The ANC Spy Bible: Surviving Across Enemy Lines

‘We walked in wisdom with our shadows,

in search of the dead part of ourselves,

which would be our shelter’

Yvonne Vera

PART ONE

In the Belly of the Beast

1

I stood at the window of my apartment looking down on the dark streets. It was the end of June 1985, some months into Durban’s temperate winter. I stared at the far end of the street waiting to see them approach. Earlier I had agreed with Yunis and Ebrahim to be the decoy.

Ebrahim had to be saved. I accepted this decision. I was part of the operation to do that. But alone in the apartment, I had my doubts. The fear that had taken hold of me earlier had returned.

As I stood motionless looking through the window my anxiety increased. I wanted to run, but I could not move: I could not abandon my mission. So, I stayed transfixed by my apprehension and dread.

I’d met with Yunis and Ebrahim that afternoon to assess the danger that was closing in on us. I was under surveillance by the Security Branch. Right now, they were parked near my optometry practice. If there was any amusement in the situation it was that the drug dealers who patrolled these night-time streets had slunk off elsewhere.

My heart was beating fast as I kept watch. I was wracked with anxiety and fear and smoked furiously. I needed the nicotine to steady myself. But also, I felt useful. I had been affirmed by a senior leader of the organisation and that felt good. It excited me. I was torn between these conflicting emotions yet submitted my fate to the direction of my seniors and to the awful thrill of what was to come.

‘Is there no other option?’ I’d asked.

‘Unfortunately, not. There is no other way out. If you run, we lose control of the situation,’ Ebrahim had replied in his soft, controlled voice honed over years of living in the underground. He kept his gaze fixed on me. I noticed his thick bushy eyebrows. They enhanced his attractiveness. ‘The police don’t have anything other than the details from the roadblock. But if you run, they will suspect more. The legend will hold. I am convinced of this,’ he reassured me.

I played out that scene in my mind while I waited. I heard his voice, the calm reassurance. In the street there was no movement. In the flats about me, people slept through the night hours.

And then I saw them coming: a convoy of police reaction unit vehicles streaming down the street, their blue lights flashing. I heard the squeal of tyres, doors slammed, loud voices shouted instructions. I heard the heavy pounding of footsteps getting louder as they thundered up the stairway. And then that banging on the door.

I tried to convince myself that this was not happening. The angry thumping startled me out of my stupor. I went to the phone and made a call. The shouting at the door could no longer be ignored. They had come for me. They had come for the willing, naive decoy.

I was under surveillance due to an aborted attempt to cross Ebrahim into Swaziland some days earlier. We’d had to stop at a military roadblock, and our names were recorded. At the time and afterwards, Ebrahim was confident that the ‘legend’ we’d created to explain our trip would hold. But I was no longer sure of this. I knew my arrest would put him at risk. I knew that if he were caught, we would have failed. And failure was unacceptable.

‘Maputo’ – the authority supervising Ebrahim’s mission into the country – was adamant that Ebrahim not be captured. He knew too much about the underground units. His capture would risk decades of hard work. With so much at stake, Ebrahim had to be transferred to another unit that could undertake his exit from South Africa.

As I’d listened to Ebrahim detailing his handler’s orders, I’d realised that I was to be the sacrificial pawn in this game. The players in Maputo had made their move.

Ebrahim sensed my tension, perhaps he saw the fear in my eyes. If he did, he did not say anything about my alarm. On the contrary he tried to reassure me. He affirmed his belief in me. He evoked the strength of my commitment to the struggle and assured me that all would be well. We repeatedly assessed the details of what we believed the Security Branch knew. We convinced ourselves that they did not know much.

In the end I accepted that the police had nothing on me. All I had to do was hold out for three days. By that time Ebrahim would be safely out of the country.

‘Resist them,’ Yunis and Ebrahim encouraged me.

This was my mission: to survive detention for three days. Or so I thought. I nodded in agreement.

‘So be it,’ said Yunis. ‘Don’t worry. Ebrahim’s right. Without him the cops have nothing. It’ll be okay. I agree that Ebrahim must not get caught under any circumstances. We cannot afford that.’

