by Wilbur Smith
Rage reflected the real-life dramas being played out in modern Africa, and the sequel Golden Fox continued the trend. Shorter than the others, it was more of a spy thriller, with one of the minor characters from Rage, Shasa’s daughter Bella, as the heroine. I was fond of Bella in Rage, but had no idea what she was going to get up to. Then in Golden Fox she came into her own as a spy who infiltrates the government. It often happened: I would create someone with no apparent future then suddenly, later, I realized what they could do. I didn’t have conversations with my characters as I had heard some authors do. My characters just lived in my mind and my writing for me to watch and record. I would often be asked if a character was me. Was I the devil-may-care big game hunter, adventurer and ladies’ man, Sean (in either Rage or When the Lion Feeds), or his brother Garrick, the runt of the litter in Rage and the cripple in When the Lion Feeds? I suppose, in truth, I identified more with Garrick. Like me, he was a loner fueled by a determination to succeed, often surprising those around him.
It wasn’t Bella, however, who stood out and grabbed all the attention, but a minor character, Vicky Gama, the wife of the novel’s jailed leader Moses Gama. Vicky had been introduced in Rage, but now in Golden Fox, with her husband still incarcerated on Robben Island, I had written a scene in which I depicted Vicky, the “black Evita” and “mother of the nation,” as a topless gin-swilling sjambok-wielding sadist, beating up a young member of her athletic club, who she suspects of being a police informer. It all took place in a mansion in Soweto, which Vicky had built from overseas donations to the struggle against apartheid.
My books are pure fiction, there are no hidden messages, no matter what people want to think. My characters are totally fictitious—I’m a storyteller—but some people drew parallels between Vicky and Winnie Madikizela—or Madikizela-Mandela, as she is known today. In the week Golden Fox was released, Madikizela-Mandela was being named in court during the trial of her bodyguard, Jerry Richardson, who was accused of murdering a young activist by the name of Stompie Seipei. Stompie, a fourteen-year-old member of the ANC Youth League, had been kidnapped with three others on December 1988 by Madikizela-Mandela’s bodyguards, who called themselves the Mandela United Football Club. Stompie was killed on New Year’s Day 1989 and his body dumped near Madikizela-Mandela’s house. He was found five days later in the veld. His throat had been cut. Richardson, the Mandela United “coach,” was convicted of the murder even though he claimed in court he had only been doing Madikizela-Mandela’s bidding; and, a year later, Madikizela-Mandela was convicted of Stompie’s kidnapping and being an accessory to his assault. Madikizela-Mandela was sentenced to six years in jail, reduced to a fine and a two-year suspended sentence on appeal. Richardson got life.
The reality was that Golden Fox was written some time before Madikizela-Mandela was named in court, but, whatever I wrote, I couldn’t please everyone all of the time. Some people would be delighted by passages that might offend others. In the novel, the scene in which Vicky Gama attacks the suspected informant did not refer to any particular person. I was writing stories, not political allegories. It depicted a type of person who could have existed in the period in which the novel was set.
It was not the only moment the novel came close to the realities of modern South African life. Golden Fox had the daughter of a fictitious South African ambassador to London wheedle her way into the Cabinet to get her hands on top secret information—including a poison gas being manufactured in South Africa by an Armscor-like entity—to give to the Russians and Cubans. As much as it was the work of my imagination, recent newspaper headlines had claimed that the assassinated white Swapo leader Anton Lubowski had been a spy for South African military intelligence—and it had been proved that Commodore Dieter Gerhard, the commander of the all-important Simonstown naval base outside Cape Town, had been a spy for the Soviets all along. Like Rage, Golden Fox showed just how the realms of fiction and fact intertwined. Golden Fox, though, would be the last time I sailed that close to contemporary political history. The reason was simple: I was a professional storyteller, not a political pundit.
