Needing to be strong in front of their children and their curious neighbours, women developed a range of coping mechanisms. To hold back the tears, one woman scrubbed and rescrubbed her floor. Another went to the toilet outside so that her children would not see or hear her cry. Some women remarked that the experience had made them stronger. “Sometimes I’m surprised that you can cope under so much stress," said one. "You find out how to do things, things you would never normally do. And you learn to speak up for people.” On the whole the women we interviewed were not involved in political organisations themselves. If anything, the detention experience discouraged them from ever becoming involved. For such women the church was the most common source of solace and support.
In 1986 the chairperson of the Pretoria branch of the Black Sash was arrested. Annika van Gylswyk was kept in solitary confinement for several weeks and thereafter interrogated. Towards the end of her six-week detention she was given a choice: stay in detention under the new 180-day regulations and face a court case thereafter, or take a plane to Sweden. She was not told the reason for her detention nor what she would be charged with. Annika was Swedish but was married to a South African and had lived in South Africa for 30 years. She opted for release and was deported immediately.
Annika was not the first or the only white woman to be detained, but this event was particularly unsettling for me. I was a regional chairperson of the Sash by then, and of course, a foreign citizen too. As in Annika’s case, my 20 years of domicile would be no defence against deportation. I became extremely nervous, turning over and over in my mind the choice she had made. What would I do?
More and more whites were being detained in the Eastern Cape and anyone involved in activities that could even vaguely be described as radical became jumpy. Documents were hidden away; small suitcases stood ready at front doors, almost as if we expected to be rushed off to the maternity ward. We became suspicious of strangers in cars outside the house and unusual clickings on the phone. One night, rushing out to a meeting, I found an empty space where my “orange bomber” should have been. My immediate thought was that the police had taken my trusty mustard-coloured Ford Escort. Activists often found their tyres deflated, and removing a car was not beyond the scope of the security police. I feared that the noose was tightening.
When I was summoned to the police station a few weeks later the news was a comic relief. The car had been found, but we would have to drive to Tsolo on the borders of the Transkei to retrieve it. There in the small police yard sat my car with blackened windows and no back seat. When we opened the doors a sweet, sickly smell assailed us: my bomber had become a dagga transporter. For weeks afterwards we found tiny seeds in the upholstery and joked about feeling slightly high from the smell.
It was a terrible time of fear and uncertainty. In June 1986 it was my 50th birthday. And while it seemed strange to plan a celebration when there was so little to rejoice about, in the end we all agreed that some fun was just what was needed. It was a Sunday - a sparkling winter's morning, with leafless branches etched against a vivid blue sky and a splash of orange from an aloe in flower. The garden was full of friends drinking, talking and sitting on the grass, and for a long time afterwards, as more and more were detained, people spoke of the party as “the last time we were all together.”
More detentions
“Hullo, Rosie!” As the handsome young man sauntered past me in Grahamstown’s High Street, I felt a frisson of loathing. And again, that flash of coppery yellow in the murky Kariega River returned and the cry of “Snake in the water!” rang in my ears. I maintained my composure and in my most imperious tone I retorted, “Only my best friends call me Rosie!”
Lloyd Edwards was a Special Branch operative, as friendly and fresh-faced as the boy next door, but beneath his panache lurked danger and deceit. He and his brother were an infamous pair, both undercover spies on the Rhodes campus until their cover was blown. Thereafter Lloyd continued as a ubiquitous presence in Grahamstown, propping up bars in local hotels or strolling confidently around campus. When the time came for the state to clamp down on white activists, it was Lloyd who was directly responsible for the detention of many of our friends and acquaintances.
One of these was Ann Burroughs, my co-chair in the Black Sash in the early 1980s. As most Sash members were professional women in full-time employment, we tended to elect co-leaders to spread the load. All the women with whom I shared leadership were challenging colleagues. Analytical, insightful, well informed, they gingered up my ideas, and when necessary, they were on hand to restrain the greenhorn in their midst. Like several of them, Ann was far more radical than I was and filled with passionate enthusiasm. Inevitably, people like her were regularly targeted by the security police. And she had the added distinction of having dated Lloyd Edwards as a student.
