The Dennis Brutus Tapes: Essays at autobiography [annotated] 1847010342, 9781847010346

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Dennis Brutus (1924-2009) is known internationally as a South African poet, anti-apartheid activist and campaigner for human rights and the release of political prisoners. His literary works include Sirens Knuckles Boots (1963), Letters to Martha, and Other Poems from a South African Prison (1968), A Simple Lust 1973), and Stubborn Hope (1978). ‘Besides being one of the most effective campaigners against apartheid in sport, Dennis Brutus was a courageous man and a poet of no mean achievement. His reminiscences make for engrossing reading, particularly the grim story of his arrest and incarceration on Robben Island.’ – J M Coetzee, Visiting Professor at the University of Adelaide, was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. ‘These tapes are conversational gems, showing Dennis Brutus at his very best: sharp in his dialogue, his biting tongue full of vigour (and sometimes invective), and yet still gentle in his recollections. They provide one last encounter with a poet in full flow, his voice distinct, crisp and politically resonant. It is good to hear the strength and the conviction mixed with ambivalence in his voice. True to form, Dennis Brutus is ready to trouble us, as is his tendency, one more time.’ – Grant Farred, Professor of Africana Studies and English at Cornell University ‘... an entirely fresh perspective on the activist-poet, who was as enigmatic as he was gifted. Speaking in trusted company, the Brutus who emerges from these conversations is disarmingly candid, laconic and self-detached – a splendid contradiction of modernist poet and irrepressible politician.’ – David Attwell, Professor of Modern Literature, University of York Cover photograph: Dennis Brutus, Austin, Texas, 1975 (© and reproduced with the kind permission of Hal Wylie)

an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620, USA www.boydellandbrewer.com www.jamescurrey.com

THE DENNIS BRUTUS TAPES Edited by BERNTH LINDFORS Essays at Autobiography

Bernth Lindfors is Professor Emeritus of English and African Literatures, The University of Texas at Austin, and founding editor of Research in African Literatures. He has written and edited numerous books on African literature, including Folklore in Nigerian Literature (1973), Popular Literatures in Africa (1991), Africans on Stage (1999), Early Soyinka (2008), and Early Achebe (2009).

When Dennis Brutus was a Visiting Professor at The University of Texas at Austin in 1974-75, he recorded on tape a series of reflections on his life, career and poetry. The material reproduced here records fragments of the autobiography of a remarkable man who lived in extraordinary times and managed to leave his mark on the land and literature of South Africa. An effective anti-apartheid campaigner, Brutus succeeded in getting South Africa excluded from the Olympics. His opposition to racial discrimination in sports led to his arrest, banning, and imprisonment on Robben Island. Upon release, he left South Africa and lived most of the rest of his life in exile. The tapes are edited by Bernth Lindfors who has added an Introduction and footnotes.

THE DENNIS BRUTUS Essays at TAPES Autobiography

Edited by BERNTH LINDFORS

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The Dennis Brutus Tapes Essays at Autobiography

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Published Poetry of Dennis Brutus Sirens Knuckles Boots Ibadan: Mbari 1963

Letters to Martha & other poems from a South African Prison London: Heinemann (AWS 46) 1969 Under pseudonym John Bruin

Thoughts Abroad Austin, Texas: Troubadour Press 1970

Poems from Algiers Austin, Texas: African & Afro-American Research Institute, The University of Texas at Austin 1970

A Simple Lust Selected poems including Sirens Knuckles Boots, Letters to Martha, Poems from Algiers & Thoughts Abroad London: Heinemann (AWS 115) 1973; Reprint forthcoming in AWS New York: Hill and Wang 1973

China Poems Austin, Texas: African & Afro-American Studies & Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin 1975

Strains Austin, Texas: Troubadour Press 1975

Stubborn Hope Including select poems from China Poems, Strains and South African Voices London: Heinemann (AWS 208) 1978 Washington D.C.: Three Continents Press 1978

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The Dennis Brutus Tapes Essays at Autobiography Edited by Bernth Lindfors Emeritus Professor of English & African Literatures The University of Texas at Austin

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James Currey www.jamescurrey.com is an imprint of Boydell and Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.boydellandbrewer.com © The estate of May Brutus 2011 First published 2011 1 2 3 4 5 15 14 13 12 11 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of May Brutus to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Brutus, Dennis, 1924-2009. The Dennis Brutus tapes : essays at autobiography. 1. Brutus, Dennis, 1924-2009. 2. Brutus, Dennis, 1924-2009—Interviews. 3. Poets, South African—20th century—Biography. 4. Human rights workers—South Africa—Biography. 5. Anti-apartheid activists—South Africa—Biography. I. Title II. Lindfors, Bernth. 821.9’14-dc22 ISBN 978-1-84701-034-6 ( James Currey cloth) Papers used by Boydell and Brewer are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests

Typeset in 11/12 pt Monotype Garamond by Long House Publishing Services, Cumbria, UK Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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Contents Acknowledgments Introduction

L IF E Recollections Family Background Attempt to Escape The Need to Get Out Caught in Mozambique Shot Down in Johannesburg

Robben Island Interlude Notes on my Activities

vii 1

15 32 47 47 60 72 92 110 118

Travel problems – Opposition to racism & apartheid – Work in sport – Scholarly work – Autobiography

Notes on my Life

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School days – Holidays & work –Teaching – On the International Defence & Aid Fund – On becoming politically conscious – Sports – Prison – Travel – On being a citizen of the world

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Contents

P O E TRY ‘Somehow Tenderness Survives’ Talking with Students Reviewing a Review On Literature & Commitment On my Poetry Further Notes on Poetry

143 157 169 180 187 197

On the fragmentary nature of my writing – On poetic method – On tenderness & tension – On my banning – On my prison poetry – On the impact of exile – Poems from Algiers – China Poems

vi

In Memoriam: Arthur Nortje 1942-1970

206

Index

209

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Acknowledgments My introduction to this volume originally appeared in Critical Perspectives on Dennis Brutus, ed. Craig W. McLuckie and Patrick J. Colbert (Colorado Springs: Three Continents Press, 1995). “Somehow Tenderness Survives” was published in The Benin Review vol. 1 (1975: 44 -45), “Lust without Passion” appeared in the African Communist 55 (4th quarter, 1973), and “Talking with Students” was brought out in Palaver: Interviews with Five African Writers in Texas, ed. Bernth Lindfors (Austin: African and Afro-American Research Institute, University of Texas, 1972). That Institute, later assimilated as part of what is now the John L. Warfield African and African American Studies Center, also issued Brutus’s Poems from Algiers (1970) and China Poems (1975). The other poems by Brutus that are quoted in the tape transcripts are from his A Simple Lust (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1973). Brutus’s remarks on “Literature and Commitment” first appeared in Issue 6, no. 1 (1976) and were reprinted in Contemporary Black South African Literature: A Symposium, ed. Bernth Lindfors (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1976). I am grateful to all these publishers for permission to quote from these works. The rest of the commentary in this book is taken from unpublished transcriptions of tapes recorded in Austin in 1974–1975 when Brutus was a Visiting Professor at The University of Texas at Austin. Most of these tapes were recorded by Brutus himself in isolation. Others were done in interaction with students, faculty members, visiting scholars, and media personnel. A complete set of the tapes and transcripts has been deposited in the library of the Centre for African Literary Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Another set will be deposited at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, when this book is published. I am grateful to my colleague Hal Wylie for providing the photograph of Brutus that appears on the cover of this book. I am also grateful to Professor Dapo Adelugba for permission to quote excerpts from his interview with Brutus in the chapter “Notes on My Life.” vii

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Introduction I first met Dennis Brutus in Los Angeles in March of 1967. I was a doctoral student at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) then, and Dennis was on his first major speaking tour in the United States, having made his way into exile in England after gaining release from prison and house arrest in South Africa just a year earlier. In Britain he had become active in a number of London-based anti-apartheid organizations, and if I remember correctly, it was his involvement in the campaign to exclude South Africa from the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City that occasioned his visit to North America. He was traveling as President of the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SAN-ROC)1, an organization he had founded in South Africa, and he was making his rounds to strategic points in the Western Hemisphere in an effort to marshal support for an international boycott of South African sports teams. In those days Dennis was better known as a political activist than as a poet. After all, up to that point he had published only one slim volume of poems, Sirens Knuckles Boots, which had been issued in 1963 by the Mbari Club in Nigeria and consequently was not widely available in the rest of the Englishspeaking world. However, his second volume, Letters to Martha and Other Poems from a South African Prison, was about to appear in Heinemann’s ubiquitous African Writers Series the following year, and this, more than any other single publication, was to make him more conspicuous to the reading public. The fact that both these books were banned in South Africa added further interest and notoriety to his verse, especially his prison poems, so his literary career 1

Dennis Brutus told James Currey in 2008 after having read the proofs of the section on ‘Publishing Dennis Brutus’ in James Currey, Africa Writes Back, 2008 pp. 207–11, how the International Olympic Committee threatened legal action against the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee for illegal use of the registered name ‘Olympic’. SAN-ROC cunningly got round this by the technicality of renaming it the ‘South African Non-Racial Open Committee for Olympic Sports’. SAN-ROC is often shortened to SANROC. 1

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Introduction was about to take off in a major way, even though he was doing nothing strenuous to promote it. Instead, he was devoting all his energy to the sports campaign; poetry was only a sideline, an avocation, something one might do to fill up spare moments at a bus stop or in an airport waiting room. Then, as afterwards, he never put poetry first. Dennis gave a talk at UCLA and read a few of his poems, and afterwards John Povey2 and I sought him out in his hotel room in order to tape-record an interview with him. John and I were more interested in eliciting his views on poetry than on politics, but the discussion ranged widely over a variety of topics, on all of which Dennis expressed himself with great clarity and conviction. I recall having been impressed not only with his facility for articulating ideas but also with his friendliness and relaxed unpretentiousness. He was very approachable and seemed to relish engaging conversation. The next time I saw Dennis was in the summer of 1969 at the Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers, where he was part of a South African delegation that included Alex La Guma, Mazisi Kunene, and Cosmo Pieterse. Again he was quite accessible and approachable, and between sessions at the conference and cultural events in the city, we had a number of chats about literary matters, chats that were continued at greater length a few weeks later in London as I was on my way back to the United States. Although he had lived there for only a few years, Dennis already knew his way around London like a veteran cab-driver, and as we moved about the city, he pointed out numerous landmarks and monuments, filling me in on details of their history. He was an excellent tour guide, and I learned a great deal about London and about Dennis himself on that brief visit. In the fall of 1969 I began teaching at The University of Texas at Austin, which had just established an African and Afro-American Research Institute to promote and publish research in Black Studies. One of my responsibilities was to found and edit a new biannual journal, Research in African Literatures, which was to be distributed to interested individuals and institutions free of charge. At my suggestion the Institute also launched an Occasional Publications Series to bring out pamphlet-length contributions by distinguished visitors to our campus. Like the journal, these booklets were to be sent out gratis to everyone on our subscription list and to anyone else who requested them. In those good old days, Texas oil money was gushing into the university, permitting a major expansion of facilities and programs. With such support, there was no need to charge subscription fees for new publications or to worry about such irrelevancies as cost-effectiveness. The Research Institute was meant to generate and disseminate research, and this it could do best by simply giving publications away. The first issues of Research in African Literatures 2

John Povey (1929-1992), Professor of English, Associate Director of the African Studies Center, and Editor of African Arts at the University of California at Los Angeles from 1964 to 1991.

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Introduction and the first two Occasional Publications appeared in 1970 and were mailed to about two thousand libraries and scholars throughout the world. Dennis made singular contributions to both series. In the third issue of Research in African Literatures (Vol. 2, No.1) he offered a memorial tribute to the late Arthur Nortje,3 a South African poet who had once been his high school student in Port Elizabeth. To the Occasional Publications Series he contributed Poems from Algiers, a collection of nine pensive poems written while he was attending the Pan-African Cultural Festival. This pamphlet included seven pages of his own comments on the poems as well. Everything – poems, comments, table of contents, title page – was written in his own distinctive calligraphic hand. This was Brutus’s third book of poetry, and though in form and style the individual poems in it more closely resembled the plain, laconic verse in Letters to Martha than the ornate, knotted, cerebral poetry in Sirens Knuckles Boots, there was also greater complexity in certain of the Algiers poems than could be found in much of what he had written based on his prison experiences. Poems from Algiers therefore represented a new turn in Brutus’s poetry that came close to being a synthesis between his earliest intense poeticizing and his moody, colloquial musings in jail. Certainly this small collection offered some fine examples of qualities that grew to be typical of Brutus’s early exile verse: a special sensitivity to place and circumstance, a plaintive nostalgia for South Africa, a brooding awareness of restlessness and tension underlying surface calm. What justified the inclusion of Dennis’s poetry in the Occasional Publications Series was his visit to The University of Texas at Austin in February 1970. He was back in the United States doing a stint of substitute teaching for Es’kia [Ezekiel] Mphahlele4 at the University of Denver then, so we invited him to come to Austin to participate in a campus colloquium on “The Black Experience.” Of course, while he was in town, we put him to work in a number of other ways too: he gave a public lecture, a press conference, a television interview, and met with student groups to answer questions about South Africa. On top of all this, he agreed to visit an African literature class that had been reading his poetry and wanted to know more about his life and art; a partial transcript of his illuminating dialogue with that 3

Arthur Kenneth Nortje (1942-1970), author of the posthumous collections Dead Roots (1973), Lonely Against the Light (1973), and Anatomy of Dark: Collected Poems of Arthur Nortje (2000). A graduate of the University of the Western Cape and Oxford University, he taught for two years in Canada before returning to Oxford, where he died from an overdose of barbituates. 4 Es’kia (Ezekiel) Mphahlele (1919-2008), South African journalist, short story writer, novelist, autobiographer, and professor who left South Africa in 1957 and worked in Nigeria, Kenya, Zambia, France, and the United States before returning in 1977. He was the founding chairman of the Mbari Club in Ibadan, which first published Sirens Knuckles Boots.

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Introduction

1. Cover of Palaver, 1972

class was published in the African and Afro-American Research Institute’s third Occasional Publication, Palaver: Interviews with Five African Writers in Texas, which appeared in 1972 (see Fig. 1). That transcript, included here, still makes interesting reading today, for it contains some of Dennis’s most extensive explications of his own verse as well as his thoughtful justification for switching from a complex to a simple poetic idiom. In the summer of 1970 I was back in Europe to attend a Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association held in Bordeaux, and I stopped by London again to visit libraries and bookshops as well as to see Dennis. While he had been in Austin in February, I had shown him the university’s Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (HRHRC), an archive of rare books and manuscripts that had been established by Harry Ransom, an ex-president of the university who was then serving as Chancellor of The University of Texas System. The HRHRC, which had been one of the pioneers in the acquisition of twentieth-century literary manuscripts, had some South African holdings of interest, among them a large collection of letters by Olive Schreiner, a complete file of the papers of H.C. Bosman, some holograph poems and letters by Roy Campbell, the typescript of one of Nadine Gordimer’s novels, and even some materials in Afrikaans by Uys 4

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Introduction Krige. But it held nothing by “non-white” South African authors, and it had made no effort to collect papers from writers in other parts of Africa. I felt that it would be a good idea to encourage the HRHRC to take an interest in acquiring literary manuscripts from these neglected writers, particularly from those in exile whose papers might otherwise never be preserved. I had sounded Dennis out on this to see if he had any manuscripts that he would be willing to allow the HRHRC to consider adding to its South African holdings. Although he had seldom kept the drafts of his poems, he thought that some of his early notebooks and holograph love lyrics might still be in the possession of friends in South Africa to whom he had sent them years ago, but given his status as a banned person in South Africa, it might be dangerous or risky for those friends if he now tried to retrieve such papers. However, he thought he might have in London a quantity of the working drafts of what he had written since leaving South Africa, and I would be welcome to collect these whenever I next passed through England. I took Dennis up on this that summer and carried back to Austin several cartons of his papers that I promptly wheeled over to the campus administration building and deposited in the suite of offices occupied by Chancellor Harry Ransom. Dennis’s papers were a fascinating amalgam of scraps, scripts, and cuttings. He had a habit of writing poems whenever the mood struck him, putting them down on whatever paper was within easy reach. So there were verses penned or penciled on the backs of envelopes, on the pages of newspapers, on magazine covers, on restaurant menus, on departmental memos, on pieces of junk mail, on laundry slips, on scorecards, even on airline vomit bags. In some cases one couldn’t tell if a particular scribbling was intended to be a poem, a terse message, a test of his writing instrument, a reminder to himself, or merely an off-the-cuff remark or reflective rumination. One example I remember with some amusement consisted of the following haiku-like lines: Dungbeetles in Texas work awfully hard. Was this a poem, an entymological observation, a comment about me, a jibe at the eccentric exertions of the HRHRC, or all of the above? Like some of Brutus’s most economical verse, these verbally frugal lines were open to a multitude of interpretations and perhaps were meant to be so. On the other hand, it is entirely possible that they were nothing more than a fleeting thought mindlessly captured in ink, a genuine jot of ephemera. The manuscripts sat in Chancellor Ransom’s office for well over a year and no action was ever taken on them. I don’t know if Ransom ever found time to look at them, or whether his scrutiny of them would have made any difference. Ransom himself was at that time being eased out of administrative 5

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Introduction

2. Cover of Thoughts Abroad, 1970. Dennis Brutus used the pseudonym John Bruin (John Brown) so as to circulate the book in South Africa where as a banned person, his writing could not be read. The drawing is by Feni Dumile whose name was disguised as Fanie du Mealie Bruin.

work – being “kicked upstairs” was the language often used to describe the process – and given a sinecure as official historian of the university, but he died before he could complete the book that was to be his last academic assignment. In the meantime control of the HRHRC had passed into other hands, and the new regime remained complacently indifferent to African acquisitions. Eventually I wheeled the boxes back to my office and posted them on to Dennis, who was by then teaching at Northwestern University. The manuscripts subsequently were purchased by Northwestern’s Melville J. Herskovits Africana Library, which later, with Dennis’s assistance, went on to acquire some important papers of the late Arthur Nortje. Nonetheless, one good thing did come out of the sequestration of Dennis’s boxes in Texas. In our discussions in London Dennis and I had hatched a plan to subvert South African censorship laws by publishing a booklet of his verse under a pseudonym and funneling copies of this publication to South African bookshops, libraries, and literary media. We thought this would be a fine prank to play on the Censorship Board, so we set about creating our own publishing house, Troubadour Press, the total plant and property of which consisted of a small post office box in Del Valle, Texas, a community just outside Austin. The wheels of production at 6

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Introduction Troubadour Press turned rapidly, and lo and behold, before the end of 1970, we had churned out our first and only publication: Thoughts Abroad, a twentyeight-page collection of poems by “John Bruin” (see Fig. 2). The blurb on the back cover stated that John Bruin is a South African currently teaching and writing outside his country. He is, as his work shows, both widely traveled and homesick. He has already been published in many magazines, in various countries and languages, and has a steadily growing reputation as perhaps one of the first South African poets to achieve international recognition. Two books of his poetry are due to appear shortly; for fuller information write to Troubadour Press.

The booklet had a striking cover – a modernistic sketch of an agonized thinker drawn by the South African artist-in-exile Feni Dumile,5 whose name was disguised in the credit line as Fanie du Mealie Bruin. There were other harmless jokes in the publicity materials we disseminated. Pretending that Troubadour Press was a thriving publishing enterprise, we prepared a flier listing a dozen additional titles that were about to be released, but to avoid any possibility of mail fraud, we took care to instruct recipients of the flier to order and pay for only those books that were already in print – in other words, only John Bruin’s Thoughts Abroad. The other books on the list had covertly humorous titles, the hilarity of which would have been understood and appreciated by only a handful of friends, family members, or faculty in the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin, none of whom received the fliers. Our mailings went exclusively to bookshops, university libraries, and literary magazines in South Africa and to a few African Studies libraries in the United States. And to keep within the letter of the law, we submitted two copies of the booklet to the Library of Congress so it could be copyrighted in the name of Troubadour Press. To add to the fun, I wrote a poker-faced appraisal of the poetry of John Bruin for Africa Today in which I expressed great admiration for this enigmatic, peripatetic poet whose intriguing volume of verse had unexpectedly turned up in a local bookshop. This wasn’t the only assessment of Bruin’s oeuvre to appear in print. One of my doctoral students, Barney McCartney, wrote an excellent review of Thoughts Abroad for Ufahamu without being in the least aware that the author whose poetry he was commenting on was really Dennis Brutus. And Nadine Gordimer, contacted and let into the secret while she was on a speaking tour in the United States, agreed to review the book for South African Outlook, even though she could have faced serious penalties back home had it been discovered that she was discussing a banned author. This modest effort at publicity yielded modest dividends, generating a few sales in South Africa and a few in the United States, but we disposed of most 5

Zwelidumile Geelboi Mgxaji Mslaba Feni (1942-1991), South African artist and sculptor who lived in exile in London from 1968 to 1979 and in New York from 1979 until his death.

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Introduction of the one thousand copies in the print run by sending them directly to Dennis’s friends, acquaintances, and former colleagues in South Africa. We had no interest in making Troubadour Press a going concern. The company had been created solely as a front for flouting one of the great idiocies of the South African legal code: the censorship of poetry. But although the book was in essence a private joke, the poems in it were actually rather good. Dennis, in assembling his papers for the HRHRC, had gathered together verses he had written in various parts of the world – London, Bristol, Belfast, Stockholm, Paris, Grenoble, Rome, Frankfurt, Dubrovnik, Cairo, Algiers, Mbabane, Tehran, New Delhi, Sydney, Nandi, New York, etc. – and then left me to select the final twenty-eight and to organize them into a coherent sequence. In this wide-ranging collection some of the rhetorical strategies from Sirens Knuckles Boots were again in evidence, especially the confessional voice of a poet-speaker who complains of being “the slave of an habituated love” for his homeland/mistress. There was also more careful attention paid to stanza structure, wordplay, and rounded framing devices than was the case in most of Dennis’s prison poems. But as in Poems from Algiers, which had been published only a few days earlier, the mood throughout Thoughts Abroad was one of homesick reverie. The exiled poet was now at liberty to wander the world, but no matter where he went, his thoughts kept returning to his native land. In that sense, he was not, and never would be, completely free while he was abroad. These morose poetic thoughts later achieved wider circulation when they were integrated into Brutus’s next major volume, A Simple Lust, which was published in the Heinemann African Writers Series in 1973.6 During the 1972-73 academic year I was away in Nigeria doing research, but Dennis and I kept in regular touch, for I needed his help in checking the transcript of a lengthy series of interviews I had conducted with him in London. A portion of this transcript, with questions edited out so it appears to be an autobiographical statement rather than an interview, was published in the first issue of the Benin Review, a new Nigerian literary journal founded by Abiola Irele, and it is reprinted in this volume. When I returned to Texas the following year, I learned that Dennis was beginning to feel a little restless at Northwestern and was ready for a change of scene, preferably to a warmer climate. With support from the English Department and the African and Afro-American Studies Program at The University of Texas at Austin, it was possible to arrange a Visiting 6

Dennis Brutus and James Currey decided that at the launch of A Simple Lust at the Africa Centre in London in 1973 he would reveal that ‘John Bruin’ was a pseudonym. This produced the most effective form of publicity in South Africa for both the book and for SAN-ROC. The revelation was made in the Johannesburg Sunday Express by a reporter who, it later turned out, was an agent for BOSS. He stated in the article that Dennis Brutus was rated by Pretoria as ‘one of the 10 most dangerous South African political figures overseas.’ ( James Currey Africa Writes Back 2008, pp. 213–15).

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3. Cover of South African Voices, 1975. Sculpture by K. Molatana

4. Cover of Strains, 1975. Drawing by Feni Dumila

Professorship for him in English and Ethnic Studies, and he came down to Austin for the 1974-75 academic year. This proved to be propitious timing, for it was at the African Studies Association conference in Chicago in the fall of 1974 that a small group of scholars met to discuss the possibility of forming an African Literature Association (ALA). Nearly all concerned felt that such an organization was needed, and it was agreed that an inaugural conference should be held in Austin in March of 1975 to launch it. Dennis and I had traveled up to Chicago with other Texas faculty (Hal Wylie, Ed Steinhart, Carolyn Parker) and postgraduate students (Wayne Kamin, Barney McCartney) in my VW bus, and on the return trip the bunch of us began laying plans for the conference. The University of Texas could not provide funds to support a meeting of a professional association, so we asked the Dean of Liberal Arts and the Dean of General and Comparative Studies to underwrite the expenses of a separate Symposium which would draw colleagues from around the country and abroad who could participate in a business meeting afterwards and go through the formalities necessary to establish a new international scholarly body devoted to the study and teaching of African literatures. The Symposium would focus on contemporary black South African literature, and our plan was to invite South African writers to give keynote addresses and then have writers from other parts of Africa respond to the issues raised. We did not 9

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Introduction have sufficient funds to fly in anyone all the way from Africa, so we had to rely on bringing to Austin only those writers who were then somewhere in the United States. Fortunately, there was an abundance of talent available. The keynote speakers were Es’kia Mphahlele, Mongane Wally Serote, Oswald Mtshali, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Cosmo Pieterse, Mazisi Kunene, Dan Kunene, and of course Brutus himself; included among the respondents were Chinua Achebe, Kofi Awoonor, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ali Mazrui, Peter Nazareth, Pol Ndu, Emmanuel Obiechina, Romanus Egudu, and Biodun Jeyifo. Never before had such a constellation of African literary stars assembled in one place in the United States. The Symposium events drew large audiences, and when the ALA was formally inaugurated, more than four hundred writers, scholars, students, and townspeople signed on as members. The success of this Symposium and the birth and baptism of the ALA owed a great deal to the organizational skills of Dennis Brutus. He was the one who formed an efficient Austin Working Committee to oversee local arrangements, he was the one who persuaded the writers to come, he was the one who ran the business meeting at the end of it all that resulted in the creation of a viable and vigorous ALA. Appropriately enough, he was also the one elected by acclamation to serve as the ALA’s first Chairperson. The Symposium-cum-Conference afforded an occasion for more Occasional Publications. Registrants at Austin received in their conference packets two booklets of poetry: South African Voices (see Fig. 3), which featured contributions by the seven poets participating in the Symposium, and China Poems by Dennis Brutus. The latter was a by-product of Dennis’s visit in August-September of 1973 to the People’s Republic of China where, as VicePresident of the South African Table Tennis Board, he was invited to witness a Friendship International Table Tennis Tournament. He had started reading translations of Mao Tse-tung’s poetry shortly before undertaking this journey, and his “China Poems” were efforts at simulating in English the kind of lucid compression found in certain Oriental forms of verse. Although Brutus had occasionally experimented with very brief forms earlier in his career, these “China Poems” gave an entirely new slant to his work; he was now moving away from the gently stylized stanzas of his early exile verse to a more rigorous and disciplined economy of statement. Some poems consisted of just three words! Even the booklet itself was designed to be a syncretic product, part Western, part Chinese, but all blended together harmoniously. As in Poems from Algiers, these tersest of verses were reproduced in Dennis’s attractive calligraphic script, but in addition there were beautifully drawn Chinese translations specially prepared by Ko Ching-Po, one of the translators of Mao’s poetry. There was another little booklet of Dennis’s poetry made available at the Symposium too, this one published under the revived imprint of Troubadour Press (now operating out of a post office box in Austin) and edited by Wayne 10

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Introduction Kamin and Chip Dameron, postgraduate students in the English Department at The University of Texas at Austin. Entitled Strains (see Fig. 4), this booklet carried samples of Dennis’s output from September 1962 to February 1975 and therefore was written in a variety of poetic styles. Some of the poems had appeared earlier in various magazines and journals, and others were scraps gleaned from Dennis’s unpublished papers. Kamin and Dameron had sifted through the typescripts that had been prepared from everything resembling poetry in the boxes of papers that had been stored temporarily in Chancellor Ransom’s office, and had made judicious selections from these remnants as well as from fresh manuscripts that Dennis had supplied them. Dennis himself was to employ the same collage technique in his next major collection, Stubborn Hope, which was comprised of some of the same miscellaneous bits and pieces composed at different stages of his career. Both volumes are interesting as diachronic synopses of Brutus’s poetic interests and proclivities. One finds a whole smorgasbord of variegated treats in each. Dennis sometimes wrote poems about Texas and Texans, but this is not what makes it possible to call him a Texas poet. Rather, it was those four little booklets of poetry published deep in the heart of Central Texas between 1970 and 1975 that give the Lone Star State the privilege of claiming him as one of its local products. He may not be from this place, and he may never have contemplated any permanent attachment to Austin, but because some of his poetry first made its way into indelible print in Texas, he left an enduring mark and therefore will always be regarded here not as a stranger or a visitor or an exile, but as a true naturalized Texan. Dennis turned fifty when he was with us in 1974-75. He was then at the peak of his powers, and he was to live for another thirty-five years, during which he continued to campaign vigorously for social justice and basic human rights not only in South Africa but also in many other parts of the world. And wherever he went, he left in his poetry traces of his responses to the personal and political experiences that most moved him. In one of his poems he spoke of his commitment to humanitarian goals as a dogged thrusting-on to new places, new names and new marks so we carve structures, so we leave striations in the rocks. This sums up his life and his legacy to the world.

Bernth Lindfors

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LIFE

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Recollections [When Dennis Brutus came to teach at The University of Texas at Austin in 1974-75, he lived in my house during the fall semester and we became good friends. I used to ask him about his life experiences, and he would tell me one story after another, some of them funny, some nostalgic, others quite sad, but all of them exceptionally interesting. He had had a most remarkable life. I tried to encourage him to write these narratives up, but he didn’t feel inclined to take the time to do this, so I suggested that he talk them into a tape recorder instead. He liked this idea and began recording almost immediately. This went on at intervals throughout the term. Sometimes he would talk about his political work, other times about his poetry or his family or his experiences as a student, a teacher or a prisoner. The tapes were transcribed by students employed part-time by the African and AfroAmerican Studies and Research Center, and Dennis usually checked the transcripts for accuracy. What follows here is the corrected text of the first tape in the series, when he was trying to construct a chronology of important events in his life, some of which he would expand upon at greater length in subsequent tapes. The typed transcript includes a number of handwritten additions which, when legible, have been inserted here parenthetically. Editorial interventions are indicated by square brackets. Misspellings of names and places as well as other errors, when known, have been corrected silently. Tape recorded early in September 1974.]

1924. November 28. Born, Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia. Parents: Francis Henry Brutus and Margaret Winifred Brutus née Bloemetjie, both South Africans at that time teaching in Rhodesia (since Jan. 1920? Married early October – holiday, 1st Monday, 1919 – probably in Port Elizabeth.) 1926. Returned to South Africa to Port Elizabeth. My father returned to Salisbury to continue teaching and only came down to settle in Port Elizabeth in 1929 (?) (Dolly born, Hankey? 1926, Feb.) 1929. Father returned from Rhodesia. (Jan.?) 1933. query. Attended school in a Coloured township called Dowerville. Name of the school: Henry Kaiser Memorial School. 15

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Recollections 1935. (October) Registered for primary school at St. Theresa’s Catholic Mission School. 1937. My parents separated. My mother went to Grahamstown with my two sisters, one two years older then myself, Helen, and Catherine, nicknamed Dolly, who is fifteen months younger than I was. 1939? (Jan.) Entered Paterson High School, Moun Road, Port Elizabeth. 1941. Went to St. Augustine’s Teacher Training College, Parow, Cape, and then learnt that I had been awarded a scholarship on the basis of the Junior Certificate results to continue high school up to university entrance level and so returned to Paterson High School. 1943. Completed Senior Certificate or university entrance exams and was awarded a merit scholarship which enabled me to go to Fort Hare. At that time Fort Hare was a university college recognized by the South African university system. It subsequently became a university college attached to a white university called Rhodes University. 1944. Entered Fort Hare. (subjects ‘44 Eng I, Holl. I, Geo, His, Education, ‘45 English II, Psych I, Hollands II, Politics, ‘47 English III, Psych II) Spent two years of the three-year degree course. 1946. Broke off from study and spent a year teaching at a primary junior school called St. Michael’s Catholic Mission at a town called Fort Beaufort. (English/Afrikaans/ Hist/Geog. etc.) 1947. Returned to Fort Hare. Completed degree, graduating Bachelor of Arts with two major subjects: psychology and English (with distinction). Sometime during this period at Fort Hare, perhaps in the first year, I won the Chancellor’s Prize of the University of South Africa for Bilingualism in English and Afrikaans. 1948? Taught at Paterson High School, where I had studied, which had moved (after a fire) from Moun Road to a Coloured housing scheme or ghetto called Schauder Township. From Paterson High School went to work in the government Department of Social Welfare as a Coloured Social Welfare Officer. 1950. Returned to Paterson High School as Senior English Master. May 14. Married May Jaggers. 1956. SA Table Tennis Bd (non-racial recognized by ITTF – World Table Tennis [organization], see articles in Contact, esp. in 1956.) 1958. Formation of South African Sports Association or SASA. This is a fairly big gap in time from the previous date (but I can’t think of anything at this stage which ought to be filled in. We’ll return to all these dates.) 1960. The year of Sharpeville and also the year (June) in which I received my first warning by the Education Department that I was liable for dismissal because of my political activities. 1961. Involvement in the move to hold a National Convention. (Convention Narrative – See essay in Fighting Talk.) Specifically involved in the formation of the Coloured National Convention movement and the holding of the 16

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Recollections Coloured National Convention in the wheat fields outside Malmesbury after the Convention was banned or declared illegal in the city of Cape Town and therefore had to be held outside the city. 1961. October. The holding of the National Convention and shortly thereafter the issuance of a banning order banning me for five years from any kind of public activity, gatherings, political meetings. Also in 1961, approximately June, suspension from teaching and in September dismissal from teaching. (See Evening Post [Port Elizabeth] about this time. Also: Guardian, The New African, [Golden City] Post, Drum.) 1962. Served with banning orders confining me to Johannesburg where I had moved to take a post at a private non-government school called Central Indian High School in Fordsburg, a largely non-white area in Johannesburg. (Taught English, Afrikaans. Registered at Wits [Witwatersrand University]. Worked for Robin Farquharson.1) 1962. October. Formation of SAN-ROC (South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee) in Durban. 1963. January. Official inauguration of SAN-ROC. My election as President of SAN-ROC. Further banning orders confining me to Johannesburg and also restricting me, and in May of 1963 arrest at the offices of the South African Olympic Committee in Johannesburg on the charge of violating my banning orders which forbade me to attend meetings. 1963. August. Escape from South Africa while under banning orders and also being required to report to the police daily. I escaped across the border and went to Swaziland and stayed outside the town of Mbabane. In August of 1963, possibly September, my father died near Cape Town. 1963. September. I attempted to get to a meeting of the (IOC) World Olympic Committee which was scheduled to be held in Nairobi, Kenya, and was subsequently changed to Baden-Baden in Germany. (Kenya refused to admit SA: cabled Tom Mboya2 from Swaziland.) Traveled from Swaziland across the border to Mozambique on September 14, 1963. Arrested by Portuguese secret police and held in the headquarters of the secret police in Lourenço Marques until September 16th. Then returned to South African secret police at the border and brought to Komatipoort in South Africa. Appeared in court in Komatipoort on Tuesday, September 17th, and then returned to Johannesburg via Pretoria escorted by secret police in plain clothes. Outside the police 1

Robin Farquharson (1930-1973), South African mathematician and psephelogical expert on elections, who had his citizenship revoked after lobbying in behalf of the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee for the exclusion of South Africa from the Olympic Games in Tokyo in 1964. He became a British subject in 1968. 2 Thomas Joseph Odhiambo Mboya (1930-1969), Kenyan politician and founder of the Nairobi Peoples’ Congress Party. He helped to form the Kenya African National Union and was Kenya’s Minister of Economic Planning and Development when assassinated.

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Recollections station in McLean Street, Johannesburg, I attempted a second escape, was shot in the back on Market Street, I think, or the intersection of Market Street and Commission Street (or Main and Bezuidenhout Street) or in that area, and was picked up by an ambulance on Main Street, Johannesburg, about 5:30 in the afternoon, taken to a Coloured hospital in Coronationville and held there until operated on. Remained there until the 29th of September. On the 28th of September a group from the Indian Congress, part of the resistance movement, attempted to kidnap me from the hospital. On Saturday, the 29th of September, I was moved from the hospital to the main prison in Johannesburg known as The Fort and held there until January of 1964. 1964. Probably the 7th or 8th of January, when I was sentenced to eighteen months in prison. 1965. July. Released from prison and issued with fresh banning orders and placed under house arrest in Port Elizabeth for five years. 1966. Worked as a cardex clerk for an engineering firm called Sharp Control. Applied for a passport to leave the country. Was refused. Was eventually issued with an exit permit, virtual exile, permitting me to leave the country but to return only to go to prison if I did return. Joined by my wife and seven children in September of 1966. (Flew to London July 31, 1966 – went to World Cup at Wembley. Stayed with Chris de B[roglio].3 May & Co traveled on Southern Cross, flew to Las Palmas (gift of Andre U) & joined ship there. 1969. Engaged in the major sports campaign in Britain called STST (Stop the Seventy Tour). Worked with Defence & Aid & John Collins4 after offering to work for AAM [Anti-Apartheid Movement] – they hesitated – and applying for teaching job. Spoke extensively in Britain and Ireland. 1970. Jan. – spring quarter or winter quarter. Visiting professor, University of Denver, as a replacement for Zeke Mphahlele. Approximately March returned to Britain to continue the Stop the Seventy campaign – succeeded (see press of this time, esp. Times, Guardian, & Star, also Radio & TV) 1971. July. Arrested at Wimbledon Tennis Courts for protesting racism in sport. Acquitted subsequently on appeal to the House of Lords. 1971. [September] Invited to take post in the English Department, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. 1972 or thereabouts? Given tenure at Northwestern and joined by my wife and the balance of the children. Three had come to the States with me: Jacinta, Antony, and Justina. 1974. August. My wife and some of the children returned to Britain at 18 Hilton Avenue, London, N.12 (Tony went to Harvard, Tina to Grinnell, Marc 3

Chris de Broglio, a founding member of SAN-ROC in 1962 and of SAN-ROC in exile in London in 1966. Author of South Africa: Racism in Sport (1970). 4 John Collins (1905-1982), British Anglican clergyman who became Canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1948 and Head of the International Defence & Aid Fund (IDAF) for Southern Africa in 1956.

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Recollections to Community College eventually), and I took up the position as Visiting Professor for one semester at The University of Texas, Austin, starting September 1st. (Subsequently extended for one year [and the summer of 1975].)

Highlights I propose now to do a kind of random discussion of what one might call highlights. These are just arbitrarily selected events which stand out as being of some interest to me or special importance to me and will naturally sound very egotistical, but then this whole project I’m afraid is an egotistical one. Later I will be doing detailed segments on writing, sport, and politics. These are a scattering, for a start, of various events which stand out in my memory. The conference in Frascati outside Rome, organized jointly by the Society for African Culture which is associated with Présence Africaine and the Italian government, at which I met some very exciting African writers including Abiola Irele5 and Tsegaye Gabre-Medin,6 (Bakary Traoré,7 Théophile Obenga8), and at which occasion I also met His Holiness Pope Paul VI. (& Meeting at Gramsci – C.P. H[ead]quarters & an “adventure peccadillo.”) The World Conference on Human Rights held in Tehran, Iran, round about 1968, at the time of the 25th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, where I represented the International Defence and Aid Fund based in London for which I worked ever since I came out of South Africa in 1966 and which I represent at the United Nations (and where the Resolution I had initiated for Decade against Racism was adopted) and where I met, at the conference, U Thant, at that time Secretary General of the United Nations. I had met Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin previously at the Algiers [Pan-African] Festival of African Arts (where we improvised [an] extra event with approval of Diallo Telli9), where I also met Bernth Lindfors and many others, and read poetry at the University of Algiers. The Kitwe United National Conference on Decolonization held [in] Kitwe in Zambia, where I acted as consultant for the United Nations for the 5

Francis Abiola Irele (1936-), Nigerian literary critic, publisher and professor of French who has taught at universities in Nigeria, Ghana, and the United States. 6 Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin (1936-2006), Poet Laureate of Ethiopia, also a playwright, essayist, and art director. Best known in English for his translated plays. 7 Bakary Traoré, Senegalese theatre scholar, author of Le théâtre négro-africain et ses fonctions sociales (1958). 8 Théophile Obenga, Congolese philosopher, historian, linguist, and professor of Egyptology who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs for Congo/Brazzaville. 9 Diallo Telli (1925-1977), Guinean diplomat and political figure who helped to found the Organization of African Unity in 1963 and served as its first secretary general from 1964 to 1972.

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Recollections conference, and where I met Kenneth Kaunda, President of Zambia ([and] met [Stokely] Carmichael10 & [Eldridge] Cleaver11 here – and [Miriam] Makeba,12 again after Port Elizabeth. Also Helder Camara,13 Fidel Castro, Seán McBride,14 Trevor Huddleston,15 Michael Scott16). The reading of poetry at the Edinburgh International Festival round about 1970, with people like W.H. Auden,17 Stephen Spender,18 Carolyn Kizer,19 and Galway Kinnell20 of the United States. And then last year, going to Peking, lecturing at the University of Peking and meeting the Prime Minister Chou En-lai. This year, 1974, one of my highlights has been going to Dar es Salaam for the 6th Pan-African Congress held at the University of Dar es Salaam which was preceded by attendance at the meeting World Congress of FIFA, the International Football Federation, where I was successful working with the African delegates in securing the exclusion of the racist South African Football Association from world sport. There are of course many other interesting sports events, and I will select 10

Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) (1941-1998), Trinidadian-American active in the Civil Rights Movement as leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and later as “Honorary Prime Minister” of the Black Panther Party. He was also affiliated with Pan-Africanist movements. 11 Eldridge Cleaver (1935-1998), American political activist who was a leading member in the Black Panther Party and author of Soul on Ice (1967). 12 Zenzile Miriam Makeba (1932-2008), prize-winning South African singer and civil rights activist. 13 Dom Helder Camara (1909-1999), Brazilian Archbishop, a champion of the poor and a pioneer in Latin America’s liberation theology movement. 14 Seán McBride (1904-1988), Irish government minister, international politician, and Chief of Staff of the Irish Republican Army who was awarded the 1974 Nobel Peace Prize and the Lenin Peace Prize for 1975-1976. 15 Ernest Urban Trevor Huddleston (1913-1998), British Anglican priest who worked at a mission station in Sophiatown from 1943-1956. He became a great and effective figurehead of the international anti-apartheid campaign. Author of Naught for your Comfort (1956). 16 Reverend Michael Scott (1907-1983), British Anglican priest who was expelled from both South Africa and South-West Africa. He founded the Africa Bureau in London. From this he mounted many campaigns including the successful one at the United Nations which eventually led to the independence of Namibia. 17 Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973), dramatist, and essayist who was born in England but moved to the United States in 1939 and became an American citizen in 1946. 18 Stephen Harold Spender (1909-1995), British poet, novelist, dramatist, translator, literary critic, editor, and professor who frequently wrote on political themes. 19 Carolyn Kizer (1925-), American feminist poet who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1985. 20 Galway Kinnell (1927-), American poet, professor, and member of the Congress of Racial Equality.

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Recollections a few of those which seem to me of special interest or which I especially value. 1967, attending the Congress held at Bamako, capital of Mali, at which we formed the Supreme Council for Sport in Africa (working with Guy de la Gorce of L’Équipe 21 – and a long chat with Jean-Claude Ganga22 where I spelt out strategy “La Bataille c’est grand, mais, la Victoire, c’est plus grand”), and attending meetings of the Supreme Council for Sport in Africa in Lagos just prior to the Olympic Games in Mexico; then the emergency meeting of Supreme Council at Brazzaville immediately prior to the Mexico Olympics, where I organized the strategy for the exclusion of South Africa from the Olympics. And then going to Mexico City itself in 1968 for the Olympic Games. Amsterdam in 1970 was especially important to me, because that was the year at which we succeeded in formally expelling South Africa from the Olympic movement, but I got even more satisfaction in 1969 when at Warsaw we expelled South Africa from the World Weightlifting Federation. Weightlifting was the sport I was first associated with in the struggle against racism, or one of the first, and I estimate that we spent between twenty and twenty-three years in the struggle to expel South Africa from the World Weightlifting body. One of my most satisfying recollections is of Munich, 1972, when the Olympics were held there, and when we succeeded in expelling Rhodesia from the Olympic Games. This one gives me great satisfaction because for much of the time I was working alone, without the support of the rest of SAN-ROC and indeed with some opposition from officials of the Supreme Council for Sport in Africa; and another reason for satisfaction is that it was a tremendous feat of timing in which we succeeded in the last few days before the official opening of the Games in forcing Rhodesia out of the Olympics. (Should do this: efforts in Village, package of material, crucial interview with Allan of Times 23 – see spread in paper; Howard Cosell;24 pressure on Ganga/Ordia,25 great help from Oman – & adventure at Sheraton Press Conference in Press Center. Help from Uganda rep; interviews for BBC & Austr. Radio.) In the political field I select a few things which give me some satisfaction. One of my earliest was appearing at the United Nations shortly after my coming from South Africa, to testify on conditions under which political 21

French nationwide daily newspaper devoted to sports. Jean-Claude Ganga (1935-), Congolese Secretary General of the Supreme Council for Sport in Africa and author of Combats pour un sport africain (1979). 23 Elkan Allan (1922-2006), British journalist and television producer. 24 Howard Cosell (1918-1995), American sports broadcaster. 25 Abraham A. Ordia (?-1995), Secretary of the Nigerian Olympic Committee, second President of the Supreme Council for Sport in Africa, and Vice-President of the International Council of Sport and Physical Education at UNESCO. 22

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Recollections prisoners were kept in South Africa, and I believe that I made some contribution towards improving conditions of the political prisoners. After that I organized, with considerable success, the British (World) Campaign for the Release of Political Prisoners. It is true that we did not get any prisoners released, but we did insure that the information was widely publicized, and I believe we contributed to improving conditions under which the prisoners were held. This work, I should say, was done working in association with Canon John Collins of St. Paul’s Cathedral of London and the International Defence and Aid Fund, of which he is president. (speaking all over Britain. See David Holden26 piece in Sunday Times. Great help from Phyllis A[Altman],27 Rica Hodgson,28 Sonia Bunting,29 Jan Hoogendyk,30 Frances Cook31 – [though] there were still tensions – & from Elspeth T[?] & of course: John & Diana Collins.) Other political events which gave me some satisfaction were being at the Kitwe conference and being invited by all the African liberation movements there to act as a spokesman for them, an indication of their confidence in me, and this was even more clearly demonstrated at the meeting of the representatives of governments and liberation movements held during the Algiers Pan-African Congress when again I was asked to speak for all the liberation movements. This has not only happened in the specifically political area, but when I was in Peking, or rather in China, at the farewell banquet given for us in Canton just before we departed from China, again I was asked by the African countries to be the spokesman for all of them in responding to the speeches at the banquet. 26

David Holden (1924-1977), British journalist and broadcaster, chief foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times, who was murdered in Cairo. 27 Probably Phyllis Altman (1919-1999), a South African exile in London who served as general secretary of the International Defence and Aid Fund, which secretly supported the legal defence of thousands of anti-apartheid activists. 28 Rica Hodgson (1920-) a South African who worked for the Treason Trial Defence Fund in South Africa and served as general secretary for the first Defence and Aid Fund in Britain in 1961-1963. Author of Foot Soldier for Freedom: A Life in South Africa’s Liberation Movement (2010). 29 Sonia Beryl Bunting (1922-2001), an active member of the South African Communist Party (SACP) who after being arrested, detained, and banned from attending meetings, went into exile in London and organized the World Campaign for the Release of South African Political Prisoners. 30 Jan Hendrik Hofmeyer Hoogendyk (1911-1990), an active member of the South African Congress of Democrats who was charged with treason in 1956 but charges against him were dropped in 1958. In the 1960s he and his wife left to work in Lesotho. 31 Frances D. Cook (1947- ), served with the U.S. State Department in various posts for thirty years, including Personnel Officer for Africa, United States Information Agency (1975-1977) and Press Office Director of the Bureau of African Affairs (1978-1980).

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Recollections This year I had considerable satisfaction in serving (with Eric Mtshali32) as part of the the delegation of the African National Congress of South Africa at the Pan-African Congress in Dar es Salaam, and for a brief while, at least, acting as leader of the delegation in the absence of Duma Nokwe,33 the official head of the delegation. I believe I was also largely responsible for the United Nations adopting a decision to organize a decade or ten-year period of action against racism and apartheid and to campaign against South Africa (and [to present] the resolutions on racism in sport). These seem to me worthwhile occasions, or some that stand out in my memory. In the literary field, some of my satisfaction has come from discovering that my work was being studied and published in other countries. This I only discovered after I came out of South Africa and browsed through Dillons Bookshop in London, but also satisfactory was the winning of the Mbari Prize round about 1962 for poetry in Africa and then returning the prize to the Mbari Club, and having my first collection of poetry, Sirens Knuckles Boots, published while I was under house arrest, banned, and indeed in prison at the time I first saw the book. ([I] probably saw [an] earlier copy or proofs while in Fordsburg, discussed contents in letters…) I think it was the first time I saw it when it was shown to me by the Commandant of Robben Island, and I was challenged as to whether I had actually published the book, and they were prepared to institute proceedings against me for a further prison sentence. (charge dropped when I could not furnish exact details of event; my memory failed me, consequence of period in solitary.) This is a story I will tell some other time when we get into details. Letters to Martha, of course, pleased me as well, when it came out in 1968 or ’67. I was in America at the time it appeared, and a very pleasant review appeared in the Guardian published in London. (I agree with [Bahadur] Tejani34 that the order is bad.) Poems from Algiers, published by the African and Afro-American Research Center at The University of Texas, as an Occasional Publication of Research in African Literatures. A Simple Lust gave me satisfaction as a fairly comprehensive selection of 32

Eric Mtshali, South African trade unionist, member of the South African Communist Party, the African National Congress, and Umkhonto we Sizwe who received military training in Russia and became the ANC’s chief representative in Tanzania from 1971 to 1976. 33 Philemon Pearce Dumasile Nokwe (1927-1978), South African teacher, lawyer, and official in the African National Congress who left South Africa in 1963 and joined the ANC in exile. 34 Bahadur Tejani (1942- ), Ugandan Asian playwright, poet, essayist, novelist, literary critic, and professor who emigrated to the United States in 1979.

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Recollections my work, and I guess I got a good deal of satisfaction out of the publication, jointly or with the assistance of Bernth Lindfors, of Thoughts Abroad, which we published under the pseudonym of John Bruin and which for some time was sold and read in South Africa. Just to bring things up to date, I get some satisfaction out of knowing that on arrival in Texas I could discover a biographical entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica which refers, flatteringly I think, to my work. Poetry Readings: Among the places where I have read are Australia and New Zealand on numerous campuses; India at the time of the Gandhi Memorial Centenary, when I was with people like Mulk Raj Anand,35 S. Khan; France, reading at Grenoble University, and also in Paris in the theatre and again as part of the week we had on South Africa when I was associated with people like Alex La Guma,36 Lewis Nkosi,37 Cosmo Pieterse38 and possibly Feni Dumile; Tanzania, reading on the campus there this year was a very satisfying experience; Algiers, earlier during the Pan-African Congress with Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin; and in Halifax, Canada, reading with Nadine Gordimer;39 other places I cannot now recall. Ireland, of course, numerous readings on radio and also at the University, and raising funds for the Anti-Apartheid Movement in readings with people like Cyril Cusack,40 Michaél Mac Liammóir,41 Austin Clarke,42 and Hugh McDiarmid.43 In Holland, both at Amsterdam and at Rotterdam at the International Poetry 35

Mulk Raj Anand (1905-2004), prolific Indian novelist, poet, essayist, and autobiographer whose works often depict the poorer castes in traditional Indian society. 36 Alex La Guma (1925-1985), South African novelist, short story writer, essayist, and political activist who left South Africa in 1966, living first in England and later in Cuba where he served as the representative of the African National Congress in the Caribbean. 37 Lewis Nkosi (1936-2010), South African journalist, novelist, dramatist, and literary critic who left South Africa on an exit permit in 1961 to take up a Nieman fellowship in journalism at Harvard University and remained in exile thereafter, doing media work in London and teaching at universities in the United States, Zambia, and Poland. 38 Cosmo Pieterse, South African play producer, poet, literary critic, teacher, and anthologist, especially of plays. 39 Nadine Gordimer (1923-), South African novelist, short story writer, political activist, and winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature. 40 Cyril James Cusack (1910-1993), South Africa-born Irish actor who appeared in more than ninety films. 41 Michaél Mac Liammóir (born Alfred Willmore) (1899-1978), English-born Irish actor, dramatist, poet, and painter. 42 Austin C. Clarke (1934–), Barbadian novelist, short story writer, and autobiographer who emigrated to Canada in 1955 and became a Canadian citizen in 1985. 43 Hugh McDiarmid (1892-1978), Scottish modernist poet, nationalist, and a leader in the Scottish Renaissance.

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Recollections Festival, reading with exiled poets from Greece, Vassilis Vassilikos44; other poets from Sweden, Hungary, Germany, Wales, and Americans like Carolyn Kizer and Galway Kinnell. In Sweden, numerous readings, lectures, television appearances, and that long visit at the time of the [African] Scandinavian Writers’ Conference at Hasselby Castle outside Stockholm, where I had the pleasure of meeting people like Wole Soyinka,45 James Ngugi,46 Edouard Maunick,47 Sara Lidman,48 Per Wästberg,49 and others for the first time, and my fellow South Africans like Alex La Guma, and also for the first time meeting Zeke Mphahlele, whom I had never met in South Africa. In Bulgaria, at the World Youth Festival in Sophia, I read poetry and also did an address on the top of a mountain, mainly on political prisoners which interestingly enough was broadcast in Moscow on Red Square so that the people were able to hear it there. Many readings and lectures in Britain, of course; Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Glasgow, Oxford, Cambridge, Birmingham, Coventry, Manchester, Liverpool, Portsmouth, Southampton, Bristol, Reading, Rugby, Cardiff, Swansea, too many places to mention. My first lecture, I remember, was given in Stratfordupon-Avon, which had a special appeal for me as Shakespeare’s birthplace, but that, I think, was a political lecture. One special occasion that stands out was reading poetry at Oxford at the funeral of Arthur Nortje; I had set up a poetry reading at London University to celebrate Human Rights Day, December 10th , and he was one of those scheduled to read there. Instead, we heard of his death, and I went up to Oxford. But there have been readings in many places. I imagine that those which gave me most satisfaction were those in Rotterdam and in Edinburgh, reading with people like W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and getting a lot of satisfaction out of getting to know W. H. Auden. Of course, there have been the readings with black poets all over the world, in Africa, in Scandinavia, and in 44

Vassilis Vassilikos (1934–), Greek novelist, playwright, poet, and diplomat. Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka (1934–), prolific Nigerian playwright, poet, novelist, essayist, literary critic, political activist, autobiographer, and professor who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986. 46 James Ngugi (now Ngugi wa Thiong’o) (1938–), Kenyan novelist, short story writer, dramatist, literary critic, and professor who now writes all his creative work in Gikuyu. Detained without trial for most of 1977, and prevented from resuming his teaching position at the University of Nairobi, he moved to London in 1982 and later to the United States, where he has taught at several universities. 47 Edouard Joseph Marc Maunick (1931–), Mauritian poet, literary critic, and translator who was awarded the 2003 Grand Prix de la Francophonie by the Académie Française. 48 Sara Lidman (1923-2004), prize-winning Swedish novelist. 49 Per Wästberg (1933–), Swedish novelist, poet, biographer, human rights activist, newspaper editor, chairman of International PEN (1979-1986), and member of the Swedish Academy. 45

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Recollections London, especially [the] Notting Hill Gate area and at a pub called The Troubadour, where I read with people like Edward Brathwaite,50 Andrew Salkey,51 John La Rose,52 Calvin Hernton,53 Efua Sutherland,54 and many others. With Ted Joans55 and also Ted Hughes56 at the ICA [Institute of Contemporary Arts]; Carolyn Kizer arranged it, and I think she read there. Then reading with many of the English poets whom I admire; John Pudney,57 Derek Stanford,58 Michael Hamburger,59 various others. In New Zealand with Allen Curnow60 at Auckland University, also with the poet Hone Tuwhare.61 Numerous readings in the United States with people like Carolyn Rogers,62 Ethridge Knight,63 whom I greatly admire, and many other of the black poets. Reading at Dartmouth College at the invitation of Richard Eberhart,64 whom I greatly admire. 50

Edward Kamau Brathwaite (1930-), Prize-winning Barbadian poet, co-founder of the Caribbean Artists Movement, and Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University. 51 Andrew Salkey (1928-1995), Panamanian-born Jamaican novelist, poet, journalist, editor, BBC broadcaster, and professor of creative writing, most of whose working life was spent in England and the United States. 52 John La Rose (1927-2006), Trinidadian teacher and trade union activist who came to Britain in 1961 and founded New Beacon Books, a Caribbean and African bookstore and publishing firm, in 1966. He also co-founded the Caribbean Artists Movement. 53 Calvin Coolidge Hernton (1932-2001), American poet, sociologist, and professor of African-American Studies at Oberlin College. 54 Efua Theodora Morgue Sutherland (1924-1996), Ghanaian dramatist, short story writer, and children’s author. 55 Theodore “Ted” Joans (1928-2003), American jazz poet, trumpeter, and painter. 56 Edward James Hughes (1930-1998), British Poet Laureate, translator, anthologist, and author of children’s books. 57 John Sleigh Pudney (1909-1977), British poet, journalist, novelist, short story writer, and author of children’s books. 58 Derek Stanford (1918-2008), British poet, literary critic, biographer, and editor. 59 Michael Hamburger (1924-2007), Berlin-born British poet, prize-winning translator of German literature, and literary critic. 60 Thomas Allen Munro Curnow (1911-2001), New Zealand poet, playwright, anthologist, and journalist who taught in the English Department at Auckland University. 61 Hone Tuwhare (1922-2008), New Zealand Maori poet and playwright who was named Te Mata Poet Laureate in 1991. 62 Carolyn Marie Rogers (1940-2010), African-American poet, dramatist, literary critic, publisher, teacher, and a leader of the Black Arts Movement in Chicago. 63 Ethridge Knight (1931-1991), African-American poet who became a major figure in the Black Arts Movement after publication of his first volume, Poems from Prison (1968). 64 Richard Ghormley Eberhart (1904-2005), American poet, winner of the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and a 1977 National Book Award.

