July 1960[1]

Plettenberg Bay

On the way to Jan Smuts Airport for my flight to Port Elizabeth, we park the Jag at the entrance to the Rivonia Police Station. The parking lot is mostly unoccupied early on this chilly winter morning on the Highveld. My breath vaporizes as I hurry from the car into the front office. The desk constable’s acknowledgment of my presence is almost imperceptible as he continues to work on a large ledger while he slides a thin register, House Arrest Daily Record 1960, across the counter. Quickly I locate the most recently filled entry line, and below it write the date, 5th July, 1960, in the correct column, enter the time, and print, then sign my name. Half-smiling at the policeman I hasten away. He calls after me, “Totsiens, Mejuffrou Nicolson.”

On the plane I settle into the seat and exhale. My apprehension that I might be detained again recedes somewhat. I am tense and I close my eyes to try and relax but the nightmare images hover under the ajar lid of my sub-conscious mind waiting to spring loose like a clutch of demonic Jack-in-the-boxes. On their faces is the painted intent of shattering my sanity: Hennie van Niekerk’s menacing leer as he snarls, “Pervert! Whore!”; the wardresses grim demeanour; the other inmates nightmare screams of fear and despair and the names of loved ones; and Rosie staring at me in the Fort’s visiting room, her look of horror mingled with love as she whispers, “What have they done to you?” Eventually I manage to shut the lid of my mind to contain them, and momentarily suspend my fears. I succumb to the smooth ride at thirty thousand feet and doze.

Four hours later we are about to alight at Plettenberg Bay on the rudimentary sand strip bush runway in a cleared field. At the last moment a white horse gallops onto the landing strip, and swearing under his breath the pilot lifts the small plane that ferried me from Port Elizabeth, circles to his right, and prepares his approach once more. Someone has chased the horse and bumping and snorting like an animal itself the plane comes to a sudden halt.

The pilot turns to me, “Sorry about that. Can’t wait for 1962 when they say there will be a new runway here and a municipal airport building with at least some radio contact. All we have now is that old wind sock.”

“Can’t be a more beautiful site for an airport anywhere in the world…” Mythic Robberg transfixes me; at times in detention I was not sure if I would ever gaze at the promontory again. “Not with Robberg lying in front of you, like a sleeping leviathan.”

A Coloured man in a faded blue boiler suit trundles the steps to the plane, and the pilot helps me disembark.

“I need to refuel.”

“Thanks for the flight…”

Walking slowly towards the small Quonset hut that offers travellers shelter from the weather, but no other amenities, my eyes remain fixed on Robberg basking undisturbed, clad in an array of green shaded vegetation.

“Welcome home,” Bert Hall, the town official who administers the airport, greets me warmly. Picking up the car keys off his desk, I return his smile. The effects of my uneven prison haircut are slowly disappearing but they give my face a lopsided appearance. Bert is shocked; he sees my dull eyes, sallow pallor and lustreless hair. A few days later his wife quotes his words to me when we meet outside the village post office, “God only knows what those bastards did to her in there.”

But now he says, “Our Liv, come back to us. We are very happy you are here…”

I inquire as to news of his family. His son was my best friend growing up. “…Four grand children now…keeps us all busy.”

The pilot enters the hut to sign the logbook. “See you in a few weeks, Miss Nicolson. I have already radioed SAMI that you are safely here.”

At the doorway he grins, and makes a thumbs up sign. “Have a lovely holiday,” he shouts as he always does and disappears into the plane.

Tired from the day’s tension and travel, I retire early to the master bedroom and lie awake in the large bed; this is my refuge, this lovely old house, Milkwood, built by my grandfather almost sixty years ago when Plettenberg Bay was an isolated Eden. Before air service, and when I was a child, the journey was a three to four day adventure from the Highveld to the Eastern Cape over many mountain passes that were sand roads and dangerous to traverse; there are still no train tracks laid through forests and across gaping ravines. Thankfully in 1960 Plett remains a remote haven. The baby I was, the little girl, the gawky ten-year old, the rebellious adolescent, the young bride, are with me in the bed where perhaps my father, and certainly (I had figured the dates) I was conceived.

In the morning seated in the warm kitchen and drinking steaming mugs of tea, I stare appreciatively at the winter garden sloping on the hillside where shy loeries call and respond  “kwok-kwok-kwok” in the red-berry bushes. The telephone jangles in the country stillness but I do not want to talk to anyone yet from my life in Johannesburg, my family know I am safe. A key is turned in the kitchen door lock and Blossom’s dark brown, weathered face with wisps of grey hair escaping from under her colourful doek peers around the door.

“Ahi, Missie Liv, you are here. You are home.” She grins toothlessly.

Feeling a rush of affection sweep over me like a low tide wave on Robberg beach, my instinct is to leap to my feet and hug the bent over figure, Blossom, a feature of Milkwood, a stanchion. But the gesture will embarrass the older woman and instead I rise to shake her hand. Blossom bobs a subtle curtsy. Gesturing for her to pour a cup of tea, I anticipate her demurral. We fall into a familiar patter.

“Ten past nine, I knew you would be at the kitchen door. So the railway bus was on time?” Blossom nods, still staring at me as if she can scarcely believe I am in the room. “Still stops at The Crags?”

“Missie Liv?”

