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- Herausgeber: Jonathan Ball
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
'A tour de force of an extraordinary half-century of campaigning for justice' – Helen Clark, former New Zealand Prime Minister and United Nations Development Chief Peter Hain – famous for his commitment to the anti-apartheid struggle – has had a dramatic 50-year political career, both in Britain and in his childhood home of South Africa, in an extraordinary journey from Pretoria to the House of Lords. Hain vividly describes the arrest and harassment of his activist parents and their friends in the early 1960s, the hanging of a close family friend, and the Hains' enforced London exile in 1966. After organising militant campaigns in the UK against touring South African rugby and cricket sides, he was dubbed 'Public Enemy Number One' by the South African media. Narrowly escaping jail for disrupting all-white South African sports tours, he was maliciously framed for bank robbery and nearly assassinated by a letter bomb. In 2017–2018 he used British parliamentary privilege to expose looting and money laundering in then President Jacob Zuma's administration, informed by a 'Deep Throat' source. While acknowledging that the ANC government has lost its way, Hain exhorts South Africans to re-embrace Nelson Mandela's vision.
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A Pretoria Boy
The Story of South Africa’s ‘Public Enemy Number One’
Peter Hain
Jonathan Ball Publishers
Johannesburg • Cape Town • London
Priase for A Pretoria Boy
‘With first-hand experience of apartheid racism and colonialism, Peter Hain consistently worked for the liberation of his childhood country. When our people needed him, he stood strong, principled and fearless against all odds. He remains a resolute champion in helping with current challenges, and cares profoundly for our future.’
– Ambassador Lindiwe Mabuza
‘“Is there anything I can do to help?” A simple question that would once again place Peter Hain in the centre of efforts to correct wrongs in the land of his birth. This book is a timely reminder that even when many battles have been won, the war against injustice is never over. As ever, Hain remains on the right side of that fight.’
– Bongani Bingwa, 702 and Carte Blanche presenter
‘More like a thriller than a memoir of international solidarity.’
– Mavuso Msimang, ANC struggle stalwart
‘From fighting for Nelson Mandela’s freedom to exposing his betrayal under Jacob Zuma, a 50-year story of constant campaigning.’
– Sir Trevor McDonald, broadcaster
‘Talk about courage and chutzpah – this young ’un helped topple apartheid!’
– Ronnie Kasrils, former ANC underground chief and Cabinet minister
‘Much in this gripping story resonates with me over our common (African) childhood and exile in Britain.’
– Natasha Kaplinsky, broadcaster
‘A stalwart anti-racist and anti-apartheid campaigner.’
– Doreen (Baroness) Lawrence
In memory of
my inspirational South African-born parents, Adelaine and Walter Hain
Contents
Acknowledgements
In writing this South African story, I have drawn on my previous books, notably my memoir Outside In (2012), published by Biteback, covering my life, including as a British MP and Cabinet minister, up until 2011; Don’t Play With Apartheid: The Background to the Stop The Seventy Tour Campaign (1971); my parents’ story, Ad & Wal: Values, Duty and Sacrifice in Apartheid South Africa (2014); Mandela: His Essential Life (2018); and Pitch Battles: Sport, Racism and Resistance (2021), co-authored with my close friend André Odendaal.
Many thanks to Eugene Ashton and Jeremy Boraine of Jonathan Ball Publishers and Duncan Heath of Icon Books: Eugene, nephew of Terry Ashton, my favourite teacher at Pretoria Boys High School, for his enthusiasm; and Jeremy and Duncan, with editor Alfred LeMaitre, for their skilful editorial advice. Thanks to Martine Barker, Tracey Hawthorne and George Claasen for their help in putting the book together.
My gratitude also to David Preiss and Peter Rogan, classmates at Pretoria Boys High; to Nick Binedell, Rob Davies, Christabel Gurney, Ronnie Kasrils, Martin Kingston, Sam Tate, Helen Tovey and Phil Wyatt for their help, though only I am responsible for the content.
And thanks above all to Elizabeth Haywood for her love and support, and for reading, correcting and commenting on my first draft.
Peter Hain
Cadoxton, Neath
May 2021
Introduction
‘SO who do you want to win, Peter? The Springboks or England?’
The land of my childhood or the land of my adoption?
‘Wales,’ is my invariable reply. Wales is the land that ended up as my home for over three decades, longer than anywhere else in my life, and where, reflecting intense rugby rivalry, a local wag once quipped: ‘You may not be Welsh, Peter, but at least you’re not bloody English!’
That was in May 1990 when I was, against all predictions, overwhelmingly chosen by the local constituency Labour Party to become Member of Parliament (MP) for the rugby stronghold of Neath, outside Swansea. The Welsh Rugby Union was founded at the town’s Castle Hotel in 1881.
The journey from boyhood in Pretoria, South Africa’s seat of government, to MP for Neath and on to several of the highest roles in Britain’s government, was a long one, with many ups and downs, twists and turns, triumphs and disappointments, and much danger and joy.
A happy childhood became increasingly fraught as my anti-apartheid parents, members of the non-racial Liberal Party of South Africa – Mom the secretary and Dad the chair of the Pretoria branch – were finally forced, with their four children, into exile in 1966.
Arriving in London aged 16, I had no comprehension that a little over three years later I would find myself leading an anti-apartheid campaign using the unprecedented tactic of pitch invasion against the 1969–1970 touring Springbok rugby team. That campaign also forced the cancellation of the 1970 South African cricket tour, a seismic event that helped propel South Africa into global sporting isolation for more than 20 years, and turned me into a bête noire for white South Africans: ‘Public Enemy Number One’ they labelled me.
Nearly 50 years later, some even sent bittersweet emails when I used parliamentary privilege in the House of Lords to expose allegations of looting and money laundering by President Jacob Zuma and his business acolytes, the Gupta brothers: ‘Congratulations and thank you, though we still hate you for stopping the Springboks,’ said one; another, Marius Nieuwoudt, was typical: ‘I hated you with a passion.’