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Recollections Lectures have often been combined with poetry reading. This is especially true, say, of Geneva, reading at John Knox University, in Grenoble at the university there, universities in Sydney, at least three, and also visiting Canberra, the government seat in Australia, and meeting Gough Whitlam,65 who was then leader of the opposition and is now Prime Minister of Australia, and whom I believe I enlisted as a stronger supporter. He was already a supporter in soccer against South African racism. In the United States, at numerous universities, of course, either poetry readings, lectures, or political discussions. From Washington University in Seattle to Monterey, to San Francisco and Berkeley, to St. Luis Obispo, to Los Angeles, Denver, Boulder, Colorado Springs, Fort Collins, Dallas, Houston, Austin, New Orleans, Washington, Madison, Milwaukee, Boston at Boston University, Boston State and Harvard on more than one occasion, including a Sharpeville Memorial in Harvard Square. At Cleveland, Pittsburgh, addressing a GM [General Motors] stockholders meeting in Detroit on the question of U.S. involvement in South African business, appearances before the House Committee on African Affairs, once under the chairmanship of Barratt O’Hara,66 another time, or at least once or twice, under the chairmanship of Charles Diggs.67 I have not spoken at many African universities, unfortunately. Ibadan once; the arrangement for a lecture at Lagos collapsed; at Algiers, as I mentioned earlier, poetry reading; and this year Dar es Salaam, but I hope to do much more in Africa. In South Africa itself, not very many speaking dates. A few at Fort Hare while a student there. At least one at Rhodes, the all-white university, for a debate while a student at Fort Hare. By the time I got to Witwatersrand University I was already banned from gatherings and public speaking. I will try to round off this tape with what we might call a travel sequence dealing with the years since I came out of South Africa up to the present. I arrived in Britain on the 31st of July 1966, and had the good fortune to get a complimentary ticket from the BBC which enabled me to attend the finals of the World Cup Soccer Match and meet some of the people in sport, including Sir Stanley Rous,68 who at that time was the powerful leader of world soccer and an ally of South Africa, but also to form an immediate contact with some of the black sports officials from Africa who were in London for that occasion. Shortly thereafter, or some time thereafter, I met Prince Philip69 at a banquet at Lancaster House in connection with my work 65

Edward Gough Whitlam (1916- ), Australian politician who served as Prime Minister from 1972 to 1975. 66 Barratt O’Hara (1882-1969), U.S. Congressman from Illinois from 1948 to 1968. 67 Charles Coles Diggs, Jr. (1922-1998), U.S. Congressman for Michigan from 1955 to 1980 who served as first Chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. 68 Stanley Rous (1895-1986), British soccer referee and administrator who served as President of FIFA from 1961 to 1974. 69 Prince Philip (1921- ), Duke of Edinburgh and husband of Queen Elizabeth II.

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Recollections for human rights. Within probably a week of arriving in Britain I flew to Kingston, Jamaica, via New York, for the Commonwealth Games and again was able to do some work for South Africa there, and in passing through New York able to do at least one radio program, possibly more (and an interview with the New York Post ). On my return to Britain I went to Budapest for a meeting of the World Athletic Association, to Dortmund for a meeting of the World Gymnastic Federation, and to East Berlin for a very important meeting of the World Weightlifting Federation. There were, of course, numerous speaking dates in Britain and Ireland. In 1967 I went to Scandinavia for the Writers’ Conference (Had been there before, I think, for Per Wästberg & Amnesty, D[efence] & A[id]), spoke in Norway, Sweden, Denmark. Shortly thereafter, I think, went to Tehran for another meeting of the World Olympic Committee, and also prior to that attended the meeting of the Supreme Council in Bamako, Mali; then flew to the U.S. for a lecture tour of about forty-two days in which I think I had about ninety-four speaking dates, including an appearance before the U.N., speaking at UCLA [University of California at Los Angeles] and various campuses and stopping in Chicago to meet my archenemy, Avery Brundage,70 President of the World Olympic Committee, whom I was meeting for the first time. 1968 I remember mainly for the meeting of the World Olympic Committee in Grenoble, at the time of the Winter Olympics, and the decision to re-admit South Africa into the Olympic movement, which I had predicted at a meeting of the Supreme Council in Lagos some months before. From the Grenoble meeting I organized the international campaign for pressure to throw South Africa out, and during this time went to Tehran for a meeting of the United Nations on Human Rights, but somehow in this period also attended the emergency meeting of the Supreme Council for Sport in Brazzaville in the Congo, where I planned the strategy for the expulsion of South Africa from the ’68 Olympics. Exclusion took place while I was on my way to Tehran. Prior to the Olympics in Mexico City I flew to New York and met Jim Bouton,71 baseballer, author of Ball Four and Glad You Didn’t Take it Personally, who traveled with us – us being myself and Chris de Broglio who had been my main ally in the struggle against racism in sport, [a] South African exile born in Mauritius currently living in London. Prior to Mexico I lectured at Haverford College, just once for a seminar, and raised some pocket money to go to Mexico. In ’69 the highlight was the expulsion of South Africa from the World 70

Avery Brundage (1887-1975), American sports official, art collector, philanthropist, Nazi sympathizer, and controversial President of the International Olympic Committee from 1952 to 1972. 71 Jim Bouton (1939- ), former Major League pitcher for the New York Yankees and Atlanta Braves and author of controversial books about baseball.

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Recollections Weightlifting at Warsaw, which I attended. I went to Warsaw on another occasion for a meeting of the Olympic Committee – it may have been the same year. At some time during this period, spoke at a youth conference at Bad Godesberg in Germany, which has associations with Adolph Hitler and seemed to have a peculiar historical interest for me. 1969 is also the year of massive organization of the Stop the Seventy [Tour] campaign, the big sports campaign when we had thousands of British students and others demonstrating in cities ranging all the way from Aberdeen in the north to Portsmouth and Southampton in the south, and in which, with Peter Hain,72 another South African, I was heavily involved. The first quarter of 1970 I spent at the University of Denver as a Visiting Professor in the English Department; visited various places, including Austin, and wrote my Austin ecology poem, then returned to Britain in time to finish off the campaign to stop the tour, which we brought to a successful conclusion. ’71 I remember mainly for being arrested at Wimbledon, demonstrating on the tennis court against British support for racism, and shortly thereafter, in the Fall of ’71, coming to Northwestern to take up a post initially, I guess, as Visiting Professor in the English Department, teaching African literature. ’71 is worth mentioning also because of an incident in my first month, approximately, at Northwestern, when a visiting lecturer was imported who happened to be a member of Parliament from South Africa, Mrs. Catherine Taylor,73 who was to speak broadly on how Africans were accepting the apartheid system. I took part in the organization of a take-over of the meeting which was executed with great élan, I should say, the whole maneuver, and she was advised to go back to South Africa and report on the views of the blacks as expressed there, and I was presented as the opposing viewpoint. It caused a great furor and was widely covered in the South African press. I am delighted to think that it made quite clear to South Africans who thought that I had opted for the fleshpots of America that I was still being active politically. It caused some embarrassment on the campus but I think [I] declared very rapidly where I stood, and the administration was made aware of this, and therefore I [did] not feel any restraints on my political activity. Last year I remember particularly for my visit to Peking, Hangchow, Canton and Shanghai, but it was also the year, as far as I remember, when I 72

Peter Hain (1950- ) grew up in South Africa as the son of Adelaide and Walter Hain and became a dramatically effective anti-apartheid campaigner in Britain. He became a Labour Party Member of Parliament, serving in the cabinets of both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. 73 Catherine Dorothea Taylor (1914-1992), South African Member of Parliament who was Shadow Minister of Education from 1971 to 1974 and Shadow Secretary for Coloured Affairs from 1972 to 1974.

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Recollections had a confrontation with Chief Gatsha Buthelezi,74 the Prime Minister of the most important Bantustan, which is in the Transkei [sic, actually Natal]. He was invited to the United States as a keynote speaker at a convention of the United Church of Christ in St. Louis, Missouri. I was invited by a rival faction in the church to present the opposing viewpoint. We confronted each other in reasonably cordial and courteous terms, but I made it clear that I did not think he spoke for black South Africans and that I was in the position, having worked and been in prison with men like Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu,75 leaders of the resistance, to articulate the true views of the black South Africans who were not allowed out of the country. On his return to South Africa, Buthelezi did me a service, I think, by calling a press conference in which he denounced me but also reported reasonably accurately the statements I made on behalf of black South Africans, and this meant that South Africans were being enabled to know through the English and Afrikaans press and perhaps also the black press what my views were and the opinions I was articulating on their behalf. (See SA papers, esp. in Afrikaans, which quoted me – illegally?) This year, 1974, I regard the Pan-African Congress in Dar es Salaam as a highlight. It was part of my travel which took in first Frankfurt, where I attended the World Football Congress and addressed the meeting of the African Football Confederation representing the whole continent, had a useful encounter with the black and white representatives of the apartheid sports organizations in South Africa, and we successfully forced through a new statute in the constitution of FIFA [Fédération Internationale de Football Association] which debars any country, and this will include South Africa and Rhodesia, which practices racial discrimination. From Frankfurt, where I also had, as an aside, a very interesting erotic encounter which no doubt will come up in other areas of this [auto]biography, I flew on to Dar es Salaam via Cairo, and did some useful things in Dar es Salaam both in terms of literature, politics, and education. Was also offered a position as a Visiting Professor at Dar es Salaam in the Language (Literature) Department, 1975. From Dar es Salaam I flew to Kinshasa to examine the arrangements, transport, and accommodation for the world title fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman due to take place this September. I was doing so at the request of Don King,76 to whom I am attached as a special 74

Mangosuthu Buthelezi (1928- ), South African Zulu politician and Head of the KwaNdebele (Natal) Homeland who founded the Inkatha Freedom Party in 1975 which put at risk the holding of the first democratic elections in 1994. 75 Walter Max Ulyate Sisulu (1912-2003), general secretary of the African National Congress from 1949-1954 who was jailed many times and served twenty-six years in prison on Robben Island. After his release, he was elected deputy president of the ANC. 76 Donald King (1931–), American boxing promoter.

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Recollections consultant for the fight. My report was a most unfavorable one, and my experience indeed was thoroughly unpleasant. From Kinshasa, with much difficulty, I flew to Nairobi and then on to London for a meeting of SANROC people and also [to] make arrangements about the return of part of my family to Britain. (a miserable trip after Dar. Tried to return to Europe, got to London, then Chicago for poetry readings the next day at Field Museum and DuSable Museum). That about concludes my odyssey for this year except that I have now reached the highlight of arriving in Austin with some trepidation. My major disappointment for 1974 has been the failure of the SART (Stop Apartheid Rugby Tours) campaign. This was a campaign I set up in Britain during a visit round about June or July 1973 in an effort to stop the British rugby team going to South Africa in 1974, a committee which was headed partly by Peter Hain but was mainly run by my son, Julian Brutus, and which I regret to say did a great deal, but simply not enough, to stop the tour. The British Lions Rugby Team duly went to South Africa and won every match with the exception of one which was drawn. (After this, tried to get campaign on SA rugby tour to France – not very successful. And hamstrung by visa difficulties in U.S.!)

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Family Background [Tape recorded on 15 October 1974.]

Children suffer from a lack of knowledge of the background of their parents. Certainly I do in relation to my own parents, so I thought I would do a tape which, among other things, would fill in for [my children] Jacinta and Marc, Julian and Tony, Tina, Cordelia, Greg, and Paula my own background, and perhaps begin with something of my own parents. I find that I am at a disadvantage in trying to reconstruct the lives of my own parents. I have to rely sometimes on information given to me by others and particularly by my brother Wilfred, who not only was older and more inquiring, but has a remarkably retentive memory. My parents married in October 1919, I guess. Wilfred, the oldest child, was born October of 1920 after they had been married somewhat more than a year. At that time they were living in Rhodesia. They had married, as far as I know, in Port Elizabeth, and then perhaps at the beginning of the next year, 1920, January, my father went off to teach in Salisbury, the capital of Rhodesia, where Wilfred was born, and Helen, my eldest sister, two years later in October. Then I was born in November of 1924. The youngest of the family, my sister whom we call Dolly – she was christened Catherine – was born in 1926. My father grew up, as far as I know, in a little town on the west coast of South Africa, a place called Saldanha Bay, which was a whaling station where his father, my grandfather, had apparently been a whaler. I learned from my mother many years later that his father had been illiterate, and that at the time that they went to Rhodesia my grandfather was to accompany them, but the fact that he was unable to sign his name meant that he was refused admission. And she told it in a way which revealed a certain harshness in my father, perhaps a certain embarrassment [for] an educated man whose own father was illiterate. I’m really just reconstructing this from my imagination. There was something about the tone with which she recounted the episode and 32

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Family Background which had apparently given her some pain from which one gets this kind of sense – the context in which an event is described more than the actual words. She would have told me this when I was already a teenager and when she was reminiscing somewhat bitterly about my father. His parents, then, were a man called Brutus, who apparently was a sailor and worked on a whaling ship and apparently was quite wealthy. He must have prospered in the whaling business: we had an heirloom, a ring with a Masonic crest on it which apparently my grandfather had given to my father. My grandfather’s wife (and my grandmother), from what my mother told me, was of German descent. Her name, I think, was Helen, and my sister was named for her, though there may well have been an aunt who was called Helen as well or instead, on my paternal grandmother’s side. If I report mainly the information as given to me by my mother, this is because my father was an uncommunicative person, and I cannot recall him ever having discussed his parents. He did occasionally talk – very rarely, but once or twice – about two daughters he had had, and a son, who would in a sense be my step-brother and [step-] sisters: a girl who was called Ethel, or affectionately Etty, and another younger daughter, who may have been frail – this is the impression I get – called Blanche, who possibly died young. There was also a son called Victor, who may have drowned as a boy. This is confused in my mind with stories of my father having a younger brother called Victor who drowned, so my information on this is clearly not very reliable. My step-sister Etty, I understand, grew up and left home, possibly with some ill feeling, and married a man of Portuguese descent. His surname was Costas, and they may subsequently have had a cafe or restaurant in Cape Town which suggests that he was classed as European and she as white by marriage, though this is conjecture. They may well have been non-whites and had a non-white café, but the sense that I got was that it was in a white or European area. My father’s first wife, whose surname I once knew but have forgotten – her first name was Rose, and my mother spoke of her with some admiration, though she was her successor. She had apparently been a person of striking beauty, but her life with my father had not been a happy one. I’m not sure of the circumstances of her death. I think she died of tuberculosis, or so I was told, but apparently in some unhappiness and perhaps some neglect from my father. All this is really very vague guesswork, and I’m trying to be as truthful as I can be. My father and his first wife had apparently lived in a part of Port Elizabeth called South End, which was a Coloured area, but an area with a large number of Asians, Indians as we called them, some Chinese, some Africans who gradually were forced out of the area, and some whites, often [from] the poorer white, lower income groups, working class. My father had taught at a school called St. Peter’s, a very old established mission school set up by the Anglican church (or Episcopalians) whose Principal was both parish priest 33

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Family Background and head of the school – a man called Father Paddy, as everybody referred to him affectionately. He may have been white, or Coloured, or even Indian, I can’t remember at this stage. His surname may well have been Indian, but he was spoken about with a kind of respect, and the respectful tones used were usually those used when speaking of whites, though it is true that there were certain people in the Coloured community who had achieved some respect and distinction and who would be spoken of in much the same terms. He was apparently on good terms with my father; they were good friends, or they held each other in high regard. If I remember correctly, my father at some stage with his first wife Rose had lived in a street called Miller Street at the top end of the South End, where a kind of gorge fell away, through which the Baakens River flowed, with attractive shrubbed and wooded slopes – a kind of mystery and wildness and a sense of dread about them. I walked there occasionally, and I remember and recall vividly now the houses perched on the edge of the gorge. Across the gorge you had the expensive white suburb of Walmer, and on one side of the gorge you had the old fort, Fort Frederick, which commanded the bay, Algoa Bay, into which Baakens River flowed. [It was an] old fort built by the British settlers probably, in dealing with the troublesome natives. My mother’s ancestry was apparently African on one side, or perhaps even Hottentot or Malay. Certainly on the maternal side she was descended from slaves, and [she] used to tell us when we were very young of the reminiscences she had heard, possibly from her mother or certainly from her grandmother, of the cruel conditions under which the slaves had lived – beatings, cruelties – and she recalled particularly vividly, as I do now, the traditional punishment of tying a slave, stripped, to the large wheel of the ox wagon and then inflicting lashes on the slave until he or she collapsed in a bleeding, quivering heap after being untied from the wheel. [My mother] grew up not very far from Port Elizabeth, [in] a little town called Uitenhage, and then went perhaps some fifty miles further to a small town called Hankey, where there was at that time a famous teacher training college. There she was educated by English missionaries, whom she used to talk of with great affection and almost veneration – a Mr. Slingsby, who was the Head of the college, and then Madam Walton, who probably was the Principal and of course a great influence and model for the aspiring teachers. [My mother] had apparently gone to school and shown great promise, and so was sent on to teacher training college, probably at about the age of seventeen or even younger since she was of above average brilliance and qualified early, together with a whole generation of men and women who qualified from this rather famous college institution for non-whites – I suppose it was a kind of Tuskegee or Wilberforce or some equivalent [institution] in the United States. And then [she] came out to teach. All the people I knew who were also teachers [and] her peers, people of her generation, had a great admiration and affection 34

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Family Background for her. Indeed, she was a person of a marvelously gentle and loveable disposition, [so] it was understandable that she should have had so many friends who cared for her. I find it difficult to recall anything she did which gave offense to other people. My father was a very different kind of person. I think I understand him better now as I mature. He was a man of considerable brilliance, talent, and achieved some quite important things, though I didn’t know [of] them all the years I knew him. I have only discovered them much later. He qualified at some teacher training college, I think in the Cape, a normal college as it was called, though it may have been the old distinguished missionary college of the Cape called Zonnebloem, which was almost a kind of intellectual capital in South Africa. All the best Coloured teachers came from there, and probably in the early years Africans qualified as teachers there too. I am guessing about his training. What I do know is that he continued studying thereafter, taking courses by correspondence through what was called the University Correspondence College, whose files and lectures were all over our home in Dowerville, all of them with the familiar burning lamp on the cover, an old oil lamp with the flame rising from it, which may well have influenced the design adopted by the Teachers’ League of South Africa, the Coloured teacher organization which adopted the same emblem. Very curiously, many years later, I discovered that my father had in fact been one of the prime movers in the creation of the Teachers’ League of South Africa, and it may well be that he was responsible for the adoption of the design – that’s guesswork. When Bennie Kies1 was working on a history of the League in the late forties and fifties, I remember him approaching me and inquiring whether I had any information on my father’s work in the establishment of the Teachers’ League, and I had to confess that I knew nothing. And indeed, it was a little dubious as to how important my father’s role had been. But I have since had corroborating evidence from other people that he played some considerable role in the formation of this organization, which in itself was an organization of considerable importance. Only earlier this year, in reading Class and Colour in South Africa, [by H.J. and R. E. Simons], and checking the index, seeing the name Brutus there, and going through the pages, I found a quotation from my father, and one I need not be ashamed of. [It was] a clear statement a long time ago, when few people held this view, of the need for the unity of all the black teachers, a unity which would disregard the kind of racial categories which the government has consistently tried to impose in order to divide the non-white oppressed. And there was he, before my birth, I guess, taking the same kind of position that I have taken in later years, and which seems to me a wholly admirable position to take. So he was brilliant, but because he was brilliant, I think, he was lonely. He 1

Bennie M. Kies (?-1979), South African teacher, lawyer, and founder of the NonEuropean Unity Movement.

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Family Background was impatient of stupidity and ignorance, and certainly he seemed to have no capacity for chitchat. He spent years over his studies. He had by Coloured standards a most impressive library that people exclaimed over when they came to the house. We had a wall literally lined with books, a huge and clumsy bookshelf about which my mother spoke disparagingly, but in which he kept all his books and greatly treasured them. I’m sorry to say that they were not all bought; some of them had the imprint of the library of St. Dominic’s Priory, which adjoined the school where he taught. The priory was a school for white girls, but it may well be that he was permitted to take books from this library and use them, and perhaps he would keep them. Certainly he studied mathematics, physics, geometry, and – what rather impressed me – French, German, [and] possibly Greek. He spoke some French, as far as I could gauge, fluently. He had the most beautiful copperplate handwriting, so that people in the township of Dowerville where we lived would come to him when they wanted something inscribed, or simply when they bought a book and wanted to have their name written in it. In those days, to own a book, to buy a book, was really quite an occasion, and they would come to him to do [an inscription] for them. Among those who would come to him was a man called Ben Japtha who himself acquired quite a distinguished and admired script. As children we saw little of my father, but perhaps I should simply go on with a kind of chronological account first. My father then was a widower at the time he met my mother. She was teaching somewhere in Port Elizabeth, [in] one of the mission schools, and was apparently an extremely popular person, very sociable and outgoing. She sang with choirs, performed in concerts, trained and conducted school and church choirs, and she also played tennis; as far as I know, at one time [she] may have been the provincial or local women’s singles tennis champion. They met and married, [but] they were people of very different temperaments. He was always, I think, rather brooding, possibly arrogant. She was sociable and marvelously unaffected with no pretentions about her, except perhaps as a teacher, when she would adopt a rather formal authoritative pose, no doubt acquired from her ideal, Madame Walton. They married on a public holiday, the first Monday in October, a bank holiday. I don’t know quite when they went to Rhodesia, and I don’t know quite why they decided to go. Perhaps they wanted to get away from his past. They were of course both Coloureds. I say that because people – certainly outside South Africa – sometimes have a notion of illicit love affairs between blacks and whites, and Coloured children as the product of such illicit unions, or even of licit unions under great strain from the rival racial tensions. There have of course been Coloureds in South Africa from the time of the establishment of the Dutch colony in 1652. Jan van Riebeeck2 encouraged 2

Jan van Riebeeck (1619-1677), Dutch colonial administrator and founder of Cape Town.

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Family Background marriage between the local Hottentots and the Dutch, as a way of establishing friendly relations, and then slaves were brought in from the Dutch colonies in the East Indies, Batavia, and they married or gave birth to children from the Dutch. And of course there was intermarriage between what would have been called Coloureds, Cape Malays, and Africans as well. My mother was of white African descent on one side and probably on both. Her surname was Bloemetjie, which is translated as little flower. This may have been the kind of name that was given to a slave descendant of a Dutch family. But she did on the one side have English descendants as well. I think the surname was Webber, and the other branch of the family, the allwhite branch, was apparently quite a distinguished one in the community of Uitenhage and a pillar of local society. Her father had been a postman, and this is a rather romantic image of the days when the post was a wagon rather like the pony express, and the man who delivered the mail from town to town would blow a horn, the traditional British post horn. I remember her evoking the image of them hearing the sound of the horn when the wagon approached the outskirts of the little village. She herself was a member of a fairly large family. I think her mother had died either of tuberculosis or possibly cancer of the throat because she did suffer from a throat disability herself in later life. I remember a remark that her mother had died of possibly cancer of the throat. She herself died at a very ripe age. She had lived a long, full, and generally useful and quite beautiful life. She died of diabetes in 1965 while I was in prison. My father too lived a long life, dying at the age of eighty-nine, as far as I know. His death came while I was in Swaziland, having escaped from the police, and so I was unable to attend his funeral. He died, as far as I remember, in Wellington, and he died lonely, away from the family. He had decided to divorce my mother in the late fifties. They had been living apart for many years, so that the divorce action was really an idle, meaningless gesture. I conjecture that he may have told her he was suing for divorce in an effort to get them reunited, and when she declined this, he went ahead with the divorce proceedings. As far as I know, she did not even know that the decree was finalized until she saw, or [until] someone sent her, a small clipping from the paper in which this was reported – a kind of legal notice that the decree had finally been granted. I leap ahead in a sense, and all this is sort of scattered. Let’s go back. They married in 1919. Wilfred was born in 1920. He was the eldest, was always my father’s favorite child. Strikingly his nickname for him was Boebbie and was a term of affection, but I suspect it was derived from booby and was really a kind of affectionate contempt. One talks of a booby as someone who is not very bright. Helen [arrived] two years later, and then I was born on November 28, 1924. I shall be fifty in a few weeks time. Dolly was born on February 26, 1926, shortly after my parents had returned from Rhodesia to Port Elizabeth and [had] in fact gone on to Hankey. My mother was pregnant at the time, and Dolly was born in Hankey. In Salisbury, as far as I know, we lived in either 37

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Family Background Pioneer Road or Manica Road, or [else] the school was situated in Manica or Pioneer Road. We left in 1925 or early 1926. I was only two years old. I have no recollection of Salisbury or the journey. I have vague images, but they may be more the result of suggestion than real memory. Wilfred of course remembers Salisbury and describes the red roofs and the green trees. I was born and baptized in Salisbury in the Anglican cathedral by a bishop who I believe was called Bishop Bevan, and whose own name may have been Dennis. I think my father’s own preference would have been to call me Frederick, or Vincent, probably Vincent which has a Latin root and might have reminded him of Victor. But at any rate, I was then called Dennis Vincent Frederick. My mother had been a Congregationalist, one of the Lutheran branches of the reformed church. My father may well have been too, though I suspect he was always an Anglican, and his association with Father Paddy and St. Peter’s School, which was an Anglican school, reinforces this suspicion. But in Salisbury, apparently he met a Catholic priest who was called Father Brown, with whom he became very friendly and under whose influence he became a convert and a Catholic. This happened before 1926, when my parents both came back to South Africa. [After] Dolly was born, my father went back to Rhodesia to continue teaching and returned, apparently round about 1929, and was now a Catholic and prevailed upon my mother [to convert]. My mother was required to undergo religious instruction. She attended a convent and studied with nuns who became very friendly, very sympathetic, towards her – indeed, much more so than towards my father in time. She became a Catholic, though before she did that, Wilfred, Helen, I, and Dolly were all baptized in that magnificent church on Prospect Hill, St. Augustine’s, in April of 1931. I remember the date because I visualize it being described in a prayer book, a little prayer book we were given as gifts at the time. My mother only subsequently became a Catholic. She was required to undergo a much more rigorous period of instruction in the catechism before she was rebaptized herself. I think she became a Catholic initially with some reluctance. It meant for one thing a severance of all those wonderful warm associations she had had with the church, the school, the choir, the Land of Hope, and the ministers of the Congregational church, many of whom my father apparently disliked and may even have been suspicious of, but once she became a Catholic, she committed herself wholly. She became a very devout and indeed a holy person, a tireless servant of the church in fundraising and organizing meetings, in forming a women’s guild, in organizing bazaars, and all the other things. My father didn’t join her in these. He still remained solitary. I begin to remember my existence from the time we moved to Dowerville, which at that time I think was called Lakeview, a little housing township of a hundred houses, built on one of the pioneering sub-economic schemes to build houses for the poorer Coloureds. This may well have been the first one 38

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Family Background of its kind, near a lake, which in time became silted over and overgrown with weeds and smelly, but later was cleaned. Water from the power station ran into it later, a great, strong, dark green torrent, and the lake itself became a kind of marina [in] which boats could sail, but of course they were white boats; whites owned the boats, there were no non-whites [among them]. My father’s association with the Catholic church was, as far as I know, quite a strong one as well, but quite independent of my mother’s. He was now teaching, at the time we were in Dowerville, at a school called St. Patrick’s Mission School in, interestingly, a little suburb outside the city, a township called Salisbury Park, so that in a sense he had not lost touch with Salisbury. The Principal of the school was a nun, a nun for whom he had a great affection and respect, who lived in a convent nearby, which was attached to the Priory, the expensive school for white girls. So he had some association with the Priory; he used its library. The Principal at the school where he taught was called Sister Anthony. She was a great friend of his, but the school was a long way off. He would leave before we woke in the morning to get a bus into town and then at the terminus to get another bus out of town to Salisbury Park. If he missed the bus, he had miles to walk. The bus service was notoriously irregular; the buses were sometimes so crowded that there was no room, or they didn’t leave on time, or they broke down, and then he would have miles to walk through an area called Bog Farm and so get to Salisbury Park and St. Patrick’s School. On at least one occasion he took the children to St. Patrick’s on the Feast of St. Patrick, which was a big event at the school, so that we could meet Sister Anthony, the other teachers, and the parents and children of that particular school. He was apparently a fearful martinet, who beat the kids savagely, but these were the days when a good teacher was measured by the severity of his discipline and the harshness of his cane, and so people spoke of him with a kind of mixture of fear and admiration, though that [knowledge] for me came later. I didn’t discover that [at the time]. As I remember him at home, it is chiefly as a distant person, but also as a person who could sometimes be enraged and could terrify us. I think I was truly terrified as a small boy. But mostly we never saw him. He left home before we were up, and he got home after we had gone to bed. On weekends he would bring a package of fruit and play a game, inviting us to guess [what it was] by smelling the package. They were usually apples or oranges or bananas which he would instruct us to cut up in halves and share, rather than have a whole fruit each, something which amused my mother. “Cut it up between the four of you,” he would say. He was, in addition to his teaching and his studies, also coaching people at night school. He was a bookkeeper [too]; he did the books of the little fruit shops – mainly Indian and Portuguese fruiterers – and these were his friends. He seemed to get on well with them, and he came home occasionally with cigars or wine which he said they had given [him] as gifts. So he was leading 39

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Family Background a fairly active social life, and at a later time this clearly involved a rather gay socializing and going to the races and the racetrack. I found him impatient of me always, or most of the time. This was because my mother, in his eyes at least, and I suspect that he was right, was overprotective of me. I think I was regarded as delicate, I’m not sure. I know that she thought that I was deaf, or partly deaf. She would call me affectionately “Dowe Jan” (deaf John), which is a kind of legendary character like Johnny Appleseed or Dr. Foster who went to Gloucester. Also, I had had my nose injured. I think I know the details, but I doubt my own memory. My nose bled freely and frequently, and this was an occasion for great fuss. I would occasionally get into fights with my brother and others, and my nose would bleed; this would be cause for great anxiety on her part. She really was protective of me, and this irritated my father who used to refer to me unkindly, or rather, in talking to my mother, would refer to me as a little deaf king or something of that sort, as the member of the family who mother excessively fussed over. He was very fond of Helen who had weak ankles, and he insisted that she wear boots instead of shoes, though I’m sure she hated it, and it wasn’t necessary. He called her Hellie, and was very fond of her. And then there was the youngest and prettiest child in the family, Dolly, who was fair with masses of dark hair and large eyes, and who was called China Doll, and in fact this is how she got the name Dolly. So of the four in the family, I think – and I’m sure I’m not merely being subject to some kind of persecution complex – of the four, I was the one he cared for least, perhaps because my mother cared for me most, or very nearly most. He had a great belief in books and encouraged us as a special treat occasionally, perhaps once a month, to go through his pictorial encyclopedia and look at the pictures. Just to look at them was a great treat. I remember the images of the Mona Lisa and the sculptures in the Vatican, the Apollo Belvedere, Julius Caesar, all the great sculpture and art of the Western world, and the books he brought with the early history of Britain and the Roman conquest and Julius Caesar. Brutus apparently played no role. I was imbibing a kind of knowledge of Roman history, but history in which, if I knew Brutus at all, I knew him as a villain. I don’t know how [my father] felt about the name. He could quote Shakespeare, of course: “Et tu, Brute?” and other things such as “Brutus was an honorable man.” He must have had some familiarity with Shakespeare [from] when he was studying English for his degree – I’m not sure he really ever got an Arts degree. He would quote poetry at various times, particularly when he was shaving. Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott,” I think, and certainly Tennyson’s “[Ode] on the Death of the Duke of Wellington”3 and probably some 3

Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), British poet who served as Poet Laureate from 1850 to 1892.

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Family Background Browning4 as well. He also encouraged an interest in poetry. Not very consistently he bought us magazines for school children; for Wilfred there would be The Champion, for me The Triumph, though I would have preferred The Champion, and for Helen and Dolly The Schoolgirl’s Own. I remember at least one, possibly two occasions, when he made us gather around the table in the evening and tell him what we had read. Wilfred would fluently recount his story, Helen would tell her story and empathize so much with the schoolgirl in the story that she would break down in tears and be unable to complete her story. I don’t remember my own performance or Dolly’s. But on other occasions we were asked to recite bits of poetry, and so, hurriedly, in a matter of minutes, Wilfred was drilling me through a poem which I still remember bits of, I think. It went something like this: A wet sheet and a flowing sea, A stream that follows fast And bends the gallant mast, my boys, And bends the gallant mast. Then like an eagle free Away the good ship flies, and leaves Old England on the lee. There was another one I must have memorized because I can quote a bit of it, too: A wind came up from out the sea, And said, ‘O mist, make room for me’ It hailed the ships and cried ‘Sail on, Ye mariners, the night is gone.’ When we would recite them, he would then show us better how to recite them, and he read with great articulateness and care, with a sense of rhythm and meter, but at the same time [with] very clear emphasis on the meaningful words, and if I read well at all, I think at least some of it I acquired from him. I remember years later I was reading from a school book [a line] which went something like “Wanted a boy how often we these simple little words may see.” I was reciting it, and he stopped me and said, “No, not like that,” and then he read them: “Wanted: a boy; how often we, these simple, little words may see,” and I think I learned from him. I lisped then as I still do, having difficulty with my s’s and th’s. I was called “thick tongue” as a tease name, one which I thought unkind and derogatory and was the cause of much rather unkind humor, but which did not, I think, excessively perturb me. 4

Robert Browning (1812-89), British poet and playwright famous for his dramatic monologues.

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Family Background I had a kind of equanimity or composure which may simply have been a numbness, an insensitivity or a lack of intelligence. I was also regarded as somewhat retarded, apart from being deaf. I was the daydreamer. My mother had another name for me: she called me Freddie Far-off, which was the name of a character in a school reader, a boy who I think was daydreaming and had magical adventures with princesses and frogs, and I remember pictures of glowing strawberries in [this reader which] I think was called Blackie’s School Reader. These would be books designed for English schools [and] were used in the missionary schools, which were generally run by the English. Indeed, at that time the English had a strong influence on provincial educational policy in various provinces, with English culture and English myths [emphasized]. One grew up on that, not knowing much about your own South African or for that matter African culture or myth. I certainly remember my father reciting those ringing lines from the old “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington”: “Bury the great Duke with the noise of lamentation,” and remember myself absentmindedly parroting it back to him at some point to his amusement and him encouraging me to go on and recite some more. We should turn, I suppose, to the circumstances which led to the breakup of the family. My father was teaching at Salisbury Park, St. Patrick’s. My mother had repeated requests to return to the school in the township, the Henry Kaiser Memorial School, which was a single church building with a couple of classrooms attached, and occasionally she did go and teach there for short spells as a reliever. But my father discouraged her from teaching. At the same time there wasn’t enough money to keep the family going. We really managed very badly. We ate badly. He cut our hair generally to save money and cut it badly so that we would be figures of fun to be laughed at in the township afterwards. My mother loved seeing us dressed and the home comfortable. She had an organ. I don’t know when she acquired it. She played it and she sang. She sang beautifully. She had been a soloist in various choirs as well as a teacher of choirs, and had probably sung on various occasions when a royal visitor came from Britain. Interestingly, she loved African choral singing, though she sang traditional English ballads mostly, again [reflecting] the strong British influence: “Men of Harlech” and “All Through the Night” and “Killarney” and “Annie Laurie” and “Sweet and Low.” They were all very much of Western culture, though there were some songs or hymns which were of African origin that she knew as well. My father loved music and must have had a great familiarity with the Western tradition. He sang badly, I think. My mother certainly thought so. I don’t think he did, and he too would sing “Men of Harlech” and “All Through the Night” and various ballads and try to teach them to us and encourage us to sing along. He also loved singing hymns, not only Catholic ones which he tried to teach us: “Faith of our Fathers” and “God Bless the Pope” and “Hail, Glorious Saint Patrick” and “Mother of Mercy” and possibly “Day by Day,” 42

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Family Background though I think I learned that one much later at another St. Patrick’s in Sydenham. The organ was in the living room, and occasionally my mother played it, and we sang along with her. When we sang along with my father, I remember myself sitting on his knee and noticing the spittle flying from his mouth as he sang. He was mustached, never bearded. His hair turned gray and then an attractive silver-gray. His skin was extremely dark, not brown, but this was in fact the result of prolonged exposure to the sun. When he moved his neck and you saw beneath his collar, it was almost milky white, a kind of creamy white rather than milky perhaps, or something of that sort. So there we were. But we were living badly, and my mother tried all kinds of things to raise extra money. Since my father disapproved of her teaching, she secretly gave music lessons when he was away and had to hurry back before he got home or there would have been a scene. Or pupils came for organ lessons. She coached privately, either students who came to the house who had to be dismissed before he got there or had to be hurried out of the back door while he entered through the front door. She also took in washing and some ironing, but she ironed badly, not to the satisfaction of the white mistresses. So she would simply do the washing part and a next door neighbor or a friend would do the ironing. Later [my father] would come around to the back door, perhaps because the front door was stuck, or to catch her. This went on several years, and the strains grew. There was tension, hostility, unfriendliness between them, though I, with my habitual kind of unawareness, was probably less conscious of it than many others of the family; certainly the girls, Helen and Dolly, were more sensitive. Wilfred was extremely intelligent and perceptive. Eventually [my parents] slept in separate rooms. My father slept alone in one bedroom which he had shared with my mother. She moved to a smaller bedroom across from the living room and shared it with my sisters. There was a third bedroom adjoining my father’s in which Wilfred and I slept. At one stage earlier, as far as I remember, all four of the children were in the same room, two boys in one bed, two girls in another. Later the girls moved, and the two boys had a bed each to himself. Later, I think through a lack of bedclothes, the two boys shared one bed. My mother became extremely devout. There was a little table in the small bedroom where she slept with the girls which was arranged as an altar with a picture of the Sacred Heart, and two candles burned on either side of it. There were other small pictures and rosaries and prayer books, and we used to gather there for prayers at night. I think this altar arrangement may well have been my father’s idea in the hope of encouraging devotion. With the kinds of tensions in the home, the devotion became very much hers. He would come in, if he came in early in the afternoon, and go to his room, lie down, read the paper, go to sleep, [and] rise for supper. We for many years had supper together as a family, but later he ate alone, and we would either eat before him or after him. In the days when we ate together, we as children 43

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Family Background were aware of the tensions between the adults and were uncomfortable and nervous, fearful. It all reached a climax round about 1937 or 1936. I was then about twelve, but my memory of these things is vague. In 1935 the Catholics opened a school called St. Theresa’s, which had been a white school, I think, but the whites were then given a better school, a convent school, and the school then, with its discarded desks and blackboards, was given to the Coloureds, and from October 1935 I attended school at St. Theresa’s. Perhaps one will have to go into this all on its own. The church was attached to the school, and after a while the church hall itself became part of the school. My mother was now very friendly with the nuns; she was preparing for instruction or was received into the church about this time, and the nuns were very sympathetic to her and our poverty and our predicament and her failure to communicate with my father and the general kind of hardships that surrounded us, though we were in many ways better off than many other families who were really doing much worse and were much poorer, [with] children who went barefoot to school all through the year, summer and winter, and walked long distances, sometimes miles, from Korsten or Schauler township, a distance of perhaps three to five miles to school each day and home after school. Eventually the nuns conspired – I’m afraid that’s the only word for it – to arrange for my mother to get a teaching position in Grahamstown, which was 108 miles away by rail, and she sneaked out of the home, taking with her the two girls, whom she could not leave with my father, and went to teach at St. Mary’s School, Raglan Road, Grahamstown, in the middle of a location on the outskirts of Grahamstown which I guess was evenly divided between Coloureds and Africans at that time. She spent a year there. We were left in the care of my father. It was not a good time, and at least one almost traumatic experience happened during that time. Then a year later she returned, and this time I think she came home. I’m not sure. We now had an aunt, her sister Louise, Aunt Louie, who was staying in Dowerville as well. [My mother] decided that when she went back to Grahamstown this time, she would take all four of the children. This she did, so I spent some time in Grahamstown at primary school at St. Mary’s. She had lived at Beaufort Street right at the beginning of the city where the road ran from the city into the township. Then she stayed with people by the name of Francis, Maude Francis and her husband, who was a waiter at a hotel. He was Indian. I don’t think they were married; their marriage in fact only took place years later, but it was of no consequence to me then or now. Now we stayed with the Eachells family, a widow with three grown daughters and a fourth called Rose who had died and was still deeply lamented by the family. This was at 4 Beaufort Street, and I walked the mile or two each day to St. Mary’s. I became an altar boy there, I believe, and I was developing my sexual appetites and diversions and also a great capacity for fantasy, about which perhaps I will talk some other time. 44

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Family Background When round about 1937 or 1938 we returned to Port Elizabeth, my father refused to take my mother back, and we stayed with a family called the Justins in Charlotte Street, living in considerable discomfort. I slept on floors there, washed the dishes, did the errands, and went to school at St. Theresa’s, arriving in time for a concert where I performed badly. I hadn’t had sufficient rehearsal, and the students there were just at the point of making their first confessions and communions, and though I think I was less well prepared than all the others, it was decided that I was intelligent and informed enough to join them. I had then and later a very good memory, and I distinguished myself as being a fine catechism student. I would usually win first place in the religious instruction class; I would head the class. And I had become an altar boy, and I have no doubt the nuns and priests had designs on me as potential seminary material. The breakup of my parents, as far as I remember, did not strike me as traumatic. One kind of drifted into these things and accepted them numbly. There is no doubt that the major cause was disagreements about money and the lack of money, and disagreements on how it ought to be spent, but I am sure that the real reasons were much more profound and really arose out of the tremendous differences in temperament and in expectations. For my mother, her marriage and her family was the happy, joyous, sociable bond, and she wanted to retain all her links with her old friends and our relatives who were scattered all over the place. My father was solitary, intellectual, bookish, and indeed I think for most of the people in our community and in our family, his own intellectual interest in the novels, poetry, Shakespeare, Latin, Greek, and French that he was studying, must have set him apart so that he found little in common or that was congenial with my mother’s circle of friends. And for him, marriage, as far as I know, was an extremely tight and almost insular thing. Perhaps he sought to protect us, too, from some of the more depraving or degenerate influences in the township; there were drunks and scenes and scandals and affairs, possibly some prostitution, and almost certainly some illicit abortions going on. Perhaps he wanted to protect us from those things. I remember him with affection, mainly because I think I understand better what kind of person he was and because I think temperamentally I have some sympathy for his cast of mind. Even now my mother’s kind of sociability does not come easily to me. Curiously, it may be the same kind of difference of expectations, of temperament, which separates me from May in many ways. While we were living in Charlotte Street, my mother was faced with divorce proceedings instituted by my father. I imagine she in turn was seeking maintenance in a judicial separation. For her it was a traumatic process. She spent days going to lawyers, trudging up and down the streets. She was appalled by the kind of arguments my father was bringing against her. Often she was in tears, and I suppose in my dumb way I may have tried to console 45

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Family Background her, but I was fairly insensitive to these things. I was already sufficiently bright as a student to assist in drafting letters and in formulating her replies. Curiously, when a final letter came at some crucial point, I said to her that I thought it could be handled in a particular way, [that] a particular statement could be made, and she said, “Well, why don’t you go and tell the lawyers this?” I went down to the lawyer, J.H. Spilkin,5 who was an old sharp who bled the blacks while doing their cases for them, but was notorious as a brilliantly crafty lawyer. I went down to his offices and saw either a junior lawyer or Spilkin himself, made some kind of crisp statement on how I [thought] the matter should be dealt with at that point, and as far as I can remember, they accepted it. Round about that time I suppose I did not realize the magnitude or significance of what I was doing, but that seemed to bring the proceedings to some kind of termination. She was paying endless sums of money, she was not getting money for support, but round about that time the matter was concluded, and I may have had a share in it. I think at the time or thereafter I reflected with some satisfaction on my contribution which had settled the matter and indeed had formulated for the lawyer the correct kind of response which should be made at that stage. 5

Jacob Hyman Spilkin (1904-1999), Latvian-born South African lawyer.

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Attempt to Escape The Need to Get Out [Tape recorded on 7 September 1974.]

This is a tape about escapes, so one might call it the escape tape. I propose to talk about my escape from South Africa, the situation surrounding that, and then my sort-of escape [from Swaziland] which got me across the Mozambique border and into the arms of the Portuguese secret police, and then my attempted escape in Johannesburg. I will start with setting the context of the first one. My general purpose is to work up to recounting the experiences as far as I can, and I find it convenient to do that in the month of September, which is the month in which it happened in 1963, particularly as the days coincide – the 14th of September this year will be the anniversary right down to the day, which is a Saturday, of my arrest by the Portuguese secret police. And I hope next week to make an attempt to recapture fairly vividly the experience at that time. But first the context. I was arrested in May of 1963 at the offices of the South African Olympic Committee where I had gone to present the case of the non-white or black South Africans who were excluded from the Olympic movement. The special occasion was the visit of a Swiss journalist, a man called Rudolf Balsiger, who was referred to in the South African press as a Swiss statistician who was closely associated with the President of the Olympic movement, Mr. Avery Brundage, of Chicago. Mr. Balsiger, it was said, was going to submit a report to the IOC [International Olympic Committee] on racial discrimination in South African sport, and it seemed important to me that an attempt should be made to present to him the facts regarding black sportsmen. The difficulty was (1) that he was meeting only with the white officials: Frank Braun, President; a man from the Department of Education called Hannes Botha, who had been appointed by the South African government to insure that its racist policy was implemented in sport; and the secretary, Mrs. [Lillian] Francey. Mr. Balsiger was not meeting with the black athletes or their spokesmen. 47

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Attempt to Escape There was a further difficulty: (2) that I had been banned round about December of 1962 from belonging to any sporting organization or any other organization or holding any kind of office in any organization. This meant that I could not in fact act as the official spokesman for the black athletes because I did not hold an official position. There is a slight qualification here that the non-racial sports body, SAN-ROC [South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee], when it was banned or forbidden from offering me a position or allowing me to be elected to a position, had given me the honorary position of President of SAN-ROC. The third difficulty was that I was under a banning order under the Suppression of Communism Act of 1950 which made it illegal for me to attend any meeting. In fact, the banning order also covered social gatherings so that it was illegal for me to drink tea or go to a dinner party or meet anyone socially. I was not fully aware of all the implications of this banning order, as I discovered at the time of my arrest. I was arrested in May 1963, charged in the courts with the crime of contravening my banning order and released on bail and ordered to report to the police daily. The whole context of my arrest deserves a separate account, I think. After I was released on bail a number of things happened. A number of South Africans were escaping from the country, including members of the Congress of Democrats, an organization of whites which was in part a kind of resurrected Communist Party. A good many South Africans who at that time had been very busy in the resistance against apartheid began to leave the country. I had, however, no thought of leaving the country myself. I began to come under pressure from members of SAN-ROC, and particularly from the man who took over my job as Acting President of SAN-ROC and who continued to function in the other sports body known as SASA [South African Sports Association]. This was John Harris, a white South African, a teacher and a member of the Liberal Party. John and I had met almost accidentally, and then I agreed to speak to a group at his home in Pretoria or agreed to go with him to the home of members of the Liberal Party. I spoke at a meeting at the home of Adelaide1 and Walter Hain,2 and it was John who drove me in his blue Volkswagen Kombi to the meeting. John was clearly interested in doing as much as he could. He was a man of great energy and intelligence, though perhaps in the long run it might be shown that it was a kind of excessive and unbalanced energy, I don’t know. John began to urge me to leave the country in order to continue the work of SAN-ROC outside. Adelaide Hain, mother of Peter Hain, Secretary of the Pretoria branch of the Liberal Party who was briefly imprisoned, banned in 1963 and left South Africa for London in 1966. 2 Walter Hain, South African architect who, with his wife Adelaide, was briefly imprisoned, banned, and left South Africa for London in 1966. 1

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Attempt to Escape He had one very strong argument. After I was arrested and while I was awaiting sentence (the case was constantly being remanded or postponed), a new law was passed in South Africa empowering the government to imprison people even if they were found not guilty. This meant that you could be held under preventive detention not for having committed a crime but because you might commit one, and whereas if you were sentenced you were given a specific period in prison, if you were under preventive detention, you could be detained indefinitely or detained for periods which were simply renewable at will. The other legal development which was important was that the “90day law,” as it was called, empowering the police to hold people on suspicion or as witnesses for 90 days, was abrogated and replaced by a law called the “l80-day law” which meant that the state could detain you in prison for periods of 180 days at a time and on release after the 180th day could rearrest you to begin a new term of a further 180 days and this could go on indefinitely. John insisted that even if I were acquitted (as I thought I would be because I had been so effective in the sports movement, and because the next Olympic games were to be in 1964 and the South Africans were under very great pressure), it was probable that I would be detained indefinitely so that I would be completely ineffective. My reason for believing that I would be acquitted was that at the time I was arrested the meeting had not yet started, and I felt that I could not be convicted of attending a meeting when in fact the meeting had not begun. I discovered in court that I was wrong, that I could be convicted for attending a social gathering as well as a meeting, and that I was guilty of the first act. In addition, Mr. Frank Braun and Mrs. Francey both were both willing to perjure themselves in court and swear that the meeting had actually begun at the time I was arrested and in fact produced minutes which they read to the court indicating that the meeting had started (this notwithstanding the fact that I had arrived at the offices and explained that I did not intend to be present at the meeting, that I wished only to meet Mr. Balsiger, and that I would leave the moment the meeting formally began). So with these pressures on me, I began to think increasingly of the possibility or the wisdom of leaving the country prior to sentencing. In fact, my notions were so vague that I had no idea in which direction I would go or how I would get out of the country. The matter became more sharply an issue when a debate arose about whether the meeting of the International Olympic Committee Executive, which was a meeting I was interested in, should be held in Nairobi, Kenya, since the Kenyans were insisting that no South Africans should be allowed to attend. The IOC response was that if the South Africans could not attend, the meeting would be moved elsewhere. I thought it was so important to have the meeting in Africa that I cabled Tom Mboya, who was then a Minister in the Kenyan government and a spokesman on this issue, urging that the South Africans be allowed to attend in order to ensure that the meeting would take place in Africa. At any rate, in the long 49

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Attempt to Escape run, the meeting was shifted to Germany, in a place called Baden-Baden. At the same time that this debate was going on, I got information that it was comparatively easy to escape from South Africa across the border into Swaziland, that the border was very badly guarded, that people traveled frequently across the border without having their papers checked, and that there was a great deal of traffic. This was confirmed by a student, whom we used to call Joko, who was staying at the same boarding house in Park Road, Fordsburg, where I was staying. (Our landlady was a woman called Mrs. Karodia.) When I decided to flee the country, it was an extremely tentative and reluctant process. One of the first people I took into my confidence was Ruth First,3 who I assumed would know a great deal about the flight of the other members of the Congress of Democrats and people in the liberation movement and whom I thought would be helpful in this kind of act. She turned me down, however, expressing the view that too many people were leaving the country, and I got no help from that quarter. John Harris, however, continued to investigate the matter and to return frequently with fresh information. The climate in South Africa at the time was full of fear. There was the massive swoop by the secret police on the headquarters of the African National Congress and the armed wing of the ANC which was called Umkhonto we Sizwe [also known as ‘MK’, ‘Spear of the Nation’]. This swoop took place at Rivonia. It crippled the resistance movement. Most of the leadership were found in a single place, and they were taken to prison, faced a long trial, and I was eventually to join some of them on Robben Island. One of the dismaying features was that the man who had infiltrated the resistance movement, who had actually performed missions for them, was a white South African engaged by the secret police to work within the movement, and he was the principal witness against them. His name is Gerard Ludi.4 He had functioned as a journalist on the Johannesburg Star and had offered John Harris to assist in getting pieces on SAN-ROC into the Star and did in fact do this. He had eventually been invited to become a member of the Executive of SAN-ROC and had attended meetings with me at a time when I was a banned person, so that each time I attended one of these secret meetings of SAN-ROC I was in fact liable to imprisonment. So Gerard Ludi knew of me, the pressures were growing, and the possibilities for escape were there, and John Harris was most insistent in urging me. Ruth First (1925-1982), South African journalist and scholar who was killed by a parcel bomb in Mozambique while working for the ANC in exile. Among her many books, the experience of detention without trial is described in 117 Days. She was married to Joe Slovo the commander of Umkhonto we Sizwe. 4 Gerard Ludi, South African journalist and police spy who infiltrated the South African Communist Party and Umkhonto we Sizwe. 3

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Attempt to Escape I still temporized and was extremely reluctant, and in fact never in all the time I was in South Africa looked at a map to consider possibilities of escape. Eventually it became at least reasonably certain that if I was charged with a crime of attending a meeting, and even if I were acquitted, I would probably go to prison. The secret police were of course closing in on me. I was under heavy surveillance, particularly by a man called Helberg, an elderly member of the secret police who was specially assigned to me, who frequently visited the school where I was teaching illegally (since I was banned from teaching), who told me frankly that he knew I was teaching and that they would catch me sooner or later at the crime of conducting a class. And Helberg is also the man who some time later was to shoot me in the back. Under these pressures I finally agreed to leave the country, and the person to alert was of course my wife, who was living in Port Elizabeth, some 700 miles away, and whom I was unable to see because it was illegal for me to leave the city of Johannesburg, as it was in fact illegal for her to come up to visit me. However, I went to apply to court and got from the magistrate an order temporarily setting aside my banning order so she was able to come up to Johannesburg and we shared a room with some friends for perhaps a week. She brought with her our young son, Gregory, who was the baby at the time. And, on an occasion when we were safe and probably out of anywhere where we could be bugged, I gave her some information about my plans. I said that I would be leaving the country shortly at an appropriate time, that I would not tell her where I was going so that if she were questioned or interrogated or tortured by the secret police, she would simply not have the information to give them, and if she were interrogated, as she was bound to be after my escape, she was to say that she had not been told that I was planning an escape so that she could claim complete ignorance of any point rather than concede some and then be forced into making further admissions. And this in fact was what she did after I escaped. Rather amusingly, when stories appeared in the press of my wife disclaiming all knowledge of my intention to escape, people felt I had concealed it from her. In fact I had not, and May knew pretty much all the time what my plans were, though I did not give her any details. When the escape finally came, we chose a Sunday because it was reported that on Sundays the border was fairly busy with traffic, and the guards, particularly in the afternoon after a good meal, were inclined to be lethargic. These would be military and civil service personnel at the border whose duty it was to check passports and material of that kind. John Harris arranged to build a box under the driver’s seat in the Volkswagen [Kombi minibus] which he thought was big enough for me but turned out not to be, or rather might have been big enough but felt claustrophobic so that I could hardly endure being in it. I gathered my papers as best I could in the room where I was staying, though I imagine I left a great deal of interesting material, political 51

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Attempt to Escape and literary. I was at that time in correspondence with Ulli Beier5 and knew in fact the title of the book [he was to publish] was going to be Sirens Knuckles Boots; we were exchanging letters about the poems he had dropped from the collection or decided not to include. I gathered my papers as best I could and on a Sunday morning went to the police station, as I had to do every day while out on bail, to sign the prison register which was kept in a safe at the police station in Fordsburg on the corner of Bree Street. I must have had some things packed, though I hardly remember this. Indeed, I may have given them to John Harris before, and he may have stowed them in a case in the Volkswagen. From the police station, instead of returning to the home to which I was confined in Park Road, I headed directly for a corner where I had to rendezvous with John Harris, and we drove, as I now recall, rather absurdly at my request, in a westerly direction which took us out of Johannesburg and then [we] had to re-cross Johannesburg going in an easterly direction because the border we were heading for was the border of Swaziland. It shows some of my ignorance about geography that at the time I was not aware that the only way out of Swaziland was through Mozambique. I must have had some vague notion of getting perhaps to Rhodesia or further north, but it was not possible. So we drove off in the morning, and then the long drive eastward through the Transvaal to Ermelo, as far as I remember, and beyond that to the border. I remember feeling a great anguish about leaving South Africa. This was compounded of a sense of denial, almost of amputation, and indeed of betrayal of leaving the country when I ought to have remained there (and, of course, fear of arrest). I know I anguished over this in the car. But we approached the border, and I was extremely nervous but we drove through, and as I have recounted on other occasions, I remember John Harris at least, and perhaps I too, waved to the guards on this languid Sunday afternoon, and they waved back at us. And so over the border, into Swaziland, making for the capital Mbabane and a place near it where an old South African acquaintance – I think I had met him once before or we may never have met – Jordan Ngubane6–was staying, a man who had himself very narrowly escaped the pursuit of the South African police and got to Swaziland. I stayed under cover at Ngubane’s place for roughly three days, fearful of two things: of pursuit by the South African police, who were notoriously active in these other “satellite” 5 Ulli Beier (1922- ), born in Germany, was central to getting the emerging literature, drama and arts of Africa recognised internationally in the fifties and sixties. In 1960 with writers, artists and dramatists he founded the Mbari Club which published Dennis Brutus’s first book of verse Sirens Knuckles Boots. 6 Jordan Kush Ngubane (1917- ), Zulu journalist, novelist and member of the SA Liberal Party who was banned in 1963, fled to Swaziland, and in 1969 moved to the United States to teach at Howard University.

