Extract from John Ryan’s Spy story (published on Amazon.com, Kindle direct publishing)
Moses removed his football boots and socks, pumped paraffin into the Primus from the ten-gallon tin that also served as a bedside table, lit the stove and lay back on his bed. He would make tea and then wander up to one of the Greek cafes to buy a pie for supper.
When Moses awoke, the cottage was in darkness but for the blue flame of the Primus. Yet something had awoken him. He listened and the noise came again. Someone was trying the door to Mrs Buhl’s kitchen, across the path.
Moses opened his own door. By the partial light of the pressure stove he could see someone on the kitchen steps. The person was carrying what looked like a large book or a parcel.
Alerted by the gushing noise of the Primus, the figure turned and lunged at Moses, propelling him backwards into the cottage. Moses glimpsed a white face under a cloth cap before strong hands grasped him around the throat and he realised with alarm that the man was trying to strangle him.
Moses managed to pull up one knee and lash out with his instep. There was a cry of pain and a fist struck Moses on the side of the face. But by then he was rolling away and scrambling to his feet.
Moses grabbed the stove by its base, below the hissing flame, holding it out in front of him like a torch, hoping the light might force the intruder to turn and run. However, the man lunged at him again, throwing punches, forcing Moses against his makeshift table.
Moses lost his grip on the stove and, as it fell, he heard a gurgling sound behind him. He realised with horror it was the noise of paraffin escaping from the overturned drum.
Moses tried to run for the door but found the intruder blocking his way, his arms outstretched.
Stanley Robertson, the stationmaster, said afterwards he caught sight of the blaze just as the overnight goods train from East London was pulling in. The train was two hours late as always. Stanley said the flames were so high that he thought the town hall was on fire.
The O’Briens felt the heat before they saw any evidence of it. So intense was the fire that it melted the tarmac on that side of Owen Street.
Jack Langton, Howard’s father and the former policeman, was the first person to ring up the manual telephone exchange and tell the operator to get hold of Harry Perry, the town clerk. He told Perry to rally the fire brigade and quickly. Forget about sounding the hooter, Jack said, it’s too late for that.
When Danny ran across the road and saw the source of the fire, it was as though a dark cloud entered his brain and he could not think or speak.
Patrick said to his father, ‘Moses can’t be in there, dad! Can he? He told us he’d be going up to get a pie!’
Digger O’Brien put a hand around the shoulder of both sons. They were standing on the island in Owen Street. The rafters of the cottage had started to collapse, leaving a red imprint on the black sky. Danny stared, fixated, until his father physically turned the boy’s head away.
Jimmy Millar, the wall-eyed Mr Fixit, was in charge of the firemen that night. They broke down the door of the Buhl’s cottage, releasing a blast of hot air and a smell that took Digger O’Brien back to the trenches.
Emerging from the cottage a few minutes later, Jimmy beckoned to Digger.
‘Don’t go in, because it’s a mess, but there’s a corpse,’ he said.
‘Moses?’ Digger asked.
‘I’m afraid so,’ said Jimmy Millar.
Digger O’Brien went in anyway. The body, trapped between the skeleton of the bed and a red-hot paraffin tin, was charred beyond recognition. But the sight of what remained of Moses’s football boots under the bed, burned leather and metal studs, would stay with Digger forever.
‘They couldn’t run a bath’
In Lusaka, leaders of the African National Congress were returning from exile. In four years, they would be in charge of South Africa.
With the party was a member of the anti-apartheid movement who had been close to them for several years. I asked him what sort of government he thought they would make.
“They are good people,” he said. “But right now they couldn’t run a bath, let alone a government. They’ve got some quick learning to do.”
The man explained, “The ANC has never really prepared itself for this. Before sanctions seriously began to bite two years ago, many members had come to believe that change would not happen in their own lifetime.”
Evidence of that unreadiness (and immaturity) came early, with the announcement of free health care for children under six and pregnant or breastfeeding mothers.
One effect of that has been to clog queues at hospitals and clinics with youngsters and mothers suffering from minor ailments, while chronic patients are delayed or even denied treatment.
Another is much more serious and even tragic. Teenage girls, many of them still at school, have become pregnant in order to get the grants on offer. And hundreds of those have abandoned their babies because they lacked the will or the proper funds to carry on as mothers.
Just a few weeks ago, a two-year-old boy was dumped by his mother in the traffic on a motorway. Fortunately, a truck driver was able to brake as the child ran into the path of his vehicle and the police were on hand to contact the welfare authorities.
