Swimming with Cobras (8 page)
Sometimes the younger Sash members were the most daunting. Sociologists, lawyers, journalists, they were of radical persuasion and mostly very knowledgeable about South African affairs. Many of them had been active in student politics. In contrast, my early forays into political activity had been muddled and naïve. In the United Nations Society at Bristol University I had been swept up on the wave of enthusiasm and zeal for global betterment without ever really becoming informed about the principles of the UN. Similarly during the Suez crisis I'd been more preoccupied with evading lonely Egyptians in exile than with the political issues at hand. Now I found myself amongst young women who were extremely well informed on the issues of the day, could think on their feet and were excellent public speakers. It was a humbling experience and an excellent education for me.
In the early years I sometimes felt that I stood out as someone who did not quite belong in radical company. I wondered what people thought when they saw me participating in protest stands. In Grahamstown these were always held around the cathedral, a prominent spot visible to all the traffic circling that busy area. Permission for each stand had to be sought from the municipality. In keeping with the established Black Sash style, we stood silently and with heads bowed, sometimes holding posters, and often we received insults and rebukes. Sometimes a car would come past with some of my nursery school children bobbing up and down in the back. Their mothers might give an encouraging wave, or might as easily look the other way.
For a while in the 1970s a unique phenomenon occurred in Grahamstown. Whenever the Black Sash held a protest stand, a lone figure would appear on the opposite corner, a large woman dressed in black and draped in a broad white sash. She was the widow of a prominent Supreme Court Judge. Sometimes she was accompanied by a child straight out of Louisa May Alcott's
Little Women
, in white dress, long white socks and a white bow. There they stood, silently staring us down, as faithful in their demonstration as we were in ours.
During the 1980s when she had gone and times had become harder, our demonstrations came to resemble hers in that only one person at a time was allowed to stand. For these demonstrations we chose the west door of the cathedral, facing the traffic coming down High Street. A support person was always out of sight behind the cathedral door, armed with a sheet of instructions, “What To Do In Case Of Arrest.” When I think of standing in that doorway, I remember feeling frozen. Whether from cold or fear I wasn't always sure. It was not something I enjoyed doing. The anxiety aside, standing still and keeping silent are not things that come easily to me. My other vivid memory of that windy and highly visible spot is of a young policeman awkwardly clutching a subversive Black Sash poster emblazoned with the words “Thou Shalt Not Kill”, while the Sash member fished deep in her coat pocket for the letter of permission he had asked her to produce. We doubted that many passers-by would have spotted the irony.
As the activities of the Black Sash enveloped me I began to find, if at first timidly, a voice and an identity. The organisation was destined to become an important and fulfilling focus in my life and the friendships I would make there would be close and lasting. I mourned my parents for a long time, feeling that their deaths had cut me even further adrift; but I realise that, had it not been for their relatively early deaths I might never have been able to get involved to the extent that I did. With ageing parents on another continent I may well have been flying back and forth for years, struggling to put down the roots that today are grappled into the rocky soil of the Eastern Cape.
St Clement's Anglican Church was situated in the coloured community next to the railway station. The Black Sash hired its hall for our weekly advice office sessions, setting out Sunday school benches and sometimes pews from the church for our clients to sit in while they waited. The hall was bitterly cold in winter and stifling in summer. Rain on the zinc roof sounded like pebbles in a tin can. Tired-looking posters proclaimed, “God is Love”.
Despite this uninspiring setting and our amateurish operations â there was no fancy equipment, not even a telephone, and our records were kept in shoeboxes - the advice office fulfilled an indispensable function in the coloured and black communities. It was known as a place where assistance could be found, not in the form of handouts but in more empowering ways. We engaged with people on a personal level, heard their stories and took practical or paralegal steps to give them even the smallest measure of control over their situations. Sometimes the helpful action was as small as a phone call to an employer or a creditor made from a callbox or our own homes, or a letter written to a state department on a client's behalf. Few of our clients had access to telephones and many were illiterate.
