PENGUIN BOOKS
CRY FREEDOM
John Briley comes to Cry Freedom with a long record of works that deal with the corrupting malignancy of violence in and out of politics. Best remembered is his Academy Award screenplay for Gandhi, although his credits date back to the haunting Children of the Damned and include his powerful Vietnam novel, The Traitors, which was called ‘the best fiction to come out of the Vietnam war’.
John Briley was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, but the pursuit of his profession has taken him all over the world. After obtaining a BA and MA from the University of Michigan, he studied for a PhD in Elizabethan Drama at the University of Birmingham. While there, he began writing for television and moved to films as a staff writer for MGM, UK. During this period he also wrote and directed two plays produced in London’s West End – both comedies – and published a critically acclaimed novel on the spread of nuclear weapons, The Last Dance.
He is married and has four children. Currently living in Spain, he is working on what he calls ‘the usual mixture: two serious ones, and one comedy’.
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Illustrations
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First published 1987
Copyright © MCA Publishing Rights, a Division
of MCA Inc., 1987
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-196267-2
To Mary and Shaun –
who lived through so much
of this with me
A novel – like a film – has a life of its own. So much can be done on the screen by a gesture, a look, the way a person is dressed, that a dozen subtle points can be made just by the way a character walks into a room… not only insights about that character, but about the other characters too, in the way they react to his entrance, or his clothes, or his mood.
Its ‘realism’ can (and I believe does in the case of Cry Freedom) create an electric immediacy and, when shared with others in a packed cinema, emotions of overwhelming power.
But the novel has its advantages too. Its pace is your pace, and its ‘reality’ doesn’t depend on performance, or music, or design. Its reality is inside your head.
This novel is based on the screenplay for Cry Freedom, which had its origins in two factual books by Donald Woods, Biko and Asking for Trouble. It is not a literal transcription of those books or, indeed, of the film script. It often moves in response to its own life, but it takes the reader on the same journey, with, I hope, much the same emotions.
The screenplay for Cry Freedom offered a blueprint for other story-tellers (the director, the actors, the editor) to follow. This novel tries to take your hand and say ‘follow me’ into the biggest and smallest theatre of all – that theatre of the imagination we all carry around in the recesses of our mind.
The day began before sunrise. It always did. If you had a job in Cape Town, the baas expected you there by seven or eight. No excuses. Just be there. And if you weren’t, there were plenty to take your place.
So the haze of smoke from the crude huts of tin and packing crate was already thick when the great hulk of Table Mountain began to emerge from the darkness in the cold grey of early dawn. Its dark mass was visible alike from the quiet, white streets of Cape Town several miles away and from the stirring, dirt paths of the illegal black shantytown of Crossroads.
The leaden early-morning routine of the township masked its precarious existence. In any section of its sprawling chaotic pathways you could find an old woman calmly brushing her teeth in a cup as she stood in the doorway of a little shack, see a young barefoot boy sleepily stuffing woodchips into a kitchen stove, a wrinkled grandmotherly figure stirring a corn meal mush, a yawning teenage girl in a cotton wrap coming from an outhouse, a doting mother placidly feeding a baby at her breast, a little girl carefully lighting a paraffin lamp on a crude kitchen table, a man shaving intently at a cracked mirror, a woman putting a clean chamber-pot back under a rumpled bed.
The only indication of Crossroads squatters’ illegality was a young adolescent sitting on the top platform of an abandoned drilling-well, the highest point in the whole wretched maze. Wrapped in a dirty blanket, he was propped against a broken support post, dozing fitfully, but around his neck there gleamed a large, bright whistle… and his sleepy eyes would open occasionally to glimpse down the long road winding to Cape Town.
His sentinel’s duty was part of the uneasy game the Government played with the shabby residents of Crossroads. The Cape area had bred some of the most independent blacks in South Africa. A port city always has its underseam, and in Cape Town it thrived in the atmosphere of part-time work and the sudden needs for ample cheap labour. Blacks were drawn to it by forces as elemental as hunger and thirst. Employers would hire you in Cape Town even if you didn’t have a work permit. And if they stayed out of the police’s way when they travelled, you could sneak your family into the area with you, then build a shack in Crossroads and survive on somebody’s labour – yours, your wife’s, your daughter’s.