‘But,’ I replied politely, ‘the values behind fighting state corruption today are the same as fighting apartheid sports tours 50 years ago.’
FOR the majority of South Africans not aware of my anti-apartheid backstory, a British ‘Lord’ using parliamentary privilege to suddenly expose evidence of state capture and money laundering in 2017 might have seemed quixotic.
In September 2017 I attacked Bell Pottinger, the British-based global public-relations company, and followed this with further and much more detailed revelations in the House of Lords about corruption. The outraged supporters of Jacob Zuma and the Guptas, along with some in the populist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), acidly remarked that I was a ‘white’, almost caricature ‘colonial’ figure.
So why me? The answer is straightforward. I was asked by prominent members of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) to help them combat the rampant corruption and cronyism that was destroying the country. This corruption was seemingly orchestrated by their own president, whom they were seeking to oust. Their request originated from an informal discussion over dinner organised by a mutual friend, Nick Binedell, the highly respected founder-director of the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) at the University of Pretoria. This was in late July 2017 when I was in Johannesburg teaching as a visiting professor at Wits Business School.
One of those present at this private meeting was former finance minister Pravin Gordhan. He had bravely spoken out against the cancer that had spread from the Zuma presidency right down through all levels of the government. Others present, members of the ANC’s national executive, were then in the middle of a hand-to-hand battle to elect a new leader of the party. The candidacy of Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa was pitted against the powerful Zuma machine, which had dispensed patronage for more than a decade.
I had met Pravin Gordhan some years before in London, when he was on an official government visit, but the others present were new to me, and I to them. At the start of our meal, under Nick’s genial but firm chairing, our exchanges were tentative. They were feeling me out, each of us anxious about the ubiquity of the state intelligence network, which Zuma had commandeered in his own nefarious interests. Mobile phones were switched off and things gradually loosened up.
I had become increasingly aware of the scale of corruption during successive visits to South Africa, especially after I retired as an MP in 2015. But not being intimately involved in South African public life, I hadn’t quite realised how deep-seated and prodigious was the reported looting by Zuma’s family and the Gupta brothers – Ajay, Atul and Rajesh (Tony) – whose vast multi-billion-rand business empire spanned media, mining and computing, and had grown exponentially under Zuma’s patronage.
In his dry, clinical way, Pravin spelt it out. His favoured phrase was ‘join the dots’: in other words, connect all the diverse components of state capture in the Zuma regime. Every government department had been penetrated by Zuma-appointed ministers and civil servants. Virtually every state agency had been similarly ‘captured’. Perhaps the only exception was the Office of the Public Protector (a kind of ombudsman mandated by the Constitution), then under the direction of the formidably independent Advocate Thuli Madonsela. All of the Zuma/Gupta appointees were no doubt placed to do their masters’ bidding rather than because they had the ability or expertise to perform the task in hand. And of course to clamber aboard the gravy train.
‘Is there anything I can do to help?’ I asked, more out of solidarity than expectation.
‘Well, actually, there might be,’ Pravin mused, thinking aloud. Others chipped in, one or two of them highly placed inside the state system and present because of their integrity and deep sense of betrayal at what was happening to the ‘rainbow nation’ that had beamed so brightly under Nelson Mandela.
Inside the country, brave journalists with the upstart online newspaper Daily Maverick and investigative units such as Scorpio and amaBhungane were increasingly exposing the sheer extent of state capture. But a lot of the looted money had been laundered abroad, Pravin explained, estimating as much as R7 billion (or £350 million). Although the opposition to Zuma inside the ANC was growing, support for Cyril Ramaphosa building, and civil society groups (so important in securing the demise of apartheid) agitating again, the international dimension of state capture was something they hadn’t managed to get a grip on. Maybe I could assist with that, Pravin and the others suggested.
During half a century in politics – from stopping whites-only South African sports tours under apartheid to 12 years as a Labour government minister – I had always been forensically focused on trying to make a difference. I was also impatient with big rhetorical flourishes, instead preferring specific practical achievements. Could this be just such an instance?
OVER the years, I had enjoyed returning regularly to South Africa, mostly on holiday. These trips included being driven four hours from East London deep into the rural former Transkei to Hobeni, home of the Donald Woods Foundation (which I chair), not that far from Nelson Mandela’s birthplace at Mvezo.
In December 2015, my wife, Elizabeth, and I found ourselves back again. I had unexpectedly been given a national honour, the Grand Companion of OR Tambo in silver, for an ‘excellent contribution to the liberation struggle’. It was a privilege to be present at the Presidential Guesthouse in Pretoria for the national awards ceremony – charming, dignified and moving, without any pretentiousness or pageantry, and intended to symbolise ‘the new culture that informs a South African rebirth’. Presiding was the Chancellor of Orders, Dr Cassius Lubisi, a former anti-apartheid activist prominent in protests against the 1990 ‘rebel’ English cricket tour led by Mike Gatting. Old veterans of the resistance – some of whom had suffered solitary confinement or torture – walked with difficulty on sticks to receive their awards; several awards were accepted posthumously by surviving relatives.
Like other recipients of the OR Tambo award, I was given a beautiful walking stickcarved out of dark indigenous wood as ‘a symbol of appreciation for the support and solidarity shown’. Entwined around it is a copper majola(mole snake), said in African mythology to visit babies when they are born to prepare them for successful and safe adult lives – as a friend and protector. I was also given a beautiful scroll with my name inscribed, a neck badge and a lapel rosette. Bob Hughes, former chair of the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM), had been a recipient in 2004, and others in the international campaign had been similarly honoured.
