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Michael Sullivan walked to a bench marked ‘Europeans Only’. where an elderly woman was sitting with her two grandchildren. They moved up to make space for him. Sullivan placed his suitcase down beside him at the end, then moved it back to make it less conspicuous. He consulted his watch, then began to read a newspaper.
It was fifteen minutes before the first rush-hour train was due. As the minutes ticked by the long platform began to fill up. The blacks and Coloureds hurried past Sullivan, and the whites began to collect in the area in front of him, waiting impatiently. Michael Sullivan looked at his newspaper sightlessly. By five o’clock there were at least two hundred people, he estimated. Over there on the big concourse people were now hurrying in all directions to different platforms. Michael Sullivan stood up. He folded his newspaper and moved away down the crowded platform, trying to look like a man wanting to stretch his legs. He wandered off through the throng, tapping his newspaper on his leg. When he reached the concourse he increased his pace.
He strode away through the crowd, side-stepping people, until he got to the big entrance, then he broke into a run. He tried to make it a jog, like a man in a bit of a hurry – he had practised this, and timed the distances involved – but panic gripped him and he sprinted, dodging people, making for the two telephone boxes across the parking area. He raced up to the nearest box; across the dial was his handwritten adhesive tape reading ‘Out of Order’. He ripped it off, rammed coins into the slot and dialled 999 feverishly.
He shouted: ‘There’s a bomb in a suitcase about to go off in ten minutes on Johannesburg Station! Clear the area! This is a warning from the anti-apartheid forces of freedom!’
He slammed down the telephone, and he felt the vomit rise in his guts. He clutched his chest and reeled out of the box, taking deep breaths. But once the vomit was forced back, what he felt was elation. He had done it! He had done his duty as instructed! Only he could have done it because no black man in his cell could have sat down on a Europeans-Only bench. He had done it! And he’d given the bastards enough time to clear the station – a lot of Johannesburg’s first-class whites-only passengers would be very late getting home tonight. He lifted his head to listen for the police sirens: but instead he heard a thud. He jerked, and looked at the big station, and he saw glass flying up into the air. He stared, horrified, aghast. Then he heard the screams, and saw the pandemonium, the people reeling out.
Michael Sullivan stared in horror. Then he vomited. He retched and staggered away into rush-hour Johannesburg.
Politics. They tried not to talk about politics, but those bombs kept going off, and now lives were going up with them. Patti was shaken when they heard of the first life lost; she was absolutely shocked by the Johannesburg Station blast that killed nine people and wounded over thirty. But she vehemently denied that any of them were Mandela’s bombs – they must have been Poqo’s, or that white student group called the African Resistance Movement.
‘Our policy is no loss of life … And anyway what alternative is there? We can’t wage a guerrilla war like Castro did because we haven’t got Cuba’s mountains and jungles, and South Africa is buffered by the European colonies to the north – Mozambique, Rhodesia, Angola. We have no option except classical urban guerrilla warfare.’
Jesus. Classic urban guerrilla warfare? ‘How do you know about urban guerrilla warfare?’
‘I don’t know anything – you’re the one who’s had the military training, not me. But it’s common sense – guerrillas need sanctuaries when the pressure is on, like mountains and jungles. And friendly neighbouring states where they can get supplies. Well, the ANC hasn’t got that.’
‘South Africa has got mountains and dense bush. The mountains of Basutoland, the Drakensberg, Swaziland, all that vast bush –’
‘Yes, but we’re surrounded to the north by hostile territory – the Portuguese in Mozambique and Angola, the British in Rhodesia – so it’s very difficult for us to get supplies through.’
‘Castro,’ Mahoney said, ‘had no friendly neighbouring territories either. Cuba is surrounded by sea.’
‘Exactly. So he could get his supplies by sea –’
‘So is South Africa surrounded by sea – almost three thousand miles of coastline.’
‘But South Africa’s got a powerful navy –’
‘Bullshit, we’ve got a very small navy. Castro was faced by the United States Navy. Even a United States naval base on the island, which is there to this very day.’
