ONE THING I TOOK advantage of was the increased mobility of South Africans in Europe. In the early 1980s they travelled more as organisations at home sent their members out to make connections, build solidarity, raise funds and seek out the movement. Student backpackers took gap years in southern Europe; academics received fellowships at British and Dutch universities; church people attended the convocations of the World Council of Churches; delegations of trade unionists took internships in the trade union federations of Europe.
My chief task was to build a network of informants from these disparate connections, not so much to recruit for the movement but rather to take the country’s political pulse, to decipher from the telegraph of disconnected conversations a picture that would better inform the response of the movement to the unfolding struggle. I sensed that I was one of many such telegraphers spread throughout Europe and I relished the role. My connection with Mandla deepened into friendship.
It was slow work at first. Initial meetings were always set up by go-betweens. I would receive an alert from the movement’s structures inside the country that someone with crucial information would be passing through. Sometimes I would take more random soundings from British people sympathetic to the anti-apartheid struggle. A meeting would be arranged, initial assignations usually outside a subway or railway station. I would be given cues of recognition: the colour of a coat or shirt, heavy-rimmed spectacles, an umbrella clutched under an arm, or a folded copy of a broadsheet. We’d then move to a secluded café or bar. The encounters were varied. Some informants were reluctant or felt compromised, fearful of this exposure to the movement with its shabby subterfuge. Others, mostly those with a political connection, were more forthcoming. Yet others were engaged, fervent.
Gradually the work built itself into a rhythm – a network of regulars, in whose information there was a consistent thread, the elements of stories building to climax, with familiar characters driving the plot. It took time and patience. I watched the foliage outside the cafés and bars changing with the seasons, the pavements gleaming with winter rain or dusty in the summer heat. I looked forward to the meetings, the developing stories, the advances and setbacks of the plots, the characters who were real people. There was a young trade unionist who was slowly building membership in a migrant worker hostel, and a 60-year-old white widow who printed up pamphlets and clandestine literature in her garage. Then there was the truck driver who took recruits across the Swaziland border at night, an engineer in an oil refinery who passed on maps of the structure, inviting sabotage, and a young deserter who had details of a planned army raid on ANC bases in Mozambique.
In my reports on my debriefings I referred to each informant by a numbered code. For myself I had a nickname for each one, capturing some defining characteristic or the clandestine detail of their narrative at odds with the settings in which they unfolded.
For example, “Mole” was a young unhappy Afrikaans-speaking diplomat working in the military attaché’s office in the South African embassy in Brussels. We always met at the back of a nineteenth-century mussel house near the Gare du Nord. The interior was moist with onion-scented steam rising from the large copper tureens simmering over gas flames in the kitchen, which was open to the room. Mole would pick at his frites and refused beer, and would not allow me to commit anything to paper. I had to memorise all of his anxious narrative.
Then there was “Slim”. Tall, thin and clever, Slim was a war resister who lived in Amsterdam and through a previous involvement in the student and emerging trade union movement had access to a network of passers-through, many of whom took the discounted student flight from Johannesburg to Luxembourg and then travelled on by bus to Amsterdam. We would meet in the Kalkhoven where I debriefed him.
A white academic, who was completing her doctorate at Oxford, I christened “Struggelista”. Her doctorate was on a Sotho chief and her fieldwork in the Maloti mountains allowed her to identify escape routes for cadres into Lesotho.
One good place to meet was the tea garden in the Vondelpark, where bulky larger men, with their truncated features – such was my stereotype of a South African secret service agent – would stand out. Another stratagem was to meet outside the damp greying façade of the Film Museum in the park and stride out along the gravel pathways, past the open air theatre and the lakes into the meadows at the southern end where sheep grazed and the low vegetation allowed one a wide view.
In advance of my monthly meetings with Mandla, I would receive a cheesy tourist’s postcard from him, of some London attraction. This would come to my post restante address with a date and time on it. I also had a fortnightly arrangement to speak to Pru about people “coming through”. She would phone me at a rotating series of callboxes in the city for which I’d supply the numbers. This could be tense and disconcerting – sometimes the phones would be out of order and we had no fall-back plan. Or there would be someone ahead of me in the kiosk and the appointed time for our call would come and go.
One evening when this happened I stalked the edge of the gracht, frustrated at the time the girl chatting inside the callbox was taking, irritated at the no doubt commonplace concerns and the superficiality of the news she was exchanging with the person on the other end. Just as I thought her conversation appeared to be winding up I saw her pop an additional kwartje into the slot and keep on talking, punctuating her conversation with loud laughter, which exploded from the glass confines enough to make me scream with annoyance.
This sent me pacing along the other side of the gracht, from where I kept an eye on the callbox glowing in the darkness under the trees. I could see the girl’s animation in the way her red scarf caught the light of the naked bulb overhead. It began to rain. Already I was fifteen minutes over my time to call Pru. I went up to the callbox and tapped on the glass, pointing at my watch. She turned her back on me and continued chatting.
Eventually she hung up and emerged from the kiosk, scowling. “Nou – geduld zeg, klootzak,” she snapped. The she pulled the hood of her raincoat over her head and wheeled her bicycle away onto the street. Giving me one more hostile glance over her shoulder, she pedalled off.