Swimming with Cobras (16 page)

As we drove to Alexandria we found that we had left the lovely day behind. Dark clouds were blowing over and as we entered the small town it began to rain. Nevertheless, we had some good fortune. The young man on duty at the prison was a conscript doing his army service. Apparently sympathetic to his lone female detainee, or perhaps just not overly familiar with the rules, he allowed Nova into Melissa's cell where they sat together for half an hour – something they would not do again for the next three months. I waited outside amid the drab surroundings. The only cheerful detail was a solitary tree full of pink blossoms, anticipating an early spring. When Nova emerged I caught sight of Melissa with a policewoman at her side being taken off in a car. She was being transferred to North End prison in Port Elizabeth. Our visit had been just in time.

The only cafe we could find amidst Alexandria's garages and agricultural stores was inside a small general dealer. There we huddled over cups of tea at a Formica-topped table roped off from packets of cornflakes, tins of condensed milk and shiny metal buckets. There were several farmers in regulation khaki gathered at the counter. For the second time that day we felt the need to talk in whispers. Nova told me that Melissa had been treated well. The cell was small and all she had to read was the Bible. Her watch had been taken, so apart from the changing light it was difficult for her to establish the time. She had scratched a calendar on the wall to keep track of the days. She had a small exercise yard in which she could do some aerobics each day, and her food was brought from the local hotel.

Our visit to the cells in Alexandria was far better than subsequent ones to Port Elizabeth. North End prison was a bleak fortress bordering on a cemetery. Inside, footsteps echoed along stone corridors and keys clattered in steel doors. Nova met with Melissa in a small cubicle where they talked through a glass partition. I was never allowed to stay and speak to the detainee. Once, after Nova's visit, we managed to walk around the grounds whistling
Yellow Submarine
underneath what we hoped were the windows of the women's cells.

In Alexandria, Melissa told her mother that she had received a visit from Lloyd Edwards. He was not there to interrogate her but to chat in a “friendly” way – mostly about himself. He also told her who the next Grahamstown detainee would be. Nova and I felt, probably naïvely, that we must warn Tim Bouwer of his impending disaster. He was a young teacher at a school in the township, where he was active in the teachers' union. As soon as we reached town we visited his house. Tim went pale at the news but realised there was nothing he could do. He would wait. An hour later he was detained. Over the ensuing weeks his partner carefully embroidered messages on clothes, which she sent to him in prison.

Among my possessions are two scrappy notes smuggled from prison by detainees during the 1980s. One, on crumpled lavatory paper and barely legible, came from a detained Dependants' Conference worker, Sox Leleki. “Rosemary,” he writes, “I want to be visited by a legal representative as soon as possible.” The disintegrating paper and the spidery writing convey something of the pathos of the detainee's lot, sitting day in and day out in prison without being charged and with no prospect of at least appearing in court. Sox's request was in vain. The Detainees' Parents Support Committee estimated that 25 000 people were detained between 12 June 1986 and 11 June 1987.

The second note is from our fieldworker, Janet Small. She was detained as late as 1988, on a winter's day when the snow on the Amatola Mountains was just visible against the skyline. It happened when we were beginning to hope that the detentions might be tailing off after a mass crackdown earlier in the year. In February 1988, 17 anti-apartheid groups had been banned in one blow. Like all the fieldworkers the Black Sash employed over the years, Janet was a model of integrity and serious-mindedness. The crumpled note, much folded and frayed by the time it reached me, read, “I feel very anxious about Sash money being spent on my salary. I deeply appreciate your support, but I think you should consider at least reducing my salary…. Looking on the bright side,” she continued, “I think a restriction order [anticipated upon release from detention] may be a blessing for me. I imagine the culture shock of walking out of solitary confinement into an exuberant Sash meeting! I'm sure I'd be overcome. On a more serious note, please don't feel too anxious about me. It is very good to experience the reality after all those years of working with ex-detainees. That work had prepared me, but somehow it is different to what I expected. Not worse, different. My heart goes out to those who have been inside for years.”

