A Sport of Nature

by Nadine Gordimer

  The Major is triumphant. Well, how do you feel about your blacks now? What about your savages hacking each other to death? What about the end of capitalist exploitation and the great dawn of freedom and peace?

  But my position is sane. I’m without doubts about that.

  This cell, at this moment, seems full to me, brimming, this empty cell is fuller than the other rooms I’ve had. My room in the house always looked as if Bettie had just cleared someone’s stuff away. I never hung it with sports pennants and school photographs and pop stars the way you girls did yours. I didn’t keep things, didn’t want to remember. What have I got of my life? Only what is here. D’you remember the toy car? It belonged to that kid. I kept that.

  Hendrik/Mercury/Icarus, don’t fall into the sea with this. From jail, from here I’m free to say everything. I love you.

  Sasha

  *United Democratic Front

  Whaila’s Country

  The letter was produced at Sasha’s trial.

  He must have bribed the young son of a farmer ruined by the ’80s drought in the Koster district who had said there were opportunities for advancement in the prison services. But what could the prisoner have had to offer? It is the wretched thieves and prostitutes, not the politicals, who traffic in the prison economy of drugs. Maybe he had even tried to convert the boy to the cause; it is known to prison officers that those trained by the Left are taught to subvert the Christian values inculcated by the Dutch Reformed Church.

  Hendrik Gerhardus Munnik had never written a letter in his life, except as a school exercise. The letter he smuggled out of prison (it was ‘under the plastic’ in his warder’s cap, he told the court) was very thick, he didn’t know what was inside. He kept it for three days before handing it over to the Commandant. And why did he decide to surrender it to prison authorities?

  Because he was afraid of what his father would say if he lost his job.

  Did the prisoner promise him any reward or remuneration for smuggling the letter?

  No.

  Why did he agree to take it?

  Because he thought it was a love-letter.

  Sasha was accused with three others, Burtwell Nyaka, Makekene Conco, Thabo Poswao, on five counts, which the Defence conducted by Joe’s most distinguished colleagues succeeded in getting reduced to the two principal ones: conspiring to overthrow the State and furthering the aims of the African National Congress. The ‘love-letter’, the Prosecution submitted, contained a clear statement of the accused’s intention to commit high treason. The passage was read out and the exhibit, numbered 14, passed to the judge: ‘Yes … I want to overthrow the State … that is the meaning of my life’. The whole tenor of the letter, the Prosecution continued, made clear that for the accused the ‘solution’ to South Africa’s problems was revolution. In this context, he lauded violent uprisings, lawlessness in the black townships, strikes and boycotts, as the blacks’ understanding of means to ‘overthrow that (the) South African way of life’. He blamed whites for the murder of white children. These sentiments he had already expressed on public platforms, in the trade union and other journals to which he contributed, in the pamphlets it would be alleged he had conspired to distribute by pamphlet bombs, in fact in his record of revolutionary activities that could be proved as far back as 1979. And his convictions were so strong that he would even risk sending subversive material out of prison by clandestine means—some love-letter!

  The Defence submitted that the letter was, in fact, ‘a moving credo’ from a man whose sense of justice and humanity had found no structures within which to redress the misery he was aware of in South Africa. He had been brought up in a family where a social conscience was the foundation of personal morality, his father had been for many years what would be known in Western countries as a civil rights lawyer, his mother had been an active liberal; their son had seen them leave their country in despair at the fruitlessness of their efforts to assist meaningful constitutional changes. It was, indeed, out of love—love for fellow human beings, for the poorest and most disadvantaged, the majority of the South African population, that the son had given up the promise of a lucrative career in law and a high social and economic position among whites in order to put his life at the service of black workers.

  Exhibit 14 included two envelopes. Within the first there was another: State House, the name of the capital, the country, this surely should have been an adequate address to have reached the one for whom it was intended. Exhibit 14 did not even reach the cover address on the outer envelope; but although Hendrik had failed to deliver it there, it had led the police to the friend Sasha had hoped would get it taken to England and forwarded. The friend was arrested and detained as another possible co-conspirator, but released after a week of interrogation.

