Swimming with Cobras

by Smith, Rosemary

  Police often placed restrictions on funerals, which they saw as political rallying events, and with so much freedom curtailed, they often were. The restrictions on this particular funeral stated that there were to be no more than 200 mourners present and that the proceedings were to be over by 2 pm. As there was some delay in getting the undertaker to release the body, this was liable to present a problem and added to the already mounting tension. As the morning progressed, a heavy police presence encircled the house, including a buffel-full of policemen armed with guns and quirts – thin, rubber-handled whips. A police dog straining at the leash was paraded up and down in front of the crowd. Howard recognised some Special Branch operatives dressed in plain clothes, one of whom had a video camera, poised to record who was present.

  When the coffin finally arrived in a small truck, the family gathered for prayers in the house, after which the official procession accompanied it down the hill to the community centre. At this point the police officer in charge, Captain Gouws, unexpectedly gave instructions for the large crowd of unofficial mourners to be held back. They were not to be allowed to attend the service. The crowd surged with frustration and we wondered how the marshals would cope, but a group of clergy who had remained behind at the house stepped in and the crowd responded with amazing discipline. People accepted the restriction, fully expecting that they would be allowed to join the coffin for the committal once the service was over. For more than an hour the group did not waver from its vigil around the house. No one left; no one sat down; no incitement occurred. In the hot, dry wind blowing off the mountains the people stood their ground, face to face with the police. We were witnessing two opposing forces of the struggle in a stand-off, the threat of violence crackling like static electricity in the dusty air.

  We noticed the clergy discussing contingencies among themselves and negotiating from time to time with the police. Then, as though a subliminal message had been sent out, people started visiting the tap in the yard, surprisingly not to drink but to wet parts of their clothing. Someone fetched a bucket and everyone dipped a scarf, a hat or a handkerchief in the water. Howard pointed out the tear gas canisters. With the service in the hall expected to end soon, both sides were sensing that a showdown was in the offing and the people were taking the only precaution they could. They were determined to meet the coffin at the cemetery, while the police in their turn had their orders to limit the gathering to 200. Throughout the day Lynette and I were never afraid, but at this point we felt anxious, unsure of what might happen next. A frustrated mourner might pick up a stone; a nervous policeman might use his gun. Howard’s steady presence was a great reassurance.

  As police vehicles began to roar off in clouds of dust towards the graveyard the crowd spontaneously began to move. Urgent words passed between the clergy and Captain Gouws, and he agreed to let them go. Some singing and toyi-toying broke out, but the young khaki-clad marshals hovered on the edges of the crowd, guiding and restraining it with surprisingly deft authority. At the graveyard entrance, the charade resumed. A line had been drawn across the dusty road and we were told that this was as far as we could go. After yet another appeal to Gouws the people were allowed in after all, but were instructed to sit against the fence 100 metres from the grave.

  I had little experience of English funerals but I’d seen many a country churchyard, quiet places, neatly tended and sheltered by green trees. By contrast this open, windswept space seemed godforsaken, the ground hard and unyielding to the spade. But in the midst of the more than 500 people gathered there, who greeted the coffin with freedom songs and fists raised in the air, I experienced an intensity of feeling that I could never have known among the moss-covered stones of any English churchyard. “We are all brothers in Christ and children of Africa!" the Reverend Finca called into the fierce wind when the committal was over and he was allowed to address the crowd. In clouds of swirling dust he and Gouws thanked each other for mutual restraint throughout the day. Then, with the shadows of the surrounding hills beginning to lengthen, Gouws lined up his men at ease over to one side, from where they watched the crowd disperse. The funeral had taken the entire day. Lynette and I drove back to Grahamstown exhausted and in thoughtful mood, each glad to have had the other by her side.

  Amidst this mounting tension, in 1984 Malvern and I were relieved to get away again, to spend a sabbatical leave in Cambridge. Though throughout our time there we’d constantly wonder what was happening back at home. Letters from friends kept us informed. One wrote about how the searchlights on Gunfire Hill were illuminating the townships at night, "son et lumière South African-style”. When we spoke to English friends or addressed meetings in Cambridge, I felt proud to talk about the groups I was associated with and the work they were doing, and was greatly heartened by the interest and concern expressed by all whom we encountered. We were privileged to be able to escape the pressures from time to time and to tap into this vein of encouragement and support. But as citizens of the pariah nation we were often also embarrassed to be identified as South Africans. While travelling by train from London to Cambridge one day, Charlotte, Lucy and I fell into conversation with a Canadian. When he asked where we came from I said “Africa”, keeping it as vague as possible. But my two young teenage daughters, born and bred in South Africa, did not share my qualms. “South Africa,” they sang out in unison.

  By the end of that sabbatical, Malvern and I both knew that we wanted to return home. In an article for the Cape Times, the distinguished academic Robin Hallet, who was visiting from England, wrote about South Africans visiting abroad. He observed that, “it may come as something of a relief to get back among one’s compatriots, to meet people exposed to the same pressures, and above all to regain the company of good friends.” He compared life in South Africa to living on the front line and concluded, “One of the great, perhaps the only, compensations of living in a pressurised society is that friendships acquire a dimension they rarely possess elsewhere, the warmth of camaraderie.”

