Death of An Idealist E-Book

Beverley Naidoo

• Herausgeber: Jonathan Ball
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Death of An Idealist is the biography of Neil Aggett, the only white person to die while being held in custody by South Africa's apartheid security police. A medical doctor who worked most of the week as an unpaid trade union organiser, Aggett's stark non-materialism, shared by his partner Dr Elizabeth Floyd, aroused suspicions. When their names appeared on a list of 'Close Comrades' prepared for opposition leaders in exile they were among a swathe of union activists detained in 1981. After 70 days in detention Aggett was found hanging from the bars of the steel grille in his cell in John Vorster Square. He was the 51st person, and the first white person, to die in detention. He was 28. His death provoked an enormous public outcry, his funeral attended by thousands of workers who marched through the streets of Johannesburg. This quiet, intense young man was, in death, a 'people's hero'. Born to settler parents in Kenya in 1953, Neil Aggett moved with his family to South Africa in early childhood. He attended school in Grahamstown before studying medicine at the University of Cape Town. Death of An Idealist explores the metamorphosis of a high-achieving, sports-loving schoolboy into a dedicated activist and unpaid trade union organiser. Beverley Naidoo traces Neil Aggett's life, in particular the years leading up to his detention as a result of a Security Branch 'sting' operation, the weeks of interrogation, and the inquest that followed his death. She recreates the momentous events of his life and, in doing so, reveals the extraordinary impact Neil's life had on those around him including his family, friends and comrades. Today, a generation later, South Africa is free and democratic. Yet the idealism and sacrifice displayed by Neil Aggett and so many others appears to have been replaced by cynicism and hand-wringing. Death of An Idealist is as much the story of a remarkable young man as it is a reminder that every generation needs its idealists.

Leseprobe

Description

‘... the detainees in police cells or in prisons are being detained under the most favourable conditions possible ... All reasonable precautions are being taken to prevent any of them from injuring themslves or from being injured in some other way or from committing suicide.’

– Minister of Police Louis le Grange in the Houses of Parliament, 1982

Two days later, Dr Neil Hudson Aggett was found hanging from the bars of the steel grille in his cell in John Vorster Square. He had spent 70 days in detention. He was the 51st person, and the first white person, to die in detention. He was 28.

His death provoked an enormous public outcry, his funeral attended by thousands of workers who marched through the streets of Johannesburg. This quiet, intense young man was, in death, a ‘people’s hero’.

Born to settler parents in Kenya in 1953, Neil Aggett moved with his family to South Africa in early childhood. He attended school in Grahamstown before studying medicine at the University of Cape Town. DEATH OF AN IDEALIST explores the metamorphosis of a high-achieving, sport-loving schoolboy into a dedicated activist and unpaid trade union organiser.

Beverley Naidoo traces Neil Aggett’s life, in particular the years leading up to his detention as a result of a Security Branch ‘sting’ operation, the weeks of interrogation, and the inquest that followed his death. She recreates the momentous events of his life and, in doing so, reveals the extraordinary impact Neil’s life had on those around him including his family, friends and comrades.

Today, a generation later, South Africa is free and democratic. Yet the idealism and sacrifice displayed by Neil Aggett and so many others appears to have been replaced by cynicism and hand-wringing. DEATH OF AN IDEALIST is as much the story of a remarkable young man as it is a reminder that every generation needs its idealists.

Quotes

‘This is an extraordinary work of scholarly engagement on the life and death of one of South Africa’s greatest idealists. It is also a story of discovery by the author, as she reveals the complex layers of her shared family history with Neil Aggett. It is a vital contribution to a rediscovery of a generation that foresaw what a truly liberated South Africa could become – and, in the case of Neil Aggett, paid the ultimate sacrifice in trying to realize it.’

– Professor Edward Webster

‘This is the story of a young doctor’s death in custody. But it is more than that. In the sensitive hands of the acclaimed writer, Beverley Naidoo, it is the unmasking of a system where torture was allowed to operate with impunity, where national security was invoked to prevent public scrutiny, where the legal system colluded in injustice and where the Rule of Law was corrupted. There are powerful and universal lessons for all time in the telling of this story. Our collective memories require a regular jolt to remind us of the need for human rights protections the world over. We have to keep the call for justice forever on our lips.’

