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RENFREW CHRISTIE DIES AT 76; SABOTAGED RACIST REGIME’S NUCLEAR
PROGRAM  
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Adam Nossiter
January 14, 2026
The New York Times
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_ He played a key role in ending apartheid South Africa’s secret
weapons program in the 1980s by helping the African National Congress
bomb critical facilities. _

Renfrew Christie in 1988. After Dr. Christie’s death, President
Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa praised his “relentless and fearless
commitment to our freedom.”, Reuters

 

Renfrew Christie, a South African scholar whose undercover work for
the African National Congress was critical in hobbling the apartheid
government’s secret nuclear weapons program in the 1980s, died on
Dec. 21 at his home in Cape Town. He was 76.

The cause of death was pneumonia, his daughter Camilla Christie said.

President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa paid tribute to Dr. Christie
after his death, saying
[[link removed].]
his “relentless and fearless commitment to our freedom demands our
appreciation.”

The A.N.C., in a statement
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called Dr. Christie’s role “in disrupting and exposing the
apartheid state’s clandestine nuclear weapons program” an “act
of profound revolutionary significance.”

From the doctoral dissertation he had written at the University of
Oxford on the history of electricity in South Africa, Dr. Christie
provided the research needed to blow up the Koeberg Nuclear Power
Station; the Arnot coal-fired power station; the Sasol oil-from-coal
facilities that produced the heavy water critical to producing nuclear
weapons; and other critical sites.

The explosions set back South Africa’s nascent nuclear weapons
program by years and cost the government more than $1 billion, Dr.
Christie later estimated.

By the time the bombs began going off, planted by his colleagues in
uMkhonto we Sizwe, the paramilitary wing of the A.N.C., Dr. Christie
was already in prison. He was arrested by South African authorities in
October 1979 on charges of “terrorism,” three months after
completing his studies at Oxford, and spent the next seven years in
prison, some of that time on death row and in solitary confinement.

“While I was in prison, everything I had ever researched was blown
up,” he said [[link removed]] in
a speech in 2023.

Terrorism was a capital offense, and Dr. Christie narrowly escaped
hanging. But as he later recounted
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he was deliberately placed on the death row closest to the gallows at
the Pretoria Maximum Security Prison. For two and half years, he was
forced to listen to the hangings of more than 300 prisoners.

“The whole prison would sing for two or three days before the
hanging, to ease the terror of the victims,” Dr. Christie recalled
at a 2013 conference at the University of the Western Cape on laws
regarding torture.

Then he recited the lyrics of an anti‐apartheid folk song that
reverberated in the penitentiary: “‘Senzeni-na? Senzeni-na? What
have we done? What have we done?’ It was the most beautiful music on
earth, sung in a vile place.”

“At zero dark hundred,” he continued, “the hanging party would
come through the corridors to the gallows, slamming the gates behind
them on the road to death. Once they were at the gallows there was a
long pause. Then — crack! — the trapdoors would open, and the neck
or necks of the condemned would snap. A bit later came the hammering,
presumably of nails into the coffins.”

In an interview [[link removed]] years
later with the BBC, he said the “gruesome” experience affected him
for the rest of his life.

Dr. Christie acquired his fierce antipathy to apartheid at a young
age, growing up in an impoverished family in Johannesburg.

Many of his family members fought with the Allied forces against the
Germans in World War II, and “I learned from them very early that
what one does with Nazis is kill them,” he said
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at a 2023 conference on antinuclear activism in Johannesburg. “I am
not a pacifist.”

At 17, he was drafted into the South African Army. A stint of guard
duty at the Lenz ammunition dump south of Johannesburg confirmed his
suspicions that the government was building nuclear weapons. “From
the age of 17, I was hunting the South African bomb,” he said at the
conference.

After attending the University of the Witwatersrand, he received a
scholarship to Oxford, which enabled him to further his quest. For his
doctoral dissertation, he chose to study South Africa’s history of
electrification, “so I could get into the electricity supply
commission’s library and archives, and work out how much electricity
they were using to enrich uranium,” he told the BBC.

From there, it was possible to calculate how many nuclear bombs could
be produced. Six such bombs had reportedly
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been made by the end of apartheid in the early 1990s; the United
States had initially aided the regime’s nuclear program. Thanks to
the system of forced labor, South Africa “made the cheapest
electricity in the world,” Dr. Christie said, which aided the
process of uranium enrichment and made the country’s nuclear program
a magnet for Western support. (South Africa also benefited from its
status as a Cold War ally against the Soviet Union.)

Dr. Christie turned his findings over to the A.N.C. Instead of opting
for the safety of England — there was the possibility of a lecturer
position at Oxford — he returned home and was arrested by South
Africa’s Security Police. He had been betrayed
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by Craig Williamson, a fellow student at Witwatersrand, who had become
a spy for the security services and was later granted amnesty by South
Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

After 48 hours of torture, Dr. Christie wrote a forced confession —
“the best thing I ever wrote,” he later told the BBC, noting that
he had made sure the confession included “all my recommendations to
the African National Congress” about the best way to sabotage
Koeberg and other facilities.

“And, gloriously, the judge read it out in court,” Dr. Christie
added. “So my recommendations went from the judge’s mouth”
straight to the A.N.C.

Two years later, in December 1982, Koeberg was bombed by white A.N.C.
operatives who had gotten jobs at the facility. They followed Dr.
Christie’s instructions to the letter.

“Of all the achievements of the armed struggle, the bombing of
Koeberg is there,” Dr. Christie said at the 2023 conference,
emphasizing its importance. “Frankly, when I got to hearing of it,
it made being in prison much, much easier to tolerate.”

Renfrew Leslie Christie was born in Johannesburg on Sept. 11, 1949,
the only child of Frederick Christie, an accountant, and Lindsay
(Taylor) Christie, who was soon widowed and raised her son alone while
working as a secretary.

He attended King Edward VII School in Johannesburg and was conscripted
into the army immediately after graduating. After his discharge, he
enrolled at Witwatersrand. He was twice arrested after illegally
visiting Black students at the University of the North at Turfloop,
and was also arrested during a march on a police station where he said
the anti-apartheid activist Winnie Mandela
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was being tortured.

He didn’t finish the course at Witwatersrand, instead earning
bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Cape Town
in the mid-1970s before studying at Oxford. At Cape Town, he was a
leader of the National Union of South African Students, an important
anti-apartheid organization.

On June 6, 1980, he was sentenced
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in prison under South Africa’s Terrorism Act, with four other
sentences of five years each to run concurrently.

“I spent seven months in solitary,” Dr. Christie said in the 2023
speech. “Don’t let anybody kid you: No one comes out of solitary
sane. My nightmares are awful.”

After his years in prison, he was granted amnesty in 1986 as the
apartheid regime began to crumble. (It officially ended in 1994, when
Nelson Mandela
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became the country’s first Black president.) He later had a long
academic career at the University of the Western Cape, retiring in
2014 as dean of research
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and senior professor.

In addition to his daughter Camilla, he is survived by his wife, Dr.
Menán du Plessis, a linguist and novelist he married in 1990; and
another daughter, Aurora.

Asked by the BBC whether he was glad he had spied for the A.N.C., Dr.
Christie didn’t hesitate.

“I was working for Nelson Mandela and uMkonto we Sizwe,” he said.
“I’m very proud of that. We won. We got a democracy.”

Kirsten Noyes contributed research.Adam Nossiter
[[link removed]] has been bureau chief in
Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans and is now a writer on the
Obituaries desk.

* apartheid
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* South Africa
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* African National Congress
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