The police closed only half an eye to it. They couldn’t afford to drive all of you away because the baas, he needed you. And he knew that he could pay you less and work you harder if you didn’t have a work permit, so he wanted some of you around. But nobody wanted you to get settled, nobody wanted you to think you had a right to be there, so –
A sudden, distant rumble cut through the growing bustle of the morning routine and the young man with the whistle sprang to wakefulness as though he had been doused by cold water. He stood and peered along the dark grey of the twisting road… and he saw them almost on the instant the sound of their heavy motors came clearly through the damp morning air: a line of huge, grey behemoths – Army Hippos – steel-clad monsters that could transport fifty troops through a barrage of rocks and even small-arms’ fire – and in their wake a long string of police vehicles – all with their lights out, all closing in on the makeshift settlement with relentless speed – the cloud of dust they raised becoming more visible as each second lightened the ash-grey sky.
The boy’s whistle pierced the area. Its shriek echoed almost immediately from a dozen other whistles. And the somnolent township shuddered like a frightened horse. Women grabbed their babies and scurried for cover, men darted for anything valuable – a watch, a wallet, a radio; young men raced through the dirt paths, leaping puddles of water, shouting warnings, hurrying others along with a vigilant bravado but darting looks of fearful apprehension over their shoulders as the roar of the military vehicles grew louder and louder.
But the attack by the ‘System’ this day rendered useless all the efforts to hide and protect. From three angles police Land Rovers hurtled into the cluttered by-ways of the settlement, each of them bearing a huge tear-gas machine mounted on the back – giant, raucous contraptions looking like early jet engines which spewed out huge volumes of burning tear-gas. Each Land Rover twisted and turned down the dirt and mud alleyways, chasing bodies before them and leaving behind clouds of choking gas.
Moving with practised swiftness, many of the blacks managed to cover their mouths with wet rags but there was no way to keep the smoke from burning your eyes, and if that wasn’t enough to drive you into the open, police with gas masks followed the Land Rovers on foot, racing from shack to shack, smashing with sjamboks, driving everyone into the open and lashing into anything that looked worth breaking. The little pathways became a chaos of people running in all directions, coughing, lunging from the whips, trying to protect small children – and the screams of pain and terror could be heard even above the whirring blast of the tear-gas machines, the police whistles, the roaring commands from the bullhorns spouting Afrikaans.
And as the smoke began to clear, police with dogs stampeded the area – and this time their goal was clear, they lunged and charged after the men, not hesitating to club an obstreperous woman out of the way, but saving the heat of their fury for the males – young and old. There was no way even the most fleet-footed could escape, and gradually they were all herded and beaten into an area where military buses with sealed windows waited to take away those who for one reason or another displeased their attackers.
The women and children, many with wet rags still clinging to their faces, many with eyes still inflamed from the tear-gas, then watched helplessly as the police proceeded to tear apart their ‘houses’ of crates and cardboard, of ropes and tin and canvas – bulldozers lumbering through the structures, flattening the tatty furniture, ripping away walls, crushing stoves, and beds, and clothes. The wide-eyed children stared, torn between fear and fascination. Most of the women just stood, clutching their most valuable possessions to them, a few shouting defiance, most taking the assault with stoic resignation and unheeded tears.
And as the inside walls of the shacks were exposed, many revealed poster pictures of Nelson Mandela, some with his name printed boldly beneath with the letters ANC… others showed poster pictures of Robert Sobukwe, the Pan-Africanist leader… but on some walls there were two or three poster pictures of a younger face. A serious, handsome face with solemn penetrating eyes. Most of these simply bore the words STEVE BIKO, but here and there thick, bold lettering beneath Biko’s name spelled out the phrase BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS. With angry purpose, the bulldozers went back and forth over these walls, their huge scrapers reducing them to shreds.
Some eight hundred miles away, a young woman was just awakening in a small, neat room. The morning was still fresh and the sounds around her were those of the country. She stretched her lithe figure, then went to a small table where she poured water into a basin and splashed the sleep from her eyes, letting the water run down her cheeks and onto her neck. She had huge, almond eyes, a sensuous mouth, but even in the relaxed languor of early morning her beautiful face bore the stamp of intellect, of a mind that seldom relaxed totally.
She wiped the water from her face with a towel and reached up to the one expensive item in her modest quarters – an ultra-modern radio with twin steel aerials. Except for a vase of flowers, the only other adornment in the room was a poster picture of Steve Biko – one exactly like those being crushed and shredded in Crossroads.
