While
I was living encapsulated in house arrest, the 1960s inexorably became
a decade of disgrace, of repressive legislation. Sadistic incarceration,
even torture by the security police to extract information from helpless
victims, was the order of the day. South Africa was following the barbaric
example of Nazi Germany and had learnt its lessons well.
Umkhonto We Sizwe sabotage continued and multiplied, always keeping
to the policy of avoiding loss of life. Installations and buildings
were the targets, not human beings.
During 1961, Poqo had emerged as a new underground sabotage organisation,
formed by extremist members of the PAC, now itself underground like
the ANC. Unlike Umkhonto, it did not confine its violence to attacks
on installations but also planned and carried out violent physical
reprisals on individuals, black and white, leading to injuries and
death, sometimes in a kind of mindless violence.
In 1963, the government's response was another General Laws Amendment
Act, which went far beyond the Act of 1962. Detention without trial
was introduced as a permanent feature, obviating any need for the declaration
of a State of Emergency. This detention could be used against any person
whom the police suspected of planning sabotage, or any offence under
the Sabotage Act, or, and more sinister, anyone who, in the opinion
of the police, could supply any information relating to it. Detainees
were held totally incommunicado for up to ninety days, or released
and then immediately re-detained for another ninety days. These were
frightening provisions, opening wide the door for ill treatment of
detainees in order to obtain information.
The infamous Act became law on 1 May 1963. Within a week the first
people were detained and by the end of 1963 there had been over 500
such detentions. There were horrifying reports of detainees' conditions,
invariably solitary confinement, usually with no reading or writing
material, although sometimes the Bible was allowed. There were reports
of physical torture, especially electric shocks applied to sensitive
parts of the body.
Some of my friends
were detained very soon, others a little later, but the shadow of "ninety days" hung
over us all. I listened, as many others did, I know, for the sound
of
a car stopping in the
middle of the night, counting the number of car doors I heard closing,
lest it should be the police.
The provision for ninety-days' detention without trial was suspended
by the minister at the beginning of 1965, but not before it had cost
the lives of three men. Official reports claimed suicide as the cause
of all three deaths, but the doubts in the minds of many have never
been laid to rest.
Babla Salojee was
one of the "suicides". He was well known
to us in Johannesburg as a lively member of the Transvaal Indian Youth
Congress. After sixty-five days of detention, Babla, so often bubbling
with laughter before his detention, fell to his death from a seventh-floor
window of the police buildings while he was being interrogated. No
one will ever really know what led to his death — unless you
believe the police story. Nor is it really necessary to know the details,
for his death, like others, lies at the door of the interrogating policemen.
More than 1,000 people were detained before the notorious Clause 17
authorising the ninety-days' detention was suspended, but it still
remained on the statute book, to be invoked should the Minister of
Justice deem it necessary. Within six months of the suspension, the
ninety days was replaced by the provision for 180 days' detention without
trial, this time to compel reluctant witnesses to give evidence. The
minister was apparently not satisfied with the ninety days' results,
even though one-quarter of the detainees had become state witnesses,
betrayed their colleagues and their cause to escape from the horrors
of gaol and torture. I should have thought the minister might have
been satisfied with one in every four. But no, even harsher measures
had to be devised to make a man sell his soul in exchange for his freedom.
One hundred and eighty days became an even uglier weapon with the same
terrifying background of isolation and torture, physical assault, thirty,
forty hours of standing in one spot without sleep or rest, and electric
shocks. This last refinement of torture seemed then to have been reserved
for blacks. It is humiliating to realise that even in detention the
white skin counts.
The year 1967 brought the new Terrorism Act. We had thought nothing
could be much worse than the previous year's legislation, but we were
wrong. The Terrorism Act spread an even wider net for those who participated
in or even knew of terrorist activities, with a minimum of five years'
imprisonment and room for the death sentence. Under the grim Section
6 of the Act, detention for interrogation became indefinite and the
detainee completely incommunicado. South Africa had indeed become a
police state.
Protest, whether
national or international, made no difference. This sadistic compulsion
remained enshrined in South
African law, but the
reality of it was hidden, high up on the top floor of police buildings,
shut in by thick walls and barred doors, through which screams of agony
could sometimes be heard. This barbarous method of extracting information
has had different names, ninety days, 180 days, and now, even today,
it is the dreaded "Section 6 ". It is still the same, but
now not only for blacks. It can be the bag over the head, the total
removal of clothes, shocks applied to the most private parts of the
body. The miracle remains that so many are not broken on this rack
of torture, which leaves no physical mark. But other marks remain. "It
has deprived me of my humanity," one detainee told me, "because
I can no longer see these people as human beings. And I am angry at
being deprived of any part of my humanity."
