The steps that almost led him to terrorism
Cohen, Derek
MY POLITICAL radicalism was a byproduct of growing up in South Africa—of the liberalism of my mother and the communist leanings of my father. South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s was a strange...
...20 DISSENT / Spring 2005...
...We were for the most part a group of incorrigibly bourgeois, overprotected, family-oriented, nonviolent young people who, on some level, understood the implications of what we were doing...
...I did, in fact, feel their hot breath on my back on more than one occasion in the following years...
...DEREK COHEN is a professor of English at York University in Toronto...
...The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 had been brutally stamped out, and the Russians had shown themselves indifferent to human rights...
...That afternoon, I called my two oldest friends in Pretoria, who knew almost nothing of my political activities and were amazed to hear me tell them that I was leaving the country that day and that I wanted them to come to the airport to see me off...
...I had plenty of physical courage...
...It was obvious to me that I was being recruited, and I immediately assumed that it was for the African National Congress (ANC), which had already embarked on a campaign of violent resistance...
...I made it clear, as well, that I would have no objection to joining the Communist Party along with the ANC if that was to be a condition of membership...
...They wanted to know which university, implying without any attempt at subtlety that they had a long reach...
...The trial was in my hometown of Pretoria, where the South African Supreme Court sat, and I managed to attend it each day...
...I might have agreed with the premise that the time had come to cause some casualties if that is what was required to wake up the South African population...
...This man told my mother that he had heard that she was sympathetic to the political prisoners and wanted to know if she would be willing to take food and supplies to his sister, who was in prison in Pretoria, where we lived...
...Torture, both physical and psychological, was used, and, predictably, some detainees had greater powers of resistance than others...
...One night I was walking in Johannesburg with Harry, a good friend who also happened to be a member of the ARM...
...Some left immediately, by airplane to London, by car to Zambia and Botswana and, usually, thence to London—in those days a favorite center for South African political refugees...
...there were black people everywhere and there were white police officers everywhere...
...IN THE MEANTIME, my mother did more than simply join the Liberal Party and attend its meetings...
...I was given the job of purchasing some of the parts, most of which were innocent in themselves, but likely to arouse suspicion if purchased in bulk...
...He offered to pay her for the items for his sister but my mother refused to accept money...
...In the meantime, apartheid became more and more deeply entrenched...
...we could complain to them if we didn't like the sandwiches they had prepared for our school lunches...
...It was no secret, Michael said, that the ANC was funded by, assisted by, and loyal to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union...
...Now it all seems silly, and I know that I looked ridiculous...
...The Liberal Party was finally banned, not because it broke any laws, but simply because it stood against the system of racial separation...
...Politically, my parents were precise and clear about their attitudes toward apartheid...
...My ANC connection in Johannesburg brought me into contact with family members of some of those on trial...
...She believed in one-person, one-vote, and at one time thought this could be implemented if only the people in power would see the light...
...A certain amount of bravado and boasting by members led to too many people knowing too much...
...By the time I had regained most of the use of my leg, the Rivonia trial of Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and the others was under way...
...This certainty made them DISSENT / Spring 2005 11 POLITICS ABROAD different from their friends and acquaintances...
...Come to my house at nine tonight...
...And it was this advantage that our opponents believed (correctly) that we, the privileged and the educated, were fighting to take away from them...
...And that was the beginning of it all...
...South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s was a strange and terrible place...
...a white policeman brutally throwing a black man or woman into a police van for the crime of not having his or her pass in order...
...Though unsurprised, my wife was indignant that the FBI had been so casual about revealing its relationship with the dreaded security branch of the South African police...
...it was in those circumstances the most ordinary question in the world, and I'm sure millions of black and white children asked their mothers the same question...
...I now firmly believe that the taking of innocent human life is always unjustified...
...But she was unequivocal that she and the other John were equal partners with Harris in the bomb action, and that all three accepted Harris's reasoning about the moral and political necessity for this dramatic and violent act...
...Questions and discussion followed...
...I remember feeling sudden excitement, flattered to be noticed by this leading campus intellectual...
...Coming from police who had been involved in torture and possibly worse, the "lesson" was an ugly joke...
...How to bring that change about was the problem...
...My mother was good-humored and encouraging...
...He was well known around the campus as possessing radical, left-wing views and being well able to defend them...
