Motherhood and malice
‘They gave my toddler crayons while they interrogated me’
In 1987 apartheid minister of law and order Adriaan Vlok boasted that the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, had been crushed in the Western Cape. For Shirley Gunn and other MK operatives, nothing was further from the truth. One of her missions involved carrying a limpet mine in a custard box. Her target: Western Cape Military Command. She describes her ordeal in detention after she was arrested
The conditions were disgusting. The toilet was blocked and every time I flushed it, excrement rose out of the bowl and flooded the floor. It was midwinter and freezing. The policewoman guarding me sat in the passage on the other side of the yard and our hospital-style metal bed was positioned in line with the open door so she could observe us. The shower water in the uncovered yard was icy cold. I tried to maintain some sort of routine with a toddler in this filthy concrete environment, washing nappies and singing songs. Haroon had complete trust in me and in the few adults he knew in the underground, but we were now at the mercy of the enemy.
I would learn later that during my detention, over 150 women, many of whom were members of the Wynberg branch of the United Women’s
Organisation, marched to the security police headquarters in Loop Street, led by Mom, Ragmat Jaffer and Dorothy Boesak, demanding my release and that of all Section 29 detainees.
Most days, we were taken to Culemborg [the railway police headquarters on the Foreshore] and I was interrogated. Haroon was always with me. To keep him busy during interrogation, the security police brought him wax crayons and a colouring book. I didn’t let him out of my sight.
On Wednesday 4 July 1990, two senior social workers from the Department of Health and Welfare Services, Mrs Robertson and Mrs van den Heever, came into the interrogation room at Culemborg. They spoke about the Children’s Act and said that the Wynberg Police Station cells were an unsuitable place for a child, according to the act.
“I know the act, I’m a social worker,” I replied. “I got my degree at UCT; where did you get yours?”
“At Free State University in Bloemfontein,” Mrs Robertson said.
“I’m surprised,” I countered. “You’re not acting ethically. Shame on you!” I put Haroon on the table and I lifted up his top. “Do you see any bruises? No bruises! No scratches!” I said. “What does that say? It says he’s well looked after, even in inhumane living conditions, as you correctly call them. There’s no reason why he should be removed from me. He’s breastfed and doesn’t know anyone besides me.”
Mom had only spent a few days with us in Melton Wold so she barely knew Haroon; neither did Jenny and her children. I certainly wasn’t going to tell the social workers the only people Haroon knew were a handful of cadres, among them his dad, Aneez Salie.
But the social workers persisted: “It’s no good you talking. We’ve got an arrest warrant for Haroon and we are taking him away.” They slapped the warrant on the table, yanked Haroon out of my arms and took him, screaming at the top of his lungs, to their car outside. They drove off as I stood there, enraged and helpless, trapped behind the metal gates. I stormed back to the interrogation room and announced that I was going to stop eating until Haroon was returned to me. This snap decision went completely against my better judgment. The worst thing for a detainee to do is go on a hunger strike. Starvation makes you weak and detainees should do everything in their power to stay strong. That was my philosophy and it worked in my favour when I was in detention in 1985, but this was early July 1990 and it seemed as though it was my only option against the security police. Their response was to threaten that if I persisted with the hunger strike I’d be sent to the notorious Kroonstad Prison in the Free State.
When I was back at the Wynberg police cell that evening without Haroon, my breasts started to become painful and engorged and I realised I had made a terrible decision. If I didn’t eat, my body’s ability to produce milk would be affected. I decided I was going to eat and drink and I was going to express my milk and insist that they give it to Haroon, wherever he was. Breast milk would be my new weapon.
Over the next few days, when the interrogation was getting tough, I told the security policemen that my breasts were sore and I needed to express milk. I demanded a basin of hot water to make the task easier. The men exited the interrogation room and a security policewoman stayed behind with an empathetic cleaner who brought the basins of hot water. I expressed the milk into the basin, turning the water milky white. When it cooled down, I’d ask for more hot water. The cleaner would leave the room with what looked like basins of milk. The men outside the interrogation room must have thought they’d captured a Jersey cow.
When questioning resumed, they’d be disarmed, struggling to pick up where they had left off, so I’d express my breast milk strategically as a diversion tactic. I spoke about this later at a special women’s Truth and Reconciliation Human Rights Violations Committee hearing on 7 August 1996, illustrating how it was possible to use our gender to our advantage.
‘Their tactics must not work’
The days went by and because Haroon was no longer present, interrogations intensified. By then I knew he’d been taken to Tenterden in Wynberg, a place of safety for children, but the knowledge didn’t make things easier. The security police then brought tape recordings of his crying voice calling for me. They told me I was a terrible mother, but that Haroon would be returned to me if I co-operated with them. I was traumatised, but I understood that this was their strategy to break me. I had to keep on withholding information, not break down, not let them see any sign of weakness. I relied on my training and my previous experience in solitary confinement. “Their tactics must not work,” I told myself, while terrible conflict and guilt raged inside me.