Most white South Africans, if they knew about the Black Sash at all, would have associated it with anti-apartheid demonstrations and viewed it with suspicion. Very few would have been aware of this other branch of Black Sash activity, carried out behind the scenes through its network of advice offices. Established first in Cape Town in 1958 and later in major centres all over the country, the advice bureaux were the agencies through which the Sash engaged with the poor, helping them steer their way through the debilitating circumstances of poverty and proscriptive legislation. Through this work we gathered an enormous wealth of information and insight regarding the life of the oppressed and the apparatus of the oppressor. The advice offices really were the engine room of the Black Sash and it was a matter of pride to the organisation that its political demonstrations and social justice campaigns arose not out of sentiment or idealism but out of solid information and analysis, gleaned from its own hard work.
While I was by nature drawn to the principled actions and expressive dynamism of the Sash's public activities, my training in welfare drew me equally strongly to the advice office. Apart from paid interpreters, advice office staffers were all volunteers. Most of us had other jobs during the week, so we worked on Saturday mornings on a roster system.
One cold morning in August 1976 I was on duty interviewing clients at a rickety school desk in the crowded St Clements hall, when I became aware of a keening sound at the table next to mine. The woman being interviewed was rocking to and fro in her chair and was clearly distressed. There was no privacy in the hall and the sad sound was beginning to make all other conversation impossible. So we took her into the church where we shut the door, and in between sobs she told us her story. Her daughter, a deaf teenager with speaking difficulties, had disappeared. She travelled regularly by rail to a special school in Umtata (now Mthatha) in the Transkei, a long and convoluted journey that involved changing trains. Her mother always asked the train guard to look after her, but this time her daughter had not arrived. She had reported the disappearance and was now frantic with worry. We decided to accompany her to the railway station to see if we could expedite her search.
The station had Victorian gables and lofty waiting rooms with benches marked “Whites only”. Steam engines were still pulling trains on this line and the metallic smell of railway smoke hung in the air. The booking clerk directed us to the railway policeman whose dingy office adjoined the shunting yard. The official knew of the case. Smug with his Brylcreemed hair and his comb in his sock, he proceeded to assure us that the bureaucratic process had been followed to the letter. Dockets had been made out in triplicate and sent up and down the line. I couldn't help picturing these useless notes being dropped from engine cab windows as trains few through remote rural stations, perhaps to be picked up by a porter or more likely, the wind. We pressed him for further information. No, no attempt had been made to speak to anyone on the telephone, the civil police had not been summoned, and the railway guard who had undertaken the custody of the child had not been interviewed. Instead we were treated to a tirade on the inefficiency of railway officials in the Transkei and the unreliability of blacks in general. Then his hectoring took on a salacious tone as he lent over the desk towards my colleague and me. “I needn't tell you what I think has happened,” he said with a wink. “She is probably ⦠you know⦔ and he resorted to hand gestures to imply a buxom lass, nodding in the mother's direction. I was appalled by his insensitivity and resented his conspiratorial tone. The mother gave no indication that she understood his innuendo but we all rose and left his office.
Outside, trains shunted back and forth, belching clouds of grey smoke. We were getting nowhere, so we shepherded the mother back to the advice office, where we decided that the best route was to alert the press. We assured her that the story of her daughter's disappearance would be made a top priority and immediately got in touch with the local newspaper correspondent, who was a member of the Black Sash, and she distributed the story as widely as she could.
Returning home to my own children that afternoon, I knew just how frantic I would have felt if one of them had disappeared. I also knew that the disappearance of a white child would not have been treated with the same callous lethargy as we had witnessed that day. The case had a deep effect on me. I could not imagine what it must be like to have so little control over one's own life.
The following Monday morning we heard that the girl had been found in safe care in a small town between Grahamstown and Umtata. Someone had read the story and alerted her rescuer. She was unharmed and able to proceed to school. Five years after this encounter, the girl and her mother visited us at the advice office again. She had finished school and trained as a dressmaker and we were able to put her in touch with a potential employer.
