WHEN WE HEARD A VEHICLE changing gear and slowing down, we all sat up, alert and apprehensive. Themba held up a hand, cautioning us to silence. Close to where we were hiding, the vehicle slowed almost to a stop, then changed gear and executed a U-turn. We could hear its tyres hissing in the gravel of the road’s shoulder. We heard a car door open and bang shut. Then came a whistle, three times, as if a man was calling to his dog. Themba looked at his watch and stood up. He motioned us to stay where we were and then, closing the folds of his jacket over his weapon, he climbed out into the bright light that now framed the opening of the culvert.
We heard a murmur of voices in greeting. Then Themba’s head ducked back in and he grinned at us. By the time we had all followed him out and up onto the road he and the driver were talking animatedly, as if they were old friends.
“This is Comrade Castro. He will be taking you from here,” Themba said.
Comrade Castro was a short, plump man with heavy black-framed spectacles and a dark threadbare suit that had seen better days. He looked like a village teacher or pastor. Parked on the opposite side of the road was a white Volkswagen kombi.
“We must leave immediately,” Castro said. “Standing here will arouse suspicion.” In the kombi he passed around a box of warm vetkoek parcels stuffed with savoury mince and a thermos flask of hot, heavily sugared tea. We gulped the food down hungrily and passed the flask around. The women sat at the back, I behind the driver.
Castro opened a kit-bag and handed some items of clothing to us – head doeks for the women and a woollen balaclava for me, which I pulled over my head right away. If we were stopped we were farmworkers travelling into town to shop. In Swaziland we had prepared for this, acquiring worn clothing and broken down shoes to better look the part. I had not shaved for days and my chin was rough with stubble. With Themba I had even practised the deferential greeting, balaclava doffed, eyes to the ground and hands clasped together that I would adopt should we encounter any white authority figures. It made Themba laugh, this stereotype of racial humility. But we all knew how to do it.
Comrade Castro turned to us from the front seat. “No questions?” he asked. “You all know what to do?”
We nodded.
I had spent hours with Themba working on my legend – a fictitious rendition of my life story, filling in the gaps of my period in exile with an invented one here in northern Natal. It was so familiar to me now that I could become that other person with only a slight change of gait, and an adjustment of accent and speed of speech. I could fully inhabit my new self at a moment’s notice.
Each one of us had memorised every detail of our respective missions. When it came to mine, this included the layout of towns, townships and farms. I knew the code names and addresses of comrades already in the country; where there were likely to be police road blocks; the mobile army camps and units that were in the rural areas in the province; how to use a public telephone box to pass on coded information; how to detect if I was being followed. I had prepared so thoroughly that only fate or trickery, I believed, could scupper my mission.
Comrade Castro switched on the kombi’s radio and tuned it to a local station. A cheerful mix of mbaqanga and township jazz, instantly familiar from my youth, filled the vehicle. One of the women behind me began to hum along. I felt a pang of nostalgia, which only heightened as I began to take in the landscape. On the horizon I could make out a smoky smudge of blue against the white clouds. The foothills of the Drakensberg.
We were speeding through farmland. It appeared empty of human habitation, except for the occasional farmworker trudging along the shoulder of the road. Now and again a scattering of outbuildings in some disrepair were evidence of a farm close by. We saw some indigenous cattle grazing close up to the fencing, their hides intricate patterns of browns, black and white against the grass blurring into indistinction as the kombi drove by.
I fell into a reverie of nostalgic contemplation as objects in the landscape brought back random memories of my youth and my student days. The familiarity of home, of being finally in the land of my birth once more, began to settle over me. Layer by layer, it claimed me back. On the radio a choral group was singing a hymn in isiZulu and a strange mixture of grief, a sense of loss underscoring relief, as if waking from a bad dream, overcame me. I turned my head against the window to hide my face from my comrades. Surreptitiously, I wiped the tears from my eyes.
Eventually, the feeling subsided. I calmed myself. Outside the landscape had opened to fields of cosmos. Everywhere I looked there was a sea of pink, white and red spreading as far as the eye could see.
