he had twenty-nine days to prepare for this — how he had not been alone — how he had been strengthened, wonderfully strengthened … he was so sorry for you Dear Father and Mother and for George and then for us all — but we were to try and be brave and bear this. He had prayed to God to strengthen us and poor cousin Hanni as well.

Willie’s own last letter to his mother struck a similarly pious note (this via Innocent Blood: Executions During the Anglo-Boer War)

Saturday 23/11/1901

My dearest Mother,

I am returning your last letter to you because I am departing to a better world where there is no grief and sorrow. It is stipulated that I will depart this afternoon. It is God’s sacred will. He cannot make mistakes. May He always be close to you and dearest Daddy and all our loved ones. May He strengthen you all. Yes, God has promised me that he will strengthen you all, now there is nothing, virtually nothing, that worries me or will hold me back. Oh, I wish I could have done more work for Him. What value there is in a single soul. God, our Father, has allowed it all for the glory and honour of His name. Adieu! Until we meet again my own, dearest Mother.

Willie

On this day..

1956: Elifasi Msomi, witch doctor

Posted on by

(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.)

On this date in 1956, Zulu witch doctor Elifasi Msomi was executed in at Pretoria Central Prison in South Africa for the murders of fifteen people.

The devil made him do it, he said. Or, rather, Tokoloshe, an evil spirit in Zulu folklore.

Msomi had not been successful in earning a living at witch-doctoring, so he consulted an experienced colleague for advice. According to Msomi, the man introduced him to Tokoloshe and said, “Get me the blood of 15 people.”

Over the next year and a half, Msomi stalked KwaZulu Natal, slaughtering victims as the demon pointed them out, and collecting their blood in bottles. He would attack them with a knife, hatchet or knobkierie after luring them to an isolated area.

The first victim was a young girl. To prove to the demon just how dedicated and obedient he was, Msomi hacked his victim to death in front of his girlfriend. Tokoloshe was delighted, but the girlfriend was horrified. She went straight to the cops and had Msomi arrested. Then he escaped from custody … with Tokoloshe’s help, he said.

Msomi followed up on his first act by slaying five children. In April 1955, he was linked to multiple murders and arrested again, but again he escaped and picked up where he’d left off.

In his book Murder By Numbers: The 100 Most Deadly Serial Killers From Around The World, Robert Keller says,

Serial killers seldom stop killing of their own accord, but that is exactly what happened with Elifasi Msomi. Having collected the blood of his fifteenth young victim, he said that Tokoloshe thanked him for his service, then bathed with him in the river before they parted company.

Without Tokoloshe to help him anymore, Msomi soon came to police attention again when he was arrested for petty theft. In custody once more, he freely confessed to the murders and led authorities to some bodies, but he said he wasn’t responsible for his actions and was only following Tokoloshe’s orders.

There was, however, the problematic fact that he had raped some of his victims and robbed others; Tokoloshe hadn’t requested THAT. At the trial, two psychologists testified that Msomi was very intelligent and got sexual pleasure by causing pain to other people.

Writing of this case in Real Vampires, Night Stalkers and Creatures from the Darkside, Brad Steiger says,

Such was the reputation of the witch doctor’s power of channeling the Tokoloshe that prison officials granted permission to a deputation of tribal chiefs and elders to view Msomi after he had been hanged on February 10, 1956. These men were thus able to return to their respective tribes and proclaim that the witch doctor was really dead and that Tokoloshe had left him to seek out another host body.

On this day..

1901: Three Boer rebels against the Cape Colony

Posted on by

On this date in 1901, Petrus Jacobus Fourie, Jan van Rensburg, and Lodewyk Francois Stephanus Pfeiffer were shot by the British at Graaff-Reinet.

They were among the numerous subjects of the British Cape Colony whose sympathy with the independent Boer republics which Britain was in the process of conquering extended so far as aiding their Dutch brethren’s resistance. In this case, the young men joined the famed Boer guerrilla Gideon Scheepers — and whatever one might say about the fuzziness of ethnic and national identity in a frontier region, this rated in London’s eyes as rebellion.

