Prologue

Prologue

A 28-year-old white trade unionist has died while in detention in South Africa. The body of Dr Neil Aggett was found hanging from the bars of his cell at security police headquarters in Johannesburg in the early hours of the morning. He was being held under the country’s Terrorism Act …

I HEARD THE NEWS ON THE RADIO IN MY KITCHEN IN WINTRY ENGLAND, on 5 February 1982. Aggett? Neil Aggett? I had a second cousin with that name. Immediately, I made a long-distance call to my mother in Johannesburg. Yes, it was my cousin Joy’s son. I had been an infant in 1944 when Joy had married a Kenyan settler, Aubrey Aggett, and gone up north, from Johannesburg, to live in ‘Keenya’, as the English used to say in those days. Although I had never met Neil, the news felt shockingly intimate. I had no idea that the security police had detained him two months earlier.

There had been at least 50 other deaths in detention, all of them black detainees. Neil’s was the first white death. The official explanation: the detainee had hanged himself.

Next day’s Guardian carried a front-page article under the headline ‘Storm of anger at South African gaol death’.1 Across the Atlantic, The New York Times ran the story under the headline ‘White Aide of Nonwhite South African Union Found Hanged in Cell’.2 Special correspondent Joseph Lelyveld noted that Neil and his partner, Dr Elizabeth Floyd, had been among 17 people active in black trade unions who had been arrested in early-morning raids on 27 November under the Terrorism Act. Lelyveld, who would later win the Pulitzer Prize for his book Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White (1986), always had an eye for the personal story. He wrote of Neil having been allowed a special visit from his mother and sister on New Year’s Eve, during which he had assured them, ‘Don’t worry. They’ve got nothing on me.’ Colleagues, friends and relatives insisted that Neil was a very stable person who had never shown any suicidal tendency. ‘He was a person of strong character. He was perfectly prepared mentally for just such an event as detention,’ said Jan Theron, General Secretary of the Food and Canning Workers’ Union (FCWU), for which Neil, a medical doctor, had been working voluntarily.

When some 90 000 black workers downed tools in a half-hour national work stoppage the following week, that too made international news, as did the astonishing scenes from the funeral. Thousands of black workers, with a sprinkling of white comrades, took over the streets of ‘white Johannesburg’ to follow the coffin, many on foot, all the way from St Mary’s Cathedral to the whites-only cemetery, some nine kilometres away. Bishop Desmond Tutu, then General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches (SACC), explained the significance to white readers of The Star. His tone was urgent. The funeral was still a sign of hope. Under the headline, ‘Mourners’ tribute to a white man was a mark of respect’, his message was a plea for them to remove their blinkers:

We get an incredible demonstration of affection and regard for a young white man by thousands of blacks. This white man gets the kind of tribute that blacks reserve for those they consider their heroes – the Bikos, the Sobukwes, the Lilian Ngoyis. Neil Aggett got the kind of salute and tribute that the black townships provide only for really special people, and he was white.3

White South Africa’s attention, however, was largely focused on mourners who raised the green, black and gold banners of the banned African National Congress (ANC), positioning it in front of the many union flags and banners. On our television news in Britain, I glimpsed Neil’s parents, with a handful of family members, sitting stunned and bemused beside the grave, just a couple of feet away from Neil in his coffin under the red flag of the African Food and Canning Workers’ Union, with its circle of linking black hands. They were surrounded by workers and activists singing songs of defiance, mourning Neil as a son of the soil while pledging to continue the struggle for freedom. It was an extraordinary scene: the small white family captured in their personal grief among thousands of mourners for whom the personal was intensely political.

The Aggetts had been a part of my childhood mental landscape in colonial Africa. I vaguely knew about fearsome Mau Mau attacks on white settlers in the 1950s, and had heard that my cousin Joy and her husband Aubrey were ‘sticking it out’ during the State of Emergency in Kenya. They had three children: Michael, Jill and Neil, their youngest. I had gleaned from family conversations that Aubrey, a farmer and former officer in the Second World War, was a tough, strong-minded man who was involved in ‘putting down’ the Mau Mau rebellion.

