A Sport of Nature

State Houses

Aleopard stands in the entrance of State House. When Nomo has a week to spare between seasonal haute couture presentations in Paris, Rome, New York and London, and flies out to Africa, the moment of arrival for her is when she passes an elongated hand over the creature’s head in recognition of the way the namesake climbed on its back the first time she was brought to visit, as an eleven-year-old child. She has a leopard-skin coat at home in her Trastevere apartment or London mews flat (depending where she passes the winter). It was designed for her by one of the Japanese couturiers who have superseded the French since Chanel and Dior died.

This other, a taxidermist’s, version of the leopard gives it flanks hard and hollow to the touch as cardboard under the bright-patterned tight silky fur, and a tongue like congealed sealing-wax in its snarling mouth. There are a small rock and clumps of dried grasses glued to the plinth with which it was supplied; the whole tableau a gift of homage to the State given by the oil concessionaires when the country became independent and the General was President for the first time, before the civil war. The entrance is an atrium, with wings of the house led to by open, white-pillared passages on either side. State House was originally Government House, and built to the standard design of one of the sovereignties of hot climates in the imperial era which, of course, flourished and declined before that of airconditioning. The President has wanted to brick up walls and extend to the whole place the airconditioning system he long ago installed in the public and private rooms, but Hillela’s early exposure to the stylistic graces and charms of the past, spending school holidays with a collector aunt, left latent in her an appreciation that has emerged in the mistress of the Presidential residence. She has insisted that State House appropriate Government House, not destroy its architectural character. She has been in charge of all extensions and structural alterations. A style of living commensurate with the dignity of the State, she persuaded the President, is not expressed in the idiom of the Hilton and Intercontinental (with which both have a strong emotional tie as the places where his return into his own was bargained for and planned). As for luxury — a measure of which every Head of State, even one as determined to live as close to his people as Nyerere was, must have in order to symbolize some estate now attainable to the people, since every head of a black state was once one of its oppressed people — real luxury is expressed in gardens and the indulgence of individual notions of comfort, idiosyncratic possessions. Behind the leopard of black independence, the atrium opens across the reception area from which official visitors waiting to be received by the President can watch, in the park, peacocks from the last governor’s tenancy trailing worn tails. Hillela would not touch, either, the collection of votary objects that surrounds the coat-of-arms that has replaced an imperial one: plaques beaten out of the country’s copper, the carvings by local artists of heroic agrarian couples, faithfully but subconsciously reproducing as an aesthetic mode the oversize head and spindly legs of undernourishment, and the toadying gifts of white visiting artists or the multinational firms who commission them — heroic animals, more leopards, elephants, lions — paintings as subconsciously reproducing the white man’s yearning for Africa to be a picture-book bestiary instead of the continent of black humans ruling themselves. She knows the strings of cheap pearls and pressed-tin miniature human limbs that encrust walls round the ikon in Eastern Europe called the Black Virgin — whether 14th-century anticipation of Black Theology or time and the grime of worshippers’ breath had made her so, the admirer who took Hillela on a weekend expedition to the shrine could not say.

The President’s passage of heroes is also intact. Strangely, even his usurper did not remove them during the period of the counter-coup. When one of the aides with the thick squeaky shoes of policemen leads an official visitor to the President’s study, they pass under the photographed eyes of Lenin, Makarios, Gandhi, Chou En-lai, Mao Tse-tung, Patrice Lumumba, Nkrumah and Kennedy.

The first few years could not have been all honey — to appropriate Ruthie’s phrase. Power is like freedom, it has to be fought for anew every day. The ousted president found refuge with Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire. He was far enough off not to be able to gather supporters in any number around him — and Mobutu knew he couldn’t get away with allowing that; it was by a secret accommodation, arrived at between the OAU and the General, that Zaïre had become an agreed place of exile for that gangster. But the now rebel forces — government forces when the General’s had been the rebel army — regrouped under the command of three ambitious officers who had escaped imprisonment by the General. They established themselves in the South-West of the country and for a time the civil war burned on. The General — now President — could contain it but not put it out. Not militarily. Now he had the advantages of the solid bases and heavy equipment of a conventional army (his former rebel one, enlarged by a sullen ‘reconciliation’ with and absorption of large numbers of surrendered troops) and the rebels had the disadvantages of makeshift command posts in the bush; but in the pursuance of guerrilla war the unconventional fighting conditions — as the President as General had so victoriously proved — often favour the apparently disadvantaged. The President thickened in the sedentary obligations of State House; in every way, he was not as quick on his feet as he was when he slept among grenades in the farmhouse. He had to begin to go abroad a lot, again; not as an exile, but as Head of State with an entourage in his private jet aircraft, he had still to seek friends, to importune, and to trade in the currencies of power. His white wife was no ordinary wife who would go along just to take advantage of a European shopping trip. She had the experience that fitted her for conclave; long ago, when she was very young, she had developed, along with the love-child inside her, a feminine skill of guardianship, an ability to see, moves ahead, what the opposition tactics were revealing themselves to be, and to intervene warning with the signal of a gesture or a look. Later, empty of love, taking notes of negotiations in cold countries, she had learnt to read more in the ellipses than the dictation. The President’s trusted advisers knew that the most trusted, the only one indispensable so far as the President was concerned, was one not of their number.

