Permanent Removal

by Cowell, Alan S.

  She changed tack.

  “So how did you meet Nyati?”

  “A friend set up a meeting.” I saw her next questions form. What friend? What motive? But she did not pursue them and I did not elaborate.

  In theory, my journey to Nyati’s home required ambassadorial authorisation. To outsiders, it could have been interpreted as a signal, a shift in policy, a calculation that apartheid’s days were numbered so it was time to befriend its heirs. It was a decision that a junior diplomat had no authority to take. But I took it anyhow.

  “So I went over to Cooktown and sat with him, listened. And that’s how I met Lily and the others. Smuggled into the township on the floor of an old VW Kombi, covered in blankets, straight past the cops. I think they figured something was going down. They kept cruising past his house. Looking in. White guys with guns. But I’d given them the slip. We talked for hours. I even tried to persuade the ambassador to visit with him – strictly hush-hush, of course. But the next time I was at the house was for the funeral.”

  “I was there, too,” she said. “I don’t remember seeing you. But then, there were 35,000 of us!”

  “Not an easy day to forget.”

  But easy to recall for those who had been there. Red revolutionary banners billowed over the heads of clerics ablaze with righteousness. The air choked with dust and sound as the police on the perimeters seized the high ground on a ridge overlooking the township, fingering their trigger guards with nervous anticipation, little suspecting that this day would initiate the reversal of all they stood for. A Wendepunkt.

  The crowd became a tide carrying me along, embracing and enfolding me in its sound, its roar, its sharp odours of sweat and fury. The young men and pre-pubescent boys – “the comrades” – formed themselves spontaneously into warrior groups, impis, raising their knees, pounding their feet, swinging their arms in imitation of a guerrilla fighter firing bursts from an AK-47. I didn’t know at the time, but their slogan translated as: one settler, one bullet.

  “Amandla!”

  “Awethu!”

  “Nelson Mandela. Hai. Hai. Oliver Tambo. Hai. Hai.”

  And then the songs, the lilting loss-filled strains and the brutal exhortations to murder, all in one great swelling chorus.

  “Senzeni Na” – what have we done? What had they done indeed to merit their enslavement?

  And, addressed to the guerrilla fighters in their camps, “Hamba kahle, Mkhonto, Mkhonto, Mkhonto we Sizwe” – go well, Spear of the Nation.

  I heard what I wanted to hear – the yearning, the bursting chorus of those so desperate to throw off oppressors who shared my skin colour. The thousands of voices rose like the thunder that rolled across the African veld to herald the rains, from the Great Fish River to the drylands of the Karoo. The hair rose on my neck and my sweat turned cold, and I raised my clenched fist with theirs as their anthem consumed us all – more powerful than mine because its revolution was raw in the making and mine was past.

  “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika” – God Bless Africa.

  The fire burned in me along with the multitude, branding us all with its simple morality: the regime, the government that we as American officials chose to deal with, was evil beyond redemption. The resistance, this great, cresting wave of humanity that carried me through dirt streets between the matchbox houses and the burned-out homes of quisling black policemen, was good. The cause was just. The comrades’ demands represented no more than we in America took for granted – freedom, democracy, human dignity. This moment, the distillation of a great struggle, had nothing to do with the Cold War, the KGB, the Cubans, the battle for Africa. It had to do only with a future in which this lumpenproletariat that stamped its feet and bellowed its songs and slogans all around me would be given the same liberty as was my birthright.

  We weren’t the only ones to grasp the significance of the moment. At midnight, with the turned dirt still fresh on the graves, the Race Ogres declared a state of emergency that granted their warriors in their armoured trucks near total powers of arrest without charge or trial, indemnity from prosecution. Roadblocks sprang up. Men with guns smashed doors at 3 am. Cells filled. Blood ran in the fury to sluice away everything Nyati and his comrades stood for.