...Indeed, the idea of injuring or killing anyone was appalling, though we did anticipate that if the revolution actually took off, government soldiers would inevitably be targets of our attack, as we would most certainly be of theirs...
...When it exploded, a seventy-year-old woman was killed and one other person injured...
...I was twenty, and there were two or three others of about our age...
...so we all saw it, and in seeing it, we recognized our helplessness: a white policeman slapping a black man in the face for being "cheeky...
...The idea, very simply, was that people like us—educated, middleclass, and advantaged—would attempt to foment a revolution of the black working and rural classes...
...our telephone was tapped by the police...
...Suddenly the danger was apparent...
...As we suspected, other arrests followed shortly...
...The police were more open in watching our house and tapping our phone and physically threatening her at the gates of the prison...
...Why, if there already existed a fully formed, larger, more powerful movement with the same aims as those laid out in his speech, were we forming another movement...
...In truth, we were quite amateurish, though we tried not to be...
...Those of us who "left in time," however, are also forever left with a nagging uncertainty...
...Harris wanted to make a dramatic statement that the resistance movement was still alive...
...The police were virtually a law unto themselves and were permitted to continue to suppress dissent and oppositional politics with the support and connivance of the nation's legislature...
...Innocent people seemed not to exist...
...A photograph in the Pretoria pro-government newspaper Die Vaderland of Harris's wife and my mother leaving the courthouse described them as mother and daughter...
...Laws fortifying an apparently omnipotent ruling party became more draconian and cruel...
...SOON AFTER, something dramatic and terrifying happened...
...Both looked up and saw me, but knew enough not to show recognition on their faces, though I almost made the mistake of greeting them...
...We feared a chain reaction, and we knew that the South African police would use torture to get information...
...And then, on a terrible day in June, Bobby Kennedy was killed...
...The possibility of death sentences being handed down was real—even for someone like me who had had so little to do with the working of the movement in so many months...
...He told us why he had asked us to meet: he had sounded us out individually and concluded that we shared the belief that apartheid could only be defeated by a violent struggle...
...Few white homes had none...
...After a long detention, he was finally brought to trial, found guilty, and hanged...
...It granted them literal social superiority, encoded in the laws of the land and supported by the organized religious communities with only a few notable and honorable exceptions...
...Only the intervention of Zambian prime minister Kenneth Kaunda secured his release...
...Two months later my green card arrived...
...and the means of that control was violence...
...I was involved, though never in a central way, in liberal politics in the town...
...Two tough-looking men stood at the door and asked to come in...
...My mother was a liberal...
...Our homes had servants who lived in servant quarters in the backyards...
...Violence, in other words, was everywhere...
...My mother believed that apartheid could be abolished by legal, constitutional means...
...Because of a clumsy orthopedic surgeon in Pretoria who had injected cortisone into my left knee with a dirty needle, I developed a dangerous infection in my leg...
...and few people had the strength to resist its blandishments...
...They were two of my colleagues in the ARM—one had been a university friend in Grahamstown...
...They truly hated us...
...This is how I might have talked myself into participating in the dreadful event...
...My own immigration difficulty assumed a proper proportion, but we were sure that it was only a matter of time before I would be forced to leave the United States...
...Others of us hung tight and waited to be arrested...
...Many cut her in the street and ended all contact with the family...
...As the year wore on, our little group met frequently...
...And I am very glad that I did not, not only because of the physical torture that I would have had to endure when I was caught, but also because of the consequences to my soul...
...Like all of us, he was aware that the police had broken the ARM...
...Many South Africans who were eager for the overthrow of the National Party were very hostile to the corn14 DISSENT / Spring 2005 POLITICS ABROAD munists...
...Although many of our members fled the DISSENT / Spring 2005 19 POLITICS ABROAD country, several were captured and served prison sentences ranging from a few weeks to, in one case, fifteen years...
...Some thought about the possibility of change—all black people did, and some white people...
...They were both handcuffed and being frogmarched toward the scene of the bombing...
...They introduced themselves as agents of the FBI and admitted that they were surprised to see me at home, having hoped, instead, to talk to my wife...
...Several of us were Jews, and Soviet repression of Jews was a factor in our distrust of the communists...
...Some of us, not including me, participated in acts of sabotage in Johannesburg...
...She was one of two people in Pretoria willing to do this service, which she did faithfully until she left the country years later...
