Outside In E-Book

Peter Hain

• Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 1099

Beschreibung

Peter Hain has always spoken his mind. So he does in this book. Here he tells his story as an outsider turned insider: anti-apartheid militant to Cabinet minister, serving twelve years in Labour's government between May 1997 and May 2010. Growing up as the son of courageous anti-apartheid South Africans, Peter Hain was first in the public eye aged fifteen, reading at the funeral of an anti-apartheid friend hanged in Pretoria. Living in exile in Britain during his late teens, he led campaigns to disrupt whites-only South African sports tours. His political notoriety resulted in two extraordinary Old Bailey trials and a letter bomb. Hain recalls his role in negotiating the historic 2007 settlement in Northern Ireland, being Britain's first-ever African born Africa Minister, and acting as a passionate advocate and deliverer of devolved government to Wales. Featuring Iraq, Mugabe, Europe, Gibraltar, blood diamonds, work alongside MI5 and MI6, and the delivery of justice for workers robbed of their pensions and compensation for sick miners, Hain's autobiography gives a fascinating insight into life near the top of the Blair and Brown governments.

Leseprobe

OUTSIDE IN

PETER HAIN

For Elizabeth with love and thanks

‘If political change was easy, it would have been achieved a long time ago. Stick there for the long haul.’

Walter Hain, to his son Peter in 1965

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Preface

1 Freedom Struggle

2 Direct Action

3 Under Attack

4 Liberals, Orwell and Labour

5 Into Parliament

6 To Be or to Do

7 Making a Difference

8 British Outsider in Europe

9 Mandarins, Ministers and Media

10 From Horror to Hope: Northern Ireland Breakthrough

11 Police, Spies and Lies

12 Cabinet Life under Tony and Gordon

13 Mission Unfulfilled

Epilogue

Afterword

Index

Plates

About the Author

Copyright

PREFACE

This is the story of an ‘outsider’ turned ‘insider’: anti-apartheid militant to Cabinet Minister, serving twelve years in Labour’s government between May 1997 and May 2010.

I first found myself in the public eye in 1965 aged fifteen unexpectedly delivering the reading at the funeral of an anti-apartheid friend who had been hanged in Pretoria. Then in Britain, from the age of nineteen, political notoriety led to two extraordinary Old Bailey trials and being sent a letter bomb. Thirty years later I was sworn in as a Privy Counsellor by the Queen.

This is intended as a readable rather than erudite book, from struggle and protest in the 1960s and 1970s to negotiating the 2007 Northern Ireland settlement. Hopefully the reader will enjoy the fun as well as the sadness, the highs and the lows, the achievements and the setbacks of an unusual political life. My aim has also been a book that has durable interest, giving a sense of what the noble calling of politics can be like, and an insight into modern government based upon contemporaneous notes and dictated recordings – an independent account of Labour in power from neither a ‘Blairite’ nor a ‘Brownite’ perspective.

I am very grateful to my wife Elizabeth Haywood for her dedicated, detailed and frank comments on the drafts, and to my parents Walter and Adelaine Hain for their observations, their courage in the anti-apartheid struggle and a lifetime’s support. My wonderful sister Sally Hain painstakingly downloaded and transcribed the majority of recordings, with assistance from Cari Morgans and Matt Ward. My former government political advisers Phil Taylor and David Taylor commented expertly on the whole draft; Frank Baker, Sarah Lyons, Glynne Jones, Andre Odendaal, John Underwood and Phil Wyatt advised on parts. My agent Caroline Michel gave invaluable advice throughout, as at its conception did Gail Rebuck. My thanks to them all.

Hopefully, when they are old enough to read it, Harry, Seren, Holly and Tesni Hain will discover their unusual hinterland and perhaps also be inspired to make a difference as their Grandad always strove to do.

Peter Hain

Ynysygerwn, Neath, July 2012

CHAPTER ONE

FREEDOM STRUGGLE

‘Ah, Peter, return of the prodigal son!’ Nelson Mandela beamed, welcoming me to his Johannesburg home in February 2000.

Although on an official government visit, in a sense I was also being welcomed to my ‘home’ – to South Africa, the panoramic, sunshine country of my childhood, as the first ever British Minister for Africa to be born on that continent.

Ten years earlier, with Mandela still in prison I remained banned from entering South Africa – a legacy of my anti-apartheid campaigning – and I wasn’t an MP then, still less a government minister. And ten years before that, I had never even considered being an MP: I was more steeped in extra-parliamentary protest and activism, the roots of which lay earlier in my South African-born parents’ brave anti-apartheid work when I was a boy.

As I settled onto his sitting room sofa for our discussions, my Foreign Office officials taking notes, all of us enjoying the thrill of being in the great man’s presence, I was barely three years into a ministerial life in the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown; it would last a further nine years, seven as a member of the Cabinet.

Although we had met a number of times before, it was always special to be in his presence. A humble icon without an ounce of self-importance or arrogance, he had a unique aura: a sense of deep tranquillity and gentleness with everyone, yet also a worldly shrewdness that made you feel simultaneously at ease and in awe.

A twinkle in his eye, Mandela – or Madiba (his clan name), used by those close to him – courteously poked fun at the elegant British High Commissioner, Dame Maeve Fort, who had arranged the meeting; he was especially taken with English ladies – the Queen included. But soon we moved on to talk about African policies, including his efforts as a mediator in the civil conflict in Burundi. Then, the meeting over, we walked out together in the bright summer’s day to a battery of television cameras, photographers and journalists gathered under the trees in his front garden, his hand resting on my shoulders, in part affectionately, in part because (now aged eighty-one) he found walking increasingly difficult.

