Recalling the battles of the class of ’79
IT IS 35 years since three Rhodes University journalism students were arrested, imprisoned and tortured for their efforts against apartheid. The chronicler of their lives, fellow student and top British journalist Janice Warman, has a deep sense that what they fought for has been betrayed.
“I have to remind myself that they’ve told me they would do it again,” she says of the exploits of Zubeida Jaffer, Marion Sparg and Guy Berger.
It is clear to her that there is huge unease about SA’s crass corruption, “the ANC’s (African National Congress’s) attacks on press freedom, the EFF (Economic Freedom Fighters) being thrown out of Parliament and the jamming of the cellphone signal (in February)”.
Warman — modest, warm, quirky sense of humour — has often returned over the decades to the country of her birth. She is publisher, author of three books and journalist, writing, editing and broadcasting for the BBC, The Spectator, The Observer and The Guardian. She spoke to the students at Rhodes shortly after arriving in SA to launch her new book, Class of ’79, and asked whether Parliament was sufficient to ensure a healthy democracy, or if we needed more activists. They answered, “Both. We need both,” she says.
WARMAN argues that we are at a point where we might remember Irish statesman Edmund Burke’s maxim that those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it. She wants us to remember that in those terrible times of apartheid there was resistance to it by white people too and in this case, by youngsters. She describes Sparg’s story as “quite extraordinary”.
Not long after graduation, Sparg, “the highly intelligent, quiet woman who sat at the back of our class, not saying much”, left SA for training in camps of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC. There she interacted with people ranging from Chris Hani to Oliver Tambo.
Sparg crossed back into SA with mines in her rucksack, placing them in police stations, “where most of the torture took place, such as John Vorster Square, Hillbrow and in East London”.
Being white helped Sparg. When a black policeman stepped forward to search her at John Vorster Square, now Johannesburg Police Station, a white policeman protested, “you can’t search a white woman. Let her in.” Sparg’s mines detonated and eventually she was arrested and sentenced to life in jail.
“If she’d not been white and a woman, she may well have been hanged for treason. Other people she’d worked with were on death row. She put her life on the line,” says Warman.
Journalist Zubeida Jaffer, whose childhood in her middle class Cape Town Muslim family was characterised by ill-health and physical fragility, was horribly tortured. She was being beaten against a wall when another man entered, and told her torturer, “Just rape her, just rape her.”
As it turned out, she was not raped but poisoned. Jaffer narrowly escaped death and was released. She was pregnant when she was rearrested and the police threatened to poison her unborn baby unless she talked. But she did not. “She didn’t want her baby to be born and grow up knowing that her mother had given in to save her,” says Warman, quietly incredulous.
“What a dreadful dilemma for any woman,” she says, adding joyfully that she met “that baby in 2009 when she’d just graduated from University of Cape Town and voted in the elections”.
Warman describes in her book how Jaffer’s treatment galvanised the moderate Muslim community into action. The police also targeted her husband, her two brothers and her uncle.
IN ONE of the most moving chapters of her book, Warman describes how Zubeida’s mother, conservative Raghmat, now in her 80s, “put on all her make-up, dressed up, left off her headscarf and went to speak to her daughter’s torturer, Spyker van Wyk, in Afrikaans. That threw him.”
Guy Berger, whose middle class mother, Lucy Gough Berger was a columnist on The Star, was arrested in 1980 for possessing and distributing banned ANC publications. He was held in solitary confinement for four months, suffered police beatings and was finally sentenced to four years in jail. He was tried alongside another Rhodes student, Devan Pillay, who like so many was deeply influenced personally and politically by the charismatic Berger.
SPARG told Warman that if she had known of Berger’s antiapartheid activities sooner, she would have become politically active earlier.
Berger, director of the Division of Freedom of Expression and Media Development for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation in Paris, tells Warman towards the book’s end, that he is quite optimistic about SA.
“He looks at countries across the world where there’s a lot less press freedom than there is here. He believes we have a democratic culture where people feel entitled to their rights and that they will express them.”
She left SA before her formal graduation ceremony, “because I knew I wasn’t brave enough to do what Guy, Zubeida and Marion did. But, I did want to pay tribute to them by writing about their lives. I also want people to remember all those, and they are legion, whose names we do not even know, who also struggled and died.”
The Class of ’79 is no misery memoir and Warman is not a bleeding heart liberal. There are few adjectives, her observations are pertinent and she is something of an historian, covering seminal events of the 1970s and 1980s draconian apartheid SA.