A Fork in the Road Page 24

  This is not meant to be a panegyric. I am simply trying to place H in a context, to try and explain why she hit me like an elemental force when we met; and why she made The Saboteurs happen when it did, and why meeting her made a difference to the way I interacted with black people, in my writing and in my life.

  Only a few months after she arrived in Grahamstown, the time came for her planned journey through Africa, mainly hitch-hiking. Before she set off we drove to Swaziland and Mozambique to spend some time with Breyten and Yolande who had come south in the hope of visiting South Africa, something that was ruled out when Yolande, as a Vietnamese, was branded ‘non-white’.

  The trip became a journey of discovery. There was, from the beginning, a sense of ‘escaping’. Even though I’d been in Europe only a few months before on another brief visit to Paris for a sabbatical in 1966, there was already a feeling of being overwhelmed by the reality of South Africa. Only shortly before we left for Swaziland there had been one of those incidents that, far from being exceptional, became the norm: a group of black people gathered on a beach at East London, expecting to meet some celebrity. He didn’t turn up; the people became vociferous; the police arrived and ordered them to disperse. Something that had started in a mood of festivity, suddenly turned nasty. The police moved in with dogs and batons and guns. Then the ‘incident’: a little girl of three was attacked by a police dog and badly mauled; she had to get sixteen stitches to mend the wound. The police officer in charge issued a statement: the girl’s parents had deliberately pushed her towards the dog in order to provoke an attack.

  By comparison, Swaziland and Mozambique were havens of peace. Both Breyten and H, in their different ways, managed to make contact with anybody and everybody. We held impromptu gatherings, in hotel lounges or on street corners or in bustling markets selling fruit and vegetables, porridge and samp and beans and mopani worms and suspicious-looking pods and sausages and bundles of tripe and sheeps’ heads and oxtails and tongues and containers with pungent drinks. A few times we gathered – the four of us, and innumerable relatives and friends and hangers-on – for discussions that continued deep into the night: on the situation in South Africa, and other countries in the south, and far up north, and in America and Europe; or on music; on our families, on our genealogies. On several of these occasions our eloquent and dynamic discussion leader or master of ceremonies was a man with a booming voice and an explosive laugh, Chicks Nkosi, an inveterate optimist who could hold us spellbound with his visions of the future, when all the thousands of little matchboxes that constituted the black townships of southern Africa, would wake up from sleep and start marching across the hills and plains to reclaim their freedom, and everybody in our meeting place would start cheering and laughing, shouting Viva! Viva! and A luta continua! And as we finally left, daylight already staining the sky in the east, and piled into our rented car to drive back to our sprawling hotel at Mantenga Falls, we would privately relive the stories and the laughter and the rejoicing and the slogans, and wonder, deep within ourselves, how anything like that could possibly be hoped to happen in our lifetimes.

  So much of my imaginings and writing of the next decades can be traced back to that journey and its discoveries – most of which had to do with most obvious yet most magical of facts: that we were all African, that we all belonged here, and wanted to belong. For the first time since my return from Europe I seriously began to doubt my passionate fixation on going back to Paris. Was it not an opting out, a running away? Was this – this place, this deepest south, this ultimate Africa – not where I really ought to remain and take root?

  Mozambique provided less of the intense interaction that excited us in Swaziland, mainly because of the gulf of language. But it was no less of an encounter with Africa. Initially, there were explosions and silences between H and me, because of her constitutional inability to say no to anyone: a youngster hitch-hiking along a route that would take us a hundred kilometres off our course, a friend she had met earlier and who wanted to know whether her son and his best friend could go camping with us, an eager elderly man who wanted to send a parcel with us to a relative living in the north of the country while we were heading south.