In Grahamstown there was no pattern to the detentions – except perhaps the signature presence of Lloyd's hand – but it often seemed that it was the vulnerable who were targeted: single women, students, people with particular family responsibilities. Very special relationships developed among those connected with the detainees, and Black Sash members were hugely supportive of each other. Judy Chalmers, Sue Power and I, Sash chairpersons in Port Elizabeth, East London and Grahamstown respectively, phoned each other almost every day. “Are you still there?” we would ask. We were part of a small but strong group bound by a common purpose and a special camaraderie. I was greatly inspired by the reserves of strength demonstrated and the resilient sense of humour that buoyed the strongest of them, come what may. When so many people around us were kow-towing to the government, this group was a lifeline.

In some circles I was viewed as radical, dangerous even. I once discovered that the mother of one of my children's friends was discouraged from friendship with me because I was regarded as a communist. I knew that this term was commonly used to tar anyone who was anti-government so I didn't much mind the label, but in truth my values were very far from the true tenets of communism. Our neighbour, an elderly man who often sat on his stoep watching the world go by, revealed just how disapproving many people were of our lifestyle when he scowled at my friends. Peter Vale once brought Nyami Goniwe, the wife of activist Matthew Goniwe, to a lunch party at our house and cheerfully called out “Good Morning, Oom” as he and Nyami stepped out of their car. The only reply he got was, “I don't greet those who walk with the black nation.” A friend from university days in England visited us and was amazed to find "fun-loving Rosie turned into a wholehearted political activist”. Moments like these always gave me pause. How wholeheartedly did I
really
immerse myself? In truth I knew that there was a bit of me that always held back, a part of Rosie that always hovered in the margins.

What accounted for this restraint? Was it my foreignness? Was it the spectre of deportation? Was it the fault of my gregarious nature that wished to belong to the community in which I found myself? Although as a family we all believed in the same principles and always felt generally more comfortable with others who were themselves engaged in activism, we were nevertheless also part of the white culture that surrounded us. We maintained friendships and social relationships with many diverse people. We were “ordinary” citizens living “normal” South African lives. I could come home from work, my head full of atrocities, and step into the cool, high-ceilinged rooms of my house, full of furniture and china my grandparents had owned and the books, paintings and music Malvern and I had collected, and the disorder and chaos of the outside world would seem remote and unreal. We had friends who were apolitical. There were conversations we simply didn't have with them. We socialised with the parents of our children's boarding school friends, some of whom lived glamorous lives that were positively surreal in apartheid South Africa. There was a particular pair who would arrive exhausted from their professional lives in the city. The mother, artistic and elegant, would recline on the couch in tapered velvet pants and cloak, exotic silver bangles jangling, and talk about the buzz of city life. I loved the sophistication and fair these people brought with them and felt positively frumpish in their presence, but of my other life, the one they seemed not to know about, I could say nothing. It might as well have been another country. Did Lloyd Edwards and his ilk look at this schizophrenic muddle and decide I was not a threat? Was it my respectable bourgeois self that protected me from being detained?

Then, just as suddenly and unpredictably as the detentions of those close to us took place, so the releases occurred. Late one evening in spring, Priscilla and Ron arrived unannounced at our door. We phoned Nova and Peter and drank whisky late into the night, hoping that the release of their loved ones would follow speedily. Then one unforgettable afternoon, I heard a shrieking in the street and the doors of a kombi being pulled back. Melissa and Ann were out. The news spread and an impromptu party erupted in our house. And as always the toast was for those who weren't with us.

The restrictions imposed on released detainees were severe. Priscilla was not allowed to leave the Albany area for a year and they were all restricted from participating in Sash activities. Gradually they began to take liberties, at first secretly and then more openly, but it was a relief when all restrictions finally expired.

