CHAPTER 17: Gavin and an ANC link?

CHAPTER 17

Gavin and an ANC link?

WHILE THE AFFAIR OF THE MISSING MONEY LINGERED OVER A year, this was just one thread among many in Neil’s increasingly complicated life. He was interweaving his day and night union work, his nights in Baragwanath Casualty and his meetings – some open, some secret – with Gavin, Sipho and other comrades. Neil would see Gavin at least once or twice a week, usually early on a Saturday morning after his Friday night shift at the hospital before heading for the office. After splitting with Nici, who had taken their baby when she left, Gavin had moved out to Crown Mines, into a tiny outside room at Peacock Cottage. By this time, the house was rented by Joanne Yawitch, a young friend of Barbara Hogan. There was just space for a bed and a couple of shelves above the door for Gavin’s clothes. But he was near to the Vegetable Garden and he threw himself into communal activities, helping to build a crèche in the old Scout Hall and a treehouse for the children. He had brought three beehives from his house in town so he could continue to distribute raw honey to everyone in the buyers’ co-op.

One night, walking home in the dark on the path that led through the Vegetable Garden to his room, Gavin stumbled into a large hole. Workers from Rand Mines had come with mechanical diggers to scoop out the earth, destroying the garden. An eviction order arrived the next day. When furious protests got them nowhere, Joanne was lucky to find a house at the end of one of the rows for her and her friends. The bulldozers arrived to flatten Peacock Cottage and the outbuildings on the day they left. Only the trees where they used to sit beside the garden were left standing, with the three beehives. Before Gavin could find somewhere to move them, a felled tree had crushed one, and the others were set on fire. The scattering bees augured the end of an era.

Gavin came to rent the narrow veranda room at the front of Joanne’s ‘new’ house. Here there was space for his bed, an old wooden armchair and a small stove with a chimney that acted as a table. This now became Neil’s port of call after a night on duty. Gavin would make Neil breakfast, then lie on the bed while Neil would sit on the chair as they talked. Although it seems that Neil constantly shut himself down to Liz, he remained open to Gavin.

With Pindile’s banning and subsequent banishment to the Transkei, Gavin’s foremost line of contact with the ANC had been cut.1 He had continued working within a broad ANC framework and network of activists, following Pindile’s plan. However, early in 1981, Gavin was requested, via Barbara, to change the nature of his relationship with the external ANC and to link directly to its forward area in Botswana. Among the trusted comrades with whom he discussed the implications were Sipho and Neil. From the beginning, Neil was ‘anti links with ANC outside’. In Gavin’s view, this was because ‘from the ultra-left position he saw them as manipulative and … using the workers as the battering ram to get state power’. Gavin and Sipho, on the other hand, were always clear that they were building the ANC position inside the country, knowing that ‘at a certain stage in history you had to mesh the internal and external machineries’. They believed that the time had come.

Neil’s concern about external manipulation taking democratic control away from workers inside the country was not new. Pindile had discussed the same issue with both Gavin and Sipho, and they, in turn, had discussed it with Neil. But Neil’s reservations were now grounded in his own experience of working in a union, in which he had come to appreciate issues of democratic accountability in a very concrete way. Furthermore, there was the grave question of how much one could trust ANC security. Gavin knew that his link would be to the Schoons. Yet Jeanette and far more senior people in the ANC had not taken seriously his and Cedric’s concerns about the now-unmasked Craig Williamson. Who knew the extent of the damage wrought by the well-fed spy as he wormed himself closer to the heart of sections of the ANC’s exiled hierarchy? It was not a reassuring thought.

However, the decision was made. Gavin would make the link. It was politically necessary, and, he argued, by taking this on himself, others who were not banned and who were still able to operate in the open – like Neil – would not be compromised if the links were discovered. He was ‘determined not to get bust’ by being exceptionally strict about procedures, never breaking the rules about using a book code, always going to his dead letter boxes (DLBs) by a roundabout route, and making sure he was never followed. He was prepared to survey a DLB for hours before making a drop or collecting a message. But were he to be picked up by the security police, he felt confident that they would not be able to break into his networks. Sipho supported Gavin’s decision, while he himself ‘continued as if I am ANC and thousands of people would have worked that way without them being members of the ANC, but working for the ANC’. At the end of their discussion, Neil too had agreed that his comrade should go ahead, ‘but he wasn’t happy’, says Gavin. He was more at ease remaining directly accountable to the union and its members, putting into practice the ANC slogan ‘Power to the People’.