  On our return, Grahamstown presented a very different scene from the one we had left a few months earlier. From our stoep we could see burnt-out school buildings where children had rampaged in protest at their poor education and being taught in the medium of Afrikaans. Security vehicles were everywhere – buffels, hippos, and the bilious, sickly coloured mellow yellows. The searchlights at night rekindled memories and brought back emotions of being carried as a small child to the underground shelter in our garden during the heavy blitzes in Liverpool. It was indeed a war zone to which we had returned.

  The sweep of detentions extended from the regional structures of the UDF down to the smallest street committees, causing the tight organisation that had characterised the communities to crumble. Communication within and between organisations became more and more difficult and it became harder for us to know who to negotiate with on matters of communal interest. In the vacuum that resulted from the removal of genuine political leadership, the youth became increasingly radicalised and undisciplined. Often it was anarchic youngsters who became the most militant. In the Grahamstown townships they were dubbed amabutho, or “warriors”. Some had guns and grenades and there were incidents of running battles between amabutho and police. One of their weapons was a scorpion, a backyard construction of metal pipe, bucket handles and springs, which acted like a gun and was lethal at close range.

  The amabuthos’ primary targets in the townships were state representatives such as community councillors and municipal police, and most especially their informers, the so-called mpimpi. Informers were often unemployed youngsters competing for tips near the supermarket. They would have been easy prey for the security police, whose offices were right next door. A nasty incident occurred when some of these suspected mpimpi were taken out onto a country road and brutally assaulted. One of them died as a result and the others had to be hospitalised. Later seven amabutho youths were arrested and four were subsequently charged with the murder. The youngest of these appeared to be n
o more than 10, and the oldest just 17.

  The parents of both sets of children approached the Black Sash for help. The parents of the young informers were afraid to take their children back home to the township once they had been released from hospital, as nobody, not even the local social workers, who lived in the townships and were caught between warring factions, wanted anything to do with informers. The parents of the accused were adamant that their children could not have been involved, claiming that they had been sleeping at home on the night of the incident. We listened to the stories and referred people to lawyers, then tried to discuss the implications of the case with sectors of the community.

  Our fieldworker, Cheryl Walker, and I set up a secret meeting with the local UDF to see if the children could be reintegrated into the community. Their days as mpimpi were over and they had surely been punished enough. It was a difficult meeting to arrange as the UDF leaders were in hiding. Thus we met late one night by candlelight in an empty fat, with young men we’d collaborated with in a perfectly open and straightforward manner before the state of emergency. But nothing was achieved. There was to be no pardoning of informers and no reintegration into the community. The case was a tragic example not only of what our society was doing to its children, but also of how attitudes were hardening as the struggle intensified. Cheryl and I returned home feeling defeated, realising that we had less and less influence at a time of rapidly deteriorating circumstances.

  Cheryl was the first in a series of strong, intelligent and courageous fieldworkers we employed over the years, all of whom served the Black Sash with commitment beyond the call of duty. Together with some of the younger Sash members, several of whom were academics, they brought enormous analytical strength and clarity to the organisation. Most opposition groups in South Africa were being targeted at this time, leaving the Black Sash to become home to women whose radical persuasions would more naturally have placed them on the extreme left. I kept in touch with several of our fieldworkers after they’d moved on, and was especially proud when, years later, Cheryl became the professor of sociology at Stellenbosch University. By then we could laugh about some of the cloak–and-dagger situations we’d been in.

  Many meetings were held under cover of darkness, always with the dread of a visit from the ubiquitous security police. A sudden knock on the door would cause everyone to freeze. I returned to the venue of a meeting once, having forgotten my car keys there just minutes before, and found myself having to whisper through the keyhole to those still meeting inside. We all got used to sheltering people who were on the run or taking people to meetings or safe houses via back roads. For a few weeks I ferried a student leader, covered in a blanket on the back seat of the car, between her safe house and her matric exams at the Nathaniel Nyaluza High School.

  Inevitably the circumstances produced their quota of conmen. We were frequently visited at home by someone who at first I called Caesar, but whose name actually turned out to be Sisa. Before the struggle he had been an upholsterer in a small town near Grahamstown. He would appear when least expected, often when there was a meal ready to be placed on the table. Like a James Bond secret agent or a John le Carré spy he would always claim to have important information, none of which ever amounted to anything. A local character called Elvis once duped me into taking him to what I thought was an important meeting. Only when we were on our way and he was patting my knee and calling me “the Mother of the Nation” did I realise that he was en route to a party, for which he was already well oiled!

  Detention without trial was one of the most commonly used and profoundly damaging weapons in the state’s terrifying arsenal. Randomly applied, it was intimidating, cruel and disruptive to communities and individuals alike, and it did personal harm not only to the detainee but also to everyone connected with her or him. Released detainees agreed that incarceration under such circumstances was the loneliest experience imaginable and they were always very grateful for any comfort or succour received.

