by Anne Summers
It was while Haigh was showing me Soweto in all its confronting squalor that the security police stopped us. White people were forbidden to visit the townships. They demanded to know what we were doing there.
‘I am an Australian diplomat,’ Haigh said, offering them his official passport. ‘We allow your diplomats in Australia to travel wherever they wish in our country, so I am entitled to do the same here.’
I was sitting beside him in the front of the four-wheeled drive vehicle. I had been scribbling in my notebook and had not had time to conceal it when we were stopped. It was absolutely, totally forbidden for journalists to visit Soweto. We looked at each other.
‘Stay calm,’ he said to me.
The police had taken Haigh’s passport and were radioing back to base. He’d told them I was a newly arrived member of the embassy staff who did not yet have a passport or ID. There was a lot of conferring and head-shaking and foot-shuffling, but eventually they came back to our vehicle and allowed us to go on our way.
For the next two days, I met with dozens of people, most of them anti-apartheid activists of one kind or another. I met lawyers, doctors, journalists, students; some of them famous like Helen Suzman, the parliamentarian who for many years was the only MP who opposed apartheid and who regularly visited Mandela in prison, or John Kane-Berman, a well-known journalist with the Financial Mail; but most of them were anxious for our meetings not to be known to the state. I followed my instructions and made sure that my interview notes and the names of the people I’d spoken to were in separate notebooks. I hoped no one would be able to crack my private code.
I was surprised at the inefficiency of South Africa. For all that Johannesburg looked like a modern city, with its skyscrapers and highways, it functioned liked the cumbersome over-bureaucratised state that it was. Television had only just been introduced that year, and was strictly controlled by the state. There was no chance of images of apartheid being beamed out of the country. Repression, more than mining, was the country’s main industry and it dominated everything. It was impossible to get anything done on the phone. Even the Anglo-American Corporation, the mining giant, insisted I made my interview requests in writing. Not easy when I was only there for two days and there was no faxing, let alone email. Everything had to be done by telex, which meant I had to get the operator at the hotel to help me. The Information Department, which was meant to arrange foreign journalists’ access to politicians, treated me with utter suspicion. I could not interview Dr Koornhof, I was told, because he was out of the country. I knew that was a lie because he’d been quoted at a local event in that morning’s newspaper so I pushed back, and miraculously Koornhof reappeared in the country, ready to meet with me. Everyone seemed nervy and uptight. There were uniforms everywhere, including in the bureaucracy, where most positions appeared to require epaulettes and shiny brass buttons.
Mozambique opened my eyes to the reality of a country recently ‘liberated’ from colonial rule. The Polana Hotel where I stayed was once grand. It had been, I was told, the place for holidaying white South Africans, with its large airy rooms, its gardens flowing down to a beach where the Indian Ocean lapped at the shores. But four years of neglect, partly no doubt as a result of it now being state owned, had changed all that. The water in the taps in my room ran brown and, I’d been warned, under no circumstances was I to drink it. In the dining room, there were few choices on the menu, although what food there was was excellent and the waiters struggled to maintain appearances. They did silver service and they still wore livery, although their sandshoes were acknowledgement that standards were not what they’d once been. A large man wheeled around a trolley with covered dishes containing dessert but each one, when opened, revealed just humble quivering jellies and pieces of swiss roll. None of the cream-laden delicacies that would once have tempted diners. The shelves of the local supermarket were almost entirely empty. There was very little food in the country, I was told by X, the representative from the Revolutionary Front for the Independence of East Timor (Fretilin), which had established an embassy in Maputo and was training young men for its revolution. He took me on a tour of the city and its environs, showing me the chaos that had descended on the country since 1975.