Even ten years after his release from prison, and having meanwhile served as President for five years and then stepped down, Mandela’s saintliness remained. ‘I wanted to welcome my friend Peter Hain,’ he said, generous to a fault. ‘He was a noted supporter of our freedom struggle and we thank him for that. Except for people like Peter, who was a leader of the anti-apartheid movement, I might not be standing here, a free man today, and our people would not be free.’

It was a proud and almost magical moment for me, standing alongside the global giant who inspired such universal affection and admiration. He had been imprisoned on Robben Island under the old apartheid regime when, as a teenager in England, I was first denounced in South Africa as ‘Public Enemy Number One’. My crime was leading successful campaigns to stop all-white South African sports tours from 1969.

Now aged fifty, I was feted as a returning VIP, not just from the days of the freedom struggle, but representing the government of the old colonial power, the United Kingdom – which in past decades I had vigorously attacked for its complicity in sustaining apartheid, denouncing as weasels its Africa Ministers.

But the journey to become a British Cabinet Minister started a long time before my years as a militant anti-apartheid protester. My transition from outsider to insider began as a son of Africa.

My life as a young boy in South Africa effectively ended with a close family friend being hanged by the apartheid government.

And the beginning of that end really began, I suppose, when the Security Police took my mother and father away in the middle of the night. Although I was aged eleven, unusual things had been happening to our family for a while, and my anti-apartheid parents had warned me that this might happen, making plans for my Gran (who lived nearby) and our black maid Eva Matjeka to look after us. I was their eldest child, used to taking responsibility and to looking after my younger brother Tom, then aged nine, and my two small sisters Jo-anne and Sally, aged six and four.

Still, when a hand shook me awake in our Pretoria home in May 1961, I couldn’t help being frightened. As my eyes opened there was a familiar friend, Nan van Reenen, a kindly middle-aged lady, anxious in the gloom: ‘Peter, your parents have been put in jail,’ she said gently, holding my hand.

I was drowsy, confused: what was happening? Where were they? They might never come back – what on earth would I do? Then: mustn’t panic, mustn’t let my parents down, stay calm, carry on.

Nan told me how, with fellow Liberal Party activists Maritz van den Berg and her son Colyn, they had been putting up posters in support of the ‘Stay-at-home’ protest called by Nelson Mandela when the Security Police turned up and detained them.

We checked to see that the others were still sleeping, she tucked up on our living room sofa, and I went back to bed and tried to close my eyes, worrying and wondering what lay ahead of us and how my even younger brother and sisters would react when they awoke.

Before she left in the morning Nan and I told them what had happened. The girls were wide eyed, and Tom very quiet. They did not cry but all of us knew that tears were being held back. Although I had no idea what was coming next, I felt I had to look after them somehow. I didn’t think of myself as the young boy I was, just that I needed to do what had to be done.

Gran soon came over and moved in – though not Grandad, who (I later learnt) took a dim view of it all. Eva quietly took charge and ensured everything went as smoothly as possible, and one of my parents’ activist friends, Anita Cohen, brought a huge meringue cake round to cheer us up.

It seemed almost normal to me that they had been detained, because we had become used to our telephone being tapped, to Special Branch surveillance of our house in the Pretoria suburb of Hatfield, and to police suddenly raiding and searching our house.

Our family was close knit and somehow my parents had managed to keep up a caring family life amidst all the trauma of their increasing participation in the resistance to apartheid. Despite being on the receiving end of a police state where basic human rights had virtually disappeared, I remember a blend of the ordinary and the extraordinary in our day-to-day lives, a mixture of excitement, stress, 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 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. Amidst 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. I never recall feeling that their activism came ahead of their children. In fact I still feel privileged to have had the best parents in the world.

Very little was made of their arrests by our teachers or our friends, as we were well looked after, and life went on. These sort of things happened, and Mom and Dad would be out soon, we were reassuringly told. But it still seemed an age before they were released, and my mother kept the letter I wrote to her. ‘Gran and Eva are looking after us well but we are missing you a lot,’ it said in clear, careful writing.

I must have blanked out my worries and emotions – doubtless a characteristic that was to stand me in good stead later on – because I do not recall it being a terrible episode. But six-year-old Jo-anne was in retrospect reaching for comfort in wanting to feel her mother near her when she modified a petticoat she had always loved Mom wearing. It had layers of stiff net which made her skirts stick out, rather like a modern day 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. We all yelled at her that she would get into ‘big trouble’ when Mom and Dad got back. But we were wrong – of course she didn’t.

They had been the first people to be detained without charge under a new Twelve-Day Law aimed at rising political dissent, which allowed for detention without trial. My father and his two male comrades Colyn and Maritz were taken off to share a cell in Pretoria Local jail where conditions were not bad. But he was concerned throughout about my mother with whom he had no contact until they were released – an anxiety increased when he almost immediately received a letter in prison from his municipal employer sacking him.

Mom had been locked up alone in a large echoing hall in Pretoria Central Prison, in which white women detainees had been held during the 1960 Emergency. Reverberating up the stairwell, she could hear the screams of black women prisoners being assaulted. She also found the wardresses flesh-creeping and intimidating, especially when they deliberately came to watch her having a bath; so much so that she decided to wash in a hand basin where it was more private. Although comforted that our Gran would be caring for us with Eva, she nevertheless worried continuously about her children – though she never revealed her real predicament and fears until many years later.

