We could chastise our servants if our shirts were not washed and ironed when we needed them; we could complain to them if we didn’t like the sandwiches they had prepared for our school lunches. The fact that the servants were all older and more experienced in life than we were didn’t matter. We were white and they were black: that was what mattered. This domestic picture shows, of course, only the more benign side of white South African life at that time. The malign side was the cruelty and violence by which apartheid was sustained.
Even as small children, some of us knew that there was something wrong with this picture. Perhaps all of us knew it, but some chose to suppress it. At the age of three or four I asked my mother, “Why are the black people all poor and the white people all rich?” I don’t remember saying it, and I certainly don’t remember what she replied. But she told me that I said it. It wasn’t profound or sensitive; it was in those circumstances the most ordinary question in the world, and I’m sure millions of black and white children asked their mothers the same question. But that something fundamental was wrong with South Africa I knew from an early age. And I believed that the thing that was wrong needed to be corrected.
My family lifestyle was typical of that of liberal, decent, well-meaning people. My parents were relatively well-off even by white standards. We had three servants, who lived in rooms in the back of our house—rooms that by law were not permitted to be physically joined to the main house (but they were near enough that the servants were within calling distance). My mother and father were kind to their servants: they paid them somewhat better than did their friends and neighbors; they treated them with respect and felt some kind of obligation to look after them. This attitude was widely called liberal guilt, and probably to some extent was just that. I know that the same could probably be said for some slave owners in the nineteenth century, so I don’t romanticize this attitude. I merely record it. Despite the real affection that existed between our family and the servants, I give my parents credit for never describing any of them as “members of the family.” They knew the difference and regarded that kind of cozy liberalism as repulsive and dishonest. Few white South Africans ever saw one of these so-called “members of the family” actually sit down with the family at a meal.
Politically, my parents were precise and clear about their attitudes toward apartheid. They hated it. They thought it was evil. And they would not, like the vast majority of white South Africans, accept it as inevitable, eternal, or unchangeable. This certainty made them different from their friends and acquaintances.
My mother was a liberal. She was also a Liberal. The former meant that she despised racial discrimination and prejudice. The latter, that she was a paid-up member of the South African Liberal Party. This meant that she was prepared to be publicly recognized as an opponent of apartheid and prepared to pay the cost of that recognition. The cost was not high, but it was real. The fifties and early sixties saw the passage and implementation of draconian laws discouraging and then forbidding political opposition to the governing National Party. The Liberal Party was implacably opposed to apartheid, but it tried to maintain that opposition within the framework of the law. That was its weakness. It was pretty much gutted as a political force despite the immense courage of such individual leaders as Alan Paton, Peter Brown, and dozens of others of equal fortitude and determination.
As the laws against political opposition tightened, Liberals became more and more marginalized, and it took more and more courage to declare oneself a party member. In my mother’s case, the penalties were that some of her friends, out of realistic and understandable fear of being tainted with the Liberal brush, stopped greeting her; our telephone was tapped by the police; and we were occasionally watched by policemen in large cars sitting outside our house. Most known Liberals were subjected to this kind of treatment and worse, but to compare that to the subjugation endured by any black person in the country for a single day is to realize how easy even white Liberals had it.
My father, a fairly successful wholesale grocer who joined his own father in business, espoused a communist political ideology. Like many Jews of his generation, he seemed to regard the communist program for change as historically inevitable and, in a sense, messianic. It described the route to world peace and harmony among the nations of the world—after the small matter of a successful proletarian revolution had taken place, of course! Now, looking back at his lectures about capitalism, I recognize that my father was naive in his belief that the Russian Revolution had solved the big problems. At the time, however, it seemed deadly serious, particularly in the South African context. He saw the need in South Africa for a violent overthrow of the government and looked forward to the death of the marketplace. This view, I might parenthetically add, has still not been proved wrong, for despite the changes that have taken place, the basic problem of South Africa’s poor/rich divide still seems very far from being solved.