The Sunday morning following the incident, Malvern and I went to lunch on a farm in the district. The girl and her mother were in the forefront of my mind as we drove out of town under a vast winter sky. In the distance the blue humps of the Amatola Mountains loomed, and flame-coloured aloes, like candelabra, illuminated the rocky landscape. As we turned off the tarred road onto a bumpy track, a leguan slithered across our path. It was the first one I'd ever seen and with its scales and mighty tail I thought we were meeting a crocodile! We passed a cluster of small labourers' houses and a trading store before reaching the farmhouse.
The large homestead smelt of polish and wood smoke from a roaring fire in the grate. Ornate dark sideboards and comfortable old sofas furnished the rooms while bearded ancestors and women in poke bonnets looked down from oil portraits on the walls. Our hosts were charming and lunch of guinea fowl and venison was splendid. The talk was of crops and the weather, children and schools. Plates and glasses were whisked away by a silent army of maids summoned by a bell that dangled from the ceiling above the dining table. Looking out from the farmhouse windows towards the distant mountains, I was struck by how dislocated we were from the shack dwellers and their problems. We toured the lands, saw exotic birds imported from faraway places and buck leaping in the veld. This farmer, like others in the neighbourhood, was beginning to turn his attention to the American tourist trade. We talked about “the staff” and, while feudal, it all seemed humane. I participated with enjoyment and ease in the pleasures of the day, and though anxiety about the lost girl nagged at my mind I behaved myself well, knowing it would be inappropriate to introduce “politics” on such a day.
So often, even in so-called liberal circles, the mere mention of words like “township” or “blacks” was considered political and therefore off limits. Many English immigrants, enjoying a lifestyle more affluent than they could have dreamt of in Britain, preferred to keep their heads in the sand, and sometimes even those who professed themselves supporters of the Progressive Party or the Black Sash made remarks that showed their liberalism to be merely skin deep. Someone would avoid a certain supermarket, for instance, because it was “too full of blacks”. Once at a very convivial dinner party, at which the wine had been freely flowing, a fellow guest greeted my “political” comments with the advice, “Go back to England where you belong!”
After our day on the farm we hurried back to town to attend a service in the coloured recreation hall to pray for the Reverend Allan Hendrickse, who had been detained. In the 1980s Hendrickse would become an MP in the tricameral parliament and be seen by many as a sell-out, but in the mid-1970s he was a symbol of the struggle. The hall was packed with people of all ages, from grandmothers to infants, and there was a feeling of anger and tension in the air. A mere scattering of whites was present, mainly nuns. We felt honoured to have been invited to attend by a man who sometimes served Malvern in Birch's, the local drapery store.
The recreation hall was like community halls all over the world, functional and cavernous, with that slightly stale smell of past gymnastic activity. In later years it became for me a place of quite special memories as I went there to hear stirring political speeches at the height of the detention campaign in the 1980s, and it was to this hall that Nelson Mandela would come in the 1990s after his release from prison. Malvern and I were impressed with the calm manner in which the Reverend Sonny Leon conducted the service and the message of non-violence he delivered. Nevertheless, the Bible readings, prayers and hymns had clearly been chosen to express strong political feeling and the singing was emotional and rousing. For Malvern the atmosphere was familiar. It reminded him of powerful Dutch Reformed services he had attended as a child. To my ear, the guttural resonance in the Afrikaans words seemed to come straight from the heart. I missed many of the innuendoes of that service, but I remember it as the first time I'd heard the phrase “white oppressor”.
What a weekend of contrasts that was. Each of the events seemed so isolated from the others, the travails and concerns of the one unknown or unheeded by the other. As polarised and baffling as it seemed to me, and as distressing as much of it was, I was at last getting involved in the kind of work I felt called to, and through it, I was no longer just observing, I was becoming a part of it all.