Swimming with Cobras (17 page)

The dean's response to the letter was to use the banner again, this time inside the cathedral, as part of the Mothers' Day service. Roy Barker was a man of great humility and a gifted preacher. Standing in front of this imposing backdrop with its logo of a child peering out through prison bars, he encouraged the congregation to pray for children in detention, for parents of detainees, for those who issued the decrees governing detention without trial, and for those responsible for holding the detainees. Congregants were given sprigs of rosemary for remembrance and he invited them to light candles as symbols of hope. The Black Sash distributed a Mothers' Day message in the form of a card bearing the words, “On Mothers' Day all children should be home. Did you know that in South Africa more than 1 500 children are in detention?”

The cathedral was an important home for many liberal activities and we were blessed with extremely sympathetic clergy. Almost without fail the wives of successive bishops and deans were members of the Sash and after the ordination of women had been introduced, we even had clergy as members.

In 1987 David Russell was enthroned as bishop of Grahamstown. Because of his courageous quest to draw attention to the plight of the poor, his name was often spoken of in liberal and radical circles. As a young priest he had lain down in front of bulldozers set on destroying a squatter camp at Crossroads in the Western Cape. Later he had chosen to live among the discarded people in the Dimbaza resettlement camp in the Ciskei, subsisting on the same rations doled out to them. He undertook several extended fasts to raise awareness of poverty in South Africa. Not everyone was pleased when a man of such clear commitment to the anti-apartheid struggle was elected bishop of Grahamstown, but for many it was an enormously heartening appointment. The stone cathedral was aglow with gold and purple stoles and mitres and rang with the sound of marimbas and full-throated Xhosa singing. "There will be no peace,” he said in his charge, “until we share equal citizenship in this one country of our birth, no peace until there is a just sharing of the goods of the land.”

People like Bishop Russell who used their voices to speak the truth were indispensable at a time of a muzzled press and a state-run broadcasting corporation. The Black Sash too had a bold and respected voice and we never lost an opportunity to speak out, whether in high-profile campaigns or in the dissemination of suppressed information. We tried the idea of a massive banner again in 1987, this time draped on the building that housed the Anglican diocesan offices halfway up High Street. We had to talk hard and fast to convince the lawyers occupying offices in the same building that the banner should be allowed to hang there. On a drizzly day we unfurled the cloth bearing the words, “Remember those in prison as if you are in prison with them," and handed out fliers bearing the same Hebrew text to passers-by. Not everyone received them willingly. I was rudely pushed aside by a high-ranking Grahamstown clergyman, not on the cathedral staff and clearly not sympathetic to their support of us. Some of our leaflets were returned to us, defaced with rude scrawls.

We once embarked on a “carcade” through the centre of town. Ten cars decorated with black ribbons and posters calling for “No More Emergencies” drove slowly down High Street at lunchtime with their headlights on. The event drew a lot of attention and it was certainly a change from our silent stands in the cathedral doorway. We spoke at schools whenever we could, but it was often difficult to get permission. The hearts and minds of the country's white children were zealously guarded, and monopolised by state propaganda. Any kind of alternative thinking was viciously demonised. Nevertheless we did find that the private schools would sometimes encourage debate and at one government school we had the occasional opportunity to speak thanks to the principal's wife, who was a firm ally.

Our younger daughters Charlotte and Lucy belonged to the Grahamstown chapter of the Pupils' Awareness Action Group (PAAG), an organisation led by young people. As their name proclaimed, they attempted to promote awareness among white scholars about the situation in the country. One evening after a meeting in the leader, Christopher Kenyon's home around the corner, the girls returned breathless and wide-eyed. They told how special branch officers had raided the meeting, marching in and searching the house. We could picture the show of dramatic bravado, designed to intimidate the gathering of youngsters. Charlotte described how the policemen had even examined the small suitcase belonging to Christopher's preschool brother.