  But in the process the apartheid regime severed its links to the distant world. In New York and London, be-suited bankers, tired of the hassle of anti-apartheid protesters on their doorsteps, called in the debts. American businesses pulled the plug on their subsidiaries, not out of any great ethical concern but to safeguard their reputation elsewhere. Confidence died. The economy shrank.

  By killing Nyati, his murderers guaranteed their own defeat.

  I visited the four bereaved women as they sat with their youngsters around them. Lily Nyati carried one small child in a blanket drawn across her back in the African way to share the warmth and synchronise the rhythms of breathing and heartbeat. It was a girl, she said, Solomon’s youngest child. A girl he had named Celiwe. Before his death he told me what the name meant: the one who was asked for.

  At that time, on the day of the funeral, I had no cause to doubt the assurances I gave that I would work with all my being to unmask the perpetrators; that I would never cease in my inquiries until every last stone was unturned, until every last link in the chain of command and obedience had been exposed, until every last traitor and informer had been brought to book.

  At this point I should perhaps offer another confession which I did not make in my dinner conversation with Zoë Joubert: in that same spirit of devil-may-care abandon, during those wild days in the Eastern Cape, among the banned people and the revolutionaries, the nature of my relationship with the journalist Jess Chase turned intimate. Who initiated this chapter in our entanglement is irrelevant. When we finally fell into one another’s arms in some remote motel outside Port Elizabeth – I had knocked on her door, not she on mine – I believe she was expecting me, finally, to make my move, for the door was not locked. I mention this to explain – or perhaps justify – the unprofessional intensity of feeling that I came to associate with this period in my life. If I am honest with myself, I should also acknowledge that, once it was all over, I spent much of my time looking in vain for someone capable of inspiring the same passions.

  “In fact,” I was telling Zoë Joubert, “I got caught on the TV coverage with all those red banners and clenched fists. Didn’t do me much good back at the embassy. All the older guys, political officers, agency types, telling me I was out of line. What the hell. Because, of course, they soon came to see that the game was up for our policy. All because of kids throwing rocks and petrol bombs. And people like Solomon and Lily Nyati.”

  “And where were you when he died?”

  “I was at home,” I told Zoë Joubert. “Just at home.”

  What I did not say was this: I heard the news from a political activist in the Port Elizabeth region, a woman from the Black Sash movement. She called me in Pretoria, in the early, pre-office hours, shocked and sobbing over the phone – clearly indifferent to the consequences of betraying her feelings to those who routinely monitored her conversation.

  She told me how the victims had always been careful to keep their movements to themselves, to travel without advance warning of their plans, to vary their routes, to stop for no one save clearly identifiable, uniformed police. But, she said, none of that would make any difference if their movements had been betrayed, foretold.

  The morning was bright and wintry on Africa’s highveld, with a hint of frost crusting the yellow, dry-season lawn. A domestic worker had left a tray of coffee and biscuits outside the bedroom door along with the morning newspapers. Discreetly, she had placed two cups on it. I thought of returning to bed as if nothing untoward had happened until I could break the news gently. But my secret lover was already stirring, sensing from my grunted, guarded conversation that something awful had occurred. Her response surprised me.

  She brushed aside my attempt to console her. She barked questions abou
t what, exactly, I had been told: how, when, where, why – for God’s sake, why (although the answer to that was clear enough in any logical sense.) She grabbed the newspapers, but the news had arrived too late for them. As a reporter, a foreign correspondent, Jessica Chase had been Solomon Nyati’s closest chronicler. She had become his admirer and confidant. Some said it went further than that: she was his gatekeeper, at least, an ex-officio advisor, far beyond the realm of objective journalism. (The embassy files contained a security police report suggesting a little more, though I never gave it much credence. For all that was said, there was no bias to her dispatches, no ideological message, subliminal or stated. The bare facts, honestly recounted, spoke for themselves.)

