“I thought we were talking about you.”
“Since you ask, there was a choice and I was happy to make it. You know I was nominated for the big P – the Pulitzer – and the George Polk. And there was my book on Mandela. Two weeks on The New York Times bestseller list! Two weeks of fame! So I had been there, done that. I wanted a rest. I’d had it with biting my nails for a story, and nights fighting deadlines. I wanted roots where I understood things – not, before you ask, three years in this mission and four years in that and all the packing and embassy wives and reception lines. I’d had enough of hurtling around like a deranged worker bee, sipping a little nectar here, a little there. It was hive time, so to speak. Time to become the queen bee. Get a life with some fun. Travel without taking a notebook and laptop along – and Chris was offering all that. He was – is – funny, warm, loving, attentive, kind, you name it. But these guys don’t come without their circle, their connections, their safety net. You marry the man – but you get the history, the tribe, the cross-references, the portfolio. For all the bridge afternoons and golf mornings and jaunts to Sotheby’s and what have you, they still don’t accept me completely. Some of his friends are married to real bitches – but they’re our bitches, if you get my meaning, from the right kennels. Chris looks after me, and I love him for it – don’t look so pained! He’s very proud, not to mention jealous, possessive. He’d kill me, and you, if he knew I was here, and I am taking a big risk. Remember that. It makes me nervous. Maybe that’s why I’m talking so much, running off at the mouth. He would not understand that I’m trying to protect us both.”
“From whom?”
“From you.”
“He seemed very interested on the beach, with his telescope.”
“I thought you might notice. He’s a tad obsessive. Successful men expect things of their wives. They expect them not to let them down in front of other successful men, to talk the talk and walk the walk, whether it’s wearing Dior or discussing the new Philip Roth or bidding for a Picasso or knowing the score at the Opera, so to speak. You have to decorate the homes and run the staff and amuse your guests and keep track of the diary at the same time as looking like a million bucks 24/7. It was what people like Zoë Joubert were brought up to do. Above all, you don’t embarrass anybody. You don’t have lovers from the past popping up and spoiling the show. As for me, well, one day I’ll tell you about my learning curve, but not now, except that it was vertical. What I do want to say is that I have built all this up. I have secured it. I don’t want to lose it. I don’t want to lose Chris. And experience tells me that when some loose cannon starts bouncing round the decks, the best thing to do is to batten down. So, with nautical metaphors mixed, over to you. Time to sing for your supper.”
She sat back and lit another cigarette. I gestured for her to pass one to me. I had not revived the habit to the extent of buying my own packs of Camels or Chesterfields, but I was happy in my new, unwired way to beg or steal. She looked surprised but lit a cigarette from her own, passing it to me with a smear of red lipstick on the filter.
I was probably more open with my reply than necessary.
I told her about the letter from Lily Nyati, about her speech at the conference in Cape Town.
I told her about Lily’s insistence that the truth lay in the identity of one person who did not attend the meeting with Nyati in Port Elizabeth. I said we could be crossed off the list of suspects as we provided each other’s alibi. She lit another cigarette then left it to burn and expire, leaving a long grey caterpillar of ash across a white porcelain ashtray.
She was silent for what seemed a long time. “Don’t go there, Tom. Please. If anything we had ever had any meaning for you.”
Her face was pale underneath its tan and her hands were clenched.
“I have to go there, Jess. I have promised Lily Nyati. I promised her once and did nothing about it and this time she’s called in the bets. I have no choice. It’s a question of honour. The Jess Chase I knew would understand that.”