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Attempt to Escape territories, [as] one might call them, and also fearful that the British colonial administration, who at that time controlled Swaziland – it only subsequently became independent – the British colonial administration would return me to the South Africans. I had some idea of the collusion between the South Africans and the British administration, but it was nowhere near in fact the degree which existed when I got there, and it struck me very forcibly that when, after three days, I made myself visible and reported my presence to the British administration there, I was met with extreme hostility, with the possible threat of return to South Africa since I had entered the country illegally without the necessary papers, and since I had failed to report myself immediately after arrival. All this was further complicated when I was refused a residence permit to stay in Swaziland. I was permitted to stay there for about a month and then was expected to leave the country. They didn’t care where I went. So that no sooner had I got into Swaziland than the pressure was on me to get out of Swaziland, and this set up fresh problems. Just to complete this section, let me say that John and I were accompanied by his wife, Ann Harris, who has since remarried in Britain to a man I believe called Martin Wolfe. I saw her occasionally in Britain. John Harris himself was hanged. He was hanged in Pretoria Central Prison while I was on Robben Island. He was found guilty of the crime of sabotage, of setting off a bomb explosion [at the] Johannesburg Central Railway Station. And indeed I went through an extremely agonizing period in prison on Robben Island when I was isolated and interrogated because the South African secret police believed that I had been associated with John in this sabotage attempt, though it had taken place when I was already in prison and though it had taken place through a series of accidents in the sense that other people in the resistance movement who had stored explosives in their garage, were tracked down by the police. They fled the country but before leaving, deposited the explosives with John Harris, [who] was given the choice of dumping [all of] it in Zoo Lake, or making use of it. He decided to use it, and planted a bomb on the railway station, and phoned the police to warn them that there was a bomb and that the concourse should be cleared. The police, as far as we can establish, chose to do nothing, and allowed the explosion to go off, injuring people and killing one, because it suited their purpose to unleash a reign of terror and arrests on both white and black South Africans under this pretext. That rounds off the story, and in a sense completes John Harris’s role, but I should say that while I was in prison he took over the work of SAN-ROC, did an excellent job, [and] smuggled material out of the country. He also flew to London to meet with our contacts there to prepare them for the campaign relating to the Olympic movement and the Olympic Games in Tokyo, and he did a truly splendid job. There has been for some years a manuscript by someone in Britain who has been attempting to do a biography of John Harris, someone I believe called Ronnie Mutch. Also a South African, now living in Newton, in the Boston area of Massachusetts, has written a novel 53

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Attempt to Escape which is an imaginative interpretation of the character of John Harris. It may be worth looking at. This concludes the first attempted escape and the context. I am sure there is much more I might mention, but I propose to go on now immediately to the second phase, talking briefly about my experiences in Swaziland, where I spent I think about a month, and reaching up to the point where I was arrested by the Portuguese secret police at a place called Goba on the Mozambique/Swaziland border. Before going on to the Swaziland phase, let me attempt to recap this material that I have so far recounted in more creative terms which would sound less flat and monotonous and less of a dry recitation of fact. So, I make a second stab at this escape period, attempting to bring it to life. The period before flight, especially the last week, was curiously unreal. It was impossible to make appointments, because at the back of my mind I knew that I could not arrange to see people in a week’s time because I would be out of the country. But it was also impossible to tell people that I would not be around. There were so many spies, so many informers, in the townships, that a chance word dropped in the wrong place might easily have reached the secret police and ended the whole venture. So I spent that week gathering up my scattered papers, clothes, as unobtrusively as I could, and selecting the few things that I could take by way of clothes in a case – I doubt if I took many papers or books – with my mind fixed on the Sunday morning when I would leave. I may well have gone to an illegal party in that last week in a kind of desperate defiance which I often engaged in (sometimes with the secret police in hot pursuit, and very often in danger of arrest under the Immorality Act since my associates were as likely to be white as black where female company was concerned). The last night was a Saturday, a pleasant evening – one of those blue-silver dusks one finds on the high plateau of Johannesburg, the sky high and clear, a few stunted trees on Park Road and in the Fordsburg ghetto area, outlined against the sky. May was already back in Port Elizabeth after a brief stay by magisterial permission in Johannesburg. I think that of the other women with whom I had emotional attachments one had already fled the country. So there was nothing much for me to do except to make sure that my bills were paid. I was still a law student at Witwatersrand University at the time, but it was probably term holidays. The Sunday morning I rose bright and early and washed – one of those brilliant Sunday mornings, quiet and placid, a kind of golden quality in the air. [I] washed probably in the little out-house where one washed in a basin without running water, and then went off to the police station. I had made, I remember now, arrangements with Joko, the student and friend – an Indian boy, who lived in the Ermelo area. His parents were there, they had a shop, and he was knowledgeable about the area. I had made arrangements with him to see that my case got to John Harris at the point where we would 54

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Attempt to Escape rendezvous. Then I strolled, as insouciantly as ever, to the great irritation of the police at the police station, into the office to sign the book, which generally could either not be found or the key to the safe in which it was kept could not be found, so that I was left kicking my heels at the whim of the police officers there, all of whom regarded me with profound distaste, if not distrust. And then leaving them, I must have gone down Bree Street, probably to the station at Braamfontein where the railway line crossed the main road. Beyond that lay Witwatersrand University and the white suburbs. It was probably there at the subway crossing the railway lines that John Harris picked me up, and we drove in the wrong direction, for some reason. I may well have decided that I wanted to do this to throw the police off the scent. In any case, the direction we were heading was that of Zeerust on the border between South Africa and Bechuanaland (or Botswana, as it is now called). Zeerust was the place where most South African escapes took place, and indeed I had assisted Ahmed Gora to escape, giving him a letter to contacts there so that he could get out of the country. He was a colleague who served with me on SAN-ROC. I had asked him to join, to the great disapproval of most of my other friends, because he was not a sympathizer of the African National Congress but of the Unity Movement, one of the rival organizations. We drove through the fairly quiet streets of Johannesburg on a Sunday morning, and then made the turn-about to head off eastwards. As I remember, at this stage I was cheerful, inquiring about plans and ideas, but also unwilling to be seen or spotted through the windows of the blue Volkswagen, so that I tried to conceal myself to some extent. Then the long ride towards Ermelo, the northeastern corner of the Transvaal, and towards the Swaziland border. Some beautiful country on the way, and some very desolate and parched and heavily eroded country as well. And then stopping at a point to eat, probably, and drink a soft drink and have some fruit, and to get into the box which John had prepared for me, and which I found so claustrophobic that I was unable to remain in it. But I remained in it for a time, uncomfortable and anguished. It was in this period, when I was alone and unable to make conversation with John and Ann, that the full realization of what I was doing came to me. It was part sorrow, part guilt, part a sense of betrayal, of a failure to serve the country, of deserting it. Earlier I wrote, in fact, a draft of a poem in which I defended myself – a poem which sounds very much as if it were written for a particular woman. It must be around somewhere. I think indeed it’s in Thoughts Abroad and goes something like this: “I am out of love with you for now.” It is my defense in the lover’s quarrel between myself and the country which had exacted too much from me and given too little in return. lt is a lyric I think I only completed when in Swaziland. The approach to the border, which filled me with trepidation, passed easily. By this time I was out of the box and crouching behind one of seats out of 55

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Attempt to Escape sight in the Volkswagen, as I remember. And driving across the border itself, through the gates which were guarded and which marked the end of South Africa and where one approached the border post leading into Swaziland, in a kind of no-man’s land in between. They waved, and probably I did too, at the men on guard, with their automatic rifles, and they waved back, and then suddenly we were out of South Africa and in the little strip of no-man’s land, and I looked back fearfully to see if there was any pursuit. And then there was Swaziland. Green hills, heavily forested, tall trees along the road. It was dusk. Everything green and damp. And we drove on. And then a fairly long drive, winding drive, down to the capital, Mbabane, and to Jordan Ngubane’s home. We stopped somewhere on the road for a last chat, a last drink, and John urged me not to dally in Swaziland but to work my way out. It was a kind of urging I was to hear from him often, for he came to Swaziland several times, each time more urgent in insisting that I get out of the country, avoid being deported by the British administration, avoid being arrested perhaps, and certainly I ought to get out in time to be able to attend the meeting of the Olympic Executive Committee. I remember us talking along the road, in the grass beside the road, and it was perhaps the last time we had a real interpersonal exchange. I remember saying to him, because I felt that one of the things that drove him was an impulse to recognition or fame – I may have been wrong, but I was trying to understand his make-up – I remember saying that fame was one thing one did not need to worry about, that fame came as a consequence of acts one did and never came as a result of a desire to be famous. It was simply a byproduct of the kind of important actions one performed. I don’t think I ever understood him. He was a young man, much younger, with an apparently relaxed, casual approach, and yet [with] an undertone of tension, tautness to him, which may well have always been there and which may well have been one of the factors which brought him to sabotage and his death. He went from his cell in Pretoria Central to the gallows singing “We Shall Overcome.” Quite fearless. His jaw had been broken at one stage by the police in interrogating him. He had obviously been tortured. His wife observed this when she visited him in prison and when he was examined by doctors. But he went to his death singing with courage and confidence that the struggle in South Africa was not only a just one but one which would eventually be successful. On arrival in Swaziland I stayed with Jordan Ngubane and his family and heard his story of how he had himself narrowly escaped from the secret police, and this story is told elsewhere, I think, so I don’t need to repeat it. After a while I moved from him to a old college friend, Dr. Allen Nxumalo,7 who had a beautiful home – it was in fact a farm called Blue Haze – in a Allen M. Nxumalo, Swazi medical doctor, President of the Swaziland Democratic Party, and Swaziland’s first Minister of Health after independence. 7

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Attempt to Escape district outside Mbabane called Ezulweni which can be translated as “heaven” or “the heavenly place.” And there I spent many pleasant days. Going into Mbabane was less pleasant. The British administration was not friendly, and unfortunately white South Africans, even some who were of reportedly liberal or radical views, seemed to be embarrassed by my presence. I spent some time in the offices there of the political movement with which Allen Nxumalo was associated. He has since become Minister of Health in the Swaziland government. And also [some time] with Dr. Ambrose Zwane8 who led the other political party in the country. There was a newspaper shop, and indeed many of the shops were South African owned, and I could read accounts of the frantic search being undertaken in South Africa for me once I had failed to report to the police, and for the ensuing three days, and my wife’s ringing declarations that she knew nothing of my whereabouts. After three days I made it known that I was in Swaziland and the Johannesburg [press] and other papers reported that Brutus had turned up in Swaziland. The newspaper clips should be available from the Johannesburg Star and the Rand Daily Mail and other papers. I undertook to do some political work, clerical work, for the political party. I also began to gather addresses in Britain and America and elsewhere for the time when I would be out of the country and needing contacts elsewhere. I also, during this time, sent a cable to Tom Mboya in Nairobi, urging that the South Africans be admitted to the IOC meeting rather than that the meeting should be changed from Africa, because I believed we could score an important success if the African countries could all attend. One of the few people who seemed friendly was a former member of the South African parliament, a white trade unionist called Leo Lovell,9 who was then serving as a consultant to the Swaziland government, and he invited me to dinner at his place, and I went, I believe, on the Friday night before my departure from Swaziland. I had, in the meantime, met another African doctor who was to play an important part in my experience in Swaziland. His name was Dr. Msibi.10 He was friendly and helpful and ran me around occasionally, and we dined together one night at a restaurant in the hills where they served a marvelous shrimp piri piri, a Mozambique hot shrimp dish. He too was at dinner that night at Leo Lovell’s place, and he volunteered to drive me to Mozambique because he had many friends there. He had friends at the border and he had friends in the airline business and could arrange for a ticket for me from Ambrose Phesheya Zwane (1924-1998), founder and leader of the Ngwane National Liberatory Congress in Swaziland. 9 Leo Lovell (?-1976), South African lawyer, Member of Parliament, and trade unionist who opposed apartheid and later became Minister of Finance in Swaziland from 1967 to 1972. 10 Dr. George Msibi, medical doctor and prominent politician in Swaziland. 8

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Attempt to Escape Lourenço Marques, the capital [now Maputo], to wherever I wished to go, whether Nairobi or Dar es Salaam or anywhere else. During the period prior to my departure I had really become very comfortable in Swaziland and felt no great urgency to get out of the country, but there were several pressures on me. One was the fact that I was being refused a residence permit to stay, but more pressing was John Harris, who visited me a couple of times and wrote to me, and kept insisting that the time was running out for me to get out of Swaziland and get to the meeting in Nairobi. John was extremely helpful, and so was a very dear friend called Dr. Robin Farquharson. Robin really needs a section to himself. He was a brilliant man. As far as I can establish, he graduated with his first degree at the age of sixteen at Rhodes University, his M.A. at eighteen with a thesis on the obscure subject of psephology, or the science of voting. He was a whiz kid and was employed at Witwatersrand University in the computer section and doing things in economics, and indeed was assigned a major special project of studying the future of the South African economy when the gold mines were exhausted. He was working on a theme called “When the Mines Die.” Robin was friendly. He kept open house. His sex life was suspect, and it developed later that he was a homosexual. But he did me several good turns, and one of them was that when I was unable to work and earn a living, and indeed unable to be at Wits, he consented to employ me as a tea-boy, someone who made tea in the offices at Wits University. I was fired from this job when his chief in the department discovered that he employed me, and the reason given was that I was a security risk. There was dark talk of the possibility that I might poison their tea! Robin was forced to let me go. But he too came to see me, sometimes together with John Harris, sometimes with a delightful woman from Port Elizabeth, Elizabeth Pittman, who had known me and Ann there and was then based in Johannesburg. Between the three of them they contrived to arrange for my British passport. Once I had told them that I was born in Salisbury, Rhodesia, they began to investigate all the implications of this and the possibility of my obtaining a British passport. And after a great deal of hard work and sympathetic cooperation of someone in the British Consulate in Johannesburg, or Pretoria, they succeeded in getting me a passport. They did more than that because not only did they get me a visa from the Portuguese embassy, but they got someone to get my shots for me. I was given various injections in Swaziland, so that I had genuine vaccination papers, but they had someone pose as me somewhere in South Africa and get me the necessary health papers which I would need to travel. They also brought me the ticket for the flight, which as far as I remember was from Lourenço Marques to Nairobi. While they were working on this, I had gone ahead on my own and done two things: I had purchased my own ticket and had got my shots at the hospital in Mbabane. 58

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Attempt to Escape So I was all set to go to Mozambique. I had, of course, a visa issued in Pretoria permitting me to enter Mozambique for the purposes of going to the airport in Lourenço Marques and flying from there. But George Msibi, it turns out, was working for the South African secret police as an agent. He drove me to the border in a Volvo, accompanied by his girlfriend, whose name as far as I remember was Beatrice, and there I was arrested. Both of us were detained, but he was released. I was held, and three days later turned over to the South African secret police. And then reports appeared in the Golden City Post, which was the paper circulating among blacks in Johannesburg, that Msibi was an informer, that he worked for the South African secret police, and most damagingly, they produced a xerox of a bank deposit on his behalf made in a bank in Pretoria of a very substantial sum. The story can be tracked down in the Golden City Post of September 1963. What emerged from it all was that Msibi had turned me over to the police and been paid for it. I suppose the clinching evidence on this point is that my former professor of English at Fort Hare University, Donald Stuart,11 met me in Halifax, Canada some time ago at a literary conference and gave me an account of how he sat in a pub in Swaziland when George Msibi was sitting at an adjoining table, and he heard Msibi boast of how he had delivered me into the hands of the Portuguese secret police. Donald Stuart told me he regretted that he had not gone over to Msibi at that point and punched him, and that it would always be for him a matter of life-long regret. But there is no doubt that Msibi did deliver me into the hands of the police and was rewarded for it. By a curious twist, Msibi is now, as far as I can establish, a Minister in the Swaziland government. It would be interesting to see his reactions if I were to visit Swaziland some time, though admittedly that is a rather remote possibility. But perhaps as things change in Mozambique I would be able to enter Swaziland through Mozambique. Certainly Johannesburg is still out of the question. One thing that happened during my stay in Swaziland which caused some pain was the fact that I had news of my father’s death. I think it was May who sent me a telegram advising me of his death. I think there were some problems about funeral expenses and I would like to believe that I did something to contribute towards them. He died in the Cape – Worcester, I think – a lonely man, an old man who had lived a full life, much of it at the end very sad, and it filled me with great sadness, and just the knowledge that I would not be able to attend his funeral seemed to me to add a further dimension of sadness. I think it was my father’s death that turned me very strongly in a religious direction, at least somewhere around this point right up to the time I was in prison. I know it was a matter of regret for me that I was not able to attend his funeral. If I had reentered the country, I would simply have been arrested on sight. Donald Stuart, Chairman of the English Department at Fort Hare University and local Chairman of the Liberal Party. 11

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Attempt to Escape I wrote some verse during this time, but I suspect very little. I may have worked on a lyric which has since been printed in Thoughts Abroad and which I finally finished when back in prison in “The Fort” after I had been shot – the one that begins “When last I ranged and revelled all your length,” which in a sense is prophetic, as some of my others are, of my going to prison, although at that time I remember writing some rather cocky letters to people in South Africa about how Verwoerd12 would dearly love to get me – Verwoerd being the Prime Minister – and how he was not going to get me. Very shortly I was to discover how wrong I was. During this time I was also writing letters to the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain, asking for their assistance in getting out and for help when I arrived in Britain, and I regret to say that I received very little response.

Caught in Mozambique [In this tape Brutus describes leaving Swaziland and being arrested at the Mozambique border. Tape recorded on Saturday 14 September 1974.] Today is the exact anniversary of Saturday the 14th, 1963, the day I was arrested at the Mozambique border at the entry port of Mozambique, so I thought I would try to recall some of those events as exactly as I could, though with no great enthusiasm. During the week prior to my departure from Swaziland I had set in motion the arrangements for several things: my passport had been arranged for me, largely though the efforts of Dr. Robin Farquharson, who had then brought the passport to me in Swaziland, traveling from Johannesburg. Very shortly before my departure, Liz Pittman from Port Elizabeth, who was then living in Johannesburg, came to me in Mbabane to bring me the certification for my health certificate, though I had already had the necessary shots at Mbabane Hospital myself. I remember her driving over and seeing me in Mbabane, barefooted, casual, a delicate and lovely person. I remember her kissing me with a tenderness which seemed to imply both farewell and anxiety. Though I registered her emotions with some surprise – simply observed them – I had no sense of impending danger or risk at that point. I assumed that, my documents in order, not being a Portuguese subject, I should have no trouble in getting to the airport at Lourenço Marques and taking off from there. In the period before I left Swaziland on the 14th, I had had a telegram informing me of my father’s death. He died near Cape Town, a lonely man, for whom I had had a fair amount of affection but no real understanding, so 12

Hendrick French Verwoerd (1901-1966), Prime Minister of South Africa from 1958 to 1966.

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Attempt to Escape that there was always a kind of ambivalence about our relationship, and this I will talk about at some other time. But I had attempted, as an adult rather than as a boy, to get near him, to understand him better. I had dim perceptions of his intelligence and of his own record of service in the struggle against racism. I had made attempts to get some biographical information from him and on one occasion had flown from Johannesburg to the Cape because of news that he was dying. And we had had one of our few conversations on the basis of something near equality. The news of his death saddened me, and particularly the knowledge that I was on the run, a fugitive from the South African police, and would not be able to attend his funeral. His death was important because it turned me for some time to a much more religious attitude. This is important because it continued after I was captured by the Portuguese police, returned to South Africa, and followed me into Robben Island with certain quite important effects, which again, I will deal with later. Also, during the week prior to my departure I had had dinner with Leo Lovell, become friendly with Dr. George Msibi, and had arranged at his suggestion that we dine at an expensive restaurant in the hills outside Mbabane, where they serve the best piri piri, a Portuguese hot shrimp dish, and where, for a change, one would be able to dine in comfort in a good restaurant without the legal barriers of apartheid which existed in South Africa. This is one of the things I relished about Swaziland, the comparative absence of apartheid limitations. In fact, as in America, the economic restraints were as real as the legal ones, so that very few blacks were in fact able to dine at a good restaurant in Swaziland, and this gave me, I suppose, further satisfaction in being able to eat in a good place. On the Saturday, I remember having gathered my things into a blue suitcase which was to follow me all the way back to South Africa, and [saying] farewell to my host with whom I had stayed, Dr. Allen Nxumalo and his wife Maude.... And so, down, as far as I remember, to Manzini, which had at one time been called Bremersdorp and had been the capital of Swaziland. We had previously traveled there to see people in the airline, or what he said were airline officials, and friends of his. They may well have been connected with the secret police, linked with Portugal and South Africa, and no doubt the British secret police as well. All this is speculation, but in hindsight, much of what we did and he did seems to me suspicious. We were accompanied by a nurse, Beatrice, who apparently was his current girlfriend, and we had beer and sandwiches and drove off merrily, cheerfully. I was, I think, in good spirits, and particularly after his assurances of his contacts and the absence of problems, I had no anxiety. [We traveled] all day, leaving at about midday and reaching the border at sunset. I suppose it’s evidence of my disorientation generally towards points of the compass that I noticed with some concern that the sun was setting in the direction opposite 61

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Attempt to Escape to the one I had assumed it would set in. It was a beautiful evening. We drove through the wooded countryside, and then over the hills on a good road, all round us the entire horizon encircling us, suffused in purples, soft pinks, a kind of mixture of colors as one might see in a seashell, opalescent or iridescent. Then into the hills, and a gap through them took us down to the Swaziland outpost, with a high fence, and a few yards beyond that a second fence, where the Portuguese Mozambique border began. I want to digress for a moment just to fill in a rather curious area of my experience in Swaziland which I might forget to mention. After I was in Swaziland I received letters from the officials of the various sports bodies, urging me to get out of the country, to fly out, and feeling that it was a matter of great urgency that I ought to attend the Olympic meeting, and very generously offering to provide support for my wife and my family during my absence, and even more importantly, undertaking to pay the expenses for a chartered flight out of Swaziland to a place of safety. There was a small private airline which had flown people, particularly farmers, from Swaziland to Botswana, and had, more significantly, enabled people to escape who were on the run from South Africa. And after I had investigated this and found out what it would cost – something in the region of $250, I guess – the check was duly sent to me. There was a curious development here. After I had seen the owner of the small plane, which seated four, including himself, and had given him his check, he was involved in flying out of the country two white South Africans who had made a daring escape from Johannesburg Central Prison, Arthur Goldreich13 and Harold Wolpe,14 who arrived in Botswana, or Bechuanaland as it was then, dressed in the cassocks of priests. Then a second flight was to be undertaken, and it was at this time that I met I. B. Tabata,15 Jane Gool,16 whom I have since met this

13 Arthur Goldreich (1929-), South African artist and member of the South African Communist Party (SACP). 14 Harold Wolpe (1926-1996), South African political economist (Goldreich and Wolpe had used SACP funds to buy the farm near Rivonia. The nineteen ANC leaders who were arrested there included Mandela, Sisulu and Mbeki. Goldreich and Wolpe escaped from their ‘white’ jail and drove to Swaziland in the bright red car mentioned later by Dennis Brutus.) 15 Isaac Bangani Tabata (1909-1990), South African founder and leading theoretician of the Non-European Unity Movement who in 1961 established and became president of the African People’s Democratic Union of Southern Africa. With his wife Jane Gool he left South Africa in 1963 and lived in Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. 16 Janub “Jane” Gool, South African political activist who joined several anti-apartheid orgnizations and helped to found the African People’s Democratic Union of Southern Africa. Banned in 1961, she left South Africa in 1963 with her husband I.B. Tabata.

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Attempt to Escape year again in Dar es Salaam, and also “Chucha” Honono.17 These were old colleagues and friends of mine, sometimes adversaries. They were members of CATA, the Cape African Teachers Association, and also the AAC, AllAfrican Convention, to which I had been affiliated through the TLSA, Teachers League of South Africa, of which I had been an official in the Port Elizabeth branch. But our branch, and including people like myself, was notoriously critical of the policy as devised at the headquarters in Cape Town, so that our relationships were warm, but often tinged with mistrust and suspicion. It was agreed that I would fly out with them on the same charter flight, if it were possible. There was some doubt about this, because the plane would only accommodate four, including the pilot, and they were three. And indeed, eventually after they had escaped safely from the country, the pilot of the plane returned my check to me, and informed me that having undertaken these two successful escapes, he had been informed by the South African police that if he attempted to fly me out of the country, the plane would be shot down by the South African air force, and that he was not willing to risk his plane or his life on my behalf. There’s just one other amusing complication. There was a priest in Swaziland at the time who had been helpful – Father Hooper, an Episcopalian (or Anglican) – who had been helpful in assisting refugees and who had been outspoken in his criticism of the South African policies while in South Africa. He was a man I needed to see in making my contacts with the pilot of the plane. On the occasion I went to his place at night, I found all the windows shuttered, the doors locked, the lights inside blazing, and a large, bright red, brand-new car parked outside. I tried several doors, knocked on them, tapped on windows, but no response anywhere. And eventually I left, disappointed and dismayed at what seemed to me sheer inhospitality, because I was reasonably certain that there were people in the house. I discovered in London much later that in the house at that time were Harold Wolpe and Arthur Goldreich, who had just escaped from the South African prison and were being hunted by the police, and that they had cowered in the house, believing that I was in fact the police outside, and they had crouched in there, scarcely daring to breathe. I turned, then, to the flight from Lourenço Marques only after I had already failed to get out by charter, and that is simply for the record. Driving down the hills to the border, Msibi and Beatrice had clowned along, we had stopped to have beers, and we seemed to be almost deliberately dawdling, so that we only hit the border a little before five, when the border post closed. This may not have been accidental. On arrival at the British post on the Swaziland Nathaniel Impey “Chucha” Honono, South African school principal and leader of CATA and AAC who had been dismissed from teaching, imprisoned, and put under house arrest in the Transkei. He fled South Africa via Swaziland in 1963 and now lives in Tanzania. 17

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Attempt to Escape border, Msibi preceded me into the post, and greeted cheerfully by name an official there whose name was pronounced with perhaps exaggerated clarity and volume. Mr. Pennyquick, he was called, and that too may have been a code signal. My passport was endorsed for leaving Swaziland. I was looked up and down with some attentiveness. There was some fussing and whispered consultation which went on for some time, and I could not understand the delay. Eventually we left, entering the Volvo and driving through the gates and the fence which marked the Swaziland border. No sooner had we crossed the border out of Swaziland and into no man’s land, than the gates were closed on the Swaziland side. The post was closing up for the night and I was in no man’s land. This may have been planned, but it did not cause me any particular suspicion, though I did note with alarm that there was no way back. Then we drove the few yards which took us to the Portuguese fence and through the gate into Mozambique territory. Immediately on arrival and stopping at the little wooden post there, with rough and ready offices, than the car was surrounded by black soldiers, with automatic rifles, who surrounded the car and stood with their guns at the ready. I was surprised. I didn’t see that the Portuguese needed this, but I thought that this must be the manner of a country which had considerable internal disorder, and perhaps the Portuguese were excessively suspicious and nervous in these matters. We were ordered out of the car, and hauled up somewhat roughly, all three of us, into the offices. There was no electricity. A pair of hurricane lamps, with kerosene burning, one in the roof and one at the desk, where a senior officer presumably of the immigration department, was sitting. He turned out, however, to be perhaps a senior official of the PIDE, Portuguese Internal Defense of the State organization, the notorious secret police, subsequently referred to as the DGS. My passport was examined in a very curious way. He used a transparent plastic ruler, placing it on the passport, and on the ruler itself were inscribed a set of letters which were apparently there in order to enable him to decode a set of letters entered in my passport, where the visa had been stamped. He looked at me with suspicion. In the meantime the car was being searched, not only the trunk and the glove box, but the seats were being pulled out, the hubcaps were being removed, under the guns of some of the police. And then I was asked to produce everything in my possession, and I remember especially the great care and suspicion with which my fountain pen had its cap unscrewed and shaken out. And everything else I had on me was examined. By this time I began to think that these precautions were excessive, and I protested and demanded to know what the delay was, since I was simply in transit to Lourenço Marques airport, I had a valid visa, and all I wished to do was to board a plane and get out of Mozambique. The fact that I indicated that my destination might be either Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, or Nairobi in Kenya, was probably extremely foolish, because Dar es Salaam and Tanzania was already seen as the base from which guerrillas were operating the 64

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Attempt to Escape resistance movement for Mozambique. At any rate, after my protests, I was told that I would have to wait, and they would have to telephone police headquarters in Lourenço Marques. I was impatient but in fairly good humor. I was not yet alarmed. Indeed, I spent the time under the rather weak light of the hurricane lamp doing the crossword in that day’s morning paper from Johannesburg and discussing it with Msibi, who told me he had no idea how crosswords worked, so that I could explain to him the logic on which anagrams, for instance, were made. Then the chief, or what was the chief on this particular issue, arrived by car, or rather, I think, a Toyota jeep, from Lourenço Marques. The search began again. I was handled now with considerably less politeness. Msibi and Beatrice were protesting and were taken off to another room, so that I saw very little of them thereafter. Finally, I was taken out to the jeep, and handcuffed to the floor of the jeep, in the back, where there was a metal ring set in the floor, and taken on a bumpy ride, over a very bad road in most part, to Lourenço Marques. The fact that I did not speak Portuguese and they claimed not to speak any English certainly didn’t help. I was being bundled off pretty helplessly, but still not with the greatest degree of alarm, because I was satisfied, or reasonably satisfied, that I would be released after my papers had been examined, and I would be able to leave. I was interrogated for some hours that night, at a place I learned was called the Villa Algarve, headquarters of the Portuguese secret police in Mozambique. An attractive building, I remember. I was to see it a couple of times thereafter, being taken in and out for interrogations, and also before I was finally taken back to the border, when I was taken for photographing by Interpol. The night was unsatisfactory. I expostulated and complained to no avail, and as far as I remember, ended up by asking for a lawyer, or to see the British consul, since I was traveling on a British passport, issued by the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. This was refused, and I was told bluntly by someone who did speak some English, that the secret police was above all these. The blunt reply I got was “We are the courts, we make all the decisions. There is no need for you to go to court.” Then I was locked up for the night in a cell which was comparatively comfortable and civilized, particularly by South African standards. In Johannesburg while being held before release on bail, I had slept on a dirty mat of some composite material, part felt, part rubber, stained with semen, crawling with bugs, and a couple of extremely musty gray blankets, prisonregulation, dirty and smelly, and I stretched them out on a cement floor and slept on them in a cell in Johannesburg [with] no mattress. In Lourenço Marques I had a bed with sheets, blankets and a straw pillow, and I had a washbasin and a jug of water. That evening I was brought some food which turned out to be not inedible. It was cooked, and as far as I remember, there was also some fruit with it, a pear and a banana. And so to bed, fuming and impatient. They had kept my suitcase. 65

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Attempt to Escape Two things about my period in Swaziland ought to be interpolated, should have been mentioned earlier. After my father’s death, I went down on a Sunday morning to attend Mass, at the cathedral in Manzini. It was partly because of the shock of the news of his death, concern for his soul within the wholly conventional Catholic notion of the holy souls and purgatory, and a kind of spiritual shock in myself at the same time, and an awareness of his presence after death. And leaving the church I had set out on a bright Sunday morning to undertake the long walk from Manzini back to the farm Blue Haze where I stayed. It was on a plain. I was offered a lift by a car. I got in. There was a lone man in it, and we chatted in friendly fashion. I’m not sure if I told him I was going to Lourenço Marques sometime the next week. I probably did not. But we did talk about Mozambique, which was quite close by, and I think he may have said he worked there. He said something to me, though, when we compared Swaziland, South Africa, and Mozambique, which at the time I paid no attention to, but which came back to me with extreme vividness, once I was in a cell in the Villa Algarve. He said in South Africa prisoners might be sentenced to long periods in prison, and might be sentenced to life imprisonment, but in Mozambique they would simply vanish, that there were men who had disappeared. It was suspected that they were in prison, but that there was no way of knowing, or ever knowing, what had happened to them. This hit me with considerable force when I was in Lourenço Marques, because I realized that there was something special about my predicament. If I was not to get out, I might well simply disappear in the dungeons of some Portuguese prison. He also talked of the tortures which the Portuguese inflicted, and particularly of one I had heard of some years before, talking to my very good friend, Alfred Hutchinson,18 before his escape to Ghana. He had talked about the bastinado, [a] Portuguese punishment inflicted on recalcitrant blacks, in which the prisoner was hung up in such a way that the soles of his feet were exposed, and these would be unmercifully beaten to a pulp until all the bones in his feet were broken, and if he ever walked again, he walked with what were clubbed feet, the mangled bones growing together, tightly bunched, almost into a ball, so the people were crippled for life. It was not the bastinado that troubled me in the Villa Algarve, but much more so the prospect of simply disappearing and never being heard of again. And so on the Sunday morning when the warders appeared, I made two demands. One was that I should be allowed to go to Mass, it being a Sunday and they being a Catholic country and I being a good Catholic. I insisted on my right to go to Mass since I was only being detained, I was not imprisoned, and I had not been sentenced. The second [demand] I made was to see the Alfred Hutchinson (1924-1972), South African writer and teacher who was imprisoned in 1952 and charged with high treason in 1956 for opposing apartheid. He described his escape from South Africa in his autobiography Road to Ghana (1960).

18

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Attempt to Escape British consul. And I added that I would go on a hunger strike until I saw the British consul. And indeed I left my breakfast, whatever it was, untouched, and I ate nothing at lunch, and when they came to collect the morning food and bring in the midday meal, they saw the breakfast food untouched. I said I would literally fast to death, but I was not prepared to eat until I had seen the British consul. When they came in the evening and I was escorted out for a rather pleasant shower, then brought back again, escorted by a black porter, I told him, too, that I would eat nothing until I saw the consul. This food thing is amusing, because in fact food does not mean much to me; I can go for stretches without it, or used to, until my stomach was injured. And the notion of starving to death just seemed something rather remote and melodramatic. I was to use it also in hospital in Johannesburg when I was shot, and in both cases it seems to have been effective. In the evening I had nothing to eat at all, and again I explained that I would not eat until I saw the British consul or a lawyer. And I was told as I had been told before, that the secret police were above the courts, that there was nothing I could do. On the Monday morning, however, having seen that I had not eaten all day the previous day, they seemed to take it seriously. I seemed to have galvanized them into some kind of action. I was taken out, somewhat manhandled again, in a police truck, and taken to what was clearly the secret headquarters for interrogation. I may go back just to my state of mind on that Sunday, and [to] the religious element which had entered into my life very strongly at this time after my father’s death, and then going to Mass on the previous Sunday, and being denied Mass on this Sunday, and the whole notion of Portugal as a Catholic country, a devout country. I should trace some of the origins of these notions at some other time. All of this combined in a kind of religious intensity of prayer, in which I made a very curious kind of prayer, in the sense that what I was asking for was simply that if there was a God, He had to get me out, and that I had no objection to whatever price I would have to pay for getting out, but what I wanted – and nothing else would satisfy me – was the simple demand that I should get out of this predicament. Indeed, I did [get out] and the circumstances are so dramatic and so curious that it is hard not to think that there was a providential element in it all. But that must be reserved for a discussion of the religious interior elements in my life. On the Monday, then, I was met by the man who clearly headed the whole secret police operation, and they told me [he] had been brought from Pretoria. He met me, and gave me a curious handshake – some kind of signal with his fingers – watching me intently, and presumably this was to establish whether I was not some kind of a double agent. They then sat me down and he offered – well, he thrust – a cigarette into my mouth, and he struck a match, and as he did so, shielding his hands, again he gave me some kind of a signal with his fingers, and presumably, if I had known the right response, I would have established that I was a spy, and [been] entitled to some kind of immunity. 67

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Attempt to Escape What I did was to produce a rosary I was carrying, as evidence of my Catholicism, and on the whole it was an attempt to unbug them, perhaps to get rid of the notion that I was a dangerous Communist spy, because this came up almost immediately. I protested and said that all I wanted to do was get out of South Africa, that I was in flight from that country, that I had opposed racism, which the Portuguese officially also were opposed to, and that I was a Catholic and not a Communist, and [I] insisted on being allowed to leave. The reply at that stage was that they had information that I was a dangerous spy – a member of the underground in South Africa and a saboteur. And that’s where we were at. This went on all day, with periodic interrogations, [and] my frequent insistence that I see a lawyer or the British consul, all of which was refused. And then they seemed to have made some kind of decision. I was taken off to another police headquarters, fingerprinted on all ten fingers, both in groups and singly, submitted to a whole series of photographs, both front face and in profile. In passing, on one of the walls I saw a plaque indicating that this was a part of Interpol, the world international political organization which deals with dangerous fugitives, and on whose files I presumably am. This period in which I protested frequently and volubly and indeed thought of escape, and looked around periodically to see if there was a way of getting away, and particularly being handled by black armed police or military, was perhaps the most bruising time. I came in for a severe manhandling. And yet one would not describe it as torture. Then I was returned to the Villa Algarve, placed in a police truck – the rear end opened at this stage, as far as I remember, a kind of jeep, threequarter tonner, perhaps – with my case, and handcuffed again, with two black military guards seated with me inside the truck, as well as the two up front, who were white, as far as I remember. And then we drove off, and I said, “Where are you taking me?” and they said, “Back to the border.” Well, this seemed to me a pleasant kind of outcome: if I was to return to Swaziland, I would simply arrange for some other way of getting out and would certainly not try the Mozambique route again. But something troubled me; bad as my sense of orientation was, something troubled me about the direction we were taking. It seemed to me not the same, certainly, as the one we had taken in the dark that night from the border. And so I checked with the black guards who were sitting with me in the back. They refused to communicate. They claimed not to be able to speak English. But we stopped at some post. I suspect now it was a communication link with the border and the South African police. For a while I was left with the black guards, and the whites up front were not present. And I said to them, “Swaziland?” And they shook their heads dumbly, and perhaps even pityingly. And I said, “But they said I’m going to Swaziland.” And they said, “Swaziland, no.” That was, perhaps, the worst moment of the journey. I realized that the prospects of being taken somewhere else – perhaps to Lisbon, perhaps to another prison, anywhere – 68

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Attempt to Escape were likely, but that I was not, as far as I could make out, being taken to Swaziland. At this stage I began to demand that I should be taken to Swaziland, but it was to no avail. So we drove down, in the gathering dusk. It was past five, and the sun going down. We drove down to Komatipoort, though I didn’t know it at the time. (Komatipoort is the border post on the main road, the arterial highway which runs from South Africa to Lourenço Marques.) I was handcuffed and cramped in the back of the army or police truck, pretty much in a crouch, being juggled up and down on a hot bench. So when we finally stopped and the rear end of the truck was opened, and I was required to get out, I was stiff and cramped and my joints moved badly. And so I crawled with some efforts, stiffly, still handicapped, out of the truck, and saw the guards, two of them facing me as I got off, with their rifles at the ready, and staggered in a sense, away from the truck, looked around, and saw the bright lights of a border post, barbed wire, and some uniformed officials in their smart white short pants, white stockings and white shoes, white short-sleeved shirts with tabs on their shoulders, uniform, peaked caps. It was all very colonial – it might have been British. But it was, and I knew it was, South African instead. And those big signs, which said Komatipoort. And besides the uniformed immigration officials, customs officials, two men in plain clothes: one of them burly, gray-haired, vaguely familiar, and when he said to me, “Ja, Brutus,” I knew it was Helberg of the secret police, the man who had been assigned to guard me, and I knew I was back in the arms of the South African secret police. I think that was the moment of sick panic, or a kind of nausea and numbness and a sense of betrayal by the Portuguese, and then gradually a kind of awareness of the kinds of danger that now awaited me. And yet there was something oddly familiar about the South African police scene which I thought I could cope with. It was only later on when I realized that I was being returned to South Africa without anyone’s knowledge, and that my presence would be kept secret, that I realized how serious my predicament was. There was one other complication arising from Swaziland. Before I had left there, I had been in touch with refugees of the African National Congress who had escaped to Swaziland and had been given refuge there on the understanding that they would not engage in any political activities. Some of these men had given me letters to be delivered to the ANC headquarters in London and Dar es Salaam. I had these letters in my case, and while I had assumed that the Portuguese would have no particular interest in the South African underground, certainly the South African police would, and the ANC was a banned organization. I ought to insert something which I curiously omitted, which is pivotal to my experience in Lourenço Marques. When I was told I was regarded as a dangerous saboteur, I pointed out that I was not, but in addition that I saw no reason why Portuguese should be interested in South African resistance. 69

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Attempt to Escape It was at that point that I was told by the man who came from Pretoria and who spoke excellent English, that the Portuguese secret police have a “friendly arrangement” with the South African secret police to capture each other’s fugitives. And so I was in the hands of the South African secret police. Both Helberg and his companion, whose name, I think, was Kleingeld, had guns in armpit holsters, as I discovered the following day, but there were also uniformed police. I protested, needless to say, with a kind of melodrama, in the hope that I would attract someone’s attention at the border post, but there were only officials there, South African officials, Portuguese officials. There was no point in my protest. Still it had to be made. One owes these things to one’s self. I was then placed, as far as I remember, in a private car – or at least it was not identified as a police car – and taken to the jail in Komatipoort: first to the police station, where particulars were taken, passports were taken, but my case was left with me; and then I was taken to the jail itself, which, like all South African jails, had a black section and a white section, but a black section of such desperate filth and squalor that they felt they could not put me in it. And so for the first and last time in South Africa, I was put in a white section of the prison. There were, in fact, no South African whites in it. Instead there were perhaps fifteen or twenty Portuguese, coming from places like Réunion and elsewhere, who sought to get into South Africa illegally – pretty much as Mexicans may get into the United States illegally – who were captured and served a short prison sentence, and then were often allowed to stay thereafter, or the police showed no further interest in them. But of course this kind of illegal labor was extremely amenable to service on the farms. It was one way farmers would get cheap labor. These were retarded, backward, underprivileged Portuguese, for whom South Africa is a country of gold and the land of opportunity, and who would no doubt submit to exploitation. They spoke little English, but there were one or two of them who seemed not only to have a smattering or two of English, but to have some very clear political notions about the oppressive nature of the political system of Portugal, and they desired to escape from it. Of course, I responded by describing the political nature of South Africa, the country into which they were coming. I went further and told them of my own – at this stage, quite desperate – predicament. I was served what white prisoners (but not black prisoners) are served in South Africa at suppertime, a mug of tea and a couple of slices of bread, covered with what we would call jam and Americans jelly. After we had eaten and I had told them of my predicament, I knelt down, recited some prayers, both because I needed them at that time, but also because it convinced them I was not a Communist, which is still one of the [scariest] things one can be in South Africa. I persuaded them to keep guard at the single spy hole in the metal door of the cell, while I set about destroying the letters I was carrying to the leaders of the resistance movement. This I did by using matches, lighting and burning the 70

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Attempt to Escape letters and then destroying even the cinders, crushing them into the lavatory pail which stood in the corner. Looking back now I realize that that was futile, because they were almost certainly xeroxed by the Portuguese police before they were returned to me, and indeed, to some extent, it was evidence of an admission of guilt, and I have no doubt that there were other spy holes in the cell of which we were not aware. In the morning we were brought out and given tea and bread and jam again, this time outside in the cold yard in the cold dawn at about 5:30 or 6. The courtyard of the prison block was covered entirely – the whole area of it – by a strong barbed-wire fence, which criss-crossed the whole area, sealing you off almost as if in a chicken coop. But, I had spent part of the night deciding to escape, and so I now began to look around for means of escape. My reasoning was simply that it would be better to be caught in the farmhouse or shot down in the street, because one would achieve some publicity in that fashion; but simply to be taken from one prison to another without anyone’s knowledge of my being in the country, would be by far the worse predicament. I suppose in this reasoning was the germ of my action later that day in Johannesburg. So I spoke to the Portuguese prisoners and asked them to help me escape, and they agreed. All they had to do was to heave me up through an aperture in the barbed wire on their shoulders, and I would force my way through a gap in the barbed wire, using things like a shirt, a towel, whatever, on the barbed wire, in an effort to get my hands less lacerated than they would [get] otherwise. So they consented, and I was heaved up. No doubt we were observed, but I was desperate, and they were willing. And I was forced halfway through the fence. The difficulty was that if I got through the aperture, I would still have to travel the entire extent of the barbed wire to get to the end and then to make a run for it, probably with no success. This may have influenced me to abandon the effort. It may also be that I realized that an escape in that area, a lonely outpost with farms miles away and really no housing or people living in the area, the chances of my being brought down were very high, but my chances of it being observed and publicized were very low, and this may have partly persuaded me to abandon the attempt. It may be, too, that the kind of direct physical courage needed to rip yourself through barbed wire and get away in that fashion, I may have lacked. That is quite possible. After some hours I was taken out and taken to a small courtroom, and it was conspicuously deserted, which was as if they sought to limit the number of people who could appear or would be aware of my presence. I was brought before a magistrate, a prosecutor and a guard. The prosecutor announced my name, the magistrate asked me if that was my name, and remanded the case to Johannesburg, [to] continue it. At that point, I made a protest arguing that I had been brought back illegally to South Africa, that I was carrying a British passport, and that I demanded to see a British consul. That’s as far as I got 71

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Attempt to Escape before I was hustled out of court. Indeed, as far as I remember, it was Helberg, my old familiar, who identified me to the court. Outside was a car, a Studebaker Lark, with Helberg and Kleingeld and myself, and my case in the boot of the car, and we were off, with no explanation, but probably to Johannesburg. In fact, the route was to take us through Middelburg, Pretoria, and then to Johannesburg. Helberg, in getting into the car, said to me grimly, but with a kind of conversational tone (speaking Afrikaans), “I’m not going to handcuff you, but if you make a single wrong move, I’ll kill you instantly. So you know where you are.” We drove along. There was a brief moment when I lodged my protest with them, and then we settled, I suppose, to a more conversational frame, and they talked about my folly in getting involved in opposition to the system, when it was clearly obvious that I could not win, that I had very few allies, that my allies were likely to betray me. They played on the hostility or antagonism between Coloureds and Africans and argued… [The tape ends abruptly here but is continued in the next tape which describes what happened upon arrival in Johannesburg.]

Shot down in Johannesburg [This tape continues where the second tape left off, suggesting it may also have been recorded on 14 September 1974.] …that after the Africans had dealt with the whites, they would deal with the Coloureds and cut their throats, and therefore it was folly to attempt to work with them in changing the country. We discussed, of course, the whole system of injustice, its discrimination against blacks, non-whites, and all this, I think, I couched in extremely reasonable terms. This is because my approach is simply normally a polite and courteous one, but also I was in the situation where it was hardly appropriate for me to take the offensive. We talked. Then we stopped at Middelburg and they put me in a prison there for a while, and took my money and bought me some milk and some fruit, and after a while we resumed our journey. I suspect at that stage that they were phoning ahead to Pretoria, which turned out to be our next stop, the Waghuis, the headquarters of the secret police for the entire country. As we left the little shop where I was permitted to buy my own milk and fruit, I dropped a cigarette package with a message scribbled on it which I had done surreptitiously in the back seat of the Lark, indicating that Brutus was held by the secret police, but I have no doubt that that did not reach anybody. 72

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Attempt to Escape On to Pretoria, where again I was briefly kept in a cell, and then taken to the headquarters on the top floor to meet probably the top man of the South African secret police. I suspect he was Colonel Sampie van den Bergh,19 who looked me up and down cursorily, while I again protested my routine formula, unavailingly, that I had been brought illegally back into the country. And so, on to Johannesburg. I imagine the business of reporting to Pretoria was partially routine, to establish that I was back in the country, that senior officials should be aware of my return, because it certainly was going to involve considerable diplomatic complications; but perhaps also to pat on the head the members of the secret police who had dutifully and safely returned me to South Africa. I think I was looking pretty distraught by this time, and van den Bergh had nothing to say to me. On the way back to Johannesburg we drove along the very good highway which links the two major cities, and we talked, but probably less than before. By now, our relationship was established, and I was the reasonable and polite but unyielding opponent of the system, pointing out its many simple practical injustices for non-whites. They were, of course, manfully defending the system, particularly arguing my folly in allying myself with the Africans (or the Bantu, as they would call them), who would, after they had killed off the whites, slit the throats of the Coloureds, and therefore it was stupid of me to ally myself with their cause. Of course, my mind worked busily even while I talked, examining the implications of my predicament – its implications for the people who had assisted in getting me out of the country, particularly John Harris, Liz Pittman and others, and the implications for the people of the resistance movement, ANC, with whom I was associated, and about whom I could say things, if under torture, which could be damaging. Months ago in a discussion with Raymond Eisenstein,20 who was a member of another resistance group, the ARM [African Resistance Movement], I had discussed the whole business of torture and interrogation and of people breaking under torture, and we had agreed on the conventional limit of twelve hours for any person to resist torture; that that was the maximum period that one could be expected to hold out, in order to allow others twelve hours in which to make their own escape. After that, one must assume that the person being interrogated would crack. I was very conscious of the fate of a friend of mine, Babla Saloojee,21 a 19

Hendrik Johan van den Bergh (1914-1997), Afrikaner nationalist who in 1963 founded South Africa’s first secret intelligence-gathering operation, the precursor to the Bureau of State Security (BOSS) which he started in 1969 and which was responsible for the worst excesses of the apartheid regime. 20 Raymond Eisenstein (1936-), Warsaw-born South African who was tried for sabotage and sentenced to seven years in prison. 21 Babla Saloojee (?-1964), anti-apartheid activist who used to drive escapees to Botswana.

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Attempt to Escape young man of the Indian Congress whose body had been found at the headquarters of the secret police, a building called the Greys. The police claimed that he had jumped to his death and had committed suicide. But an autopsy and medical report revealed that his injuries, particularly his internal injuries, were much more likely the result of torture than of a jump from a high building. There had been others who had disappeared mysteriously, so that this was certainly something that I was aware of. As we entered the outskirts of the city, we drove through a suburb called Waverley. I remembered a fellow student at the University, a young girl who was very close to me and who lived in the area. So it occurred to me that I might escape from the car at a stoplight in this portion of the city, and if I could find her place, I would be sure or reasonably certain of a hiding place. So it was a matter of timing. I had the problem that on the back seat where I was sitting, both rear doors had the locks firmly depressed, so my job would be to simultaneously lift the lock and turn the handle, and this is what I prepared myself for while talking fairly animatedly to Kleingeld, who was driving, and Helberg, who was sitting in the front seat beside the driver, but half-turned so that he could keep an eye on me all the time. We reached a stoplight in Waverley, and I surreptitiously put my left hand on the door handle, ready to depress it. But Helberg reached over from the front seat and put his hand on my right wrist and held it firmly. And the light changed and we drove on. He looked at me without a word, but let me know that he was aware of what I had planned to do. And I looked at him wordlessly, but acknowledged that my attempt had failed. This was unfortunate for them, because it persuaded Helberg that I had abandoned the idea or thought of escape, and so he was more relaxed thereafter. We drove not to the headquarters of the secret police, the Greys, but to McLean Street, where the principal police station for Johannesburg is situated, or was. I had already decided that I would make my bid to escape as we left the car to go into the building. It may well have been Marshall Square; I shall have to check that. When we alighted from the car, both Helberg and Kleingeld in their shirtsleeves, with their armpit holsters showing, instructed me to go to the back of the Lark. They stood over me while I opened the trunk of the car and removed my blue suitcase. My plan was to carry the suitcase from the street the few yards to the sidewalk and to deposit it there, bending over it as if I found it very heavy, and then from that crouching position to take off. And that is what I did. When I glanced at them as I moved off, I saw that they were both agape. And in a courtroom [later] a magistrate inquired irritably why they had allowed me to escape. They explained that I had moved as quick as lightning. I was blitz running. I moved off then, dodging through the crowds, and was able to cover a considerable distance. It was five o’clock, the streets of Johannesburg extremely crowded with people knocking off from work, and nearby was West End Station, where many of the Africans who worked in the city 74

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Attempt to Escape would board a train to return to their location or ghetto. There were literally hundreds in the streets, and I dodged and weaved through them, with speed and agility, the sort of thing I had done at school when I was carrying bundles of pressed laundered linen, and traveling some distance at some speed. When my mother resumed teaching in order to support us, our linen was given to someone else, a friend, to do each week, and it was my job to take it there and bring it back, and I delighted in the test of skill involved in running through a crowd, weaving in this way. I heard Helberg and Kleingeld, who was smaller and more agile, the younger of the two, shouting behind me to stop. I weaved through the crowd, and there were people who attempted to stop me and assist the police, thinking I was a thief or a pickpocket. I darted down the street and turned right in what I think was Bezuidenhout Street, until it intersected with Main Street, then crossed over rapidly, dodging through the crowd and traffic, traveling down Main Street in the direction of the Magistrates Court. At the Magistrates Court on the corner of Main Street I turned sharply left, going up what I think was Ferreira Street, and continuing to the end of the block where I think it rejoined Marshall Street, and ran towards the police station. There was a bus approaching me, an African bus, heavily loaded with people on the steps, returning home from work to the ghetto, and already overcrowded. But as it approached me I boarded it, scrambling up the steps and forcing my way through the people who were on it, in an effort to shake off Kleingeld. Unfortunately, the bus was traveling in his direction, and so it approached him after I had boarded it, and he in turn attempted to board it. Standing on the top of the steps I put my foot on his chest and thrust him away from the bus, and he fell into the roadway in a heap. But by this time the bus conductor had got at me and was objecting to my boarding an overloaded bus, and promptly heaved me out of the bus as well, so that I fell against a parked car, injuring my knee, and then got up and scrambled off, heading again towards the police station. (I may have got the second scar on my body from this fall against a parked car.) Kleingeld, who was shaken by his fall, got up painfully and followed me. I reached the intersection at Bezuidenhout Street again, and turned right – unwisely, I think, but intending partly to double on my tracks and head for Commissioner Street where I had some good friends (they’re now in London) who, I believe, would have given me shelter if I could get to the little restaurant on Commissioner Street. But going down Ferreira Street where it intersected with Main Street, I passed Helberg, who had come along, puffing and blowing, and who shouted to me to stop, and who stretched out a hand to stop me. I swerved by him, and as I passed him I heard a loud sound and felt a dull thump as if someone had punched me in the back. I kept running, crossing over Main Street, and then, looking down, saw that the front of my shirt was covered with a large stain, and I realized I had been shot – at that time, I think, I thought in the chest. 75

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Attempt to Escape [Unfortunately, the next page of the typescript is missing and the tape is lost, but the narrative continues on the following page.] I learned from a letter in the press [afterwards] that it was from [the] AngloAmerican [building] that someone looking down from an office and seeing me there, phoned for an ambulance. They had seen or heard a shot and saw a man bleeding on the pavement, [the] sidewalk, and called for an ambulance – unfortunately not the right kind. In South Africa, one needs to specify what kind of ambulance is required. The ambulance came, the men in their long white coats got out and brought out their stretcher from the back of the ambulance, and came over and looked at me, and then put their stretcher back in the ambulance and got into it and drove off. I was alarmed by this. There was a nightmarish quality about it, and I asked the Special Branch what had happened, or why the men were leaving. And Helberg, gray-haired and in his fatherly manner, said to me, “But Brutus, you know that these men would lose their jobs if they took you in their ambulance. That is an ambulance for whites only, and you will have to wait for a non-white ambulance.” So I waited perhaps another half-hour, forty-five minutes. It was a long time, and I remember with some amusement Helberg, squatting next to me and saying, “Anyway, I hope you survive,” and I replied, with some humor, I think, “Well, I hope so, too.” And waiting for the ambulance, I took out my handkerchief and tried to plug the bullet wound which was somewhere in my chest, at the bottom of the thorax, in an effort to staunch the blood. As time went on I discovered to my dismay that I was in fact lying in a pool of blood which was steadily forming under the small of my back, and I think that it was only at this point that I began to realize that I did have two bullet wounds, but without realizing that the bullet had gone clear through me. There is one other baffling thing which I discovered later in hospital: that there was, in fact, a third wound in my body, lower down, in my stomach, which I have not been able to explain, but which bled a good deal – I still have the scar – and which did not come from a bullet, apparently, but [it] did give me the impression that I had had two bullet shots. And if the bullet had emerged from the second hole, my own guess is that it would indeed have been fatal, not that the first one wasn’t dangerously close to fatal as well. Eventually the ambulance came, [the] Coloured ambulance, [and] took me to a Coloured hospital [in a] Coloured location or housing area called Coronationville, where I was wheeled out of the ambulance and into an elevator and taken to the top floor, the operating room. By now my clothes were soaked with blood, and so they were simply cut off me with the scissors, and I was shaved and prepared for the operation. I was still at this time trying to get messages out about who I was and what had happened to me, and get it generally publicized in order to alert people that I was back in Johannesburg. The operation itself was a peculiar episode. In the ambulance taking me to the hospital, there were at least four uniformed policemen, with notebooks 76

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Attempt to Escape and pencils ready, expecting no doubt to record my dying messages and incriminating information, and they asked me who the people were to whom I wanted to send messages. I gave them the name of Mrs. Karodia, the woman with whom I had stayed in Park Road, Fordsburg, because I assumed she would pass the message on to my family. I did not give the names of any of my political or sporting contacts, but they kept waiting, and they probably were concealed behind screens while I was being prepared for the operation. But when I entered the theatre itself, or was wheeled in, there were roughly six of them there, in uniform, crowded around the operating table, up against the elbows of the two doctors and the nurses who were to operate on me. The doctors protested, perhaps to protect me, perhaps because they thought it was unethical to have the police there, and certainly because it made it very difficult for them to operate. In addition, the policemen had not been sterilized or scrubbed up, and so the whole process was halted while the doctors argued with the police, and some of the police then went off and put on green gloves, and green masks, green hoods, green overalls, green cloth over their boots, and returned to the operating table. The doctors found that they still could not operate. (And I should express appreciation. These doctors were whites, working in a non-white hospital, clearly men with sufficient ethics and conscience to want to do a good job.) So with the police still there, now in operating theatre uniforms, and the doctors still unable to perform the operation, I pulled myself into a sitting position and said to the doctor in charge that I thought the police were hoping to get a statement from me, perhaps under anesthetic, and that if I made a statement now, it might make it easier for them to do their work and to allow the doctors to do their [own] work. And so the policemen produced their pencils and notebooks and took down my statement. “I regret nothing. I would do it again if necessary. I have done what I believe to be just, and there is no more I intend to say.” They wrote this down and then retreated to the doorway of the operating theatre and stayed there throughout the operation. I don’t know if I did any speaking while I was unconscious. I was told afterwards by a nurse who had taken part in the operation and who felt that she had a certain intimate link with me thereafter, that she had been the one who had removed my entire gut and placed it on the table for the operation, that the bullet had penetrated the gut at least three times, because it was folded upon itself, leaving six separate penetrations, each of which had to be stitched, in addition to the routine stitching of the point of entry and the point of exit of what was called a through-and-through wound. I had, I believe, twenty-two stitches when the abdomen was sealed up after the operation had taken place. I was then placed in a private ward [with a] single bed, with policemen in the ward with me, where they sat at the table and smoked and played cards and joked twenty-four hours a day. In addition, [there were] other uniformed policemen sitting on a bench outside my wardroom. By this time news of the 77