Much has been written over the years about this appalling attack on
humanity, which continues to this day in South Africa. The Nationalist
government justifies it as a defence against encroaching communism.
What white South Africa cannot see is that if anything can convince
people of the advantages of communism, it is the poverty and exploitation
that is firmly rooted in the apartheid system, supported and protected
by a police state.
As these laws were
passed, I became increasingly horrified and frustrated. Surely it
could not be possible for human beings
to stand back and
allow these laws to be passed, to operate with all that goes with them
in the detention cells? Yet white South Africa does. Almost the whole
white population does nothing more than "cluck". The Western
world equally "clucks" — and continues to enjoy the
economic relations, which benefit it and unashamedly bolster up this
abhorrent regime.
I have already
said how often I am — and still am — asked
why I don't leave South Africa. Part of the answer lies in my utter
hatred of the security and apartheid laws and practices of South Africa.
It is my belief that by staying in South Africa, having suffered some
of the persecution inflicted by the government, by being prepared to
accept whatever lies in the future, I can make my stand clear.
By the end of the
1960s, seven years after the introduction of ninety days, eighteen
black men had already died in detention.
Only six were
alleged by the state to have died of natural causes. Twelve were shamelessly
claimed as suicide or death by hanging. Imagination shudders at what
the dead men must have suffered to bring them to the state when death
by hanging is preferable to life. Were they tortured beyond endurance
until they made the statements demanded by their interrogators? Did
they find death preferable to becoming state witnesses? Whatever the
cause of death, these "suicides" must, like Babla Salojee's
fall, lie at the door of the security police. Nor are there lacking
proven cases of murderous assaults by the police upon their helpless
victims. For Joseph Mdhluli and Steven Biko, for Neil Aggett, the full
circumstances have never been disclosed, yet in these cases there can
be no doubt that they died at the hands of the police. Were these indeed
the only such cases?
As the trials began
in the courts, so also came the triumphs and tragedies of the accused
and the witnesses. The police
bragged, "They all
talk sooner or later." Perhaps they do. Human endurance must have
its limits and gradually reports emerged of the sufferings of the detainees.
Evidence was needed by the police for successful prosecutions. Statements
from the detainees had to be obtained. Complaints to the courts of
statements extracted under duress brought no relief. There were policemen
a-plenty to deny any truth in the detainees' reports of violence or
long periods of sleepless standing.
This decade of political trials led off with the famous Rivonia trial.
Walter Sisulu and Ahmed Kathrada, my colleagues at the treason trial,
had been dramatically arrested with twelve others at a house in Rivonia,
a Johannesburg suburb of large houses and pleasant wooded gardens.
Nelson Mandela was brought from gaol to join them while he was still
serving his five-year sentence.
Only ten men stood trial on charges under the Sabotage Act. Four of
those who had been arrested had made a dramatic escape from the Marshall
Square police station. Their escape was hailed as a triumph in those
dark days. Robert Hepple did not stand trial for he had made a statement
to the prosecution and was released. He fled the country immediately
and no one knows whether, had he not been freed, he would have become
a state witness and faced his friends in the dock. James Kantor was
discharged at the end of the state case.
Nelson Mandela spoke from the dock in words that have made history.
The African National Congress is struggling for the right to live .
. . During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of
the African people. I have fought against white domination and I have
fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic
and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and
with equal opportunities. It is an ideal, which I hope to live for
and to achieve. But if need be it is an ideal for which I am prepared
to die.
South Africa had waited in tense expectation the day before they were
sentenced. They had all been found guilty except one white. Would they
live or die? The death sentence had been demanded and it was a possibility.
I had not once been able to attend their trial in Pretoria because
I was forbidden by my bans to leave Johannesburg. Even at this crucial
time, I could not say goodbye to my friends.
On the day of the
sentence I did not go to work. I felt that I could not bear to be
sitting in my office when it came,
whether life or death.
I went instead to sort and prepare the food and clothing for winter
parcels for the banished people. I took my transistor radio with me
and when I heard the words "life imprisonment" I could only
whisper "They live! They live!" Then I thought of the agony
of the wives and the irony of it all, that they would be so thankful
for the life imprisonment of their husbands, which would make a mockery
of their marriages. Life imprisonment for these convicted men meant
just that. There would be no remission. Life meant for the term of
their natural lives.
