‘A horrified 21-year-old white girl’
IT IS well after midnight when I am woken from an edgy sleep by the shrill tring-tring of the Currie Street phone in our sparsely furnished lounge. Then the sound of Melissa stumbling sleepily to answer it. “Sue? What’s happening?” I get out of bed and see Melissa’s grim face, rumpled hair, her hands holding the phone too tightly.
“Keep us posted Sue,” she says, “please.” She puts down the phone.
“It’s Chris,” she tells me. “His house has been firebombed. That’s all Sue told me. Somerset Street just got the call; Olive answered, her room is the closest.”
Chris Mbekela is chairperson of the Grahamstown Youth Organisation. We’ve often worked together on the Grahamstown Voice. Chris has a fiercely enquiring mind, he can consume great gallons of beer, and he’s known to be a target of Branch. Now they’ve struck.
“Apparently Olive has gone to help,” Melissa adds. “She’s made a plan to meet Priscilla there. And Roland’s also borrowed a car to go and check out the situation.”
We white students and liberals and lefties with cars and access to phones and services are useful to our black colleagues and comrades in the townships when it comes to crises like this. We at least can drive with some legitimacy in night-time streets.
“Oh god,” I say to Melissa. “Oh god, I hope he’s fine. Where’s Miseka?” His girlfriend.
“I have no idea,” she replies. We hear Ray emerge from his room. “What’s going on?” he says sleepily. He’s shivering as he pulls a hoodie over his head.
“Chris,” says Melissa again. “His house has been firebombed. That was Sue on the line; they’ve gone for help; well, Olive and Roland have. Priscilla’s also on her way.” Ray stares at her.
“No.” We all hug each other tight, share a cigarette, mutter and curse about fucking Branch, and then after a cup of tea and another smoke, maybe two, we decide all we can do is go to bed and wait for news in the morning. Shuffle back to our beds. Cold and concerned.
In the morning Melissa and I are waiting for Olivia to fetch us at Currie Street. Olivia has recently dinged my car again, so it’s in for repairs. We are supposed to finish off a job for Rhodeo, and we’re anxious for news about Chris.
“She’s always fucking late, isn’t she?” complains perfectly punctual Melissa. We are both grumpy. Waiting for Olive – what a pain, I agree.
Her blue Kadett eventually pulls up, its tyres grinding on the crushed stone. Olivia is wearing sunglasses, and she steps out of the car and tells us more about what happened after Chris’s house was firebombed.
“He got me out of bed at midnight, maybe one in the morning to take Miseka to hospital. You must know how I’m feeling this morning. I don’t think she’s going to make it.” “She’s what?” Melissa and I say in horrified unison. “I don’t think she will live,” says Olivia.
“Come, let’s go.” Melissa opens the front door of the car, looks at the back seat and gasps, “What? What’s that stuff ?” Olivia says, “Blood. Ja, that stuff ’s to soak up the blood.”
“Whose blood?” Melissa gags, and I see the grey fabric coated in a chalky powder that almost – but not quite – hides a seeping brown stain. And around it, burnt flesh, curled at the edges, like scattered cornflakes. I stare incomprehensibly. And Olivia starts humming. She starts fucking humming.
Melissa and I are beyond shocked and we drive in silence to the offices. I am in the back, staring out the window, sitting as far away from the chalky bloody mess with its sickly-sweet smell. Melissa catches my eye in the mirror. She looks horrified, deeply disturbed. We are driving in a car in which a burning woman was taken to hospital to die.
Wordlessly, we go to the upstairs offices of Rhodeo and make coffee, huddling together. “Jesus, did you hear what happened to Chris and Miseka?”
Ray arrives with Roelien and Shelley. “This is horrific, I can’t believe they’re taking it to this level.” “No. I just can’t,” Shelley is crying, distraught. “Apparently she won’t make it – Miseka.”
“Ja, I was there,” says Olivia, “it was so terrible.” She rummages in her handbag and finds a pack of cigarettes. Offers them around, lights up. We all just sit there, quite unable to work. Smoking, silent. So strange, a person we know is dying, perhaps has already died.
