The question is frequently asked how white South Africans can abandon all the privileges which are theirs for the taking and choose instead to become revolutionaries and side with the oppressed. For outsiders it is an impossibility: South Africa for white people is the land of milk and honey where they can expect a standard of living probably unmatched by any other country in the world. A beautiful country with such wealth that it literally oozes out of the ground and such an abundance of cheap labour that virtually every white family can afford a servant. A life of luxury, pleasure, holidays, travel, sunshine and sport. Good jobs, good salaries, little prospect of unemployment, good homes, good education... you name it. Why would anyone reject all this and choose instead a life of persecution: detention, prison, banning, ostracism, exile?
Hatred of the system of society under which they live and rebellion against it are not natural responses for white South Africans as they are for blacks. They are responses that have to be learned: from others, from unique personal experiences or from books.
For most whites breaking free of the web of privilege and racism and finding the route toward enlightenment is not easy. The apartheid system, through the rewards it bestows on those who accept it and through its insidious propaganda, does not breed white dissidents. But despite all the forces ranged against them, some white South Africans do manage to break loose and find their way into the camp of those who believe in a non-racial democratic South Africa.
Some are fortunate to have enlightened parents and so never become deeply ensnared in the barbs of racism; they break free easily. Others may meet someone who influences their lives or have personal experiences which help them to break loose. Most whites who do manage to see the light, however, reach that position through the intellectual route. It cannot really be any other way, for whites are not usually at the receiving end of apartheid and hardly ever learn what it means in any practical sense. For all who do find the way, however, the route is uphill and slippery all the way.
I was born and bred in South Africa and grew up a 'normal' complacent white South African. I unthinkingly accepted the system and for twenty one years never questioned it. Why should I have done so? I knew nothing else and no one had ever told me anything else. I had never had any black friends, never spoken to any black person outside the master/servant relationship, never been in a black township, into the home of a black person or worked with any black people. South Africans were white people - Europeans. Blacks just existed in the background, there to do the work and then disappear when we needed them no longer.
I absorbed the normal white prejudices against blacks and bore a 'healthy' hatred of them. The world view I had imbibed put everything in its place: blacks could not rule as they were uncivilised and would just fight among themselves if granted power. They had to be kept separated from us as they had a different standard of living, a different - inferior - culture and a different set of moral values. Blacks were essentially lazy and dirty. All they wanted to do was steal the things we had acquired through our hard efforts. We lived here, they lived there in their dirty slums. We had our buses and train compartments, our beaches, our restaurants, our cinemas, and they had theirs. It was all quite fair, all quite just. What other way could things be ordered?
Occasionally the blacks would riot and some of them would get shot in the places where they lived. They would burn down the schools and bars which we whites had provided for them out of our own taxes. How could they be so ungrateful for what we'd given them? But what could you expect from people who were drunk most of the time and inherently violent?
They would never be allowed to come and make trouble in our areas so it was okay if they got themselves shot or killed themselves in their own areas. We whites would show them that we didn't need them. They could go on strike or go away for good. We'd manage. They needed us more than we needed them so they'd be the ones to suffer most.
I matriculated at the age of 17, leaving school totally ignorant of the world in which I lived. Not a single political thought ever arose in my head. Today I marvel at the advanced level of political understanding of young black scholars, even at the primary level. But then black people grow up in a totally different environment. Their whole lives are a battle to survive, a battle against the system from the day they are born. The politics of struggle is infused into their blood at an early age. Whites on the other hand learn only the politics of preservation. The world is theirs and no one is going to take it from them.
I was fortunate - some would say unfortunate - in not having to go to the army after leaving school. At that time not every white male had to go. There was a ballot system and I was one of the lucky few not selected. If I had gone my life would perhaps have followed an entirely different course: the army tends to amplify the worst racist tendencies inherent in white South Africans and turns most of those who go to it into bigoted black-haters and ardent defenders of the white faith.
Instead I went out to work and within two years had been through a number of jobs. I wasn't much interested in working, nor was I interested in studying - I didn't quite know what I wanted to do. All I was really interested in was my motorcycles and motorcycle racing. Jobs were easy to come by and the pay was good. Work a while, save a bit and then muck about for a few months. All quite normal; all part of growing up.