She cried, ‘So what’s your point?’
‘The point, darling, is that Castro and eighty men – only eighty – landed off the yacht Granma on the coast of Cuba and ran straight into gunfire. Only three years later Castro marched triumphant into Havana, despite all the odds against him.’
‘So?’
‘And Mao Tse-tung didn’t have any friendly territories to supply him either. On the contrary he had the whole might of America and Chiang Kai-shek dropping bombs on him –
‘So – what’s the point?’
He only knew that he did not accept that South Africa and its borders were unsuitable terrain for guerrilla warfare. The point was that although he rejected communism he admired Castro as a soldier. He admired Mao Tse-tung as a soldier. They had tremendous odds against them but they waged courageous and efficient guerrilla wars. Efficient – that was the point. The ANC and their MK were inefficient. The ANC had been in existence fifty years, apartheid had been in existence for fourteen years and all the ANC had managed was bombs. They had not liberated one square foot of territory. Bombs were bad soldiering. Oh, he admired Mandela’s courage, but as a soldier he was no Castro, no Mao Tse-tung. He was pissing into the wind with his bombs – it would all come back at him. Soon he would be caught and hanged and then the police would run rings around MK; the Spear of the Nation would flap around like a chicken without its head.
‘The point is bombs won’t get you anywhere in this hard-arsed, well-armed, heavily policed Afrikaner country. Bombs are no good unless they’re part of a well-fought guerrilla war, where they’re aimed at military installations and industry – otherwise they’re counter-productive, especially when they start killing people. Nobody respects a bomber, they hate him. Unless they wage a proper guerrilla war the ANC will lose international sympathy, and that is all they’ve got going for them. And bombs will only make the government more repressive.’
‘Could they be more repressive?’
‘Sure. How about concentration camps of suspects, like the British did during the Boer War?’ He snorted. ‘We’ve only begun to see apartheid legislation. If they decide to get really tough that’ll be bad news for you and me.’
‘So we should just give up, should we?’ she countered aggressively. ‘Mandela and MK are wasting their time?’
‘Mandela should be devoting his considerable brainpower and courage to organizing a guerrilla army, not fucking about with home-made bombs and sticking his head in a noose. It’s a quixotic waste of good manpower. And suicidal. If bombs are all MK’s good for, forget about them. And forget about the ANC, because what good is a liberation movement without an army? It’s a paper tiger.’
Her eyes flashed. ‘Bullshit! They’ll do it with urban guerrilla warfare!’
‘They’ll fail. They’ll shoot themselves in the foot.’
She glared at him. ‘You think the ANC are useless, don’t you? You don’t think they can run the country –’
‘I’m not saying that –’
But, ah yes, he was saying something like that. Patti wanted one-man-one-vote tomorrow, but look at the Congo – were those blacks capable of running the country? Look at Ghana, look at Uganda … Of course Mahoney wanted apartheid abolished tomorrow, of course he wanted a happy multi-racial South Africa. But the only way democracy would come to Africa was gradually, with political education. One-man-one-vote tomorrow would create chaos.
‘But I don’t believe there’ll be chaos,’ Patti said; ‘I believe the experienced ANC leadership will prevent the type of chaos that’s happening in the Congo. But if chaos is what it takes to get rid of apartheid, so be it. If we’ve got to blow the whole government to kingdom come to achieve a just society, so be it.’
He smiled. No use arguing with her. ‘You really are a communist, aren’t you? Tear down the whole structure, rebuild on the ruins?’
‘I’m a socialist, darling. Not a Marxist. And so are you, in your secret racist heart.’
‘Me a socialist?’
