 
### The Tale of the Sakabula Bird

By Vincent Gray

Copyright © 2016 Vincent Gray

Smashwords Edition

This book is a work of fiction. All the characters developed in this novel are fictional creations of the writer's imagination and are not modelled on any real persons. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.

All rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the author.

ISBN: 9781311191175

Author Biography

As a son of a miner the author was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. He grew up in the East Rand mining town of Boksburg during the 1960s and matriculated from Boksburg High School. After high school he was conscripted into the South African Defence Force (SADF) for compulsory national military service at the age of seventeen. On completion of his military service he studied courses in Zoology, Botany and Microbiology at the University of the Witwatersrand. After graduating with a BSc honours degree he worked for a short period for the Department of Agriculture in Potchefstroom as an agronomist. Following the initial conscription into military service in the SADF, like all other white South African males of his generation, he was then drafted into one of the many South African Citizen Military Regiments. During the 1970s he was called up as a citizen-soldier to do three-month military camps on the 'Border' which was the operational theatre of the so-called counter insurgency 'Bush War' during the Apartheid years. Before and in between university studies he also worked as a wage clerk on the South African Railways and as a travelling chemical sales representative. The author is now a retired professor whose career as an academic in the Biological Sciences has spanned a period of thirty-three years mainly at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Before retirement he lectured and carried out research in the field of molecular biology with a special interest in the molecular basis of evolution. He continues to pursue his interest in evolutionary biology. Other interests which the author pursues includes radical theology, philosophy and literature.

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This book is dedicated to my wife Melodie and my daughter Ruth

I

Excuse me, may I offer you my services without running the risk of intruding.

Do you wish to order something to drink?

I fear you will not be able to make yourself understood by the worthy stone-faced Zulu gentleman who presides over the fate of this fine establishment. In fact, as one of our noble aboriginals, he only speaks two languages both of which would sound foreign to most people in the world. He only speaks the two native languages, isiZulu or Afrikaans. And I might add that this is a strange combination of linguistic proficiency even for a Zulu. Of course you would expect that a Zulu should be able to speak isiZulu, but what other language would you expect him to speak? I would say English, especially if he hails from Natal which was once a colony of the British Empire. But here we have a black man, a Zulu, an aboriginal in the truest sense of that anthropological concept, who while being bilingual happens to speak only Afrikaans as his second language. It is quite inexplicable, if not extraordinary, indeed it is remarkable and begs for an investigation and also an explanation, but I assure you, he cannot comprehend a single word of English. Feel free, ask him anything you like in English and he will ignore you. Most South Africans are bilingual, especially with respect to English, but he is the statistical anomaly, the proverbial outlier of the Gaussian distribution, the white raven or the black swan if you like.

He was born in the district of a place called Piet Retief, which is in Natal or KZN. What I have managed to gather over the years while drinking at this bar is that he grew up on a farm near the town of Piet Retief. He received his primary education at a farm school. The medium of instruction was in Afrikaans. And he has managed to get by without knowing a single word of English, and this is not an exaggeration. As a child when he learnt that the English had defeated and dismembered the Zulu Kingdom he vowed that he will never utter a word of English from his lips for as long as he lived. He has abstinently stuck to his vow and has made no effort to learn a single word of English or the fundamentals of English grammar. So you will wait in vain if you try and order a drink in English. Look at him, he does not even know that we are speaking about him, not that he would care.

His unusual nurtured and practised inability to comprehend or speak a single word of English may go a long way to explain his reserved manner, his dour demeanour. You find this an anomaly? Well I can assure you, you are now in the land of anomalies. Everywhere you look you will find anomalies.

You probably have not noticed that there is another anomaly reigning in this fine establishment. You look perplexed at my comment. Look around and tell me what you see. You don't comprehend what I am getting at? OK, let me explain, apart from our Zulu friend, strange as it may seem to you, I am the only other native in his bar who can speak Afrikaans, the rest of the clientele, like you, all happen to be foreigners, even though they are black, every last one is a foreigner. And what's more they are not tourists; they are all exiles, exiles every one of them, all living in one or other form of exile, there are many kinds of exile and states of being in exile. They are migrants, refugees if you wish, who have fled from one kind of disaster or another. They are economic and political refugees.

How do the foreigners order drinks? Good question. I have not been able to figure it out for myself. I think he can read minds.

I see the Zulu gentleman is ready at last to take our order. What are you drinking?

If you like beer, I would recommend the draught beer straight from the keg.

Yes I will have a draught beer as well. No let me pay, it will be my pleasure. Money is no problem.

Why should it be? I am a working man, old as I may appear.

I don't look my age? Well, thank you, that is a kind thing to say.

I don't believe in retirement. In fact, I will work until I drop dead. As I said, I am a working man. My motto is another day, another dollar.

Oh here are our beers.

Cheers.

I see the beer meets your approval.

You must excuse me, I am being very talkative tonight, it is a fault I have, and my other fault is that I think I make friends too easily, and I seem to speak too easily about myself and about the things I know, as if it these are the most important topics of conversation in the world.

You say you don't mind listening to the unsolicited conversation of complete stranger. You say you are happy to listen to someone even if that person is going to only talk about himself all night. You are prepared to listen even if he is going to exaggerate his self-importance and the significance of his existence. It honestly won't bore you to death? You say that I am not boring you at all? You expect to find that what I have to say could indeed be very interesting, if not entertaining. Well then _Mon Cher Monsieur_ , you are too kind.

I agree that the night is young and you say that you are at a loose end without any care or commitment.

I may add that the night is not only still very young, it is actually in its infancy, in fact at this very moment it is waiting to be born and it is also going to be a very long before it dies at the break of dawn, and anyway, you say that you are not going anywhere, plus you are a good listener. This is then a rare occasion indeed, a valuable moment in both of our lives. Ah, I have made you laugh again. I see that I amuse you, it doesn't matter, I don't mind. But I agree that it is true that we may never meet again, we may be like two ships passing in the night. I have to confess that I have a good sense of occasion and this is not an occasion to be missed.

Actually I am not really that talkative and most of the time I don't talk much about myself. But tonight for some reason I feel like talking. I feel like confessing everything about myself, to anyone who cares to listen. Even though we are both strangers to each other, I will not hide anything from you about myself. No one wants to listen to the sorrows of a drunk. I am not drunk as you can clearly see. I have already had two or three beers, but so what, tonight is a special occasion. And I have been cured of all my sorrows. You say I am very fortunate to be cured of all my sorrows. Yes I am thankful. But it was a long and difficult cure. Being cured of all my sorrows, and also been too old to have any regrets I promise not to disappoint you. If I end up singing a paean of personal praise to myself then so be it. You will no doubt forgive me for being a bit of a narcissist.

Yes I am from Boksburg. Haven't I already said that I am from Boksburg? I think I must be getting old. Sorry, I did not hear you properly; you were actually asking why this town is called Boksburg? The town was named after Dr Bok. The story goes like this. A person by the name of Carl Ziervogel originally from Graaf Reinet bought a farm called Leeupoort. On the 21st of March 1887 just when he was going to sell his farm gold was discovered on Vogelfontein the farm next to his farm. Of course he took his farm off the market. At that time Dr Bok was the secretary of state of the Transvaal Boer Republic which was recognized as an independent Republic by the British in 1881. Dr Bok discussed the gold discovery with President Paul Kruger who recommended that Dr Bok establish a properly surveyed and organized township to facilitate the orderly development of gold mines on the Leeupoort and Vogelfontein farms. The new gold mine town was named Boksburg in honour of Dr Bok.