Gavin’s formal linkage came in the wake of changes brought about by the arrival of Mac Maharaj as head of the ANC’s underground political development at the beginning of 1978, including a drive to ensure that any internal political underground was more thoroughly linked and accountable to ANC leadership. Recalling that Mac had once told me that Neil had worked for the ANC, I wrote to him in 2009 to ask if he could elaborate on the information that had come through to him. I explained that, from my interviews, I had developed ‘a picture of people around Neil who were working more autonomously within a broad ANC framework and network’, as well as those who were ‘under discipline’, taking direct instructions through an ANC forward area. Mac replied that Neil had been ‘organically linked’ to Jenny (Jeanette) Schoon, who was on the SACTU committee focused on union organisation inside the country, and part of the ANC underground committee. He also objected vigorously to two of my phrases. His first criticism focused on the words ‘working more autonomously’, which, he said, ‘removes any accountability to the ANC and allows the individual to claim that he/she is working “within a broad ANC framework” by picking and choosing whatever he or she agrees with in the framework’.

I had heard about the ‘working more autonomously’ culture from others besides Gavin and Sipho. Ismail Momoniat spoke of how activists within the Indian community in the 1970s and early 1980s were part of a wider grouping who didn’t necessarily know each other but were all connected with Barbara Hogan. ‘Although we saw ourselves as an explicitly ANC grouping, we didn’t see the need for any formal membership. [We] saw ourselves as part of above-ground opposition, many of us coming from a Black Consciousness background, having switched. The way we operated was quite important, emerged out of years of repression … [we] would try and be smarter about how we’d link up with the outside.’ This manner of fairly independent working was also reflected by Barbara in describing the first period of her relationship with the ANC, even after formal recruitment.2 This was something that Mac had set out to rectify.

Mac was also not happy with the phrase ‘under discipline’ as referring to those directly linked to a forward area: ‘Embedded in this is “direct instruction” which narrows down “under discipline” to reduce matters to top-down orders and instructions which the person has to carry out on pain of …’ I was curious about his sharp critique of what were the perceptions of internal activists. I asked Gavin if he could explain Mac’s response to me. He said he liked the rigour in Mac’s letter and ‘the way he makes us re-evaluate the phrase that I had easily accepted (“working more autonomously within a broad ANC framework and network”). I also chuckle at his aversion to the insinuation that “under discipline” means top-down orders and instructions, because for me this is exactly what characterised the external ANC.’

With Gavin’s experience of accepting direct linkage to Botswana, his further comments on Mac’s letter were revealing:

… if you look at what constituted ANC Internal then, it was about a few comrades having connections with outside, but building up cells inside after the manner of the M plan, which linked with each other – the underground – and which fed into open organisation. So internally there were more people organising and linked to each other than were linked to the external ANC. And some individuals within this network of cells were slightly wary of the external ANC even as they celebrated and fostered its objectives and religiously listened to and punted the positions put across on Radio Freedom, because of its ‘top-down’ leadership style … There really was a complete difference in cultures between external and internal, you know. Just as an example, we would take months of testing of an individual before recruiting him or her, and then would have freedom of debate within our cells where a discourse was fostered that flowed back and forth across them and eventually surfaced in open organisations.

The ‘freedom of debate’ maintained within their cells made it more difficult for an infiltrator to remain undetected than in a culture that strongly promoted adherence to a party line. The case of Craig Williamson was a prime example.

Williamson’s conception of how the external ANC operated became a blueprint for the security police. After manufacturing his own ‘escape’ to Botswana, six months after the Schoons had crossed the border, he made his way to their dining table. After a discussion, Marius wrote three letters of introduction for this ‘old friend of Jen’s’ to take to senior ANC comrades in Lusaka.3 While working for the International University Exchange Fund in Geneva, Williamson remained in contact with Botswana comrades until his cover was broken at the end of 1979. If Williamson, or a successor, picked up a story similar to the one Mac believed – that Neil was ‘organically linked’ to Jenny Schoon – a note would have been inserted in Neil’s security police file. But from where had this story come? The one person who could have helped to unravel this thread is no more. In 1984, Jeanette Schoon was blown up, together with her six-year-old daughter Katryn, by a parcel bomb. The parcel was addressed to Marius, who came home to find their two-year-old son Fritz wandering among the remains. The bomb had been sent by Williamson.

1 Pindile Mfeti mysteriously disappeared from Butterworth in 1987 and the truth has never emerged.

2 ‘On the whole I think that it can be said that my relationship to outside was based upon a formal commitment to the A.N.C. but that in actual practice I worked fairly independently of outside, relying for the bulk of my political guidance and activity on comrades loyal to the A.N.C. inside South Africa, some of whom were formally linked to the movement and others not.’ Barbara Hogan, ‘Problems Arising in Internal Work’, 1981, The State vs Barbara Hogan, Supreme Court of SA (Witwatersrand), Case No 163/82, Exhibit B2.

3 The letter to ANC National Executive Committee member Henry Makgoti reveals the breadth of what was discussed. See Karl Edwards, Schoon Network. ‘The Schoons and Internal Reconstruction’, p8.