– Helena Kennedy QC

Title Page

Death of an Idealist

In Search of Neil Aggett

Beverley Naidoo

JONATHAN BALL PUBLISHERS

JOHANNESBURG & CAPE TOWN

Dedication

To all those who loved Neil, and to idealists, young and old, who strive for a just society

ABBREVIATIONS

Abbreviations

AFCWU

African Food and Canning Workers’ Union

ANC

African National Congress

CCAWUSA

Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers’ Union of South Africa

COSATU

Congress of South African Trade Unions

CUSA

Council of Unions of South Africa

DLB

Dead letter box

DPSC

Detainee Parents’ Support Committee

EDA

Environment and Development Agency

FCWU

Food and Canning Workers’ Union

FOSATU

Federation of South African Trade Unions

GAWU

General and Allied Workers’ Union

IAS

Industrial Aid Society

ILO

International Labour Organization

KAU

Kenya African Union

KPR

Kenya Police Reserve

LKB

Langeberg Kooperasie Beperk

MAWU

Metal and Allied Workers’ Union

MK

Umkhonto we Sizwe

NIS

National Intelligence Service

NUSAS

National Union of South African Students

SAAWU

South African Allied Workers’ Union

SACC

South African Council of Churches

SACP

South African Communist Party

SACTU

South African Congress of Trade Unions

SAP

South African Police

SASO

South African Students’ Organisation

SASPU

South African Students’ Press Union

SB

Special Branch or Security Branch (South African Police)

SRC

Students’ Representative Council

TRC

Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Note on terminology: South Africa’s history has left us with problematic racialised language – for example, ‘Coloured’. We are caught in an impossible trap when describing historical reality. But readers would be driven mad were I to put all the so-called population groups in quotation marks, so I have used none.

FOREWORD BY GEORGE BIZOS

Foreword

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

The Aggett inquest was a mirror held up to reflect the unimagined depths of depravity, brutality and destruction employed by the Security Police.

Helen Joseph, Founder member Congress of Democrats, Treason Trialist and the first person put under house arrest

The vast propaganda machine of the State creates a situation in which people do not know their own history. For instance, we have lived through the period in which Neil Aggett died. What steps have we taken to ensure that the lessons of today will be taught to our children?

Dullah Omar, first Minister of Justice in a democratic South Africa

BEVERLEY NAIDOO’S DEATH OF AN IDEALIST IS AN IMPORTANT contribution to the history of the struggle for freedom in South Africa. Dr Neil Aggett, who died in detention on 5 February 1982, was a socially conscious young man. His dedication to his medical and trade union work, his commitment to labour activism, his uncompromising principles and his tragic death make him a very worthy subject of the insightful tribute offered in this book.

Under the apartheid regime, those with close links to African trade unions were closely scrutinised. From the mid-1970s there was a surge of trade union activity by the African workforce. Students across the country, both black and white, became involved in what was known as the ‘Wages Commission’, a euphemism for trade union work used by labour activists to avoid the regime’s scrutiny. The National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) was at the forefront of a campaign for the recognition of trade unions and the release of political prisoners. Charles Nupen and Karel Tip, two NUSAS presidents, Glenn Moss, the president of the Wits Students’ Representative Council, Cedric de Beer, a student leader, and Eddie Webster, a Sociology lecturer at the same university, were acquitted of charges that they were furthering the objects of the ANC and the Communist Party. The trial, in which Arthur Chaskalson, Denis Kuny, Raymond Tucker, Geoff Budlender and I acted as counsel, lasted ten months.

From the perspective of the regime, certain English-speaking universities were more than a mere irritant; they were a veritable anathema. Neil Aggett was a student at the University of Cape Town, where he completed a medical degree in 1976. Aggett worked as a physician in black hospitals in Umtata and Tembisa, and later at Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto. He was appointed organiser of the Transvaal branch of the Food and Canning Workers’ Union. He lived with Dr Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Floyd, his companion (who shunned the term ‘girlfriend’), in the depressed area of Jeppe in Johannesburg. Both Neil and Liz had black friends in the trade union movement. In the eyes of the security police, what better proof did one need that they were communists, terrorists and traitors? The fact that Neil Aggett avoided reporting for the regime’s military service put the matter beyond any doubt.

The catalyst for Neil Aggett’s arrest followed the arrest of ANC activist Barbara Hogan, whose list of ‘Close Comrades’ (those sympathetic to the struggle) was intercepted by the security police (through no fault of Barbara’s). Over 60 students, young graduates and others involved in trade unions were detained. Many of the detainees were white. The detentions were triumphantly announced by the regime. The parents of the detainees reacted quickly, and, under the leadership of Dr Max Coleman and his wife Audrey, an organisation called the Detainees’ Parents Support Committee (DPSC) was formed. They demanded access to their children and started a release campaign. No charges were brought against most of the people detained.

