Our man in mbabane, p.30
Our Man in Mbabane, page 30
“You worked for the Central Statistical Office of Swaziland, correct?” Matthew asked.
“Yes, but I was recruited by the African National Congress to go to Swaziland to take guns and munitions into South Africa,” I said. “I just went down there and was lucky to find that job.” I instantly regretted my tone but couldn’t stop myself. I had put it to them as a leftist challenge, something we sometimes encountered from other lefties in London. It’s like a dare: “I’ve been running guns. What have you been doing for the socialist cause?” Christopher took it well while Matthew grew quiet. The truth was, they were doing plenty just by keeping the bookstore open.
“Well, we’re glad you survived,” Christopher said. “That is certainly a worthy cause to support,” he continued, and we left it at that.
My earlier tone indicated how fragile my state of mind was at the time. Depleted. I was fortunate to survive mentally for three years in Swaziland. Christopher and Matthew were gracious enough to let me stay with them indefinitely, though I chose to move to other homes while people were on vacation, reminding me of my first few months in Swaziland.
The job search was going implausibly badly. I somehow had neglected to contemplate how I would appear to international consulting organizations in London: a foreigner. Why would they hire an American? I’d have to be extraordinarily qualified in some high-demand specialized area with zero supply of available British citizens. My skills were hardly that august.
One evening, in a pub, a professor from Bagehot gave me the address of his friend, Dr. Kevin Carter, who was working for an economic consulting firm in Philadelphia. I dutifully sent off a cover letter and a résumé, expecting nothing to happen. And nothing did. But about a month later, his friend tracked me down through a series of phone calls—I was moving from house to house, not wishing to outstay my welcome—and told me if I ever came to Philadelphia, he’d like to talk to me. He apologized for not getting in touch sooner, but unfortunately he had left the firm where my letter was sent, and they had only forwarded it to him recently.
Somehow this sounded auspicious to me, and I set off for the US about a week later, heading straight for Philadelphia. The interview with Dr. Carter and his nerdy colleague, Dr. Thomas Eickman, both PhDs from the University of Pennsylvania, was a long chat about my work at Bagehot for the two professors. They liked my knowledge of programming matrix algebra in Fortran. Their model of the US economy was the same design as the UK one I’d worked on in London. But they were uninterested in my work in Swaziland except that they viewed it as a public service job—something one does when young. Dr. Carter had been in the Peace Corps in Latin America, so he felt he understood my reason for going to Africa. Little did he know.
This discussion was the first positive encouragement I had gotten in two months of job searching. My savings were nearly exhausted. But without an immediate offer of work, I traveled to DC and stayed with a friend from my LSE days.
One small consulting company specializing in Africa had a position I was qualified to do. The Eritrean gentleman who interviewed me in their dismally decorated offices was encouraging and said he’d put me on a proposal for a job in Botswana, but only if a professor at Colby College in Maine approved me. This professor, having worked in Botswana, was trusted by the government in Gaborone.
I took a long, slow series of trains and buses to Maine and stayed a night in a cheap hotel, having arranged to see the professor the next day.
The interview was more of a long reminiscence about our experiences working overseas, what we liked, what was challenging, and how we resolved common issues. I left it with no expectation of a job offer, but to my surprise, they offered me the position in Botswana several months later. I turned it down.
Immediately after speaking to the Colby professor, I phoned Dr. Carter in Philadelphia, as he had requested. To my amazement, he offered me a job as associate economist in his firm at an annual salary of $25,000, starting as soon as possible. Having not lived in the US for six years, I had no idea if the pay was a lot of money or nothing. I was broke. Exhausted. Drained. So, accepting the job immediately and unconditionally was easy. I started the following Monday after renting a cheap apartment in West Philly. My life might have gone differently if the Botswana offer had arrived earlier, but I felt too grateful to Dr. Carter to accept the African one by the time it surfaced. He was taking a risk on me, an unknown with no US-based business experience, someone who might prove unreliable or jump ship quickly. I couldn’t let him down.
The $25,000 wasn’t a lot of money, even in 1981. But my work quality, efficiency, and productivity were stupendous, earning me a significant pay increase after my one-year tenure. Having never worked in a business environment, I was unclear about my duties, so I did far more than was expected. I was assigned to be the forecaster for the US long-term model. I quickly shortened the time we all spent on the forecast to one week each quarter from four weeks. I became popular.
After dispensing with the Botswana job, much to my surprise, I was contacted directly by Ruth First, the famous journalist and Joe Slovo’s wife, about a position in Mozambique. Ruth was the operational head of the Centre for African Studies at the Universidade Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo, sharing the leadership with Aquino de Bragança, the CEA founder and director. I assumed Walter had helped set this up after I asked him about working in Mozambique.
To be contacted by Ruth First to do a job in Mozambique was a great honor. Ruth was a very prominent anti-apartheid journalist in South Africa before going into exile. Her investigative journalism exposed many of the brutalities of apartheid. By 1960, she was banned, ending her South African journalism career since banning forbids publishing. In exile, she continued to write about political injustices in Africa, particularly in South Africa.
