13 | MANDLA

COMRADE CASTRO DROPPED me off at a sign that read Helderstroom 5 km. “This is where I leave you, comrade,” he said. “You know what to do.”

“I do,” I replied. “Thank you for everything.”

I took my bag and the bottle of water he held out to me and climbed down onto the gravel on the edge of the road. Small stones crunched beneath my boots as I walked around to the driver’s side. Comrade Castro stood leaning against the door, fanning his face with his hat. His grip was firm as we clasped hands. There was no need for further conversation. I waited for a tour bus to pass by and then walked slowly across to the other side of the road, where I watched the kombi turn in an arc and drive off in the direction we had come. The last I saw of Comrade Castro was his arm and clenched fist held high out of the window in the hot afternoon air.

I looked around. Below me in the dip lay the town of Helderstroom and off to one side, glimmering silver in the distance, was a vast vlei. I already knew it from my training. I knew that it was renowned for its water birds and the dense beds of reeds on its banks. Further still the township was laid out, wobbly in the heat haze, and beyond that was the national road snaking away out of the town.

The walk down into the town did not take me long, but all the while, now that I was away from the safety of the kombi, a strain of anxiety was rising up in my throat. The streets were deserted and the sun baked down. The houses I passed were all of the uniform nondescript and sturdy type, built from yellow and red quarry rock. Some of them had white gables, bearing the date that the house was built. All had deep shaded stoeps. I came to an almost dried out stream where willow tree branches brushed the road, giving cool shade, and I was grateful for its temporary shelter. Nearly every garden had a square of lawn in front, neatly clipped, bordered by flowerbeds. I noticed that roses grew profusely here. Shortly after I had crossed the bridge over the river bed, I came to what passed for the centre of town. Dominated by the sandstone edifice of the Dutch Reformed church at one end, where a lichen-encrusted old canon, no doubt from the Boer War, stood in the forecourt, and a Pep Stores at the other, was a small square of shops – a pharmacy, a bakery, a funeral home, a couple of insurance company agencies, and a building society. Everything appeared to be closed in the stifling afternoon heat, but I kept to the edges anyway, walking at a steady pace, anxious to avoid contact or being conspicuous. Soon the road began climbing up the hill and, fit though I was, I felt my breathing becoming laboured. As the houses fell away and the road grew steeper, I stopped to drink some water and look around me. Behind me Helderstroom shimmered in the heat. On either side of the road were green paddocks, some with horses in them. Ahead, at the top of the crest, was a pine forest. I breathed in the smell of the resin. Droplets of sweat ran down the sides of my face. It was a very hot day.

As I had anticipated, right on the crest of the hill was an old wooden fence, leaning inwards under the weight of a wild and untrimmed honey-suckle hedge. When I looked carefully I saw a gate with a couple of missing planks in it and a rusted bolt without a padlock. It was hard to read the letters of the flaking white paint but I made out the words The Eyrie and knew I had come to the right place. I pushed at the gate and it yielded to my touch with a squeak and a groan. I stepped through and found myself in a densely planted garden. In front of me was the back of a small house with uneven white walls and a rusting green corrugated-iron roof. The top half of a stable door was open and I heard a fragment of jazz – Miles Davis, I thought – and smelt the strong scent of a curry being cooked.

I knocked softly on the door and waited. A white woman – about my age, with straight black hair tied back from her face, wearing black jeans and a white T-shirt – turned from the stove where she was tending a pot and offered her hand.

“You must be Mandla,” she said. “I’m Rachel.”

At first I was unnerved by my necessary proximity to Rachel. White people were strangers for me. As a child I had had nuns as teachers, but they were Irish and somehow didn’t count. White South Africans were a different species, encountered in my youth as the police, whom we feared, or the odd shopkeeper in the local township supply stores, who patronised us. There was never genuine connection. In exile doing military training in the Soviet Union, our instructors had been white, but their authority was conferred by rank, not by race, and they were boldly internationalist in their outlook, given to camaraderie in the military mess halls after a day’s training, dispensing shots of vodka. We knew that in the capitals of Europe there were whole communities of exiled white radicals, draft dodgers and others involved in campaigns to “isolate the apartheid regime”, but in real terms one rarely encountered whites in the camps in Africa and even then only senior leaders of the movement, political commissars, or communists from another age. The foot soldiers were black.

