20 | MATTHEW

IN AMSTERDAM SPRING gave way to summer. The boughs of the elms, thick with new foliage, hung heavy over the streets, as if weighed down by the sudden humidity that thickened the air. The sun was a white-hot ball above the city spires, unmoving in the sky. Pollen carried on the breeze coated the cobbles with a light yellow down. In the grachten dense little clouds of gnats swirled and danced inches above the water. In the buildings along the banks sash windows were pulled high once more and strains of music drifted out from inside the apartments – jazz and chords or scales from someone practising the piano – interspersed with the cries of children at play in the recesses of hidden living rooms. The bars and cafés put out stools and tables on the pavements and the streets were a Babel of conversation. The whirr of bicycle wheels and, further off, the submerged hum of the outboard motors of flatboats out on the water were constant background noise. In the canals, the heat depleting the water’s oxygen forced fish up to the surface for air; sometimes you could catch their scales flashing in the sunlight just beneath the viscous surface. And always the swans were there, cutting their brilliant trails through the water, swirling luminescent bubbles, usually with a posse of dirty grey cygnets in tow.

The citizenry dressed down, abandoning their offices at three in the afternoon and taking to the parks. At Allegro we placed fans in the stacks and kept the door to the street propped open. Janneke and I would stand in the doorway, smoking, cold Heinekens in our hands.

Even at night the heat could be stifling. For a while Oliver dragged our mattress beneath the window, shifting the sofa against another wall, so that we could catch the slight coolness that rose from the canal below. We discarded sheets. If we moved together in our sleep a layer of sweat formed instantly between our skins and one of us would gently push the other away. I took to running ice cubes over Oliver’s body – the only eroticism allowed by the heat – delighting in his low throaty chuckles as I ran the cubes over his lower abdomen and the insides of his thighs.

It was in this atmosphere, in the intoxicating fug of Amsterdam’s heatwave, that I took on my new role of subterfuge, learning and perfecting what Mandla had called spy-craft. During my lunch breaks, or under the pretence of doing errands for Allegro in the afternoon, and in the long summer evenings, I began working for the movement. Once a month Mandla came to Amsterdam. We met mostly at the Paramaribo, occasionally somewhere else.

Of my activities, and what was becoming my double life, I told Oliver nothing.

One afternoon, Mandla and I were sitting outside at a table by the water, to escape the muggy heat of the café inside. We were talking about the armed struggle and I sensed a subtly critical note behind his words. Most ANC cadres, himself included, had received military training but he’d never told me about his military experiences beyond that, other than the general information he had shared with me the first time we met. I knew that he had spent time in the Soviet Union and had visited Cuba, and that he had been at different times in Botswana and Swaziland. How he now came to be based in London I did not know.

Our monthly encounters and conversations often ranged over a broad spread of topics. One of the things I enjoyed most about Mandla was his eloquence. No matter what the subject, his knowledge was impressive. There was always a genteel nuance to his critique and he used language carefully and with effect. His use of ideological phraseology was always underscored with a faint hint of irony.

We sat contentedly in the shade together while he explained that while the odd, spectacular act of sabotage might inspire the people, South Africa was not yet ripe for an armed struggle, or at least not one in which guerrillas confronted the apartheid military in conventional combat. Outright resistance had been ruthlessly crushed. The task was to build over time a broad and inclusive movement – workers’, students’, women’s and youth formations – as an irresistible force to the regime. We should tap into every form of dissent. We should also be intensely practical. The intention was to bring all “democrats” into the fold of the ANC. And next time an opportunity such as 1976 presented itself, the movement would be better prepared, better able to provide strategy and leadership.

Mandla was convincing and persuasive, all the more so to me after having been cut off from politics for the last three years. I was hungry for news and for analysis. He brought books from London for me and had also arranged a subscription to the ANC’s weekly newsletter. This was sent to my post restante address at the Amsterdam post office.

In the new conditions, Mandla explained, we were to be open to all forms of organisation; we could learn from the European left, from the Dutch anarchists, and from the many exiled communities in the city.

One of the first things Mandla had tasked me with was a reconnaissance of left-wing bookshops for useful material.

One such bookshop was Fort van Sjakoo, an anarchist store tucked into one of a series of squatted warehouses near the Waterlooplein. In this district there was always a frisson of tension in the air. The threat of the eviction of illegal occupation by the city council was a constant and at the corner of the plein two wagens were parked, semi-permanently, manned by listless policemen who, stripped down to their vests, spent most of their time playing cards on a tailgate in the shade of a tree.

The bookshop’s plain pine shelves were crammed, and its walls adorned with overlapping political posters of every cause and description – Ban the Bomb, Support the PLO, Solidarity with the Surinamese Left – there were even some urging a boycott of apartheid South Africa. The shop was so small that no more than two or three people could browse at a time.

Fort van Sjakoo was a treasure trove of the practical aspects of subversion, from every struggle imaginable. Some material dated back to the partisans in the Second World War. There were manuals on resistance, containing instructions on how to set up a radio mast, make a clandestine broadcast in half an hour and then move on; how to make pamphlet bombs to distribute propaganda; how to pick locks, and break and enter buildings without leaving a trace. When I read about the pamphlet bombs, I was immediately transported back to Cape Town, to Paul and Pru and the others. Our student activism seemed like a lifetime ago.

Then there were more elaborate works: how to set up a secret network of cells, and stratagems to divert police when organising marches or demonstrations. There were even copies of The Anarchist’s Cookbook, a manual on bomb making.

I browsed in Fort van Sjakoo all through that heatwave, picking through every manual until I had exhausted the stock. I bought those publications that seemed most relevant and useful and made the proprietor more than curious about my intentions. He tried to engage me, but I rebuffed him, saying only that I was a student of political science. I doubt that he was convinced. A few days later I took the train to Rotterdam and explored the left-wing bookshops there, but they tended to turn up the same materials, so I gave that up.

My work fell into a pattern. Material in English I would mail to a cover address in England – to a Mrs Patricia Sterling at 43 Anson Road, Tufnell Park, London. The material in Dutch I translated in longhand. The staff behind the counter in the post office in Amsterdam greeted me these days. “You again? What do you have for us today?” And I would smile and exchange pleasantries with them in my much improved Dutch.