Yes I was also born in Boksburg, I grew up in Boksburg and I have lived in Boksburg all my life. I have lived most of life in the same flat. In fact I was born in the Boksburg Benoni Hospital. The hospital still exists. It is on the other side of the railway line across from the Lake standing next to the Cason Mine Dump. Unfortunately Cason Mine Dump is no longer the majestic man made mountain that it used to be. It now looks like a half-eaten stale bread roll. It was once the biggest mine dump in the world.

When I was a kid we stayed in the suburb called Plantation, just down the road from the Boksburg Benoni Hospital. My dad was one of the big shots working for the East Rand Propriety Mines or ERPM for short. He was a very prominent man in Boksburg in the 1960s. In 1969 three years before he died he caught the biggest Marlin ever landed off the KZN North coast. In the July of 1972 he was killed by an enraged elephant bull that he had wounded on an elephant hunt in Mozambique. He had hunted elephants in Mozambique quite regularly. He was a very experienced elephant hunter. Our house in Plantation was full of ivory and stuffed elephant feet. I was 23 in 1974 when I graduated with a BA in fine arts from the University of the Witwatersrand. I was very ambitious; I thought I could make a living as an artist only to discover it was not that easy. So at the end of 1974 I went to Wits Tech and completed a higher diploma in fashion and dress design, and then in 1977 I went to the University of Potchefstroom to do an MA in fine arts. In 1978 my mother died of breast cancer. I was the youngest of three siblings. I have an elder brother and sister. We were left with a sizable inheritance. In 1979 with my share of the inheritance I bought a beautiful old two story building with an arcade that opened onto Commissioner and Leeupoort Street. The building is called Cinderella's Arcade. It was built in 1892. At street level the arcade is lined with small shops. Above the shops are flats. I converted the two corner flats facing Commissioner Street into my live-in art studio. The arcade is just around the corner from the Masonic Hotel, a mere 2 minutes' walk away. In 1911 a second arcade called the Morris Arcade was built a few blocks away.

Yes it does sound like the rain has stopped.

You want to go outside for a smoke.

I don't smoke, but that is not a problem, I will come with you. See our Zulu friend has nodded his head. He knows you wish to go for a smoke. He will keep an eye on our beers.

Don't you think it has turned out to be a beautiful summers evening. The clouds are gone, the night sky has opened up and just as expected the air is thick with swarms of flying ants, well not really ants, they are actually termites. See how the bats are having a feast. Let's walk over to the Lake; we have to walk past that ugly palisade fence that has been erected around the old putt-putt golf course in order to get to the Lake. Careful you don't want tread on a toad, the lawns appear to be literally alive with a plague of toads chasing flying ants. The Lake now smells quite bad; it reeks with the stench of sewage. It has also become green like pea soup.

Yes it's a man-made Lake.

It was constructed in 1888 by a man called Montague White and only became filled with water after a massive ran storm in 1891. So for three years before it was filled with water it was called Montague's folly. It soon became a major attraction on the Reef. In 1885 a steam boat called the 'Mona' was launched on the Lake to take visitors on cruises around the Lake. Soon hotels, restaurants and cinemas sprung up in the streets and side streets surrounding in the Lake. The Masonic Hotel was built here on the shores of the Lake in 1883. You can appreciate why Boksburg Lake quickly became a popular inland holiday resort. On Saturdays and Sundays there would be over a hundred rowing boats that could be hired. Can you image what is must have been like with all those rowing boats floating on the Lake. Palm trees, popular trees, willow trees and oak trees where planted around the shores of the Lake. You can see how huge the palm trees have become. They are over a hundred years old. A refreshment kiosk and band stand was also built. The promenade we are walking along now was also built in 1895. At night the promenade and Lake would be lit up with electric lights and hundreds of people, including lovers would promenade around the Lake before or after eating out at one of the many restaurants or after seeing a movie at one of the many cinemas close to the Lake. There was also a massive rose garden, a spring garden, an autumn garden and even a swamp garden. Near the old Magistrates Courts was the Vogelfontein ice skating rink. There were hardly any cars in those days. People travelled by train from Pretoria and from across the Reef to visit Boksburg Lake. Boksburg Station which is close to the Lake used to be called Vogelfontein Station and every weekend between 5000 and 10 000 people from across Johannesburg and the Reef arrived at the station to visit the Lake. Promenade concerts were held every Saturday afternoon. Fishing was an extremely popular pastime on the banks of the Lake. Boksburg Lake regattas regularly drew crowds of visitors of up to 8000.

Lets take a walk along the promenade.

Yes that is a raft. It has always been chained to that tree on the bank. I am surprised it is still floating after all these years. Should we go over to have a look at it? It has been years since I have been anywhere near the raft. As kids we played on the raft. As a teenager I embraced and kissed many girls while standing on this raft in the moonlight.

Actually, the raft has a special significance for me.

If it interests you I will tell you a story about my first encounter with the death. It was a drowning.

You are interested?

OK.

It was on this raft that the finitude of life was revealed to me in all its terrifying profundity. It happened to be the death of a loyal patron of the Masonic Hotel pub, someone I knew.

Go ahead light up another cigarette. You want us to step onto the raft?

Yes I think it still safe to step on board. It still looks seaworthy to me. Just be careful as we step on board, it tends to rock and one can lose one's balance. It really has turned out to be such pleasant evening don't you think. I see the clouds are beginning to break. Look there is the moon.

At the time of the drowning I was still kid in primary school in Boksburg North and every day I used to travel by bus to school. Each morning the bus would stop at the bus stop opposite the Masonic Hotel. One day as it was slowing down to stop we noticed that something was going on at the shore of the Lake close to the bus stop. A police car and mortuary van was parked outside the Masonic Hotel. Two policemen were standing on the bank of the Lake next to the moored raft on which we are now standing. I could make out a body lying on the raft's deck. When the bus stopped I grabbed my school bag I jumped off the bus and walked over to the moored raft. It was 7.00 am in the morning and there was an icy chill in the air which burnt my cheeks like dry ice. It was grey and misty outside. The whole Lake was shrouded in a thick blanket of mist. A heavy mist was rising from the surface of the lake almost like steam from a hot bath. You could not see Cason Dump and even the opposite shore of the Lake was not visible. A large white swan paddling slowly past was barely discernible in the mist. It looked like an apparition. You could only more or less make out its silhouette.

I stepped onto the raft. It shifted away from the bank, straining against the chain. To keep my balance I reached up and managed to grab hold of this same steel cable which is still fastened after all these years to the willow tree behind us. You see that the cable stretches across the lake to the island where it is tied to that big willow tree standing close to the bank. The cable was frozen. I did not have any gloves on. My hand nearly froze to the cable. I am really surprised that the cable is here, stretching across the lake to that willow tree on the island.

