Roots of Outrage

Michael Sullivan walked to a bench marked ‘Europeans Only’. where an elderly woman was sitting with her two grandchildren. They moved up to make space for him. Sullivan placed his suitcase down beside him at the end, then moved it back to make it less conspicuous. He consulted his watch, then began to read a newspaper.

It was fifteen minutes before the first rush-hour train was due. As the minutes ticked by the long platform began to fill up. The blacks and Coloureds hurried past Sullivan, and the whites began to collect in the area in front of him, waiting impatiently. Michael Sullivan looked at his newspaper sightlessly. By five o’clock there were at least two hundred people, he estimated. Over there on the big concourse people were now hurrying in all directions to different platforms. Michael Sullivan stood up. He folded his newspaper and moved away down the crowded platform, trying to look like a man wanting to stretch his legs. He wandered off through the throng, tapping his newspaper on his leg. When he reached the concourse he increased his pace.

He strode away through the crowd, side-stepping people, until he got to the big entrance, then he broke into a run. He tried to make it a jog, like a man in a bit of a hurry – he had practised this, and timed the distances involved – but panic gripped him and he sprinted, dodging people, making for the two telephone boxes across the parking area. He raced up to the nearest box; across the dial was his handwritten adhesive tape reading ‘Out of Order’. He ripped it off, rammed coins into the slot and dialled 999 feverishly.

He shouted: ‘There’s a bomb in a suitcase about to go off in ten minutes on Johannesburg Station! Clear the area! This is a warning from the anti-apartheid forces of freedom!’

He slammed down the telephone, and he felt the vomit rise in his guts. He clutched his chest and reeled out of the box, taking deep breaths. But once the vomit was forced back, what he felt was elation. He had done it! He had done his duty as instructed! Only he could have done it because no black man in his cell could have sat down on a Europeans-Only bench. He had done it! And he’d given the bastards enough time to clear the station – a lot of Johannesburg’s first-class whites-only passengers would be very late getting home tonight. He lifted his head to listen for the police sirens: but instead he heard a thud. He jerked, and looked at the big station, and he saw glass flying up into the air. He stared, horrified, aghast. Then he heard the screams, and saw the pandemonium, the people reeling out.

Michael Sullivan stared in horror. Then he vomited. He retched and staggered away into rush-hour Johannesburg.

Politics. They tried not to talk about politics, but those bombs kept going off, and now lives were going up with them. Patti was shaken when they heard of the first life lost; she was absolutely shocked by the Johannesburg Station blast that killed nine people and wounded over thirty. But she vehemently denied that any of them were Mandela’s bombs – they must have been Poqo’s, or that white student group called the African Resistance Movement.

‘Our policy is no loss of life … And anyway what alternative is there? We can’t wage a guerrilla war like Castro did because we haven’t got Cuba’s mountains and jungles, and South Africa is buffered by the European colonies to the north – Mozambique, Rhodesia, Angola. We have no option except classical urban guerrilla warfare.’

Jesus. Classic urban guerrilla warfare? ‘How do you know about urban guerrilla warfare?’

‘I don’t know anything – you’re the one who’s had the military training, not me. But it’s common sense – guerrillas need sanctuaries when the pressure is on, like mountains and jungles. And friendly neighbouring states where they can get supplies. Well, the ANC hasn’t got that.’

‘South Africa has got mountains and dense bush. The mountains of Basutoland, the Drakensberg, Swaziland, all that vast bush –’

‘Yes, but we’re surrounded to the north by hostile territory – the Portuguese in Mozambique and Angola, the British in Rhodesia – so it’s very difficult for us to get supplies through.’

‘Castro,’ Mahoney said, ‘had no friendly neighbouring territories either. Cuba is surrounded by sea.’

‘Exactly. So he could get his supplies by sea –’

‘So is South Africa surrounded by sea – almost three thousand miles of coastline.’

‘But South Africa’s got a powerful navy –’

‘Bullshit, we’ve got a very small navy. Castro was faced by the United States Navy. Even a United States naval base on the island, which is there to this very day.’