Neil Aggett was on that list, as was Liz. They were both detained (but not charged with any offence) on 27 November 1981. During that time, detention without trial was an integral part of the regime’s strategy. The Rabie Commission had been established to placate critics of the detention system. Chief Justice Rabie was charged with reporting on the internal security of South Africa. The biased report was published on 3 February 1982. That same day, the Minister of Police Louis le Grange, when questioned in Parliament on the treatment of detainees, said,

… the detainees in police cells or in prisons are being detained under the most favourable conditions possible … All reasonable precautions are being taken to prevent any of them from injuring themselves or from being injured in some other way or from committing suicide.

Just two days later, Neil Aggett was found hanging from the bars of the steel grille in his cell in John Vorster Square. He had spent 70 days in detention. He was the 51st person, and the first white person, to die in detention. He was 28.

The death of the first white detainee was more than an embarrassment to the regime. There was an outcry among the local and international press led by the Rand Daily Mail in South Africa and The New York Times. Two outstanding reporters, Helen Zille, current leader of South Africa’s opposition Democratic Alliance political party, and Joseph Lelyveld, a future Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, who became executive director of The New York Times, regularly reported on the inadequacy of control over the security police who tortured detainees. The regime described the media’s conduct as a ‘frenzy’ that was becoming too much to bear.

Neil Aggett’s father retained William Lane, an attorney, who in turn asked me to handle the inquest into Neil’s death. Also involved were attorneys David Dison and James Sutherland, as well as advocates Denis Kuny and Mohamed Navsa. We worked very hard to produce nearly 20 statements from former detainees. Our experience told us that if we accepted the police’s version that it had been a suicide, we could open up a wider inquiry into the general treatment of Neil Aggett than if we argued it was a murder. Our hope was that we could convince the magistrate that the security police could still be held responsible for driving Neil to suicide.

It is never easy for a relative to believe that their deceased loved one committed suicide. Neil Aggett’s family members were no exception. But after discussions with a medical doctor, the probabilities tended to show that suicide was a distinct possibility. There was another reason that led me to this view. On the floor of Neil Aggett’s cell was Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek,open at page 246, dealing with the suicide of the young man whose passionate love for the widow had been rejected:

Every minute death was dying and being reborn, just like life. For thousands of years young girls and boys have danced beneath the tender foliage of the trees in spring – beneath the poplars, firs, oaks, planes and slender palms – and they will go on dancing for thousands more years, their faces consumed with desire. Faces change, crumble, return to earth; but others rise to take their place. There is only one dancer, but he has a thousand masks. He is always twenty. He is immortal.

Neil Aggett’s loving father, mother and sister bravely agreed to put forward the case based on suicide, but understandably not without great reluctance.

The inquest lasted 42 days, extended over six months. The magistrate did not make it easy for us. He stopped our cross-examination on relevant matters and ruled half of the detainees’ statements inadmissable. Despite these obstacles, the graphic accounts of the systematic torture of detainees at the hands of the security police were more than embarrassing to the regime. Our argument concluded with an appeal to the court that the rule of law be observed. We argued that ‘this court’s finding will clearly show that we are all subject to the law of the land and its processes which protect the dignity of human life’.It was our hope that the police were not above the law, but we were sorely and sadly disappointed. The magistrate’s judgment of 187 pages took nearly two days to read. The security police were exonerated and the blame was cast on one of Neil Aggett’s fellow detainees, Auret van Heerden. The magistrate found that Van Heerden was not blameless in Neil Aggett’s suicide, remarking that he should have informed the police immediately when he was worried that Neil Aggett had been ‘broken’. The magistrate limited the detainee’s obligation to a ‘moral’ duty and not a legal duty.

The evidence brought to light during the inquest demonstrated the flagrant disregard for human dignity that existed in South Africa. The magistrate’s decision demonstrated the state’s wily ability to maintain a harsh and unjust system. The finding that Neil Aggett was not hanged by his captors may have been correct. But the decision that Neil Aggett was not tortured by the security police and driven to suicide was wrong. Liz Floyd asked the question that the police and the magistrate did not answer: ‘If the Security Police treated [Neil] the way the magistrate accepted they did, why did he die and why have over 50 other people died in detention?’

Where was the blame for Neil Aggett’s death to lie? The Aggett inquest had cleared the security police, but at the same time had implicitly exposed the Rabie Commission’s bogus findings, and the security police’s callous claim that they were concerned with the welfare of detainees. ‘Who would watch the watchers?’asked a report by Lawyers for Human Rights.

