7 – Anger and all that stuff
But in our chats and the interviews, the earlier traumas still surface, horrific visions of burned and mutilated bodies. This alone can explain the sometimes unnerving twitching and grimaces in his intense face.
“I saw many things,” he said,
“people being butchered next to me, people being burned next to me whilst I was
young. Those things have disturbed us
you know, but we managed to pass to pass the lower primary, then higher primary,
thinking about those things, we were sharing ideas about those things. Many policemen were ambushed next to us, they
were slaughtered, they were burned next to us.
And we used to clap hands, and
say, Ow, we are happy.” But he did not
rest content with that. He admitted that
mistakes had been made, that their humanity had been compromised. “I am not excluding myself from that because
we were fighting for the freedom. They
are mistakes of the struggle. I want to
focus on those mistakes – those advantages and disadvantages. Why?
Because, for instance, there are countries that are still experiencing
what we experienced here in South Africa.
If you look at the South African situation today, each and every
government department is toyi-toyiing, they are breaking things and all that
stuff.” He deplored what had happened a
few days previously, riots and police brutality following on a march on the
government buildings in Pretoria. “That
is anarchy. And that can make the
country unruleable, more than 1985. So
whatever may occur or happen in this country, they must not repeat those
mistakes. There must be a new form of
addressing things. Unlike we did
before. For instance, one settler, one
bullet, you know, as APLA used to say.
You notice that, people they were judged by their colour, not their
achievements. There are many white
people who contributed in our struggle.
Even though FW de Klerk was the minister of apartheid, in the mid 80s,
and he was working for the Nationalist Party, but there was a contribution that
he did for this country. That is why we
are here today. Although we exerted a
tremendous pressure on him, he's the one who managed to listen to that
pressure. And then, by taking that
decision, he was such an independent person.”
As was Vuyo himself, just by
stating that view.
۞
This former
APLA guy, when he talk about the past operation, you won’t be surprised to see
him crying, all that stuff. And he said,
“Hey, if I knew, I was not going to embark myself on the struggle. Ja, it wasn't good.” That is why I want to write about those
mistakes of the struggle. There were
many mistakes, many mistakes.
My
brother was a member of AZAPO. In 1985,
they fled from town, they were chased by UDF, ANC. So they went to Bathurst, so they stayed
there for quite a long time, quite a few weeks.
So then after, they, one of them, in fact my brother also, he wanted to
go there, but it was since that he was drunk, too much drunk, so he
escaped. Then they went to Port Alfred
to attend a party, not knowing that it is their night of death. Ja. It
is a trap that is set for them. They
were set alight and they died there.
Then my brother, other guys phone him and say, Your colleagues are dead
here, and he fled from PE to Durban. And
now he's working there in Durban, he's got a house there. But we were staying together; my other
brother, the one we buried last December, he was very active, he was also in St
Albans for politics, Pollsmoor Prison for politics. Now,
in the Eastern Cape, if we are ten in this house and then we are all members
of the ANC, we must go and meet a psychologist – there is something wrong with
us!
You
know, even my reverend, B.N., was so shocked here at the town hall, at the TRC
hearings, when he heard about the story of Victoria Road, in 1987. Those Victoria Road people were my
neighbours. I was there, I observed that
situation, I was there physically. But
the only guys who helped were the white guys who were the policemen. So, not everything during apartheid was
wrong. Some was right and some was
wrong. There were these guys who were
working for the municipality police, we called the amangundwana – the
rats. They were securing the
school. It was during the night, past
7, it was winter so it was dark outside.
So those guys they were drinking there, stuff like Old Brown, wine,
those policemen that were securing those buildings. So, someone somewhere took a stone, and then
throw that stone at those guys. Those
guys without notifying exactly who's throwing a stone, they went to one of
those houses, my neighbour there in Victoria Road. I heard the shot, gwaaaa. It's like then, usually when the police shoot
now we like to go out now and say, fweeewh, then throw stones and petrol bombs
and that stuff. But on that night it was
very sad, you know. When the police
arrived there, those white guys, one side of a head was here, another side was
there. Everybody in the house was just
slaughtered. Those police, they used
axes, knives, and then they shot. It was
a mess of mess, you know. Ja, that story
shocked me, in that hearing, and the story of another guy from Alexandria, he
was also active in UDF. They take his
penis and cut it.
Some
of our guys, they went to Fort Cox.
They've got certificates and diplomas from that school at Fort Cox,
these guys from APLA, these soldiers.
Because they say they don't want to be soldiers anymore. They say they were not born to be soldiers
but they wanted to liberate the country.
Now, they want to change now, to move on and to think fresh. One of their comments was that they were not
counselled by their political organisations, or by this government. They were used in dangerous operations, in
shameful operations. They said even if
they were killing the white people, they are the people of God. Suppose after those operations we reconcile,
we sit down, we get some counselling there, because we were not killing dogs,
we were killing people.
One
of the operations that I attended, when I was working for ANC, was very
shameful. It was very painful, very
painful, not just painful. But, in 1996,
I told myself, I must go to the psychiatric hospital. In fact I went to Clinical Psychology. I met Dr F., then she sent me to the
psychiatrist there in Y Street, then the psychiatrist referred me to that
hospital, then I received the counselling there, for a week.