...She told us that her ex-husband had been arrested along with two or three others associated with the ARM leadership...
...Others I knew in the movement would have had no hesitation in refusing to take part in any action that endangered the innocent...
...The images are vivid and clear...
...Some have remained obsessed with and committed to the new South Africa...
...In 1968, I was a graduate student at New York University, recently married to an American fellow student...
...One evening, Michael introduced me to Ann Swirsky...
...He then talked about the nature of this struggle and described how it might be managed...
...Without hesitation my mother agreed...
...others have gone on to lead relatively normal lives...
...It was simply something we didn't discuss...
...Liberal-minded white people were motivated in their desire for change largely by a sense of fairness and a hatred of racial doctrines...
...His argument was fairly simple...
...I listened to the magnificent pre-sentencing speeches of the men who had risked their lives to save the country...
...In my mother's case, the penalties were that some of her friends, out of realistic and understandable fear of being tainted with the Liberal brush, stopped greeting her...
...The former meant that she despised racial discrimination and prejudice...
...The means we would use to effect this revolution were supposed to exclude the taking of innocent human life...
...Those were terrible times in South African history...
...The police were surrounding two men, both of whom we recognized...
...Walking toward the train, we were suddenly halted by a hurried procession of white policemen angrily making their way through the station...
...She objected to being investigated—the agents had questioned our neighbors—and was, characteristically, determined to act...
...For all its nastiness to its own citizens, the Russians alone of all the major powers invested money, material, training, and education in support of the South African Revolution...
...It wasn't profound or sensitive...
...Like many Jews of his generation, he seemed to regard the communist program for change as historically inevitable and, in a sense, messianic...
...Some behaved with great courage...
...But I know too that I was lucky that Harris did not know me then...
...I had an apartment in the city where I hid dynamite and other accoutrements of bomb-making, such as timing devices and detonators...
...He was only slightly older than I, but much wiser, smarter, better read, and brilliantly articulate...
...I know that the same could probably be said for some slave owners in the nineteenth century, so I don't romanticize this attitude...
...They were pale and frightened looking, and I wondered why the police had brought them to the scene...
...We talked about apartheid, and one of them allowed, only half jocularly, that similar laws would be useful for law enforcement in the United States...
...At about five o'clock one morning our telephone DISSENT / Spring 2005 17 POLITICS ABROAD rang...
...Neither was a fool...
...Here my own story deviates from that of the mainstream...
...At first there was a sweep through Cape Town, where people suspected or known by us to be group members were seized one by one...
...It was certainly not because of any squeamishness about capital punishment on the part of the judiciary, which had already given South Africa one of the highest rates of capital punishment in the world...
...I met an ANC contact in a Johannesburg coffee shop and talked about joining the party...
...I woke my parents and told them that I was going to have to leave the country...
...The successful dynamiting of one key pylon could disrupt the power supply to a large number of homes and signal to the authorities the presence of an oppositional force...
...And I believed that the thing that was wrong needed to be corrected...
...A massive explosion in a public place that would, indeed, endanger life would produce this effect...
...After all, they were most definitely in jail at the time of the explosion...
...My father was adamant that change could not come about without a violent revolution and a proletarian dictatorship...
...There were occasional stories of escape, too...
...My time in the hospital and in recovery—a total of five months— coincided with stepped-up revolutionary activity by all parties...
...He was the brother of a woman who had been detained in accordance with the 12 DISSENT / Spring 2005 POLITICS ABROAD recently passed emergency measures designed by the government to suppress political dissent in the white communities...
...He was the first and only white South African to be judicially executed for political crimes by the apartheid regime (there were police assassinations...
...Harry and I had been discussing his dissatisfaction with the ARM program and the threat he had received 16 DISSENT / Spring 2005 POLITICS ABROAD when he told the leadership that he wanted out of the movement...
...Servants prepared our food, made our beds each morning, polished our shoes each day, and tended our parents' gardens...
...There seemed, with the recent crackdowns on the various resistance movements, little to be done...
...The bombing was, however you cut it, an act of terrorism designed to sow fear among the people: it was a weapon of covert warfare that was supposed to make innocent people fear for their lives as they walked the streets...
...My parents bought me a plane ticket to London and gave me some money to live on...
...How could you stop a machine like the South African Police Force, which was possessed of almost unlimited physical and political power...