South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) revealed deeply troubling circumstances surrounding not only Neil Aggett’s death but also the inquest, including state-organised mock hearings in advance of the actual hearings, evidence cover-ups and conscious decisions not to change the detention system following his death. The final report of the TRC stated that ‘troubling inquests’, such as the one into Aggett’s death, led to the regime using alternative methods of eliminating its opponents.

* * *

About 15 000 people attended Neil Aggett’s funeral on 13 February 1982. They packed St Mary’s Cathedral in Johannesburg and lined the route to West Park Cemetery. Archbishop Desmond Tutu saw the funeral as a sign of hope for South Africa, ‘an incredible demonstration of affection and regard for a young white man by thousands of blacks’.

Noted anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, who was no stranger to the state’s detention tactics, said in an interview before his 12 September 1977 death in police custody,

You are either alive and proud or you are dead, and when you are dead, you can’t care anyway. And your method of death can itself be a politicizing thing … So if you can overcome the personal fear of death, which is a highly irrational thing, you know, then you’re on your way. And in interrogation the same sort of thing applies.

Is it possible that a hopeful and altruistic Neil Aggett had read Biko’s words, as well as those of Kazantzakis, before deciding to sacrifice his own life? There is no question that the death of heroes like Steve Biko and Neil Aggett, among hundreds of others, contributed to the struggle. They did not die in vain.

Thirty years later, we still find ourselves asking: what really happened to Neil Aggett? During the Nuremberg Trials, following the defeat of Nazi Germany, Romanian-born American prosecutor Benjamin B Ferencz said: ‘There can be no peace without justice, no justice without law and no meaningful law without a court to decide what is just and lawful under any given circumstances.’The magistrate at Neil Aggett’s inquest had clearly never read Ferencz’s wise words.

This book is an inspired tribute to one of South Africa’s great freedom fighters, and captures the essence of a man whose name figures among the list of heroic detainees who died in the struggle. Beverley Naidoo has meticulously, accurately and painstakingly unearthed and recorded who Neil Aggett was – from his childhood to the brave decisions he made during his student days to his detention and, finally, his untimely death. She examines his principles, beliefs and values and how justice – one of the greatest values – was cheated when it was found that there was no one to blame for his tragic death. The information is carefully laid out for readers to decide for themselves what really happened.

This book is an important contribution to the literature on the struggle for freedom. We can never forget the injustice that emerged in the name of security, the injustice that persisted in South Africa for far too many years, the injustice that claimed the lives of so many brave and innocent men and women during the darkest time of South Africa’s history. I strongly encourage all those interested in the struggle and the relevance for South Africa today to read this book. Justice may have been cheated, but if we remember the tragic story of Neil Aggett, his memory and our history will not be.

George Bizos

SENIOR COUNSEL, JOHANNESBURG BAR

April 2012

In Detention

He fell from the ninth floor

He hanged himself

He slipped on a piece of soap while washing

He hanged himself

He slipped on a piece of soap while washing

He fell from the ninth floor

He hanged himself while washing

He slipped from the ninth floor

He hung from the ninth floor

He slipped on the ninth floor while washing

He fell from a piece of soap while slipping

He hung from the ninth floor

He washed from the ninth floor while slipping

He hung from a piece of soap while washing

CHRIS VAN WYK, It is Time to Go Home, 1979

Contents

Contents

Prologue

PART ONE: Beginnings and Transformation

CHAPTER 1: From Cape to Kenya

CHAPTER 2: Settlers and resistance

CHAPTER 3: From Kenya to the Cape: ‘We’ll march on’

CHAPTER 4: Kingswood College: ‘avoiding evil of every kind’

CHAPTER 5: University: ‘the long-haired coterie’

CHAPTER 6: Searching

CHAPTER 7: ‘We should throw stones’

PART TWO: Comrades

CHAPTER 8: Jozi: Comrades

CHAPTER 9: A new brotherhood

CHAPTER 10: Breaking the rules, making the rules

CHAPTER 11: Arguments, debates and stepping stones

CHAPTER 12: Into the union

CHAPTER 13: Learning the ropes

CHAPTER 14: Personal relationships

CHAPTER 15: ‘Point by point by point’

CHAPTER 16: Eating the workers’ money

CHAPTER 17: Gavin and an ANC link?

