— Man, I still think they have to keep up the sabotage down there somehow. Even if it’s with wire-cutters and choppers.—
— What I think — symbolic targets are the idea — all right. But sabotage is correct tactically for another reason. What is sabotage? — James was quoting a formulation, too. — Sabotage is violence to property. And whites are the ones with property — it’s something blacks don’t have. So sabotage is dead right in the situation. The results can be calculated, hey, Whaila; you’re talking to whites in a language they’re going to understand.—
— Well yes. But it’s a tactic that’s not going to have much chance to succeed from the point of view of timing. We just don’t have the manpower to do the job. Too many in prison, or here, outside. Our people are getting arrested and rearrested all the time. You’ve got a hundred-and-eighty days’ detention, now, not just ninety. And the sentences — they’re getting five or ten years for nothing. We don’t have the sophisticated weapons to be effective. Have to keep running about … we need new sources of supply. The government has all the weapons, all the spies to make the sabotage campaign fail, as things stand now … I don’t know … and maybe we haven’t thought enough about the way the enemy will react. We know the reaction to mass action, okay, since Sharpeville — but the type of action the government will take against a sabotage campaign, not only against our Underground but also the people … the people! How much more repression can the townships take without expecting more positive results from us? There’s also the question of training. — He stopped himself. — How much training our men have had and how good it was. In real military battles experts decide which weapons are right for which purpose, their striking power and so on. It’s something I want to go into … When it comes to guerrilla operations in the bush, the throw-outs from other countries’ hardware aren’t going to do. — They knew this must be what they had heard as a blur of voices when he and Arnold were behind a closed door. — And then there’s timing again … Things’ll be easier next year when Basutoland and Bechuanaland become independent. If we can get in there, we’ll be just over the fence from our people …—
— Only Smith to worry about, then; our men will be able to come with ZAPU* down from Zambia right to Gaborone. You can just about wave over to the folks from there!—
— Not yet, Bra James, not quite yet.:—
Hillela took the freedom under turns of talk, to follow any aspect of the kind for which, as her cousin had complained in childish confidences long ago, all the advantages she had shared with him never gave an explanation. She would surface suddenly with her preoccupation, laying it before them. — There are people who have given up being white.—
Busewe pretended to be jolted from his chair. All three men laughed at her.
— You know exactly what I mean. What it means, there. Bram Fischer, the Weinbergs, Slovos, Christa, Arnold. And there are others … another kind. I knew them, I was in a family … they wanted to but they didn’t seem to know how?—
*
— It solves nothing. — Pauline served her family at table. Carole had her boyfriend to lunch. Sasha was there but he did not bring girls home. — Back here his kind still carry a pass. Feeling free to sleep with a black man doesn’t set him free.—
Carole’s boyfriend knew one mustn’t expect small-talk at that table. And the merciless intimacy with which each member of the family knew the context of subjects raised meant that he could not expect to follow anything more specific than the emotions roused. Carole squeezed his thigh comfortingly under the table. Her mother lifted her head, two streaks of grey, now, at the hairline, like Mosaic horns, to challenge; but no-one was drawn. Carole had told Bettie the news in the kitchen. — Hillela? A black man? What, is that girl mad? Black men are no good for husbands. He’ll run away, you’ll see. Ah, poor Hilly. We must bring her back home to us.—
Sasha in his room tore some sheets out of an exam pad and began to write: She’s jealous. Saturday classes for kids. Reformers are (take pride in being) totally rational, but the dynamic of real change is always utopian. The original impetus may get modified — even messed up — in the result, but it has to be there no matter how far from utopia that result may be.
Utopia is unattainable; without aiming for it — taking a chance! — you can never hope even to fall far short of it.
Instinct is utopian. Emotion is utopian. But reformers can’t imagine any other way. They want to adapt what is. You move around, don’t you, bumping up against — brought up short every time! — by the same old walls. If you reform the laws, the economy defeats the reforms. (That’s what my father tells you, so you must admit it’s true), If you reform the economy, the laws defeat the reforms (out of your own mouth, to him, a hundred times, when you’re on that war-path of yours with a neat hedge Alpheus clips on either side). Don’t you see? It’s all got to come down, mother. Without utopia — the idea of utopia — there’s a failure of the imagination — and that’s a failure to know how to go on living. It will take another kind of being to stay on, here. A new white person. Not us. The chance is a wild chance — like falling in love.
Sasha did not know what it was he had written: a letter? He did not keep a diary, having too frequently a revulsion against his own thoughts to want to be able to turn back to them. He would not tear up the pages. He would put them away yet at the same time leave them around somewhere easily come upon. She might read them. She was always so eager, secretly, to understand what she couldn’t, ever; so nosey.
*Zimbabwe African People’s Union
A Perfect Circle of Sand
Hillela was conscious throughout. But the hard work going on in her body, which usually performed its functions without bothering her, engaged her completely during the birth. As if in a train crossing at full speed a landscape in the dark, she saw and heard nothing outside that body until the sudden cessation, the light moment after part of her body slipped free of her. There was a great uproar of shouting and rejoicing. The yelling sway of voices chanting, singing, at different distances. It was all for her; she put the heel of her hand on her trembling empty belly and tried to sit up, smiling. She had come all alone to the hospital and now everyone was celebrating her, everyone.
Whaila was away in their home country, his and hers, when his baby was born. Nkrumah was in Peking, and the celebration in the streets was a real one: the crowds rejoicing an army coup, and his fall.
She knew where Whaila was but no-one else did, not even Busewe and James — or if they did, acknowledgement was not made. They were supposed to accept that he was somewhere in Europe at a meeting of the alliance he had helped form, a few years earlier, with liberation groups from the Portuguese-colonised countries, FRELIMO from Mozambique, MPLA from Angola, PAIGC from Guinea. The father of Ruthie’s grandchild moved in the streets of South African cities within passing distance of Olga (in Cape Town at the tail-end of her summer holiday), Pauline and Joe (on their way to a lecture at the Institute of Race Relations in Johannesburg) and Sasha (leaving the city’s reference library and taking a detour into the black end of town to buy an African jazz record for a girlfriend’s birthday). Whaila was just as close, at one time or another, to his children by his divorced wife, and to his mother’s house, 8965 Block D, in a black location. But he was also just as far, because he could make no attempt to see them; he carried a forged passbook with a false name, and that persona was under orders to see what could be done to revive the internal structure of the movement and accelerate recruitment of men for military training outside.