She cried, ‘So what’s your point?’

‘The point, darling, is that Castro and eighty men – only eighty – landed off the yacht Granma on the coast of Cuba and ran straight into gunfire. Only three years later Castro marched triumphant into Havana, despite all the odds against him.’

‘So?’

‘And Mao Tse-tung didn’t have any friendly territories to supply him either. On the contrary he had the whole might of America and Chiang Kai-shek dropping bombs on him –

‘So – what’s the point?’

He only knew that he did not accept that South Africa and its borders were unsuitable terrain for guerrilla warfare. The point was that although he rejected communism he admired Castro as a soldier. He admired Mao Tse-tung as a soldier. They had tremendous odds against them but they waged courageous and efficient guerrilla wars. Efficient – that was the point. The ANC and their MK were inefficient. The ANC had been in existence fifty years, apartheid had been in existence for fourteen years and all the ANC had managed was bombs. They had not liberated one square foot of territory. Bombs were bad soldiering. Oh, he admired Mandela’s courage, but as a soldier he was no Castro, no Mao Tse-tung. He was pissing into the wind with his bombs – it would all come back at him. Soon he would be caught and hanged and then the police would run rings around MK; the Spear of the Nation would flap around like a chicken without its head.

‘The point is bombs won’t get you anywhere in this hard-arsed, well-armed, heavily policed Afrikaner country. Bombs are no good unless they’re part of a well-fought guerrilla war, where they’re aimed at military installations and industry – otherwise they’re counter-productive, especially when they start killing people. Nobody respects a bomber, they hate him. Unless they wage a proper guerrilla war the ANC will lose international sympathy, and that is all they’ve got going for them. And bombs will only make the government more repressive.’

‘Could they be more repressive?’

‘Sure. How about concentration camps of suspects, like the British did during the Boer War?’ He snorted. ‘We’ve only begun to see apartheid legislation. If they decide to get really tough that’ll be bad news for you and me.’

‘So we should just give up, should we?’ she countered aggressively. ‘Mandela and MK are wasting their time?’

‘Mandela should be devoting his considerable brainpower and courage to organizing a guerrilla army, not fucking about with home-made bombs and sticking his head in a noose. It’s a quixotic waste of good manpower. And suicidal. If bombs are all MK’s good for, forget about them. And forget about the ANC, because what good is a liberation movement without an army? It’s a paper tiger.’

Her eyes flashed. ‘Bullshit! They’ll do it with urban guerrilla warfare!’

‘They’ll fail. They’ll shoot themselves in the foot.’

She glared at him. ‘You think the ANC are useless, don’t you? You don’t think they can run the country –’

‘I’m not saying that –’

But, ah yes, he was saying something like that. Patti wanted one-man-one-vote tomorrow, but look at the Congo – were those blacks capable of running the country? Look at Ghana, look at Uganda … Of course Mahoney wanted apartheid abolished tomorrow, of course he wanted a happy multi-racial South Africa. But the only way democracy would come to Africa was gradually, with political education. One-man-one-vote tomorrow would create chaos.

‘But I don’t believe there’ll be chaos,’ Patti said; ‘I believe the experienced ANC leadership will prevent the type of chaos that’s happening in the Congo. But if chaos is what it takes to get rid of apartheid, so be it. If we’ve got to blow the whole government to kingdom come to achieve a just society, so be it.’

He smiled. No use arguing with her. ‘You really are a communist, aren’t you? Tear down the whole structure, rebuild on the ruins?’

‘I’m a socialist, darling. Not a Marxist. And so are you, in your secret racist heart.’

‘Me a socialist?’