As it was, the books were almost writing themselves. Anyone outside the country wouldn’t believe what we were living through daily, and as always in Africa, tragedy lurked around the corner. We had a bad experience in July 1989 when a hit-and-run driver knocked down and killed our domestic servant Gladys Siqele. She was outside our Bishopscourt home in Cape Town walking with a friend back to her house when a car mounted the pavement and mowed her down. I was out of the country on a book tour at the time. My wife thought she might have been targeted because of my books, by another “Wit Wolf.” The original “Wit Wolf” (white wolf), a disaffected and disgraced twenty-three-year-old South African Police constable named Barend Strydom, was sitting on death row in Pretoria for a shooting spree he conducted in full uniform with his service sidearm that claimed seven African lives and wounded fifteen more on November 15, the previous year. He claimed to be the leader of the White Wolves, but that turned out to be a figment of his imagination. He was sentenced to death but escaped the noose as the National Party Government under F. W. de Klerk had suspended all executions. He was released in 1992 as one of 150 political prisoners and granted amnesty by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the democratic elections in 1994.
We posted a R10,000 reward for information about Gladys’ death. The police asked us if we or Gladys had any enemies. We didn’t, at least none that we knew of, but we told the police of an incident a couple of weeks before when a car swerved toward a black pedestrian and then drove away at high speed.
The tire tracks swerving toward Gladys, who had been on the opposite side of the road, were as clear as daylight. The car had to have been traveling at high speed because Gladys was killed instantly.
Gladys had been with us for twenty-one years and was the mother of four children. We went to her funeral and it was one of the most moving experiences of my life. Under the hot sun, in the gentle red dust, the deep, pungent home-smell of Africa all around us, there were 300 to 400 mourners singing of their love for Gladys and for mankind as if it was the total spirit of Africa given voice. That day, as the tears ran freely down my face, I celebrated that I too was an African, that only here amid tragedy, could I feel such a powerful, unbreakable bond.
Four days later a 32-year-old police sergeant approached his station commander and confessed he had been driving the car. Almost a year later Jacobus Michael Charles Andrews appeared in the Wynberg Court on a charge of culpable homicide, alternatively reckless driving. In October, he was convicted of culpable homicide and fined R1,000 or twelve months’ jail. Nothing would bring Gladys back; we did what we could for her children who were all adults, but his sentence was only a slap on the wrist.
We were very sad and very angry.
•••
After the euphoria of the general elections on April 27, 1994, that swept the African National Congress into power, it was as if the genie had been let out of the bottle. There were rampant expectations, an economy in decline and freebooters on the side turning a profit at every corner through state tenders and the abuse of state resources. The most frightening thing though was the criminal violence—fed by the flames of disillusion, especially among African youth. At one stage, there was a real fear that South Africa could become like Lebanon and those who were able to would simply leave the country and settle elsewhere. It was made worse, paradoxically, by the new adherence to the doctrine of human rights. The police were virtually powerless, and the courts had been rendered impotent to hand down sentences of any meaningful deterrence. I have always believed that to survive we must have laws and morality. I’m not a great practicing Christian, but religion has a very strong place in the formation of our society because it teaches people ethics. We are spoiling whole generations of people now. You don’t have to work, you can claim benefits; if you want to write obscenities on the walls and go on the soccer field and swear your head off, you�
�re a hero. Human rights, while in principle absolutely essential and admirable—and I’m an unwavering supporter—can be abused and criminals can go free if you have a good lawyer, enough money and know the right people.
The situation though wasn’t bad enough for us to leave South Africa forever; that would only happen if the country became ungovernable, ruled by a crazy racist in an environment where I felt physically threatened—in other words in a situation like that in countries to the north of us, in particular Zimbabwe under the despot Robert Mugabe. I have witnessed inhumanity which changed my attitude when in Rhodesia during UDI, specifically that those systems which had been fine in Victorian times were now long past their sell-by date.
I knew that apartheid was such an iniquitous doctrine and that it couldn’t persist, but I wasn’t able to stand up and say so in public. I already had the Bureau of State Security (BOSS) watching me constantly. I had a tap on my phone for years. I was walking down Muizenberg beach in Cape Town after apartheid ended and a fellow came up to me and said, in an Afrikaans accent: “I know you.” I replied, “Have we met?” and he said, “Ach, no, we haven’t met, but I worked for BOSS and for a year I had to sit and listen to you on the telephone. Old Wilbur, you boring!”
