We did on occasion venture further than the Transkei for our camping expeditions, going up into the Drakensberg Mountains and Lesotho. Of course it rained more there. You can't be in the mountains in the summer without thunderstorms and rain. There were the inevitable leaks in the tent, and we would have to hold sleeping bags in front of the fire to dry them. Occasionally we got stuck in mud and had to pull up bushes and ground cover to create purchase for the car's wheels. Lucy confessed in later years that at times she was nervous of our journeying. Of course to a small girl it must have seemed as if we were heading into the wild and unchartered jungle.
One holiday in Lesotho, it rained so much that we had to seek refuge beside the Orange River in a cluster of huts behind a rough-looking inn. Basic as it was, it was a good spot from which to observe the local comings and goings. Cavalcades of donkeys loaded with panniers crossed the bridge, their drivers stopping at the inn to pleasure the girls there â or so we assumed, judging by the squeals of delight heard in the night. We watched too as the sangoma descended the mountain, ringing a bell to herald his arrival and the holding of his clinic. And thoughtfully, the local policeman arrived daily with the weather forecast, so that we'd know when it was safe to resume our journey on the muddy road. When we were eventually able to find a dry campsite we explored the area more widely, riding on ponies and discovering a cathedral-like church in a remote valley. How difficult it must have been to build it in that rough and inaccessible terrain. We stumbled too upon an isolated trading store where the South African-born manager was living in exile, having married across the colour line.
On this particular holiday, the Bells, our friends from Kansas, were with us with their four daughters. Betsy had been a girl scout and was great at making the road passable when our vehicles got stuck. Once we encountered a lorry hanging perilously over a precipice. She tried to engage the driver with talk of mountain lore such as helping strangers in a bind but all she got was a surly look. Language was probably the barrier, but it may also have been our South African registration plates. On another occasion she made us stop on the God-Help-Me pass and listen to bagpipes being played far below. Betsy was sure it was shepherds, but as the music came nearer, it turned out to be pop music blaring from the local bus.
At Cathedral Peak in the Drakensberg we camped in a lovely poplar glade with mini rapids in the nearby river. Malvern's colleague Tony Davies was with us, a trout fisherman and good companion with many a campfire story. Though the fish were elusive that year, every day had its own memorable magic. One morning Tony, Charlotte, Lucy and I set off at dawn towards Cathedral Peak, waving goodbye to Malvern and Anna who were off to hike through the Nduma Gorge. We were entirely alone except for a gang of baboons who were barking in the distance. We unpacked our breakfast picnic and cooked scrambled eggs as the sun rose over the mountain, bathing all the gulleys and jagged crevices in golden light and reaching down to the grasses below. Charlotte and Lucy, who were at the time reading their way through the Laura Ingalls Wilder
Little
House
series, danced with delight. “This is a moment we shall remember until we die,” they chimed. It has certainly remained in my memory as a moment when it felt as though we had the gloriously lit world entirely to ourselves.
For several summer holidays we escaped to the tiny village of Rhodes, nestled in the mountains close to the southern border of Lesotho. The place enchanted us. It has broad streets, attractive Victorian houses and best of all, lots of lovely trees. Oaks, poplars, willows and pepper trees all cast their shadows over the dry earth, shading the streets. The story of their arrival may be a myth but it is a charming one. The early burghers of Rhodes village wrote to Cecil John Rhodes telling him of their intention to name their village after him, in the expectation, perhaps, of a bucket-load of diamonds. Instead he sent a wagonload of trees. What a legacy those leafy, shady sentries have proved to be, especially in summer when the Eastern Cape sun beats down.
Here, on each visit, we'd stay in the same stone house, loving the wide verandah and cool, dark interior lit only by paraffin lamps. The children delighted in a place where they could wash their hair under waterfalls, swim in the river, play ball in the street and pick cherries in the orchard of a long-abandoned farmhouse. There were several people living in Rhodes who were seeking an alternate lifestyle, and on one trip, Betsy Bell and I baked bread to barter for fresh vegetables from some of these communes.