  There was a stir of comment in the public gallery the day Hendrik gave his reason for accepting the letter; typically soppy, probably thinking of his Koster meisie back on the farm. These backveld boys, plaasja-pies! His brother-in-law, a cartage contractor from Pretoria and not to be patronised, who had accompanied Hendrik’s mother to court, turned angrily on the faces behind him. No, a boereseun was no match for a Jewboy communist. The mother grasped his hand in a vice to quiet him; never looked up from under her hat.

  The Defence disputed the Prosecution’s interpretation of the letter. The person to whom it was addressed was like a sister to the accused. She was a relative who had been brought up by the accused’s parents as one of their own children. He had been deeply attached to her, she was apparently his confidante through childhood and adolescence. It was not surprising that under conditions of sensory deprivation in solitary confinement, where time loses its normal dimension and partings of many years may seem the same as partings that took place a few weeks or months previously, he should have turned to her, in imagination, to review his life and set out his commitment to serve others. In no way could the intimate confidences of this letter be regarded as constituting a revolutionary document. And whom could it have been planned to incite? The intended recipient had lived abroad for a long time. Defence requested that the letter be read out in its entirety, not quoted from selectively.

  The other mother was beside her husband and they heard it all. There were flashes in Pauline’s face. Joe made no move to touch her. There was the sense around them, in them, that the matings, the birth of children, the quarrels, the convictions that didn’t lie together, the unsaid, the spoken that should never have been said, the right questions, the wrong answers, the trust and distrust, the blame and the forgiveness were casting them in the bronze of a single fused figure. For them, there was nobody else in the court; the mass of their feeling occupied it, it would not have been surprising if everyone on the adjoining benches had edged away or silently trooped out with a bow to the judge.

  Olga was very supportive. Whether Arthur liked it or not, she insisted that Pauline and Joe move out of that pokey flat and into her house, where they would be properly fed and looked after during their ordeal. After all, the two sisters had only each other—they had lost Ruthie, she might be dead, for all they knew. But Olga did not attend the trial. Pauline would not expect that of her. She had never been in court in her life; police vans from which hands clung through the diamond-mesh guard, men in shackles led to the dock, a red-robed protector with the authority—thank God—to lock away burglars, rapists, embezzlers, car thieves, murderers where they couldn’t threaten decent people any longer—all that belonged to the criminals and the poor. Poor devils, the latter; a matter of environment. Certainly not the environment to which the sisters belonged, and in which even Pauline’s children had been brought up. Poor Pauline, she hadn’t deserved Sasha. Olga’s Clive, hardly a year older, was consultant to exporters and importers in the wine industry, an authority on vintages, with a ‘nose’ equal to that of some of the great experts in France; sad for Pauline: when Clive’s name appeared in the newspapers it was not as an accused in a trial for treason but as author of his syndica
ted column for wine lovers. But Olga was loyal to her sisters, never would have heard a bad word said about the other one, and would not tolerate any condemnatory remarks about Pauline’s son. Once or twice she invited carefully-selected friends to dinner—her sister and brother-in-law surely needed some distraction, sitting day after day in what she imagined a court must be like. Olga deliberately did not avoid the subject that was in the guests’ minds, like a death in the family. Sasha was not disgraced; he was wronged. He had somehow fallen through one of the manholes of life into an environment that wasn’t his; there had been criminal carelessness somewhere, on somebody’s part, maintenance was a scandal, what did one pay taxes for if no-one was secure any longer. Her own nephew had been locked away by these Afrikaners, put on trial by them, arid he was a young man of good family, intelligent, cultivated. If Arthur wanted to (he didn’t look as if he wanted to, he was spitting out fish-bones without even putting his hand over his mouth) he could tell some tales about the real criminals, the swindling and finagling that went on high up in the financial world in connivance with members of the government. Whom had her nephew swindled? Whom had he cheated or hurt? —He’s done nothing! The government is mad!—

  There was an abrupt change of atmospheric pressure which all felt without for a moment knowing why.

