A Fork in the Road Page 43

  He felt his throat contract. But it was impossible to refuse outright. There was something in their attitude, something below the surface, an expression in their eyes, that made him hesitate. He told them he needed time to think.

  Of course, they said. Take all the time you need. We’re not pressing you. Just think it over. Think of your studies. Think of your family.

  A week later they were back. As generous and friendly as before. This time there was an almost imperceptible shift in their attitude. He was still free to take his time, of course; but at some stage they would need an answer. They counted on his co-operation.

  That was when he dared to ask them outright, ‘You want me to spy on my friends?’

  They seemed hurt. That wasn’t a word they would ever use, they assured him. It was a matter of simple observation. And of communicating only what might be harmful to others. It was to prevent untoward things happening. Nothing more. Surely the safety of his community was important to him? An environment in which he and his family could live a decent life and in which all his ambitions could be fulfilled. He should think of his hard-working parents. Of his brothers and sisters. They all stood to benefit from his decision.

  They would be back in another week. Would that suit him?

  He wanted to tell them to go and never, ever to come back. To fuck the hell off. But he couldn’t. He was too scared.

  The day before he came to me he tried to remain incommunicado. For the first time that year he didn’t even go to lectures. But in the afternoon, downtown, near the cathedral, they came and stood on either side of him. He had never even seen them coming. One moment he was sauntering on his own, the next they were there, smiling and friendly.

  Back to the Botanical Gardens. So …? He must have had time to think it over properly?

  He tried to ward them off. But they had a way of circling and circling around him with their remarks, their questions, and then suddenly moving in.

  Well …?

  He needed more time. It was a difficult decision.

  Nothing difficult about it at all if his studies and his future were important to him. If he cared about the welfare of his family. And his own.

  And what, he suddenly dared to ask, what if he said no?

  They were sure, they said with their unwavering smiles, that he wouldn’t be so short-sighted.

  But really, he insisted with last-ditch bravado. He had thought about it. It was very tempting. But no. He couldn’t. He respected his professors. He was close to his friends. They should please forgive him, but he couldn’t.

  ‘Perhaps you haven’t really thought about the alternatives,’ said the older of the two, a man who bore a stale smell of smoke on him. ‘This is for your own good.’

  ‘What are the alternatives?’

  The man didn’t exactly smile. The expression on his face was more one of commiseration.

  ‘I’m sure you wouldn’t like to think of alternatives,’ he said.

  In a last gasp of boldness he managed to ask, ‘So you’re not really giving me a choice, are you?’

  ‘Oh no, it remains your choice. Absolutely. We wouldn’t think of pressurising you.’

  They got up. They would be back in two days. They hoped he didn’t mind, but they really couldn’t wait much longer.

  Now he was here with me. There was no one else he could turn to. But what could I do? Going to the SB myself would be useless. They would simply deny all knowledge of him. Asking my lawyer friend Neville to intervene, would make things incomparably worse for the student. I could approach other friends – in psychology, in politics, in sociology, in any number of other disciplines. But they would all be dead ends.

  And tomorrow the two men would be back.

  Seldom in my life have I felt so impotent, so useless. All I could urge him to do was to persist with saying no to them. And then to come back to me. But how would that help? There was nothing, absolutely nothing, those people could not do.

  When I saw my young visitor off at the front door, a pale blue Toyota pulled off from where it had been parked on the far side of the street.

  I remained standing at the door watching the young man walk away.

  He never came back.

  I had only his first name, which made it difficult to make enquiries. But I did manage to pick up his traces from two of his professors. All they could tell me was that he’d stopped coming to their classes. I got hold of his home address and was received with hostility and open suspicion. He had ‘gone away’, was all his mother was prepared to say.

  Worst of all, by far the worst, was the sickening thought, afterwards, that it might all have been a ruse. He himself might have been planted by the SB to fulfil some sinister design of their own.

  And yet I shall never forget the expression of utter hopelessness on his face that day he came to me.