  She dressed without showering, by turn stricken, alarmed, remorseful, enraged. She left the house with a spray of gravel from the rear tire of her motorcycle as the big steel gate opened. I recalled tasting the bile of anger at the back of my throat: if Nyati and his comrades had been betrayed, then surely someone must pay.

  We left the restaurant to return to the hotel. I had told the story of my life to Zoë Joubert and I had airbrushed Jess Chase out of it completely.

  The coffee shop was empty so I assumed her daughter had gone ahead to their room. The moment did not seem to permit any suggestion of closer intimacy. As the elevator rose towards my floor, I tried to take her hand but she pulled back.

  “I’m leaving very early tomorrow, for the coast,” she said. “So I suppose this will be goodbye, Tom.”

  “Goodbye?

  The elevator stopped at my floor. She stepped out with some reluctance and we stood together in the corridor as it sped onwards.

  “Zoë, I really want to see you again. Meeting you has been very special for me.”

  “For me, too. I wish it were all so simple. And there is Mills to think of. We didn’t exactly fool her, you know. She’s not naïve.”

  The child’s name provoked a silence.

  “Is there someone, you know, significant?”

  “Only Mills. Don’t be silly, Tom. And you’re a former ambassador. You’re supposed to be a bit more diplomatic.”

  “Well, as diplomats used to say, given goodwill on both sides … Surely there’s some way we can meet again. We have got to know each other pretty well and I have lots of free time. Sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. I meant I would dearly love to spend more time with you. Coffee. Lunch. No demands. I would love to drive that way again, anyhow.”

  “Tom. It’s a free country these days. I can’t stop you driving wherever you like. But I can’t make promises I can’t keep. Give me a couple of days to get settled and maybe it will seem different. I’ll call you. We’ll see.”

  Part Two

  With the blue light flashing, Theron overtook the Honda as it slowed to a halt. The backup, driven by De Kock, boxed it from behind. In no time at all the steel handcuffs were on the captives’ wrists, the prisoners split up between the cars. De Kock disguised the Honda’s licence plates with a false set from Headquarters. The detainees realised that no matter how they wriggled to get their hands on the interior door handles to throw themselves clear, the child-proof locks – of all things – prevented their escape.

  Eight

  IN LIMBO, AWAITING ZOË JOUBERT’S signal.

  The familiar reflex: when in doubt, work. In this case on the task set by Lily Nyati; however inadequate my qualifications to meet her expectations, however great the distractions of waiting.

  I make to-do lists, wrack my brains to recall names of people who might help, cross off tasks when modest accomplishments are achieved – an appointment fixed, a purchase made.

  I download sheaves of transcript; procure A-4 legal pads and a stout, black, leather-bound notebook of high quality vellum. It will become the incomplete journal on which I have based this attempt at a narrative.

  I pore over the record of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, particularly the sections concerning the murder of the Cooktown Four and the remarkable, public confession of Kobus Theron, the white security policeman who admitted to leading the death squad that killed Nyati and his comrades after their meeting with the Old Deep set. Oddly, for all my attempts to pinpoint Zoë Joubert’s activities during that era, using a variety of search engines, I turn up no matches and it strikes me as odd that she has left no trace, no footprint, in the testimony of the commission – the Domesday Book of The Struggle. Has something been redacted? And if so, how would I know?

  When you root around in history, you can never tell what will emerge from the careful constructs of official narratives, the undergrowth of obfuscation. You are a clumsy hunter stumbling over rocks and tangled, hidden roots, stirring unsuspected life forms, alerting the prey to menace. I was venturing into the events that formed a new nation’s self-image, its pride, its sense of exceptionalism. And I had travelled far beyond those bureaucratic frontiers laid down in my passport by Faku and Nieuwoudt. That was fine as long as my inquiries went no further than the laptop in my hotel room.

  Ultimately it was obvious that my investigation could not simply be conducted in some forensic bubble of web searches and paperwork. I would have to talk to the people who might know something and might be able to help.