As the highest honour the country can bestow, the OR Tambo awards were, as always, given by the sitting president. At the time this was Jacob Zuma, and neither of us imagined then that our paths would cross again. ‘I’m so pleased, so very pleased it’s you,’ he whispered to me on stage; at a personal level he could be quite charming. Returning to my seat, I raised my fist in an ‘Amandla’ salute to cheers from the audience.
And it was after that awards ceremony in Pretoria, during a brief break in Johannesburg, that Elizabeth and I were invited to dinner with the deputy vice-chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). I had expressed an interest in teaching, because I wanted to pass on some of the experience and expertise I had gained in a long political career, especially from being in government. That led to my appointment as a visiting professor at Wits Business School, promoted by its then academic director, Chris van der Hoven, and hence to Nick Binedell’s dinner meeting with Pravin Gordhan and others.
SO what exactly was it that I might do to help them? Pravin explained that plenty of the looted billions had left the country through global banks, and since the president, as an alleged direct beneficiary, had absolutely no interest in getting the money back, the only way to do so might be to put pressure on the international banking system from London.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I will try to do what I can. But I cannot fire any bullets unless I am given the ammunition.’ I explained that although I was still a parliamentarian, members of the House of Lords are allocated no secretarial or research staff, as MPs are. I didn’t have the resources or expertise to dig up the information needed.
I still had no idea what exactly was expected of me. But several of those present offered to follow up, and before I flew back home I met privately with someone highly placed, right inside the heart of the Zuma state, who was to become my ‘Deep Throat’ (an echo of the Watergate scandal, which brought down President Richard Nixon) – a key source of the insider information I needed for an effective exposé.
On the day of my departure, Deep Throat presented me with a wad of material concerning the role of global banks in facilitating the suspected Zuma/Gupta money laundering of billions of rands stolen from South African taxpayers.
All fine, I explained, but I was in no position to analyse this material myself. If I were to use my Lords platform, I needed to have meticulously prepared speeches that, especially if revelatory, had to be impeccably credible and served up to me as the near-finished article. Often, I had found over the years, experts tended to be so engrossed in their own material that they found it difficult to see the wood for the trees. If I had a skill, it was to cut through all the undergrowth and get to the nub of the issue.
Deep Throat seemed to grasp this, and, in the South African vernacular, we agreed to ‘make a plan’. A secure system of electronic communication would be established, and drafts of speeches or letters for me, demanding action from the UK, would be sent early enough for me to check, edit and query before time of delivery. I resolved not to tell anybody about Deep Throat, certainly not her or his identity. I still haven’t, and won’t – unless Deep Throat determines otherwise.
This was in early August 2017, and by then the clock was ticking. A titanic battle for the party presidency was emerging between Cyril Ramaphosa’s backers – including all those to whom I had been introduced – and Jacob Zuma’s anointed successor, his former wife Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. She was a formidable figure in her own right – a former minister of health, foreign affairs and home affairs, and the first woman to head the African Union Commission, the executive body of the African Union, the successor to the Organization of African Unity (OAU). I had met her when I was Britain’s minister for Africa in 1999–2001. And some who had known her during the anti-apartheid struggle as a brave, capable and fiercely independent woman wondered how on earth she had allowed herself to be manipulated into maintaining the evidently corrupt Zuma dynasty.
Zuma had built a political machine that had never lost an internal party fight. Despite the country’s systematic economic and administrative decline, he had such an iron grip on the ANC that it was difficult to envisage how he could possibly be defeated five months later at the party’s elective 54th National Conference, held in December 2017 at the Nasrec exhibition centre in Johannesburg.
Although the Ramaphosa supporters were growing in confidence, I flew back to London with no illusions that whatever I could do – and it was by no means clear then exactly what – would have any effect whatsoever on the outcome upon which South Africa’s future rested: a choice between a remorseless collapse into a mire of degeneracy or a fightback to reclaim the high ground upon which the Nelson Mandela presidency had once stood, and for which my parents and I had fought in the anti-apartheid struggle.
As a young teenager in Pretoria in the early 1960s, I’d learnt the critical importance of absolute discretion from my parents as they increasingly became targets of the apartheid state. Once, an escaped prisoner was smuggled into our house to stay overnight before my dad drove him secretly away, evading the eyes of the Special Branch men parked at the bottom of our drive. ‘Don’t ever tell anybody anything about this,’ my mom had exhorted me, explaining that she and Dad could be imprisoned otherwise.
People from all walks of life have trouble keeping a confidence, let alone a secret – something I discovered was a particular disease of the Westminster parliamentary bubble. My dad had a saying: ‘If you don’t know, you can’t tell.’
Boyhood
ENCOUNTERING Pretoria’s notorious Special Branch for the first time turned out to be as incongruous as it was threatening.
Very early one morning in 1960, when I was aged ten and my brother, Tom, not yet eight, we awoke to a discomforting rustling of strange figures in our bedroom in the modest house my parents rented at 1127 Arcadia Street, Pretoria. Who were they? What on earth were they doing?
Mom and Dad came in, gave us a hug, explained that they were security policemen and told us not to worry. In a vain search for ‘incriminating evidence’ the men had my scrapbooks, culled from Dad’s weekly car magazines – I was keen on cars and motor sport. Then my sisters Jo-anne, aged five, and Sally, aged three, called out from their bedroom next door that the cupboard drawer where their panties were kept was being searched – embarrassing the officers, who knocked over the cage containing my pet white mouse, which escaped, to be pounced on and killed by the cat.
A year later, in May 1961, I was woken up after midnight. As my eyes adjusted, there was the familiar face of Nan van Reenen, a kindly middle-aged lady, anxious in the gloom: ‘Peter, your parents have been jailed,’ she said gently, holding my hand.
Although Mom and Dad had warned us a while back this might happen, I immediately wondered, where were they? Would they ever come back? What would we do? Then: mustn’t panic, mustn’t let my parents down, stay calm, carry on.