Anyway, apart from the crowd that had assembled on the bank next to the raft the rest of Lake was deserted. The body was fully clothed, the jacket was buttoned up, a tie was around the neck, the shoes were still on and there was a watch on the wrist. The second hand of the watch was still ticking. The watch must have been water proof. The body had been fished out of the Lake and dragged onto the raft deck. I stepped closer to look at the face. The face looked familiar. The raft began to rock as more people crowded onto it. I recognized the body. It was the body of a person called Kobus Groenewald. He worked at the ERPM gold reduction works.

It was the first time in my life that I had seen a dead body. He had recently been a guest at a dinner party my mother had organized. As kids our parents allowed us to stay up when they had a party, also because the other guests had kids and they often brought them along. He loved Mario Lanza's _Drinking Song_. That night he was all tanked up and filled with the _joie de vie_. When my sister played the record with Mario Lanza's _Drinking Song_ his alcohol flushed face became transfixed with exaltation. He begged my sister to play the _Drinking Song_ over and over. As I gazed at his dead body spread out on the raft the melody and lyrics of the _Drinking Song_ filled my head. Even though I barely knew the man, I began to feel incredibly sorrowful and disturbed. All I knew was that he was a bachelor and had a reputation for being a lively party animal. This person whom I had once known as a living being no longer existed. It was a shocking realization. Only his dead body existed now, the person that had once animated that body was gone. That was also an extraordinary realization. The person who had once so thoroughly enjoyed Mario Lanza was no longer with us.

While I stood on the raft staring at the body the crowd assembling on the banks of the Lake close to the raft continued to grow. I hung around listening to the running commentary that the different people were giving. His car was still parked outside the Masonic Hotel. Apparently he had been drinking at the Masonic Hotel the previous night.

Everybody had a theory about his death and what he was doing before his death.

Some said he committed suicide. Others said that he was drinking alone until the pub closed. Some insisted that he had been with a group of friends playing darts. A person remarked that he saw him in the lady's bar with a woman. It seemed like they were having fight. Others thought they had seen them arguing outside on the pavement. A person eager to have his say swore that he saw the man having an argument with 2 or 3 men on the bank of the lake at about 9.00 pm. Someone else insisted that the man was definitely in the lounge with a couple of strange people until about 10.00 pm. He was definitely murdered by his companions, they looked like criminals. A person who lived in a flat across the street said that even though it was dark she saw him standing on the raft at about 11.30. Several people all nodding their heads agreed that had he committed suicide. Apparently he was a regular patron at the Masonic and everyone agreed that his untimely death was such a tragic shame especially because he had been such a friendly and jovial person with an unquenchable lust for life. Someone remarked that his death made no sense. Someone who had just arrived wanted to know why he had committed suicide? But then another person continued to insist that he had been murdered, he had been thrown into the icy waters and died of a heart attack.

The theories relating to the nature or cause of his death continued to proliferate growing more elaborate and some verged on the fantastical. It came as a surprise to me that crowd of onlookers had become so quickly numb and desensitised to the presence of the corpse. I felt that one should be respectful in the presence of a dead person's body. Yet a spirit of joyful and festive callousness had erupted among the crowd of onlookers.

While listening to everybody debating the circumstance of his death I saw a familiar figure approaching. It was one of my mom's friends who worked as a journalist. She was obviously coming to do a story on the death for the _Boksburg Advertiser_. She had not seen me, and I did not want her to see as it was almost 8.00 am, and I should have already been at school. I quickly walked away along the promenade into the mist and then cut across the back to Market Street and caught the 8.15 bus to Boksburg North which is a suburb on the other side of Cason Dump.

In Boksburg North when the bus stopped at the bus stop next to the Empire Bioscope an old woman got up from her seat and made her way slowly down the aisle. Pasted on the wall outside the Empire a poster advertised _The Sign of Zorro_. Guy Williams was being featured. On the opposite side of the street the red and white pole of Tony's Barber Shop caught my eye. The barber shop had just opened. One of the barbers was a dwarf. The other barber was a huge man, almost seven foot tall. Both barbers were was standing outside on the covered pavement next to the barber red and white pole smoking cigarettes. They looked such an odd pair, the midget standing next to the giant. Both were dressed in white barber jackets and white trousers. The dwarf had this little white barber jacket specially tailored to fit him. He also wore specially tailored little white barber trousers. Every day on the way home from school, the bus would stop at the bus stop right next to the door of the barber shop. Every day I would look out of the bus window and see the dwarf standing on a wooden box cutting someone's hair. His head always looked huge in proportion to his body.

Everything felt so abnormal that morning. It felt like I was in a dream. You know how it is in a dream, somehow everything is always so incongruously juxtapositioned in space and time, the dead body lying on the raft, the dwarf standing next to the giant on the pavement next to the red and white barber shop pole, both dressed in white barber uniforms, the apparition of the swan, the old lady with the walking stick struggling with slow steps down the aisle of the bus and the poster on the wall advertising the _Zorro_ matinee, I could have been hallucinating all of this. This is exactly the way I felt.

I don't know why, but I was overcome by a weird impulse, without thinking I also climbed off the bus behind the old lady. I stood on the pavement and watched the bus pull off; it chugged away in a cloud of black diesel fumes, going up the narrow road past the Boksburg North Swimming Pool. As I watched the bus vanish I realized that the act I had just committed was now irreversible. It was a profound thought at the time. I still remembered it to this day. Do you remember those old 8 mm projectors? You could stop the projector and run the film in the reverse direction, and watch everything going backwards in time. As I watched the bus getting smaller and smaller, I thought about time travel, like going back into the past. I thought that if we could re-run the tape of time until Groenewald stopped his car outside the Masonic Hotel and we could have called out to him, you know, to warn him or something like that.

You know time is a bit of mystery even physicists admit as much. No one seems to be absolutely sure about what kind of thing or phenomenon or process time really is.

There was a café with tearoom called the Café Florian on the opposite side on the road right next to Tony's Barber Shop. I crossed the road and walked into the Café. I was greeted by the bell ringing, buzzing and chiming of a pinball machine being played at the edge of full tilt. It was warm inside. The pleasing aroma of percolated coffee filled the air. I sat down at a small table and ordered a cup of coffee and a cream doughnut. One of the guys gathered around the pinball machine walked over to the old jukebox. It was still before we had rands and cents. It was 1959. I had two shillings in my pocket. It was a lot of money in those days. The guy must have put a penny into the jukebox slot. The next minute the music for _Tequila_ by the Champs fills the café. It was so weird. I began to tap my feet under the table in rhythm with the music. The guys crowding around the pinball player were sort of jiving and every now and then on cue they shouted in unison ' _Tequila_ '. In retrospect the 1950s was the golden age of the pinball machines in Boksburg.

While listening to the music and sipping my coffee I remembered a tale about the life of Buddha. Do you know the story? You don't? Well one day when he was a young man he slipped out of his father's castle and he saw an old crippled man, a sick man, a dead man and a holy man with no home. He then realized that nothing can stop anyone from being born, becoming old, falling sick and eventually dying. You may say no one can escape the ravages of time. Anyway I don't think time was the issue in this story. Buddha then decided to give up everything in order to become a holy man with no home and no money so that he could find the answer to the problem of birth, old age, sickness and death. He thought long and hard about how he could find a cure that would release mankind from his suffering.

