Two days, two ANC heroes, two elderly white men. First, Ronnie Kasrils, formerly a guerrilla fighter for the ANC armed wing for 30 years, one of a handful of ANC fighters rumoured to be a KGB colonel, then a rather good sanitation minister for South Africa, now Minister for National Intelligence. Today, Denis Goldberg, the only white man convicted in the Rivonia trials that imprisoned Nelson Mandela, Govan Mbeki and others. Except Nelson and the others were sent to Robben Island, and Denis, being white, couldn't be imprisoned with his comrades so was sent to prison in Pretoria, for 22 years.
22 years.
Christ.
I knew he'd been to prison because despite the chastisement of the Minister for Water Affairs, I'd done some preparation (a complicated procedure known in journalistic circles as “googling.”) I knew he'd been sent to a different prison than Robben Island. I knew that my friend Larry's stepmother had visited him for 14 years. I just didn't know it was 22 years and, as a fact inserted casually into a conversation about augmented bacteria as a way of emptying pit latrines, it was a bit of a shock.
Denis used to work for Ronnie. Ronnie is a Minister and as friendly as the other Minister was frosty. He does a great impression of an Italian neo-realist film where a mayor opens a town's new public toilet by peeing in it. Ronnie enjoyed pretending to do the same thing when he inaugurated VIP (Ventilated Improved Pit) latrines all over Southern Africa. He said sanitation was a relief from the soldiering. Now, he's a Minister for National Intelligence in a building which has no identifying sign and is oddly located next to a busy highway outside Pretoria and near a shopping mall, and where the very polite staff don't bother to check for recording equipment or cameras. Indeed, Ronnie's tremendously friendly PR person asked instead whether I could send her my recording because she hasn't yet figured out how to work her recorder. I said of course and then wondered why she couldn't just access the recordings from the walls.
Denis lives in a house above a fishing village outside Cape Town. We flew to Cape Town from Johannesburg brain-squeezingly early this morning, on Kulula, yet another cheery low-cost airline. I don’t know who decided that low-cost airlines had to try to be funny but they did and they do. At least the Kulula crew were actually funny. As my mother knows well, my sense of humour in the morning is difficult to locate. It was a miracle then that I smiled when the pilot said “The weather is predicted to be fine but weather reports are sometimes wrong. [Comedic pause] Unlike my mother-in-law who is always right.” He repeated his speech in Afrikaans but nobody laughed then. When we landed the cabin crew woman said “We have landed in Cape Town. If that's not where you wanted to be, that's your problem.”
Probably you had to be there. Trevor, who accompanied me, calls Kulula the BEE – Black Economic Empowerment – Airline. He said, “it's the kind where you can take your goat.” Not unless goats are kept by well-heeled white South Africans. The aeroplane was green, but the passengers were almost uniformly monochrome. I asked Trevor where the Bs of BEE were. “They can't afford it. They'll take a taxi. 15 hours by road.”
But I will stop whining about how surprisingly un-rainbow things are in South Africa, because Denis indirectly told me off. He was talking about English “comrades” who criticise South Africa for not being perfect, and for things being the same. He says, “it's only been 13 years.” He says he watches Movango (sp?), one of the unidentified vernacular soaps I watched, which is in the minority Venda language, and realises how far they have come. Blacks would never have been on TV before. He says that after he was released, he went to give lectures in various countries. In the US, after an African-American audience had got over its shock that their ANC speaker was a white man, he was told, “thank you for what you have done for us.” He said, “Thank you but I didn't do it for you. I did it so my children could choose who they could be friends with.”
Over lunch, Denis said he'd escaped from prison once, and that three of his comrades escaped again. The apartheid authorities moved all the white political prisoners to another prison while they upgraded the security of the escapable one. For two and a half years, they were in the hanging jail. They were put in cells right next to the gallows. At least one man was hanged every week. “We used to hear them the day before practising the drop and the sound of the trap going. It was quite disturbing.” The night before an execution, someone would start singing hymns. Eventually the whole prison would join in, until 3000 voices were singing, but “with no hope in their voices.” At 6am, the condemned man was executed and singing stopped.
[A joke from Trevor: A teacher asked a class of children if they knew the first name of Mr. Mandela. Nobody answered for a while. Then a kid stuck his hand up and said, "Free!"]
Despite Denis, and despite Ronnie, and the marvellousness of them both, the highlight of the last two days involved neither prison nor spooks nor toilets. At a breakfast meeting for Ashoka Fellows [I'm in a hotel; providing links costs money; do some deep journalistic investigation], of whom Trevor is one, guests had to introduce themselves one by one. I blurbed on about toilets. A man leaned over and said, in”I can get rats to clean them.” I said, “?” He said, “I train rats to detect landmines and isolate disease.”
I said, “I've never heard that said to me before. Please continue.”
He is a Dutch man called Bert. He likes rats. He is based in Tanzania, where I will be next week. I also like rats. I may have to find out more.
p.s. if anyone gets the pap reference, he/she gets a pint.