Yunis was my immediate senior in the underground and my elder brother. His direction sealed the debate. I was never quite sure in which capacity I accepted his words. It didn’t matter, I was part of the plan.

Yet the nagging thought of my dispensability had stayed with me while I waited. I had struggled with the idea that I was to be the decoy. To argue otherwise was to show the weakness of my fragile sensitive side. Perhaps I was no longer of use to the unit. Perhaps I was the expendable pawn.

As quickly as these thoughts ran through my mind, I dismissed them.

Hadn’t Ebrahim said, ‘The movement has faith in you?’ Hadn’t Yunis been equally as positive? He would not recklessly abandon me, his brother.

And so, I accepted the decision. Controlled my anxiety, remembered that Ebrahim himself had undergone long periods of detention and torture. Had spent fifteen years on Robben Island for his role in the early sabotage campaigns of the African National Congress. Our trust in the movement’s leadership knew no bounds. They were our lodestars, our heroes, our pathbreakers. We, the foot soldiers, followed, perhaps blindly but willingly. It was the way of the movement. It was the way we lived our lives.

After this meeting with Yunis and Ebrahim, I had felt the need to see my partner, Soraya, but she had other plans for the night. I did not push her to change them. I should have.

The reality of my arrest only took hold when I heard the cell’s metal door clang shut. I do not remember being manhandled from the apartment. I do not remember being shoved down the stairs to a waiting van. I do not remember being bundled into the van. Or the drive to the police station. Or the gloating faces of the police as they booked me. I do not remember any of this. I was jarred back to my senses with the sharp turning of the key in the lock. I was alone. Alone with my beating heart. Alone with my nightmares. In the dim light, the emptiness of my cell was overwhelming. The pale olive colour of the walls and the cold concrete floor produced a claustrophobic, engulfing and terrifying silence.

I had been detained under Section 29 of the Internal Security Act. At the time of my arrest 60 people had already died in detention, Steve Biko among them back in 1977. Torture, both mental and physical, was intrinsic to detention yet the inquests into these deaths found that no one was responsible. South Africa’s security legislation abandoned detainees to the mercy of their interrogators.

I sat down on the bed and then it struck me: would I survive detention? I shuddered at the thought. The many tales of the torture and suffering of those who had gone before flooded my mind. I could not keep these thoughts away. I could see, in the dim light, their words of anguish written on the walls. I was a victim of my own awareness. My detention was no longer an imaginary event that might or might not occur. It was real. It had happened. I could taste fear in the dryness of my mouth. It oozed out as sticky sweat that pooled in my armpits and trickled down the sides of my body. I was unable to escape its dripping stench as it took control of me.

The horrors in my mind were awakened. I was trapped in them, forced to confront all that I dreaded. I slumped onto the mattress, petrified, waiting for the turning of the key. Waiting for my torturers to come. I tried desperately to control the fear. I needed to survive for three days. What was going to be was going to be. I had to accept the inevitability of torture. I was terrified that I would not be strong enough to survive.

I had no idea of what was to come. We had been too optimistic and confident in our assessment. We overestimated our abilities to survive. We underestimated the enemy’s capacity. The sacrificial pawns exacted a much greater price than I had expected. A price that my family also had to pay. And although they paid it willingly, the experience was to mark them forever.

Yet detention brought me into contact with the man who would become the Nightingale. And my interactions with him changed the direction of my life. We became players in an exciting but dangerous game. He was a Security Branch officer in the belly of the beast. I was a comrade in the underground. Meeting him was opportune. Carpe diem. I seized the moment.

2

I was born in the time of apartheid, 1959, a few years before South Africa became a republic. This piece of history stands out for me, not because of the event itself, but because it was the year my mother left us. I was two years old.

I was the fifth son in a noisy brood of boys, in a family with a complicated past. My biological mother was of mixed descent. Her half-white genes mingled with my father’s Indian ones creating in her offspring an interesting blend. We looked different, a shade somewhere in the middle of apartheid’s categories. Because we looked different, we were treated differently. We inhabited the uncomfortable spaces in between races in a country obsessed with classification.