“Well, Jessica de Vere is asking you – begging you – to drop it, fly back to Washington. Anywhere. What honour? One man’s vanity or an honourable history that has been written, accepted? You have no concept of what is at stake. What is it with you? The Avenging Sword? That’s it, isn’t it? The 5th Cavalry charging over the hill. The presumption that there’s a simple, one-stop solution. Truth, democracy, the healing power of freedom? It’s history, for God’s sake. The TRC spelled it all out. The killer admitted it. Chapter and verse. Look at the transcripts. They’re out there on the internet. Page after page after page. Cross examination by George Bizos, full disclosure. How they stopped the car, how they separated them and killed them and burned them. Where, when, how. The planning. Who gave the order. What it said. Permanent Removal from society. The accomplices. What more does Lily want? She knows what happened. You say she wants to know the name of some informer or other. How do you know there is only one? How do you know what you’ll stir up? You say you are looking for the guilty man, or woman. But who’s going to decide guilt or innocence? You talk as if you are judge and jury. But you’re neither. You’re an outsider – like you always were – trampling the grass. Now take me home. Quickly. It’s late and I don’t want to call the driver.”
Beachy Head Drive – Millionaires’ Row, as most people called it – was virtually deserted, the cars and the people locked away securely behind high, white walls. I stopped outside the house she indicated and waited as she let herself in through a heavy wooden door that looked as if it might have been imported from Tunisia or Morocco.
Before it hissed closed on hidden, hydraulic hinges, I caught a glimpse of a courtyard arranged around a pool and open area looking out over the moonlit ocean. She did not turn. I heard her heels tip-tapping across tiles.
I retraced the route, skirting Central Beach and the Beacon Isle, up the sharp rise past Cornuti’s. On Main Street, the teen set was just getting into stride, the music booming, the drinks pouring with hours to go before the procession of parental SUVs and hired mini-buses arrived to gather up their rubber-kneed charges. I turned down Church Street towards the Plettenberg. As I passed the crossroads near the stone church, another vehicle – a black Range Rover – pulled out of the side street leading to the party house. Through the dark-tinted windows, I caught a faint glimpse of a profile that seemed vaguely familiar. Only when I parked my repaired rental car alongside the ranks of more august vehicles outside the hotel did I notice that my passenger had dropped her gold Cartier lighter. It was engraved: “To Jess, with enduring love, Chris.”
Seventeen
THE CASE AT THE TRUTH AND Reconciliation Commission boiled down to this: to secure amnesty, Kobus Theron had to make a full and complete confession, proving that his actions in killing Solomon Nyati were inspired exclusively by the political struggle – warfare, not murder.
It was not at issue that he and his crew had killed Nyati and his comrades – Lucas Zinto, Sipiwo Ngalo, Happy Mboniswa.
But under the commission’s mandate, the question to be answered was whether all four targets had been part of the insurgency against white rule in the Eastern Cape, or had one of them – a driver – been a person of no known revolutionary status, an accidental player, collateral damage.
If that death was proven to be gratuitous, amnesty would be refused. Poring over the testimony – all the more grisly for its matter-of-fact tone – there was another line of inquiry that fascinated me just as much.
In the darkest of his bloodstained dreams when – if – he relived the moments of gunfire and burned flesh, had Theron ever thought that this moment would come? Could he believe that the world had changed so much, that Captain Kobus Theron had been brought before a public tribunal, with the sound of the tumbrels rattling in his ears?
Yes, I gave the order to De Kock and the others.
Yes, I devised the means of beating and stabbing and burning.
Yes, I executed the plan, as was my duty. F
or I was a soldier. A soldier assassin.
In one way, Jessica de Vere had been right: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had heard in exhaustive detail what happened on that awful night. The killer’s recital was in the public domain. Why stir the bones, unearth the ghosts? But she was wrong in another way. The Commission had heard nothing to identify the traitor mentioned in Theron’s testimony. The story was critically incomplete, and the prospect of a statute of limitations being imposed within days meant that it might well remain so forever.
I could not delay either. When it came to the business of getting to grips with the evidence and the personality of Theron, I had postponed and prevaricated for long enough. The deadline set on the visa page of my passport – “conference purposes only” – was fast expiring.