I sat in the café drinking my coffee and thought about Buddha's search for a cure that would end all suffering. I decided to wait in the café listening to the jukebox music until the bioscope opened for the morning matinee. I bought a ticket and sat in the back row. You want to know what a bioscope is? In those days we used to call a cinema the bioscope. The young men who were playing pin ball in the café also bought tickets. When I came out of the cinema squinting in the bright late-morning sunlight I saw that the bar of the Boksburg North Hotel was already open for business, and patrons were streaming in. I caught a bus back to the Town Hall from the bus stop next to Tony's Barber Shop. I got off at the Town Hall and started walking slowly back home along the Lake's promenade. I stopped at the raft. The crowds were gone. It was all very quiet; there was not a person in sight. The body was gone. His car outside the Masonic Hotel was gone. I stood there for a few minutes gazing at the raft.

The mist was gone. The winter sun was shining on Cason Dump. On top of the dump I could see the eight coco pans standing on the rail line at the edge of the summit, where they had been left more than fifty years ago. Close to the shore on the opposite side of the lake I could see the swan, and white ducks and grey geese, all floating on the water. Grey headed seagulls wheeled in the sky calling to each other. In the middle of the Lake a coot called. Everything had returned to normal. Life goes on as if nothing had happened. For a twelve year old it was a very sobering realization.

On the other side of the Lake is the Lake Pavilion which used to be a tearoom and restaurant. The Lake used to be our regular haunt when were kids, strange as it may sound it has featured quite prominently in my life, even though it is a poor substitute for the Seine in Paris. The name of my business happens to be Lakeside Investments.

As kids we used to regularly fish off the old raft, spending entire weekends on the raft. By the way, I recently heard that one of my childhood friends had passed away. He passed away some time ago and I only heard about his death yesterday. We lost contact a long time ago. His passing was unexpected. It is hard to believe that he is gone, that he is no more, and that he had been dead for a long time without me even knowing it. If he had lived we would be the same age.

His name was Riaan Slabbert. He was a handsome dude, a real womanizer of note. Like me he also became a professional artist.

He eventually left Boksburg for good on his 750 cc Honda. We had a beer here at the Masonic before he left Boksburg on his motorbike. He stopped at Hermanus in the Western Cape for a beer and a hamburger, he stood on the terrace overlooking the ocean, and said, _fok_ , and he never left that town until he died. In Boksburg he struggled as an artist. In Hermanus his fortunes changed. He made a reasonable living selling paintings and giving art lessons. The last time I saw him was in 1994. After the first democratic elections I travelled down to Hermanus and spent a month down there painting. At the time he was working on a painting, a very weird painting of a black stallion standing on the edge of cliff in the moonlight. He was so happy in Hermanus he worked himself to death. He painted night and day without stopping to eat or sleep. They say his studio was so full of finished paintings it could have caused an avalanche.

He was one of those Afrikaners who were born in Zambia and whose family came back to South Africa shortly after Zambia got independence. They arrived in Boksburg in 1964. In Zambia his father worked on the copper mine at Kitwe. There were only English medium schools in Zambia so when they returned to South Africa they placed him and his elder brother in an English medium school instead of an Afrikaans school. There were three brothers. The eldest brother was in the permanent force. He was a parabat instructor in Bloemfontein. While they spoke Afrikaans at home, they were not your typical Afrikaners. For example, they never went to church, he and his brothers had never been baptised, in fact I don't think they belonged to any church; he was completely Godless as an individual, even in primary school. Through my association with Riaan I became aware that there were alternative ways of being an Afrikaner. He never referred to himself as an Afrikaner nor did he ever use the word Boer or acknowledge any kind of Boer mythology, he was an Afrikaner with no heartfelt allegiance to Afrikanerdom. Yet when we were together we spoke Afrikaans. We spoke Afrikaans incessantly as if our entire being depended on the continuous stream of Afrikaans words filling the air around us. Normally in those days you were only considered a genuine Afrikaner if you belonged to one of the three Afrikaans Reformed Churches. In my school days I knew that Afrikaans kids who belonged to the Apostolic or Pentecostal Churches were viewed as not really belonging to the Volk.

It seemed that Kitwe was a kind of paradise the way Riaan spoke about the place. They brought back an African Grey parrot and their TV. We didn't have TV in South Africa in the 1960s. Their TV occupied a prominent place in their lounge in Boksburg North. It just stood there in their lounge and I would always look at the blank switched-off screen with a great sense of wonder of what it must have been like watching TV in Kitwe. Imagine TV in Kitwe in the 1960s!

I first met Riaan at Dirk Jordaan's art studio. Dirk Jordaan was another one of those Afrikaners who also did not conform to any of the stereotypes of Afrikanerdom. He had a profound influence on our lives, smashing all the Afrikaner taboos and conventions. Every week on a Tuesday afternoon I would go for art lessons at Dirk Jordaan's art studio which was on the 4th floor of Morco House at 282 Commissioner Street. Riaan became my best friend. We spoke Afrikaans when we were alone together, but we spoke English when we were with English speaking friends. He spoke English with a colonial Zambian accent. You could hear the old country in his accent. It was through him that I became part of a wide circle of English speaking friends and acquired my proficiency as an English speaker. I also began to see the world through English-speaking eyes. It was like putting on new spectacles. There were four other students in the afternoon art class. They were Clive du Toit also an Afrikaner, Carol Rosenberg, Janet Mendelowitz, and Stanley Aires. We had all become exceptionally good friends, often meeting as a group on Saturday afternoons at the Stella movie theatre, which was called a bioscope in those days. Carol's father was our family doctor and Janet's dad owned the Chemist in Commissioner Street opposite the bowling greens near Boksburg Station.

Sometimes we would take a break during the art lessons and go have tea and cake at Alistoun's Bakery which was next to the CNA and opposite the OK Bazaars in Commissioner Street. In a way we fell under the influence of Janet and Carol, they were always full of new ideas and new ways of seeing the world. It was Janet and Carol who suggested we should start going for tea breaks during our art lessons. Janet often spoke about her holidays in Paris, where she had taken walks down the left bank of the Seine and had visited the Louvre almost every day. She said that having tea at Alistoun's Bakery made her imagine that we were all artists drinking coffee at some café in Paris on the left bank of the Seine in the Latin Quarter near the Sorbonne. This was the kind of stuff they were filling our heads with. We all began to speak in anticipation about when we would all eventually go to Paris to start our real lives as artists and live like Henry Miller.

Yes I did eventually spend some time in Paris as an artist.

Those were memorial days. Boksburg was a great place to grow up as a teenager.

When we got to high school Riaan and I used go together to the wild sessions held in the Lake Pavilion which use to be a tearoom and restaurant. It was mainly Afrikaner youth who went to the sessions at the Lake on Saturday nights. It was a very rough and boisterous crowd dancing to the rock n roll and pop music of the 1960s. The sessions at the Lake were also well known for the many legendary fights that took place on the surrounding lawns outside. Usually the police pickup van would arrive to break up the fights and sometimes arrests were made for drunken disorderly behaviour in public. After paying the entrance fee to get into the session, they would stamp your wrist and then we would go inside to check out the talent. If the talent looked good we try and get off with a girl. If you got off with a girl you would find a dark spot and start smooching, and try and feel her up, and screw her if possible. The girls were all nice Afrikaans _meisies_ with lovely firm breasts, _die room van die Volk is verkrampt_.