She did perhaps find the odd hour to shop, as well. Quite soon after their alliance began the President had made it clear that his companion could not go about with him in cotton shifts, jeans, and sandals made by street cobblers. Fortunately, she knew fine fabric and good cut; as a child performed the equinoctial rites of storage, carrying silk and suède garments against her cheek.

The collapse of the rebel forces which finally ended the war was brought about not by the President’s military victory but by the victories in conclave. The French were persuaded into embarrassment over the arms that were being supplied to the rebels through Chad; the Americans debated in Congress a cut-off of their ambiguous aid to the rebels, aid which at first the Under Secretary of State defended as a policy of bringing peace to the region. The cut-off was implemented and after the shortest decent interval the President successfully negotiated a $3 billion loan from the United States for the rehabilitation of war-devastated areas in his country. It was all as he had said: he had to win his war with arms from the East, and to win his peace with money from the West. The world press was amazed to report that only a rainy season after his troops still had been monitoring the physical surrender of arms in the South-West, his Ministry of Agriculture held an agricultural show in the region and the President was rapturously received when he addressed rallies there. His pithy style of comment on the event made a good quote: —My popularity comes from the full stomachs of my people. — He was accompanied by a military brass band from the capital, but not by Hillela. Absent in exile and occupied by war, he had not visited the people in the South-West for a long time, and it would not have been wise to reinforce any sense of his having alienated himself by bringing to them a white wife.

He did not, however, take along one of the other two wives, the black ones, either. Hillela’s place, for him, cannot be filled by anyone else. The first wife resented her but scarcely had any opportunity to demonstrate that resentment. She was already fifty when the President brought Hillela to his capital, and more because of her venerable position as his first wife than her age, regarded as in retirement. She had her house and retainers in the village where she had spent her childhood. The President took Hillela to be presented to her; his escort keeping its distance, they drove alone as they had when they encountered the elephants but his monumental profile with the curved chip of nose was heavily sad: he would have wished to be taking her to his mother, but she had died while he was winning his war in the bush, and he had not even been able to be at her funeral. He repeated, as people do for themselves rather than the one to whom the observation has been addressed again and again: —The eldest is the best of them. All my children. And this one gave birth only to girls. She was very annoyed … blamed me! And then I had five sons with the other. That was worse, because since then she hasn’t been able to blame anyone but herself. Poor woman, she’s all right with her house and her farm, plenty of relations to work it for her. But I think she drinks. When our women drink, their faces get dead-dark and the red from inside their mouths begins to grow out to their lips. She was never a pretty girl, but lively.—

She lived among altar-like pieces of 19th-century furniture which must have come down to her not only from her father — a chief — but from some European missionary family before him. The room was dark and the silences long as Sela’s; the first wife was put out rather than disarmed by the ease with which the white woman made herself at home where she should have been ill at ease in strange surroundings, feeling the reserve of a way of life that doesn’t belong to white people. In the kitchen with the relatives, she got talking as if she were back somewhere she knew well, and tasted the wild spinach being cooked to go with the maize porridge as if it were a treat. When asked whether she had any children: oh yes, a daughter. — A black child. — The old wife took the President’s smiling remark as a boast: this one was young enough to bear him black children.

But the old wife did not live to see whether this would happen. The news came to State House that she had died; as customary with Africans, the President said, there were a half-dozen versions of the apparent cause. He gave her a funeral in keeping with her status. There are many sides to the President no-one would suspect but that Hillela seems to know through some matching in herself, although outwardly they have always appeared an incongruous pair — it is not the matching of beauty in the couple of the Britannia Court photograph. Sadness, like every other emotion, is diffused powerfully by the President’s physical presence: after the funeral it was again in the lament of the rhythm of his breathing, the lie of his hands and the look of the nape of his neck, so broad that the delicate, tiny ears appear stamped back into it. He was ashamed because he could not manage to weep at the funeral. (Hillela was listening, if he wanted to talk.) It was his first woman he was burying, the mother of his daughters; the young man who had been her husband was going down into the grave, too. Yet he had no tears.

Hillela lay in bed and patted the place beside her. He padded over the cool marble floor of what had been the governor’s bedroom, reluctantly; but took her nightgown off over her head and gazed at what he had revealed to himself. He moved in beside her; moved on.

