Heidi and I had woken very early on 11 March to leave for Bop. We were on the last stretch of the 300-kilometre drive from Johannesburg to the twin towns of Mafikeng and Mmabatho and a cool dawn picked out the thorn trees along the road. I was watching the fuel gauge drop faster than the signposts could count the kilometres down. Something was wrong with the car, which was finally rebelling against the punishment of following the election campaign and years of abuse while I chased pictures. I tried to keep the revs as low as possible, but the chances were good that we might not make Mmabatho without refuelling.
The rural petrol station-cum-trading-stores we passed, spaced progressively further apart as we headed deeper into the dry west, were all shut. In desperation, I turned into a mine-housing compound in search of someone to sell us fuel. A hastily-dressed Afrikaans women showed us the home of the foreman. He could help, she assured us. Despite the early hour, the little community was abuzz with activity. Inside the small, over-furnished house, the foreman’s wife was talking excitedly on the phone; ‘Everyone’s been called up,’ she said into the receiver.
I was startled. The situation in Bop, just a few kilometres away, must have worsened if the army was calling up reservists. Perhaps the South African government had decided unilaterally to take the homeland back under its control in an attempt to quell the unrest and ensure that next month’s poll could take place. Her husband wiped shaving-cream from his throat and nodded a curt greeting to me, then disappeared back into the bathroom to finish his toilet.
‘There are people coming from Rustenburg, Ventersdorp, even Witbank,’ she continued in Afrikaans, her voice trembling. I realized that she was not talking about the South African Defence Force, but white supremacist militias, raised in those predominantly right-wing towns. Bop was plumb in the middle of the Western Transvaal, heartland of the white right, and there would be no shortage of armed volunteers. Without waiting for an answer about the fuel, I got up, smiled and discreetly left. We had to get into Bop before the right-wingers, or the army, or whoever, sealed the border. Sure enough, on
a level stretch of road just before town, a pair of civilian pick-ups were parked alongside the road. A bearded man in khaki shirt and shorts was on the gravel shoulder. As we approached, he stuck his hand out for us to halt, but I kept going, neither accelerating nor braking, and waved. He couldn’t quite decide if we were of his ilk or not. It was enough of a hesitation for us to get past them and into Mafikeng.
Mmabatho is a new town, built specifically to house the government of Bop, and Mafikeng was the old African town and mission that had gained fame during the Boer War of 1899-1902 for resisting a 217-day siege. It should have become infamous instead, as the British and other white defenders had eaten well every day of the siege, whereas its black inhabitants had starved. Mafikeng also became the site of a notorious British concentration camp for captured Boer civilians.
Unknown to us then, Mangope had called on the right-wing Afrikaner leader General Constand Viljoen to come to his rescue. Viljoen, a former chief of the army, had formed the Freedom Front, a coalition of right-wing Afrikaner groups that were pushing for an independent white volkstaat, that were allegedly the sunny face of racism. Viljoen’s white paramilitaries were to assist the Bop security forces regain control of the streets. But within the ranks of Viljoen’s right-wing army were the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (known by its Afrikaans acronym AWB), a bunch of neo-Nazis led by Eugene Terre’Blanche, a corpulent drunk who liked little more than riding a stallion at militaristic rallies, where he would mesmerize audiences with his brilliant, often hypnotic, rhetoric. Despite his propensity for falling off his horse, he was still regarded as an intrepid figure by a minority of whites.
In farm pick-ups and dated cars, thousands of white South Africans heeded the call to defend apartheid and reinforce their claim to a white homeland. But the bottom line for most of the white supremacists was an opportunity to kill blacks. They had long visualized a fight to the bitter end against black communist revolutionaries, and the negotiated settlement that De Klerk had reached with Mandela was, to them, a betrayal. Their country and heritage had been signed away without a
battle being fought on South African soil. The black liberation movements had never mounted a serious military campaign against the potent white state. The armed wing of the radical black Pan-Africanist Congress, APLA, was widely derided as two men and a fax machine despite some ugly acts of racial terrorism, including an attack on a church packed with white worshippers that clearly demonstrated their refusal to distinguish between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ targets, civilians or soldiers.