PART THREE: The Rising Tide

CHAPTER 18: The rising tide

CHAPTER 19: Publicly and privately

CHAPTER 20: The Anti-Republic Day Campaign, and two heady weeks

CHAPTER 21: Daily reality, ‘discipline’ and a relationship cracks

CHAPTER 22: Unions on the move

CHAPTER 23: Conscription?

CHAPTER 24: Close Comrades

CHAPTER 25: John Vorster Square

CHAPTER 26: Gavin’s getaway

CHAPTER 27: ‘Stay well bro & keep strong’

CHAPTER 28: ‘We can use other methods’

PART FOUR: Seventy Days

CHAPTER 29: Arrest

CHAPTER 30: Pretoria Central Prison

CHAPTER 31: John Vorster Square: ‘Try not to threaten them’

CHAPTER 32: Christmas visits: ‘Don’t worry’

CHAPTER 33: Whitehead takes charge

CHAPTER 34: The first statement

CHAPTER 35: Limbo

CHAPTER 36: Behind the frosted glass

CHAPTER 37: The long weekend

CHAPTER 38: ‘Broken’

CHAPTER 39: Two scenarios

CHAPTER 40: ‘What is done in the dark …’

PART FIVE: Lies, Truth and Recognition

CHAPTER 41: ‘Purging of grief through activity’

CHAPTER 42: Public protests

CHAPTER 43: Funeral preparations

CHAPTER 44: ‘A man of the people’

CHAPTER 45: ‘We have been deeply touched’

CHAPTER 46: In pursuit of a wider justice: ‘Do it!’

CHAPTER 47: ‘Snooping around people’s houses’

CHAPTER 48: Whose voices shall be heard?

CHAPTER 49: ‘Mr Bizos is changing the scope of this inquest …’

CHAPTER 50: The Controller

CHAPTER 51: A shameful collaboration

CHAPTER 52: Summing up

CHAPTER 53: ‘No one to blame’

CHAPTER 54: The unanswered question

CHAPTER 55: Truth and Reconciliation?

CHAPTER 56: Truth and recognition

Epilogue

Photo Section

SOURCES

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

LIST OF INTERVIEWS

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Prologue

Prologue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1The Guardian, 6.2.82.

2The New York Times, 6.2.82.

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

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

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

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

PART ONE: Beginnings and Transformation

PART ONE

Beginnings and Transformation

CHAPTER 1: From Cape to Kenya

CHAPTER 1

From Cape to Kenya

NEIL HUDSON AGGETT

Born on 6th October at Nanyuki, Kenya.

Youngest son of J.A.E. AGGETT residing at:

P.O. Box 136,

Somerset West.

I

My father was a farmer in Nanyuki, and I had one elder brother, Michael and one older sister, Jill. I went to school when I was six at the Nanyuki primary school, where I was a weekly boarder. After that I went to the Nyeri primary school, where I was a boarder until the age of ten. In January 1964, my family and I left Kenya by ship and arrived in Durban. My father sold his farm and invested his money in South Africa …

Neil Aggett, 1st statement, John Vorster Square1

THE DUSTY TOWN OF NANYUKI SITS A FEW KILOMETRES NORTH OF the equator in the Laikipia Valley at the foot of Mount Kenya – Kirinyaga to Kikuyus, whose ancestral stories spoke of Ngai the Creator, who made the first man and woman, high up in its peaks, responsible for all the land as far as they could see. When Joy gave birth to Neil on 6 October 1953at the Nanyuki Cottage Hospital, soldiers stood guard at the entrance. African ‘askaris’ from the King’s African Rifles provided protection against night attack from Mau Mau guerrillas slipping down from the mountain forests. The ‘red hats’, as they were known locally – on account of their tall, black-tasselled red fezzes, worn above khaki jackets and shorts – were themselves prime targets as ‘loyalists’, collaborators with the European occupiers.

Knowing that the hospital was under armed guard, Joy may well have given her personal pistol to Aubrey to keep safe during labour. Carrying her pistol in a holster on her belt or in her handbag, even around the house, was a matter of course in 1953, while Aubrey always carried a large revolver. At night they slept with the guns under their pillows. Laid up in the same hospital with a bad attack of measles some months previously, Aubrey had been called upon to help fend off an attack while still in his pyjamas. The potential horror in the family tale was mitigated with a touch of humour. Yet less than nine months before Neil was born, the murder of the Ruck family on 24 January had struck a particular terror, captured in photographs of the slaughtered couple and their six-year-old son, hacked to death in his bedroom, surrounded by his toys. It was the ultimate colonial nightmare.