And so I was initially anxious around Rachel. In her presence my palms were clammy and at first I was reticent in my conversation, expecting from her some slight or racist rebuke. I slept in a room at the back of the house – the servants’ quarters, they were called – so that there would be no hint of impropriety should someone call unexpectedly or see me on the property. It was a comfortable enough room and I took no offence at the implied racial hierarchy.

In the beginning our familiarity grew out of necessity. Rachel and I needed to discuss and agree upon our mission and so our early conversations were focused on strategy and short-term planning. Gradually, however, as I became easier in her company, I discovered that we had many more things than our undercover activism in common. For one thing, there was music. I had inherited a love of jazz from my father and Rachel had much the same taste. In the evenings she played Coltrane, Miles Davis, Oscar Peterson and Harry Belafonte. I found the music soothing and reassuring. For another, Rachel was a reader and the house was filled with books. Apart from the almost obligatory biographies of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, and the novels of Dostoyevsky, she introduced me to Faulkner and Steinbeck. We found that we had similar tastes in poetry and a mutual admiration for Hemingway. I read voraciously at night in my outside room, sometimes going through half a dozen books in a week. Before dinner, Rachel and I would sit out on the stoep at the front of the house, each with a glass of whisky – Rachel taught me to appreciate single malt – relaxed in our eyrie as the sun set over Helderstroom and the breeze rustled the pines. Down the hill below the pear orchard we could hear the metallic rhythm of cow bells ringing out from the valley as the herdboys shepherded cattle across the shores of the vlei.

The similarity of our interests meant that we fell, after some weeks, into easy friendship.

From the beginning Rachel had overlooked my initial reticence, disabusing me of any notion of inequality between us through her humility, her informality and her perpetually optimistic disposition. She loved to cook and grew an abundance of different herbs in the kitchen garden. I got to know their names and to identify some of them in the rich, aromatic meals she prepared – Mediterranean and Indian dishes I had not experienced before. In the camps the catering had been restricted to a monotony of stews with pap, with the occasional addition of goat, chicken or, rarely, beef.

Rachel was an early riser. In the morning before I even opened my eyes she would drive into Helderstroom to buy fresh bread and the daily newspaper. We got into the habit of breakfasts together of toast and apricot jam, with me in charge of the toaster and coffee pot, while Rachel sat at the kitchen table reading the news out loud to me from the paper.

Some nights we would have a nightcap together on the stoep, the paraffin lamp on the top step turned low, and the sky above us dense with stars. This was when we talked about our pasts, me hesitantly, Rachel with her usual candour and endearing openness. She told me how she had become involved in politics (progressive parents, members of the Liberal Party, student activism in NUSAS, and from there recruitment into the underground). She allowed me the space and gave me encouragement to open up about my own upbringing and involvement.

Rachel was an ornithologist by training and passion, and she planned for this to be her long-term career. She had been attracted to Helderstroom to research her PhD thesis on the environmental impact of agricultural pesticides and pollution from coal-mining on grassland and waterbird populations. She had a fellowship for the research from the University of the Witwatersrand and confided that she had ambitions to study further one day. She had her heart set on the famous Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology in Oxford, which was doing ground-breaking research in behavioural ecology. She drove a bakkie with the University crest and the text Department of Ornithology on it and in it she kept the tools of the trade – powerful pairs of binoculars, bird guides, traps, a camera and a sound recorder, with notebooks (updated daily over our sundowners) in which she recorded sightings of this species or that. She was as serious about the authenticity of her research as she was about our mission for the movement.

Birdwatching, which was what I called it, was the perfect cover to travel the region. It allowed us to drive off the main roads and traverse gravel and dirt tracks into the deeper countryside where rural communities lived. What Rachel had been doing for some months on her own, and which I was now to join her in strengthening, was using her legitimate excursions to build up a network of activists to resist the forced removals in the area. Even if we were stopped by a passing police patrol, the ornithology legend explained our presence in an area as innocuous. I was her research assistant and guide conversant in Zulu.

Once we had an encounter with a white farmer when we stopped for coffee by the side of the road. He admonished us in Afrikaans, saying that the area was not safe for white women – people had been attacked on farms in the area. Rachel told him that I was there to protect her and he seemed reassured. He gave me a curt nod and I smiled warmly at him.