  My own situation was becoming steadily more difficult. During the eighties the government, threatened from all sides, changed the law governing military conscription. At the time I went to university, when only a restricted number of new recruits were absorbed into the army, their names were drawn by lot. It so happened that I was not among the chosen. Over the years, military service became ever longer: from a few months in my time, it increased to two full years, followed up by compulsory annual camps for many years. Now, in the eighties, it was announced that even men of fifty-five could be called up, and we were all required to register. The actual selection was to be random. This new measure was something I had never bargained for. All I knew was that I would not face this kind, or any kind, of conscription. But I wasn’t going to wait quietly for a possible call-up to materialise. In the circumstances I had only one choice. I wrote an open letter to the minister of defence and to President P. W. Botha and made public my stance of refusing to obey any call-up.

  Interestingly enough, the call-up never came.

  But there were other potholes and traps along this road. The End Conscription Campaign was gaining ground throughout the country, particularly on the university campuses; and on more and more occasions I was invited to address the opponents of the system. It was quite a quandary. To dissuade anyone from obeying a call-up for military service was branded treason, for which there was a heavy prison sentence. On the other hand, not heeding the appeals of young men who needed to be encouraged, would be, to my mind, an even worse kind of betrayal. The only solution I could think of, if solution it was, was to accept such invitations to address dissidents wherever in the country they found themselves. All I could reasonably, and legally offer them, was a talk on the nature of individual responsibility. I cannot urge you not to go to the army, I would tell them. But there is one thing I can do, and am doing now: that is to remind you that no one can compel you to act against your own will. You do have a choice. Don’t ever forget that. You have a choice. You must also know, however, that every choice has its price, and this price may be painful and high. That is ultimately for you to decide. The only truly important thing to remember is that you do have this choice. If you cannot accept the challenge, that is your decision. But whatever you do decide to do, never forget that it will be you, and only you, who takes the decision.

  What overall effect these talks had, if any, I don’t know. But I do know that I received a significant number of letters from young men who had emigrated to Holland, to Canada, and elsewhere, rather than do their military service. I may not have been responsible for any of this. But at least I tried. There was not much else I could do.

  It was a situation in which individual action, however well meant and however precisely targeted, had become demonstrably futile. This, among many other reasons, was why the expedition to Dakar in Senegal, in July 1987, became such a watershed. Shortly before, one or two groups of influential businessmen had travelled from South Africa for discussions with members of the ANC in exile; but this time the aim of the Institute for a Democratic Alternative in South Africa (IDASA) was to bring the ANC in contact with Afrikaners fro
m a variety of backgrounds – politicians, artists, writers and journalists, academics, jurists, educationists, leading theologians, businessmen, student leaders, a rugby captain. In great secrecy, the imprisoned Mandela had begun to talk to a few representatives of the South African government, including the ministers of justice, constitutional affairs, foreign affairs and even a reluctant and volatile President P. W. Botha. Significantly, he did not meet F. W. de Klerk who, presumably, was still regarded as too rightist to be trusted. ‘To us,’ wrote Mandela in his memoir, ‘Mr de Klerk was a cipher … he seemed to be the quintessential party man, nothing more and nothing less.’ But not one of us, and presumably very few members in the ANC in exile, were aware of this. In the group that assembled at Jan Smuts airport on 6 July, not one had any idea of who the others would be. And the government did its best to intimidate and discredit us. On our return to Johannesburg on 20 July, after a journey that included not only Dakar but also Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso and Accra, our passports were confiscated amid indications that P. W. Botha had actually given an order to have us all arrested. Only the forceful intervention of Pik Botha, minister of foreign affairs, saved the day. Even so, somebody had tipped off the extremist AWB, the Afrikaner Resistance Movement led by the notorious Eugène Terre’blanche, to ensure that, even if we were allowed back, we would be welcomed by a rowdy and militant mob. If we had not been smuggled past the demonstrators in ones and twos there might well have been a violent confrontation.