Mozambique had been a Portuguese colony since around 1500, although efforts to develop the country were sporadic and, compared with some of their other colonial endeavours, half-hearted. But in the mid-1960s as part of the continuing worldwide uprising against colonialism, FRELIMO, a Marxist party, had led a guerilla war of independence. The war succeeded, somewhat abruptly, when democracy returned to Portugal and in June 1975, Mozambique acquired its independence. One of the first laws of the new government was to require all Portuguese to leave the country immediately, allowed to take just 20 kilograms of luggage with them. Now a civil war was raging. The national front—funded and largely organised by the South African and Rhodesian governments—was trying to bring down the government of Samora Machel.1 My most striking memory of Maputo was the number of road accidents. Every few hundred metres we encountered yet another car wreck, some of them very serious with bodies strewn all over the road. The South Africans are sending cars in, said my Fretilin guide, but very few people know how to drive. The Portuguese had kept that skill to themselves apparently.
My reason for going to Mozambique had been to try to interview Robert Mugabe. In 1974, after spending eleven years in a Rhodesian prison, he and compatriot Edgar Tekere had made Maputo their base for the revolutionary war ZANU was waging against the regime of Ian Smith. Before the interview could be scheduled, I had to be ‘screened’, I was informed by the ZANU press office. This had involved meeting in a bar with several of Mugabe’s men, all of whom wore the full Che Guevara guerilla garb: khaki pants, leather vests, berets, sunglasses, guns. Justin Nyoka, who headed the ZANU Public Information department, would decide if I could get to interview Comrade Mugabe. It seemed to me that the meeting was more a flirtation than a screening but I remained professional and explained how my newspaper would be a wonderful vehicle for their leader to get his views on how independence should be won for Zimbabwe to an Australian audience. There was only miniscule diplomatic representation in Mozambique, so the Australian government had no direct contact with Mugabe and his men. Australia’s Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser and his Foreign Minister, Andrew Peacock, would be flying into Lusaka in just a few days, I explained. My interview offered the perfect way to get the ZANU point of view in front of CHOGM. Nyoka was noncommittal. I explained that I would be flying to Tanzania, en route to Lusaka, the day after tomorrow; I needed the interview before then.
A few days later I was at the airport, angry and disappointed. I had not got the interview. I had waited. I had called Justin Nyoka as often as Maputo’s failing telephone system would allow, but I could not get a commitment. Instead, he gave me Edgar Tekere, who did not fit my preconceptions of what a guerilla should be like. He was a tall, softly spoken man, the son of an Anglican priest, who laughed a lot during our interview and he began each answer with a rhetorical question. But he was, I reminded myself, committed to armed struggle, he had spent years in prison and he had recently succeeded Mugabe as Secretary-General of ZANU, which organisation he—and not Mugabe—had co-founded. Getting to talk to him was something, I suppose, and the paper had run my lengthy Q&A with him. When I re-read the interview while writing this, I was surprised at how significant it really was. Tekere disclosed details of ZANU’s military position in Zimbabwe, its political position on a number of key issues to be addressed in Lusaka and was clearly sending messages to British and other Commonwealth diplomats. Perhaps most important of all, he told me that while ZANU enjoyed ‘the support of socialist countries to varying degrees’, it would not be allowing Cuban troops to join the fight. It was the fear that Cuba, acting as proxy for the Soviet Union, might send in troops that was one factor driving Malcolm Fraser’s efforts to secure a political solution in Zimbabwe.
But no one had heard of Edgar
Tekere and I was worried that I had failed in my first assignment as a foreign correspondent. I had not been able to snare the top guy. I had yet to learn that securing an interview with a foreign political leader takes time and patience and that success had very long odds. Now I was heading to Lusaka where I would join my colleagues in the Canberra Press Gallery who were flying in with Fraser. I’d attend the briefings, write about the CHOGM meeting, report on the expected stoush between Fraser and Thatcher; in other words, I’d be just another hack, doing what all the others were doing. I had dashed my chance of breaking out and getting my own special story, the big scoop of an interview with the world-famous Robert Mugabe. Oriana Fallaci had nothing to fear, I told myself bitterly. The bold Italian journalist Fallaci was my idol and, if we’d had such a term then, my role model. I admired her without reservation. Her Interview with History had been published just three years earlier. It was a collection of her most famous and audacious interviews, with the likes of Henry Kissinger, the Shah of Iran, Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir. Fallaci was not only able to sit down with such people; she gave them hell when she did. Her trademark was to berate, confront or otherwise embarrass her subjects. In 1972, she famously reported Kissinger describing himself as ‘the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse’. Kissinger later said this was the most ‘disastrous’ media interview he had ever given. Just a month after I failed to interview Mugabe, in September 1979, Fallaci would again make headlines when during her interview with the Ayatollah Khomeini, she ripped off the chador she had been required to don in order to meet the Iranian leader and challenged him to confront her full face and her hair.
