Swimming with Cobras (23 page)

When we learnt that road workers were becoming easy targets for travelling agents, our interpreter and I headed to a place en route to East London euphemistically called “Lovers' Twist”, where extensive roadworks were in progress. We talked along the roadside to men operating picks and shovels, and at lunchtime we spoke to them in the wooden shed, which operated as a canteen. “Taking out insurance is like buying a pair of shoes,” we advised them. “If it pinches, don't purchase.” Whenever possible we lobbied the insurance industry, urging that companies should be held responsible for the conduct of their agents.

As the network of advice offices linked into a national one, we were able to pick up common problems and build up dossiers to make the Sash voice stronger. Insurance matters became our speciality in Grahamstown and we produced an easy-to-understand booklet providing guidance on insurance practices. The Knysna advice office received an award for excellence in consumer protection for their work on debt traps and micro-lending. Following their campaign, the Department of Trade and Industry was compelled to pass measures protecting consumers, proving right the Ethiopian proverb, “When enough spiders' webs unite, they can tie down a lion.”

One area that continued to be a struggle was pension payouts – a story of bungled administration for many years. Post-1994 the situation became even more dire and the advice office became increasingly drawn into this struggle. I spent many days visiting the social security office in Bisho trying to untangle individual pension problems, and talked to a succession of MECs for welfare. One day as one of them opened a bulging cupboard, an avalanche of cardboard files and papers cascaded to the floor. It was clear that there was no prospect of discovering individual records in that mess. In frustration and embarrassment she shouted at me that I had “too many accusations!”

We were fortunate to have the Grahamstown Legal Resources Centre as our great ally in the pensions struggle. The director accompanied two of us from the Sash office to meet with the Public Protector, Selby Baqwa, in Pretoria in July 1997. We struggled for 16 months to get access to him, and it was only when we enlisted the help of Carmel Rickard of the
Sunday Times
that we finally got our interview. Armed with information from our monitoring of pension pay points and social security offices, we unloaded our problems on the Protector's desk. We told him of long delays in the processing of applications for social grants, and lack of feedback on the progress of applications. Our researchers had shown that the average waiting period after application was 15 months or more. We quoted again the story that had received widespread press coverage, of 800 grant applications dumped outside a pension office, some having been used as toilet paper. One man's affidavit described a typical scene at an East Cape pension payout point: "Officials arrive late, about 11am or 12 noon, anytime they choose. The officials take out two chairs. Then the computer dies down. They tell the people to go home. The same the next day. At one point they announce that the money is finished." Not for nothing were cartoonists referring to the Eastern Cape as the Province of Chaotica. The devolution of power to this province had not been to the benefit of the people.

The Public Protector heard us out and promised to visit the province, which he eventually did. In the meantime the Legal Resources Centre began to take batches of delayed pension applications to court, with considerable success. We also managed to get some good media publicity. I had an article published in the
Mail and Guardian
, in which I accused the Eastern Cape government of laying on road shows like Roman circuses to divert the populace's attention from the issues of the day. This remark had an interesting echo in a later TV show in which I participated.

The programme
Two Ways
gave studio audiences the opportunity to ask questions of a panel on a selected topic. On November 1998, I participated in one on pensions. My fellow panelists were a representative of the Disabled Persons Association and the Minister of Social Welfare Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, to whom I had referred in a letter to the
Business Day
as “the young minister”. She had clearly taken exception to this, for while we were being made up, with a communal powder puff, she accused me of having been patronising. “But Geraldine,” I retorted, “I was appealing to you as a sister in the struggle!” I don't believe she was mollified. During the programme I thought her handling of questions was bright and articulate, but hard, even ruthless. No-one who saw her in action that day would have described her as “the young minister” – or would have had the gall to claim her as a sister!

The questions from the studio audience were all too familiar to anyone involved in the pension crisis and, although usually thinking on my feet was not a strength, I did not find it difficult to respond. A member of the audience who had misunderstood my
Mail & Guardian
piece complained that to his knowledge not a single circus laid on by the government had passed his way. But the best moment came when a disability grant holder stepped forward, waving his identity book, quoting his number, shouting at the minister and asking her why his grant had been stopped. It was a dramatic micro-demonstration of widespread grassroots distress.