We joined a handful of cars waiting in vain for a petrol station to open. There were nervous whites and their families wanting to fill up so that they could leave town, as well as the newly-arrived right-wingers. No one paid more than cursory attention to the body of a black woman in her forties crumpled against one of the walls.
‘Ons is op ’n kaffirskiet-piekniek (a kaffir-shooting picnic),’ a man told me. He and his girlfriend were sitting on plastic chairs set up on the back of a pick-up and drinking beer, icy from the coolbox between his knees. For him and his kind, this was a potential orgy of racist, white trash goonery. They had chosen the right place to enact their violent fantasies: Bop was by far the most surreal of the ten homelands that had made up the phantasmagoric landscape of apartheid.
For white South Africans, Bop had for years been their vacation from the Calvinist restraints of their own society. In the homeland’s luxuriously kitschy Sun City resort, they came to gamble, carouse with black prostitutes and watch pornographic movies. Vast sums of cash brought in the Miss World pageant, international golf, world title boxing fights and musicians, all of whom, with a nod and a wink, finessed the sports and cultural boycott of pariah South African by visiting ‘independent’ Bophuthatswana.
Despairing that the petrol station would ever open, we pushed on towards the town-centre and found dark-green-uniformed Bop soldiers patrolling the streets. Alongside them were white men, most dressed in camouflage or khaki uniforms garnished with the three-legged swastikas of the AWB.
We wandered around nervously, until one of the Boers told us that
he would put a bullet through our heads if we came within 300 metres of them. These were not my favourite people. They were concentrates of hatred, aggression and fanaticism, cloaked in Christian and Old Testament righteousness. Perhaps it was the way I walked, dressed, or some kind of psychic power that allowed them to pick up my antipathy, but they could smell that I was a Kaffirboetie, ’n kommunis, a word which can be delightfully hissed through tightly-drawn lips.
We decided to forgo valour and check out the black residential areas where we would most likely find ANC supporters. I was not sure where to go, since I used to avoid Bop like the plague. To me, it was a place imbued with evil. The irony of the AWB’s arrival to help prop up Mangope’s tyrannical reign was that I had years previously dubbed the Bop security forces ‘the black AWB’.
Lost, we wound our way aimlessly through the suburbs, with the fuel gauge showing empty, when we happened across a petrol station that was being plundered by a black mob. I decided in favour of the blunt approach and parked right in front of the pumps. The looters stared at us as if we were insane. I saw flickers of greed pass from eye to eye. A car full of cameras and who knows what other treasures had just rolled into their hands. I got out and announced that we were journalists and desperately needed petrol. A couple of guys, bare-chested, with shirts tied around their waists, looked at each other. ‘No problem,’ they said in unison. The pumps had been ripped right off the wells, and a bucket was lowered into the reservoir. We all laughed and joked, and suspicious characters asked for money for the petrol. ‘Just a donation,’ they assured me. I paid up, probably more than the value of the petrol, but on that day, the fuel was priceless. I had just looted a tank of fuel, and I could certainly identify with the pleasure looters took in the pastime. As Heidi and I continued cruising, we came across a group of black civilians gathered under a large willow tree. They were fearful and showed us patches of blood soaked into the sand, holding out cartridges they had found nearby. It seemed that the right-wingers had been driving around town shooting at any black they saw.
We went to the one hotel that was still open, where all the other journalists had set up base. There were working phones, food, booze and armed security guards at the gate. Ken was there with Monica; they too had run out of gas and he had abandoned
The Star
’s car somewhere in town. No one was sure as to what would happen next.
The right-wingers had made their base at the airport on the edge of town. On our way there, we passed car-loads of them driving through town, belligerently waving their guns. Some wore balaclavas to cover their faces, others were brazenly bare-faced. Near the entrance to the airport terminal we met John Battersby, the
Christian Science Monitor
correspondent. His face was swollen and bleeding; he had been badly beaten by goons when he tried to get in to speak to the Afrikaner leader Viljoen. And John doesn’t even carry cameras, the usual magnet for trouble. We returned to the hotel and waited for some kind of development. The Bop military base was a little way up the road, and if they did stage a coup, as rumour said they were now contemplating, they would have to come right past the entrance of the hotel. I nodded off on the comfortable couch thoughtfully located in the reception. After a while, I started awake, jumpy that we were missing something. Heidi and I went back out for a cruise.
