*Pan Africanist Congress
Trust Her!
The young guest did a little typing — a task invented by her host to make her feel useful — and some evenings played the guitar for him and sang those old coffee-bar songs, ‘We Shall Overcome’ and ‘House of the Rising Sun’, while swallows flew in and out of mud nests they had made in the brick lattice of his livingroom. He would not come to Tamarisk to swim; would not accept her casual invitation to join her, any time, when she went to the Manakas’. Njabulo Manaka had permission from the Command in exile to live outside the camp provided for refugees, but his friends were those who still lived in the camp. Some on their way to refuge had been captured in Northern Rhodesia and repatriated by the British colonial authorities; they had had to escape from the police at home, once again. Some were from the areas, at home, of hut-burnings and rural police posts whose methods of interrogation, the sjambok, suffocating plastic bag over the head, heavy boot on the spine, were less sophisticated than city facilities of electric shock. The office space up rotting stairs, the administrative titles, the few chairs were not sufficient to accommodate everyone who got away, even at that early stage, and neither did everyone have the education to be of use there. Along with other rank and file, from the cities, these men waited in the camp to be sent to the countries where the Command was negotiating for them to receive military training for their future as freedom fighters. A world refugee organization fed them meagrely, and although the host government made it a condition of refuge that they should not take jobs from local inhabitants, a few, like Njabulo himself, while waiting clandestinely made use of skills they had that most local inhabitants didn’t have: he worked as a garage mechanic.
The smell of mealie-meal and cabbage that never cleared from the Manaka flat wafted out a signaclass="underline" food and privacy among friends, with a woman in charge. The cushions of the old sofa that had one wooden arm missing never recovered shape from the impress of one trio of behinds before another flattened them. The snorting gulp of the lavatory emptying was as constant a punctuation of talk as laughter, argument, and the greetings of new arrivals. In the company of Christa and Sophie there was no question of women being ignored; and hadn’t the girl slept there, on the kitchen floor, like any one of them? Many did not frequent Tamarisk Beach, feeling out of place in that high-ranking, half-naked, intellectual colloquy, and did not know the difference between the status of this white girl and that of Christa the revolutionary, one of themselves.
Newspaper cuttings and smuggled reports on the Lilliesleaf trial were coming to the office. — It’s a white man who betrayed everything, all of us! Terrible, terr-ible. That’s what I always said, we whites in the movement must be ve-ery careful, if anything happens through one of us, what is our position with blacks? Who’s going to accept us? We going to isolate ourselves, we not going to be trusted ever again … I thought when I met that Gotz fellow … I don’t know … He was too eager to tell you all about himself, make a clean breast of it, you know—ek is ’n ware Afrikaner, plaas seuntjie, maar—like some religious conversion he wanted you to be convinced of. Ag, man, I felt like telling him, I’m an Afrikaner, too, plaas meisie, it’s not such a big deal that you’ve come over to the movement. But some of them, they did think he was a catch for us—
— Meantime, they were on the hook — Christa’s soprano distress was counterpointed by the low, black bass.
— Oh my god, they were. And the way he went for the women! Well, you see what one of them let herself in for … Oh he tried something with me, but I never liked him, I never trusted him, he was clever all right, he smelled out that I didn’t and then he kept clear. Terr-ible. Terrible fellow. And look what he’s done. A white’s blown the whole High Command.—
The volubility of high spirits that was Christa had changed to hysteria. In the silence of the black men on the old sofa she struggled against some kind of responsibility that suddenly had come between them and her.
— And in Umkhonto? There’s infiltration there already. And Lilliesleaf, you’ll see, as the State brings them into the witness box, there’re blacks who were mixed up with informing there, too. Just the same, Christa. A thing we don’t know how to deal with. A pro-blem. — In this company the euphemism took on weight with a long, round African O.
— But not right among the High Command. Close to them, eating with them, talking to them about important things with a tape-recorder going under his clothes or wherever it was, even under a pillow in bed, ugh, it disgusts me. Look, Njabulo, ever since I read that this morning my hands have been shaking — look, Elias—
— No, man, traitors are traitors. He’s right. But the brothers at home will know what to do with them, don’t worry.—
— With the High Command in jail? With life, if they don’t get hanged? Not worry?—
— Anyway, those bastards who put them there, they won’t live to get old.—
— Who’s going to get Gotz in a location alley, the way they’ll get the black ones? I’ll bet he’ll live a long life of promotion in the police or become a successful private detective, spying for divorce cases. I know the Boere. He can use his tape-recorder under some more pillows.—
— Is there anything new from Umtata and Engcobo?—
— I don’t know, I didn’t see …—
— Oh I asked Johnny. He showed something from the Star, just said the usual, ‘peasant unrest’ still going on among the Tembus. ‘Agitators’ are still at work.—
— Man! Tax was almost doubled for us there from nineteen-fifty-five up to nineteen-fifty-nine. You know? Ever since, how we have been suffering! You remember Dalindyebo’s meeting in sixty-one against the rehabilitation scheme? That thing that took our land and pushed us tight together like cattle? A thousand chiefs came to that meeting. By the time I was grown up, Influx Control wouldn’t let us out to find jobs. My uncle was chief in our place, he didn’t want us forced back into the reserves, so the government made another man chief in his place. They do those things! My uncle was the one who said, They just want us chiefs to sign a piece of paper that says, destroy me, baas. He said, Let them destroy us without our signatures.—
— You know, we should have been better organized in the Western Cape, man. Too many Tembus who were working on contract around Cape Town joined Poqo instead of us.—
— Well! What do you know about the unions? ANC-affiliated unions were pretty active, I was working in one. — Christa shed her self-assumed burden at the turn towards a subject where the integrity of her contribution could not be questioned, even by herself.