Swimming with Cobras (2 page)

Below the tree house, the upper reaches of the Kariega River formed a wide and full stream, perfect for swimming. The water danced with flashes of colour in the late sunlight greens, earth browns, golds and coppers inviting us, hot and dusty from our hike, to plunge in. Lying on my back in the water, reflecting on the day's walk through virtually untouched countryside, I thought of a line from Yeats' poem
The Lake Isle
of Innisfree
, where in a “bee-loud glade” peace came “dropping slow.” My reverie was disturbed by cries from my fellow swimmers as a flash of coppery yellow caught my eye.

“Snake!” someone shouted. A cobra was swimming beside us, his long body curving and undulating.

“Snake in the water!” Everyone made for the bank and scrambled out of the river. I grabbed at the roots of an overhanging tree, heaving and pushing against the mud of the bank, slipping in my attempts to gain purchase, panicking until I got to the top. Legs covered in mud, heart beating furiously, I looked back to see the cobra swimming mid-stream, unconcerned by the commotion. There was no flickering forked tongue, just a purposeful, sinuous swim. Except for this movement, one might have mistaken it for a stick, so well was it camouflaged in the dappled water.

As I lay in my sleeping bag that night, I thought of my many walks in the green storybook hills of the English countryside; such a contrast to Africa where the hillsides that beckoned were often deceiving, turning out to be rough and treacherous, with rocky cliffs and prickly bush. Here the dappled water could stir at any moment with sinister life. Here, in the most peaceful moments, danger was never far away.

With hindsight I realised the unprovoked cobra was nothing to fear. Still, its coppery flash remained with me, lurking alongside many of my experiences in my adopted country. Years later as I sat in a Port Elizabeth township hall with peeling walls and broken toilets, watching the notorious South African Police commander, Eugene de Kock, testify before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), I thought of it again. With his dark, heavy spectacles De Kock seemed to me the embodiment of evil. Descriptions of Vlakplaas, the bushveld farm where apartheid hit squads were trained, conjured up monstrous scenes from Dante's
Inferno
. Except that the testimony of De Kock's colleague Dirk Coetzee on the burning of the body of anti-apartheid activist Sizwe Kondile at Vlakplaas in 1981 was like no poem I had ever read. “The burning of a body on an open fire takes seven hours. While that happened we were drinking and braaing next to the fire. The fleshier pieces take longer, that's why we frequently had to turn the buttocks and thighs.” I thought of others nearer home whose remains had suffered a similar fate and I wanted to throw up. Yet if I had seen De Kock or Coetzee on the street, would there have been any clue to their pasts? Torturers bear no mark of Cain; hit squad men giving testimony in suits and ties appear innocuous – someone's father or son. Time and again during the TRC hearings, I was struck by what the political theorist and holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt described as “the banality of evil”.

Eugene de Kock was one of almost 8 000 people to apply to the TRC for amnesty for human rights violations perpetrated under apartheid. Full disclosure was a prerequisite for amnesty to be granted. Some 22 000 statements were received from victims of atrocities, approximately 2 200 of which were heard in public over a period of two years from April 1996.

In preparation for these hearings, the Black Sash meticulously perused its records of apartheid abuses in the period from March 1960 to May 1994. Our task was to identify people who could apply for reparation and some who might be asked to give their testimony before the commission. It was taxing work for our researchers, sifting through the masses of material and selecting cases based on legislation defined by the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act of 1995. The emotional cost of reading through the details of assault, torture, murder, deprivation and fear, especially in the 80s during the height of atrocities in the Eastern Cape, gave us all a great deal of empathy for the commissioners.

As we began to hold preliminary interviews with those identified by our research, we listened to hideous reminders of those traumatic years. We had to prepare each interviewee for the process of taking their story to the TRC, as well as offer counsel in terms of their expectations. In particular it was necessary to explain that reparation was likely to be symbolic rather than substantive, and that if amnesty were granted to perpetrators, no prosecution could follow. We did wonder how much agony and bitterness the commission might unleash, but we supported it as a necessary process and certainly one that felt to us like the culmination of the work we had been doing over decades.

