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The ANC Spy Bible. Moe Shaik
Читать онлайн.Название The ANC Spy Bible
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780624088974
Автор произведения Moe Shaik
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
Robertshaw tried hard to break through my resolve not to disclose everything. Occasionally I let him feel he had made headway. For instance, I wrote a long ‘letter’ to my father outlining how I had explained my activities to the police. I also bemoaned the fact that the Security Branch did not believe me. I asked Phillip to hand this ‘letter’ to his superiors on the pretext that he had found it in the corridor. Phillip’s superiors dutifully forwarded my ‘letter’ to the Security Branch. The ruse helped to ease the intensity of my interrogation sessions. I was never questioned about the ‘letter’.
By the end of September, Lieutenant Robertshaw decided he had no case with which to charge us. Ebrahim’s car was now in the police pound but there was no forensic link to Ebrahim or any weapons. Besides there was no Ebrahim to bring to court. Yet, Robertshaw saw no defeat in this. He simply accepted it for what it was and let the process of Section 29 play itself out.
Robertshaw’s interaction with Yunis and me did affect him at a personal level. In many of our discussions he often wondered how he would fare under Section 29 if the tables were reversed. He never could answer that question. In truth the answer can only be found in the lived experience.
Robertshaw knew that I had not revealed all the information at my disposal. Yet this did not drive him to torture either me or Yunis. Instead he spent the hours of interrogation trying to understand us and, in the process, came to respect our commitment to freedom as the source of our inner strength.
Perhaps he was troubled by his own demons. Detention does things to both the captor and the captured. A strange bond develops. This bond does not lessen the contradiction that separates enemies, it rises above it. In the confines of the restricted battleground, vulnerabilities are shared.
For instance, Lieutenant Robertshaw was concerned about his sensitive young son. Why he confided in me I shall never know, but I respected him for doing so. His son was an outsider in a macho culture and Robertshaw feared that the boy would not cope in a country that demanded much of its white males. I suspected from our discussions that in his attempts to understand my commitment, he was trying to understand his son’s needs and to respect these. He was a captive of the conservativeness of the time, yet behind his steely blue eyes, I sensed a sensitive and conflicted soul.
In mid-October the interrogation sessions came to an end. They were getting nothing out of us, and the questions went over the same ground time and again. The rest of the year Yunis and I spent trapped in a state of suspended reality. My mind was my only companion and like all companions, it was both friend and distractor. I longed for human contact and at times I would even have welcomed an interrogation session rather than the emptiness of the days that I was forced to endure. The torture of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation took hold of me.
It was the nothingness of the endless hours that was devastating. Each new day was a repeat of the previous one: the sun rose and set punctuated only by the uneventful meagre meals of breakfast, lunch and supper and the vast stillness of the in-between. No amount of pacing the cell, counting the steps from wall to wall or exercising could while away the long empty hours.
The effort to keep sane became harder. The vacuum fed the catatonic drift to self-withdrawal amplifying the constant voice of despair that played over and over in my head. My thoughts spoke loudly and incessantly. I awoke each morning with renewed hope that today the horror would end. As the hours passed, positive thoughts gave way to negative ones, and then to hopelessness and utter frustration. Sometimes I screamed out my frustration to the silence of the corridors. Only the damned of the place could hear me, but they too were helplessly enmeshed in their own despair. The months dragged on. I lost a sense of myself, plagued by the pervasive self-destructive belief that I was forgotten, even by the ones I loved.
I soon forgot what I looked like. My only image was reflected in the distorting waters of the urinal. I forgot the sound of my voice as the silent months went by. My cell and its emptiness and the voices in my head were the only testimony to the fact that I was alive.
I developed an acute sense of smell and hearing. I could smell the deodorant – or lack of it – of the different police officers and prisoners as they passed my cell. I could smell food long before it was brought to me. I could hear the jangle of keys and the footsteps of those who walked the corridors. I would spend hours each day rocking from side to side. It was the only movement that gave me comfort. Withdrawing into myself afforded me a sense of stillness. The world became a distant and strange place.
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