...Armed with a story about buying goods for my father's shop, I went off very nervously...
...I was at this time an undergraduate student in a small university in Grahamstown in the Cape Province...
...And I was left out of it...
...The extent of our advantage was most evident in the disadvantage of the nonwhite South African people (Black Africans, Coloureds, and Indians), who vastly outnumbered and surrounded us in every aspect of our daily lives...
...I thought this a futile exercise: the idea of appealing to an elected official seemed to me a waste of time...
...That was its weakness...
...The malign side was the cruelty and violence by which apartheid was sustained...
...That evening, at Michael's home, about seven people gathered, all of whom I had seen before, but none of whom I knew well...
...and armed resistance, in which civilians were left unharmed, had failed too...
...Our own party had made few inroads into black South Africa, which was, after all, the ostensible and ultimate source of the revolutionary success...
...In her conversations with Michael and me, Ann was quite explicit about her role in the bombing and was understandably relieved to have missed the event...
...The Germans have a nice word for it: Leidenschneid—it means something like "envy of suffering...
...I was directed, in other words, more by practical possibility than ideological difference...
...Postscript: My story has an American ending...
...I could not now bear the knowledge that I had willfully killed an innocent person...
...These were vulnerable by being dependent upon electrical power...
...and he decided to do something to prove that resistance was not dead...
...I warned my wife that evening that there was no way I would get a green card, and that we had better start making other plans for the future...
...My mother told them that I had left the country and would enroll in a university in England...
...Several of us were eager to "do" an action in Grahamstown, but our leaders wisely recognized that in a small town like ours it would take the police about ten minutes to realize who the culprits were and to arrest all of us...
...Although many left-leaning South Africans were reluctant to break completely with the Russians, the evidence was too obvious to be ignored...
...Although we knew that this kind of action was directly contrary to established policy, it was undeniable that the two belonged to our group...
...My mother and father were kind to their servants: they paid them somewhat better than did their friends and neighbors...
...He was well known as a brilliant and charismatic man, persuasive in argument and bold in action...
...We were going to attack government and military targets—communications installations, for example...
...His voice was low, melodramatic, and conspiratorial...
...The fact that the servants were all older and more experienced in life than we were didn't matter...
...As the laws against political opposition tightened, Liberals became more and more marginalized, and it took more and more courage to declare oneself a party member...
...Those of us on the periphery wondered what had happened and what the connection to the ARM actually was...
...It was clear from Ann's account of the events and the thinking that led to the bombing that Harris was the dominant figure of the trio...
...It later became clear that they had been brought by the indignant police to view their own—or ARM—handiwork, as an object lesson in the effects of "terrorism...
...That small action of producing a banned book galvanized us...
...To the workingclass, poorer white South Africans, apartheid gave a style of living that uneducated and disadvantaged people could not hope to possess anywhere else in the world...
...And I remember wondering what I would have done had I been approached by John Harris and asked to participate in this terrible act...
...After offering anyone with misgivings the opportunity to leave, Michael then informed us that we were now members of the National Committee for the Liberation of South Africa...
...Because I had been pretty much an invalid for several months and never involved in an action I felt fairly immune, but Harry knew he was in danger...
...The very presence of black people in South Africa was regarded as an affront that had to be kept under control...
...And I was proud to be seen with them, though I realized that the chances of my being arrested were good, simply because of the association...
...I was certain that nothing could be done...
...Some homes had one servant, some had three and four...
...corruption...
...In this, the Liberals proved to be right, after all...
...He had found out something about my views from one or two of my political friends, and had decided to try me out...
...But the danger was real, as we were all to discover over the next couple of years, and that made it serious...
...One morning when I was alone at home there was a knock on the door...
...still, if I had been suspected and reported, I would undoubtedly have been arrested...
...Michael made a long introductory speech...
...Actions," as they were called, were taking place in the large urban areas of Cape Town and Johannesburg...
...I would attend anti-apartheid demonstrations and, with my university student colleagues, was subjected to abuse and small acts of violence by local youths who loathed us because we were students—members of what they correctly perceived as an elite—and also because we spoke out against the apartheid system that sustained them...
...Who were we...
...Now, looking back at his lectures about capitalism, I recognize that my father was naive in his belief that the Russian Revolution had solved the big problems...
