A Fork in the Road Page 28

  But the new phase in censorship – that is, the Lammie Snyman period, following the banning of Kennis van die Aand – hit the jackpot with Etienne Leroux’s Magersfontein, o Magersfontein, published in 1976 and banned by the board in 1977. After that it was taken on review by three judges of the Supreme Court. By this time, the terms of the Publications Control Act had been amended to allow for the ‘likely reader’ of a publication to be taken into consideration, and for a committee of so-called ‘literary experts’ to advise the court. In these changed circumstances, and with Lammie Snyman replaced by the young and open-minded Kobus van Rooyen, Magersfontein was declared, in the nice phrasing of censorship judgements, to be ‘not undesirable’. The award of the Hertzog Prize for literature to the book, the highest accolade of the South African Academy of Arts and Science, effectively confirmed the end of the plague of censorship in the country. Sadly, however, in recent times the ANC government under Thabo Mbeki, which has become increasingly totalitarian in its approach, has announced measures that threaten to steer the control of films and publications back to the dark ages of Nationalist rule. In this respect, as in others, the hard-won freedoms celebrated in 1994 are now exposed to the threat of ever more insidious erosion.

  For Kennis van die Aand there were still two further hurdles to cross. In 1979, five years after the ban, it was referred to the board again on review. By this time the Committee of Literary Experts was already functioning. I approached the Revd Izak de Villiers, who was also a poet and regarded as liberal-minded, to testify on my behalf. He declined, pointing out that he was already on the committee of experts and would be in a position to act more effectively in that capacity, ‘from the inside’. But when the verdict came, it was announced that the finding of the committee had been unanimous. I was shocked, after the strong personal assurances de Villiers had given me. I telephoned him to ask him why he had lied to me, which I did not find very appetising coming from a man of the cloth. He could give no coherent explanation, apart from mumbling about having been in a depression and unable to think clearly. Many years later he apologised. But I still regard that action as one of the most painful betrayals of my life.

  There had been others. During my student years one of my true mentors in literature had been T. T. Cloete, and much of my lifelong involvement with literary theory had been nurtured by him. My political Damascus in Paris – first, my outrage about Sharpeville, then much more drastically my reaction to the student uprisings – had alienated him as he came to believe that I was promoting the cause of communism and had become an enemy of the state. After Kennis van die Aand he wrote a secret paper for the Broederbond on the ideological threat posed by writers like Nadine Gordimer, Breyten Breytenbach and myself, which was disseminated to the Departments of Afrikaans at several universities. In the University of Port Elizabeth, an entire first-year course in Afrikaans literature based on Cloete’s ‘revelations’ was devised by one Humphrey du Randt, a literary nonentity who was in cahoots with politicians in powerful positions. This, I realised, was paving the way for state action. By that time, Breyten was already in prison, but Nadine and I were exposed. Both of us decided to take du Randt to court as an early safeguard against further action by the SB.

  I approached an astute lawyer friend, Neville Borman, who abhorred the apartheid regime and relished the opportunity of issuing a suit for libel against du Randt. The learned professor, already the laughing stock of literary scholars, had been bold while launching back-stabbing attacks from within the safety of the Broederbond, but did not have the courage of his convictions in an open court. So he travelled to Grahamstown to see me personally. It was one of the most distasteful confrontations I have ever experienced. He went down on all fours on the cheap green carpet in my office at Rhodes and burst into tears as he pleaded for mercy on behalf of his wife, who he said was ill, and his poor children. Faced with this abjection I relented, which might have been a mistake. He undertook to publish apologies to Nadine and myself, to terminate his slanderous first-year course, and to pay our legal costs. Later, predictably, he attempted to renege. I undertook to intercede with Nadine. Reluctantly, she consented to drop charges, but firmly insisted on a public apology, and dictated the wording for it. I, foolishly, left the wording of the apology to the grovelling quadruped. As a result, he formulated it in the vaguest terms and kept me waiting for the promised refund of legal costs until I threatened him with another summons from Neville.

  Many years later, the air between Cloete and myself was also cleared, this time in a spirit of understanding and generosity – fostered by the political changes in the country. In due course I was even invited to deliver a T. T. Cloete Lecture at Potchefstroom University.

  In the meantime the censorship scene was beginning to change from inside. But, as happens so often with the nastier forms of disease, it had to get worse before it got better. At roughly the same time as the ban on Etienne Leroux’s Magersfontein, both Nadine Gordimer, with Burger’s Daughter and I, with A Dry White Season, were hit with bans, in what more or less amounted to Lammie Snyman’s death rattle. A year earlier, the English edition of Rumours of Rain had also been impounded upon arrival in South Africa, and kept under embargo for months; but when it was announced, early in 1979, that it had won the CNA Award, then the country’s major literary prize, the embargo was hurriedly lifted. It was this kind of confused and cowardly action that had helped seal the fate of censorship even before it was officially dismantled.

  The writing of Rumours of Rain was unexpectedly interrupted when a contingent of seven security police arrived at my front door in 1977 and burst into the passage without producing a search warrant. They had come, they announced, to search the house. What for? I ventured to ask. The man in charge, a lean and hungry-looking officer called Siebert, merely narrowed his eyes, and told me that this was none of my business: they would know what they were looking for once they’d found it.

