RK

Oh yes, apartheid was established in 1948 when I was exactly ten years old. But even before apartheid, this was the legacy of three hundred years of colonial rule. There was plenty of racism and prejudice.

In response to my question, my mother said to me, “Yes, what we see here is bad. It’s not like what’s happening with the Nazis, because there our people are in concentration camps and the gas chambers.” But, she said, “it starts this way,” with racial prejudice and victimization. That opened my mind, and kept it open.

The friends who I grew up with, many of them were told by their parents, “Oh, you mustn’t worry about the blacks, they’re used to this. You just worry about yourself.” My parents gave me the opposite lesson. Going to school, I was very interested in the French Revolution. I had a great school teacher who opened my eyes further and, as I was getting towards the end of school, I began making friends with black people, as difficult as it was.

When I was twenty-one, the Sharpeville Massacre occurred. I was so shocked by it that I made the decision to do something. By this stage, I was interested in Sartre and existentialism, I lived quite a bohemian lifestyle as a script writer. But this startled me — I rejected as nonsense the idea that exercising my will would lead to my freedom, and decided I had to do something about apartheid.

I had a vague connection with the SACP through my mother’s cousin, Jackie Arenstein, and I went to visit her and her husband, Rowley. They were lifelong communists, and I began to assist them in their work. Rowley was on the run from the police, and I looked after him as his minder. I worked to find safe houses for him. I had the huge network of friends you would expect a young bohemian to have — the kind of people who might not be that political, but were certainly unconventional and against racist rule. I utilized that network, and very quickly became educated in terms of Marxism with him as my mentor.

From then on I became very involved in South African politics, got fired from my job, and became a member of the ANC and the SACP underground. It was the military wing, uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), that I became most involved with. I had been in the movement for not even two years, but they saw this young, energetic guy, who was clearly cut out for that type of clandestine work. I was placed at the top of the command of MK’s provincial command in Natal. I was then a wanted man, but managed to evade capture, leaving the country at the end of 1963.