We were a bit slow to realise the potential of the National Arts Festival for our awareness campaigns. I suppose we always viewed this event as a kind of holiday from the usual demands and concerns of our work, though the arts were increasingly politicized and it was never possible to escape entirely. Many artists and theatre companies were boldly using the festival to relay the anti-apartheid message, sometimes at considerable risk, so one year we decided to mount a photographic display showing scenes of repression and violence in Grahamstown. It was not very prominent but it attracted attention and we took the opportunity of selling buttons bearing human rights messages and car stickers with the words “East Cape Emergency Blues”. When festival-goers were asked to complete questionnaires with comments and criticisms, someone wrote, “Since when is the Black Sash an art form?” On another occasion we organised a film festival featuring a compelling series by South African filmmaker Kevin Harris. These included a documentary on the life and work of Beyers Naude, the well-known Afrikaans theologian and rebel Dutch Reformed Church minister, and another entitled, “Witness to Apartheid”, on responses to the security police during the states of emergency. The films elicited considerable interest and we counted ourselves lucky that only one show was banned.

Once, at the end of the 1980s, we held a protest during the festival. We chose to stand at night just before show time, on the steep road up to the monument theatre. As the bumper-to–bumper traffic turned into Lucas Avenue to make its way up the hill, the stream of raised headlights picked out our posters in luminous pink: “No Detention”, “No House Arrest”, “No Death Penalty”, “No Group Areas”, on and on for hundreds of yards up the hill. It was an exhilarating stand in the cold and dark, with headlights boring into our faces. The first night we stood without interference but on the second the Special Branch arrived and we were instructed to disband. We were satisfied that our bit of street theatre had made a striking visual impact on many festinos and hoped that it had given some of them pause for thought.

A popular feature during the festival were historical tours of Grahamstown. These tended to concentrate on the town as a settler city, “a little bit of England nestling in the foothills of the Eastern Cape”, as the SABC described it. Visitors were shown the churches, schools and museums, the stately homes and the quaint, white-painted cottages. The Black Sash decided it was time to present the other, less romantic view, the version of Grahamstown's history as a frontier city where various cultures had settled and mingled and clashed for centuries. Thus in the early 1990s, using borrowed kombis and Sash volunteers as guides, we began to offer a social history tour which encompassed the pre-settler history of the town as well as the story of the townships.

We were surprised at how popular our tours became, especially among foreign visitors. From the top of Gunfire Hill where the Settlers' Monument stood we asked our groups to imagine the confluence of peoples in the surrounding Zuurveld, from San hunter-gatherers and Khoi pastoralists, through Xhosa stock herders to European hunters and farmers. All of them were seeking the same resources and establishing a dynamic kind of cultural and commercial frontier that might have evolved very differently had it not been for the decision by the British to demarcate and settle the Eastern Cape. The story then became a military one. From Fort Selwyn we drove our guests past the old Drostdy building and the iconic Drostdy Arch that marked the entrance to the British military barracks. From there we could look down the High Street to the Cathedral of St Michael and St George, which is built on a natural spring near which the Xhosa chieftain Ndlambe had "a great place" when Colonel Graham arrived to eject the inhabitants of the region and establish a settlement. From there we drove to Artificers' Square, where we pointed out the neighbourhood that housed the hapless working class settlers who had been lured to the Eastern Cape to strengthen the British presence. Down the road from there, the old marketplace was a reminder that the town grew into a thriving centre of trade before the discovery of diamonds and gold in the interior sidelined it, turning it into a commercial backwater. Since then Grahamstown has been characterised by the more cerebral pursuits of education and law.

Passing through the District Six of Grahamstown, a “frozen zone” where people of various races lived in a mixed community until as late as the 1970s, we told the story of the Group Areas Act. Then we crossed the Kowie ditch into the townships. In Fingo Village, amid the dismal slums that are the result of massive population pressure and uncontrolled rack-renting, we related the events that led to the amaMfengu being granted freehold rights after the last of the frontier wars. At St Philip's church I always enjoyed pointing out the black Madonna in the stained glass baptistery window, evidence of the emergence of black consciousness in the Anglican Church as early as 1945. I also made a point of showing where the GADRA office had stood before it fell victim to the conflagration at the adjoining beer hall. Then up the hill past Makana's Kop and into Joza township, where we told the stories of the 1950s defiance campaign, the zenith of apartheid in the 1960s and 1970s, and then the 1980s revolt and the successive states of emergency. After a two-hour drive we returned to town via the Coloured and new Indian areas. It always gave me great pleasure leading one of these tours and I was fascinated each time to reconsider the history of the town and the region through a new audience's eyes.