In Gilliomee’s study – propaganda would probably be a better word – the photographs, and the not-so-subliminal message, bore some comparison to movies like The Wild Geese showing valiant white men on devious but fundamentally noble missions in Africa, mercenaries with hearts of gold who emerged from the battle as heroes, while the bad guys got their comeuppance. And, when the filming was over, everyone wiped off the blood and muck. Those were not the ground rules in Namibia.
The images showed Theron and his men dressed in tight-fitting camouflage shirts and shorts, accompanied by loyal, black trackers who helped them follow the spoor of their prey – insurgent nationalist guerrillas barely into their teens.
In the background, you could see large armoured vehicles, or a helicopter gunship or a troop-carrying, old Dakota airplane. On some of the vehicles, the bodies of dead insurgents had been lashed to the big front mudguards like hunting trophies.
In one photograph that fascinated me in particular, Theron kneels alone, his squad out of focus in the background, to examine an indistinct footprint. He leans on an automatic rifle painted in camouflage colours as if it were his staff. It is the dry season and the trees behind him are brittle as twigs. The ground is powdery, bleached to the whiteness of bone. He wears a forage cap, a gingery pioneer’s beard obscuring his face. There is not an ounce of fat on him. He seems separated from his men by the burden of command as much as by physical space.
The caption identifies the location as Ovamboland, long before his arrival in the Eastern Cape. He is leading a “stick” of police special forces, some Namibian, some Angolan, some black, some white. They will run all day through the sparse, sandy bush, weaving between skeletal trees, shadowed by their lumbering Casspir armoured truck with its mounted .50 cal. machine gun and supplies of water and food. (When the trucks hit landmines, they sometimes ignite like beacons in the bushlands, offering conflicting messages to the combatants on each side.)
They bring their adversaries to ground. They force a firefight which they usually win, kneeling to shoot as tracer rounds ignite the dry foliage. When the fight is over, they will collect the enemy’s captured weapons – Kalashnikov assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, landmines – to be photographed and taken as booty – perhaps for use in subsequent dirty tricks manoeuvres when it is necessary to leave forensic traces of the enemy, to ascribe blame for a particular massacre or atrocity. In the firefights, the police special forces have no body armour, no protection other than their wits, their superior firepower and their ability to out-manoeuvre their foe.
They prefer agility to encumbrance. They gather up captives and prisoners, to interrogate and recycle into the fray as turncoats. If they win one skirmish, they soon have to fight another: their adversary has the numbers to replace its dead, while Theron and his men do not.
They win battles but lose wars.
Kobus Theron was born on the outskirts of Windhoek, the Namibian capital. His childhood was no different from that of other white youngsters raised at a time when racial separation seemed built to endure, when white leaders offered their followers no reason to doubt that supremacy would last, as one of them said, for a thousand years.
The habits and manners Theron grew up with were just as much part of the fabric of his life as a Yankees game for a young New Yorker or a night’s clubbing at a trance party for a teenager in London. But his generations’ destiny was to fight a string of hidden campaigns to maintain the protective shield enfolding their people, to guard the perimeter of privilege.
In those days, there were few points of comparison with the outside world. Television was not even introduced to South Africa until 1976 – the year, by coincidence, of the Soweto uprising.
At home as a child – I came to understand – Theron had befriended the son of the family maid who lived in a shack in the dusty backyard of his small detached home in what would have been a de facto “white” suburb, despite the presence of black menial workers in their much smaller quarters. You can imagine them, barefoot boys, Tom and Huck, indifferent to skin color, in ragged shorts and oversized khaki shirts, spindle-shanked and giggling, one tow-headed and unkempt, the other crowned with tight, dusty black curls, inventing games to play involving pebbles and dirt and arcane scores, much like children anywhere in the forgotten epoch before Play Stations and Game Boys and electronic distraction. How many times, travelling in southern Africa, did you hear that white refrain: man, I grew up with these people; I know them. And how many times did you doubt the validity of that claim to a deeper wisdom?