They left the dock,
these leaders of their people, left their wives and their children
and went singing down the steps
into the underground
cells below, singing into gaol, for the rest of their lives. Their
wives came singing from the court to face the empty years. Winnie Mandela
and Albertina Sisulu led them, both to face many years of bans and
house arrest, in addition to the loneliness of the "Robben Island
Widows", the women who see their husbands once a year through
a perspex window in that forbidding maximum security island gaol.
Albertina Sisulu, Winnie Mandela: they were leaders in their own right,
just as their husbands were leaders. Their dignity, their courage,
their control, were beyond description. Winnie was already banned and
we were forbidden to communicate with each other. One wife, Caroline
Motsoaledi, could not be there. She had seven young children, the youngest
only a few months old, born during her husband's detention. Caroline
had been arrested and detained while she was actually in court during
his trial and held in gaol for several months. She was not told until
long after the end of his trial whether her husband had been acquitted,
sentenced to gaol or condemned to death, and even then she did not
know what to believe.
The Rivonia trial was not even a month over when another political
trial affecting some of my friends flared up. From 4 July onwards there
were mass raids throughout the country. I was raided as usual, in the
middle of the night, relieved that it was only a raid and not an arrest.
I lost some valuable material on the banished people and a few books.
All these were removed by the police and I never saw them again. I
sometimes wonder where and how all our documents are stored and if
they have been properly filed by archivists so that at some future
time we shall be able to recover them in good order. I doubt it.
In the morning I learnt that several of my friends had been detained
and that the raids and arrests had indeed been nationwide. It seemed
to have been a national crackdown and it led to many political trials
of which the one involving some of my friends was the Communist Party
trial. I knew that the former Communist Party had been revived as an
underground organisation, because since 1960 pamphlets had been appearing
sporadically over the name of the Communist Party. I had no idea who
the members were. I supposed that they must be some of the old members
working underground. I did not know that new members had been recruited,
nor that some of them were former members of the Congress of Democrats.
As a matter of fact, some of my closest friends turned out to have
been Communist Party members. Some of these people had joined the underground
Communist Party during the 1950s, including our president, Pieter Beyleveld;
others only after the Congress of Democrats had been banned. Although
these disclosures came as a surprise, I cannot say that they disturbed
me greatly. The Congress of Democrats had conscientiously tried to
do its work as a member of the Congress Alliance. It seemed irrelevant
that some of its members had also been members of the Communist Party,
for this was true also of the African National Congress and the South
African Indian Congress, though admittedly in far smaller proportions.
Bram Fischer, our beloved advocate of the treason trial and the leader
of the defence team in the Rivonia trial, was amongst those charged.
He was detained first for a few days in June and then released again
until a second detention in September. He was granted bail so that
he could fly to London for an important civil case in which he was
appearing as senior counsel before the Privy Council. He returned to
South Africa to stand his trial with the other accused, but before
the end of the trial, Bram went into hiding to work underground.
All except two were convicted in this trial, under the Suppression
of Communism Act, and served sentences in gaol varying from one to
five years. Most of them had been amongst my friends in the Congress
of Democrats and I missed them very much, not only when they were in
gaol, but also when they were released, because they all received house
arrest and banning orders and we could no longer communicate with each
other. That they held some political theories differing from mine was
totally irrelevant to our friendship and to our loyalty to the liberation
struggle.
It was during the
1960s that real treachery first raised it ugly head. In the Rivonia
trial, Robert Hepple led the way. He
had been arrested
with the others but during the months in gaol before the trial began,
he had been prevailed upon to make a statement to the security police
and to agree to become a state witness. This was the first time in
political trials that such a thing had happened and it came as a great
shock. During the trial, Walter Sisulu said of Hepple in reply to the
prosecutor, "He is a traitor. Anyone who gives information to
the police is a traitor . . . Hepple will be ostracised to such an
extent that he can do no further harm."
It was the first time that I had had to think about this and it seemed
to me that Walter was speaking not just about Bob Hepple, but about
any others who might fall in the same way. It has remained in my mind
ever since. There have been many since Hepple; some tortured beyond
endurance and for them there can be nothing but pity. There are others
who have not been so tortured but have not kept silent. It must be
a terrible burden to carry for the rest of your life and to be ostracised
for it. When the Communist Party trial began later, it brought further
shocking examples of betrayals of trust. Pieter Beyleveld, National
President of the Congress of Democrats, a leader in the liberation
struggle, appeared as a state witness against his former colleagues.