  I was unceremoniously ordered to sit down, Alta who’d been working in her pottery studio, was called in, ‘to prevent her from alerting the neighbours’, and the seven men started to ransack my study: every drawer, every filing cabinet, every bookshelf, although I did not get the impression that their interest was literary. When I suggested that if only they’d tell me what they were looking for I might help them to find it, Gauleiter Siebert very curtly told me to shut up. ‘We’ll find what we want, don’t you worry, even if it means breaking down every brick in this house.’ From the growing pile of books and files and press cuttings and notes and manuscripts gathered by the Seven Samurai I gradually formed a pretty shrewd idea of what they were searching for. Some time earlier, Breyten Breytenbach had briefly returned to South Africa, more or less clandestinely, in disguise and under the assumed name of Christian Galaska, on a private mission that might, or might not, have had to do with anti-government activities. In the course of the next year or so, the government unearthed all manner of mind-blowing ‘evidence’ against him, including the planned arrival of Russian U-boats in a secret hollow somewhere below Robben Island. The security police, alerted to his mission, which had already been called off by the ANC and their organiser, Johnny Makhatini, followed him throughout the country, pouncing only as he was about to board a plane back to Paris.

  And it was in the wake of Breyten’s visit that my unwelcome visitors arrived. It was several hours before they left – after they had also driven me up to my office at Rhodes University, squeezed in tightly between two officers on the back seat of the car, with two others in front. The remaining three stayed behind at home, presumably to keep a lookout for subversive action by my wife and our two children of five and three. In the end they left with a large box filled with confiscated books and papers, including all my notes for Rumours of Rain; and both typewriters.

  In some miraculous way they had overlooked the first draft of the novel itself, which was in our bedroom upstairs where I had been working on corrections. In those days, through some stupid superstition, I ne
ver made any copies of a manuscript in progress, firmly believing that it was unlucky to keep more than the single original typescript. But from that day on I made sure that I kept several carbon copies of everything I wrote, one of which was mailed to friends in Europe every week.

  I was on a curious high after they left. I did not tell anybody about the visit. But I did drive to a colleague’s home to borrow his typewriter, and before the end of the day I wrote double my daily quota. In the end, Rumours of Rain was finished well before the deadline I had imposed on myself. However, Alta’s anxious entreaties – for the children’s sake – after that visit from the SB resulted in my holding back the manuscript for a full year after it was completed. Her concern was triggered, among other reasons, by the unnerving discovery, only a few months later, that the officers who had visited us were exactly the same men who were responsible for the torture and murder of Steve Biko. The man who drove the van in which the naked Biko was transported from Port Elizabeth to Pretoria was the same Siebert who had threatened to break my house down brick by brick.

  I had attended Breyten’s trial in Pretoria and used the opportunity to look in on two other trials in progress in the Supreme Court to wish the accused well; I was even allowed by the security police to spend a few minutes alone with Breyten. One small piece of information he passed on to me I found particularly touching: in the cells below the courtroom, he said, he’d noticed among the spread of graffiti on the wall one inscription that had struck him: it was, quite simply, my title Kennis van die Aand.

  He was sentenced to nine years. But after barely one year he was hauled out of prison to face a second trial, this time for allegedly attempting to escape. Among the letters he’d smuggled out from his incarceration, with the ‘help’ of a young warder known as ‘Lucky’ Groenewald, were copies of letters addressed to several friends, including myself. How well I remember the only one that was actually delivered to me, carried by Lucky in person.

  It was a shattering experience. What the tone of this letter conveyed was the devastating effect solitary confinement had had on Breyten. All I knew was that he needed help. From the first moment I had very little doubt that the whole thing had been a set-up. There was no way I could trust this Lucky person with his fake naïvety, his apparent Boere-innocence. But the overriding impression was that Breyten desperately needed help. I paid scant attention to the specific request in the letter: that he needed R300 – quite a substantial sum in those days – towards arranging a cavale. I must confess that in the confused state I was in at that moment, I had no idea that cavale referred to an attempted escape; I did not even think of looking it up in a dictionary. And even if I had understood perfectly what my friend wanted I would still have acted in the way I did.

  Lucky insisted that I destroy the letter immediately, which I did in his presence. But I did memorise as much of it as I could, and afterwards wrote that down. We arranged to meet a few hours later, by which time I had the cash ready.

  At the same time I had to warn Breyten of my suspicion that Lucky had been planted to incriminate him. I went across the street from my home to a very good friend, whom I trusted completely to keep a secret, particularly a dangerous one. We conferred for half an hour. The friend concurred with my fears, but resolved that I could not turn down Breyten’s desperate request. So we agreed on two things: I would compose a letter in response to Breyten’s, to sound as helpful and sympathetic as possible, while still trying to convey the message about my suspicions; and I had to ensure, by planting a tape recorder in my car, that I had evidence about Lucky’s role, in case he did turn out to be a spy and I had to prove my suspicions in court.

