Question: What were your orders?
Answer: We were ordered to ensure the permanent removal of Nyati from society. To take him out, eliminate him.
Two
ONCE THE LETTER WAS OPENED, so was Pandora’s Box. Sleep became almost impossible, a restless semi-consciousness, veering between blank wakefulness and not-quite-slumber. A flickering peep-show from my past – names, faces, tennis parties, gunfire; still, cold bodies; live, warm bodies; funerals – left me grasping for the present before I slid into soft-focus replay of younger days.
South Africa had been the arena of my first diplomatic assignment. Not, as later, a nation feted by the world as a joyous experiment in rainbow harmony, (offset, of course, by the monsters of AIDS and criminal violence) but in more sombre days, when the sinews of oppression were taut and seemingly permanent. I had been sent to a country in the final, violent paroxysm of a bloody conflict, one defined in absolutes: black, white; Afrikaner, African; minority, majority; tyranny, freedom; capital, Kapital.
I had been sent there to represent a superpower that hedged its bets, insisting – how conveniently we forget this now! – that the oppressors could be persuaded to set the terms of their own demise, while the oppressed waited patiently for redemption.
Above all, I had been sent there in my youthful prime, prey to every intoxication of thought and flesh in a land that offered both in industrial proportions. It had been my testing period, before the required adherence to official policy built its carapace over raw instincts of spontaneity, hardened the rushing arteries of indiscretion.
I had been duped by the elation of the victims, suffering their only ticket to freedom, who foreswore their own present to deny their enemies a future. I had been entrapped by the passions of revolutionary times in the pell-mell rush towards a new order in which the sins of the past would be automatically expunged.
In short, I had believed freedom was indivisible. My commitment to the God of policy had wavered. I had loved and left and been left. I had arrived an innocent, an ingénu. I departed with scar tissue still raw.
The sun came up somewhere over the Kalahari Desert, and the sky brightened rapidly towards Cape Town. When I raised the window blind, the light was so piercing that I almost winced.
They came at me in a pincer movement as I stood impatiently at the immigration desk, annoyed after my long flight that it was taking so long to process my entry form and temporary visa.
There had been a delay when the immigration officer in her crisp, white uniform ran my passport through the computerised scanner. Furtively she moved a hand below the counter, presumably to raise some kind of discreet alarm to which the two men responded.
One of them was smooth skinned and slightly plump, the other stringy and lean, a hint of roughness around his knuckles. Initially, I hoped that they might be part of the reception committee, bearing an invitation to a quiet lounge with freshly brewed coffee and chilled fruit juice while my suitcases were picked off the conveyor belt and the formalities were taken care of, as so often in my diplomatic days.
“If you could just step this way, sir,” the white officer said. “Nieuwoudt. Airport security.”
“It will not take a moment, a minor matter,” his colleague said. “A slight discrepancy. No cause for alarm. My name is Faku.”
With some reluctance, I followed them, confused and ill-tempered. They had taken possession of my passport, my carefully filled-out immigration form, my currency declaration – in other words, they had taken control of me.
I walked between them, unblocking the muttering line that had formed behind me of passengers awaiting their moment at the immigration desk before the raised rubber stamp of official welcome formally descended on their passports with the quiet, satisfying thump of validation.
I carried my shoulder bag with its laptop and documents. The plainclothes men led me back from the row of immigration desks, away from the gateway to the baggage collection point. Strangers followed my movements with undisguised and faintly hostile curiosity.
What was I? Some kind of illegal immigrant, arms dealer?
“Discrepancy? I don’t think I quite follow.”
“Step in here for a moment, meneer,” the stringy officer said. His use of an Afrikaans courtesy sounded like a sneer.
“You will soon be on your way,” Faku said, adding as what he seemed to think was a joke: “One way or the other.”
The room had no windows. Two chairs on one side of a Formica-veneered table faced a single chair on the other. A grid of neon lighting in the ceiling bounced back off a linoleum floor marked with burn marks from some phase of pre-history when people smoked indoors.