The Rucks were among 32 white settlers whose murders, in all their grisly details, gripped the European imagination during the Emergency years and long afterwards. However, Neil was born into a society where the majority of brutal deaths remained largely nameless in the English-speaking world, whether of the many thousands of Mau Mau fighters and civilian suspects, or the many hundreds of African loyalists.

* * *

Neil’s grandfather, Ted Aggett, born in the eastern Cape to a farming family from Devon, in southwestern England, dreamed of going thousands of miles up north. An uncle who had been on a shooting trip to British East Africa in 1906had returned with a deal. The British Governor had sold him 25 farms, at £25 each, in the fertile central highlands below Mount Kenya. The condition was that Ted’s uncle put European settlers on the land. With each farm covering thousands of acres, he had no difficulty selling them on to family members, including Ted, who was managing a hotel in Seymour, up in the thickly wooded Amatola Mountains. In 1911, Ted’s parents and three generations of Aggetts and Smiths from Ted’s mother’s side, a weave of cousins and in-laws, set sail with their trunks for Mombasa aboard the SS Adolf Woermann. Twenty-eight-year-old Ted had recently married, indeed eloped with, 21-year-old Claire Ogilvie Hudson. With a strict magistrate stepfather, who had sent her to study at the Royal College of Music in London, she had been expected to do better than Ted, a small-town hotelier. Claire, known as Bonnie to her new Aggett family, was also pregnant.

The ship anchored in the middle of the deepwater harbour at Kilindini, to the south of Mombasa Island. The family were rowed to where they could scramble over rocks to the shore and make their way to British officials in the customs shed. From Mombasa to Nairobi, they travelled on the ten-year-old railway.2 In Nairobi, settlers who were heading for Naivasha and Nakuru could continue up-country by train. But those travelling northeast to the foothills and plains beneath Mount Kenya bought ox-wagons and mule-drawn buckboard carts, hiring Swahili-speaking cooks and other ‘boys’ to accompany them.

South Africans, both English and Afrikaner, were a minority in the European population in a colony that attracted many English gentry, especially military men of officer class. However the Aggetts and Smiths were to become the largest European settler ‘extended family’ in Kenya. Aubrey was born in Nairobi on 21July 1912, and his brother Hudson the following year. Soon afterwards, with war looming between Britain and Germany, and East Africa likely to become a battleground, Ted took his family back south to the eastern Cape, where they remained until Aubrey was ten.

* * *

In 1922, Ted Aggett’s family returned to Kenya, leaving South Africa at the time of the white miners’ rebellion on the Witwatersrand. The mine owners planned to reduce wages and bring in cheap black labour. Hundreds were injured when the rebels were quelled with military force. There were deaths, including three white miners sent to the gallows.

As it happened, 1922also saw Kenya’s first wage-related political unrest. At its centre was Harry Thuku, a 27-year-old Kikuyu man who was a clerk in the government Treasury. During the war, many thousands of Africans had served in the British Army as cooks, labourers and stretcher-bearers. Far from being rewarded for their service, they returned home to find that ‘land leases’ for white settlers had been increased from 99 years to 999years. A forceful orator, Thuku used his weekends to tour rural areas speaking out against exploitation of labour, laws that prevented Africans from buying land, the hut tax and the kipande (pass), by which the authorities controlled the movement of Africans.

In the eyes of Europeans and the more conservative Kikuyu chiefs, Thuku was an ‘agitator’, and on 14 March 1922the Governor had him arrested. Thuku’s supporters gathered at the police station in central Nairobi; over the next couple of days, some 7 000to 8 000people, including Kikuyu women, faced a line of African colonial policemen armed with rifles and bayonets.3 Stories differ over what led to the first shots, but a massacre followed. The first Kikuyu political song, commemorating the bravery of the women who had protested with their menfolk, dates back to these first stirrings of the trade union struggle in Kenya.

Thuku, who was detained without trial in the remote semi-arid north for the next eight years, was dangerous not just because he agitated for higher wages. His articulacy threatened the core imperial belief about innate European superiority, and that it would be hundreds of years before Africans, ‘the natives’, would ever be ‘civilised’. Fifty years later, it would be an argument repeated between Neil and his father.

* * *

The little family history that exists about the years between two world wars takes the form of pioneer stories. Ted took his wife Bonnie and their two sons to the land he had acquired a few miles outside of Nanyuki. In 1971, a teenage Neil pasted an article into his journal entitled ‘Pioneers of East Africa’. The writer, Elsa Pickering, tells a story of Ted Aggett and his family being stuck in the open during heavy rains for four days in lion country when their mule-drawn buckboard cart was stranded on a bridge over the flooded Ewaso Ng’iro River. A washed-down tree had got stuck in the axle, causing the mules to panic and bolt. With only a little pork to eat, they made a fire under an umbrella. The two boys, Aubrey and Hudson, slept in the buckboard, blankets draped over them as a wet tent. Reaching home eventually, they found rain pouring through the roof of their two-roomed thatched house.

