Moe Shaik: Documenting scars of the Struggle

Moe Shaik opens up about wounds apartheid inflicted upon South Africa

MOE Shaik always wanted to sing. He almost took a gig as the lead singer in a band after varsity – until his father nipped that, unceremoniously, in the bud.

On Thursday night, March 5, though, he might be picking up the mic at Exclusive Books’ branch in Hyde Park, Johannesburg, to sing – as he officially launches his memoir

The ANC Spy Bible, which ironically has, as one of its main characters, an apartheid security policeman dubbed the Nightingale.

The book, which took Shaik four years to write as a novel, before being re-framed as a memoir, tells the story of his life – from uMkhonto we Sizwe freedom fighter to accidental guerrilla intelligence operative and, ultimately, head of South Africa’s foreign intelligence operations.

It’s a project that he’s immensely proud of and still a little overawed by, he says, picking up a copy to sign at his Pretoria home.

“My wife Erin pushed me to write it, that and reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s (author of Eat, Pray and Love) Big Magic on Creative Living Beyond Fear. Erin said ‘you have to own your scars’, pushing me to keep healing and deal with the past. She’s Canadian, she knew all about apartheid but she wasn’t part of the Struggle. Instead, she’s astounded by how much the past is still with me and so many of our friends.”

The novel was savaged by two reviewers in its manuscript phase, but one celebrated editor and best-selling novelist, Mike Nicol, felt that Shaik’s efforts could really work as a memoir and that Shaik should be encouraged. Nicol volunteered to be that editor.

“I’ve never met Mike,” laughs Shaik about the incredibly close bond that developed between the two, over the next seven months of rewriting the memoir, “because I’m an insomniac, I’d write at night when my family was asleep and send him the chapters in the morning, and he’d send back his suggestions”.

The book is written as creative non-fiction, a style that worked for Shaik, who is adamant that he did not want to write just another history book.

The result is a fast-paced memoir, brutal in its honesty, that traverses Shaik’s nine-month detention without trial in Durban, his older brother Yunis’s torture in the cell down the corridor, the chance meeting with the Nightingale and the subsequent betrayal by two presidents in a liberated South Africa.

The Nightingale met Shaik in detention and, afterwards, passed him top secret security police files at his optometrist’s practice in Durban. The contents were so explosive – more than 880 ANC and MK members on the security police books, as either informers or double agents, right up to the ANC’s national executive committee itself – that Shaik found himself catapulted up the MK ranks, given command of his own specialised unit and flown out of the country in disguise, several times, to personally brief ANC president Oliver Tambo – and ANC intelligence supremo Jacob Zuma.

Yet when he tried to raise the issue of spies in the liberation movement’s ranks, after the advent of democracy, both Thabo Mbeki and Zuma shot him down; Mbeki by so constraining the Hefer Commission’s terms of reference, into the claims against Bulelani Ngcuka, that the files could not be referenced, rendering the commission toothless, and by Zuma refusing to testify at the commission without the ANC’s permission.

But both presidents would raise the issue of spies and double agents later; Zuma as recently as last year at the Zondo Commission. It’s those inconsistencies employed by two presidents for their personal expediency that rankles, admits Shaik, to say nothing of his experience much later – of trying to ensure the intelligence services met their constitutional mandate but instead being deliberately and directly thwarted, by then intelligence minister Siyabonga Cwele, to make the agencies protect Zuma and his kleptocratic regime instead.

Cwele would later suffer the public ignominy of seeing his wife arrested and jailed for running an international drug running ring – from their home.

“There was a shocking level of infiltration and betrayal in the ANC and MK, but there has been a deep resistance to talk about it,” Shaik says. For him, though the “Bible Project”, as it was dubbed, remains firmly in the past.

“At an individual level, I don’t want to remember the s*** anymore, but at a societal level we should know what caused people to become askaris (turncoats) and informers. Maybe then we will understand our society better, maybe then we will understand the levels of violence that underpins genocides and xenophobia, and the self-hatred that pours onto the streets.”

The blame, he believes, is entirely the fault of the apartheid system, which dehumanised everyone in its ambit, from his torturers to his erstwhile comrades. Shaik managed never to give in to temptation; if the Nightingale had been a godsend then Lieutenant, later Captain, Hentie Botha, of the Durban security police, had been his nemesis.

Botha never knew how close Shaik had come to ordering his assassination, going as far as to send a cadre to his unlisted address, under the ruse of conducting a face-to-face survey.

Not everyone was like Botha, not everyone was blameless either. While Shaik was writing the book, he would ask himself if it was possible to find good in bad or bad in good; if people who were ostensibly evil could be noble and vice versa.

Subsequent events, and the opportunity to write the book, have answered that for him. Throughout it all, he’s been reminded of the words of “Hans”, the Stasi (East German) spymaster who taught him his craft, in the dying days of the Cold War: “In intelligence you will work with s*** every day. Accept that there is more good in the world than bad.”

Shaik has also kept true to another of Hans’s aphorisms: “Stay one step ahead in the game and exit when your intuition tells you to.”

Today he’s a different man from the activist and spymaster he once was, he certainly doesn’t look 61 as he hugs his eight-year-old daughter Kaye.

He smiles at the compliment: “In my head I’m still the boy who went into the cell. I’m still waiting for that magical moment to be let out of the cell – to be that young boy again.”

He’s given himself to the book for the next six months. He’ll be marketing it, speaking to media and meeting the public, before plunging back into work again. “I’ve still got to make a living,” he grins.

He has learnt much during the last five years, mostly about himself. He has owned his scars. He only has one fear.

“I am dreading being asked to read passages aloud in public from the book. I can’t even do it in private without breaking down because some of the parts are still very raw, very emotional.”

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I don’t want to remember the s*** anymore, but at a societal level we should know what caused people to become ‘askaris’ (turncoats) and informers

Mo Schaik AUTHOR

| KEVIN RITCHIE MOE SHAIK in his Pretoria home. He says it took him four years to write his memoir, The ANC Spy Bible.