Nan explained how, along with fellow Liberal Party activists Maritz van den Berg and her son Colyn, they had been preparing to flypost in support of a three-day ‘stay-at-home’ protest called by Nelson Mandela, who was operating underground and constantly hunted by the police. It was a protest against all racial laws but proved to be the last disciplined, mass, non-violent demonstration of that era. Massive police intimidation and raids led to the detention of some 10000 activists.
Mom and Dad had enthusiastically decided to distribute stay-at-home leaflets and put up posters in Lady Selborne township, just west of Pretoria city centre. But they had hardly arrived when a car drew up behind theirs. Two Special Branch officers, Viktor and Van Zyl (known to them), stepped out. Although stunned, Mom didn’t panic, quickly chewing up and spitting out the draft of the leaflet they’d wanted to discuss with local black comrades. She jumped from the car with the posters and ran off to a nearby shop that she knew had a back entrance. But the shop was locked up for the night: the police cornered her, and Viktor pounded up to grab her and my dad.
After Nan and I checked to see that the others were still sleeping, Nan lay down on our living-room sofa, and I tried to close my eyes, worrying and wondering. Before she left in the morning, Nan and I told the others what had happened – the girls wide-eyed, Tom very quiet, holding back tears. I felt I had to look after them somehow, not thinking of myself as the young boy I was, just that I needed to do what had to be done.
Gran (on my dad’s side) soon came over and moved in – though not Grandad, who (I later learnt) objected to his son’s ‘irresponsibility’. Our domestic worker and close friend, Eva Matjeke, quietly took charge and ensured that everything went as smoothly as possible. We walked to Hatfield Primary School, just around the corner, as usual, and one of my parents’ activist friends, Anita Cohen, brought over a large meringue cake to cheer us up.
By then our telephone was tapped, Special Branch cars were constantly parked outside our gate, and Special Branch officers periodically raided and searched the house. Yet somehow Mom and Dad managed to maintain a caring, close-knit family life amid all the trauma of their increasing resistance to apartheid. Life was a blend of the ordinary and the extraordinary, of excitement, stress and shock, and yet lots of family fun and togetherness too.
Dad took time to teach his boys about cricket, to come and watch us play in school teams, and to take us to club football matches and motor races. He made space to help with my homework and to discuss my emerging interest in what they were doing in politics. Amid all the persistent political pressure and crises she faced, Mom, incredibly, was also always there for us and looked after the family home. She was the fulcrum of both their political activism and our family life, somehow balancing both. Their activism never seemed to come ahead of their children: we all felt we had the best parents in the world.
Mom and Dad would soon be out of detention, we were reassured. But time dragged and it seemed a very long two weeks before they were released. ‘Gran and Eva are looking after us well but we are missing you a lot,’ the letter I wrote to Mom said in clear, careful writing. I still have it.
I must have blanked out my worries and emotions – doubtless a characteristic that was to stand me in good stead later on – because I don’t recall it as being a terrible episode. But six-year-old Jo-anne was, in retrospect, reaching for comfort in wanting to feel her mother near her. She modified a petticoat she had always loved Mom wearing. It had layers of stiff net that made her skirts stick out, rather like a crinoline. There was a thin nylon section, from waist to hip before the netting, and Jo-anne cut holes in this so that she could wear the petticoat with her arms through the holes. ‘You’ll get into big trouble when Mom and Dad get out,’ we all chided her – though she didn’t.
It turned out they had been the first people to be detained without charge under a new ‘12-day law’ – formally, the General Law Amendment Act 39 of 1961 – aimed at suppressing rising political dissent by allowing for detention without trial. Dad and his two male comrades, Colyn and Maritz, shared a cell in Pretoria Local prison, where conditions were not bad. But he had no contact with Mom until they both were released – his worry about her increasing when he received a letter in prison from his employer, sacking him. What did he expect, Grandad grunted.
Generally, our teachers and friends didn’t pick on us, except that a couple of years later Sally, newly at school, found her first teacher hostile, and once she was deliberately prevented from going to the toilet when she needed to, wetting her pants as a result.
Mom was held separately and alone in a large echoing hall in Pretoria Central prison, where white women detainees had been held during the 1960 state of emergency. She could hear the screams of black women prisoners being assaulted reverberating up the stairwell. Wincing in disgust, she witnessed them being deliberately humiliated by being forced to strip, the warders once leering at a pregnant woman. In the days that followed she became increasingly angry at the gratuitous nastiness of prison staff to black prisoners. She also found the wardresses creepy and intimidating, especially when they spied on her having a bath. Instead, she switched to washing in a hand basin – less comfortable, but more private.
Although Mom was reassured that our Gran would be caring for us with Eva, she worried constantly about us – never revealing her true predicament and fears until many years later. Her mood swung between guilt at how she had abandoned us and determination that she would not be cowed. She wondered briefly whether to give up: she had no doubt it had been the right thing to respond to Mandela’s stay-at-home call, but her detention sharpened the constant inner tension between her maternal responsibilities and activist duties.
Prior to the new statutory 12 days’ detention without charge, she and Dad were held for the maximum two days while the police searched for evidence with which to bring charges. But because Mom had secretly chewed up and spat out the one piece of incriminating evidence – a leaflet urging people to go on strike and stay at home – much as they tried, the Special Branch could not find anything on which to base a prosecution, so had to release them.
We weren’t really sure what was going on, so when walking home from school with Tom and Jo-anne, it was really emotional to unexpectedly spot my dad strolling along to meet us with Sally in her favourite perch on his shoulders. Four-year-old Sally had been frightened when she first saw him because he had grown an unfamiliar beard in prison. But Jo-anne, who was especially close to our father, looked up from chatting to a school friend, had a rush of happiness and ran across the road to be scooped up for a huge hug.