...Perhaps all of us knew it, but some chose to suppress it...
...there was enough goodwill and, perhaps, fear for the future, in the white community...
...My parents were relatively well-off even by white standards...
...The police powers of persecution, arrest, detention, torture, and spying seemed only to increase...
...In everyday life, their arrogance was most vividly expressed in the way in which they treated black South Africans...
...The cost was not high, but it was real...
...They knew the difference and regarded that kind of cozy liberalism as repulsive and dishonest...
...But for the most part we were fairly isolated, and our largest achievement as a revolutionary group was the building of links with the local African community...
...This domestic picture shows, of course, only the more benign side of white South African life at that time...
...And that was how it began...
...In Johannesburg I was connected with the old group, now renamed the African Resistance Movement (ARM), one member of which was the same Michael who had originally brought us together and with whom I developed a close friendship...
...that the fight against this system of violent suppression required violence...
...I had become impatient with the ARM and did not think the reasons for a separate and much weaker revolutionary movement to be sufficient...
...London was full of South African politicals, and in short order I made contact with Michael, who was fortunate enough to have been in England when the arrests began...
...One was the steady arrests of members of the ARM...
...Ann had been an essential part of the bomb plot...
...I was now ready to become more actively involved...
...She endangered herself by doing this...
...Some have died...
...But it was clear that our movement was being utterly destroyed...
...My father, a fairly successful wholesale grocer who joined his own father in business, espoused a communist political ideology...
...some have turned their backs on it, though I know that the experience of resistance will be forever in their blood...
...One day, shortly after the socalled Sharpeville massacre in 1960, when white people were arrested on a scale not seen before in South Africa, a strange man came to our front door...
...Those of us on the left believed that white South Africans had, by a huge majority, thrown in their lot with apartheid and were consciously turning a blind eye to the violence of the system...
...but all of us wish to have suffered, to know ourselves under those specific and historic conditions of adversity, and we envy and admire our colleagues who underwent what might easily have been our own fate...
...The choice before the white public would be clear: they were for apartheid or against it...
...To the surprise of most South Africans, and the huge relief of the families of the prisoners, none of the men on trial was given the death penalty—no doubt because of the massive presence of the world media in Pretoria...
...In the end, apartheid was defeated by the power of money and those forces of established authority that wished to see a stable and prosperous nation emerge out of the morass of violence...
...others were not so brave and gave their interrogators all they wanted without resistance...
...I was put in touch with a man who instructed me on the making of detonators and bombs, though the fact is that I'm technologically stupid, and it's lucky that I was never called on to exercise this particular skill...
...I envy them their moral clarity and wish I had possessed it then...
...Of course, it was the black people who endured the violence and the white people who watched it...
...It was exciting and frightening...
...A year earlier I had acquired a passport so that my sister and I could take a short trip to Europe as her graduation gift...
...I think I would have gone along with him and persuaded myself that it was a right and necessary action...
...But our plans specifically forbade the taking of innocent life as we pursued our revolutionary goals...
...Our attempts at secrecy as to who was involved in the movement had not been successful...
...It was not until the plane was in the air that I could breathe easily...
...He saw the need in South Africa for a violent overthrow of the government and looked forward to the death of the marketplace...
...She and the two Johns had been, and still were, I suppose, members of our group...
...It described the route to world peace and harmony among the nations of the world—after the small matter of a successful proletarian revolution had taken place, of course...
...Michael knew a lot of people in the same situation as we, and soon enough we had a small group...
...John Harris was another casualty of apartheid...
...Our success as a revolutionary force would be visible in the support of the native population, who would join us in the struggle, which was, after all, their struggle...
...To be white was to collaborate with apartheid...
...Each day we would read the newspapers to see who had been arrested where...
...We put the matter on the back burner and continued our studies, waiting for the axe to fall...
...I should note that Harris had telephoned the police thirteen minutes before the blast, and that the police had ignored the warning...
...The black population, I think it is fair to say, regarded all anti-apartheid activity with approval, but not with a great deal of confidence...
...The fact that the Rivonia defendants had not been executed was no guarantee that this would not happen to us...
...He argued, Ann told us, that it was now vital that all South Africans engage with the question of apartheid in an immediate and personal way...
...Were we in any way affiliated with Nelson Mandela and the ANC...
...The law now gave the police the right to detain indefinitely any person they deemed a threat to national security...
