Spooked by spy stance
Donald Card's letter “Informers Aren’t Evil” (DD, Sep 4) deals with a complex issue badly. Apartheid was evil and every problem in SA stemmed from that. To say the laws were legal at that time is to ignore their impact on the majority of our countrymen and women.
Robert Sobukwe was effectively interned for nine years under those laws on Robben Island. What was his crime?
Steve Biko and Mapetla Mohapi were murdered under these laws. To compare an informer – whom I acknowledge saved lives by preventing murder irrespective of the law they opposed – to those who befriended and betrayed the people Jonathan Ancer writes about in Betrayal: The Secret of Apartheid Spies, who were trying to change the law by peaceful means, is obscuring the issue.
In the mid-1980s, when this was taking place, the liars in the National Party were telling “whites” we faced a total onslaught by the ANC, yet at the same time they were negotiating with Nelson Mandela to end the very system that the scum Ancer writes about were gathering intelligence for through their spying.
The people he writes about are not heroes. Now they hide from what they did. How heroic is that? You only need to read how the people who were arrested were treated, not for illegal actions but for their sense of Ubuntu. Alex Boraine's son was one of those arrested and tortured because of campus informers, yet he never saw the inside of a courtroom because they informed on ideas, not on illegality. We know that ideas outside of the Broederbond's naked racism terrified our socalled leaders and their agents in the security police.
Under the laws Card defends I was forced to do national service and while there, a spy who operated at the then Natal University tried to recruit me to enrol at Rhodes University. All I had to do was spy. That was never going to happen.
I was enough of a coward for not refusing to serve in the navy as the sacrifice was too great.
They say age brings wisdom. That is clearly not universal. Andrew Macdonald, via e-mail