The streets were deserted. There were no right-wingers to be seen and the Bop security forces were also absent. In a poor residential area of town, we found a slender black man who claimed to be an ANC official of some sort. He told us that someone had been killed near the airport. Following his directions from the back seat, we almost drove straight into a column of right-wing vehicles at an intersection. The ANC guy went into silent shock. ‘Get down, on the floor!’ I yelled at him and he folded himself into the space behind the front seats. Fervently hoping they had not seen our passenger, I smiled pathetically at the menacing figures standing on the backs of their pick-ups, a variety of guns trained on us as they passed. The column stretched left and right as far as I could see. What were they up to? I had to get into the column, but there was the problem of our little secret in the back seat. ‘Com, I have to follow them. Is that OK with
you?’ I absent-mindedly looked in the rear-view mirror, thinking I would see his face. ‘OK,’ his quavering voice gamely floated up from the floor.
South Africans have an old-fashioned sense of road etiquette, and so, when I caught the eye of one of the drivers and indicated that I wanted to be let into the line ahead of him, he nodded and stopped to allow me in. After a kilometres or so, we heard a burst of gunfire and then everyone was pulling to the sides of the road. We did the same and watched as dozens of these fools started firing at random into the mud huts alongside. For some reason they also peppered a water tank. I could not discern any incoming fire and I wanted to take pictures, but I was scared to step out of the car, knowing their antipathy to journalists. I could take pictures through the windscreen, but if they saw me and came over, they would find our passenger and kill him without a qualm. Probably kill all of us. ‘I’m getting out,’ I told Heidi. She looked horrified, ‘Don’t!’ but we both knew that I would. I took a few steps away from the car and began shooting pictures. Within a minute or two, they noticed me. The guns all swung towards me and they began to yell and curse.
‘But I’m showing you being attacked,’ I tried to convince them in my best Afrikaans. ‘It’s in your interest.’ No one bought that line, but it stalled them a little. The column had begun to retreat and in their eagerness to leave it looked as though they would not bother with me. I started to relax, but then I turned to my right and I saw a man standing on the bed of a light pick-up some 15 metres away. He was pointing a pistol right at my head. ‘I’m going to kill you now,’ he informed me softly in Afrikaans. I watched his index finger tighten on the trigger. Everything slowed right down. I knew he was not bluffing, that he was going to shoot. Suddenly, a tall wiry man with an ugly grimace underneath his greying moustache stepped between the gun and me. He ripped the one camera off my neck and hurled it to the ground - the other of my two cameras was hanging from my shoulder, and I used my elbow to push it out of sight, behind my back. His face contorted and he was saying something, but I could not hear for the
blood rushing through my ears. I could have kissed that unattractive face - he had unwittingly save my life. Then they were all gone and we were alone.
I walked shakily back to the car and got in. Heidi looked at me, her face pale, stricken. We pulled off on to a side road where black residents urgently waved us to a hiding place behind the hut that the AWB had been shooting up. I feared they might follow us, not believing we had somehow managed to get away unscathed. I also had difficulty believing how stupid I had been. I knew the pictures were shit from the first frame. But there was no time to dwell on it: a woman had been severely wounded in one of the houses. They carried her out into the dusty yard, where Heidi began to dress her wounds. She looked in a bad way, blood everywhere.
The convoy we had intercepted had been trying to leave Bop. The homeland army had been unhappy with Mangope’s decision to call on the Boers, and the unmitigated racism displayed by the right-wing militia had utterly alienated them. Their disappearance from the streets was the sign that they had withdrawn their support of Mangope. Constand Viljoen had watched his attempted rescue of the homeland leader start to degenerate into a racial showdown and ordered his men to pull out.