Mamphela Ramphele was a doctor. A few years before, Steve Biko had been a medical student, just as she was. But Steve had moved from medicine to black politics – such as they were in South Africa. And now Dr Mamphela Ramphele was the sole doctor in a small black clinic for which Steve had somehow managed to raise the money – even though he was ‘banned’ by the South African Government, forbidden to be in the presence of more than one person at a time, forbidden to write or to speak publicly.
Like Steve, Mamphela was light of colour and, under the byzantine laws of race in South Africa, could have applied to be listed as ‘Coloured’ rather than ‘black’. ‘Coloureds’ were descendents of mixed races. Black and Dutch, black and English, black and Portuguese. The South African Government preferred them, primarily because there were even fewer of them than there were white South Africans, and by granting them some small privileges that were denied blacks, they served as a lightning rod for black anger. If the blacks grew jealous enough of the marginally higher wages and marginally better jobs allowed Coloureds, their minds were diverted from their more justified anger at what the Government was doing to them.
But like Steve, Mamphela was too bright not to see the malign purpose behind such classifications, too ethical to want ‘advantages’ that split black South Africa into feuding camps.
Slipping from her dun-coloured nightdress to wash, Mamphela suddenly froze in mid-movement. The deep voice of a radio newscaster had been relaying the morning news and, having covered the state of the dollar and the rand, the latest from the Middle East, the Common Market and the East–West conflict, he calmly began an account of a police raid on an illegal township outside Cape Town that morning. ‘A number of people were found without work permits and many are being sent back to their respective Homelands,’ he reported imperturbably. ‘There was no resistance to the policing action and many of the illegals voluntarily presented themselves to the police and military authorities.’ His voice then changed to sunny enthusiasm. ‘The Springboks ended their rugby series against the visiting Argentinians with a sparkling 33–10 victory. The Springbok pack –’
Mamphela reached up and switched the radio off.
Her eyes went slowly to the poster with Steve’s picture.
Back at Crossroads, the last of the military vehicles was leaving – a giant Hippo packed with sweating and laughing police. It drove off across the plain towards Cape Town, leaving a little cloud of dust in its wake. For a time the women and those men left behind watched it depart with a numb stoicism… and then slowly, one after another, they began to reassemble what was left of their possessions.
A pall of dust and smoke still hung over the area, but patiently, doggedly, the damaged walls were reassembled and patched. It had all happened before. It would happen again – in a month, a week, three months – maybe not so severely, maybe more. It was the price you paid for work – for being black. The only indication that it left rankling seeds of bitterness was a hand here and there that fiercely slapped a picture of Mandela or Biko back onto a ‘living-room’ wall.
At the clinic – it was named Zanempilo, meaning ‘Place of Healing’ – Mamphela was making her early morning rounds. She was dressed in a white surgical coat, as clean and simple as the ward itself. All the patients in this ward were children, most suffering from diseases a pure water supply and ordinary sanitation would have prevented. But clean water and ordinary sanitation weren’t available for the great majority of Africans and the child mortality rate was one of the greatest indictments of the white Government of South Africa.
A tiny room that housed the critically ill was at the end of the ward. Tenjy Mtintso had been the night nurse, and when Mamphela entered, she was in the room taking the temperature of a little girl who displayed a bad infection that covered part of one eye and ran down the side of her face and shoulder. Tenjy, a tiny, pretty girl of twenty, who looked younger and far more vulnerable than she really was, glanced up anxiously at Mamphela, but Mamphela went straight to the small desk by the door and began examining the night records.
Tenjy removed the thermometer from the child’s mouth, recorded the temperature, then began to change the child’s nappy. Mamphela moved to her side. ‘Her temperature is down,’ Tenjy said, ‘but she still isn’t holding any food.’
Mamphela bent to the child, first feeling her pulse, then listening to her heartbeat. But all the time Tenjy’s eyes dwelled on her. Finally Tenjy could wait no longer. ‘Did you hear the news this morning?’ she asked quietly.
Mamphela didn’t move her attention from the child. ‘If they’d caught him,’ she said flatly, ‘we’d have heard. They would have boasted of it.’ Its finality surprised Tenjy – but it didn’t convince her.
Later, at breakfast in the small kitchen, others on the staff argued the same point. Mapetla Mohapi, a tough, earnest colleauge of Steve’s who helped at the clinic, was as convinced as Mamphela that if Steve had been arrested, the news would be out. ‘The police find him – maybe with posters in the car – you think that wouldn’t be the first item on the news?!’ he yelled, going out the back door to fetch wood for the stove.
