A Fork in the Road Read online

  Only a day before his arrest I’d had a long conversation, in the tearoom at Rhodes University, with friends in the Department of Politics, who knew Biko well and could wax eloquent – even though they were normally quite hard-boiled realists, even cynics – in discussing this charismatic young man’s impact on black politics, particularly in the Eastern Cape. And now came the news of his arrest, in Grahamstown itself, a few blocks away from the house in which I sat working on a novel about a fictitious black man arrested, and tortured, and killed, not by nameless grey shadows in the security police, but by people known to me, who in the recent past had searched my home.

  The days that followed Biko’s arrest were chaotic, and rife with rumours. It was only on 13 September that something definite came out of the confusion: Steve Biko was dead. The first statements by the unlamented minister of justice, Jimmy Kruger, announced that he had died following a hunger strike. One speaker at the National Party congress which was then taking place in the Transvaal, a man called Christoffel Venter, stood up to congratulate the minister who, he said to applause, was such a democratic leader that he even ‘allowed detainees the democratic right to starve themselves to death’.

  Kruger’s famous statement at the congress, reverberating around the globe, was that, ‘Biko’s death leaves me cold.’ Afterwards he claimed that the Afrikaans expression, Dit laat my koud, does not mean It leaves me cold, but something like I am sorry, I am neutral about it. At the annual meeting of the Afrikaans Writers’ Guild, a month later, I proposed a motion that was adopted unanimously, to confirm, very simply, that It leaves me cold means It leaves me cold.

  Gradually more of the truth filtered through, and at the inquest into the death in November the full state version of the event was presented, starting with an account of the ‘extensive brain injury’ sustained by Biko, an ‘abrasion to the left forehead’ and other ‘numerous but superficial injuries’. In spite of the brilliant and dramatic cross-examination by Sidney Kentridge and George Bizos, the magistrate predictably found that, ‘on the available evidence the death cannot be attributed to any act or omission amounting to a criminal offence on the part of any person.’ Even so, this event has remained a defining moment in the contemporary history of South Africa; and in spite of the official finding, the evil machinations of the security police had been exposed more relentlessly than ever before.

  As far as A Dry White Season was concerned, however, my paralysis continued. It seemed obscene to resume writing. How could I indulge in fabricating a fiction – no matter how extensively it was based on fact – when in my immediate vicinity a man had been tortured and killed in such a way? It was one of the few times in my life when I felt like agreeing with Theodor Adorno who argued that after the Holocaust, poetry was no longer possible. For several months I could not write at all. I felt so drained and sickened by it all that I could not even join in any of the public demonstrations that followed Biko’s death and the government’s decision, a month later, to ban almost twenty political, religious and cultural organisations, thereby making public resistance to apartheid virtually impossible. Only when Nadine Gordimer telephoned to invite me to join her and Athol Fugard in a statement of protest did I drift out of my paralysis. Very slowly, life came ebbing back. And in the course of many discussions with those closest to me, above all Alta, I came to realise that writing – and most pertinently, writing A Dry White Season – was not an obscenity, or an irrelevance, but an imperative.

  To a large extent the press, all the public media, had been gagged. Public demonstrations were illegal. Most of the organisations that had previously orchestrated resistance to apartheid, had been silenced. But in this oppressive silence there was one voice that could still be heard, no matter how maligned or suspect it had become for many: the voice of the arts. For me, the voice of fiction.

  At this time a group of students at Rhodes University asked me to address them about the road ahead. I told Lynette, the young woman who had come to talk to me, that I really didn’t see much point in it. She was one of the most persuasive, positive, courageous young people I had met in years, and in the past I had always accepted her invitations. But this time I wanted to decline. The odds had become too great.

  She stood up and looked me straight in the face. ‘If that is really the way you feel, I shall go and tell them. But then, next time we have a students’ meeting, we can take as our topic what to do if people like you no longer want to talk to us.’

  I accepted.

  The next morning a crowd of staff and students gathered in the quad. I spoke about the imperative never to stop protesting, never to give up, never to take no for an answer. I probably summoned up Camus, as always. And, taking my cue from Artaud, I built up to a rather melodramatic, overheated conclusion:

  We shall shout our resistance from the rooftops. And when we are no longer allowed to shout, we shall speak our truths. When we can no longer speak, we shall whisper. And when they forbid us to whisper, we shall signal through the flames.

  Rabble-rousing, purple prose indeed. But I was desperate.

  And after that, slowly, but fired by a ferocious resolve, I returned to the novel.

  But that was not the end of it. When the book was finished, I sent it to my Afrikaans publishers, Human & Rousseau. Following the earlier fate of Looking on Darkness, they decided – with good reason, as it turned out – that in the prevailing climate they could not risk publication. After that, I turned to my three friends at the University of the Witwatersrand, Ernst Lindenberg, Ampie Coetzee and John Miles, who had previously founded the informal, ad hoc publishing firm of Taurus, and brought out the clandestine edition of An Instant in the Wind. This novel had not encountered any problems with the censors, presumably because even though, like Looking on Darkness, it dealt with a love relationship between a coloured man and a white woman, it was set in a rather remote past. A Dry White Season was contemporary, and it dealt with something more explosive than interracial sex: the pornography of the security police, and the efforts of an ordinary, unremarkable Afrikaner to bring to light the darkness and the institutionalised violence that underlies apartheid.