  Pauline put down her knife and fork, stood up and flattened her hands on Olga’s Georgian table so that the wine jumped in the glasses. Then she lifted the hands and dug the spread fingers up through that wild head of hair that needed the attention of a good stylist. Her eyes held their audience as they had always sought to. —Olga, Sasha did not do nothing. Understand that. He did everything he could to bring down this government, and the power of white people who made it, and all their white governments before it. They recognize the danger he represents to their evil; don’t you sit here and minimize that. This trial is a sign of his effectiveness. He did something.— And she sat down to her plate while others did not know how to take up again the normal flow of the evening; for a few moments only she and Arthur were eating—he never listened when Pauline spoke, and had not been interrupted.

  Since Olga did not come to court she did not hear the letter read out. There was merely a mention of its existence as evidence, no extract of its contents or mention of the name of the individual to whom it was written, in the day’s newspaper reports of the trial. When Joe’s colleagues, the team defending Sasha and his co-accused, came to confer with Joe and Pauline, Olga sent in Jethro’s successor with tea and cream scones (Olga’s servants stayed with her faithfully until pensioned; the old cook had been retired to KwaZulu—the recipe remained) but she ensured there would be absolute privacy for the discussion going on in her little sittingroom, where some of her favourite pieces were gathered, including the Blackamoor lamp that used to stand in the main lounge. When she walked past the door she rose on tiptoe.

  Pauline did not talk of the letter to Olga. And Joe did not need to be told not to. So Olga was not caused pain by any unearthing of what else had been out of place in the environment of the family. Anyway, it was none of her business, never had been, she had not taken any responsibility for Ruthie’s child beyond buying her a new outfit every six months.

  Pain was caused to the girl with whom Sasha lived for several years up to a short while before he was detained. They were parted by then, but although he never mentioned her in the letter, she had been with him in the tin cottage with the water-tank and the frangipani. She had married someone else while he was in detention; the husband was a friend of Sasha and the couple came up from Durban, in solidarity with those on trial, at least once to attend part of the proceedings. When the letter was read out she realized that for its writer she never had been in the cottage, that was what was wrong that she hadn’t understood, all the time they were together. There was no need to laugh at Hendrik, the boereseun, the plaasjapie.

  The letter was merely one exhibit in a dossier of incriminating evidence that took months to be led. Burtwell Nyaka and Makekene Conco received varying sentences. Sasha was found guilty on both counts of the indictment and given a lengthy sentence, along with Thabo Poswao, although the period of punishment on each count was to run concurrently. Joe’s colleagues decided against an appeal to a higher court, for Sasha. There was the danger that instead of the result being a reduction of sentence the State might cross-appeal for a heavier one. There were some aspects of the case where the Defence, all things considered, had been lucky. The matter of the letter was an example: because of Hillela’s new names and somewhat unlikely and exotic status, perhaps, the Prosecution never made use of her strong association with the African National Congress, the fact that she was the same woman who had been the wife of the assassinated Whaila Kgomani, and who after his death had worked for the Congress in Eastern Europe as well as Africa. If the Prosecution had chosen to exploit these links, it wouldn’t have been too credible to attempt to establish Exhibit 14 as any kind of love-letter.

  When sentence was passed, Sasha suddenly did not belong to them—Pauline and Joe and Carole (who had flown out to be with her parents for the verdict). The blacks in the gallery began to sing and stamp over calls for order and as the police hustled them out they went stamping, waving fists at the four men being led down to the well of the court whose fists were raised to them, and already there were new verses for the refrain of their song: woza Luthuli, woza Mandela, woza Tambo, woza Sisulu, woza Mbeki, woza Slovo, woza Kgomani—to those names they added the names of the four men, the three blacks and their white brother, descending to prison. For the first time in his life Sasha resembled Pauline—turning, pausing before he was pushed down to the well—his face public, blazing, exalted, open to the chanting crowd dragging and tramping their feet heavily along the boards as they left the gallery. Then he was gone.