At the 1987 Black Sash conference in Cape Town I was unexpectedly elected one of the organisation's national vice presidents. I was not only taken completely by surprise but also concluded that I had been elected by default. The national executive was a small body that was usually made up of members who lived in the headquarters region, and I felt quite sure that far stronger women than I would have been elected, had they not been in detention or banned from holding office. Becoming part of this august body terrified me, but I decided that my appointment was important for the Eastern Cape. No one from our rather remote area had been on the national executive before, and as an area that was suffering disproportionately severe repression, it deserved to be kept on the Black Sash national agenda. In the end I loved the meetings and the journeys to Cape Town and found my fellow executive members congenial, stimulating and fun. The national leadership was always in the hands of remarkable women whom I held in awe and all of whom, I am glad to say, became good friends of mine. They were articulate, lucid and calm, and fine public speakers who were able to project both the tenacious and the balanced sides of the Black Sash's character. It was a great privilege finding myself at that level of the organisation with colleagues like Sheena Duncan, Mary Burton, Di Bishop and Jenny de Tolly. Our discussions certainly brought new perspectives to the Grahamstown experience and I think the Eastern Cape Black Sash benefited from this contact. Later, this benefit was further enhanced when our Grahamstown colleague Hilary Southall, a highly insightful and meticulous statistician and I were appointed to management roles in the Black Sash Trust.

The Sash national conference in 1988 was addressed by Frank Chikane, then General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches. In the wake of the February bannings he did not mince his words. “Those who are white still have space to cause change,” he said. “If you do not use that space you are responsible for the deaths of the people.” It was a direct challenge to organisations like ours to step into the breach. Chikane's challenge stirred up considerable debate, as one of our dilemmas at the time was whether the Black Sash should become affiliated to mass-based movements such as the Federation of South African Women (Fedsaw). The fact that we had remained non-aligned over three decades had probably ensured the Sash's survival thus far. Being small, we were remarkably focused and cohesive, and being white perhaps gave us a special duty-cum-licence to speak truth to white power. But given the increasingly polarised nature of our society there was pressure for the organisation to leave the ivory tower of middle-class privilege and join forces with a broad front of women. Chikane seemed to be addressing this issue directly. Emboldened by this, I and my colleague Ina Roux made an impassioned plea for affiliation with Fedsaw. In the end the conference expressed support for the federation, encouraging individual Sash members to participate in and strengthen contacts with the movement, but stopped short of affiliation. With hindsight I could see that it was the right decision. The credibility of our information and our analysis had always lain in our independence, and as the national president reminded us again, being small was our strength.

The Black Sash was anything but shy and had never shirked its duty to “use the space”. The price we paid in the number of members detained and restricted bore witness to that.

Getting the message across

A distressing feature of the scourge of detentions was the number of children who were swept up in the dragnet. According to the South African Institute of Race Relations, during the eight months of the 1985-1986 emergency, 7 996 people were detained, 2 000 of whom were under the age of 16. “What kind of society needs to be protected from its own children?” the Black Sash asked.

The Sash participated in a national campaign entitled Free the Children, which eventually spread to France under the patronage of Madame Mitterand, wife of the then president, and to Sweden where it was launched by Lisbet Palme, wife of the Prime Minister, Olof Palme. In Grahamstown our contribution to the campaign was to drape a gigantic banner down the spire of the cathedral bearing the biblical words, “Suffer the children to come unto me.” The banner was visible all the way up High Street and for as long as it hung there, Sash member Val Letcher and her family, all keen campanologists, tolled the cathedral bells.

One response to the banner came in the form of an anonymous letter addressed to “My fellow Anglicans,” and distributed in the cathedral. “It is with deep concern,” it read, “that I noticed our beautiful cathedral used by the Black Sash for a protest of a political nature. A house of God is not a place for expressing political aspirations, or its spire for political propaganda against authority. Black Sash has again shown its true colours.”