Still angry, I watched miserably from the Maputo departure lounge as a spanking-new plane, with a huge giraffe painted on its tail, took off. Wondering what was happening to my flight, I went over to the counter. It turned out that flights were not called at this tiny excuse for an airport. The plane I’d just seen speed down the runway was heading for Tanzania. Not only that, on board was Robert Mugabe and his team, on their way to Lusaka. Worse, there would not be another plane for days. And worse still, my luggage was on that plane.
The only way I would be able to get to Lusaka would be to return to South Africa and find a flight from there. I made my way to the train station where there was a dirty old local, with just one class of travel, that would stop frequently until it reached the border where I’d transfer to a South African train. Before I boarded I had to be inspected by customs, to ensure I was taking nothing illegally out of the country. That was a bit of joke, I thought to myself, it was not like there’d been anything to buy in Maputo. I had nothing except the clothes I was wearing, a sleeveless knee-length red dress, and my handbag. I did not have a jacket or even a cardigan, although I had had the wit to keep my typewriter and tape-recorder with me. Now the customs men were homing in on my bright yellow, and admittedly snazzy, Olivetti portable and my small tape-recorder. I was taking them out of the country illegally, they declared. Where was my export permit? It was useless to state that items such as these were not procurable anywhere in Mozambique because that, of course, was why they wanted them. Grimly, I handed over my tools of trade, demanded token pieces of paper as receipts in return and carrying only my bag slung over my shoulder, walked down the platform.
As the train chugged away from the station, I realised that I was alone in my compartment. The corridors were teeming with people looking for seats so once I’d beckoned that it was okay to join me, an astonished-looking crowd of school kids poured in. They made sure to keep a respectful distance between the white lady and their dark bodies. We did a lot of reassuring smiling at each other. As the train stopped at each station the crowd in my compartment changed, but what did not alter was the initial look of incomprehension and wariness on their faces when they saw me. ‘Are you sure it’s okay?’ everyone seemed to be saying. They all knew that a few hundred kilometres further west, once we reached the South African border, what we were doing would be against the law. And they, not me, were the ones who would be punished. But we weren’t there yet so I continued to share the relative luxury of my space.
It soon got dark and adults, almost all of them men, replaced the school kids as my travelling companions. Again, there was a lot of smiling as they sought to calm any nervousness I might have felt. I was still too angry and upset at myself for missing the plane, losing my luggage and my typewriter to have any concerns about anything else. We stopped for a while at a station where everyone seemed to get off, to stretch legs and to buy food. Cautiously, I stepped down onto the platform. I was nervous at being stranded here if the train suddenly took off but I savoured my luck at being able to see this tiny outpost. The place was noisy and dirty and full of laughter and the uncensored sounds of people simply living and dealing with each other. Back on the train, the men in my compartment started opening bags of sandwiches. I realised they must be on their way to work in the diamond mines. These men were the backbone of the South African economy, imported labour, paid a pittance, forced to live for months on end in harsh barracks-style accommodation, sentenced to instant death if they were caught stealing even the smallest stone. One of them noticed my hungry glances. After buying the train ticket, I had no money left. A man shyly offered half his sandwich; he took measures to demonstrate to me that his black skin had not touched the bread, that it was okay for me to accept his offering. I gratefully devoured the food but I felt overcome by shame that there was this hierarchy based on race and that, for no reason at all, my skin colour placed me near its top.