“Ex-Lover Ordered Woman’s Detention,” a headline in the regional newspaper proclaimed. What the report did not describe was the period of intimidation that preceded the detention. It began with a knock on the door late one night when Ann was alone in her house. She quickly switched off the lights and listened to the ensuing silence. Then she heard people quietly calling her name. “We know you are in there,” they tormented her. For some time they walked around outside the house before eventually going away. This kind of intimidation was by no means unheard of. Two Sash activists returned from work one day to find a bloodied and necklaced doll pinned to their door. Marion Lacey was a radical academic who was not shy about her ANC sympathies, while Melissa de Villiers had made her name as a student activist. Marianne Roux, a specialist in labour relations and workers’ rights, was awoken one night by the noise of a brick shattering her front window. Wrapped around the brick was a death threat in newspaper type saying, “Your name is to be removed from the death list soon.” Her line of research had clearly earned the Special Branch’s ire.
As the garden of Ann’s house bordered onto ours, she started hopping over the fence to sleep in our spare room. Our nights became increasingly uneasy. We would wake every time a car stopped outside our house or voices were heard in the street, fully expecting the police to come for Ann. In the event, she was detained at her place of work at the National English Literary Museum. A phone call from a colleague informed us that a group of security policemen had arrived, produced a warrant of arrest and taken her away.
Discovering where a detainee was being held was extremely difficult but we had ways of finding out what we could. One of these was to visit the waiting room of the district surgeon, who examined prisoners and detainees. He happened to be our family GP as well, so I would go there on the pretext of needing a script for some or other mild illness, and sit paging through magazines, hoping to catch a glimpse of a detainee being brought in or out of the surgery. I would even casually ask the receptionist who had been seen that day. She gradually grew wise to my nonchalance and one day she bawled me out, accusing me of interfering in police business. Another way of tracing the whereabouts of a detainee was to haunt the police cells. Our guess following Ann’s detention was that she would initially be held at the New Street police station, so we stood in the road as near to the cells as we could and repeatedly shouted her name. “Ann Burroughs!” we called. “Ann Burroughs!” Sure enough, she heard our calls and shouted back. We were soon made to move on but at least we had located her and had assured her of our support.
In due course Ann was removed to the North End prison in Port Elizabeth, where she developed a kidney infection, probably as a result of the conditions under which she was held in Grahamstown. The toilet in her cell did not work and she was provided with a bucket only after some days. Her first opportunity to wash came after three days when she was taken to the police mortuary for a shower.
Ann was one of a group of seven detainees who took the rare step of going to court to apply for their release from detention. Very few lawyers were willing to take on detainee cases but the activist community had an excellent ally in a sharp-witted and b
luntly spoken lawyer with a reputation for being a tough street fighter. David de la Harpe was a hunter and falconer, and a raconteur who could stand in the pub drinking with a wide range of people, including Special Branch policemen. It was he who brought the case on behalf of Ann and her fellow detainees. As part of her application Ann used the fact that Lloyd had been instrumental in her detention.
“Lieutenant Edwards and I have shared many intimacies,” she said in her affidavit, "and I do not believe that he can objectively and honestly apply his mind to the question of whether or not detention in terms of the emergency regulations is justified." The case did not succeed, but a courageous stand had been taken.
We were disappointed to discover one year that Lloyd and his contingent were holidaying at the same beach resort as we were on the Eastern Cape coast. We were paddling on the river in our canoe, watching a kingfisher diving for fish and a water rat emerge from a hole in the bank, when Lloyd and his pals, beers in hand, roared past us in a boat. On another occasion while swimming in the lagoon I spotted Lloyd’s partner and some other police wives lounging on the bank while a domestic worker in full maid’s uniform served tea. On the tray, I was alarmed to see a gun.