  Outside in the street his family was passed from arms to arms in the huge embrace that is the reverse of the hostility a mob can generate. The mother of Thabo was clinging to Joe, weeping with pride and sorrow, and he held her head to him, like a lover. Viva!, coming by way of Cuba, Mozambique and Nicaragua, had joined the old litany of freedom cries. They flew back and forth, exciting the police dogs and bringing the white shop assistants to the doors of the chainstore and Greek-owned supermarket in the maize-belt town. Political trials were no longer held in the cities, in order to avoid mass gatherings of blacks, but trade unionists had come by the busload and they were joined by local black delivery men wheeling their bicycles, farm workers with their small purchases of soap and sugar, unemployed youths—all those people from a nearby ‘homeland’ who gravitated towards the streets of the town where they were forbidden to live. Petrified among them was the equestrian statue that stands in every Transvaal dorp, the Boer War general with the trunk of a stone tree growing up into his horse’s belly to solve the sculptor’s problem of supporting his work. Press cars and several chauffeur-driven ones with diplomatic number plates (these cases attracted foreign observers at a high level) made through the crowd a passage which flowed closed again. Pauline was swept away but Joe heard her: —Those sentences don’t mean anything! They’re not going to be all those years inside! The end to all this will come long before then!—

  Trust Hillela; she chose well. The President was able to achieve in his one-party state what the handbooks on and surveys of Africa concede as ‘impressive development’ during the years when oil prices were high, and by the time oil resources were no longer such a profitable source of revenue had succeeded in diversifying the economy so that, in comparison with most neighbouring countries, his people are reasonably well off and there has been no serious ‘crisis of expectation’ to threaten the stability of the regime. The oil fields, mining industry and banks are nationalized, land has been redistributed and there are co-operative farms, but agriculture, learning from the disasters elsewhere, has not been collectivized. The General within the President has never forgotten the subversive power of hunger. The petty shopkeepers have not been touc
hed. The Lebanese still constitute what is best referred to as an informal banking structure; so long as the back-of-the-shop deals in foreign currency stay within reason, it is best to ignore them. The country rarely has any entry under the list of violations of human rights published by Amnesty International; imprisoned cabinet ministers and officials of the previous regime were amnestied one by one in the yearly celebrations of the President’s reaccession to power which take place in State House, country-wide sports stadia and schools. Of course there is a prison where individuals designated Enemies of The People are held. As a prisoner in another country once wrote, there surely have to be such places? The rendezvous just and unjust keep, in turn. Every power has to put away what threatens it? Habeas corpus is entrenched in the constitution, and the occasional expulsion of a miscreant foreign journalist intent on finding a story discreditable to African regimes in grievances of the sort malcontents and anti-social elements have in all societies, scarcely is to be regarded as suppression of freedom of the press. The President’s son, the Colonel, is Director of National Security. But no-one can accuse the President of nepotism in this case; the Colonel is immensely capable, a man with a particular silence suited to conscientious discharge of his duty. It is a silence that came to him in the room of an Arab house, developing with the pattern of light and dark that played over him there, as a photographic negative fixes a phenomenon of place, time and experience. He is greatly feared and known by the designated Enemies of The People as the President’s hit man. There is no amnesty from his surveillance. He is married to a young woman from the Ministry of Works and has provided the President with the eldest son of an eldest son—in his less formal photographs the President in an open-neck shirt is often shown with his good-looking white wife (or is she half-caste, she has an African name), and this favourite grandson on his knee or restrained by the hand—he’s an exuberant child.