  When it was time to publish A Dry White Season, Ernst, Ampie and John could not risk taking any chances. They still had the list of subscribers compiled at the time An Instant in the Wind was circulated; but they also had to make sure that there would be no leaks at the printers. Their solution was to find a small Indian firm where nobody understood Afrikaans. To make doubly sure, they delivered the manuscript without any title or author’s name attached. This information was divulged only on the very last day of printing.

  There were other hazards along the way. I had to have regular contact with my ‘publishers’, preferably by telephone, to deal with queries as and when they arose. Knowing from experience both bitter and hilarious how vulnerable all phone conversations were, the solution we found was to use as our reference a thesis on the poetry of Breyten Breytenbach recently written under my supervision by Annari van der Merwe, today the publisher of the prestigious firm of Umuzi. We were naïvely satisfied that this would eliminate all problems. But there were a few that could not be foreseen. Foremost among these was John’s tendency to forget bits of key information. In consequence, when we’d arranged for them to call me at a public telephone or a friend’s house at, say, eight o’ clock in the evening, there might be a most unexpected call from John at ten in the morning or three in the afternoon. A flustered, badly disguised voice would ask, ‘Sorry, man, I’ve forgotten what number we’re supposed to call you on tonight. Can you please tell me again?’ Which would result in an endless new series of explanations, diversions and reroutings.

  Amazingly enough, the book came out, apparently without a hitch. I had flown up to Johannesburg for the occasion, and in the bookshop of a mutual friend we met, long after hours, to put the 2,000 printed copies in padded envelopes and address them to the names on the mailing list, with a printed slip in each to inform the recipients o
f the price, and to assure them that if they did not want the book they were welcome to return it to sender.

  As far as I know, only a single copy was returned; and nobody failed to pay.

  A week later the book was banned, but by that time the full print run had been dispatched, and the printer – still none the wiser – had been paid.

  There was a final piquant twist to the story when about two weeks later I went to London for the British launch of the book. I was waiting for the boarding call when two solemn men in flannels and sports jackets and wearing telltale grey shoes, turned up beside me and invited me to step aside with them. I was taken to a wooden partition in a wall. Behind it was a door leading to a small room, concealed so neatly that nobody could possibly suspect its existence without prior knowledge. Inside were a group of six or seven men. In the middle of the room, which could have been a waiting room at a station, was a long low table; and on the table sat the black Samsonite suitcase I had checked in only minutes earlier.

  I was invited – the word they used more than once – to write down a full list of the suitcase’s contents. They studied the list, then invited me (that word, once again) to reflect, just in case I had forgotten something. I accepted the invitation, duly reflected, added another few handkerchiefs and one pair of underpants, and handed the list back to them. Da capo. Another moment of reflection. A red jersey added to the list. No more? No more. Are you quite sure? I’m sure. You can vouch for it? I hope so. Are you really, absolutely sure? I think I’m sure. The primus inter pares approached the suitcase, undid the two clasps, then straightened his back and turned round to face me.

  ‘For the last time,’ he said, ‘are you sure?’

  I sighed and nodded.

  He opened the case and stepped backwards. One never knows with terrorists.

  When there was no detonation, several of the others approached the table and gave a helping hand. Every single item was removed, inspected from all sides, professionally evaluated, and placed on the open space on the low table next to the suitcase. Once it was clear that there was no contraband or explosives or booby traps among my nondescript possessions, the leader of the pack beckoned one of the others to follow him, and they disappeared through the door which was no door.

  Ten minutes later they were back.

  ‘You may go,’ said the top brass. Whereupon he invited me to repack my suitcase. I swallowed the rage that had been building up steadily inside me and did his bidding.

  Only as I picked up the case to leave did I venture to ask, ‘Do you mind telling me why I was detained?’

  ‘You were not detained,’ said Numero Uno. ‘You were just invited to—’

  ‘I know,’ I said as calmly as I could. ‘To tell you what I had in my suitcase. But I really would like to know what you were looking for.’

  A long pause. Then, now visibly irritated, the spokesman said, ‘All I can say is that we received a tip-off.’

  ‘About what?’

  He stared hard at me. ‘That you were trying to smuggle copies of your book out of the country.’

  ‘But could you please explain,’ I said, exasperated, ‘why anybody would want to smuggle copies of a book that is banned in this country to a country where it is not banned and where it has already been published?’

  ‘You may go now,’ said the Grand Inquisitor.

  And this time I thought it wise just to do as he said, while there was still a chance of catching my plane.

