Rumours of Rain

by Andre Brink

  What does this mean in practical terms?

  At first I tried to find solutions by using every “correct channel” available to me, either in the course of my duties or through my access to politicians and others in key positions. I had, for example, many discussions with a Cabinet Minister whose son I had once defended in court. The only result was the kindly and well-meant advice to confine myself to my work and not to interfere with politics.

  When I realised that within my career I could do no more than help certain individuals without effecting any essential change in the overall system, I had to take my choice one step further. And while continuing to practise as an advocate, soon after the so-called “Conspiracy Trial” of 1965–1966, I founded the organisation INKULULEKO on which this Court has already heard sufficient evidence.

  In the beginning I insisted on non-violent procedures: establishing organisations to initiate a campaign similar to that of the con-scientizaçao in Brazil – realising the effort required to first convey to the oppressed the notion of his oppression, counteracting as it were the conditioning not only of a lifetime but of an entire history.

  This was soon expanded to embrace a programme of carefully controlled sabotage, isolating targets which would have an impact on the mind and the imagination, yet without any danger of causing injury or loss of life.

  But I believe the distinction comfortably drawn between violence and non-violence to be mainly an academic one. Once one has chosen to rise up against an oppressive establishment, one should also be prepared to go all the way – in direct equation with the increasing power and violence of your opponent. There was a time when our organisation could foresee the possibility of effecting, by non-violent methods, a meaningful change in the attitudes prevalent in this country. But the authorities decided to react with increasingly violent measures, creating less and less scope for the most ordinary expressions of opposition. The result was that in due course we in INKULULEKO reached the stage where we also had to provide for urban terrorism.

  I realise only too well that by killing one policeman one cannot overthrow a system. But through his death one can demonstrate that justice is not the prerogative of officialdom. It has become imperative for small groups of highly organised men to keep alive in the minds of the people, through dangerous and daring acts, an outrageous thought: the idea that the system is vulnerable, that freedom exists, that justice can be implemented by the people. And so I gave my approval to those forms of violent action through which one can affirm one’s freedom and prove one’s solidarity with the oppressed masses.

  I am not ashamed of it. Had I remained inert or silent, that inertia or silence would have implied a condonation of what was happening. That I couldn’t accept for a moment. I still cannot, even though I realise you will win in the short run because you have enough brute force at your disposal. But in the end your system must crumble. For in order to cling to power permanently one would require what you lack: right on your side, and justice in your system.

  Today I find a special meaning in the words of the great Afrikaner leader, President Paul Kruger, expressed in 1881 and now inscribed on the base of his statue on the square in front of this Court:

  “With confidence we expose our cause to the whole world. Whether we triumph or die: freedom will rise in Africa like the sun from the morning clouds.”

  I have copied out the whole piece of ranting rhetoric, even though I feel that Bernard harmed his own cause by turning a courtroom into a political tribune for the expression of his clichés. I was thinking of his statement as Louis and I sat beside our little table in the café in Aliwal North: I would have liked to discuss it with him, but the old sullen expression on his face suggested that he was not prepared to pursue our conversation.

  “Let’s go,” I proposed, pushing aside the last few greasy chips on my plate.

  Without a word he went out ahead of me while I stopped to pay at the counter. The radio started blaring again, after a brief interlude. In a pram against the far wall a baby began to cry. We got away just in time. Ever since Louis had been born I’d found the noise of babies intolerable.

  7

  IT WAS JUST after eight when we set out on the hundred miles to Queenstown; even the lights of Jamestown, in between, could do nothing to alleviate the monotony of that dreary stretch.

  The moon rose, revealing in its sepulchral light the prehistoric skeletons of koppies and ridges and hills against the stars. Now everything was reduced to the glare of the headlights on the road before us. The rest did not concern us and could be denied, even though it continued to threaten one with its subliminal existence.

  The last time I’d passed that way had been just after the first news of Dad’s illness. For the funeral Elise and I had flown to East London, where we’d hired a car. I could have done the same that weekend; for such a brief visit it would have been much more practical than the exhausting car trip. “In my condition.” But I needed the time to think; to come to terms with myself; or simply to get away.

  Dad had died at the height of day, at one o’clock. Almost exactly one year before that weekend. Then, as now, it had been winter. And as we drove on it felt as if we were approaching the farm not only in space but also in time.

  Always travelling, on one’s way from somewhere to somewhere, in transit. Dad’s illness had also been a journey away from us. I hadn’t been there when he died, only at the funeral. But the last time I’d seen him before his death, I’d already had the impression of taking leave on a station or at an airport: seeing him surrounded by all who had been nearest to him, one nevertheless had the impression that nothing was intimate, that everything had been reduced to the banality of small-talk. Because the traveller had already disengaged himself from the present, projecting himself into a dimension of which we others could form no concept.

