Lily seemed to think you were quite the hero, making sure that her daughter did not change her mind and risking the awful fate that awaited both you and Theron. Stepping out with Theron into the crowd must have needed a lot of courage. I am not sure you realise just how volatile these moments are; how it just takes one slogan, one chant, one denunciation to trigger a necklace killing. Perhaps you did.
I still don’t understand your motives but when Lily told me that you had actually been stoned and pushed around yourself, then I must say I began to look at things in a different light. It is quite possible that, if you had not done what you did, Celiwe would have allowed Theron’s execution to go ahead. And who knows what would have happened to our rainbow nation after that? Who knows what monsters from the old days would have emerged to embark on reprisals? We were probably on the brink of a paroxysm of mutual retaliation that would have strained, if not destroyed, the social fabric.
Maybe that was what some of them wanted. And certainly the inflammatory tone of Gilliomee’s articles seemed designed to achieve in print what could not be achieved on the ground. But there was another aspect of your intervention that struck me. When you arrived in South Africa, when we had those cosy dinners in Cape Town, when you came to my party on the deck for inspection by my friends (you did not pass universal muster, I can assure you!) you were aloof, cold, different, fenced off. When you stepped out into that crowd, it seemed to me, you were finally acting as if you understood where we all figure in this new order; how we stand ready to take the lumps and hope for the best and pray for tolerance.
Every day we risk retribution, and every day that it does not come – in a carjacking or a burglary or some such – is a bonus. Maybe we are living on borrowed time, but we are drawing down the debt and every day hope a little more fervently that our country will become a normal one, if that is possible. South Africans, I think you know, don’t regard themselves as just one more humdrum lot. We punch above our weight. We’ve won more than our share of Nobel prizes. We punished and revered Nelson Mandela. We engineered a transition from tyranny and the brink of all-out war to freedom and democracy. But we know that, ultimately, the onus – the burden of guilt, if you like – is on us, the whites, the former rulers.
Now we have to make one more supreme effort to make it work. And if that involves stepping out into the crowd, figuratively in most cases and literally on that day of yours in Cooktown, then so be it. One thing I realised from your intervention is that we cannot simply stay in our cocoon, hiding from the society whose birth we once tried to hasten. Yes, you upset us. But you also made us look at ourselves more honestly, to see where the complacencies had grown over our memories and our ideals. No one liked the mirror you held up to us. But we all had to look into it.
So that, in a way, brings me to the point where I have to take my own advice and fill in the final piece of the jigsaw about events in Port Elizabeth and Cooktown that night, and in the broader emotional tangle. Maybe Kobus Theron has already told you this, since he would almost certainly have known. Maybe he wanted to keep one or two secrets up his sleeve for later. Maybe he even wanted to spare you the unhappiness of too much knowledge.
But the fact is that the encounter with Solomon Nyati in Port Elizabeth that night was not my first with him. Far from it. I told you once that the scar tissue on my shoulder was a war wound. In a modest sort of way, that was the truth. When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings were in progress, I spent every day wondering whether my secret would come out. Whether I would be subpoenaed, whether I would, in fact, need to apply for amnesty. But nothing came and I had to assume that the people who knew the truth had decided to remain silent. That is the way people like Theron work, squirreling away their little bits of knowledge for future reference. It is their stake money, their pile of chips. They play their hands like your Mississippi gamblers. And, of course, once you try to keep something secret, you merely increase the value of their capital. They have the drop on you. As the years go by, it becomes ever more difficult to own up, to tell the truth. So, after all the forced confessions and allegations that night on the deck, it is time for me to come clean. In a way, it is easier now that many of the friendships that we sustained with our myths and fairy tales about one another have fallen away and the ones that remain are the true ones. I supposed I have you to thank for that very ambiguous restructuring of my social network.