It was nice having Dad around the house on weekdays. He’d been fired by the Pretoria municipality, where he’d worked as an architect, because of his anti-apartheid work. But suddenly we were struggling financially, relief only coming via a donation by an anonymous Liberal Party member. Until Dad was offered a temporary post by another party member two months later, we had to survive by living on account. I remember the understanding of shopkeepers as I signed for essential items in the chemist or grocery store – not a comfortable experience and one that made me determined to be both financially prudent and independent in my life. And not to be beaten down by anyone, ever – certainly not by our enemies.
Our life settled back to its abnormal normality as my parents soon sprang into action again.
OUR experience was nothing like that of my white cousins or school friends: like 99 per cent of conventional English-speaking white South Africans, they lived almost in a different world.
Yet we had also come from their white world, and still had a substantial foot in it. My mother was born Adelaine Stocks in the seaside town of Port Alfred, in the Eastern Cape, the descendant of English and Irish 1820 Settlers. My father, Walter, born in Northdene, Durban, was the son of Scottish immigrants who had left Glasgow after the First World War. As a 19-year-old, he had been wounded in action in Italy in 1944 while serving with the Royal Natal Carbineers.1
I was actually born a British subject in 1950 in Nairobi, Kenya, where Dad got his first job after graduating from Wits University as an architect. But our stay there didn’t last long because in 1951 he was offered a new job back in South Africa.
Showing the kind of courage and daring for which they would become renowned in the anti-apartheid struggle, my parents decided not to make the return journey by Dakota aircraft as they had done coming up to Kenya. Instead, when I was aged about 15 months, they drove their 1936 Lancia Aprilia over 4000 kilometres through central Africa from Nairobi to Pretoria; they deliberately hadn’t informed their parents, expecting disapproval.The trip was eventful, with numerous punctures, engine, steering and suspension breakdowns, and other mishaps in the African bush. But throughout they had friendly help from inquisitive locals amazed at seeing white people out on their own in the heart of Africa, as well as from white settlers in Uganda, the Belgian Congo and Northern and Southern Rhodesia.
They were delighted that I learnt to walk during the trip, though they were occasionally envious as they watched me eagerly munch up my food after they had run out of money to feed themselves. Well into the four-week journey I was apparently reluctant to leave the car, which had become ‘home’. I slept on the back seat and Mom and Dad slumped on the front seats.
As I grew up, first in Pietermaritzburg and Ladysmith, and then mainly in Pretoria from 1954, our lifestyle, at least to begin with, was the conventional one of a white family of moderate means. My father worked; my mother ran the home. We were not well off, but we were able to live in a comfortable, rented detached house set in ample grounds. A black domestic worker lived separately in a room with a toilet and shower next to the garage – the usual servant’s accommodation on white properties during the 1950s and 1960s.
Until I was about eight, my parents’ social circle consisted largely of other middle-class white families. We would visit our white relatives and friends and they would visit us. It was a happy, carefree and secure childhood, with the weather and the space for outdoor activities. Pretoria in those days was an easy-going place, and later on my brother and I were able to roam without restriction with our friends on bicycles and also in soapbox carts we built ourselves.
Every December, the two rear bench seats of our blue Volkswagen minibus were turned into a bed for the 1100-kilometre overnight trip to my maternal grandparents’ home in Port Alfred, on the banks of the Kowie River. There we spent our Christmas holidays fishing off the jetty or enjoying long lazy days on the broad sandy beaches and swimming in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean.
LIKE everyone else in South Africa, apartheid affected every nook and cranny of our daily lives, from sex to sport.
By law I had to go to a whites-only school, travel on a whites-only bus, live in a whites-only area, sit on whites-only park benches and observe my parents voting in whites-only elections. In 1959, when I was nine, I helped them deliver leaflets for a white Liberal Party candidate in a whites-only parliamentary by-election in white suburban Pretoria East.
But, unlike all my school friends and cousins, my parents schooled us in respect for our black fellow citizens. My dad’s wartime experience in Italy had broadened his mind, and my mom had had an impishly questioning and rebellious outlook as a teenager. Their eyes had also been opened by the more relaxed race relations they had encountered in Kenya, and by the warm, friendly faces of the Africans they had met on that eventful drive back to Pretoria in 1951.
So, two years later, a South African friend from Kenya was on fertile ground when he recommended that they be invited to join the newly formed non-racial Liberal Party. They were both attracted by the party’s policy of one-person-one-vote, regardless of race. But there was no local Liberal branch in Ladysmith, where we were living at the time and where Tom had been born. So the only way they could join was to start their own branch. And the only place to have the inaugural meeting was in our family house, having borrowed chairs from friends (some of whom were not told that blacks might sit on them). The meeting was addressed by party president Alan Paton, author of the seminal novel Cry, the Beloved Country.
As he turned up for the meeting, Elliot Mngadi, later the party’s national treasurer, remarked, ‘This is the first time I’ve ever come through the front door of a white man’s house.’ (In those days, black servants or gardeners were only allowed through the back door.) So, from a young age, I became used to blacks being in our home – not only as servants but also as equals and friends.
Years later, well after we had moved to Pretoria, where Jo-anne was born, we would visit party colleagues in the black townships that ringed the towns and cities throughout the country. Because town centres and suburbs were strictly reserved for white residents, it would have been unheard of for any of my white school friends or relatives to do this, just as they would never have considered their black compatriots as friends rather than servants.
MY free-spirited parents, having always wanted to visit Britain, decided they had better do so before their three children were old enough to incur substantial travel costs.
Our car was sold to pay for the ocean-liner fare, my Dad arranged for a job in London and we embarked at sunny Cape Town docks in January 1956. Apart from being embarrassingly seasick – once all over a corridor floor while running for a basin – I found it all rather exciting. But I remember how cold and grey London felt in mid-winter. It seemed so strange, so different. No wide-open spaces, no barefoot sunshine. Instead, shoes and socks, thick clothes, coats, huddling in the house to get warm, thick hanging smog, heavy traffic, big city. And so many people: walking, talking, buzzing, thronging the pavements, everywhere and anywhere I looked.