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Attempt to Escape shooting had reached various people, including Dr. Zainab Azvat,22 who was a close friend of mine, together with her husband, Dr. Kazi; [they] had rushed to the hospital and demanded to see me, as she was my personal physician. The response she got, as she reported to the Rand Daily Mail the following day, was that the two policemen she encountered debated whether they should shoot her or whether they should arrest her. She was not allowed to see me at that point, was subsequently able to force her way into my ward as a doctor, and I believe it was to her I gave the information that I had had two bullets shot into me, when the correct information was that I had two bullet holes but they had come from the same bullet. I omitted to say that while awaiting the operation I had again asked a nurse to obtain a priest for me. This may have been because I thought I was going to die. I was at that time in this religious phase. It may also have been that it was part of my notion to communicate with someone. I was in an unconscious state for a long time after the operation; when I came to, I was to find the police in my room. By this time the following morning, the Rand Daily Mail had had as its headline story on the front page, together with my picture, the story that I had been shot in Johannesburg, something to the effect [of] “Fugitive Brutus Shot in Johannesburg.” The story was also carried in the morning paper in Port Elizabeth, and my wife May learned about it when my son Julian went to fetch the morning paper at a nearby shop, read the headline himself, and brought her the paper to read. She flew up later that day, and I saw her, I think, that evening. In the meantime the nurses were fussing about me a great deal, though they were not allowed to talk to me by the police, but they contrived to find ways, and one of them had the delightful thought of smuggling in a small pocket-sized transistor radio, which I concealed under the sheets and kept the volume down, [so I] was in fact able to hear periodic reports of my condition and the kind of coverage it was getting in the press. It was there that I learned that the British consul had been contacted in the matter, that the Prime Minister of Rhodesia, Sir Roy Welensky,23 had denied that there was any evidence that I had ever been born in Rhodesia, notwithstanding birth certificates and baptismal registers, and I may even have been able to laugh in spite of the twenty-two stitches and the rest. I was really in very bad shape. I had lost a great deal of blood and was being given a blood transfusion from a large drip suspended over me. In addition, because my energy had failed, I was being given a large drip from Zainab Azvat (ca. 1920- ), medical doctor who participated in the Passive Resistance Campaign and other anti-apartheid activities until she was banned in 1964 for five years, after which she and her husband left South Africa on exit permits and went to live in London. 23 Raphael Welensky (1907-1991), Northern Rhodesian politician and last Prime Minister of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. 22

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Attempt to Escape another glass container of glucose. I was also getting a saline drip of salt water pumped into my bloodstream, and in addition, because I was having difficulty with breathing – my left lung had collapsed under the impact of the whole episode; I was functioning, in fact, on one lung – I was required to have a thing clamped over my nose or mouth periodically in order to reactivate this particular lung by breathing exercises. In short, I looked rather like a man ready for a space venture, with tubes and masks and contrivances. And this was the kind of spectacle May saw when she arrived at the Coronation Hospital. I think it’s one of those things which revealed the nature of her own character, that her first response to me, or her first comment when we spoke, was, “You promised that you would never escape.” And I had to admit that I had this once attempted to escape. It’s a complicated story which goes back many years when I first, perhaps ten years ago, became involved in political activity of a very minor nature: protests against racist housing, the Group Areas Act, racist education and the De Vos Malan Commission, racism in sport, [particularly] my early work against racism [in] weight-lifting and table tennis. I said to her then, and I said often in the intervening years, at each stage as my involvement in political opposition increased, I would say to her that at the rate things were going, at some time in the future I was likely to be arrested and imprisoned, and that beyond that was the possibility that I would be found dead, and the police would report that I had attempted to escape. And if that ever happened, she was not to believe [it], but was to insist on an inquest and a full inquiry, because I would not attempt to escape in order to give them the pretext of killing me off. So when the story first appeared that I had been shot attempting to escape, she had denied it because she had had my assurance that I never would attempt to escape, and I had in fact broken my assurance. So I have always found it amusing to reflect that what she first said to me when we spoke was pretty much to the effect of “You damn fool. You promised never to attempt to escape and now you have gone and done it.” At any rate, I began to mend slowly, not quite quietly. No sooner had I come out of my unconscious state, than I insisted on seeing: one, a lawyer, and two, a British consul. On a lawyer they were not too opposed, except that very few lawyers would come anywhere near me, so that there was difficulty in engaging a lawyer. On the British consul they were adamant. I was a South African subject, subject to their law, and I had no recourse to British law. So I embarked on my second fasting ploy. I refused to take any food. I was being given liquid food taken through a tube. I refused to have it. I also insisted that the blood transfusion being supplied to me should be stopped, and the glucose supplement and the saline drip. And I said I would not cooperate with the hospital in any way until I had seen a British consul. We managed to get this story out of the hospital; indeed, a reporter, whose name I won’t mention (though his name could be established on the records), was 79

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Attempt to Escape able to get [the] story, [and] the Sunday Times ran a feature on “Brutus on Hunger Strike in Hospital.” I also declined to perform the kind of lung exercises I needed to keep myself going. By this time the newspapers were full of the old debate around my case. At least one headline in the Rand Daily Mail was “Five Countries Involved in Brutus Row,” the five countries being Britain, whose passport I had; Rhodesia, who had issued the passport, since the British controlled Rhodesia at the time of the Federation [of Rhodesia and Nyasaland], which was breaking up ([into] the Central African Federation); Swaziland, where I had been and to which I should have been returned, if the Portuguese were going to deport me from Mozambique – Mozambique and the Portuguese government were involved as well; and of course the South African government. There were questions raised in the British House of Commons by Harold Wilson24 and others, as they rightly might, since it was learned that I was the bearer of a British passport; cables from the United Nations; Amnesty International flew out its own lawyers to observe the proceedings; and the British Legal Association flew out a Queen’s Counsel called Tom Kellock,25 who attended my trial when I eventually appeared in court. These were some of the complications, but there were others, and one is certainly worth mentioning. My brother Wilfred, who had not yet gone to Robben Island at this time – indeed, I had no idea that he would be going – was able to see me. He has a way of charming policemen which I don’t have, and so he was able to see me occasionally, and to let me know that an attempt was being organized on a particular day to kidnap me out of hospital. I discovered, so I can fill in some of the plans now, that the plan was to bring an ambulance to the hospital which they would hijack, with men in white coats, and in the ambulance they would have a coffin (I think a stretcher might have been preferable, but a coffin would enable them, I suppose, to conceal my identity), and they would come to my ward, which unfortunately was not on the first floor, and if necessary shoot it out with the cops; they were going to be armed, but alternatively, simply bluff their way into the hospital, and then get me out of the hospital as a corpse, concealed in a coffin, and drive off with me. We worked out an elaborate code in which, if the attempt was on, he was to bring me carnations, or send me flowers, but they had to be carnations, on the day the attempt was to take place, which was going to be the Friday of that week, the 28th of September. By this time I had protested to the doctors about the noise of the policemen playing cards and smoking in my room, and that on at least one James Harold Wilson (1916-1995), British Labour politician who served two terms as Prime Minister, 1964 to 1970 and 1974 to 1976. 25 Thomas Oslaf Kellock (1923-1993), British lawyer and Chairman of the AntiApartheid Movement, 1963-1965. 24

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Attempt to Escape occasion when some of the police were drunk, one of them had put his gun to my temple and threatened to shoot me, jokingly, but [it was] an unpleasant experience. But the smoke certainly was doing my single lung a great deal of damage, and the doctors insisted that they should remain in the passage outside. One of them, a bearded head of a squad, was friendlier than the others, and I talked to him occasionally, or complained to him. What my brother also told me when he came to see me was by a rather complicated set of signals: referring to tapeworms in his body, and making circles on his stomach, he let me know that there was a tape recorder concealed in the springs of the bed on which I was lying, so that any conversation I had would be tape recorded. But we agreed that the plan would go forward and they would get me out of the hospital in a coffin. There had been another very ugly episode outside the prison immediately after my shooting, which I did not know at the time, when some people had stormed the hospital demanding to be let in and to know the truth about me. But the details of the kidnap episode I learned on Robben Island from a fellow prisoner who had been one of those engaged in planning the operation. In the evening the flowers arrived, and so I knew the attempt was on, and though I was in no condition to help myself, I assumed that they would take care of it. Then the squad came on for the evening. They were headed by the bearded and friendly policeman to whom I had talked on one or two occasions. He said to me, “I don’t know what’s up, but I know that we have all been issued with special extra ammunition tonight, and there is an armored car patrolling the hospital grounds.” I realized then that the police were armed, and that they would shoot down anyone who attempted to see me or get to me. He came back and added as an afterthought, “Incidentally, we have been told that if there’s any attempt to rescue you, we should shoot you first.” All this seemed to me singularly unprofitable and indeed dangerous. So when my favorite nurse came on duty – a lovely woman, Fatima we might call her, with a kind of Titian hair, and very attractive – she took my hand, and wrote in the palm of my hand with a ball-point with which she recorded my temperature each evening, that the attempt was on. And in turn I wrote in my hand, “Tell them to call it off.” Because I was now aware of the extra ammunition, and that the police were in a state of preparedness. She made an excuse and found a pretext for leaving the hospital though she had just come on duty, and went over to the nurses’ quarters and phoned the signal that it should be cancelled. In spite of the signal, the attempt went ahead, and they only turned back at the window when they had climbed up to my window and seen that the police were indeed armed and ready, and at that point the attempt was abandoned. This is not quite the end of the story, because the next morning I was rushed out of the hospital and taken to the Fort, the main prison in Johannesburg, and there is no doubt that this decision was made because of the attempt and in order to prevent any further attempts. It was the nurses 81

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Attempt to Escape who came on duty early the next morning who somehow contrived to let me know that I was being moved from the hospital to the Fort. The police were constantly preventing nurses from having access to me, especially those who belonged in other wards and ought not to be seeing me. The doctor who was handling my case and who had operated on me, protested and argued that I ought to remain in the hospital at least until the stitches – and there were twenty-two of them – were removed, because this kind of care could not be given to me in prison. But he was overruled by the police, and I was taken away. I discovered rather sadly at the Fort when I got there and I happened to see my papers, that he had signed a statement saying that I was fit to be removed from hospital, and that my stitches had been removed. That’s the kind of pressure which the police could exert on doctors. That was apart from the prison doctors, who were the willing collaborators with the police. I was taken off to the Fort, wheeled out of the hospital in a wheelchair to an ambulance. I remember a nurse stuck a carnation in my buttonhole, which may have seemed a little incongruous, I suppose, and yet by this time I felt the kind of defiance, bravado, the necessity to keep my spirits up. May was informed of my removal, and she was there at the hospital as I was being wheeled out, but was not permitted to speak to me, only to see me. And so we drove to the Fort. There was a rather pleasant little episode in the ambulance. There was a young white uniformed policeman guarding me in the ambulance itself, and we talked, something about the carnation, I think, and then he said to me in a clumsy way but I thought it touching, that he hoped it would never ever arise that it would ever be necessary for him to shoot me, or indeed any situation in which he would have to confront me in any kind of conflict. It was perhaps a kind of oblique tribute, but I thought I liked the spirit in which he said it. And so to the vast doors of the Fort, the great red prison overlooking Johannesburg on a hill, with the sirens of the escorting police motorbikes screaming. And then to be helped through the great iron doors, and into the reception section – the non-white section, of course – with the warders insisting that I was capable of walking, and being taken to the hospital section of the non-white prison, for awaiting prisoners – those awaiting trial and not convicted – and therefore somewhat more comfortable than the section for those who were already convicted. I was given a bed in a cell; there was a window high up, and it was barred and also covered with gauze so that one could see nothing out of it, the cell about the size of a small toilet, the steel door and the spy hole, a Judas hole, in it. And I lay there and each day I was required to get up and walk for exercise. For a while they gave me another prisoner, one of those who are trustees and cleaners, to help me hobble around the prison courtyard. And very shortly a warden came in with a basin and a large scissors and asked me to lift my shirt as I lay on the bed, and 82

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Attempt to Escape clumsily snipped the stitches which were still in my stomach – black gut cotton, I guess, looking rather like lace and indeed removed so early that the scars remained much longer than they would have otherwise, because the stitches had been removed prematurely. I struggled through the prison food, which was very bad, but I was allowed food from the outside provided it did not come in tins, provided it could be opened and inspected. And May was allowed to see me and other friends were allowed to see me; I think I was allowed visitors once every three days, perhaps once a week, but it seemed reasonably frequent. And Ruth Hayman26 was able to see me; she had been engaged as my lawyer to defend me [at] my original arrest for attending the Olympic meeting, and would now continue to act for me. Sometime later she was herself banned and house arrested, and therefore prevented from acting in any legal issue, but this was after I had already been sentenced. And through Ruth and through John Harris, the work of SAN-ROC was able to go forward, and I was able to smuggle out messages, both relating to the strategy of SAN-ROC and then specifically an appeal to the meeting of the International Olympic Committee executive, the meeting I had originally set out to attend from Johannesburg, and which had taken me to Swaziland and Mozambique. [I was also able] to get out my personal appeal to Avery Brundage of Chicago, President of the International Olympic Committee, calling for the expulsion of South Africa. And, notwithstanding many difficulties, we were able to get someone to the meeting in Baden-Baden, to deliver this message, to have it read, and it was effective. I will not say that it was my message that persuaded the IOC to make a decision to exclude South Africa from the Olympics in 1964 in Tokyo, but certainly the mere impact of the bullet which had been fired into me, and the kind of publicity surrounding the event and the outcry at the United Nations, in Britain and elsewhere – there were demonstrations of protest in sport at many British universities – this kind of thing created a climate in which it was much easier for the IOC to take the kind of decision which it was most reluctant to take because so many of the Olympic committee countries were sympathetic to apartheid. The conditions in prison were not unduly harsh, at least in the period while I was in the prison hospital and awaiting trial. But I saw around me so much brutality, so much arbitrary beating of prisoners by those who were working there, that already I was appalled by the horror of what faced me. Opposite my cell was a man who had been arrested for rape and whose death apparently Ruth Hayman (?-1981), South African lawyer and anti-apartheid campaigner who offered free legal advice and representation in court to women who appealed to the Black Sash organization for help. Because she defended anti-apartheid activists, she was banned and placed under house arrest in 1966. She and her husband moved to London in 1968. 26

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Attempt to Escape was a foregone conclusion – in South Africa blacks who rape whites are executed – but in addition to this, he was denied water. He would lie there for hours crying out for water, which was not brought to him. When the wardens eventually opened his cell door, it was to beat and kick him, because he was the man who had dared to fuck [a] white woman. This was merely one aspect of it. I was required to stand to attention each day, as the prison inspection took place. One favor they did grant me – in this way I suppose I was rather privileged – I was allowed the use of a bathroom with a full bath, and one of the prisoners who was encouraged to look after me, a convicted prisoner, was in charge of preparing buckets of hot water which would be carried to the bathroom, so that I could have a bath. I would in turn give him some of the food which was being brought for me, goodies like dried fruit and biscuits and cookies and cigarettes, though he was not supposed to be smoking. It may be that they wanted him to worm himself into my confidence, so that he would be able to get information to alert the wardens in time. As a digression let me say that I wrote at least two poems in prison at this time. One I remember dealt with the prismatic effect the gauze on my window had on the sunlight as it slanted into my cell. The cell itself was painted gray inside, all four walls and the doors and the ceiling and the floor, so one lived in a kind of gray cement box. But into this slanted this iridescent sunlight for a brief while each day as the sun moved overhead, and I remember writing some poetry about it. Just to complete this poetry footnote, I should say that on the Sunday in the prison in Lourenço Marques I had looked out of the window – it’s subtropical, warm and sultry by the sea, magnificent glossy palm trees standing bright in the sunlight, and nearby me was a bullring, of all places, where bullfights took place, and the name Villa Algarve itself had a certain poetic magic – and so I wrote a poem which combined some references to Federico Garcia Lorca27 and the bullring and the palms. But I fear that is lost. I remember attempting to rewrite it in the hospital section of the prison. And then at least two poems I had written I reworked. One, written while a student at Wits and working as a tea boy for Robin Farquharson in his office, begins “I am out of love with you for now”; I worked on [it] in Swaziland as well, and now, as far as I remember, reworked [it] in the Fort. The other I had begun to write many months before, traveling from Port Elizabeth back to Johannesburg after I had been given magisterial permission to leave Johannesburg briefly with my banning orders lifted which confined me to Johannesburg. Traveling through the South African landscape with its marvelous female contours, I had written a poem which 27 Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús Garcia Lorca (1898-1936), Spanish poet, playwright, and theatre director, probably shot by anti-communist death squads during the Spanish Civil War.

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Attempt to Escape was at once for the country and for a woman, which began: “When last I ranged and revelled all your length/I vowed to savour your most beauteous curves,” where beauteous is a particularly precious adjective and functions in an ambivalent way, so that it could be applicable both to a woman and to the landscape. I reworked this in the Fort now, and it seemed particularly apposite, because it talks, months before I went to prison, about etching in my brain the contours of beauty so that they would comfort me during the prisoned night, the nights I had anticipated I would spend in prison. So these are three things I did at this time. The case, of course, was going forward. I appeared in court at least three times, manacled as if I was still likely to escape, and, though normally prisoners do not appear in the dock with handcuffs, I was required to continue wearing them while in court; and each time the case was remanded, either because my health was not sufficiently good for me to be sentenced, or because the State case or the defense was not sufficiently prepared. Ruth Hayman was an attorney but not a trial lawyer, so someone else had to be engaged, whom she would brief, to take the case. And I was given the man – whom I admired a great deal, and who had done several excellent jobs before – called David Soggott,28 as my barrister or advocate, as opposed to attorney. Unfortunately, he then became involved in a major case, as far as I remember, in Swaziland, and had to drop my case, to my considerable disappointment, particularly when the young man who replaced him proved to be extremely inept and nervous of the police system. His name, I think, was Schoonman, or something to that effect. The upshot of all this was that when it finally came to sentence, after the case had dragged on for some time, I suggested, and he agreed very heartily, that instead of him speaking in my defense, I would speak in my own defense prior to sentencing. And I think this was a good thing. However, first the evidence had to be established, and this was a complex and to my mind very largely redundant process, in which it had to be established that I was, first of all, a banned person who was banned from belonging to organizations, attending meetings or social gatherings; that I was confined to the magisterial district of Johannesburg; that I was confined to a particular house; that I was required to report to the police daily and sign a police book each day at the police station. And this took a great deal of time, and the books were produced and the keys of the safes in which the books were kept, etc., etc. And so to my attendance in the offices of the South African Olympic Committee, to which Mr. Helberg and Mr. Kleingeld testified. I guess I had two familiars most of the time I was in South Africa, and my lawyer then 28 David Soggott (1931-2010), South African lawyer and civil rights advocate who represented in court many prominent opponents of governments in South Africa, South-West Africa (now Namibia), and Swaziland.

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Attempt to Escape asked how these men had known that I was going to be at the meeting. The magistrate ruled this question out of order as contrary to the national security, the national interest, and so we will never know. But my own suspicion is that the Olympic officials had anticipated that I would attend in order to present the views of the blacks, and had advised the secret police of this. Their arrival in the office so conveniently out of what appeared to be a cupboard in the wall was extremely suspicious. At any rate, to clinch the case, something happened that astounded me. For though I had been arrested before the meeting had begun – and had made this very clear when arriving at the offices that the moment the meeting began I would have to leave, and that I asked that no meeting should begin while I was there because it was a criminal offense for me to attend the meeting – the president of the South African Olympic Committee and the secretary of the SAOC, Mr. Frank Braun and Mrs. Lillian Francey, both testified that the meeting had begun and that I had attended the meeting. And to clinch the matter and dispel any doubts, Mrs. Francey proceeded to read the minutes of a meeting which allegedly had begun while I was there, and statements of mine were recorded as part of a meeting which had been held. This seemed to me out and out perjury; I would have preferred to fight it, [but] my lawyer thought better not to, and in any case it would have been very difficult to have evidence in support, though John Harris had been there, and several other members of SAN-ROC who certainly would have testified to the contrary. But in the case of the blacks, their voices against those of the white South Africans would not have counted for much. And so the case was remanded for sentencing, and I was required to appear in court on January the 8th for sentencing. I spent a good deal of time preparing my defense. I had two choices, and my first inclination was to say, “Sure, I’m guilty. I did it, and I would do it again,” and then making a ringing attack on the apartheid system. It would have earned me the maximum imprisonment on each count, and I was liable to three years on each of six counts, so that eighteen years is what I might well have got. My lawyer dissuaded me, and my own better judgment told me too, that perhaps this was not the best way to deal with it. My health was certainly very poor, and just looking at the kind of brutality – and I may specify some of this on another occasion – to which other non-white prisoners were subjected, I had the most serious doubts whether I would survive in prison. It dismayed me that I might die in prison, mainly because I thought I had some usefulness left in me, and I thought it would be a great pity if I were not allowed [to live]. I was praying a good deal at this time, and I made a kind of a deal with God, in which I said, “Well, I’ll settle for three years, but I’m not going to take any more than three years, because I think that’s the maximum I can endure.” On the day of sentencing there were people there from the British Jurists, and the International Jurists, and U.N. representatives, and I’m sure their presence and South Africa’s anxiety about its image had something to do with 86

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Attempt to Escape the leniency of my sentence. I would like to think, too, that my address from the dock, which very considerably surprised the magistrate, had something to do with it, because when the magistrate invited my counsel to speak prior to sentence, he said, “The defendant will speak for himself.” The prosecution then pulled a very smart move, to which I had fortunately been alerted: they asked me to make my statement from the witness stand. The difference between the statement from the witness stand and from the dock is simply that statements on the dock need not be made under oath, and more importantly, they are not subject to cross-examination. If I had gone into the witness stand, not only would I have had to speak under oath, but I would have been compelled to answer questions, and the secret police could have elicited a very considerable amount of information in the process of crossexamination, not necessarily relating to my own case, but to other people engaged in various forms of opposition, whom they were trying to nab. I spoke, I suppose, for between fifteen and twenty minutes, which is a considerable time in a South African court. I was repeatedly interrupted by the magistrate, who constantly ruled things I was saying out of order. I kept my temper. I was not flustered. I pursued my points doggedly. And although it is illegal for any sentenced person’s works to be quoted if he is a banned person – and therefore nothing of my statement was reprinted in the newspapers – there must be records of it somewhere. And I might even make an attempt to recall some of it now or in the future. At any rate, I think it was an impressive performance, and a very calm and a very carefully argued one. At the end of it, the magistrate retired and then came back for sentencing and gave me eighteen months, to everyone’s astonishment, including my own. His reasoning was, that though I had six offenses, four of these were in a sense a single offense because they were connected. I had left the country without legal papers, but having left the country without legal papers, I had had to leave Johannesburg, I had had to leave the house in which I was confined, I had had to absent myself from signing the police book each day, so that the four essentially stemmed from a single event: failing to sign the book, leaving the house I was confined to, leaving the magisterial district of Johannesburg to which I was confined, were all embraced in the single act of escaping from the country without legal South African papers. I still had two other offenses, though: I had attended a meeting as a banned person, and very annoyingly, I had escaped from the police while in custody and had gotten myself shot. So these two offenses had to be punished separately. I was given three months on each, making a total of eighteen months. And I remember returning to the Fort as a sentenced prisoner, and being met by the clerk at the reception who had to check me in; when he asked how much I had gotten, I said, “Eighteen months,” [and] he said with great disgust, “Goddamn. It should have been eighteen years.” And there was a sense in which he was right. It certainly would have been possible for me to get the maximum amount. 87

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Attempt to Escape Just going into prison, not as a charged person, but as a convicted offender, is an enormous difference. The treatment is instantly different, from the moment you are brought out of the dock as a convicted prisoner and put in the section where other convicted prisoners are kept, as opposed to those who are awaiting sentence, being herded into the police truck, taken back to the great doors of the Fort, and brought in again, the truck driven in, and then to the reception desk, and to be stripped, [to] surrender your clothing and your possessions, to be given a little red undershirt and a pair of dirty short trousers, no shoes, no socks, and to be there in a line, crouching like animals on the floor – for the convicted prisoners don’t stand in line, they crouch, and wherever they move they run in a kind of a crouch – that first hour probably was the one of the grimmest I had to endure in prison. There weren’t many quite as bitter as that one. Before going on with the actual prison experience after conviction, let me fill in a few gaps of the pre-sentencing period, things I remember. A priest did come to see me, after all my numerous requests for one. He happened to be the Catholic chaplain at the University, a Franciscan, I think, or a Dominican, and a man of considerable courage but some caution. There were many other South African priests who I fear would be too intimidated to make contact with a “Communist” fugitive, and so I remember seeing him once at least, and I remember his memorable parting: “Courage, mon coeur,” he said, “Courage.” And I used to repeat that to myself sometimes. I remember, too, May coming up for my sentencing, and bringing the children with her; they had driven up with Hartley Davis, I think, a long road of over seven hundred miles from Port Elizabeth. I saw the children: Gregory was a baby then. I was to see him once more in Robben Island, when he was permitted to accompany May there. And they were, I think, calm, a little tearful perhaps, with the excitement of it all and the fuss, probably the adventure of travel. Julian, I think, cared a great deal. I know he kept a scrapbook of my doings. I was to see it many years later. The headlines, the stories, the pictures. I remember other things: one, being taken out to exercise in another section of the prison, still while awaiting sentencing. But once it was decided I no longer needed the comfort of a prison hospital, I was put in a cell which I was subsequently told was the condemned cell for convicted murderers who were awaiting execution, which was by no means a pleasant thought; and I was identified by the other prisoners as the prisoner who was in the condemned cell. And on the whole, even before sentencing, I was segregated from the prisoners who were there for common law offenses, what we were later to call the criminal prisoners, presumably because it was regarded as a bad influence to have me among them. And I was in this cell which was segregated and over a staircase. I could look out, down on the courtyard, and see the repeated and arbitrary beatings, both by the wardens and by the trustees or long-time prisoners. I remember occasions when I sat in my cell on my roll of blankets – I was now sleeping 88

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Attempt to Escape on the concrete floor on a strip of matting, no longer in a bed. During the day you were required to roll up the mat and the blankets; you were not, in fact, supposed to sit on it, [and] you could not unroll it until four o’clock in the afternoon when it was time to go to bed after supper. What I heard, a number of times from my cell, [were] strange sounds, like someone striking a pumpkin with a stick, a kind of wooden, hollow, echoing sound, and when I stood up on my roll of blankets, and stretched up to the window and peered out, I would see that it was the batons of the wardens falling on the shaved skulls of the prisoners that made this sound. I found a great deal of sodomy, homosexuality, around me, particularly among the young prisoners awaiting a trial, often between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, crowded into metal cages, forced to sleep two to a cage sometimes, and being periodically hauled out and interrogated by the wardens and other prisoners, for their homosexual activities. The whole question of homosexuality was an important one to which I have given some thought, and which is reflected in some of my poetry. Exercising pretty much in solitary, I was however allowed for a short while to exercise with another prisoner who was also being kept in solitary, and who had been charged with a burglary combined with a rape of an old white woman. And as we walked the yard, the two of us would converse furtively. He wanted me to write him a letter of appeal, or some letter which would enable him to get free legal counsel. But he was being kept in solitary, and there was no way he could see the Commandant in order to appeal to him for assistance, the kind of assistance he was asking from me. So what he had done was to tear up the prison blanket in strips. This was a punishable offense, the destruction of government property, and usually meant that you would be put in a cell where you would be more noticeable and where you would also have access to the Commandant. He told me the rather gruesome details of this burglary, which he had undertaken with a couple of others, and how they had succumbed to the impulse of raping this woman, and [he] told it all quite dispassionately, perhaps a little puzzled at his own behavior. Before I left the Fort to go to Pretoria, I learned that he was convicted and hanged, and so he was one of the men I knew in my life, and there were many, who had at the time I met them somehow the shadow of death hanging over them, shadowing their faces. John Harris was such a one. And Vuyisili Mini29: he was a friend in the African [National] Congress in Port Elizabeth with whom I had worked – a great, bluff, jovial man whose hobby was conducting a choir, and he too was hanged. And Colin Langford, a classmate in junior school, had his skull smashed open in a fight. And I sometimes reflected on these men I met, who were due to die a violent death by some manner. Vuyisili Mini (1920-1964), singer, trade union organizer, member of Umkhonto we Sizwe, and one of the first ANC members to be executed in South Africa. 29

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Attempt to Escape One other episode I remember from the days when I was awaiting trial: I was moved from the section in my condemned cell to another section, perhaps because I became too friendly with other prisoners, or spoke to them about my political activities which had gotten me in prison, so I was moved even further, and when I had visitors, May or someone else, I would be taken to somewhere near the front of the prison to an eighteen-foot-high wire fence, and was allowed to converse with people through the fence. I was still wearing a suit and a shirt, and perhaps even a tie at this time (I was not yet convicted). I remember being escorted back on one occasion. I had gone to meet May, we were walking along the prison walk, past the administration offices; I had picked a petal of a rose, and gave it to her through the wire when we met; and then [on] being escorted back and entering my own section, I remember the warden, with a certain malicious pleasure, forcing me to strip and to stand naked, a considerable time, while all the other prisoners passed, allegedly to search me, to find out whether anything had been given to me, but really in order to humiliate me. And this kind of thing was fairly common. But all of this was nothing compared to life once one was a convicted prisoner. During the time I was in prison waiting trial, I was allowed to receive unlimited letters. I received an enormous number of letters of encouragement, greetings, mainly from Britain, where I think the Anti-Apartheid Movement must have urged a campaign of letter-writing to me. Many letters of support, and I had time to do some writing, and so managed to acknowledge a great many of these letters. I don’t know if the acknowledgements were ever received by the people to whom they were addressed, but I think I should get down on record somewhere my appreciation for the hundreds and perhaps thousands of letters which were received, and express my gratitude and assure people that I did receive the letters, that I have not forgotten their kindness at that time. Also – and this was mainly through the efforts of Sibyl Marcus and several others – I was deluged with books, a great deal of reading matter. The police tried to restrain this; they insisted that I was not allowed hardcover books, but only paperbacks, and this was reversed until I was not allowed to receive paperbacks, only hardcover. I raised this and got Ruth Hayman to raise it, and I think by the end I was allowed to read. pretty much hardcover or paperback. However, nothing political. I spent a great deal of time in prison – there’s nothing much else to do – reading, writing. I read much of Dickens,30 which I had planned to read all my life and never got around to. A great deal of Dickens, certainly Chekhov,31 some philosophical works, [and] someone 30 Charles Dickens (1812-1870), popular British novelist, short story writer, journalist, and editor. 31 Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860-1904), Russian short story writer, playwright, and physician.

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Attempt to Escape brought me William Butler Yeats’s collected works32 as a gift. So I had boxes of reading, which I then gave away to the prison library, and no doubt others made use of them. But I did have a veritable feast. I would read for four, six hours at a stretch two or three times a day until the lights went out, or otherwise. Even if the lights burnt all night, one was not permitted to read after suppertime, but some of my most useful reading was done at that time, particularly [books by] some of the Victorian novelists, whose works I had not been able to do justice to before. Interesting things were happening during this time to other people, and after I was sentenced. For one, Robin Farquharson crashed his Volkswagen on the border of Botswana. [The tape ends here, but there is a note saying the narrative continues on the next tape. Unfortunately, that tape and its transcript, if any, have been lost.] 32

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Irish poet and dramatist who won the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature.

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Robben Island [The missing tape and transcript may have described events leading up to Brutus’s incarceration at Robben Island. The narrative picks up at the point where prisoners are about to be transported to the island. No date recorded.] At the Cape Town docks the area was cordoned off and heavily guarded. There were two tugboats at the wharf, or jetty, the first one a kind of decoy, so that you passed from the one boat through it to the second one where men stood armed, with their guns at the ready. We were herded aboard the second boat, which was the ferry to Robben Island and which was named Issie after the wife of the former Prime Minister, Jan Smuts,1 but first there was a rather nasty experience to be undergone, because the first boat, while it was tied up at the quay, was some distance from the landing, and we were required to jump from the land to the boat. This would not have been particularly difficult, except that the boat was heaving and swaying on the tide, and that we were handcuffed and manacled together at wrists and ankles so we had to jump in pairs, and there was a real danger that if you mistimed the jump or lost your footing, that you would go down, the pair of you, into the sea between the land and the boat. I murmured to the prisoner chained to me that we ought to time it correctly, that I would count to three, and that we would jump on the count of three. And this we did, scrambling onto the first boat, and then walking across it through to the other one, where we were herded downstairs into the hold, and traveled that way to the island. Some prisoners had never seen the sea, and I had had the humbling experience in Leeuwkop of finding how inadequate language was in describing the sea to someone who had never seen it. On the quay waiting for 1

Jan Christian Smuts (1870-1950), South African statesman, military leader, and philosopher who served as Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa from 1919 to 1924 and from 1939 to 1948.

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Robben Island our turn to jump, I had looked around at what I could see of Cape Town and the docks, with a kind of sick feeling, quoting to myself lines from a poem, “Look your last on all things lovely,” and murmuring lines, half-wryly, like “at daybreak for the isles.” And those were lines I was subsequently to weave into a poem which is printed in Letters to Martha. When we got to the island, there was some difficulty in getting out, getting ashore, and getting organized in a truck that drove us over to a temporary reception center. Around us there were prisoners working or returning from work – it was pretty late. We had arrived when most of them were already locked up, having been fed, and then we were marched over, or run over, to the kitchen. I found myself at the head of the line and marched with some dignity, refusing to run at the head of the chain of prisoners. This meant that those behind me, even if they wished to run, could not run. There were warders around me, shouting and threatening me and occasionally cuffing me, but I continued to walk, and so all those behind me walked. It was a kind of naive and almost simple-minded courage which I sometimes displayed, for which I don’t particularly take credit, but it was a rejection of the kind of animal-like behavior which the warders demanded of us, and which I was not prepared to give. Years later, I was told by May, who had it from a prisoner, that the prisoners were impressed by it and that it gave them courage. After we had eaten, we were taken to a large cell in a part of the prison just finished – so unfinished, in fact, that there was no water in the taps or in the toilets yet. And our clothes were taken from us, the clothes we had arrived with from Leeuwkop. We were not issued other clothes. We were given blankets instead. And so we huddled in the cell and slept on the floor. I watched the dawn the following morning, the sky turning orange, saffron and brilliant vermillion, against pale green like the green of ripening apples. We were given some clothes and breakfast, and then taken over to the temporary administration section on another part of the island, where we were issued with more clothes and were medically inspected, and then, I think, issued with new prison cards. Mine was a white one, unlike the others, which I think were red or green or blue, depending on the number of years of their sentence. Mine was white because I was in for under two years. In fact, I was the only prisoner on the island with a card like that, and almost certainly ought not to have been on the island, and this was occasionally pointed out to me. One last recollection of that first day was that as we were locked in by the warders in charge of the large cell in which we were to be kept, one warder shouted that we should be silent and went on to say, “You think you have come to Robben Island, but you’re wrong. You’ll find out that you have come to Hell Island.” That was an ominous threat. While being seen by a doctor, I pointed out that I was recovering from a bullet injury and had not properly recovered because of the treatment I received at Leeuwkop. The doctor, whose name was Gosling, told me that I would have to be treated like any other prisoner. We were then locked up in 93

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Robben Island a cell in this administrative area, and perhaps this was done deliberately to teach us a lesson. For very shortly, from our cell windows we were able to see another batch of prisoners, perhaps as many as fifty, being brought in from the place where they were working, which was a quarry on the beach. They may have been digging rocks, or building a wall, hauling rocks out of the sea, or they may have been working somewhere else. They had been brought in for discipline. George Peake,2 a Coloured prisoner and former member of the Cape Town City Council who was serving a sentence for sabotage, had been on the island for some time, therefore was knowledgeable, and also had managed to get himself some responsibilities as a prisoner, so he could walk around. He came to us and told us that the prisoners who were brought in were called the Masondo group, after Andrew Masondo,3 who was one of the ANC political prisoners and a former lecturer in mathematics at Fort Hare. What had happened was that the warders had consistently ill-treated Masondo in the place where he was working with his squad. Masondo had protested this, and as punishment he had been tied to a stake in the center of his working group and denied the opportunity to go to the toilet or to drink water. He had been left there for some time in the sun. There apparently had been previous episodes similar to this, and as a result the prisoners in the Masondo squad had all refused to go to work, or refused to continue their work. So they were being marched in in order to be disciplined. They were lined up, with a row of warders facing them who were armed with batons or leather straps. A report was made to a young, slim officer called Lt. Frazer who, after hearing the complaint, had issued a command in a quiet, almost conversational voice, saying “Carry on.” “Carry on” in South Africa is a special term in the language of warders. It is almost the equivalent of the army order “fire at will” and is a command normally reserved for riots and jail breaks. When the instruction is given to have a “carry on,” it means that the warders are free to do pretty much anything to the prisoners. In this instance they waded into the prisoners with batons and straps and sticks and then grabbed wooden pick handles and staves from a nearby storing shed. They beat the prisoners and the prisoners scattered, the warders raining blows on them as they ran. Some tried to crawl under a fence in an attempt to escape, some were unconscious, others tried 2

George Peake, South African anti-apartheid activist and one of the founders of the South African Coloured People Organization who was charged in the Treason Trial (1956-1961) and later imprisoned on Robben Island for planting explosives outside a prison in Cape Town. 3 Andrew Masondo (1937-2008), South African anti-apartheid activist who joined the African National Congress’s military wing Umkhonto we Sizwe in 1962, was arrested the following year, and spent thirteen years in prison on Robben Island. Upon release he received further military training in Moscow.

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Robben Island to ward off the blows. They were struck over the head, across the arms, shoulders, elbows, beaten to the ground. It was an indescribable kind of unleashed fury, and when we came out of our section later, there were still splashes of bright red blood, almost vermillion, contrasting with the gray broken flint that formed the gravel of the area. I heard of warders with special sadistic preferences, who concentrated on striking only at elbows, ankles, or knees, trying to permanently damage joints and break the bones, and others whose preference was only for striking skulls, so that one warder would plead to the others to hit everywhere else but on the head, and save the heads for him. “Just leave the heads for me.” This kind of thing was fairly common. This occasion would, I expect, have taken place anyway, this particular “carry on,” but now it probably served a double function, in that it was used to give us an object lesson of what was liable to happen to us. But we were not only to see an example. Later in the same day we were ourselves to experience such an example. As far as I remember, we were taken back to our cells, in our own new section of the prison, and then fetched out later in the afternoon to work in what was called a quarry, but this term was used extremely loosely. It’s not always a place where people quarry in the earth. In this instance what we were required to do was to carry large rocks from one area and dump them in a hole, which I supposed we were being asked to fill up. The stones were of various kinds, and of course if they were fairly small or moderately big, you were required to take several. But others were much bigger and almost too much for one person to carry. The catch was (1) that you had to carry these stones at a run to the hole where they had to be deposited, (2) that as you ran, you were beaten by warders to hurry you along, and (3) that they also attempted to trip you, sometimes succeeding so that you fell heavily and were then beaten while you lay on the ground, or as you got up and gathered your stone and made off with it. As the work went on, the tempo increased. We were required to run ever faster, the beatings increased, and the number of warders who were beating us was augmented by other warders who were off duty and who came along to join in the fun. And there were always the longtime prisoners, probably serving life sentences for criminal offences, who were used as “trustees” or boss-boys and wanted to get themselves in the good graces of the warders and therefore joined in these beatings. This was apart from their own sadistic impulses, I guess. So we had a bad time. I saw others fall, get up, their legs and their feet (we had no shoes yet) bleeding, their noses bloody, their heads bloody. At least one of the prisoners from Natal, a young Asian boy, literally passed out, fainted, or was beaten unconscious. And it went on until I thought it could no longer be endured. At first, and this may well have been a mistake, I worked energetically, and even cheerfully, and encouraged others, and was determined to display the kind of courage which would demonstrate that my spirit, or 95

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Robben Island our spirits, were not being broken. But this of course attracted even more attention, more violence, more viciousness, and so by the end of the day, by the time we were taken back to our cells, I was in pretty bad shape. In addition, while you worked, and this was a further goad, if you did not work sufficiently hard, the warder would take from you your identity card, your meal ticket, and by taking it, he signified that you were being punished and you would not receive any food that evening. By now we were all pretty hungry, just from the hard work, and perhaps for the entire following day there would be no food for you. Some did, in fact, lose three meals the following day. It was my first experience of the kind of arbitrary and almost limitless brutality, the sadism, the malicious glee with which warders saw people fall and would beat them and force them to their feet again. There is no doubt that we learned in that first short period just what lengths of brutality we could expect to see on Robben Island. And I suppose it did have some kind of salutary effect. I might as well go on with this chronicle and record my next rather gruesome experience. Within a day or two (there may have been a Saturday or Sunday intervening when we didn’t do much work, and I had to go and report to the administration to get my documents in order) so I imagine it was on a Monday that I was assigned to a squad working on the beach. We were at this time issued with prison-made sandals, most of which were badly fitting and painful to wear, and we would be marched out to the kitchen, a large prison kitchen, and we sat down in rows on the ground and were given our porridge there. (Often the wind blew in from the sea, carrying the fine sea sand onto your porridge so that it formed a fine layer on the surface.) After we had our breakfast and coffee (Coloureds got bread at lunchtime, Africans got crushed corn, and we may have got bread in the evening. I’m not sure; it all seems far away), we were lined up in squads and were marched off to work. Some [members] of the PAC [Pan Africanist Congress] were anxious to be in the squads which would take them marching where [their leader] Robert Sobukwe4 was being kept. At this time he was on the island under preventive detention, confined behind barbed wire and guarded by police. One of the things I noticed in the morning when the squads were being made up was that the senior criminal prisoners who had positions of some authority organizing the squads would come along with the warders and select the people they wanted for their squads, particularly the new young political prisoners whom they wanted for homosexual purposes, and the warders would cooperate with them in this. 4

Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe (1924-1978), South African anti-apartheid activist who founded the Pan Africanist Congress and was elected as its first president in 1959. The PAC organised the Pass Protest which in March 1960 took the name of Sharpeville into history, because the police killed 69 people, many of whom were shot in the back.

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Robben Island I was sent out to work on the beach with a squad. My job in the early part of the morning was carrying rocks out of the sea to the shore where they were used to build a wall around the island alongside a road which was to run the entire periphery of the island and was part of its defense program. The rocks were slippery, large, many of them covered with seaweed, and extremely heavy, and one kept one’s footing with enormous difficulty, wearing these smooth, leather, badly made sandals. In fact, it was so dangerous walking in these sandals on the rocks along the shore, slipping and sliding on the slimy seaweed, that in order to work more efficiently I took them off. This was a mistake because the rocks were also sharp at the edges and slashed my feet; I saw little ribbons of red blood in the pools of water on the sand, where the waves broke and gathered. I worked there but was not very efficient. In any case, they brought in a group of criminal prisoners whose job it was to beat us and goad us. It was hard work, but I thought at that time that the sight and sound of the sea, the smell of the brine, the sparkle of spray in the air, and the sight of the low, blue, luminous horizon – these things were compensations for the hard work. As the day went on and the mood of the warders got uglier, beatings became commoner. And when a prisoner slipped and fell into the water and was floundering around, a warder would come along and would stand over him on a rock and put his foot on his neck, keeping the prisoner under water until he fought for air, bubbles coming to the surface in pools where he was being kept. The mood grew uglier and the work harder. About lunchtime the chief sergeant or senior officer came along, and one of the things he came about, it seemed, was the application I had made while at Leeuwkop for permission to continue my studies. He instructed the warders that I was one of those people who was to be given special treatment. No doubt there were others because we were the kind of prisoners “who wished to be educated and wanted to take over the country from them.” The consequence was that I was taken off the rock carrying and made instead to push a wheelbarrow loaded with rocks. This was difficult because the wheelbarrows had to be pushed on the sea sand, and when they were heavily loaded, the single wheel of the wheelbarrow tended to sink into the sand, making it extremely difficult to push. This was my work, and I attempted to do it, except that the warders, in almost every instance, decided that I was not carrying enough rocks on my wheelbarrow, so they would instruct the criminal prisoners to pile even more rocks onto it. These were piled on until the wheelbarrow wheel was sunk into the sand almost to its axle, and this made it literally immovable or nearly so. I’m not particularly strong physically, and after the fort and the hospital I was probably less strong and weakened by the lack of exercise. I will say that I made just about every effort I could to move the wheelbarrow on these occasions, and I would in fact go down in front of the wheelbarrow and turn the wheel itself, painfully hauling it forward. This did not satisfy the warders who beat me persistently as I worked, and 97

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Robben Island then to cap it, one of the prisoners, a particularly unpleasant one I’m afraid, kicked me with a kind of karate kick, leaping into the air and then lashing into my stomach. I may have exaggerated the pain, but it certainly was acute at the time. My stomach still was in pretty bad shape and painful, and for many days thereafter I suffered various pains which I attributed to this kick in the stomach – he was wearing boots. In addition, and these were minor pains by comparison, the entire length of my body on the back, from the nape of my neck down to my heels, was a mass of bruises from the repeated blows I had received. I don’t know how many days (it couldn’t have been many) I worked on the quarry. One morning at breakfast, when we were being issued our porridge, and there was some kind of medical inspection, I reported that I was suffering the consequences of this injury to my stomach, so I was taken out of the squad and put to work in the prison yard, where my job was to drag some kind of mat back and forth across an area which I think they were going to cultivate, possibly lay grass and even perhaps turn it into a football field, as I believe they did later, when I was away, or even while I was there, but kept in the maximum security single cell section. There I was not able to see what was happening in the other part of the prison where I had worked, which was called the tin prison, or the sinktronk. I worked in the sinktronk area but my feet were enormously blistered by these badly fitting sandals, so that I worked in considerable pain. This was near the hospital section, and indeed I was checked into the sinktronk hospital and stayed there for a while. The hospital section was made of galvanized iron. There were rows of beds in it, and beside each bed was a mat, and though I thought I was now going to sleep on a bed, it was explained to me that the beds were only there for inspection purposes, that one stood beside them in the morning when the senior officer passed through the prison, but that one slept on the mat beside a bed, and this indeed is what I did all the time I was there, with one exception. On one day there was a visitor from the Red Cross who was sent to Robben Island to investigate conditions, and so we were allowed to get into the beds in the morning, and then after he had passed about midday, we were required to get out of the beds and return to our mats on the floor. This Red Cross episode was a curious one. Information had been smuggled out of Robben Island about conditions there, so an investigator was sent, and up to that time I was without shoes, but it was decided that I ought to be issued with shoes and socks in case the Red Cross investigator asked to see me. In fact, he did not. I got the impression that he did not try very hard to establish the facts. But it is complicated by the fact that the prisoners were not sure who the Red Cross man was and were not told that he was coming, so when he happened to question prisoners in the presence of warders, the prisoners were afraid to speak frankly, because he might, for all they knew, have been a member of the prison administration in plain clothes, and any statement 98

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Robben Island they made would be used against them, and they would subsequently be punished. The specific issue which was getting some attention outside, was a thoroughly unpleasant one, which as far as I remember involved the Kleinhans brothers who were reputedly among the most sadistic warders on the island. What they had done to a particular prisoner was [to] instruct him to dig a hole, a deep trench, and get down into the trench. Other prisoners were instructed to fill the trench until he was buried in the sand with only his head showing, and at that point, the warders instructed him to open his mouth, and they urinated in his face and mouth. This gave them great pleasure, great amusement. News of this episode was smuggled out. I was round about this time able to see Barney Zackon,5 a lawyer who came to the island to see me with regard to my appeal, and technically we were supposed to be in a place where we could not be overheard by warders, but Zackon, a member of the Liberal Party who was himself under considerable pressure from the police, was not very enthusiastic about receiving information from me about prison conditions, insisting that he had come entirely with regard to my case. The Red Cross visit was a failure, I think, because the kind of evidence which should have reached the Red Cross on the outside did not reach them through this visit. My own experience with the hospital beds is an example of this. After this, while I was working in the prison hospital at the sinktronk, I was summoned because I had made a complaint about the prisoner who had kicked me in the stomach. Very cleverly I was escorted from my cell in the hospital section to the complaint section by the very prisoner who had assaulted me, and he made it quite clear that if I testified against him, he would simply proceed to assault me afresh. I was thus in a position where, while I could testify to the assault, I was unable or unwilling to identify the prisoner who had committed the assault, and it was this same prisoner who escorted me back to my section. At any rate it was decided the following day to move me to a section near the old administration where I would be in solitary. The purpose for this was twofold: one, I would be unable to communicate with any other prisoner, so that if I laid a charge against the prisoner who had assaulted me, I would not be able to contact any other prisoners who could act as witnesses and confirm the assault. The second and more dangerous purpose was that in the isolated situation I was in, it would be possible for the same prisoner who had previously assaulted me to enter my cell and assault me with the connivance of the warders but without the knowledge or the awareness of any other prisoner who would not be able to see it happening. 5

Barney Zackon (1927-2009), South African lawyer who defended many antiapartheid activists until he was banned by the government in 1965. He left South Africa on an exit permit the following year, continuing his legal work in England.

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Robben Island I was kept in this area for some time, mainly with other prisoners who were being held on other charges; they were regarded as among the most vicious and were segregated at work as well in a barbed wire area where they sat with two-pound hammers breaking stones. It was known as the knife stabbers’ camp, for especially those prisoners who were guilty of assaults and stabbings on the island itself, and some of them were men with multiple murders, some committed outside prison, some of them inside prison. While we worked on the occasions we were able to talk, they would sometimes narrate the murders they had committed both inside and outside prison. They were a curious bunch, and I might some time talk about their psychology, and particularly their attitude towards me as a kind of simpleton who had gone to prison for a political offense, something wholly incomprehensible to them. It was a camp for sadistic prisoners and also sadistic warders. The Kleinhans brothers were there, and also a senior warder called van Greunen, who happened to be one of those who singled me out for particularly vicious treatment. Once I was brought out of the knife stabbers’ camp because of a brutal fight that had developed among them, in which they clubbed each other with hammers, or struck each other with spades and pick axes. I was brought out and taken to my cell because the warders were going to be entertained by allowing the knife stabbers to fight each other until they were literally senseless. I watched this from my window, but it was a kind of entertainment, bloody and almost animal, which the warders delighted in arranging. It was while I was in this solitary section of the old prison or outronk that the decision was made to send me to a hospital at a prison in Cape Town so that I could receive treatment for my stomach. On my return from Retreat, which is where this prison was, Tokay Prison, in a suburb of Cape Town, I found a number of new people there. I heard their voices rather than saw them. Two batches of people who had been awaiting trial had arrived on the island. One group from the Cape was led by Neville Alexander6 and was called the YCCC [Yu Chi Chan Club]; it was allegedly a Chinese-inspired group who had engaged in guerilla activity. It included not only Alexander but Don Davis,7 Fikile Bam,8 and others, and I will return to discuss them on another 6 Neville Edward Alexander (1936- ), South African scholar and political activist who, after the disbanding of the YCCC, founded the National Liberation Front. He was arrested in 1963, convicted of conspiracy to commit sabotage in 1964, and imprisoned on Robben Island from 1964 to 1974. 7 Don Davis, South African member of the Non-European Unity Movement and the Yu Chi Chan Club who also was imprisoned on Robben Island. 8 Fikile Bam (1937- ), South African member of the Non-European Unity Movement and the Yu Chi Chan Club who was arrested and detained after the Sharpeville and Langa massacres and was imprisoned on Robben Island between 1964 and 1975. After his release he earned a law degree and served in a variety of positions in government, industry, and education.

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Robben Island occasion. The other group included Nelson Mandela, who had been taken to Johannesburg for the conclusion of the Rivonia trial, and that Rivonia group included old friends of mine apart from Nelson. There was Walter Sisulu, with whom I had worked closely in Johannesburg with the National Action Committee Council, which was formed after the ANC was banned; also Govan Mbeki9 from my hometown, Port Elizabeth, with whom I had been associated for many years; Ahmed Kathrada10 from Johannesburg in whose apartment on Market Street I had stayed many times and with whom I had worked closely on various sports issues; Raymond Mhlaba11 from Port Elizabeth again; Andrew Mlangeni12 whom I had not met before; and the rest of the Rivonia party. Andrew Masondo was there already, and I was to meet him later when we were all put in the maximum security section which at this time was not complete; in fact, when I had been carrying stones on arrival at Robben Island, this was a part of the process of completion of the new maximum security section immediately behind the administration block. In June of 1964 I was taken off the island, accompanied by two other prisoners who required medical treatment as well. We were taken on the ferry to Cape Town and then to Caledon Square Prison and [afterwards] to the prison in Retreat. It was from Retreat that I traveled for several days to Victoria Hospital in Wynberg for treatment and where my brother contrived to see me illegally. My sister-in-law Martha, who also had come to visit me on the island, brought me a handsome cake which was eaten by the warders. I was not permitted to receive it because I was now a sentenced and convicted prisoner, rather than an awaiting-trial prisoner. After treatment in Wynberg I also requested and saw a priest while in Retreat Prison and had contemplated escape and had been dissuaded by him from undertaking it. Indeed, there was no reason why I should escape. I had only another year approximately to serve, except that even now there was no certainty that I would be permitted to leave prison after I had served my sentence. On return from the mainland, approximately on the 23rd of June (which, 9

Govan Archibald Mvulyewa Mbeki (1910-2001), South African politician, editor, and leader of the African National Congress who was imprisoned on Robben Island for twenty-four years. 10 Ahmed Kathrada (1929- ), South African accused in the Treason Trial and the Rivonia Trial and spent eighteen years in prison on Robben Island and another seven years in Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison near Cape Town before being released in 1989. 11 Raymond Mhlaba (1920-2005), South African anti-apartheid activist and one of the accused at the Rivonia Trial who served twenty-five years in prison, first on Robben Island, then at Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison near Cape Town before being released in 1989. 12 Andrew Mokete Mlangeni (1926- ), South African, member of the African National Congress who was sent for military training in China. On his return in 1963 he was arrested and imprisoned on Robben Island.