So there my parents were: united in their hatred of the evil of apartheid but different in their beliefs about how that evil could be eradicated. My mother believed that apartheid could be abolished by legal, constitutional means; there was enough goodwill and, perhaps, fear for the future, in the white community. She believed in one-person, one-vote, and at one time thought this could be implemented if only the people in power would see the light. (In this, the Liberals proved to be right, after all.) My father was adamant that change could not come about without a violent revolution and a proletarian dictatorship.
Of course, I oversimplify both their positions. Neither was a fool. But I think I capture the essential difference between them and between the radical and the liberal lefts, both of which were regarded with deep suspicion by most whites and lumped together as traitors and communists. The black population, I think it is fair to say, regarded all anti-apartheid activity with approval, but not with a great deal of confidence. To them, apartheid was so deeply entrenched as to have begun to seem eternal, even part of God’s larger plan. In the end, neither the liberals nor the radicals fully prevailed. In the end, apartheid was defeated by the power of money and those forces of established authority that wished to see a stable and prosperous nation emerge out of the morass of violence; corruption; and, above all, economic decline that characterized the closing years of the apartheid era.
IN THE MEANTIME, my mother did more than simply join the Liberal Party and attend its meetings. One day, shortly after the so-called Sharpeville massacre in 1960, when white people were arrested on a scale not seen before in South Africa, a strange man came to our front door. He was the brother of a woman who had been detained in accordance with the recently passed emergency measures designed by the government to suppress political dissent in the white communities. The law now gave the police the right to detain indefinitely any person they deemed a threat to national security. This was a power they had always possessed with regard to black people—in fact if not in law—and it was now extended to include whites. This man told my mother that he had heard that she was sympathetic to the political prisoners and wanted to know if she would be willing to take food and supplies to his sister, who was in prison in Pretoria, where we lived. He lived in another town and wasn’t able to do this himself. Without hesitation my mother agreed. He offered to pay her for the items for his sister but my mother refused to accept money. Soon after that other relatives of other prisoners came to Pretoria (where the main detention center for political prisoners was located), and soon my mother was taking several parcels each day. She was one of two people in Pretoria willing to do this service, which she did faithfully until she left the country years later. She endangered herself by doing this. The police were more open in watching our house and tapping our phone and physically threatening her at the gates of the prison. Only the best of her old friends kept in touch. Many cut her in the street and ended all contact with the family.
I was at this time an undergraduate student in a small university in Grahamstown in the Cape Province. I was involved, though never in a central way, in liberal politics in the town. I would attend anti-apartheid demonstrations and, with my university student colleagues, was subjected to abuse and small acts of violence by local youths who loathed us because we were students—members of what they correctly perceived as an elite—and also because we spoke out against the apartheid system that sustained them. To the working-class, poorer white South Africans, apartheid gave a style of living that uneducated and disadvantaged people could not hope to possess anywhere else in the world. It granted them literal social superiority, encoded in the laws of the land and supported by the organized religious communities with only a few notable and honorable exceptions. And it was this advantage that our opponents believed (correctly) that we, the privileged and the educated, were fighting to take away from them. They truly hated us.
MY POLITICAL ACTIVITIES continued in this way for my first year at university. In the meantime, apartheid became more and more deeply entrenched. The police powers of persecution, arrest, detention, torture, and spying seemed only to increase. Laws fortifying an apparently omnipotent ruling party became more draconian and cruel. The Liberal Party was finally banned, not because it broke any laws, but simply because it stood against the system of racial separation. Liberalism, in that context of violent oppression, seemed to me a hopeless remedy for what ailed South Africa, and I came to the conclusion that to fight apartheid with reason and argument was futile. Now it seemed obvious to me that my father had always been right; that the fight against this system of violent suppression required violence. How could you stop a machine like the South African Police Force, which was possessed of almost unlimited physical and political power? The police were virtually a law unto themselves and were permitted to continue to suppress dissent and oppositional politics with the support and connivance of the nation’s legislature. In everyday life, their arrogance was most vividly expressed in the way in which they treated black South Africans. You had to be willfully oblivious to avoid seeing the casual brutality—the random, easy contempt and physical violence—with which black people were treated on a daily basis.
