‘They wanted me to tell them about the ANC, but I didn’t know much,’ Raks said. ‘The Black Consciousness Movement was what animated me.’
‘What about the charge of sabotage?’
‘We were in various actions,’ he said blandly. ‘But the police were vicious. At first, they just hit us. No questions, just whack. We were beaten really hard. It went on for two or three weeks. We were put into sacks and thrown into the river. We thought we would drown — we knew people who had died.’
‘Didn’t they interrogate you?’
‘After that, yes. But the beatings went on. They wanted to know who our friends were — the details. “Who are the Communists?” That kind of thing.’
Raks spoke without much anger but with feeling, as though it had all happened long ago, in another galaxy, far away. He was quite well dressed, wearing a jacket and tie, as he had at the birthday dinner, but there was something about him — an intimation of frailty — that was disturbing.
‘They stopped beating us when they realized that we had nothing to tell them,’ Raks said. ‘Then we went to trial. It was a short trial. Torture was not mentioned, nothing of our treatment came out. We were sentenced. I got five years. In those days you did every day of your sentence.’
‘Tell me about Robben Island.’
Robben Island in the sea, just a mile off Cape Town, was now a popular tourist attraction, though a sobering one. Visitors were taken out in boats, and former political prisoners served as guides.
‘I served my whole sentence there, from 1979 to 1984,’ Raks said. ‘It was cold and uncomfortable and impossible to escape from. As I told you, we saw Nelson Mandela. We passed notes, scribbling on pieces of paper and smuggling them back and forth.’
But books and papers and pencils were forbidden and were confiscated if they were found. Even Mandela, the future president, was trifled with — his books and writing material taken from him. In place of study or self-improvement or any intellectual activity there was manual labor.
‘We did road repairs,’ Raks said, for the island had once had a community on it — houses, roads, churches, a leper settlement. ‘Most days we dragged seaweed out of the ocean — ten-foot lengths of kelp. The seaweed was sold to Taiwan and Korea.’
That was an interesting detail, the Chinese and the Koreans enjoying the delicacy of Cape Town seaweed with their noodles by wringing the sweat from the faces of these slave laborers. But there was no recrimination against them, no hard words for Margaret Thatcher or Dick Cheney who had both publicly declared Mandela a terrorist; no bitterness against the Belgians who bought diamonds, and the Israelis who traded in guns and food to a racist government which was committed to killing and torturing and imprisoning some Africans and creating ghettos for others; and just laughter for the Japanese who got themselves officially declared white in part so that they could trade with the white supremacist government, but mainly so that they could play golf at whites-only country clubs.
Raks said, ‘When I got out I was deported to Bophuthatswana.’
Bophuthatswana had been a Bantustan, a small deprived ghetto of bad land and poor houses where Separate Development was to take place. Bantustans had since been dismantled, the fences taken down, and were now a source of labor and of emigrants to the urban shanty towns outside the major cities.
That was Raks’ story. He had disliked telling it. But listening to him I saw something familiar in his limp posture and sad expression. It was the ravaged look of someone who had had a near-death experience that had gone on far too long: years in a cage. I had seen that same look in the Ethiopians who had been locked up in the prison in Addis, in my friends in Uganda who had suffered through Amin’s tyranny, in Wahome Mutahi who had been given the water torture in Nairobi. It was a look of seediness, not a broken spirit but a fractured body, premature aging, and a sort of sidelong mode of delivery, hating to look back. In a word, their spirit had not been broken but their health had been shattered.
Going home that night, I noticed a great fuss in the streets. The taxi driver was excited, his blood was up, his radio was chattering. I suspected a riot or some kind of civil disorder, for there were helicopters going thunk-thunk-thunk overhead and the sound of ambulance sirens.
‘Trouble at the Pirates football game,’ the driver said.
‘What kind of trouble?’
‘Stampede,’ he said.
Latecomers to the game, 15,000 of them, had been trapped and crushed in a tunnel at the stadium entrance. There had been nowhere for them to go, for there were 60,000 people inside the ground. Forty-three people had been killed and hundreds injured. With the first screams and the confusion, the game had been stopped and then abandoned.
‘Someone told me to go to that game.’
‘Would have been a great game. But the stampede. Ach. Was terrible, man.’
Through a friend I met Mike Kirkinis, guide to fossil sites. I liked him immediately. He was energetic and an optimist and he worked hard. He was no snob. He said, ‘Africans in Jo’burg tell me that they’re from the bush. That their grandparents herded goats. I say, “Hey, what a coincidence! My grandfather herded goats in Cyprus.” It’s true. It helps to remember where you came from.’
Mike, in his early forties, owned a helicopter. He ran tours out to the archeological sites of Sterkfontein and Swartkrans, places that bristled with bones of humanoids, the richest fossil sites in the world and South Africa’s first World Heritage Sites. I agreed to go out with Mike one Sunday morning.
‘I’ll bring my girlfriend. We can have a picnic.’
His girlfriend, Sybilla, was a German veterinarian. She was six foot one and very beautiful. She owned a Rottweiler. As a vet, she specialized in the health of elephants. The previous year, when she was on an expedition to Mali ‘darting’ elephants and treating them, an elephant which had been insufficiently tranquilized rose up unexpectedly, tossed Sybilla to the ground and trampled her, smashing her pelvis and her legs. Mike had flown to Bamako to help her and in the course of the year she had healed. You would not have known she had come close to being destroyed by big elephant feet unless you gave way to temptation, as I did, and gazed intently at her legs. The tiny scars and stitches did not detract from their beauty but only reminded me of her strength and courage. She had long silken hair and flinty-blue eyes. She flew the chopper expertly.
‘She intimidates people,’ Mike said.
I said, ‘Not me. I mean, if you wanted to go to the ends of the earth she’s the one to go with.’
When we were aloft, Mike explained that what I was seeing down below was the ridge on which Johannesburg sat — the Witwatersrand, the White Water Ridge — clearly upraised, because (so he said) an asteroid had hit the planet right here a few billion years ago and rearranged the landscape, displacing the inland sea by pushing the gold-bearing reef, the great lip of rock, nearer to the surface. The gold, discovered in 1886, was the making of Johannesburg. (Diamonds had been found in great quantities in Kimberley about twenty years earlier.)
Flying in this helicopter was a guilty pleasure, because although I bemoaned air travel I loved flying low over the Johannesburg suburbs, looking at the mansions, the evidence of white flight from the city, and black flight, too. From aloft I could see clusters of condominiums and gated communities, stately homes with swimming pools and horse paddocks, the adjacent slums, the squatter settlements: everything was visible. Flying with Mike was a language lesson, too: the park land, the drifts, the vlei (marshland), the klows (ravines), the kopjes (little hills), the narrow tracks, known as spoor across the veld, a large wildtuin (game reserve), the snelweg (highway), the vryweg (freeway). Also, the variously named detritus from the gold mines, for they created an enormous amount of rubble and sludge — the mine dumps and slime dams.