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Robben Island if it is the feast of St. John the Baptist, would be the right date), I was permitted a missal, the Roman missal of the Catholic Church. I returned first to the isolation section of the old tin “tronk” (prison), and then we were all marched down or brought down to the newly completed, much more sturdy stone building that had been built of gray flint stone found on the island. This was the new maximum security prison, consisting of eighty-eight single cells built in a square around a courtyard. In this courtyard, over which there was a parapet or bridge or catwalk patrolled by a guard with an automatic rifle at all times, we first worked clearing the ground and later worked breaking stones. For a brief time, when we were visited by a journalist from a British newspaper, we were given the job of mending torn prison clothes with needles and thread, and were duly photographed doing this; the picture appeared in the British press and has been printed widely elsewhere. After the photo was taken, the following day we returned to breaking stones. I spent thus most of the remainder of my time on Robben Island breaking stones. This was because I was held to be not strong enough and not well enough to undertake hard work. The other prisoners – Mandela, Sisulu, Mbeki, and the rest, and the Neville Alexander group – were sent off each day to work in a quarry, a limestone quarry, where they dug lime out of the earth, and returned at about four in the afternoon covered with dust, as I have described in one of my poems. I was left to break stones except for perhaps the last two weeks of my sentence, when I was given the much lighter chore of being a prison window cleaner. Perhaps this was part of the process of rehabilitation and preparing me for normal existence once again. This would be round about June of 1965, a year later, but the period of breaking stones was in fact a period of immense psychological action rather than external physical action, and I’ll have to discuss that. At no time was it absolutely certain that I would be released from prison. In fact, the contrary might have been more certain, to the extent that at the time that I was due to be released from prison, it was discovered that all my clothes – my shirt, my jacket, my trousers, my shoes – had been sold by a warder. This was fairly common practice in the case of people who were serving life sentences, so it must be assumed that at least one warder, and perhaps more, thought that I would never again need civilian clothes. By some curious twist or very complicated process, it was discovered that this warder was engaged in running a secondhand clothes business and was busy retailing clothes of the convicts. It was tied up with another equally complicated issue which I will try to unravel. Let me just talk about some of the external things before turning to the internal ones. While I was breaking stones, there was a pail in the middle of the area where we broke stones which one was required to use as a toilet. And one needed permission to approach the pail. The warders would conveniently be abstracted or concerned with other things whenever one needed to attract their attention to go to the pail. I remember on one occasion 102

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Robben Island my walking over to the pail without permission and therefore being threatened with punishment for disobedience. In addition, the warder, who carried a loaded automatic rifle, engaged me in a discussion in which he said that I ought not to complain about being in prison or the hardships of prison life for I had brought it upon myself. I had brought myself to prison; no one else had done it. I agreed with him and said, “Yes, I agree that it is for the prison system to imprison me for opposing them, that if I were free I would be working to imprison the Prime Minister, whom I regarded as a criminal,” and I mentioned his name: Dr. Verwoerd. The warder, of course, was outraged, and reported me for this insubordination, which was almost approaching heresy. It was proposed that I should be tried in the prison court for this offense. The punishment for it would be lashes. There were milder punishments: I could have been deprived of my food or put on spare diet, which would have meant drinking rice water three times a day for a period of six or twelve or eighteen days, but it was predicted that I would receive lashes. South Africa is one of the countries where corporal punishment is still inflicted as part of the law. The system is to strip a prisoner naked, and then strap him to a large metal triangle so that his hands are outstretched, and then to use bamboo canes, usually six feet in length, sometimes dipped in salt, I am told. The prisoner is literally assaulted with these, and the marks they inflict, and I have seen them, are marks you carry for life. What the rod does is literally to cut out a slice of flesh from the buttock, leaving an open wound which looks rather like a freshly bitten plum, a great red fleshy pulp wound. And six lashes would mean six of these gashes, and for days thereafter the prisoner is unable to either sit or lie on his back because of the injury. Well, faced with the prospect of lashes for having spoken disrespectfully about the Prime Minister, I demanded that I should be allowed legal defense and that a lawyer be brought to Cape Town to defend the case for me. Rather than get involved in this kind of legal hassle, which would involve exposing what the charge against me was, this particular charge was dropped. It was not the only time I got into trouble. While I was still in the old jail in solitary, I had been approached by a prisoner who undertook to smuggle letters out of the prison for me [by giving] them to a warder who would post them on the island or in Cape Town and to whom replies could be addressed. I could make appeals for money or anything else and they would be given to me, provided the warder got a slice. Well, I was a new prisoner and the notion attracted me, so I wrote a letter to John Harris – strange how our lives were linked – and asked him to send me some money, which duly arrived though I never saw it, but I did get a letter back from John, and our warder went off and bought for me sweets, and cans of beans – not a warder, a prisoner, but perhaps a warder originally bought it. For a day or two I lived high on the hog with perhaps one-tenth of the money that was sent to me. But the kind of sterile existence, the unappetizing and almost inedible food in prison, made this a very welcome relief, and I might well have done it more often except 103

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Robben Island that I was going through a kind of spiritual trauma, which needs some discussion. But the further complication was when I returned from the mainland and the prison there, where I had again been contemplating escape, I found a letter from John Harris waiting for me from the same prisoner who had acted as go-between before. It was mainly about sport, and it must have been written some time before because round about the time the letter reached me, the news also reached me that John Harris had been arrested for sabotage on the main railway station in Johannesburg and a bomb explosion had killed one woman and injured others. John Harris had been captured, been beaten up and tortured by the police, and was facing the death sentence. I then received a message from George Peake, my fellow prisoner in the maximum security section where we were all in single cells, warning me that the prisoner who was bringing me the letter was part of an elaborate trap – what in prison parlance is called a bomb. A bomb is an elaborate scheme by which either a prisoner or a warder is trapped in a conspiracy and got into serious trouble. So George alerted me that Garibaldi – as we called him in code because he was a prisoner who wore a red shirt – that Garibaldi was part of an elaborate trap to plant a bomb for me and that the letters were being transmitted for me as part of this process to trap me into something extremely dangerous, the outcome of which would be that I would get a further charge, a further sentence, of a number of years, insuring that I remained in prison. So that was part of the kind of uncertainty and anxiety I was living through in prison. I had one other: one day I was summoned to the office of the chief and he confronted me with a copy of Sirens Knuckles Boots. It was, I think, the first time I ever saw the book in print, and he asked me if I was the author and I confirmed this. He told me that I would formally be charged with the crime of publishing poetry, when this was a criminal act for me, and I was liable to a sentence of a further three years. This is part of this rather curious situation I was in because I cooperated with him in preparing the information about the book to establish my guilt. He insisted on knowing, and I found I could not tell him, the exact date on which the manuscript had been transmitted. I racked my brains – I tried desperately to remember the exact date so that it could be entered into the indictment so that I could be charged and convicted. I was going through a period of agonizing guilt and of agonizing attempts to be honest and truthful, and so I genuinely tried, but part of the process of agony was that my mind was becoming extremely unreliable and particularly my memory. I could remember things exactly but not remember the order in which they had happened. And so I was unable to supply the information, and the charge was eventually dropped. Looking back, I can see how the series of pressures working on me simultaneously – the possibility of my never ever getting out of prison, facing first one charge of insubordination, and then the knowledge of a plot against 104

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Robben Island me to ensnare me, and then of course I had clearly broken prison regulations at least in terms of smuggling letters out and receiving letters back – all this combined to create a state of tension, heightened by the kind of spiritual anxieties I was going through, which set up a wholly new phase of near insanity, and certainly of hallucinations ending in attempts at suicide, about which I will talk some other time. Let me just add two footnotes which fill out some of the external experience. It was in the section of the tin jail where I was in the temporary hospital with other prisoners lying on the floor that I first discovered the systematic use of sexual assault as a method employed by the warders in prison. The exchanges would go something like this: a warder would ask one of the lifers who was there, and who was known to have several mistresss or wives, as it was called, “How many political prisoners have you fucked today?” or “How many poqos have you fucked today?” Clearly there was a system by which prisoners were rewarded for sexual assaults on the political prisoners, and poqo was a term used for all political prisoners, regardless of whether they were ANC, PAC, YCCC, or as in my case, they belonged to no specific organization. The outcome of this I saw in at least one instance, and I have written about this, of a young boy, no more than a schoolboy, who was first starved into submission, and then in addition beaten to compel him to submit, beaten until he wept and cried, urinated and generally messed up his cell, but after this would continue to be starved to the point where he himself begged for sexual assault. This was the great achievement of the lifers: if they could reduce a prisoner to the point where he not merely submitted, but out of hunger and out of pain and the innumerable beatings he had had, actually begged for sexual assault. This was regarded as a great achievement. I heard innumerable tales of this, in addition to occasions when I witnessed beatings myself, or the systematic denial of food and exercise to a prisoner in order to starve him into submission. All this of course happening in the larger context of homosexual relations which were established anyway, independently of beatings or political implications. And one of the things I came to understand or began to understand in prison was the possibility of forming valid emotional relationships. I am not sure that I thought it through in prison. I was merely beginning to question my own hostility to the notion, the sense of the unnaturalness of it. And by the time I left prison homosexuality was still offensive to me, both morally, for everybody, and specifically for myself. But even this generated tensions of a curious kind, which I will discuss. Two footnotes, which I suppose need to be added, are (1) that I was never sexually assaulted myself, and (2) that there were numerous occasions when this was threatened, particularly when I was in solitary, and particularly and most graphically round about December of 1964 when I was removed to a more distant section of the maximum security prison and threatened with this kind of experience by prisoners who were doing life. One specific 105

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Robben Island occasion when the other prisoners expressed a particular sexual interest me was when I reported to the hospital in the tin jail after I had been assaulted on the beach in the quarry and I was complaining and requesting treatment. I had, as I say, been beaten continuously, and my back, the entire back from my nape down to my ankles, was a mass of bruises. These turned purple and green and became quite a spectacle, so that in the section where I was kept with the other prisoners, warders would come over and request me to strip in order that they could see these bruises, which formed just a continuous pattern, like a carpet, over my body. I became something of a spectacle, almost like a tattooed lady in the circus. Standing in line at the hospital, where allegedly I was going to be attended to and where I was eventually put for treatment, and given suppositories (they suggested I was simply constipated when I was complaining of these stomach pains), standing naked in the line there awaiting treatment with the other prisoners, there were prisoners who expressed a sexual interest in me and threatened to deal with me at some future date, but nothing came of this. In the maximum security section I was kept at various times in three different cells: first in one near the entrance, later in one lower down the corridor on the same side, later to one on the opposite side of the corridor, slightly further up, and eventually to this remote one on the other side of the quadrangle, where I remained, as far as I remember, most of my time. I also had a brief interlude in a cell in the far side of the quadrangle, shall we say side two as opposed to the further side, which is side three; side four was the entrance side and the side on which the catwalk was built. From the window in my cell where I first arrived I had the fortune, if I stood on my lavatory pail and rolled up my blanket and put that on top of the lavatory pail and then stood on the blanket, delicately balancing on the rim of the pail, I had the fortune to reach up and look through a window high up in the wall of my cell, and from the window I could see the sea and a few fir trees, green and black, but of course I wasn’t in my cell all that much. I was out breaking stones. And if I was in the cell, it was an offense for me to look through the window, so if I was caught by the warder passing along in a corridor, I would be punished for looking through the window. But the sight of the sea gave me pleasure on the rare occasions I was able to see it. There was a road that wound down, one running from the administration block and security section down to the jetty, another one which wound by, going to the part of the island where the warders lived and they had their school and cinema and gymnasium, and sometimes one even saw civilians, men and women, walking by there. I never did see the stars, though I made the attempt once when I was in side two of the maximum security and directly opposite the catwalk where the warder patrolled all night with his automatic rifle. Roughly on the corner where side one and two joined there was a machine gun post and a lookout on wooden stilts raised above the ground. And I remember another one near 106

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Robben Island the section where I originally was put, as well as one near the prison yard at the kitchen where we were issued our food. I was visited in prison. At first it was ruled that as a D category prisoner I was allowed a visit once every six months and a letter once every six months. I disputed my classification because I carried a white card and I had a sentence of under three years, and eventually the rules were re-jigged in my favor so that I was visited at various times on the island. Once by Martha, my sisterin-law. When she came again a second time I was going through my traumatic period; it was round about the first of November, and I refused to see her. And at least once [I was visited] by May who came to the island bringing with her Gregory who then was still a baby in arms, and we were able to communicate through a fence with two sets of fences separating us, and the warders of course in attendance, and all the prisoners on the one side of the fence shouting simultaneously to their relatives on the other side of the fence, who were also shouting simultaneously. It was a kind of bedlam and not very much conversation took place. At first in the maximum security section we were not allowed to work or to go out at all, until there were protests from people like Nelson and Walter, and they then agreed to allow us to exercise once a day for half an hour. We walked in a circle and were not allowed to talk, rather like the images one sees of prison yards in an American prison. At first there were no showers and washrooms in the maximum security section because the water was not working. Eventually there was a section at the far end where corner three intersected with corner four where there were showers and washbasins. But for the start we were made to strip in the maximum security section and then run all the way over to the old tin jail and shower there, either under extremely powerful jets of water, almost like fire hoses, or else the water would be turned off abruptly while we were in the process of a shower. I think it was there that for the first time, going over to the shower, I was able to talk to Nelson and Walter and Kathy and Raymond and Colin and Andrew and Elias Matsoaledi,13 the other member of the Rivonia group. And I remember with much pleasure that Walter Sisulu’s greeting to me was by the code name that I had used when working for the National Action Council, a name which he and perhaps one other person knew (she is now in Britain) – a name which the secret police tried a great deal to discover whom it belonged to. Walter’s answer, as Ruth’s had been, was that the man the name belonged to had already escaped from the country and there was no point in trying to find out who he was. But I take pleasure in the extremely effective concealment of my 13

Elias Matsoaledi (1924-1994), South African trade unionist who played an active role in the establishment of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). Banned in 1952 and imprisoned during the 1960 State of Emergency, he went underground upon release and worked for Umkhonto we Sizwe. He served twenty-six years on Robben Island.

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Robben Island alias, something I did much more skillfully than people in more responsible positions who failed to conceal their identities. In the maximum security section with its eighty-eight single cells, as far as I remember, we were mostly political prisoners. Occasionally a criminal prisoner would be brought in because he was going to be given some extra punishment, and a few of them were kept there in order to bring us our food while we were in our cells, and also to act as informers and spies. And of these I will mention a couple, because they are the people who were involved in my own various complications in prison. Let me say that on the whole one of the things I learned from the non-political prisoners was their wonderful matter-of-factness, their understanding of the nature of the South African system as an oppressive system, and their rather contemptuous attitude towards us, particularly those of us who thought of change by non-violent methods. And of course the folly of going to prison for an ideal rather than for a bank robbery was something that caused them endless amusement. But I learned for myself to work out how much those who were criminals by the violations of the criminal code were themselves very often the victims of injustice in another form, that the racism and oppression which we challenged and which denied us our human freedom was in other ways operating to destroy their human dignity and their freedom. They were outlaws and proud of it; they stood outside the law, and they had very few illusions about the justice of the system under which they lived. They spoke frequently about their exploits outside, many of them perhaps boasting, and they were extremely curious to know what the politicians would do about them when they came to power, and the notion that they would be excluded from justice when we took over was one that appalled them. It antagonized them, of course, because they saw no reason why they should support us when we were liable to imprison them as well. And that may simply be because they had a better understanding of the conditions which produced their predicament than we had. This raises an interesting idea: I believe that if the liberation movement came out with a clear statement on this issue, it would be able to enlist a far greater measure of support from a section of the South African public which does not now support us. They include the criminals, the tsotsis, the riff-raff, the people compelled to live outside the law because no opportunity exists for them inside the law, or simply because they have lost their documents and there is no way of reestablishing their identity. An announcement directed at the reexamination of the South African legal system so that fewer people will be made criminals by the system, apart from those who become criminals by challenging the section of the law dealing with political activity and racial justice, but simply in terms of the economic relations, [the] opportunity [and] the right to function in a society and work within it and live comfortably within it – I think such a challenge and statements along these lines would elicit a great deal of support from a very large and significant section of the 108

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Robben Island South African population. It is not enough for us to think of our reforms simply in terms of legislation which affects racism, equal opportunity, the right to vote, and the right to form trade unions and things like that, some of which is necessary and some of it merely reformist. But to attack, to go to the heart of the South African system and define the degree to which the system creates criminals, and to make the statements indicating that we will reject and overthrow that system so that the present conditions will no longer obtain, I think through that, one could make not only an important contribution to the transformation of the society and declaration of one’s objectives, but one would elicit an extremely significant measure of support of the kind that we need very badly. And this is also the lesson of the Algerian revolution but which at this time we simply do not have. This issue, I believe, deserves a special comment, in an area not related to the biographical material, and a memorandum perhaps addressed to the ANC, with a copy to Albie Sachs,14 who I think would be responsive to this notion as a result of his study on justice in South Africa. 14

Albie Sachs (1935- ), South African lawyer and civil rights activist who in 1963 was arrested and detained in solitary confinement for nearly half a year. He left South Africa on an exit permit in 1966, living in England and later in Mozambique where he was severely wounded by a car bomb in 1988. In 1990 he returned to South Africa, helped to draft its new Constitution, and in 1994 was appointed to the Constitutional Court. He has written several books about his life and the legal system in South Africa.

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Interlude [Tape recorded on 18 September 1974.] Fell Street on a Sunday evening somewhere towards the end of 1965. It is Sunday evening. I sit in the kitchen at my home in [Port Elizabeth]. I am recently out of prison. The house still seems strange to me: the kitchen crowded and uncomfortable with nothing visually pleasing, much of it grimy. The furniture too large and projecting awkward corners and edges that make me uncomfortable. Down the passage in the front room the radio is playing. I sit gloomily at a table, my mind taut and prickly with a sense of confinement. A long weekend of house arrest, with only the short morning break I have taken, presses in on me with the knowledge that it is illegal for me to go out by the back door into the small concrete yard or onto the stoop by the front door. All this makes me irritable, the kind of brooding, pent-up anger. The children are playing somewhere, perhaps in the yard, perhaps out in the street in front of the house. They too are not allowed to have visitors because I am under house arrest, so that they may go to their friends but they may not be visited by their friends. There is a knock at the front door and May goes down the passage to let someone in. They come a short way down the passage, and she ushers someone into the front room and then comes to tell me in an urgent whisper it’s a Special Branch. “Vladimir,” she says, the code name we use for any member of the Special Branch since Vladimir is the chief of the local secret police. I go slowly up the passage to the front room with mixed feelings, anger and hostility that a member of the Special Branch should be in my home. I prefer to meet them at the front door and keep them there and not admit them into the house. I resented their intrusion on my home and on my privacy. But also some apprehension. There was no knowing what new contravention of my banning orders I might have committed unwittingly. There was no knowing what they might have discovered of my illegal activities in the past. There was no way of knowing what new restraints they might have thought up to impose on me. They were quite ingenious in increasing their 110

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Interlude restraints and the irritations they could impose. I cautioned myself that I must keep my temper and not say too much that is offensive. They have ways of retaliating by introducing new restrictions, new irritants. “Nant,” I say, and “Nant,” he says. He goes on, making conversation affably in Afrikaans. I say bluntly, “What is the matter and why do you want to see me?” I am insisting that he state his business immediately. He continues to try to disarm me with politeness, and when it does not work, he begins to clumsily indicate that I have done something wrong. He says, “You went to church this morning.” “Yah,” I say. “It is against the law. You have contravened your banning order.” I am irritated. I say, “What, is it against the law to go to church? Is that what the Suppression of Communism Act is about? It would be interesting to see if the law could prove that I was furthering the aims of Communism by going to church.” I go on angrily until he breaks in to say harshly, “I don’t make the law. My job is to carry out the law, and you have broken the law.” I go on a little more mildly. “Well, I think the government would look very foolish if they arrested me for going to church and charged me with furthering the aims of Communism, and if they wish to punish me for going to church, then I will be prepared to go to prison, but I think it would do the government more harm then it would do to me.” “That’s not my business,” he says. “My job is to see that you carry out the law.” We argue. I contend that a man must follow his conscience, that the government is supposed to be interested in upholding justice, and justice does not include punishing a man for following his conscience. This goes on for some time and we wrangle. But as we argue, I remember the warnings I have received from others who have been interrogated by this man whose name I knew then but have since forgotten. Others who had been questioned by him had contrived to let me know in the first days after my release from prison that he was one of the most dangerous, most vicious, of the local secret police; that he was a man who could invent or devise additional punishments or contrive to place one in extremely difficult situations with the police if he was irritated in some way. I begin to soften my comments, and it tapers off with a comment from me that I will consult the local police, but that I did not think I had done anything wrong and that I was prepared to continue going to church on Sunday as my religion required. Abruptly he changes the subject. “But that was not what I wanted to talk to you about.” “Yes?” I say interestedly. He begins to fumble. “We know that you are intelligent. We know that you were a teacher. We know that there are a lot of your people who respect you.” 111

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Interlude I am curious and listen and make noises encouraging him to go on. He takes a deep breath and begins what may have been a prepared speech. “A man like you could be a leader of your people. You are educated and many of them are illiterate or have very little education. You are a teacher and many of them are just workers. Many of them listen to you. Now,” he says, “if you could work for your people, if you could, instead of fighting the government, get your people to work with the government, if you agreed to cooperate, there would be many advantages for your people, and you would be able to serve your people. You could be helping the government to carry out its policy of advancing the Coloured people.” “Are you offering me a job?” I interrupt him. “Well, not exactly,” he says. “I am really just trying to find out how you feel, but surely you must see it would be in your own interest if you had a good job and at the same time you could be helping your people and helping in their advancement.” I feel suddenly cold and stand up. I say to him firmly, “I think you had better leave.” He mumbles awkwardly and speaks of just exchanging ideas. I repeat coldly, moving towards the door myself, “I think you had better go. This is not something we can talk about.” He continues to mumble, apologetically I think, as he gets up and moves towards the door himself. It is clear that he understands that this is not a subject we can discuss. I go the short way down the passage and he follows me. I hold open the door. He leaves. “Nant,” he says, with false cheeriness as he goes. I close the door without a word and walk down the passage to the kitchen and sit down as I sat before, fuming. Subsequently, through May, I got the parish priest to visit me, although this was a contravention of my banning order without having previously had permission from the magistrate. The priest stands at the door reluctant to come in, but I invite him in – another contravention of the banning order – and we sit down. I tell him briefly of the visit by the secret police. I tell him of my sense of obligation to attend Mass on Sunday, and I ask for his advice and support. He is friendly and sympathetic but embarrassed. He is reluctant to commit himself to any statement which would imply approval of my breaking my banning order. He is perhaps thinking of having to go to court and explain himself and face the possibility of prison. The Catholic Church, like the other churches in South Africa, is not anxious to come in conflict with the apartheid system and the government. Eventually he says, “I will arrange for you to have an interview with Bishop Green.1 It is not in my power to make this decision. I can understand how you feel, but I cannot give you advice. You had better see Bishop Green.” Sometime later I see Bishop Green, a good, simple man whose elevation 1

Ernest Arthur Green (1915-1988), Bishop of Port Elizabeth for thirty-two years.

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Interlude to the bishopric, the episcopacy, had surprised those of the more intelligent priests and whose appointment was a surprise to those of us who tried to forecast who of the senior priests would succeed him. He is a man with a record of service in the locations and the reputation for compassion for blacks. But he is cautious when I see him, perhaps because I had previously embarrassed the church establishment in the Eastern Cape by trying to get two of my children enrolled in a white Catholic school. Naturally this had been opposed and the children had not been able to attend the white school, but the principal of the school had had the grace at least to be embarrassed. In a sense my action had been no more than a probe of the willingness of the church to stand up against the apartheid educational system. I was not surprised when it failed. Now Bishop Green tossed the question back into my own lap. He explained that it was a matter of my own conscience, that he could not give me advice to defy the law of the country, that if I chose to go to church I should do so, that if I was prepared to face the consequences, that was for me to decide, but that he was not free to instruct me to defy the state. The interview ended on a note less than cordial, but at least I was not discourteous. After that, for as long as I chose, I went to church on Sunday in contravention of my house arrest order which confined me to my home for the weekends and in contravention of the banning order which forbade me to be present at any gathering, [any] social gathering, which included church attendance, but I was not in fact arrested for it. The state decided, wisely perhaps, that they did not want to be involved in the unpleasant publicity which would follow if I was arrested under the Suppression of Communism Act for attending Sunday Mass. I seem to remember that thereafter I was again visited by the secret police, who advised me that I had best seek magisterial permission to attend church, and I did so at some point and saw the Chief Magistrate, Mr. [R.C.] Stewart, and told him that I understood that I needed his permission to go to church, that I had been going, that for me it was a matter of conscience, that I proposed to continue going to church, and that I believed I needed his permission to do so. He was courteous but firm and said that it required in fact permission from the Minister of Justice in Pretoria, but that he could not give the permission and that I ought not to go to church until I received it. It becomes vaguer after that. I don’t quite remember how it all worked out. I certainly cannot remember getting a letter from the Minister of Justice giving me permission to go to church. I may have stayed away from church for a time awaiting such a letter and then resumed church again. What is certain is that I did not get arrested for going to church. Some time after this, however, May was called in by the Chief Magistrate – this is a fairly routine procedure – and advised that she ought to desist her activities or she would be liable to a banning order. She inquired what activities of hers were offensive to the State, and the Magistrate replied that it was not 113

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Interlude his duty to tell her, that she should know this herself. She left on that note, and proceeded to do, or continue to do, whatever it was she had done which had incurred their displeasure, but she was not banned. This represents just a segment of my experience. Some interpolations and corrections. The house to me was only half familiar. I sat at the table glumly. The front room doubled as a bedroom at night. There was a couch crowding the room which the children used as a bed to sleep on. The room was fairly crowded by the large radiogram, one of my few indulgences to satisfy my interest in music, both classical and jazz, and on the wall was a watercolor by Cézanne2 which was a large one and one of my special private joys or affectations. The Special Branch man was familiar to me because he had been assigned to me for surveillance. He may well have been one of those who met me on the day of my release from Red Hell, the local prison. He had also occasionally sat in a car outside the house, a small Volkswagen, with the double purpose of intimidating me and intimidating friends who might be tempted to visit. He also visited the house fairly frequently, making random visits at odd moments during the day or night, when I was supposed to be under house arrest, to insure that I was there. Sometimes, in fact, I was not there, but May would answer the door and say that I was in the toilet or bathroom. I, in the meantime, would have got out of the house through the bathroom window and sneaked down the lane beside the house to meet someone, generally for some political activity. I had learned of his viciousness through friends who had been interrogated by him and who had contrived to get a message to me through May. He was also, as far as I remember, the Special Branch man who interrogated May after my disappearance from Johannesburg when I had escaped to Swaziland, had periodically visited her while I was away and while I was in prison, and was probably the man who had announced to her my arrival back in Port Elizabeth after release and being brought up from Robben Island to Red Hell. When he told me that I had been to church in the morning, he said it triumphantly as evidence of his vigilance and to indicate that the secret police were always aware of my whereabouts. I was unimpressed. And when he talked of me as being intelligent, I do not think I was flattered. I both suspected his motives and had such a low opinion of him that it did not matter. He spoke of others who had agreed to serve the government. He mentioned [George] Golding3 and [Richard] van der Ross,4 and I had interrupted to say I despise them. They betray the people. 2

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), French post-impressionist painter. George John Golding (1906- late 1960s), Chairman of the Coloured Advisory Council and longtime President of the Coloured People’s National Union. 4 Richard Ernest van der Ross (1921- ), Coloured South African educator, editor, journalist, and historian who served as Principal of the Battswood Training College for Teachers and from 1975 to 1986 as Rector of the University of the Western Cape. 3

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Interlude Supplementary note on Bishop Green. He had spent most of his life as a humble priest working in an institution for the deaf and dumb at a place called Witteboem in the Cape and had achieved some local fame by appearing in court when a deaf and dumb African was being charged with a crime and acting as an interpreter in sign language for the accused. I don’t remember the outcome of the case, but for a white man to have agreed to perform this service or volunteer to do so was itself sufficiently unusual to attract our attention. I round off this segment by some references to the Special Branch, as we call the secret police in South Africa. I have written in two places about my experiences with them. The one, a lively account of a visit by the Special Branch when my house was being searched for explosives, appeared in Contact in Cape Town possibly round about 1961 or 1962. And then for a Christmas number of Fighting Talk I remember doing a piece called “Sport, a Threat to the Security of the State,” which evoked some favorable comment. These two should be taken up together with this encounter with the Special Branch. Somewhere I must have recorded the story of the time I was raided and the book of Yeats’s poetry I was reading at the time was dismissed as “resitasies,” an Afrikaans word which might be translated as nursery rhymes or something like that. There was always, of course, a sense of menace in one’s relationship with the secret police, and mine were quite numerous. One knew their capacity to jail people arbitrarily. There were many reports of their cruelty and torture interrogating people, and each year the reports became uglier. And in my case, since I was in fact engaged in a number of activities all of which could be described as either illegal or subversive – these ranged from challenging apartheid in sport to apartheid in education, apartheid in housing, in addition to the work I was doing privately with the ANC, though I was not a member, and to some extent with CPC, the Coloured People’s Congress, with which I was loosely and I think never officially associated, not in an official capacity – all these [activities] meant that I was liable to arrest for things I was doing which the Special Branch suspected I was doing and they could arrest me either on evidence of these activities or merely suspicion of these activities. In 1961 I suppose I was most overtly politically active in working for the Coloured National Convention. This was a Convention which was eventually held in the wheat fields of Malmesbury and which I regard as one of the most useful political activities I was ever involved in. (I wrote a short article on the Malmesbury meeting for Fighting Talk shortly afterwards.) I was banned immediately after the Convention was held in October of 1961. But in addition to working openly for the Convention, and this is a story which needs to be told, I was secretly working with the ANC, which had already been banned, in setting up and developing this initiative in the Coloured section of the oppressed. For a very short while Nelson Mandela was in hiding in our home. He was already then being referred to as the Black 115

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Interlude Pimpernel and was being sought high and low in the country by the secret police. And after my association with him (I had met him years before in Johannesburg during the treason trial), I was associated with his number two man, Walter Sisulu, who was carrying on Nelson’s work in both developing the African Convention which was held in Maritzburg and the Coloured National Convention. Among other things I took Walter, when he came to Port Elizabeth, to meet the oldest, most respected leader of the Coloured community, a Mr. Erasmus, whom we all called affectionately Oomkrag. So there were always things. And I was writing for Fighting Talk and New Age, cooperating with the ANC branch in [one community], later running it, virtually, with two others during a state of emergency. [This] meant that when one met the Special Branch, one was filled not only with a kind of hostility which inevitably one felt, but also some anxiety and uncertainty because there was no way of knowing how much they knew about what I was doing. In addition, my clandestine affairs were not only political, and I learnt from the best possible source that the secret police were also aware of my extrapolitical affairs which, since they involved crossing the color and racial barrier, were illegal and could have led to my imprisonment and disgrace and the destruction of my standing, I think, with many people in the community. Looking back, I am struck by how I was forced to steer an extremely difficult course. While I was being politically active, and this was fairly widely known, I also had a responsible position in sport as Secretary of the South African Sports Association [SASA], with a membership which eventually reached about fifty thousand black sportsmen, non-white sportsmen, all over the country. I had to persuade them that the course I was taking was one which would not involve them in a collision with the law. Most of the sportsmen were workers, many of them working in the factories of Port Elizabeth and elsewhere. Many of them were not highly educated, and they were dependent on me and the other officials for the charting of the policy which was to be followed in trying to get international recognition for the non-racial sporting bodies. They were, of course, aware, many of them, of the fact that while I was pursuing a diplomatic and rather nervous course in the area of sport, I was much more openly in conflict with the system in other areas (housing, education), and I am amazed that they trusted me sufficiently to allow me to go on setting the pace in the sports fight, when they knew that many of my activities outside the sports area were much more political and much more dangerous. I think one must assume, whatever their nervousness, that some of them cared sufficiently not only in the area of sport but in the area of justice and human rights not to oppose me. One cynical view, perhaps, would be to say that they allowed me to go ahead while they watched because they assumed that if in fact the secret police and the government were to act, they would act against me rather than against the body of members in the organization. At any rate, this is what did happen, 116

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Interlude and not many of the sports officials were penalized by legal action. George Singh5 was one to be banned fairly early, and he too had had both political and sporting connections. I was the next. And thereafter it was some years before the Special Branch increased its pressure on sportsmen to the extent of banning orders, but there was a consistent policy of intimidation of sportsmen, right, in fact, from the day when SASA was formed in East London in 1958, but this should be detailed in the separate segment dealing with the fight against racism in sport. Future projects should include a discussion of the South African writers I knew or know, including [Arthur] Nortje, [Nat] Nakasa,6 [Nadine] Gordimer, [Stanlake] Samkange,7 [Can] Themba,8 [Alfred] Hutchinson, [Athol] Fugard,9 and several others. [Es’kia] Mphahlele I only met outside South Africa. 5

George Singh (1930-1984), South African lawyer and general secretary of the South African Indian Football Association who founded the nonracial South African Soccer Federation. 6 Nathaniel Ndazana Nakasa (1937-1965), South African journalist and short story writer who left South Africa on an exit permit in 1964 to take up a Niemann Fellowship in journalism at Harvard University and committed suicide in New York City a year later. 7 Stanlake John William Thompson Samkange (1922-1988), Zimbabwean nationalist, novelist, historiographer, journalist, and educator who taught African history at various universities in the United States. 8 Daniel Canodoise Themba (1924-1968), South African short story writer and investigative journalist for Drum magazine who moved to Swaziland where he worked as a teacher. 9 Athol Fugard (1932-), South African playwright, novelist, actor, and director.

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Notes on my Activities [Tape recorded on 13 October 1974.]

Travel problems I have been asked to come and talk about my poetry at Stirling University [in Scotland], but I probably will not be able to go. I have also been invited to York University in Canada where an organization is being formed of South African expatriates. It might be useful at this point to say something about why I will not be able to go to Canada or to Scotland, or for that matter to Kinshasa where I had hoped to be at the Muhammad Ali – Foreman fight to which I have been invited by the promoter, Don King, for whom I acted as consultant and on whose behalf I went to Kinshasa in July after I had attended the Pan-African Congress in Dar es Salaam. The heart of the problem, and I shall not attempt to discuss it in detail here, is that I am no longer allowed a visa in the United States, that my current visa expired in August [1964], but Northwestern University is currently at least making half an effort to get me an extension of that visa or a transfer to an H-visa, which is the one granted to distinguished visitors. But as a consequence of my present predicament it is impossible for me to both leave the United States and return: that if I was to leave, I would not be granted a visa for re-entry. And so until such time as my visa status is clarified definitively in the United States one way or the other, either by an extension of permission to stay here or a flat refusal amounting to prohibition and possible deportation, I am stuck in the States.

Opposition to racism & apartheid Racism in Britain is in essence no different from racism in South Africa. [Arthur] Nortje said it is the anonymous men of the world who plot the racist situation in South Africa. Racism in the United States is no different in essence from racism in South Africa; [this is evident in] the revelation of the Kissinger and Nixon tilt in support of the white supremacists in South Africa, which has come out in the past week – a tilt which I discerned long ago, and which 118

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Notes on my Activities I commented on in a radio debate with a spokesman from the Africa desk in the State Department, a man called Newsom1 who is now shown to be a liar because the things he said in denying my charges have now been established. All the things he denied are now proved by this kind of revelation by Jack Anderson,2 Ted Silk, and others. One is living a kind of South African situation in Britain. Certainly I was engaged in opposition to racism in Britain, both in relation to the British society and its racism towards Indians, Pakistanis, Africans. I was arrested at Wimbledon, not because I was protesting against South African racism, but against British collaboration with South African racism. Here in America I work with organizations challenging racism in the American society as well as working with others whose concern is with racism in Southern Africa. So the quality of my context, my milieu, has not changed, but the focus must change depending on which country I am in. So on purely political grounds I am torn between attention to South Africa and attention wherever I am. But there are emotional conflicts too. In addition, one of the curious consequences of the success of FRELIMO in Mozambique, the success of PAIGC in Guinea-Bissau, the promise of success in Angola – all this kind of success of the liberation struggles, instead of making me optimistic, has made me far more pessimistic and indeed glum and somber. I note with concern the failure of the South African liberation movement to exploit this significant upsurge of African strength elsewhere, a moment which is literally a watershed in the history of colonialism in Southern Africa. Their incapacity, their inability, their failure, their unwillingness, whatever it might be, to develop the kind of thrust which, it seems to me, this is the right time for – this is what gives me not only profound pessimism in terms of the struggle, but a much more profound pessimism in terms of my possible role in serving the struggle. In a month’s time I shall turn fifty, and one of the things I will be doing before then is making my will, in anticipation that there is not much more left of my life, and not much more left that I can do. And as a correlate to this has come a sense, a reluctant and grudging sense, that I will not be able to make a significant contribution to the liberation struggle of my country. I have at various times offered whatever skills and services I have to people. It is a promise I made to Nelson Mandela in prison on Robben Island. It is an offer I have made to the ANC and to Oliver Tambo3 since coming out of 1 Eric David Newsom, U.S. Foreign Service Officer on the staff of the Office of the Secretary of State. 2 Jack Northman Anderson (1922-2005), a muckraking investigative journalist and winner of the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting whose exposés of the tactics of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and the Nixon administration led to a White House plot to assassinate him. 3 Oliver Reginald Tambo (1917-1993), South African anti-apartheid activist who became a leading figure in the African National Congress, serving as its President

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Notes on my Activities South Africa, and one of the things which I suppose one might regard as progress is my participation in the Pan-African Congress in Dar es Salaam as an official member of the ANC delegation there. But on the whole I cannot see myself playing a significant role because I cannot see the movement developing a significant thrust in the near future. The implication of this seems to me not only that there is no prospect of usefulness for me but there is no prospect for much of a useful life for me in the future, certainly not in relation to South Africa. So I must ask myself whether there are other things I can be useful in, and I find none that I particularly desire to be useful in. It does not mean complete abstention or withdrawal or total idleness. I’ll go on doing whatever useful things I can when I am asked to do them or whatever I see that needs to be done. But it seems to me the thrust, the drive, the sense of constructive direction, of rebuilding with a purpose, is not there. For me there can be no apex to the struggle. If freedom comes to the people of South Africa, as I do not doubt it will come, it does not seem to me it will come in my lifetime, nor that I can make any more significant contribution than I have in the past, a kind of helpful propagandistic role, an occasional financial contribution, an effort at planning, making suggestions, speaking. I’ll go on doing these things, perhaps with somewhat less energy than in the past. Beyond that, nothing much. If I were to choose something that has reinforced this impression and perhaps clinched it in a sense, it would be meeting with the ANC people in Kurasini, going out to the camp outside Dar es Salaam, discussions with Thami [Mhlambiso]4 in New York, and people in London – a sense of dividedness, of a lack of direction. I would say if I were given some kind of a challenge to what I have suggested on what should be done to strengthen the thrust, I would certainly say that I believe there is great potential for assistance from China, but this was not being accepted for ideological reasons which I thought were mistaken, and that failing that kind of accumulation or accretion of greater strength, greater thrust, I do not see any prospects in the immediate future for any serious challenge to apartheid, racism, domestic colonialism, in South Africa. There is certainly far more thrust, far more hope within the country notwithstanding the extreme repressive measures of the apartheid system. The contradictions are heightened, [and there is] a great deal of tension, a great deal of articulate and very sophisticated opposition to apartheid coming from the students, through the spokesmen of SASO [South African Students’ Organization] and others. The prospect of the Transkei and Namibia being granted independence, which has been mooted this week, suggests a whole 3 (cont.) while living in exile in London and as its National Chairperson upon returning to South Africa in 1991. 4 Thami Mhlambiso, Representative of the African National Congress to the United Nations from 1972.

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Notes on my Activities series of internal tensions challenging the system. Externally I do not see anything of that kind.

Work in sport I suppose I ought to refer in passing to my work in sport, which has probably been one of the most useful areas for me and one that gives me great satisfaction. Since October 1958, when SASA [South African Sports Association] was formed at the Milner Hotel in East London, all the way to 1974, we have had a pretty steady stream of successes, some of them quite important. In the exclusion of South Africa from international sport – Tokyo in 1964, Mexico in 1968, Munich in 1972, Amsterdam and the expulsion of South Africa in 1970 from the Olympic Movement, Warsaw in 1969, South Africa’s expulsion from world weightlifting and from world athletics, the pressure being applied on South Africa in Davis Cup tennis – all these help, but there are still too many defeats along the way, defeats which were, I fear, the result of our own lack of commitment, [with] people whose services were voluntary and therefore were not bound to perform anything but what they chose to perform. And so we have let some victories slip out of our grasp. If I were to judge the work in sport and my own role in it, I would say that certainly my coming to the United States was a mistake. I don’t exaggerate the importance of my role in London, but SAN-ROC [South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee] since I left there has certainly slowed down the tempo of its work. It has done things, but generally too little and too late. I cannot be persuaded that the campaign to stop the British Lions going to South Africa this year was conducted with anything like the seriousness, the vigor, the intensity that it might have been. The current debate about Davis Cup tennis seems to me to have lacked the injection of an element which would have toughened the Indian stand in their refusal to play South Africa, a stand which would have been reinforced by other countries. Currently I am working with the problem of probable Indian penalization. The Indians are likely to be penalized by the Davis Cup nations for their refusal to play South Africa, and unless there is a coordinated protest and an indication by other countries that they themselves will withdraw from the Davis Cup competition if India is penalized for taking a stand on principle against racism, unless we can get such a stand, we will have suffered one more defeat and the Indians will have been forced to suffer unjustly. And it is on this matter that I propose to go to New York at the end of this week, to try to do some work at the UN, though my enthusiasm for journeying to New York and sweating through the corridors of the UN and elsewhere diminishes, and I am not as sure as I would like to be that my expenses will be refunded by SAN-ROC. The other troubling issue is the projected tour of France in November of this year by the Springbok rugby team. I have had a phone call from Chris [de Broglio] in the past week and have in turn telephoned Thami [Mhlambiso] of the ANC in New York, asking him to go to work on the UN [representatives], 121

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Notes on my Activities particularly through [A.D.] Ouattara,5 the ambassador of the OAU [Organization of African Unity] in New York, and hopefully something will be done. I want to send off a few cables, but it may well be that I will have to go to New York at the weekend to try and kick some action on both tennis and rugby. But it will be with a considerable lack of enthusiasm. I like travel less, and though New York has its attractions which compensate for the slog of having to get there and sweat out the round of interviews and phone calls, on the whole I would be happier if I did not need to do it. But I guess I might as well say that the sports thing has been one of my most useful contributions in the struggle against racism in South Africa, and I think this is a success which is acknowledged by most people. Regrettably, some members of the ANC, particularly those around the London office, seem reluctant to give me credit for my role. I should imagine that the AntiApartheid Movement in Britain prefers to think of itself in many instances as the prime mover, and either to ignore or play down my own role. Notwithstanding this, I think the facts will show that this has been an area in which my input has been important, and that the consequences of my action were important in eroding the walls of apartheid in South Africa, in a way which is hardly paralleled in any other area of the society.

Scholarly work But perhaps it is about the literary side that I should be talking on this tape. I have always felt extremely uncomfortable and unhappy about my inadequacies and my incompetence as a scholar, and one of the resolutions I formed in coming to Austin, or at least I hope I cherished, was that here I would get down to more critical writing, especially the Nortje study which seems to me to be required, though I am delighted to know that Guy Butler’s [compilation in] Lonely Against the Light 6 has come out, with my assistance, though he has not had the courtesy to send me a copy of it. I have since written for one but still have had no reply from him. I am also pleased to know that Raymond Leitch in Toronto is about to begin work on his M.A. thesis on Nortje’s work, and I am pleased that I wrote a letter in support of his wish to do such a study, and no doubt he will do a good one. But that does not exonerate me from the obligation of doing my bit to get Nortje’s work more widely known and more widely appreciated. I had hoped to do some reviewing and some prose criticism and magazine articles, however superficial. I still rely too heavily on taped reproductions of talks given, which, as talks will always be, are superficial. They aren’t prepared papers. But perhaps the 5

Alassane Dramane Ouattara (1942- ), Ivoirian politician who later became Prime Minister of the Ivory Coast from 1990 to 1993. 6 Frederick Guy Butler (1918-2001), South African poet, playwright, and professor of English at Rhodes University. Editor with R. Harnett of Lonely Against the Light, special issue of journal, New Coin, September 1973.

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Notes on my Activities time will come. I would like to believe that one of my achievements will be to be able to point to at least something in the area of criticism as useful as the things done in the area of creative writing. So Austin might yet turn me into some kind of scholar and critic with the kind of apparatus of footnotes and references and quotations and careful examination of ideas of others in the light of what other criticism and critical discussion there has been, so that one comes up with the kind of full-bodied, thoughtful article or discussion or criticism which I think is what one ought to call scholarship. I have done nothing of this sort yet, though I have made promises and broken many of them, particularly the article for the Black World Encyclopedia of Keith Irving which I promised and failed to deliver, and there are so many others. If I get the Guggenheim Fellowship that I have applied for, on the strength of a recommendation by Etheridge Knight and an earlier suggestion by Samuel Hynes,7 I guess I shall be bound to produce some kind of scholarly study, though I suppose I am consoled by the notion that my chances of getting a Guggenheim must be pretty remote, if only because of the very poor, half-hearted, and inadequate proposal I put forward in applying for the fellowship. I suppose one thought at the moment helps me to be easy in my mind, and that is that even these tapes of biographical and critical material, these comments I now put down about my work, are, in some measure, a kind of a literary contribution, at least in the sense of it being available for others who are interested in this kind of thing.

Autobiography I shrink from the notion of autobiography, though lately I have found it less repellant and have even thought of doing fragments which might be called Essays at Autobiography, in the sense of making an attempt at autobiography. One might do fragments if nothing else. As I have complained before, I fail to see in my life any kind of cohesion or pattern or unifying thread which would justify an autobiography. It seems to me that autobiographies need organization of one’s knowledge of one’s life in such a way that a pattern emerges, some kind of intelligibility is made of the mass. I do not see such a pattern, though at times I thought that I detected it. (The “Driftwood” poem for instance, hints at the perception of a pattern, [as well as] “Tracks in the Sand” or the other Algiers poem about the anniversary day, and the notion of bits of my life fitting into pieces like a mosaic.) But I see no such pattern, and until I can impose some such order on what happened to me, it doesn’t seem to me that I’m entitled to write about it. The mere events, though they might in some instances be exciting or intriguing or dramatic and possibly flattering to me, do not in themselves justify writing a book. 7

Samuel Hynes (1924-), American scholar and Professor of English at Northwestern University while Brutus was teaching there.

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Notes on my Activities Indeed, I’m a little scornful of the black South African tradition of autobiography. I find too many black South Africans who have felt the need to do this autobiographical effort, very often [write] a kind of apologia, I think, for flight, and [to assuage] their sense of guilt, betrayal, or cowardice for leaving South Africa. It seems to me simply true that, among other things, I reached a point in South Africa that my usefulness was exhausted. As someone who was under house arrest and banned from all organizations, there was not much left I could do, except go to prison again. Though I do not think that the notion of a return to prison horrified me so that it would it would have been impossible to think of going to prison, it did seem to me a peculiarly futile exercise to go back to Robben Island and break stones or polish windows again. It seemed to me not a particularly useful contribution to the liberation struggle. Hopefully I have in fact been more useful outside than I could have been inside. It is possible that I resist ideas that suggest that there is a pattern in my life, that I am unwilling to identify such a pattern. The possibility arises in several ways. One of them that I think I tackled in part in my schizophrenic chronicle is the notion that came to me in prison of myself as a damned soul, as in fact a demon which simply inhabited human flesh at that particular point and functioned as a devil to precipitate certain actions or engender them in others. Devil’s advocate is a term which has other connotations and so is not appropriate here. But the end of such a line of thinking is to think of oneself as perpetually damned and endlessly inhabiting bodies, and leaving them, and then inhabiting others in an endless series of reincarnations until the end of time, and then to enter an eternity of damnation again. A notion that came to me in prison during a period for which I can find no exact name. I sometimes talk of it as a period of hallucination and possibly even insanity. Those who were with me in prison at the time know of it, and no doubt someday I will have to put it down on tape. I have referred to it obliquely occasionally in talking of my attempts at suicide in some of my poems in Letters to Martha. I have referred to it, but I am not yet ready to grapple with it. But from that notion does emerge some kind of pattern. I may well have exorcised the notion through the schizophrenia poems. Another alternative exists of a pattern: the whole notion of providence, of a divine shaping of my life so that I am simply a tool, an instrument, and that I am in fact at my most useful when I am not doing what I want to do but what is given to me to do, that I ought to achieve this kind of complete surrender to the will of God and become his instrument. This is another pattern which suggests itself and which periodically I resist, perhaps because it seems to me so much of religion is passé. To so many people today the notion of being religious and intelligent is impossible, that religion and intelligence, a worldlywise kind of wisdom, are simply mutually exclusive, and that one can’t be politically effective or credible if one has this supernatural explanation for the world. It raises other problems of course, and certainly in terms of a socialist 124

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Notes on my Activities political stance or ideology, it seems to me that such an ideology excludes – not absolutely, and I would not say necessarily – but almost invariably, excludes notions of the spiritual or supernatural interpretation of history or the world. And yet just this week, getting a letter from a priest who met me twentyfive years ago, before I was married, when I was about to be married, I suppose, but when I might still have opted either for bachelorhood or indeed celibacy as opposed to marriage, getting from such a priest an echo from the past, from an incredibly distant and almost forgotten past, this kind of event seems to reinforce a providential reading of my own life at least, if not of history. So when I get a motto on a fortune cookie that says, “A melon on the roof may fall either of two ways,” it seems to me that I am at a point where I am making choices again, or choosing directions or allowing directions to be chosen for me. One of the implications of surrendering my hopes for any kind of significant service to South Africa seems to me to be that it gives me a great deal of individual freedom of role, that as long as I held in reserve the notion that I might be called on to perform some specific services in the struggle, as long as I held in reserve that notion, I held in reserve some of my own impulses and inclinations, and excluded directions which now become available to me if I surrender those possible choices which seem to be looming in the future. Of course, even now I retain my kind of double-thinking notion that if I surrender the hope of serving South Africa, it is at that point that I am most likely to be of service, because it will not be as a result of my own desire or aspiration, but through the surrender of desire. Even as I say this, there comes into my mind the echo of words by Thomas à Kempis8 in The Imitation of Christ – a book I read often at one stage in prison when I was trying to achieve some kind of spiritual depth – in which he speaks of the surrender of desire as a necessary stage to the attainment of that which is desired. I think it is perhaps even more beautifully expressed in the writings of St. Alfonso Maria de’ Liguori9 writing on the will of God. Of course, all this is, for some people, simply unintelligible religiosity, but for others no doubt it has a religious significance. For me it is simply a kind of stumbling and groping between two worlds, a material, wholly natural world, and a supernatural and spiritual world. For now, I teeter or totter between the two, stagger around without being able to define my world and therefore being unable to define myself in relation to a world. If the world is ambivalent, then my participation in that world is necessarily ambivalent. The [de’ Liguori] book is also one I read in prison, and which I remember vaguely. It is perhaps worth mentioning or noting that the end of my schizophrenic 8

Thomas à Kempis (ca. 1380-1471), German Catholic monk. Alphonso Maria de’ Liguori (1696-1787), Italian saint and author of Uniformity with God’s Will and other works.

9

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Notes on my Activities chronicle is an end in prayer, or an incoherent babble of prayer, which quotes from a litany recited in Xhosa, and the invocation to prayer which occurs in it is the Xhosa call, “Let us pray,” just as is a repetition in litany of the words, “Pray for us.” So it would seem that certainly the schizophrenic poems work towards a prayerful ending, if you wish, an accidental echo perhaps of [T.S.Eliot’s] The Wasteland,10 where “Shanti, shanti, shanti,” is “Peace, peace, peace.” 10

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965), American-born English poet, playwright, and literary critic who was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature.

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Notes on my Life [These remarks are excerpted from a variety of sources: principally a lengthy interview conducted in Austin by Professor Dapo Adelugba, a visiting scholar from Nigeria, on 25 October 1974, but also from discussions with students in African literature classes and from an interview on a radio program called “ The Inquiring Mind” conducted by Jessie Pena and Patsy Watkins and broadcast by the Longhorn Radio Network at The University of Texas at Austin on 16 December 1974.]

School days I probably attended school for the first time round about 1931 since that’s the admission age, when you are seven or turning seven, [but] I found a pretext for not going to school. I might as well get into this. I apparently had a fall and injured my nose, and it used to bleed profusely. It was thought I had a broken bridge, and I may well have had it, I don’t know. But it was useful because every time I looked at books or bent over a slate my nose would bleed. This was a good excuse for not going to school. The truth of the matter is that if my nose didn’t bleed, I would poke my finger up it until it bled to make sure I didn’t go to school. So I found excuses for not going. I didn’t like school. I don’t know how much of it was my own psyche or whether at that stage my mother was projecting onto me. She was a teacher in this little township at Dower Memorial School, where there was another teacher who was very dear to her. They had their lunch together, had tea together, and sang together in the church choir. She was an unmarried woman called Miss Mintoor, and this woman was like a younger sister to my mother and relied on her for advice and everything else. When I went to school, my mother arranged that I should go to this teacher’s class. Well, this teacher died, and my mother said that I no longer wanted to go to school because this teacher was not there, and this may have been true. I don’t remember feeling this particular emotion, but I remember my mother verbalizing it and me agreeing with it, so even now 127

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Notes on my Life I don’t know whether it was her projection or mine; but I was delighted to have an excuse not to go to school. And indeed, I seem to remember another teacher, into whose class I would have gone now that this Miss Mintoor was not there, who was a big, rather masculine and cruel teacher. She used to beat the kids. She had a bad reputation for caning the kids with a ruler. So I may well have wanted to stay out of school because I didn’t want to go to the new teacher who was called Jane Prinsloo. I guess it’s important, although it didn’t occur to me then or even now, presumably for a child to be alone when everybody else is at school between the ages of six and ten, [that this] would shape his personality. He would tend to be more solitary, first of all, out of [the] circumstance, but he would adapt to it and eventually would be more solitary by preference because he was more used to being alone than being in company. And that may have shaped my personality. But then, in 1935, a mission school called St. Theresa’s was opened. It was run by Catholic nuns who were very pleasant people. My mother had become a Catholic maybe a year or two earlier or somewhat later, and my father had become a Catholic perhaps seven years earlier. At any rate, there was now a Catholic school. It was situated in a white area, so that when we went to school we often had fights with the white kids who would throw stones or bottles or whatever at us and we would throw things at them. When the police arrived, invariably they would take the side of the white kids, even if we were in the right and had been assaulted by much bigger kids. So it may be that one acquires an awareness of the racial discrimination and injustice in the society very early. St. Theresa’s had been a white school, and the whites had then been given a much finer school in a big, new, impressive building, so the old building with its discarded desks and blackboards and junk was given to the blacks and we went to school there. This was October 1935, and I spent, I suppose, five or six years there. I completed my junior schooling there, except for a break in 1936-37 when I went to another Catholic mission school in Grahamstown called St. Mary’s. When I went to school at the age of eleven, I could neither read nor write because I had been out of school from the age of six. But to say that I could not read or write is inaccurate because I had in the meantime taught myself to read. I had no formal reading training, but my brother used to read stories, and I would then go and reread the stories he read, and I would guess at the difficult words. My mother was very good. On Sunday afternoons she used to read poetry to us, sometimes traditional nursery rhymes such as “Little Jack Horner,” “The Duke of Gloucester,” “Robin Hood,” “Who Killed Cock Robin?” “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary,” “Wee Willie Winkie,” “The Three Wise Men of Gotham,” and so on. She would read them, and then we would read them aloud and look at the pictures, and I learned to recognize words. 128

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Notes on my Life But I was literally illiterate in the sense that I could not write. I was in a quite desperate situation because being so big, I couldn’t be put in the smallest class. I was too big. So I was put into what’s called Sub B – Substandard –which leads into Standard One, and they would write history notes on the board about “The white man came to South Africa in 1652. He landed here and the natives attacked him so he killed the natives.” All the other students would be diligently writing this down except that I couldn’t write. And I was lazy too, I guess; I didn’t try to write. So what I would do each day was give my lunch – which you carried to school with you in your pocket – I would give my lunch to some other student so that he or she would write my notes as well as theirs. So for a long time I still wasn’t learning to write. I suspect I discovered that there was an easier way to do it because I was going home hungry with an empty stomach every day by giving away my food. I discovered that it was possible to charm some pretty girl in the class who would do it for me out of love rather than for bread. It may be that I began to practice my masculine wiles at a very early age – I’m not sure but it may well be. Eventually in desperation I learnt to write very badly, and the nuns would give me books to take home to practice the shape of an a and a b in copperplate handwriting. But my handwriting was always bad and became worse as I went on. By the time I was at university my handwriting was illegible to everyone. I couldn’t read it, and nobody else could. I remember writing a psychology exam in my final year where the professor said, “All right, you have written the exam. Now come to my office and read it to me,” because he couldn’t read it. Many years later when my handwriting was just impossible, I went into a shop and saw a book that said “Teach Yourself to Write.” It was not about writing essays, it was about script, and I said, “I need to learn to write.” So I bought the book, took it home, and began to practice. Fortunately, it was during a holiday – I was already teaching – there was a teacher’s conference which I attended but found very boring. So I spent all the sessions diligently practicing my handwriting, hour after hour, and this is how I acquired my handwriting. My university career was in many ways not at all creditable. I failed exams with notorious regularity and for bad reasons. On one occasion it was a beautiful morning, and I went in to write an exam in Dutch. I had walked through the dewy tall grass, so I wrote poetry in the exam until it was almost time for the exam to be over. Then I turned in my poetry and walked out. This was not particularly helpful in terms of passing exams. But in another way I suppose I did rather well. In my first year [at Fort Hare University College] I was taking English and Dutch and a few other courses – politics, education, history – five courses, which was a full load. They held a competition in the first year for bilingualism for all the universities of South Africa with a prize awarded by the Chancellor of the University. Now I was a first-year student and I had very little Afrikaans because the 129

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Notes on my Life nuns who had taught me were from Ireland, Irish missionary nuns who couldn’t speak Afrikaans themselves, so I had been badly handicapped going to high school. But at high school I had suddenly decided to become good in Afrikaans because my brother had come home from college and showed me a student magazine in which he had written an article in Afrikaans. I was very impressed. I discovered subsequently that he had pinched the article from somewhere else, so I needn’t have been so impressed. But it impressed me that he could write poetry in Afrikaans and get it published. Now I felt I must do it too. Suddenly, starting with a tremendous handicap because I was way behind others (I was probably the only student to get 2% in an examination for Afrikaans; that’s how bad it was), within two years I was scoring 78-80% in Afrikaans. It is very interesting to know how I acquired the language. Not through grammar books or textbooks or novels. I read a lot of Afrikaans poetry; often I didn’t understand it, but I would get the feel of it. I would acquire more words in my vocabulary, and I would get a sense of images, so it was a marvelous shortcut to the heart of the language. I penetrated to the heart of the language without the formalities of the grammar and everything else. Well, [at Fort Hare] I was competing with students who were majoring in Afrikaans and had had three or four or five years, and yet I tied with a final year student for a gold medal in Afrikaans. I suppose it was quite distinguished for a freshman to tie with a finalist. And then I got a distinction in English when I graduated, which is quite rare for a black in a South African university. Our exams, incidentally, were marked by an internal examiner and an external examiner from one of the white universities so that there was always the chance that you could pass internally and still fail because of the external control.

Holidays & work I would go home for the holidays, but holidays during high school and so on were nonexistent. We just stayed at home; there was no money to go anywhere, and you didn’t even do anything special. You didn’t go to the beach although the beach was nearby because most of the beach was for whites only. We couldn’t even play in the park because the parks were for whites only. So when a holiday came, there was no notion that this was a period of recreation, of enjoyment, because the facilities simply didn’t exist. When I was at Fort Hare, I came home twice a year, and of course my mother fussed about me and my sisters and my friends, and we would go to the movies together. As adolescents or young men we would date and take the girls to parties. My present wife lived with our family most of the time. She was an orphan, and in a sense my mother had practically adopted her. So we went to all the same dances and the same movies and occasionally a picnic or whatever it was. So holidays really were not special occasions. 130

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Notes on my Life Now, when I finished at Fort Hare – again, I find it curious looking back – my brother who was four years older than I had spent some time working on the trains as a Pullman porter, carrying beds and sweeping out the train and so on. He made it sound very glamorous – the places you traveled to and the people you saw. I was envious of him. So when I left Fort Hare, I found that I could not get a teaching position. It was a holiday, schools hadn’t reopened, I had no job, so I became a bedding boy on the trains, and on the whole it was much less glamorous than I expected. But one traveled, and I may even have developed my appetite for travel then because you were literally running six hundred or eight hundred miles by train from one city to another, constantly on the move, really not seeing very much because you were working all the time. And when you got to the end of the line, you were so exhausted that you didn’t feel equal to going anywhere. The next morning you would get up and run the train back another eight hundred miles, and that was it.