...They told me quite frankly that they were investigating me and, further, that they had received information about me from the South African authorities...
...I was twenty-two years old and too easily impressed and intimidated by high-powered intellectuals like Harris, who, by the way, was only in his late twenties himself...
...The rest of us waited, usually alone, communicating by surreptitious calls from public phones or meetings in anonymous places, talking anxiously and planning escape...
...it wasn't, as with our black colleagues and friends, the real experience of continuous, violent physical oppression—although some in our group were to find out more about that later on...
...I was, of course, photographed by the police when I spoke outside the courthouse with these people...
...While this event held the headlines for a while, other things were happening...
...that it used violence, torture, and murder in order to maintain its own version of order, which all blacks and some whites saw as oppression and subjugation...
...HARRY' S ARREST galvanized me...
...I now think that though Harris believed that the bombing was, somehow, an inevitable part of the evolution of resistance, he was wrong both historically and morally...
...Stories had begun to trickle out about the torture of John Harris...
...So there my parents were: united in their hatred of the evil of apartheid but different in their beliefs about how that evil could be eradicated...
...This man, John Harris, had been in prison since the night of the bombing together with the other man involved, also named John...
...She had been politically involved with the man who had put the bomb in the Johannesburg railway station but, at the time we met, he had still not been charged...
...But more, he wanted that statement to galvanize white South African opinion...
...At the age of three or four I asked my mother, "Why are the black people all poor and the white people all rich...
...On the night of the bombing, my parents and I were in Johannesburg, taking my sister to catch the train back to university in Cape Town...
...Michael gave us tracts and books to read, textbooks on how to start a revolution and how to keep one going...
...Once it was out in the open, we planned my escape...
...Still, I can't find it in myself to blame him...
...it was absurd...
...At the same time, though, I made contact with the ANC...
...a white policeman kicking and punching a black man for some minor transgression...
...I was rendered unconscious, rushed to the hospital, and lived for two months in danger of amputation...
...Slowly, after several operations, I returned to health...
...I applied for a green card for legal-immigrant status, but heard nothing from Immigration...
...He argued too, as all of us always had, that apartheid itself was inherently violent...
...Few white South Africans ever saw one of these so-called "members of the family" actually sit down with the family at a meal...
...They all saw it, they all knew about it, and they almost all went along with it, having little choice in the matter...
...It was known that black South Africans made up the bulk of the ANC, that its leadership was black, and, despite its known communist ties, it seemed to promise a real chance of revolution...
...Stories also filtered through the system too about how our colleagues were holding up or how quickly they were broken down...
...AND THEN, quite suddenly, disaster struck me, personally...
...At the time, however, it seemed deadly serious, particularly in the South African context...
...Harris watched the whole movement coming apart, members being arrested and people escaping...
...While our colleagues were in prison, stories about their behavior under torture and duress leaked out...
...Harry and I had anticipated that he, as a more active member, would be arrested first and that he would give my name to his interrogators, partly to be able to give them something new and also in the knowledge that I would have received a timely phone call from his brother...
...And this is only what we saw in the streets every day...
...This attitude was widely called liberal guilt, and probably to some extent was just that...
...and we were occasionally watched by policemen in large cars sitting outside our house...
...there were two men in their late twenties, one an older graduate student, the other a newly hired assistant professor...
...The conversation lasted about an hour...
...The latter, that she was a paid-up member of the South African Liberal Party...
...To this point I had fairly successfully concealed from them my involvement in the movement, but, of course, they had suspicions all along...
...I called him that night at home to tell him that I had his wallet...
...I thought our movement was too small, too limited in its possibilities, and I wanted to move on to something that was demonstrably more active and more involved in the African community...
...So," he said, eschewing the niceties, "How do you think we can put an end to apartheid...
...The more radical-minded leftists were motivated by a sense that this was a class rather than a racial conflict and that it was an international struggle for a new world order...
...Looking back on it, I was lucky not to have been put into the position of making such a frightening choice...
...What went on in the police stations and police cars we knew as well— torture and murder were normal occurrences...
...In the end, neither the liberals nor the radicals fully prevailed...
...I think she was a little excited and a little proud of me too...
...Indeed, a couple of years later, I actually approached a known ANC member and was on the verge of being brought into that movement when the Rivonia arrests took place and ANC activity was severely truncated...