There was an occasion that gave everyone in the struggle community great pleasure and inspired a resurgence of courage. Louise Vale, a Sash member who worked in informal education, had been detained. Her husband Peter tried every available avenue to get her released, from challenging the law and seeking publicity, to petitioning people in high places. All to no avail. One evening Peter went to drown his sorrows at a local hotel. After several drinks he noticed that Lloyd Edwards had appeared at the bar. Striding over to him, with a full tankard in hand, Peter struck a blow for us all by emptying his frothing beer over the surprised policeman's head. The graffiti artists wasted no time. "Down a Lloyd: Feel Satisfied!" they scrawled on the wall of a local supermarket. The parody of Lion beer’s advertising slogan gave us all great satisfaction. Shortly after, while visiting Louise in Port Elizabeth’s North End prison, Peter’s car was stolen. We were convinced that it was not the work of an ordinary car thief.
Various other escapades gave us heart in the fight against the monolithic state. Two American friends of Peter’s simply walked into North End prison one day, claiming to be Louise’s lawyers. They got deep into the building before the sting was detected. In another incident the boyfriend of our detained fieldworker Janet Small dressed up as a dentist's assistant when he heard that Janet was to be brought in to the local surgery for an emergency visit. Unfortunately Mike Kenyon was himself a closely monitored activist and the Special Branch soon arrived to escort him out.
The security police were both canny and brazen in their infiltration of groups, especially on campus. Malvern and I knew several students who had been taken out for drinks and offered financial inducements to act as spies. A local pharmacist told us we would be surprised at the number of students’ chemist bills that were paid for by the police. There was no doubt that a dense network of amateur spies was in operation even in this small town.
A cause célébre on the Rhodes campus was the case of Olivia Forsyth. Olivia belonged to all the activist groups, where she was highly regarded for her strong leadership qualities. She had a habit of disappearing once a month to Port Elizabeth where, she told her friends, she visited an old uncle. In reality she was meeting her police handler. Olivia’s regular reports must have done her so-called comrades much damage. Certainly many of them suffered harassment or detention. She was herself detained for a short period, no doubt to make her cover plausible. It was only after she had left Rhodes amid fanfares of praise that her deceit was eventually exposed.
It turned out that Olivia had been a lieutenant in the security police. Her next mission after leaving Rhodes was to infiltrate the ANC in exile. This did not go smoothly and she landed up being detained in Quatro, the ANC’s prison camp in Angola. She eventually escaped to Britain, where she was reunited with her father.
Malvern concocted many a false application for masters and doctoral projects so that young detainees could have access to literature in jail. He was well respected for his political voice on campus, especially at a time when the principles of academic freedom and freedom of expression were being radically undermined. One particular protest march has left a vivid vignette in my mind. Malvern and a few colleagues were leading a student demonstration against the state’s threat to university subsidies when the police, armed with batons and quirts, charged onto the university lawns. The ensuing clash resembled a football riot, but in the midst of the mayhem the phalanx of academic gowns stood firm. Malvern's thick white hair stood out like a beacon among them.
Malvern's role and image on campus made life difficult for Anna, who did her degree at Rhodes. All eyes were on her to join left-wing activities, but no 19-year old wants to be a clone of her parents and she steadfastly refused to be radical. Meanwhile her brother was undergoing his political blooding at the University of Cape Town. As a member of the Students’ Representative Council he was arrested during a mass demonstration, beaten up and jailed for the night. I was proud of him of course, but secretly relieved that arrest for political protest did not result in a criminal record. I was also grateful that he was never detained. Lucy, our youngest, confessed that she too felt pressure to be involved in anti-apartheid activities, but when she eventually went to UCT she found her niche in non-racial sport. She eschewed the inter-varsity leagues, playing tennis and hockey in township leagues instead, where poor infrastructural facilities were a small price to pay for the authentically South African experiences she was exposed to. She learnt to speak isiXhosa and made more black friends than any of us had ever had. She became active in the organisational side of sport too, and once found herself at a sports congress where she was one of only four white delegates in a gathering of 900.
