— I'm told they sing freedom songs.—
— Then the warders come and kick the cell doors and swear. I'm not talking about fear. Normally, people like us never think what it must be like because as far as we're concerned criminals, murderers, hang. We don't. But here, where politicals are hanged, when you're inside and you hear the singing, you think of things that didn't ever have to enter your mind before.—
The learning process continues.
Although a liberation movement strives to act rather than react, because its existence is a phenomenon of opposition to power it is constantly forced to respond to what those in power do, to move in the foreshadow of what the power is planning to do, and to predict what it might or might not be led to do by any pre-emptive action. 'Taking into account changing circumstances' is a tenet like that of a farmer taking into account the weather, and it covers as many factors as there are signs in the heavens, variables in the four winds. Sonny's late development of political sense, grown slowly out of a priggish and subservient morality, ensured that his judgment never lost touch with principle, while his unhesitating return to the struggle after detain-ment and imprisonment ensured that he was capable of bold pragmatism. With these credentials added to his intelligence and gifts as a speaker, he had emerged from among others to the company of decision-makers. There, the combination in his personality was reflected in his position: considered as one of the radicals, he was yet reassuring to the cautious; he could be used to press decisions in a form acceptable to them. There was an exhilarating war-time will to consensus on the strategy and tactics of attacking the government and its supports, military and economic, throughout the world, as well as in the country itself. Comrades who were arrested were immediately replaced by others ready to do their work; the interchangeability of leadership again and again defeated bans and imprisonments. Under the endless disruption of a hounding State — files seized, offices burned down, comrades become political nomads sleeping when and where they could — the huge problems of mass organization continued to be debated and tackled. How to emphasize a constituency among hoes and factory overalls without losing the chance to draw in the people the government were co-opting with the penny sweetmeats of middle class instead of rights? How to get rid of corrupt, government-protected councillors without the people taking the decision into the hands of their own anger and killing them? How to keep proper contact with the youth and street committees who wear the T-shirts and carry the colours but go beyond the approved methods of struggle and give the State the opportunity to charge leadership with incitement to murder? What issues — population removals, strikes, stay-at-homes, boycotts — would be most effective, pursued where, at what period?
There were also internal problems. Sonny brought them all home — to Hannah, that is. Hannah understood the inferences behind the positions various individuals took; he and she argued over and unravelled them together. Comrades who were united in a line of thought sometimes apparently unaccountably diverged. Someone whom Sonny had been sure of: —He didn't back down, he just sidled away. — The question was of alliances; he and Hannah were sitting outside her cottage in the garden, which they had to themselves because the people who lived in the main house were overseas. — I can't agree we should 'take each case on its merits' until we've decided exactly what are the minimum areas of policy agreement necessary before a group should be accepted. — Sonny's distended nostrils were his familiar sign of tension. — Only when we confront these people with that can we judge whether they're coming in with a genuine commitment or with the intention of influencing our objectives in some way. All smiles, and the next thing you've got a palace revolution. That's the problem with a broad alliance — which we want, which we pursue, we must have — each organization has the right to work in its own way, but that doesn't mean a licence to creep in and subvert. It's been used for that before, it'll be tried again. We can't have it. Can't risk it.—
Her soft breasts rose and fell in the low-necked dress she wore to enjoy the sun, a water-colour wash coloured her blonde skin, but he was staring for her response and did not see her. — I think that may be an exaggeration. It's not as if this lot represents any great constituency. To attempt anything like that, they'd have to have strong support on the executive, they'd have to have people with influence — people among you—
— But that's exactly what worries me. Why does someone on the executive with whom I've discussed the whole matter in principle, again and again, before the actual situation came up — and we had exactly the same point of view — why today does he say nothing?—
— He's changed his mind. Doesn't necessarily mean someone's changed it for him.—
— Yes it does. Because we've always been so open — you know — between us, it would be natural for him to tell me he'd changed his mind. Say why, discuss it.—
She sat up straight and picked ants off his sleeve. — Who was it he was along with?—
— A couple of people he hasn't been particularly enthusiastic about before. If you can call it 'with'; as I say, he gave himself away by saying nothing. I suppose it amounted to being with them.—
— You'd better take off your shirt. Ants all over you; look. — He held up his arms and she helped him out of the sleeves. While she shook and slapped at the shirt he ran his hand back and forth in the hair on his breast, turned in upon himself.
— Here, my love. — But he did not take the shirt from her and she sat down with it in her lap. — You don't want to say what you're thinking.—
— No I don't. But he's ambitious… I've told you that before. Oh in the right way, I meant; he believes he could be used more effectively, he thinks he knows better how to deal with some of the forces against us. He feels he's the one who understands big business. And he knows the mentality of the Afrikaners. But he'd like to be in the papers more often… You know? — She laughed at his reluctant realization of this. — If he could gather supporters, a faction around him, he might just feel justified in pushing somebody else out, at the top—
She continued for him: —And maybe there's a way to do it.—
— But what a way! This is the crowd who wanted to put up candidates for the regional council elections, eh. We had to work to persuade them to call it off.—
— Are you going to talk to him?—
— I don't want to before I've talked to others. if there are others. flush them out.—
— Be careful. No palace revolution, but no witch-hunt. Certainly not led by you.—
On these days when they talked like this in a garden, there not by right but by calculation of someone else's absence, as if theirs was a clandestine meeting of the other kind he so often attended, there was no love-making. Now while Hannah went on, speaking his thoughts as well as her own, in her private, perceptive way, his sense of where he was underwent a strange intensity. It was physical. He became aware on the very surface of his skin, his bare breast and arms, as well as through sight and smell, of this that was called 'the garden' hovering and pressing in upon him. The shadowless mauve of the Jacaranda full-blown, ectoplasmic, near his face, tree ferns airing green wings spread over the pond tiled with lily leaves, the mist of live warmth from cut grass. A tingling peace on his nerve-endings, in his ears, murmured over by some sort of birds with grey tails rustling in a fig tree. As he sat with Hannah, the blurred rush of the chronology of living was halted for a while. The absolute of existence: an alpine pine hatched against failing light above the darkening earth, the bright tiny moths of the first stars flitting out of the hazy radiance of the sky. Clouds obscuring like shadows; the northern tree shivering at the tips of feathered branches as the heat waves of the day rose. The red-polished stoep and the rotting wooden windows, the room there, with the bed, the chaotic, disintegrated forms of the painting — all was stayed, as before a hand held up. Over the moment he sees the foreign tree, the element like himself that doesn't belong, fall majestically, following its giant shadow that is falling across the man and woman in this garden, now. Where the saw has razed through its stout trunk the rings of its years are revealed under a powdering of sawdust.