When I replied to Ruth, expressing doubt about doing the work in Maputo, my life was complicated. I’d only worked for two months at the consulting firm and didn’t want to jeopardize my financial security. Also, I preferred not to disappoint Dr. Carter. Ruth replied to me, indicating that she’d work on alleviating the issues that concerned me. Our correspondence lasted a year, always focusing on getting me to Mozambique to complete part of a Mozambican transport sector project. In retrospect, I may have misinterpreted her interest in having me work in Mozambique.
As my first year of work in the US progressed, my stature grew in the eyes of my boss and the other senior colleagues. Thus, when I approached Dr. Carter in the spring of 1982 about going to Mozambique, he was reluctant to refuse my request. Instead, he said I could take a short-term unpaid leave, provided it was between forecast cycles. I accepted those conditions and the consulting job in Mozambique and flew to Maputo in June of ’82.
As was the case in Swaziland, housing was in short supply, so I stayed at various people’s homes until a longer-term solution, a couch in a family’s home, was offered. The Marshalls were some of the nicest people I’d ever met and very generous. They and their two young children welcomed me into their home and shared everything. Food was scarce, however. It was my pleasure to bring them supplies—canned hams, curried chicken, etc.—from my work trips to Swaziland and South Africa. Broken rice boiled with dried fish was the staple of the house; it was about all you could buy in Maputo at the time unless you had foreign currency. Occasionally, people sold special items, like gelato, in the street. When there was nothing else, fishy rice was what they had to eat, much to the children’s dismay. The electricity was often off. The elevators had long since ceased to operate due to a lack of skilled workers and spare parts. I carried my bicycle up eleven flights of stairs each day after work. There was water, but cold showers were the order of the day. Socialism wasn’t proving to be the enthralling system of government my Marxist textbooks envisioned.
Ruth was brilliant, quick witted, and highly agile in conversation. One colleague at the CEA described a meeting with government officials where she had subtly turned the discussion in favor of her viewpoint. They all agreed with the proposal she wanted but thought they had come up with the idea themselves. They owned it and left the meeting greatly satisfied with its conclusion, not feeling manipulated in the least.
One couldn’t but be impressed with Ruth’s resilience and fortitude. In 1963, she was imprisoned by the South African Police under the government’s “Ninety-Day Detention” law, whereby the SAP could arrest anyone suspected of a politically motivated crime and hold them without access to a lawyer for ninety days. They put her in solitary confinement, and when they released her after the three-month ordeal, they let her walk a short distance outside the prison before re-arresting her. They kept her for a total of 117 Days (the title of her book about the experience), and she never broke; she never told them anything they didn’t know already.
But working for her wasn’t easy; her humor was acerbic, and she used it when you were slow witted or made mistakes. But it was impossible not to admire her; her intellectual power was astonishing, and her knowledge of the politics and history of southern Africa was breathtaking. She was the perfect person to head the CEA operationally.
The first part of the project was to interview the shippers in Swaziland. For the shippers in South Africa, I preferred to have a new identity, which Ruth said she could arrange. So, I duly handed over some passport photos and ultimately received a Mozambican passport.
While I was completing the work on the Swaziland paper, Ruth invited me to lunch at her and Joe’s house in the Sommerschield neighborhood of Maputo. Sommerschield was a gated and guarded community to protect people like Joe and Mozambican officials from raids by the South African Defense Force. In January 1981, the SADF entered Mozambique to attack the ANC in Matola, a suburb of Maputo. Both sides lost lives, but unfortunately, many SADF members were able to return to South Africa. Thus, the attack was sufficiently successful from the South African viewpoint to cause apprehension among the ANC in Mozambique.
The lunch was simple, some sandwiches and juice, but this was luxurious in Maputo at the time. Afterward, Joe invited me to play a game of chess with him. Ruth retreated to another room to read or work. We both played atrociously, and the game ended in a draw. While playing, Joe sketched out a task for me. He knew I would be interviewing the South African Railway authorities about their views on successfully competing against Mozambique. So, he asked me to locate the SAR computers. This mission would be my last for the ANC.
In contrast to Ruth, Joe was one of the most amiable people I’d ever met. Kind, considerate, and genial, Joe was a person everyone loved immediately. The word was that the MK troops in Mozambique adored him and valued his political classes as a highlight of their military training. By 1982, Joe had been a senior commander of the ANC’s military wing, MK, for many years. In 1985, he became the first White member of the ANC’s National Executive Committee.
I certainly couldn’t refuse to try to do the assignment Joe gave me. I would have tried to do anything he asked. Later, it occurred to me that this task might have been the only reason Ruth had been so adamant about having me come to Mozambique. It seemed less likely that the ANC would have felt my request to work in Mozambique was a reasonable reward for my gunrunning activities. I’ll never know the answer as to why I was hired for this consulting job. However, re-reading my old correspondence with Ruth, I suspect it was the former reason that took me to Mozambique; Joe must have urged Ruth to employ me. I’d never met Ruth before going to Mozambique, only Joe.