‘No!’ Tenjy shouted. ‘They’d try to get him to confess to something first! Because if people know the police have him, they have to be more careful about the way they treat him!’
As usual, Mamphela was reading as she ate, but she was listening to the argument. She tapped Tenjy on the shoulder and pointed out the window. ‘They think he’s here,’ she said. She was pointing to the police car parked along the dirt road leading to the clinic. It contained the two local policemen who trailed Biko throughout each day. They were sprawled in the car in their usual way, watching everything through half-closed eyes, secure in the knowledge that anything coming or going would have to pass them. ‘If the police in Cape Town had taken him, surely that lot’d be the first to know,’ Mamphela continued. ‘And they wouldn’t be hanging around here.’
Ntsiki Biko, Steve’s attractive, somewhat buxom wife, was keeping herself busy by emptying medicines from a delivery box, carefully placing them by category in the refrigerator and checking them off against an inventory list. She too had been listening to the argument, fraught with anxiety herself, but trying to weigh both sides against the worry in her heart. ‘I think he’s hiding,’ she offered with more conviction than she felt. ‘He was there with Peter Jones and Peter has a work permit. If Steve was arrested, Peter would have called me.’ It stilled everyone for a moment. Even Tenjy didn’t want to win the argument at the price of increasing the anxiety they all heard in Ntsiki’s voice.
Themba, a young ten-year-old who sat at one of the windows keeping a constant eye on the police while he ate his breakfast, finally broke the silence. ‘They’re coming,’ he said.
Mamphela looked up again from her book. A few people were already coming up the road towards the clinic. She knew some would have been walking all night. A few for days. ‘All right, let’s finish up and get the day-room ready,’ she said, folding her book and pushing away from the table. She glanced at Ntsiki before she left. ‘You know Steve,’ Mamphela said, ‘he’ll be all right.’
‘He will for sure,’ Ntsiki replied and forced a smile. Mamphela touched her arm gently and moved off briskly to start her day.
East London is a port city on the Indian Ocean, seven hundred and fifty miles or so from Cape Town. It’s a provincial city, no great metropolis, but it had gained a degree of notoriety because Donald Woods, the editor of its paper, the Daily Dispatch, had shown uncommon courage in publicly taking the Government to task for some of its major absurdities over the race laws. Woods was a sixth-generation South African who believed, like almost every other white in the country, that South Africa belonged easily as much to them as it did to any black. But he had been trained as a lawyer and he was born with enough imagination to leap over walls of schooling and culture to understand that the Government was being neither ethical nor humane in its rule of the voteless blacks.
He did not believe blacks should be given the full right to vote. He certainly did not believe they were capable of administering the Government, or even of having a significant say in its administration. But he did believe in justice as he saw it, and he did believe that all humans have some inalienable rights. When he caught the Government violating those basic ethical premises, he struck at them with a pen so sharp and so precise that his paper was quoted from one end of South Africa to the other. It also made his paper and himself a target for several Government actions in the courts. But his legal training, and the Government’s paradoxical deference to its independent judges, saved him time and again from fines that could have crippled the paper, and at times from prison itself.
One of the things he attacked most vehemently was the practice of police raids on black townships – legal and illegal. He had grown up accepting the laws that forced blacks and whites to live apart, and that blacks should be housed in townships removed from the white cities. But that those blacks should be subject to arbitrary harassment – and worse – at the hands of those who were supposed to uphold the law inflamed him as a man and a lawyer.
It was true that blacks living in illegal townships were violating residency regulations, but if the Government wanted to act on those violations they should take specific cases to court, not subject numberless men, women and children to wanton assault and battery. But he knew, like everyone else in South Africa, that the illegal townships were tolerated because white employers benefited from the cheap labour they provided, so he found the raids on them hypocritical as well as immoral.
On this day in November 1975, Woods had seized on the news of the raid on Crossroads and decided to make it his headline story – and the subject of his lead editorial. He called in his front-page make-up man, Tony Morris, and together they started shifting stories around on the page one mock-up. The previous lead story on Ford’s pardon for Nixon on Watergate would go to the left-hand side of the page, and the Government’s refusal of the new appeal to release Nelson Mandela would go centre where it would juxtapose the story on Crossroads. The prospect of a Japanese auto-assembly plant in Durban would have to be moved to the back page.
He was in the midst of it, his blue pencil circling the headline areas and scrawling tentative type-faces when Ken Robertson, one of his most laid-back but productive newsmen, pushed into the office past Alec, the elderly black ‘tea-boy’.