“Please sit down.”
“What is all this? I really don’t understand. I’m here for a conference. Officially invited by the sponsors, including your President.”
“There is no need for temper, Mr Kinzer,” Nieuwoudt said. “Just a few simple questions.”
“What kind of questions, for God’s sake. It’s been a long day and night of flying from Washington.”
“Washington.” Faku repeated. He had flipped out a folding notebook held by a strand of elastic. Now he wrote in it. I could see my name and passport number and a date. There was a file number that looked vaguely familiar. And the word “Washington.” He noticed that I was reading his notes upside down. He flipped the notebook lid closed and smiled at me.
“But your flight came in from the UK.” Nieuwoudt shoved my immigration form across the desk to me. In the section marked “Origin of flight” I had written: “London.”
“I made a connection in London.”
“Aha.”
Faku wrote again. But I could not see what he wrote.
“From Washington? You made a connection in London from Washington?”
“There is no direct flight. For God’s sake. Is this some kind of third degree?”
“An interesting choice of words,” Faku said. “Why would you accuse us of torture? Is it something you are familiar with?”
I drew in a deep breath and gathered my thoughts. I was a former American ambassador. My name and rank were still on file in Washington. I did not need to answer their questions. It was a matter of time before I demanded that they allow me a call to the local consulate to avoid an international incident.
“I want to cut the chase,” Nieuwoudt said, sounding reasonable.
“Cut to the chase.”
“As I said, I want to cut the chase. Your passport is an ordinary American passport. Is that true?”
“Of course.”
“But in our database you are listed as a diplomat. So why would a diplomat travel on a non-diplomatic passport?”
“Your database is out of date. Obviously.”
“Or your mission is not as stated.” Faku looked up from his writing and stared at me.
“What on earth are you suggesting? I am here as an official guest at a conference. Look!”
I fumbled in my shoulder bag to retrieve my credentials and handed them my dossier of invitation letters, accommodation advice, travel advisories. In the past I would have stonewalled, demanded an apology, stood on the dignity of my nation and my calling to public service. Now I simply wanted an end to this farce, this shake-down or whatever it was, and be on my way. Of course, it is never wise to offer officialdom an iota more information than is being requested. Instantly, I regretted my excessive helpfulness.
Nieuwoudt flicked through the folder. The widows’ letter fell from its pages and Faku swept down on it, scanned it quickly, then paused to read it more carefully, before handing it to Nieuwoudt.
“Thank you, Captain,” Nieuwoudt said.
“That is no problem, Sergeant,” Faku said. “It seems as if our friend, Mr Kinzer, has more than just a conference on his mind. We had better take a photocopy.”
They did not seek my permission.
Alone in the room with me, Faku leaned back in his chair. Below his dark suit jacket, his shirt buttons st
rained over his stomach. He made no attempt to conceal the hand-gun in a leather shoulder-holster.
“You see, Mr Kinzer, when people come to our country and they have certain missions that are not on the official agenda, it is our job to make sure our country is safe.”
“If your database told you I was here as a diplomat many years ago, then it must have told you I harbour no ill will against it.”
“Our database tells us many things, Mr Kinzer. Many things indeed and about many people.” His belly trembled to the rhythm of a throaty chuckle.
Nieuwoudt returned to the room. He handed a photocopy to Faku, who folded it into squares and sandwiched into his notebook. He rose from the table, shuffled my papers into their dossier and took a last glance at them.
“Nice hotel, eh, Sergeant, where they have put him up. We should be allowed to stay in such places!”
“VIP, Captain.” Nieuwoudt said, allowing himself a thin smile.
“You see, Mr Kinzer, many things have changed since you were here. For the better. Correct, Sergeant?”
“Correct, Sir. Many things are different. So it is better, Mr Kinzer, to let the dogs lie asleep.”