Babies have not only been abandoned. They have been battered too. And not only by young mothers driven to their wit’s end by constantly crying infants. There seems to be a boyfriend or partner syndrome in some cases: “If you don’t shut that child up, I will!”
Introducing these grants may have been an honest mistake by honorable men but they have become a point of corruption ever since. Old age pensions continue to be claimed long after the death of the original recipient. Many thousands of rands in social security funds have been embezzled by officials down the line.
The incompetence of civil servants has been another major problem in the 20 years of democracy. A recent independent report showed that less than 20 per cent of municipalities were properly managing the funds allocated to them. Hence all the protests over the non-delivery of services.
Mismanagement is rife at province level too, particularly in the education departments. Witness the scandal in Limpopo a few years ago where hundreds of pupils had to go without school books for most of a year because a consignment had simply been dumped in the veld by the company contracted to deliver them.
Another issue has been the quality of teachers appointed. If they are appointed at all, for there are instances where posts continue to go unfilled, year after year.
This is particularly true in the rural areas where pupils have to write exams on work they have never been taught.
Where money is there, yet no one is sure how it should be apportioned, major corruption can readily flourish. And that in turn is fed by a sense of entitlement that has almost become endemic. If you don’t know where that cash should go, just help yourself! You deserve it, after all, after apartheid.
And that path leads us right to Nkandla, and to a shameless president we legally may call a liar now.
Political commentators differ on how much Jacob Zuma will suffer at the polls through the folly of his R246-million homestead. I believe it will be considerable.
More than a million of the “born free” generation (whom Zuma and company must have come to regard as their party’s voters-in-waiting) are so disillusioned they haven’t bothered to register. Julius Malema’s EFF group should attract a fair number of the former ANC Youth members. And Ronnie Kasrils’s “don’t vote” call to ANC voters at large must be a barometer of how many of the older leaders feel.
If the new ANC leaders had any common sense, they would have called for Zuma’s impeachment ahead of the Democratic Alliance. But then common sense seems to be a commodity in short supply among the present ANC hierachy.
As are honesty and integrity.
High Noon in torrid Luanda
November in Luanda is a knock-down and drag-out month for heat. Which, like Bermuda’s sandflies and Daytona Beach’s mosquitoes, is not a fact you will see bandied about in travel guides.
By eleven o’clock, even the black Angolans – whom one would expect to be reasonably immune to the situation – are scurrying off to find some respite among the palm groves.
They dart from one pool of shade to the next, criss-crossing streets and alleys as they go, like a terrorised crowd fleeing before some hidden sniper.
One o’clock is the meridian. Now the siesta is fully into its stride, the pavements downtown deserted.
Except for me, trudging along on a pair of fried eggs. Intermittently massaging a neck gone stiff to no avail, from turning to look out for taxis.
And a solitary policeman. Grey of face and uniform, he keeps measured pace on the other side of the street, plainly suspicious of the stranger who chooses to venture out in this sauna weather.
With sidelong glances, we watch each other through the haze that rises from the tarmac. Clomp. Clomp. The sound of our feet is an infraction upon the gentle snoring of the city.
I think this could make a good movie scenario. Then remember that it did. ‘High Noon’, of course. Gary Cooper, the late Princess Grace, and the most convincing bunch of renegades that ever appeared on celluloid.
The vision of Deadwood Gulch (or was it Dodge) grows as we turn a corner, still faultlessly in step, and head towards the old town hall. It’s the heat, naturally, and the silence, the shuttered buildings and the minute hand up in the clock tower, moving fatefully onward.
In my mind, it becomes a game. The cop, gun strapped low, can be Cooper. A little darker and rounder, perhaps, but pure granite underneath.
Me? I’m Tonto, Festus or Pancho. Some such sidekick. Not quite a Cooper but the next best thing. A veteran of shoot-outs and bar brawls.
Striding out to our next showdown, I smile conspiratorially across at my partner. He responds with a frown. Deadwood Gulch fades into reality.
My hotel still being a long way off, I start whistling to lighten the load. The policeman’s frown darkens so I stop. Maybe it’s a jailable offence to whistle during the siesta.
At once, an alarm bell begins to ring somewhere ahead of us.
Cooper, that was, acts commendably in character. The large gun is palmed, quick as a flash. He turns towards me but is persuaded by my idiot expression that I can have nothing to do with this new development.
