Chapter Six
Home - Continuations and Departures
Mid-1950's to the early 1960's

 

Home to trouble

We were back in Johannesburg, in our single-room flat on Smit street, facing the Art Deco hospital to the north. I was distinctly wobbly, there was discomfort, often acute, in each of my three legs of imagined stability. Our marriage tottered in disarray - I was wracked with the inerasable thought that I’m far, far too much like my father, especially in what Beate believed to be my joyless anxieties about money matters. There was/is little doubt that this was/is the case. A less shackled spirit, she was/is able to live without apprehensions vis-a-vis these mundane matters. However, they irked her, as they did me. I expected my rebellions to include rejection of this archetypical bourgeois issue. Well ... reject as I tried, it remained embedded in my thoughts and actions. She had begun, I feared, to look elsewhere. I remember being very, very frightened as, on weekends, she drove off to our beloved Magaliesburg with others. My overtime work on the drawing board in our flatlet tied me down.

The second dimension of my desired stability, architectural work? This too was under attack. We had returned short of money from our journeys abroad. We were both required to find employment, urgently. Having had the fulfilling experiences which I encountered in London, I was not unwilling - temporarily, I imagined - once more to accept so-called commercial practise. I took up my previous position, admittedly at a marginally more advanced level, to complete some of the design projects I had initiated earlier. Back to the Jo’burg grind.

And politically? The banning orders the Minister of Justice had placed on me were effective, readily enforced by constant Special Branch surveillance. I could not take part in open, public action; my sole scope remained in undercover, surreptitious activities. These led, for an otherwise gregarious person, to lonely isolation, mostly on tasks I could perform in my home, away from “gatherings of two or more people.” Preparing documents or helping to plan, say, the venue for the Congress of the People, were all very well but did not ameliorate my loneliness. That, of course, had not affected Beate who, having been left un-banned by Mr Swart, was busily out and about on her political and other activities. Our alienation intensified. I threw myself more and more into work, as frequently in our tiny home as, at weekends and of evenings, at my place of employment. Such jaunty cheerfulness as I displayed was external, a worked-at stance. I had found that “troubles come not single spies, but in battalions.”

Fortunately, notwithstanding its heavy commercial bias, my architectural work was often rewarding. I completed the production drawings, specifications and site supervision of the apartments in Cyrildene which I had designed before leaving for Europe. My employer was sufficiently satisfied to make me responsible for carrying to completion the sketches I had previously outlined for a massive office block in Marshall street, central Johannesburg. That, numerous incidental tasks and designing a similarly huge block of double-storey shops with offices above for West street in Durban, kept me occupied. And ameliorated the seemingly always tight Lipman bank account.

The sketches for Cyrildene had won approval from Bertold Lubetkin when I had met him in London. He was a renowned pioneer of modern architecture, a person who clung throughout his life to his carefully thought-through dissenting views. Whenever he thought fit, he publicly confronted the British establishment, including, with considerable lese-majeste, Charles Windsor. Nikolaus Pevsner, then editor of the prestigious journal The Architectural Review, had commended the Marshall street block in a telling series of articles on South African architecture which he had written on visiting the country. By the early 1960s, I was ready to present myself as a designer when, with Beate and our two small children, we were pushed into political exile in Britain. By that time, February1963, effective political involvement had become impossible and the stability of our marriage far less threatened. We were able to face banishment from home in good though weighted heart, though certainly not with joy.

 

A decade of political collisions

The ten years prior to our departure were marked, overwhelmed by political dissent. Among other events, I list those most clearly recalled:, we formally quit the Communist Party; we assisted in supporting the Alexandra Bus Boycott, we were ostracised by Liberals of most hues, members of my family included; we were subjected to racist, political abuse from members of the National Party and their ilk. We became involved in acts of political sabotage, specifically attacks on public property. We travelled to ‘internal exiles’ who had been officially marooned in far-away, alien places. Out home was raided, searched by our Special Branch ‘minder,’ Detective-Sergeant Johann Coetzee. Under much pressure, we decided again to go abroad, to accept political exile.