The mother of the Colonel, the second wife, has treated Hillela with respect that Hillela has sometimes been able to cajole into some kind of affection — but the second wife cannot make a sister out of a white woman. The respect — for her usurper, a foreigner, it’s not as if the President had done the normal thing and simply taken a third wife from among his own people — probably comes about because the second wife knows Hillela went to protect the eldest son in some far country, after he had done a wicked thing and joined the people who wanted to kill his father. The Colonel himself must have told his mother; and told her never to talk about it, because it has never been mentioned between Hillela and her. She does not live in State House but has a large house of her own, in town, and maybe the President still visits her occasionally; she was married at fifteen and is not much older than Hillela. Visitors entertained at State House in the last few years have come upon charming young children chasing the peacocks and tame guinea-fowl from their roosting places in the flamboyant trees, and riding bicycles over the lawns. The visitors presume these are the children of the President by his present wife (although they look quite black — it is said those genes prevail in mixed progeniture). But no-one knows for sure whether Hillela has had any children as the President’s wife; whether she ever had any child other than the namesake. It seems unlikely; the President has seen her in a light other than that of perpetuator of a blood-line. Any woman could be that. In fact, no man wanted Hillela to be like any other woman, would allow her to be even if it had been possible for her, herself. Not even the one who supplied a brown-stone. The charming children, who have the composure and good manners of black and the precocity of white upper-class children, dressed by Hillela and educated at schools chosen by her, probably have been born to the President since his third marriage, by the second wife. Anyway, that one will never lose her position as mother of the best of them. That is something between the President and her no other woman will ever have. It would not trouble Hillela. What others perceive as character is often what has been practised long as necessity; the President’s highly intelligent intuition, that has made him so successful in his allocation of portfolios in his government, recognized the day she hopped into the hired car and set off for Mombasa with him that Hillela is a past mistress of adaptation. But Hillela has not been taken in by this African family; she has disposed it around her. Hers is the non-matrilineal centre that no-one resents because no-one has known it could exist. She has invented it. This is not the rainbow family.

The President and his wife were hosts to experts from Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Hungary, East Germany and the Soviet Union attending a workshop on his country’s trade and economic links with Eastern European countries (Hillela entertained some old friends at State House). The President succeeded in obtaining a loan from the World Bank to form his Rural Development Corporation for the upgrading of provincial towns. Abdu Diouf of Senegal (an old friend of the President, this one), then Chairman of the OAU, paid the President’s country a state visit. It was also the year Pauline was back in Africa.

The monthly telephone calls to her son had tailed off several years earlier. But at least he made the effort to reply to her letters irregularly, and she wrote regularly although the letters were about people he did not know and a life far removed from what mother and son had experienced together. That was childhood and adolescence; their battleground, to be avoided.

There were no letters from him and when she tried to telephone, she heard the plaintive siren of disconnection. It was a voice that was no voice; an alarm. Joe got in touch with his old colleagues in Johannesburg and they investigated. It was as Pauline had known, as she had told Joe, she knew from that mindless voice — Sasha was in detention. It was logical for Joe to be the one to fly back, since he was the man to deal with the law, legal representation, prisoners’ rights—

— What law? What rights? They’re holding him under Section 29. What lawyer among your friends has been able to get permission to see him? They can keep him in solitary confinement indefinitely. The only ways of getting to him, helping him, must be other ways, and I’m the one to find them.—

Her face surrounded by stiff grey hair was incandescent with the manic excitation of anxiety he had seen sometimes in clients whose mental balance was threatened; Joe understood that if he tried to make Pauline wait in London, take a bus every day at ten o’clock to her pleasant job at a Kensington Church Street book shop, she would simply go mad. Not just in a manner of speaking.

They flew together to Johannesburg, awake all night on the plane, silent together, as they had once hurried back along the footpaths in the Drakensberg. But that time they had not found an arrest, what they had found that time was nothing, nothing, child’s play, this time was the real horror that hung over your life, all your life, if you belonged in that country, no matter where you ran to.

Joe did what lawyers can do; and that was a lot, despite Pauline’s dismissals. Applications for the parents who had come from abroad to see the detainee were finally approved after Joe reached, link by link of connections — members of parliament, judges, influential friends-of-friends — the Minister himself.

The meeting was terrible. Pauline’s blazing red face, steamy with tears, relived it for hours in the Rosebank flat friends had lent them. It was Sasha’s fault, it was Joe’s and hers: there he stood behind the cage and faced them as if he expected them to be facing him as a criminal, prisons are for criminals, aren’t they? — and that wasn’t the way they had come at all, that long distance to find him, endured that sycophantic struggle to get to see him!

He was all right. What was ‘all right’? He was not ill or apparently depressed. No thinner if paler than they remembered him on his last visit to London. No more difficult to talk to, taking into consideration that the awkward platitudes exchanged, which were one part of the customary mode of communication between them, couldn’t have been anything more, anyway, in present circumstances, with a warder on either side of him listening in, and the other part of their family communication, the clashes between mother and son, were too preciously intimate for a non-contact visit. What was ‘all right’ about his being led away by two louts back to solitary confinement, a bible and a sanitary bucket? ‘All right’ was the report given by white liberal members of parliament when they received parliamentary privilege to visit such prisoners: it meant that prisoners were still alive, in possession of their senses and with no immediately apparent evidence of the wounds, bruises and burns of torture. One was supposed to be grateful to the prison authorities, the Minister of Justice, the government, for that? As an aside, there was also the routine Opposition condemnation of the principle of preventive detention. That was ‘all right’, too. That was all the conventions of justice, of humanitarian concern meant in this country Pauline had rejected but where she had left a hostage. Joe went back to London because — she let him know — these were his conventions, in all good faith they represented all he could do; she stayed to do what she had failed to after the Maritzburg All-In African Conference more than twenty years before; to find what else there was for her, beyond them.