Before the twelve days kicked in, they had been held for the maximum two days while the police searched in vain for evidence to bring charges. Mom had secretly chewed up and spat out the one piece of incriminating evidence that could have led to charges – a leaflet urging people to go on strike and stay at home – quickly managing to do this just as the Special Branch first turned up. Told about this later, I was rather taken with her ingenuity, having recently seen my first James Bond film, From Russia with Love.

Much as they tried, the Special Branch could not find anything to bring a prosecution, and after the fourteen days were completed my parents had to be released. I hadn’t known about the exact timing, and so it was a great relief to walk home from school with my brother Tom and sister Jo-anne and unexpectedly see my Dad strolling along to meet us with my little sister 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, especially close to her 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.

The immense joy of family reunion was, however, tempered by my father’s forced unemployment. Losing his job was a big financial blow. Yet somehow we struggled through financially with the help of a donation from an anonymous Liberal Party member. Until he was offered a temporary post by a Party member two months later, we had to survive living on account at local shops. I remember the understanding of shopkeepers as I signed for essential items in the chemist or grocery store – an experience which made me even more determined than before. I was not going to be beaten down by anyone, ever – and certainly not by our enemies.

But soon my parents were in action again – and life settled back to its abnormal normality.

None of my white cousins or school friends experienced anything like this, for they were conventional English-speaking white South Africans. And, intriguingly, so by origin were my parents. My mother Adelaine was descended from the English 1820 Settlers and my father Walter from Scottish immigrants who had left Glasgow after the 1914–18 World War. As a nineteen-year-old, he had been wounded in action fighting with the Allies in Italy in 1944. I was actually born a British subject (and remained so) in 1950 in Nairobi, Kenya, where my father had been working on his first job after graduating from Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg as an architect.

Our stay there didn’t last long because my Dad was offered a new job back in South Africa. When I was aged about fifteen months my parents daringly drove an old car several thousand miles down the African continent, home to South Africa; deliberately, they hadn’t informed their own parents, expecting disapproval. But they were delighted that I learnt to walk on the way, though occasionally envious as I munched my food, sometimes when they had run out of money to feed themselves. Well into the four-week journey I was apparently reluctant to leave the car since it had become ‘home’. I slept on the back seat and Mom and Dad slumped on the front seats at night. Amidst numerous tyre punctures, breakdowns and mishaps in the African bush, they had throughout friendly help from inquisitive locals amazed at seeing white people out on their own in the heart of Africa.

As I grew up, first in Natal for a few years, and then mainly in Pretoria from 1954, our lifestyle, at least to begin with, was a conventional one in the 1950s and 1960s for 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 maid lived separately in a room with toilet and shower next to the garage – the usual servant’s accommodation.

Until I was about eight, my parents’ social circle was typical. We would visit 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 easy going and my brother and I were able to roam without restriction with our friends on bicycles and in soap box cars we built ourselves. And, every December, the two rear bench seats of our Volkswagen minibus were turned into a bed for the 700-mile overnight trip to my maternal grandparents’ home on the banks of the Kowie River, at the pretty little seaside town of Port Alfred in the Eastern Cape. There we spent our Christmas holidays, fishing off the jetty or spending long lazy days on the broad sandy beaches and swimming freely in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean.

The process of making South Africa such a very pleasant place in which a white boy could grow up had begun some 300 years earlier, when the first permanent settlers from Europe landed at what became Cape Town in 1652. In the centuries that followed, their descendants and followers remorselessly colonised the rest of the land to the east and north, pushing the indigenous black tribes into remote and less hospitable areas.

British settlement increased after Britain in 1806 annexed the strategically important Cape, later triggering conflicts with the Afrikaans-speaking whites descended from early Dutch, German and French Huguenot settlers. Two bloody ‘Boer Wars’ occurred, during which 26,000 Afrikaner women and children died in British concentration camps. All this spawned a fierce nationalism in Afrikaners, deeply resentful of their English-speaking compatriots. Eventually South Africa was granted independence in 1910.

Throughout this period and afterwards, racist, white dominance increased until the hated system of apartheid (meaning ‘separateness’) was instituted from 1948 when the Afrikaner National Party came to power for the first time. Pro-Nazi during the Second World War, the ‘Nats’ (my parents called them) quickly ushered in probably the worst racist tyranny the world has ever witnessed.

Apartheid affected everything. I had to go to a whites-only school, travel on a whites-only bus, play sport with and against whites alone, live in a whites-only area, sit on a whites-only park bench and observe my parents voting in whites-only elections.

As a teenager I remember vividly my Dad showing me the legislation which statutorily defined ‘whiteness’ in terms which for me perfectly captured the Orwellian character of apartheid:

A white person means a person who –

(a) in appearance is obviously a white person and who is not generally accepted as a Coloured person; or

(b) is generally accepted as a white person and is not in appearance obviously not a white person.

My mother had lived until aged nineteen on the outskirts of Port Alfred, close to a Coloured* family and with Africans of the Xhosa tribe passing her door en route to the town. Two of her school teachers – one apparently a communist – had commented in different ways to her that everyone should be treated equally, and she remembered being struck that, instead of being inferior, Paul Robeson, the black American singer-actor, was hugely impressive in one of his Hollywood films when she saw it at the local cinema. Her father was prominent in the Eastern Cape branch of the mainly English-speaking United Party, which was led by the wartime hero and Prime Minister Jan Smuts, and she sometimes accompanied him to public meetings.