In all this, we retained, frequently exploited, the privileges automatically accorded to whites, not least white ‘intellectuals.’ We were but rarely in danger of direct physical attack, we were not obliged for each second of each day to carry passes, the dreaded “dompas.” We were not exposed to vicious, unannounced mid-night searches, nor were we publicly humiliated, daily. We need not immediately fear anyone in uniform - from police officers to postmen or railway officials. We could call on citizens’ rights, we could seek and, most important, pay for legal advice. We were, in short, not black - the despised, ‘inferior’ helots of an apartheid society.

Each of the events I have mentioned above merits, I think, more discursive comment than a listing, starting with our bizarre, ambiguous relationship with the Communist Party.

My youthful borrowings from the Public Library in central Johannesburg included a massive report on Soviet life by those indefatigable social researchers Beatrice and Sydney Webb. Published in, as I recall, the late 1930s, it carried the title, Soviet Communism: a New Civilisation? Later, following further studies, the Webbs removed the question-mark from subsequent editions. They had now made the momentous discovery - a new civilisation. After Beate’s and my visits to Romania and, to a far lesser extent, Hungary, I was impelled, in my mind, to re-instate the query.

Then the London Observer carried extended, verbatim reports of Khruschev’s astonishing address to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party (1953) under, if my memory is correct, the title The De-throning of Stalin. What a de-throning that was: authenticated instances from the new Secretary-General of the Party of widespread, arbitrary imprisonment, torture, murder, death by deliberate neglect; terrible accounts of scientific, artistic, cultural dictatorship, dismissal by decree; horrifying details about how the ‘Great Patriotic War’ had been bungled, how millions had died in that tragic mess. One’s capacity for revulsion, nausea was stretched beyond its limits. This is what we, like the Webbs, had welcomed, defended against what we believed to be prejudiced anti-Soviet bias - as, in many instances, it was.

Back in South Africa, we reported to, discussed all this with our friends in general and many of our underground comrades, some of whom ranked among ‘the leadership.’ The so-called ‘ordinary’ members were flabbergasted, lost, bewildered. This was, surely, hogwash, the usual anti-communist propaganda. They looked to their leaders for re-assurance, explanation. To a man, and woman, the latter were silent - also lost? - or incredulous to the point of interrogating us as though we were hostile witnesses. After a brief period of ideological agitation, and silence from the leadership, interest in such alien matters subsided under the pressures of brutal and brutalising home events. Apartheid policies were being implemented, vigorously, uninhibitedly. We had our own brutalities, directed at our comrades, and us.

However, some among us brooded in quiet disaffection; a situation that was not helped when an admired leader, the ever-belligerent lawyer Vernon Berrange, returned from a visit to the USSR with two distinct, disparate reports. His public addresses were fulsome in their praise of what he had seen there, while his private discussions with Party members were interspersed with pointedly negative observations and critically charged anecdotes. Yet, the silence of our leaders, the passivity of our usually most vocal dialecticians, roared in our ears - Berrange, as we all knew, was a strange cove, definitely his own man.

That was 1953 through to 1956, when the Soviet army invaded its fellow ’socialist’ state, Hungary, ostensibly to save the people of that country from a right-wing coup. Actually, as was patent then and admitted an half-century later, the objective was “criminally” to subdue a rebellion against a dictatorial ‘actually existing socialism’. The popular uprising - like the Prague Spring of 1968 - had looked to establishing something akin to the ‘socialism with a human face’ promised for but suppressed by the later Soviet, also grossly illegal, incursion into Czechoslovakia. As, indeed, did the less publicised, the similarly deterred ‘Polish October’ associated with Wladyslaw Gomulka later in 1956. Then, as a dozen years on, the SA Party’s leadership’s silence continued to shriek.

A few tried to ruffle the drums of silence, I among them. Beate and I were then living in Durban, to which we had moved so that I could complete the large building project on which I had worked earlier. I was now a junior - a very, very junior - partner in the architectural firm. Beate was appointed to the Headship of a college for African students who were studying to become nursery school teachers. That was abruptly discontinued: the government announced its withdrawal of funding because, its representatives explained, African toddlers did not require such teaching!