One New Year's Eve it began to hail, with large, icy stones hitting the roof. There was no fridge in the house and so some of these, gathered in a bucket, proved ideal for our champagne. Don, Betsy's husband, had become friendly with our neighbour, the 76-year-old Tannie van Rensburg, and returned from a visit with a chicken. The fact that it was still alive did not deter him and when he'd plucked and roasted it we all enjoyed a splendid supper. The only mistake we made that evening was not joining the people who had come from miles around to dance the night away in the village hall. The thump of
boeremusiek
kept us awake until dawn.
It was Tannie van Rensburg who told us the story of her grandfather and the mermaid. The sea, according to Tannie, washed up a mermaid as her grandfather was walking along the beach. He quickly ordered his servant to catch the creature and took her home with him. But she was sad and began to pine, so he decided to return her. When she realised she was on her way to the sea she began to sing, upon which all the other mermaids came to the edge of the water and carried her back into the waves. Tannie van Rensburg also believed that the world was fat. "If it was round," she asked, "how would we walk? We would hang down like birds, and water from the sea would wash over us.”
When Charlotte and Lucy returned to Rhodes village many years later to see if it had retained its early magic, there were many more holidaymakers, all driving luxury vehicles and upgrading the houses. It was no longer possible to sit in the road as we had done, chatting to the neighbours and sipping preprandial drinks. But lines of a poem Lucy wrote showed she was still struck by the sound of “turtle and laughing dove, piet-my-vrou”, and the “blanket of dark starry sky draped over hills.”
For one who had arrived in South Africa longing for the tidy, cosy English countryside, these outdoor holidays in remote places helped me appreciate the very different South African landscape. I knew that we were privileged to have these opportunities, every one of which helped me identify more with my adopted land and gave all of us the chance to recharge before returning to the demands of our daily lives.
Repression hits the Eastern Cape
It was Boxing Day of 1981 and Malvern and I were visiting a friend being held in an East London prison. The visitors' room was cramped and the thick stone walls seemed to press in on us in the heat. Guy Berger was seated behind a glass panel and the closest we could get to him was to place our palms against the barrier. Conditions were not bad, he said, but all he wanted was to be outside where he could watch the progress of a day from sunrise to sunset. We were entering the time of detentions and successive states of emergency when many people, including acquaintances, colleagues and friends, would do time in service of the struggle.
Guy was serving a four-year sentence, commuted to two, for engaging in activities to further the aims of the ANC. Upon his detention he had been deprived of sleep for 48 hours, then forced to strip down to his underwear and put through an all-night interrogation session by a security policeman who stalked around him, brandishing a cane. He was subsequently held in solitary confinement for three months until his trial. He was 24 years old, a Rhodes student and volunteer in the Black Sash advice office. Later he would become the professor of journalism at Rhodes University, after which he would be appointed UNESCO Media Development director in Paris.
Following the Soweto uprising in 1976 in which black students protested against the forced use of Afrikaans in schools, the political temperature in the country rose dramatically, and the Eastern Cape was no different. The region was the home of the ANC as well as many important political leaders. Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko, Govan Mbeki and others all had Eastern Cape roots. The Black Consciousness Movement had a strong following in the region and it was in Grahamstown that Biko, its ideological leader, was arrested in 1977. There was an outcry across the country and around the world following his subsequent death in detention, and the South African state responded by banning 18 political organisations and several newspapers. A spate of detentions followed, and for the next decade and more, they came in unpredictable waves. According to the South African Institute of Race Relations, by 1986 the Eastern Cape, which enjoyed a high level of political organisation at grassroots level, also had the largest number of detainees in the country.
The United Democratic Front (UDF) was launched in 1983 and within a year this broad-based, non-racial movement had the support of over 600 organisations â but within the same year, over half of the UDF leaders were in jail. State President PW Botha enforced a draconian “total strategy” to deal with the perceived threat from within and outside the country. This saw South Africa extensively militarised. A partial state of emergency, rationalised as a measure to “normalise” society, was declared in July 1985 and gave any member of the security forces, of any rank, the power to arrest without warrant and detain for up to 14 days without charge. This period could be extended on the authority of the Minister of Law and Order for an unlimited period. The state of emergency also sanctioned the use of military force to coerce and control the townships through curfews, surveillance and house-to-house searches. In reply, the UDF called on people to make the townships ungovernable by, among other things, barricading or trenching the streets to impede the movement of police and army vehicles.
