IT WAS AN AUTUMN DAY, and the light coming in at the windows of my office was dim. In the courtyard below, a square that was permanently in shade, the detritus of the season – brittle leaves and discarded crisp packets – swirled in untidy eddies. I eased the lid off the heavily sugared coffee I had bought in the greasy spoon below the office and took a sip. Glancing at the pile of reports on the corner of my desk, I decided to save Matthew’s for last. Some of the others’ rendering of the political intricacies of the struggles unfolding in South Africa could bore one to distraction in comparison. I would read the newspaper first and enjoy my coffee and then apply myself to the tasks of the day ahead.
Suddenly I heard footsteps in the passage outside my office. The uneven rhythm in the way the floorboards creaked told me that it was a man with a limp – and then he was there, filling the doorway. After all these years. His bulk obscured the fluorescent light in the passage, and then his damaged leg was tilting him into the room. He was back, a Banquo’s ghost, returned from some other place, some other fiefdom.
“Greetings, comrade.” I stood up from behind my desk.
There was no fervour in Mzwai’s response, and no warmth in his handshake either, but his greeting was cordial.
The decisions alluded to in Dar, it would appear, had transpired. During the course of the morning I was brought up to speed. Mzwai had been instructed by headquarters in Lusaka to bring greater oversight to London, which was regarded as an increasingly important source of intelligence, especially as the “mass” struggles in the country proliferated seemingly out of the control of the regime. But also, I grimly suspected privately to myself, out of the control of the movement too. I sensed again an invisible hand shaping my fate, but I fought off the negative mood that was threatening to cloud my judgement. I reminded myself that it was not for me to decide on strategy or planning but to execute it to the best of my training and abilities.
Mzwai moved into the bigger office, which had been our meeting room, next to mine. He also took over the chairing of our meetings. They started and ended on time and he controlled the flow of discussion well and attentively. He seemed to have mellowed over the years. The acerbic edge to his interactions was still there, but it was muted. His belligerence seemed to have been tamed, too, perhaps by experience and increased authority. He would listen carefully, absorbing information, gaining an understanding of our informants, where they fitted, and how much weight should be given to their intelligence. Together we sifted through the information, analysing it and building up a picture of what was happening. Then we would determine what we would take back to our informants and fashion a response: suggestions, instructions, interpretations for those on the inside, seeking through this sleight of wordplay to influence the situation on the ground.
The change was subtle at first and I acknowledge that I did not see it happening right away. I was grateful for the support and gravitas Mzwai lent to our efforts and so perhaps I did drop my guard. Small things began to jar – the elisions of fact, a developing line, Mzwai discounting the reliability of information from a long-standing and trusted source.
A source’s questioning of movement strategy was, for me anyway, something to be taken seriously. It was a pointer to faulty logic, a lack of clear thinking, and therefore flagged up a need, no matter how uncomfortable, to go back and revisit certain assumptions.
Mzwai did not see it that way. In his reports summing up our meetings he would sometimes discount the information that was provided, for example, by Matthew in Amsterdam or James B. in Frankfurt. These were two of my most reliable constants and neither had ever given me reason to doubt his integrity or loyalty. I tried to dismiss the nagging voice inside my head, telling myself that Mzwai had the bigger picture and broader knowledge and that it was my own ego that was getting in the way. Matthew had accompanied me to Tanzania and, or so I thought, had made a good impression there.
Then the sense of alienation, of being cut off, began to deepen. In contrast to the others in the office – a collection of affable secretaries and part-time receptionists who came and went, and a smaller group of more senior staff, most of them men – who all left their office doors open, Mzwai’s door was often shut. Whereas the office staff would engage in casual across-the-passage banter and conversation, the contrast with Mzwai, where voices behind his closed door were low and always muted, was increasingly apparent.
Strangers, or at least not the regular visitors to the office, would call on him. Meetings of the Political Committee took place to which I was not invited. Mzwai invoked the “need to know” basis as explanation. This was new. The PC had after all been set up to share information to improve strategy. If I encountered Mzwai and one of his visitors in the lobby, I began to notice that he paused the conversation until I had passed. Comrades who visited from Zambia, Tanzania or one of the other front-line states no longer dropped into my office for a chat, or invited me over for the habitual whiskies at the Golden Stag across the street.
On the face of it, the life of the office went on. Our group of affable secretaries continued to have their too-long conversations over coffee in the subterranean basement. A hint of scandal and their voices would rise in sudden shrieks and raucous laughter, which echoed up the stairwell and left us to answer the unattended phones. I continued to venture out into the winter pall for my meetings with my contacts, in pubs and cafés across the city, all of them chosen for their anonymity. In the cubby-hole offices of the upper floor, operatives Thulani and Prince read through documents, absorbed in their analytical work.
But I had the sense of a shadow play, of an intangible shifting of relationships in the office, perhaps even the wider movement, which was elusive, not possible to describe in concrete terms. It was like a stage play peopled with activity but with the voices off – indecipherable whispers – determining the action, the plot as elusive as if in Chinese script. It felt ominous.