Here’s what she wrote to me by hand after obtaining the project funding:
[Note: SIDA/SAREC are Swedish aid agencies, and the Polana was the top hotel in Maputo at the time.]
It was an enormous privileged for me to work for Ruth, get paid, and have access to a vehicle into which I could load food and other supplies after traveling to Swaziland and South Africa. So, I diligently worked on the transport project and produced two papers, both well received by my CEA colleagues, though the news wasn’t positive. The shippers in Swaziland and South Africa preferred the port of Durban because it was reliable. Shipping via Mozambique was far slower and more problematic than via Durban. With the Mozambican railway, you couldn’t track where your cargo was nor when—or even if—it would arrive at its destination. This uncertainty created by the inefficiencies of the Mozambican rail and port system caused too many difficulties for the shippers’ clients. It wasn’t a matter of cost; it was a question of reliability, and Durban had an enormous advantage in speed and dependability. Also, the Mozambican rails and ports workers had little incentive to perform well; they knew they’d be paid regardless. Even the most socialist of my colleagues talked about introducing incentives into the system. The conclusions of my two papers were consistent with this viewpoint. Three or four years later, the Mozambican government also had the same realization and converted to capitalism.
During my interview with the SAR bureaucrat, I asked to tour the computer equipment room, mentioning my fascination with the computer room in Swaziland’s Finance Ministry: The computer was so tiny! The official looked at me, and his eyes narrowed in suspicion. So I moved on to another topic.
Having failed to obtain the information Joe had requested, I racked my brain for something to help him and decided to propose sabotaging the rail infrastructure. I bought an elegant, detailed map of South Africa, which included roads, the entire railway system, and the location of tunnels. After studying it at length, one tunnel appeared to be critical to many rail lines. Traffic wouldn’t stop if that passageway were blocked, but the re-routing would be time-consuming and expensive. But my proposal of this idea to Joe after a second lunch in Sommerschield was met with silence. I’d disappointed Joe and myself. Polo had failed in his final mission.
Not long afterward, on August 17, I was typing up my final report. For some reason, Ruth had declared a day off at the CEA, telling us that we need not come into the office that day. Believing our productivity would be higher, the Marshalls and I stayed at home. We were all working from their apartment when we heard the news. Though a “holiday,” most of the staff had been enjoying socializing at the office. They idolized Ruth and were understandably happy to spend their free day with her. Tragically, it was her last. Ruth opened a parcel bomb sent by an agent of the South African Police. She died instantly. Others were injured, including Aquino de Bragança. He and another colleague were hospitalized, but their injuries were not life-threatening.
There was a large crowd at the CEA memorial service. Joe and Ruth’s three daughters, Shawn, Gillian, and Robyn, came from the UK. They and Joe were distraught, and everyone was stunned; looks of disbelief filled our faces. Ruth was an incredibly vibrant, vocal, charismatic person; it was difficult to comprehend that she was no longer with us. The funeral was the last time I saw Joe. I finished my report, delivered it to one of my CEA colleagues, and headed back to Philadelphia.
Mozambique disillusioned me with its dysfunctional government-owned businesses and lack of basic amenities, like food and electricity. My days as a socialist were over. But I have no regrets about supporting the ANC in its struggle against apartheid. It was a just cause, and I completed my tasks as requested to the best of my ability. I am proud to have had the privilege to do so. Would I do it again, knowing all I know today about South Africa? Absolutely.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Richard Koss for his research support and Dominic Wakeford, Alison Imbriaco, and Lisa Kaess for their editorial support. Gloria Reisman also reviewed and commented on select chapters of the novel. Finally, the Rand Daily Mail list of young people killed by the South African Police was recovered via Newsbank at https://www.newsbank.com/libraries/colleges-universities/solutions/international-regions/rand-daily-mail-archive-1902-1985. Any remaining errors in facts, editing, and proofreading remain the author's sole responsibility.
Recommended Reading
First, Ruth. 117 Days, An account of Confinement and Interrogation
under the South African 90-Day Detention Law. London: Penguin
Books, 1965.
Mandela, Nelson. No Easy Walk to Freedom. With a foreword by
Ruth First. London: Heinemann, 1965.
Slovo, Joe. Slovo—The Unfinished Autobiography. With an
introduction by Helena Dolny. South Africa: Raven Press, 1995.
Wieder, Alan. Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid.
With a foreward by Nadine Gordimer. South Africa: Jacana
Media, 2013.
“uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) in exile” at https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/umkhonto-wesizwe-mk-exile.
For a review of what happened during the Silverton siege, see https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/silverton-siege.
About the author
K. E. Karl is an author whose fiction has appeared in the Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Lowestoft Chronicle and the Evening Street Review. He has lived and worked in Oregon, London, Mbabane, Philadelphia, Maputo, Bangkok, New York, and Zurich. Our Man in Mbabane is his first novel, based on his experiences supporting the African National Congress in the 1970s and early ’80s. See kekarl.com for more information. Karl currently resides in Philadelphia.
K.E. Karl, Our Man in Mbabane