On one occasion she was to startle her father by challenging the visiting United Party MP about something he had said at a meeting when he stopped by later at their home for a meal. She had also worked for the town’s community newssheet (to which her Dad, active on local issues, contributed). She typed it and staffed the office. So she was the more politically aware when, aged twenty-one, she married my father in Pretoria in 1948. Although he had been brought up to question everything and was vigorously anti-establishment by temperament, his parents had never talked politics to him. Despite the fact that they had both been Labour Party members in their youth in Glasgow, they shunned the politics of their adopted country; like most British immigrants they turned a blind eye to the racism and went along with the status quo.

The vast majority of white South Africans continued to live a life thriving off apartheid but curiously insulated from its terrible consequences. Current affairs was not taught in schools, and my parents had little knowledge of the mesh of repressive laws that stultified black life. They were barely aware of the African National Congress (ANC) nor of its new emerging leaders in the late 1940s, including of course Nelson Mandela. But, unusually for whites, they did share a respect for blacks. Their eyes had been opened by the more relaxed racial structure they found in Kenya, and also by the warm, friendly face of the Africans they had encountered on their eventful drive back home in 1951.

So a South African friend from Kenya was on fertile ground when he recommended two years later that they be invited to join the newly formed non-racial Liberal Party. They formed a branch with a student, Annette Cockburn, in Ladysmith where we lived at the time and where Tom had been born. There was nowhere else to have the inaugural meeting except in our house, and it was addressed by Alan Paton, author of the renowned Cry, the Beloved Country. Elliot Mngadi, later National Treasurer of the Party, remarked: ‘This is the first time I’ve ever come through the front door of a white man’s house.’ (Blacks acting as servants or gardeners might be allowed in the back door.)

From a young age, I became used to blacks being in our home – not only as servants but as equals and friends. Years later, well after we had moved to Pretoria, where Jo-anne was born, we would visit Party colleagues in one of the black townships that ringed the towns and cities throughout the country. Under apartheid’s rigid segregation, town centres were 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 having blacks 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 father arranged for a job in London, and we embarked at Cape Town at the beginning of 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 arriving in mid-winter. It seemed so strange, so different. No wide open spaces, no barefoot sunshine any more. Shoes and socks, thick clothes, coats, huddling inside the house to get warm, 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 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, and I recall playing happily on the farm and helping the hay making amidst the excitement of combine harvesters and tractors. In one spell of very hot weather, we all took our bedding and slept out on the front lawn – that seemed a real adventure – especially when the milk woman surprised us in the early morning.

Soon after they had arrived my parents discovered the liberal newspapers, the 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: Suez, when the British, French and Israelis attacked Egypt, and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. These made a big impact upon them and they joined progressive British opinion in strongly opposing both.

They also read of tumult in their home country. In August 1956 10,000 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 every 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 following ‘Treason Trial’ lasting two 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 by blacks. My parents followed all these events avidly, and became concerned and restive. Late in 1957 when my father’s old architectural firm in Pretoria telephoned and asked him to return, they decided to do so, and he flew out alone early in December. We had no car and Mom was left to pack up and travel with four small children, first by bus and train up to London, and then down to Southampton to board an ocean liner.

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 onto the railings, three-year-old Jo-anne sang over and over again a little song ‘Hello, My Daddy’. But I distinctly remember glimpsing ugly hammerhead sharks circling the hull: a menacing shiver clouded my joy, but I didn’t know why.

The city of my childhood, Pretoria, holds strong memories, some fond, some unhappy. With wide streets lined with jacaranda trees, majestically purple in flower, it had white suburbs with detached homes and large gardens kept nicely manicured by black gardeners. The old capital of Afrikanerdom and a bastion of apartheid, it held few progressive instincts. Yet a branch of the Liberal Party had become active by the time we returned there early in 1958, and my parents quickly rejoined.

Their introduction was dramatic. A peaceful women’s demonstration against being forced to carry passes in the nearby township of Lady Selborne was broken up by baton-wielding police. Many were injured and when their men folk returned from work feelings ran high. The township was soon in uproar. The local Liberal Party chairman John Brink had driven in to try to restrain the police and, when he failed to return, I remember the drama of my Dad driving out to look for him and being worried as we all waited anxiously for his return. To my relief, he came back soon. But this was because he had met John returning from the township, bloodied, in a windowless car which had been stoned by residents venting their fury at a white intruder, not knowing he was on their side. He only managed to escape when the local ANC organiser Peter Magano recognised him and jumped onto the car bonnet in protection. The blood and shattered glass were terrible, I thought; he could easily have been killed – and Dad too, trying to rescue him. What was happening to us, I wondered?

Then aged eight, the only other time I had been frightened and shocked by the sight of a bloodied face and clothes was when a black boy called Tatius, in his early teens, and allowed to stay in our servant’s quarters as a favour, had been set upon by white youths as he walked along a nearby pavement. Apparently they took exception to him penny-whistling, and beat him up ‘to teach him a lesson’. He arrived home crying, billowing bloody bruises on his face, his legs and arms raw. It was all too sadly typical of the random, savage cruelty blacks might face. Protests by my Dad to 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 the Special Branch as somebody new to keep an eye on.

