Histoire de mon fils

Les Noirs étaient habitués à être serrés les uns contre les autres. Dans les queues pour les transports, pour les permis de travail, pour l'allocation de logement, pour tous les papiers pourvus de cachets qui autorisaient leurs vies (...) Un seul corps, réunion de tous ces corps, respirait dans une diastole et une systole communes, et au-dessus s'étendait la liberté du ciel immense et dégagé de l'après-midi.

She stirred beside him. — Change the way they think. again. I don't
know. It's not so long since you learnt to change the idea you had of
yourselves as powerless against whites. The old Left did it, by god! Thank
god. Only the old Left. Now new realities to be accepted. It's going to be
hard for many, looked at from here. It means the loss of absolutes— you
know what I mean? I'm a missionary's granddaughter. It makes people feel
insecure. You can screw up the courage to do what you have to do to get rid
of the old structures that hold you down if you can believe there's a paradise
on the other side. You die for freedom only if there's the political equivalent
of eternal life to come — which is liberation as promised in the old socialist
writ, not in some compromise with a mixed economy, people with money
— whites, and bourgeois blacks! — still owning property on land the
whites stole by conquest! That's how it will seem!—
— But the writ's being rewritten! That's the point! People have been
willing to die now for that. We've got to wake up and realize it, if it's to
mean feeding and housing and educating our people in freedom! Giving the
generations of uprooted people and refugees somewhere to live instead of
somewhere to run from— There.

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?

D'une certaine distance, nous pouvions voir quelque chose accroché à notre grille (...) C'était un chat crevé, et attaché serré à son cou un morceau de carton écrit en rouge : SALE PUTE DE NOIRE COMMUNISTE DEHORS.

Although Sonny had been refused a passport for the compassionate
purpose of visiting his wife and daughter, others were making the trip
across the frontier for openly political purposes. White industrialists,
churchmen, academics, liberals and lawyers: they were people belonging to
professional and social structures within the law, even if they now pressed
official confidence in them by tentatively stepping beyond it. Most never
had had, nor sought, any contact with the liberation movement within the
country. The instinct of a ruling class to seek out what it hoped might be the
discovery of something of their own kind beneath a different skin and a
different rhetoric ignored the opportunities to do so at home and led them to
go abroad to meet the movement's leaders in exile, instead. For the feared
future seemed to exist, already, there, outside the country. Perhaps some of
its expected retribution might be won over, by pre-emption, before it arrived
within

A young girl came early in the morning. She had purple-pink painted
lips and nails and she wore white plastic boots, a smart little garment-
factory girl on her way to work. Any neighbourly informers watching the
house would have thought her one of the girl-friends of the son, she looked
exactly the kind of girl they believe the son of our kind of people would be
attracted to. Her long nails and her bangles clicked as she scrabbled for the
note in her bag and gave it to my father. In the midst of the strain and
tension of those moments there was an incongruous aside, in my feelings;
pride in the fact of the unguessed-at commitment of our people to the
struggle, hidden under this cheap appearance. Whites don't know what
they're seeing when they look at us; at her, at the black women from the
country knitting jerseys for sale on the city pavements, at the black combi
drivers taking over the streets, the miners in their NUM T-shirts; at my
sister, Baby, at Aila, my mother. I want to tell them.