I was a highly sensitive child. I felt – and still ‘feel’ – too much. I hurt too easily and often life simply overwhelms me. I used to be in terror of my sensitivity. Tears came easily and were a constant source of embarrassment both for me and my brothers. To survive in a household of boys, I learnt to hide my sensitive side. Boys can be harsh with one another even in their playful games.

Rabia, my mother, and Lambie, my father, met and married in Johannesburg. She had a son, Selim, from a previous marriage, and her sons with Lambie came in quick succession: Faizal (1954), Schabir (1956), Yunis (1957) then me, and in 1960, Shamim.

Apart from having so many children Rabia and Lambie did not have much of a relationship. A year after Rabia left, she was killed in a motor vehicle accident, so I never knew her and I have no memory of her. Nor did Lambie ever speak about why she left, no matter how often I asked him. He kept that door tightly shut.

I came to accept that Rabia gave birth to us and then simply left. Whatever her reasons for doing so, all I know is that her absence left in me a debilitating fear of abandonment. Her leaving was a secret whispered only among those who knew and evoked in me an insatiable curiosity. From an early age I developed an obsession with unravelling secrets.

My father’s silence about her was impenetrable and because of this she intrigued me to no end. His silence and the distance Rabia’s family kept from us compounded the mystery of my mother. Some of Rabia’s sisters chose to live a ‘white life’ in apartheid South Africa. Perhaps our blended hues reminded them of everything they wanted to deny.

Much to our good fortune, our neighbour in Springfield took pity on my father and his boisterous brood. Kaye Maharaj looked after us during the day, and at night she enjoyed my father’s company. They soon fell in love and married. She accepted us as her own and later, in 1966, gave birth to my sister, Rehana. It remains a testimony to Kaye’s good nature that she never used the terms ‘stepmother’ or ‘stepchildren’. Rehana was a wonderful addition to a family of boys and crept into our hearts. Because of her, we could, for a while, stop being boys.

The circumstances of our lives created a strong bond among my siblings. We learnt to take care of and look out for one another. Faizal, being the eldest, was put in charge. He washed us, fed us and played with us. This burdensome responsibility meant Faizal didn’t have much of a childhood, but he looked after us with the single-minded dedication of a loving parent.

Because I was terrified of the dark, it fell to Yunis to comfort me at night and to accompany me on those scary night calls to the toilet. He always acted as a gracious guardian to both Shamim and me, and this was why, in that moment with Ebrahim, I trusted him implicitly. He would look out for me. He was my brother who was afraid of nothing, who possessed the remarkable ability to endure hardships. Life had endowed him with an inner resilience.

A house full of boys is a complicated and messy place. From a young age my sensitive nature demanded order and tidiness. The disorder and clutter of my brothers disturbed my equilibrium. Over time this desire for order became another of my obsessions.

Raising children was not easy for my parents. They worked hard to overcome the trapping economics of the working class. We were well fed, but nothing went to waste. Our needs were taken care of but our wants were subjected to the balance between expenditure and income. Clothing was bought, darned when necessary and became hand-me-downs worn with pride and swagger. Our way of life was happy, and this cemented the bond between us.

Yunis, Shamim and I hung out together. We became a ‘gang’ in a rough neighbourhood full of gangs. We had to fight to win the respect of the street. We took care of one another and became adept at navigating street life, mastering the ability to detect trouble and danger.

I don’t know when it started but I became addicted to the art of observation. I sought answers through observation and became a keen surveyor of people and the unspoken communication between them. I enjoyed the ‘thrill’ that came from decoding non-verbal communications. My life as a spy began early.

My parents enveloped us in a family life that had an aura of openness with lots of fun, a fair share of trauma, heated debates and numerous political discussions. We came to embrace our ‘otherness’ as giving substance and meaning to our mixed identity.

My father was a worldly political animal who encouraged in us a consciousness of change. He had a passion for reading and insisted we do the same. Through endless discussions in a smoke-filled house he infected us, especially Yunis and me, with the dreams of revolution.