  It took some time to compose the letter. Years before, in Breyten’s first published volume of prose, called Katastrofes (1964), he had written a small story about a man buying himself a pumpkin for his birthday on 16 September, Breyten’s own date of birth. The pumpkin begins to grow uncontrollably and devours everything around it, including the man who bought it. Over the years, this story had become a starting point and a pretext in many of the letters we’d exchanged. And it now seemed the obvious framework of reference for the new letter, undoubtedly the most precarious of our entire correspondence. I’m not sure that in those fraught circumstances I did a particularly good job, but I did my best to devise a story in which a pumpkin is used to deliver a message planted by hostile vegetable forces in order to save the life of some innocent potato or leek or beetroot. This I incorporated in a seemingly straightforward reply to Breyten’s letter. I also included the R300. Then I slid my tape recorder under the passenger seat in my car, made sure that it worked, and drove to the house of the ‘uncle’ with whom Lucky was supposed to be staying.

  Just before I got out of the car to meet him, I switched on the recorder.

  A minute later I opened the passenger door to let Lucky in. He slid into the seat and pushed it back as far as it could go, ostensibly to make room for his long legs. The whole situation made it abundantly clear that Lucky knew exactly what to expect – and wanted me to know that he knew. As he pushed back his seat, the tape recorder on the floor was exposed in all its glory. And so we had to conduct our ensuing conversation with the recorder in full view, with both of us pretending not to be aware of it at all.

  Hilarious, yes, I suppose it was. But in the circumstances, with Breyten’s life in more than one respect at stake, it really did not seem all that funny. At least, I wretchedly tried to console myself after Lucky had taken his leave, I had some evidence of the attempt to frame me. And I blindly hoped that, somehow, the mere fact of the SB knowing that I was wise to what they were up to, would discourage them from proceeding against Breyten any further.

  It was a vain hope.

  A few months later, Breyten was brought back to the Supreme Court to face a second trial. Unlike the first time, where the trial was in the hands of a right-wing judge clearly kowtowing to the apartheid regime, the new judge attempted – within the narrow scope permitted him by the system in force – to allow justice to prevail. No further punishment was pronounced, and the state’s representatives received a severe dressing-down. It was largely due to this verdict that no further action was taken, either against Breyten or those of us implicated in the trial. Only weeks before the trial, when I was in Johannesburg to confer with Breyten’s brilliant new lawyer, advocate Johan Kriegler, I had asked him about my own chances following Breyten’s appearance. Kriegler merely folded his hands, looked me straight in the face, and said, ‘You’re in the shit.’

  Even before this second trial I had some further encounters with the security police. At one stage I found myself in Pretoria to appeal on Breyten’s behalf against a ban imposed by the Publications Control Board on my friend’s collection of poems, Skryt: since Breyten was then in prison he could not handle the appeal himself. However, a minefield of legalities prevented me from acting on his behalf unless I could obtain his written permission – which was possible only if the security police were prepared to pass my written request on to him. I was instructed to go to their headquarters in Pretoria and on the appointed morning I presented myself at the Wachthuis. Needless to say, I was in a state of trepidation. As a futile precaution I took two friends from Wits University with me, but they were ordered to stay outside when I was led through the heavy iron security gate that slammed shut behind me. I couldn’t help thinking, rather melodramatically: Abandon all hope, ye who enter.

  I followed someone down a long ill-lit corridor, into the intestines of the cavernous building, and was shown into an office. Its very ordinariness, its drabness, was shocking.

  ‘There are friends waiting for me,’ I informed the major in charge, a thickset man in grey flannels and a blue sports jacket, smelling of smoke and with teeth and hands discoloured by nicotine. ‘Could you please tell me at what time I should ask them to come back?’

  His face remained utterly expressionless. ‘That,’ he said in a low, even voice, ‘is entirely up to you.’


  I was ordered to sit, and several other men, all in sports jackets, joined the major around a nondescript desk. I couldn’t help remembering my friend John Miles telling me about a visit he’d paid the SB some months earlier, also in connection with Breyten, in the lugubrious blue building of John Vorster Square in Johannesburg. One of the interrogators had spent the entire session standing with his back against a door frame without ever saying a word; all he did was to hold an orange in his outstretched hand, throwing it up and catching it, throwing it up and catching it, palpating the fruit in his large paw, then resuming the maddening throwing and catching, throwing and catching, throwing and catching.

  For several hours the men in the interrogation room – which was soon clouded by slowly whirling blue smoke – kept on asking about my relationship with Breyten. Where and when we’d met. Whether he had ever introduced me to a man called Johnny Makhatini. I denied it all, trying to eliminate from my memory the small Malebranche bistro where I’d first met Johnny and had been introduced to elaborate strategies of communicating to a contact address in Paris details of plane and rail and bus timetables, which had made no sense to me, and had seemed more of a boys’ game of cops and robbers than anything truly serious. Or any of a long list of other names, most of which I honestly had never heard before. Whether I believed in violence as a solution for political problems. No, I said. Whether to my knowledge Breyten was likely to resort to violence. No, I said. On and on and on, going in circles most of the time. There was a curious, uncanny sense of calm, of detachment in me. If this is it, I remember thinking, then let it be so. All I can do is sit it out.