If I am honest, another reason for keeping quiet was my embarrassment at my own foolishness. I had acted in such a gullible way over the years in my desire to be close to The Struggle that I came very close to undermining it – not terminally, but enough. When I have told you what actually happened, you may decide that the breach in our relationship should be permanent. I hope that is not the case. But there is no way of resuming our friendship – if that is what it was – without honesty. I think that you have been forced now to consider your own role in our struggle, however much of a bit part it might have been – ouch, did you say? – so I will finally tell my story, too.”
I imagined her breaking off, at this point, setting down her fancy fountain pen, perhaps making tea, or walking out onto the deck to survey that so-familiar vista of ocean and mountains. I imagined her in bright sunlight, lightly clad in the warm, summery weather of the southern hemisphere as I contemplated the murk of a northern winter, following her story in a pool of light cast from a reading lamp positioned next to my favourite, winged, red, leather armchair. I had no reason, of course, to see her that way. For all I knew she may have been writing to the tattoo of hailstones and thunder as lightning crackled over the storm-tormented sea. After what came next, that might have been the more appropriate metaphor.
“So, yes. I had met Nyati before. It seems in another lifetime now, shortly before I went abroad for my studies where my parents thought I would be inoculated against all the pressures of The Struggle. I was supposed to be packing up to head for England and America. But I slipped away and went down to Port Elizabeth one last time to see friends in the Black Sash because I knew they had the contacts in the townships, which I did not. And so I met Solomon. He set the rendezvous. It was at Crystal Sands, the same place as he died. I asked him why and he told me that he had to find places the system could not follow him to. Every word at home was monitored, he said, and he only conducted conversations there that he either didn’t mind the police monitoring or wanted them to hear.”
Now it was my turn to pause, make tea, survey the view. I walked across my study to close the drapes. The words came back to me – “or wanted them to hear.” Instead of tea, I poured a stiff jolt of single malt, with a splash of branch water. No ice.
If Nyati’s tradecraft was unchanged by the time I met him, then clearly my conversation with him fell into the category of exchanges that were either insignificant or designed to be shared with his enemies. If what I was reading was true, Nyati had pretended to be talking to me that day in his bugged home in Cooktown. But, in fact, he was talking to Kobus Theron, sitting somewhere nearby with the headphones clamped to his ears to catch every intonation. And when I said the things I did, Nyati knew full well that, despite my lowly rank, my words would be amplified by being reported back to the highest level. At his meeting with the Old Deep set in Port Elizabeth, hours before he was kidnapped and killed, Nyati joked that, one day, they might attend his funeral. At least he understood the risks he was taking, even if Jess and I didn’t.
“Anyhow, we went for a walk in the dunes. When I heard where he had been killed all those years later, I knew then that we had not been as alone as he thought. They were there. And when they chose where to kill him, I assumed they were sending a message. In any event, Crystal Sands was as good an isolated spot as any for a brutal murder to be committed without witnesses. Two birds with one stone. They were nothing if not pragmatic. As we walked, I told him that, ever since the Soweto riots of ’76, I wanted to be part of The Struggle, really part of it, the whole thing, the operations, the spying, wh
atever was needed. I wanted to join the guerrillas, Umkhonto we Sizwe, the Spear of the Nation. If young black kids could hack it, so could I. I would be his little drummer girl. He laughed – that annoyed me because I thought he was laughing at me. But he wasn’t. It was just his way to cover his thoughts while he computed all the odds. Looking back it all seems strange – white college girl, black revolutionary, a walk in the sand. But people forget that it was never all so monochrome, monotone – what is the word I am looking for? Simple?
There is so much shorthand used to describe events that cry out for a much finer script. I supposed that is the nature of propaganda: boil complexity down to a single emotive slogan that reinforces one side of the argument and hides the other. My country was depicted in terms of black or white while, for some of us, the reality was etched in half-tones, greys, off-whites. And, of course, for all the heroism of the comrades and Madiba, so much of The Struggle was riddled with betrayal. The regime had spies everywhere, single agents, doubles, trebles. If a young white woman arrived on a black man’s doorstep offering help with the revolution, what on earth would he have thought? A plant? A honeytrap?