She went to the house of another couple whose child — a daughter, this one, a student and not a trade unionist — was in detention. Being Pauline she had neither sought an introduction through anybody nor telephoned first; just was there, with her great quick eyes ready to stare down timidity, scepticism or distrust, on the doorstep and then in the livingroom. The professor of chemistry and his wife found she had burst in not to commiserate in misfortune but to share action against it. Out of this intrusion on meek despair she became one of the founders of a committee of detainees’ parents; the professor and his wife became numbered among those who did not beg for mercy for their sons and daughters but demanded justice, and by justice meant nothing less than the abolition of laws, opposition to which had sent their young and thousands of others to prison — laws that in those years removed whole populations of black people from their homes and dumped them elsewhere at the will of whites; divided blacks’ own country into enclaves under dummy flags from beneath which blacks could not move about freely; kept education segregated in favour of white privilege; tried for treason leaders of non-violent opposition, turning it to violence; attacked black trade union action with mass dismissals, police intimidation, banning and imprisonment of officials; and created the last institution and edifice of white domination, the Parliament with three Houses provided by the State, one for Indians, one for people of mixed blood, one for whites — and none for the mass of the people, the blacks.

The Committee members, too, respected no conventions of how things were being done in the official best interests of the country. They would not be turned away from State doorsteps; they unearthed facts and figures — how many people were detained each month, each week, each day, and who they were — that were not revealed by the police or the Minister of Law and Order. They learnt to use Underground — or rather under-prison-wall — means by which they were able to inform the newspapers of a hunger strike among detainees anywhere in the country, while the police denied such a strike was taking place. They followed word-of-mouth to find the evidence of parents of black schoolchildren who were scooped into police vans and detained, in that long period of boycotts; they produced at public meetings in church halls (the only assembly places where there was some chance of proceeding without a ministerial ban) children of nine and ten whose precocity, here, was a terrible fluency to describe their experience of the cell, the solitude, the plate of pap pushed across the floor, the sanitary bucket and the beatings.

Black parents’ committees set up in the segregated townships, but they did not keep themselves apart from whites and the whites did not confine their concern to the smaller number of their own in detention but were active on behalf of the thousands of black sons and daughters; with her son shut away, Pauline received back the acceptance she had been deprived of when the Saturday morning children ceased to come singing up the brick-lined path in the garden laid waste with broken bottles and human shit.

The acceptance was happening at the same time as petrol bombs and limpet mines began to explode in streets where whites went by. Countless black children (even Pauline’s colleagues could not keep tally in the burning townships) had been killed; now the first white children were. This was the kind of bond between white and black the whites had not foreseen and were never to recognize.

Sasha also found ways and means. It was from Maximum Security that he wrote the last letter to his sibling cousin.

I am incommunicado, so might as well try to reach you. That’s not so much more hopeless than trying for anyone else now. Little Hendrik who comes on duty at night has smuggled in this paper for me. He had it under the plastic lining of his warder’s cap; just now, when he took off the cap, there it was. He’s about nineteen and has a double crown, the hair stood up all bright yellow and sticky-shiny He always wants to get out of my cell quickly because he’s agitated — he likes me, and is afraid of that. He likes me because I don’t curse him—gaan kak, Boer—the way the brave ones do. These maledictions are scratched into the walls where I’m kept.

I suppose there are prisons like this where you are, too. That’s a ridiculous thing to say — I’m not quite crazy, don’t decide that — of course there are prisons, but I mean ones where politicals are held. There surely have to be those. Every power has to put away what threatens it — that’s where the just and unjust causes meet. Okay, I know that, I accept it. Not cynically. I still believe. But l hope you don’t think about these places. Because it’s no good, you can’t imagine what it’s like. I had read so much — the Count of Monte Cristo to Dostoevsky to Gramsci! — and I thought I had a maximum security Baedeker in my head, I knew my way around every 7-by-7 cell, along every caged catwalk, saw the bit of sky through bars and had ready-paced-out the exercise yard, had my ingenuity kit to keep track of days with bits of unpicked thread. And the mouse or cockroach that would become a friend. (Sources: from Ruth First to Jeremy Cronin and Breytenbach.)

Even the business of the thread is wrong. I know every day when I wake up what day it is and whatever else has gone out of my head in seven months the calendar beside the phone in Point road is there, with the volk’s holidays figured in red, Day of the Vow that if Dingane killed Piet Retief it would be only whites killing blacks from then on, Family Day when the whites picnic and the dockworkers and miners get drunk alone in their single-sex hostels. Today is the 214th day I’ve been incommunicado.