Back to my attempt publicly to raise the Soviet assault on Hungary, a matter impinging morally on our own local efforts to resist, at minimum to humanise, three hundred years of invasive white domination. Since Beate’s and my arrival in Durban some eighteen months earlier, I had been helping out at the local New Age office, being frequently and for long periods, the sole person on the premises. New Age was the then registered name of an independent, largely Communist staffed, weekly newspaper which had been re-named each time it was banned in terms of the Suppression of Communism Act - The Clarion, The People’s Paper, The Guardian and so on.

From there, I wrote a carefully worded ‘letter to the editor’ arguing that ‘the movement’ was obliged strongly to protest against the Soviet invasion as another, a left-wing blow to national liberation. The letter was not published until, weeks on, I wrote in complaint to the editor, whom I knew. His was, I claimed, an act of partisan censorship; if it continued I would leave the office in personal protest. The letter appeared in an abbreviated, a butchered form, as did others written by sympathetic friends and acquaintances. We were dissidents within a purportedly dissenting newspaper.

Now, late-1956, in an advanced state of disaffection, Beate and I tried to resign from the Party - via the link person of the Durban cell to which we had been assigned. A leading comrade from Jo’burg came to visit us; an opinionated, disputatious theorist of ‘scientific socialism,’ a headman accustomed to arguing detailed intricacies of dialectical materialism - in its most abstract, recondite forms.

Our visitor was smugly aloof, as befitted a doyen who had, over many years, taken not an iota of notice of we underlings. After about an hour of one-sided discussion, he told us that no one resigns from the Party. The Party, imperiously, expels its dissidents: it assertively remains a revolutionary group that prides itself on ritualised procedures echoing those of military castes the world over. With solemn incantation, we were duly ejected; now on the outside looking in; for there was still Party work for us, especially apropos New Age.

It was a relief and a regret. We were glad to be free of repeated moral prevarication and cant. Yet, we had learnt much from many loyal, devoted comrades who remained and remain close friends. Our minds had been broadened immeasurably, we had been encouraged to read and debate widely. We had learnt to analyse rather than mindlessly accept conventional thinking. We were grateful and simultaneously resentful. On a significant, an intellectual level, the Party did not, could not banish us; nor, in our minds, did we irretrievably cut ourselves from it. We watched to, where feasible, participate in events that seemed expressly relevant to ‘the struggle.’

Indeed, our ex-comrades stood in urgent need of all the help they could muster. Their self-advertised Leninist claims to being ‘the vanguard of the vanguard’ had minimal substance; certainly in southern Africa where the organised proletariat was no more ‘the leading force’ in society than we few communists led the working class. Further, though the leadership might decry political spontaneity - largely, I came to think, because it removed control of political resistance from them - oppressed populations across the country continued to resist without Party direction. Supposedly dialectic myths gave birth to mythical offspring.

As a case in point, a true vanguard would not have been so detached from the population, let alone the working class, as to have been excluded or excluded itself from the Alexandra Bus Boycotts of 1943, ‘44 and ‘54. We were marginally involved in the latter when, under the cry Asinamali, “we have no money,” Alexandra dwellers refused to pay the one penny increase in bus fares to and from Johannesburg. Instead, twice each working day, they walked the dozen or so miles in orderly, self-disciplined solidarity. From 1943 through to ‘54, the ANC and Party were taken by surprise rather than being the vanguard initiators and subsequent leaders of the peoples’ spontaneous actions. They were barely represented; except as ordinary participants. We white cadres realised all too belatedly that the marchers needed assistance: well into the boycott, we helped organise motorists to ferry people weary from walking, from working their everyday stints and otherwise running their lives. Veritably a Leninist vanguard rising magisterially above spontaneous, peoples’ action?

 

Ostracised saboteurs

Our departure from membership of the Communist Party - not, I stress, from socialist precepts - was not bruted abroad. Given the illegal status of the Party, that would have been foolish. It did, however, leave us politically and socially isolated; it added a further, a vital dimension to our already troubling dissociation from the mostly white world about us.