Wealthy parents kept me and my crazy hobby going. After three years I'd reached the top of the league in the local bike-racing scene and wanted to go further. Lack of money prevented me doing so and the only way I could see of making money in the quantities I needed was to set up my own business. I had some experience in glass-fibre work and to gain more experience in this field I decided to go overseas - which means to Britain for white English-speaking South Africans. I was also keen to acquire experience in the far more sophisticated British bike-racing scene.
In April 1970 I took a boat to Britain. At first I was a model emissary for white South Africa. I would tolerate no criticism of my country and defended it with naive pride. South Africa was 'not half as bad as shown in all those outrageous propaganda films on telly', I often responded. I could not understand why people said such harsh things about my country. Nobody at home complained, and they were there. Why should these people who had never been to South Africa be so critical? Why couldn't they wash their own dirty dishes first?
I soon learned that I was totally ignorant of the reality of my own country and that most people in Britain knew more about it than I did. They asked questions and made assertions I could not answer - they told me about my country. From 10,000 kilometres away I had within the space of a few months learned more about South Africa than I had in all the time I had lived there.
After spending a few weeks with relatives in London I managed to get a job in a glass-fibre factory in Kent. The job that was offered to me was on the shop floor and at first I was a bit reluctant to accept it, as I had always considered factory work below my dignity. In South Africa only blacks worked in factories. I only accepted the job because I wanted to gain experience and there was no better way than to actually do the dirty work.
I could not believe the conditions under which we were required to work. The itching glass-fibre dust in that factory hung like a mist from the ceiling and the air was infused with the pungent smell of resin. The management had filtered air conditioners in their offices while the people who did the actual work had to breathe in that vicious dust and the poisonous vapours. The resin stuck to your clothes like blobs of oil paint to a canvas, your hands got lacerated on hardened spikes of glass fibre and dried and wrinkled from washing them in acetone.
The management would periodically venture out of their comfortable offices with white coats and clipboards to inspect your work. They'd poke their fingers into your lay-ups looking for bubbles and berate you for wasting so much resin. Why couldn't they do the work if they were so good? At the end of the week you'd take home £13, or £20 if you'd worked overtime, yet what you'd produced in that time could be sold for hundreds of pounds. It was obvious that the lazy sods who sat in their dust-free offices and drank coffee all day were creaming off the profits we'd made: they all had smart new Jaguars and we had to catch buses.
The unjustness of this setup as well as the sheer nastiness of factory work forced me for the first time in my life to sit up and consider the manner in which the world worked. How was it that the workers who created such wealth got paid so little? How was it that the management cared so little about the conditions under which we had to work?
In an attempt to find answers to these sorts of questions and others I began to read books. I didn't know where to start so began by reading books about self-improvement and human relationships. This led to an interest in sociology and psychology and ultimately politics. Before this I didn't even know what sociology was or the distinction between it and other social studies. Nor did I know the names of any sociological or political theorists - not even Karl Marx.
I began to devour books by the ton and inevitably read some that I knew would not be allowed in South Africa. The fact that these were banned at home lent them a certain fascination. After a while I made a point of seeking out these books, not because I agreed more with the viewpoints expressed in them but because I felt that I had to broaden my horizons as much as possible while I had the opportunity. From them, however - especially the ones about South Africa - I learnt that there was another way of looking at my country and that the policies of its government were not altogether defensible.
My sudden awakening to the world led to a slight but shortlived religious revival. As I became aware of the complexities of the world and of the terrible things going on in it, I wanted to find immediate solutions to them. Not understanding the forces behind the events and appearances of things and not knowing what I could do to change them, praying to god seemed to be the only answer.
While recognising that religion has motivated some of the most progressive opponents of apartheid and is often the starting point for many people in the development of a social consciousness, for me it served only as a barrier to further development.
At first the turn to religion, coming with my growing awareness, made me feel fresh, a new person - 'born again' so to speak. In my reading I had learnt that 'Marxists' were opposed to religion and I therefore became intensely anti-communist, in the most subjective sense. This was nothing more than the coming to the surface of the indoctrination to which I'd been subjected all my life. As I understood it, communists were the devil incarnate. Their sole purpose of existence was to make trouble and take away our freedom. Communists were always associated with evil and war; Christians with goodness and peace. I did not understand that our rulers used the word 'communist' to label everybody they did not like, everybody who did not agree with them. By calling themselves Christians they made us believe that they were acting in the name of god and that their motives were honest and sincere. Consequently, I found myself in the curious position of wanting to see change but of harbouring negative views of all those who advocated change.
