LITMIR.BIZ

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ran through me. ‘Guys, I think we’re being followed,’ I said. ‘Two cars have stopped at the roadblock. If they turn left then we have a tail on us.’

      ‘Abort the mission,’ said Ebrahim. ‘Head back as fast as you can to the Ermelo Inn. The other unit is staying there overnight. I need to inform them that the mission is aborted.’

      I kept focused on the rearview mirror, my heart pounding. Maybe I was wrong. But no, the two cars turned left. My stomach tightened.

      The drive back to the Ermelo Inn was tense. We were silent, each of us playing out various scenarios, too fraught to vocalise them. Perhaps I was wrong about the cars, but we couldn’t take any chances.

      ‘Ebrahim,’ I said eventually. ‘Something’s wrong here.’

      ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘what are you thinking?’

      ‘The roadblock was arranged to get our names and the car registration. I’m sure that it’s the cops following us.’

      ‘I don’t know. You may be right. The more worrying thing is there was no sign at the T-junction that would indicate that the guide to take me across was there. That concerns me.’

      ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘The guide was to leave a Coke can under the T-junction signpost. That would have told me he was in the vicinity waiting for me.’

      ‘Do you think he’s late?’ I asked.

      ‘I don’t know,’ came Ebrahim’s slow response.

      ‘There are too many strange things here,’ Shirish chipped in. ‘I agree that something is wrong.’

      I latched onto Shirish’s support. ‘After you’ve briefed the unit at the hotel we should get back to Durban as quickly as possible, Ebrahim. We can reassess the situation and plan your exit from there. We shouldn’t take any more chances.’

      The firmness in my tone must have taken Ebrahim by surprise because he hesitated. Then he said, ‘Alright, we go back to Durban tonight. I will inform everyone.’

      Shirish and I waited in the car park while Ebrahim briefed Hélène about the aborted trip. Little did we know that in the next room the Security Branch had electronic listening devices monitoring their conversation.

      The outcome of this was that the Security Branch decided to arrest us. Also, one of their highly placed sources in Swaziland had identified the man in the photograph talking to Hélène as Ebrahim Ismail Ebrahim, a leading member of the ANC Swaziland Political Military Committee. The order was given to arrest us that night. Ebrahim had to be captured. Now luck had run out for all of us.

      4

      I was held at CR Swart Square, the police’s provincial headquarters, in cell number 26 at the end of a long corridor of detention cells. My cell consisted of two parts: a gloomy four-by-four square metres lit by a ceiling light that was dim and never switched off. In one corner was a toilet and alongside the toilet a single mattress. About a metre and a half above the floor on the side of the bed and reaching to the ceiling were windows enclosed by steel mesh. They could be opened slightly to allow air into the cell. On the side adjacent to the bed was a concrete block that served as a bench. About three metres from the windows was a brick wall. From my cell I would have access (when allowed) to an enclosed rectangular courtyard about nine metres long, ten metres high and four metres wide with concrete slats as a roof that let in the rays of the sun, the rain and the cold.

      They came for me in the early hours of the morning, not long after I’d been locked up. The key grated in the lock and an officer jerked his index finger at me. ‘Come.’ I was handcuffed and taken to the lifts. The officer pressed the top button: the fifteenth floor.

      The fifteenth floor was a dreaded place. It haunted all the stories of torture and interrogation. As the lift rose, I ran a mantra through my mind: hold on for three days. Three days is all you must survive.

      On the fifteenth floor I was taken down a long corridor of closed doors, the officer’s footsteps harsh on the lino flooring. The place reeked of officialdom, secrecy, power.

      Abruptly I was shoved into an interrogation room crowded with Security Branch officers and ordered to stand against the wall. The officers rushed at me from all directions, yelling questions. I wanted to establish the rules of engagement, but there was no telling who oversaw this mob. There was no single person I could focus on. This was the ‘softening up’ part of the game.

      Soon enough I was given the ‘water cure’ treatment. There was a pause in the raucous behaviour. The men stood there staring at me. Blue eyes staring at me. The blue eyes of white men that held power over me. Big muscular men who dwarfed me. I had never been in the company of so many white men. Then an officer laughed. ‘You must be thirsty,’ he said. ‘Here, have some water.’

      I drank slowly to gain time, grateful for the water, but also wary of what was to come. When I’d finished I handed him the glass.

      ‘Have another,’ he said, filling it.

      ‘It’s okay, I’ve had enough, thank you.’ Be polite, stay focused, I kept telling myself.

      Around me the men started shouting: ‘Drink up. Drink up. Drink up.’

      And now the glasses of water kept coming. When I could drink no more, the water was forced down my throat. I spluttered, coughed, wanted to retch until an eerie silence filled the room. These huge men stood staring at me.

      I had a desperate need to pee. My stomach was heavy, swollen, my bladder aching at bursting point. A bag was forced over my head and hands gripped my torso from behind. Darkness and fear.

      The first blow slammed into my stomach. I doubled over with pain, unable to breathe, water gushing out of my mouth and burning through my nostrils, wetting the bag. I thought I would drown. The incongruity of drowning on the fifteenth floor with a canvas bag over my head did not escape me. The humiliation welled up with the force of a wave, a wave that came roaring out of my mouth.

      The blows continued. I staggered, jerked, thrashed in a crazed rage to free my arms and pull the bag from my head. I needed air. I needed the punches to stop. I was suffocating, choking. Each time I collapsed, I was hauled to my feet and struck again. Each strike harder than the last.

      Then my bladder released, I pissed down my pants. I was gasping. Screaming. My head exploding with lights. I was going to die of suffocation in that canvas bag.

      Which suddenly was snatched from my head. I gulped down air, my vision gradually clearing, my heart rate slowing.

      They let me recover. Arms folded, surrounding me, a solid wall of flesh. Blue eyes unblinking. In a way I was relieved that the torture had begun. It was the expectancy of it that had frightened me while I’d waited in my cell. The fear of an event is often more debilitating than the event itself. I could now turn my mind to what they knew.

      But the torture wasn’t over. An officer grabbed my neck from behind in an armlock with such force that I heard a crack in my head. A sharp pain shot along my right arm. (Years later I would suffer partial paralysis of that arm and require corrective spinal surgery.) Now there were only three of them in the room.

      What struck fear in me was not so much the intensity or the duration of the assault, it was the anger I sensed in their voices. It was hatred, pure hatred that came from a dark and irrational place.

      After that initial bout of torture, I sat alone in the interrogation room for what seemed hours. Through the window I saw the dawn, the sun forcing its visibility through the darkness. This was my favourite time of day. During my student years I’d spent many hours studying through the break of dawn. I loved the sight of the sun rising, the freshness of the morning air. My thoughts were always clearer in this quiet time, the stillness broken intermittently by birdsong. But now I was tired and drained of energy. I slipped in and out of sleep. This is when Lieutenant HJ ‘Hentie’ Botha made his appearance.

      He entered the room and sat

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