He held a book in his hands, and my eyes fell on the title: Tell Freedom by Peter Abrahams. I was transfixed. The words seemed to speak of a world beyond the walls of the Alliance.

five

“I tried, without yet having read Angela Carter, Kathy Acker or Tsitsi Dangarembga, who would one day show me how, to capture the turbulence of the body. I tried to write its desires, excesses and subjugations, but I could not think of this intimate woman’s writing as political. I had written love stories that acknowledged cruelty and fear. I had put the body at the centre of a tale and tried to express the passions that had gripped me. But I had failed. The savage censor in me tore up my pages, revolted by the self that appeared on the page – naked, wild, vulnerable.

forty

“Shocked as I was by what I had seen, I was not surprised. This violence, flowering like a malignant plant, is rooted in the past. It has a lineage. South Africa is a country that makes men by breaking them first. That is the masculinist ethos of the gangs, the police, the apartheid army, and of a wider culture slow to exchange words but lightning quick to trade blows. I sat on a bench at Three Anchor Bay and watched black oyster-catchers running along black rocks. I longed for a return of the numbness that pushed violence into places I could not access, like the time I was released from detention in 1985.

There is the great suffering that is an intrinsic part of love, the love of one’s work, the love of the world, and of humanity. There is the unbargained-for cost of telling stories — the hounding by dictators, military leaders, spy networks, secret services, all those with their own agendas, all those who like or dislike only through the screen or filter of their ideologies or insecurities. There are other costs — the death-threats, the enmities incurred by the innocence of the word, the demons of rivalry, the degrading competition which leads the best practitioners, if they submit, away from their beautiful journey.

Chapter 9: Leave no Mark: Escape

“The story my parents want to tell is different from the one I want to write.

My dad wants to recount the political history of South Africa and the Movement. He wants to tell me about the comrade-uncles in Lusaka and London who I knew as a toddler and young child, explaining how they – and he – fitted into the broader trajectory of the ANC. My mum wants to tell the story of the people who shaped her activism, like Joe Gqabi, who guided her as she told him about the discontent at Phefeni, and her friend Baba who turned up with his Beetle on June 16. The story she wants to tell is one of shared effort and history.

The story I want to tell is of my gentle yet courageous dad, and how the path he chose cost him dearly. It is the story of my beautiful mum, barely in her 20s, with bravery I cannot imagine ever possessing. It is of both of them in love, idealistic and determined. It is of my feisty, fearless and fun-loving aunts and uncles, and my grandparents, the quiet revolutionaries.