Many of them lost their virginity on the lawns of Boksburg Lake. If there was no talent and no getting-off prospects we would hit off to the Masonic Hotel to play darts and knock back a few drafts of beer. At the session they would be knocking back Oude Meester brandy mixed with Coke Cola in a coke bottle. What is a session? A session was equivalent to a discothèque nightclub.

Am I Afrikaans? An interesting question.

Yes I suppose I am Afrikaans? Which means I am indeed an Afrikaner, a Boer if you wish. I grew up in Boksburg in a typical Afrikaner fashion. As I said I was born in Boksburg. I first visited this pub at the Masonic Hotel in 1969 as a very precocious and worldly wise teenager when Riaan and I were in Matric, I had just turned 18, that makes it about 45 years that I have been a frequent and loyal patron of this fine establishment. Indeed a life-long patron of this joint!

II

Should we walk back? I see our ladies of the night have started to assemble for duty under the trees near the road.

So you are curious about the fact that I have made a living as a painter in Boksburg of all places in the world? I have actually made a very good living from painting for most of my life. I also worked as a successful fashion designer. I suppose fortune has favoured me. I am not ashamed to admit that I am wealthy.

But life as a painter has been a roller-coaster journey. The creative impulse waxes and wanes. For me painting has been a never ending struggle. It has involved a constant search for novelty. It has required a ceaseless search for images. As an artist I have had to push myself to the very limits of my imagination only to suffer suicidal burnouts in the face of failure. It has taken me a life time to get nowhere. As the saying goes it has been a life filled with both ecstasy and excruciating agony, a life lived at the edge of perpetual crisis.

Yes my studio is just around the corner. You would like to see my studio? No problem! It won't take us a minute. A quick walk and we will be there.

Let's cross the road here, it is clear. That building over there on the corner is Cinderella's Arcade. I now own all the buildings in the entire whole block, all worthless possessions in a dying CBD. Shortly after I bought the building I converted the corner shop into a gallery for exhibiting paintings. Above the gallery on the first floor overlooking Commissioner Street you can see my art studio and apartment. On the third floor are flats which I rent. I have also been a landlord all my life, a collector of rents. Just let me find the keys and then we can go inside the gallery. Wait a minute while I switch on the lights.

You want to know if all the paintings are for sale.

To answer your question all the other paintings except that one over there are for sale.

You find that painting puzzling. Unusual, bewildering, out of the ordinary, surreal. Yes it is a strange and perplexing painting even for me. I painted it more than 40 years ago. Is there a story? Yes there is a story behind that painting. I have never told anyone the real full story behind that painting. The painting was inspired by a profound dream that I once had during one of those suicidal burnout episodes that I have periodically suffered from. I see that the painting intrigues you. Yes the woman in the picture is exceptionally beautiful; she was truly a magnificent woman.

Ok, we better get back to the pub. Let me put off the lights and lock up. If you are interested I will tell you the story about the woman in the painting. The story starts with another painting called the _Tale of the Sakabula Bird._ Yes there is an intentional a play on the words _tail_ and _tale._

The _Tale of the Sakabula Bird_ was a painting which I exhibited at my second major exhibition. The exhibition ran for a week from Saturday to Saturday. Every painting was sold and I became an overnight celebrity in Boksburg. I suppose I don't sound very modest. But you know what is like to climb the podium, you tend to become overly self-indulgent, basking in the afterglow of sweet success, and it is difficult not go on a binge of self-praise. Anyway, as I was saying I was feted as a celebrity over the entire East Rand. There were rave reviews in the local newspapers. Something great had happened in Boksburg. I had become an instant hit and my bank account began to look very good.

On the opening night I noticed among the visitors an attractive young woman with blue eyes, long platinum blond hair, dressed in faded jeans and a T-shirt, and also wearing a black beret with a little red star. She was part of a jolly scruffily dressed group of young adults who all appeared to be university students in their early twenties. The opening of the exhibition had been widely advertised and the students must have pitched up out of curiosity, and possibly also the enticement of tables laden with good wines and eats could not have been resisted. I soon became aware that I had attracted her attention.

From your knowing smile I believe you are getting to know me. You have that telling, humorous look. Am I that transparent? Do you find my touch of conceit amusing? OK, without wishing to sound vain or narcissistic I was once an exceeding good looking man who could easily turn the heads of the most attractive women. I was addicted to women and they in turn found it impossible to resist me. That was my ulterior motive behind my interest in fashion design; it gave me an opportunity to be among women. I also happened to have a natural talent for dress-design and dressmaking. Of course I enjoyed dressing women just as much as undressing them, and they did not seem to mind having my hands all over their bodies, nor did I flinch at the task. It was always my pleasure. You are finding me funny again. Look I was a very masculine dress-designer, macho if you wish, and they always enjoyed the danger and tension that the physical intimacy of my presence brought to the dressing-room. The dress-fitting room was not a neutral or clinical environment as would be the case with a doctor's consulting room or the surgery of the gynaecologist populated with all kinds of obstetric tools and apparatus. I notice your ironic grin has not faded. Anyway to cut a long story short it was through my dress-designing work that I made friends with the owner of a modelling agency. She was always on the lookout for new talent but none of the beautiful girls that her agency recruited could ever matched the beauty of four of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. To this day no other woman has ever matched the beauty of the magnificent four. I have always been a connoisseur of female beauty. These four possessed the kind of beauty that you remember for the rest of your life. The girl whose attention I had attracted at my art exhibition was the most beautiful of the magnificent four. I had taken many beautiful girls to bed, but none matched the beauty of my magnificent four.

So in my life I have known four truly magnificent women. I fell in love with each one of them.

Did I take any of my beautiful four women to bed? No not all, actually just one of them, the most beautiful. The most beautiful of the four was the one that came to the art exhibition, the one who is in that painting you saw in the gallery.

Would you like something to eat? You not hungry, well maybe we can order something later.

To be completely honest and extraordinarily humble, I was very mindful and actually very thankful that nature had been so exceedingly generous to me when it came to good looks, athletic prowess and natural charm. By chance I was tall and dark with broad shoulders and a strong athletic build. I had a natural grace. Yes, natural grace? You laugh. Yes I was indeed gifted with natural physical grace. I played a very good game of rugby, I also wrestled and I even boxed. I once belonged to both the Boksburg amateur wrestling club and to the Boksburg amateur boxing club. I have always being a very physical person, and coupled with my natural charm and good looks, this turned out to be potent combination. Women were drawn to me. I had this animal magnetism if you like. Women came on heat when they saw me. I was dark and dangerous, and women found me irresistible. I was truly blessed.