“Yes…”

“I say this only one time…your mother told me you were in trouble…I pray for you every night…now I see that you suffer. They are bad, bad people…but now I cook all your favourite foods…put some meat on those bones…” Blossom shakes her head, “Ahi, so sorry. So sorry. May Jesus …”

Rising again and interrupting the old woman, I clasp one of her hands in both of mine. “I’ll be OK. Some Plett air, some walks on Robberg beach, some food from my Nana…” There are tears at the corner of Blossom’s rheumy eyes. “Don’t cry, don’t cry… I’ve cried enough for us both.”

The title words of today’s post are by Anglo-American poet T.S. Eliot in his famous Four Quartets. Last weekend on a glorious fall day I was in our nation’s capital. The area around the mall is indeed living proof of Eliot’s idea that “Time past and time future are contained in time present” — this is expressed in modern coinage as “being in the moment” and in other literary references as “the eternal moment.” Yes, indeed, the past lives on and the dream will never die…

Washington Memorial 10.8.11

©Janet Levine 2011

MLK, Jnr. Memorial 10.8.11

©Janet Levine, 2011

© amazon.com 2011

Agaat, Marlene van Niekerk’s latest novel  is worthy of being lauded as one of the great ones of any time and any place. Tolstoyan in its magnitude and impact, it is as ambitious in its themes as it is precise in its minutest details. Agaat, Dutch for Agatha, also meaning the Good, is the name given to an abused “colored” child taken from a wretched hovel on one farm in the Overberg where she clings to life, and whisked over a mountain pass by her benefactress, prototypical Afrikaner woman, Milla de Wet, to her farm, Grootmoedersdrift. The life blood of the novel is the flow and flux of the intimate, decades long love and hate they find in the essence of their own and each others’ psyches and souls. This symbiosis is intertwined with love of the earth and of Milla and her husband, Jak’s child, Jakkie. It interweaves fable, magical realism, earthy details of farming, power plays in relationships, communication that is beyond words yet shared in glances and silence, communion of the spirit. The cast is large, the emotional and psychological context larger. Van Niekerk is a poet as well as a novelist, and the language she creates sings the siren song of the place she grew up, a farm in the Overberg.

This is the song I sing as well. I first heard of this novel when I was driving in Massachusetts one afternoon on a late June day last summer. By happenstance I was listening to a NPR airing of an interview with Marlene van Niekerk about Agaat. The author’s name was vaguely familiar to me. I was instantly draw to the intonation of van Niekerk’s voice, how shy she seemed and yet at ease. She spoke impeccable English, although she writes and teaches in Afrikaans. A lifelong anti-apartheid activist I was intrigued that van Niekerk’s protagonist in Agaat was an Afrikaner and that the novel (at least on one level) describes the dissolution of apartheid from the perspective of a perpetrator of the infamous ideology. Months later I began to read the novel and was immediately drawn into Milla and Agaat’s world. Every reference, every intonation of every thought resonated deeply in my South African soul. Many times I was reading through tears. Agaat’s bed-time tale to little Jakkie that concludes the book was so powerful that it took me several attempts to read it through.

As the reviewer wrote in her New York Times review of the novel, it is for this sort of book that writers write and readers read.

Dankie Marlene, ek is baie trots.

On March 21 1960 the South African police shot and killed 69 people–men, women and children–at the police station in the dusty East Rand township of Sharpeville, South Africa. Almost two hundred more were injured. Almost all were shot in the back as they tried to escape the police bullets. On that Monday, the Pan-African Congress (PAC), an anti-apartheid movement lead by university lecturer Robert Sobukwe, initiated a series of protests against black people having to carry the hated “dompas” (identity documents) signifying that they were aliens in their own country. As the tragedy at Sharpeville unfolded outrage in the country and around the world resulted in unprecedented media fury aimed at the racist apartheid policies of the white Afrikaner Nationalist government.

The  10 days following the Sharpeville massacre changed the course of South African history. Protests and strikes were widespread and a run on the stock market particularly by foreign investors almost crippled the economy. Scores of thousands of protesters were detained, and as the jails filled, Sobukwe’s goal of rendering the country ungovernable seemed closer. Prime Minister Dr. Verwoerd’s government declared a state of emergency and on April 9 he miraculously survived an assassination attempt. Repressive legislation aimed at squashing any resistance was rushed through parliament and ushered in the dark years of “granite” apartheid as South Africa (overnight it seemed) became a police state.

Subsequently, regrettably, the world has seen similar outrages against humanity, and it seems they increase exponentially as we watch innocent people dying as a result of  terrorist activity or internecine warfare all over the world. But Sharpeville remains a high-water mark of shame in the struggle for human rights.

A native South African, I was a young teenager at the time and already a staunch proponent of human rights and an anti-apartheid activist. Today I remain committed to the struggle for human rights everywhere. In 1960 I can remember hearing the military helicopters overhead as the government cordoned off the black townships from the rest of the country. At night, in the Johannesburg suburb were I lived, to the east and west, we could hear salvos of gunfire as the police quelled all resistance. I was convinced that the anti-apartheid movement would prevail and freedom was upon us. But it took 44 more years for the first democratic elections to be held in South Africa, and Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress government of national unity to be formed.

Currently March 21 is a public holiday in South Africa, Human Rights Day. To celebrate the great heroes of that historic moment, particularly Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe and his PAC, and the extraordinary events of the year that shook South Africa, my motherland, a place I love fiercely, I have written a historical novel, CONFLAGRATION. It is a tender love story set against the perverted political furor.

I am hopeful I will connect with the right literary agent for this book. If any interested literary agent thinks they may want to represent this work, please contact me, so with this novel, we can help  to carry the torch of human rights forward, as well as the dream of a shared humanity that never dies. I’d love to hear from blog readers too.