At the end of 1970, still in Britain, I decided to continue in a formal way what I had been learning through the casual reading of books: I enrolled at the University of Cape Town to do a course in sociology. This is how it is if you're white and relatively well off - go overseas, expand your consciousness and then decide you'd like to further your education. For the vast majority of South Africans this style of living is unthinkable.
University changed everything. It taught how to be rational and critical; to question everything. Religion was the first casualty. It could not stand up to the questioning and exposed itself to me as no more than a set of superstitious answers to difficult questions. Science taught that things should only be believed on the basis of the evidence that supports them; religion required that I just believe things without any evidence at all, that is, by faith. For me the belief that there was a divine creator and a divine justice could no longer be upheld; it contradicted the belief that we could create a better world and that justice should be achieved here on earth.
In the sociology class I met Stephen Lee. He, like me, preferred to sit in the back row of the class where you could talk and swap notes and books with fellow students. He had been at university for a year already, changing his course from business science to sociology. He found out in his first year that he did not want to become a 'capitalist' and had developed, as a reaction to what he'd been taught in the business classes, an interest in the Marxist conception of society. He had also involved himself in student politics and this had contributed towards the leftward direction of his political development.
On one occasion I agreed to swop with him one of the banned books I had brought back to South Africa for an interesting book he was showing off. This led to regular exchanges of books and to combined search operations for progressive articles and books in the university's exceptionally large library. There was not much literature of this kind as most books and magazines in that category had been banned or 'appropriated' by the students. However, between the two of us we managed to ferret out a number of interesting titles, mostly Marxist-inclined, in the most unlikely locations. These we photocopied from cover to cover, bound and used to swop with other students who were also searching for similar literature. Once we got into the right circles we were amazed by the large amount of banned literature in circulation. In a short while we possessed trunk-loads of banned books and articles that we'd photocopied. People would go to extreme lengths to obtain the books that were supposed to be bad for them. We were thankful to the apartheid censors for the valuable service they performed in printing their lists of prohibited publications - we knew those were the ones worth reading!
The sociology course was a great disappointment. Economics, my second subject, was even more demoralising. Our textbooks were all giant American tomes which claimed to teach their subjects 'scientifically' by looking at reality 'as it is' and not 'how it ought to be'. It soon became obvious to us that we were surreptitiously being taught conservative politics disguised as sociology and economics. The world, we were taught, was an essentially static and harmonious entity and all social structures, such as classes, served equally important functions by holding society together. Human societies were characterised by consensus and harmony and everything that happened was the result of conscious decisions by people to make things happen, not the result of the working-out of intangible generalisations such as 'social forces'. Change in society involved the authorities making small adjustments to relieve pressure points. There were no inherent antagonisms which could lead to conflict and, god forbid, revolution. Conflict was brought by outside forces impinging on this otherwise stable organism.
You didn't have to be a genius to see that this was just so much nonsense. It was particularly insulting to be taught this in a country like South Africa where social antagonisms were so blatant. By implication our lecturers were telling us that the reactionary politics of the apartheid rulers was science. They, the white politicians, were saying essentially the same thing as the sociologists every day: everyone in their station served a function; the whites had to rule as they had the skills and the tradition of ruling; the blacks provided the labour which society needed; South Africa's black citizens were happy with their lot and had no real grievances; all strains where they occurred would be relieved by slowly introducing reforms; conflict was brought from the outside by communists who incited and intimidated people to rebel against the government for the political ends of foreign interests.
The claptrap that we were being taught contrasted sharply with the Marxist perspective on things we were learning through books read on the side. These seemed to give a much more accurate portrayal of the society in which we lived, a society riven by antagonism and conflict. Blacks did not need any 'communists' to tell them that the society they lived in was oppressive and unjust or that the way to overcome it was to rebel against it. Apartheid meant conflict.
Marxism was also the best antidote for racism. It taught us that racial antagonism and conflict, far from being 'natural' and 'inevitable', were the products of colonialism and imperialism. Racism in South Africa began with colonial occupation and expansion and was fostered as part of the strategy of the settlers to win and maintain control over the local population. The racist policies of the apartheid regime were just the latter day manifestation of continued colonial domination - the particular form of colonialism where the colonisers and colonised inhabited the same country.