Antjie Krog points out in her book,
Country of my Skull
, that the alternative to the TRC would have had to be punitive trials such as those of Nuremberg and Tokyo. Unlike post-war Germany and Japan, however, whose defeats had been complete, post-liberation South Africa faced a situation more like the one in post-Pinochet Chile. The overthrown regime formed part of the new government and continued to have some political power and influence. Furthermore the process of negotiation in this country had established a mood for reconciliation, and so South Africa looked to the Chilean model of a truth commission instead.

Not everyone supported the TRC. In fact, it was often more lauded outside South Africa than within. There were South Africans we knew who showed no interest in reports on the hearings. “It's all over now,” they would say. “Why do we have to go back?” Somehow it was the outside world that saw most clearly how miraculous it was that there had been no violent revolution or apocalyptic backlash in this country.

I attended several of these emotionally fraught hearings in Eastern Cape towns, each time reliving the horror of events that the Black Sash had monitored, and meeting up with victims whose stories I, and my fellow Sashers, knew so well.

One such hearing took place in February 1997 in the town of Cradock, once home to Olive Schreiner, the 19th century pacifist, feminist and author of
The Story of an African Farm
. It was also the birthplace of the renowned writer, Guy Butler, who played such a leading role in the English-speaking community that had become my adopted milieu. It was home, too, to activist and community leader Matthew Goniwe, one of the Cradock Four who had disappeared while returning from a meeting in Port Elizabeth in 1985. His badly burnt body, together with those of his comrades, was found near the PE suburb of Blue Water Bay. Nine years later, during a 1994 inquest, we heard how orders had been given for two of the four men to be “permanently removed from society”. All four were stopped at a roadblock and brutally killed before their car and their bodies were set on fire. On the day of their funeral, President PW Botha declared a State of Emergency. Later, Nelson Mandela would say: "The death of these gallant freedom fighters marked a turning point in the history of our struggle. No longer could the regime govern in the old way. They were the true heroes of the struggle.”

That hot summer's day, the Cradock town hall was full of people both young and old. A lighted candle focused the eye and gave a religious air to the proceedings. Each morning it was lit in a simple ceremony to mark the upholding of the truth and the burning of the past. The hall was very still. The commissioners sat on the stage and opposite their table sat the victims, telling their stories and responding to careful questioning. Through our headphones we listened to the translators in their glass cabins. Only here and there did we see a white face.

One of the stories told that day was of a couple who had been banished to nearby Illinge from another Karoo town because of the husband's political activism. In Illinge, living in makeshift accommodation far from family and home, they endured constant police harassment. They were followed when they went out and were often awoken in the dead of night by police raids. People became wary of the strangers in their midst. Small wonder then that when this couple's baby died, there was no money to buy a coffin or have a proper funeral. So we heard about the three-month-old infant placed in a cardboard box and the procession to the cemetery, where with hands and a spade, the parents dug a grave in the hard, drought-ravished soil. As the testifying mother began to keen, a counsellor put an arm around her shoulders until her sobbing ceased. A murmuring, a sighing, rose from the people sitting around us.

Up and down the length and breadth of South Africa, similar scenes played themselves out in dusty halls as the cruel minutiae of life during apartheid spilled out. I was filled with sadness and humility as we stepped out later into the Cradock sun filtering through the feathery pepper trees. So often people would say that all they wanted to know from the commission was where their loved ones had been buried. Just to have a proper grave dug, a headstone erected – such a small request in the face of the tragedies that had wrecked their lives. Eastern Cape poet Mzi Mahola felt their heartache when he wrote in his poem
The Land Will Heal
: “For too long their hearts quivered with grief / As they searched for the vanished / The dead in graves with no holes.”

In seeking and recording the truth, the TRC hoped to exorcise shameful events, heal some of the hurt and restore the moral order of society. Noble aims, but how difficult it must have been for the commissioners to sit day after day listening to horror stories unfold. In the first stanza of her poem
The
Archbishop Chairs the First Session
, Ingrid de Kok captures the emotion of those sessions in a simple and iconic image:

On the first day

after a few hours of testimony

the Archbishop wept.

