I am alittle curious about what on the tee-shirts that Donald Wood's family recieved.
The little girl putr one over here head and started screaming her head off.
She appeared to have minor burns over her face and arms.
I was just about to post the same thing. My grade is watching this in Geography and my friends thoguth that it was acid.
But, she appeared to be better however months later it was on New Years, so I don't know how powerful it was.
I thought the boy was gonna start crying cuz he rubbed his eyes w/ his hands and everything.
Some other kids thought it was some wierd burning and itching powder.
As far as I can remember, in the book based on the film it says that the tee shirts were soaked in acid/ similar burning chemical, although i take the point about them kids not being too severely affected by it. They did seem to come wrapped in plastic in the film, so it's possible they could be representing them as having been dusted with powder or something.
shareyea it was soaked with acid and itching powder. Mary suffered server burns
shareI think the government engineered some chemical on the t-shirts:
They used a doctor guy who recently stood trial in South Africa, named Wouter Basson, who was the head of the South Africa's Chemical and Biological Warfare (CBW) program at the time.
Among the evil things the CBW did, poisoning t-shirts was one of them.
It's funny, when they recently showed this film on SABC I actually expected the package to be a letter-bomb: they sent a lot of anti-government people letter-bombs in those days, à la Ruth First and Albie Sachs....
Me too; I was flashing back to Hitchcock's Sabatage when I saw the kids with the package.
"There are three sides to every story: yours, mine, and the truth." ~ Robert Evans
I watched the movie in my history class and my teacher said she read the book it was based on and she said in the book they said it was fingerprinting powder on the t-shirts.
shareit was acid.
they laced the t shirts with acid and sent the package addressed to the children.
this actually happened in real life.
Yep.
From the BBC story from 1978 which reported Donald Woods' arrival in London:
"Most recently his six-year-old daughter was severely burned after putting on a tee-shirt she received in the post, which had been soaked in acid. "
That sickened me more than anything else the old regime did.
shareYou are correct j85-1 as you say it did happen in real life!The Afrikaans are vile people as I have posted on another thread here.I lived in South Africa for two years...1970-1972 and believe me that Apartheid (pronounced apart-hate which is what it was)system was terrible.When I look back on it I wonder how I stuck it for so long.If you like this film you must see "The Power of One". Then you will see just how vile the Afrikaaner can be.
I remember someone telling me that they soak the T-Shirts with Hydrochloric Acid mixed with wax. So in contact with body heat the wax melts into the acid.
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"One death is a tragedy, one million deaths is a statistic." - Joseph Stalin
To completely end this topic, the chemical that was spread on the shirts was ninhydrin (triketohydrindene hydrate), which police use(d) to dust for fingerprints. This is why it is likely that the South African Security Police at the time sent the shirts.
shareI like that statement: "To completely end this topic,..." ! Talk about a final conclusion! This is exactly what we call in French jeter de la poudre (de ninhydrine?:-):-))aux yeux, which translates approximately with "pull the wool over one's eyes". It is true indeed, and michaelprestondavidson must get credit for bringing the first actual fact about this topic. However, it is much too brief to "end the topic", and instead of trying to épater la galerie (=showing off), Mr. Harley-Davidson should have tried to tie a knot on this very leaky subject.
I mean, people have mentioned that it was acid here, acid this and that, acid, period. There is no such substance as "acid", except jargon for LSD (which is not even an acid per se, but a derivative of an acid -LSD is lysergic acid diethylamide). Here is not the place to give a lecture on chemistry, so it is sufficient to say that "acid" is a property intrinsic to a compound, and that there are a very high number of acids. So "acid" alone says nothing about the actual nature of achemical. The image of an "acid bath" into which some unfortunate fellow falls in horror movies corresponds most likely to the types of acid (the type found in car batteries) that react violently with water and flesh such as sulfuric acid, and to a lesser degree, hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acids. The most common acid in households is vinegar(acetic acid), but wearing a vinegar-impregnated shirt will not hurt much a healthy skin surface!
So, saying that the T-shirts that were worn by Donald Woods' kids were laced with acid is hollow, to say the least. Now, what was missing with the last post in order to clarify the debate is some info about ninhydrin, and exposing the distortion of the forensics' conclusions, which is responsible for the current confusion about the T-shirt story. Simply google the story and you will find out that there are currently as many versions of the story as the pro-apartheid government would have liked back then....
Here it is, simply: ninhydrin is a compound (and NOT even an acid) that reacts with proteins and their building blocks (=amino acids) to form a blue-violet product, so it is very useful in forensics to detect fingerprints and traces of various human fluids. So basically, the damage to human contact with ninhydrin is not acid burn but is due to the very destruction of proteins that form essential structures and components of the human body. For some reason, the ninhydrin story did not sound impressive enough in a printed form, and the press has nonetheless stuck with a story involving "acid".
Yep, B-movies have played a major role in the scientific training of the average Western citizen, and those cool "acid baths" from which one emerges as a skeleton have left a permanent imprint in our collective psyche. Ninhydrin ? That's for sissies! Ninhydrin baths are so gay !!!
Hoping that this has not exceeded the limits of your patience.... it's just
feodoric we could well have done without ALL that "beep"!
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