On July 6, 1901, Scheepers executed a raid on the town of Murraysburg — “Scheepersburg”, he called it — and put loyalist houses to the torch.

The British Gen. John French sent columns of men into the rugged Camdeboo Mountains in an effort to trap the irksome commando. Scheepers and most of his troop of about 240 men escaped, but about 27 or 28 Cape Colony rebels were captured (along with a few free staters, who could not be charged as rebels).

A particularly revolting incident happened in the execution of the three who were shot. This was, that the firing parties were a body of ten men, five with ball, and five with blank cartridges. After the word “present,” which brings the rifle to the shoulder, one of them “‘pulled off” before the command “fire” was given, and the bullet blew off the top of one man’s head.

-British guard Wilfrid H. Harrison in his Memoirs of a Socialist in South Africa

Eight of these people were executed as rebels over the ensuing weeks, with the aid of Jan Momberg, one of their erstwhile mates who turned Crown’s evidence against them to save his own life.

After Fourie, van Rensburg and Pfeiffer were shot on Aug. 19, Ignatius Nel and Daniel Olwagen — both teenagers — died at Graaff-Reinet on August 26; and, Hendrik van Vuuren, Fredrick Toy and Hendrik Veenstra were shot at Colesberg on September 4.

Though the British made an effort to obscure the final resting-places of these potential martyr figures, their graves were located. Fourie, van Rensburg and Pfeiffer, along with Ignatius Nel and Daniel Olwagen, are among the men subsequently exhumed and placed in a collective grave. A monument in Graaff-Reinet honors these and three other guerrillas executed there … one of whom is Gideon Scheepers himself, who was captured in October of 1901 and executed the following January.

There’s a good deal more about Scheeper’s rebels, and these men in particular, in a two-part article by a descendant of van Rensburg here: part 1 | part 2.

On this day..

1964: Vuyisile Mini, Zinakile Mkaba and Wilson Khayingo

Posted on by

On this date in 1964, anti-apartheid fighters Vuyisile Mini, Zinakile Mkaba and Wilson Khayingo went to the gallows of Pretoria Central Prison — the first three members of the African National Congress’s military arm to be executed by apartheid South Africa.

In 1960, on the 21st of March — a date still kept as South Africa’s Human Rights Day, and worldwide as the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination — white police gunned down 69 black civilians protesting the color line.

After the Sharpeville Massacre the struggle over racial apartheid in South Africa escalated to a much more violent plane.

Confrontations throughout South Africa following Sharpeville led the white government to declare a state of emergency and begin rounding up thousands of regime opponents. Pretoria also immediately outlaws the leading black resistance organizations, the Pan Africanist Congress and the African National Congress.

Driven underground, both PAC and ANC spun off military wings in 1961 to meet force with force.

We have already visited the “Langa Six”, members of the PAC’s Poqo.

Shortly thereafter, on December 16, Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation” in Zulu, but better known simply as “MK”) announced its advent with placards in city streets.

The time comes in the life of any people when there remain two choices: to submit or fight. That time has now come to South Africa. We will not submit but will fight back with all means at our disposal in defence of our rights, our people and our freedom.

MK conducted its first dynamite attacks that very evening in Port Elizabeth; over the ensuing 18 months, it carried out more than 200 bombings and other acts of sabotage against the facilities of the apartheid state: train tracks, power stations, telephone wires, offices.

