A Fork in the Road Read online

  The lecture had unexpected consequences. Some time afterwards, after Fischer had been released to die in the home of his brother, I was invited by his daughters, Ruth and Ilse, to deliver the funeral oration in Bloemfontein. I was prevented from accepting by the one action of my father’s which I have never been able to forgive. He had been complaining of chest pains for some time and I knew that over the past twenty years he’d had several heart attacks, at least two of them serious. At the time of Fischer’s death my father had made an appointment with a doctor. Then he learned about the invitation from Bloemfontein, and promptly cancelled his doctor’s appointment. If we declined the invitation to the funeral, he said very calmly and very firmly, he would reinstate his appointment. Otherwise, whatever happened, would be on my head.

  I had no choice but to send the text of my speech to Bloemfontein with friends. But it was with great resentment and a feeling of having betrayed Bram Fischer and his cause that I watched them drive off.

  On that unforgettable day, as Fischer’s death was mourned, as his life was celebrated, over a non-existent grave, the state having refused to hand over even the ashes of the deceased to his family, I remembered the weekend at Phoenix. Those two young boys and their reactions to being kept away from the swings on the beach because they were black. And Mewa Ramgobin. The man he had become. The man he might have been.

  Cry, the beloved country.

  The weekend in what was then still Natal added to a growing feeling of malaise in me. The elation that had marked my return from Paris was beginning to wear off. The realities of the South Africa I’d come home to were proving too strong for the expectations and the idealism that had buoyed me during the first months. My involvement in the theatre, directing Camus’ Les Justes, had kept disillusionment at bay for a while; meeting Alta and getting married brought a new lease on life. But the disheartening reality of the everyday world was becoming too insistent to ignore. There was an underlying hopelessness in the situation. The reception of the Gandhi lecture had provided some new impetus to my faith in the future. But the reality of Mewa’s existence in banishment, corroborated by so much other evidence of the impasse the country seemed to have reached – the hardening racism of whites, the despair and anger simmering among blacks, particularly the young generation – was draining my energy and stifling my optimism. In my journals from that time, there are more and more comments on an ‘inner paralysis’ that was gnawing away at my wish to do something, and at my more and more urgent need to write. ‘This impotent and unbearable anger about what is happening all around me – the blunt stupidity and entrenched inhumanity and ritual cruelty that marks white society – the more I see of people the less I can believe in them and the more I need to find refuge in “humanity”, which can be a dangerous illusion …’ And the visit to Phoenix Settlement was a definitive milestone on this road.

  The gloom only began to lift once I was able to immerse myself in the writing of Looking on Darkness. Then came the unbelievable uproar about the banning of the book. This also had an immediate effect on my daily life. There was a seemingly endless avalanche of letters and telephone calls not only from places scattered across the map of South Africa, but from Stockholm and Stuttgart and Seattle and Santiago, from Tokyo and New Delhi and Aix-en-Provence and Laos and Yaoundé and Buenos Aires, you name it. More pertinently, I was approached by strangers in the street who wished to shake my hand and wish me good luck. Others turned up on my doorstep, or in my office at the university. Some of the correspondents and visitors were chancers who assumed that I must dispose of unimaginable riches and would love to share these with them. Some were genuinely in need. A number of old acquaintances wrote to say that they wanted to break off all contact as they felt they could no longer be associated with someone like me. In most cases it was a relief, but a few of the letters did hurt.

  Many of the strangers who got in touch were black. As if the ban had suddenly broken down all the traditional barriers. For every person that turned his back, there were five new friends. For every white who was peeved or offended, five blacks were interested. It did not mean that my black readership grew exponentially overnight. But the ban on the book had a ripple effect in the black community. People who would never read it, came to know about it. And with the traditional obstacles cleared away, my possibilities of making contact with fellow South Africans were suddenly unlimited.

  A few years later this was confirmed by the publication of A Dry White Season. Not all the contacts stimulated by publications and bans could, by any stretch of the imagination, be called ‘normal’. But at least the possibility of personal relationships had been created. And much of what ensued during the following decades was determined by these beginnings.

  One of the consequences of the ban on Looking on Darkness and its subsequent publication in so many countries was that a heavy international workload was added to my schedule. Even though I tried to limit my commitments to what seemed only strictly necessary, I was travelling more and more of the time, including up to eight or nine trips abroad a year, to conferences and symposiums and launches and literary festivals and universities in Europe, the US, South America and Australia. It brought about meetings with a number of writers who were household names and had taken a place of honour in my reading – and in my lecturing – over many years. The Congolese Tchicaya U’Tamsi whose wisdom was always illuminated by humour. Amiri Baraka with his verve and flamboyance. James Baldwin in whom a deep bedrock of sadness underpinned everything else. The fatherly Chinua Achebe who was like an aloe that had taken root in a foreign land, and whose great concern was children’s books: ‘It is a fallacy to think we can teach our children. They teach us. They teach us how to fly. Because children can fly, you know. We are weighed down by possessions.’ Ngugi wa Thiong’o, as alert and unwavering as a fishing eagle. More recently there was the beautiful Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, her figure as poised and graceful as her prose. There were also exiled South Africans like Bessie Head, with whom I developed, in Australia, a special and at times deeply moving rapport; the often truculent but always stimulating Lewis Nkosi, and innumerable others. More and more over the years I had encounters with representatives of the ANC in exile – in Melbourne, in Amsterdam and London, in Dublin and Edinburgh, in Copenhagen and Helsinki and Stockholm, even in Moscow and what was then still Leningrad. These meetings often started formally, even cautiously, but invariably they became hearty and exuberant, even celebratory; more than once they marked the beginning of friendships which still endure.

