The apartheid government’s top-secret Chemical and Biological Warfare Programme sealed the Truth Commission’s investigations into gross human rights abuses on the 31st of July 1998. South Africans and the world listened with disbelief and then shock to a group of doctors who perverted science to entrench white supremacy. Truth Commission Chairperson Desmond Tutu described the public testimony on the programme, code-named Project Coast, as "the worst evidence I’ve ever heard". Some of the apartheid scientists disclosed how they tried to produce a vaccine and a bacterium to sterilise and kill only black people. But the most disturbing allegation was that the apartheid government planned to poison jailed ANC leader Nelson Mandela in the eighties.

Credits: Darren Taylor, Angie Kapelianis, Manana Makhanya and Danny Booysen.

Transcript: http://www.sabctruth.co.za/sabctruth/slicesright.htm#doctor 

From the series South Africa's Human Spirit. Available wherever you find your podcasts.

© SABC 2021. No unauthorised use, copying, adaptation or reproduction permitted without prior written consent of the SABC.

Additional music by Whitesand - Do You Feel What I Feel? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM7qA8n9S88&list=RDkQSoW1VnkH4&index=47