The images are vivid and clear; there were black people everywhere and there were white police officers everywhere; so we all saw it, and in seeing it, we recognized our helplessness: a white policeman slapping a black man in the face for being “cheeky”; a white policeman brutally throwing a black man or woman into a police van for the crime of not having his or her pass in order; a white policeman kicking and punching a black man for some minor transgression. And this is only what we saw in the streets every day. What went on in the police stations and police cars we knew as well—torture and murder were normal occurrences. And they were brought to public attention only in the most egregious circumstances that never once, to my knowledge, resulted in appropriate punishment of the police. The very presence of black people in South Africa was regarded as an affront that had to be kept under control; and the means of that control was violence.
Violence, in other words, was everywhere; it was real to all South Africans no matter what their color. They all saw it, they all knew about it, and they almost all went along with it, having little choice in the matter. To be white was to collaborate with apartheid; to be white was to have privilege forced upon you; and few people had the strength to resist its blandishments. Of course, it was the black people who endured the violence and the white people who watched it. Some thought about the possibility of change—all black people did, and some white people. How to bring that change about was the problem. Liberal-minded white people were motivated in their desire for change largely by a sense of fairness and a hatred of racial doctrines. The more radical-minded leftists were motivated by a sense that this was a class rather than a racial conflict and that it was an international struggle for a new world order.
ONE DAY during term, I was sitting on the library steps, enjoying the sunshine. A graduate student I knew slightly came over to me, interrupting my reverie with a friendly kick to my shoe. He was only slightly older than I, but much wiser, smarter, better read, and brilliantly articulate. He was well known around the campus as possessing radical, left-wing views and being well able to defend them.
“So,” he said, eschewing the niceties, “How do you think we can put an end to apartheid?”
“Only by violence,” I replied.
"Come to my house at nine tonight.” His voice was low, melodramatic, and conspiratorial. And that was how it began. He had found out something about my views from one or two of my political friends, and had decided to try me out. I remember feeling sudden excitement, flattered to be noticed by this leading campus intellectual. It was obvious to me that I was being recruited, and I immediately assumed that it was for the African National Congress (ANC), which had already embarked on a campaign of violent resistance.
That evening, at Michael’s home, about seven people gathered, all of whom I had seen before, but none of whom I knew well. Michael made a long introductory speech. He told us why he had asked us to meet: he had sounded us out individually and concluded that we shared the belief that apartheid could only be defeated by a violent struggle. He then talked about the nature of this struggle and described how it might be managed. The idea, very simply, was that people like us—educated, middle-class, and advantaged—would attempt to foment a revolution of the black working and rural classes. He hinted at financial sources and talked about the success of the Cuban Revolution against Fulgencio Batista, only a couple of years earlier, which gave hope to revolutionaries around the world. He picked up from a table Che Guevara’s Handbook, the mere possession of which in those days could have netted him a year in jail. That small action of producing a banned book galvanized us. Suddenly the danger was apparent. We were joining forces with the proletariat and being inducted into an organization whose purpose was the violent overthrow of the South African government. It was exciting and frightening. Looking back now, it seems absurd; it was absurd. But the danger was real, as we were all to discover over the next couple of years, and that made it serious.