We lived first in the West London suburb of Ealing, where I began school. Then, because the rent was much less, we moved to a tiny cowman’s cottage on a farm in Ruckinge overlooking Romney Marsh, in Kent. My sister Sally was born there that Christmas of 1956, and I recall playing happily on the farm and helping with the haymaking. During one spell of very hot summer weather, we all took our bedding and slept out on the front lawn. That seemed a real adventure – especially when the milkwoman surprised us in the early morning.
Soon after they arrived in Britain, my parents discovered the liberal newspapers The Guardian (then still called the Manchester Guardian)and The Observer, through which they gained a much better understanding of world affairs than was possible from the parochial and conservative South African media. Great events occurred in 1956: the Suez Crisis, when the British, French and Israelis attacked Egypt, and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. These and other developments made a big impact upon them, and they joined progressive British opinion in strongly opposing both.
But they also read of the tumult in their home country. In August 1956 more than 10000 women of all races gathered at the seat of government, the Union Buildings in Pretoria, in protest against the extension to women of the hated pass laws, which controlled the movement of blacks, who were required to carry an identity document (or ‘pass’) at all times. That December, 156 people – including Nelson Mandela and the entire leadership of the ANC – were arrested for high treason, the subsequent ‘Treason Trial’ lasting more than four years before they were acquitted. Meanwhile apartheid laws such as the Immorality Act (outlawing sexual intercourse between whites and members of any other racial group) were introduced, provoking increasing protests and boycotts.
Mom and Dad followed all these events avidly, and became concerned and restive. Late in 1957, when Dad’s old architectural firm in Pretoria telephoned and asked him to return, they decided to do so, and he flew out alone in early December. We had no car, so Mom was left to pack up and travel with four small children (aged between one and seven), first by bus and train up to London, and then down to Southampton to board an ocean liner. I remember helping her shepherd the younger children, though, in retrospect how she managed I have no idea.
A fortnight later there was a hum of excited anticipation as the ship pulled into Port Elizabeth docks in the hot summer sunshine. For a seven-year-old boy it seemed an enormous drop from the deck to the quay below, where my Dad, whom we had not seen for six long weeks, waited with both sets of grandparents. Holding on to the railings, three-year-old Jo-anne sang over and over again a little song, ‘Hello, My Daddy’. But I distinctly remember glimpsing the shivering sight of ugly hammerhead sharks circling the hull.
WITH wide streets lined with jacaranda trees, majestically purple in flower, Pretoria in the late 1950s and 1960s was a place of white suburbs with detached homes and large gardens nicely manicured by black gardeners.
The old capital of Afrikanerdom was a bastion of apartheid, with few progressive instincts, quite unlike cosmopolitan, big-city Johannesburg. Yet a branch of the Liberal Party had become active by the time we returned to Pretoria early in 1958, and my parents explained to me that they intended to rejoin.
Their introduction was dramatic. A peaceful women’s demonstration against the pass laws in Lady Selborne was broken up by baton-wielding police. Many women were injured, and feelings ran high, especially when their menfolk returned from work. The township was soon in an uproar, and the local Liberal Party chairman, John Brink, drove in to try to restrain the police.
But he failed to return. I remember feeling worried as my Dad drove out in our Volkswagen minibus to look for him. He came back soon, to our relief, but only because he had met John returning from the township, bloodied, in a windowless car that had been stoned by residents venting their fury at a white intruder, not knowing he was on their side. Brink only managed to escape when the local ANC leader, Peter Magano, recognised him and jumped onto the car bonnet to protect him.
I was just eight years old. I looked at his car, wide-eyed at the sight of blood and shattered glass. He could easily have been killed, I thought – and Dad too, trying to rescue him. What on earth was happening to us?
I recalled another recent frightening and shocking image. It was the bloodied face and clothes of a black teenager called Tatius, who had arrived at our house one day. Some white youths had taken exception to his walking along a nearby pavement playing his penny whistle – even though he had stepped into the road to make way for them – and had beaten him up ‘to teach him a lesson’. He arrived in tears, with billowing, bloody bruises on his face, his legs and arms raw. Tatius had been allowed to stay with his mother in our servant’s quarters, but only as a special favour. Under apartheid rules, black workers in white suburbs could not bring their families with them.
Mom and Dad explained that what had happened to Tatius was all too typical of the random, savage cruelty faced by blacks. Protests made by my dad at the local police station were greeted with barely hidden contempt, and he angrily wrote a letter to the Pretoria News. On publication, his name was duly noted by Special Branch as somebody new to keep an eye on.
Lady Selborne township was named after the wife of Lord Selborne, a former British high commissioner for southern Africa. It was unusual in being a mixed-race township with an old British colonial heritage. It was cheek by jowl on one side with a white suburb, without the normal restrictions on whites visiting. During the day, Mom would visit regularly, accompanied by Sally, who would usually be left at the local Tumelong English Mission in a black crèche (unthinkable for a white child) while Mom went about her political business. The English women who ran the mission, Hannah Stanton and Cecily Paget, were Liberal Party members. I occasionally went along too at weekends, sometimes with my siblings, as we were too young to be left alone at home.
The more we did so, the less novel it became to drive along the dusty or muddy tracks and peer at the houses, some ramshackle, others more solid, but all so starkly different from the comfortable white communities in which we, our relatives and our school mates lived. I remember staring in wonderment then – as I have ever since – at black women hanging out clothing to dry, pristine despite the primitive conditions for washing and the dust swirling around.
Soon, Mom and Dad were both on the Pretoria Liberals’ committee, and she became the branch secretary. Our rented houses, first in Hilda Street and then in Arcadia Street, were regularly filled with Liberal members and activists, both black and white.