  Apart from this, there was ample evidence that during the delay at the airport our luggage had been tampered with before being released to us. I found a mysterious set of red billiard balls in my suitcase. More importantly, the journal in which I’d made copious notes of the whole trip was missing. Fortunately I had anticipated something of the kind on our stopover in Paris and left a complete set of photocopies with my publisher. The moment my original journal went missing, an official in the French Department of Foreign Affairs dispatched the copies in a diplomatic bag to Cape Town from where they were couriered to me in time for the series of public meetings on the Dakar event which I addressed, sometimes on my own, sometimes with the member of parliament Errol Moorcroft.

  For months in advance, there had been secret scurryings between the members of the group and the two main organisers, Frederik van Zyl Slabbert and Alex Boraine, previously leaders of the Opposition in parliament, and afterwards founders of IDASA. In Paris, their contact and fellow organiser was Breyten; and the whole enterprise was sponsored by Danielle Mitterrand, wife of the French president. We were all enjoined to keep the whole enterprise secret. And I still find it something of a miracle that to such a large extent the secret was respected sufficiently to ensure that the SB did not abort the whole enterprise.

  For many of the travellers there were, initially at least, other worries: it was revealing, and amusing, to note, during the first few days of the trip, that the overriding question in the minds of all those brave hearts, all of them leaders in their field, people to be reckoned with, was: What will my mother say if she finds out? I cannot recall a single man in the group who was concerned about the fathers. But it must say something about the makeup of the Afrikaner psyche that we were all deeply apprehensive about the reaction of our mothers.

  The ANC delegation was led by a young and confident Thabo Mbeki, even at that early stage introduced as the ‘crown prince’ of the organisation. In Dakar he introduced himself by saying, ‘I am Thabo Mbeki. I am an Afrikaner.’ Shades of Ich bin ein Berliner. Several delegates became good friends of mine. There was Essop Pahad, who is now the minister in the office of the president. There was the ebullient Steve Tshwete, and the scintillating intellectual Mac Maharaj, with his amazing command of English. His most touching moment came when we spoke about something as simple as where we came from. ‘The longest period of permanent residence I had in my life was my years on Robben Island.’ There was the warm and inspiring Barbara Masekela who would be my candidate for the first woman president of the country, who later became ambassador in Paris, and subsequently in Washington. The Washington residence welcomed me when Franklin Sonn was in charge there: another lifelong friend from Dakar – although he initially formed part of the ‘internal group’. Lindiwe Mabusa, another poet, was in the ANC delegation too and was among the exiles whom I visited again in Lusaka a year or so later; now high commissioner in London, she, too, offered me the hospitality of her residence during visits. A few of them I’d met on other visits abroad, most importantly and endearingly Kader Ismael, whom I had first met in Dublin, and whose erudition and love of the arts and flamboyant turn of phrase won and warmed my heart from the outset. Today we are neighbours.

  Apart from the wide-ranging discussions, the witty repartee, the in-depth exchanges – not only during official sessions but at the night-long get-togethers where differences were explored, agreements sealed and celebrated, lasting friendships forged – added new dimensions, new ways of seeing and thinking, to many of us. There were some exceptions too, like the historian Hermann Giliomee, who remarked to me within the first few days, ‘You can’t trust these people’, Lawrence Schlemmer and one or two others, who – in their own way of seeing – refused to be ‘duped’ and developed an even more profound distrust of the ANC than before. With hindsight, I suppose some might regard them as the first in our group to ‘see the light’ and to become disillusioned with the prospect of a future ANC government. Yet I am not so sure that the situation was as simple and obvious as that. A number of members from the ‘internal group’ have undoubtedly shifted their positions – or ‘grown’, or ‘developed’? – over the years; it seems to me that the same may be said of the ANC group from outside. Certainly, a person like Mbeki cannot be, cannot be expected to be, the same person he was in 1987. At that moment, I still believe, there were enough people on both sides who made it possible to believe that a radical renewal of South African society was actually conceivable, and that we could play a part in it.