I said to him, “Well whatever you do, please don’t tell my readers!”
Whenever I returned to South Africa from my long researches, it was always with excitement mixed with trepidation because of the violence and the crime. After the ANC came to power, we had forty-eight years to catch up with in six months and a lot of people had been left behind. It was OK to be free, but freedom meant respecting others and their property. I had a man who walked around my Cape Town house with a dog, and I had security fencing, but I was most concerned for the lives of the people who worked for me. They were the ones at risk. I could protect myself but they were vulnerable.
There were two very positive changes for me when apartheid ended, and they both involved Nelson Mandela. South Africa’s acceptance into the global community thanks to the international reputation of Madiba meant that my books were now selling well in the US, for the first time ever exceeding the sales in the UK, which had always been the benchmark. In fact, US tourists visiting in huge numbers to Cape Town would often ask where I lived and the tour guide would drive them up to Bishopscourt. One day, I was in my oldest clothes with a hat over my eyes when a luxury bus pulled up.
“Do you know where Wilbur Smith lives?” one of the riders asked.
I said, “No, but Dr. Chris Barnard, the world-famous heart transplant surgeon, lives just down the road,” and off they went. I valued my own privacy a lot more than I valued Chris’s.
The second was the holding of the rugby world cup in South Africa in 1995. The South African Rugby Board had won the rights to host what would only be the third ever world cup, although it was the first for our national team, the Springboks, because they had been excluded from the first two because of apartheid. It was Mandela who won the game—and the country—for us, in one of the most incredible acts of reconciliation ever witnessed. It was so great that a book was written about him and the rugby world cup by journalist John Carlin, called Playing the Enemy. Clint Eastwood subsequently made a film Invictus, with Matt Damon as Bok captain Francois Pienaar and Morgan Freeman as Mandela.
Nelson Mandela remains my hero to this day. I had the privilege of shaking his hand and, having grown up and lived my entire life in Africa, understand the true greatness of his achievement. I am one of those South Africans who worried what the shape and face of my own country and indeed the continent would become when he died. Sometimes, I thought, self-styled philanthropists like former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and pop stars Bono and Bob Geldof were doing more harm than good by wanting to treat the symptoms and not the causes of the problems in the continent. One of these was their insistence on writing off international loans, which to my mind was like rewarding bad governance and unaccountability. It wasn’t about them not understanding the African mind, but rather that they ignored the reality of the African concept of government. The whole structure was predicated on tyranny, controlled by one person, from Shaka in KwaZulu Natal to Mzilikazi in what became Zimbabwe. They committed terrible atrocities to consolidate and stay in power—a pattern that had continued with terrible consequences in modern Africa, such as when Mugabe put down the Matabele dissent using his North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade. Even Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia had resorted to force when his people were starving. And then there were the kleptocracies of the Central African Republic and Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire (today the Democratic Republic of Congo) where money that was supposed to help the people was shamelessly looted and deposited off shore, gratefully received by unscrupulous Swiss bankers.
The dictators don’t accept the idea of using money to generate more wealth for the country. They either spend it, or steal it—and then when the country can’t repay the billions they have been loaned, the West will be asked to write off the debt and advance another tranche.
The dictators then think, “Oh boy, we’re on a good wicket here! We’ll never have to pay anything back. When is our next gift coming?” This isn’t about black or white. It’s human nature.
South Africa’s own problems were similar yet nuanced: the apartheid government had impoverished all black South Africans, and so they had nothing to lose. It didn’t take long, much like post-perestroika Russia, for some of the better-known erstwhile Marxist freedom fighters to metamorphose almost overnight into big time capitalists and tycoons. We even had a phrase for it in South Africa, the “gravy train,” or the propensity of activists to lose their principles for the allure of directorships, a practice only exceeded by another phenomenon—not exclusive to South Africa either—of tenderpreneurs: people who have become obscenely wealthy by using their political connections to wangle state jobs and contracts.