From the detention cells had come reports of ill-treatment of detainees,
both black and white, long unbroken hours of interrogation without
rest or sleep, and physical assault. Affidavits testified to the truth
of these reports. The common pattern of detention was continued physical
abuse in addition to total isolation and mental torture.
Pieter Beyleveld
had been subjected to none of this. He decided, very deliberately,
to betray his friends after only a
short time in detention
rather than face the possibility of a gaol sentence. This was the man
who had been our leader, trusted and accepted not only by us but by
the whole Congress Alliance. I heard the rumours of his dishonour but
I refused to believe them unless I saw him in the witness box — almost
anyone else, but not Pieter Beyleveld. I soon knew that it was true,
that Piet was a traitor. He had sold his friends to gain his own freedom.
I was appalled at this betrayal and I could not bear to see him again.
A year later, however, I saw him coming towards me in a city street.
There was no time for me to cross to the other side. We passed each
other in silence but our eyes met. I have seen that same look in the
eyes of my dog after some misbehaviour but the difference is that I
feel sorry for my dog.
On the other hand we also paid the price of our naivety. Gerald Ludi,
whom we had accepted fully as a member in all our Congress of Democrats
activities, turned out to be a professional police spy. He had been
very active with us and also in the underground cells and committees
of the Communist Party. He testified in court as a paid infiltrator.
It cost the accused dearly in their trial but although I hated Ludi
I never felt the same contempt for him as for Pieter Beyleveld.
Against this agony of betrayal by those we trusted, there were those
who refused to testify in court to the statements forced out of them
by torture and they faced, unflinchingly, periods of imprisonment for
their refusals. Amongst them were my friends, Violet Weinberg, Leslie
Schermbrucker and Izzy Heymann. Leslie went to gaol for 300 days for
refusing to testify against Bram Fischer, Violet was sentenced to three
months for refusing to testify against Izzy. Izzy refused to testify
against a friend and was sentenced to a year's imprisonment. There
were many amongst the blacks too, but Izzy, Leslie and Violet were
my friends and it came very close.
I thought often of whether I should be able to hold out against the
threat of imprisonment, against torture. The pressure for a statement
under physical duress is not something for which I can predict my own
conduct. I have not been so tested. I do not know the limits of my
endurance. I can only pray that I should be given strength enough for
whatever might befall me.
Despite these heroic stands, the 180-days law was relentlessly succeeding
with many in its vile purpose. Witnesses appeared, morally shattered,
aware that they were betraying their friends and their cause, yet lacking
the strength to face imprisonment and a broken life on discharge.
The claim is sometimes
made that their evidence added little or nothing to the case against
the accused. The judicial value
of the evidence
is set against the possible gaol consequences of refusal to testify.
But this takes no account of the damage done to the witness, the shame
that has to be carried for life and the ostracism that has been earned,
the stigma of "traitor" that cannot be excised.
Some left the country; others remained. Some felt no shame. Yet most
had been people of stature in the liberation struggle and this made
their fall the more tragic, to have been so trusted and then to betray.
This was a bitter period. No one politically involved felt safe from
the menacing knock on the door. No one could get news of relatives
detained for many months.
Even before Bram Fischer's arrest in 1964, tragedy had struck his
family. Immediately after the end of the Rivonia trial, Bram and his
wife, Molly, had set off for Cape Town for their daughter Use's twenty-first
birthday. On the way, there had been an accident on a river bridge.
Bram's car had fallen into the river and Molly could not be rescued
from the car in time to save her life. Many banned people came to her
funeral to say goodbye to her and to be there with Bram and his children.
Yet with all our sorrow, there was also a feeling of triumph for us
in being together with so many other banned people whom we had not
seen for so long, to greet them with a clasp of the hand and a few
whispered words despite our bans.
Bram returned from
England to stand in the dock with his colleagues for the first part
of his trial — no longer
the eminent counsel in his robes, but an accused, still standing
as upright, as fearless
and dignified as on the day he applied for the recusal of the Judge
President in the treason trial.
There came a day
when Bram failed to appear in court. There was only a letter to his
counsel. "I owe it to the political prisoners,
to the banished, to the silenced, and to those under house arrest,
not to remain a spectator, but to act." He had gone into hiding
in South Africa in order to oppose the policy of apartheid as long
as he could. He believed that unless the whole oppressive system was
changed radically and rapidly, disaster would follow. To try to avoid
this became a supreme duty.