‘Of a sort. I couldn’t love you if you weren’t just. You also think there’s got to be a redistribution of wealth in this country. A redistribution of land, for a start. Housing – why should the vast majority of urban blacks live in hovels while the whites live in nice suburbs? The state must provide decent housing. The mines, and big industry – why should the blacks, who create the wealth, receive miserable wages while the fat white shareholders get the big profits? Obviously, the commanding heights of commerce must be nationalized, like the coal and steel industry in Britain.’ She spread her hands. ‘That hardly makes me a communist, any more than Harold Wilson … ’ She sat up straight. ‘And now can we please stop talking about bloody politics? Weekends are supposed to be for us …’
But you couldn’t avoid politics in South Africa because you lived with it. And with those bombs. And with the government’s new laws to deal with it all. That year the Defence Act was beefed up to give the army wider powers to suppress internal disorder, the period of military training was extended and a police reserve was created. Police powers of interrogation, control of suspects and witnesses were drastically increased: now they were empowered to detain a suspect in solitary confinement, without access to a lawyer and without a criminal charge being laid, for successive periods of twelve days. The state already had the power to ban and banish people and organizations, but now new legislation gave them the power to condemn people to house-arrest without a trial. The Prisons Act forbade the press from reporting on conditions in jails, and new legislation empowered the state to hold suspects incommunicado, which made it impossible for a prisoner to prove he had suffered third-degree treatment. Magistrates holding inquests were frequently hearing how suspects were ‘having accidents’, slipping on soap in the showers, falling down staircases, ‘committing suicide’ by throwing themselves out of high windows, hanging themselves, being ‘shot in self-defence’ when attacking their interrogators, ‘shot escaping custody’: the new laws made it impossible to refute this new tendency of suspects to injure and kill themselves. The editor of Drum gave Mahoney the task of reporting on all such inquests. ‘Build up a case file against the bastards.’
‘God,’ Mahoney said to Patti, ‘it’s getting like Orwell’s 1984.’
‘Do you still,’ Patti said, ‘consider that Mandela shouldn’t plant bombs?’
Oh Jesus, he didn’t know anymore. He would like to see the government blown to smithereens too.
‘God help Mandela when his luck runs out …’
It was not long before Nelson Mandela’s luck did run out.
He was disguised as a chauffeur, driving a shiny Jaguar through the rolling green countryside of Natal. It was a tertiary road, only used by country folk, a needle-in-a-haystack road, which made it impossible that the police were so lucky to just pick the right one. Their ambush was massive. Mandela drove straight into it: within moments his car was surrounded by firearms.
It was an agent of the American CIA, a professional going about America’s covert business, who had heard on the underground grapevine of Mandela’s movements, asked President John F. Kennedy for the green light, then tipped off the South African police. Within hours the whole world knew of the triumph of the forces of law and order.
As Mahoney had said, bombs lose international sympathy.
15 (#ulink_10d98c36-12d5-59da-b4ac-cc5a6ed6b6e3)
The Spear of the Nation was broken. The bombs spluttered out. ‘Which,’ as Mahoney wrote in an article for the Globe, who sometimes published his work, ‘is not surprising in view of the massive armoury of draconian legislation the state has assembled to suppress dissent. It can lock you up, without a trial, even before you have dissented. But what is surprising is the case of the State versus Nelson Mandela. The police know that he was the commander of MK, directly and indirectly responsible for the recent spate of bombings, liable therefore to the death penalty: but he was only charged with incitement and leaving the country without a passport. With the laws of human rights and habeas corpus in tatters, with suspects regularly “committing suicide” by leaping from windows, it is surprising that Mandela wasn’t also a victim of Newton’s law of gravity; or that evidence of his bombing was not “discovered” – a fingerprint here, a bit of explosive there, an eyewitness or two – which would have ensured he succumbed to gravity on the hangman’s trapdoor. But, no: three years’ imprisonment is all Mandela has received – a mere slap on the wrist.
‘But as the ANC evidently rule out the possibility of a Castro-style guerrilla war because the buffer states are in unfriendly colonial hands, and as their urban guerrilla war has flapped to a standstill, they are reduced to a couple of offices in the “sanctuary state” of newly independent Tanzania and London. Doubtless they’ll get a trickle of refugees from South Africa who have the guts to cross hostile territory to reach them, but what are they going to do with them? Train them in Russia, then send them back as urban guerrillas? Big deal: more cannon-fodder for the draconian security legislator.