But then, after we walked on a bit, Solomon said: ‘Okay. One day you will get the call.’ Or something like that. Maybe it was: ‘we will call on you’. Other people we both knew had vouched for me and I know they had made inquiries to check me out, so I guess he was prepared to take a gamble. I remember, as if it were yesterday, the moment when he reached his decision. He stopped and turned to look me straight in the eye. His voice changed. We weren’t chatting any more. He was the commander. The call will come, or you will think it has come, he said, but before you go any further with any operation – I repeat any operation or mission – you must check with me. He explained the passwords I was supposed to use and the response he would give if a mission was to go ahead. None of that is important now, except that I waited a long time for the call. All the time I was abroad, I guess I was what they would call a sleeper. I got on with my studies. I was diligent, industrious. Then I came home.”
Thirty
I FELT A SUDDEN AVERSION TO READING on. What on earth would I learn now? How many more layers had been hidden from me on this madcap venture? Above all – how could I have been so foolish, so solipsistic? When you embark on some personal odyssey – a.k.a. ego trip – to reformat your own history, how much consideration do you give to the impact it will have on other people? And how much do you calculate the distortions of their perspectives? Stories, versions have their orthodoxy: A did this and B did that and C just did nothing. But when you start playing around with the equation you get a different result. A+B might equal C but A times C produces a different B. The factors acquire new values. People emerge in different lights. So do you as the instigator. If you have a secret, you behave in a different way than you do when it is exposed. Your confidences are the adhesives holding together your relationships with the people who don’t know what you know. Remove them and the relationships change. There’s no glue anymore. Things fall apart. The centre, like the poet said, cannot hold. I had stripped away the secrets of an entire cohort. But not all of them, as Zoë Joubert now seemed determined to demonstrate.
“In the years I had been away things had changed. I had left a country of simmering rage. Now it was boiling. The townships were becoming ungovernable. The young people, the comrades, could not be restrained. I think there was a feeling that so much was happening inside the country that the guerrilla war from outside had been overtaken. The revolution was building even without the freedom fighters to give it a push with their AK-47s or their bombs. So maybe my mission – my first mission – was just a tactical move to show the new comrades in the townships that the old guard comrades were still out there in Lusaka or Harare or Maputo fighting for them, sending insurgents into the country to sabotage the system. My orders were simple enough if you know South Africa. Or, at least, I thought they were. I was to drive a bakkie – a pickup – to a border area and wait. Two men wearing farm labourers’ coveralls would emerge at the rendezvous point and get onto the back. They would have a bag that I was to hide under the front seat. I would drive them towards the big oil-from-coal plant at Secunda. Then I was supposed to drop them off and drive as fast as I could to a rendezvous near Soweto to hand over the bakkie, but without drawing attention to myself by speeding. (We had pretty strict speed limits in those days.) It should have been flawless cover. There is no more common sight in the farming areas than a white person driving labourers around on the flatbed of their pickups. I’d travel up there overnight, pick them up just before dawn and drive them to Secunda in broad daylight. It was a bold idea, turning the prejudice to the freedom fighters’ advantage. We’d have no problems with the road blocks, because I was white. My orders were to tie up my hair, put on a baseball cap and try not to look like a student. If I was stopped, I was to speak Afrikaans, which, given my roots, was no problem. I went through all the codes and procedures I had been given to verify the mission with Solomon. I was given a cut-out, an intermediary I trusted from way back, a black reporter. (His name isn’t important. And I still feel bound by some vestigial sense of honour to keep it to myself. But I suspect you would have met him without realising how active he was. He was a pretty good reporter, too.) I knew that he was close to Solomon and that I could trust him. We arranged the pickup point and the handover of the keys. At that time, cell phones weren’t all that common but you could get a pager service and I gave him my pager contacts. The way the system worked, you had to call a number and give the message verbally to an operator who would then forward it to the designated recipient. It would appear on the pager’s tiny black and white screen. Of course, the messages were monitored, so we devised an innocuous code. If we were good to go, the message would say: ‘Call me now or never’. If the operation was cancelled, the pager would say: ‘Happy Birthday, Doll!’ We had quite a laugh about that, the reporter and I, probably because there was a lot of tension in the air at the time. Solomon was not happy about the mission because he did not know the men who would be crossing the border. There had been a lot of penetration of the ranks by the regime. Betrayals. Torture. The Armed Struggle diluted, weakened. Umkhonto we Sizwe had been trying to repeat its success blowing up a Sasol plant, so Solomon believed it was worth a go. Looking back now, I wonder how secure his own precautions could have been in the climate of the times.