  Inside South Africa, the seventies and eighties became more and more harrowing. In the long run it was almost impossible to find time for writing. Hardly a day went by without someone turning up at my front door to ask for help. These visits were often concerned with personal or domestic matters: someone who needed money to pay school or university fees; someone who was threatened with eviction unless the rent was paid; a woman who needed money to buy clothes for her children, a man who had collapsed in the street and needed to go to hospital, a boy who had been abandoned by his parents, and an ancient, wizened old man whose only son had died and who now had no one to take care of him … There were, inevitably, opportunists and chancers too. One teenage girl, a consummate little actress, arrived at least once a week, pretending to be a different person with new needs every time; a small, spruce man with an amazing command of English and who went by the name of Milton, who usually turned up with a basket of fruit, and more than once tried to sell me the plums or lemons he had just picked off my own trees at the back of the house; a large, boisterous woman who arrived at my front gate in a storm, safely ensconced under a wide umbrella while I became soaked to the skin in the torrential rain. ‘Can you please give me money to buy a shop,’ she demanded imperiously. ‘Then I won’t ever bother you again.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ I apologised, ‘but I’m afraid that is a bit steep.’ She shrugged and looked at me as if she was doing me a huge favour: ‘Then how about wheels?’ ‘Wheels?’ I asked,
flabbergasted. ‘A car,’ she explained. When I regretfully declined, she said condescendingly, ‘All right, then just give me bus fare.’ On another occasion she wanted money to buy school shoes for her children. I telephoned the shop to enquire about the price, then presented her with the exact amount. She refused to take it. ‘That will be Ackerman’s,’ she said. ‘You may buy shoes for your children at Ackerman’s. But I shop at Cartwright’s.’

  Most of those in need I directed to organisations where they could be helped. The Black Sash. Local charities. Doctors. Hospitals. Lawyers. Where it was feasible, I tried to step in myself. Sometimes by helping pupils at school or students at university with their work, or by spending time with young would-be writers on their manuscripts. There was a young man, Raymond, whose dearest wish was to become a photographer. For several weeks I gave him lessons, and at the end of the course I gave him a camera to set out on his own. A few times there was no pretext: spontaneous friendships developed and ran their course, driven by their own momentum. Such a man was Kenneth Mdana, who first came to me in the wake of the ban on Looking on Darkness. We started talking, a conversation that continued until I left Grahamstown, almost fifteen years later. Kenneth was an incredibly resourceful entrepreneur, always with a bee in his bonnet, a new scheme hatching. To set up a shop. To set up a brick-making concern. To become a journalist. I dutifully became involved every time. The problem was that his schemes almost never worked out – in part, because he did not believe in gradualism. Kenneth thought big. Mindful of my vegetable-growing days, I fell for each and every scheme. I’m still not sure how many thousands went down the drain in this way. And yet, somehow, Kenneth made me believe that it was always worthwhile: and if there was a failure now and then, or even every time, there was always the firm assurance that next time it would work.

  The last scheme we were involved in was his translation of A Dry White Season into Xhosa. It started with the loan, then the gift, of a typewriter. Then a second typewriter. Then long stretches when I had to ‘keep him going’, to buy him time for writing. The entire process took years and years. But he saw it through. In the end the translation was published, under the title Umqwebedu. It was not a commercial success. But I shall always be indebted to him for the glimpses he afforded me into his life and the life of his people. And for the equanimity – no, the uproarious good humour – with which he managed to surmount every obstacle that came his way. The break that was caused by my move to Cape Town at the end of 1990, was an irreparable loss. He contacted me only once, to let me know that his wife had died; he needed money for the funeral. But the rest was silence.

  It was not always possible to respond to calls and cries for help. There were those people who found themselves in more hazardous circumstances – not just debt, or legal or administrative or career problems, but personal agony which seemed to be irremediable, caused by the simple, deep, terrible fact of living in the wrong country at the wrong time. Several times I was drawn into families where things were falling apart impossibly. One such moment will remain with me forever.