Which is just another reason why Nelson Mandela was so special. We had all watched with trepidation and more than a little sadness as he began his slow, inexorable decline. The attention to his series of health scares was nothing less than ghoulish, but that was what happens when you see a great man going. When he died on December 5, 2013, I wrote: “An African giant has fallen, but the legend that was Madiba will echo down the centuries.” I don’t believe I will be proved wrong on that. The entire country went into mourning, with scenes that hadn’t been witnessed since the country first went to the polls as one on April 27, 1994. I don’t believe we will ever see that kind of national kinship again, especially not in my lifetime. It’s a pity, but an incredible gift to have lived through a period which traversed Nelson Mandela standing in the dock under a possible death sentence on terrorism charges, being banished for the better part of his adult life to a rocky island in the middle of Table Bay, and then emerging twenty-seven years later to pull a fractured country together—and then stand down as he had promised after only a single term in office.
It was unprecedented in the ways of Africa, and nigh-on unheard of internationally. We were poorer for his passing, but far richer for having had the privilege of knowing him.
•••
Perhaps because of its subject matter, and how closely it hewed to the world falling to pieces around me, Rage had been my most difficult novel to write. Yet, somehow, it had worked—and readers fell in love. The novel sold almost a million copies in 1988, and was an international bestseller. It also broke the world record for the longest ever South African novel, with the paperback weighing in at 626 pages, breaking the previous record holder—Madge Swindell’s 1983 novel Summer Harvest—by 26 pages.
The stigma of South Africa’s apartheid regime had dogged me my entire career. As Charles Pick used to say, it was one of the reasons my novels had not taken off in the United States as quickly as they had in the rest of the world. For Americans, everything that came out of South Africa was damaged by association with the political regime. It was a similar story in other parts of the world. On a publicity tour in New
Zealand, I was accosted by fourteen scruffy men from HART—the “Halt All Racist Tours” movement. They were the same mob who had successfully disrupted the South African Springbok rugby tour in 1981, flour bombing a rugby ground and almost inciting an all-out civil war between All Black rugby fans there to see a contest between the two greatest rugby playing countries in the world, and protestors who wanted to see the end of apartheid. They wanted to present me with their “Racist of the Year” award, which I declined with thanks. Clearly, they hadn’t read anything I had ever written. The fact that I was white and South African was enough for them to denounce me. Later, when I was questioned on New Zealand television’s News Hour, I counterattacked by accusing HART itself of blatant racism—the labeling of me, just because I was white. It seemed they thrived on racial conflict—without it, they wouldn’t exist. My books, I said, had always been anti-racist—in fact, my early books had been banned because of friendships and sexual relationships that crossed the color bar. One thing is certain: I abhor racism, and I always will.
Stories moved me and inspired me—since my childhood—and the idea that they should aspire to do more than that had never really occurred to me, or, if it had, I never truly entertained it. Rage and Golden Fox, however, became the focus of the perennial debate between popular and literary writing in the most unexpected way.
In 1991, the South African novelist Nadine Gordimer won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I was involved in the periphery of the award after a fan, Andrew Kenny, wrote to a Johannesburg newspaper, the Star, asking why I hadn’t been considered by the Swedish committee. I had never met Kenny before, but his opinion seemed to strike a chord with a great many readers, and soon letters to the editor flooded in, reflecting both sides of the debate. Kenny’s argument was that, compared to the number of people who read Nobel laureates like Gordimer, my novels—and others like them—had an immense reach, one that could influence many more people and contribute to their understanding of the modern world. Far from being pure escapist fun, Kenny argued, books like mine were the only ones that could hope to affect the way we lived our lives. Like many critics before, Kenny didn’t hold back on what he thought were my shortcomings—my books, he said, were unsubtle, my dialogue stilted, my people caricatures; my stories were filled with unbelievable sex and far-too-believable violence. Yet, if he had to choose one book to explain South African politics to a foreigner, he would unhesitatingly choose Rage.