Oh my mother has seen me, and Joe was here, there were two visits with him before he went back to London. But what is there to say. The reasons I’m here are not negotiable (as Joe would put it). I’m where I have to be. Yes, Joe, I want to overthrow the State, I can’t find a way to live in it and see others suffer in it, the way it is or the way it revises its names and its institutions — it’s still the same evil genie changing shapes, you have to smash the bottle from which it rises. Rhetoric. That’s the fancy language of my speechifying to unions that the Major reads back to me in interrogation. But I am my fancy language. I used to read a lot of poetry — as you know. Well, that’s my poetry. That’s the meaning of my life.

Oh I tell him: it’s fancy to you because even now when you can see it’s all up with white-man-baas, you see the real end as a ‘fancy’ you’ll knock out of the heads of a horde of ignorant blacks incited by romantic white radicals. The Major snorts with laughter (every mannerism these interrogators have that one wouldn’t notice in anyone else becomes piggish) when I say there is unbeatable purpose expressed in the horrible mishmash of Marxism, Castroism, Gandhism, Fanonism, Hyde Park tub-thumping (colonial heritage), Gawd-on-our-sideism (missionary heritage), Black Consciousness jargon, Sandinistism, Christian liberation theology with which we formulate. He thinks he’s getting somewhere with me. He thinks I’m beginning to have doubts, and they’ll soon be able to produce me as a State witness at somebody’s trial. He’s not getting anywhere. I have no doubts; I only see better than he does that if the means are confused, the end is not.

Gaan kak, Boer. I’ve always died a thousand deaths. You remember how when we went to the dentist as kids, I couldn’t eat breakfast, my knees and elbows were pressed together, I wanted my steps to take me backwards when the nurse called me to the chair. And the big fuss about the army I was always scared stiff I wouldn’t be able to stand things. But that was dread, which is fear of something that hasn’t yet happened. There are times when I’d do anything to get out. I’m craven. But never when I’m with the Major or his team. All the things you’ve read about have happened to me; even if my feet are swollen from standing and I have a thirst for sleep that’s the strongest desire I’ve ever known — Hillela, forget about sex — even then when they lead me back here I always have the feeling I’ve won.

There’s nothing more to dread. Is there? If they put me on trial and the skills of all Joe’s colleagues can’t get me off, I’ve stood it for seven months in prison, if I go in for years, I won’t have to die that death again.

I’m going to tell you that at first Pauline actually had the idea you might be able to ‘do something’ about me! Olga recognized you in a newspaper photograph, Hillela is Madame la Prèsidente. How you got there, that’s confusing, too. When I wrote some years ago you were supposed to be married to an American professor, but the letter came back. Pauline was in one of her hyped-up states when she arrived here: you would get your President to pull strings. What strings? Through the OAU; she had rushed off to one other old chums still teaching African Politics at Wits and checked your husband’s standing, which proved high. Joe had to point out that the OAU was not exactly influential with the South African security police. It was only a lapse; my mother’s really always been cleverer than Joe, we know. She’s still here. I realize she’ll never go back while I’m inside. She’s tremendously active with a group that supports us — detainees, and politicals on trial. It’s possible she might land up inside, too. She looks wonderful. I’ll tell you: happy. She’s the only person I see except the Major’s team, and Hendrik and his mates in uniform. The visits are in the presence of warders, you can’t say much, but all Pauline and I have to say to each other is political and we’ve come to some strange kind of intuition between us, a private language by which we’re able to convey information back and forth in a form Hendrik and co. can’t follow. Family sayings, childhood expressions — we have access through them.

Then why do I say I’m incommunicado.

You couldn’t experience it, of course, being more or less a lucky orphan, but hearing from outside exclusively in the voice of your mother, it’s like being thrust up back again into the womb.

I can never guess whether you’ll be interested or not. Because I can’t imagine what your life is. If I think of you in the morning, for instance, I can’t imagine where you get up out of bed as you used to in your short pyjamas, that kind of baby dress with bikini pants, you having breakfast — what sort of room, not a kitchen! — you going off to do what? What do you do all day in a President’s house? State House — Groote Schuur’s the only one I’ve ever seen, and I’ll bet yours isn’t Cape Dutch-gabled. I’m lodged with the State, myself, so we’ve both landed up in the same boat, but you’re at the Captain’s table, and I’m pulling the oars down in the galley. That’s supposed to be funny, in case you think I’m dramatizing myself. I was going to say — I don’t know if you’re interested in how I got here. I don’t think it will be any surprise to you that I am. I was on my way while we were still kids, although I made a kind of nihilistic show of kicking against it. Pauline’s Great Search for Meaning. It was a pain in the arse. You went off and plink-plonked on your guitar. I sneered at her. My school — the one she chose for me, did Joe ever decide anything for us? — its Swazi name meant ‘the world’, one of those great African omnibus concepts (I love them), the nearest synonym in our language is a microcosm, I suppose. Nobody at home knew how happy I was there — certainly not you. Carole may have suspected. It was the world (and the world’s South Africa for us) the way we wanted it to be, the way Pauline longed for it to be, and into which she projected me. But it had no reality in the world we had to grow up into, less and less, now none at all. It was all back-to-front. When I went to school, I went home — to that ‘world’; when I came to the house in Johannesburg, I was cast out. Good god, even you were more at home in that house than I was. Alpheus in the garage, Pauline and Joe’s pals bemoaning the latest oppressive law on the terrace under that creeper with the orange trumpet flowers. At Kamhlaba blacks were just other boys in the same class, in the dormitory beds, you could fight with them or confide in them, masturbate with them, they were friends or schoolboy enemies. At the house, my mother’s blacks were like Aunt Olga’s whatnots, they were handled with such care not to say or do anything that might chip the friendship they allowed her to claim — and she had some awful layabouts and spivs among them. I smelt them out, because where I was at ‘home’, that sort of relationship, carrying its own death, didn’t have to exist. Poor Pauline. I hated South Africa so much.