In January 1964, a month after Kenya gained independence from Britain, Aubrey brought his family to live in South Africa, settling after a few months in Somerset West, not far from Cape Town. He was open about not wishing to live under a black government led by some of the people he had helped to lock up. They arrived in the midst of the crackdown on the opposition to apartheid. Nelson Mandela and his co-accused, who had been arrested at Rivonia six months earlier, were in the middle of their trial. The ‘90-days’ law, rushed through Parliament and made retrospective, provided legal cover for their earlier detention. With no need for charges, no access to lawyers, solitary confinement, and the 90 days indefinitely renewable, the security police now had unfettered power to interrogate any anti-state suspects. By January 1964, the first three deaths in detention had already occurred, with two officially explained as ‘suicide by hanging’. In June that year, Joy and Aubrey would have shared the relief of most white South Africans that the Rivonia trialists were being locked away for life, the black prisoners on Robben Island, and Denis Goldberg, the sole white trialist to be convicted, in Pretoria. Indeed many would have been happy to see them hanged.

When, less than a month later, my brother Paul and I were detained in the next swoop on ‘subversives’, the Aggetts’ sympathies were most surely with our distressed, law-abiding parents, and even more so when my brother was charged and convicted in the first Bram Fischer trial.4 Neil was ten when his parents sought their safe haven in the Cape. Eighteen years later, he was the young man whose body was reported hanging inside the notorious John Vorster Square.

Neil’s parents flew to Johannesburg. His sister Jill met them at the airport. Jill remembers how her previously robust father came off the plane, instantly aged, weeping. Even before leaving home in Somerset West, in his distressed state, Aubrey had been obliged to face a Cape Times reporter. He kept the interview brief, having managed to type a short statement with Joy that he handed to the reporter outside the house:

Our son was detained on November 27 last year. We still have not been told why he was held in detention. We were informed this morning that he was found hanged in his cell at John Vorster Square in Johannesburg. That is all we know.

As far as we know the last time that he was seen by either family or friends was on December 31, for 40 minutes. We intend doing our utmost to find out why this happened.5

Aubrey’s son had died in the hands of the state. In family conversation, I had picked up intimations of a rift between father and son as their views had diverged. But Neil’s death was to have the effect of setting Aubrey, then nearly seventy, on a life-changing path. He wanted to know the truth.

What had happened to Neil inside John Vorster Square? Had his interrogators tortured and killed him, then strung him up to make it look like suicide? The thousands of mourners who chanted, ‘Botha is a terrorist! Botha is a murderer!’ were convinced of this. The security police regularly reported detainees hanging themselves, throwing themselves out of high windows, even slipping on bars of soap. Yet even if Neil had taken his own life, what had brought him to that condition? Either way, he had died in their custody.

Aubrey used his savings to fund a top-rate legal team for the inquest, led by the formidable senior counsel, George Bizos. Despite similar fact evidence from former detainees, making this a ground-breaking inquest, the verdict was ‘no one to blame’. A couple of tantalising half-hour TV Eye documentaries in Britain could only scrape the surface of the buried stories.

For the rest of the 1980s, South Africa remained on fire, until Nelson Mandela’s release in February 1990 offered the hope of dousing the flames. Exiles could now return and I could carry out research for my writing inside the country. In 1993, I set off with Olusola Oyeleye, a theatre director colleague, to find out about South African street children. Our drama workshops took us to Cape Town, which I had last seen disappearing in a purple haze beneath Table Mountain from the deck of the ship that had carried me away twenty-eight years earlier. We were on a tight timetable, but, spurred on by Olusola, I decided to drive out to Somerset West to meet Neil’s parents for the first time: ‘You’ve been talking about them. They’re obviously in your mind. So why don’t you go and see them?’

The Aggetts still lived in the house that had become their home not long after arriving from Kenya. Surrounded by a tidy garden, it was one of those single-storey houses with modest rooms enclosed in dark wood, brightened by sunlit windows. I was moved by their unresolved grief and deep anger at the apartheid state. They wanted to talk about Neil, with Aubrey openly acknowledging the rift that had developed between him and his son. Their pain was vivid. Aubrey’s voice simmered with fury as he spoke about the police and their lies. At 81, he was still a burly, forceful man, to whom my cousin Joy often demurred. Her voice was sad, resigned, restrained. What strength of character it must have taken for Neil to stand up to, and break away from, this powerful father. The terrible irony of the death of a son at the hands of the police state that his parents had once so admired struck me more sharply than ever. Later, I would discover a deeper irony that must have tormented Aubrey even further.