A little later, Roland arrives. He looks completely dishevelled. Devastated. He walks in quietly, sits in a chair and hangs his head in silence for about 10 minutes. I’m not sure if he’s crying, I can’t see his face.
“So, I get there,” he finally says, sitting up. “So, I drive in André’s car and I get there to Chris’s place and there’s fire and smoke and chaos and the cops are there, and Miseka is fucked, like really badly burnt, and Priscilla and Olivia have managed to get her into the back of Olivia’s car, her flesh is sliding off her, and Priscilla goes with her. And I take Chris, but when we get to the hospital, the place is crawling with Branch.”
His eyes, full of disbelief, flick from one face to another.
“There are guys in the parking lot and guys in the admissions, so I just leave Chris in the car – who’s in fucking agony and shocked shitless – and I just know, I mean they’ll just detain him if he gets admitted and then he’ll disappear or something,” he stifles a sob, “and it was fucking terrifying.”
Aghast, we all stare at him. “They tried to arrest me too, for trespassing on hospital premises or something fucked,” he says, “so I just took Chris and we found a private doctor through the Black Sash… phew, she’s gonna die, you know, there’s no chance she’ll sur- vive.”
He puts his face in his hands and his shoulders shake and Melissa and I make him coffee and Olivia gets up and arranges stuff on the tables and starts fiddling with the light tables. Autumn sun falls through the giant glass windows that overlook the perfectly manicured green sports fields.
It’s a glorious day. Perfectly nor- mal. We can hear the thwack of a ball against a bat; the whirr-whirr of the pigeons on the window ledge. I am terrified and revolted. I cannot shake off the images of the burnt flesh. And we still have to drive home in that car again, Olivia still has to drop Melissa and me back at the house, we’ll have to drive in that car again. This is my first direct encounter with an apartheid atrocity. Not that we name it yet. I am just a 21-year-old honours student at Rhodes University in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape, in the eye of the political storm that is gripping the country.
Not long after this, Roland is detained. He spends a few nights in the Grahamstown mortuary adjoining the police station, with severe bronchitis and a couple of corpses for company. And then two weeks at the PE prison in North End known as the Rooi Hel – a red-brick horror, a red hell. About six weeks later, I see Chris at the SACHED offices with Louise Vale. He is a ghost, a shadow, he can barely speak, one arm is still bandaged, and his fingers are thick and scarred pink. But his soul is still on fire, I can see, his eyes are full of flames.
My heart is so sad. “How is Miseka’s family?” I ask.
He just shrugs under his jacket with its worn-out sleeves. Louise is making us tea but she puts the cups down and begins to sob. Chris, too, will end up being detained. He will spend nearly three years in detention without trial.
Many years later, 12 or 13 in fact, I will hang my head when I hear Chris Mbekela’s submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: “This incident took place at 12 midnight. And if I’m not mistaken, the following day Miseka was sent to Livingstone Hospital in PE, where she died. That is what happened, Mr Chairperson.”
I recall brutal staccato snatches of his testimony: “Startled by the flames… A firebomb… Shouting… She was looking for me. I grabbed her. I wasn’t thinking straight. We tried to phone the ambulance. It was engaged.”
Later, I read the submission transcript: “I then phoned Priscilla Hall. She was someone who worked with us and she responded and said she was on her way. Someone else who I called was Olivia Visser.” (Forsyth, either misheard or mis-re- membered.)
“I refused to be admitted because at the time there was information that the Security Branch was outside and at the time they thought that I was dead and when they discovered that I was still alive they wanted to kidnap me so that I would not be traced.”
You cannot forgive without knowing who to forgive, he went on to say. And he was right and noble and dignified, I thought – but of course none of this I knew at the time. I was simply a horrified 21-year-old white girl.
Startled by the flames… A firebomb…
This is an extract from Student Comrade Prisoner Spy by Bridget Hilton-Barber, published by Zebra Press at a recommended retail price of R230.