Lady Selborne was unusual in being a mixed-race township with an old British colonial heritage, which meant the normal restrictions on whites visiting did not apply, and my parents were later to become well known there. During the day my mother visited regularly, accompanied by my youngest sister Sally, who was under school age and 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 Party business. The English women running the Mission, Hannah Stanton and Cecily Paget, were Liberal Party members.

From aged eight onward, I occasionally went along too at weekends, sometimes with my brother and two younger sisters as we were too young to be left alone at home. The more we did so the less novel it became, driving through the dusty or muddy tracks and peering at the houses, some ramshackle, others more solid, but all so starkly different from the comfortable white communities in which we and our school mates lived. I remember staring in wonderment then – as I have ever since – at seeing African women hanging out clothing to dry, pristine despite the primitive conditions for washing and the dust swirling around.

My parents were both soon on the Pretoria Liberals’ Committee. My mother later became branch secretary, a position she held until she was banned from doing so in 1963. Our rented houses, first in Hilda Street and then in Arcadia Street, saw regular visitors and callers from Liberal members and others, black as well as white. Despite the continuous buzz of activity, my parents ensured that our friends could come around to play, and that we could go to their houses. My brother 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 my Mom and Dad acted as race controllers and my small sisters cheered us on. We were also taken regularly to watch motor racing at the Kyalami circuit some thirty miles away on the road to Johannesburg. The nine-hour all-night race was a special treat as I watched my favourite, the British driver David Piper, win every time in his green Ferrari.

Not all of my boyhood was entirely innocent, however. Aged about ten we stole the odd tin of condensed milk from boxes in our house bound for a black township. We occasionally went around at night throwing small stones on the mostly corrugated iron roofs of white homes and then scampered away. We got old clothes, winding them up to look like snakes, then crouched behind our garden hedge and pulled them in the gloom across the pavement so that passing pedestrians – invariably blacks – jumped in fear as we screeched in delight. But one of these pranks rebounded terribly as I remember to this day in shame. With friends we would put a balloon in a plastic bag and leave it lying on the road for one of many cyclists, enjoying from our vantage point on the garage roof how they were startled when it burst as they rode over it. Then we placed a large stone inside an empty-looking bag, and I watched horrified 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 terrible, not least because I knew he was poor. I never did anything like that again.

Mom and Dad had first met and talked in August 1958 to Nelson Mandela, his close comrade Walter Sisulu and other defendants during what became known as the ‘Treason Trial’. Held in the Old Synagogue courtroom in Pretoria, many of the accused went 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 crossed over with the ANC, whose Pretoria leader, Peter Magano, became 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 banned from doing so. She was a self-trained ‘journalist’ – but, unlike my Dad, not university educated, having gone to work straight from school as an office clerk. At this time in her early thirties, small, dark haired and pretty in an unaffected way, she cut a diminutive dash as she scurried about organising and harrying the authorities, especially in courts and police stations where blacks were treated worst.

Other political organisations at the time represented the different racial groups – Mandela’s ANC for example was mainly for Africans and the Congress of Democrats mainly for whites. The Liberal Party’s appeal was based on membership open to all racial groups on an equal basis. Committed to universal franchise, it 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 which above all inspired my parents and became increasingly imbibed by their children.

Many 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 Pretoria University, an Afrikaans-speaking institution, were militantly pro-apartheid and would line up outside Party meetings, shouting slogans and abuse. I remember vividly their noisy, intimidating barracking outside a Party colleague’s home as we remained inside and feeling fearful, wondering if they might burst in at any moment, until they finally went away.

By contrast my parents became close friends with many blacks. David Rathswaffo, for example, was a particular family favourite who would call by and take 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 also a clerk at the Supreme Court in Pretoria, where all the major political trials took place. Until, that was, in 1959 when the government decided that blacks should not carry out such ‘responsible tasks’, which should be reserved for whites. David was replaced by a white man – whom he had to train for the job – and made redundant.

It was incidents and events like this, part of the staple diet of our daily lives, which meant that from a young age I became politically conscious without being myself politically involved. My Dad used to spend time with me explaining some of the absurdities of reserving better jobs for whites under apartheid: that black decorators could paint the undercoat but not the final coat, that they could pass bricks to white builders but not lay these themselves.

By this time the new Nationalist Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd was well into his stride. A more intellectual leader than his predecessors with a total belief in 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’. Soon he would end the attendance of what had been a handful of blacks at the white universities.

In 1959 a prominent Pretoria Liberal and local doctor, Colin Lang, contested the Pretoria East by-election to the Provincial Council as the Nationalists’ only opponent. He turned in a creditable performance, with twenty-four per cent of the vote, saving his deposit. Our home was the campaign headquarters. This was my parents’ first experience of electioneering and canvassing for a non-racial party amongst the overwhelmingly racist white electorate. I remember, aged nine, helping to leaflet in the tree-lined white suburbs, and finding it fun. Party members came across from Johannesburg to help. One of them, Ernie Wentzel, was a young white lawyer who subsequently became a great family friend. He 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 Kaffir?’ 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 recounting the tale 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 and dilapidated old Gestetner duplicator which 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 get roped in to collate the sheets for stapling and helped with pushing it through doors as it was distributed by a team transported in our Volkswagen minibus – all rather exciting, I felt.

In February 1960, just as I turned ten, the British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, addressed the South African Parliament, speaking of the ‘winds of change’ blowing through the African continent, and greatly embarrassing the apartheid government, who had good reason to expect the usual platitudes of complicity from Britain my parents had warned me to expect. They were delighted at this international shot-in-the-arm for anti-apartheid forces who felt increasingly alone and isolated in what was by now a full-blown police state.

