Words do not
slice skin
shred flesh
shatter bone
Dethrone dictators
Poet, freedom fighter or… impimpi, traitor? Not to forget husband and father...
At Fire Hour by Barry Gilder is a beautifully crafted novel, a gripping narrative in artfully woven rich prose and dialogue that realistically includes bits of African lingua franca, interspersed with poetry providing lightness and welcome distraction. It would be a mistake to read this novel too fast. Although the complex plot set in the South African liberation struggle is captivating, the reader could miss nuances that are too often absent from biographies and historical narratives.
Beyond the author being an admirer of the Russian school of reality literature of famous novelists like Leo Tolstoy and (a century later) Mikhail Sholokhov, this novel depicts the reality of various branches and aspects of the ANC in exile. Several renowned artists come into the narrative with their real names and amazingly well-described personalities, leading to the story of the exceptional role of culture and the contribution of the arts to the resistance against apartheid. Outstanding examples, like the poets Mongane Wally Serote, ‘Willy’ Keorapetse Kgositsile, and graphic artist Thami Mnyele, or jazz musicians ‘Dollar Brand’ aka Abdullah Ibrahim, and Jonas Gwangwa who is familiar to world-wide solidarity movements as the leader of the ANC’s cultural ensemble ‘Amandla’. In fact, the author himself was at the time a singer and composer of struggle songs that have contributed significantly to the South liberation struggle – and was also a trained soldier and ANC intelligence officer in Botswana.
One of the big issues in Gilder’s story is what constituted a frequent existential dilemma for artists and writers as well as intellectuals, academics and other professionals between their strong urge to take up arms and fight the bloodthirsty militarised apartheid system or to rather stick to contributing through their talents – although the latter choice was not necessarily safer, nor necessarily exclusive. A main theme is the fact that for non-armed ANC militants to exercise their artistic or intellectual capacities against apartheid at the frontline, often in contact with comrades inside the country, was also a very dangerous choice. History shows that many murders and attempted assassinations by the regime in the frontline states – Botswana, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Lesotho – and elsewhere were targeted against artists and intellectuals.
In this novel, Barry Gilder tells first-hand of the creation of the famous Medu Arts Ensemble of ‘cultural workers’ in Gaborone, Botswana, close to the South African border and how it succeeded to relate closely to the cultural resistance inside the country. Apartheid’s deadly June 1985 attack on Gaborone left, among others, the artist, Thami Mnyele, dead.
The main fictional character of the novel is Bheki Makhatini, a poet who cannot live without his notebooks and pencil stubs to write down all he sees and experiences. As a leader of the militant South African Students Organisation, SASO, he regularly visits an ANC exile contact, Pumla, in Botswana to report the situation and activities inside the country. This was how ANC cadres stayed in touch and often led or advised the resistance and political underground inside the country from the frontline states.
South Africa did not have the conditions for a maquis, neither because of its geography nor due to the collaborator regimes of the rural bantustans, which were reserves of cheap labour and, already since the South African Union in 1910, covered by a tight web of oppressive surveillance and mostly forced collaboration of so-called ‘traditional’ governance. Therefore, since the banning of the ANC in 1960, the liberation movement was forced to reorganise and work from exile while many, like Nelson Mandela, languished in prison.
Apartheid’s security police (SB), suspicious of Bheki’s trips to Botswana, arrest and badly torture him. They want to know who his ANC contacts are. Bheki has a psychological reaction to bad torture that makes his mind and memory disconnect. As a result, he is unable to remember what he might have said or done from that point. Then the SB police, realising Bheki’s potential as an ANC cadre, set a vicious trap by releasing him without obvious motive. That will cause Bheki to be suspected of having been recruited as an apartheid agent.
Bheki joins the ANC in exile and chooses as nom de guerre ‘Sholokov’, his much-admired Russian-Soviet author of And Quiet Flows the Don, awarded the 1965 Nobel Prize. Initially, Bheki is unaware of the suspicion of him that informs the riveting plot thread throughout the novel, reappearing and disappearing again without the reader being able to wholly forget that it might be fatal – especially if one knows that the multiple manipulations of the apartheid forces peaked during the 1980s and badly infected the ANC body, its armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, and the internal underground structures. Thus, the SB not achieving their aim, they remain a threat to Bheki until the end of his life.
For those who have known the South African liberation struggle, this novel is an insider’s reality story covering the struggle from the late 1970s through the crucial 1980s and ending after liberation. It gives a lively description of life in the ANC and the different cadre deployments, among others, at the frontline in Botswana, the military training camps in Angola, further training in the Soviet Union, the international department in London, the headquarters in Zambia, while emphasising the importance of discipline and deployments, often at the expense of ignoring family, in order to achieve the united action needed for sustaining such a big, protracted struggle.
For Bheki and Pumla this is far from easy. After their first night as lovers in Gaborone, they are seldom based in the same country. For communication they depend on comrades’ goodwill and safe but slow, hand-carried mail routes connecting the ANC’s wide world of places of deployment. Pumla especially longs for her husband when, unknown to him, she is pregnant and gives birth to their son Maxim. But their delight of being at last the three together at the Medu culture festival in Gaborone is short lived. Bheki’s voice is hoarse when he recites his last poem:
Words do not
slice skin
shred flesh
shatter bone
Dethrone dictators
That night Bheki and his unit of guerrilla fighters cross the border fence into South Africa ready to face the enemy and fight.
Besides the cultural pillar of the struggle, the story lifts a veil on what was called ‘Security’ or ‘Mbokodo’, the ANC’s feared intelligence unit, which the author knew well. However, he does not hesitate to describe how this unit, at times, committed violence and even criminal violence – in this story even fed by personal motive and abuse of rank.
In brief, exile in the ANC was a tough life, accepted as the way to freedom, but in reality, not as romantic as it is sometimes portrayed in later autobiographies and oral histories. Some of the scenes of extreme violence in firefights or torture were part of that life and can’t be avoided in reality literature. Yet they might not be easy to read – or to write.
In my reading, the sprinkle of poetic moments in the text with their airy language opened myriad little windows to related human and natural landscapes. Thus, they were not only welcome breathers in a creatively crafted text, but inevitably led my mind to the universality of the struggle for freedom of peoples in Palestine, Vietnam, Cuba, WWII Europe, from Toussaint Louverture to the Mau-Mau in Kenya and so many, many more of humanity who did not count the price to pay for this highest of good to bequeath to their children.
Hélène Marinis Passtoors
April 2024