The battle lines were drawn. Young people took to the streets, only to be met by massive police retaliation. The South African Institute of Race Relations notes that in 1985, a total of 879 people died in political violence throughout the country, with 441 of these dying at the hands of security forces. The Black Sash intensified its role of witnessing, monitoring and recording events, especially in the rural areas of the Eastern Cape. Membership of the organisation climbed again, reaching 2 000 nationally. In Grahamstown we had a membership of 40.
Many of the affidavits we took from township residents pointed to gross police abuse and misconduct. On 21 March 1985, the 25th anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre during which anti-pass law protesters were killed, 20 people were shot dead by police in Uitenhage. The police alleged that there had been unrest at a funeral and that they had been attacked first. But an affidavit taken from a mourner tells a different story. "I saw two hippos [armoured vehicles] in front of us and another at the back near 16th Avenue,” he said. “We were walking down Maduna Road. When we got close to the hippos the police started shooting. I was shot in the ankle and fell down. While I was lying on the ground the police left the hippos and came amongst us. They took our umbrellas. They collected stones and scattered them among the dead people. I did not see anyone in the crowd carrying stones, sticks or any other weapon. I was taken to hospital in an ambulance and later escaped. I was afraid that I would be put in jail.”
Much of the action of the political struggle was played out on the streets of small towns far from the regular circuit of politicians, journalists and foreign observers. Isolated and poorly resourced at the best of times, these centres were rendered especially remote during the restrictive states of emergency.
Adelaide, lying at the foot of the majestic Winterberg mountains, was one such town. I liked visiting â in winter, the range was often blanketed with snow and in summer, seen from the hot dusty plain below, the mountains seemed cool and inviting. The road from Grahamstown was lined with soil the colour of rust, dark green bush and sisal trees. Now and again one would see a monkey on a telegraph pole or the flash of a meerkat crossing the road. The houses in white Adelaide had frilly fretwork balconies and large, shady gardens and the streets were lined with pepper trees and blue gums. But the town had the air of being past its prime. Across the railway line lay the township, a jumble of shacks and dusty tracks, and beyond, a swathe of modern township architecture where small square houses stood in regimented rows, presided over by high-mast electric lights.
The Grahamstown Sash visited Adelaide over the years and saw the advice office grow from a small kitchen-run operation to a properly staffed and equipped office. The delightful Sheddy Magwa worked there. His name, he told me, came from his birth in a shed during heavy rains when his family's hut had collapsed. I was tempted to make a comparison with a more famous birth in a stable â all the more so when Sheddy told me, “Somehow from an early time I knew that I must carry the burdens of my people.”
Sheddy was a warm man with an infectious laugh and a face that crinkled easily into a smile. His house was made of roof irons painted bright blue. The ceiling sagged and was stained with damp. On top of a small television set were pictures of Jesus Christ and Nelson Mandela, whom he referred to as “my man”. In his youth, Sheddy had gone to Cape Town, where he discovered the ANC and began proselytising for the movement in the township hostels, enduring harassment by the police and several spells in jail. By the time I met him his days of recruiting for the ANC and for Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), its armed wing, were over and he was now involved with the advice office and the Presbyterian Church, educating rural people about their rights.
Inevitably perhaps, Sheddy's three sons left the country in 1980 and spent periods in Angola, Mozambique, Zambia and Tanzania, where one of them attended the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College. From 1980 to 1991 the Magwas heard no news of their sons. Once when I visited in 1990, Sheddy's wife had gone to Bisho to attend a rally at which Chris Hani was to speak. She hoped that Hani might have news. Needless to say this small, frail woman got swept up in the vast crowd. She got nowhere near Hani and came home disappointed. Eventually two sons did return, with news that Zwelithemba had died in 1984, apparently during a mutiny in an ANC camp. That was a hard blow for Sheddy, who felt that he might have indoctrinated his sons. He hoped in vain until his dying day that he might hear the full story of how his son had died.