  Not that these deviations were all annoying or a waste of time. Gradually they brought with them an indispensable discovery of what ‘African time’ was about. Some of it I only learned to understand in retrospect. All my life I have been hurrying – to do something, to get somewhere, even when I had no idea of what that ‘something’ or ‘somewhere’ might be – as if I was by nature scared of getting stuck without anything driving me on or luring me elsewhere. But this early, all too brief, exposure to the Africa beyond our borders marked the beginning of a shift. Towards what? I am not sure I can define it: perhaps it is by its very nature indefinable. Perhaps it is just this: that there need not be a specified aim or destination. H knew this instinctively. Which was why, very soon afterwards, on her ‘aimless’ journey through Africa, she could tune in so spontaneously to the continent. One late afternoon, as we were preparing to return to our hotel at Mantenga Falls, H found an old man in a market, a man as ageless and as dignified as a euphorbia. He had been waiting all day for a friend or relative who was supposed to take him home, somewhere in the green hills. But the person had failed to turn up, and now the old man was stranded. He did not seem unduly perturbed about it: if the lift materialised the next day, or the day after, it wouldn’t make much difference. Predictably, H proposed that we take him home. Just as predictably, I was upset. While we argued, the old man stood serenely waiting. He must have known who would win the argument.

  ‘But look!’ I was fighting back, angrily and unreasonably.

  ‘There’s nothing to look at,’ H said imperturbably. ‘Let’s just take him home. He is tired. He is old.’

  ‘But we’ll be late,’ I insisted.

  ‘Late for what?’

  I turned directly to the old man, trying to bypass her. ‘I really am terribly sorry,’ I explained to him. ‘But we have an urgent appointment at our hotel.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Please understand,’ I pleaded, beginning to be persuaded by my own urgency. ‘We must get back to our hotel before dark.’

  All he said was the single word, ‘Why?’

  It hit me in the guts. Why indeed? Why did we have to be anywhere at any given time? I took a deep breath and, avoiding H’s brown eyes, said, ‘Let’s go. If you will show us the way?’

  It was a journey of about an hour. The sun was down before we arrived at the old man’s village. For most of the time he had a solemn little smile on his face carved with deep incisions like a Makonde mask, his timeless eyes hooded. He was sitting very straight, a posture like an aloe, in a silence that seemed to have been gathered inside him for years, perhaps for centuries and generations; but it was a radiating silence, spreading gently through the car, like something he wished to share with us. A silence of suffering perhaps; certainly of understanding, of wisdom and forgiveness.

  And by the time we arrived, I felt as if all the earlier anger and anxiety and resentment had ebbed out of me. I had learned a lesson, the terms of which I could not yet explain, and which even now I am not sure I have fully grasped. But it has to do with not resisting and yet not being passive either: perhaps an acknowledgement of complicity, not in some act of commission or omission, but simply complicity in life, in the hour he had generously deigned to share with us. I had the feeling, then, of knowing, and understanding, something more about this continent which was his, but also mine. The silence persisted on the long way back; but this time there was nothing tense or anxious about it; we held hands, our fingers lightly clasped. We were together, now.

  And once we finally arrived at Ponta do Ouro, our destination, and settled into the bright yellow and red cabins allotted to us, after attempting the first night or two to sleep on the beach and being devoured alive by swarms of sand fleas and small crabs and man-eating mosquitoes and all ten plagues of
ancient Egypt, it was bliss. But there was a dark undercurrent too, provided by a copy of an old magazine that had found its way with us, that featured a long discussion between James Baldwin and someone called Schulberg that did the rounds and provoked endless discussion which never strayed far from the aches and agonies of the promised land, so near and yet seemingly so distant.

  There were other reminders of where we came from. Almost next to the holiday cabins of Ponta do Ouro was a military camp where a detachment of the Mozambican army was stationed – melancholy-looking young Portuguese men, none of them appearing a day older than sixteen, plodding about in army boots far too big for them, and carrying automatic rifles that made them look even more like kids playing. The saddest thing about all of this was that the soldiers had brought a mascot with them, a small black boy whose parents had been killed in the war. What made it even more poignant, was that he had his own mascot, a baby vervet monkey that he took with him wherever he went, and that clung to him as if to its mother, its wizened black face more ancient than any we had seen.

  The war, we learned, was not far away; was never far away. Frelimo and Renamo. Africa and Europe. The ubiquitous war of Africa and its Others. Soon, within a month or so, H would also be drawn into it when she was approached to carry messages to people who subsequently turned out to be Frelimo men. In due course the news would filter back to me, when a contingent of security police turned up and wanted to know what I knew about a certain Miss H and her involvement with planned terrorist activities in neighbouring states. I was duly warned: ‘We want you to know that we’re keeping an eye on you, we’re watching you very, very closely.’ Because it concerned race relations, and because I, as a white, was not supposed to get involved in the things blacks were up to.

