Nadine Gordimer - A Sport of Nature

She went to the house of another couple whose child — a daughter, this one, a student and not a trade unionist — was in detention. Being Pauline she had neither sought an introduction through anybody nor telephoned first; just was there, with her great quick eyes ready to stare down timidity, scepticism or distrust, on the doorstep and then in the livingroom. The professor of chemistry and his wife found she had burst in not to commiserate in misfortune but to share action against it. Out of this intrusion on meek despair she became one of the founders of a committee of detainees’ parents; the professor and his wife became numbered among those who did not beg for mercy for their sons and daughters but demanded justice, and by justice meant nothing less than the abolition of laws, opposition to which had sent their young and thousands of others to prison — laws that in those years removed whole populations of black people from their homes and dumped them elsewhere at the will of whites; divided blacks’ own country into enclaves under dummy flags from beneath which blacks could not move about freely; kept education segregated in favour of white privilege; tried for treason leaders of non-violent opposition, turning it to violence; attacked black trade union action with mass dismissals, police intimidation, banning and imprisonment of officials; and created the last institution and edifice of white domination, the Parliament with three Houses provided by the State, one for Indians, one for people of mixed blood, one for whites — and none for the mass of the people, the blacks.

The Committee members, too, respected no conventions of how things were being done in the official best interests of the country. They would not be turned away from State doorsteps; they unearthed facts and figures — how many people were detained each month, each week, each day, and who they were — that were not revealed by the police or the Minister of Law and Order. They learnt to use Underground — or rather under-prison-wall — means by which they were able to inform the newspapers of a hunger strike among detainees anywhere in the country, while the police denied such a strike was taking place. They followed word-of-mouth to find the evidence of parents of black schoolchildren who were scooped into police vans and detained, in that long period of boycotts; they produced at public meetings in church halls (the only assembly places where there was some chance of proceeding without a ministerial ban) children of nine and ten whose precocity, here, was a terrible fluency to describe their experience of the cell, the solitude, the plate of pap pushed across the floor, the sanitary bucket and the beatings.

Black parents’ committees set up in the segregated townships, but they did not keep themselves apart from whites and the whites did not confine their concern to the smaller number of their own in detention but were active on behalf of the thousands of black sons and daughters; with her son shut away, Pauline received back the acceptance she had been deprived of when the Saturday morning children ceased to come singing up the brick-lined path in the garden laid waste with broken bottles and human shit.

The acceptance was happening at the same time as petrol bombs and limpet mines began to explode in streets where whites went by. Countless black children (even Pauline’s colleagues could not keep tally in the burning townships) had been killed; now the first white children were. This was the kind of bond between white and black the whites had not foreseen and were never to recognize.

Sasha also found ways and means. It was from Maximum Security that he wrote the last letter to his sibling cousin.

I am incommunicado, so might as well try to reach you. That’s not so much more hopeless than trying for anyone else now. Little Hendrik who comes on duty at night has smuggled in this paper for me. He had it under the plastic lining of his warder’s cap; just now, when he took off the cap, there it was. He’s about nineteen and has a double crown, the hair stood up all bright yellow and sticky-shiny He always wants to get out of my cell quickly because he’s agitated — he likes me, and is afraid of that. He likes me because I don’t curse him —gaan kak, Boer— the way the brave ones do. These maledictions are scratched into the walls where I’m kept .

I suppose there are prisons like this where you are, too. That’s a ridiculous thing to say — I’m not quite crazy, don’t decide that — of course there are prisons, but I mean ones where politicals are held. There surely have to be those. Every power has to put away what threatens it — that’s where the just and unjust causes meet. Okay, I know that, I accept it. Not cynically. I still believe. But l hope you don’t think about these places. Because it’s no good, you can’t imagine what it’s like. I had read so much — the Count of Monte Cristo to Dostoevsky to Gramsci! — and I thought I had a maximum security Baedeker in my head, I knew my way around every 7-by-7 cell, along every caged catwalk, saw the bit of sky through bars and had ready-paced-out the exercise yard, had my ingenuity kit to keep track of days with bits of unpicked thread. And the mouse or cockroach that would become a friend. (Sources: from Ruth First to Jeremy Cronin and Breytenbach.)

Even the business of the thread is wrong. I know every day when I wake up what day it is and whatever else has gone out of my head in seven months the calendar beside the phone in Point road is there, with the volk’s holidays figured in red, Day of the Vow that if Dingane killed Piet Retief it would be only whites killing blacks from then on, Family Day when the whites picnic and the dockworkers and miners get drunk alone in their single-sex hostels. Today is the 214th day I’ve been incommunicado .

Oh my mother has seen me, and Joe was here, there were two visits with him before he went back to London. But what is there to say. The reasons I’m here are not negotiable (as Joe would put it). I’m where I have to be. Yes, Joe, I want to overthrow the State, I can’t find a way to live in it and see others suffer in it, the way it is or the way it revises its names and its institutions — it’s still the same evil genie changing shapes, you have to smash the bottle from which it rises. Rhetoric. That’s the fancy language of my speechifying to unions that the Major reads back to me in interrogation. But I am my fancy language. I used to read a lot of poetry — as you know. Well, that’s my poetry. That’s the meaning of my life .

Oh I tell him: it’s fancy to you because even now when you can see it’s all up with white-man-baas, you see the real end as a ‘fancy’ you’ll knock out of the heads of a horde of ignorant blacks incited by romantic white radicals. The Major snorts with laughter (every mannerism these interrogators have that one wouldn’t notice in anyone else becomes piggish) when I say there is unbeatable purpose expressed in the horrible mishmash of Marxism, Castroism, Gandhism, Fanonism, Hyde Park tub-thumping (colonial heritage), Gawd-on-our-sideism (missionary heritage), Black Consciousness jargon, Sandinistism, Christian liberation theology with which we formulate. He thinks he’s getting somewhere with me. He thinks I’m beginning to have doubts, and they’ll soon be able to produce me as a State witness at somebody’s trial. He’s not getting anywhere. I have no doubts; I only see better than he does that if the means are confused, the end is not .

Gaan kak, Boer. I’ve always died a thousand deaths. You remember how when we went to the dentist as kids, I couldn’t eat breakfast, my knees and elbows were pressed together, I wanted my steps to take me backwards when the nurse called me to the chair. And the big fuss about the army I was always scared stiff I wouldn’t be able to stand things. But that was dread, which is fear of something that hasn’t yet happened. There are times when I’d do anything to get out. I’m craven. But never when I’m with the Major or his team. All the things you’ve read about have happened to me; even if my feet are swollen from standing and I have a thirst for sleep that’s the strongest desire I’ve ever known — Hillela, forget about sex — even then when they lead me back here I always have the feeling I’ve won .