Memory Is The Weapon

Chapter Thirteen - The Change

128 chapter thirteen My metamorphosis from veritable violent beast to human being began in 1955 when the first seeds of political awareness were sown at that historic anti-removals campaign mass meeting. My introduction into the new world, where men and women spoke their minds and openly challenged the police, led me to youth clubs, libraries and education centres. Lectures, debating societies and public meetings took the place of gang hideouts, street corners and dark alleys. Constitutions, preambles and manifestos – strange words to ears accustomed to police whistles and gunshots, war cries and gang calls – replaced guns and knives. And so, a new and exciting world revealed itself to me and a few of my friends who had also grown tired of bloodshed. We took our scars and wounds with us to the debating societies and political education classrooms, took them and held them aloft as trophies earned by our courage. But to our surprise The Change The Change 129 people, especially young folks our age, were not all that impressed by our past and concentrated on educating and refining us in manners and in discipline. One evening in December of 1956, I attended the usual weekly Western Areas Students’ Association political orientation meeting in a study room at the Margaret Holtby Library in Western Native Township. The guest speaker was a trade unionist called Gosane ofAlexandra Township , whose son Bob Gosane had made a name as a daring photographer for Drum magazine. The previous weekend I had been one of a panel of speakers discussing the need to politicise and assimilate gangsters into the mass movements of the Congress. And who, at the time, was better experienced or qualified to lead the talks than one who had spilled blood; one who was tired of township violence and sought rehabilitation through politics? Old man Gosane was impressed and offered to come to Western Native Township. Ten years later, we were to join hands to fight for the rights of residents there as members of a tenants’ association. After Gosane spoke, Pauline, our chairperson, informed us that Robert Resha was unavailable; he had been arrested the previous day with several other high-ranking officials of the ANC, the Transvaal Indian Congress, the Congress of Democrats and the Textile Workers’ Industrial Union. The charge was high treason. The news sparked a flurry of excited discussion among the members, some of who expressed fears of indiscriminate harassment and arrest. The raids were countrywide and those arrested included lawyers, doctors, professors, schoolteachers and ordinary people. Huge teams of heavily armed special branch policemen conducted midnight and dawn swoops, and many prisoners were flown to Johannesburg to be held at Number Four, whose ‘government’had earlier that year placed me under a sentence of death. The raids on political activists began on December 5 after hundreds of arrest warrants had been signed by the chief magistrate of Johannesburg. The high treason charge set the country agog with wagging tongues and the running of frightened feet. Never in the history of this land did the word ‘treason’ evoke so much debate. Our history teacher Scheepers, a full blooded Boer nationalist of the Malan and Strijdom stock, suspended ordinary classes to discuss the importance and justification of the Treason Trial. He told us of the danger of communism which, he asserted, was specifically anti-coloured; 130 Memory is the Weapon anti-anyone of mixed racial origin. We burst out laughing and I asked him if he knew of Robey Leibrandt the Boer fifth-columnist sentenced under the Smuts government to life imprisonment for spying against the Allied Forces. Leibrandt had faced a ‘different’kind of high treason charge: at least he was anti-communist, unlike those Congress atheists, said our teacher. ‘Your coloured nation will be in peril, the same peril we Boers faced against the hostile Zulus. Support for the communists will alienate you from God,’ said Scheepers. Class ended early that day. Government action had been very swift and our political mentors in the students’ association recognised that it would affect the Congress movements. It was trade unionist Moometsi Lekoto who said that some back-up or underground infrastructure had to be established in order to thwart the system’s destructive machinery. ‘We cannot allow Congress to be destroyed through these treason charges. All over the land our leaders are being arrested in the hope that our organisations will die. We must all...