MANDLA WAS AS handsome as Pru had described him. I picked him out immediately in the gloom of the Paramaribo. This was a bar in an alley off Amsterdam’s busy shopping street, the pedestrianised Kalverstraat, frequented mainly by Surinamese exiles and always heaving with people. It was a typical bruin café, with wood-panelled, smoke-stained walls, low lighting and brass pulls. On the walls were sepia prints of the white clapboard houses of colonial Paramaribo, the capital of Surinam, with their distinctive wooden balconies and rococo patterns carved into the eaves. Palm trees in silhouette spiked the skies and in the distance the slow-moving waters of the Surinam River shimmered. In one corner was a jukebox which dispensed a cheery mix of reggae and creole pop.
It was early evening and already the bar was filling up. Only a few white faces in the crowd. Mandla was sitting at the back of the bar, sunk back in a sofa, a beer on the table in front of him. He was facing the door, sheltering behind a copy of The Guardian. He was sharp featured, almost leonine, and his cheeks were lightly scarified, perhaps as a result of an initiation ritual in his youth. Pru had told me he looked dapper, and on this our first meeting he was dressed formally in a charcoal suit, with a crisp white shirt but no tie. As he stood up to shake my hand, I noticed a powerful physique that filled out his jacket. There was no fat on this man. He was pure muscle.
Mandla’s grip was firm and his smile genuine. My initial nervousness abated under his no-nonsense approach. He was matter-of-fact about my recruitment into the ANC. “Trusted comrades” had vouched for me, he said, but before we next met I was to draft a detailed autobiography so that his structures could vet me finally against their information. He told me that the movement was regrouping inside South Africa, after the repression of the 1976 uprisings, the banning of all liberation parties, and the moving of the direction of operations to outside of the country. They were gathering intelligence, building new networks, and seeking strategically placed recruits in Europe. Cities like London and Amsterdam were ideal places to have “listening posts” because South Africans passed through them easily as tourists or participants on the conference circuit, or to study. These cities with their thronging crowds, their anonymity, were perfect places for the movement to gather information and to meet with activists from inside. People like myself, who were not openly identified with the ANC, were perfect go-betweens. The ANC, he said, would use me to do research, to debrief people passing through, and to pass on messages, reports and tasks both ways. This information would be absorbed into the larger structures of the organisation and help rebuild the underground.
When he had finished talking, he smiled. “You are nervous,” he said. “Is this too much technical detail?”
“It’s not that,” I replied. “It’s more that I wonder if I am up to it. I’m out of practice. I have been away from home – from South Africa – for three years now. I have no contacts there anymore – except for Pru, that is.”
“Try a decade,” Mandla said. “That’s how long I have been away, give or take. It is a good thing, though. You have been off the radar for some time. They’ll have assumed that you have settled, are lost to the cause, enveloped in your European life.” He paused, smoothing a crease in his newspaper. “And I believe you are in a relationship.”
I grimaced, hesitating about how to respond to the statement that wasn’t a question. I didn’t know how much Pru had told him about my situation. Probably everything. I had become so comfortable in my homosexuality in Amsterdam that I bridled at the need to be defensive again. I experienced a sudden rush of mixed emotions – the thrill of the possibility of involvement in doing something useful for the movement, doubt that I could do a good job of it, and fear at being drawn back into its moral rectitude which had been so suffocating back in South Africa.
“We all need to find ways to refashion our roles,” Mandla continued, “even if we are not at home. We all have something to contribute; it adds to the totality of the effort. You will find your feet.” He had an infectious smile. “But enough of politics. Let’s see what they have here.” He ran his finger down the cocktail menu. “Ah,” he said, “Cuban caipirinhas. We used to drink these in Havana.” Without asking me, he ordered two of the cocktails. They were delicious and took the edge off my recurring nervousness.
“Now tell me about the Paramaribo,” Mandla said.
“It’s a Surinamese drinking hole,” I started. “Like us, they are exiles.” I told him that the coup in the former Dutch colony had resulted in almost a third of the population fleeing to Holland. “I chose the Paramaribo for our meeting because …” I was suddenly uncomfortable “… because, well, I thought we would be less conspicuous here than in one of the city bars.”
Mandla put back his head and laughed. “You mean as a darkie I don’t stick out as much here!” he said. “Good thinking, Matthew, good spy-craft.”
I was disarmed by his largesse. He ordered two more caipirinhas and I began to relax.
“And you, Matthew? Tell me about yourself.”
He probably knew it all already, but I found it easy to talk to him. I accounted for how I had come to Amsterdam, my military call-up, my involvement with Paul, Pru and the others in the events of 1976, my difficulties at settling into this new city, my longing for home.
“Exile is hard,” he agreed. “Do you live alone?”
“I live with my lover,” I answered, avoiding a reference to gender, “who is studying music at the Utrecht Conservatory.” Wishing to avoid further questioning, I went on to tell him about my work at Allegro, how my knowledge of music had grown. He was interested in the fact that Janneke sourced music in Eastern Europe.
“Ah,” he said, “when I was in the Soviet Union there was little recreation. We went to many concerts. I was uneasy at first. Back in the Transkei our exposure to music, classical music, that is, was limited to the hymns we sang at church. And jazz, of course, especially in my home. My father, he was a fan of jazz – Miles, Coltrane, Makeba, Count Basie.” He looked wistful for a moment, then gathered himself and smiled at me. “But there, in Moscow and other places, music was a part of the fabric of life, not set apart as high art. I grew to love Shostakovich and Stravinsky. We must share recordings some time.” He tapped at his cocktail glass and his smile broadened. “And the music in Cuba,” he added. “Now that is something else altogether.”
Mandla had thrown me. Despite how Pru had described him, I had still been expecting more of the ideologue, someone not necessarily unpleasant or unfriendly, but closed, a disciple of political strategy, ready with rhetoric. This was what my brief foray into student activism in South Africa had led me to expect. Yes, there were the generic references to time spent in Cuba and the Soviet Union that marked him as a revolutionary, but there was something else – a delicacy or sensitivity to this worldliness about him that was attractive. I was on the point of offering to take him through the stacks at Allegro when I noticed he was looking at his watch.
Mandla sprang to his feet. “Matthew, a pleasure to meet you,” he said. “I look forward to our working together. To the revolution!”
With a look that I could only interpret as ironic, he picked up his glass, raised it, and knocked back the remains of his cocktail. Then he was gone, out into the darkening alley. I stayed behind and nursed my drink for a while, eavesdropping on a group of Surinamese at a table nearby talking about food shortages in Paramaribo, and rumours of a counter-coup.