My friendship with Stephen grew and after several months he invited me to join him and others who were planning to build a seaside shanty on a small, remote, rocky outcrop named Oudeschip, about 15 kilometres down the coast from Cape Town. The hut was to be built out of driftwood and packing-case wood. The packing-case wood would have to be carted there some distance along a mountain track. We set to but the others dropped out after a short while when they realised how much work was involved. The hut was completed within six months and served as the perfect retreat for studying and discussing our changing world outlook. It was also the ideal place to invite female companions!
It was not long before we began to treat our university courses with cynicism, learning only so much as was necessary to satisfy supervisors and pass exams. We regularly skipped lectures and spent the time at Oudeschip instead. There we could read things more interesting and worthwhile. This reading did not remain within the ambit of the few subjects we were studying: our interests broadened to studying the actual society we lived in, to history, to politics and to the struggle of the oppressed against racist domination.
The three years at university overturned all our beliefs, attitudes, prejudices and fears. The process was erratic, slow and traumatic. Deeply ingrained prejudices which we'd not considered as such had to be rooted out. Beliefs we'd thought our own turned out to be the product of years of racist and fascist indoctrination - notions of white superiority were the most persistent.
The great white myths had to be debunked. The first of these was the historical myth that white South Africans had a moral claim to the major portion of the country since most of the land was unoccupied when they moved into the interior. Those areas called the 'homelands' were the only parts occupied by Africans and that was why they were being granted 'independence'. It came as a shock to find out that in fact all of the country had been occupied by Africans for hundreds if not thousands of years prior to the arrival of the Europeans and that the history of the settlers was a history of plunder and death, a process continuing to this day.
The second myth, which flowed from the first, was that there were no majorities in South Africa - only a number of minorities. There were the Whites, Coloureds, Indians, Zulus, Xhosas, Sothos, Tswanas - 13 'ethnic groups' in all. Each of the African 'tribes' was different to the next and all antagonistic to the other. No group could claim a right to South Africa - it was a 'multi-national' country.
Once the colonial principle of divide and rule was understood, this myth fell flat on its face. Why did Africans have to be sub-divided into numerous linguistic/cultural groups while the whites were one homogeneous entity despite the fact that they were also divided linguistically and culturally?
The next was the myth that South Africa's blacks were the most well-off blacks on the continent and that the government was doing more for them than any black government in Africa was doing for its citizens. The total meaninglessness and irrelevance of this claim, which was brought up every time apartheid was criticised, was exposed when it was realised that this was no more than a ruse to deflect attention from apartheid onto some allegedly worse case elsewhere. Besides being untrue it was also an excuse for white privilege. The true injustice of apartheid was manifested when the comparison was made between the living conditions of white and black South Africans. Besides, were blacks supposed, after being told that it was worse elsewhere, to be grateful that they were living under apartheid and satisfied with their lot?
Overcoming belief in the political myth that South Africa was a democratic multi-party state gave a sharp boost to my political transformation. Realising that only 15 per cent of the population had the vote and that that vote was deliberately exercised to perpetuate a dictatorship of white rule over the black majority made the 'government' as bad as any military dictatorship where no one had the vote at all.
The apartheid regime was a product of the illegal colonial creation which Britain set up when it brought the four colonies of Natal, the Orange Free State, Transvaal and Cape together to form the Union of South Africa in 1910. The wishes of the indigenous inhabitants of the country were ignored and only the white settler minority was consulted. Not once since then had a South African government been democratically elected - by all the people, that is - and the regimes in power had only been 'governments' in the sense that they had maintained control over the affairs of the area by force of arms.
The myth propagated with the most vigour was the one which claimed the omnipotence and invincibility of the regime. This had two sides: that white rule was complete and that the regime's 'security forces' could meet any challenge; and that black opposition was insignificant and would never be powerful enough to overcome white rule.
Any undemocratic regime which has no popular support needs to perpetuate the myth that resistance is futile, since this achieved is half the battle won. Understanding this liberated us from the intimidating effect that the regime's kragdadigheid (show of force and toughness) had on those who wished to do something to undermine apartheid.
There were many other myths to be shaken off - so many that it is not possible to list them all. Life under apartheid is a life of lies. The system is so morally unjustifiable and indefensible that the only way most white people can live under it without suffering from the most debilitating guilt is by cloaking themselves in its lies and propaganda. As each lie is peeled off so the truth - and horror - of apartheid begins to be seen.