Acquaintances who we suspected to be Party members became chary of us and, probably less so, we of them. We did not wish to embarrass them by venting our criticisms of the leadership in their company. They were puzzled by our views when, in the course of events, we expressed them, however cautiously. Party membership, not least under conditions of watchful illegality, was socially introverted; sufficiently so to make all but close, close friends - trusted comrades - mindful of our challenging, to some even threatening opinions. Police spies in the Party were not unknown, as all were then aware and came subsequently to know for certain; largely from the many post-liberation scandals, confessions, political trials and items of evidence presented at hearing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. At the best of times, social life ‘underground’ was filled with stress. Now, in a worst of times, it became unsustainable; a situation that was made the more fraught by the weighty impediments to cross-colour relationships.

We were unable to turn to my family, except to my deeply respected uncle and his wife. They, like Beate’s parents, were or had been social democrats: without necessarily agreeing with us, they appreciated our commitments. Authentic social intercourse of a supportive nature seemed doomed with members of the then militant, the triumphant National Party and as dubious with those of the largely English-speaking racist reactionaries who associated themselves with the United Party. With few exceptions, Liberal Party supporters were indifferent or, most frequently, belligerently hostile. This came and was directed personally from leaders and spokes-people such as Alan Panton, then living in the Durban area. He and his close colleagues seemed almost pathologically fearful of communists, of communism; of all individuals and ideas that might be depicted as leftist. Association with us was, we came rightly or wrongly to think, proscribed from on high - the then rampant red bogey unremittingly at work. The carapace of our isolation appeared to be impermeable.

In the case of the Liberal Party, that too was ambiguous: not only because we had/have good friends among the Liberal left, but because I was soon, around 1960, to find myself involved in serried acts of political sabotage under their ambit. Prohibited as an anti-apartheid colleague but incorporated as a direct action saboteur! Life in those politically hectic years seemed characterised by contradictions, anomalies, disjunctions. Relationships were fraught, marriages under constant internal as well as external pressures. Estrangement and divorce were common among our comrades, friends and acquaintances. Bourgeois, nuclear family relations seemed unable to cope with the impacts of the times as readily as, we imagined, were the bonds of traditional African, extended families.

Political sabotage at about thirty years of age? Immature or not, that is what occurred, largely as a consequence of isolation, frustration, helplessness in the face of a ruthless enemy - the administration and its military/police might. The Sharpeville massacre of 1960 had blown away any lingering hope that change might come from political pressure alone. For many, direct action, initially sabotage seemed inescapable.

Beate and I were recruited, or rather willingly inveigled into this by Monty and Myrtle Berman, a leftist couple we had known and been fond of from Springbok Legion days. In their disenchantment with the Communist Party, they had allied themselves with the left-Liberal African Resistance Movement (ARM). We were told and wanted to know little about the financial and other support for this alternate underground body. We knew that, like its various Liberal antecedents, mass backing was absent, non-existent. Ironically, we were now, briefly, to exemplify something of Joseph Conrad’s image of skulking, cloaked, bomb-throwing anarchists. We were to live out our impatience, our adventurism; our white, middle-class alienation from the majority population.

I particularly recall three sorties, each with its smack of school-boy derring do. First, one of our benign attempts to discomfort the government: we ‘borrowed’ a school bus over a weekend to drive a group of nurses across the Mozambique border where an ANC contingent was waiting to transport them further north. The SACP/ANC’s Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) was, presumably, preparing for cross-border armed conflict. Monty, an accomplished actor, wearing a clerical outfit, escorted them through customs, dropped them off, then drove back to Johannesburg. Success. We washed, cleaned and returned the vehicle late into the Sunday evening.

Next, we brought down a power-line on the outskirts of northern Johannesburg’s well-heeled suburbia. Three black colleagues and I chose to saw through the legs of a massive metal, corner pylon in the expectation that it would bring others down during its collapse. It did not. We worked with tiny hack-saws for hours in the dark. When, eventually, the giant crashed, the outermost leg punched me in the chest. Dazed, I fell backward to watch the fireworks as the cables rubbed against each other and snapped. This, I felt sure, was the prelude, the transition to death. My co-saboteurs lifted and assisted me to our distant, parked motor-car. I dropped them off as arranged and rushed home, there to seek small-boy maternal comfort from my waiting spouse. We were scared - of the SB and of what had occurred in this ill-conceived, poorly planned, amateurish escapade.