‘Boss,’ was Ken’s only word. But he slapped a stack of pictures on Woods’ desk. Woods turned to look at them as Ken confidently took a cigarette from the pack on Woods’ desk and lit up.
They were pictures of the raid on Crossroads – some of them blurred, but all of them dramatic: a weeping woman clutching a baby in her arms as she stands helplessly in front of her ruined shack; a young boy being clubbed by two police; an old man sitting, dazed and numb, in a ragged armchair, the walls around him smashed and broken; a young girl being chased by a whip-wielding policeman: a bulldozer smashing through a tiny makeshift kitchen.
Woods looked up at Ken in amazement. Ken smiled. He was slightly overweight, more than a little irreverent and he had neither the education nor the intellect of his boss, but he had ‘street smarts’ and an eye for trouble and he knew Woods looked on him as protegé and favourite.
‘How’d you get these?’ Woods asked challengingly.
Ken puffed smoke and smiled. ‘I got them. Do we dare print them?’
Woods examined the pictures again. He was an intense man when he was working. His glasses and his mane of thick grey hair made him look a bit older than his forty-two years, but he was fit and youthful in his movements. A man in his prime. Suddenly his face broke into a sly grin. ‘For these, I’ll risk it,’ he said with finality. ‘I’ll even give you a by-line.’
‘You’re a prince,’ Ken retorted. ‘If they put me away, yours’ll be the first name on my lips.’ They both knew that South African press ‘freedom’ was a maze of paradoxes, hedged by dozens of laws and regulations and that printing pictures of police beating blacks could bring both official and ‘unofficial’ reaction. But the paradox was that, if you had enough of them and they were bad enough, the Government sometimes felt it was better to let the matter drop than to keep it in the public eye by pressing charges. It was the kind of thin line Woods and Ken both liked to tread.
Ken scooped up the pictures to write the captions, his face still creased with a self-congratulatory grin.
‘Come on, tell me. How the hell did you get those and get back here?’ Woods demanded.
‘It’s the twentieth century, boss – wait till you see my expense sheets.’
‘And who tipped you off?’
‘The same guy who took ’em. You see, you keep accusing me of drinking for pleasure, but it’s really the hardest part of my job. If you drink long enough you’re bound to find one cop who’s read your editorials, boss, and once in a while one who actually agrees with them.’ He smiled archly at Woods and held up one of the pictures. In the foreground there was a flattened wall – and on it an array of the poster pictures of Biko. ‘What about “Mister Biko”?’ he asked. ‘Use his name in the story? My “boy” said his picture was everywhere.’
Ane that shifted the tone of the exchange. ‘Do you think there was a meeting or something?’ Woods asked.
‘From what he said, I’d think there must have been,’ Ken replied. ‘Biko couldn’t have been there, but one of his people shooting his mouth off about Black Consciousness – that, I’d say, was almost a certainty.’
Woods mulled it over for a moment, then shook his head. ‘No, leave him out of it. I want the authorities blamed for that raid. I’ll take care of Biko in an editorial. With one bunch of nutcases saying white supremacy justifies anything, all we need is a black nutcase saying black supremacy will save the world.’
Ken nodded agreement to that and swung out the door. Woods turned back to Tony Morris and the page one mock-up. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘we’ll put one of those pictures right at the top in the centre.’ And his blue pencil circled in the area.
The edition produced the explosion Woods anticipated. The pictures were reprinted in papers all over the country and Woods received the usual battery of phone calls – veiled threats from the police, the office of Bantu (Black) Affairs – the Minister of Information, violent threats on his life from anonymous callers, male and female, and occasional words of congratulations from a fellow editor.
The one thing that ultimately seemed to save him from prosecution in this case was the editorial he wrote on Biko. It was captioned BANTU STEPHEN BIKO – THE UGLY MENACE OF BLACK RACISM and it won approval from even the direst enemies of the paper.
And that made Mamphela’s uninvited visit to the Daily Dispatch even more surprising. She came dressed in jeans and a white sweater, and she looked stunning.
She strode through the long corridor to Woods’ office with a confident hauteur that drew as much attention as her physical attributes. Blacks did not walk that way in provincial cities in South Africa. When she came up to Ann Hobart’s receptionist’s desk, she slammed a newspaper over the typing on Ann’s blotter. ‘I would like to know who’s responsible for this?’ she demanded.