Yunis and I went to the University of Durban-Westville, a segregated one for Indians, in the immediate aftermath of the Soweto Uprising in 1976 when African school children revolted against apartheid education policies. The politics of that time were dominated by the Black Consciousness Movement led by the charismatic Steve Biko.

The uprisings awoke political voices across the country’s universities. These were exciting times of student mass meetings, of protest songs, marches, class boycotts, defiance and resistance. This was when we broke free from the forced complacency of our parents’ generation. This was the time that fuelled the dreams of a better future and the realisation that the apartheid state could be defeated. It was the calling of our generation.

If there was a watershed year in that time it was 1980. This was the year that ‘Indian’ and ‘Coloured’ students rose against apartheid in the way that ‘African’ students had done a few years earlier. Our segregated universities became the centre of the struggle against apartheid. From the universities the uprising spread to the schools and soon entire communities were involved.

Joining the ANC was a natural progression. In this Yunis travelled to Swaziland and made contact with ANC representatives. He returned as the head of a newly established underground unit called MJK, named after the affable ANC leader, Mandla Judson Khuzwayo. Yunis’s first act as leader of this unit was to recruit me. It was a moment I cannot forget.

I had completed my studies at university, graduating with degrees in science and optometry. In 1984, I opened an optometry practice. As it turned out, this was a perfect cover for our underground activities.

The ANC was a banned organisation and to be accepted into it was an affirmation of our commitment to the struggle. It was a membership rooted in sacrifice, dedication, loyalty and discipline, in the eradication of apartheid. More importantly it was the path to the building of a non-racial nation.

Shortly after my induction into MJK, we were joined by Jayendra Naidoo, a student leader. He came from a politically active family with a long involvement in the struggle. Equally importantly he had a razor-sharp mind, a cautious disposition and a resourceful network. For us to survive we had to master the art of secrecy. No one could know that we had joined the ANC, let alone know of our unit, MJK. During the day we lived our ‘normal’ lives but under the cover of darkness we pursued our secret agenda.

In the 1980s, communities organised themselves around issues that affected them the most. It was a creative and effective form of resistance. Grassroots organisations mushroomed throughout the country which eventually led to the formation of national organisations such as the United Democratic Front and the Congress of South African Trade Unions – collectively referred to as the ‘mass democratic movement’.

I loved the non-racial character of the mass democratic movement. It gave me a sense of a more embracing identity. It made me see the humanity in the ‘white’ comrades willing to do their part. I stopped thinking in terms of colour and as a victim. In short, non-racialism liberated me from my own prejudices and biases.

Under this banner people of all hues were mobilised against apartheid, not only in South Africa but in various capitals around the world. The ANC championed the cause of non-racialism, from which it derived its strength. It was not a party of the oppressed. It certainly was not an Africanist party. It was a movement of liberation, both local and global. It brought together all those willing to fight for the eradication of legislated racism. We called one another ‘comrades’, a term of endearment and respect, a mark of loyalty, a commitment to liberation.

Like other ANC internal underground units, MJK immersed itself in the mass democratic movement. We continued like this for many years until we were tasked in the mid-1980s with the mission that was to change my life. Yunis was summoned to Swaziland. At a briefing there he was told that MJK had been selected to bring into the country a high-ranking member of the ANC named Ebrahim. We were to provide all the logistics for him within the country including keeping him safe. Ebrahim’s mission was to assess the underground units of the ANC to determine how the struggle to overthrow the apartheid regime could be intensified.

3

Our unit successfully infiltrated Ebrahim into the country and for six months managed to keep his presence a secret. His mission had been highly successful and now the time had come to get him back across the border so that he could report to the ANC leadership. He was excited, adamant that the conditions for insurrection were developing.

‘What I need to do,’ he told us, ‘is convince the ANC that it has to intensify the armed struggle to capture this growing revolutionary mood.’

It was heady stuff.

Part of Ebrahim’s six-month mission had included liaison with an European couple, Klaas