Together we move towards the sound. The source turns out to be a jeweller’s shop, which fact causes us to exchange meaningful glances.
Peering through the glass frontage, we see the alarm on an inside wall. Its little hammer is beating in agitation. There is no other sign of movement.
The policeman and I confer by way of jumbled sign-language. The front door, we agree – after furious pulling and pushing at the knob – is impenetrable.
But running down both sides of the shop are service lanes. My companion signals that I should tackle one while he investigates the other.
Stumbling past dustbins, I find a small window near the back of the building. It is open but stoutly burglar-proofed.
I chin myself up on the ledge, long enough to gain an impression of a dark room, full of packing cases and broken timepieces. Also to glimpse an indefinable shape – possibly someone’s cap – edging forward above the level of a work-bench.
I drop down, charged with adrenalin, and sprint back to the street, clearing the dustbins like a steeple-chaser.
Taking the bend at full speed, I run straight into the chest of a grey uniform, which clutches me eagerly. Surprised, I stare into the face and, suddenly, the heat of the day gives way to a clammy chill.
It is not my policeman!
Stuttered explanations fall on foreign ears. I point wildly at the interior of the shop and the new cop grunts knowingly. Though he is shorter than my friend, his grip is ferocious.
I consider the circumstantial evidence. A burgled shop, a stranger in obvious flight from the scene. My fingerprints on the windowsill.
Of course, everything will be sweet when Cooper shows up. If he shows up. What if he had taken off after the real burglar? Never to be encountered again? Or not by me, at any rate.
But even as I stand there, with the policeman’s arm around my throat, Cooper emerges from the other lane.
He is carrying a large ginger cat. He drops it as he takes in the scene, stands poised for a moment, then moves to the attack.
A barrage of slaps to the other policeman’s neck secures my immediate release. The invective that accompanies this threatens to curl the paving stones.
The second cop retreats, spectacularly abashed. My friend takes my arm. And together, Cooper and Festus (or Tonto or Pancho) go forward in search of new pursuits.
A cold beer, I feel, would be an adventure in itself.
From One Man’s Africa
Encounters with an Icon
Nearly 26 years separated my first and second encounter with Nelson Mandela.
The first time, the African Nationalist Congress leader was in the dock in Pretoria facing a strong chance of being executed for treason. He had already spent a year in jail for incitement and for leaving the country illegally. I was a young reporter in the Press gallery, taking notes.
The second time was when Mandela was on an excursion into Africa after his release in 1990. In Lusaka, Zambia, a BBC colleague told him there was someone in the media party who had covered his treason trial.
Mandela sought me out and we chatted. I told him we in fact had other links. We had been born within 50 miles of each other. After that, he called me “my fellow Transkeian”.
For a while I felt special. Then I realised Madiba was exercising one of his greatest talents: His innate ability to relate to people, to make them feel at ease.
He had done it with his prison warders. In the future, he would do it with the widow of Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid, and with dyed-in-the-wool rightwingers.
Much more than that, he would do it with a nation.
These are extracts from my reports on those rather different occasions:
Sunday Chronicle, June 14, 1964
FRIDAY, 7.30 a.m. The clock in the Pretoria Raadsaal strikes the half-hour, sparking a domestic crisis in Church Square’s pigeon colony. Outside the locked door of the grey-stone Palace of Justice, a handful of journalists and lawyers’ clerks page through their morning newspapers.
A No 2 bus circles leisurely on its way to Brooklyn.
7.55: The crowd around the palace entrance has grown to the size of a rush-hour bus queue. Among the newcomers is a bearded university student who claims to have heard on the best authority that at least two of the eight men will get the death penalty.
As the doors swing open, a young white woman says, “I hope they hang the lot.”
8.30: Winnie Mandela, dressed all in black, enters the packed courtroom. Behind her is an aged relative whom the papers have identified as Nelson Mandela’s mother from the Transkei. A blanketed woman in the third row moves on to the floor to make room for them.
Across the room, an orderly yawns noisily.
9.45: Twelve plain-clothes warders take up their positions behind the dock. With the defence is Cry, the Beloved Country author, Alan Paton, who is to give evidence in mitigation.
The stage is set and the doors are barred. A late-comer brings the news that the court precincts have been cordoned off by a force of police. The man on my right observes, “They’re taking no chances.”
10.00. Mr Justice Quartus de Wet takes his seat and the countdown of more than eleven months is about to end.
Headed by Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, the accused file into the dock. They wave cheerily to their relatives and Sisulu blows a kiss to his wife.