...they treated them with respect and felt some kind of obligation to look after them...
...He picked up from a table Che Guevara's Handbook, the mere possession of which in those days could have netted him a year in jail...
...You had to be willfully oblivious to avoid seeing the casual brutality— the random, easy contempt and physical violence—with which black people were treated on a daily basis...
...This view, I might parenthetically add, has still not been proved wrong, for despite the changes that have taken place, the basic problem of South Africa's poor/rich divide still seems very far from being solved...
...Only the best of her old friends kept in touch...
...she had, as she told us, kept the explosives in her home, had agreed with Harris's reasons for the action, but was on holiday in Rhodesia on the night Harris planted the bomb...
...to be white was to have privilege forced upon you...
...We were joining forces with the proletariat and being inducted into an organization whose purpose was the violent overthrow of the South African government...
...MY POLITICAL ACTIVITIES continued in this way for my first year at university...
...To them, apartheid was so deeply entrenched as to have begun to seem eternal, even part of God's larger plan...
...But she told me that I said it...
...But a woman had died, another had been injured, and the violence had been perpetrated by members of and, more seriously, in the name of the African Resistance Movement...
...The news of the arrests scared us...
...Going through the normal motions of catching a flight was nerve-racking...
...But that something fundamental was wrong with South Africa I knew from an early age...
...I REMEMBER LISTENING to Ari11'S story one evening in London, feeling somewhat awed to be in private possession of such terrible knowledge...
...As I have said, the group declared itself to be absolutely opposed to endangering civilians...
...So, one afternoon I disguised myself slightly by wearing a pair of glasses and changing my hairstyle...
...A graduate student I knew slightly came over to me, interrupting my reverie with a friendly kick to my shoe...
...They are all out now, of course, and widely dispersed across the Englishspeaking world...
...Even as small children, some of us knew that there was something wrong with this picture...
...So Michael's argument for a new organization satisfied most of us...
...A bomb in a suitcase was placed near a bench in the white section of the Johannesburg railway station...
...But our experience of revolution was gleaned DISSENT / Spring 2005 15 POLITICS ABROAD from books...
...The very day after my departure, three large white men in plain clothes came to our front door looking for me...
...Less than a week after the assassination a letter came in the mail...
...It was Robert, Harry's brother, calling to tell me that Harry had been arrested...
...and, above all, economic decline that characterized the closing years of the apartheid era...
...I don't remember saying it, and I certainly don't remember what she replied...
...They hated it...
...And we were going to help turn the country upside down...
...and I think I might have gone along with him...
...One day my contact, the bombmaking instructor, having spent the afternoon with me, accidentally left his wallet in my car...
...He hinted at financial sources and talked about the success of the Cuban Revolution against Fulgencio Batista, only a couple of years earlier, which gave hope to revolutionaries around the world...
...It bore Kennedy's signature and said that he was looking into Marjorie's appeal for help in getting my immigration status regularized...
...There I became more deeply involved in the affairs of the group...
...This meant that she was prepared to be publicly recognized as an opponent of apartheid and prepared to pay the cost of that recognition...
...It was pretty much gutted as a political force despite the immense courage of such individual leaders as Alan Paton, Peter Brown, and dozens of others of equal fortitude and determination...
...Instead of shunning me, as had happened to others I knew, my pals agreed to come...
...Another appeal of such attacks was that the pylons were unguarded, and it was possible to attack them in isolated areas where there were unlikely to be people about...
...0 NE DAY during term, I was sitting on the library steps, enjoying the sunshine...
...None of us wishes to suffer...
...Of course, I oversimplify both their positions...
...The bomb had exploded a short while earlier, and though we were aware of the heavy police presence, and knew that a bomb had gone off in the station, we had made no connection to ourselves or anyone else we knew, assuming that it was the work of a radical African group...
...Now it seemed obvious to me that my father had always been right...
...She was also a Liberal...
...it was real to all South Africans no matter what their color...
...Looking back now, it seems absurd...
...We could chastise our servants if our shirts were not washed and ironed when we needed them...
...So, although he had been careful about concealing his real identity from me, it was suddenly in my possession...
...Liberalism, in that context of violent oppression, seemed to me a hopeless remedy for what ailed South Africa, and I came to the conclusion that to fight apartheid with reason and argument was futile...