‘So, what other realistic weapon do the ANC have left? The only answer is: labour. The labour that creates South Africa’s wealth, the black muscle that works the mines, industry, toils on the farms. Surely, if they withhold that labour, in the form of strikes, they will not only bring the economy to a standstill, they will also destroy the basis of the Lekker Lewe, the Good Life upon which this unhappy land was built. Strikes will pull apartheid down – right?
‘Wrong. Why? Two reasons.
‘One: strikes require organization. Leaders, shop stewards, discipline, instructions, leaflets. Sorry, folks, but the aforesaid legislation, backed up by a system of well-paid informers, will stop that at first base: twelve days’ detention without trial, and twelve days and twelve days for as long as it takes, plus house arrest, banning, and banishment will nip that in the bud.
‘Two: the workers want their work. If you’re black, you’re poor. And if you’re fired, there’re ten guys to take your place, and they don’t only come from South Africa, they hail from Mozambique, Rhodesia and Malawi. South Africa has to patrol its borders to keep illegal black immigrants out, because lousy though the wages are they’re many times better than back home.
‘So my educated guess is we can forget about the ANC for the time being. The Afrikaner has finally won his long battle that began with the Kaffir Wars and the Great Trek. He’s got his beloved republic and Lekker Lewe at last: land, security, and labour, all sewn up. The ANC, blustering a thousand miles away is, in the words of Mao Tse-tung, “the mere buzzing of flies”.’
‘It’s good writing,’ Patti said grimly, ‘“wise beyond your years”, as your editor says. But I wish to Christ you’d stop being so disparaging about the ANC.’
‘I’m sorry. I’ve got a lot of time for the ANC, I simply mean that they’re a lame duck now. Or for a long time. Until they get their act together.’
She glared. ‘“Lame duck”? Far from it, pal! Let me assure you that this duck –’ she tapped her breast – ‘is not lame!’
Oh Jesus. ‘What does that mean?’
She closed her eyes. ‘Nothing,’ she sighed.
‘Patti? Are you up to something?’
‘No … I’m just devastated by Mandela’s arrest, that’s all. While he was around there was hope – something was happening. Now?’ She sighed bitterly. ‘I’m angry because what you say in your article is probably true … Freedom: that’s all I want. For everybody. Freedom to live how I want, where I can afford, to love who I like.’
They were lying beside the little pool at the cottage. ‘I know the feeling.’
She shook her head, her eyes closed behind her sunglasses. ‘No, you only partly understand, darling. You only understand the injustices of being a lusty young white man having an affair with a lusty young Indian woman, the towering injustice of not being allowed to come out in the open and just enjoy the fun of being in love. But you don’t fully understand that Indian lover of yours, Luke, what it’s like to be an Indian. Or a native, or Coloured. But an Indian is something else again – an Indian is just as sophisticated as you whites, Luke.’
‘I know.’
‘But you don’t know what it’s really like to be as good as the next person, even smarter, as pretty as the next girl but not allowed to stand next to her in a post office queue. A bank queue. Not even ride on the same bus. Let alone live in the same suburb. You don’t know how insulted that makes you feel, you commiserate but you don’t carry away with you that appalling sense of injustice.’ She sighed. ‘But that’s not what I’m really talking about. I’m talking about you.’
‘Me?’
She sighed up at the sky, eyes closed. Silent a long moment. ‘I really love you, Luke. I’ve tried not to. I’ve tried just to keep it a fun relationship – just a sex thing, but I failed long ago. And in fact I’m very lucky. Because, as an Indian, I had no selection at all. No choice of men. Oh, there are a dozen eligible Indian men I could have, but I just don’t happen to fancy any of them. Imagine that – if the law made you choose your love-life from a dozen women you didn’t fancy. Imagine the feeling of bondage, if the law did that to you. But, wow, did I fancy you! And I’ve got you: so I’m lucky, aren’t I?’
‘And so am I.’ He tried to jolly her out of this mood. ‘If it weren’t for the law you’d have won that Miss South Africa contest and be in Hollywood now.’
‘Bullshit. But, yes, we’re lucky. But it’s also very, very sad. Because there’s no future in it.’