Now the naked reality of apartheid stood before us: what had looked 'normal' was a perversion; what we had always accepted was unacceptable. When you are faced with something that turns out suddenly to be the opposite of what you have always believed, your attitude towards it changes rapidly: a friend who deceives you can no longer be your friend. We were angry at having been deceived for so long. The system which had bestowed on us so many privileges had done so at the expense of others - at the expense of black people. It could no longer be defended, only challenged.
As everything grew clearer we became fired with a burning desire to see the end of this monstrosity. Our desire was not motivated so much by guilt - a negative drive - but by the positive wish to see a new, more just and democratic society. To wish for the end of the society we'd grown up in and which had given us so much - including the ability to see it for what it was - meant challenging everything. This was not easy for us as we'd always been taught to respect authority, to believe in the benevolence and justness of the government, and to believe that all change came out of the deliberations of politicians in parliament. Parliament was the ultimate political reality; everything outside that was the dark world of 'treason' and 'terrorism'.
But how could a regime that enforced segregation, legitimised exploitation, tolerated abysmal poverty alongside great wealth, turned the majority of its people into semi-slaves, deliberately stunted their education, prevented their free movement, forcibly removed them from one part of the country and corralled them in reserves which it called their 'homelands', jailed and tortured those who raised their voices in protest - how could a regime that did all this and more expect loyalty and respect? It could only expect from the majority of its citizens 'treasonable' behaviour. Only a truly democratic government which showed respect for its people, which responded fairly to its peoples' demands instead of eliminating those making them, could expect loyalty and respect.
As our perceptions changed, so we were faced with the inevitable moral dilemma that confronts whites when they begin to realise what apartheid is all about: what to do?
Students like ourselves tended to follow several distinct routes, most of which ended in abandonment and a return to the apartheid fold. Some became so incensed with what they saw that they became instant super-revolutionaries demanding that everyone immediately come out on the streets with their pitchforks. These ultra-leftists, commonly found on university campuses, formed themselves into little cliques which splintered over theoretical differences into various warring factions every few months. The world in which they wished to make revolution was a purely theoretical one, having little connection with reality. After a few years they had burned themselves out and invariably turned into cynics or vehement opponents of their former views.
Then there were those who were revolutionaries for as long as father paid the university fees. As soon as they had to fend for themselves or landed well-paying jobs there was no more time for playing revolution. They became taken up with their own lives; the pursuit of swimming pools became more important.
There were also those who pretended that apartheid did not exist. They preferred to be seen with black people, to spend most of their time in the black townships, and looked upon fellow whites as the enemy. Such behaviour was no more than a token protest and never led anywhere. The realities of life under apartheid soon 'corrected' this 'deviation'.
We were determined not to follow any of these well trodden paths but were not certain which way to go. We were treading new ground. There was no one to point the way and we had no examples to follow. It was easy to shout at apartheid from the comfort of our plush homes in the sanctity of our white suburbs, but to do something which was not patronising was another matter. Liberal-minded South Africans who reached this point found it difficult to take the next step.
The question of what to do was answered for me one day when a canvasser from the white opposition Progressive Party (now called the Progressive Federal Party) came to the front door to sell the virtues of his party. When I expressed disinterest he said that I should at least make up my mind about one thing. To make his point he held up a hand with outstretched fingers and said: 'There are five choices open to every white person'. Pointing with his other hand to his little finger he said: 'One, you can join the Nationalist Party'; to the next finger he said, 'Two, you can do nothing; Three, you can leave the country; Four, you can do something unconstitutional'; and finally to his thumb, 'You can join the Progressive Party'.
I thought about this and realised that he was absolutely right. The National Party, the party of apartheid, was obviously out of the question; doing nothing was the same as condoning the system even if you expressed rejection of it; emigrating was copping out; the Progressive Party, even if it claimed to be opposed to apartheid, was a totally irrelevant and ineffectual organisation which served no other purpose than to give credibility to the apartheid regime's claim that the 'government' was democratically elected and that the Nationalists were the legitimate ruling party.
That left only the 'unconstitutional' choice. From my re-reading of South African history I had learnt that constitutional opposition in South Africa meant not opposition at all: it meant acceptance of white minority rule. Real opposition, namely, opposition which sought to end exclusive white rule and put in its place the democracy of one-person-one-vote, was by definition unconstitutional.