But I knew that there was a hidden harshness to the beauty of this terrain. On these farms below the foothills workers lived in hovels, eking out a meagre living, exploited, subjected frequently to verbal abuse, sometimes also to physical violence by the white commercial farmers who had gained ownership, illegally, of this land. I was also aware of what had been happening more recently – that whole families, generations of whose ancestral lands these had been for centuries, were being forcibly moved to reserves to make way for more white farmland and the relentless pursuit of racial segregation. These people had lost their crops, their cattle and their homes. Land that contained the bones of their forefathers was being ripped away from them, forcing them to set up homesteads of corrugated-iron shacks in what could only be described as increasingly decimated, overcrowded wasteland. Subsistence was barely even that. Destroyed and hopeless, they were living an existence of enforced poverty. I had seen the pictures of these broken people. There was spilled blood here and death in these hills.
But there had also been some resistance. Although coverage of this was suppressed in the media – the areas were no-go zones for journalists – our networks were patching together a samizdat account of resistance to the removals. There had been attempts at marches and demonstrations, but most of these had been brutally broken up by police firing rubber bullets or teargas. There had also been more trenchant opposition. Mysterious veld fires burning fiercely at night had ravaged the crops of some white farmers. A police station in a small town not far from where I was heading had been torched. The approaches to white towns were strewn with nails and rocks, intended to disrupt traffic. In the rural townships there were occasional sporadic riots and disaffected youth looted white-owned bottle-stores and shops. There had even been a small number of murders of white farmers – violent robberies, or so they appeared, but part of the general restiveness. These events had produced a deep unease in the white population of the small rural towns that dotted this landscape. The military had recently been deployed to support the local police.
I knew this, had studied all of this, because the resistance was why I was here.
As if reading my thoughts, the women who had been singing along in soft harmony to the radio behind me, perhaps to cover their nervousness, had fallen silent. We were approaching a town. The kombi slowed as the density of the traffic grew. Ahead of us, turning off the main road onto a rural artery, was a convoy of military trucks. As the heavy tread of the armoured vehicles’ tyres churned up clouds of red dust, you could feel the tension rise among us, but soon they had gone and the dust had settled.
This small town was almost identical to so many in this province, with its standard collection of 1960s architecture. Most of the buildings had concrete facades and featureless picture windows barred against theft. The treeless, litter-strewn main road offered the usual chain stores – OK Bazaars, Checkers, Pep Stores and Ackermans, a few bottle-stores. Small knots of shoppers hung around the entrances. By now the sun was high in the sky and it beat down on the tar, making the surface shimmer. I noticed a wall of sand-bags around the entrance to the police station, outside which the flag hung limply on its pole. There were thick wire grids over the windows.
Comrade Castro drove on through the town and past the taxi rank. A few kilometres further he turned off left into the township. This turned out to be an orderly grid of characteristically small red-brick houses, most with clean-swept yards, some graced by a tree or bed of canna lilies. Further back we could see rows of tin shanties crowded closely together. A fug of coal smoke hung over the roofs.
A herd of goats ahead of us in the street forced us to slow down, but before long we drew up outside a tavern. It was a hive of activity. On its concrete veranda, women were grilling mielies over coals in a petrol drum, dogs were sniffing out morsels from the debris in the gutters, and a group of men were conversing over quarts of Black Label. Some of them were hanging over the vibracrete balustrade, while others leaned back in plastic garden chairs. A glimpse through the tavern door revealed a pool table and a crowd of drinkers grouped around a bar.
A man came up to the passenger window and greeted Comrade Castro. They had a brief conversation in low voices. Then Comrade Castro turned around and addressed the women, who were busy gathering up their few things in expectation that this was where we parted ways. They were right.
“This is where I leave you, comrades,” Comrade Castro said simply. “Be careful.”
We exchanged perfunctory farewells. I watched the women walk purposefully around the back of the tavern and along a path until they were taken up with the procession of other women walking to and from the shops. Then Comrade Castro put the kombi in gear and eased the vehicle back onto the hot tarmac.