Hermie’s glimpse of the unveiled

SHE stood outside my home on Upper Orange and asked, “Where is that rorbies?”

Hermie Adams had placed me in this position before, but that was pre-1994 and I was always able to reply with an honest: “I do not know”. A rule of the underground was that what you don’t know, you can’t sing about when the Special Branch did a Boere vastrap on your person.

During the 1985 State of Emergency, Hermie had been held in Pollsmoor awaiting trial on a charge of assault. A fellow had flirted with Gabeba at a langarm dance in Athlone. Hermie had confronted the offender, whose brother was a local cop, with a whisky-breathed: “Lyk my ghoes soes ‘n take-away?” And popped him one.

While Gabeba’s feminist sensibilities were affronted by this sexist objectification, she was nonetheless delighted by his caveman-type chivalry. It was so unlike Sean, her Unity Movement beau from Walmer Estate: he who couldn’t jazz and whose principled position on so many issues had restricted their dating options.

These socio-political norms contoured the path to Gabeba’s encounter with Hermie.

Millie Jackson was performing at 3 Arts Theatre in Plumstead. This was haram to the “no-permit” Sean, so she went to the show with a posse of her sturvy cousins from Primrose Park.

During Millie’s It Hurts So Good and the verse “You take my pride and you throw it up against the wall, you take me in your arms, and bounce me like a rubber ball”, Gabeba sensed that she was being looked at.

She focused on Millie’s slow-burn groove but as “Turn right around” was throated by Ms Jackson, she obeyed. It was Hermie, and the distance between Balvenie Avenue and the Bo-Kaap was filled by the whispered, “and make sweet love to me”.

When Sean left to study abroad, the secret lovers married by Muslim rites and Hermie became Hamied.

A month later, while awaiting trial, he was recruited into MK by Simon, who had been arrested at a roadblock for driving without a licence. It turned out that Simon had lived in Elsies River’s Malawi Kamp before he and his family were moved to Langa Township.

They had friends in common, and by the time Hermie was released on the grounds of insufficient evidence, he was familiar with most of the content of The Freedom Charter.

The first verse of Mary Oliver’s poem, Snow Geese, came to mind as Gabeba and I pondered the whereabouts of her errant husband: “Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last! What a task to ask of anything, or anyone, yet it is ours…”

It was the road between

Gaborone and Cape Town that centred him, Hermie told me once: “The open spaces of the Karoo freed me. I could think about my life, my brother.” Crossing the border post back into South Africa with his cargo of weapons, money and coded messages brought no fear or anxiety.

“I had a purpose. Every hour on the road was part of my reclaiming what was taken away from me. If the Boers killed me in the process, I would die a happy man.”

While Gabeba and I spoke, Hermie was travelling back from Wentworth in KwaZulu-Natal. He had offered to chauffeur Mona, a woman who just needed to leave Cape Town and the heartache associated with it, to be with her mense.

Hermie had obliged for no other reason but to honour the call of the road. To feed a hunger that emerged for the reason named by the late Keorapetse Kgositsile: “Whose thousand thundering voices shall I borrow to shout once more: Daar is k**in die land?”

In her poem, Mary Oliver describes the epiphany of being graced by the wonder of seeing geese in flight, and which she might never see again: “Maybe I will, someday, somewhere. Maybe I won’t. It doesn’t matter.

“What matters is that, when I saw them, I saw them as through the veil, secretly, joyfully, clearly.”

Hermie had had a glimpse of the unveiled and that of which the blues-wise Bra Willie Kgositsile had sung.