The train stopped. I realised from watching the miners that we had to disembark. With gestures, they made me understand I had to have my passport stamped and then walk a short distance to Komatipoort, the South African border town, where another newer and sleeker train waited. Bright klieg-like lights revealed the platform to be so clean it could have satisfied hospital standards, but I felt as if I was walking onto a World War II movie set. Every few metres stood a uniformed guard, his peaked cap resembling those worn (at least in the movies) by Nazis, and beside each guard a large and savage Alsatian dog. The dogs surged and strained at their leashes and I cowed as I passed them. But I soon understood that they were not barking at me. It was the men beside me, those generous souls who had shared their sandwiches, who were the target of the dogs’ fury. These men, too, shrank back, but other guards emerged behind us and forced the men to march past the dogs and ordered them to form a line in front of a small table where another guard sat, papers spread out in front of him. I needed to go to the toilet and found myself forced to use the one marked ‘Blankes Dames’. Then I joined the line, feeling really frightened for the first time since I had arrived in southern Africa.
Suddenly, two guards were at my side. They were pulling me by the arm and dragging me out of the queue. It was quickly apparent that I had made a dreadful mistake in joining the black line. The guards were friendly enough, but insistent. I lowered my eyes in embarrassment as I was escorted past the miners to the very front of the line. I was pushed ahead of an Indian woman and her five children who, until my arrival, had been first in the queue. When I squatted down to rest the papers on my leg while I filled them out, a chair was brought for me. I was treated with courtesy despite the fact that I looked like a ruffian; I had not been able to change my clothes for a couple of days. I remembered that I had a bundle of Fretilin leaflets in my handbag. All communist organisations were proscribed in South Africa; it was a crime to even possess, let alone distribute, their publications. But my skin colour saved me, just as my sex had saved me in Soweto. It simply did not occur to these guards that this white woman would be smuggling subversive literature, just as it did not cross the minds of the police in Soweto that I was anything other than a secretary at the embassy. The man at the little table looked at my passport, checked the visa that had been awarded me by the embassy in Canberra, and waved me through. I was taken to the other train and guided towards a compartment. Three wome
n were already seated there, a mother and two daughters, all Afrikaans, plump and smug. They wrinkled their noses in disgust. I probably did smell by now. As we sped towards Johannesburg I shrank into my corner, unable to overlook the difference between the two train trips. The government might be touting the end of petty apartheid but if it was happening at all, it was only in the big cities, in front of the international gaze. Move to rural South Africa and, as I had just observed, nothing had changed.
In Lusaka, Andrew Peacock cheerily informed me that he had rescued my luggage while he was in Dar-es-Salaam. And, he said, he’d been able to get consular staff to retrieve my typewriter and tape-recorder. It was impossible to exaggerate how relieved I was. As a show of gratitude, I introduced him to Justin Nyoka. At a press conference in London the week before, Peacock had said he was willing to hold talks with the Patriotic Front in Lusaka ‘should they want to meet with us’. Soon Australia’s Foreign Affairs Minister was sitting down with Edgar Tekere. I had not got the interview with Mugabe but at least I was able to facilitate a diplomatic connection between the Australian government and the man who in April the following year would be elected as the newly independent Zimbabwe’s first black Prime Minister. We did not know then that Robert Mugabe would become as brutal a dictator as the world has seen, that his regime would turn murderous within months and that he would find the way to retain power, despite vigorous opposition from those who had once fought by his side in the independence struggle. In November 2017, Mugabe was finally deposed as President of Zimbabwe by his own military, who awarded him millions of dollars in compensation and a gurantee of immunity from prosecution. He had held the position since 1980, a despot clinging to power in the face of international condemnation. But in 1979 he was seen as a freedom fighter and a patriot. Unlike Mandela who still languished in a South African prison, Mugabe was free and was being cheered by the world as he defeated the harsh and racist regime of Ian Smith. In promising democracy and recognition for all, regardless of race, Mugabe had brought hope to southern Africa that the end was in sight for the remaining racist regime, the government of South Africa.