And
I went because it's like, that guy, those people, they were not supposed to be
killed. That's what we realised. It was anger and all that stuff, you know. It was just anger, and it was midnight
then. It was the enemy. When the police, and soldiers came, we went
where they were hiding, and we wait for ten minutes. And we asked one of our friends, Thembani,
not to shoot. Let those guys relax
there, you know it's like a snake. If
you don't touch a snake a snake won't come to you. Just leave them. Because the battle was already finished. We said, No, leave them, they are hiding
here, because they don't want us to see them.
In fact they are going now. But
Thembani who was the commander, became angry, he said he will shoot everybody,
he brought out his pistol, his automatic machine gun. He opened fire then he killed them on the
spot. All of them. He killed them, all of them. And, later on, it was hard, later on there
were 15 Casspirs, and he used a bomb to take them down [Vuyo clicks his fingers, one two three] And 24 SA Defence guys, they died there in
those cars.
۞
One of the hobbies Vuyo listed on his CV was “Middle Eastern
studies”. He was like that; he would
pick up on a line of interest, and read about it in the newspapers; so more
than once we discussed the Israeli-Palestinian situation, compared it to South
Africa, as the popular media often did.
Even his decision to seek counselling was informed by opportunistic
reading, since he had an aunt who worked in some fairly menial capacity in the
university’s psychology department, and might bring home a discarded textbook. Vuyo said, “When you are a student, although
you are at higher primary school, you do read and then because you've got that
understanding about reading, you think about reading all the time, so, I was
reading and then, I used to ask about psychology. One day I met X., she was doing masters there
at the university, and the Professor R., so I had that interest in
psychology.” At the hospital he took
counselling with another masters student; he told her he was “busy with
studying, I wanted to study further, because she asked me, don't I want to
work? Now, I know I was supposed to say
yes. Maybe there was an opportunity
somewhere there, but I said no, because I want to study then. Even now, should I get any kind of a job,
I'll study. I'll study.” And he laughed with his eyes scrunched into
playful slits.
۞
Vuyo did have a
girlfriend for much of the time I knew him; we’ll call her Patsy. I met her a few times, a sweetly round-faced
young woman whose mother happened to work for a friend of mine. Patsy was herself something of an
entrepreneur: she peddled pavement phone services, or ran a little spaza
shop. Patsy’s mother hinted at drink
problems. Eventually it transpired that
he and Patsy had got onto a gambit of gathering up beer-bottles from around the
shebeens and selling them to a local glass company; he was recycling and
cleaning up at the same time, he said.
I hoped he wasn’t getting mixed up
in the alcohol business itself. No, no,
he would never do that, he insisted, alcohol caused so much damage in his
community.
But he did. In the end I heard he and Patsy together were
somehow trading in liquor, to what extent illegally or legally I couldn’t make
out. Worn down by multiple disappointments,
that’s where he ended; it said a lot about the state of his society, and it may
have been his final undoing.
Though I personally never once saw Vuyo drunk, and only once or twice
could smell the cheap beer leaking from his pores, I suspected alcohol was
implicated in one incident.
After one longish absence, he came to my office rather more
smartly-dressed than usual, newer black polished shoes and a narrow dark
tie. He was on his way to court, he
said. Patsy had laid charges against him
for assault and destruction of property.
Then and there, as if practicing for his appearance, he vehemently
denied the charge. I couldn’t quite work
out what had happened. A dispute over
keys; then she had locked him out of the house and refused to come out or let
him in. In a fury he had ripped a gate
off its hinges, or broken a door, or both.
He was just trying to get back into his own house, he said; he was
worried about what she was doing in there.
On her actual person he had not laid a finger. She had gone mad, he said, he couldn’t
understand it; he thought maybe her family was putting her up to it for some
reason. He even thought witchcraft might
be involved. I wondered how a
counter-accusation of unsubstantiated bewitchment would hold up in court. For his part, he knew it was her word against
his. And he couldn’t see how she could
charge him with destruction of property when it was his house he had damaged, not hers.
Yet now she had occupied it; but he would let her; he didn’t care about
the house so much; he would stay at his sister’s place until her head came
right. He just wanted her to come back
to him, kind and sweet and supportive as before.
Clearly there was much more to this
than met the eye, but what it was, what personal and communal history fed into
it, I could scarcely begin to guess.
He did not need me to do anything,
he said; he just wanted to let me know what was going on.
Keep in touch and tell me what
happens, I said.
Not long afterwards he was back, his
tie loosened. Patsy had not turned up;
the case had been postponed. Maybe it
would just fizzle out, I said.
In the end, it did. Meanwhile, he was concerned about where Patsy was,
and why she hadn’t come to the magistrate’s court. I drove him back to the township, up around
the curve of the cutting, where the indigent immigrants were building their
tattered shacks on the precarious limestone slopes.
They’ll just get washed away in the
next big rain, I commented.
The problem was there were no jobs
in the rural areas, Vuyo said.
Government officials who were supposed to be looking after those places
never went there; they themselves preferred the city hotels or the fleshpots of
the provincial capital. Not enough
houses were being built. Because of
corruption.
Which struck me as ironic, coming
from a man who did not have a home of his own to go to tonight, unless the
woman relented for some reason.
We drove round the back way, where
the alienating silvery tangle of the electrical substation abutted on the
tragic rows of anonymous mounds marking the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of recent
AIDS deaths, each marked by no more than a wooden stake and a small aluminium
tag.
I dropped him there, on the edge of
the township extension. He insisted he would
walk the rest of the way to his sister’s; he didn’t want me to get lost trying
to get out again.
۞
Text and images © Dan Wylie
"Township: One house amongst many"
Grahamstown 2016
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