For months Bram
succeeded in evading capture and led the lonely life of a fugitive,
in heavy disguise, moving from place
to place. His youngest
daughter Use spoke of him with her own quiet dignity: "My father
is a great, great man." Her mother dead, her father on the run,
both within a few months, left a heavy burden for this twenty-one-year-old
girl to carry. Her married sister lived in Rhodesia, a prohibited immigrant,
able to enter South Africa only by special government permission; her
younger brother was in very delicate health.
On 11 November 1965, Bram was captured by the police after months
of hiding, but never far from Johannesburg. His trial began. His Communist
Party colleagues were already serving their sentences. They had been
convicted under the Suppression of Communism Act but Bram was linked
also with Umkhonto We Sizwe and charged under the Sabotage Act, which
carried the death sentence.
Towards the end of his trial, Bram spoke from the dock. He had refused
to give evidence on his own behalf because he knew that he would then
be cross-examined and could endanger other people.
I am on trial for my political beliefs and the conduct to which those
beliefs drove me. The charges arise from my being a member of the Communist
Party ... two courses were open to me. I could confess and plead for
mercy or explain my belief and my activities. If I were to ask for
forgiveness I would be betraying my cause, I believe that I was right
and I will explain my views to the court.
He spoke of the tragedy of the fine and loyal persons who turned traitor
to their cause and their country, because of the methodology of the
state.
In this, his final statement to South Africa and the world, Bram Fischer
said,
In confidence we lay our cause before the whole world. Whether we
conquer or whether we die, freedom will rise in Africa like the sun
from the morning clouds.
It was a translation of the inscription in Afrikaans on the base of
President Paul Kruger's statue in Church Square in Pretoria, only a
few yards away from where Bram himself stood that day. When I chose
Tomorrow's Sun as the title of one of my books, I did not know that
I was echoing Paul Kruger's words.
Bram was sentenced to life imprisonment on 5 May. His children were
now alone and he gave them his last smile as he went down from the
dock to the cells below, his hand raised in the Congress clenched-fist
salute.
He had defended us in the treason trial and we were acquitted. He
had defended the Rivonia trial accused and they had been convicted
and sentenced to life imprisonment. Now he too was sentenced to life
imprisonment. There was a press photograph of his children. Ilse and
Paul, leaving the court. Ilse's head was held very high.
I could not be present at Bram's trial, just as I had not been able
to go to the Rivonia trial, so I did not see Pieter Beyleveld standing
again in the witness box, this time to testify against the man who
had loved and trusted him.
During 1963 and
1964 there had been literally hundreds of political trials all over
South Africa, wherever there had been
centres of political
activity. The Eastern Cape area had been the main target of the police
crackdown. It had always been the most militant stronghold of the ANC
from the days of the Defiance Campaign. With the national leadership
of the ANC already imprisoned on Robben Island, the security police
moved in against the rank and file membership everywhere and especially
here. "We mean to have peace and quiet in the area for the next
ten years," said a security policeman to a press reporter. His
meaning was plain, but he did not spell out the cost to hundreds of
men and women, mainly for membership of, or assisting, the banned ANC.
Almost 1,000 were arrested. Hundreds faced trial after months in custody,
sometimes more than a year. The sentences were long, up to twelve years
in some cases. There was sometimes immediate re-arrest after short
sentences, sometimes even before the completion of the first sentence.
Trials were often held in camera, presumably to protect the state
witnesses, and deliberately situated in out-of-the-way towns, making
the provision of defence difficult at short notice. Sometimes there
was no notice of a trial. Accused men wrote from police cells asking
for legal defence for their trials and the letters arrived after the
prisoners had already been sentenced and taken to Robben Island. The
Eastern Cape was the area most severely affected, but this was the
general pattern of political repression during those years.
It was during this time that the Federation of South African Women
gradually ceased to function. At national and regional levels the executive
membership was increasingly depleted by banning orders on our leading
members, just when we needed them to organise and develop the new women's
clubs for affiliation. In the Eastern Cape these clubs had initially
been very promising, but this area was badly affected, not only by
bans but by arrests of active African women. Several of them were gaoled
under charges relating to the banned ANC.
Francis Baard and Florence Matomela were the outstanding leaders of
women in the Eastern Cape, a formidable pair of fearless women. They
endured years of political persecution; bans, detentions, solitary
confinement and imprisonment, but nothing could break their spirit.