In 1999, after five years in the Black Sash advice office, I began to realise that it was time to retire from the fray. I still felt a strong passion for the work but I could tell that the colour of my skin, the manner of my speech and everything about my image was no longer right for leading the advice office into the future. My much younger colleagues, under the leadership of Jonathan Walton, were more than able to continue the work. So with the millennium approaching, our first grandchild on the way and Malvern's own retirement coming into view, I took my leave, knowing that I would continue to work for the community but in other ways and perhaps at a gentler pace. We were also keen to travel more widely than we had done in the past. As a little girl I used to lug the heavy atlas out of my father's glass-fronted bookcase and gaze at the maps, promising myself that I would go to all sorts of exotic places. It was 1996 before I visited India with two friends, and now China and Nepal were beckoning.

Actually, I was rather nervous about retirement, worrying that I might be sidelined and have little to do. As it turned out I quickly found myself busy again. I realised that my expertise was still of some use when organisations like the Legal Resources Centre and the Public Service Accountability Monitor called on my help. And when the Friends of the Library asked me to sit on their committee I found my new passion. I was pleased to throw myself into this new task. How else would I ever have met the Fingo Village Revolutionaries, a group of gentle Rastafarians who worked in the Fingo township library promoting perhaps the one thing our society needed most – books, reading and knowledge.

At home

“Come on, family, how shall we celebrate the millennium?” I asked at dinner one evening early in 1999. Fortunately only our youngest, Lucy, was still at home and numbers around the dinner table no longer reached the critical mass for producing a collective groan. Anna was married and living in London while Matthew and Charlotte were both working in Cape Town. Lucy entered into the spirit of the ensuing brainstorm and it was she who said, with a Shakespearian flourish, "Let's put a girdle round the earth.” And so we came up with the idea of a walk around the globe, or at least a global walk, in which we would get our friends in various parts of the world to participate. Malvern may have groaned inwardly, but he responded with his usual amusement, “I thought you were retiring this year, my dear.”

Malvern and our children were not the only ones who trembled slightly at my enthusiasms. When I retired from the advice office my friends and colleagues presented me with a book of tributes in which several of them alluded to the rather intimidating demands I apparently made. Sheena Duncan described a daily ream of fax paper curling onto her floor, followed by my phone call to check whether she'd got it and what she thought of it. She claimed she was often too afraid to confess she'd not read it yet. Someone else suggested that I'd been born draped in a sash and wielding a chairperson's gavel! I know that I sometimes exasperated people by “chairing” a committee when I was not in the chair, making another colleague describe me as “a good chairperson but a demon of an ex-chairperson”. Is this what my friends in the East London advice office meant when one of them wrote in a card, "Before you retire give us tips, how did you manage to be one of the more arrogant women but being cool and calm most times”? I had always been inspired by the Tibetan proverb, “Better to live one day as a tiger than a thousand years as a sheep”, and if living as a tiger meant
being
a bit of a tiger then so be it. For the most part my colleagues were tigers themselves, so I took with a pinch of salt the cartoon they had drawn of me jogging along in my sash (though actually jogging is something no one would ever have seen me doing), with a phalanx of panting and exhausted Sashers following in my wake. Funniest of all is a cartoon (adapted from a UNESCO cartoon in the Sash magazine of March 1988) of me as a dungareed child bawling slogans like “freedom”, “justice” and “peace” while my parents cower on a couch wondering, “What are we going to do with her when she grows up?” My Grahamstown friends, who had not known my parents, could not have realised how accurately they were portraying them. And the cartoonist's solution to my parents' predicament? “Sending her to Africa seemed the only answer!”

Whenever I was asked to list my favourite things I always said that one of them was going downhill really fast on a bicycle. I suppose that is how I lived. But I also always listed quieter pleasures like nude bathing and eating Greek yoghurt with honey.