Between the wars, Ted was largely absorbed in managing the Gilgil Hotel in the Rift Valley, his clients including aristocratic members of the hedonistic Happy Valley set. When he gave that up to develop his thousands of acres of bush into profitable land, the former hotelier remained a sociable man, one who enjoyed company at the club, as well as riding and boxing. For Bonnie, life revolved more closely around her two sons and the home they called ‘Glen Ogilvie’. Although the terrain bears no resemblance to a Scottish glen, the name asserted both lineage and heritage.

As a young man, Aubrey began working as a farm manager for relatives, the Bastard family, on the Sweet Waters estate along the Ewaso Ng’iro River, while Hudson was sent back to South Africa to study at Glen Agricultural College, in the Orange Free State. By the time war was declared in 1939, Hudson had returned, finding work at Kenya Creameries. The brothers were close enough to have bought a farm together at Sotik, about a hundred miles southwest of their father’s farm. However, plans to develop it were put on hold as both enlisted in the Kenya Regiment, Aubrey number 222and Hudson number 404. While Hudson rose to be in charge of a battery of African artillery, Aubrey began as an intelligence officer in Abyssinia during the East African campaign, fighting alongside Emperor Haile Selassie’s Ethiopian patriots against Mussolini’s occupation. With the defeat of the Italians in 1941, Aubrey, now a captain, was transferred to the livestock control division, where he was responsible for buying cattle needed to feed Allied forces in North Africa, as well as their thousands of German and Italian prisoners. At the beginning of the war, both brothers were still single.

* * *

How Aubrey first met Joy reflects the colonial interweaving of Kenya and South Africa. Aubrey’s employer at the time was Aunt Ethel, his father’s youngest sister, who had married into the Bastard family. Shortly before the war, Aunt Ethel invited a young woman related by marriage to come up from South Africa for a holiday at Sweet Waters. Who can say whether the invitation was entirely innocent? But before the young lady’s visit was over, she and Aubrey, the young farm manager, were engaged and he was given leave to accompany her to South Africa to arrange their marriage.

It was during the voyage south that Aubrey met Joy Norman, who was enjoying a holiday cruise with her father. A qualified librarian who worked at Johannesburg Central Library, at 22 the glamorous Joy was five years younger than Aubrey. He invited her to the wedding. Joy was unable to attend but sent a gift. A few weeks later the package was returned to her, unopened. A note from Aubrey said that his fiancée had called the marriage off and he had returned to Kenya alone. Joy wrote back, beginning a correspondence that would continue through the war.

In January 1944, with three weeks’ leave, Aubrey flew to Johannesburg to propose. Joy was a town girl who had never been to the Kenya Highlands, although, as an avid reader, she may have been familiar with Karen Blixen’s exotic, romantic and aristocratic memoir, Out of Africa, published in 1937. Joy accepted Aubrey’s proposal.

A photo taken after the wedding ceremony in Kensington, Johannesburg, on 5 February 1944shows her smiling radiantly, with hand held tight by a uniformed Aubrey. In his Winston Churchill spectacles, he looks like the cat that got the cream. They are standing on the steps of a plain brick building in front of a closed wooden door. Joy wears a stylish, knee-length white dress with matching shoes and an elegant wide-brimmed white hat. Her younger sister Madge, in a slightly darker, equally elegant outfit, stands on her other side, with what may be a touch of a question in her eyes. They are soon to be separated by thousands of miles. In the photo, my father stands smiling next to Aubrey as ‘best man’, in a wide-lapelled, double-breasted, pinstriped suit. Only six years older than Joy, he was her debonair, musical uncle who had often chaperoned her to dances. Aubrey in his uniform could have personified ‘There’s a Boy Up North’, a song my father had written for Vera Lynn, nicknamed ‘the Forces’ Sweetheart’, better known for her ‘There’ll Always Be an England’. There is something very English about the wedding group on the steps, and the only clue that this wartime snapshot was not taken in England lies in the resplendent bouquets carried by the sisters, overflowing with the deep-coloured cannas of a South African summer.