Ann, as baffled by her manner as the question, glanced down at the paper. It had been folded to Woods’ editorial on Biko. Ann looked back up, but before she could stammer a reply Mamphela put a card crisply on the paper. ‘Dr Mamphela Ramphele,’ she said forcefully. ‘And if he won’t see me, you’d better call the police, because I don’t intend to leave until he does.’
Ann hesitated, still a little dumbstruck by the impact of Mamphela, but she was beginning to recover enough to be annoyed at a black woman with that much effrontery. She let that annoyance register, then picked up the phone.
‘There’s a “Doctor” Ramphele wishing to speak to you, Mr Woods,’ she said coldly.
Woods was used to Ann’s reaction to blacks, especially her reaction to blacks with pretensions. He assumed ‘Doctor’ Ramphele was an elderly doctor of divinity with some story to tell. ‘Please send him in,’ he said equably and turned back to the piece he was writing for the day’s edition.
Ann opened his door. ‘Doctor Ramphele,’ she announced acerbically. For a second Woods did not look up from his work, then he swung around and was confronted by this black Athena striding angrily towards him. The thing that registered first was her anger, but it was closely followed by an awareness of a figure that did not belong to any doctors of divinity Woods knew.
He glanced disconcertedly at Ann. She read the appeal in the look, bowed crisply – and went out the door.
Mamphela placed the editorial before Woods. ‘I’ve read this paper long enough to know you’re not one of the worst,’ she said tartly, ‘so it’s all the more baffling that you would try to pass this vicious fiction off as reasoned fact!’
Woods had recovered enough from his initial shock to react to that as any decent writer would. ‘Well, Doctor –’ he glanced at the name he had scrawled when Ann called – ‘Ramphele, you’re right – I’ve stuck my neck out to take a stand against white prejudice, but if you think that means I’m going to go soft on some sensationalist pushing black prejudice, you’ve brought your complaint to the wrong man!’
It was the kind of attacking forcefulness that reduced most antagonists to a little respect at least. But it had no such effect on Mamphela. ‘Black prejudice!?’ she exclaimed. ‘That’s not what Steve’s about at all! Don’t you even bother about the facts before you rush into print!’
‘Your Mr Biko’s building a wall of black hatred in South Africa,’ Woods retorted, ‘and I’ll fight him as long as I sit in this chair!’
‘What you do in that chair is put words in his mouth – and you know he can’t answer because he’s banned! If –’
‘I believe I understand what Mr Biko is about!’ Woods interrupted hot-temperedly. ‘And I am not –’
She cut him off as sharply as he had her. ‘Well, you believe wrong!’ she continued. ‘And he can’t come to you. If you’re the honest newsman you claim to be you ought to go to see him.’
‘Look –’ Woods began in fury… but then he caught hold of himself. What was he doing engaging in a shouting match with some woman… and a black woman at that. He looked at her again, beautiful, intelligent beyond doubt, cocky as a white millionairess. ‘Where are you from?’ he muttered at last.
Mamphela only lowered the pitch of her voice slightly. ‘From here, South Africa,’ she replied sardonically. ‘But I was one of two from my tribal area to be granted a scholarship to Natal Medical School. I’m a token of your white paternalistic concern for the natives of this land.’
It was goading, and for a second Woods almost took the bait and started to respond with a sarcasm to match hers, but he caught himself – sighed, leaned back and tossed his pencil on the desk. ‘Well,’ he said wryly, ‘I’m glad we didn’t waste our money.’
Mamphela smiled slightly. If there was one thing that could disarm her anger, it was humour. She backed away from the desk and slouched in a chair, staring at him all the time, taking his measure as a human being at last, not just as the author of a piece she considered erroneous and malicious. Woods didn’t break the silence. There was no doubt she was appraising him. The only question was what her evaluation would ultimately be. Finally she spoke and this time it was without defiance. ‘I know you’re not a fool, Mr Woods, but you are uninformed. Steve Biko is one of the few people who can still save South Africa. He’s in King William’s Town right now – that’s his banning area. You ought to see him…’
And her quiet sincerity struck Woods with every bit as much impact as her flamboyant anger.
King William’s Town was not more than forty miles north of East London. One of South Africa’s many pretty little towns. The town itself, of course, was reserved for whites. The blacks lived in a township about five miles from the centre of town. The little matchbox houses looked as dismal as the houses in other townships, but the countryside around was so gentle and inviting it almost appeared to be less than a hardship to be forced to live in such a place.