There has been madness since the beginning, in the whites. Our great-grandfather Hillel was in it from the moment he came up from the steerage deck in Cape Town harbour with his cardboard suitcase, landing anywhere to get away from the Little Father’s quotas and the cossacks’ pogroms. It’s in the blood you and I share. Since the beginning. Whites couldn’t have done what they’ve done, otherwise. Madness has appeared among blacks in the final stage of repression. It is, in fact, the unrecognized last act of repression, transferred to them to enact upon themselves. It is the horrible end of all whites have done.
The Major is triumphant. Well, how do you feel about your blacks now? What about your savages hacking each other to death? What about the end of capitalist exploitation and the great dawn of freedom and peace?
But my position is sane. I’m without doubts about that.
This cell, at this moment, seems full to me, brimming, this empty cell is fuller than the other rooms I’ve had. My room in the house always looked as if Bettie had just cleared someone’s stuff away. I never hung it with sports pennants and school photographs and pop stars the way you girls did yours. I didn’t keep things, didn’t want to remember. What have I got of my life? Only what is here. D’you remember the toy car? It belonged to that kid. I kept that.
Hendrik/Mercury/Icarus, don’t fall into the sea with this. From jail, from here I’m free to say everything. I love you.
Sasha
*United Democratic Front
Whaila’s Country
The letter was produced at Sasha’s trial.
He must have bribed the young son of a farmer ruined by the ’80s drought in the Koster district who had said there were opportunities for advancement in the prison services. But what could the prisoner have had to offer? It is the wretched thieves and prostitutes, not the politicals, who traffic in the prison economy of drugs. Maybe he had even tried to convert the boy to the cause; it is known to prison officers that those trained by the Left are taught to subvert the Christian values inculcated by the Dutch Reformed Church.
Hendrik Gerhardus Munnik had never written a letter in his life, except as a school exercise. The letter he smuggled out of prison (it was ‘under the plastic’ in his warder’s cap, he told the court) was very thick, he didn’t know what was inside. He kept it for three days before handing it over to the Commandant. And why did he decide to surrender it to prison authorities?
Because he was afraid of what his father would say if he lost his job.
Did the prisoner promise him any reward or remuneration for smuggling the letter?
No.
Why did he agree to take it?
Because he thought it was a love-letter.
Sasha was accused with three others, Burtwell Nyaka, Makekene Conco, Thabo Poswao, on five counts, which the Defence conducted by Joe’s most distinguished colleagues succeeded in getting reduced to the two principal ones: conspiring to overthrow the State and furthering the aims of the African National Congress. The ‘love-letter’, the Prosecution submitted, contained a clear statement of the accused’s intention to commit high treason. The passage was read out and the exhibit, numbered 14, passed to the judge: ‘Yes … I want to overthrow the State … that is the meaning of my life’. The whole tenor of the letter, the Prosecution continued, made clear that for the accused the ‘solution’ to South Africa’s problems was revolution. In this context, he lauded violent uprisings, lawlessness in the black townships, strikes and boycotts, as the blacks’ understanding of means to ‘overthrow that (the) South African way of life’. He blamed whites for the murder of white children. These sentiments he had already expressed on public platforms, in the trade union and other journals to which he contributed, in the pamphlets it would be alleged he had conspired to distribute by pamphlet bombs, in fact in his record of revolutionary activities that could be proved as far back as 1979. And his convictions were so strong that he would even risk sending subversive material out of prison by clandestine means — some love-letter!
The Defence submitted that the letter was, in fact, ‘a moving credo’ from a man whose sense of justice and humanity had found no structures within which to redress the misery he was aware of in South Africa. He had been brought up in a family where a social conscience was the foundation of personal morality, his father had been for many years what would be known in Western countries as a civil rights lawyer, his mother had been an active liberal; their son had seen them leave their country in despair at the fruitlessness of their efforts to assist meaningful constitutional changes. It was, indeed, out of love — love for fellow human beings, for the poorest and most disadvantaged, the majority of the South African population, that the son had given up the promise of a lucrative career in law and a high social and economic position among whites in order to put his life at the service of black workers.
Exhibit 14 included two envelopes. Within the first there was another: State House, the name of the capital, the country, this surely should have been an adequate address to have reached the one for whom it was intended. Exhibit 14 did not even reach the cover address on the outer envelope; but although Hendrik had failed to deliver it there, it had led the police to the friend Sasha had hoped would get it taken to England and forwarded. The friend was arrested and detained as another possible co-conspirator, but released after a week of interrogation.
There was a stir of comment in the public gallery the day Hendrik gave his reason for accepting the letter; typically soppy, probably thinking of his Koster meisie back on the farm. These backveld boys, plaasja-pies! His brother-in-law, a cartage contractor from Pretoria and not to be patronised, who had accompanied Hendrik’s mother to court, turned angrily on the faces behind him. No, a boereseun was no match for a Jewboy communist. The mother grasped his hand in a vice to quiet him; never looked up from under her hat.
The Defence disputed the Prosecution’s interpretation of the letter. The person to whom it was addressed was like a sister to the accused. She was a relative who had been brought up by the accused’s parents as one of their own children. He had been deeply attached to her, she was apparently his confidante through childhood and adolescence. It was not surprising that under conditions of sensory deprivation in solitary confinement, where time loses its normal dimension and partings of many years may seem the same as partings that took place a few weeks or months previously, he should have turned to her, in imagination, to review his life and set out his commitment to serve others. In no way could the intimate confidences of this letter be regarded as constituting a revolutionary document. And whom could it have been planned to incite? The intended recipient had lived abroad for a long time. Defence requested that the letter be read out in its entirety, not quoted from selectively.