After offering anyone with misgivings the opportunity to leave, Michael then informed us that we were now members of the National Committee for the Liberation of South Africa. Questions and discussion followed. Were we in any way affiliated with Nelson Mandela and the ANC? This was the question everyone was waiting for. Why, if there already existed a fully formed, larger, more powerful movement with the same aims as those laid out in his speech, were we forming another movement? It was no secret, Michael said, that the ANC was funded by, assisted by, and loyal to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Many South Africans who were eager for the overthrow of the National Party were very hostile to the communists. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 had been brutally stamped out, and the Russians had shown themselves indifferent to human rights. Although many left-leaning South Africans were reluctant to break completely with the Russians, the evidence was too obvious to be ignored. Several of us were Jews, and Soviet repression of Jews was a factor in our distrust of the communists. So Michael’s argument for a new organization satisfied most of us. For myself, I would have been delighted if he had represented the ANC. But I was satisfied to be part of the revolution regardless of party. Indeed, a couple of years later, I actually approached a known ANC member and was on the verge of being brought into that movement when the Rivonia arrests took place and ANC activity was severely truncated.
Michael gave us tracts and books to read, textbooks on how to start a revolution and how to keep one going. Who were we? Michael was in his early twenties; there were two men in their late twenties, one an older graduate student, the other a newly hired assistant professor. I was twenty, and there were two or three others of about our age. And we were going to help turn the country upside down. The means we would use to effect this revolution were supposed to exclude the taking of innocent human life. Indeed, the idea of injuring or killing anyone was appalling, though we did anticipate that if the revolution actually took off, government soldiers would inevitably be targets of our attack, as we would most certainly be of theirs. But our plans specifically forbade the taking of innocent life as we pursued our revolutionary goals. We believed that sabotage would be a chief means of encouraging revolution. We were going to attack government and military targets—communications installations, for example. These were vulnerable by being dependent upon electrical power. The successful dynamiting of one key pylon could disrupt the power supply to a large number of homes and signal to the authorities the presence of an oppositional force. Another appeal of such attacks was that the pylons were unguarded, and it was possible to attack them in isolated areas where there were unlikely to be people about. Our success as a revolutionary force would be visible in the support of the native population, who would join us in the struggle, which was, after all, their struggle.
And that was the beginning of it all. As the year wore on, our little group met frequently. “Actions,” as they were called, were taking place in the large urban areas of Cape Town and Johannesburg. Several of us were eager to “do” an action in Grahamstown, but our leaders wisely recognized that in a small town like ours it would take the police about ten minutes to realize who the culprits were and to arrest all of us. Some of us, not including me, participated in acts of sabotage in Johannesburg. But for the most part we were fairly isolated, and our largest achievement as a revolutionary group was the building of links with the local African community.
TWO OR SO YEARS after this began, I left the university and found a job as a high-school teacher in Johannesburg. There I became more deeply involved in the affairs of the group. I was put in touch with a man who instructed me on the making of detonators and bombs, though the fact is that I’m technologically stupid, and it’s lucky that I was never called on to exercise this particular skill. I had an apartment in the city where I hid dynamite and other accoutrements of bomb-making, such as timing devices and detonators. I was given the job of purchasing some of the parts, most of which were innocent in themselves, but likely to arouse suspicion if purchased in bulk. So, one afternoon I disguised myself slightly by wearing a pair of glasses and changing my hairstyle. Armed with a story about buying goods for my father’s shop, I went off very nervously. Now it all seems silly, and I know that I looked ridiculous. I remember the conversation with the salesman who served me being awkward and implausible; still, if I had been suspected and reported, I would undoubtedly have been arrested.
In truth, we were quite amateurish, though we tried not to be; revolutions are seldom started by professionals and experts. We were for the most part a group of incorrigibly bourgeois, overprotected, family-oriented, nonviolent young people who, on some level, understood the implications of what we were doing. But our experience of revolution was gleaned from books; it wasn’t, as with our black colleagues and friends, the real experience of continuous, violent physical oppression—although some in our group were to find out more about that later on. One day my contact, the bomb-making instructor, having spent the afternoon with me, accidentally left his wallet in my car. So, although he had been careful about concealing his real identity from me, it was suddenly in my possession. I called him that night at home to tell him that I had his wallet. He was a mathematics teacher at the University of the Witwatersrand who was later kidnapped by the South African police from his home in Zambia, drugged, and bundled back to South Africa where he was formally arrested. Only the intervention of Zambian prime minister Kenneth Kaunda secured his release.