As a result of these gifts that nature had so generously bestowed upon me, I have always been confident with women and I could never resist taking advantage of them when the opportunity arose. I was always willing to oblige when it came to the job of satisfying their physical needs. I became a natural philanderer, it was my second nature, it was my supreme weakness, and it did not help that most women found it difficult to resist the combined effects of my charming confident manner and good looks. I enjoyed the chase and even more the conquest, with its rewards of sensual pleasure. I wore my heart on my sleeve and was constantly falling in and out of love. As in Plato's _Phaedo_ my soul was more than a prisoner of my body, if I had a soul, it was indeed in complete bondage to my body. I was certain that I could have my way with any female that showed the slightest hint of attraction towards me. Therefore any signal of attraction from a gorgeous woman never escaped my notice, and I could never resist an opportunity to seduce a woman whenever the occasion arose. I was gifted in discerning the mind and emotions of women. And if I noticed even the slightest indication of interest it was guaranteed that she would end up in my bed. I was the proverbial animal electric. You have never heard of the proverbial animal electric? Neither have I. I have just invented it now. I'm funny? No not really. Right now I happened to be in a very good mood.

What happened with the gorgeous blond? I see I have excited your curiosity. Yes I can assure you, this is no fishing story, or a school boy's exaggerated fantasy of conquest.

Throughout the evening we kept on making eye contact and exchanging mutual smiles. This was an opportunity I could not allow to slip away. We were openly flirting with each other. I sensed that we were mutually attracted to each other. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed that she had taken an interest in two paintings that I had purposely juxtaposed, placing them close together, side by side. The two painting were a composite, they belonged together, even though together they looked incongruous, odd, incompatible. The one was of a Sakabula Bird in full flight and the other was a nude picture of Bathsheba preparing to take her bath.

She was obviously lingering with premeditated intent in front of these two paintings. I took this as a positive signal for action from my part and so I walked over to her and made my acquaintance. She introduced herself as Wanetta Samuelsson. She said that the two painting intrigued her. She wondered why they had been placed so closely next to each other; because she was unable perceive what mysterious link held them together. I was very impressed that she had noticed that I had purposely put them together in order to provoke the viewer's curiosity. It was then that I realized that there was something very special about her. They were also the only two paintings that had not been given names.

I asked her if she would like a glass of wine. She said that a glass of red wine would be nice. I fetched a glass of very good red wine for her from an excellent vintage, and we started talking about the two paintings. But before I could answer all her questions about the two paintings one of her came friends came over to tell her that they were going. I noticed that she was clearly disappointed that our conversation had been interrupted, in fact cut short, because her friends wanted to leave so soon.

Before leaving she said it was a pity that she had to leave, because she would have liked to hear what I had to say about the two paintings. She also said something along the lines that she was disappointed because she would have liked to have spent more time looking at the rest of my work. I could see that she was genuinely disappointed that she had missed this opportunity. For me this was a break not to be missed. I immediately extended an invitation for her to come again and suggested that she come on the final evening of the exhibition which was going to be on the next Saturday night. I promised to give her a personalized tour of the entire exhibition, and furthermore I would explain in full the hidden meaning of the two mysterious pictures to her.

III

I can see that you are also curious about the two paintings. You want to know more about why the painting of the Sakabula Bird should be so intriguing. _Mon Cher Compatriot_ , the Sakabula Bird also called the Long Tailed Widow Bird is indeed a most interesting bird. It is a pitch black bird with an extravagant and magnificent tail. The tail is so long that it often appears to hamper the bird's flight. In fact in full fight the bird seems to be decidedly sluggish as it floats sort of suspended in mid air over its grassland habitat. As I have already said the _Tale of the Sakabula Bird_ happened to be the name of this painting.

You may wonder what survival edge or physical benefit or fitness value that such an incredibly long tail could have for the Sakabula Bird.

Such a long tail as we see in the Sakabula Bird does most certainly slow the bird down and restricts its mobility. The tail definitely does impose a physical handicap on the bird with respect to its mobility, especially when it has to escape the attentions of a predator or raptor. So why would the Sakabula possess such an obvious physical liability?

According to Darwin's theory of sexual selection many of the most conspicuous and visually spectacular physical characteristics possessed by birds and animals have a sexual ornamentation function. In animals and birds sexual ornaments are prominently displayed during courtship in order to trigger sexual desire for copulation. Sexual ornaments represent all the secondary sexual characters that are not directly involved in the physical process of copulation. In contrast to the secondary sexual characters, the primary sexual characters are the actual sex organs which have a more direct physically involvement in the process of sexual reproduction. In other words the primary sexual characters consist of the organs or an anatomical apparatus that are directly involved in the mechanical process of copulation and eventually conception. Secondary sexual characters such as the large fleshy wattles and combs, spurs, ornate tails, long colourful neck feathers of a rooster are not directly involved in the physical process of copulation. Also other examples of secondary sexual characters such the horns or antlers of herbivores are not directly involved in the physical process of copulation. Plumage colour in male birds is yet another example of secondary sexual attributes.

In many species of mammals and birds the males and females often look very different as a consequence of possessing different secondary sexual characteristics. These differences in the appearances between males and females in animal or birds are called sexual dimorphisms. Dimorphism means that the male's morphology differs very markedly from the female's morphology. This is fairly obvious in adult humans. Women's bodies differ markedly from the bodies of men in many respects including secondary sexual ornamentation.

Sexual dimorphism is also very obvious in many bird species such as cape sparrows, mask weavers, golden bishop, red bishop, long tailed widow bird or the Sakabula Bird. Darwin's theory of sexual selection explained how and why this phenomenon of sexual dimorphism between the two sexes arose. It is the sexual dimorphism of the two sexes that makes them sexually interesting to each other.

According to Darwin's theory of sexual selection many characters or attributes possessed by birds and animals function as sexual ornamentation or decorations in order to trigger the desire for copulation in their mating partners. Without the triggering of desire no copulation would take place. If no copulation occurs then there will be no procreation or reproduction. Without reproduction there would be no progeny. And if no progeny is produced the species will vanish.

Sex has become a paradox for man. Because of the unique biology and psychology of humans it is possible for men and women to separate sexual activity from its primary function which is reproduction. Humans are among the few animals that frequently engage in sexual activity primarily for its own sake and only secondarily for the purpose of reproduction. But in monogamy sex is never really engaged in for its own sake. It always serves the function of keeping male and female long enough together so that female's offspring can be successfully raised to adulthood. A lactating mother does not ovulate. So the man will continue to stick around for the sake of sex alone.

According to Darwin sexual selection has also shaped the human body, the human face and the human mind. Darwinian sexual selection exerted by male preference has shaped the breasts, waists, hips, buttocks, legs of female bodies. Darwinian sexual selection exerted by female preference has also shaped body size, beards, and the penises of male bodies. Sexual selection in humans has also influenced other secondary sexual characters such as hair colour, skin texture, skin colour, eyes colour, eye size and shape, lips, ears, nose size and shape, face shape, hand size and shape.

Believe it or not, women's breasts are primarily sexual ornaments and their main function is to attract the interest of men. It is impossible for men not to be excited by the female breast. Every feature that makes a woman's body attractive to men serves a sexual ornamental function. This is how women get our attention and keep us interested in them. The size and shape of a woman's breasts serves primarily a sexual function. Supplying milk to an infant is only a secondary function of the female's breast. Big shapely breasts don't necessary produce more milk than smaller breasts. So the size and outward appearance of a breast does not always give a true indication of its milk supply capacity.