A security crackdown naturally ensued.* By 1963, the white government had managed to expose and arrest three-quarters of MK’s regional Eastern Cape High Command. Vuyisile Mini, Wilson Khayingo, and Zinakile Mkaba were all swiftly condemned on multiple counts of sabotage plus one of murdering a police informant. International appeals for clemency fell on deaf ears; one fellow-traveler later remembered the men taking leave of their fellow-prisoners in a haunting song.**

“The last evening was devastatingly sad as the heroic occupants of the death cells communicated to the prison in gentle melancholy song that their end was near … It was late at night when the singing ceased, and the prison fell into uneasy silence. I was already awake when the singing began again in the early morning. Once again the excruciatingly beautiful music floated through the barred windows, echoing round the brick exercise yard, losing itself in the vast prison yards. And then, unexpectedly, the voice of Vuyisile Mini came roaring down the hushed passages. Evidently standing on a stool, with his face reaching up to a barred vent in his cell, his unmistakable bass voice was enunciating his final message in Xhosa to the world he was leaving. In a voice charged with emotion but stubbornly defiant he spoke of the struggle waged by the African National Congress and of his absolute conviction of the victory to come. And then it was Khayinga’s turn, followed by Mkaba, as they too defied all prison rules to shout out their valedictions. Soon after, I heard the door of their cell being opened. Murmuring voices reached my straining ears, and then the three martyrs broke into a final poignant melody which seemed to fill the whole prison with sound and then gradually faded away into the distant depths of the condemned section.

* It was during this crackdown that future president Nelson Mandela was rolled up. Mandela had helped to found MK.

** According to The Road to Democracy in South Africa, 1960-1970, the song was Mini’s own composition titled “Pasop — nants’in-dod’inyama, Verwoerd” (“Watch out, here is the African man, Verwoerd!”). If it is available online, I have not been able to find it.

On this day..

1922: Taffy Long, Herbert Hull, and David Lewis, Rand rebels

Posted on by

RAND MINING RECOVERY.

LOWER WORKING COSTS.

(From our correspondent.)

JOHANNESBURG, Oct. 28. The Rand Daily Mail, in an article dealing with the economic situation of the Union, gives striking figures illustrating the steady advance of the gold industry on the march towards prosperity.

Profits for the July-September quarter show an increase of £1,136,000 over the previous quarter. This has been accomplihed not only by lowering wages, but by all-round improvement in efficiency per unit, mining costs having fallen from 25s. 8d. in 1921 to 20s. 5d. in September, 1922 …

[T]he Rand Daily Mail says that these facts “represent unmistakable omens of coming prosperity which should steel the downhearted farmer to greater effort and encourage the suffering industrialist throughout the Union, and transform the pessimism of the merchant into healthy confident and hope.” (London Times, Oct. 30, 1922)

THREE RAND EXECUTIONS.

ANTI-GOVERNMENT RIOT.

(From our correspondent.)

JOHANNESBURG, Nov. 17. The bitterest feeling prevails among the workers over the refusal to reprieve the three men, Long, Hull, and Lewis, who were condemned to death for murder in connexion with the Rand revolt, and were executed at Pretoria to-day.

Appeals for mercy poured in till almost the last moment, and an open-air mass meeting was held, in which prominent Communists took part. At this meeting angry and threatening speeches were made; the names of General Smuts and Sir Lionel Phillips were boohed, and the crowd attempted to break into the Town Hall, severely injured a detective, and was finally dispersed by armed police. The public generally approves the Government’s firmness. The condemned men sang the Red Flag on the scaffold. (London Times, Nov. 18, 1922)


“Come dungeons dark or gallows grim the sun will be our parting hymn.”

FUNERAL OF RAND MURDERERS.

COMMUNIST APPEAL TO CHILDREN.

(From our correspondent.)

JOHANNESBURG, Nov. 19. Remarkable scenes recalling the funeral of the victims of the great strike of 1913 were witnessed at the burial of the remains of Long, Lewis, and Hull, who were executed on Friday. The coffins, in separate hearses, were followed by thousands of workers, with banners and regalia, representing every trade union. “The Red Flag” was sung at the graveside and addresses were delivered, in which members of Parliament, of the Provincial Council, and Town Councils participated.

…

The latest development of Communist propaganda in Johannesburg is the distribution broadcast among children and students as they are leaving their schools and colleges of a pamphlet denouncing as “legalized murder and a blot on history” the execution of the men convicted of murder at special treason courts. (London Times, Nov. 20, 1922)

On this day..