Here my own story deviates from that of the mainstream. In Johannesburg I was connected with the old group, now renamed the African Resistance Movement (ARM), one member of which was the same Michael who had originally brought us together and with whom I developed a close friendship. At the same time, though, I made contact with the ANC. I had become impatient with the ARM and did not think the reasons for a separate and much weaker revolutionary movement to be sufficient. I thought our movement was too small, too limited in its possibilities, and I wanted to move on to something that was demonstrably more active and more involved in the African community. It was known that black South Africans made up the bulk of the ANC, that its leadership was black, and, despite its known communist ties, it seemed to promise a real chance of revolution.
Our own party had made few inroads into black South Africa, which was, after all, the ostensible and ultimate source of the revolutionary success. I was directed, in other words, more by practical possibility than ideological difference. I met an ANC contact in a Johannesburg coffee shop and talked about joining the party. I made it clear, as well, that I would have no objection to joining the Communist Party along with the ANC if that was to be a condition of membership. For all its nastiness to its own citizens, the Russians alone of all the major powers invested money, material, training, and education in support of the South African Revolution. I was now ready to become more actively involved.
AND THEN, quite suddenly, disaster struck me, personally. Because of a clumsy orthopedic surgeon in Pretoria who had injected cortisone into my left knee with a dirty needle, I developed a dangerous infection in my leg. I was rendered unconscious, rushed to the hospital, and lived for two months in danger of amputation. Slowly, after several operations, I returned to health. My time in the hospital and in recovery—a total of five months—coincided with stepped-up revolutionary activity by all parties. And I was left out of it. By the time I had regained most of the use of my leg, the Rivonia trial of Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and the others was under way. The trial was in my hometown of Pretoria, where the South African Supreme Court sat, and I managed to attend it each day.
It was a riveting event. My ANC connection in Johannesburg brought me into contact with family members of some of those on trial. I was, of course, photographed by the police when I spoke outside the courthouse with these people. And I was proud to be seen with them, though I realized that the chances of my being arrested were good, simply because of the association. I listened to the magnificent pre-sentencing speeches of the men who had risked their lives to save the country. To the surprise of most South Africans, and the huge relief of the families of the prisoners, none of the men on trial was given the death penalty—no doubt because of the massive presence of the world media in Pretoria. It was certainly not because of any squeamishness about capital punishment on the part of the judiciary, which had already given South Africa one of the highest rates of capital punishment in the world.
One night I was walking in Johannesburg with Harry, a good friend who also happened to be a member of the ARM. We bumped into another friend who looked anxious and harried. She told us that her ex-husband had been arrested along with two or three others associated with the ARM leadership. Harry and I had been discussing his dissatisfaction with the ARM program and the threat he had received when he told the leadership that he wanted out of the movement. The news of the arrests scared us. Our attempts at secrecy as to who was involved in the movement had not been successful. A certain amount of bravado and boasting by members led to too many people knowing too much. We feared a chain reaction, and we knew that the South African police would use torture to get information. Because I had been pretty much an invalid for several months and never involved in an action I felt fairly immune, but Harry knew he was in danger.
As we suspected, other arrests followed shortly. Torture, both physical and psychological, was used, and, predictably, some detainees had greater powers of resistance than others. Each day we would read the newspapers to see who had been arrested where. At first there was a sweep through Cape Town, where people suspected or known by us to be group members were seized one by one. There were occasional stories of escape, too. Notably, there was one man who asked the police to wait while he packed some clothes, slipped out his back door and, after several days on the run, crossed the border with his girlfriend on a motorbike. Stories also filtered through the system too about how our colleagues were holding up or how quickly they were broken down. It was all unnerving because all unknown. The possibility of death sentences being handed down was real—even for someone like me who had had so little to do with the working of the movement in so many months. The fact that the Rivonia defendants had not been executed was no guarantee that this would not happen to us.