When I was older — by the time you left the house — I hated them all, or I thought I did. Maybe even Joe. I expected them to have solutions but they only had questions. Do you realize I was the only answer Pauline ever had? She knew what to do about me: sent me to Kamhlaba, ‘the world’. But I had to come back. Joe half-believed his answer: the kind of work he was doing, but you know how she was the one who took away half the certainty. And she was right, in her way, you can’t find justice in a country with our kind of laws. I feel as Bram Fischer did, that if I come to trial it’s going to be before a court whose authority I don’t recognize, under laws made by a minority government of whites. I’d like to reject that white privilege, too, but how can I take away from Joe the half he believes in? It’s all my father has. And of course if I can get off and live to fight another day, so to speak, I want that. No sense in a white being a martyr. There’s not enough popular appeal involved.

I’ve no way of knowing how much you know. I mean, you certainly know the facts of what has happened in this country since you left. After all, you were married to a revolutionary. You probably knew more about it, from a politico-analytical point of view, than I did, at least during the years you were with him — and that’s why I can’t imagine you, Hillela, that’s it, I can’t imagine you living your life in the tremendous preoccupation that is liberation politics. Yet it seems this has been your solution, in your own way — and I never thought of you as in need of a solution at all, I still don’t, I never shall. You know, in these places one suffers from something called sensory deprivation (Pauline’s crowd apparently have published an extensive study of this which has horrified even people who think those like me ought to be kept locked up: they’ve revised their punitive premise, they think we deserve all we get, but nobody deserves quite that). I have it, too, ‘sensory deprivation’, I won’t go into the symptoms but the incoherent jumps in this letter are well known to be one. As I said, I’m not really crazy, and they won’t get me that way. Thoughts are wonderfully free when you’re in this state of sensory deprivation. Some hallucinate but it’s not that with me. It makes me know things I didn’t know. About you, Hillela. You were always in the opposite state. You received everything through your skin, understood everything that way. I suppose you still do. One can’t judge change in others by change in oneself.

They said you went because of the journalist chap. A solution. D’you know he was almost certainly working for the security police? The whole business of raiding the cottage where you lived with him was a put-up job, to keep his credibility and make him appear to have to flee the country so he could carry on his slimy trade in Dar es Salaam? Apparently the ANC blew his cover there, I heard the whole story only recently. Well, at least nothing happened to you. What do you look like, Hillela. I didn’t see the newspaper photograph with you sitting next to Yasir Arafat (imagine Olga’s face).

I got lost somewhere a few pages back. Even now — specially now — you must know just about everything, in terms of events, and the reactions of white power to events, here; and the precipitation of events by that power. But you can’t know what it has been to live here, I hated everyone in the house for not having a solution, because I was like Pauline, I was looking for one myself. Pretending not to be. Not arriving at one, through my skin. I’ve always been afraid to feel too much, the only time I did it was all so painful, such a mess. But in the Seventies everything changed. Pauline and her crowd were told they could not look for a solution — it was not for them: something like a state of grace, they couldn’t attain it. You knew that, before then. Long before. Well, whatever your view of the Black Consciousness movement (you may be politically sympathetic or not, for all I know, it’ll be a matter of alliances, now, although you were a loyal kid in your own way and surely your ANC ties prevail, whichever way your President/husband inclines) — whatever you think, Black Consciousness, black withdrawal freed us whites as much as it reduced us to despair. Despair for my mother; she packed up Joe and Carole and went to London. Me — it freed me. There was nothinga white could do in ’76 when the black students had the brilliant idea of beginning the revolution at the beginning of blacks’ lives: in school. Don’t believe anybody who claims to know who exactly should take the credit. SASO has a good share, underground ANC has some, but there were so many little groups with long titles that became proper nouns in the acronymic language we communicate in now. It was spontaneity that created its own structures, but the form action took was old as revolt itself, as oppression itself. The demands arose first from the apparently narrow orbit of children’s lives — the third-rate education, the prohibition of students’ councils, the objection to Afrikaans as a medium of instruction. But this was another Kamhlaba—‘a world’ of a different kind from Pauline’s failed solution for me, a real microcosm of real social conditions under which blacks live. These childish demands could be met only by adult answers. What the young really were doing was beginning to put their small or half-formed bodies under the centuries’ millstone. And they have lifted it as no adult was able to do, by the process of growing under the weight, something so elemental that it can no more be stopped than time can be turned back. They have lifted it by the measure of more than ten years of continuous revolt — pausing to take breath in one part of the country, heaving with a surge of energy in another — and by showing their parents how it can be done, making room through the ’80s for new adult liberation organizations — you’ve heard about the UDF^*—for militancy in the trade unions and churches.