Teaching I think I liked playing school as a kid. I loved telling stories and entertaining other kids, [especially] if I read something from a book my father gave me on Roman history with pictures of Caesar’s conquest of Britain and Mark Antony and Pompeii, Augustus Caesar. I liked this kind of activity which seems to me to parallel the kind of thing one does as a teacher, but I didn’t choose ever to be a teacher. However, I discovered that at Fort Hare you could do a degree and then a teacher’s diploma after that, or you could do a degree and a teacher’s diploma at the same time; it just seemed to be sensible to save money by doing the two at the same time, so I thought I might as well acquire the teaching diploma while I am acquiring the degree. It meant of course that you were increasing your workload. You took many more courses in teaching. You also had to do practice teaching while you were qualifying for the diploma, and I taught at schools in the area of the college, Fort Hare. When I got out and was down in Port Elizabeth, I would offer or be asked to come and teach classes at the high school, and I found I enjoyed it. I think it boosted my ego, and so I liked it. But I found that in a limited area I can teach very well and with great enthusiasm, and there are other parts of the syllabus that I dislike and I teach them very badly. It’s always been like that. So I guess I have some talent for teaching, but I don’t think I have the temperament of a teacher who will teach the things he dislikes as well and as thoroughly as he teaches the things he likes. I am still teaching eighty percent of what I don’t want to teach, and it is not because I dislike the work. It is simply that I feel I don’t have sufficient expertise. There are two out of every ten things I teach that I am sufficiently comfortable with, and I teach them with great enthusiasm and great enjoyment. The others I teach somewhat laboriously, and it’s a strain. I am convinced that I am not by temperament either a teacher or an academic. I 131

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Notes on my Life think I may well continue, but it is not where I ought to be. It’s a slot, but for me it’s a square peg in a round hole. I taught Afrikaans (not as well as I should have in spite of my gold medal), and I taught a little Latin because there was no one to teach it, and the students needed it to get admission to a university. I taught some physiology which I liked very much. It was a subject I had enjoyed at high school myself. I also taught religious instruction, treating the Bible, for instance, as great literature. But I was forbidden by the government to teach religion because they decided that I was teaching religion with a heavy anti-white, anti-missionary emphasis, so I was forbidden to teach it. I had some very talented students. Some of them are now doctors, others are lawyers. Arthur Nortje was one of them, but he was just one out of many very bright students. And when I meet them now, I’m glad to say, they recall with pleasure some of the things I did when I was teaching them – not all, but there were a few things. One of them is now a law professor in America; he’s on a fellowship at Yale, and he thinks that what I did was to communicate to the kids that the fact that they were black was unimportant, that they were human beings, and not only human beings but human beings of quality with tremendous potential. They could go anywhere and do anything and this in defiance of what the system was doing to them. [After leaving South Africa], I stayed in London for almost five years. I was offered a teaching job at a high school and I accepted it. I might well have spent the rest of my years teaching at a high school in England. It could easily have happened, and I would have been quite satisfied. But I wanted to do some work for the Anti-Apartheid Movement, so I volunteered to work for them free of charge. I think there was some rivalry or jealousy. There seemed to be people who were running the office who were a little afraid of admitting me, and I think it was really on the question of my reported efficiency. I was rumored to be just dynamic in campaigning on the sports issue, so I suspect they had no enthusiasm for me notwithstanding the fact that I had volunteered to work for them. Then John Collins, who is the Canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral and a very dear friend who heads the International Defence and Aid Fund which looks after political prisoners and gets money from the United Nations, offered me a job working for the Fund. When this happened, the Anti-Apartheid Movement became very upset, and they then offered me a job to keep me away from Collins. But Collins said to me, “What would you get as a teacher?” And I said, “About 100 or 120 pounds a month.” And he said, “All right, I’ll pay you what you would have got as a teacher.” He was getting me very cheaply, as I realize now, but I stayed on for five years, you know, earning what in Britain was really a very poor salary, with a large family to support. And then Zeke Mphahlele was applying for American citizenship, and the American government refused to give it to him, saying that the only way he could get it would be by leaving America and applying from some other 132

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Notes on my Life country. So Zeke got a job at the University of Zambia, but he had no one to replace him at Denver. So he cabled me, asking me to take his job for a quarter. I went to John Collins and said, “Look, I have this offer, and I don’t know what to do,” and he said to me, “Well, I know that I have been underpaying you all these years, and I don’t want to stand in your way, so if you want to go to America, go.” I did not believe I could teach anymore. I had stopped teaching, I had been to prison, I really had not kept up with literature at all, and in working for political prisoners in Britain, there was really very little time for literary activity. But I accepted Zeke’s post. I thought I did a very bad job. I left there very unhappy with myself. But during that time, Lindfors invited me to Texas, and I went and enjoyed myself, [after which] I went back to Britain and simply resumed my work for Defence and Aid. John Collins promoted me and he gave me an increase in salary, and so we were prepared to go on. It is still the work I would rather do than any other work. To work for political prisoners and their families still seems to me the most worthwhile thing I can do, except that there is so much bureaucracy and pettiness and jealousy that I became increasingly frustrated. Apparently the reports of my work in Denver were quite good. Also, Northwestern University was having a very serious race problem. The black students had occupied the President’s office; they had barricaded him and forced him to sign demands, and the Vietnam thing had erupted, and the campus was in a mess. I suspect I was invited to Northwestern because they needed a black or a token black who was also a militant and therefore would be acceptable to the black students, but who also had tolerable academic credentials. I am still amazed that I have tenure at Northwestern with a lousy B.A. Perhaps I’m being a little cynical, but my own view of Northwestern is that it was not only because I was desirable that they got me but also they were in a jam at that point. The fact that they have given me tenure must mean that I have satisfied them since I am there. I wasn’t just a stopgap.

On the International Defence & Aid Fund This is a Fund that gives legal defense for political prisoners in South Africa, so the defense is not the army, and the aid is financial and material aid to the families of political prisoners. It is a Fund I represent at the United Nations; I have to go to the UN occasionally on behalf of the Fund. I did once have an amusing experience when I first came to America. People thought ‘Defence’ had something to do with the army, and ‘Aid’ was big federal funding programs to foreign governments usually for political motives, so I was invited to a top secret meeting by mistake. There I heard all kinds of curious revelations about the activities of the CIA, and the U.S. in Guatemala and elsewhere, and all this went on for two days before I was due to speak. When I spoke, coming from an entirely different position, where defense was legal defense and aid was 133

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Notes on my Life humanitarian aid – I am in fact totally opposed to the kind of things the CIA does – you can imagine how much confusion this caused in this particular top secret conference. They had let a viper into their bosom. It was one of the funniest things that ever happened to me.

On becoming politically conscious In high school there were teachers who were very politically conscious and who tried to make the students politically conscious. Some reacted to this at once with enthusiasm and formed a student group or they would join a teacher organization as an associate. I didn’t – mainly, I think, because of this impractical streak in me, a kind of abstracted, absent-minded quality – but I was conscious sometimes, perhaps more acutely, more sensitively conscious, of the racism in the ghetto and the viciousness and the injustice of the system. I remember very strikingly going to visit a priest once who was very nice to me. He was Irish, intelligent, and I think he saw me as potential seminary material; he thought I would become a priest. I went to visit him and knocked on the front door. Well, blacks don’t go to the front doors of priest’s houses. And when he came out he said to me, “You know, I sometimes think that you forget you’re black.” And I laughed because I knew it was true, that for me I was just a human being. I didn’t feel that I was the inferior, and I interacted with people as equals whether they were white or black. But I remember this now as a kind of curious thing, and again I think it may have had something to do with this kind of absent-minded way I floated through the world. I would discover injustice by my collision with it. When I was much more grown, as a teacher I would go into the bookstore and ask for the Observer or the London Times or the New Statesman, and the woman behind the counter would say, “Tell your master that they haven’t come in yet,” because she would automatically assume, “A black, what would he know about the London Times?” I would say to her, “No, it’s for me,” and she would say to the other woman behind the counter, “He reads English!” with great astonishment. These were revealing little touches because it meant I was encountering arrogant racial oppression not theoretically, and not even in the kind of rather monotonous daily grind of the ghetto, but through a very personal impact made on me as an individual, not as one of a group or a class, but me personally, so one understood it much more because of the kind of personal quality in it. At any rate, I was not moved to any kind of political action. I didn’t think very highly of the people who were engaged in political work, and that’s another rather long story. But then a number of things happened at the same time. One, the ghetto in the city was declared a white area, and so [people in it] had to move to another ghetto outside the city, and their houses were destroyed. Some of them had managed to buy their houses and were losing the thing they had given their lifetime for. And that hit me, and it hit me not personally because our home wasn’t touched, and we did not own it – it was 134

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Notes on my Life in the mixed area on the edge of the city. This was a ghetto right in the center of the city. In addition, the government decided to take all the schools away from the missionaries because the missionaries were not doing sufficient to indoctrinate the blacks into the acceptance of racism and inferiority. So you had an educational attack on the system combined with an attack on the homes, and there was a great deal of hardship. The parents of the children in the schools would ask what the teachers were going to do, what kind of leadership the teachers would give them because in a semi-literate or illiterate community the teacher is regarded as the community leader and counselor and guide, much as a doctor may be in some communities or a priest in others. And it was this combination of pressures from a number of directions [that affected me]. Let me be honest, too. I had helped to set up a new school with great difficulty in a particular area in the ghetto. I had negotiated with the Education Department and done the letter writing and the debating and the actual problems of plumbing and building and everything else. And when the school was done, the people who had put the school together – it was a Moslem community – wanted me to become principal of the school. Well, the government and the Education Department decided against it. The argument was that I didn’t have enough experience, which may have been true, but it may also have been a political decision. I was being hit personally and socially and educationally at the same time, and suddenly I plunged into the existing teacher political organization and became an activist in it – vice-chairman, editor of the journal, public speaker at meetings, leading the protest against the destruction of the ghettos, the new educational apartheid, and so on. Suddenly I was plunged into a specific form of ghetto politics which didn’t involve larger issues or ideology and all the rest of it. I had almost ten years of that. It was only about four years before I went to prison that I became involved with the ANC and the underground, the militant resistance movement. In the meantime, I had been writing for the resistance papers, and if people couldn’t get into the shops in town from their ghetto, I would purchase material for them. So that I was a bridge with the ghetto and the resistance there. But by the end of my term in South Africa, I was very deeply involved in the resistance movement. Nelson Mandela, when he was hiding from the police, hid at my place, and the man who became the number two man, Walter Sisulu, when Mandela went to prison, I worked very closely with him. By that time I was very actively involved in the resistance movement. But I didn’t go to prison for my work in the resistance movement. I went to prison because of my work against racism in sport. They could well have arrested me for my political activities had they known, but they were not aware of it. I had succeeded in concealing it. I don’t know if there is a satisfactory explanation for [why I became so heavily involved]. Sometimes I think I’m just dumb: I have a kind of stubborn 135

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Notes on my Life persistence, an almost irrational determination. I don’t regard myself as particularly brave. When I was shot by the secret police in Johannesburg while trying to escape, I didn’t know that the man who shot me had won a gold medal for marksmanship. I think if I had known that at the time, I might well have decided not to attempt to escape. So it’s hard to say what keeps one going. I sometimes get rather annoyed with myself for this kind of stubbornness. But it’s rewarding in the sense that one does see progress. There are advances that are made in different areas, successes you gain, and then it seems you develop an appetite for success. Once you have succeeded, you want to go on to do other things.

Sports My father encouraged me to keep a scrapbook of athletes – boxers, swimmers, wrestlers, different sportsmen – albums of photographs, autographs, and things like that. It may be that as early as at that time I had already become interested in sport, much more in a theoretical way than in a practical way. I was an admirer of sportsmen. I was a sports fan, but I was not in fact an active sportsman. I played sport, of course, with the other children in the ghetto. We played soccer and cricket and rugby. I played most of them badly, probably because even then there was a kind of dreamy, impractical streak in me so that what I tried to achieve was never quite equal to what I imagined I could achieve. And my interest with sport remained with me all my life. At high school I played soccer and cricket. I was very interested in sports results and attending sports events. By the time I was in high school I was playing cricket for a club formally. When I got to Fort Hare, I played soccer, rugby, cricket, and played rather badly, I think. I never claim to have had prowess as an athlete or a sportsman but was regarded as a pretty good left-handed fast bowler in cricket. I was a weak batsman, but I was used quite a lot because I was regarded as a good bowler. And then on leaving college, when I started teaching, I continued playing cricket, but more important, because of my theoretical interest, I was the school manager for sports teams, the one who arranged fixtures between the schools. I coached the softball and baseball teams with some success since the softball team won the provincial trophy, and, in addition, I was representing the school sports organization in the local sports union. I was a delegate there and an intelligent one, I should think, because I was promoted to assistant secretary, then secretary, then vice-chairman, and ultimately chairman and delegate to the national body. So a whole complex of awareness of sport and the sport structure and sports constitutions and an awareness of sport as a national rather than as a local or regional structure was developing in me over a period of about ten years. By the time I had conceived of forming a national sports organization which would mobilize all the blacks to challenge the white sporting 136

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Notes on my Life organization – by that time I had served on about six or more national sports bodies in different sports: lawn tennis, table tennis, cricket, weightlifting, judo, boxing, national president of softball and baseball. So I had the contacts as a result of knowing people in all these sports, but I also had the very important constitutional experience of knowing how to maneuver when you came to a resolution or a vote or the drafting of a constitution. Without my being aware of it, I was being equipped with certain skills which really qualified me for a key job. And it is very interesting that when the meeting which I had convened in Durban to form a super sports body of all the blacks to challenge the whites, I was offered the presidency, and I declined it because I knew that a president was just a figurehead. The real key figure in an organization is the secretary – the man who writes the letters and draws up the agenda and arranges the contacts and the conferences and the delegates. So I chose to be secretary, though it was less prestigious, because I knew that for the kind of work I intended doing, it was far more important to be in a key functional position rather than a prestigious but ornamental position. I think what hit me [initially] was going to college at Fort Hare, which was an old military fort turned into a missionary college run by four churches, the Episcopalians, the Catholics, the Presbyterians, and the Methodists, and discovering there, where I had played cricket and football and done some track and field, that some absolutely brilliant black athletes whose performances were better than those of the South Africans who were being selected to go to the Olympic Games and everywhere else, but because the blacks were black, they couldn’t get on the team. It had nothing to do with their performance. And I think it was simply the injustice of this, the brute reality of discovering that you might be the best 440 yards man in the country or the best miler in the country, but you couldn’t get on the team because you were black. I think that made me mad. I was really very annoyed about it and I got involved in organizing meetings and forming unions. I was traveling very widely in South Africa, mostly hitchhiking all over the country during my holidays, and meeting sportsmen everywhere and talking to them about [their situation]. It all started at college, I think.

Prison In prison I was in solitary for almost five months. I had been having such a rough time in a big cell with sixty-five other prisoners: the noise and the brawls and the discomfort (we were all sleeping on the floor with our heads to the wall and people walk over you at night and that kind of thing), so I was very pleased when I was put in solitary because I thought with my kind of intelligence (this is conceit), I would have no problem dealing with solitary. My cell in solitary had three rows of bars across and six down so there were eighteen bars, and so I divided my day into eighteen parts. I would say to myself that the first part would be for remembering all the old movies I had 137

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Notes on my Life seen and then the next part of each day I would choose a particular poet, Browning or Tennyson or Shakespeare, and I would spend one-eighteenth of my day on that. Then I would spend maybe another part remembering books I had read or things I had done, any damn thing. And I would have a part for prayer; each day I would set aside a portion for prayer, and this was very curious because eventually through prayer I began to develop hallucinations which ended in two attempts at suicide. Suddenly I began to believe that I was so bad, so evil, and my poetry as well, that the only good thing I could do in the world was to kill myself. That was the only good thing left for me. So I attempted suicide twice. But it seems to me that [the cause of it all] was my overconfidence in my ability to deal with solitary. I was too sure I could deal with it, and instead it just got to me without my being aware of what was happening.

Travel I have circumscribed the globe twice, starting in London to New York to San Francisco to Honolulu to Sydney to Manila to Delhi to Moscow to Rome and back to London, going right around the world. And not just once. Twice. The second time I flew directly from London to San Francisco or Los Angeles and down to Fiji, on to Auckland, from there to Manila and Bangkok, then to Cairo, Cairo to Paris, Paris to London. That gives you an indication of the extent of the traveling. Some of the most rewarding places have been Tehran, Mexico City, Havana. Budapest is one of my favorite cities. So is Dubrovnik in Yugoslavia – a marvelous old Roman city with the old Roman forts still there. Copenhagen, Scandinavian countries, and of course last year, I think, was a kind of cherry on top when I was invited to Peking, Shanghai, Canton. I wanted to go to Peking, but I never thought the opportunity would ever come, and I had given up travel. But Peking was a very pleasant experience, and it means in fact that there’s no place left in the world that I want to go to. I no longer travel anymore to go to a place. I go to do a job, and I go back. That’s all. I may be invited to places, but there’s no place that I can look at on the map and say, “I wish I could go there.” I have traveled so much that I think I’m probably just weary, bone weary. When I was a young boy, for me one of the things I wanted to do was travel. It always seemed to me that a man who could claim he had traveled was a man who had prestige. If a man could just claim he had been to Cape Town or Johannesburg, I was envious of him. Now I have traveled just about everywhere I want to go, and travel doesn’t impress me anymore. Once upon a time it did. I am glad to say I have never gone anywhere on a holiday. I have gone always to work, whether it is Tehran or Cairo or Algiers for the Festival or Lagos for a sports meeting or Ibadan for a lecture, or Nairobi or Dar es Salaam – the whole continent back and forth. And Europe – London, Paris, Amsterdam, Rome, Geneva – all of Europe except I couldn’t go to Lisbon while the Portuguese were there, the colonels. I could go to Lisbon now. I 138

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Notes on my Life have been in Athens, though at first I refused to visit the city because I opposed the military rule there; I was not prepared to even spend a penny on a bus ride there. I have traveled widely, but I don’t think it has enriched me. I think there are many people whose culture is enriched by exposure, say, to Mexican culture, Spanish culture, whatever. In my case, because my concentration has been on doing a job for South Africa, and not being a tourist, I have never gone anywhere to see the sights. I have gone to do a job, and therefore my openness to the culture – the music, the wine, the painting, the people, the dances – has been limited. I’ll give you a very interesting example. When I left Johannesburg, I went to London. Immediately I had to attend a sports meeting in Kingston, Jamaica, the Commonwealth Games, but they could not get me a flight from London to Jamaica. I had to fly from London to New York to Jamaica, and BOAC [British Overseas Airways Corporation] fixed up the flight and got me complimentary accommodation at the Hilton. And I had come out of a ghetto! To stay in the Hilton in New York was a tremendous contrast. But I traveled from JFK Airport to the Hilton in New York with a file on my knee, working all the time in the bus. The skyscrapers of Manhattan were outside the window, but I did not even look up to look at the landscape because I said, “I’m not a tourist. I’m going to do a job, and I am preparing for the job.”

On being a citizen of the world In South Africa I tried not to be a South African citizen because being a South African citizen meant such severe limitations on who you could be and what you could do that I used to refer to myself as a citizen of the world. I used to get into trouble every time I had to fill out a form which asked, “What race are you?” and I would write “Human,” and turn in the form. This would get me into trouble. But I was very consciously trying to resist the programming that takes place in South Africa where everybody’s horizon is limited. So I did not think of South Africa in terms of a particular boundary that limited me. On the other hand, I had an intense kind of almost sexual response to its beauty – sunsets, mountains, rivers – so that wherever I was, I would respond to the surroundings there without recognizing boundaries. I didn’t say, “This is South Africa.” I would say, “This is a piece of country that I respond to.” When I came out, it occurred to me that this whole notion of patriotism is a rather old-fashioned notion. It’s rather out of date. The world has shrunk to a global village, you know. One oughtn’t to have the kind of nationalistic, narrow obsession with a particular region. And so I’m almost a little contemptuous of my own attachment to one corner of the globe when I really ought to have a loyalty to the whole globe. I guess what I’m saying is that I had a particular attachment to that part of the world without feeling necessarily bounded by the lines on a map. 139

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Notes on my Life But it also seems to me that I know more about the suffering of people there than anywhere else in the world, and if I’m going to be useful, it is better to be useful in the area where I have some expertise rather than becoming a generalized kind of do-gooder. You must stick to the area you know and try and make a contribution there.

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POETRY

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‘Somehow Tenderness Survives’ [The interview that follows was tape recorded in London over a period of two days in August 1970. All questions and non-literary statements have been edited out in the interest of providing a consecutive autobiographical narrative on a single theme.] I think the earliest literary influence on me was my mother, who not only recited nursery rhymes to me as a child, but had herself a love for poetry. She was a schoolteacher who had taught, as teachers do in South Africa, the whole range of the junior curriculum, and had been educated by English missionaries who created a taste for her in literature. I suspect their own education was not terribly good in terms of literature – the things they encouraged her to like were things which I grew out of in time. As a student teacher she learnt and later taught things like “Under the spreading chestnut tree/The village blacksmith sat” [sic] and Colley Cibber’s appalling poem “The Blind Boy”1 and Wordsworth’s “Lucy Gray,” which I think is a very bad introduction to Wordsworth.2 It is a poem of considerable sentimentality. At any rate, this is “memorable” poetry – easy to remember, with all the features which poetry normally has in a rather exaggerated form, so that one knew rhyme and rhythm and imagery. And there was a Longfellow,3 about the wreck of the Hesperus: “It was the schooner Hesperus/That sailed the wintry sea...” and things like that. Fortunately also some good things – I think Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” is one; Thomas Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,”4 which in some ways is regarded as a touchstone of English poetry. If one knew these, one had a fairly good entry into English poetry. I learnt these from her, 1

Colley Cibber (1671-1757), English actor-manager, playwright, and Poet Laureate. William Wordsworth (1770-1850), English romantic poet and Poet Laureate from 1843 to 1850. 3 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), popular American poet, translator and professor. 4 Thomas Gray (1716-1771), English poet, classical scholar, and professor at Cambridge University. 2

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‘Somehow Tenderness Survives’ and heard her recite them and read them to us, rather earlier than the average schoolboy – white or black – and certainly earlier than the mass of the black schoolchildren around the country. In addition, my father was also a schoolteacher (at one time he studied for an Arts degree – BA – with the University of Cape Town by correspondence) and would memorize poetry and recite it preparing for his examinations. So I was hearing bits of poetry all around me. One which I remembered all my life is Tennyson’s ode on the death of the Duke of Wellington, “Bury the Great Duke,” which has since become an element in one of my very few poems relating to him. This is the picture of the kind of beginnings I had. In addition, my mother had a great love for the Arthurian legends and used to read the stories of Sir Galahad and Sir Lancelot and the Round Table in secondhand books, cast-off books given away by white families – at various times she took in washing to augment the family income when she wasn’t able to teach. Married women teachers were discouraged in the educational system. My father also disapproved very often of her being out of the home teaching. My brother, who is four years older than myself, went to one of the better non-white missionary schools run by Anglican nuns; it was one of the few non-white schools at that time which had the vestiges of a library, often secondhand and cast-off books from white schools. He would bring one home once a week. These included, again, things which contained Arthurian legends and similar stories. My mother would read these to us in the evenings or on a Sunday afternoon. Most of this is pre-school, for a rather odd reason. I don’t quite know how it happened, but at some stage, I not only damaged the bridge of my nose – possibly cracked a bone in it as a boy – but also I was a bleeder, with an excessively sensitive nose which bled heavily, and this prevented me going to school. In addition, because I didn’t like going to school, I would sometimes irritate my nose to the point where it bled as a pretext for not going to school. So by the age of seven and eight, at the time when most other boys of my age had started kindergarten, I had had two interrupted spells of starting school and then quitting again and was much at home and spent a lot of my time reading – I had no real companions at my age. So these are, if you will, the earliest literary elements which come together. When I did go to school, I found myself in a rather peculiar position. I was then about ten, or close to eleven, when I seriously began schooling, but I was beginning at kindergarten level, which is six-year-olds and seven-year-olds, because I hadn’t done any of the previous years. But possibly because of my reading on my own, I was very rapidly promoted. This meant that while I had an advantage in some subjects, in fact was ahead of my class in them, in others – like arithmetic and history and geography – there were enormous gaps in my knowledge of the basics, which all the others had acquired. The shape of the world, for instance, and how many oceans there were – things which I had 144

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‘Somehow Tenderness Survives’ to discover by flying around the world. It meant a very unequal kind of education. And going to a school where people spoke a very bad kind of pidgin English, the average Coloured person grew up knowing both English and Afrikaans, but both badly, with possibly a smattering of one of the African languages, depending on his area. I went to a school where there were Irish nuns teaching, who themselves had no training as teachers – they were do-gooders, who came out to the missions to educate the poor blacks – and they couldn’t speak Afrikaans, nor could they teach it. So one received an education without one subject which was compulsory (by law you had to know both English and Afrikaans). So one had an extremely uneven and spotty kind of education, and this left you with a tremendous handicap when it came to writing, at the senior level, an examination which was standard for the whole population. I don’t think I wrote poetry until about the age of fourteen or fifteen. When I did, I think it was an entirely spontaneous impulse. As far as I remember, the first thing I wrote was for a full moon in August and really wasn’t bad, even looking back at it now. It had a rhythm and an image and a good vocabulary. And it lies around somewhere; one might still find it. It was round about this time that my brother went off to college to become a teacher – he would be nineteen – and when he came back during the holidays, I discovered that he had acquired a mastery of Afrikaans. This annoyed me very greatly, because I hated to be outdone by him in anything. And when I learned that he had written some Afrikaans poetry for the school magazine, I felt I ought to write as well. So it’s very likely that the second poem I wrote was an Afrikaans poem; I’m not sure. I think there was also an English love lyric; I was having one of my adolescent crushes. Certainly there was this Afrikaans love lyric about this time, chiefly because I felt I ought to compete with my brother. I discovered, when I went to high school, which is standard 7 – the equivalent of junior high school, I suppose – that there were other chaps in the class who were messing around with bits of verse. And we had an excellent science teacher, an anarchist, who encouraged us to set up a student publication to attack the staff, and I found myself being made the editor of this. Often it turned out that there were no articles for this publication, so I would have to sit down and write several to fill the pages, and so I wrote some poetry, as well as an amusing essay – at least one. I’m never good at dates, but if I remember correctly, I would have gone to junior high round about ‘39, ‘40, certainly after the outbreak of the war. And I know that in ‘42 I had completed junior high and was going to senior high, so that places us fairly easily. There is a junior certificate and then senior certificate, which is the equivalent of matriculation, and then you go on from there to university. When I wrote matric, which is university entrance, of fourteen who wrote (and this is in a town of over 200,000; there could be only fourteen non-whites writing the university entrance!) only four passed! And of the four who passed, 145

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‘Somehow Tenderness Survives’ two did not get a university pass, they got a school-leaving pass. So we ended up with two people in the total non-white population of the area who might go to university, if they had the money! In my case, there was a scholarship from the city council, a municipal scholarship, which I managed to win. I was placed first in the whole district, which I suppose was a distinction, though one I hadn’t worked very hard for. But it was sufficient to pay for three years at university. I should add that had I not won the university scholarship, there was a Catholic Irish priest who had told my mother that he thought I was sufficiently promising and that he would pay for the first year at university – at least – and see what could be done thereafter. This was because my mother was a devout Catholic and so was I, and I was the top altar boy, server, and things like that, and I am quite sure I had been marked down as a potential priest, who would go to the seminary at some stage. So they would encourage my education. But it was a nice thing to do in any case, and the kind of thing which didn’t happen to many non-whites – and if you didn’t get this kind of opportunity, then you were just lost. You just became absorbed into the labor pool or the system generally. I began studying at Fort Hare College in ’43 or ’44 and went on to ’47, but the reason why I took an extra year – I could have finished by ’46 – was that we had run out of money in the family, and if you had done two years of a degree, you were allowed to teach. So I took a year off from university to teach in a little village in the Karoo, a place called Ft. Beaufort, chiefly known for having the biggest lunatic asylum in the country. I taught there for a year and did some study and then went back to college the following year. I remember now that in the year when I broke off from university to teach – I was staying on my own, in a little place attached to a church – I wrote a great deal of poetry, which I collected in a thing called “The Grey Notebook,” retitled “Green Harvest” because it was all immature stuff. There would be about a hundred poems there, I suppose, which are probably lost now. At the university, I was one of the editorial staff of the student publication, and I know they printed a poem – something about a cavalier, a sort of a sonnet – in the student annual, which was really quite selective in what it would print. But we got ambitious, as usual, and tried to produce a monthly, of which maybe three or four issues came out. In one of them, I did a terrible review of James Joyce,5 an essay on Ulysses, which appalls me now, looking back on my straight-laced Catholic solemnity. I also wrote a remarkable short story in the Joycean idiom, a stream-of-consciousness short story, which really was very good. And many years later, in prison, when I was with other prisoners who wanted to be entertained, I would tell them this short story. And they were delighted. I was forced to repeat it on several occasions. I don’t 5

James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish novelist, short story writer, and poet.

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‘Somehow Tenderness Survives’ know where it’s got to. The journal was just called SANC: South African Native College – which was what Ft. Hare was then. The newspaper was The Ft. Harian, for which I did a lot of potboilers, reviews of films and books and so on. It would be very interesting if one could recall all I was reading at that time. I was reading, for instance, Horizon, a literary thing, which was really quality literature. Quite the best stuff being produced in Britain during the War came out there. You wouldn’t find Ezra Pound6 elsewhere, or Elizabeth Bowen.7 Major writers, who have since emerged, began there. It was one of the best journals going. These were thrown out of the university library, and I collected an armful and read through them on my own – and what I found there excited me and presumably influenced my thinking and whatever I wrote at that time. My favorite poets at that time? Well, as a high school boy, I had been recognized as an expert on Browning to the flattering extent that a teacher would sometimes ask me to take on a difficult Browning dramatic monologue. I had been told that Browning was the most difficult poet going and, very fortunately, having said this to a Science master, he said it wasn’t true, people just put you off. Once you believed it, you were in trouble, but if you didn’t believe it, you were okay. I accepted his word (he was teaching physics!) and, sure enough, I found I could work my way through Browning. Then I got to university and for the second year Arts English course, Browning was a prescribed work. You really had to know Browning. And there, too, I found other students doing the course coming to me for coaching in Browning. As far as my other favorites are concerned, I think I really got interested in John Donne8 after about three years of teaching, as late as that. At the university, I suspect that we were required to know Donne. Our teacher didn’t know him, so one wasn’t really taught him. I think I knew very little Donne at university – but again, I may be wrong. I’m not too sure. I do know it was after I left university that I discovered Eliot, who wasn’t taught, and Yeats, and Hopkins,9 who weren’t taught either. We were taught the old-fashioned English syllabus, where if you knew the Elizabethans and the Victorians, you were okay. That’s where literature ended; nothing much happened after that. 6

Ezra Pound (1885-1972), American expatriate poet and literary critic who was a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry. 7 Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen (1899-1973), Anglo-Irish novelist, short story writer, and essayist. 8 John Donne (1572-1631), English metaphysical poet, Anglican priest, Dean of St. Paul’s Cathdral in London, and Member of Parliament. 9 Gerard Manley Hopkins (1884-1889), English poet, Jesuit priest, and professor whose innovative experiments in prosody and imagery anticipated the development of free verse.

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‘Somehow Tenderness Survives’ Ft. Hare was not really a university. It became a university college, which made it a subsidiary of Rhodes University. But at the time I was there, it wasn’t even a university college, it was a “native” college, which was a rather special breed of thing. But the degree I did there was on a par with the university degree. I set out planning to do three courses in English and three in Afrikaans or Dutch. I was going to major in those, but I messed around in Dutch, and so instead of majoring in Dutch, I only took two courses there and took Psychology as a second major. I also took things like education and politics, history and geography. You took two majors. Doing a degree in English, I specialized in Webster,10 in drama – out of cussedness – as opposed to Shakespeare, which everybody was specializing in. And I got a distinction in English, which was pretty rare, and for which I think you had to get over 66% on each paper you wrote. I missed it in Psychology, chiefly because I got tight very unwisely the night before I wrote one of my last papers. The professor of Psychology, a Norwegian named Jensen,11 was quite a distinguished man who subsequently went to the white university in Natal to teach Philosophy, and he thought I was one of his brightest scholars. I could probably have concentrated on Psychology. Having got a distinction in English, this in fact qualified me for another scholarship to do an M.A., but they found some peculiar pretext – apparently Catholics were disqualified – so I never did get the scholarship for an M.A. Had I got it, I would probably not have taken it, because I had to go out and earn. After leaving the university, I taught for a short while and then threw it up. I didn’t like teaching. I taught partly at the school where I had been educated myself, which is Paterson High School, where I had done my junior and high school education, and then went to a Catholic high school called St. Thomas Aquinas – both of these were in Port Elizabeth, where I grew up. I should perhaps mention that when I was teaching at St. Thomas, I had a marvelous love affair with a girl who was a student but whom I religiously left alone until she left school. I felt, as I always have, that it’s unethical to date your students and so I didn’t go near her, as long as she was in my class, although she was absolutely adorable. But once she had left school, I then felt free to take her out, and I might well have married her. For her, I wrote perhaps a hundred poems, which are since lost. But a lot of them were collected in a little red notebook, which I called “The Red Book.” So if one could find that, one would have quite a lot of poetry. It would be Wordsworthian, Shakespearean sonnet stuff because one grew up thinking of Wordsworth and Shakespeare as exemplars of poetry. And I should think Browning would have influenced this sequence, too. One of the poems I wrote for her has been salvaged, and I think it’s 10 11

John Webster (ca.1580-ca.1634), British Jacobean playwright. O.C. Jensen (1898-?), professor at the University of Fort Hare from 1927 to 1947.

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‘Somehow Tenderness Survives’ primarily influenced by Hopkins. Her name was Dulcy, and I wrote little things about Dulce, which is Latin for “sweetness.” And I called her “Sweetness” and, sometimes, “Sweet.” In my poems I would just call her Sweet, and the last poem in Sirens Knuckles Boots is a poem from that period which says: “So, for the moment, Sweet, is peace....” I’m talking to her, so it’s with a capital S. But it’s invariably printed with a small s, so people think I’m saying that peace is sweet, when I’m really saying to her, “My Sweet, there is peace,” which is quite a different thing. If there are any others of that quality, then they couldn’t have been too bad, although now I tend to be rather contemptuous of that group. I doubt if they were any good. The Dulce poem, as far as I remember, took thirty versions – at least thirty. Others, perhaps a dozen, maybe twenty. The more clotted they were, the more hard work there was, but normally some of it would come to your mind whole. An entire sentence or phrase would come straightaway, and this would establish the idiom for you. Then the rest would be pruning of a multiplicity of ideas, to make them function simultaneously. I remember, on one occasion – and this is in the early ‘60s, possibly round about December of 1961 – having to write a Christmas card to someone with whom I had had a love affair and it had just broken. Probably the most important event, or series of events, in my life. It’s had a lasting impact. Writing for her (she was white; our whole affair was illicit and we could have gone to prison dozens of times; she also worked with me in the underground, in the political movement) writing for her – I think this is how it happened – I found I couldn’t write a Christmas card that said what I wanted to say, so I wrote a little lyric instead, which had been taking shape in my mind for some time, and which I think was influenced by Auden’s poem: “Lay your sleeping head, my love, human on my faithless arm...” I’m not sure, but I think that influenced it. This was the first of my night songs, “Nightsong: City,” in which I achieved magically the simultaneous writing for South Africa and a particular woman. So, then, I could be talking to her and, at the same time, about the country. When I took the pen to begin writing this Christmas card, this was what the poem was going to be. At the moment I started, I didn’t yet know what was going to happen. It was in the process of writing it that I discovered one could do the simultaneous statement, which I have done ever since. It’s always a private as well as a public statement. Many of the love lyrics are also political, if one would read them that way, and many of the political poems are in fact couched in intimate, personal terms. You know, when Sirens Knuckles Boots was put together, it was another woman who said she would dig up what she could find from my papers. She came to consult me and I said, “I don’t care a damn what you take. You see what you want and take it.” And she gave the bunch to Mbari. Some of the poems she took were written for her, but she also found the older ones, and found among my papers the one which had been written in the ‘50s for Dulcy, which really belongs to a period ten years earlier. The things which I wrote for 149

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‘Somehow Tenderness Survives’ her in ‘61 and the things I wrote for Dulcy in ’50 – you can see the gap is ten years – I would say that in fact my style hadn’t changed all that much, but that, I think, is because I always had several styles. There was a simple, direct statement, generally lyrical and rhyming and strictly metrical, often in stanza structure, but there would also be the kind of complex Hopkinsian stuff, and there would be a kind of colloquial, conversational, unadorned poetry, which I picked up from Yeats. Some of Yeats is wonderfully direct and simple. I think I was writing in all these styles, but at the time, for me, the ideal was a kind of fusion of Donne/Hopkins/ Browning, which I would work towards at my highest pitch. But I could be writing at the other levels as well. Today I think I’m reverting to the less ornate approach, but as the idea comes to me first – if it comes in essentially simple, conversational terms – I will then work it out in those terms. But if it comes to me as an idea which has been germinating, and when it takes shape in verse, comes in a complex form, then I will go on developing it as a complex statement. But very often I wish that my best poetry would be a simple, singing kind of poetry, so I may postpone an idea because it doesn’t come in that form. Or I may dismiss it altogether. Or, as now – last night, going home after a political meeting, a wonderful evening – a portion of a poem came straightaway as I came out of the tube into the night. But a fraction of a second after that came the remembrance that I’m not writing poetry anymore, so I dismissed it. Whereas, if I had been writing, I would have begun to explore the idea, walking all the way home. By the time I had been able to sit down and write, the poem would have been almost complete. This is normally how it works. The idea is developed in the elaborations, and you hear the rhythm in your head and sound them out, and so on, for the final shape – which may still, of course, take redrafting and reshaping. But if it presents itself as a complex notion or image initially, I tend to accept that. Sometimes the whole form comes. Not only the diction, but actually the structure of the poem. Some of them, which consist of a statement and then the recapitulation or exposition, are always in the sonata form: for instance, “This sun on this rubble after rain,” which is then developed in three refrains, each of which develops the initial theme. When you end: “Like the sun on this debris after rain,” you have modulated into a statement which is richer than the first one, because you have worked it out in the exposition section. But the whole poem may come like that. Of course, I have also gone through mystical phases, when it seemed to me immoral to write poetry, so for a whole year I would stop writing. I find that it is impossible for me to simply take a decision not to write. This doesn’t mean that I have stopped thinking poetry or that ideas don’t come to me, but I simply refuse to put them down. And when they come – when I’m walking the street or in the tube – if I am prepared to look at them closely, I will discover the ramifications of the idea, and the images will leap to mind and so on, and I will have a poem. But when it comes as it normally comes first 150

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‘Somehow Tenderness Survives’ – as a kind of insight or perception or a musical phrase – if I dismiss it, then that’s the end of the poem. Now why do I do this? Normally, simply when I begin to develop a guilt about an accumulation of work and I realize that I may not do the work, but to give myself the possibility of doing it, I must cut out poetry. So that if I have spare time, rather than turning to verse (if I turn to anything) it will be to unfinished projects that I’m working on. Poetry is still a dreadfully occasional thing for me. What is worse, as long as it’s occasional, as long as one is a dilettante, one’s not a craftsman. I have always said a good poet is like a good carpenter: if you made a table, the four legs would be square – you know, they would stand even on the ground, the thing wouldn’t wobble – so that one would plane and chisel and hammer away until it was a well-wrought piece of carpentry. And it seems to me that if I ever made such a commitment – to be a craftsman in poetry – inevitably, the other things I’m doing would suffer, because I think you would have to be prepared to abandon yourself to some measure of impulse, because I think that this is in the nature of poetry. It’s true Keats12 used to sit down every morning at ten o’clock and write for two hours solid, and he would know it was coming. He said that “Poetry has to come as naturally as the leaves come to a tree,” and he could sit down and do a stint. I know other poets who say, “I do forty lines a day – no nonsense.” And I think one can do that, because a lot of one’s notions about writing poetry are merely sentimental. I think one oughtn’t be romantic about being a poet, but I do believe that some of the writing of poetry is by impulse. In order for me to make a total commitment to poetry, I would have to remake myself. This is not impossible, in the sense that I could wholly shut out, say, my political activity, my organizing work, my sport, the kind of chores which I do from day to day with this and that committee, and so on. I think it would not be impossible, but I think it would be immoral. This is what really stops me: that a total commitment to the craft of poetry, with the kind of integrity which that implies, would do damage to what I now regard as essential to integrity for me. Which means social concern. Specifically, social concern with my own country, to which I have a particular – largely sentimental – obligation. It seems to me that what you do in Britain on race is as useful as what you do in South Africa on race. I think it’s extremely valuable to be working on it here, except that you mustn’t spread your fire. There are good people working on the British scene; there are a few on the South African scene. That is where my knowledge, my expertise, my own experience lies, so it makes sense to do that. On the other hand, I should think that if I got a year as a writer-inresidence or something, I would probably do all the other little things I’m doing now, or some of them, because there would always be time for them, 12

John Keats (1795-1821), English romantic poet.

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‘Somehow Tenderness Survives’ but my kind of relentless pursuit of what I was after would be of such a measure that I would be free of the sense of mere dabbling, of slipshod work, or just plastering and wallpapering over cracks, and that sort of thing. To tell the truth, there are very few of my poems I can go back to without dissatisfaction, very few, and in fact the closer I look at them – and this is why I don’t often do it – the more dissatisfied I become. I can see alternative choices, a clumsy jointing of images where they just don’t fit smoothly, or where one might have fit several more things in the same phrase by a rearrangement or the choice of another adjective. And very often, of course, I fail, not through doing too little, but by attempting too much and succeeding badly. So one is conscious of the defects all the time. In fact, my most productive periods are very often simply an expression of dissatisfaction with my verse. I’m really reworking themes, because I feel I have stated them incompletely. So several poems may often just be oblique attacks on a central idea, which I haven’t elaborated fully. There are very few of my poems I would rate as quite finished, and oddly enough, the one or two which I think I could not do any better on – though they are not perfect yet – are poems which are almost generally condemned. This is very amusing, because it seems to me “Longing,” in its way, is nearly perfect in what it sets out to do. Now maybe it sets out to do the wrong thing, but having set out to do something, it came very close to achieving it: a fusion of very high-powered intellection, a series of purely abstract notions making a certain argument, but this argument building up also to an emotional intensity where the intellectual part is not lost, but reinforces the emotional part. But I don’t think I have met more than maybe half a dozen at most – possibly three or four is more accurate – people who said, “Now, that is a good poem!” And I don’t mind terribly, but it does make me cautious, because supposing one were to make this total commitment, and supposing, in fact, you set out to do these rather ambitious things – the world might agree that you are a bad poet! Much of my poetry is written late at night or in the early hours of the morning, chiefly because my days are so busy. I’m only alone from midnight, perhaps, because the whole day has been tied up with talking and interviews, telephones, etc., particularly when you are on the road. You speak at a public meeting which ends at eleven, and you then have to have coffee with people until midnight and so on. If you’re not alone, of course, you can’t write. Unless, as I sometimes do at meals, I can cut off my associates from me and write a poem on the menu or something of that sort. But normally, once you’re in company, it’s impossible to write. But it’s hard to know what environment is congenial, because often I write under the most uncongenial circumstances. One explanation for why I can write so easily in so many places may be that it is my way of asserting, subconsciously, the difference between what I was in prison and what I am now, a kind of celebration of pseudo-freedom – not real freedom – but to 152

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‘Somehow Tenderness Survives’ celebrate the contrast between confinement and this new kind of mobility. I find I can write in a jet plane with great ease. I can go into a totally new and sometimes even alien, hostile environment and still find the capacity to write poetry, perhaps because I’m celebrating this kind of leap-frogging that I’m doing. At other times I write because I find so much in my daily work that is frustrating. You go to an embassy to raise an issue on South Africa or even to get travel documents to enter a country and you kick your heels in corridors for days on end. When I am very angry or frustrated and I don’t want to get mad – because then I would lose a grip on the situation – I turn inwards, and I write poetry instead, rather than blowing my top. There are less compelling situations which provoke my poetic impulse, too. I may get a notion in the tube and find that I don’t have a pen or I don’t have paper, so I don’t write it and then I forget it, but perhaps going to bed it may come back to me. Or on some other occasion I may see the same advert, or whatever triggered it off initially, and the notion may come back – often in a quite different form. I may then write it, or scribble the opening line on my newspaper. If I throw the paper away, then that’s normally the end of the poem, if I don’t keep it somewhere and go back and work on it. But often, say, if you get a notion in the morning, you forget it during the day. Going home, it comes back – and you don’t feel like writing. So you toy with it in your mind, you explore its possibilities or its ramifications, and if they become exciting enough, you can then write the poem. Or you may let it go. Or you may find visitors at home or the telephone ringing or something and it will disappear again. On the whole, I try to avoid “occasional poetry,” because I have a guilt about it. So lots of things happen which seem to be an occasion for a poem and I don’t write it, I resist writing it. I should think that I could have written a great deal more of elegiac poetry but I don’t. Those I write are almost always sufficiently immediate and compelling. They also tend to be very bad poetry, because – another reason – I write without conviction, conscious of this occasional nature. I should add that I make a very clear distinction between personal and poetic commitment. I believe that the poet – as poet – has no obligation to be committed, but the man – as a man – has an obligation to be committed. What I’m saying is that I think everybody ought to be committed, and the poet is just one more of the many “everybodies.” His commitment may or may not come through in his work; I don’t think this means writing on specific political themes. I think it is immoral for an artist to import propaganda into his work. It shows a lack of integrity. But I am convinced that we all have a role; we have all got a job to do in society, chiefly in the transforming or even in the destroying of a given society, This happens, not because we are poets, but because we are people living in the society. It may be that the poet, by virtue of his talents or perhaps because of his sensitivity, may either be able 153

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‘Somehow Tenderness Survives’ to see things better or say things better, but he has no obligation because of his poetic function. I don’t think one must say to poets, “You have got to be committed because you’re a poet” any more than you should say to a carpenter or a man in a trade union he’s got to be committed. I think the poet is just another man. True, his concern is with ideas, where the carpenter’s might be with lumber, so his criticism would be on the level of ideas, possibly, because this is his plane, just as for the carpenter it would be on the level of bad housing, because that’s his plane. So, he must do his thing where he is, but I would hate to go around the place telling people, “You have got to be committed because you are a poet.” I’ll say to them, “We ought all to be committed, because we are people, we are all part of the same human environment.” I have always been committed, but my commitment has taken many forms. When I was a social worker, my concern was with social rehabilitation, social welfare. This was my involvement in the society. As a teacher, I was opposed to discriminatory education, because that’s where I was. When I was active in church work, for instance, in the slums or wherever, this was not an absence of commitment to a cause, nor of an obligation in the society. It didn’t show in my poetry; there were no social messages, but I would like to think that even now all I’m doing is commenting on the environment. And when the environment made no impact on me the way that prison, say, made an impact, or house arrest, or bannings, I did not reflect it, because it wasn’t hitting me in that way. But, the moment it began to hit me, I reacted to it – not because I imported it, but because it was now the stuff of my existence, it was part of the fabric of my existence. To reflect what I was, was to include it. It seems to me that certain themes which I was working on in the past, or which have run through my work consistently, are still there. There’s a kind of religious questioning, which in fact has intensified after prison, and which I still continue now, whether it’s in Algiers “On this anniversary day,” or whether it’s in Denver “Living a poem,” or whatever – I’m still asking certain questions about the nature of my existence and certain theological concepts, if you like, religious concepts. That is still there. I still write the kind of intimate, personal, lyrical poetry – generally love lyrics and things like that or for nature or for South Africa – which tend not to be wholly egotistical. They are not only about me, but they tend to import bits of the South African situation or the South African predicament into my work. That, I think, is still there. In essence, one is still being tender about the loved object, but one’s relation with it is different because it’s now not mere nearness. It’s not the violated, ravaged landscape that I lived in, but looking at it from a distance. It strikes me sometimes that the world is so small today, and the areas of the world – in what is important – differ so little, that one needn’t attach oneself to a particular area to the exclusion of all other areas. Also, I often suspect patriotism of being mere sentimentality, this kind of “my country right or wrong” nonsense, when in fact it’s the world we’re living in and not 154

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‘Somehow Tenderness Survives’ countries. And it is true that South Africa is in no way unique in the kinds of people that are there, in its climate, in its geography, in its mountains, in what is attractive. Having roamed, as I have, most of the world, I know how much South Africa is like so many other parts of the world. It’s got unique political characteristics, but these really don’t affect the quality of the human beings there; they are pretty much like people elsewhere. So how does one justify this sentimental attachment to an area no different from areas in Algiers or around Carmel on the west coast of the U.S.? It seems to me one cannot justify it as an emotional response. But when I was in South Africa, in a very large South African community – and a very narrow one, with a terribly ghettoized mentality – one of the ways I managed not to become ghettoized myself, so that I never became the typical subservient black man or, for that matter, the typical rebellious and frustrated black man, but something in between, was because I said, “In fact, I am a citizen of the world. I can go anywhere and I can meet anybody and I do not accept this kind of limitation on me, either the sub-man or the man confined in a particular locality or location defined for him by the State, with boundaries that he could not go beyond.” I felt I was not localized, I couldn’t be kept in my place. And this meant that one transcended a local patriotism. So now, I ask myself: if, in South Africa, you were not a patriot, how do you justify now being a narrow patriot? If I am one now, then I suspect it’s merely a sentimental posture. It gives me a persona as a particular poet with a particular voice – the exiled poet – but how phony is it? And then, I think the answer is really: you must do what you can do where you are. Although it is fine to fight for humanity, one must always see “humanity” in terms of real persons. One’s reaction to good or evil is a reaction derived from real experience, so that the evil I must fight is the evil I know. The people I must fight for are the people I know. It’s fine to fight for blacks in Britain, and I do what I can, but the blacks I know best and the situation I know best are the blacks of South Africa and the situation in South Africa. In terms of geography, of landscape, I have seen mountains as fine in the Rockies. I have seen beaches as fine in Algiers and on the west coast. So that I suppose, in a sense, one sees people in a landscape, and then one knows that landscape, and it is dear to you not because of what it is intrinsically, but because of its associations. So it’s a special landscape relating to special people; otherwise, it seems to me, there’s very little justification for being sentimentally and narrowly attached to a particular strip of the earth, because our concerns more and more are global. It’s one family – “one world,” in Wendell Willkie’s words,13 which I read long ago. I have always accepted it as one world. So we 13

Wendell Lewis Willkie (1892-1944), American politician and Republican Party nominee for the 1940 presidential election, which he lost to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who then appointed him ambassador-at-large and sent him around the world to promote a vision of “One World” freed from imperialism and colonialism.

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‘Somehow Tenderness Survives’ ought to be patriots of the world rather than of a country, but to get a focus, I think you need a place and you need people. So my greatest commitment – personal as well as poetic – is still to South Africa.

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Talking with Students [When Dennis Brutus came to The University of Texas at Austin in February 1970 to participate in a colloquium on “The Black Experience,” he spent most of his time talking about race and politics in South Africa. Throughout the day – which included a public lecture, a press conference, a television interview, and several meetings with students – he was bombarded with questions about apartheid, political oppression, revolution, and his own role in the South African struggle. Only once did he talk about his writing; this was in a large African literature class where he read and commented on several of his poems and invited questions from the students. What follows is a partial transcript of that class meeting and probably one of the most revealing excursions into the complex mind and imagination of an outstanding poet from Africa.]* I’m glad to be here, and it seems to me the most useful thing I can do is to spend most of the time answering questions on the things that interest you. I ought to warn you that I don’t know all the answers, and when it comes to poetry, even my own, I don’t always give the same answer to the same question. This may sound odd, but I believe one tends to look at the same thing at different times in different ways. I think only dead people don’t change, and even they putrefy so that there is a form of change. Another thing I should say is that I feel I know what I try to mean by my own poetry, and I think I know how it ought to be read in terms of meaning. So it seems to me sensible to read some of my poems while I’m here, partly because they tell you something about Africa and African writing and about the African predicament today and partly because they tell you something about my own work. The first one I’m going to read is called “The Sibyl.” You know, of course, that a sibyl was an old woman who made prophecies. There were sibyls or oracles in Greece. Now I had a friend called Sybil; it’s really as simple as that. And so I would write, not a poem for her (because this would be a little * The page numbers in brackets are to A Simple Lust (London: Heinemann & New York: Hill & Wang, 1973).

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Talking with Students

5. Photograph of Dennis Brutus from Palaver, 1970

“corny”), but a poem for her at a second or third remove by finding a new image, somehow. But as a tribute to her I would stick her name in the title. I’m really talking in the poem, as you can guess, about the politics of South Africa and the inevitable bloody kind of destruction that must come there. But I shouldn’t be explaining everything. If it’s a good poem, it will explain itself. Her seer’s eyes saw nothing that the birds did not, her words were sharp and simple as their song; that mutant winds had honed their teeth on ice that sap ran viscous in the oaks and senile pines – these things were common cause except to those whose guilty fear had made them comatose; who could not guess that red coagulate stains would burst from summer’s grossly swollen veins or spell out from the leaves of opulent decadence that autumn’s austere nemesis would come to cleanse? [page 6] 158

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Talking with Students I think it comes off, and I think it says quite a number of things. But perhaps we should go on to another, the poem about the troubadour [page 2]. I haven’t read this one for a long time, but I did look at it last night because I have always felt a little sad about a typographical error in it. It seems to me one can read the first line and it can sound terrible unless you put the accent on the first syllable of traverse. It should be tráverse. This is because in geography, when you are using sextants and other things to map a country, it’s called a “tráverse” – the actual process of measuring a piece of land from the angles of the hills and valleys – and I am using the geographical term as a verb. Once you have accepted that, the rhythmic structure, I think, becomes much more convincing as a poem. One needs that accent. A troubadour, I tráverse all my land exploring all her wide-flung parts with zest probing in motion sweeter far than rest her secret thickets with an amorous hand: and I have laughed, disdaining those who banned inquiry and movement, delighting in the test of will when doomed by Saracened arrest, choosing, like unarmed thumb, simply to stand. Thus, quixoting till a cast-off of my land I sing and fare, person to loved-one pressed braced for this pressure and the captor’s hand that snaps off service like a weathered strand: – no mistress-favour has adorned my breast only the shadow of an arrow-brand. I know I don’t read that one with much conviction, but this is just because I’m self-conscious about it. It’s really a rather intricate poem, and if you will be patient, I’ll spend a little time talking about it. First the genesis. I was writing a lot of terribly loose, very bad free verse at the time, most or nearly all of which I threw away, and it seemed to me that I needed the discipline of a very tight poetic form. The tightest form I could think of was the sonnet, which is a very demanding form. And of all the sonnets – the Shakespearean variation, the Spenserian,1 Hopkins’s variations and so on – it seemed to me that the Petrarchan2 was the most difficult. The Petrarchan rhymes abba/abba and cde/cde, and I decided I would make mine even more difficult; there would be only two rhyming sounds, an “a” sound 1

Edmund Spenser (ca. 1552-1599), English poet best known for his epic allegory The Faerie Queen (1590-1596). 2 Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), Italian poet, scholar, and humanist.

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Talking with Students and a “b” sound throughout the whole poem, not merely octet and sestet. So I made up my mind that the next poem I was going to write would be a hell of a tight one and would have this kind of structure. I didn’t know what it was going to be about, but I resolved that I needed some discipline. At that time I was forbidden to leave a particular district in South Africa. I had an order from the secret police restricting me to Johannesburg. So for the hell of it, I used to think up excuses for having to travel. I would persuade my wife to find a pretext (she was about seven hundred miles away from me); I would smuggle a note down to her and back would come a telegram, “Baby seriously ill,” or something like that. I would have to go to court, and there would be a legal process by which the banning order, the confining order, would be set aside for twenty-four hours or forty-eight hours. So I was allowed to dash away and come back. This happened fairly often. I liked those trips because I was doing what they were telling me I couldn’t do. I was defying their orders and actually conducting underground political activity at the same time. So, traveling around and having this notion of myself traveling around, the ideas began to fall into place with this shape. Gradually they came together. I wanted to catch a certain medieval quality – I forget why – and that’s why you have a troubadour, a Don Quixote, quixoting in the poem. But you also have a line from a very early Latin hymn written by Thomas Aquinas,3 a very beautiful hymn from which I borrowed the phrase, “motion sweeter far than rest.” Furthermore, the resistance movement in South Africa has as its signal an upraised thumb. So you can see the thumb is in the poem as well. This is a code signal. And “Saracen” refers to the armored cars the police drive which have searchlights on them and may have guns. So there are all kinds of things woven into the pattern, but above all, there was an awareness that I was going to prison sooner or later. You can’t go on doing this and not get caught. And I expected to go to the prison on Robben Island, the worst prison in the country, which is off the beach of Cape Town. So when I talk of a weathered strand, it’s functioning in two ways: it’s a bit of cloth from a garment that’s frayed, weathered, worn out, but it’s also the strand where the waves break. It’s an anticipation of a particular prison. And whereas you went into battle, Don Quixote and everybody else, wearing your lady’s scarf or handkerchief wrapped around your lance, I knew that this was not for me, that what I would wear could be imaged by a rather old fashioned prison garb with big arrows on it. The only kind of mistress’s favour I would wear – my mistress being my country – would be a convict’s clothes. I hope this doesn’t make it too complicated. I think it’s still a successful poem, even if you forget about all these complexities. It still comes off, I think. 3

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), Italian Catholic priest, philosopher, and theologian.

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Talking with Students Of course, it is also a sexual poem. It’s a poem for a particular woman – very much so in the first stanza where one recognizes her posture. As for “cast-off my land,” I was thinking back to the time of Defoe,4 and further back to Fernando Po, to the man who had been a castoff, a castaway, as Robinson Crusoe was. A castaway is a man who goes to an island, and I expected to be a castaway; I would go to Robben Island. But in another sense I am talking of fabrics, mistress’s favours, weathered strands, meaning bits of worn cotton, worn wool, and they’re cast off in stitches in knitting because you “cast on”and “cast off ” when you’re knitting. I don’t know whether it’s overambitious, but I was trying to do three things at the same time there. It’s an anticipation of what would happen to me politically. But I’m also trying to stick within the strict imagery of the poem which is of a mistress, a beloved, who sits sewing in a castle. I’m sure you know the image from “The Lady of Shalott” and things like that. So it’s working in three ways. Of course, all my poetry is not so complicated. But the troubadour image is important throughout my work. There was a phase when this was the dominant image in my poetry. Could you explain why you have moved from this kind of complex poetry to a poetry of plainer statement in Letters to Martha? Yes. As you know, I spent a period in prison for my opposition to apartheid and racism. But you may not know that much of it was in fact spent in solitary confinement. And this meant that you were in very great danger of going insane, and I came very close to it. To keep yourself busy you would have to organize your day in such a way that you could use up the whole day, because you saw no one, you spoke to no one, your food was just pushed under your door on the floor – a bowl of porridge three times a day. So you said to yourself, “Well, I’ll spend an hour thinking about literature and another hour thinking about movies,” and you stayed away from things like your family and so on – you didn’t dare think of them. And eventually, having exhausted most of the common themes, I got onto looking at my poetry. And the more I looked at it, the more horrified I became. It seemed such utter rubbish. I could have, in a sense, committed suicide at the mere thought of it. I had reached that point. And you went through this kind of dark night, and then, sensibly, you would say, “All right, if it was so terrible, what’s better than that? What would you do instead if you could start again?” Either you didn’t write at all, which seemed to me the sensible thing to do, or you would write differently. I had even sent my wife a message (I was allowed one letter every six months) saying, “I want all my poetry destroyed and nothing published.” 4

Daniel Defoe (ca .1659-1731), prolific British novelist, journalist, and pamphleteer. Author of Robinson Crusoe (1719).

