ON MY WEEKLY VISIT to the Amsterdam post office to pick up letters at the post restante, I found a postcard from Mandla of the Houses of Parliament. I smiled and turned it over. The brief message informed me that he would not be coming to Amsterdam for our monthly debriefing; another comrade would be at our usual table in the Paramaribo. I was disconcerted. There was such a pattern to our relationship after all this time, an ease, an unspoken depth of trust, a real friendship in fact, that I didn’t at first understand or take in what this meant. For a moment I felt almost bereft. Then I was puzzled and after a while of trying to find a code in the terseness, angry.
I went into the Gouden Gondel on the Raadhuisstraat nearby, where I nursed a whisky for an hour or so. Disappointment brought home to me how I much I looked forward to seeing Mandla and how I had come to count on his friendship. He wasn’t just a comrade. He had become much more than that. We had taken to going to listen to local jazz after our meetings in a small smoke-filled cellar club, the intensity of our earlier interaction ebbing away in the smooth flow of the music. I had especially been looking forward to this next visit so that we could talk about Dar es Salaam, which was rapidly fading into a sepia-tinted, palm-fronded memory. I needed Mandla to be my guide and interpreter in so many things. I needed the simplicity and the warmth of his companionship. Perhaps he had taken some time off or had some personal business of his own to attend to. I realised that Mandla knew most of my back story but that in fact I didn’t know anything really of his.
On the day of our appointed meeting I tried to shake off the greyness of my mood. I got to the Paramaribo early and ordered a mojito. I spotted the comrade immediately he entered and paused in the doorway, a dark shape against the brightness of the spring sunshine. He was tall, thin and angular, and a few years older than Mandla. He wore glasses and had a thin goatee, black mottled with grey. He strode across to me and shook my hand.
“Prince,” he said.
He declined a mojito, ordering a sparkling water instead.
“Where’s Mandla?” the waiter asked as he took our orders. He looked enquiringly at me.
“I don’t know,” I replied shortly.
When the waiter was gone I repeated the question to Prince.
“Comrade Mandla has another assignment,” he replied. “You will be dealing with me from now on.”
Although I tried not to show it, my heart sank. “For how long?”
“I don’t know,” Prince said, taking small fussy sips from his glass. “It is for the relevant structures to decide. Now what do you have for me?”
Obediently, I handed over my latest report and waited while he flicked through the typewritten pages. I thought his reading was cursory, to be honest, as if he wasn’t really all that interested, but then I was used to interacting with Mandla. Over time and with the development and deepening of our bond, Mandla and I had worked out a mutually valuable way of working together. I knew I was sulking. Prince made an occasional mark beside a paragraph in my report with a gold Parker pen but he didn’t shift up and invite me to sit beside him on the sofa and engage with the content, the way Mandla always did. In contrast to Mandla, who would often challenge my assumptions and my interpretation with additional information, and argue the facts, Prince offered no response and gave no input. When he had finished reading and had asked me a couple of arbitrary questions, he thanked me, secured the report in his briefcase, paid the bill and left.
“He’s a sombre one, that one,” remarked the waiter, whose name was Henk and who had brought over a fresh mojito without my even asking.
“You could say that,” I said.
When I had been sitting moodily on my own for another half an hour Henk joined me. He had dreadlocks, thick and long, and big muscled arms. His skin gleamed like polished ebony in the light of the oil-lamp on the café table between us. He drew on his sjekkie, his flickering black eyes intelligent and intuitive behind the smoke that drifted up towards the ceiling. Sipping on his mojito, he filled me in on the latest goings on at the Paramaribo – a visit by a posse of police, aggressive in their demanding the IDs of the patrons, a raid to flush out illegal immigrants, the general racism of Dutch society, the latest on the coup in Surinam.
I knew Henk was trying to cheer me up but when I left I was still feeling dispirited. In the street outside an insinuating drizzle appropriate to my mood had taken hold. It seeped in under my clothes. When I got home I went straight to bed and welcomed the obliteration of sleep.
The meetings with Prince that followed the first one were equally desultory, if not more so. His unresponsiveness did little to make me warm to him. The few notes he made appeared arbitrary; they gave me no clue as to the value or impact of my intelligence. Once I asked what he thought of an opinion I had given on a series of conversations I had had with one of the South African trade unionists I’d met and who had recently been seconded to the FNV to develop a manual for shop stewards based on shop floor observations in Holland.
“I have no view,” he replied. “I will take this material back and in the context of other information the comrades on the committee will come to a view – a consensus view.”
I felt that I had been put in my place.
Before long I had to acknowledge that the briefings had become a dead exercise. I desperately missed the cut and thrust of my engagement with Mandla – the passion of contestation. With him my information came alive; it was effervescent with the dialectics of struggle. With Prince I had the sense that he had settled on a “line”, a dogged notion of how the struggle should unfold and a conviction of the shape of the ensuing victory. There was no debate, no nuance, no room for discussion. He eliminated for his assessment of my information anything that did not serve this notion, although he did note any developments that might threaten it.
A cold presentiment settled over me. What was he doing with the information I was passing to him on the basis of trust and loyalty to the movement? I had named people, revealed strategies. What if some difference, a power struggle even, was being played out? What if Prince himself was not to be trusted? I remembered the undercurrents I had felt in Dar es Salaam and Mandla’s ironic smile. Terrible doubt and uncertainty began to cause me sleepless nights. Was I doing the right thing? Where was Mandla?
I talked gloomily to the pigeons across the well from my apartment window. “So the pigeons come home to roost, do they?” They turned their heads this way and that, observing me with unblinking eyes. I felt foolish and alone.
Then the expected postcard with the date and time of my next meeting with Prince failed to arrive at the post restante counter at the post office. The next month it was the same. I could draw only one conclusion. The briefings had been terminated.
I tried calling Pru but a recorded message on our usual telephone number told me that the service had been disconnected. There wasn’t anyone else I felt I could call without causing risk.