40 | MATTHEW

AFTER MY RELATIONSHIP with Mauritz ended, I descended into a cynical existence of abstinence. Everything seemed empty of meaning. Not even the sensuality of the arrival of spring in Amsterdam, as the grey clouds loosened their hold on the sky, could move me. Before, when the miracle of the changing of the season began I had always been enchanted by the crocuses, shiny yellow and purple, pushing tentatively through the wet matted grass on the pavement under the elms on the Ceintuurbaan where it crossed Leidseplein. And, as the sun gathered strength and brought warmth to the streets, the flush of blossom in the apple and pear trees in the Vondelpark had always made me feel a hushed kind of privilege. But this time around I was oblivious to the colours of the changing city. I hardly noticed as Amsterdammers exchanged their scarves, coats and jumpers for looser, more revealing clothes.

Drinking coffee one morning at an outdoor table for the first time in months I watched morosely as three students, men, as always in a group, ambled across the street towards the university on the Spui, chatting quietly. They all had that alluring national blend of Flemish blond and darker, black-haired Moor that I found so compelling. They leaned against the rough red-brown brickwork of the entrance, sunning themselves, eyes half closed against the sun and the smoke that trailed from their sjekkies.

Ordinarily, I would have been captivated, taking in the offering of sun-glimpsed sensuality, the casually suggested eroticism over a bitter coffee chased down by a Beerenburg. Today I didn’t give them more than a single appraising glance. I carried on reading through a sheaf of photocopied news cuttings that Mandla had sent me about strike action in Johannesburg. The following week I was to meet with two trade union activists from home, who were in the city to attend a conference of the Federatie van Nederlandse Vakbonden and, assiduous as always when defeated by life, I was making notes and charting a list of questions that would frame my briefing from Mandla, who was due to arrive later in the day.

A light rain was falling, dulling the afternoon light, as I made my slow way to the Paramaribo and when I walked inside the bartender had just switched on the lights. I found Mandla sunk back into the soft confines of the sofa we usually occupied. He was engrossed in the sheaf of notes I had sent him on the debriefing of the trade unionists. He looked up at me, a mojito in his hand, and gave me his wide smile.

“Matthew,” he said. “You look terrible.”

Suddenly I saw myself through Mandla’s kind eyes. I knew that since Mauritz I had lost weight and I could see for myself in the cracked mirror in the shower at Singel 500 how my skin seemed to have been invaded by greyness and that my ribs were visible. There were dark rings under my eyes. My favourite charcoal-grey coat, the one with the old-fashioned herring-bone weave, was too big for me now and patches had worn through at the elbows. I put my hands self-consciously into my pockets. Lately I had been picking at the skin around my thumbnails until it bled and my hands were unsightly.

I slumped down beside Mandla on the sofa and he signalled to the waiter.

“If we have been working you too hard, I apologise,” said Mandla, “but the report you’ve presented on the delegation is extremely useful. I think it is almost your best work yet, so please don’t quit on me now.”

In truth I had worked very hard on that report and his praise, which was rare, brought a flush to my face. I had focused my efforts on giving as much detail as I could glean of the strategies for the stay-aways planned for the country and had tried to bring out some of the richness, the vivid sense of drama and colour and courage which felt so absent from my life now in Europe. I had been at pains to bring the intricacies of the struggle alive in an almost novelistic way, taken it upon myself to attempt to inhabit the minds of each of my informants who had been attending the FNV congress in The Hague. One activist during the period under review was a student on a fellowship to Oxford, whom I had named “Earnestine” because of her frowning concentration on giving me as clear a picture as she could of the student rallies she’d participated in in the Eastern Cape and descriptions of some of the students who were office-bearers but who were suspected of being informers for the Special Branch; another was a defector from the army, like Oliver, who had seen service and brought me invaluable information about raids across borders by the SADF. I had called him Niemand.

I thanked Mandla and gratefully took my drink from the tray before the waiter could lower it to our table.

“You’re not working me too hard,” I said. “You know I do it gladly. I like to write. If I don’t write it all up, I sometimes feel afraid that it will leave me.” I don’t know why I said these last words or quite what I meant by them, only that my engagement with the activists who passed through Amsterdam accentuated the hollow sense of loss of homeland that I still felt so keenly.

“Well, in my opinion,” Mandla grunted, “you have a natural aptitude.”

