A Demonstration in Winter.

It's midday in the city, another cold day in winter and the clouds are tinged yellow from the pollution. The police have blocked off all traffic for a block in every direction and have pulled back, fingering their weaponry eagerly as they stand alongside their poor cousins - assorted traffic policeman who stand with arms folded by their cars and motorbikes squealing static and gibberish. A demonstration is underway - if you can call fifteen women wearing T-shirts choosing to sit on a pavement a demonstration.

They’re nervous, you can see it in the way they keep looking at each other. They know they’re Breaking the Rules. Not the rules of the country, although they’re doing that - the rules of ‘good behaviour’. Nice people just dont do things which will make the police target them.
We're on the main road between the military headquarters in Johannesburg, and a large park, which normally is filled with workers lying sleeping in the sun but on a day like today, is empty and strewn with all the trappings and scatterlings of Africa - plastic packets, food wrappers and garbage.

Fat permanent force soldiers stand on the other side of the metal fence and watch cheerfully, as the women sit, their arms linked, wearing the bright yellow t-shirts of the UDF. I'm with a smallish group of other lefty types and assorted members of the press, standing on the otherside of the now deserted road, watching as the plainclothes secret policemen circle around, their Uzi's swinging casually. One holds a video camera and pans back and forth over us all, capturing us for later posterity in some dingy screening room at John Vorster Square.

At the far end of the empty park behind us, I can see a wall of curious black people watching, chewing on their takeaways and keeping a definite distance from the soldiers who begin to emerge and take up position, their helmets looking Star Wars-like in the bright cold grey of the day. I wonder just what the people are thinking as they watch these well fed whites doing their version of a demonstration.

A yellow prison truck glides down the empty road towards us, and the secret policemen laugh and chatter with the regular blue uniformed counterparts as the van pulls to a halt beside the small group of plainly nervous women. The police efficiently begin grabbing them and ushering them into the van -some go willingly, others - imbued with bravado - refuse to get up, and the policemen with shrugs and grins, drag them and bundle them up and inside. The clicking of the camera's from the media people around me sounds like crickets in thick bush.

Knowing the ways of the police, I start looking around for escape routes - because as soon as the truck is gone the only diversion for the circling secret policemen, is the group of onlookers. And the very fact that we're there means we must be somehow aligned to this flagrant little breach of the Emergency Regulations. A photographer has the same idea, and we quietly begin to edge back and down the street - this catches the attention of some of the policemen, who speak hurriedly to the plainclothes men, and as we walk - two men detach themselves from the parked cars around which the forces of law and order are arranged, and begin to follow.

The photographer and I move as fast as we can without breaking into a run. The barricade across the road, manned by the regular traffic police is reached, and we casually saunter through - and move towards the nearest corner, that reached, and hidden briefly from view of the approaching policemen, we break into a run. For the next hour or so, we play cat and mouse back and forth through the city streets, the men tagging us and taking by turns to come close and circle ahead of us. The photographer and I cant work out what they're doing - perhaps they're just being bloody minded, and practising their following skills, or maybe they know that if they grab us - they're gonna have to bundle us through a number of city blocks and there're a thousand opportunities then for us to get away.

Many things slip through your mind as you’re being chased through crowds in a modern city, by secret policemen. Among other things - that you’ve somehow stepped into a movie, and also, just how utterly alone you are. To add to the surrealism, I note the bright lurid colours of film posters for the latest Disney flick, outside a cinema.

It’s bad enough being in South Africa in the first place, then on top of that, to be part of a minority who can see the opression occurring, but who so are ridiculously naïve in their approach it’s insane. They cant seriously believe that they are contributing towards the overthrow of a monolithic structure like the South African government, even though they believe they are.

The white left are children. They dont know anything.

There’s a commune across from the double storey house I’m staying in, filled with various student activists. The notice board just inside the door has various letters and printed leaflets - one details what to do in the event of a police search. Of course under the present legislation, the short answer is: You can do nothing.

They hold meetings in the kitchen of the commune, a few feet away from the telephone - and smile patronisingly when I try and explain about infinity transmitters - devices which can open the microphone of a telephone reciever so that eavesdropping can be achieved silently. They dont talk about ‘important stuff’ on the telephone, and that’s sufficient.
Important stuff being the holding of meetings to ultimately churn out leaflets and pamphlets and stickers.

I got shown a leaflet once, crudely drawn and garish - showing PW Botha dangling a small black child by one ankle - the bright letters stating
‘BEHOLD, THE CHRIST CHILD DETAINED’.
I couldnt help but laugh. What the hell was this going to do?

I explained to them that I had an electronics expert friend, who’d made a small transmitter - tiny enough to fit inside a cigarette packet - and by the careful turning of a screw, you could override the sound on TV and broadcast your own soundtrack for a radius of three or four kilometres. Why not create a small package the size of a shoebox, wiped clean of fingerprints, with a taperecorder, and play a message over the soundtrack of the nightly eight o clock news?
People blinked. Then carried on discussing the events of the day.

I didnt get it. Wasnt there a war on? Didnt they want to communicate the reality of the situation to Joe Public? Surely doing it in a hi tech way which scared the thugs employed by the Police Force shitless, was a fun and effective route? Using superior technology to achieve your aims, and kick some ass, and have fun in the process?