Youngsters like Theron – and their black playmates – soon arrived at the point where their destinies diverged. It might be in a segregated church or cemetery, or walking down a street where black people were booted from the sidewalks if they strayed onto them. It might be when laws apportioned them to different store entrances, different neighbourhoods, different schools.
Theron would learn that his young playmate was the son of a different tribe, subservient to his in the natural order. His playmate, too, would know that this was how things would proceed henceforth, unless he took steps to change it, excluded from the benefits his white friend took for granted. It is quite conceivable – although there is no record of this – that, in later years, in the bush of Ovamboland, they would take their places on different sides of the same firefight, Theron intent on preserving the life he grew up with, his playmate battling to destroy it.
The origins of Kobus Theron’s commitment to counterinsurgency, his roots as a bush warrior, as a murderer, remained stubbornly hidden.
According to a faded newspaper clipping folded into Gilliomee’s book, Theron’s father had been the sub-manager of a small bank, cautious and deferential, with little cause to draw attention to himself. And for most of Theron’s teenage years, his mother was an invalid, struggling with blackouts and surgery that sapped her strength even as he grew into his manhood.
In his teenage years, poring over the selected, filtered offerings at the small public library, he read widely about Africa of the 1960s – the beginnings of The Struggle in South Africa and the Rivonia trial that sent Mandela to prison; the upheaval in the Congo and Kenya; the decline and bloodshed that seemed to accompany Africa’s freedom elsewhere on the continent; the visible involvement of the Soviets and Chinese in supporting the struggles against white domination.
Afrikaners traced their African heritage to the 17th century, when Johan Anthoniszoon – a.k.a. Jan – van Riebeeck landed at the Cape in April 1652 to establish a victualing station for the Dutch East India Company’s mariners rounding Africa on their long voyage to Asia. He was just a few days shy of his 33rd birthday and was already a veteran of the company’s far-flung operations. Among the tasks set for him and the followers who arrived with him aboard three ships was the building of a fort.
For Van Riebeeck’s descendants, theirs was the Covenant with God that guaranteed their civilising role in Africa; and theirs was a sense of supremacy that shielded them through all their tribulations, delivering them, finally, into the highest offices of the land in 1948 to build a state defined by racial separation. In the darkness they attributed to their adopted and subjugated continent, though, their candle so
on began to gutter, buffeted by what Harold MacMillan, a visiting British prime minister, called “the wind of change”.
When his mother died of brain cancer, Theron was just 18 years of age, a draftee in the South African Defence Force. But his preference was for the police, actively fighting insurgents on the outermost frontiers of South Africa’s stockade.
He discovered a liking for the hard life of the bush, the nights under the stars cradling an automatic rifle as the crickets fell still in the chill towards dawn. He relished the elemental battle for survival, eyes and ears alert for the crack of a snapped twig to betray an enemy’s approach. But how could that explain the callousing of the soul that permitted him to devise and oversee the stabbing and incineration of Solomon Nyati?
Nowhere in his testimony at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission did Theron acknowledge any particular racial hatred, although I doubt that he would have killed whites with the same clear conscience as he killed blacks.
Perhaps, given the lessons of his childhood, given the high tensions of the bush wars in which he fought, killing on behalf of his beleaguered people might come to be seen as a mere extension of the inherited order, a holy war before the term acquired the connotations it did. And the Covenant endured.
Four times Theron was riding in Casspir armoured trucks that hit landmines and four times he survived – proving to him that the stern God who received his people’s prayers had some purpose in keeping him alive.
In South Africa, he traded the camouflage fatigues for a collar and tie, or a safari suit hung from his slender, muscular frame. Squash, jogging and swims in the surf replaced the more ardous regime of Ovamboland.
In the townships of the Eastern Cape, with his unregistered weapon and his warrant card and his underlings and informers, the job held fewer perils for him, but just as many for his adversaries. The outcomes were no less lethal.
Permanent Removal Page 14
