It was called “Project Coast” and was headed by Wouter Basson – AKA “Dr. Death” – a cardiologist who was the personal physician of the then South African Prime Minister PW Botha.

The top-secret chemical and biological weapons programme developed a lot of unusual practices used to kill and control people during the era.

Now, there’s an exhibition of Project Coast’s haunting practices, on at the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Johannesburg. It is called ‘Poisoned Pasts’:

Poisoned Pasts honours those individuals who fell victim to the CBC Programme, including about 200 Namibian freedom fighters killed by lethal injection. Those targeted also included members of apartheid security forces and even a member of Project Coast who had lost the trust of his colleagues.

Consisting of artefacts used during the programme, the exhibition showcases “human experiments, plots of mass murder using poisoned beer and anthrax, assassination attempts through poisoned clothes, tampered tools, and exploding letters,” according to Quartz.

Here’s a bit of history:

At its height during the 1980s and early 1990s, Project Coast’s malign innovations were used to arm South Africa’s troops fighting in neighbouring countries, or by police to control protesting crowds at home, and by the secret agents to target liberation leaders.

Details around the covert project began to come to light as apartheid ended. In the years since, historians have collected roughly 5,000 pages of documents, military memos some personal photos, trying to uncover the true extent of the covert weapons program, but even this is not enough, say the exhibition’s curators, Chandré Gould, Brian Rappert and Kathryn Smith.

Many of the victims’ stories remain silent, killed with their unidentified bodies destroyed without a trace. Among the victims were at least 200 members of Namibia’s liberation movement SWAPO (South West Africa People’s Organization), killed by lethal injection between 1979 and 1988. Several members of Renamo, Mozambique’s rebel movement, were also killed by lethal injection in 1983. Some, like the senior ANC’ leaders Pallo Jordan and Ronnie Kasrils, lived to tell the tale—twice—when assassinations by poisoned umbrellas and then a “modified” screwdriver, failed.

There was once the threat in the form of a baboon foetus—the likely result of animal experimentation—hung from a tree outside Desmond Tutu’s house, to discourage him from speaking out against the inhumanity of apartheid.

But there’s still so much we don’t know.

According to one of the its curators, Dr Chandre Gould, the exhibition was “undertaken in the spirit of investigating the possibilities and challenges for understanding ourselves in relation to the past,” according to the Nelson Mandela Foundation.

Despite the changes that have taken place in South Africa with the end of apartheid, there are a striking number of parallels between then and now regarding how violence is justified and power is concealed.

Poisoned Pasts asks whether our tainted yesterdays are finding expression now in the silences created by the practices of diplomacy, politics and science, and in other disturbing and unsettling ways.

Still to this day, Project Coast remains largely shrouded – and we have got to ask ourselves why.

[source:qz]