  It was, for many of us, the first true glimpse of a New South Africa. The dream was no longer just a dream, an illusion. It had become attainable, whatever the odds. One should never forget that at that very juncture the country was in a mess: the rapid rise of the United Democratic Movement had rendered South Africa practically ungovernable; and the extreme violence with which the government tried to stem the tide, was a sign of its growing desperation. Never before or since has terrorism in one form or another been so widespread in South Africa, most spectacularly in the programmes of systematic and universal torture and state-sponsored murder and explosions introduced by P. W. Botha and his successor. And even those of us who are in revolt about the waves of violence the country has to face today as I am writing this, should pause to consider how nearly irredeemable the situation had become in 1987.

  There was something that had always struck me on my journeys abroad, since long before Dakar: it was the observation that whenever two South Africans, one black, the other white, met on foreign soil, surrounded by people from every imaginable country in the world, these two would be the ones who, in the course of an evening, would drift together and acknowledge each other as brothers or sisters. There was a memorable occasion in London when an expatriate black South African met a white compatriot who had come on a visit, and vociferously confronted him: ‘You fucking Boers! When we’re in South Africa, you despise me and vilify me and beat me and throw me into prison. You don’t allow me into your restaurants or hotels or cinemas, you refuse to drink with me, you kick me off the sidewalk when you meet me, you degrade and humiliate and insult me at every opportunity and in every possible way. And then you expect me to love you?!’ He paused for a moment, then added in measured tones, ‘And I do!’

  Dakar was the living illustration of this almost fateful bond that, in spite of all, tied us together. We arrived in Senegal as members of two delegations, divided by a fair deal of hesitancy and suspicion; when we left, we were – with the exception, perhaps, of a few disgruntled
cynics in the ‘internals’ and two or three manipulators with hidden agendas among the exiles – members of a single group of South Africans. What we had seen was the vision of a shared future. What we had achieved was to prove that violence did not need to be the only option: negotiation had become a viable alternative; to talk, to discuss, was now the obvious way. And, as Thabo Mbeki pointed out some years later: together, we had reduced the fear of change among blacks and whites alike.

  There were many unforgettable things about Dakar. Its smells and sights – of dirt and dust and shit and flowers and ozone; its brightly coloured birds and markets, its throngs and sudden spaces, its vistas of an ever-present dark-blue sea, its outrageous and brightly coloured textiles, its lambs roasting on the spit in streets or backyards, its straggling chickens and mangy dogs, its tall men in stark white boubous, its stately women with piled-up colourful braids and headgear, its laughing children with wide smiles and cascading laughter. There were parties and receptions to welcome us – in halls and on terraces and in yards engulfed with foliage, in the presidential palace – but always we returned to our meetings and discussions, in a tumultuous and never-ending celebration of the discovery and the affirmation of everything we shared and which was so much more than what divided us.

  The key moment was a trip, by boat, across the narrow strait that divides the mainland from the island of Gorée, where long ago, as Toni Morrison reminds us in Beloved, over sixty million slaves were incarcerated before being transported to the States. Thousands perished by jumping off the small boats that transported them from the portals of the House of Bondage to the waiting ships. This meant almost instant death in a feeding frenzy amid the lurking sharks. But these captives were the lucky ones. For the others there was a lifetime – or generations – of slavery ahead. Crowded, in tears, in the small space of the front entrance, in the stifling embrace of two curved flights of stairs, we were shaken to the bone, moved more deeply than anything most of us had ever felt before. And there were some who voiced the almost impossible hope that, like this house of the death of dreams, Robben Island might one day become a station on humanity’s road of hope, that Long Walk to Freedom Nelson Mandela was already secretly writing in his small cell, in preparation for the day he would walk out of there himself, a walk he never doubted, but which for us, there – even in spite of the new shared hope we had discovered – seemed impossibly far away.