Swimming with Cobras

by Smith, Rosemary

  A dynamic new organisation that was also enjoying a higher public profile and helping to spread the message, was the End Conscription Campaign (ECC), which was launched in 1983 with the backing of various anti-apartheid organisations including the Black Sash. Its aim was to stop compulsory conscription into the apartheid army. Malvern and Matthew both participated, though neither became prominent in the movement. White South African males between the ages of 18 and 30 were conscripted for two years, after which they were liable for call-up as army reservists to do duties in their hometowns. By 1983 13 young men had been sentenced to prison for refusing to do military service on political and/or religious grounds. A small victory was won when the 1984 Defence Amendment Act allowed objectors with compelling religious reasons to appear before a tribunal. If non-military service was granted, they had to serve one and a half times the length of normal service.

  Conscientious objection always stirs up a lot of emotion. I had read about the white feathers of cowardice that were presented to pacifists in the First World War, and I remember a distant relative being spoken of in hushed tones at family gatherings because he had appeared before a military tribunal and ended up working on the land instead of in the army. In the Zimbabwean civil war, those who left the country instead of fighting were referred to as taking the "chicken run", a term which became part of South African parlance too, as many young men left the country rather than face two years’ compulsory service. After 1984 the South African Defence Force began sending troops into the townships to exert control, pitching South Africans against each other in a way that many were not willing to participate in. Registration for national service happened at school, making it very difficult for young men to escape the call-up, though somehow a few always did. In most social circles it was considered unpatriotic not to do one’s national service.

  Anna had a boyfriend who came from a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and although at the time he was no longer a member of the sect, he registered for non-combatant service. This did not mean that he would never find himself in dangerous situations, however. He described an incident in which his army vehicle had been trapped in a narrow alley surrounded by chanting residents carrying home-made weapons and lethal pieces of roofing. Non-combatant or not, he was perceived as part of the occupying enemy and was in mortal danger.

  President PW Botha had convinced the nation that it was facing what he termed a “total onslaught” from hostile, mostly communist forces. In this context the phrase “on the border” conjured images of boys defending the homeland against a besieging enemy. Many went to the border with this heroic scenario in mind, only to find themselves deep inside Angola or Mozambique, plundering villages and participating in operations to destabilise communities. These incursions were vehemently denied by South Africa, but their legacy was a generation of brutalised young people both in South Africa and in the neighbouring states. It was a war that had no winners. An army chaplain once told Malvern and me of his revulsion and despair when men returned to base from an expedition into Mozambique with dead bodies draped over the bonnets of their vehicles like trophies from a springbok hunt. For 20 years the South African Broadcasting Corporation ran a Forces’ Favourites programme to keep up the morale of the troops on the border and their girlfriends back home. The radio presenter was awarded the Order of the Star of South Africa for exceptional service of military importance. Much more lasting than Forces’ Favourites, however, is the large body of literature by young writers haunted by their experiences in the army.

  The remarkable thing about the ECC was the broad spectrum of support it attracted. Many participants came from outside the usual liberal groups. Of course the campaign faced repression, its leaders were detained and meetings were banned, and yet it flourished. With its signature yellow ribbons it had a national impact and was blamed for contributing to a reported low morale in the army. Lucy had a friend who was undergoing his army training as a volunteer officer. Part of the course was entitled “Enemies of the State”, which included a condemnation of the ECC. Lists of names were handed out of people to take note of in the ECC, and there was Malvern’s name. Our young friend enjoyed conveying the news to Malvern that he’d made the grade. Even more amusing was the news that Malvern’s photograph had been spotted in an army camp in northern Namibia. A friend of Anna’s was summoned to see his colonel and while waiting in an outer office he saw the photograph on a notice board. Closer inspection revealed that it had been torn from a section in the Rhodes Rag magazine headed “Studs on Campus”.

  As a member of the ECC Malvern refused to participate in “dad’s army”, an auxiliary force of middle-aged men that went away on weekend camps to practise their shooting at imaginary enemies. He was equally unwilling to patrol schools at night with armed and trigger-happy patrols. But a civil defence option he was happy to consider was fire-fighting, so he joined the auxiliaries. He was issued with an overall, which looked as though it was meant for the Michelin Man, seen so often in adverts at the time. It wrinkled, bulged and flapped around his white boots. With his splendid fireman's helmet, peaked at the front and back, hard, shiny and white, he looked as though he was off to a fancy dress party, rather than to fight fires in defence of the nation. Uniforms and helmets simply did not suit my academic husband’s shambling white-haired persona.

  Still, Malvern took his new duties seriously and for several weeks he went off to lectures and drills at the fire station. Then the great day arrived when the recruits were to fight their first fire. They set off with clanging bells and wailing sirens for the place where a magnificent blaze had been lit for the purpose, but on their way the clutch on the fire engine broke. They were left ignominiously sitting by the roadside waiting for another engine to come to the rescue. When it finally got them to the scene, all that was left were a few smouldering ashes. In the end, Malvern didn’t see active service during his short spell as a fireman.