That’s where I come in — came in. If you couldn’t wait, I suppose you had to go: Pauline went. There was nothing for whites to do but wait to see what blacks might want them to do. There was a lot of shit to take from them — blacks. Why should I be called whitey? I didn’t ever say ‘kaffir’ in my life. Not being needed at all is the biggest shit of the lot. But everything was changing — no, the main thing was changing. Not the laws, the whites were only tinselling them up for travel brochures. (You could marry your black husband here, now, but you couldn’t buy our old house and move in. Though you could live illegally in a Hillbrow that and get away with it; apartheid is breaking down strangely where everyone said it never would — among the less affluent whose jobs are at risk from black competition …) The main other thing was changing, the thing far more important than the laws, in the end. Blacks of all kinds and ages were deciding what had to be done and how to do it. Even the white communists, people like Fischer and Lionel Burger, hadn’t recognized quite that degree of initiative in blacks, before, they’d always at least told blacks how they thought it could be done; and even the ANC in its mass campaigns had responded to what whites had done rather than forced whites into situations where they were the ones who had to respond to blacks. Now it didn’t matter whether it was one of the black bourgeoisie the radicals said were being co-opted by the white system, a businessman like Sam Motsuenyane getting British banks to make their South African operation acceptable by putting up capital for a black bank and training blacks to run it, or whether it was kids willing to be shot rather than educated for exploitation, or whether, from ’79, it was the bosses forced to admit they couldn’t run industry without a majority of unionised labour with which to negotiate. It wasn’t any longer a question of justice, it was a question of power the whites were confronted with. Justice is high-minded and relative, hey. You can give people justice or withhold it, but power they find out how to take for themselves. There are precedents for them to go by — and whites on the black side had tried to establish these — but no rules except those that arise pragmalically from the circumstances of people’s lives. That’s why text-book revolutions fail, and this one won’t. Castro made a revolution with fifteen followers. Marcos was driven out to exile by Filipinos who simply swarmed around his military vehicles like ants carrying away dead vermin — they’d judged by then he couldn’t will his soldiers to fire into crowds. I know it’s said that Reagan saw the game was up for Marcos and that’s why the troops didn’t shoot — but that’s not the whole story. The slave knows best how to test his chains, the prisoner knows best his jailer. (How did I persuade Hendrik to bring me this paper!) The way we’ve lived here hasn’t been quite like anything anywhere else in the world. The blacks came to understand that to overthrow that South African way of life they’d have to find methods not quite like anything that’s succeeded anywhere else in the world.

What a lucid patch I’ve struck. But where I came in: I wrote you about that, in the letter that was returned. I saw no point in becoming Joe (though I still admire my father) but the legal studies I’d been dragging myself through were a good background for what did come up. Something blacks did turn out to want was whites to work for them in the formation of unions, people with a knowledge of industrial legislation. They gave me a job. When the United Democratic Front was launched, and the unions I was working for affiliated, I got drawn in along with them, by then, blacks had sufficient confidence to invite whites to join the liberation struggle with them, again. They have no fear it’ll ever be on the old terms. Those’ve gone for good. So you’re not the only one who’s spoken on public platforms. I was up there, too. There’s not much corporate unionism among blacks — you know what that means? Unions that stick to negotiating wage agreements, safety, canteen facilities and so on. Our unions don’t see their responsibility for the worker ending when he leaves the factory gates every day. Their demands aren’t only for the baas, they’re addressed to the government, black worker power confronting white economic power, and they’re for an end to the South African way of life.