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Talking with Students The first thing I decided about my future poetry was that there must be no ornament, absolutely none. And the second thing I decided was you oughtn’t to write for poets; you oughtn’t even to write for people who read poetry, not even students. You ought to write for the ordinary person: for the man who drives a bus, or the man who carries the baggage at the airport, and the woman who cleans the ashtrays in the restaurant. If you can write poetry which makes sense to those people, then there is some justification for writing poetry. Otherwise you have no business writing. And therefore, there should be no ornament because ornament gets in the way. It becomes too fancy-schmancy; it becomes over-elaborate. It is, in a way, a kind of pride, a self-display, a glorying in the intellect for its own sake, which is contemptible. I don’t know whether I would hold the same position now. I am only trying to explain how I arrived at that position then. So I said, “You will have to set the thing down. You will ‘tell it like it is,’ but you will let the word do its work in the mind of the reader. And you will write poetry that a man who drives a bus along the street can quote, if he feels like quoting.” Very ambitious indeed. But this is based on the idea that all people are poets. Some are just ashamed to let it be known, and some are shy to try, and some write but don’t have the guts to show it to others. But we all are poets because we all have the same kind of response to beauty. We may define beauty differently, but we all do respond to it. So this was the assumption: don’t dress it up; you will just hand it over, and it will do its own work. And I think in fact I may have succeeded in one or two poems. I’m going to read one where this may have come off. It doesn’t really need an explanation, but I’ll just tell you that I was kept in a prison in Johannesburg after I had been shot in the stomach by the secret police, and then put in a truck with about sixty other prisoners. We were chained together, hands and ankles, and put in trucks and taken down to Robben Island. That’s a distance of about a thousand miles. First they would strip you, take all your clothes from you, and you would line up naked. Then they would come along and issue everybody these short trousers – a kind of Bermuda shorts! – and a little vest, and then they would chain you. You would be barefooted, of course. And you would travel about four in the morning in trucks escorted by security police and cops on motorbikes and in armored cars. (I don’t know whether we needed that kind of security.) And halfway on the journey, in a little town called Colesberg, we stopped for the night and were given porridge and then put back in the trucks and sent off again. This is a poem about it [pages 52-53]:

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Talking with Students Cold the clammy cement sucks our naked feet a rheumy yellow bulb lights a damp grey wall the stubbled grass wet with three o’clock dew is black with glittery edges; we sit on the concrete, stuff with our fingers the sugarless pap into our mouths then labour erect; form lines; steel ourselves into fortitude or accept an image of ourselves numb with resigned acceptance; the grizzled senior warder comments: ‘Things like these I have no time for; they are worse than rats; you can only shoot them’ Overhead the large frosty glitter of the stars the Southern Cross flowering low; the chains on our ankles and wrists that pair us together jangle glitter. We begin to move awkwardly. 163

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Talking with Students Well, that’s it. I don’t know whether I ought to throw that out, and you will have to decide for yourself whether it achieves what it sets out to achieve. It may be that in time I can persuade people that my intentions were valid. Or it may be that I will have to be unpersuaded – this may well happen, judging from what I wrote yesterday. I would say that I seem to be occupying a kind of middle ground at the moment. But this may simply be because I lack the guts to maintain the position which I believe to be right and which people are persuading me is not right. I don’t know. I have an open mind on the matter. This Colesberg poem is in fact a more artistic poem than it appears to be. I think the art is just concealed. I think, for instance, the use of the word awkwardly at the end has more than one function. I think the use of [four stars of] the Southern Cross with a kind of religious overtone, a certain spirituality, helps the suggestion that awkwardness is gracelessness, is being without grace, is being ungraceful. But to be without grace, which is something given to you gratis by God, is a spiritual concept. And if someone is without grace, if one is graceless, if one is awkward, couldn’t one also be, if without grace, forsaken by God? “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”; this – the loss of grace – is the absolute depth of deprivation. To be totally deserted by God, to be forsaken, is desolation. And what I am trying to achieve is an absence of grace so total that one is desolate, and I have made the word awkwardly, the absence of grace, function for it. So it is really perhaps a more arty poem than it would appear at first. How long after the experience was this poem written? At least a year. Is that typical of most of the prison poems? No, the Letters to Martha themselves were written earlier, but as you know, the Letters to Martha tend not to capture immediately an experience. They talk about it, but this one is immediate. And as the experience moved further away from me, or I moved further away from it in time and it became less intense, it became more manageable. I could at first only write about it from the outside, but later on I could live inside it, to some extent. So some of the Letters to Martha were written within maybe six months or eight months of coming out. But the sharper ones were written further and further away. Do you regard this kind of poetry as protest poetry? No, I don’t. But would you say these poems contain protest? Yes, I think they may have a protest function. I would like to believe I don’t go around in my poetry saying, “What a terrible thing racism is,” or “What a terrible thing apartheid is.” I would like to believe I don’t say that in my poetry, 164

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Talking with Students except by indirection, by implication. By reporting a simple experience I ask people to make up their own minds. But I don’t try to persuade them as to how they ought to make up their minds. I don’t think I myself would call this protest. I would say it functions as protest; it has the effect of protest. But I think it’s poetry and not protest; it’s not propaganda. The politics is not imported into it. I may be a little old fashioned in this, but I have tried not to preach about racism or to make political speeches about racism in my poetry because I really believe that there is a thing called artistic integrity. I really believe that one ought not to turn art into propaganda. I think this is not only dishonest, I think it’s a prostitution of the art. I know people don’t always agree with me. There are some who say, “So what, all art is propaganda,” and I think this, in another way, is true. But I feel myself that it would be dishonest and discordant to introduce crude political statements, raw political dogmas, preachments against racism, in poetry. I don’t believe one ought to do this. Now that I live in Denver5 – I write poetry about the Rocky Mountains, or it gets into my poetry somehow. In South Africa you write about prison and police and machine guns because this is your landscape, in the same way that the Rocky Mountains are my landscape in Denver. The police and the system of tyranny surround you in South Africa. But isn’t some of your later poetry propagandistic to some degree? I’m thinking, for example, of the poem where you speak about your role in sports or the poem entitled “Their Behaviour” in Letters to Martha. In “Their Behaviour” I was writing to a Welsh woman who said, “I wonder what it’s like in South Africa.” I was just trying to help her, and I was replying on a particular day which seemed to catch the quality of South Africa; this was Blood River Day, a once-a-year tribal ritual when whites celebrate their historic victory over the blacks in a battle which raged until the river ran with blood. The poem was written for her information. It may be propagandistic but that wasn’t the intention. The intention was pure description. As for the one about sport, I really don’t think it should have been printed. I think it’s the kind of personal statement which one makes in a moment of very grave self-doubt, when you begin to wonder whether you have done anything at all, and you say, “Well, damn it all, I did do this.” You make a kind of assertion. I even think that, having chosen to write it, I argued it through all the way. I think it’s got momentum; it does finish itself. But I think it may well be propagandistic because, in making that kind of defense of myself, I had to incorporate raw political elements, crude things. I would not have included that poem in the volume myself. 5

Brutus was teaching at the University of Denver at this time.

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Talking with Students You said you wanted your poetry to be easily understood by the bus driver, the man on the street, and so on. Wouldn’t protest poetry permit you to communicate directly with such people? Well, I suppose one answer to that is you can’t write poetry about anything you don’t feel poetic about. If it doesn’t take flight, if it doesn’t get off the ground, if you don’t feel that you have got a certain tension, a certain singing quality – well, you might even want to do it, but it won’t come off. In fact, I think I have written some like that and thrown them away because I felt they hadn’t come off. You have mentioned a number of times that you throw away a lot of poems you don’t like. Have you ever had any second thoughts about this? No, but strange things have happened once or twice. Once I was speaking at a meeting in Geneva, and after the meeting someone came up and said, “Oh, I liked your new poem in Transition.” And I looked, and there was a poem which I had given away in disgust because I didn’t want to see it anymore. When I looked at it, I said, “Damn it, did I write this?” because it seemed quite good! But when you see it in print, somehow it doesn’t talk to you anymore. You’re more detached about it; you’re not so self-conscious. It’s not like striptease, when you see it in print. And also, after you have forgotten all about it, when you come back to it, sometimes it looks all right. But there are others I rediscover and tear up because they look worse than they did before. So it works both ways. Is it true that you write a lot of your poetry on airplanes? Yes, I have probably written more poetry in a plane, certainly of late, than anywhere else. Maybe it has something to do with gravity, but I do feel lighter in a plane. I feel in a sense liberated, freed of all kinds of restraints and – provided people don’t make small talk – I find that I function better. Images, responses, and very often an idea which came to me in a class or in the toilet or anywhere else which I didn’t work on then, can return to me, and the thing has matured over six or eight months so when I now write it, it already has a whole series of complicated images associated with it. Or sometimes just bits and pieces – you can pick up a stone here and a pebble two months later on a different beach and so on. Ultimately you can shape them together and get something. And a plane seems to do that to me. I find that the pieces settle together. Could we look at one more of your poems? Yes. How about “So, for the moment, Sweet, is peace,” the last one in Sirens Knuckles Boots? It really isn’t a bad poem. It was written, I should think, around about 1950, a long time ago. And it was written as part of about fifty or sixty of which this is the only one left; the others have all been lost. It’s a little sad, I think, but when I looked for them, this was the only one I could find. I had 166

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Talking with Students won the Mbari prize for poetry, and they had written to say, “Have you got any more poetry we can publish?” and I scratched around and discovered I had thrown them all away except this one. Maybe the others were bad, or I didn’t like them, but this one seems to me, looking at it now, not too bad. It was written at a time when I was doing some study on Gerard Manley Hopkins, and I think he is the strongest influence here. I have always been influenced first of all by John Donne, who is still, I think, the strongest influence on my writing, and then Browning in various periods, and people like Eliot, Ezra Pound, Patchen,6 Rexroth,7 Wallace Stevens8 – quite a lot of Americans, more than you would expect. But at this time I was on a Hopkins kick. It’s got a kind of sonnet structure, as you might notice. As far as I remember, I meant it to be four lines and then six lines and then four lines again. It adds up to fourteen but it’s not a proper sonnet. And there’s rhyme in it too, but chiefly half-rhyme because I think I was influenced also by Wilfred Owen9 and Gibson10 at the time. You’ll find a word like cape is not too far from spray, and still has the same kind of l that crawl has. It’s a kind of half-rhyme. Curve and scourge are also not too far apart. And the images, I suppose you can see, are fairly simple. The first one is the sea, the second one a snail, later on there’s a bit about a pelican in it, and then it goes back to the sea. If you know a nineteenth-century English poem by Swinburne11 called “The Swimmer’s Dream,” I may even have been influenced by it, because it’s a poem about lying in the curve of the wave, or a part of it. The pelican image is also interesting because although it’s a long time before the troubadour, there is another hymn by Thomas Aquinas in which he compares Christ to the pelican. It’s an old medieval image of Christ. Apparently when baby pelicans are dying of thirst, the mother pelican will peck her own breast and they will drink her blood. Christ, you see, shed his blood to keep his baby pelicans alive. I’m using the image in another way by saying that the pelican sustains itself, keeps itself alive. Can you keep yourself alive by feeding on your own blood? Like the “pelican pecks,” you see. An 6 Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972), American poet and novelist known for reading his poetry and fiction with jazz accompaniment. 7 Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982), American poet, translator, and literary critic who was part of the Beat Generation. 8 Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), American modernist poet, lawyer, and insurance executive who won the National Book Award in 1951 and 1955 and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1955. 9 Wilfred Edward Salter Owen (1893-1918), British poet and soldier, a leading poet of the First World War. 10 Wilfrid Wilson Gibson (1878-1972), British poet, many of whose poems are set in Northumberland. 11 Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909), British poet, novelist, and essayist.

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Talking with Students unhappy little alliteration there, by the way. I think those p’s are too close. The word Sweet, incidentally, should be capitalized because there was a girl whose name was Dulcy, and I’m playing on “Dulce et Decorum.” One of Aquinas’s hymns in Latin begins with the word Dulcis or Dulce. So the Sweet there, the sweetness, has many meanings. So, for the moment, Sweet, is peace I rest, wave-cradled, safe from emotion’s spray balmed by the shadeless trough, the sun-greened, sensed, unfigured lean-feel of your ocean-self. Oh I know unrest returns, the scourge – what love can pelican-peck for long its own swollen heart for sustenance? can one shake pain as raindrops from a cape? can the self, an unprotected mollusc, crawl free from the past’s whorled labyrinths? Even the thought of pain’s return brings pain a fissure mars the moment’s quiet delf: help me, my heart, to hold this instant still, keep me in quiet’s acquiescent curve. [page 33] I think it comes off. There may be some defects, especially that “pelicanpeck.” But otherwise it’s all right. I wonder if you noticed the use of assonance; there’s a very deliberate use of certain vowel sounds: wave, safe, spray, where the same kind of a sound is consciously repeated. And notice too the f ’s and the l’s, particularly the l’s, which seem to me to give the feeling of leaning against a wave – balmed, shadeless, the lean-feel of self – all those l’s against each other. And, of course, when waves break, they are blue or green, but at the moment they rise to crash, they’re colorless, really transparent, if you look at them very carefully. So the “shadeless trough” is the peak at which the wave is in fact uncolored, without shade. I think that’s all, except that I was writing the poem in a kitchen, I remember, and I looked at the plates on the shelf which were a kind of blue Delft, but I used delf instead. Think of cups and saucers without cracks in them and then think of one being cracked – this nice quiet plate on a quiet shelf. And if it’s cracked, it’s got a fissure, which spoils it. A fissure mars (I think that r is good there) “mars the moment’s quiet delf.” But I’m afraid I’m showing off. I had better stop.

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Reviewing a Review [One of the first reviews of Brutus’s A Simple Lust appeared under the title “Lust without Passion” in the African Communist, No. 55, 4th quarter, 1973. It was written by someone identified simply as GALA. According to Roger Field, Alex la Guma: A Literary & Political Biography ( James Currey, 2010, p. 236), this was a pseudonym used by Alex la Guma in articles he wrote for the African Communist. Here is the entire review.] Heinemann Books in London recently published a collection of poems by the South African poet Dennis Brutus. The collection includes his earlier works, namely Sirens Knuckles Boots, Letters to Martha, Poems from Algiers, Thoughts Abroad. All these and others are now published under the title “A Simple Lust.” A victim of apartheid oppression and police persecution, one who served a sentence on the notorious Robben Island, Dennis Brutus has also been active in the campaign to isolate South Africa from world sport and in campaigns for the release of political prisoners. The reader of these “poems of South African jail and exile” would therefore look forward to an experience of poetry rooted in the realities of South African life and the poet’s identification with his country and his people’s experiences, inside jail and out. But the reader with this expectation is disappointed, for Brutus seems to be concerned only with his own personal relationships and reactions to the world about him. “A troubadour, I traverse all my land/exploring all her wide-flung parts with zest…” For the African people poetry has little to do with books. It lives in their speech, in their songs, it reflects their attitudes towards life about them, it is common property. Poets, like Oswald Mtshali for example, who have written, have succeeded in transferring the common experiences to paper and have still retained their own personalities as poets. But for Brutus everything, jail, exile, oppression, happiness, despair, happens to himself, the poet, only. “…The iron monster of the world ingests me in its grinding maw.” “What wonder such gingerly menacing claws, they would rend me if they could…but I accept their leashed-in power…” Even when he turns outward or pays tribute to somebody else, like Lutuli, one has the feeling that it is more a gesture than identification. It can be argued of course that Brutus comes from a more individualised section of South African society and carries with him the poetic traditions included in the education of that 169

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Reviewing a Review community. Perhaps modern poetry is the product of a more individualised society, and Brutus is a modern poet. But the world is common to the poet and his fellow man, the poetry in which he formulates his experience of it must still evoke a general reaction, touch a chord in every heart, expressing what others feel but cannot express themselves, drawing all into closer communion. The poet, thanks to his talent and inspiration, can at least express what others feel, and when he expresses himself they recognize his longings as their own. It is difficult to find this with Dennis Brutus. He is more the poet’s poet. His imagery satisfies himself and the cognoscenti perhaps, but hardly anybody else. Who but the initiated among us can explain “an ordinary girl” surveying the poet “with Stanislav disdain” or “the diurnal reminders excoriate their souls”? Then again he is more concerned with geography and the physical world than with people. Robben Island is a “barred existence” and “Cement-grey floors and walls, cement-grey days, cement-grey time…” The poet is alone there, and only half-hears “the weary tramp of feet as the men came shuffling from the quarry.” In fact this is the only line in “On the Island” that is concerned with his fellow-prisoners, out of four verses. Outside of prison, under house-arrest, in exile, travelling, everything seems to be happening to the poet only and to nobody else. Brutus is also the intellectual poet and words in ink mean more in his book than any that could have been written in human blood. While much of his imagery is derived from the sexual experience, which in itself could profoundly evoke the human spirit, Brutus’s simple lust is unfortunately without a simple passion. GALA [After reading this, Brutus dictated on tape his response to the points raised by the reviewer. Recorded on 22 September 1974.] I have seen so many unfavorable reviews of my poetry that I begin to wonder whether there are not fundamental defects in the work, but I balance this against a number of favorable reviews which seem to say the reverse. It is, I guess, not often done and perhaps not quite the done thing for poets to reply to reviews of their work, though I have never regarded myself as a conventional poet, so I do not mind commenting on this particular review, especially since this comment is intended for information but not for formal publication. There seemed to me certain criticisms in this particular review which are wholly false, and so I am inclined to express some concern about the journal which published it. When a journal publishes a review which does not truly reflect the contents of a book, I think there is the danger that the readers may come to distrust the reliability of the journal. I single out, rapidly, three points which seem to me central to the criticism. One is the complaint that my work is entirely personal and fails to reflect the experience of others but is wholly centered on myself. Second, which is a fairly pervasive one, is that I am not truly representative of the South African society. The reviewer argues that I come from a more individualized section of South African 170

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Reviewing a Review society and carry with me the poetic traditions included in the education of this individualized section, and that my work is therefore defective in vocabulary and sensibility because it doesn’t reflect the mass of experience. The third point I would take up is the complaint that my work is “simple lust unfortunately without a simple passion.” That may be the most difficult one to dispose of. To get down to particulars, it seems to me the reviewer is using pre-prison poetry to complain about poetry which should have been written about the prison experience. In fact, the lines he quoted – “A troubadour I tráverse all my land/ exploring all her wide-flung parts with zest” – even these lines are from a poem which ends by anticipating my going to prison, and in the poem itself there are references to experiences which were common to a number of other South Africans: being banned, being forbidden to travel, suffering various restraints which ranged from confinement to a magisterial district to confinement under house arrest. These must be experiences which others were having as well. And then, to go on again and say that I failed to reflect attitudes of others towards life and the kind of existence of the people in the ghetto, this seems to me so wildly false. Notions of police arrest, sirens in the night, of the debris and rubble of the ghetto, these are all the images in my poems which were images familiar to others. It was their daily experience. That I described it as I saw it seems to me not a betrayal. I had to choose between a neutral observer’s stance or the individual-involved stance, and in that way infuse it with my own feeling, my own passion. These seem to me not to be disadvantages or vices. As for the Luthuli1 poem [page 170], which he suggests is more a gesture of tribute than identification, I think [identification is] sufficient in the lines in the poem, in lines like “return to us” and “after the fires of our anger have blazed or smouldered” [sic] which indicate an identification not so much with Luthuli but with the people, with their predicament and their struggle. And when the reviewer complains that in the sequence “On the Island” there is only one line that is concerned with my fellow prisoners out of four verses, this is simply false, and this is one remark which made me go back to the text to see if the reviewer was indeed right. I find instead that the fourth sequence, the fourth portion of verse of the sequence, is entirely about the predicament of all the prisoners. I quote [page 72]: On Saturday afternoons we were embalmed in time like specimen moths pressed under glass; we were immobile in the sunlit afternoon 1

Albert John Luthuli (1898–1967), South African teacher, politican, and President of the African National Congress who was awarded the 1960 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the nonviolent struggle against apartheid.

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Reviewing a Review waiting; Visiting time: until suddenly like a book snapped shut all possibilities vanished as zero hour passed and we knew another week would have to pass. In a footnote I might say that visiting time should be printed in quotation marks to indicate that it is a special period on Saturday afternoons when the prisoners may be visited and spend the afternoon waiting and hoping that they will indeed have a visitor. The complaint about the absence of passion hardly requires refutation. In a sense some of my poems are intensely passionate to the point of eroticism, and that this passion is a dual passion – addressed both to an individual person and to the country – and it seems to me that simply to have read the title poem in the collection [“A simple lust is all my woe”, page 176] would have made the reviewer think again because it is in itself a reference both to passion and to the very specific lust or appetite which is an appetite and lust for freedom, an almost irrational impulse and desire for freedom which cannot be satisfied, and which is expressed in the poem through the very intimate sexual imagery of someone overspent in the act of coitus or love-making. And then taking it from that intimate sexual image, it immediately moves into the broader statement of on whose behalf I speak, and the poem coming at the end of the collection is in fact a declaration of the intent of all the poems and the theme that runs through my work, and I quote: only I speak the others’ woe: those congealed in concrete or rotting in rusted ghetto-shacks; only I speak their wordless woe, their unarticulated simple lust. I have two further comments, one generalized, one specific. There is a fairly common assumption among the uninformed, and I found this too when speaking to Afro-American audiences, that there will be a certain simplicity, directness, absence of subtlety and craft, in African poetry. In fact, the whole oral tradition, and particularly the tradition of oratory and praise poetry, is the reverse. It is full of ornament, full of sophistication. The oratory, even in extemporary public orations, is organized, subtle, and functions by a kind of strategy of persuasion. I say all this by way of corrective, because I do not find the complexity of my own work, its reveling in exploiting the resources of language, to be either inconsistent with the oral tradition or indeed with the language of the common man who appreciates the use of fine language. And this might lead to one rather sour afterthought. I have found among 172

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Reviewing a Review intellectuals, and particularly political hacks and especially Party hacks, a certain arrogance in relation to the common man, the working man, the assumption that he is incapable of either subtlety himself or the appreciation of subtlety in others. This may well flow from those slogans, clichés, and broad generalizations of working for the people, working for the masses, working for the common man, and therefore a kind of anti-intellectualism, anti-eggheadism. I think this is false and shows a lack of respect for and appreciation of the humanity of the common man. And so on to a specific comment. There are certain people who would find my work unsatisfactory for a number of reasons, and these reasons really derive from their own postures and assumptions. The element of religion in my work, which I have found difficult to deal with myself, but which I incorporate in my work only when it is a matter of absolute honesty and because there is no way of excluding it from the statement of my thought at that particular time, must displease those who are nonreligious or atheistic, just as my individualism, which led me often to be in conflict with the strict Communist Party line in South Africa and critical of it – and which was one of the reasons why I declined to become a member of the Party – all this must give dissatisfaction to those who are members of the Party and who have been consistently critical of me for my “individualism,” just as I imagine some of them are now critical of me because of my enthusiastic comments on the Chinese political direction as a result of my visit to Peking, Canton, Shanghai, and other parts of China. What I am saying is that it seems to me that someone who is ideologically and dogmatically at odds with me must feel things in my work or find things in my work which are unsatisfactory. It seems to me, however, unfortunate that having made certain decisions about the content of my work and the fact that it was not in agreement with preconceived notions of how it ought to be – it seems to me unfortunate that in trying to review it, there has been a quite willful distortion and suppression of elements of my work which I think reflect precisely those things which the reviewer regards as virtuous and which he claims do not exist in my work. The seven parts of the tribute to Chief Luthuli, called “For Chief,” [pages 170-76] seem to me to exhibit several facets of my work and, indeed, these fragments are a deliberate mosaic because of the sense that it was not possible for me to pay to Chief the kind of tribute I wanted to pay to him in a single statement, and therefore I settled for these fragmentary statements. The first is almost an external observation of Chief. It pays tribute to him as a person but does not involve me nor indeed the rest of the South African society. The second approaches much closer to the real act – his death under a train – which is used through the reference to a machine in the second fragment, though the machine has its broader connotation of also being the political machine, the machine that destroyed him. The third one merges with the sorrowing posture of the people, and I think particularly the refrain where my 173

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Reviewing a Review own personal sorrow is interjected to fuse with the broader statement of their sorrow. The fourth, with its invocation to him to join us in our struggle and to be with us when we have broken through and performed the necessary destructive acts, seems to me to invite Luthuli to join us, and us is unmistakably me and the others, and to say that this is a personal intrusion seems to me mere nonsense. The invocation to him in the fifth section by oblique comment implies certain defects and weaknesses in those who are currently struggling, and that kind of criticism is not well-received. In the sixth the criticism continues, but I am part of that criticism for again I talk of us in the last line of the first stanza, and the invocation to Chief becomes now the urging that all of us should draw strength from Chief ’s memory and drive us to greater effort. And the last stanza is a tribute to those who are in the liberation army and themselves actively engaged in the struggle, and it is my personal gratitude I express here, but it is a gratitude which surely is felt by others as well. I choose one or two others which seem to me to express the experience of the community rather than of an individual and therefore to give the lie to the criticism. The Colesberg poem about the journey from one prison to another is a poem about a group of us, a shared experience. At no point is it an individual experience though it is an individual’s account of that experience, but no one individual intrudes into the account except perhaps the grizzled senior warder. The South African Freedom Day poem on page 109 of the Heinemann edition is entirely concerned with the collective experience of the men in prison. It is, of course, my individual voice speaking, but there is no attempt by me to intrude into the poem. The language is essentially simple, the description sympathetic and closely observed, and the vocabulary by no means is the kind of vocabulary aimed at what is called the cognoscenti. It is, however, appropriate to recognize the criticism of a pretentious or precious vocabulary in certain places. I accept this criticism. I do not dispute that it may well be inaccessible to people who will not be bothered with checking up words in a dictionary or racking their own minds for the recollection of the meaning. This seems to me a wholly legitimate exercise for the poet in his exploration of the resources of his media. He may do it, and indeed the tone changes. One writes poems in a simple and direct language on occasion, and on other occasions in a much more complex context one does justice to that particular thought. I turn to a poem, page 106 in the Heinemann edition, which certainly can be criticized on the grounds of egotism but surely not on the grounds of simplicity of vocabulary or the choice of image. I would go further and say that by a kind of extension the ‘I’ in the poem is the ‘I’ of all South Africans protesting against the injustice of this apartheid system and the guilt of the rest of the world which connives at that injustice. I quote: 174

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Reviewing a Review I am the tree creaking in the wind outside in the night twisted and stubborn: I am the sheet of the twisted tin shack grating in the wind in a shrill sad protest: I am the voice crying in the night that cries endlessly and will not be consoled. If passion is used in its fairly common garden sense of emotion or sexual passion, it seems to me I have done as well as any in South Africa and perhaps better than most. And I read page 148 of the Heinemann edition: I will lie with you lounging in long grass on a long mellow afternoon and twine my fingers in yours groping in long moist grass; and then as the impulse moves lock arms, front breasts, touch lips or lazily tongue, exploring your mouth and tongue we will lock haunches, your strong thighs, mobile legs be active agents to enhance, prolong delight and the land slope away to the river-valleys and rise again in foothills of the far mountains and the brilliance drain from the bright sky and the world grow blue, then cold, then dark and the day go, and night come. Other critics writing about my work have perceived the significance of the title poem (page 19) of my first collection, Sirens Knuckles Boots, and have particularly made much of the point that the poem begins at a generalized level of the experience of others. The opening line of the poem is neutral, “The sounds begin again,” but by the end of the poem all the experiences in the poem have been integrated into me, and I have indicated my acceptance of them, my possession of them, the fact that they are part of 175

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Reviewing a Review me, and the line now is “my sounds begin again.” And though the change in diction is slight from the opening line to the closing line, this is as complete a statement as one can get of one of the processes happening in my poetry: the movement from external observation to internalization and acceptance. There seems to me a strand so persistent running through my early work that critics who fail to see it are themselves deficient in some way. The strand I refer to is the fusion of the emotionally private and the politically public, the fusion of political statement at one level with the private, emotional statement on another level and the same words functioning simultaneously for both purposes. This certainly seems to me true of “Nightsong: City,” [page 18] which is at once a poem about Port Elizabeth and South Africa on the brink of armed resistance, of sabotage and explosions, and a poem for a particular woman; and “Erosion,” [page 16] which deliberately gives the clue that it is eros as well as erosion that I am talking about and all those fairly obvious sexual symbols that occur in the poem; or “This sun on this rubble after rain,” [page 9] [or] for that matter the Troubadour poem [page 2]; and [also] [page 4] in “Somehow we survive” – in all these there is an intensely personal emotion at the same time that there is a very clear political statement being made for those who will listen. But it is in the fusion of these two – of the intellectual process of description and observation combined with the emotional processes of feeling and sensing – in this fusion, it seems to me, is one of my most worthwhile achievements. It was certainly what I was trying to get and which I believe I sometimes managed to get, but if this is a main strand in my work, as I believe it is and as others seem to have agreed, then I must wonder whether there is not a defect in those who fail to perceive it. Another which can be read on these two levels is on page 31 of the Heinemann edition, a little fragment which Sidney Clouts,2 when he saw it, called “an achieved poem,” and by his comment gave me encouragement to go on working at poetry and at this kind of poetry. The poem has a footnote explaining that it is “Flying into Kimberley,” and this places it geographically and topographically, flying into this barren town in the middle of the plateau of South Africa with the wasteland, the diamond diggings, the puddles, the pools one sees from the air – all that is geographical and topographical, and it can be read in that way and achieve a description of an emotional relationship to the country. But the poem is, of course – and it is generally read this way – also a description of an emotional relationship with a particular woman, and this is what the poem sought to do: to operate on these two levels of the intimate and personal as well as the public and political. I read it: 2

Sydney David Clouts (1926-1982), South African metaphysical poet who relocated to London in 1961.

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Reviewing a Review Under me your living face endures pools stare blindly muddied by ageless misery: descending to you in a rage of tenderness you bear me patiently. It may be worthwhile to go from that one to the one on the facing page, page 30, which is avowedly a poem addressed to a single person, and this I think comes out very clearly in the first three lines. The relationship is established. And yet worked into the texture of the poem as the fabric is more thickly woven – worked into that texture is the unmistakable qualities of the South African landscape so that, though the poem has a personal and intimate and private relevance for a particular individual, it is a poem others living in the South African society with its batons, its clubs, its violence, any person living in the South African society can relate to the predicament of the people in the poem. Kneeling before you in a gesture unposed and quite unpractised – I emphasize, though we need not be assured for neither could take time to posture standing always stripped to the very bone and central wick of our real selves that burnt simple and vulnerable as flame – Kneeling before you for a moment, slipped quite unthinkingly into this stance – for heart, head, and spirit in a single movement responded thus to some stray facet of your prismatic luminous self as one responds with total rhythm in the dance – I knelt and answering, you pressed my face against your womb and drew me to a safe and still oblivion, shut out the knives and teeth; boots, bayonets and knuckles: so, for the instant posed, we froze to an eternal image became unpersoned and unageing symbols of humble vulnerable wonder enfolded by a bayed and resolute maternalness. 177

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Reviewing a Review Footnote: In the last stanza I suggest the word should be poised instead of posed: “so, for the instant posed, we froze to an eternal image” seems to me, first of all, to be dissonant because there are too many 0 sounds, one coming very early, “so,” and then “posed” with “froze” much too close to it. “Poised” would have just the right modulation of the vowel sound. Besides, “posed” seems to me contradictory for the opening lines are “Kneeling before you in a gesture/unposed,” and four lines later, we “could not take time to posture,” and in the next stanza “slipped [quite] unthinkingly into this stance.” All this seems to me to reject the use of the word “posed,” and I am pretty certain that it should have been “poised” and may well have been so in the Sirens Knuckles Boots edition. Notes on two points made earlier in this comment. I realize that it is possible that my visit to Peking occurred subsequent to the review being written and so, very likely or at any rate, it was not possible for this act of mine to have a bearing on the review. This does not, however, invalidate my general point: that my critical and nonconformist attitude in relation to a rather rigid Party line has frequently earned for me the criticism of being an individualist, and this is perhaps the most popular label stuck on me in the circles of Party hacks. The second point is my comment distinguishing between my earlier work and my later work. It is surely not unreasonable that a poet should exhibit a progression in his work, a maturing process, and that his earlier work should be less technically satisfactory. I refer specifically to some excesses of vocabulary in my early work which I would not be guilty of now unless I felt indeed that the idea or the context in which I was working was such that I needed words other than the ordinary ones. There is, I think, a very clear difference between the earlier work prior to prison and the work written as a result of the prison experience. This has been commented on elsewhere, particularly I think in a taped interview written up in Palaver published by The University of Texas, an account of the process by which I work from a more ornamented style, more embroidered and certainly with a more “intellectual” vocabulary, towards the simpler, more direct style of the Letters to Martha and the poems thereafter. In passing I might mention that there are still critics who regard my earlier work as technically more accomplished and who found the more spare, more prosaic diction of the later poetry a falling off in quality. My complaint against the review is its failure to recognize that there is this progression from a more heightened diction to a more simple and direct communication. The review contrives to suggest that the vocabulary of the troubadour poem or of the “Our aims our dreams our destinations” poem [page 82] is a vocabulary which is found throughout the poetry, and this is simply not true. Poetry written in exile, I submit, represents a fusion of the earlier, richer style with the simplicity and directness of the prison poems and is, I suppose, the style I would now adopt for most forms of communication in verse. 178

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Reviewing a Review If I were to meet the reviewer on his own terms and use his language, I would define poetry as the individual expression of the communal experience. I’m afraid I’m not very good at that kind of jargon. What I would say is that each person in South African society experiences the same system, but that each person has his own special way of experiencing that system, and it is by the communication of the individual’s experience of the system that one contrives to express the totality of the experience for all. (I should add that this review of a review is being done informally and without formal preparation. I realize that I could, and perhaps should, do a much more detailed point-by-point reply to the points made in the review. I have no doubt that if I were to do so, I would come up with pretty much the same conclusions: that this is a review which is inaccurate and misleading and that it evidences a bias against my work which I think is not wholly a consequence of a response to the text as such but to influences external to the text.)

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On Literature & Commitment [At a symposium on Contemporary Black South African Literature held at The University of Texas at Austin in March 1975, there was a panel on “Literature and Commitment” involving Keorapetse Kgositsile1 and Dennis Brutus as featured speakers and Chinua Achebe 2 (representing West Africa) and Ali Mazrui 3 (representing East Africa) as respondents. After Kgositsile had spoken, Brutus made the statement that follows.] I want to examine the essence of commitment and, continuing in the vein of Willy Kgositsile, reiterate one of the points he made. Before doing that, however, I propose to make some prefatory comments, look at certain aspects of commitment as expressed in the writing of blacks in South Africa, examine the relation between those writers who are involved in protest and the others who are part of the system, and conclude with some general observations which I think have useful lessons for our audience and particularly for critics in the field of African literature. (I do not propose to get involved in the debate this morning about my own work; I think I should abstain from that discussion.) The essential point to recognize, and one Kgositsile has made, is that there is no uncommitted writing. It has been said in America in much simpler and sloganistic terms: “If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.” You have to decide which side you are on: there is always a side. 1

Keorapetse William Kgositsile (1938-), South African poet and political activist who lived in the United States from 1962 to 1975 and was later to become the Poet Laureate in South Africa. 2 Albert Chinualumogu Achebe (1930- ), Nigerian novelist, poet, essayist, literary critic, and professor who, in addition to numerous earlier honors, has recently been awarded the Man Booker International Prize and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize. 3 Ali Al’amin Mazrui (1933- ), professor and prolific author of books on African politics, culture, and Islam. Currently the Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities and Director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at the State University of New York, Binghamton.

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On Literature & Commitment Commitment does not exist as an abstraction; it exists in action. This is what it is about: everything we do is either functioning within the system as it exists, or challenging the system. It is as simple as that. So when one examines literature, or when one creates literature, one is either following an established order and functioning within it, or one is bucking that order, challenging it, questioning it. It may be a useful aside to point out that the weariness, the irritation, the dissatisfaction which African writers feel when they are subjected to Western criticism is symptomatic of something much deeper. It is not just the rejection of a set of literary values: it is a questioning of a whole social order, of the Western way of life and its values. So the criticism expressed by Africans which exists within the literary field must be seen in a very much larger context. I think in Africa we are trying to discover, painfully and often unsuccessfully, a way of recovering our humanity, and in that process we find that what the West has to offer is a deformation and a mutilation of humanity. Fortunately we are not alone. There are people in the West who themselves feel this profound dissatisfaction and are engaged in challenging the system; the people who demonstrated on this campus yesterday and a week ago on issues of racism (Sharpeville and discrimination against minorities) were the embodiment of that dissatisfaction. On the South African scene, we find a long history of writing which is writing in protest against the existing order. If we turn to a poet like Samuel Mqhayi4 (perhaps still the greatest poet to come out of South Africa and who is little known in the West), we see in his famous satirical poem addressed as a welcome to the Prince of Wales that marvelous double level of meaning which functions as official salutation and at the same time as the most profound expression of disgust and contempt – for those who can read the signs. We see the same kind of thing in Jolobe’s writing5 about the making of a servant equated with “how an ox is broken,” and in the fiction of a later generation – Peter Abrahams6 in Tell Freedom, Path of Thunder, Wild Conquest. That generation is followed by people like Ezekiel Mphahlele and Willy Kgositsile, and I would like to count myself and people like Alex La Guma and others in that group – all of us in opposition to the system, in conflict with it, and, inevitably in the process of conflict, being hurt in some way or another. That we accepted as the price of our activities. 4

Samuel Edward Krune Mqhayi (1875-1945), Xhosa novelist and poet whose works bear the imprint of traditional forms of verbal art. 5 James Ranisi Jolobe (1902-1976), Xhosa poet, novelist, essayist, translator, and teacher. 6 Peter Henry Abrahams (1919-), prolific South African novelist and autobiographer who left South Africa in 1939, settling first in England and in 1956 relocating in Jamaica where he became a renowned broadcaster.

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On Literature & Commitment One should perhaps look briefly at some of the white South African writers, who seem to me to fall into two broad categories: the Lionel Abrahamses,7 the Nadine Gordimers, who stand for liberal values (and I will examine that concept in a moment); and then there are the functionaries, the lackies, the butlers – and I include Guy Butler here – who are functioning within that particular context and really are subservient to the system. But I want to look at that rather curious group which is regarded in the West as consisting of the most distinguished voices of the liberal tradition in South Africa and which forms a subgroup of the first group, and I choose two examples: Alan Paton8 and Athol Fugard, both of them mistakenly regarded as heroes in the West, both tired and defeated and, in the case of Fugard, now an accomplice of the system, a man who goes on television in London and New York and appeals for the playwrights of the United States and Britain to allow their plays to be performed in South Africa. Men like Arthur Miller,9 Tennessee Williams,10 and Arnold Wesker11 had taken a stand and said, “Either all our plays are performed for everybody or they are not performed at all; we will not allow them to be performed for white audiences only.” Today Fugard is pleading that those men should accept the apartheid system, function within it. And Paton, who comes to Harvard for an honorary doctorate – and that itself says something for those of you who understand the system – he comes here to say that apartheid exists, we must learn to live with it, we must learn to function within it. And those two men, mark you, are regarded as the stalwarts of the liberal cause in South Africa. Then we come to a younger generation of black poets, whom I salute: the Pascal Gwalas, the James Matthewses,12 the Joyce Sikakanes,13 and two people 7

Lionel Abrahams (1928-2004), South African poet, novelist, critic, and publisher who founded and edited the literary magazine The Purple Renoster from 1956 to 1972. 8 Alan Stewart Paton (1903-1988), South African novelist, essayist, biographer, antiapartheid activist, and founder of the multiracial South African Liberal Party. 9 Athur Asher Miller (1915-2005), Prize-winning American dramatist and essayist. Author of Death of a Salesman and many other plays. 10 Tennessee [Thomas Lanier] Williams (1911-1983), American playwright whose plays won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and the Tony Award. 11 Arnold Wesker (1932- ), prolific British playwright, poet, short story writer, essayist, and journalist. 12 James David Matthews (1929- ), South African poet, fiction writer, journalist, and founder of two publishing houses, BLAC and Realities. 13 Joyce Sikakane (1943- ), South African political activist and reporter for the World and Rand Daily Mail who was arrested and jailed for seventeen months, after which she was prohibited from returning to journalism, so she left South Africa in 1973 and wrote A Window on Soweto (1977). More recently she has been involved in producing documentary films, among them A South African Love Story: Walter and Albertina Sisulu (2004).

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On Literature & Commitment who are with us today, Oswald Mtshali14 and Wally Serote,15 whom I salute for a special act of courage yesterday which did not take place in this auditorium but out in the open air on the Main Mall, when they spoke in the Sharpeville commemoration. The reality of the South African situation is such that when they return to South Africa, both of them will be faced with the prospect of arrest and imprisonment for something that happened in Austin, Texas. The question which naturally arises in some minds is: “What is the relationship between the writers who function within the system and the writers who challenge the system?” And there are several points to be made here. The first one to note is that there is almost no dialogue at all, no communication at all – with negligible exceptions – between these two groups of writers. This absence of communication in itself is worth looking at, because they speak and use the same words, but the words do not have the same meaning. If you spoke to a white South African, he would assure you that South Africa is a democracy. Every white man and every white woman in South Africa has the vote. For them, indeed, South Africa is a democracy. So when a black South African speaks of hoping to achieve a democratic society, it baffles the white South African, who says, “But we have it already.” They are using the same terms, but it is clear they are not even communicating with each other. But even more fundamental than that failure in a shared language is the failure to share values. They really are talking about different societies, and therefore, even when they use the same words, what they are about is something so different as to be unintelligible to the other. And that point might well be borne in mind. I will return to it when I speak of its relevance for the critic and the interpreter of African literature. It seems to me that one of the things we are doing is to engage ourselves in the struggle to recover and rediscover our humanity, and in that struggle there are a great many people who can’t understand what this is about. They fail to see the necessity; they ask, “What are you going on about?” And that is because they have already accepted us as we are, as if that is the only way we can be, and that they cannot imagine us any other way. On the subject of commitment, Chinua Achebe said long ago in an interview here on The University of Texas campus, “Commitment runs right through our work. In fact, I should say, all our writers, whether they are aware of it or not, are committed writers.” And he went on to say, “I believe it’s impossible to write 14

Oswald Mtshali (1940), South African poet whose Sounds of a Cowhide Drum (1971) was one of the first books by a black South African poet to be widely distributed. 15 Mongane Wally Serote (1944- ), South African poet and novelist who as a young man became involved in the Black Consciousness Movement, was arrested in 1969 and detained in solitary confinement for nine months, afterward lived in exile in the United States, Botswana, and England before returning to South Africa in 1990 and being appointed Head of the Department of Arts and Culture of the ANC.

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On Literature & Commitment anything in Africa without some kind of commitment, some kind of message, some kind of protest.” But obviously, if what we are striving for is something which is unintelligible to people, then they are going to have extreme difficulty in being able to interpret us, simply because if they cannot perceive our goal, then the whole process of working towards it is unintelligible to them. I would like to quote something from Louis James16 which comes from a paper by Dr. Romanus Egudu17 and which had escaped my attention. He says, “In situations as explosive as that of Africa today, there can be no creative literature that is not in some way political. Even the writer who opts out of the social struggles of his country and tries to create a private world is saying something controversial about the responsibility of the artist to society.” Where does that lead us? If the kind of challenging remarks made by Willy Kgositsile and the kinds of things I’m trying to say now trouble you at all, I will be very pleased. But I hope that I will do more than trouble you, for I want to suggest at least a few guidelines or pointers for the direction in which interpretation and criticism of literature might go. I will conclude with a few points stated rather starkly, which I hope you will, at your leisure, give some time and consideration to. I apologize for their simplicity, but it seems to me that truth very often is simple, though my critics, I know, are irritated sometimes by my simplicity. Let’s start with something quite basic. Literature is about life and about people. That’s what it is about. And really, sometimes we have to remind ourselves that that’s what it is about, and the consequences that flow from that. “Who are the people? Who are these people we are writing about and writing for?” Well, they could be a great many things. But I want to assure you that if you think it’s the New York Review of Books, or professors of English at this campus or any other, or the critics of the Times Literary Supplement – it may be obvious but I need to say it: you are wrong. Those are not the people. And indeed, one would find a very interesting and revealing statistic, if you looked at a novel widely acclaimed by the critics as a serious artifact and you compared its sales with that, say, of The Love Machine by Jacqueline Susann.18 The critics and the elite – note the words – may be reading John Gardner’s The Sunlight Dialogues,19 but millions of people – thirty million people – have read Xaviera Hollander’s The Happy Hooker,20 and that says a great deal about the society. In one dorm on this campus I guess two hundred people read 16

Louis James, now emeritus professor of English at the University of Kent at Canterbury. 17 Romanus Egudu, Nigerian poet and professor of English at the University of Benin, Nigeria. 18 Jacqueline Susann (1918-1974), American author of best-selling novels. 19 John Champlin Gardner, Jr. (1933-82), American novelist, essayist, literary critic, and professor of English at Harpur College, State University of New York, Binghamton. 20 Xaviera Hollander (1943-), Dutch memoirist. A former call girl and madam, she was arrested for prostitution in New York in 1971 and forced to leave the United States.

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On Literature & Commitment one copy until it fell apart, so you have to multiply your thirty millions by some other figure – that says something about what is being done to people, these people about whom literature is being written and for whom literature is intended. I suspect, I fear very much, that we are not troubled when people are fed that garbage. It doesn’t trouble those of us who are involved in the business of literature. And yet if thirty million people or more read The Happy Hooker, that’s where literature for people is happening. One ought to ask questions about a society and a social order in which that kind of thing occurs, because that is a deformation and a mutilation of the human mind and the human personality in its commercialization and merchandizing of the human body. So, if literature is about people and for people, let’s look at two classic comments which are sometimes adduced in terms of the function of literature. There is the notion that the origins of literature, of all literature – its direction, its purpose, everything – flow out of a love of humanity. Well, this will not do. For if humanity is the reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement or the New York Review of Books, we are really writing for just a segment of humanity, a narrow and privileged segment, an elite. We are excluding from our concern and from our responsibility the mass of the people. Mao Tse-tung had an interesting thing to say about writers and artists in his lectures on art and literature at the Yenan Forum. He says that the writer or the artist tends to play the hero; he thinks he’s important, he thinks he’s somebody special, but he must understand that the more he plays the hero and the special person, the more the people will not accept him. The writer distances himself from them in the process of making himself a special person, because special persons remain only a segment, an elitist segment, of the society. What I am saying may seem a kind of reversal, a turning upside down of a whole series of widely accepted values within a particular culture. If that is so, let me assure you that that is precisely what I intend. I will conclude with one comment. In my view, and I believe in the view of the bulk of the writers coming out of Africa (this is especially true of the works of South African writers like [Peter] Abrahams, [Breyten] Breytenbach,21 Can Themba, [Pascal] Gwala,22 [Mazisi] Kunene,23 [Alex] La 21

Breyten Bretenbach (1939-), prolific South African poet, novelist, essayist, artist, and political activist who writes in both English and Afrikaans. He went into exile in France in 1960, and upon returning to South Africa in 1975 was arrested and sentenced to seven years of imprisonment for high treason. 22 Mafika Pascal Gwala (1946-), South African poet, anti-apartheid activist, and leader of the Black Consciousness Movement. 23 Mazisi Raymond Kunene (1930-2006), Zulu writer, anti-apartheid activist, representative of the African National Congress in Europe and the United States while living in exile from 1959 to 1992, and designated Poet Laureate of South Africa in 2005.

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On Literature & Commitment Guma, [ James] Matthews, [Lewis] Nkosi, [Richard] Rive,24 and [Es’kia] Mphahlele), cultural activity is only one front in the struggle for the liberation of humanity in Africa and in the rest of the world, in an attempt to achieve our full potential, our full dignity, our full humanity. 24

Richard Moore Rive (1939-1989), South African novelist, short story writer, and professor.

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On my Poetry [Tape recorded on 11 October 1974.] Because I am often not able to accept invitations to talk about my poetry, I thought it would be a good idea to put some thoughts on tape, fairly rambling thoughts, which could be played on occasions when people were interested in either hearing the poetry or hearing me talk about it. I have of course commented at various times and in various places on my poetry, and there are many things that I will try not to repeat since they can be found elsewhere. What I will try to do is take a general look at the last collection, A Simple Lust, which includes most of my earlier work and try to say one or two things about it that are new. Perhaps I should add that a good deal of poetry has appeared elsewhere which does not appear in A Simple Lust. Some of it I discarded as not worth reprinting there, some simply because at the time I was putting A Simple Lust together I could not find all the things that I thought I might include. I am thinking especially of things like the Sabotage poem which appears in the [Anne] Tibble collection, African-English Literature [1965] and a few things that appeared in the Journal of the New African Literature and the Arts published at Stanford, or things which appeared in African Arts published at the University of California [at Los Angeles]. In addition to those omissions there are others, perhaps as many as a hundred poems which I simply was unable to find, which I remember vaguely as reasonably successful, and which, if I could have found them, I would probably have included in the collection. However, A Simple Lust seems to me a rounded statement, clearly divided into at least three periods: pre-prison, post-prison, and exile poetry. The title poem of the first section, “Sirens Knuckles Boots,” [page 19] seems to me to say something which possibly has been overlooked. Gerald Moore1 has somewhere made the very useful point that the opening line of 1

Gerald Moore (1924- ), British literary critic, translator, and professor who has taught at universities in Africa, Europe, the United States, and Hong Kong.

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On my Poetry the poem is restated in the conclusion with the implication of an acceptance of the sounds of the ghetto. What I would add is simply that what I was saying in the poem was that the sounds of the ghetto, of the police, of police raids, the agony of the ghetto, was a constant for me – and indeed, still is (and which I accept). It is the sounds of apartheid, of the townships, the locations, whether this is in Kwa-Zakele in Port Elizabeth, in Fordsburg in Johannesburg, or in all the other locations and ghettos I have been in. It is the sounds which seem to me especially to catch the quality of existence in the townships. “A simple lust,” with which I conclude the collection [page 176], is in fact, as I have said somewhere else, a rewriting of a poem which I lost, a poem which seemed to me to sum up what my work was about. I have an uncomfortable feeling that the rewritten version as published does not catch the same kind of summation of what is essentially the theme of my work, but I guess it will have to stand until we can recover the original version and perhaps compare them. The sexual image in “A simple lust” is based on the belief that the need for freedom is as fundamental to the human psyche as all the other animal appetites of the body: eating, sleeping, drinking, making love, excreting, breathing. It seems to me that the need to be free is as basic as these basic needs. But I have given it of course a sexual dimension. I talk in the opening lines of the pain one feels in the reins or testicles after making too much love, after too much giving – that kind of agony – and the notion of pain there is then transferred to the pain of all those in the ghettos or the locations or townships. Coming out of South Africa, I have found the ghetto perhaps the most intelligible word to describe the curious living arrangements for blacks, non-whites, in South Africa; the word location is disarmingly neutral. The word township has certain pleasant overtones, and both of these seem to me inappropriate for what life is like in South Africa. But perhaps I should read the [first] poem: The sounds begin again; the siren in the night the thunder at the door the shriek of nerves in pain Then the keening crescendo of faces split by pain the wordless, mindless wail only the unfree know Importunate as rain the wraiths exhale their woe over the sirens, knuckles, boots; my sounds begin again. 188

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On my Poetry One of my early critics complained that the words seem to be excessively nebulous. This may be a valid criticism, but it was in fact what I was trying to achieve, a kind of ambience, barely defined with only certain elements standing out. It is in fact a very consciously crafted poem. The rhyme, which is often unobtrusive, particularly in the last stanza, is one of the functioning things in the poem. The image in the second stanza, I might say, is borrowed from a Goya2 painting of an execution in Spain. I am trying to catch both the defenselessness and the terror of the people whose faces are split by their wide-open mouths so that their eyes and foreheads disappear. I expect it is not always realized that the great bulk of my poetry is always addressed to two levels. I think this [has] sometimes given some difficulty: the fact that the poem would be written for an individual, generally a woman, and at the same time would address itself to South Africa, the country, as the other woman with whom I have a curious love-hate relationship, into which all kinds of sexual elements enter. This is simply because my relationship, my emotional response to the country, had this kind of sexual ingredient. Certainly “The sounds begin again” was a poem written to a particular woman, and tried to explain the kind of constant awareness aurally, through sound, what life was like in South Africa. I have already referred to the sexual imagery in “A simple lust,” but this, in fact, is a case where the sexual imagery is transferred wholly to the country, and it was not addressed to a woman. It is one of the few poems that I can think of in which I am trying to say what my poetry is about. The reference to “congealed in concrete” should be easy to recognize for those who know the “Letters to Martha” poems. A simple lust is all my woe: the thin thread of agony that runs through the reins after the flesh is overspent in over-taxing acts of love: only I speak the others’ woe those congealed in concrete or rotting in rusted ghetto-shacks; only I speak their wordless woe, their unarticulated simple lust. The woe in the poem, and it recurs three times, is a deliberate echo of the woe in “The sounds begin again,” and if “The sounds begin again” was set 2

Francisco Goya (1746-1828), Spanish romantic painter and printmaker.

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On my Poetry at the beginning of my work and “A simple lust” at the end of it, the two together would be the ends of an arc linking all my work. The “over-spent” and “over-taxing acts” of the first stanza again I deliberately crafted to give the sense of strain, both through repetition and through the use of the vowels and consonants. Many of my poems have the fusion of two emotional relationships at the same time: an individual woman and the country. “A troubadour” is such a poem [page 2]; so is “Somehow we survive”, [page 4] “Nightsong,” [page 18] “The sun on this rubble after rain,” and so on. The number of instances are fairly obvious. I thought I would read “Somehow we survive” because it is one of the early poems which has this fusion. “Nightsong” was perhaps the very first in which I achieved this, I should think possibly in December of 1961 or perhaps 1962, maybe even 1960. “Flying into Kimberley” [page 31] is, I think, another successful example of this fusion, and I might read it. But now “Somehow we survive,” a poem which, together with others, were addressed to the same woman: Somehow we survive and tenderness, frustrated, does not wither. Investigating searchlights rake our naked unprotected contours; over our heads the monolithic decalogue of fascist prohibition glowers and teeters for a catastrophic fall; boots club the peeling door. But somehow we survive severance, deprivation, loss. Patrols uncoil along the asphalt dark hissing their menace to our lives, most cruel, all our land is scarred with terror, rendered unlovely and unlovable; sundered are we and all our passionate surrender but somehow tenderness survives. If I may go back to “A simple lust” [page 176] and add a comment I 190

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On my Poetry intended to make after reading the poem, I would stress that the only with which the second stanza begins, is not a claim that I am the only one making statements about the woe of the others – that clearly is not true. What I am saying is that the simple lust which is all my woe, the simple lust which I express, that is what I am talking about. That is my woe, and it is the theme of my work, and I am saying what I express in my work is not only mine, but it is that of the others – the others in South Africa. It is on behalf of them, “their wordless woe, their unarticulated simple lust,” that I see myself as functioning. There is a continuing debate going on in my work, a kind of lovers’ quarrel, with myself on one side and sometimes a woman, sometimes a woman and South Africa, sometimes only South Africa, on the other side. Here is one I wrote, starting it in Johannesburg while working as a tea-boy for Robin Farquharson, continuing it in Swaziland at a farm called Blue Haze owned by Dr. Allen Nxumalo, and which, as far as I remember, I finally revised when I was back in South Africa in the Fort in Johannesburg awaiting trial and sentencing: I am out of love with you for now; cold-sodden in my misery your contours and allurements cannot move me: I murmur old endearments to revive our old familiar glow again – like sapless autumn leaves they rasp in vain. You have asked too much of me: Fond-fool, bereft I cling unloving, to remembered love and the spring. [page 41] The debate continues of course but in exile it becomes interiorized. It is myself I am talking to, and the next poem, which is about the death of love for a person, is in a distant way related also to the death of affection for a country which is the consequence of exile, of rejection and separation. The form is the form I borrowed from traditional African oratory, of a statement and then the development and restatement, and harps back, I suppose, to the occasional meeting I attended in New Brighton when communal issues were being discussed. It is a form I had used earlier in several of the poems in the “Sirens” collection: 191

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On my Poetry Does the heart survive the death of love the slow receding of the flush of tenderness leaving wet sand and debris, dessicated shards of molluscs the stink of decaying weed and fish the slow atrophy of the fibrils of tenderness leaving a numbness and scarred dead-white tissue a keratinous scaling and gangrenous rot vision grows lack-lustre glaucous cloud-lour darkens the sun, cloud, skies, colours are leached to nondescript shades; pulse thickens and rigor freezes the limbs: love being dead, or dying, can the heart survive? The theme of exile which is merely hinted at here is so strong and so obvious an element in my work that it does not seem to me there is anything that I can usefully say about it except to suggest that it is often less explicit than readers may realize. The diction of that last poem [page 169] has sometimes been criticized as being inflated, or a kind of mandarin English. I sympathize with this view, but I think what I was trying to do in the poem needed that kind of vocabulary to catch the kind of feeling I was trying to communicate. Arthur Nortje, who is an acute critic, commented somewhere that he thought that there was a kind of disgust in my work which filled the reader with disgust, and he thought this a fault. I’m a little amused by this because it seems to me that I succeeded in doing what I had tried to do, to communicate my own sense of disgust, a feeling of being surrounded by decay. It may well be that I succeeded too well. I should think there are other poems, however, which don’t have the element of disgust, and one might say that they compensated for the “disgusting ones.” Talking of Arthur Nortje, a very fine poet, certainly a finer poet than I could hope to be, I pass on to a tribute I wrote for him after his death of an overdose of drugs at Oxford in 1970. This is a poem I read recently at the request of a speech class, read unsatisfactorily, I think. It is, I think, an uneven poem, and it may well be that some of it I read badly because I read with a lack of conviction. This seems to me one of the ways in which a poet can test his own work, reading it aloud to an audience, and unfailingly there are weak lines when he has a kind of hollow feeling and realizes that the line is not as good as it should be. However, I will read this with as much confidence as I can: 192

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On my Poetry Do not think the flowers in winter are unmoved The rosebuds in December knot True the flowers will sway with every passing breeze and bend with a moving stream or bob with every heavy drop that rains down With the onset of the frost the rosebuds clench (those last stubborn strays) expose chill surfaces – large shroudlike waxen petals to shield the tender inner ones, while by secret regulation the slow hidden fires of growth burn where the lambent colours exploding perfumes mature Deep to the vast storehouse of earth’s central heat it reaches and from the reservoirs of summer’s warmth soaked into passages of the middle earth it sucks nuzzling blindly with groping roots and finds the fire that flows [through] thin stem from vice-gripped roots to sustain in tepid warmth the slow fires of growth, sempiternal. 193

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On my Poetry Do not think the flowers are unmoved by the winter’s cold: at the first onset of December frost the last lingering rosebuds knot (And what right have we to speak of winter as a time of cold and death? We can speak of it who speak in categories but cannot speak the Creative Word) In the frozen heart of winter in the frost-white air the world is full of golden berries, golden and red and bronze and yellow as the world prepares for next year’s birth. [pages 163-65] I thought I would round off with a few general comments and anticipate one or two questions which might arise. For instance, what am I doing now, what do I expect to do by the way of writing for the future, and the inevitable question that is asked about the writing of exiles in general, but which I will only attempt to answer for myself. After A Simple Lust, I continued writing bits and pieces, and they are scattered in various places. A few things have appeared in journals; others, I believe, are due to appear in various places, but I have hardly kept track of this. I suppose one of the satisfactions I have had recently is an entry in the latest edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica which comments favorably on my work. Moving to America was not particularly fruitful. I did not find the climate and circumstances in Evanston at Northwestern congenial. There was a great deal to be done simply in teaching and paperwork, and that of course left me much less time to write. But I did perhaps turn out twenty or thirty bits, one or two of them perhaps fairly good. My trip to China, visiting Peking, Shanghai, Hangchow, Canton, and reading some of Mao Tse-tung’s poetry prior before going there, and speaking about it and talking about literature in general at Peking University, did spark off some writing in a kind of Chinese mode. Many of the poems I wrote in China were five lines long, some of them three lines long, in imitation of the Japanese haiku form and even earlier the Chinese form from which the haiku is derived. Of the perhaps thirty that I wrote and left in Peking as a gift, there are copies, and I have talked to various publishers about bringing them out. James Currey3 at Heinemann has expressed an interest. So has Donald 3

James Currey (1936-), British publisher who edited the Heinemann African Writers Series from 1967-1984 and then established his own firm, James Currey Publishers, specializing in academic books about Africa.