...I had not to that point participated in an action...
...He was a mathematics teacher at the University of the Witwatersrand who was later kidnapped by the South African police from his home in Zambia, drugged, and bundled back to South Africa where he was formally arrested...
...Those who had not fled were in jail, and only a very few cadres like the three involved in the bombing were left...
...Soon after that other relatives of other prisoners came to Pretoria (where the main detention center for political prisoners was located), and soon my mother was taking several parcels each day...
...revolutions are seldom started by professionals and experts...
...The fear was made worse when we were approached at the airport by Liz (the woman who had told Harry and me of the very first arrests in Johannesburg), who warned us that the police had just pulled someone off a departing plane...
...The fifties and early sixties saw the passage and implementation of draconian laws discouraging and then forbidding political opposition to the governing National Party...
...She wrote a letter to New York's Democratic senator, Robert F. Kennedy, who had visited South Africa and given several rousing speeches attacking apartheid...
...They had been guests in our home and, while in Pretoria jail, fed by my mother...
...Her husband, innocent of involvement, was arrested and kept in prison for two weeks...
...We had three servants, who lived in rooms in the back of our house—rooms that by law were not permitted to be physically joined to the main house (but they were near enough that the servants were within calling distance...
...It was a riveting event...
...We were white and they were black: that was what mattered...
...This was a power they had always possessed with regard to black people—in fact if not in law—and it was now extended to include whites...
...His most recent book is Searching Shakespeare: Studies in Culture and Authority...
...They thought it was evil...
...And they would not, like the vast majority of white South Africans, accept it as inevitable, eternal, or unchangeable...
...My family lifestyle was typical of that of liberal, decent, well-meaning people...
...It was all unnerving because all unknown...
...My leg was pretty well healed, and though I walked with a limp, I didn't need a cane...
...He lived in another town and wasn't able to do this himself...
...It was relatively simple for me to leave, though not without danger...
...I was out of there, away from South Africa...
...In affluent homes, they served us our meals, and we could, as teenagers returned from school, call to one or another of the servants to bring our lunch or a cup of tea...
...Those of us who were never tested must always wonder how we would have fared under the circumstances of imprisonment...
...During his trial my mother and her friend Adelaide Hain, a heroic woman who quietly and fearlessly battled apartheid, accompanied Harris's wife to the trial...
...I remember the conversation with the salesman who served me being awkward and implausible...
...Meeting Ann Swirsky was important to 18 DISSENT / Spring 2005 POLITICS ABROAD me...
...It was strange and frightening for all of us, but everyone pretended calm...
...Michael was in his early twenties...
...DISSENT / Spring 2005 13 POLITICS ABROAD And they were brought to public attention only in the most egregious circumstances that never once, to my knowledge, resulted in appropriate punishment of the police...
...We believed that sabotage would be a chief means of encouraging revolution...
...We all wonder if we would have lived up to our ideals...
...He had been horribly beaten by the police, his jaw broken during interrogation...
...Almost immediately the police arrested two men, both associated with the ARM...
...But I was satisfied to be part of the revolution regardless of party...
...Law had failed utterly...
...Young white people like me lived in a world of privilege, wealth, and advantage...
...This was the question everyone was waiting for...
...We bumped into another friend who looked anxious and harried...
...One arrest would be followed by others, then by a lull, and then by a few more...
...For myself, I would have been delighted if he had represented the ANC...
...Despite the real affection that existed between our family and the servants, I give my parents credit for never describing any of them as "members of the family...
...But I think I capture the essential difference between them and between the radical and the liberal lefts, both of which were regarded with deep suspicion by most whites and lumped together as traitors and communists...
...Notably, there was one man who asked the police to wait while he packed some clothes, slipped out his back door and, after several days on the run, crossed the border with his girlfriend on a motorbike...
...Only by violence," I replied...
...TWO OR SO YEARS after this began, I left the university and found a job as a highschool teacher in Johannesburg...
...Most known Liberals were subjected to this kind of treatment and worse, but to compare that to the subjugation endured by any black person in the country for a single day is to realize how easy even white Liberals had it...
...What was the logical next step...
...I merely record it...
...Many have told their own stories...
...The Liberal Party was implacably opposed to apartheid, but it tried to maintain that opposition within the framework of the law...
Vol. 52 • April 2005 • No. 2