I knew it would work, an more importantly, it would freak out the authorities completely - instead of ineffective pamphlets by amateur propagandists, or bomb blasts which could be used to cause anti-Struggle feeling, suddenly they’d be confronted by non violent attacks from a quarter they werent expecting.

They’d have to use the Post Office to try and track down the source of signal, and then get there to grab the transmitter - a good four minutes or more of whatever message you fancied, broadcast to a selected suburb. Yummy. But the Lefties werent interested.

Still moving at speed through the crowds. It’s invasion of the body snatchers all over again, or so it feels. Surrounded by people just going about their daily lives, unaware of the shitstorm raining down - currently on me.

Of all things, we slip inside a bank, and pause panting beside the door, peering out - one of the followers bounds up to the door and stares at us then takes up position, looking back and forth over the heads of the crowds for his partner. A security guard comes up to us, we ask to speak to the manager, and after hurried explanations and pointing out of the bearded white man standing with his arms crossed just outside the door, we manage to talk our way into being shown past the tellers, down some back stairs and deep into the bowels of the building, and finally out onto the street a block away.

We're near Khotso House, the centre for assorted democratic organisations - and thus the target of any number of assorted surveillance squads and camera's - we decide the hell with it, and run for the entrance and up the stairs to the Black Sash offices, where a young woman I know works.
The place is full as usual with hundred of assorted black people, sitting in the rows of chairs and benches, patiently waiting their turn to go into one of the little offices and have their problems solved. Not that they ever really are, but it keeps the staff busy trying.

The woman's name is Joy, and she's become something of a friend - well that's what one calls it when you find yourself utterly attracted to someone who doesn’t mind the attention but doesn’t want to screw your brains out or marry you or both, preferably. Cute as a button. Dammit.

We slip in-between the long suffering rows of people and into her office - and a tall man called Mzwahke's sitting there with her. Mzwahke styles himself as 'the People's Poet' and has used all the various government actions against him in an ongoing PR campaign to let everyone know just how dangerous he is. Sort've Rod McKuen without the talent.

He's an arrogant asshole in fact, and sits there staring down his nose at us - difficult to do seeing as he's sitting and we're standing, but eventually he gets the hint and leaves. Joy smiles, and yet again a wide variety of lascivious thoughts well up. Ever know a person who you'd be content to lick their face forever, if they'd only just consent to it? Mmm. We spent many evenings drinking red wine, and chattering over Italian food during lunchtimes, and I suppose she was a friend.

We talk, and I explain the situation and we hand over the film canister - she puts it in an envelope and promises to mail it out of the area. With hindsight of course we should've just asked her to hold onto it and give it to me at some point in the future, but we didnt.

The photographer and I left the building, promising to stay in touch - briefly bonded together by the little flurry of police action against us. The spool of film never arrived, not surprisingly, as nearly a year later the word spread through the Leftist circles that Joy Harnden was a police spy. Many people didnt believe it, myself included - but she quickly disappeared, leaving shock and anger in her wake amidst the Black Sash and JODAC members. Of course the Left closed ranks and pretended that she'd been under investigation for years, and that it was no big surprise. But it was.

The landlord had turned off the power some time back, and I was living in a state of candle-lit splendour, due to non payment of rent. Not because of any particular statement or anything. I just didn’t have any money.

Next door to me were a group of people loosely connected to a debt collection agency - and I’d gotten friendly with them over time. So in the mornings I’d go next door and use their bath, while they were making up joints and cleaning their weapons for the day. No big deal. A black canister lay on the table one time, gleaming like some high grade fashion house accessory aerosol - and got told it was some sort of heavy duty gas canister used by the police. Tear Gas? I asked - nope, some sort of weird nerve gas type of thing. Oh - cool, I replied, taking the joint and swallowing smoke, en route to the bath.

Much to the fear and loathing of the landlord, we’d strung an extension cord from their balcony to mine, and so come night time, I could play my radio in the dimness.
All in all a comfortable arrangement.

I recall late one night by candlelight, chatting with Joy Harnden, and hearing the unmistakable sound of a distant explosion and subsequent echo through the late night urban landscape. And read the following day it was Khotso House being bombed by 'unknown persons'.

The police descended on my apartment shortly after Joy was exposed and disappeared, but luckily I caught a flash of the blue uniforms as they were coming up the stairs, and ducked next door, into the safety of the debt collection mobsters. We watched through the peephole as they pounded on the door. Eventually they gave up and left.

I moved soon after.

Disappearing into an endless stream of anonymous apartments - phone number under someone elses name, bank account ditto, apartment jumping.

I kept on standing up on stages though, spitting venom at the assembled crowds in whatever venues I could find. Staring in amazement at these people whose lives kept on moving in some predestined path that they somehow trusted.

Already I'm trying to cope with the leftover damage from the Army. Nightmares, jumping at unexpected sounds, hours standing beside windows and watching Just In Case. Never relaxing for fear that the moment I do, some unspeakable Machine will burst in and drag me back to the violence and fear of the Army, the beatings, the physical exhaustion, the cowering animal I became. I can't drink too much either, because that leads to bouts of uncontrollable hysterical crying. Not good if you're supposedly a suave sophisticated activist type, standing on stages and doing your bit for the Struggle.

So I'm filled with ghosts.

And the realisation that Joy was a spy, tears scabs off wounds I didn't even know I had.

And I continue on, the anger increasing.

And I am haunted.