In any event, I drove up the road towards Botswana. I can’t say I felt 100 per cent enthusiastic. Yes, I was opposed to apartheid and I was prepared to prove it by embarking on the mission. But this was what the state – and my parents – would call it terrorism. At the time, Umkhonto we Sizwe had a policy of avoiding civilian casualties at all costs. So there was a moral fig leaf. But, frankly, I knew my father and mother would not see it that way if I was caught. Neither would a lot of my closest friends, not least of them Chris de Vere. While I was abroad he had dropped by to visit me on his business trips so our old relationship never really broke off. Most whites would excoriate me, among them a lot of my anti-apartheid friends who simply did not believe in violence of any kind. Frankly, I was scared, too. I might get shot or killed. I might get arrested. I had no training for this kind of thing. I doubted I would be able to withstand the pain of torture and I knew, deep down, that I would betray Solomon even before they switched on the electrodes, or whatever they chose to do. The more I drove that night, the more I asked myself what I had got myself into. In principle it all seemed so heroic – like Orwell in the Spanish Civil War, an act of valour in real conflict with real guns and real risks. Finally, I was joining The Struggle. But I was out of my depth. I had offered a commitment that was too much for me. I did not have the courage of the young kids I’d be picking up. I began to blame Solomon, too. If he was not too happy about it, why had he exposed me to this danger? Was it some kind of test? There was no way I could call him back at that hour to ask. But what if I just turned around and headed back? Then what? What would ha
ppen to the freedom fighters at the roadside? What would happen to The Struggle? And, of course, what would happen to me when the comrades in Lusaka or Maputo discovered that I had been the weak link in the chain? I was trapped. I would have to go through with it, whatever the consequences. I had been a protester. Now I was to become a terrorist.
I was about 10 minutes from the pickup point when my pager went off. It was still dark but I could see the message quite clearly in the little LCD screen: Happy Birthday, Doll!
The message looked even more ridiculous a few miles from the Botswana border than it had when we devised it. But I did not need a second asking. I barely slowed down. I did a 180-degree turn with the handbrake, and nearly rolled the bakkie right over. And then I was heading back down the road. I never knew who it was but someone shot at me and the bullet grazed my shoulder. I ditched the bakkie and the baseball cap as soon as I could at the first town I came to and did what I could to stop the bleeding.”
My glass was empty. I had not noticed the storm brewing outside my windows in Washington but now it had built to a fury, tossing and tormenting the trees out front as the rain swirled in the street lights. The refill was more modest than the first jolt. I was reading closely and did not want to be distracted. The most perilous part of an aborted mission is always the getaway. If the alarms have gone up and the enemy listeners are alerted to any unusual chatter, then the simplest phone call can be a betrayal. You have to have absolute faith in your contact. You have to have a bolt hole. If there is a question of a wound, you need medical treatment. In other words you need a network. A secure network. Inadvertently, apartheid had built a network – the blacks-only townships where a fugitive could go to ground. But, of course those places were honeycombed with police informers, bugged homes, agents of the system. And wounded whites with bleeding shoulders were hardly the most inconspicuous of visitors.
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