The constitution in force had been designed by whites to preserve their hegemony of political power. It completely denied blacks any constitutional rights whatsoever - they were the subjects of what whites decided was best for them. Denied constitutional avenues for bringing about meaningful change, what were the victims of apartheid supposed to do? Unflinchingly accept whatever dispensations were foisted upon them? Sit back and wait on the magnanimity of the whites to take pity on them? By declaring that the African National Congress and the Pan-Africanist Congress were 'banned' in 1960, and the Communist Party before them in 1950, the regime had demonstrated that it would not tolerate any real opposition at all, constitutional or otherwise.
One could therefore not be afraid of this word 'unconstitutional'. It had none of the connotations that were associated with it in other parts of the world. What right in any case had an illegitimate regime to declare the bounds of constitutionality?
In the same way that it was more honourable to disobey the unjust laws created by an illegitimate parliament than obey them, it was more honourable to act outside the illegitimate constitution than inside it. Having accepted this, it was only natural that we should have sought a home for our views. All the legal political organisations or parties were part of the system in one way or another. In them all you could do was raise your voice in protest at the prevailing political setup - a waste of time in a situation where the repressive forces had been given such draconian powers that they could physically remove or eliminate anyone who raised theirs too loud. It seemed obvious to us that the only effective way of opposing this vicious regime was to confront it directly, but secretly and outside its framework of rules.
The only effective organisation that appeared to be doing this was one which had been declared 'banned' by the regime - the African National Congress. It was the one organisation that stood for the complete eradication of apartheid and for the creation of a democratic South Africa not based on any racial premises. It was also the one organisation that made no distinction as to 'race' when it came to membership.
The Freedom Charter to which the ANC subscribed was a particularly impressive document of intention. Its preamble started: 'We the people of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know: that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all our people'. Its ten clauses began: 'The People Shall Govern! All National Groups Shall Have Equal Rights! The People Shall Share In the Country's Wealth! The Land Shall Be Shared Among Those Who Work It! All Shall Be Equal Before the Law! All Shall Enjoy Equal Human Rights! There Shall Be Work and Security! The Doors of Learning and Culture Shall Be Opened! There Shall Be Houses, Security, and Comfort! There Shall Be Peace and Friendship!'. If belief in such principles amounted to 'terrorism' and 'treason' then so be it - we would be 'terrorists' and 'traitors'. These ideals were worth fighting for and worth any risk, even prison.
From this perspective our attitude towards the struggle against apartheid changed drastically. The ANC had been forced by the regime to adopt a strategy of resistance which included armed struggle and this meant coming to terms with the question of the use of violence to achieve political ends.
The ANC's adoption of armed struggle was not a question of the ends justifying the means. The history of South Africa quite clearly demonstrated to us the complete futility in opposing white minority rule by peaceful means alone. The ANC had for nearly fifty years striven by peaceful means to resist white domination yet every manifestation of peaceful resistance, whether it took the form of protests, demonstrations, boycotts or strikes, whether it was passive or defiant, was put down by the authorities with the utmost brutality and bloodshed. Thousands had died in the attempt to advance their rights or protect the few they had. Each campaign of action against the white rulers had been answered with new and increasingly harsh 'security laws', detentions, torture, imprisonment, bannings, banishments and death. How much more violent would the regime get when it saw that the demands of the oppressed went beyond demands for human rights and for the complete eradication of the system of white minority rule - for state power?
Peaceful resistance had led nowhere. Instead of halting or slowing down the implementation of the regime's apartheid laws, the apartheid rulers had enforced them with increasing vigour and barbarity. The laws were inherently violent in themselves: millions had been forcibly removed from their homes and dumped in the impoverished bantustans where they died of starvation and disease; urban black populations had been herded into insanitary townships on the outskirts of the white cities; millions had been arrested and imprisoned under the pass laws; families had been split up in the interests of 'racial purity'; the black population had been denied proper education; patriots had been tortured and imprisoned or driven into exile...
The ANC with its tradition of peaceful struggle had not taken to armed struggle lightly or easily. Nor was the turn to arms an act of revenge or self-defence. A point had been reached where the only choice was to surrender to white minority rule or to fight on with whatever means were available. All peaceful and constitutional channels had been closed; the only alternative was to organise a people's army, Umkhonto we Sizwe - The Spear of the Nation - to defend the oppressed and fight for the kind of South Africa that the majority of people wanted.
We had little difficulty in accepting that the ANC's turn to arms was justifiable and that the armed struggle against apartheid was a just and legitimate form of struggle.
