RACHEL CALLED IT the “long haul of careful step-by-step, on-the-ground organisation”.
Parallel with the reports and photographs and information I knew she was sending regularly to her handler for distribution abroad, our more trenchant strategy was to build a coalition to mount more effective resistance, which would serve not only as a network mobilised against the removals, but also provide the basis for more durable structures to resist apartheid in the long term.
Through our birdwatching excursions we traversed the landscape, meeting with people in dispersed communities who had somehow been involved in resistance to the removals. We met with local church elders who were trying to get the South African Council of Churches involved in a campaign, a journalist on a small local newspaper who had tried to provide coverage on the removals only to be reprimanded by his editor, ageing ANC activists who had mobilised rural resistance in the 1950s, and a handful of militant students who had wanted to organise marches and demonstrations, petrol bomb the police and stone their vicious dogs when they were set on the people.
Some were dispirited, defeated by the ferocity with which the police broke up even peaceful pickets, the violence with which people were removed, and the wilfulness of the destruction of their property. Or the disappearance of the most vocal and visible activists.
Sometimes Rachel and I met with them together – usually when I was needed to translate – and sometimes on our own. There was a hierarchy to the contacts: a leadership group, for example, who worked only with Rachel. Quite often these meetings took place at local churches, where the presence of a white person was unremarkable. Many of the clergy at the churches were white. The contacts tended to be older people, teachers or church elders.
My beat was the sprawling rural shantytowns where the presence of a white person would excite interest, possibly even hostility. My contacts were the edgier ones, the students, the hot-heads, whose anger shimmered in their faces and who demanded that we provide them with weapons so that they could take on the police and the army.
Rachel said the key to a revival of confidence was to break through the isolation of the activists all working in their small terrains. We need to help them widen their parochial responses to the immediate dangers they faced, to assist them in broadening their networks by recruiting trusted others and linking up with structures that were emerging in other communities.
What was critical, she said, was to devise means of resistance that were multi-faceted and effective. They needed to hurt the government and those people who were benefiting from the removals, but at the same time we needed to calm the angry youth. Burning the crops of white farmers at night, torching the police stations, and throwing Molotov cocktails at the troops only invited more brutal repression.
The people needed rather to boycott the white-owned shops in the area and refuse to buy their products in order to force them to take a stand or face ruin. The drivers of the trucks that moved the agricultural produce from the white-owned farms for sale in the towns and cities should refuse to do so. We needed to engage the trade unions that were emerging in the area on the coal mines and in the paper mills. Workers needed to down tools until their demands, namely, that the removals stopped, were met.
On cooler evenings Rachel and I would make a log fire in the front room of The Eyrie and sit staring into the flames and discussing these strategies into the small hours over our single malt whisky and music. The room always smelt strongly of pine.
Rachel fascinated me. I had gone into exile to join the ANC so that I might be trained as a cadre of Umkhonto we Sizwe and become a freedom fighter who would come back into the country armed with a Kalashnikov to liberate the people through the persuasiveness of bullets. It was rooted in youthful bravado and an unrequited anger at the brutality of the regime. It would not be long before carnage would be seen on the streets during the student uprisings of 1976, when young people would be cut down simply for demonstrating with pathetic cardboard placards. That was when the swell of exiles would grow and thousands of youngsters would choose to head across the borders.
In the Soviet Union we had received credible military training. I was a master marksman. I could negotiate any terrain and was expertly schooled in the art of camouflage. I could leopard crawl under fences and haul myself over walls. I could negotiate the most tenuous of footholds or toss a grenade with precision.
But our instructors, from the affable Vladimir to the austerely ideological Igor, who seemed to have been present in every revolution in Africa or Latin America since the very early 1970s, derided what they called the militarism of Third World revolutionaries. Unless they were supported by the people, these revolutions, based on small revolutionary armies, would fail. They needed to be “rooted in the people”. They were hostage to the next properly armed group taking power. Look at Africa, they would say. Yes, a revolutionary army might be effective to protect the people from attack and sabotage as armed propaganda might well unnerve the ruling elite, but the impetus for change needed to come from an organised working class and the masses.
I suspected that they were disillusioned. They had seen too much, lost too many battles in the backwaters of the world, providing support cynically to support the objectives of the Cold War, rather than authentic aspirations of the people. These debates were usually argued over in the mess halls huddled around the huge iron radiators of the time – these monsters broiled and hissed in the training camps in the deeper reaches of the rural Soviet Union with snow drifts piled high at the windows. They dissented from the line of our own leaders who had sent us there for training.
Vladimir said once: “The South African struggle can never be won through guerrilla war. Your terrain is not suitable. Your military is too strong and the regime’s allies – the US and Europe – are too complicit. But you have substantial industry and a working class. You need trade unionism. Your strength is the vulnerability of their, that is, the whites’, economy.”
This kind of exposure to Vladimir and Igor was too fleeting to leave a real impression on me. Back in the camps in Botswana and also in Angola, our political education within the ANC structure was austere and ongoing. It included reading the classics: Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, and some theory of armed revolution derived from Cuba. It was useful and I learnt a great deal, but it was also very academic. With Rachel I was more or less back in Vladimir and Igor territory. Her arguments made sense to me and as our discussions grew deeper, some of her optimism and vision for a sustainable, peaceful country occasionally rubbed off on me.
After a couple of months in The Eyrie, comfortably into our routines and relaxed in our genuine friendship, it seemed natural that we would draw even closer, and so it came to pass. One clear black night, no moon that we could see, and not even the slightest of breezes, we took a stroll down through the pear orchard after dinner. I carried blankets and a flask of hot coffee, Rachel the mosquito repellent and a small paraffin lamp. Through the trees there was a clearing that opened out onto the valley below. It was pitch dark and I was grateful for the swinging light in front of me. The tough elephant grass that had wanted to tie up my ankles was a not very distant memory.
“Rachel, what are we doing out here?” I asked.
“Patience, Mandla,” she replied and I could hear her smiling.
She guided me to a hollow in the grass against a hard, rocky hillock and I put the blankets down. The mixture of the smell of freshly brewed coffee and the pungent scent of the pines was intoxicating. Rachel sat down on a blanket and reached up for my hand. “Sit next to me, Mandla, and look straight ahead of you – yes, there, out across the valley.”
I sat obediently and trained my eyes on where she was pointing. “What am I looking at?” I asked. Again she told me to be patient.
Then she grabbed my hand and said breathlessly, “There! Look! Do you see them? Shooting stars!”
It was like watching tiny blocks of ice break off a frozen Milky Way and drop silently, swiftly, out of the sky into deep nothingness – one right in front of us, then two in quick succession off to the side. It felt like a magic show put on by the cosmos just for the two of us. Rachel lay down next to me, drawing warmth from my body and I put my arm around her.
That night I did not go back to my outside room to sleep.
The next morning we were shy with each other, the way that new lovers are, and I was nervous that there would be awkwardness. But with Rachel there was never anything like that. We fitted together. We worked.