SOON AFTER, something dramatic and terrifying happened. A bomb in a suitcase was placed near a bench in the white section of the Johannesburg railway station. When it exploded, a seventy-year-old woman was killed and one other person injured. Almost immediately the police arrested two men, both associated with the ARM. Although we knew that this kind of action was directly contrary to established policy, it was undeniable that the two belonged to our group. Those of us on the periphery wondered what had happened and what the connection to the ARM actually was. On the night of the bombing, my parents and I were in Johannesburg, taking my sister to catch the train back to university in Cape Town. The bomb had exploded a short while earlier, and though we were aware of the heavy police presence, and knew that a bomb had gone off in the station, we had made no connection to ourselves or anyone else we knew, assuming that it was the work of a radical African group.
Walking toward the train, we were suddenly halted by a hurried procession of white policemen angrily making their way through the station. The police were surrounding two men, both of whom we recognized. They had been guests in our home and, while in Pretoria jail, fed by my mother. They were two of my colleagues in the ARM—one had been a university friend in Grahamstown. They were both handcuffed and being frogmarched toward the scene of the bombing. Both looked up and saw me, but knew enough not to show recognition on their faces, though I almost made the mistake of greeting them. They were pale and frightened looking, and I wondered why the police had brought them to the scene. After all, they were most definitely in jail at the time of the explosion. It later became clear that they had been brought by the indignant police to view their own—or ARM—handiwork, as an object lesson in the effects of “terrorism.” Coming from police who had been involved in torture and possibly worse, the “lesson” was an ugly joke.
While this event held the headlines for a while, other things were happening. One was the steady arrests of members of the ARM. One arrest would be followed by others, then by a lull, and then by a few more. The rest of us waited, usually alone, communicating by surreptitious calls from public phones or meetings in anonymous places, talking anxiously and planning escape. Some left immediately, by airplane to London, by car to Zambia and Botswana and, usually, thence to London—in those days a favorite center for South African political refugees. Others of us hung tight and waited to be arrested. But it was clear that our movement was being utterly destroyed. At about five o’clock one morning our telephone rang. It was Robert, Harry’s brother, calling to tell me that Harry had been arrested. Harry and I had anticipated that he, as a more active member, would be arrested first and that he would give my name to his interrogators, partly to be able to give them something new and also in the knowledge that I would have received a timely phone call from his brother.
HARRY'S ARREST galvanized me. My leg was pretty well healed, and though I walked with a limp, I didn’t need a cane. I woke my parents and told them that I was going to have to leave the country. To this point I had fairly successfully concealed from them my involvement in the movement, but, of course, they had suspicions all along. It was simply something we didn’t discuss. Once it was out in the open, we planned my escape. My parents bought me a plane ticket to London and gave me some money to live on. A year earlier I had acquired a passport so that my sister and I could take a short trip to Europe as her graduation gift. It was relatively simple for me to leave, though not without danger. That afternoon, I called my two oldest friends in Pretoria, who knew almost nothing of my political activities and were amazed to hear me tell them that I was leaving the country that day and that I wanted them to come to the airport to see me off. Instead of shunning me, as had happened to others I knew, my pals agreed to come. It was strange and frightening for all of us, but everyone pretended calm. My mother was good-humored and encouraging. I think she was a little excited and a little proud of me too. Going through the normal motions of catching a flight was nerve-racking.