  The previous time I’d been on the farm, just after news of his illness had reached us, had been a surprise. Expecting to find him weak and exhausted, I discovered in him a tranquillity incomprehensible to me, as if infinite space had opened up behind his eyes. He had Suetonius beside his bed, in addition to a pile of other books – biographies, travel books, even novels; in his grey eyes was a light of keenness and enthusiasm. “Now at last,” he said, “I have the time to catch up with everything I’ve ever wanted to read.” He talked incessantly, not only about his well-worn hobby but about topics I’d never expected him to be interested in. He even spoke about his illness, without a hint of self-pity. And when I said goodbye, he took my hand and said calmly: “Well, Martin, in case I don’t see you again, good luck to you.”

  But that final visit was different. By that time he was so riddled with cancer that he could think of nothing else. The radiation had caused him to lose all his hair, jaundice had turned his face and hands into parchment, his voice had become high and shrill, and halfway through a sentence he would forget what he’d wanted to say. His skull appeared shrunken and fragile like that of a bird.

  His only interest, now, was his illness and the variety of medicines he had to take; broken down, through pain, to this concentration on the irrelevant and the trivial. The total indignity of suffering.

  And then the distance between us, our absolute isolation. Even his hand, when I was forced to take it, wasn’t like his at all: it was a confirmation of all that kept us apart rather than of what ought to bind us. Exactly the same feeling I had about Bernard in court. He, too, was on the point of departing. A life-long voyage; as final as death. Only the formality of dying remained. And there, too, I would be absent.

  Even from his own point of view it must have appeared entirely unnecessary. He could have stayed in England, couldn’t he?

  It was to keep faith with all those dispossessed by apartheid that I decided to escape from custody. There was still work to be done. Through my arrest the organisation had been caught on the wrong foot and I had to make sure it could be placed on a new basis in order to continue even without me. I owed it not only to
those individuals who had been collaborating with me and whose lives had been endangered by my arrest, but to all those who had been imprisoned, or banished, or silenced for their beliefs. It is not the escape of an individual which is important, but the demonstration to others that the system is not invincible. And once again I derived a particular sense of obligation from the very fact that I was an Afrikaner.

  During one of the cases I defended in Johannesburg I used to drive out to Alexandra early every morning to help transport people boycotting the bus services after an unreasonable increase in tariffs. Several times I was stopped at police roadblocks and threatened with prosecution. In the end they did institute proceedings against me, but abandoned it before it came to court. However, my most important recollection of that experience is that, of all the people I picked up – people who’d set out to walk ten or fifteen miles to work, starting at four or five o’clock in the morning – not one would believe me when I told them I was an Afrikaner. In their minds “Afrikaner” and “apartheid” had become synonymous. It made me realise, more than ever before, the obligation placed upon me by being an Afrikaner myself: an obligation towards all those suffering as a result of laws made by my fellow Afrikaners.

  My only regret in connection with my escape is that the two young warders who had helped Ontong and me to get away were themselves apprehended. I can only hope that in the long run they will reap some reward for the price they have had to pay.

  Basically the same reasons which had prompted my escape from custody were responsible for my return to the country in November 1975. I could have elected to stay in London after completing the organising work for which I had gone there. Many of my colleagues tried their best to persuade me to stay there. But how could I remain a passive spectator while others were suffering? I was fully aware of the risk involved. Even in spite of disguising myself as an old lady the Security Police were bound to rediscover my tracks sooner or later. But I had made up my mind many years ago, and all that remained to be done was for me to follow my chosen course to the end.

  I must emphasise that I do not believe in martyrdom and have no sympathy with masochism. South Africa has had more than enough martyrs as it is. What I did was not influenced by a consideration of what might happen to me if I were caught: I did it precisely because it did not matter to me what the consequences would be for myself. Freedom is infinitely greater than the individuals devoted to its cause.

  I believe in life. I regard myself as a happy man because I have never deprived myself of anything meaningful in life, endeavouring to live as fully as I could at any given moment. Also, I believe it is much better to live for a cause than to die for it. But by the time I returned from London death and life as such were not really relevant any more. All that mattered was that I had to do whatever I could while there was still time to do it. Knowing that even if I were caught there were others whom I could confidently trust to continue the struggle.

  My sole regret is that I wasn’t able to do even more. Perhaps my arrest could have been avoided at the time it happened. But it is so easy to misjudge a situation, or a trivial detail, or a friend.

  (Was he looking up at me when he read those words? Had he noticed me in the audience? It must have been my imagination.)

  In any case I bear no ill feelings to anyone, and I blame no one, whether friend or policeman. They all did what they regarded as their duty.

  It was the news about Bernard which, in retrospect, brought that tedious evening into such startling perspective. If it hadn’t been for that, I would probably never even have remembered it again. As it is, I find the memory obsessive.

  I have never felt quite sure about my feelings towards Professor John Pienaar. In my student days I admired him, which was the obvious reaction of a young aspiring writer to the first live poet he’d ever met. At the same time I felt inhibited by his overbearing personality, aggravated by the suspicion that he and his wife had chosen me as a possible husband for their bespectacled, brilliant daughter Pippa (named after Browning’s poem). Flattered as I was by regular invitations to meals in the home of the great man, I was wary about his real motives and about the daughter with her shapeless figure and astounding intellect. After Pippa had passed away on the slopes of the Jonkershoek Mountains (we’d all tried our best to dissuade her from coming, but she’d insisted: “You’ll be there to give me a hand, won’t you, Martin?”), the professorial-couple remained devoted to me; while, from all the walls of the house, poor Pippa’s beady eyes kept watching one through the fat lenses of her spectacles.