  I can still see it: the old man standing opposite me, quaking with rage. But his stooped shoulders, whose usual squareness suggest the confidence of a man who knows that God is on his side, betray the underlying pain. On a chair against the wall his wife is slumped, sobbing quietly, a motherly hen disturbed in her brooding; and on the edge of the narrow bed sits a young man, pale, his blond head bowed, but with a body rigid in defiance. ‘It would have been easier for me today,’ says the father, his voice trembling, ‘to have been told that my son was dead. Rather than this.’ I feel like an intruder in this intimate and agonising scene. What I am witnessing is more than the gulf which separates generations: it is, in a family context, the breakdown of one system of values and the affirmation of another; the shattering of an image the world has long taken for granted, that of the Afrikaner monolith. Half an hour earlier, the young man, a postgraduate student in my department, telephoned me and asked me to come to his digs. He had just informed his parents that he was in love with a girl who, like himself, is the child of an Afrikaans-speaking church minister – except that, in terms of the South African racial laws, he is white while she has been classified ‘coloured’.

  ‘What will become of us?’ asks the old man in horror. ‘I shall lose my job in the church. Not one of our friends will speak to us again.’ This, to him, is more important than whatever may happen to his son.

  ‘He is still our son,’ the mother whispers in quiet desperation; her husband does not even seem to hear.

  I plead with him not to tear his family apart, but he stubbornly refuses to give an inch. The Bible tells us, he argues, not to consort with the animals of the veld. I get the impression that the mother may be open to more understanding; but during the rest of our conversation she is very deliberately sidelined by her husband; and when they leave, the break seems to be complete. For as long as he refuses to reject the woman he loves, the young man will not be regarded as the son of the family.

  It pleased me to find that in his own way he was as stubborn as his father. He stayed with his girlfriend; in due course they were married. Some years later he became a lecturer at the same university. His father resigned from his position in the church. I do not know whether there ever was a reconciliation. Perhaps, when the political change in the country came, it may have been too late for this family.

  At the time this was only one episode among innumerable others I had to tackle during those middle years of the eighties. It was the first time in my life that I had to turn away from writing for several years: the demands of every day had simply become too much. The most difficult to handle were the cases of families where a father, or brother, or cousin, or child had been picked up by the security police and had ‘disappeared’. There was so little I could really do; on my own, certainly, I was powerless. Once again I had to turn to others for help – organisations like the Black Sash, contacts in parliament or close to it. There was a lawyer friend who very often was prepared to pursue such cases. Without charge. Two or three times I ventured to confront the SB myself. I came to know much more intimately than I would ever have wished the inside of their depressing grey offices hidden behind a seemingly ordinary door on the floor above OK Bazaars in the centre of town. But behind that wooden door was an intimidating steel grille; and once that slammed shut there was no telling whether it would ever be opened again. Those visits began long before I was summoned there in my own right, to recover the papers and typewriters the SB had confiscated from my home, or to ‘answer a few questions’.

  Needless to say, such interventions, or attempts at intervention, were not always successful. There were in fact, some very distressing moments. I remember being visited one Saturday afternoon by a distraught young man. During our conversation he burst into tears and sobbed so violently that he became incoherent. Only after several cups of tea did he recover sufficiently to tell me his story.

  He was a first-year student at Rhodes, the third of seven siblings. Since his early childhood he had dreamt of studying, but to proceed to university from a coloured township was almost unthinkable. However, his family had soon realised that he was unusually gifted and after long discussions with his class teacher and his school principal, they started preparing for the big step. From the age of twelve he himself had spent every spare hour doing all kinds of odd jobs – from gardening and washing cars and running errands for white housewives to doing bookkeeping for shopkeepers and charity organisations – so as to earn money. Until at last, two years after finishing school, he had saved enough to register for a BA at Rhodes, planning to proceed to a law degree afterwards. It was tough, but the whole family was prepared to scrape together their puny resources to keep him going, and two kind white people, a teacher and a lawyer, had signed surety for a loan.

  Then, three weeks before he came to see me, he had received an unexpected visit from two white strangers who took him to the Botanical Gardens where they starte
d discussing his studies with him. They were surprisingly well informed about his background, his family circumstances, his future plans and dreams. And they were exceedingly friendly. After an hour or so they came to the point. They had been following his progress at Rhodes and they were impressed by his potential. Aware of the odds against which he had to battle for success, they were prepared to offer him a job for five years, until the completion of his LLB; in addition, they would pay him a monthly retainer, enough to supply his family; he would even have enough pocket money left to take care of some of his needs beyond the merely basic.

  And in exchange?

  Oh not much, they assured him. Not much at all. It would take up very little of his time. A few hours a week would be enough.

  But what kind of work were they talking about?

  It took them a while to get to the point. He must be aware, they said, that there were some students at Rhodes – only a small handful – who were not interested only in studying but who were involved in all kinds of activities that could harm the lives of other people. These miscreants were well known to the authorities, but it wasn’t always easy to obtain hard and pertinent evidence against them. It was of vital importance to the whole student community, to the welfare of society, that such nefarious activities be brought to the attention of the authorities. There was no risk involved, none at all. He could go on with his studies and nobody would ever be any the wiser. All that was required of him would be to report, from time to time, to these two gentlemen on specific individuals on campus. What was said in certain lectures. Who attended which meetings. Nothing out of the ordinary. No risk at all. The sort of thing he would be noticing anyway. The only effort involved might be a brief report from time to time. And just think of what he would be getting in return …