The fear was made worse when we were approached at the airport by Liz (the woman who had told Harry and me of the very first arrests in Johannesburg), who warned us that the police had just pulled someone off a departing plane. It was not until the plane was in the air that I could breathe easily. I was out of there, away from South Africa. The very day after my departure, three large white men in plain clothes came to our front door looking for me. My mother told them that I had left the country and would enroll in a university in England. They wanted to know which university, implying without any attempt at subtlety that they had a long reach. I did, in fact, feel their hot breath on my back on more than one occasion in the following years.
London was full of South African politicals, and in short order I made contact with Michael, who was fortunate enough to have been in England when the arrests began. Michael knew a lot of people in the same situation as we, and soon enough we had a small group. One evening, Michael introduced me to Ann Swirsky. She had been politically involved with the man who had put the bomb in the Johannesburg railway station but, at the time we met, he had still not been charged. This man, John Harris, had been in prison since the night of the bombing together with the other man involved, also named John. Ann had been an essential part of the bomb plot; she had, as she told us, kept the explosives in her home, had agreed with Harris’s reasons for the action, but was on holiday in Rhodesia on the night Harris planted the bomb. Her husband, innocent of involvement, was arrested and kept in prison for two weeks. In her conversations with Michael and me, Ann was quite explicit about her role in the bombing and was understandably relieved to have missed the event. But she was unequivocal that she and the other John were equal partners with Harris in the bomb action, and that all three accepted Harris’s reasoning about the moral and political necessity for this dramatic and violent act.
Stories had begun to trickle out about the torture of John Harris. He had been horribly beaten by the police, his jaw broken during interrogation. After a long detention, he was finally brought to trial, found guilty, and hanged. He was the first and only white South African to be judicially executed for political crimes by the apartheid regime (there were police assassinations). During his trial my mother and her friend Adelaide Hain, a heroic woman who quietly and fearlessly battled apartheid, accompanied Harris’s wife to the trial. A photograph in the Pretoria pro-government newspaper Die Vaderland of Harris’s wife and my mother leaving the courthouse described them as mother and daughter.
Meeting Ann Swirsky was important to me. She and the two Johns had been, and still were, I suppose, members of our group. As I have said, the group declared itself to be absolutely opposed to endangering civilians. But a woman had died, another had been injured, and the violence had been perpetrated by members of and, more seriously, in the name of the African Resistance Movement. It was clear from Ann’s account of the events and the thinking that led to the bombing that Harris was the dominant figure of the trio. He was well known as a brilliant and charismatic man, persuasive in argument and bold in action. His argument was fairly simple. Harris watched the whole movement coming apart, members being arrested and people escaping; and he decided to do something to prove that resistance was not dead. Like all of us, he was aware that the police had broken the ARM. Those who had not fled were in jail, and only a very few cadres like the three involved in the bombing were left. Harris wanted to make a dramatic statement that the resistance movement was still alive. But more, he wanted that statement to galvanize white South African opinion. He argued, Ann told us, that it was now vital that all South Africans engage with the question of apartheid in an immediate and personal way.
The choice before the white public would be clear: they were for apartheid or against it. A massive explosion in a public place that would, indeed, endanger life would produce this effect. He argued too, as all of us always had, that apartheid itself was inherently violent; that it used violence, torture, and murder in order to maintain its own version of order, which all blacks and some whites saw as oppression and subjugation. The bombing was, however you cut it, an act of terrorism designed to sow fear among the people: it was a weapon of covert warfare that was supposed to make innocent people fear for their lives as they walked the streets.
I REMEMBER LISTENING to Ann’s story one evening in London, feeling somewhat awed to be in private possession of such terrible knowledge. And I remember wondering what I would have done had I been approached by John Harris and asked to participate in this terrible act. I was twenty-two years old and too easily impressed and intimidated by high-powered intellectuals like Harris, who, by the way, was only in his late twenties himself. I had plenty of physical courage; I had not to that point participated in an action; and I think I might have gone along with him. I might have agreed with the premise that the time had come to cause some casualties if that is what was required to wake up the South African population. (I should note that Harris had telephoned the police thirteen minutes before the blast, and that the police had ignored the warning.)