The speech engendered hope amongst blacks burdened by anger, poverty and frustration, and the ANC called for an economic boycott in protest against the ‘passes’ blacks had to carry all the time. 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, they had to be in order and signed by a white employer. On one occasion Mom illicitly signed many passes for men fearing arrest in Lady Selborne.

Then on 21 March 1960, at Sharpeville township south of Johannesburg, policemen sitting in armoured vehicles suddenly opened fire on peaceful protesters, using over 700 rounds and killing sixty-nine 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 and, explaining the horror of the massacre, my mother told us she had to go and help. I was worried something might happen to her – 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 van was instantly surrounded by the black attendants, checking the tyres, cleaning the windscreen and then escorting the vehicle onto the highway, with encouraging shouts and whistles.

A state of emergency was declared as riots swept the country and the killings reverberated around the world. The Treason Trial was proceeding in Pretoria and the ANC President, Chief Albert Luthuli, was staying at the house of the Pretoria Liberal Chairman, John Brink, while giving evidence. He publicly burnt his pass on 26 March 1960 and called on others to follow suit. His action coincided with the Government’s suspension of the Pass Laws, which my parents heard with great excitement. But Luthuli was arrested, tried and later fined. My Mom had the privilege of being sent to pay the fine and transport him back to the Brinks’ home where I remember meeting him. He seemed a grandfatherly figure, silver grey hair and austere but friendly towards a boy who knew little about the detail 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.

The relaxation of the Pass Laws gave false hope that they were to be abolished. For a short period there was a feeling throughout the country that apartheid was teetering and my parents were excited by the prospect, though my Dad, always a hard-nosed realist, told me that it was a mistake to raise expectations. He was proved right. The Pass Laws were reinstated on 7 April and, worse, the next day the ANC and its break-away, the Pan African Congress (PAC), were banned as unlawful organisations. This was a heavy blow, particularly to the ANC, which for nearly half a century had struggled non-violently against harsh discriminatory laws that in Europe would long before have led to bloody insurrection. 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.

This period in 1960 was a tense time for our family. Along with some 2,000 anti-apartheid activists, many prominent Liberals were detained and I found it chilling that they included many whom I knew on first-name terms and who had visited our home. Now there was the uncomfortable sense that a bright light was shining on everything we did as a family. For the first time 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 up outside the house, for my brother Tom and me there was also a sense of ‘cops and robbers’, eerie yet exhilirating.

Then in June Mom was advised that her name had been seen on a list of people to be arrested, that she should leave immediately, and meanwhile go quickly to a home of friends unconnected with the Liberals. We arrived home from school to be told we were going on holiday right away. Although it was a nice surprise, when I (as the oldest) was told the real reason, my mood turned quickly to worry that we might be caught. In Mom’s absence I had to ensure clothes and toys were properly packed – though apparently she opened her case later to find far too many underclothes and very little else of use.

My Dad came home from work and we loaded the vehicle, checking there were no Special Branch around, before we drove to collect Mom. She took the wheel and we waved goodbye to him for the fourteen-hour overnight drive to our grandparents’ home in Port Alfred. I repeatedly looked back at the road behind and it was a real relief to see that we were not being followed. The tension receded and, on arrival, we quickly settled into the routine of a break by the seaside, albeit (unlike our normal sun-baked holidays) this time in the middle of the South African winter.

My Dad later joined us. It was a criminal offence under the State of Emergency to divulge information on detainees and there was difficulty communicating between areas, so he had been asked to check on the state of the Party in the Eastern Cape Province and Natal. We drove there before returning to Pretoria and I remember Alan Paton’s house, The Long View, high up overlooking the hills north of Durban. He was kindly, though a little gruff, to a ten-year-old barely aware of his growing international reputation.

But something he told me made a big impact: ‘I’m not an all-or-nothing person, Peter. I’m an all-or-something person.’ This was to become a watchword for my subsequent political activity in which strong principles had not so much to be compromised as to be blended with hard-edged practicalities: the aim achieving concrete goals, not basking in the luxury of purity.

Moustached and fit, Dad was informal and friendly, though strict and severe to any of his children if we ever strayed. Self-discipline and hard work were ethics he instilled in me. ‘The things that are really worth achieving are usually difficult to do’ was one of his sayings. Another was: ‘if it was easy to change apartheid, it would have been done a long time ago; you have to be prepared to stay the course for the long term’. However he also encouraged us to enjoy ourselves and both my parents were popular amongst my friends. Affectionate and close to each other, they became renowned for selflessly looking after others. Unwilling to give up on a challenge until all avenues were exhausted, they were always practical and impatient with the petty personality tensions or starry-eyed idealism present in left-wing politics. I was proud of them and these values and attitudes were to become important guides for me in my own political life much later.

We returned from our unscheduled holiday after the country-wide State of Emergency was lifted at the end of August 1960 and the remaining detainees were released. But soon afterwards our home was raided by the Security Police for the first time and statements by people wounded at Sharpeville taken secretly the day after the shootings were seized, never to be seen again. We returned home from school to be told in a matter-of-fact way what had happened. Although I took it in my stride, the house seemed ‘dirty’ somehow, as if burglars had been through all our stuff.

Whites in the local Liberal Party contributed food parcels for the families of ANC or PAC detainees and I sometimes helped my parents deliver these in our minibus to Pretoria’s townships of Lady Selborne, Atteridgeville and Eastwood. Although there was always a certain tension about these missions, I remember also a sense of purposeful enjoyment and accomplishment.