According to Aubrey, Neil’s chief interrogator, Lieutenant Stephan (Steven) Peter Whitehead, a man slightly younger than Neil, ‘had it in for him’. Both parents were adamant that their son had never been a member of the ANC, nor a communist, as declared by the police. I sensed their unease with the idea of a future ANC government. The country was lurching towards its first democratic elections amid ‘third force’ violence, then being largely portrayed as ‘black on black’. Aubrey spoke of Neil’s death as ‘this tragedy’. There was something almost mythic in the story of this once-strapping figure of authority forced to pay such a heavy price for his personal obduracy and that of his chosen country.

I took a photograph of Joy and Aubrey sitting on their floral-print sofa beneath an oil painting of bush and thorn trees below snowcapped Mount Kenya, a scene from their old farm near Nanyuki. Olusola, who had spent most of the afternoon outside playing cricket with their grandson, took a second picture. I am smiling, Joy is trying to smile and Aubrey, standing between us outside the front door, has a grim haunted look behind his tinted glasses. I came away sad. The son whom Neil’s parents spoke about seemed largely a shell, although Joy seemed to hold on to something a little more tangible. Her memories about Kenya were especially poignant. ‘He was such an easy child,’ she said. Such an easy child. A mother’s words to soothe an unhealed wound.

A year later, I was back in South Africa to gather responses to the draft of No Turning Back, my novel about a street child. It was July 1994. The country had survived the pre-election violence and was in honeymoon mood after President Mandela’s recent inauguration. There was an almost fairy-tale atmosphere in Cape Town. I was travelling with my husband Nandha, who had narrowly escaped being sent to Robben Island, and our daughter Maya. Despite the charmed air, it was impossible to forget the myriad ways in which apartheid had eaten into the lives of so many families. Expectations across the country soared high. A long row of bright murals along a bleak Soweto street captured the mood in bold pictures and words: STEVE BIKO, MALCOLM X, MARTIN LUTHER KING, MAHATMA GANDHI and OUR MAIN MAN ROLIHLAHLA interspersed with SAVE THE WORLD, FEED THE WORLD … SYMPTOMS AND SIGNS OF AIDS … and EDUCATION IS THE KEY.

I couldn’t help wondering what Neil would be doing in this new South Africa, had he survived. While in Cape Town, I made a second visit to the Aggetts in Somerset West, this time meeting at the home of Neil’s older brother Michael, who lived nearby with his wife and five sons. Michael, an army doctor, and Mavis, a teacher, were protective and caring towards his parents. When I told them that I felt drawn towards exploring Neil’s story further, Joy and Aubrey seemed pleased. I explained that I would first have to check feasibility, as the materials and people I would need to interview would be mainly in South Africa. Joy had amassed a collection of papers, photographs and news cuttings about Neil and said that I was welcome to delve into them. They were stored in their garage. Aubrey gave me details of his attorney, David Dison, in Johannesburg, who had the inquest papers. I was glad that they were keen, yet instinct told me to be cautious. I wouldn’t want to cause them more distress, but if I took on the task I would have to establish my independence from the outset. My commitment had to be to the work itself and to exploring whatever truths might be revealed. I could not do less.

In Johannesburg, I visited David Dison in his bright, spacious office in a concrete-and-glass skyscraper overlooking the city’s grey-domed Supreme Court. Five thick volumes, A4 in size with green covers, frayed at the edges, and faded blue and grey binding, sat on his desk. These were the court dockets, containing a full set of the statements and affidavits presented at the inquest. Aubrey had given permission for me to take them. There was a bonus. It turned out that David had known Neil. For a while, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there had been a commune of sorts – young white radicals living in a compound of rundown white miners’ houses belonging to a disused mine. Neil and his partner Liz Floyd, also a doctor, hadn’t lived there, but various friends had. Apart from offering leads to those close to Neil, David said something that particularly struck me. Of all the people he had known in the commune crowd and on the left, Neil had broken away the most completely from his family. He was uncompromising. He lived his ideals.