In the course of 1999 Malvern and I planned the millennium hike we had hatched with Lucy round our dinner table that night. We contacted friends around the world inviting them to do a hike as near to New Year's day as possible in the hope that, at 10 kilometres per hiker, we could accumulate a total of 1 000 km. We encouraged people to choose a historically significant destination, to send a brief record of their group's effort, and to mark the occasion with a donation to a charity of their choice. We were amazed by the response. Photographs and stories came in from around the globe. Great Britain had the most representatives and their walks ranged from country rambles with small family groups to a 40-strong multigenerational party tramping over the Cotswolds; from a rain-soaked walk along the Thames in London to a march across the bogs and crags of north-west Scotland to find the remains of a crashed World War II plane. In America friends did the Pacific Crest Trail and in Australia a party of 13 walked from Spit Bridge to Reef Beach along the north of Sydney harbour. David Woods, the Rhodes vice chancellor at the time, and his wife, Charlotte, walked in the Ithala Game Reserve and into the foothills of Swaziland. Val and Trevor Letcher, whose family had tolled the Grahamstown cathedral bells during political protests of yore, walked in Namibia, while our own party strode along the Eastern Cape beach from Riet River to the Three Sisters. I enjoyed the walk with old friends like Jackie Cock, Kathy Satchwell and Julia and Chris Mann, but our record of the day shows a photograph of Malvern reluctantly holding the fort at home, following a neck operation. A grand total of 1 234 km was walked “around the earth” on or around 1 January 2000.

Over the years our house hosted endless meetings, many parties and much fun, and the album that records most of these is our visitors' book. To begin with it reflects Malvern's political aspirations in the Progressive Party. Joyce and Colin Eglin, Alex and Jenny Boraine and Helen Suzman all stayed with us in those early days, when the talk was of election campaigns and antiapartheid strategies. Then there were the writers and academics like Noni Jabavu visiting from Nairobi, Es'kia Mphahlele and Rob Amato. One of our visitors wrote down this definition of a university from the American poet, Robert Hillyer:

Where scholars prepare other scholars, not for life,

but for gaudy footnotes and a threadbare wife.

This was certainly apt for our struggles on an academic salary, but also for Malvern's battle to find time for writing and keeping up with trends in literary thinking. At first the academic visitors from abroad were few and far between, owing to the boycott of South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. However, Lionel Knights and Muriel Bradbrook of Cambridge, both well-known scholars, did visit and we felt fortunate to have contact with such great minds during a time of increasing isolation. The poet Sydney Clouts lived next door for a while. He was often caught up in enthusiastic bursts of emotion and once whirled me down the street at night saying, “Grahamstown is just like Paris!” I must say I failed to see the similarity.

From the 1980s onward the visitors' book begins to reflect the growing number of people visiting from abroad on antiapartheid business: Oxfam and Amnesty International workers, British MPs and members of embassies, representatives of churches in Scandinavia and Germany. And as the new era dawned, more local figures too. Perhaps most notable of these was Frene Ginwala, who came in 1990. The Black Sash hosted her at a meeting in the office after which we brought her home for supper. A peculiar meeting occurred in our living room later that evening when a local ANC activist arrived in her nightdress to meet with Frene. It had clearly been past her bedtime when she received the call delegating her to represent the local movement. I was impressed again, as I had been in Harare, by Frene Ginwala's incisive mind and I was not surprised when she was later appointed the Speaker of South Africa's first democratic parliament.

In 2002 the visitors' book reflects a glorious week in our lives – the visit of Marie and Seamus Heaney. Malvern spent many years teaching and admiring the work of this great poet, and to mark Malvern's retirement a colleague arranged to bring Heaney to Grahamstown for a week. It was an imaginative and bold plan. As a Nobel laureate Heaney was much in demand all over the world and we really didn't think he would come, but Wendy Jacobson is nothing but determined. As Marie later said, “I told Seamus this Wendy means business. You'd better go.” In the event the town rose to the occasion, the university took the opportunity of holding an extraordinary graduation ceremony to bestow an honorary doctorate on him, and we made two wonderful new friends. The visit was a cultural feast and everything worked with clockwork precision – down to a roaring salute, as though on cue, from a lion when the Heaneys visited in the local Shamwari Game Reserve.