Doesn't matter. Aila said that and he lay beside her with his heart
beating up in resentment against Hannah. He had listened entranced to the
things Hannah said; they seemed to speak from the centre of life, which no-
one else he had known had ever mentioned. But the centre of life wasn't
there, with her, the centre of life was where the banalities are enacted— the
fuss over births, marriages, family affairs with their survival rituals of food
and clothing, that were with Aila. Because of Hannah, Aila was gone.
Finished off, that self that was Aila. Hannah destroyed it. Aila was gone,
too, Yet she lay beside him alive. Something bigger than self saves self; that
had been the youthful credo he had taught his shy bride. He listened to Aila
breathing, giving a little snore, now and then, and smelt the too-sweet odour
of her skin creams warmed by the rise of her body temperature in sleep —
the cloying familiarity in marriage, flee from it to the clandestine love wild
and free of habit— and he longed unappeasably; nothing, nothing was there
to stanch the longing for everything he had fled.
Aila the comrade. Exhibit No. 1 in court was an RPG-7 rocket-launcher,
two RPG-7 rockets, three RG-42 hand-grenades, two limpet-mines, two
FM-57 land-mines, and a length of flowered curtaining material. It had been
bought in the Oriental Plaza by that other Aila, who sewed curtains for her
son's bedroom. Aila sat between police officers with her head up,
composed, a smile and lift of eyebrows for Sonny and Will in the front row
of the public gallery. Sonny had no rational control of his feelings at this
period come upon his life. Day-light — the daylight of courtrooms and
police footfalls, the huddle of lawyers and the shuffle to rise in court as the
judge entered the canopied bench — dazzled his solitary, night mood. But
this at least was his place, the unchanging ground of struggle across the
veld. With a lance of pain, pride in this woman, Aila, broke through. He
scarcely noticed the sudden agitation in the boy.

If he had been the one with the right to judge her. As her husband? As a
comrade? The construction he had skilfully made of his life was
uninhabitable, his categories were useless, nothing fitted his need. Needing
Hannah. His attraction to Hannah belonged to the distorted place and time
in which they — all of them — he, Aila, Hannah, lived. With Hannah there
was the sexuality of commitment; for commitment implies danger, and the
blind primal instinct is to ensure the species survives in circumstances of
danger, even when the individual animal dies or the plant has had its season.
In this freak displacement, the biological drive of his life, which belonged
with his wife and the children he'd begotten, was diverted to his lover. He
and Hannah begot no child; the revolutionary movement was to be their
survivor. The excitement of their mating was for that. But Aila was the
revolutionary, now.

I have lived with Aila all the time while he, my father, was living his
secret life and I have never heard of this 'Machinery' or this code name for
some high command: the secret life she was living. I've been the cover for
both of them. That sticks! She didn't even need to confide in me; the silence
she kept, for my protection, made me her conspirator, just as I've been his.

A gross
tap dance of policemen's boots clipped smartly up and down past the father
and son. Whichever way they stood aside, they were in someone's path.
Exchanges and orders in the blacks' own languages and the Afrikaans of
white officers flew about in the haste and impersonality of individuals
dependent, each for his own fingernail hold of authority, on a hierarchy of
command. Physical bewilderment made it difficult for the father and son to
be self-effacing; both let themselves be buffetted as if they were inanimate
obstacles some cleaner or workman had left lying about, while what they
were witnessing through the wire mesh and the doorway was some
intensely piercing awareness they alone could receive, because Aila
belonged to them. Because Aila belonged to them, everything they saw
happening to the other victims being escorted across the yard from some
cell or Black Maria out of sight could be happening, out of sight, to her.
Sonny himself had been brought at that trotting gait of one in handcuffs to
register in the anterooms of trials. He had seen wretched, blubbering men
dragged by warders, punched, where they bent double, to make them
opstaan jou bliksem, by white bullies or shaken and shouted at by black
bullies, he knew as a commonplace sight a barefoot man hobbled by ankle
chains shuffling as a horror risen from the slave past into the memory of
computers and the glare of strip lighting in the anteroom. But Aila, Aila,
Aila had nothing to do with this! Aila in the neat, sweet-smelling clothes
she sewed for herself, the seed-pearl necklace round her throat, her arms
drawn to her sides in rightful, subconscious shrinking from the walls that
held him — that was as far as Aila had ever been, ever should be, in contact
with any of this. And the boy — what must it mean to be the boy, who
knew nothing of it, not a particularly manly youngster, protected too much
by his mother so that despite his intelligence and his reading (yes, admit it,
encouraged in that by his father) he knows only at second-hand the ugly,
brutal temptation of the power of one being over another, he's been shown
only the beauty and nobility of resisting it, father smiling calmly at his
adolescent son brought to pay a prison visit. The father could do now what
he had not been able to across the glass barriers, then: Sonny put a hand on
Will's shoulder. To comfort. To be one with him.