This may sound crazy! But it makes lot of sense. Have you ever wondered why men are so obsessed with tits? Women are walking sexual ornaments and that is the reason why we cannot resist looking at women, and that is why we get so much pleasure from looking at women. Yes I agree, we also want to touch women as well. Nothing is more wonderful than to touch a woman. What about looking at woman?

Yes for sure, women want us to look at them. What is very interesting is that women do not only want men to look at them. Women are also competing between themselves for the attention of men. They want other women to look at them as well. They compete for the spot light of a man's look. Women spend a heck of a lot of time doing their faces and choosing their clothes so that can look sexy. But I am sure that they want to look exceptionally beautiful and sexy to other women, so that these other women quickly realize that they cannot compete for the attention of the same guy, and they just sort of give up, concede defeat in the face of superior competition for the gaze of men and all of that.

Yes, I would say that humans are the most sexual of all the animals. Concealed ovulation and continuous sexual receptivity in women have evolved to keep men continually attentive with respect to supporting, provisioning, protecting women irrespective of whether or not they are ovulating. Females with narrow waists or a waist to hip ratio of 0.7 are preferred by men because it indicates non-pregnancy and sexual receptivity for fertilization.

I agree with you, sex is one of the greatest paradoxes in the Universe.

In all living creatures sex is the dance of life because its goal is always the fertilization of eggs. In humans sex has been transformed into an activity for its own sake rather than for the sake of reproduction. That's the paradox I am thinking of.

In Greek mythology Pandora was the first woman and through her both sexuality and death had entered the world of men. She was both beautiful and evil. On the other hand in Plato's Symposium there was Diotima the woman from Mantinea who taught Socrates all about Eros and the ladder of love. But then there was Darwin's theory of sexual selection and the role of secondary sexual characters in his book The Descent of Man. He also called these secondary sexual characters 'ornaments' because their sole function was to trigger desire for the sake of copulation and procreation. Diotima spoke about a process whereby the personal experience of the physical erotic desire of the incarnated person for the beautiful bodies of other humans becomes transformed into the disembodied impersonal abstract spiritual love of the disincarnated soul for the eternal heavenly forms of beauty, the good and the true.

I could never fully comprehend Diotima's theory of the art of love. Nor did I feel any compulsion to struggle intellectually with Plato's Symposium. Rather give me Darwin; he made everything understandable to the plain man. How did sex become a moral problem with man if we evolved from primate ancestors?

That is a good question!

If our remote common ancestors that we share with the apes did not have any moral issues with regard to enjoying the physical pleasures of sex without any long term commitment, then how did sex become such a complicated moral issue? Eros, desire and sex was a problem for Socrates and Plato even though they and all their friends were primary interested in only having sex with adolescent boys. Moral issues regarding sex with women did not feature in Plato's Lysis, Symposium or Phaedrus.

You want to know more about the girl.

Let us first order another two drafts.

Nog twee asseblief

Baie dankie

Here we go, of to the Wild West show. Cheers.

Let's drink a toast to beautiful women.

To all the beautiful women that have crossed our paths.

To beauty, to beautiful women, to women, cheers.

IV

Cher ami, for the whole week I could not stop thinking of her. I became the helpless victim of intrusive thoughts. I was so feverish with desire for her that I feared for my physical and mental health. It was not only the fever of lust for physical union with her that held me in its grip, I was also suffering from all kinds of foreign emotional disorders such as been overcome by an irresistible craving for emotional union with her. I feared that my judgment had become impaired. My neural circuitry was playing havoc with me. It was this craving for emotional attachment and bonding that frightened me. As men it is not unusual for us to experience very strong and powerful urges for sexual consummation with some highly desirable woman without feeling any strong need to establish an emotional attachment to that person, especially after having had sex with her.

Had I fallen in love with her? In the end I concluded that I had fallen hopelessly in love with her. Why else would I be suffering from exhilaration, euphoria, and increased energy, and sleeplessness, loss of appetite, trembling, a pounding heart, and spells of rapid breathing? I was even plagued by sudden attacks of anxiety. Was it possible that I could have caught the contagion of love at first sight? A contagion that was particularly virulent.

The next couple of days seemed to have taken an eternity to pass. When Saturday evening finally arrived I found myself waiting anxiously for her arrival. I kept on looking around for her; I kept on looking at my watch. I was completely distracted. My nerves were shot. Fortunately almost all of the painting had been sold and only a few viewers had pitched up. This is why I told her to come on Saturday night. I would be able to give her my full attention. By 8.30 the gallery was practically empty and she had not arrived. Just as I was beginning to experience that terrible sinking feeling of extreme and unbearable disappointment she arrived.

_Mon Cher Monsieur_ it was such a relief to see her again and what a superb woman she was. I could hardly control the pounding of my heart. I felt as nervous as a teenage boy on his first date when I saw her walking through the door. This had never happened to me before.

She looked stunning in her outfit; she was wearing a black sleeveless and backless satin cocktail dress that clung to her body. At the back it was crossed strapped and the dress was held up with shoulder straps connected to the cross strap. She was braless. The slinky soft material of the dress run smoothly over every curve of her body, barely covering her thighs, but it fitted her shape perfectly. The dress' exquisitely designed bodice with its V neckline and shining sequins accentuated the mounds of her firm and shapely breasts. She stood before me in her black high heels. The glittering sequins of her evening bag hanging by a thin strap from her shoulder matched the sequins on her dress. She looked so sophisticated for such a young woman, and so innocently seductive.

For a natural platinum blonde she had a very unusual and rare skin tone. Her skin was beautiful. You would expect a natural platinum blonde to have milky white skin. Her skin tone was a very light caramel colour which gave her skin a natural light tanned appearance, and that was not the result of exposure to the sun. It was completely natural. Her name was also unusual. It was the first time that I met someone called Wanetta. She said it was an old English name which meant pale-skinned and was possibly derived from the same root as the word wan. Her face and skin colour was hardly wan or pale. She joked about her name and thought it was actually related to the Spanish name Juanita which means a woman who is stunningly attractive, sexy and intelligent. I don't know if this was true or if she was having me on. She said that her close friends called her Juanita. I realized she had a good sense of humour and could laugh at herself, but she also seemed to be a self-confident and serious person.

Shortly after Wanetta's arrival Mrs Rebecca Goldman my agent marched into the gallery and announced that all the paintings had been sold and that I had become an overnight celebrity and I had made her a lot of money and also a lot of money for myself. When Rebecca saw Wanetta she raised her eyebrows and gave me a sceptical and disapproving look. She said, 'I see you have already received your prize.' She had some business details to discuss with me before her dinner date.

It seemed that the gods could not have been kinder to me. I felt exuberant. I felt that I could conquer the world. It seemed I could not put a foot wrong. I would be receiving my prize as Mrs Goldman had so perceptively noticed. Wanetta took it as a joke, possibly even as a compliment. One prediction was certain; I would be receiving my prize in my bed, if not tonight then some other night. I felt super-confident about this.