He put his grey head

on the long table

of papers and protocols

and he wept.

It was hard to see, as we listened to story upon story of brutality, beatings and torture, how victims and perpetrators could ever become reconciled. And yet, miraculous tales of forgiveness and hope were commonplace.

We heard that day in Cradock of two families, the one brutalised by the other, who had made peace and now worshipped as members of the same church congregation. In a hearing in East London, another story of forgiveness emerged, of the Kohl family whose teenage son Alistair had been killed by a police bullet 12 years earlier, at the first funeral I'd ever attended in a Grahamstown township.

At the height of the struggle in the 1980s there seemed to be a political funeral every weekend, and each one spawned the next. Typically, in a volatile face-off between young angry activists and nervous soldiers, something would go wrong. Tear gas might be fired into the procession of mourners, people would scatter, aggression would ensue, and before long real bullets, some of which hit innocent people like Alistair, would follow.

This event had irrevocably changed the Kohls' lives, yet they spoke without bitterness or rancour. They listened to others telling similar stories or worse, and later described the hearing as an experience of healing. For my part, I was filled with admiration for this calm, eloquent couple sustained by their strong faith. I had a son of Alistair's age, and not for the first time the truth of the isiXhosa saying,
“Umuntu ngumntu
ngobantu”
, became a little clearer for me: a person is a person through other people.

As the Kohls recounted the events that led to Alistair's death, I could feel again the heat, the dust, the pressing crowd and the fear that was so common at these gatherings. The smells and sounds were vivid in my mind, as visceral as the memory of the cobra in the river.

Grahamstown funerals always seemed to be enveloped in a dusty, ash-gritty wind. The acrid smell of smoke from frequent fires on the hillsides around the town clung to our nostrils and sometimes, a thin layer of ash settled on the yellow security vehicles patrolling the streets. It truly seemed as if our society was on fire.

There was no shade in the usually packed football stadium on top of the hill in Joza, one of the three local townships. Skin parched in the sun and dust. Police helicopters buzzed overhead. From time to time we would hear the thud of a tear gas canister as it hit the ground and people would put handkerchiefs to their mouths as an ominous grey cloud floated over the stadium wall.

The mourning family huddled in black by the coffin, often looking rather startled at the hijacking of the funeral for a political purpose. Marshals and speakers sported Cuban-style khaki shirts and black berets. Young men carrying sawn-off pieces of wood fashioned like AK47s danced to the rhythm of the toyi-toyi: knees up, boots thumping, voices chanting “huss-huss”. “An injury to one is an injury to all!” the crowd called, and then they sang choruses full of invective, fists raised and clenched in the air. “The cart with no wheels: move, Botha, you're going to be crushed!” or “Mrs Botha is sterile, she gives birth to rats; Mrs Mandela is fertile, she gives birth to comrades!” More chilling would be cries like, “Informers we will kill you, hayi! hayi! Witches we will burn you, hayi! hayi!” But by contrast there would also be the resonantly harmonised hymns and songs, rendered with the pathos and yearning of American negro spirituals. “Freedom is in your hands, show us the way to freedom, let us get away from slavery in this land of Africa.”

Whenever possible the Black Sash had representatives at these funerals, who would invariably be asked to give a message. I never minded standing in front of large gatherings, but I often felt my message was tight and pallid in contrast to the full-throated deliveries of the main speakers. I was also ashamed of my linguistic poverty. Proceedings were usually in isiXhosa, yet they were always meticulously interpreted for the handful of non-isiXhosa speakers present. There would be some leaders from the churches in town, some students, perhaps someone from a white opposition party. Our presence was a gesture of solidarity with the embattled and mourning community. The Black Sash was also there to monitor and record events. If things went wrong, there had to be witnesses. And perhaps the presence of a few white pastors and women wearing sashes did act as a restraining factor.