  Chinks appearing

  I was waiting in the wings of Port Elizabeth’s Feather Market Hall, shaking with nerves, when a Black Sash colleague pulled me aside for a last word of advice: “Remember, Rosie, apartheid rhymes with hate, not hide!” This was not a last-minute indoctrination lesson. I needed no reminding that the system we were fighting was hate-filled and I had never been one for hiding, even when quaking in my boots. I was due to chair a public meeting to be addressed by Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, and my colleague’s words were just a quick reminder to my stubbornly English tongue.

  It was 1987 and something had happened that made us hopeful that there might at last be chinks in the state’s armour. The Institute for a Democratic Alternative in South Africa (IDASA) had organised a conference in Dakar between a delegation of South Africans from within the country and another from the ANC in exile. On their return, delegates were aglow with stories of openness and conciliation. The banned and demonised ANC had been given a human face. The mutual willingness of the two parties to reach beyond the usual South African constraints was what grabbed the imagination.

  The Dakar conference was followed by a series of report-backs around the country. In Port Elizabeth, 1 600 people packed the Feather Market Hall to hear Van Zyl Slabbert speak. The hall was thundering with noise as toyi-toying and banner-wielding groups arrived and took their places, amid the visible presence of several "heavies" from a private security firm. There had been bomb threats and rumours that the meeting would be disrupted and I was disconcerted to see even the national coordinator of IDASA with a gun bulging out of his belt. As the meeting was co-sponsored by the Black Sash, I was chairing it, and while waiting in the wings I was reassured to see how nervous Van Zyl Slabbert was too!

  His message was clear: if the political will was there, negotiation was still possible. If not, the alternative would be destruction. As the audience broke into shouts of “We are the future!” and “Slabbert! Slabbert!” I was amazed to see what reservoirs of hope and exuberance were released when people encountered signs of change. After the mee
ting we watched busloads of singing and chanting people drive off to the townships, followed closely by a phalanx of police vans. In the midst of this joyous scene I overheard a tight-lipped bystander remark, “And they expect us to treat them like human beings!” I was not surprised by the comment but nevertheless saddened that the uplifting evening should end on such a sour note.

  In April 1989 my own chance came to meet the ANC in exile. I was invited to an IDASA conference in Harare, Zimbabwe, entitled “Women in the Struggle for Peace”. Eighty South African women met at the conference, 55 were in the IDASA party and 25 were exiles from ANC missions around the world. This was an undreamt-of privilege and there was great excitement in our delegation, but also considerable anxiety. How would we all get on? Would there be police plants among us? Would we even be allowed to get there? I realised just how jittery some were when the woman who sat next to me on the plane clutched my arm and asked fearfully, “What’s happening?” when the cabin lights went off for landing.

  For me the overriding emotion was elation, and in that mood I fell in love with Harare. The broad streets and flowering trees, and the modest scale of the cathedral and law courts appealed to me. In so many colonies the architectural language was one of domination, with vast government structures dwarfing the buildings around, but in Harare it seemed to me the state buildings were perfectly proportioned. Each morning I got up early to pound the streets, relishing, as I walked, a sense of freedom from daily concerns and even from the chance of being followed or watched. The streets were clean and well kept and I was amazed at the size of some of the suburban properties, no doubt still tended by legions of servants. Cars seemed to be at a premium and I don’t think I saw a single smart one. On one occasion a group of us hired a taxi that appeared to be held together by string – we had to hold onto the door to prevent it falling off! During a lunch break, a few of us were taken shopping by a member of the ANC delegation whose husband was the head of the organisation’s mission in Harare. At one point her battered little car cut rather recklessly in front of another, and the obscenities yelled from that car window by its young white occupants were horrific. Our chaperone ignored the incident. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Be above it. We call them Rhodies; they aren’t Zimbabweans.”

  The women in the IDASA delegation formed a disparate group, including community workers, journalists, doctors, lawyers, social workers, nursing sisters and housewives, all from a wide spectrum of political persuasions. There was a feisty academic from UWC (“University of the Wild Coloureds”, she called it); a mother of an awaiting-trial prisoner on a treason charge; a cabaret artist whose songs brought tears to our eyes and who would later become an ANC MP; and a Democratic Party enthusiast who rather crassly urged everyone to vote DP, when many in her audience did not even have the vote. We were a mixed bunch indeed and judging by the conversation of some of the delegates, the Black Sashers sometimes felt way out on the far left wing.

  The ANC women came as a surprise. We had known that they would be politically sophisticated, and the firebrands were certainly present. Some were young, glamorous and fashionably dressed, and highly articulate. They had been to the ANC school in Tanzania or to universities in the Eastern bloc or the States. The white women among them seemed to me to have a sneering tone, looking down on us as naïve, middle-class amalungu who came nowhere near matching their commitment to the cause. But most of us were surprised to find older women of enormous warmth and generosity, including three members of the ANC hierarchy. Many of them had been in exile for a very long time, some having left behind small children whom they would next meet as teenagers or adults. There was a grandmotherly communist with her East European accent and her braided hair, who defended Stalin with tears coursing down her cheeks; an erudite cultural attaché, graduate of Rutgers University, in jangling earrings and bracelets; and a razor-sharp barrister from London in a colourful, flowing sari.