  Inevitably, that would mean blowing whatever scant cover my presence at the now-concluded conference might have offered. There was little choice if I was to fulfil my mission. Zoë Joubert still had not announced her intentions. Time was ticking on in other ways, too: my visa limit had been set at 14 days – a highly unusual restriction for reasons I did not understand. Once those days were up, I would become an illegal immigrant to be removed, expelled, declared persona non grata.

  But the last thing I wanted to do was to report in to some dingy bureaucracy to seek a visa extension or a change of purpose in my visit – for “conference,” read “vacation” – that would light up all the alarm bells Faku and Nieuwoudt had doubtless wired into my presence in their country: for “vacation,” read “spy,” “provocateur” or any number of unsavoury, accusatory labels.

  I looked up old contacts in the press and diplomatic world who might offer some clues as to the players in this drama, coaxing them under false pretences into meetings – “just to chew the fat”, “for old times’ sake.”

  The journalists were older now, as was I. Some had risen to powerful positions – barons of the new order. One of them, Artie van Zyl, had become owner and publisher of one of the biggest, mass-audience newspapers with a predominantly black readership – an incongruous pinnacle of achievement for an Afrikaner who had grown up far apart from the black majority, yet so typical of this newer bond between the tribes competing for, and sometimes sharing, the spoils of freedom.

  He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, with blunt, fleshy features and thinning hair the colour of pale straw. He favoured Texan boots and open-neck shirts, with sleeves rolled up over massive, hairless forearms. In his office, where I called to see him, he kept a life-size replica of a black man in the royal blue work clothes worn by most of the country’s labour force and domestic staff. At difficult times, in the morning news conference, Van Zyl told me, when he could not decide which scurrilous story should fill his tabloid’s front page, he would point to this totem of his news values and ask his staff: which story would he prefer to read?

  “Works every time,” he said.

  But the mention of Kobus Theron and the Cooktown Four snuffed out the “hail-fellow” merriment.

  “Forget it,” he said bluntly. “We’ve moved on. History is history. Do you know how many generals and colonels and sundry cops are out there, keeping things quiet, drawing their pensions? Do you think they want their lives turned upside down? Do you know how many people in the new government, in business, in provincial administrations have got secrets from The Struggle? Torture camps in Angola. Unauthorised bombs. Settling scores. Do you know how many of these liberals” – he used the term with unconcealed scorn – “these white pussies with their bleeding hearts wan
t to keep quiet about what they really got up to? Couriers for the terrorists, man, I’m telling you! Bombers even! But it’s gone now. We’re the new nation. We’ve buried the past. We don’t poke into the hornet’s nest. I’m not interested in history. Neither is he,” he said, nodding towards his god of news.

  I found others in dark bars, hiding from the light. Few of my erstwhile press contacts had tenure in their newsrooms now that a new generation of reporters and editors had arrived to replace them. Most had taken early buy-outs on reasonable, no-questions-asked terms, trading decent pensions for discreet exits, especially among those who had been particularly intimate with, or openly sympathetic to, the enforcers of apartheid. The net caught up many who had not fitted either category, ageing workhorses who did the math and figured it made more sense to go quietly to pasture than to scramble for a place in the sweepstakes of a new order where their race was now a handicap.

  There was one journalist in particular I wanted to see.

  With Artie van Zyl’s help I tracked him down to a dingy watering hole called The Rusty Nail, whose décor (and clientele) might not have changed since the 1960s – a polished wooden bar with towels to soak up the spills, a limited selection of essential spirits in a serving rack: cane, brandy, Scotch, gin. The entrance from the street looked as if a signboard had been removed that, I surmised, would once have decreed: “Slegs Blankes” – whites only. Faded by time, gilt lettering above the entrance to a separate room proclaimed: ‘Ladies Bar’. There was no muzak, no offering of “pub grub”, no raucous slot machines or sports TV. Just booze at reasonable prices, small bags of salted peanuts and potato chips to keep the thirst intact, and cigarettes sold in boxes of 30s.