Since Aneez and I had agreed we’d forfeit the Clifton flat if anything happened to either of us, I eventually took the security police there, convinced that Essa would know I’d been detained by then and that Aneez and the comrades with him would know too. The security police got me to open the door, pushing me in front of them as a human shield so that if we were shot at by whoever might be inside, I’d be the one to take the bullets. Our sparsely furnished flat was neat — and deserted.
A week later, the security police informed me that I would get Haroon back; no further details. On Thursday that week, they brought him to me at Culemborg. We were then taken back to the Wynberg police cells and told we’d be taken to another prison the next day.
Haroon’s beautiful, smiling eyes were sunken; he was dehydrated and had lost weight. He adjusted very quickly to the police cell, though, trotting around, happy to be reunited with me after eight days of separation, and he soon started suckling again.
We were fetched the next day. I was handcuffed and the two of us were ushered to the back seat of a police car and guarded by a black security policewoman. Two security policemen sat in front. They took a route that went via Sunset Beach, driving around Sunset Circle a number of times to check if we were being followed, then along Baden Powell Drive, past Monwabisi and Macassar, and over Sir Lowry’s Pass. They were silent as they drove, and demoralised, I thought, as it was not their plan for Haroon and I to be reunited. That order had come from elsewhere.
They drove further and further away from Cape Town and eventually turned right at the Caledon offramp. A little further on, they parked at the Caledon Medium-Term Prison. We were locked up in the hospital cells of the women’s section. There were two toilets and a bathroom with a big bathtub as you entered the section via a small adjoining yard. Along the left-hand side of a passage to the right were three lock-up cells. We had the first cell, but I made sure another was kept open and used it to store our clothes. I put the mattress on the cold passage floor for us to sit on. We had the hospital section to ourselves — much bigger and cleaner than the Wynberg police cells — but for how long I didn’t know.
That Friday night, Haroon started vomiting and had acute diarrhoea. No-one responded when I pressed the bell in the cell. By Saturday his condition had worsened, but the warders insisted we’d have to wait until Monday for the district surgeon to attend to him. By nightfall, Haroon had deteriorated. Rain was hammering down and the wind was howling. I rang the bell incessantly and shouted for help through the metal mesh and bars, but nobody came. By Sunday, my child was disappearing in front of my eyes. He was so ill that he flopped in his pushchair, too weak to hold up his head. Again I was told we’d have to wait until Monday. I tried to feed Haroon but nothing stayed down. I was hysterical and started fearing his gastroenteritis was engineered and he’d been deliberately infected.
Dinky cars
At 10am on Monday, the district surgeon, Dr du Plessis, sauntered in and after examining Haroon said, “There’s nothing wrong with him. He has gastroenteritis that I can treat. There’s something wrong with you.” It was obvious that in his mind I was a terrorist. The way he looked at me was just like how the security police did. I kept the medicines Dr du Plessis prescribed for Haroon with his name on the bottles as an exhibit in case I ever had to go to court. The fact that nobody came to my aid over the weekend was inexcusable; a child of Haroon’s age could have died without prompt treatment. I slowly nursed him back to health and eventually he was his old self again, toddling about. The passage was perfect for the dinky cars Jenny had packed for him: they sped down the shiny, polished surface at tremendous speed. We’d play for hours. Once, Haroon attempted to unlock the grid-door lock to the yard with wax crayons and ended up jamming it instead.
Two female warders saw to us, bringing us our three daily meals on trays, letting us out when the security police came to interrogate me and supervising our exercise time in the yard. We were let out to exercise for an hour each day — half an hour in the morning and half an hour in the afternoon. To prevent Haroon from falling and scraping his knees, I put him on my shoulders and we walked around the yard together. I drew a large happy sun on the wall with the multicoloured crayons. The warders didn’t stop me, but they didn’t like the sketch of a female warder with a large bunch of keys that I drew on the ground in the yard. The winter rains washed it away, but the bright, smiling sun remained visible until we were released.
Perched on my shoulders, Haroon had a bird’s-eye view of a mother kiewiet sitting on her eggs in a vent in the yard and a father bird observing her from the top of the surrounding high wall, bringing her things to eat. As time went by, the eggs hatched and the father bird worked harder, bringing more worms for the mother and chicks. We were there long enough to witness the life cycle from eggs to chicks, but not long enough to see them flying to freedom.
I stormed back to the interrogation room and announced that I was going to stop eating until Haroon was returned to me
Rain was hammering down … I rang the bell and shouted for help through the bars, but nobody came. By Sunday, my child was disappearing in front of my eyes