Then our attempt to burn down the office in which the local municipal authorities were storing their newly minted, about-to-be issued passes for black women. The twenty-four hour per day possession or not of compulsory identification documents - the hated dompas - had long been employed as a means of harassing, terrifying, arresting, fining, imprisoning, deporting black males. The system was now to be brought directly to women. We had learnt where the dreaded new passes were temporarily stored. What to do?

On this occasion, our intervention was marginally better planned. We studied the premises to identify its central characteristics and proceeded accordingly. We used glass-cutters to gain access through a plate-glass door; in our preparatory exercises we stuck newspaper to large sheets of glass with a syrupy jam in order to dampen the sound of falling glass. We carried jerry-can, plastic bottles for the petrol we intended pouring on the files before setting them alight. Most important, we were helped by two young African women who were to engage the two guards in seductive, preferably loud conversation while we worked. The guards habitually sat around a lit brazier in a doorway removed from our target. We planned our escape route to a car that would be waiting nearby for us.

All went well. Except that the cutters were insufficient for the unexpectedly sturdy glass of the door. In haste, we poured the petrol through a hole for receiving letters in a timber panel of the door. That lit with an enveloping whoosh. The place was ablaze. We fled as we heard the guards yelling behind us. I, a great deal shorter than Monty, managed to leap up and over a boundary wall with an agility I could not have imagined possible. He seemed to hurdle the wall with aplomb. The women ran to the vehicle that was waiting for them, as we sped to ours.

Not a word in the press or on radio. Our inside informant later told us that the project had succeeded: the passes, reconstituted with great difficulty from general official records, were not available for issue until months after the originally promulgated date. Monty and I felt almost invincible, but succumbed to the sound advice that we should cease activities for a period. Wisely, he went abroad for a while, from where Myrtle and he continued their lifelong anti-apartheid activities.

Soon after, probably early-1960, Beate’s and my home, an inner city apartment, was raided by the police in the persons of Detective-Sergeant Johann Coetzee and two accompanying constables. Our daughter, Jane Thandi, had been born eighteen months earlier: as newcomers to parentage, we were noticeably more politically cautious than we had been previously. In my case, the restricted zone of public, mostly quasi-political operation open to a banned, a ‘named,’ person helped to ensure this stealthy watchfulness. And that was even more firmly pressed on us when, six months on, in mid-1960, our second-born, Peter Anand, arrived. We rapidly learnt that the exigencies of committed radical dissent and those of infant family life do not mesh readily. While they remained staunchly supportive, Beate’s now ageing parents were not slow to remind us that the children’s welfare was our, not their responsibility.

 

Visits and farewells

In all this, I was able quietly to indulge a few semi-public political activities; the most memorable of which was covertly to visit, to offer tangible assistance and solidarity to people who had been declared ‘internal exiles.’ At that time, the apartheid government appeared willing - no, eager - to import divers means of dealing with those who opposed it, including a practice developed in the days of the Tsarist empire and continued by the government’s officially demonised enemy, the purportedly communist USSR.

The procedure was simple, cost-effective, nasty. A selected, supposedly dangerous individual was banished to a far-off, usually impoverished rural locality where the local language, customs, terrain, climate were alien. There, she or he was allotted shoddy, minimal accommodation and expected to forage for daily sustenance. Transport to shops, medical clinics, places of worship and similar everyday facilities was unavailable: either because it did not exist or as a consequence of the inadequate moneys given to exiles. Conditions were cruel, lonely, humiliating, demoralising. In addition to unsuitable housing, the banished lacked clothing, they were unpaid, without reading or writing material, radios or electricity. They were reduced to conformity with an ideologically contorted image of vicious, racist ignorance - to a putative state of self-sufficient ‘savagery.’