  As Pienaar slowly turned into a literary potentate as a great compiler of anthologies and a member of prescribing committees and prize juries, he began to produce less and less original poetry, hobnobbing, instead, with Cabinet Ministers and accepting nominations to cultural commissions and the Board of Censors. Ever since his retirement and subsequent move to Pretoria, there had been persistent rumours about his elevation to the post of cultural attaché or to the Senate. Above all he remained a charming gentleman, a bon viveur, a patron of the arts, and an excellent host.

  So it was with mixed feelings, as usual, that Elise and I accepted his invitation to an “intimate meal” to celebrate the publication of his Collected Poems in January last year.

  At these “intimate” occasions the professor usually allowed himself a touch of eccentric nonchalance, wearing, over his evening suit and frilly shirt and velvet bow-tie, a scarlet gown of Japanese silk, and soft black slippers lined with lamb’s wool. (Bernard usually referred to him as “Monsieur Jourdain” and never went to any of his soirées; curiously enough, Pienaar remained very fond of him. Perhaps, in his heart of hearts, he was homosexually inclined.)

  In this garb, all red and black, like a hierophant in some esoteric cult, the great man opened his solid teak door to our discreet knock. He was flanked by Mother, formidable in lilac and lace, an orchid bobbing on her bosom and the lower regions of her goitered throat obscured by pearls, redolent of powder and perfume.

  “Oh, Martin. Oh, Elise. How good to see you.”

  With a soft white hand, all rings and nail varnish, Pienaar steered Elise through entrance hall and passage, past graphic work and the first intimations of dear Pippa on the walls, over Bokharas and Hamadans, to the lounge with the muted lustre of silver and porcelain behind the glass doors of stinkwood armoires. The floor was covered with two Afghan carpets of extraordinary size, surrounded by a constellation of smaller Bakhtiaris and Isfahans; and on the walls one could admire, apart from the work of local greats and a life-sized study of dear Pippa, a Braque, a Matisse lithograph, drawings by Degas and Renoir, and an Ensor, while the glass shelves of alcoves, illuminated with subtlety and skill, showed off the work of Hamada and Leach and ancient Chinese craftsmen.

  The guests were hand-picked too. The Church moderator, Dr Koos Minnaar (widely known as Koos Cunt, after one of his unofficial pastimes), a university rector, a couple of MPs, a retired judge, a few literary critics. Almost out of place in their midst, the progressive newspaper editor Wynand la Grange. And the jet-set magnate, Thielman Pauw. All of them accompanied by their wives, except for Thielman, who’d turned up with a sexy blonde at his side (ever since he’d become a property millionaire he regularly served on juries choosing Miss Something or Other). His choice of companion was the only indication of the Thielman I’d known at university. In those days he’d been a likeable but totally irresponsible good-for-nothing known mainly for his prowess as a stud; in later years he became, in public at least, the epitome of bourgeois respectability. When he addressed a meeting it sounded like Koos Cunt in prayer. He donated hundreds of thousands to Good Causes, especially the Party, and he’d already been tipped as a future Minister of Economic Affairs. One problem he still had to overcome was a tendency to settle differences with his fists. Still, he had what was generally regarded as “a good heart”; an uncut diamond.

  Copies of the Collected Poems had been placed, with studied nonchalance, all over the l
ounge, to be paged and fondled at leisure by the guests. Thielman was the first to break the ice when he exclaimed: “I don’t understand a word of it, Prof, but I think it’s damned smart of you.”

  “Why don’t you also try to write poetry?” asked his blonde companion, massaging his biceps as an obvious surrogate. “I’m sure you can do it.”

  “No, writing isn’t my line. But I am toying with the idea of publishing a magazine.”

  “We already have far too many papers,” said editor La Grange.

  “You needn’t fear competition,” said Thielman, giving him a companionable blow between the shoulder blades which sent him reeling. “Mine won’t be a newspaper, but a weekly news magazine. Like Time, only in Afrikaans.”

  “Isn’t it a very difficult field to conquer?” the rector enquired tactfully.

  “Don’t you worry, man,” replied Thielman, winking. “The Department of Information has already promised to take ten thousand copies a week.”

  “What in God’s name are they going to do with ten thousand a week?”

  “That’s not my worry. They can distribute the stuff or pulp it, I don’t care. As long as the circulation goes up.” He took up position squarely in front of La Grange. “Where you fail with your newspapers I’ll succeed with my thing. You newspaper boys have gone all out to fuck up the whole of the Afrikaans press.”

  There were smothered exclamations of shock or protest from the ladies. Mother, fortunately, had gone to the kitchen to consult with her cooks and waiters.

  “Criticism, that’s all one sees when you open a newspaper these days,” Thielman went on. “Otherwise it’s just sex and sensation. What’ll become of your paper if you drop the back page? Let me tell you, you boys are undermining Afrikanerdom worse than the Communists themselves.”