The eight men seem composed and in unnaturally high spirits. There is the usual surprise to find they are all dressed in well-cut lounge suits, not prison garb. All are clean-shaven.
10.30: Unexpectedly, a game of thrust and parry has developed between Alan Paton and Percy Yutar, head of the prosecution team. It is a battle between a man of words and a man of letters and it becomes obvious where the advantage lies.
Yutar, predatory veteran of the art of cross-examination, goes on the attack with all the devices of his experience – and the witness who came to plead for clemency for others soon finds that he is on the defensive himself. The prosecutor has produced a dossier with an account of the Liberal Party leader’s movements and public statements over the past four years.
Cross-examination ends abruptly and Alan Paton, red-faced and angry, returns to his seat. Mr Justice De Wet decides it is time for tea.
11.30: The accused file back into the dock but this time their smiles are tight and their gestures lack assurance. Dennis Goldberg is white-faced and even the others seem pale under their dark skins.
Defence lawyer Harry Hanson’s final address is short and deliberate. It reflects Mandela’s statement from the dock earlier this week that it is the Government that should be on trial here.
When he sits down, the judge nods and the eight men stand. Kathrada scratches nervously at his ear. Mandela clenches and unclenches his fists.
It is all over so suddenly that most of the public are not aware sentence has been passed. But jubilation spreads quickly to the black section of the gallery as Kathrada turns around and mouths the word, “Life”.
Mrs Bernstein says, “Thank God.”
Waving and smiling, Nelson Mandela and his co-accused disappear down the stairway to the cells. The man on my right says, ‘They’ll only serve 15 years.”
1.45: The Black Maria carrying the prisoners has left for Pretoria Central and the crowds have dispersed. Two riot policemen walk away from the scene, their job over. One says, “They should have hanged the bastards.”
Church Square returns to its lunch-time routine. A No 2 bus circles on its way to Brooklyn.
And 26 years later:
The Argus Africa News Service, April 15, 1990
Nelson Mandela has moved into the warm embrace of Africa with his first trip beyond the frontiers of South Africa in 27 years.
The biggest crowd ever seen in Zambia came together in Lusaka to welcome the man Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda said was “as much our leader as you are the leader of the African National Congress”.
Earlier, successive groups of ANC members – most of whom were not born when their icon went to jail – toyi-toyied before the crowd of Zambians and chanted slogans.
From there, Mandela travelled to Harare, Zimbabwe, where more than 50 000 people packed a stadium with a normal capacity of 35 000 to acclaim their reverence and wonder at his presence.
Later, the man who confessed on leaving Victor Verster Prison, that one of his greatest yearnings during his long years in jail was to be able to hug a small child, had a chance to embrace more than 30 small children.
They were the sons and daughters of ANC members in exile in Harare. Aged from about two to twelve, they came on stage at the University of Zimbabwe where Mandela received an honorary doctorate in law.
Before he did, the children indulged in an unrehearsed bout of toyi-toying that had the audience of academics and diplomats on their feet.
Nelson Mandela stooped and hugged every child. He discarded a formal speech and said: “Every day I am here, I enjoy the feeling that I am a human being.
Then his eyes flooded with tears, and he turned to look through a far window at the soft hills beyond the campus.
A wing and a prayer
LUANDA – Perhaps because of their maritime background, the Portuguese display a healthy cynicism about airlines and flying.
Many still maintain the acronym of their national carrier, TAP, stands for Take Another Plane.
And in the old Lourenco Marques, Mozambique, expatriates from the mainland used to say the name of the internal service, DETA, was equally cautionary. It warned travellers: Don’t Expect To Arrive.
What slogan, one wonders, would they apply to the present-day TAAG (Transportes Aereos de Angola) line in this other independent province?
Terror And Anguish Guaranteed? Transports Arabs And Goats? Either would be apt.
Travelling TAAG is like being on a mid-quality indigenous bus in almost any part of the continent, with the essential difference that the trauma is all taking place at 30 000 feet.
The impression that this may not be your ordinary everyday shuttle begins with a small maul at Luanda Airport at six in the morning – a crush of humanity, of people violently intent on being somewhere else.
To say the aircraft eventually becomes packed would be a laughable understatement. Every seat is taken, three-quarters of them twice over. The additional numbers consist of children, lap-held. Some are sucklings, noisily having breakfast. Most of the rest could qualify as the oldest babies in the world.