On first seeing my friend Alfred Hutchinson in his pit of exile, I was appalled, ashamed. He had been, and remained, a young militant, a dynamic activist in the struggle for liberation that had so decisively shaped his generation of energetic black dissidents. He had been an university student - tall, lithe, athletic, appealingly handsome, ready immediately to smile, to joke about himself and his comrades. It was he who years later told an anti-apartheid audience at the Wigmore Hall in London, that he’d recently swum in the Black Sea and, inviting companionability, announced that he had “come out like this.” Alf had been a scholar; one who hungered for knowledge, understanding. Now he was in intentionally isolated exile on an outlying portion of Bushbuck Ridge, adjacent to the Kruger National Park, some six hours drive from Johannesburg.

Unbeaten, he had soon befriended a number of local people, learnt a smattering of their dialect, was busily explaining the sources and rudiments of their poverty in exchange for all manner of pragmatic, useful assistance from them. An unshakeable city dweller, a Jo’burg sophisticate, Alf proudly showed we visitors his new-found skills in nurturing vegetables, improving his one-room shelter and on other, analogous rustic tasks. We had brought him bedding, clothes, tools, books and magazines, a radio and batteries, torches plus boxes upon boxes of foodstuff. His gracious, delighted gratitude was infectious, we seem to have spent the entire day with him in sparkling laughter. We parted - with lists of items to bring on our future visits - feeling almost as unbowed as Hutchinson so patently was. The trip had been an inspiring victory for confident, self-assured dissidence; one that enabled me the more readily face Johann Coetzee’s subsequent mid-day invasion of Beate’s and my home.

Whereas visits to Alf Hutchinson were encouraging, heartening, the Special Branch visitation - an unexpected, but hardly surprising call - was bizarre, unsettling, scary.

At home alone, working at my drawing board, I heard a respectful knock on the door. On opening it, I received a similarly polite introduction and outline explanation for this official, Special Branch visit. No aggressive banging on the door, no shouting, hostile threats; all well-mannered, discreet - suitable police behaviour for a white residential neighbourhood. At the door, Detective-Sergeant Coetzee told me that, empowered by the Suppression of Communism Act, he and his colleagues had come in search of possibly incriminating evidence. Would I kindly allow them in, accompany them and, if necessary, accept certified receipts from them for items they might be obliged to confiscate. The ensuing procedure was thorough, efficient, always orderly. The range of places they inspected was revealing; many would not have occurred to me. After exhaustively examining the kitchen, bathroom and entry/dining space, they moved to the living area, bedrooms and balcony recess.

Coetzee went at once to my drawing board in the living space. He carefully studied the drawings and the pile of associated documents, asked me to explain precisely what I was doing, its relevance to the overall building project and the significance of specialist architectural symbols. Throughout, his courteously phrased questions were incisive, penetrating. He was, from the outset, a far remove from the stereotypical dull, plodding cop I had envisaged. He and his colleagues systematically scrutinised our books, removing each from the shelves, noting its title and shaking it to allow possibly hidden papers to fall free. It was a drawn-out process, relieved only by inconsequential comments they made to each other.

Then Coetzee encountered a serried row of Afrikaans language publications. Here, his attention was caught by our volumes of poetry in that language. He paged slowly through these books, reading aloud portions that I had underscored, my custom with printed material that attracted me. The mood, the entire ambience of the search/raid changed, dramatically, decisively. His companions and I heard him read with obvious relish the opening lines of a particularly beautiful passage from the great Eugene Marais,

“O koud is die windtjie en skraal,
en blink in die doflig en kaal ...”

We laughed in parallel with him as he spoofed a piece of boy-scout doggerel,

“Gee my ‘n roer in my regte hand,
Gee my ‘n bok wat flug oor die rand.
Gee my, Suid Afrika.”

I recall thinking him a remarkable, a fascinating policeman; one who recognises, appreciates fine poetry. I imagined him thinking me a strange English-speaking radical; one who savours the best Afrikaans poets. He made no attempt to conceal his quizzical, obviously interested glances at our heavily burdened bookshelves, and at me. He rushed through the remaining volumes in the sitting-room, urging the constables also to do so. On the balcony, he saw my rugby gear hung out to dry: I played his adored national game! For which team in what position he asked? A spark of friendly companionship lit his eyes, I had scored a try in my last match. Then, the penultimate touch, my squash kit tumbled from the bedroom wardrobe as he opened it ... what’s this, please explain the game? A sporting literary intellectual? - not quite the prevailing police, or popular, image.