In time, the demand for our tour grew beyond our capacity as a volunteer organisation, and we published a do-it-yourself guide, which ran to two editions and several reprints. As always, it was the hard-earned substance of our message that gave it its power. Information-gathering, monitoring and research were fundamental to everything we said or did. Our knowledge was our power and we believed that knowledge would empower others, some in their struggle for dignity, others just to throw off their blinkers.

This relentless pursuit of information was illustrated in the Sash's monitoring of all pass law cases, and until the 1990s we had volunteers who attended every political case that appeared in the magistrate's and Supreme courts, sometimes raising bail funds from friends and sympathisers. This kind of dedication, applied in a range of areas, enabled us to produce informative booklets which became widely used and respected on topics ranging from the plight of prisoners on death row to community resistance in the Eastern Cape. One, on the role of the municipal police in the Eastern Cape, was a good example of the nature of our work. In a region where fear and ignorance often prevented police abuses from coming to light, this booklet served to highlight the activities of a particular branch of the police, while also advising readers on their rights in the event of arrest.

In late 1986 we became aware of men in royal blue uniforms milling around in town. They turned out to be the new
kitskonstabels
(or instant officers), a hastily recruited municipal force attached to the South African police. Fresh from mere weeks of training, these black auxiliaries arrived in townships across the country to supplement the riot forces already deployed there, and quickly established a reputation for random and brutal operations. Their many derogatory nicknames bear witness to the disrespect with which the communities regarded them. In our area they were known as
greenflies
and
wild rats
. In fact, so unpopular were they that they often had to live in protected compounds on the edges of townships, or be deployed to areas where they were unknown. Many of those deployed in Grahamstown, for instance, were Zulus, while Xhosa men were sent to Natal. Nevertheless many volunteered for the work, lured no doubt by the combination of money and guns. Unemployment in the Eastern Cape was running at around 80% in some regions and the average wage was low.

The shifting of law-enforcement responsibility to the municipal police was part of a cynical state strategy. Under the guise of encouraging more self-determination, the state was handing over more and more unpopular functions to the black local authorities. They had previously already been given the unenviable task of rent collection. Functions such as these generated untold resentment among the people and bred internecine conflict, exacerbated by the arrival of the municipal forces. It is possible that the black-on-black and inter-tribal violence that threatened the run-up to the first democratic elections in 1994 had its roots in this situation. Our research revealed that municipal policemen sometimes interrogated suspects for up to 12 hours before handing them over to the South African Police for formal investigation. Yet they kept no crime registers, observation books or cell registers. One policeman told us frankly that when he'd heard a job advertisement on the radio for law enforcement officers, he thought he'd be settling quarrels among people, not getting involved in “robbery and assault”.

Our booklet warned that entrusting lethal weapons to untrained people was a recipe for disaster. The Commissioner of Police dismissed our fears as sensationalist but there were soon several incidents to confirm our fear. One chilling event left an indelible impression on me because I personally took statements from witnesses and survivors. Four people had been killed and five wounded when three
kitskonstabels
opened fire at random on an unsuspecting household. A grandmother was listening to her favourite serial on the radio. She was sitting at the table peeling potatoes and chopping cabbage for supper, her shoes kicked off her feet. Suddenly there was a knock on the door and a cry, “Open up, open up, it is us.” The door was kicked open and three drunken
greenflies
burst in. They accused someone in the house of throwing stones and began to fire wildly. Paraffin lamps were peppered with bullets, plunging the scene into darkness, and in the ensuing mayhem three families were dislocated forever. Years later when this case resurfaced during interviews for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it was again the poignant minutiae of the domestic scene that struck me, as well as the sudden and brutal fracturing of lives.