Any pleasure that Aubrey’s mother, Bonnie, might have taken in her son’s marriage was short-lived. Within a week of the marriage, news arrived that Aubrey’s younger brother Hudson was dead. He and his unit had been on their way to Burma when their ship (the SS Khedive Ismail) was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine off the Maldives. Almost everyone had drowned. Aubrey returned to his post up north. Arriving in Kenya, a few months later, Joy found her mother-in-law reserved and cold. She put this down to the loss of her son. However, for the young librarian brought up in the tree-lined end of Kensington, Johannesburg, who had left behind her family, friends and urban comforts, life in Kenya must have been a challenge. She had married a man whom she had got to know through correspondence but with whom she had actually spent very little time.

1 Neil Aggett, First Statement, 6-8.1.82, section 1, Record of Inquest Enquiry on Dr Aggett, University of Witwatersrand Libraries Historical Papers, AK2216, B1, Docket 1.73.

2 Two and a half thousand indentured Indian labourers died while working on the railway to Kisumu, four for each mile of track laid, some of them eaten by lions according to Dr Sultan H Somjee, curator of ‘The Asian African Heritage: Identity and History’, National Museums of Kenya/Asian African Heritage Trust, Nairobi, 2000.

3 David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005, p16.

CHAPTER 2: Settlers and resistance

CHAPTER 2

Settlers and resistance

IN THE FIRST YEAR OF THEIR MARRIAGE, THE AGGETTS LIVED IN THE small Rift Valley town of Nakuru, where Aubrey worked in government livestock control. Early European settlers in the Rift Valley had sent labour recruiters east, into the Kikuyu areas of the central highlands, to encourage Kikuyu families to become tenant labourers on European farms. In return for a prescribed number of days of labour, helping the Europeans clear and work the land, ‘squatter’ families were allowed to live on the farms, graze their cattle and cultivate a small shamba (field) for themselves. While the white farmers simply regarded them as hired hands, the Kikuyu believed they were acquiring customary rights of ownership and use of land, called githaka. Most were unaware that a 1925ruling in Kenya’s High Court declared that they were only ‘tenants at will’ who could be evicted by the European landlords without even the right of appeal.

As settler farmers began to develop high-grade dairy and beef farming, they increasingly regarded Kikuyu-owned cattle as a disease threat. They also objected to these cattle grazing on land that they now wanted for their own expanding herds. When annual tenant contracts came up for renewal, European farmers reduced the amount of land that each Kikuyu family could cultivate. By 1952, the year before Neil was born, some 100 000Africans had been forcibly ‘repatriated’ from the Rift Valley. The choice for Kikuyu families was stark: either go to an overcrowded ‘native reserve’ in the central highlands or join the growing number of poverty-stricken squatters in the shanties on the outskirts of Nairobi.

After a year of livestock control work in Nakuru, Aubrey took Joy to start their family on the farm that he had bought with his brother before the war. Sotik was far to the west, across the Aberdares, the Mau Escarpment and beyond the Mara Forest. Here, Aubrey supervised the building of a house and threw himself into developing his farm and herds of cattle, using local Kipsigi and Kisii labourers. Their first son, Michael John, was born in 1946and their daughter, Elizabeth Jill, three years later, in 1949. In these early years of their marriage, they could not see much of his parents at their home farm, Glen Ogilvie, near Nanyuki. While Aubrey’s work as the bwana took him out on the farm and beyond, Joy’s life as the young memsahib revolved mainly around the house and garden, overseeing domestic staff and, after her children were born, the children’s ayah. There was the social life in the club with other settlers, including those from the tea estates around Kericho. Aubrey was a keen horseman, and polo, tennis, golf and bridge interspersed days and weeks spent on their remote farm.

Yet the central thread in Joy’s later reminiscences was not isolation but her pleasure in ‘country life’. She loved being surrounded by the bush, with its vast herds of zebra, wildebeest and giraffe, as well as elephant, lion, cheetah, elusive leopard and all manner of antelope and other wildlife. The settlers accorded animals their domain, and the presence of wildlife was not regarded as an intrinsic threat to the settlers’ way of life. But the presence of ‘undomesticated’ Africans was. Like the pass system in South Africa, the kipande1 controlled the lives of Africans, who, if found in the ‘wrong’ place, could be accused of trespass, and jailed.

* * *

For the settlers, the person who came to epitomise the threat presented by Africans was Jomo Kenyatta. His ability to take on the British in their own language was a source of great pride to Africans, especially other Kikuyu. After 15 years in England, where he had studied Anthropology at the London School of Economics, Kenyatta returned home in 1946