Finally, as he searched a dressing-table, he found a number of documents tucked among my shirts. He paused, glanced perfunctorily through them, looked intently at me, left them in the drawer. He shook my hand, thanked me for my co-operation, followed the two constables out through our front door. End of Special Branch visit and of Detective-Sergeant Coetzee’s informal but always probing interrogation.

What was one to make of these events? Had the visit been an elaborate, pre-planned police game, an attempt to soften me, to win my confidence before the coming onslaught of crude, tortured questioning of the type for which the SB was notorious? Was it a mutual, genuinely friendly surprise; one born of shared, previously unrealised, cultural interests? He knew we had quit the Communist Party, he told me so in a manner suggesting that to be a recommendation. Was it some combination of these possibilities? What was it? Beate and I analysed the enigma to the point of exasperated ennui. Eventually, we agreed on one matter: whatever Coetzee’s intentions, we were sufficiently troubled to now think seriously of and urgently to prepare for an escape into political exile. With Peter’s birth, this became yet more pressing.

About two years on - impelled by further, country-wide political harassment and, most compellingly, by the ruthless slaughter at Sharpeville - we decided to go abroad. The resistance movement was temporarily cowed, white South Africans rushed increasingly to support a government whose triumph was undisguised. Police surveillance of leftists was unremitting. We felt demoralised, reaction seemed firmly in the saddle. Our white privileges allowed us opportunities unavailable to the majority of our fellow citizens; flight was, for us, a possibility. As the months passed, as our debate intensified, we turned in growing reluctance to such an escape.

This, once more, brought me face-to-face with Johann Coetzee. My application for a passport was, apparently, passed to the Special Branch and then to him. He telephoned me in that context, asking me to call on him in his office. There he showed and encouraged me to glance at the files which he had on me. As I recall, they consisted of five manila folders, each choking with reports on when and with whom I had been observed at meetings, with detailed records of telephone conversations - serious and trivial - which I had long forgotten, with notes from ex-comrades who had commented on me and other documents that mentioned my name. They seemed comprehensive - the dedicated work of a diligent bureaucracy, nothing too trite for attention. If they were intended to impress, to scare me, the ploy succeeded.

Coetzee then moved to the substance of the meeting: why, for what purpose did I need a passport? As I had discussed with Beate, I told him I was eager to pursue my architectural studies at doctoral level. I showed him academic papers which I had published, only to find that he already possessed copies. Indeed, he had sought a report on them from Professor Meiring, then Head of the Department of Architecture at the University of Pretoria. After a lengthy discussion, Coetzee declared himself prepared to - as I recall his words - “let me out of the country.” There were two conditions: on graduating, I was to return home in order to put my experience to use in South Africa, and while abroad, I was not take part in anti-apartheid activities. Somewhat facilely, certainly hastily, I accepted - to honour the first condition almost four decades later and the second directly after his proscription about my family joining me in Britain was no longer in force.

That second condition accounted, I thought, for much of Sergeant Coetzee’s seemingly considerate thoughtfulness. His intentions were now patent. Of course I could take up academic studies in Europe, and return to his surveillance on their completion. But my wife and children would not be free to join me until I had demonstrated a blanket abstinence from anti-apartheid involvement for a period to be determined by our kindly minder, Johann Coetzee. In the event, the period was measured in months, apparently a sufficient time to secure and consolidate my grateful acquiescence.

I left the Sergeant on another of his gripping, manly handshakes, his affected good wishes echoing in my gloomy thoughts. Shortly after, early in February 1963, I parted from my family, friends and many close comrades. My heart was already weighed down by the coming, indeterminate separation, my mind filled with sad leave-takings, my expectations dwelt on ominous futures. Apropos my country of birth, I travelled with Alan Paton’s evocative words, “cry the beloved country” - there were many tears of departure. These were not comforting emotions to accompany one across the magnificent sweeps of the African continent, over the etched lines of the Nile in its extensive desert setting, into the tight, snow-bound continent of Europe - startlingly white from the heel of Italy to my destination, a friend’s suburban home on the southern outskirts of London. Unknowingly, I had begun a flight of political defeat into three decades of exile.