  After that holiday, if holiday it was, black would never again be simply black to me, or white white. What was intensified by this journey, was the raging turmoil in my mind about the ‘place’ of a white person in a black struggle for liberation. It was dramatised by the debate between the white, liberal, Jewish Schulberg and the black Baldwin: Schulberg arguing with devastating clarity and logic, trying to remain calm and to reason, Baldwin becoming ever more passionate. Logically speaking, Baldwin would point out time and time again, yes, logically, logically, you may be right – ‘but, Budd, we live with pain and rage – with pain and rage.’ Many years later, at the Edinburgh Festival, the only occasion on which I ever met James Baldwin, there were moments when, through the layers of weariness and disappointment that had become heavier with the years, that smouldering passion still shone through his words and set his sad eyes alight. We live with pain and rage – with pain and rage. Those translucent days with H and Breyten and Yolande – green in Swaziland, golden in Mozambique – brought a new, real and deep understanding of what South Africa was about, what had accumulated in its past, what marked its wounded present, and what might possibly still lie ahead. About what my own possible part in it all might be, I still could not define very clearly. But I knew that I was moving towards a moment of choice, and that there was no way it could be avoided.

  A few weeks after this holiday, H left on her meanderings through Africa. For me, it was an agonising time. She was an incorrigibly bad correspondent and sometimes a month or more would go by without any news at all, when fears and apprehensions and suspicions took over. And when, always well after the event, she would report on her journey and I would realise that my fears had been groundless, even though what she had lived through was often enough to turn one grey overnight. But she would always shrug or laugh it off. I was left to conjure up images of shaky bus rides on dusty roads, with the person next to you peacefully, or noisily, sleeping with a heavy head resting on your chest or in your lap; of spendings nights with strangers in some godforsaken little hovel in the bundu; playing on an idyllic beach in Zanzibar, paddling in a leaky canoe or trying to catch fish with your bare hands; fighting off flies, or mosquitoes; attending political rallies in market squares and scattering in all directions to get away from police; sometimes hiding away from random gunfire in the night; wallowing in muddy water, or falling ill and being attended by strangers muttering in foreign languages; attending the funeral of a dead child; speaking to priests in white robes or dog collars, noses and cheeks flushed in alcoholic scarlet or purple, sombre as marabous; gazing at the snows of Kilimanjaro in the distance; admiring the flight of pelicans rising unbelievably high on thermals, or flocks of flamingoes ascending pink against the horizon like an early dawn; or staring in disbelief at European men in impeccable white playing cricket or bowls or croquet on a lawn at the edge of a lake; being assailed by beggars and lepers, by the maimed and the famished and the altogether hopeless; Mayibuye Africa.

  I followed her whole journey on a map, cherishing memories that seemed more and more unlikely, dreaming about a future that seemed more and more impossible. Africa was reduced to this map, as I tried to wend my own way through Grahamstown, the small university town that had become my refuge – not a refuge from the world, but a different kind of immersion in it. I talked to white friends who had in various ways been scarred by futile or meaningful attempts at involvement ‘on behalf of’ others: Norman, whose experience of solitary confinement had caused him to withdraw more and more deeply into himself; Terrence, banned from interacting socially with more than one person at a time, after he had spent time in the Transkei investigating security police activities and atrocities in their vain attempts to bring to boot the murderers of a family of whites at Bashee Bridge. They had rounded up all the men and boys from mere children to venerable old patriarchs, near-suffocating or half-drowning them and forcing them to ride the broomstick ‘helicopter’, or taking them up in real helicopters, tying their ankles together and pushing them out to dangle upside down, and beating them, and beating them, and beating them. I spoke to black friends, some of whom had been at the receiving end of these tortures and had survived, somehow, to tell their stories. Not broken, at least not all of them, but made more resolute, more dedicated, more passionate about one day, that utterly impossible day, when the dry white season would end and rain would come down to assuage the thirsty land.