But my parents were also at pains to ensure that we had in other respects a ‘normal’ childhood. Our friends came around to play, and we went to their houses. At 1127 Arcadia Street, Tom and I later organised bicycle races through our yard and out via the garage entrance onto the pavement, then back in through the front gate; these sometimes went on for several hours, with school friends teaming up in pairs and sharing the cycling as Mom and Dad acted as race controllers and my small sisters cheered us on. During a night bike race Jo-anne and Sally held torches to light up particularly dangerous spots. One time, Mom invited spectators from our school and charged an entrance fee to raise money for the school’s black caretaker when he retired (I had discovered that he had no pension). My best school friend was Dave Geffen, and his mother, Gladys, helped Mom provide refreshments for sale towards the collection.
I caught the motor-sport bug from Dad, and we were taken regularly to watch races at the Kyalami circuit, some 50 kilometres away on the road to Johannesburg. The nine-hour, all-night race was a special treat, and I watched my favourite, the British driver David Piper, win every time in his green Ferrari.
Tom and I also built box-carts, as did Dave, using pram wheels with rope steering to veer downhill, sometimes on winding streets from the Union Buildings, once on a very steep kopje (hill) near the Voortrekker Monument with competitors from across Pretoria. In our early teens, Dave and I organised bike rallies. We built streamlined wooden platforms over our handlebars. These contained pre-prepared sheets that enabled us, in those pre-calculator days, to work out times manually for reaching the endpoints of each rally stage from average speeds and mileages provided by the organisers (usually one of us taking it in turns). Mom and Dad acted as timekeeping marshals along the route.
Cricket was also a passion, and Tom and I went to see England (touring as the Marylebone Cricket Club, or MCC) playing North Eastern Transvaal at Pretoria’s Berea Park in December 1964. Near where we sat, the rising young stars Mike Brearley and Robin Hobbs walked around the edge of the field; six years later, Brearley was to figure courageously in the sport’s apartheid story.
My boyhood was focused on schoolwork, sport and playing with friends, though I did have a secret crush at Hatfield Primary School on Jennifer Gee – not that I ever told her. She was a popular girl in our year, with a cheerful demeanour and short, curly blonde hair. A special treat in 1963 was getting permission from my parents to see, in the main Pretoria cinema, the James Bond film From Russia With Love. The scenes of his Casanova-like behaviour seemed very daring, because sex was a pretty taboo subject in our culture at the time.
Not all was innocent, however. When I was about ten, Tom and I stole a tin of condensed milk from boxes in our house intended for a black township and hid it in our tree house for illicit sips. We occasionally went around at night throwing small stones on the mostly corrugated-iron roofs of nearby homes and then scampering away. We got old clothes, winding them up to look like snakes, then crouched behind our garden hedge and pulled them through the gloom across the pavement so that passing pedestrians jumped in fear as we screeched in delight.
But one of these pranks rebounded terribly, as I remember to this day with shame. Some friends and I would put a balloon in a plastic bag and leave it lying on the road for unwary cyclists to ride over. From our vantage point on the garage roof, we would enjoy how startled they were when the balloon burst. Then one day we placed a large stone inside an empty-looking bag, and I watched mortified as an old black man crashed against it, all his precious shopping – food and provisions – spewing out over the street. I rushed out of my hiding place to help him gather it up, seeing him weeping and feeling awful, not least because I knew he was poor. I never did anything like that again.
IN August 1958 Mom and Dad excitedly told us that they had met and talked to Nelson Mandela, his close comrade Walter Sisulu and other defendants in the Treason Trial, explaining who they were.
The trial was held in the Old Synagogue in Pretoria, and many of the accused would go outside during the lunch break for food provided in turn by the local Indian community, Liberals and other sympathisers. The charismatic Mandela, my parents told me, was ‘a large, imposing, smiling man’. Increasingly, their activities overlapped with those of the ANC, whose Pretoria leader, Peter Magano, had become a friend and key contact.
Also in 1958 the Liberal Party launched a weekly news and comment magazine, Contact, covering the anti-apartheid struggle. My parents subscribed and Mom later became its Pretoria correspondent. Telling us to ‘keep quiet and go and play’, she would clatter away on her small Olivetti typewriter, covering Nelson Mandela’s trial and other trials until she was eventually banned from doing so.
Mom was a self-trained journalist. Unlike my dad, she was not university-educated, having gone to work as an office clerk straight from school. By now she was in her early thirties, small, dark-haired and pretty in an unaffected way, and she cut quite a dash as she scurried about organising people and harrying the authorities, especially in courts and police stations, where blacks were treated the worst.
The Liberal Party’s appeal was based on membership open to all racial groups on an equal basis. Committed to a universal franchise, the party contained a range of political opinion, from socialists to free-market liberals, but both its unity and its radicalism sprang from an uncompromising support for human rights and a fierce anti-racism, the principles that above all inspired my parents and were increasingly imbibed by their children.
But most whites in Pretoria remained bitterly opposed to the very existence of the Liberal Party, seeing it as in some respects even worse than the ANC because it contained whites like them. Students at the University of Pretoria, then an Afrikaans-language white institution, were militantly pro-apartheid and would line up outside Liberal Party meetings, shouting slogans and abuse. I remember vividly their noisy, intimidating barracking outside a party colleague’s home as we sat inside, fearfully wondering if they might burst in at any moment, until they finally went away.
Among my parents’ close friends was David Rathswaffo, a particular family favourite who would call at our house and take the time to swap greetings and stories with me. He had some great one-liners where syntax and grammar got horribly jumbled, to hilarity all round: he would always say ‘Can I see you in camera?’ if he had some confidential information. He also never quite came to terms with telephone tapping. One day, needing to give my mother an urgent message about helping a black comrade who had escaped from the court, David lowered his voice and whispered, ‘Please come, Jimmy has escaped’ – as if the whisper might fool those listening in.