He took a rubber date stamp and ink pad from a desk in the corner of the room, stamped my passport and, in a handwritten annotation, added the words: “14 days. Single entry. Conference purposes only.”
Faku handed me my documents and opened a side door I had not noticed, leading directly into the arrivals hall with its crowded carousels.
“Welcome,” he said.
I collected my baggage and looked back over my shoulder. The door to the small, airless interview room had closed seamlessly. There was nothing to suggest that the room existed, that anything had happened at all. Uncertain as to what this encounter might mean – other than some kind of bizarre case of mistaken identity by two over-zealous officers – I made my way without incident or further scrutiny through customs and into the shimmer of a Cape Town morning.
Outside the airport, beyond the glass doors, there seemed to be some kind of demonstration, led by a young woman with a bullhorn, chanting against official corruption. Riot police in blue uniforms, holding German shepherd dogs, leashed and snarling, had the protesters pinned behind barricades. There were crudely painted posters: “No to Arms Deals!” “No to Kickbacks!”
The young woman with the bullhorn seemed barely out of her teens but confidently led the chanting, as if she were some kind of African Joan of Arc, cloaked in righteous rage.
For a moment, I stood poised, drawn towards the protest, towards this strange echo of my earlier times here, yet aching for rest.
“Conference purposes only.”
Faku had materialised again at my shoulder. “Official delegates, that way,” he said, pointing to a cordoned area inside the terminal building, designated by a large banner proclaiming: “Truth and Reconciliation. Pre-registration.” As I turned away from the protest, I saw a rock arc into the police lines. Immediately afterwards a teargas canister drew a counter-trajectory in white smoke.
The conference organisers had sent an entire team to extract me from the melee – a driver, a greeter and a sort of factotum equipped with a clipboard on which were clamped my speaking schedule and a brief professional biography to be approved for the conference website. No reference was made to the rumpus outside the airport. Or to my brief encounter with Faku and Nieuwoudt.
My resume left an unexplained gap between the entries for Princeton and Harvard Law School and those for my more senior diplomatic assignments, omitting my earlier experience in South Africa. The title “Ambassador” was used liberally, with no explanation for the brevity of my final posting in Paris before the brusque order to return to Washington, to hand the ambassadorial keys to a motor trader from California who had made significant campaign contributions – an exchange surely more familiar to him than to me.
My “personal interests” were listed as: reading, travel, music. Familiar camouflage, obscuring anything even remotely personal.
The reception committee was composed of women in their middle years. Something about their single-mindedness, their solidity reminded of the widows who had composed the letter, the tricoteuses of the revolution, moulded by the resolve and stoicism that marked their generation, never knowing whether a child or husband or brother or sister would survive the day without a fatality, a burning, an arrest, a disappearance. A beating from one side or the other. Now, they wielded their clipboards and schedules like rewards of victory – emblems of safety and certainty in a halfway peace.
They would drive me, they said, to my hotel. I would rest. Lunch was free time. The first appointment: a formal reception early that same evening, at another hotel. Sessions would start the following day: 8:30 am sharp. A local SIM card was included with my conference documents – a pay-as-you-go, with complementary start-up credit. Mini-bus transport would be arranged. Secretarial facilities available if needed. The conference language would be English, with ad hoc translation into isiXhosa, isiZulu, Sesotho and Afrikaans.
The women talked, laughed. I laughed. I had forgotten how easy – and important – it is to laugh; how much laughter functions as a prophylaxis against the sense of doom that can all too easily overcome the uninitiated.
In a blur, through the windows of the mini van, I was vaguely aware of squatter camps spreading over the sandy, windswept Cape Flats. Slender columns of black smoke rose above the shanties as they had in the old, revolutionary days. My escorts chose not to allude to them or explain them. The bridges over the busy, chaotic four-lane highway were covered in steel mesh to prevent the launch of projectiles or bodies.