Looking back on it, I was lucky not to have been put into the position of making such a frightening choice. Those were terrible times in South African history. Innocent people seemed not to exist. Those of us on the left believed that white South Africans had, by a huge majority, thrown in their lot with apartheid and were consciously turning a blind eye to the violence of the system. There seemed, with the recent crackdowns on the various resistance movements, little to be done. Law had failed utterly; and armed resistance, in which civilians were left unharmed, had failed too. What was the logical next step? This is how I might have talked myself into participating in the dreadful event. I now think that though Harris believed that the bombing was, somehow, an inevitable part of the evolution of resistance, he was wrong both historically and morally. Others I knew in the movement would have had no hesitation in refusing to take part in any action that endangered the innocent.
I envy them their moral clarity and wish I had possessed it then. I now firmly believe that the taking of innocent human life is always unjustified. But I know too that I was lucky that Harris did not know me then. I think I would have gone along with him and persuaded myself that it was a right and necessary action. And I am very glad that I did not, not only because of the physical torture that I would have had to endure when I was caught, but also because of the consequences to my soul. I could not now bear the knowledge that I had willfully killed an innocent person. Still, I can’t find it in myself to blame him. John Harris was another casualty of apartheid.
Although many of our members fled the country, several were captured and served prison sentences ranging from a few weeks to, in one case, fifteen years. They are all out now, of course, and widely dispersed across the English-speaking world. Some have died; others have gone on to lead relatively normal lives. Some have remained obsessed with and committed to the new South Africa; some have turned their backs on it, though I know that the experience of resistance will be forever in their blood. Many have told their own stories. Those of us who “left in time,” however, are also forever left with a nagging uncertainty. While our colleagues were in prison, stories about their behavior under torture and duress leaked out. Some behaved with great courage; others were not so brave and gave their interrogators all they wanted without resistance. Those of us who were never tested must always wonder how we would have fared under the circumstances of imprisonment. We all wonder if we would have lived up to our ideals. The Germans have a nice word for it: Leidenschneid—it means something like “envy of suffering.” None of us wishes to suffer; but all of us wish to have suffered, to know ourselves under those specific and historic conditions of adversity, and we envy and admire our colleagues who underwent what might easily have been our own fate.
Postscript: My story has an American ending. In 1968, I was a graduate student at New York University, recently married to an American fellow student. I applied for a green card for legal-immigrant status, but heard nothing from Immigration. One morning when I was alone at home there was a knock on the door. Two tough-looking men stood at the door and asked to come in. They introduced themselves as agents of the FBI and admitted that they were surprised to see me at home, having hoped, instead, to talk to my wife. They told me quite frankly that they were investigating me and, further, that they had received information about me from the South African authorities. We talked about apartheid, and one of them allowed, only half jocularly, that similar laws would be useful for law enforcement in the United States. The conversation lasted about an hour. I warned my wife that evening that there was no way I would get a green card, and that we had better start making other plans for the future. Though unsurprised, my wife was indignant that the FBI had been so casual about revealing its relationship with the dreaded security branch of the South African police. She objected to being investigated—the agents had questioned our neighbors—and was, characteristically, determined to act. I was certain that nothing could be done. She wrote a letter to New York’s Democratic senator, Robert F. Kennedy, who had visited South Africa and given several rousing speeches attacking apartheid. I thought this a futile exercise: the idea of appealing to an elected official seemed to me a waste of time. We put the matter on the back burner and continued our studies, waiting for the axe to fall.
And then, on a terrible day in June, Bobby Kennedy was killed. My own immigration difficulty assumed a proper proportion, but we were sure that it was only a matter of time before I would be forced to leave the United States. Less than a week after the assassination a letter came in the mail. It bore Kennedy’s signature and said that he was looking into Marjorie’s appeal for help in getting my immigration status regularized. Two months later my green card arrived.
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