Meanwhile Mom had become known in Pretoria as the person for non-whites to contact whenever anyone fell foul of the police. On one occasion she helped bail a group of women from Soweto, including the mother of Nelson Mandela’s close leadership comrade, Walter Sisulu. With the ANC and PAC now illegal, black membership in the Pretoria branch of the Liberal Party – by this time the only legal anti-apartheid group in the city – boomed. There seemed a constant flow of people in and out of the house. Branch meetings were held in our living room with my father and others collecting black and Asian members from their segregated townships and taking them home afterwards.

Amidst the increasing political turmoil surrounding us I was enjoying school life at Hatfield Primary School, where I became Head Prefect. Strict discipline, doing homework conscientiously on time and playing sport virtually every afternoon were the watchwords. Certain teachers, aware of the Hains’ growing notoriety, were quietly supportive, as were some of my friends and their parents.

In March 1960 the Treason Trial ended with the acquittal of all defendants. The ANC President, Oliver Tambo, immediately left the country to ensure that the organisation survived outside South Africa. Nelson Mandela went underground before he could be rearrested, and became leader of the ANC armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), which he said would perform sabotage with strict instructions not to kill. I recall intense discussions with my father, who was totally opposed to violence. But he did not attack the ANC, and acknowledged to me that the longer apartheid continued the more violence there would inevitably be; that’s why we had to persuade apartheid’s rulers to change before it was too late.

One morning I woke before dawn, shivering in shock to discover strangers in the bedroom shared with my brother Tom. Who were they? What on earth were they doing? What were they stealing? Were we going to be hurt? Then Mom and Dad realised we had woken and gave us a hug, explaining they were Security Policemen and not to worry. The episode soon turned more incongruous than threatening. I was keen on cars and motor sport, and the men had my scrapbooks culled from my father’s weekly car magazines – they were searching in vain for ‘incriminating evidence’. Then Jo-anne and Sally called out from bed next door that the cupboard drawer for their panties was being searched – which embarrassed the officers. But they also knocked over the cage of my pet white mouse which escaped only to be pounced on and killed by our cat, which upset us all. I found my mood switching during the search from initial fear to amusement and then outrage.

A few months later, and while still underground, Nelson Mandela called for a three day ‘stay-at-home’ at the end of May 1961 to protest against all racial laws – in which my parents participated, leading to their arrest. The stay-at-home was a great success on the first day, but it soon fizzled out after massive police intimidation and raids (some 10,000 were detained). The last disciplined, mass non-violent demonstration to be held in the old South Africa was over.

By this time contacts with our relatives had become increasingly strained. Although our wider family was quite close, none of them was at all politically involved. My uncle Hugh was by then the millionaire owner of a construction company and did not want his business affected. When we were holidaying in Port Alfred, we would be invited out on their speedboats and on one occasion I attempted water skiing. We had also been regular visitors to his house to play with our five cousins who were similarly aged, and to swim in their pool. But these invitations suddenly stopped. Mom and Dad tried to explain to us why, shielding how upset they were, especially from my sisters Jo-anne and Sally, who (aged six and four) were far too young to understand why they would no longer be seeing their close cousins, Anne and Liz.

My mother, brought up as a Christian Scientist, now felt estranged: what was Christianity about, she felt, if not to give support and understanding in times of difficulty? Her brother Hugh and sister-in-law were devout Christian Scientists, as were most of her wider family. How could the admirable principles of Christianity be reconciled with apartheid? And how could the sometimes fundamentalist Christians in the Dutch Reformed Church who ran the apartheid government possibly justify the human misery they deliberately inflicted?

I and the younger children used to go to the nearby Christian Science Sunday School and my crunch moment came while my parents were in prison. When I realised that the person teaching us was a police officer, I decided that we were not going any more. I later started to discuss religion with my Dad, always an atheist, gradually coming to the conclusion that I was possibly an atheist too, but probably more of an agnostic.

My aunt Marie Hain meanwhile ran a travel agency in Pretoria and felt obliged to place an advert in the Pretoria News saying that her company had no relationship with the Mrs Hain of the Liberal Party – who just happened to be her sister-in-law. Despite the absence of any personal hostility between us, a barrier grew as we moved in different worlds. When life later became extremely difficult and my father was out of a job, our well-off relatives could have helped but chose not to. They remained in all other respects friendly and (within the white framework) decent, caring family folk. It was simply that they were not ‘political’, we were a gross embarrassment, and they feared it would be risky to be too closely associated – upsetting and difficult to understand, especially for my younger brother and sisters.

Then, in December 1961 Umkhonto began a campaign of placing incendiary bombs in government offices, post offices and electrical sub-stations, carrying out 200 attacks in the following eighteen months. When I asked them anxiously about this, my parents were amazed that the ANC were able to place some of these bombs in Pretoria offices, where all government workers, down to the cleaners, were white – until Peter Magano said: ‘Don’t forget the messenger boys are still black!’

The term ‘boy’ was patronisingly applied by whites to all black men and, from an early age, I remember castigating friends when they called out to their black gardeners in this way. The spectacle of bumptious white kids casually talking down to greying black grandfathers tending their gardens epitomised for me the daily indignity of apartheid. On one occasion my best friend Dave knocked off the hat of an elderly man and I remember having a real go at him and insisting he picked it up and gave it back – which he sheepishly did.