“Thank you,” I said again.

“When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.”

I looked at him questioningly. “Hemingway?” I hazarded when he didn’t respond.

“A Farewell to Arms,” said Mandla, giving me an appraising look. “Not bad, Matthew, not bad.” He patted the pages of my report back into a neat bundle and said, “And I have good news for you. I am taking you with me to Tanzania. It is time you connected with some of your comrades.”

Tanzania did a lot to lift my spirits. For one thing, it was Africa, not Europe, and for another, Pru was there.

In between the official business of discussion groups and strategy sessions, we managed to find time to relax and talk just as friends with a shared past and many good memories. Although we had continued our regular call-box briefings, I hadn’t in fact seen Pru in person since she had arrived so unexpectedly in Amsterdam to ask me to participate in working underground for the movement. She told me she had a lover – a partner, she called him – who worked for Lawyers for Human Rights and that they were considering a long-term commitment. His name was Daniel and he had been born and raised in the Eastern Cape. I told her about Mauritz, but it was still difficult for me to try to explain our break-up and she didn’t press me. She told me I was looking thin and tired – “but still so handsome, Matt, somehow the gaunt look suits you” – which made me smile. She was wearing her hair shorter these days and the habit of twirling a strand through her fingers had gone. Perhaps that was why she had cut it. Altogether she seemed happier and more at ease with her life and I was glad for her.

We sat together on the terrace of the hotel, our faces turned to the warming sun, gazing out at the beaches on the coastline of downtown Dar es Salaam, ice-cold beers at our elbows. We talked until we couldn’t talk anymore.

The air at the coast was humid and the raucous mewing of gulls overhead was a constant background noise during the day, even when we were in sessions inside the hotel where it was cooler. The hotel’s air-conditioning came on intermittently but it didn’t appear to do very much other than make disconcerting clanking noises. In the evening we gathered on the balcony and the alcohol started to flow and conversation grew louder and noisier as the hours went by.

One evening I found myself standing on my own, down at the end of the railing, just taking in the sounds and smells that couldn’t ever be from anywhere else in the world but this continent. They were foreign yet familiar and I realised with something like shock that I was closer to home now than I had been in a very long time. I heard raised voices as people called out to one another in the street below us, and the cheerfully impatient blaring of horns in the traffic. I took in the tantalising scent of the eucalyptus trees, the menthol tang that rises from leaves warmed by the sun, mixed in with the heavy, fishy musk of rotting seaweed. And, as darkness fell, the smoke from coal braziers. But it was the roar, the rush and the pounding and then hissing of the waves breaking on the shore, the sound of the Indian Ocean, that made me long for home more than anything else.

Our discussion sessions with other comrades for the most part were lively and challenging. Many different viewpoints and strategies to do with the liberation struggle both inside and outside South Africa’s borders were aired, and many a passionate argument lasted deep into the night. I was questioned closely about my activities over the past months. It felt strange to be regarded as an authority on things about which little was known – the war resisters’ movement abroad, the anarchist movement, and the complicated history of squatters’ rights in Amsterdam and the tactics surrounding their resistance.

Most of the time during the few days I spent in Tanzania I felt energised and invigorated. Mandla, however, appeared distracted, even on edge. I thought I picked up undercurrents of tension between certain members of the various groups that formed and reformed during breaks in the sessions, and there was an underlying grimness in the drinking of duty-free whisky out on the muggy terrace when the business of the day was over. I was used to drinking with Mandla but I noticed that by the time he turned in for the night he was often slurring his words.

One of the reasons for this particular gathering in Dar was that the movement’s intelligence structures were being restructured, which meant a redeployment of personnel, apparently to give more coherence to strategy and decision-making. I understood that something of this might have accounted for the nervousness of some comrades, especially if they were unsure of their positions and where they might next find themselves. When Pru had caught her flight back to Johannesburg and Mandla and I were waiting for our connections at the airport, he told me that networks and contacts were in the process of being broken up and “redistributed”. There was anxiety about some comrades’ places in the broader scheme of things and many felt they were in danger of being undermined.

“What about me?” I asked Mandla as I heard my flight being called. “Do you –?”

“You’re an asset to the movement, Matthew,” he said and it seemed to me that that old irony of his was back again. “You, my friend, are an asset.”

“Until next time then,” I said. “Safe journey back to London.”