Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

One day there may be a street named for the date. A great many people were detained, arrested or banned on 19th October 1977; many organizations and the only national black newspaper were banned. Most of the people were black — Africans, Indians, Coloureds. Most belonged to the Black Consciousness organizations — the Black People’s Convention, South African Students’ Organization, Soweto Students’ Representative Council, South African Student Movement, the Black Parents’ Association, and others, more obscure, whites had never heard of before. Some belonged to the underground organizations of the earlier, long banned, liberation movements. And some belonged to both. All — organizations, newspaper, individuals — appeared to have been freshly motivated for more than a year by the revolt of schoolchildren and students on the issue of inferior education for blacks. Hundreds of teachers had accepted the authority of the children’s school boycott and resigned in support of it. No persuasion, bribery, or strength of threat by the government had yet succeeded with the young and the elders to whom they were mentor; and the government, for its part, refused to abolish the separate system of education for blacks. However the situation was summed up the explanation remained simplistic. The majority of children in Soweto had never returned to school after June 1976.

A few white people were detained, arrested, house-arrested or banned on 19th October 1977, and in the weeks following. The Burger girl was one. She was taken away by three policemen who were waiting at her flat when she returned from work on an afternoon in November. The senior man was Captain Van Jaarseveld, who to make her feel at home with him under interrogation in one of the rooms with two chairs and a table, reminded her that he had known her father well.

She was detained without charges. Like thousands of other people taken into custody all over the country, she might be kept for weeks, months, several years, before being let out again. But her lawyer, Theo Santorini, had reason to believe — indeed, a public prosecutor himself had indicated in a moment of professionally-detached indiscretion during one of their frequent encounters when the courts adjourned for tea or lunch — that the State was expecting to gather evidence to bring her to Court in an important breakthrough for Security — a big trial — at last — of Kgosana’s wife. — That one — he said; and Santorini smiled his plump, sad cherub smile. That was the important one. For many years he had been engaged with the same prosecutor in the running battle for tattered legalities by which he had got Marisa Kgosana acquitted time and again. The government — police probably even more so, because as they complained to her lawyer, she ‘gave them a hard time’, offering not so much as one of her red fingernails’ length of co-operation when they were only doing their duty — the Minister of Justice wanted her out of the way, inside, convicted for a long stretch. The public prosecutor, so far as Kgosana was concerned, made a suggestion for her own good, quite objectively, in the form of a warning to Santorini. It would be better for this client of his not to risk airing, in answer to allegations being made about her at the Commission of Inquiry into the Soweto Riots then in session, any line of defence that might be useful to the prosecution in the event of a future case brought against her. He would do best not to press for her to be ‘produced’—for Marisa was in detention, too.

Prisons for women awaiting trial and women detainees are not among the separate amenities the country prides itself on providing. Where Rosa and Clare Terblanche found themselves held there were also Coloured, Indian and African women; different colours and grades of pigmentation did not occupy adjoining cells or those served by the same lavatories and baths, nor were they allowed into the prison yard at the same time, but the prison was so old that actual physical barriers against internal communication were ramshackle and the vigilance of the female warders, mini-skirted novices dedicated to the Chief Matron as to the abbess of an Order, could not prevent messages, the small precious gifts of prison economy (cigarettes, a peach, a tube of hand-cream, a minute electric torch) from being exchanged between the races. Or songs. Early on, Marisa’s penetrating, wobbly contralto announced her presence not far off, from her solitary confinement to Rosa’s, and Clare’s. She sang hymns, piously gliding in and out of the key of ‘Abide with me’ to ANC freedom songs in Xhosa, and occasionally bursting into Miriam Makeba’s click song — this last to placate and seduce the wardresses, for whom it was a recognizable pop number. The voices of other black women took up and harmonized whatever she sang, quickly following the changes in the repertoire. The black common law prisoners eternally polishing Matron’s granolithic cloister, round the yard, picked up tiny scrolled messages dropped when Rosa and Clare were allowed to go out to empty their slops or do their washing, and in the same way the cleaning women delivered messages to them. Marisa was at once the most skilled of political old lags and the embodiment, the avatar of some kind of authority even Matron could not protect herself against: Marisa got permission to be escorted to Rosa’s cell twice weekly for therapeutic exercises for a spinal ailment she said was aggravated by sedentary life in prison. Laughter escaped. through the thick diamond-mesh and bars of Rosa’s cell during these sessions. Although detainees were not allowed writing materials for any purpose other than letters which were censored by Chief Warder Magnus Cloete before being mailed, Rosa asked for sketching materials. A ‘Drawing Book’ of the kind used in kindergartens and a box of pastels were delivered by her lawyer and passed scrutiny. The wardresses found baie, baie mooi (they talked with her in their mother tongue, which was also hers) the clumsy still lifes with which she attempted to teach herself what she had claimed was her ‘hobby’, and the naive imaginary landscape that could rouse no suspicions that she might be incorporating plans of the lay-out of the prison etc. — it represented, in a number of versions, a village covering a hill with a castle on the apex, a wood in the foreground, the sea behind. The stone of the houses seemed to give a lot of trouble: it was tried out in pinks, greys, even brownish orange. She had been more successful with the gay flags on the battlements of the castle and the bright sails of tiny boats, although through some failure of perspective they were sailing straight for the tower. The light appeared to come from everywhere; all objects were sunny. At Christmas detainees were allowed to send home-made cards to a reasonable number of relatives or friends. Rosa’s was a scene banally familiar to Chief Warder Cloete from any rack of greeting cards — a group of carol singers, and only the delighted recipients could recognize, unmistakably, despite the lack of skill with which the figures were drawn, Marisa, Rosa, Clare, and an Indian associate of them all; and understood that these women were in touch with each other, if cut off from the outside world.

Theo Santorini did not repeat, even to those closest to Rosa Burger’s family over many years, the strong probability that the State would try to establish collusion of Rosa with Marisa in conspiracy to further the aims of Communism and/or the African National Congress. The charges would allege incitement, and aiding and abetting of the students’ and schoolchildren’s revolt.

His discretion has not prevented speculation. What Rosa did in her last two weeks in London is unclear. She did have contact with Leftist exiles, after all. She was at a rally (informers are inclined to up-grade their information) for Frelimo leaders, where her presence was honoured by a speech, delivered by one of his former close associates, lauding her father, Lionel Burger. That much was under surveillance, and will certainly appear in any indictment. She apparently abandoned without explanation an intention to go into exile in France, where the French Anti-Apartheid Movement was ready to regard her as a cockade in its cap. She told no one, no one, how she occupied her time, between the meeting with old associates at the rally or party and her return. It’s reasonable to suppose she could have been planning with others, putting herself at the service of the latest strategy of the struggle that will go on until the last prisoner comes off Robben Island and the last sane dissident is let out of an Eastern European asylum. Who could believe children could revolt of their own volition? The majority of white people advance the theory of agitators (unspecified), and the banned and underground organizations adopt the revolt as part of their own increased momentum, if not direct inspiration. Sailors gag on stinking meat, children refuse to go to school. No one knows where the end of suffering will begin.