Such congestion makes it difficult to slap at the mosquitoes and flies that screen anxious first-timers from the demonstration of how they would be expected to conduct themselves should the aircraft end up in the drink.
A subjective appraisal of conditions suggests that prospect may not be too far distant.
Outside on the apron, a hefty queue of passengers snakes its way to another TAAG 737. Following it is a tractor and trailer bearing that flight’s luggage.
A man in overalls is riding shotgun on the trailer. It hits a rut in the tarmac and several suitcases and parcels fall off. This amuses the trailer attendant to the extent that he tosses a few more over the tailgate for good measure. He continues to chortle as he arrives and helps load the hold.
After the plane to Malanje takes off, five cases and two parcels remain scattered on the apron.
While the cabin doors of our aircraft are about to close, two white men clamour up the stairs. “We’re with the commander,” they say. Immediately, two seats are cleared in the front row and the congestion ebbs back to compensate.
Coffee, tea or milk? A ridiculous prospect on Flight 016. Although there are five hostesses aboard, adding madly to the overload, no trolley would be able to negotiate the aisle.
TAAG captains seem to have a width of discretion on public safety. The man who flies us to Lubango takes the direct route, right over the war zone. And he does not bother with the tight-circle descent, the internationally accepted way of keeping missiles out of posteriors.
We eventually return to Luanda by a deviation further out to sea, taking in distant aspects of Benguela and Lobito. That pilot should go far; the other, the further the better.
Lubango airport is like a scene from MASH, abuzz with helicopters, hospital planes and MIG-21s and 23s. The MIGs are enthralling with their low sweeps and parachute-assisted landings. We have a fair opportunity to appreciate them. The plane from Luanda is an hour late.
But its lateness is less surprising to the government officials who have delivered us to the airport than the fact that it has arrived at all. Apparently every day at Lubango airport contains an element of lottery.
Just ahead in the queue is our commander himself. At the foot of the stairway he is stopped by a private in the Fapla army, who says he may not proceed until the aircraft is searched.
“But I’m the captain!” says the captain.
“Maybe you’re the captain in the air,’ says the soldier, ‘but I’m the captain on the ground.”
TAAG advertises 15 regular flights out of Luanda. Insofar as it is within my power to decide, the airline will be at least one passenger short on every such occasion.
From “One Man’s Africa”
Extract from Spy Story
Shack fires in squatter settlements were a common sight for Daniel. A pressure stove would explode, a candle fall over, and a community would lose their life’s possessions, if not their lives. Most squatter homes were made of cardboard and untreated timber that ignited like touchpaper.
The kiosk burned differently. For a while it retained its shape, and Daniel realized it must have an inner shell of breezeblock and solid beams. But as he watched, one rafter collapsed and the other members capsized into the form of a fiery cross. He was reminded of old photographs of Ku Klux Klan lynchings.
Another memory sprang to mind, a memory so sharp he felt a chill at the back of his neck. It invoked a similar scene, another night of flames and smoke but a night, above all, of terror. And with startling clarity, his mind’s eye superimposed a further image on the burning kiosk, the face of an old friend with a unique smile. Then, almost instantly, that image seemed to melt in the heat of the burning kiosk.
Extract from O…
Extract from One Man’s Africa:
The Dark Continent is at once a misnomer and an awful truism. The sun never shines as brightly as it does in Africa. Unfortunately, the brightest sunshine cases the darkest shadows and the miseries that lie in Africa’s umbra are the most abject in the world.
African Americans used to say of their lot (and perhaps they still do) that what white Americans wanted, they themselves had precious little of; but what white Americans didn’t want, Afro-Americans had in great quantity.
So it is with Africa and the West: Africans grow skeletal because the West squanders the world’s resources whereas those things the West avoids – like poverty and disease – Africa possesses in abundance.
And yet, not for nothing has this continent been confirmed as the cradle of all humankind. Not for nothing do we now know that the first people on earth were Africans, and that other races developed from them.
Not for nothing do African’s misplaced citizens – the Afro-Americans and West Indians – hanker to return to fund their roots. And not those people alone.
Everyone of whatever race, nation or creed who comes to Africa feels a magnetism that cannot be ignored or explained. Because it is primeval.
Because Africa is like a mother calling her children home.
Old, addled and poor she may be, but the pull of the umbilicus is still there. Irresistibly.”
Extract from One Man’s Africa.
John Ryan 