Many people argued that there still remained peaceful avenues of bringing about change and that therefore all activity should be concentrated in this direction; that violent struggle should only be resorted to when there was absolutely no other choice. But we believed that such a point had long been reached and that peaceful methods alone would never be sufficient to wrest political power from the hands of the racists. Were the oppressed just supposed to stand and take bullets in the back and not return the fire? Were they to deny themselves a form of struggle simply because some people found it difficult to justify morally?
Those who pleaded that there were never moral grounds for resorting to violence to achieve political ends were usually people who knew nothing of the violence of apartheid or of the history of the people's struggles against white tyranny. Such people seldom made moral denunciations of the unceasing violence used by the regime to preserve and perpetuate white privilege and rule.
In our final year at university both of us, naturally, began to think about our future after we'd completed our courses. Our political development had led us to a position where we could no longer live comfortably under apartheid. Our consciences would not allow us to find work and 'settle down': if we identified with the oppressed we could not live like the oppressor. The only way we could justify living in South Africa was if we were fighting the system. But if we were going to give ourselves to the struggle against apartheid it had to be through the medium of some organisation and the only organisation we could consider joining - the ANC - could not be contacted inside South Africa. We knew that the ANC had missions in various African countries, but our South African passports prevented us from visiting them. The only alternative was to go to Britain to make contact with the organisation there.
And that's what we did.
In February 1974 we set off for Europe by ship - the cheapest way. From Barcelona where we disembarked we made our way directly to Holland to spend a few weeks seeing as much of the country as possible. Once we got to Britain we would immediately get down to business.
We arrived in London in the evening of the 24th of April and spent the first night at a youth hostel in Earls Court. No time was to be wasted: first thing the next morning we would present ourselves at the ANC office.
Stephen had never been to London before so the next day we decided to take an underground train to Trafalgar Square to see a few sights on the way to the office. When we surfaced at the Square, newspaper billboards greeted us with the announcement: 'Salazar overthrown in Portuguese coup'. Immediately we realised the profound consequences this would have for apartheid South Africa. All the buffer zones it had relied on for so long would soon disappear and the armed struggle would rapidly be brought to its borders. The coincidence of this news and our plan to go to the ANC somehow seemed auspicious. We were entering a new era, both personally and politically speaking.
The ANC office was not quite what we'd expected. First we had trouble locating it and then when we did find the door number, there was no indication that it was the ANC. From the street door a steep, dark stairway led to another door through which we entered into a small cluttered room. We introduced ourselves to someone and said we were from Cape Town and had come to find out about the ANC. Someone else was beckoned from another office who introduced himself as the Chief Representative. He shook hands welcomingly and then immediately returned to his office, asking us to please wait. He typed something and then returned and handed us a note: 'You should not come here like this. Please meet me at the caf around the corner in half an hour.' We nodded in understanding and left the office. Things looked promising.
When the Chief Representative came to the caf he was with another person. We explained again that we had been studying at the University of Cape Town and that we had come to Britain to find out more about the ANC and were keen to do something about apartheid when we went back.
Their first thoughts must have been that we were spies or police agents because it was hardly the usual thing for white South African tourists to walk in off the street and offer their services to the ANC. Nevertheless, we had a good chat and they were keen to hear our views on the current situation at home. A further meeting was arranged for the following day at a nearby pub.
At the next meeting the Chief Representative arrived with a white comrade. This was reassuring to us as we knew that in theory the ANC accepted whites into its ranks, but did not know if there actually were any. The Chief left us with the comrade who inquired more deeply into our political views than we had been required to express the previous day. There followed a number of similar meetings on subsequent days and at one of them we were required to write down our personal details, presumably so they could check on our bona fides.
Both of us were impatient in the extreme and wanted them to send us back to South Africa immediately to carry out some task for the Movement - we were prepared to do anything. Our naivity would not allow them the time to check up on our credentials. We knew that we were not police agents and somehow assumed they should too.
When it became clear that our incorporation was going to take longer than expected, we moved to another hostel with a longer-term tenancy. To pass the time we immersed ourselves in the literature of the liberation movement, attended political meetings and talks, and generally primed ourselves for our prospective role as revolutionaries.
At the new hostel I met Robin, to whom later, for a while, I was to be married. She and a friend had left South Africa on an impulse because they were fed up with life as typists in the offices of Johannesburg. Arriving penniless, Robin was forced to take up a job as a typist in the offices of London.