I often felt guilty that my involvement took me away from the children too much and once asked Charlotte whether they had felt neglected. “Good heavens, no!” she said. “You would have been too much for us!” Our children know us too well. While Queen Mary was said to have the word “Calais” written on her heart, my children knew that they were most likely to find words like "meeting" and "agenda" engraved on mine. Often, of course, Malvern and I brought our political concerns home with us and many discussions took place around our dining room table, which sometimes bore the brunt of our impassioned conversations. There is a nasty scar where Anna once , in a furious argument about some forgotten topic, scored the tabletop with a fork. There’s also a grease mark down the wall where she threw a salad bowl at her Italian boyfriend, Roberto. After she’d spent her post-matric year in Italy, Roberto came to visit. Unwisely I decided to cook my version of osso bucco for him. When he commented in Italian to Anna that my political activities clearly did my culinary skills no good, she threw the bowl at the startled young man.
We were proud of our four youngsters, and though we were aware that our activities put pressure on them, we felt that the diverse ways in which they were developing bore testimony to a democratic openness in our home. We dispensed many cups of tea in our sitting room to parents of young students who had been detained and were often surprised at how out of touch they were with their young. Some parents, the more politically aware, felt a mixture of pride in their offspring and outrage at the security police; but for many this was their first wake-up call to the reality of living in a police state.
At the beginning of July 1986 the security net tightened to include one of our closest friends. Malvern and I were home for lunch when a phone call came from Katherine, Priscilla Hall’s elder teenage daughter. “The police are here,” she said. “I think they’re taking Priscilla.” I went straight to the house and there in the study stood Lloyd Edwards and his henchmen, searching through her papers.
Priscilla was a formidable and highly respected activist who did especially crucial work in relation to the plight of resettled people, the needs of detainees and l
ater, the area of informal education. We’d had little doubt that the Special Branch was watching her. She’d been subjected to a chilling campaign of anonymous phone calls and in her usual thorough way she’d kept transcripts of them all. An example recorded at 3.21am was a male voice saying, “You are going to be sorry, you bitch.” Her final warning had come a few days before Lloyd's arrival at her door, when a lone security policeman had stepped into the office where she was doing some photocopying after hours. Her heart thumped as he searched her handbag and rifled through some papers. After some pointless picking up and putting down of files, he left the office with the words, "This is just a friendly warning. We don’t want to detain you. You have children and your husband is in England. But these are troubled times, we are in an emergency.” And then he added, “You must lie low for a bit.” Priscilla felt intimidated but it was not in her nature to "lie low". In an affidavit made after the event she said, "I take my family duties very seriously, but I am also convinced of the rightness and urgency of my work, and I intend continuing with it.” Her work on behalf of detainees had been invaluable; now she was to become one herself. She was told that she was being detained under the emergency regulations but was given no reason.
I felt curiously tongue-tied as we stood on the doorstep of the Halls’ house and watched Priscilla being driven off in a police car. I wished so much afterwards that I had given her a hug. Katherine and Ruth, who were remarkably composed, came to stay with us, and during phone calls to Ron in Cambridge, where he was on sabbatical leave, we all dissuaded him from rushing back. For us the day was also marked by the death of our beloved dog, Sparky. Under normal circumstances we would have gone into a period of collective decline, but now we found ourselves with an extended family and little time for mourning a pet. Amongst other things, Ruth succumbed to German measles during this time and had to spend days propped up on the couch surrounded with books. Watching the royal wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson on a borrowed colour television set, because ours was black and white, provided some diversion. I had been a royalist as a child and still loved the pageantry. I was also glad that Ruth was being kept company while the other children were at school.
Swimming with Cobras Page 11