  It was apparent that the ANC women had planned very carefully for the conference and were strategic in their arguments and responses. By contrast, our group was too disparate for any cohesive thinking. As there were several of us from the Black Sash, we were at least able to caucus and present a united front. There were times of empty rhetoric and gross overstatement, when we seemed merely a gathering of Lenin’s “useful idiots”, and I wondered whether the whole conference was really just an ANC public relations exercise. At other times the divisions between the delegations seemed just too deep to cross. Discussions on conflict and violence threatened to degenerate into bitter recrimination, while thorny issues such as sanctions, majority rule, affirmative action and the economy gave rise to sharp differences too. Even the final plenary session was in danger of ending inconclusively, until Frene Ginwala, the barrister from London who would later become the first Speaker of the National Parliament, pulled together the many loose strands and highlighted our unity of purpose.

  Several Zimbabwean women addressed the conference with lessons from their liberation experience. They lauded the vision of the gathering, regretting that Zimbabweans had not had a similar chance to meet and discuss their situation. Too many Rhodesians had tried to prevent the future instead of preparing for it. They pointed out that although Zimbabwean women had made major contributions to the liberation struggle, few received any political rewards. Many a story was told of how Comrade Freedom, who had fought alongside the men and commanded units during the war, had been relegated to tea girl during peacetime. “National liberation does not necessarily square up with female liberation,” we were warned. Years later, reading about Mugabe’s infamous Matabeleland massacres in Peter Godwin’s book Mukiwa, I did also wonder why events like that were airbrushed out of the conference.

  In the documentary, Chain of Tears, directed by Toni Strasburg, we saw the effects on children of covert raids by the South African Defence Force, aimed at destabilising and flushing out opposition forces in Mozambique, Botswana and Angola. The full personal horror of it came home to us when we heard stories about some of the bombings suffered by those in exile. A young woman told of how her student husband was killed by a car bomb in Gaborone. She was late for work and he went outside to start the car. She heard a bang and a neighbour came running to tell her what had happened. “It is hard to tell what I saw,” said Jackie through her tears. “Just pieces of his body." A young girl from Grahamstown who had fed the country at the time of the upheavals in the schools, wept one night as she told Ina Roux, a therapist and keen member of the Sash in Grahamstown and me, about her living conditions in exile, first in an ANC camp and then in Lusaka. She had left Grahamstown in a blaze of adventure but the reality of exile proved far from romantic. She earned 14 qwashas a month, plus a housing subsidy and food rations; 12 qwashas paid for a beer. The official word was that in Lusaka everyone was paid the same, from the leaders down to the lowliest messenger. Presumably exiles living in first-world cities enjoyed a much better lifestyle.

  On the whole we were all careful not to fracture the conference’s fragile unity, and sincere efforts were made to find ways of acknowledging a shared, if unequal, experience of oppression. The message that came through most clearly from all the ANC women was their longing to come home and be full human beings in the country of their birth. In summing up the conference, Frene Ginwala stressed that a chink had been opened in the barriers between us and that our mutual understanding had been enhanced through the exchange of personal experiences. In the end there was hardly a dry eye in the hall when we linked arms and sang We Shall Overcome and Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika. Even in spite of some troubling signs, there seemed to be so much hope for a bright future.

  In January 1990, less than a year after Harare, a Cape Town colleague and I were invited to represent the Black Sash at another conference, this time in Amsterdam, which would again bring together delegations from inside South Africa and out. Organised by the Women’s Committee of the Dutch Anti-Apartheid Movement, the Malibongwe conference, aimed to highlight the women’s stru
ggle. More than 150 South African women met to consider their role in the liberation movement and in a free and democratic South African future. FW de Klerk had just taken over from PW Botha as State President and of course he had earth-shaking surprises up his sleeve. But at least to us in the home delegation, his imminent announcement of the unbanning of the ANC was entirely unknown. Who knows how much the exile delegates knew?

  We were due to fy to Amsterdam on New Year's Eve. Just after Christmas, Malvern, Charlotte, Lucy and I went to Nature’s Valley for a few days of relaxation by the lagoon, meals out of doors and convivial conversations with friends. The forests encircling the valley were cool in the summer heat, and in the sea we spotted schools of dolphins. It was with some reluctance that I packed my suitcase with winter clothes and headed for the airport. Did I really want to be in Europe in January? My hesitation only increased when we got to the Port Elizabeth airport to find the concourse deserted and my name not on the passenger list. Time ticked by and the fight was about to be called when there was a sudden outbreak of hooting and screeching of brakes. A feet of taxis disgorged the Port Elizabeth delegates and their supporters into the departures hall, several of them wearing the banned ANC colours and one of them waving our air tickets. “Grab your ticket!” shouted Malvern as I was swept up in the crowd, through the check-in gates and onto the plane without saying a proper goodbye. Lucy told me later how thrilling she’d found it to be surrounded by that crowd, feeling that the hopes and fears of South Africa went with our plane.