‘Of a sort. I couldn’t love you if you weren’t just. You also think there’s got to be a redistribution of wealth in this country. A redistribution of land, for a start. Housing – why should the vast majority of urban blacks live in hovels while the whites live in nice suburbs? The state must provide decent housing. The mines, and big industry – why should the blacks, who create the wealth, receive miserable wages while the fat white shareholders get the big profits? Obviously, the commanding heights of commerce must be nationalized, like the coal and steel industry in Britain.’ She spread her hands. ‘That hardly makes me a communist, any more than Harold Wilson … ’ She sat up straight. ‘And now can we please stop talking about bloody politics? Weekends are supposed to be for us …’

But you couldn’t avoid politics in South Africa because you lived with it. And with those bombs. And with the government’s new laws to deal with it all. That year the Defence Act was beefed up to give the army wider powers to suppress internal disorder, the period of military training was extended and a police reserve was created. Police powers of interrogation, control of suspects and witnesses were drastically increased: now they were empowered to detain a suspect in solitary confinement, without access to a lawyer and without a criminal charge being laid, for successive periods of twelve days. The state already had the power to ban and banish people and organizations, but now new legislation gave them the power to condemn people to house-arrest without a trial. The Prisons Act forbade the press from reporting on conditions in jails, and new legislation empowered the state to hold suspects incommunicado, which made it impossible for a prisoner to prove he had suffered third-degree treatment. Magistrates holding inquests were frequently hearing how suspects were ‘having accidents’, slipping on soap in the showers, falling down staircases, ‘committing suicide’ by throwing themselves out of high windows, hanging themselves, being ‘shot in self-defence’ when attacking their interrogators, ‘shot escaping custody’: the new laws made it impossible to refute this new tendency of suspects to injure and kill themselves. The editor of Drum gave Mahoney the task of reporting on all such inquests. ‘Build up a case file against the bastards.’

‘God,’ Mahoney said to Patti, ‘it’s getting like Orwell’s 1984.’

‘Do you still,’ Patti said, ‘consider that Mandela shouldn’t plant bombs?’

Oh Jesus, he didn’t know anymore. He would like to see the government blown to smithereens too.

‘God help Mandela when his luck runs out …’

It was not long before Nelson Mandela’s luck did run out.

He was disguised as a chauffeur, driving a shiny Jaguar through the rolling green countryside of Natal. It was a tertiary road, only used by country folk, a needle-in-a-haystack road, which made it impossible that the police were so lucky to just pick the right one. Their ambush was massive. Mandela drove straight into it: within moments his car was surrounded by firearms.

It was an agent of the American CIA, a professional going about America’s covert business, who had heard on the underground grapevine of Mandela’s movements, asked President John F. Kennedy for the green light, then tipped off the South African police. Within hours the whole world knew of the triumph of the forces of law and order.

As Mahoney had said, bombs lose international sympathy.

15 (#ulink_10d98c36-12d5-59da-b4ac-cc5a6ed6b6e3)

The Spear of the Nation was broken. The bombs spluttered out. ‘Which,’ as Mahoney wrote in an article for the Globe, who sometimes published his work, ‘is not surprising in view of the massive armoury of draconian legislation the state has assembled to suppress dissent. It can lock you up, without a trial, even before you have dissented. But what is surprising is the case of the State versus Nelson Mandela. The police know that he was the commander of MK, directly and indirectly responsible for the recent spate of bombings, liable therefore to the death penalty: but he was only charged with incitement and leaving the country without a passport. With the laws of human rights and habeas corpus in tatters, with suspects regularly “committing suicide” by leaping from windows, it is surprising that Mandela wasn’t also a victim of Newton’s law of gravity; or that evidence of his bombing was not “discovered” – a fingerprint here, a bit of explosive there, an eyewitness or two – which would have ensured he succumbed to gravity on the hangman’s trapdoor. But, no: three years’ imprisonment is all Mandela has received – a mere slap on the wrist.

‘But as the ANC evidently rule out the possibility of a Castro-style guerrilla war because the buffer states are in unfriendly colonial hands, and as their urban guerrilla war has flapped to a standstill, they are reduced to a couple of offices in the “sanctuary state” of newly independent Tanzania and London. Doubtless they’ll get a trickle of refugees from South Africa who have the guts to cross hostile territory to reach them, but what are they going to do with them? Train them in Russia, then send them back as urban guerrillas? Big deal: more cannon-fodder for the draconian security legislator.