 

What do I mean?

The concluding sections of previous chapters contain brief accounts of how a number of key concepts have been employed in this book. Some were used in different contexts, others supplemented by related terms and/or phrases. Terminological precision is seldom stable, often sterile. Lest I lose myself and my readers, a further, also abbreviated, effort to reach for clarity seems required. My concern here is not to offer formal definitions, but rather to probe overall contexts of meaning.

Consider first an abiding cast of mind, my commitment to life’s so-called ‘losers’ (what an immediately complacent, revealing term that is!). This, my political protagonists depict as a maudlin, a sentimental response to human existence, historical and contemporary. People like me, their unruffled, detached charge runs, lack tough-minded equilibrium. We fall readily into naive bathos, into mawkish empathy with the always abundant “wretched of the earth,” the omnipresent victims of social Darwinian fitness. I cannot rebut the accusation, my guilt is palpable.

Here I stand, I can do no other but echo my many fellow sentimentalists, my purportedly bleeding-heart mentors. Drawn from a casually culled collection of authors on my nearest bookshelves, they include Paolo Friere,

Sharon Salzberg,

Albert Einstein,

And once more Salzberg,

Then Theodore Roszak,

Lastly, Erich Fromm,

Taken together, these ad hoc statements point to the roots of radical dissent: they engender suspicion of even putatively well-meaning leaders and their acolytes, of sonorous experts and savants - of those who exude power, who prowl in their authority.

They are also central sources of socialist ideals, from, say, the Diggers of the English Civil War and subscribers to the subsequent Conspiracy of the Equals of the French Revolution, to early socialists such as Charles Fourier, Robert Owen and the Chartists of the 1830s and 40s, to my beloved William Morris. They form the bases of feminist advocacy, of demands for instituting the rights of women in social, political and economic life, of fundamental changes in women’s roles in society. They reverberate with the revolutionary ideas of Mary Wollstoncroft, Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, Sheila Rowbotham, Arundhati Roy. They underpin libertarian notions of free association, voluntary co-operation, self management and similar commitments; as they do the urgent calls for sanity made by ecologists and environmentalists. They are the mainspring of humane, modernist architectural designs - from, say, Hassan Fathy in Egypt, Charles Corea in India, to Ted Cullinan and Hermann Hertzberger in Europe.

Insipid, lachrymose melodramatic? No - hard-headed, practical, down-to-earth humanism. This is the seedbed of one’s dissent from the widespread fascistic trend evident at the turn of the 21st Century: state power that is implacably directed against its constantly conjured-up ‘enemies’ and its critics, that calls on enormous economic and military force, that is backed by widespread surveillance, by lies, by officially endorsed distortion. It is an increasingly menacing world: one in which protestors are invariably depicted as “violent;” in which supposedly countervailing police/military action is “restrained” - by the use of teargas, plastic bullets, vicious baton charges, beatings, illegal arrests, sexual abuse, torture and similarly “moderate” measures. The recent propaganda bogey of creeping socialism has been supplanted by the reality of increasingly overt fascism.

Mention of that threatening world, brings one to the first title on the cover of this volume, ‘On the Outside Looking In,’ a phrase that applies immeasurably beyond a lone author. It covers the great majority of humankind, those who toil under, inter alia, despotic rulers, colonial powers, ‘global’ corporations and the governments which dance to their grinding tunes. That largely indigent mass consists overwhelmingly of people who, from birth to death, remain outside the ante-chambers and ‘corridors of power.’ Few of them would, I imagine, know where the infrequent inward looking peepholes might be found.

This, plainly, is far too large and complex a topic to handle here. For readers who wish to pursue the matter, I recommend a start with, say, Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power (2002), John Pilger, The New Rulers of the World (2002), the especially relevant issue of Monthly Review under the title ‘Imperialism Now,’ (July-August 2003), and for a specifically South African emphasis, Aswin Desai, We Are the Poors: Community Struggles in Post-apartheid South Africa (2002).