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On my Poetry Herdeck,4 who was with Black Orpheus Press and is now with a press called Three Continents based, I think, in Washington. And so has Arthur Wang, of Hill and Wang, who brought out A Simple Lust in America; they are a subsidiary of a much larger press, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. My difficulty in having these published is simply that at present I can’t locate my own copies of them. Some, fortunately, are with Bernth Lindfors at The University of Texas. The rest are scattered in various places. When I find them, which hopefully will be soon, I will offer them to at least one publisher, and I have hopes of having them reproduced on the paper I used in China, which is a cheap writing pad which the Chinese use, but which has attractive decorative line drawings of bamboo shoots and things like that. So that’s one possibility. Coming to Austin, where I have been now for a little over a month, has been productive in a peculiar way. I have always had a sense of psychotic and schizophrenic tendencies, impulses, forces in my own psyche, and they became more acute on arrival in Austin, although they had certainly been latent for a long time before. This set me off on a burst of work, which was part record of the process of conflicts and the symptoms that were developing within me, but also, I think, part therapy, an attempt to write myself out of the condition. At one stage it seemed to me that by writing about my symptoms and observing them, I would either feed the symptoms so that there would be a process of increasing degeneration, [thereby] writing myself more deeply into schizophrenia, or writing myself out of them by the process of observation and chronicling of the experience. Now, at the beginning of October, it seems to me I have written myself out of them, that I am prepared to write an end to that particular phase. Out of it came a great deal of verse, some bad, perhaps one or two good ones, and others which seem to me capable of improvement if I am prepared to work on them and pare them down – [using] a kind of economy of language, [a] greater chiseling down to precision. But there seems to me in this material a whole separate cycle of verse which I am now thinking of calling, “Austumn Schizophrenic Chronicle,” Austumn being a pun on both Austin, Texas and autumn with an s inserted to hint at the schizophrenic quality of this particular chronicle. It seems to me I have done almost everything I need do in this chronicle except that two of the major statements in the chronicle are only in draft form and may well never be written up fully, and also I have to write the concluding sections, which will be a kind of breaking down into incoherence, and a switching into other languages, including Latin and Xhosa. This will take some working on. And a coda which I think will be a versified last will and testament. So there are two potential works in the works at the 4 Donald Herdeck (1924-2005), American publisher who founded Three Continents Press in 1973 and brought out three hundred works by writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and other parts of the non-Western world in the twenty-three years he ran the company.

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On my Poetry moment and certainly there is enough other scattered poetry, if one thinks of the things written subsequent to A Simple Lust, and those written prior to the book but which were not included in it, to furnish a third slim collection. And hopefully someday I will get around to an edition of selected poetry. It might only include ten from A Simple Lust. There may be only that many that I would be convinced deserve preservation in a final summary of my work.

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Further Notes on Poetry [Brutus recorded some of these remarks on tape. He wrote others for various publications produced by The University of Texas at Austin.]

On the fragmentary nature of my writing I turn fifty next month, and in terms of my life span, what I have written is really very little because it tends to be very fragmentary. There is no major statement. Most of my work has been so fragmentary, the statements are so staccato, that one cannot look for a sustained statement except by putting the bits together. Now that to me is not a serious writer. If I was serious, I would have constructed a sustained statement. I may yet. Every now and then I toy with a novel. I have written a play and thrown it away because I didn’t like it. I imagine I could do other things. But again I think there are writers with the temperament to keep writing, like Keats [who wrote] two hours a day and said, “Poetry must come the way the leaves come on the tree.” No effort, it just comes naturally. Well, I don’t have that. Shaw1 said that genius is applying the seat of your pants to the seat of the chair, and that I don’t have either, that kind of application. So temperamentally I don’t think I’m a writer either. I’m an occasional writer. I’m not a serious writer.

On poetic method If poetry were merely communication, one might as well write in prose – not that I despise prose, which can be as expressive a medium as any other. But I believe that poetry is not merely the communication of ideas; it must carry a great deal more, in terms of its impact. The simplest definition of the poet still seems to me to be a man more sensitive to the world around him and more sensitive to the use of words in which to convey his experience. It is better to say what I mean in terms of 1

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Irish playwright, novelist, essayist, literary critic, and winner of the 1925 Nobel Prize in Literature.

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Further Notes on Poetry practice, of examples, but a few generalizations are not out of place. From my work at its best, and from the work of others, I expect a certain structure: the ideas developed, built up, integrated, [with] a certain consonance in the sounds, bent to the purpose of getting a certain tone or mood, [and] the images growing or flowing naturally out of each other, [avoiding any] discord in image or language unless this is what I deliberately seek. One must of course see vividly, and communicate the vision. At the same time, I am against the straining for ultra-vivid images, an outré thought or idea, which often seems to be evidence of modernity. The introduction of machines, cars, etc., which stamped the poets of the thirties and forties in their quest for social realism – this seems to me part of a passing phase which need no longer be labored. References will be natural and fit into the whole framework without strain. The same applies to typographical tricks. Granted that most poetry reaches us first through the eye and not the ear – and the work of e. e. cummings2 and Marianne Moore3 seem to justify some of these devices – on the whole I think that the poem can still get by on conventional punctuation (a minimum, if possible), and that it is not necessary to use these tricks. Indeed, I would say that they have helped to widen the breach between poet and audience, which is the bane of our time to an increasing extent. Eliot’s contention (I quote roughly) that a poem should create an emotion but not express an emotion, is only half-true as a moment’s thought will show. Certainly we want to create an emotion in the reader, but nearly all poetry derives from the impulse to say something which is in itself the expression of a feeling. It can be summed up as an integrity of image – that is, a unity and consonance, [with] attention to the sound – the music – to ensure that it harmonizes with the sense. [This is] not as impossible as it sounds but is generally disregarded by practitioners today. This last raises an interesting point: there is a studied flatness and avoidance of effect in current writing. This is deliberate, is even set as an ideal for writers. I cannot sympathize with it. There is a striving towards colorlessness in tone, even in living as if we were masochistically forcing ourselves to reflect the drab conformity [and] uniformity of our ferroconcrete culture of monotonous city blocks. (Perhaps the flamboyance of beatniks and teenagers is a protest against this?) There is a certain defiance in the conformity, [a tendency] of saying, “Do I suffer? Very well, then I suffer,” [and] of grinding one’s own face in the dust. And of course, the stance of most poets today is defensive, apologetic. Did Eliot have anything to do with this? Perhaps. And perhaps [G.W.] 2

Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962), popular American poet, painter, novelist, essayist, and playwright. 3 Marianne Moore (1897-1972), American modernist poet whose Collected Poems (1951) won her the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize.

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Further Notes on Poetry Stonier’s charge4 that he is really an anti-poetry poet has some substance. This would partly explain the studied use of flat commonplace words by most poets. But I had rather we were mandarins, or as Keats said, lovers of words – though I grant that there are poets who take this too far into obscurity; I remember things by Alex Comfort5 and by Wallace Stevens particularly well. My generalizations and comments are hedged by qualifications and asides, I know, but the points still seem worth making. There is the larger issue of poet and audience, and so much to be said on it. The first thing to say is that the poet today is almost without audience, and that we should try to bring the poet closer to people to create an audience for him – not to inflate his ego, but because the good poet has something to say which is worth hearing, and people are not hearing him because of conditions which cut them off from him. A pity. Yevgeny Yevtushenko,6 for instance, does not have much to say to me, [but] he is at the same time giving readings to hundreds of thousands. [This] is understandable: our society – without sounding doctrinaire or Marxist – is simply not the milieu in which he can make the impact he makes in his own [society], where there is a simplicity and absence of pretension, a closeness between idea and practical living, which enables his directness and simplicity to evoke an immediate response. Well, if our life is more complex and sophisticated – for better or worse – then we must have the poetry which will evoke a response in our society, even while it is in the process of change. I do not think the poet in our society should seek a lowest common denominator – go on all fours – to secure a mass audience. But with so large a mass of literate and sophisticated people, it should surely be possible for him to reach thousands, at the very least. And perhaps I am oldfashioned in this, but it seems to me that one of the biggest things he can still do is to express, communicate, and awaken in others the sense of beauty and wonder and the moving quality of the basic human emotions and experiences. I have just been reading some contemporary verse, by undergraduates and others, and am struck by its thinness: its reluctance to say anything momentous, or even to admit that anything like this exists. [There is] an avoidance of the important, settling on the trivial or the mundane instead. It is not that momentous things don’t happen to these people, but they will play it down.

4

George Walter Stonier (1903-1985), English literary critic, novelist, playwright, and literary editor of the New Statesman. 5 Alex Comfort (1920-2000), British physician, pacifist, anarchist, novelist, and poet best known for his book The Joy of Sex. 6 Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko (1933- ), Russian poet, novelist, dramatist, essayist, screenwriter, editor, actor, and film director.

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On tenderness & tension The word ‘tenderness’ recurs more often than any other word [in my poetry]. I think if you were to do a word count, you would find it easily one of the words that occurs most commonly. It is of course a complex emotion which becomes complicated by the object to which it is directed. At its simplest it is tenderness in relation to a woman, but at another level, particularly in relation to the country where there’s a tender relationship between me and the country, it has an element of compassion in it because it is [a reaction to] the ravaged landscape and the brutality of the police inflicted on the ghetto. It’s that kind of tenderness I feel for the country. A poem like “Somehow we survive” [page 4] is operating on two levels. On the one level it’s a poem to a woman, and it says we will go on being in love in spite of the dangers around this love affair. This is the woman who shared many dangers with me. She was white, and if she had been caught, she would have spent her life in prison, if not been killed. She was taking great risks. So our tenderness for each other survives in the face of all the pressures on us. But at another level I am talking politically, and I’m saying, in spite of the brutality which is inflicted on us by the police, we continue to love the country. “Tenderness, frustrated, does not wither.” So you have several dimensions of what tenderness is about. The criticism as I understand it – I may be misquoting but I’m trying to represent my critics fairly – has been that my love should have turned to hating, that when a situation is so intolerable, you don’t go on loving, you turn to fighting. But it doesn’t seem to me in my own terms that the loving excludes the fighting, and indeed I know that while I was writing poems about tenderness, I was part of the underground struggle engaged in resistance. So the notion that I was accepting [the situation] because I was loving the country seems to me simply a misreading which would be clarified if you read several poems because the statement appears in different forms, and if one takes the whole, what you see is a man who loves the country and who will fight for it to be free because he loves it. So the love is not contradictory to the fighting. It is true is that much of my poetry is dependent for its success on a kind of intellectual tension. It’s always an opposition of ideas or an opposition of feelings. Now, that kind of tension is what makes my work succeed when it does succeed, and this, in a South African context where one is living in a society which is constantly tense, [where] there is always the threat of arrest or imprisonment or beating. It seems to me that I might not have been a poet if I had not lived in South Africa, without that kind of tension in the very air I breathed. So I guess I ought to be grateful in one sense that I did live there. In another climate I might have been so comfortable, and there would have been such a complete absence of tension, that I might not have ever written anything at all. It is only when there is an element of conflict or tension within a situation that it generates articulateness. You have something to say, not 200

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Further Notes on Poetry because of the simplicity of the situation, but its complexity, the sense of tension in it.

On my banning My poetry as such was never banned, but I as a person was banned, so if anything I wrote was published, it was a crime for me and also for the editor who printed it in his paper or magazine. The banning order was served on me for something that had nothing to do with poetry. It was a banning order directed against me mainly because I tried to get blacks into the South African Olympic team, which was an all-white team. So what they did was to shut me up principally to prevent me working in the area of sport, but the ban was a blanket ban. It covered everything, including poetry. The law under which the ban was served is called the Suppression of Communism Act, and by South African law to ask that blacks should be in the Olympic team was a Communistic act.

On my prison poetry I have never tried to write an account of my prison experience. I have never attempted this systematic record for a number of reasons. It’s not very exciting, and it’s not at all unique. There are people in South Africa’s prisons who have suffered much more than I have and who would be entitled to record their experiences and say to the world, “These are worth looking at.” I never felt that way about my own, and that’s why my approach has been not to attempt a systematic account but simply to isolate very specific events or experiences or emotions or even episodes which by themselves crystallize an element of the prison experience and become a kind of prism through which you can see the larger thing because if you can get into this segment of it, you can get the feeling for the whole. But I have never tried [documenting everything], and I don’t think I ever will. In fact, I have forgotten most of my prison experience, some of it deliberately suppressed, others that I don’t particularly care to remember.

On the impact of exile If one looks at the broad, continuous statement in my work, which begins with a concern about the condition of South Africans, the condition of the country, and goes on to an expression of affection, which is both personal and directed to an individual, and generalized, directed to the people and the country – in a sense almost a love affair – and then [moves to] the stage of exile which, among other things, raises some conflict between lover and beloved, between me as patriot and [as critic of my] country – the sense of distance, of being haunted by the country, the sounds of the country, images of the people and their situation – all of this seems to me part of a continuous statement in my work, and at the same time there is a statement about my own emotional condition in relation to the country. 201

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6. Cover of Poems from Algiers, 1969/1970 7. Cover of China Poems, 1975

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Further Notes on Poetry These things are never static. It seems to me the kind of question asked in “Does the heart survive the death of love?” which picks up a statement in a much earlier lyric, “Somehow we survive/and tenderness, frustrated, does not wither,” looks at survival in a different way. Since the situation is not static, emotions undergo change, and it [is] not an unnatural step to…become schizophrenic in the sense of having a divided heart. [This results from] the constant awareness of one’s situation which has been left behind, but which remains as a kind of almost living presence, together with the daily impact of [one’s] immediate situation, its demands, its problems.

Poems from Algiers I learnt of the Algiers Pan-African Cultural Festival only very shortly before it was due to start, and remember my incredulity on discovering my verse being quoted in a long essay on African expression in the advance literature. I was naturally delighted to be invited, but en route became increasingly filled with misgivings about my right to be called an “African voice”: how far were my ideas and opinions and art at all peculiarly African? Thus I first questioned Africa and myself, in bad stumbling verse, in an attempt to find what was true. This is not a defense, but an explanation. I worked out the problem I think, in a series of answers about Africa – some in discarded (or lost) verse – in assertions of myself and my (South) African experience, but especially in my re-discovery of the “variousness” of Africa and the extent to which my own difference was a part of it. And especially in a sense of “belonging” – as far as it is possible for a loner like me to remain belonging for any time. From this, perhaps, the alienness of “driftwood.” I think it is possible to trace a developing line from the diffident and oblique statements of the first verses to the more assured assertions up to the driftwood poem, which was the last completed – though not the last begun. There is also, I think, a movement from self-acceptance to self-assessment, but I find the language and images offer nothing which requires special comment. These verses need little explanation – even comment can be minimal – unlike a lot of my other verse, where I enjoy talking about what I was trying to do, or the problems I encountered, or the situation which gave rise to the poem. Both the watermelon verse and the “Homesickness” lines – where the wordy title is self-mocking – try to work by indirection, as in the leap into Afrikaans for the name for japonicas. The Casbah poem, after a walk there, is also oblique, as a comment on the absence of evidence of the revolutionary origins of modern Algiers. The question of “Africanness” might be resolved in various ways for the critic, and has a special relevance now, with a Seminar planned on the question for Yaoundé, in December. But whatever African experience and values it might assert which are peculiarly African, the one thing Africanness need not 203

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Further Notes on Poetry assert is exclusivity. I mean a knowledge of other – e.g., Western – values and critical or aesthetic standards should not disqualify, still less debar one from a critical function in Africa. To have exchanged ideas with black militants in Texas, or talked with Maoris on their maraes, with radicals in India or young activists in English universities, these things should better equip one, just as the Prado, the Sistine Chapel, the Taj Mahal or a Stan Getz7 Concert enhance one’s experience. I settle for being the non-totemistic “new” African artist Ebrahim [sic] Salahi8 spoke about this month, who will simply take his place in the whole of world culture while always bearing certain distinctive features as a result of his origins and experience. And it may be that in some respects our experience is more humane – that is, is more considerate of human feeling, because we have, up to now, in some measure, escaped the dehumanizing processes or events which have made a mark, or are marking, other societies.

China Poems While the guest of the Peoples’ Republic of China in summer 1973, I wrote some verse which I presented on my departure to my hosts as a mark of my appreciation, affection and esteem. I hope they indicate my admiration for the Chinese people and their great leader, Mao Tse-tung, and that they will help promote friendship between the people of China and all the peoples of the world. Many things are memorable about my China visit: the friendliness and generosity, the poised confident children, the barefoot doctors and commune leaders; the old ivory carver working overtime so that there would be more money for liberation struggles; the Chinese anxiety about nuclear attacks and greater anxiety “whether they were doing enough to prevent the emergence of an elite”; the absence of traffic-jams, of pollution and commercial advertising; the even more striking absence of poor or ill-fed people; Chou En-lai (and many others) saying: “China is not free unless the world is free,” and, directly to me, at a reception: “We support you in your struggle for freedom in South Africa and” (slowly and with an emphasis which I reported subsequently to Oliver Tambo, Acting President-General of the African National Congress of South Africa), “we will be glad to give you all the help you ask for.” Shortly before going to China I was fortunate to discover Mao Tse-tung’s poetry in the Willis Barnstone9 translation. Mao is a great poet – but in the classical tradition, so that he disparages his own work (Mao: “they are in the old 7

Stan Getz (1927-1961), American jazz saxophone player. Ibrahim Mohammed El-Salahi (1930- ), Sudanese painter, printmaker, and art teacher whose works make use of Arabic calligraphy, signs, and African forms. After political imprisonment in Sudan, he has lived in exile in England and Qatar. 9 Willis Barnstone (1927- ), American poet, literary critic, translator, and professor. 8

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Further Notes on Poetry style and might encourage a wrong trend and exercise a bad influence. Besides they are not much as poetry, and there is nothing outstanding about them.”) and urges younger poets not to follow his example. I was invited to speak to the English majors at Peking University and, in speaking of commitment in African writing, was able to relate this to Mao’s work. Even before my trip I had begun to work towards more economical verse. My exposure to haikus and their even tighter Chinese ancestors, the chueh chu, impelled me further. The trick is to say little (the nearer to nothing, the better) and to suggest much – as much as possible. The weight of meaning hovers around the words (which should be as flat as possible) or is brought by the reader/hearer. Non-emotive, near-neutral sounds should generate unlimited resonances in the mind; the delight is in the tight-rope balance between nothing and everything possible; between saying very little and implying a great deal. Here are examples, from other sources, of this form. Goose-grey clouds lour There is an enormous gap to be traversed in the mind between the softness (silliness is also suggested) of “goose-grey” and the thunderous menace of “lour” presaging a storm. Exile: schizophrenia: suicide Consider the terror of the journey to be made in the mind from exile to the declension of suicide.

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IN MEMORIAM Arthur Nortje, 1942-1970 ARTHUR (KENNETH) NORTJE: BORN CAPE PROVINCE SOUTH AFRICA (PORT ELIZABETH?) 1942 (DECEMBER): “COLOURED”: EDUCATED ST. MARKS E.C. MISSION SCHOOL (COLOURED) AND PATERSON HIGH (COLOURED) SCHOOL SCHAUDER TOWNSHIP PORT ELIZABETH SOUTH AFRICA: A BRILLIANT ALL-ROUND STUDENT AND EXCELLENT SPORTSMAN (CRICKET & RUGBY): STARTED WRITING POETRY AS SCHOOLBOY: WON TOP PRIZE IN SCHOOL POETRY-WRITING COMPETITION. DID EXTENSIVE STUDY ON POETRY OUTSIDE SCHOOL HOURS WITH SPECIAL INTEREST IN GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS. WON SCHOLARSHIP WHEN COMPLETING HIGH SCHOOL ENABLING HIM TO TAKE B.A. DEGREE AT (COLOURED) COLLEGE OF THE WESTERN CAPE (BELLEVILLE): TAUGHT IN SOUTH END HIGH SCHOOL (COLOURED) IN 1964-65; THEN AWARDED SCHOLARSHIP TO READ ENGLISH AT JESUS COLLEGE OXFORD: COMPLETED STUDIES AND WENT TO CANADA TO TEACH (HOPE, B.C. AND TORONTO) : RETURNED TO OXFORD 1970 FOR B. PHIL. FIRST PUBLISHED IN Black Orpheus (IBADAN) AFTER WINNING AN MBARI PRIZE FOR POETRY IN 1962: PUBLISHED IN VARIOUS PLACES BUT DID NOT ACTIVELY SEEK PUBLICATION: VERSE IN: Modern Poetry from Africa AND South African Writing Today (BOTH PENGUIN) AND FORTHCOMING Seven South African Poets (PIETERSE: HEINEMANN AFRICAN WRITERS SERIES). HE BORE AS WE ALL MUST THE BURDEN OF EXISTENCE: AND BORE IT WITH A CERTAIN PANACHE: ALMOST BRAVADO. BUT HE HAD THE ADDED BURDENS SO MANY SOUTH AFRICANS MUST BEAR: THE RESTRAINTS AND INDIGNITIES OF RACIAL PREJUDICE AND RACIALIST LEGISLATION: THE LIMITATIONS OF OPPORTUNITIES: THE RESTRAINTS OF TALENT: THE DENIAL OF FACILITIES. HE KNEW THE HARDSHIPS AND SQUALOR OF GHETTO

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Further Notes on Poetry EXISTENCE ON THE FRINGES OF SOCIETY AND NEVER GAVE UP TRYING TO ACHIEVE THE FULL STATURE OF MANHOOD: NEVER ACCEPTED THE DENIALS THAT APARTHEID SOCIETY TRIED TO IMPOSE ON HIM. HE LIVED LIFE FULLY: RELISHING IT: PERHAPS OVERCOMPENSATING FOR THE DENIALS HE HAD KNOWN IN HIS MOTHERLAND AND WITH AN IRREVERENCE PERHAPS LOGICAL FOR ONE WHO HAD BEEN DENIED CULTURAL ROOTS IN HIS OWN SOCIETY. AS A POET HE WAS PERHAPS THE BEST SOUTH AFRICAN POET OF OUR TIME: THIS IS NOT ONLY MY VIEW BUT THAT OF MANY OTHERS WHO APPRECIATED HIS WORK: IT WAS IMMENSELY SKILLED AND ENORMOUSLY VARIED: HE COULD BE LYRICAL COLLOQUIAL DRAMATIC AND COMPLEXLY AUGMENTATIVE IN TURNS: THE TOTAL IMPRESSION IS OF AN INTRICATE TEXTURE WOVEN WITH GREAT SKILL WITH AN ASSURED AND MASTERFUL HANDLING OF LANGUAGE WHICH GAVE A FEELING OF ALMOST MUSCULAR STRENGTH: OFTEN HIS LINE COULD SING AND BE SIMPLE: BUT MOSTLY HE PREFERRED THE REASONED LINE: DEVELOPED STATEMENT: WAS INTERESTED IN CONSTRUCTING A POEM WHICH MOVED AND CONVINCED AND DELIGHTED. THERE ARE HINTS IN HIS WORK OF THE LONELINESS HE MUST HAVE FELT: ESPECIALLY WHEN HIS MIND BEGAN TO MOVE TOWARDS MORE FULL POLITICAL INVOLVEMENT WHICH MEANT THAT HE WAS ACCEPTING SELF-EXILE: BUT LITTLE OF THIS SHOWED IN DAILY INTERCOURSE OR IN HIS LETTERS – BUT DOUBTLESS HIS QUEST FOR LOVE IN VARIOUS AFFAIRS WAS AN INDICATION OF THIS, HE REFERS SURPRISINGLY OFTEN TO DEATH: THROWS UP IMAGES OF AND SIDELIGHTS ON IT WHICH SHOW HE HAD LOOKED CLOSELY AT IT: YET EVEN IN LETTERS WRITTEN A WEEK BEFORE HIS DEATH AND IN HIS RECENT POETRY THERE IS NO HINT OF FOREBODING. HE DIED YOUNG (28) BUT HAD GIVEN AMPLE EVIDENCE OF HIS GREAT TALENT: IT IS A SAD LOSS.

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The year of the giant. The year of the dragon. The year of the thin lizard, Death. It may be I will go the way he went. Who cares. To me it is all one. To me, but not to others. We shall see. Dennis Brutus

[From Research in African Literatures, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1971): 26-27.]

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Index A., Phyllis 22 À Kempis, Thomas 125 Abrahams, Lionel 182 Abrahams, Peter 181, 185 Achebe, Chinua 10, 180, 183 Adelugba, Dapo 127 Africa Today 7 African and Afro-American Research Institute, University of Texas at Austin 2, 4, 23 African and Afro-American Studies and Research Center, University of Texas at Austin 15 African and Afro-American Studies Program, University of Texas at Austin 8 African Arts 2n2, 187 African Communist 169 African Football Confederation 30 African Literature Association (ALA) 9-10 African National Congress (ANC) 23, 23nn 32-33, 24n36, 30n75, 50, 50n3, 55, 61n14, 69, 73, 89n29, 94, 94n3, 101, 101n9, 101n12, 105, 109, 115-6, 119-22, 119n3, 120n4, 171n1, 135, 183n15, 185n23, 204 African People’s Democratic Union of Southern Africa 62nn15-16 African Resistance Movement (ARM) 73 African-Scandinavian Writers’ Conference, Stockholm 25 African Studies Association (ASA) 9 Aidoo, Ama Ata 10 Alexander, Neville Edward 100, 102 Ali, Muhammad 30, 118 All-African Convention (AAC) 63n17 Allan, Elkan 21 Altman, Phyllis 22 Amnesty International 28, 80

Anand, Mulk Raj 24 Anderson, Jack Northman 119 Anthony, Sister 39 Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) 18, 24, 60, 82n25, 90, 122, 132 Aquinas, Thomas 148, 160, 167-8 Atlanta Braves 28n71 Auden, Wystan Hugh 20, 25, 149 Australian Radio 21 Awoonor, Kofi 10 Azvat, Zainab 78 Balsiger, Rudolph 47, 49 Bam, Fikile 100 Barnstone, Willis 204 Battswood Training College for Teachers 114n3 Beat Generation 167n7, 198 Beatrice (girlfriend of George Msibi) 59, 613, 65 Beier, Ulli 52 Benin Review 8 Bevan, Bishop 38 BLAC (publisher) 182n12 Black Arts Movement 26nn62-63 Black Consciousness Movement 183n15, 185n22 Black Orpheus 206 Black Orpheus Press 195 Black Panther Party 20nn10-11 Black Pimpernel 115-6 Black Sash 83n26 Blackie’s School Reader 42 Blair, Tony 29n72 Bollingen Prize 198n3 Bosman, H.C. 4 Botha, Hannes 47 Bouton, Jim 28

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Index Bowen, Elizabeth 147 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau 26 Braun, Frank 47, 49, 86 Breytenbach, Breyten 185 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 21, 26n51, 27 British Jurists 86 British Legal Association 80 British Lions Rugby Team 31, 121 British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) 139 Brown, Father 38 Brown, Gordon 29n72 Browning, Robert 41, 138, 147-8, 150, 167 Bruin, John 7, 24 Brundage, Avery 28, 47, 83 Brutus (grandfather) 32-3 Brutus, Antony (Tony) (son) 18, 32 Brutus, Blanche (stepsister) 33 Brutus, Catherine (Dolly) (sister) 15-16, 32, 37-8, 40-1, 43 Brutus, Cordelia (daughter) 32 Brutus, Dennis Vincent Frederick: Life: family background 32-46, 143-5; youth 1516, 38-42, 134, 136; early education 15-16, 127-30, 144-5; university, 16, 136, 145-8; teaching 16, 131-3, 135-7, 148, 194; professional organizations 16-17, 135-6; banning 17, 48, 201; escape 17-18, 47-91; arrest 17-18, 47-9, 60, 64-73, 86; prison 18, 65-8, 70-2, 82-109, 135, 137-8, 162-4, 171, 174, 201; wounded 75-82; Robben Island 92-109; house arrest 1105; exile and work abroad 18-31, 133-4, 201-3; conferences 19-20, 30; Olympics 21, 28-9, 47-9, 56, 83, 86, 121-2, 201; campaigns 22-3, 30-1, 115-22; literary activities 23-7, 84-5, 122-4, 145-68, 170204; travels 19-31, 118, 138-40, 160, 173, 178, 194, 203-5; Works: “And I am driftwood” 123, 203; “Austumn Schizophrenic Chronicle” 124-6, 195; “Blue pools of peace” 11; “Colesberg” 162-4, 174; “Does the heart survive the death of love” 192, 203; “Do not think” 193-4; “Driftwood” 123, 203; “Dungbeetles in Texas” 5; “Erosion: Transkei” 176; “Exile” 205; “Flying into Kimberley” 176-7, 190; “For Chief ” 169, 171, 173-4; “Goose-grey” 205; “I am out of love with you for now” 55, 191; “I am the tree” 175; “I will lie with you” 175; “In the sunlight” 203; “Kneeling before you

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in a gesture” 177-8; “Longing” 152; “Living a poem” 154; “Nightsong: City” 149, 176, 190; “On Saturday afternoons we were embalmed in time” 171-2; “On the Island” 170-2; “On this anniversary day” 154; “Only in the Casbah” 203; “Our aims our dreams our destinations” 178; “The sand wet and cool” 123; “A simple lust is all my woe” 172, 188-91; “So, for the moment, Sweet, is peace” 149, 166-8; “Somehow we survive” 176, 190, 200, 203; “The sounds begin again” 175-6, 188-9; “South African Freedom Day” 174; “A South African in Algiers: Homesickness” 203; “Sport, a Threat to the Security of the State” 115; “This sun on this rubble after rain” 150, 171, 176, 190; “The Sybil” 157-9; “Their Behaviour” 165; “A troubadour, I tráverse all my land” 159-61, 167, 169, 171, 176, 178, 190; “When last I ranged and revelled all your length” 60, 84-5; “The year of the giant” 208; China Poems 10, 202, 204-5; Letters to Martha and Other Poems from a South African Prison 1, 3, 23, 93, 124, 161-5, 169, 178, 189; Poems from Algiers 3, 8, 10, 23, 169, 202-4; A Simple Lust 8n6, 8, 23, 157, 169, 194-6; Sirens Knuckles Boots 1, 3, 8, 52n5, 104, 149, 166, 169, 175, 178, 187; Strains 9, 11; Stubborn Hope 11; Thoughts Abroad 6-8, 24, 55, 60, 169-79, 187-90, 194-5 Brutus, Ethel (Etty) (stepsister) 33 Brutus, Francis Henry (father) 15, 17, 32-45, 59, 60-1, 66-7, 128, 131, 136, 144 Brutus, Gregory (son) 32, 51, 88, 107 Brutus, Helen (grandmother) 33 Brutus, Helen (aunt) 33 Brutus, Helen “Hellie” (sister) 16, 33, 37-8, 40-1, 43 Brutus, Jacinta (daughter) 18, 32 Brutus, Julian (son) 31-2, 78, 88 Brutus, Justina (Tina) (daughter) 18 Brutus, Marc (son) 18, 32 Brutus, Margaret Winifred Bloemetjie (mother) 15-16, 32-40, 42-6, 75, 127-8, 130, 143-4, 146 Brutus, Martha (sister-in-law) 101, 107 Brutus, May Jaggers (wife) 16, 18, 45, 51, 54, 57, 59, 62, 78-9, 82-3, 88, 90, 93, 107, 110, 112-4, 130, 160-1 Brutus, Paula (daughter) 32 Brutus, Rose (father’s first wife) 33-4

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Index Brutus, Victor (stepbrother or uncle) 33, 38 Brutus, Wilfred (brother) 32, 37-8, 40-1, 43, 80-1, 101, 128, 130-1, 144-5 Bunting, Sonia Beryl 22 Bureau of African Affairs 22n31 Bureau of State Security (BOSS) 7n6, 73 Buthelezi, Mangosuthu “Gatsha” 30 Butler, Guy 122, 182 Caledon Square Prison 101 Camara, Dom Helder 20 Campbell, Roy 4 Cape African Teachers Association (CATA) 63n17 Cape Town City Council 94 Caribbean Artists Movement 26n50, 26n52 Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture) 20 Castro, Fidel 20 Catholic Church 39, 102, 112 Catholics 44, 137, 148 censorship 6, 8 Central Indian High School, Fordsburg 17 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 133-4 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de 160 Cézanne, Paul 114 Champion, The 41 Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich 90 China 10, 22, 29, 101n12, 120, 173, 178, 1945, 204-5 Ching-Po, Ko 10 Christ, Jesus 167 Cibber, Colley 143 Clarke, Austin C. 24 Cleaver, Eldridge 20 Clouts, Sidney 176 College of the Western Cape, Belleville 206 Collins, Diana 22 Collins, John 18, 22, 132-3 Coloured Advisory Council 114n2 Coloured National Convention 16-17, 115-6 Coloured People’s Congress (CPC) 115 Coloured People’s National Union (CPNU) 114n2 Comfort, Alex 199 Commonwealth Games, Kingston, Jamaica 28, 139 Community College 19 Congress of Democrats, South Africa 22n30, 48, 50 Congress of Racial Equality 20n20 Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) 107n13 Congress of the International Comparative

Literature Association, Bordeaux 4 Congressional Black Caucus 27n67 Constitutional Court, South Africa 109n14 Contact 16, 115 Cook, Francis D. 22 Cosell, Howard 21 Costas (stepsister Ethel’s husband) 33 Cummings, Edward Estlin 198 Curnow, Thomas Allen Munro 26 Currey, James 1n1, 8n6, 169, 194 Cusack, Cyril James 24 Dameron, Chip 11 Dartmouth College 26 Davis Cup 121 Davis, Don 100 Davis, Hartley 88 De Broglio, Chris 18, 28, 121 Decade against Racism 19 Defoe, Daniel 161 de la Gorce, Guy 21 de’ Liguori, St. Alphonso Maria 125 De Vos Malan Commission 79 Dickens, Charles 90 Diggs, Charles 27 Dillons bookshop 23 Donne, John 147, 150, 167 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize 180n2 Dower Memorial School, Port Elizabeth 127 Drum 17, 117n7 Duke of Wellington 40, 42, 144 Dulcy (girlfriend) 149-50, 168 Dumile, Feni 6-7, 9, 24 DuSable Museum of African American History 31 Eachells family 44 Eachells, Rose 44 Eberhart, Richard Ghormley 26 Edinburgh International Festival 20 Egudu, Romanus 10, 184 Eisenstein, Raymond 73 Eliot, Thomas Stearns 126, 147, 167, 198-9 El-Salahi, Ibrahim Mohammed 204 Encyclopedia Britannica 24, 194 En-lai, Chou 20, 204 Episcopalians 33, 137 Erasmus, “Oomkrag” 116 Evening Post 17 Farquharson, Robin 17, 58, 60, 84, 91, 191 Farrar, Straus, Giroux (publisher) 195

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Index Fatima (nurse) 81 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 119n2 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) 20, 27n68, 30 Field Museum, Chicago 31 Fighting Talk 16, 115-6 First, Ruth 50 Foreman, George 30, 118 Francey, Lillian 47, 49, 86 Francis, Maude, and husband 44 Frazer, Lt. 94 Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO) 119 Friendship International Table Tennis Tournament 10 Ft. Harian 147 Fugard, Athol 117 Gabre-Medhin, Tsegaye 19, 24 GALA. See La Guma, Alex 169-70 Gandhi Memorial Centenary 24 Ganga, Jean-Claude 21 Gardner, John Champlin, Jr. 184 “Garibaldi” (informer) 104 Getz, Stan 204 Gibson, Wilfred Wilson 167 Golden City Post 17, 59 Golding, George John 114 Goldreich, Arthur 62 Gool, Janub “Jane” 62 Gora, Ahmed 55 Gordimer, Nadine 4, 7, 24, 117, 182 Gosling, Dr. 93 Goya, Francisco 189 Grand Prix de la Francophonie, Académie Française 25n47 Gray, Thomas 143 Green, Bishop Ernest Arthur 112-3, 115 Group Areas Act 79 Guardian 17-18, 23 Guggenheim Foundation 123 Gwala, Mafika Pascal 182, 185 Hain, Adelaide 48 Hain, Peter 29, 31 Hain, Walter 48 Hamburger, Michael 26 Harris, Ann 53, 55, 58 Harris, John 48, 50-6, 58, 73, 83, 86, 89, 103-4 Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (HRHRC) 4 Haverford College 28 Hayman, Ruth 83, 85, 90, 107

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Heinemann 194; African Writers Series 1, 8, 169, 174-6, 194n3, 206 Helberg (member of secret police) 51, 6970, 72, 74-6, 85 Henry Kaiser Memorial School, Port Elizabeth 15, 42 Herdeck, Donald 194-5 Hernton, Calvin Coolidge 26 Hill and Wang (publisher) 195 Hitler, Adolf 29 Hodgson, Rica 22 Holden, David 22 Hollander, Xaviera 184 Honono, Nathaniel Impey “Chucha” 63 Hoogendyk, Jan Hendrik Hofmeyer 22 Hooper, Father 63 Hoover, J. Edgar 119n2 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 147, 149-50, 159, 167, 206 Horizon 147 House of Commons, Britain 80 House of Lords, Britain 18 Huddleston, Trevor 20 Hughes, Edward James “Ted” 26 Hutchinson, Alfred 66 Hynes, Samuel 123 Immorality Act 54 Indian Congress 18, 74 Inkatha Freedom Party 30n74 Institute of Contemporary Arts 26 International Council of Sport and Physical Education, UNESCO 21n25 International Defence and Aid Fund (IDAF) 18-19, 22, 132-4 International Jurists 86 International Olympic Committee (IOC) 1n1, 17, 28, 28n70, 47, 49, 56-7, 83 International PEN 25n49 International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) 16 Interpol 65, 68 Irele, Francis Abiola 8, 19 Irish Republican Army 20n14 Irving, Keith 123 James, Louis 184 Japtha, Ben 36 Jensen, O.C. 148 Jeyifo, Biodun 10 Joans, Theodore “Ted” 26 Johannesburg Central Prison 62 Joko (student) 50, 54

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Index Jolobe, James Ranisi 181 Journal of the New African Literature and the Arts 187 Joyce, James 146 Justins family 45 Kamin, Wayne 9-11 Karodia, Mrs. (landlady) 50, 77 Kathrada, Ahmed 101, 107 Kaunda, Kenneth 20 Kazi, Dr. 78 Keats, John 151, 197, 199 Kellock, Thomas Oslaf 80 Kenya African National Union 17n2 Kgositsile, Keorapetse William 10, 180-1, 184 Khan, S. 24 Kies, Bennie M. 35 King, Don 30, 118 Kinnell, Galway 20, 25 Kissinger, Henry 118 Kizer, Carolyn 20, 25-6 Kleingeld (member of secret police) 70, 725, 85 Kleinhans brothers 99-100 Knight, Ethridge 26, 123 Krige, Uys 4-5 Kunene, Dan 10 Kunene, Mazisi Raymond 2, 10, 185 KwaNdebele (Natal) Homeland 30n74 La Guma, Alex 2, 24, 169-70, 181 La Rose, John 26 Labour Party 29n72 Land of Hope 38 Langford, Colin 89 Leeuwkop Prison, Johannesburg 92-3, 97 Lenin Peace Prize 20n14 Liberal Party, South Africa 48, 48n1, 52n6, 59n11, 99, 182n8 Library of Congress 7 Lidman, Sara 25 Leitch, Raymond 122 L’Equipe 21 Lindfors, Bernth 1-11, 19, 24, 196 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 143 Longhorn Radio Network 127 Lorca, Federico Garcia 84 Lovell, Leo 57, 61 Ludi, Gerald 50 Luthuli, Albert John 170-1, 173-4 Mac Liammóir, Michaél 24 McBride, Sean 20

McCartney, Barney 7, 9 McDiarmid, Hugh 24 Makeba, Miriam 20 Man Booker International Prize 180n2 Mandela, Nelson 30, 62n14, 101-2, 114-5, 119, 135 Marcus, Sybil 90 Marxism 199 Masondo, Andrew 94, 101, 107 Matsoaledi, Elias 107 Matthews, James 182, 186 Maunick, Edouard Joseph Marc 25 Mazrui, Ali 10, 180 Mbari: Club 1, 3n4, 23, 52n5, 149; Prize 23, 167, 206 Mbeki, Govan Archibald Mvulyewa 62n14, 101-2 Mboya, Tom 17, 49, 57 Melville J. Herskovits Africana Library, Northwestern University 6 Methodists 137 Mhlaba, Raymond 101, 107 Mhlambiso, Thami 120-1 Miller, Arthur 182 Mini, Vuyisili 89 Mintoor, Miss (teacher) 127-8 Mlangeni, Andrew Mokete 101 Modern Poetry from Africa 206 Molatana, K. 9 Moore, Gerald 187 Moore, Marianne 198 Mphahlele, Es’kia (Ezekiel, Zeke) 3, 10, 18, 25, 117, 132, 181, 186 Mqhayi, Samuel Edward Krune 181 Msibi, George 57, 59, 61-5 Mtshali, Eric 23 Mtshali, Oswald 10, 169, 183 Mutch, Ronnie 53 Nairobi People’s Congress Party 17n2 Nakasa, Nathaniel Ndazana 117 National Action Committee Council 101, 107 National Book Award 26n64, 167n8, 198n3 National Liberation Front 100n6 Nazareth, Peter 10 Ndu, Pol 10 New African 17 New Age 116 New Beacon Books 26n52 New Statesman 134, 198n4 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award 182n10

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Index New York Post 28 New York Review of Books 184-5 New York Yankees 28n71 Newsom, Eric David 119 Ngubane, Jordan Kush 52, 56 Ngugi, James (Ngugi wa Thiong’o) 25 Nigerian Olympic Committee 21n25 Nixon, Richard 118, 119n2 Nkosi, Lewis 24, 186 Nobel: Peace Prize 20n14, 171n1; Prize in Literature 24n39, 25n45, 91n32, 126n10, 197n1 Nokwe, Philemon Pearce Dumasile 23 Non-European Unity Movement 35n1, 55, 62n15, 100nn7-8 Nortje, Arthur Kenneth 3, 6, 25, 117-8, 122, 132, 192, 206-7 Nxumalo, Allen M. 56-7, 61, 191 Nxumalo, Maude 61 Obenga, Théophile 19 Obiechina, Emmanuel 10 Observer 134 O’Hara, Barratt 27 Olympic Games 137, 200; Grenoble 28; Mexico City 1, 21, 28; Munich 21; Tokyo 17n1, 49, 53, 83 Ordia, Abraham A. 21 Organization of African Unity (OAU) 19n9, 122 Ouattara, Alassane Dramane 122 Owen, Wilfred 167 Paddy, Father 34, 38 Palaver: Interviews with Five African Writers in Texas 4, 158, 178 Pan-African Congress, Dar es Salaam 20, 23, 30, 118, 120 Pan-African Cultural Festival, Algiers 2-3, 19, 22, 24, 203 Pan-Africanism 20n10 Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) 96, 96n4, 105 Parker, Carolyn 9 Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC) 119 Pass Protest 96n4 Passive Resistance Campaign 78n22 Patchen, Kenneth 167 Paterson High School, Port Elizabeth 16, 148, 206 Paton, Alan Stewart 182 Peake, George 94, 104 Pena, Jessie 127

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Pennyquick, Mr. (Swaziland official) 64 Petrarca, Francesco 159 Philip, Prince 27 Pieterse, Cosmo 2, 10, 24, 206 Pittman, Elizabeth 58, 60, 73 Poet Laureate 26n56, 40n3; Britain 143nn12; Ethiopia 19n6; New Zealand 26n61; South Africa 180n1, 185n23 Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado (PIDE) 64 Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison 101nn10-11 Pope Paul VI 19 Pound, Ezra 147, 167 Povey, John 2 Prado 204 Presbyterians 137 Présence Africaine 19 Pretoria Central Prison 53 Prinsloo, Jane 128 Pudney, John Sleigh 26 Pulitzer Prize: Drama 182n10; National Reporting 119n2; Poetry 20n19, 26n64, 167n8, 198n3 Purple Renoster, The 182n7 Rand Daily Mail 57, 78, 80, 182n13 Ransom, Harry 4-6, 11 Realities (publisher) 182n12 Red Cross 98-9 Red Hell 114 Republican Party 155n13 Research in African Literatures 2, 23, 208 Retreat Prison 101 Rexroth, Kenneth 167 Rive, Richard Moore 186 Rivonia 50, 61n14; group 101, 107; trial 101, 101nn10-11 Robben Island 23, 30n75, 50, 53, 61, 80-1, 88, 92-109, 114, 119, 124, 160-2, 169-71 Rogers, Carolyn Marie 26 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 155n13 Rous, Stanley 27 Sachs, Albie 109 Salkey, Andrew 26 Saloojee, Babla 73 Samkange, Stanlake 117 SANC: South African Native College 147 Schoolgirls’ Own, The 41 Schreiner, Olive 4 Scott, Michael 20 Scottish Renaissance 24n43

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Index secret police: British 61; Portuguese 17, 47, 54, 59, 61, 64-5, 67, 70; South African 17, 50-1, 53-4, 56, 59, 61, 67, 69-70, 724, 86-7, 107, 110-7, 136, 160, 162 Serote, Mongane Wally 10, 183 Seven South African Poets 206 Shakespeare, William 25, 40, 45, 138, 148, 159 Sharp Control (firm) 18 Sharpeville 16, 27, 96n4, 100n8, 181, 183 Shaw, George Bernard 197 Sikakane, Joyce 182 Silk, Ted 119 Simons, H.J. 35 Simons, R.E. 35 Singh, George 117 Sistine Chapel 204 Sisulu, Albertina 182n13 Sisulu, Walter 30, 62n14, 101-2, 107, 116, 135, 182n13 Slingsby, Mr. 34 Smuts, Issie 92 Smuts, Jan Christian 92 Sobukwe, Robert Mangaliso 96 Society for African Culture 19 Soggott, David 85 South African Coloured People Organization (SACPO) 94n2 South African Communist Party (SACP) 19, 22n29, 23n32, 48, 50n4, 62nn13-14, 173 South African Football Association 20 South African Indian Football Association 116n4 South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SAN-ROC) 1, 7n6, 17, 18n3, 21, 31, 48, 50, 53, 55, 83, 86, 121 South African Olympic Committee (SAOC) 17, 47, 85-86 South African Olympic team 201 South African Outlook 7 South African Soccer Federation 116n4 South African Sports Association (SASA) 16, 48, 116-7, 121 South African Students’ Organization (SASO) 120 South African Table Tennis Board 10 South African Voices 9-10 South African Writing Today 206 South End High School 206 Soyinka, Wole 25 Special Branch 76, 110, 114-7 Spender, Stephen Harold 20, 25 Spenser, Edmund 159

Spilkin, Jacob Hyman 46 St. Augustine’s Cathedral, Salisbury 38 St. Augustine’s Teacher Training College, Parow 16 St. Dominic’s Priory, Port Elizabeth 36 St. Marks E.C. Mission School, Port Elizabeth 206 St. Mary’s School, Grahamstown 44, 128 St. Michael’s Catholic Mission, Fort Beaufort 16 St. Patrick’s Mission School, Salisbury Park 39, 42 St. Patrick’s School, Sydenham 43 St. Paul’s Cathedral 18n4, 22, 132, 147n8 St. Peter’s School, Port Elizabeth 33, 38 St. Theresa’s Catholic Mission School, Port Elizabeth 16, 44-5, 128 St. Thomas Aquinas High School, Port Elizabeth 148 Stanford, Derek 26 Stanislavski, Constantin 170 Star, The 18, 50, 57 State of Emergency 107n13, 116 Steinhart, Edward I. 9 Stevens, Wallace 167, 199 Stewart, R.C. 113 Stonier, George Walter 198-9 Stop Apartheid Rugby Tours (SART) 31 Stop the Seventy Tour (STST) 18, 29 Stuart, Donald 59 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee 20n10 Sunday Times 22, 80 Suppression of Communism Act 48, 111, 113, 201 Supreme Council for Sport in Africa 21, 21n22, 21n25, 28 Susann, Jacqueline 184 Sutherland, Efua Theodora Morgue 26 Swaziland Democratic Party 56n7 Swedish Academy 25n49 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 167 Symposium on Contemporary Black South African Literature 180 T., Elspeth 22 Tabata, Isaac Bangani 62 Taj Mahal 204 Tambo, Oliver Reginald 119, 204 Taylor, Catherine Dorothea 29 Te Mata Poet Laureate, New Zealand 26n61 Teachers League of South Africa (TLSA) 35, 63

215

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Index Tejani, Bahadur 23 Telli, Diallo 19 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 40, 138, 144 Thant, U 19 Themba, Daniel Canodoise “Can” 117, 185 Three Continents Press 194-5 Tibble, Anne 187 Times (London) 18, 21, 134 Times Literary Supplement 184-5 Tokay Prison 100 Tony Award 182n10 Transition 166 Traoré, Bakare 19 Treason Trial 94, 101n10, 116; Defence Fund 22n28 Triumph, The 41 Troubadour Press 6-8, 10 Troubadour, The (pub) 26 Tse-tung, Mao 10, 185, 194, 204-5 Tuskegee Institute 34 Tuwhare, Hone 26 Ufahamu 7 Umkhonto we Sizwe 23n32, 50, 50n3, 89n29, 94n3, 107n13 United Church of Christ, St. Louis, Missouri 30 United National Conference on Decolonization, Kitwe 19 United Nations 19, 20n16, 21, 23, 28, 80, 83, 86, 120n4, 121, 132-3 United States Information Agency 22n31 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 19 universities: Algiers 19; Auckland 26, 26n60; Benin, Nigeria 184n17; Boston 27; Boston State 27; California at Berkeley 27; California at Los Angeles (UCLA) 1, 2n2, 28, 187; Cambridge 143n4; Cape Town 144; Dar es Salaam 20; Denver 3, 18, 29, 165n5; Fort Hare 16, 27, 59, 74, 94, 129-31, 136-7, 146-8, 148n11; Grenoble 24, 27; Grinnell 18; Harvard 18, 24n37, 27, 117n5; Howard 52n6; Ibadan 27; John Knox 27; Kent 184n16; Lagos 27; London 25; Nairobi 25n46; Natal 148; New York 26n30; Northwestern 6, 18, 118, 123n7, 133; Oxford 3n3; Peking 20, 194, 205; Rhodes 16, 27, 58, 122n6, 148; Stanford 187; State University of New York, Binghamton 180n3, 184n19; Stirling 118; South Africa 16; Sydney 27; Texas at Austin 2-4, 6-9, 11,

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15, 19, 23-4, 127, 157, 178, 180, 183, 195-6; Washington 27; Western Cape 3n3, 114n3, 206; Witwatersrand 17, 27, 54-5, 58; Yale 132; York (Canada) 118; Zambia 133 University Correspondence College 35 Van den Bergh, Hendrik Johan “Sampie” 73 van der Ross, Richard Ernest 114 van Greunen (warder) 100 van Riebeeck, Jan 36 Vassilikos, Vassili 25 Verwoerd, Hendrik Frensch 60, 103 Villa Algarve 65-8, 84 “Vladimir” (member of secret police) 110 Walton, Madam 34, 36 Wang, Arthur 195 Wästberg, Per 25, 28 Watkins, Patsy 127 Webster, John 148 Welensky, Raphael “Roy” 78 Wesker, Arnold 182 White House 119n2 Whitlam, Edward Gough 27 Wilberforce College 34 Williams, Tennessee 182 Willkie, Wendell Lewis 155 Wilson, Harold 80 Wimbledon Tennis Courts 18, 29, 119 Wolfe, Martin 53 Wolpe, Harold 62 Wordsworth, William 143, 148 World Athletic Association 28 World Campaign for the Release of Political Prisoners 22, 22n29 World Conference on Human Rights, Tehran 19 World Cup Soccer, England 18, 27 World Football Congress, Frankfurt 30 World, The 182n13 World Weightlifting Federation 21, 28, 121 Yeats, William Butler 91, 115, 147, 150 Yenan Forum 185 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny Aleksandrovich 199 Yu Chi Chan Club (YCCC) 100, 100nn7-8 Zackon, Barney 99 Zonnebloem College 35 Zwane, Ambrose Phesheya 57

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Dennis Brutus (1924-2009) is known internationally as a South African poet, anti-apartheid activist and campaigner for human rights and the release of political prisoners. His literary works include Sirens Knuckles Boots (1963), Letters to Martha, and Other Poems from a South African Prison (1968), A Simple Lust 1973), and Stubborn Hope (1978). ‘Besides being one of the most effective campaigners against apartheid in sport, Dennis Brutus was a courageous man and a poet of no mean achievement. His reminiscences make for engrossing reading, particularly the grim story of his arrest and incarceration on Robben Island.’ – J M Coetzee, Visiting Professor at the University of Adelaide, was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. ‘These tapes are conversational gems, showing Dennis Brutus at his very best: sharp in his dialogue, his biting tongue full of vigour (and sometimes invective), and yet still gentle in his recollections. They provide one last encounter with a poet in full flow, his voice distinct, crisp and politically resonant. It is good to hear the strength and the conviction mixed with ambivalence in his voice. True to form, Dennis Brutus is ready to trouble us, as is his tendency, one more time.’ – Grant Farred, Professor of Africana Studies and English at Cornell University ‘... an entirely fresh perspective on the activist-poet, who was as enigmatic as he was gifted. Speaking in trusted company, the Brutus who emerges from these conversations is disarmingly candid, laconic and self-detached – a splendid contradiction of modernist poet and irrepressible politician.’ – David Attwell, Professor of Modern Literature, University of York Cover photograph: Dennis Brutus, Austin, Texas, 1975 (© and reproduced with the kind permission of Hal Wylie)

an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620, USA www.boydellandbrewer.com www.jamescurrey.com

THE DENNIS BRUTUS TAPES Edited by BERNTH LINDFORS Essays at Autobiography

Bernth Lindfors is Professor Emeritus of English and African Literatures, The University of Texas at Austin, and founding editor of Research in African Literatures. He has written and edited numerous books on African literature, including Folklore in Nigerian Literature (1973), Popular Literatures in Africa (1991), Africans on Stage (1999), Early Soyinka (2008), and Early Achebe (2009).

When Dennis Brutus was a Visiting Professor at The University of Texas at Austin in 1974-75, he recorded on tape a series of reflections on his life, career and poetry. The material reproduced here records fragments of the autobiography of a remarkable man who lived in extraordinary times and managed to leave his mark on the land and literature of South Africa. An effective anti-apartheid campaigner, Brutus succeeded in getting South Africa excluded from the Olympics. His opposition to racial discrimination in sports led to his arrest, banning, and imprisonment on Robben Island. Upon release, he left South Africa and lived most of the rest of his life in exile. The tapes are edited by Bernth Lindfors who has added an Introduction and footnotes.

THE DENNIS BRUTUS Essays at TAPES Autobiography

Edited by BERNTH LINDFORS