  In 1984 it was time for another review of the ban on Kennis van die Aand. This time there was no problem. Kobus van Rooyen, who had grown considerably in the new liberal dispensation he had brought to censorship, did not hesitate to set the book free – albeit with an age restriction of eighteen. Even then the finding was not without a sting in the tail. When my then paperback publisher, Fontana, applied to the Publications Appeal Board for permission to export their English paperback edition to South Africa, they received the following report:

  The Committee of Literary Experts advised that the work could not on account of its literary characteristics or merits, be protected against undesirability.

  – There are no qualities in the novel that compensate for the cardinal defects noted in the report.

  – An example of the crude intermingling of sex and religion is found here, and here.

  – Absolute sophistication and literary or theological insight cannot be expected from the reasonable likely reader of this book.

  – It is not only a very mediocre novel, it is at times a non-novel; non-literature. This is not the result of amateurish blundering and bungling, but rather that of sophistication but essentially trite and superficial manupulation [sic!]

  – What has given serious offence is the way biblical and religious material in general have been employed to gain artistic plausibility and significance.

  – The attitude of the author and storyteller is one of bitter hate and resentment.

  – To expect his readers to accept the sacred terminal experiences in the life of Jesus Christ as symbols or metaphor of sexual satiety as in this particular novel – that is going too far.

  They had dropped the original charges of pornography, blasphemy and endangering the security of the state, only to morph into literary critics.

  Yet it would not be entirely true to regard the abandonment of censorship as an unequivocal victory for literature, for the arts generally. What was decisive in this development was the overall context in the country, particularly since the Soweto uprising of 1976 and the murder of Steve Biko a year later, with its immediate aftermath, the banning of nineteen political organisations and a general clampdown on the press freedom. Predictably, these dire events led to an increased persecution of all forms of opposition – a process that persisted, visibly, with the repression and the successive states of emergency in the country during the eighties, until even P. W. Botha could no longer contain it and subsided into apoplexy. But even while this was happening, there were growing signs of panic in the government’s frenetic attempts to manage the situation. International sanctions were beginning to hurt the regime. Locally, a United Democratic Movement was established as a front for the exiled ANC; trade unions, permitted by the government in a desperate attempt to relieve the pressures accumulating within labour, introduced open defiance and challenges to the authorities on the floors of factories; demonstrations and various forms of opposition gained momentum in the churches, on the university campuses. The security police simply lacked the manpower to counter all these challenges at the same time. The desperate measures they were driven to, included the worst excesses of torture and repression the country had yet witnessed – but once again the very excesses signalled the breakdown of the system. And in the midst of all this turmoil, the arts were no longer regarded as a serious threat. Especially for a regime not noted for its interest in reading. P. W. Botha himself was reputed not even to read newspapers.

  South Africa was finally ready to face the challenges of democracy. Except that, regrettably, democracy is seldom permanent unless an electorate remains constantly alert against abuses. What a pity that today, after some fifteen years of this new experience, the old reflexes should appear to be preparing for a comeback – sponsored by the very people who, under apartheid, had suffered most under the lack of freedom of speech. But we know, depressingly, that a battered child is often likely to become an abusive parent.

  HAPPY RETURNS

  CAST THY BREAD upon the waters, said the preacher, for after many days it will return to thee. The poet Uys Krige was more cynical: ‘If you cast your bread on the water,’ he warned, ‘you must not expect to get a Christmas cake in return.’ I couldn’t help remembering this when I thought about unexpected responses I have had to my writing over the years.

  One of the most moving letters I have ever received, about ten years after the publication of An Instant in the Wind, was from a woman in Scotland who sent me a few pound notes, asking me to buy flowers, to put on the graves
of Aob/Adam and Elisabeth. It was painful to explain to her that they were fictitious characters.

  An overwhelming letter once came from a woman in Belgium. She gave no address, but the letter bore the postmark of a town near Charleroi. There was no need for me to answer, she insisted. She merely needed somebody she could write to, and for some reason my books had convinced her that I would be that person. Her life was in a mess, she said, and she had to unburden to someone or she would go mad. From then on, for more than two years, she bombarded me with letters. Occasionally there would be an interval of a week or two, once even a couple of months, but on average there would be three or four letters a week, running to five or eight or ten or upon occasion even twenty or thirty pages, on very thin blue paper, in a handwriting that fluctuated between primness and wild extravagance. The contents varied just as much. She was married, but had just begun an affair with another man; in due course a second lover started drifting on and off the stage. She also had suspicions about the affairs, real or presumed, of her husband. The story became as complicated as any soap opera on television. I kept waiting for a letter announcing some kind of conclusion, or a request for advice (which she seemed to need rather desperately), or simply informing me that this was The End. But it never came. Eventually the letters just stopped coming.

  The reaction of women readers to the portrayal of Andrea in The Wall of the Plague was strongly divided. I had some very angry attacks and denunciations; at the same time it was gratifying to receive from female readers some of the most enthusiastic and supportive encouragement I have ever had for any of my novels. One response I found particularly touching, deeply moving in fact, came from a young woman in France who wrote to me that she had identified so strongly with the character of Andrea that she had been prompted to write me the story of her own life in reply. Her letter ran to just over 300 pages. I tried to persuade her to find a publisher for it, but never heard from her again.