  There were black students to whom I would give extra classes in the afternoons. Sometimes with unexpected results, as when one of them, a tall and gentle and always smiling man called Prins, who had a contact in the post office, started to warn me when the security police had given instructions for my mail to be opened, or my phone to be tapped. ‘Be careful,’ was all he would say. ‘Be careful. There are eyes and ears all over the place. Don’t let them catch you. We need you outside. Be careful.’

  But this happened only rarely. I was still acclimatising, feeling my way, learning.

  During university holidays I often went to Cape Town. Jan Rabie and Marjorie Wallace’s home in Green Point was a bazaar for artists of any description. What made it unusual, for someone with my background, was that this must have been, for Afrikaans speakers, one of the only places in the country where colour didn’t matter at all. I have often wondered how many foreigners from abroad landed in Cape Town with only a single name and address: Jan Rabie. They were of all persuasions: from Tory or Republican to Labourite or communist, from men of the cloth to women of dubious virtue, from rabble-rousers to academics, from grave, pale researchers to extravagant adventurers. No wonder that this was H’s first port of call, on the day I met her. And it was no coincidence that this was the place where our campaign against censorship was officially launched, and where I first met Ingrid.

  But the real eye-opener, the real window-opener, was the opportunity of meeting ‘people of colour’ without any inhibition or question. For many of us, more and more as apartheid grew worse, it was easier to meet an Indian from Durban, a coloured from Cape Town, a black from Johannesburg, in London or Paris or Cologne. Because of its tradition, this could happen almost ‘normally’ in a place like Grahamstown. But the context was English. It was more or less expected that meetin
g across the colour divide would occur more readily there. The house in Cheviot Place was Afrikaans. And that made all the difference.

  Some of the lasting friendships of my life began there, over coffee or red wine or one of Marjorie’s inimitable boboties – prepared in a black pot that grew blacker and smaller every time it was used, since Marjorie did not believe in ever washing it, and simply allowed the encrustations to build up over the years, restricting more and more the little round hollow in the centre. This was where I first met the writer and academic Kenny Parker. The robust and ever-voluble Richard Rive. The poet and dramatist with the gentle smile, the shy eyes and the acerbic wit, Adam Small. And all of this, step by step, bit by bit, helped me to acclimatise in my own land, to redefine the parameters of the ‘normal’. To argue and reason and fight, and to find one another, and laugh, and embrace, and learn to believe in the future.

  * * *

  There were setbacks too. When Back to the Sun, after three rewrites, was finally done, my usual Afrikaans publishers, Human & Rousseau, responded negatively. Both the directors, Koos Human and Leon Rousseau, wrote me well-meaning and deeply sincere and utterly damning letters. By then it was already 1968, and I was in Europe again. The letters boiled down to the same verdict: I had made, they said, what might well have been the worst mistake of my life by getting involved with H. She clearly had no good influence on me and was threatening to turn me into something I could never be: a political writer. This, they told me, went against everything that had made me a writer. They couldn’t very well tell me to break up the relationship. Through a cruel and perhaps crude stroke of irony our relationship was, just then, in fact crumbling, for reasons that had nothing to do with writing.

  With the exception of the devastating blow dealt me by the censors when they banned Looking on Darkness five years later, this was the bleakest moment of my writing career. In both cases, staggering and struggling to remain standing as currents and countercurrents of emotions tried to sweep me from my feet, there was ultimately only one decision that branded itself into my consciousness: You’re not going to get me down. You’re not going to win. I won’t stop writing. I’ll bloody well show you. Melodramatic defiance, of the adolescent kind. But right then it was all I could hold on to. And during that year in Paris I was pushed much, much further than before on the road to becoming what Koos and Leon had found me incapable of: a political writer. With this supreme irony, that I now believe they were right. By temperament I was never a political writer. From that time on I could not write anything that was not political. But that only confirmed, I think, that I was indeed not a ‘political writer’ in the sense in which it is usually understood. I don’t think I have ever written ‘about’ politics. If politics permeated everything I wrote, it was as part of that much-misunderstood notion, the ‘human condition’. The public, or social, dimension of the human condition. What fascinated me then, as it fascinates me now, is the concept of story. And it is hard altogether to exclude a political dimension from the telling of any story.