From the outset, I knew that this was more than a single story and that this biography would have its idiosyncrasies. I was on at least two journeys. One was to discover something about the life of this younger cousin whom I’d never met but who, in a deeply racialised society, had also striven to break through the confines of upbringing. The second was, as a former exile, to understand more about the resurgence of a new generation of activists inside the country and how Neil fitted in. I have not aimed for a comprehensive picture, but, in uncovering some of the narratives and layers, I was ready to go beyond simple political legends. When I returned in 1995, to spend a week reading the papers inside the Aggetts’ garage and begin my first interviews, I knew this would be a big project, although I never imagined just how long the process would take, nor that I would need to put the work aside for ten years before resuming it. Neil’s parents are both dead, as is his older brother Michael. When Joy died, I felt guilty. I had raised her hopes and she had already endured so much. Out of Neil’s immediate family, only his sister Jill will read this.

Nearly everyone who spoke to me about Neil, of their memories and experiences, helped me understand something more, not just about him, but the world he inhabited. Those closest to Neil took great care to explain to me, in detail, the highly charged political context in which they – and Neil – had been operating inside the country. Soon after Neil’s death, there had been approaches from writers and filmmakers seeking a simplified dramatic story of the young white trade unionist-cum-doctor killed in detention. They had not got far with their projects. I sensed that had I not shown the desire to grasp the political nuances that had mattered so much to them as young activists, our conversations would have quickly terminated. A friend of Liz Floyd’s commented that I should count myself lucky that she had agreed to talk with me. It was not just that I was stirring up deeply painful memories. Liz had made a judgment on my willingness to comprehend the layers of politics behind the personal story.

Throughout my search, there has been someone whose voice I have relied on more than any other. It would be impossible to understand what happened to Neil without understanding the story of his closest of comrades, Gavin Andersson, intertwined with that of Sipho Kubeka.6 After Neil arrived in Johannesburg, about to turn 24, they became his brothers. Both spoke to me at length about their comradeship. Visiting England for a trade union course in 1995, Sipho spent a weekend at our family home. I learned that this had been no ordinary friendship. A couple of months later, in Johannesburg, Gavin Andersson made time for a number of extensive interviews and drove me to old haunts shared with Neil, most of which he hadn’t visited since ‘those days’. At the end of our sixth interview, he declared that he was emotionally drained and would be glad when I was back on the plane, going home.

At the end of 1997, with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) well under way, I wrote to Gavin, explaining eighteen months’ silence. There were concrete reasons why I had not begun writing, but behind these lay something much more amorphous. It’s clearer to see in retrospect that I needed more time to absorb what I was hearing and reading in order to do justice to a story – stories – containing so much pain. In my email, I commented, ‘But I don’t think the fundamental issues are going to disappear when the hearings come to an end. What is your view?’

Gavin’s perspective was encouraging. He took a long view:

No I don’t think that the issues will be any less resonant here once the TRC hearings are over. Although those who were most involved in sustaining Apartheid (the right-wing and DP [Democratic Party] politicians AND big business) protest that we are looking back too much and we must get on with life, I think it will take decades before people really erase the pain and destruction of dignity that went with that epoch.

When I finally resumed work on the project in 2007, Gavin’s encouragement remained constant. Posed a question or simply asked for a view, he would respond swiftly, often at length. Most important, I felt that he was genuinely reflecting, and that this digging-up of the past was also taking him on a journey. We are now a whole generation on, yet the questions with which Neil and his comrades grappled remain alive and pressing.

1 The Guardian, 6.2.82.

2 The New York Times, 6.2.82.

3 ‘My View by Bishop Desmond Tutu’, The Star, 25.2.82.

4 Bram Fischer SC, from a prominent Afrikaner family, led the defence team in the Rivonia Trial while secretly leading the banned South African Communist Party. Granted bail during his own subsequent trial, so he might act in an ongoing patent case in the Privy Council in London, he returned to South Africa but jumped bail and went underground. He was caught nine months later and sentenced to life imprisonment.

5 ‘We will try to find out why’, Cape Times, 6.2.82.

6 Kubeka was previously spelt with an ‘h’, hence variations in spelling.