David was a clerk at the Supreme Court in Pretoria, where all the major political trials took place. That was until 1959, when the government decided that such ‘responsible tasks’ should be strictly reserved for whites. David was made redundant and then replaced by a white man – whom he had to train for the job.
It was incidents and events like these, part of the staple diet of our daily lives, that led to my becoming politically conscious without being politically involved. Dad used to spend time with me explaining some of the absurdities of apartheid, such as reserving better jobs for whites: that black decorators could paint the undercoat but not the final coat, that they could pass bricks to white builders but not lay bricks themselves.
By this time the new Nationalist prime minister, Hendrik Verwoerd, was well into his stride. A more intellectual leader than his predecessors, DF Malan and JG Strijdom, Verwoerd was seen as the ‘architect’ of the ideology of apartheid. He had earlier complained that the pre-apartheid system of schooling had misled blacks by showing them ‘the green pastures of white society in which they are not allowed to graze’. As minister of native affairs, he would introduce the baleful policy of Bantu education, intended to ensure that blacks received a substandard education. In 1959 the ironically named Extension of University Attendance Act was introduced to end the attendance of what had been a handful of blacks (such as Nelson Mandela) at white universities.
In 1959 a prominent Pretoria Liberal and local doctor, Colin Lang, contested the Pretoria East by-election to the Transvaal Provincial Council as the ruling National Party’s only opponent. He turned in a creditable performance, with 24 per cent of the vote, saving his deposit. Our home was the campaign headquarters – my parents’ first experience of electioneering and canvassing for a non-racial party among the overwhelmingly racist white electorate.
I remember, aged nine, helping to leaflet in the tree-lined white suburbs, and finding it fun. Party members travelled from Johannesburg to help. One of them, Ernie Wentzel, a young white lawyer who subsequently became a great family friend, addressed open-air public meetings from the back of a flatbed lorry, silencing the bitterly hostile audience’s shouts of ‘Would you like your sister to marry a black?’ with the response (in a heavy Afrikaans accent), ‘Christ man, you should see my sister!’ I thought this hilarious and used to enjoy my dad’s recounting it to friends.
The by-election raised the profile of the Pretoria branch and brought my parents and other key activists to the attention of the authorities. Mom and Dad were soon helping to produce a monthly newsletter called Libertas.It was typed by Mom and printed on a noisy old Gestetner duplicating machine that stood in a corner of our dining room, its black ink frequently dripping where it shouldn’t, and its wax stencils hung up for reuse if needed. I would be roped in to collate the sheets for stapling and help with pushing them through doors, as the leaflets were distributed by a team transported in our minibus – all rather exciting, I felt.
MOM buzzed about the city helping and advising people, and cajoling the stubborn authorities. She was a hive of energy and determination.
In March 1960 she illicitly signed scores of passes for men fearing arrest in Lady Selborne after the ANC called for an economic boycott in protest against the pass laws. She explained to me how these identity documents were designed to restrict and control the movement of blacks about the country, and if a black person was outside a designated rural area, their pass had to be in order and signed by a white employer.
Then came a peaceful pass-laws protest organised by an ANC breakaway, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), in Sharpeville township, south of Johannesburg, on 21 March 1960. Policemen sitting in armoured vehicles suddenly opened fire on the crowd, using over 700 rounds and killing 69 men, women and children and wounding over 180 others. Most were shot in the back while running away.
For days afterwards, the police laid siege to Sharpeville. Food was running short. Mom explained the horror of the massacre, and told us she had to go and help. I was worried – maybe the police would open fire on her too? So it was a relief when she returned, buoyed up, explaining that after filling up our minibus with provisions donated through the Liberals, she had stopped for petrol at a service station and asked for the tyre pressures to be checked because ‘we are heavily loaded with food for Sharpeville’. The vehicle was instantly surrounded by the black attendants, checking the tyres, cleaning the windscreen and then escorting it onto the highway with encouraging shouts and whistles.
Chief Albert Luthuli, the president of the ANC, publicly burnt his pass on 26 March 1960 and called on others to follow suit. A state of emergency was declared. Riots swept the country and the Sharpeville killings reverberated around the world. Luthuli was staying at the house of John Brink while giving evidence in the Treason Trial, and was arrested. Mom was asked to pay the fine and transport him back to the Brinks’ home, where I remember meeting him. With his silver-grey hair he seemed a grandfatherly figure, austere but friendly towards a boy who knew little of the details except that his treatment by the police was plain wrong. Although still only ten, I was by now very conscious that the police were our enemies.
In the aftermath of Sharpeville, there was talk of apartheid teetering. My parents were excited by the prospect, though Dad, always a hard-nosed realist, told me that it was a mistake to raise expectations. He was proved right.
On 8 April the ANC and the PAC were banned as unlawful organisations. It was a heavy blow, particularly for the ANC, which for nearly half a century had struggled non-violently against harsh and discriminatory laws. Mandela and his colleagues decided they had no alternative but to reorganise the ANC to enable it to function underground, and the PAC adopted the same course.
The government had imposed a state of emergency, granting itself even more draconian powers. Along with some 2000 anti-apartheid activists, many prominent Liberals were detained, including many whom I knew on first-name terms and who had visited our home. It seemed that a bright light was shining on everything we did as a family. Our phone was tapped, our mail intercepted and our house regularly observed by the security police. I got used to knowing that harmless phone calls to friends were no longer private. But, with Special Branch cars parked outside the house, for my brother Tom and me there was also a sense of ‘cops and robbers’, eerie yet exhilarating.
Harassment
In June 1960 Mom was advised that her name was on a list of people to be arrested, that she should leave Pretoria immediately and go to friends unconnected with the Liberal Party. We arrived back from school to be told by Dad that we were going on holiday right away. It was a nice surprise, until I (as the oldest) was told the real reason. In Mom’s absence (she had slipped away earlier), I had to ensure that clothes and toys were properly packed.