There’ve been a great many funerals. The law can stop the public meetings but not always the rallies at funerals of riot dead — although the law tries. Sometimes the police Casspirs and the army follow people back to the washing of the hands at the family’s house, and the crowd gathered there is angry at the intrusion on this custom and throws stones, and the army or police fire. Then there is another funeral. This has become a country where the dead breed more dead. But you’ve seen these scenes of home on your television in State House. There were plenty of television crews to record them before the law banned coverage. And clandestine filming still goes on. I can imagine that, Hillela — you sitting watching us — but of course you look about eighteen years old, and now — good god, you must be forty. You also see the madness that this long-drawn-out struggle has bred. Your traitor was lucky, he was white and he flitted long ago. The blacks who inform have roused madness in ordinary people. Necklaces of burning tyres placed over informers’ heads, collaborators’ heads, and packs turning on a suspect among themselves and kicking him to death. ‘Her’, too; I was at a funeral of a unionist, shot by the police, and some youngsters followed the cry that a girl had been recognized as an informer and each brought down upon her blows that combined to kill her. You know how people come up to a grave one by one and throw their flower in, as a tribute? Well, each gave their blow. Mistakes are made sometimes; that is sure. I don’t know if that girl was what the crowd thought she was, or if she just happened to resemble a culprit. And the manner of dealing with culprits. What happened to the smiling grateful kids who used to come to free classes at the old church on Saturdays — even you gave them a Saturday or two, didn’t you, before you found there were better things to pass the time. They boycotted the Bantu Education that made it necessary for them to receive white charity coaching, they got shot at and tear-gassed after you’d gone, there’ve been funerals for many of them. Does bravery, awesome contempt for your own death take away all feeling? (White kids don’t even know what death is, we were kept away from funerals for fear of upsetting us psychologically.) Can you kill others as you may be killed — and do even worse? And is this death really worse than death by police torture? Whites don’t call their fellow whites savages for what goes on in this building.

No-one is on record for feeling any remorse. Neither the police and soldiers who shoot blacks every day, nor the blacks who kill — no, not their own people, which is what whites are saying — but those who are not their own, anymore: who have lost all identity but that of enemy. There’s colour-blindness for you, at last …

What excuse is there for that? The madness. How do you feel about that? The whites want the madness to be the last, the final, triumphant vindication of all they themselves have done to blacks for hundreds of years.

There’s no excuse.

There’s only the evidence: if over hundreds of years you distort law and order as repression, you get frenzy. If you won’t attempt to do justice, you cut morality, human feeling, pity — you cut the heart out.

White kids are being killed in landmine explosions and supermarket bombings, on Sunday rides and shopping trips with their loving parents. The mines and petrol bombs are planted by blacks, but it’s the whites who have killed their own children. The loving parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. The white family tree.

How is it possible to live like that; well, how was it possible to have lived like that. They can go away from what’s happening now, but they can never go away from the way we lived for so many generations. On little floating islands, it exists still, that life like patches of blue water hyacinths that used to choke the rivers, broken from their moorings now and being carried out by heavy seas. (Sentence sounds odd because, in fact, it’s the beginning of a poem I tried to write; break up the lines and you’ll see it’s not so bad.) I hired a cottage — only eighteen months ago — along the North Coast. It was on, wooden stilts and built of corrugated iron with a wooden stoep and a water-tank. White miners used to save up and retire on pension in little pondokkies like that, but they’ve nearly all been pulled down for time-sharing condominiums for richer whites. This one was in an area the Indians have got declared for them since they’ve had a House in Parliament, and their development scheme hasn’t started yet — so an Indian friend found it for me. (You see, there’s privilege even among revolutionaries.) Between the strikes and the funerals I was going there regularly whenever I could. It was my Safe House. The Gandhi settlement nearby was burned down and Buthelezi’s government-approved private army was fighting our United Democratic Front people in a black township just over the hills. In my cottage there was perfect peace. The wasps buzzed their mantras. I ate the shad I caught and drank my Lion lager like every South African male. At night I sat out in what the darkness reverted to the miner’s garden. I couldn’t see the weeds and broken chairs and rusted pots, and the frangipani trees, that had survived neglect and the black women’s search for firewood, were a constellation of scented stars just at my head. The frogs throbbing on and the sea hissing. I’d walk down to the beach. Nothing. Nothing but gentleness, you know how the Indian Ocean seems to evaporate into the sky at night. In the middle of my witness of the horror of this country, I experienced the white man’s peace. I did. I woke up at night and heard the heavy sea, the other sea, pounding on the land. But that was only a line for the ending of the poem; although I was being carried out on it, it was bringing me here.

There has been madness since the beginning, in the whites. Our great-grandfather Hillel was in it from the moment he came up from the steerage deck in Cape Town harbour with his cardboard suitcase, landing anywhere to get away from the Little Father’s quotas and the cossacks’ pogroms. It’s in the blood you and I share. Since the beginning. Whites couldn’t have done what they’ve done, otherwise. Madness has appeared among blacks in the final stage of repression. It is, in fact, the unrecognized last act of repression, transferred to them to enact upon themselves. It is the horrible end of all whites have done.

The Major is triumphant. Well, how do you feel about your blacks now? What about your savages hacking each other to death? What about the end of capitalist exploitation and the great dawn of freedom and peace?

But my position is sane. I’m without doubts about that.

This cell, at this moment, seems full to me, brimming, this empty cell is fuller than the other rooms I’ve had. My room in the house always looked as if Bettie had just cleared someone’s stuff away. I never hung it with sports pennants and school photographs and pop stars the way you girls did yours. I didn’t keep things, didn’t want to remember. What have I got of my life? Only what is here. D’you remember the toy car? It belonged to that kid. I kept that.

Hendrik/Mercury/Icarus, don’t fall into the sea with this. From jail, from here I’m free to say everything. I love you.

Sasha

*United Democratic Front