Robin and I struck up a close relationship and within a couple of months had moved out of the hostel and into cheap digs in the Fulham area of London. She was not a political person when we first met, but was quick to shift her views on South Africa when she began to think about them politically. In no time she became embroiled in political activities with us and began to take an interest in exile politics.
Stephen grew impatient waiting for the ANC to decide whether it was going to send us back to South Africa so he took off back to Holland where he got a job as a carpenter. Later he moved on to Spain where he earned a living teaching English to wealthy Spaniards.
I had sufficient funds to last a few months but was eventually forced to search for work. My South African passport acted to my detriment here but I managed to find the occasional typing job through some less scrupulous employment agencies which did not ask for documents or National Insurance numbers. Through a friend of my parents I was able, after much bureaucratic wrangling, to obtain a work permit for a social work job in a sort of glorified reformatory in Wiltshire. Robin and I parted company temporarily; she went back to the hostel.
Stephen returned to Britain around the end of the year (1974) and at his first meeting with the ANC they told him that it would be possible for us to go back to South Africa to do something for the Movement. We must have been found acceptable.
He phoned me in Wiltshire to tell me the good news. At last things were moving. I immediately handed in my resignation even though I'd gone through tremendous pains to obtain the work permit and had only worked for three months. I hated the job anyway and had felt totally cut off from the world there.
Stephen and I moved into a squat in Fulham with a number of other homeless people, to await the period of training the ANC had promised us before our return to South Africa. Stephen, on account of his having obtained a British passport, was able to take a job with London Transport as a bus conductor; I had no choice but to rely on my rapidly diminishing savings.
To pass the time both of us became involved, through friends we had met in the area, in the anti-Common Market campaign that was taking place at that time prior to the referendum. This involvement was foolish as we were associating with communist and left-wing Labour types while we should have been keeping our noses clean. Our political mentors in the ANC should have forbidden us from engaging in such activities.
For obvious security reasons it is not possible to give much detail of the training that was given to us. Nevertheless it can be said that it was designed to provide us with the practical and survival skills we would need to operate as a propaganda cell in underground conditions in South Africa. It was also to prepare us mentally for what could happen to us if we got caught.
The plan was that we would go back to South Africa as soon as possible after completing the training course and then lie low for a few months to ensure that we were not being watched. During those first months we were to find ourselves jobs, settle down and become 'respectable' citizens. Most importantly, we were in no way to expose our real political views but create the impression, especially among family and friends, that our trip overseas had 'matured' us and that our former radical views had mellowed.
The training took place over a period of several months, but at a very leisurely pace. The lessons were conducted in various private homes - obviously ones considered 'safe' - and, if only theoretical matters were to be discussed, in pubs, parks, cars and restaurants. Over the period we were required to read a vast number of books, mostly about the detention and prison experiences of people who had been captured during the second world war or in South Africa and other fascist countries. Although reading these was somehow romantic at the time, they did serve to prepare us for what was later to be our fate.
Since our major activity, at least for the first period of our operations in South Africa, was to be the production and distribution of propaganda material for and in the name of the liberation movement, the training concentrated on preparing us for this sort of activity. We were instructed in the art of writing political propaganda and how to reproduce it using simple methods such as stencil duplicating machines. Instruction was given on the use of the postal system for mass distribution and a number of mechanical methods of distributing agitational literature were demonstrated.
One of these methods was the 'leaflet bomb'. These were hardly 'bombs' in the real sense of the word but simple timed explosive devices for throwing bundles of leaflets high into the air in order to spread them over a large area where a target crowd of people were gathered. They had been used with spectacular effect many times before in South Africa and had become one of the hallmarks of the liberation movement's internal propaganda activities. Peculiarly, there was little evidence that this method of propaganda distribution had been used in other situations throughout the world where there was severe suppression of revolutionary viewpoints.
The last part of our training involved setting up communication structures and working out financial arrangements. We swopped false names and safe addresses and adopted a set of code words for open communications. These included a set of signals that we could relay to each other if we suspected the enemy was on to us.
This done, our instructors gave us a pep talk about the value of the work we were about to undertake: we would be letting the people and the enemy know that the ANC was alive and working for liberation; we would be participating in the historic task of removing from the face of the earth one of the most abominable scourges to be visited upon humankind. Finally, they wished us luck and said, jokingly, that they would write to us in prison. They never kept their word!