By 1962 my father, now working in a private architectural practice, had taken over as Chairman of the Pretoria Liberals and so my parents occupied what were effectively the two top positions in the city’s only legal anti-apartheid force. As such they became even more prominent targets in this citadel of Afrikanerdom. They seemed to be permanently in the Pretoria News and, late in 1962, my father began to write frequent leader page articles for the Rand Daily Mail, the country’s main liberal newspaper, which made me even more proud.

He also helped me with my essays on current affairs at Pretoria Boys High School. My favourite teacher, Terence Ashton, remarked that my writing ‘seemed remarkably similar to that of W. V. Hain in the Rand Daily Mail’. Ashton taught us English and, trying to explain the phrase persona non grata to our class said: ‘Hain’s parents are persona non grata with the government because they think.’ The school had some liberally minded teachers, increasingly aware of my parents’ growing role. While they never referred to it, some were quietly sympathetic, my reputation as a hard worker and enthusiastic sportsman perhaps standing me in good stead. The only time I was picked upon was when some boys started calling me ‘a communist’; despite being upset, I was determined to ignore them, staring fixedly ahead as if I hadn’t heard.

On 5 August 1962, having been seventeen months on the run, Nelson Mandela was finally captured near Howick Falls in Natal, after an informer tipped off the police. Mostly disguised as a chauffeur, he had evaded the authorities and travelled throughout the country organising the ANC underground, with the media dubbing him the ‘Black Pimpernel’.*

His trial opened at the Old Synagogue in Pretoria on 22 October and my mother covered it for the Liberal magazine Contact. She was often the only one in the white section of the public gallery when Mandela entered each day; after raising his fist in the traditional ANC Amandla! salute to the packed black section he would turn and do the same to her, an acknowledgement she found very moving. Nearly thirty years later when she and I met him in the House of Commons in May 1991 she said: ‘I don’t suppose you remember me.’ To which he replied, giving her a great hug: ‘How could I forget!’

It was around this trial that I first became properly aware of Nelson Mandela’s importance. His beautiful wife Winnie attended the trial each day, often magnificent in tribal dress. Once, when my sisters went with Mom, Winnie bent down and kissed the two little blonde girls, to the evident outrage of the onlooking white policemen repulsed at the spectacle. But, although Mandela’s magnetic personality dominated the courtroom, it did not prevent him being sentenced to five years hard labour on Robben Island.

By now the world was beginning to mobilise against apartheid. On 6 November 1962 the General Assembly of the United Nations voted for sanctions against South Africa, and my parents had become friendly with two sympathetic officials in the Netherlands and West German Embassies. We got to know them too as our families mixed, and they both mentioned the difficulty of meeting non-whites socially and suggested that the Liberal Party host gatherings to remedy this. These were held in our house, what became known as our ‘diplomatic parties’, for me exciting occasions as I took to spotting the different models amongst the dozens of cars pulled up on our front drive.

Then our lives took a turn for the worse. In January 1963 my mother was summoned before the Chief Magistrate of Pretoria and warned to desist from engaging in activities ‘calculated to further the aims of communism’. He was unable to specify which of her activities fell within this definition and advised her to write to John Vorster, Minister of Justice, for clarification. The reply from his office merely repeated the phrase and then stated: ‘Should you so wish, you are of course at liberty to ignore the warning and, if as a result thereof, it is found necessary to take further action against you, you will only have yourself to blame.’ Aged thirteen, I remember very clearly a daily newspaper cartoon which had Vorster saying: ‘Go and find Adelaine Hain, see what she is doing and tell her she mustn’t.’

She was by now spending hours haunting the courts – sometimes dashing from building to building when ‘grapevine’ information told of yet another group of black detainees. She would find out their names, inform the parents and get legal representation if necessary. Many had been assaulted and tortured. I remember being distressed when she told me how one young man had been inflicted with electric shock torture and went completely out of his mind, staring vacantly into space.

Meanwhile my parents had been excited by John Kennedy winning the American Presidency and his sympathy for the civil rights movement led by the charismatic black preacher Martin Luther King. ‘There’s the answer to white South African prejudice,’ my Dad used to say, ‘how can anybody deny King is a highly intelligent man?’ Yet when confronted with this question, whites used to reply – ‘Yes, but he is not like our blacks: they really are inferior.’ You could not win with such prejudiced ignorance. (When Kennedy was assassinated on 22 November 1963, I can still remember the moment I saw the shocking news on billboards in Pretoria; a piece of hope in me died too.)

With Liberal activists like my parents proving increasingly troublesome to both the Security Police and Ministers, the government set about the systematic destruction of the Party. In Parliament the Minister of Justice, John Vorster (detained during the war for his pro-Nazi activities), accused Liberals of being communists in disguise and tantamount to terrorists. Government ministers stated in Parliament: ‘We will have to restrict the Liberal Party.’ A cartoon in the Pretoria News of 11 March 1963, titled ‘the Scapegoat’, had a goat marked ‘Liberal Party’ being dragged by a knife-wielding Vorster up a hill towards a sacrificial pyre at the summit, with Prime Minister Verwoerd and other government luminaries forming an applauding procession behind him.

During 1963 many prominent Liberals throughout the country were banned and the fear of repression increased almost daily. My parents warned me that life was going to get much more difficult as the government extended its police state by introducing the notorious law which increased to ninety days the twelve days for which people could be held without charge (and under which my parents were held in 1961). There was nothing we could do about this because it never occurred to me that they should give up their ideals for a more comfortable life.