  As early as the 1970s the Black Sash organised a support programme for political prisoners in Grahamstown’s Waainek prison, providing pocket money, films, newspapers and magazines, as well as meals for the visiting families. The champion of this programme, Kathleen Satchwell, was a fearless young woman who was to become one of South Africa’s Supreme Court judges after 1994. Late one Friday night when three women detainees, one with a baby, were suddenly released, Kathy drove them to King William’s Town. They were awestruck to see the lights of houses and cars again and Kathy was swept up in the eruption of talk, laughter and hugging that ensued when they reached home to find that some of their comrades, who had been held in other prisons, had also been released.

  On Christmas Eve one year we tried our luck by asking permission to sing carols in the prison. Not surprised to be denied access, we adjourned to a nearby hillock where we sang under the pine trees. It was a still, warm night, the sky velvety dark and covered in a patchwork of stars and the large orange orb of a recently full moon peeking over the horizon. One of the children with us shouted out, and at the prison windows we could see arms waving through the bars of the cells. Our singing had been heard.

  Helping the families of prisoners of conscience – opponents of the regime rather than criminals - was the specific brief of an organisation called the Dependants’ Conference (DC). A small local committee had existed in Grahamstown since 1963, but with the escalation of detentions it was becoming inundated with requests for support. Often people just needed information about their detained relatives, but increasingly their need was for assistance to cope with the effects of detention. The Reverend Bob Clarke now opened Grahamstown's first formal DC office and in collaboration with them we established a process for the debriefing of ex-detainees. This project, masterminded by two remarkable Sash members, Priscilla Hall and Marianne Roux, made it possible for detention data to be systematised, trends to be identified and, as always, our campaigns to be informed by hard fact.

  Over a ten-month period from 1987-88, some 200 ex-detainees were debriefed. Apart from the circumstances of their arrests and the conditions in which they were held, we also documented the physiological and psychological effects – and after-effects – of their experiences. Released detainees experienced depression, mood changes, lack of confidence and reduced trust in people, and very often backaches, chest pains, headaches and insomnia. Where possible we made referrals to the psychology clinic at Rhodes University and the outpatient unit at Fort England psychiatric hospital. If nothing else, just telling us their stories at least had therapeutic benefit.

  Detention not only isolated people from their usual support groups but also deprived them of any control over their situation. Detentions often appeared to be completely random; many detainees were never questioned and very few were ever given reasons for their arrest. According to a 1987 survey conducted by the Human Rights Trust in Port Elizabeth, more than half of the people then in detention were being held for alleged membership of certain organisations, while more than a third were being held on charges that the state was unable to substantiate. One 63-year-old man from Kenton-on-Sea told me that he had been going from house to house collecting money for a lawyer to defend detainees from his community, including his own son. He collected small amounts, but then he was arrested. He was held in a small, very cold cell with some adults and eleven children who shared their blankets with him. “We asked for blankets but were not given them. The day we arrived there we got nothing to eat. The following day we got coffee and porridge three times a day. My book with the names of the people who had given money was taken from me. But we were never charged with anything and we never appeared in court.”

  Predictably, the conditions under which people were held were appalling: overcrowded, dank and filthy cells, inadequate sanitation, poor food. Medical attention was cursory at best. District surgeons would stand at cell doors and shout, “Is everybody all right?” or something similar and then move on before hearing the replies. Bas
ed on our findings we persuaded a judge to inspect the conditions in local prisons. It seemed to achieve little but we hoped that it would at least send the message to the prison authorities that they were under scrutiny. I never personally debriefed anyone who had been tortured, but the occasional story did emerge, and we couldn’t help wondering whether some of our security personnel had perhaps learnt their trade from the infamous colonels of the Greek military Junta, notorious for their ghastly torture methods.

  The Black Sash extended the debriefing project to examine in particular the impact detention had on the women who were left behind. Detention seemed to be designed to make life as difficult as possible for all concerned, and most often it was women who were left with the burden of responsibility and stress, along with the inevitable financial and emotional struggles. Frequently it was the major breadwinner who was detained, and usually his employer would stop paying his wages, leaving rents and school fees unpaid. On top of this, wives of detainees might face antagonism from unsympathetic communities. A cloud of suspicion was spread by the SABC and other media, with words like “agitators” and “enemies of the state” indiscriminately used. The old adage that there is no smoke without fire was often proffered as the only comment on detentions without trial, and where communities were already divided this could lead to vilification of those connected with detainees.

  Usually they were held far from home, making it difficult for families to discover where they were being held, let alone visit them. Permits had to be obtained and transport was an added burden. Some relatives told us that they could not visit as they had nothing to give the detainee and they did not want to compound the mutual feelings of guilt and distress by arriving empty-handed. “I felt very sorry and worried that we couldn’t go,” one woman told us. “We tried to send money whenever my mother got her pension.” Taking children to visit was particularly distressing. One mother told us, “The visit made my son cry. He couldn’t understand why we left his father inside at the end. So I never took him again.” Already these children may have witnessed the horror of their father’s arrest, perhaps late at night and with some force.