The landmarks were comfortingly familiar – the twin cooling towers of the old power station at Langa and, of course, Table Mountain – a somewhat more photogenic marker. With laden mini-bus taxis challenging our every manoeuvre and dark-windowed BMWs offering no quarter in the fast lane, we swept along the curve of freeway past the Groote Schuur Hospital, alongside the grounds of the university and the Rhodes Memorial (Rhodes Mem, in the shorthand of college students). Buck and zebra grazed on the mountain’s lower slopes.
From a rise near a Holiday Inn, the Mother City offered herself for inspection. The bare lands of District Six, slowly reviving after the uprooting of its mixed-race population back in the apartheid ‘60s; the port where container ships docked and the Yacht Club offered berths to more elegant vessels. Below the wall of Table Mountain, three cylindrical apartment buildings delivered a remarkable architectural affront to one of nature’s great vistas. I remembered they had been nicknamed the Tampon Towers to acknowledge both their bizarre design and their singular inappropriateness to their setting. Past Signal Hill, out to sea, Robben Island slumbered on the glittery ocean.
“Our President was there. On Robben Island. You see,” the factotum who had introduced herself as Sheryl Makwazi said. “He was imprisoned there. Even him. For 27 years he was in jail. Eighteen on that island. Hard labour. Breaking stones. Comrade Mandela. Madiba.”
The mini van transported us to one of the newer hotels along the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront, a development had not existed in my earlier days as a junior attaché. I was slightly disappointed to see that the area had become one giant strip mall with boutiques and fancy eateries, bookstores, cafes, parking lots, apartment houses, yacht marinas. In my memory, it was still a longshoreman’s working place with godowns and quays, and a single restaurant, the Harbour Café, serving Greek salad with bricks of feta and raw onion, and a chunky, white, saltwater fish called kingklip.
Finally, after many thanks and assurances that another mini van, with the redoubtable Sheryl riding shotgun, would collect me at 6:30 pm sharp for the opening reception, I was released to my hotel room and my memories.
Fighting sleep, I placed a call back to Washington. It would be early there, 24 hours in local time since I had left an eternity ago. I wanted to catch her before she went off to her job in one of those inter-departmental outfits that pokes
its nose into other people’s business. I knew she rose early in the day and I had a question to ask her concerning her time as my first boss in the embassy here in South Africa. I caught her as she was about to leave her brownstone. She listened; I thought I heard her sigh.
“I’ll get back to you,” she said. No suggestion in the way she spoke of surprise or pleasure to hear from me.
I unpacked on auto-pilot, hanging a light-weight suit in a closet, placing shirts and underclothes in drawers, plugging in adaptors to hook up my laptop and cell-phone charger. Spilling out of the suit-bag’s compartments came a belted safari jacket and bathing shorts, T-shirts, chinos, walking boots, a travellers’ fly-fishing rod, digital camera, sun hat, sneakers, flip-flops, condoms (packed more in hope than expectation: as I had often told junior diplomats in my earlier life, spontaneity should never be left to chance.)
I stripped and showered; inserted the local SIM card into my cell phone. My room looked back, towards Table Mountain. I watched as the cable cars crept up and down its splintered buttresses, crossing half-way between the base station and the summit where clouds formed and reformed: the tablecloth, the locals called it.
The letter I had opened on the plane referred to the killing of Solomon Nyati, a small-town schoolteacher who had risen to great prominence as an opponent of apartheid, a harbinger of what his land might one day become. A prophet in his own land.
His death had been one of the most chronicled of political assassinations. Three of his comrades perished with him, their names woven into the national liturgy: Zinto, Ngalo, Mboniswa, Nyati – The Cooktown Four. I had met them all, drawn to their struggle. A white security police officer, Kobus Theron, had openly admitted that he led the death squad that killed them. In his quest for amnesty, he had appeared at the hearings known as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission – a model of justice and catharsis that would be pored over at our conference.
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