Oh God, he did not want to talk about the future, all he cared about was here and now, the happiness of being in love.
‘No future,’ she repeated. She hadn’t opened her eyes. ‘People say apartheid can’t last much longer, but how long is that? Ten years – twenty – thirty? A twinkling of an eye in the history of a country but a lifetime for you and me.’ She sat up suddenly. She swept back her hair and said: ‘Shall we please stop talking about it? Can we just be happy? And have fun?’
Just fun love? He didn’t want that – he wanted the real thing. Oh yes it was fun, to be in love and beating the law, these deliciously exciting lover’s trysts, wine in the sun, the lovely satiny feel of her nakedness as they romped in the pool, her long black hair flared out in clouds as she floated, her lovely breasts and belly and pubic mound awash, her long golden legs glinting, and bathing together as the sun went down, legs hanging over the rim of the bath, soaping each other, drinking wine, talking.
‘Just fun love,’ she said. ‘Look at it this way: we wouldn’t make love so much if we were allowed to sleep together every night. You simply couldn’t keep up this spectacular weekend performance.’
‘Yes I could.’
‘No you couldn’t. You’d get bored. Sexually bored.’
How could any man become sexually bored with this sensual beauty, those legs, that heavenly bottom, those glorious curves, that classically lovely face, those sparkling, flashing dark eyes. ‘Impossible. But maybe you’d get bored with me?’
‘That hard-on? Impossible. But, you see, if it were legal, I’d want to marry you. And that’s the good deed apartheid’s done us – if we could get married you’d get scared and run away.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘Oh yes. You’re far too young to get married, Luke. You haven’t sowed enough wild oats yet.’
‘I love you,’ he said. ‘Fuck the wild oats.’
She smiled sadly. ‘I am your wild oats, Luke. Your forbidden wild oats. I just hope your memory will be the more vivid because of that.’
Oh Jesus. ‘I love you and I love you and I love you. And I’m not going to leave you.’
‘And I believe you mean it. But you cannot marry me. Illegal, So? So you’re safe to be in love without the responsibility that usually entails.’
‘But I do want to marry you.’
‘And you’re lucky. Because if you weren’t screwing me you’d be screwing some nice white girl who’d be wanting you to marry her. I’m saving you all that hassle. Us women are trouble, Mahoney; remember that when you leave me.’
‘You’re not listening. I’m not going to leave you.’
She sighed. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘you will leave me. And if you don’t, I will leave.’
‘That’s a terrible thing to say.’
‘I’ll never want to leave you,’ she said sadly. ‘I’ll be leaving … what? Us? But there is no “us”. Because there’s no future in “us”. “Us” means being together forever. That means a home. Home means marriage, all the things Mother Nature designed “us” for. But all that is impossible – for us. So there is no real “us”, to leave. So I will leave … our heartbreak.’ She waved a hand at the cottage walls.
He could not bear to hear this. ‘We could leave this fucking country instead!’
She snorted softly. ‘Oh, don’t imagine I haven’t thought about it often. But I don’t want to leave Africa. And go where?’
‘Australia.’
‘Australia? Never heard of the White Australia Policy? They haven’t got a black problem because they shot most of them. And they don’t intend acquiring a new one.’
‘You’re not black, for Christ’s sake!’
She smiled. ‘Oh, I know I’ve got a good complexion. All I’ve got to do is read the ads for suntan lotions. Drive along the beaches I’m not allowed to lie on and see all the pretty white girls desperately trying to get themselves the tan nature gave me. But the fact of the matter is that I’m not white, and Australia has a White Australia Policy. And so has Canada.’
‘England then.’
She waved her hand. ‘But that’s not the point. The point is I don’t want to leave this country, Luke! It’s my country. I just want to change the bloody place! I want to stay right here and raise hell until they change it. I refuse to leave.’
Oh, Jesus. ‘And how’re you going to raise hell?’
She sighed, then grinned and kissed his cheek. ‘Just a figure of speech. Don’t worry, darling, my hands are as clean as the driven snow.’