They were my friends. Francis is still alive, now living outside Pretoria.
She was banished from her old home in Port Elizabeth, the centre of
the Eastern Cape, on her return from gaol. Florence died within a year
of being discharged. They shared indomitable courage and dedication,
yet they were in many ways different from each other. Francis is tall
and massive, dignified and reserved, a woman of authority, capable
of immense personal and political loyalty. Florence I was laughing
and loving, warm and generous of heart. She sang her way through I
hardships, always leading and drawing others to her side.
Both these leaders of the ANC Women's League and the Federation were
brought to Johannesburg for the early part of the treason trial. They
returned to Port Elizabeth to continue their active resistance to passes
for African women and their work in the trade unions, especially Francis.
In the 1960s they both served gaol sentences. Of such stuff is the
liberation struggle of the African people made.
In Johannesburg, the banned women included Lilian Ngoyi, the National
President, Bertha Mashaba, Violet Weinberg, Amina Cachalia, Mary Moodley,
Albertina Sisulu and myself, all national executive members, some of
us also on the regional executive. There were many others. The Federation
had needed time to compensate for the loss of the membership of the
African National Congress Women's League and the Congress of Democrats.
But we did not get the time we needed.
The government's repressive measures had also hit the surviving members
of the Congress Alliance in the same way. The Indian Congresses, the
South African People's Organisation, the South African Congress of
Trades Unions, had all been depleted by bannings and arrests. There
were some who had left South Africa. Not one of our organisations had
dissolved itself, for that would have been to concede destruction and
defeat.
It has been suggested by political researchers that when the government
finally made passes compulsory for African women at the beginning of
1963, this marked the failure of the Federation as a women's organisation.
Nothing could be further from the truth. As far as the anti-pass campaign
was concerned, the Federation did not, at any time, stand or fall on
whether passes were to be made compulsory in the end. Our task was
to unite women in the struggle for freedom and justice. This we did.
For almost eight years, from 1955 to 1963, the Federation with the
ANC Women's League undoubtedly delayed the issuing of passes to African
women. The whole Congress Alliance saw this as a victory in itself.
But in the climate of political repression in the 1960s, there was
no possibility for the Federation to survive in the form in which we
had known it.
At the end of July
1967, the beloved Chief Luthuli died, crushed to death by a sugar
train near his farm. President
of the ANC, winner
of the Nobel Peace prize, he also held the highest ANC award, the Isitwalandwe, "one
who has fought courageously in battle". Deposed by the government
from his chieftainship, he remained "Chief to his people and to
all of us. I remember him in the treason trial, sorely wounded by Advocate
Trengove's suggestion that he was not being honest in the witness box.
Seven years later he was suddenly gone from us, killed by a train in
Groutville where he had remained, a man of non-violence.
Some 7,000 people
came to his funeral; millions mourned his death. His funeral became
an African National Congress affirmation.
Chief’s
body lay beneath the green, black and yellow flag. Men and women of
the old ANC, the Women's League and the Youth League displayed their
colours and their uniforms in tribute to their dead leader.
Those bitter years of repression brought an exodus of people from
South Africa. Some left by exit permit, that one-way door which lets
you out but does not let you in again. Others went through the back
door, without papers or permits and with this way there is no coming
back either. I found it sad, a grievous disappointment that so many
should go. I knew and accepted that some were needed to play their
part in building the external forces of the ANC, but I could find few
valid reasons for others to go, to leave the struggle.
Personal reasons
for going were many and varied. None may sit in judgement on those
who have made such a difficult and
painful decision for themselves
and their families. In some cases it was fear of interrogation and
detention, of possible conviction and years in gaol. "You are
useless in gaol!" I heard this very often but I didn't agree,
for to me there is an enormous value in being ready to endure something
of what our friends and colleagues endure, in keeping that undying
pledge of the Freedom Charter, "Side by side, throughout our lives,
until these democratic changes have been won."
Some would say they must go for the sake of their children. I think
then of the Mandela children, the Sisulu children, the Motsoaledi children
and so many more. Yet I am childless, so it is not for me to question
such decisions. Others were unable to adjust to banning orders and
house-arrest conditions. This must depend upon the individual capacity
to adjust, to accept what you cannot change.
Whatever the reason, those who have left South Africa are not to be
envied. Some have been materially or academically successful, others
had to struggle to establish themselves. I think they all look back
nostalgically to the land they left.
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