After Mrs Goldman had left Wanetta told me that she had waited the whole week in anticipation to hear what I had to say about the two paintings. I had fixed the labels with the names of the two painting back on the wall below the paintings. As I have already told you, the one with the Sakabula Bird was called _The Tale of the Sakabula Bird_ and the other was called _Bathsheba_. She raised her eyebrows when she read the names of the two paintings.

I told her that the Sakabula Bird's tail was basically a display ornament very much like the peacock's tail, but like the peacock's tail there was an interesting twist to its function. I then told her that the Sakabula Bird's tail functioned as a kind of sexual decoration that was used in courtship and that the female Sakabula Bird only selects males with the longest tails as their preferred mating partner. Thus it was the sexual selection pressure exerted by the females that had caused the male Sakabula Bird's tail to increase in length. Of course while I was telling her this she listened with an interested but amused expression on her face.

She wanted to know if it was possible that the tails would become longer and longer as a result of the combined pressures of female's sexual preference for longer tails and competition between males for female mating partners. Well various kinds of mutations can lead to an increase in tail length. When they occur they will be passed onto the new generation of male offspring. With the occurrence of successive waves of spontaneous and random mutations for increasing tail length, each new generation of male offspring will have longer tails. Because the females prefer males with the longest tails only males with the longest tails will pass on genes for longer tails. Not many shorter tail genes will be passed on to each new generation of male offspring because males with shorter tail males will be less successful in finding mating partners.

She was quite perceptive. She wanted to know whether under the pressure of female sexual selection would not the tails end up becoming so long that it would become impossible for the male Sakabula Bird to fly. If they can't fly because their tails have become too long then they will not be able to find mates. In the end competing for mates on the basis of tail length will become self-defeating.

A satisfied smile appeared on her face. She asked: 'Was it possible that the tails of the male Sakabula Birds will eventually get so long that they will end up not been able to fly anymore and when that happens the Sakabula Bird species will vanish. Can competition for sex eventually lead to a species' extinction?'

That was an interesting question. Could such a phenomenon of run-away-sexual-selection occur in nature resulting in grotesque and extreme development of sexual ornamentation in males?

She also wanted to know if there was any evidence for this eventuality in nature. If animals stop having sex they will go extinct. That much is obvious. If animals compete for sex then they will also go extinct. That is not so obvious. But maybe sex and death are somehow connected. You may say check mate! It can't be. But it is an interesting point.

She then asked me why tail length should be so important to female Sakabula Birds. My answer was the standard text book answer. Tail length is positively correlated with superior genes. This means tail length is a positive indicator of genetic superiority.

Then she wanted to know that if the theory of sexual selection basically predicts the existence of a strong correlation between tail length and the relative superiority of the male bird's genes, does the female Sakabula Bird actually know that this is the case? This was the missing piece in the puzzle of sex selection theory.

What did I think about the question she asked?

Well as you can appreciate, _Cher monsieur_ , having no formal training in Zoology I was only an educated layman when it came to the intricacies of Darwin's Theory of Sexual Selection. I had my own copy of Darwin's _The Origin of Man_ which I had studied very carefully so naturally I felt confident enough to conclude that the female birds did indeed have the cognitive capacity to use tail length as an indicator for assessing male genetic quality before accepting them as sexual partners.

She burst out laughing at the serious way that I had answered her and possibly also because of the serious expression on my face.

Then I made the valid point that it was metabolically more expensive for a female to make an egg than for a male to make sperm. So if it costs the female a lot more to make eggs then she would not want to waste her expensive eggs by having them fertilized by inferior sperm.

Again she laughed, but she conceded the point that I had just made, because what rational female would want to waste her precious eggs on genetically useless sperm.

So we both agreed that the female bird must have somehow acquired the knowledge that males with longer tails have superior sperm and that birds with shorter tails have inferior sperm.

After we had exhausted our analysis of what the painting of the Sakabula Bird could embody for any viewer who wished to extract more than a mere aesthetic visual experience from the picture we turned our attention of the picture of Bathsheba that I had painted.

All animals including human beings who failed to attract mates will also in the end fail to reproduce. In order for any species or any individual for that matter to perpetuate itself it has to find not just any mate, but a suitable mate. And as we all know this can become a serious problem that may be impossible for a given individual to solve. All birds and animals, including humans had to solve in one way, or another, the problem of how to successfully attract suitable mates. In order for humans to find mates the problem of romantic attraction had to be first solved, possibly through a process of evolutionary natural selection. We now know that the most potent way that an individual can romantically attract a partner is by deploying romantic strategies and manoeuvres that embody features and signals that will be sufficiently captivating or enthralling to excite the desires of the opposite sex, which is precisely what Bathsheba ended up doing when she took her bath on the rooftop.

Did I tell her all of this? Of course not! How could I?

It is very dangerous in a romantic setting to start having an intellectual discourse about what is going on between yourselves. You will end up giving the game away and kill the passion. I was aware of this danger and did not want to walk wide eyed into the trap of reducing everything to evolutionary strategies of sexual conquest for the purpose of insemination or keeping one's eggs safe from contamination with inferior sperm. So I decided to take another approach with regard to talking about the painting of Bathsheba. But before I get to that I would like to dwell on a very significant possibility of what could have been going on in the Bathsheba story.

Must I go on ahead with the story? Thank you.

As I was saying humanity descended into either polygamy or polygyny as power and resources became more and more consolidated in the hands of the few. This means that women had to compete with each other to become wives of the small pool of men who possessed sufficient resources to look after one or more wives. Under these circumstance women would resort to premeditated mate poaching. They would intentionally employ mate poaching behaviours in order to lure and entice married men into affairs or short-term liaisons that could potentially develop into permanent or long-term alliances with the prospective male. This is only one possible interpretation of the story of Bathsheba. Of course there are alternative interpretations of the David-Bathsheba drama. For example, in the conventional interpretation Bathsheba is the innocent victim of the lust of David and not the scheming seductress.

Wasn't David the real mate poacher? Yes in the traditional interpretation of the story he is cast in the role of the scheming mate poacher in a drama filled with irony and tragic comedy. When I painted my Bathsheba picture all these things were going through my mind, but in my romantic pursuit of Wanetta I wanted to seduce her with other intellectual charms that would impress her all the way into my bed. If I began to speak about mate poaching or the deployment of romantic strategies and manoeuvres that embody features and signals that excite the desires of the opposite sex, this line of discussion may put her off.

My _cher ami_ I need to remind you that she was already displaying romantic strategies and manoeuvres aimed at exciting the desires of the opposite sex, in this case me, by the premeditated action of dressing up in that gorgeous outfit that she was wearing. We were both complicit, we were both acting with ulterior motives, but the romantic game of seduction requires that while we are aware of this, we avoid talking about it, instead we become both readily complaint to each other's manipulations while being innocent of our own hidden intentions and desires at the same time.

At the emotional level I was not willing to accept the biological reduction of romantic attraction and love to a simplistic outcome of Darwin's theory of sexual selection. Darwin's book _The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex_ had huge impact on nineteenth century thought. Next to Karl Marx's _Capital_ it was one of the most important books produced in the nineteenth century and we certainly have not heard the last of Darwin's _Descent of Man_ and his theory of sexual selection. What Marx had to say in _Capital_ was true in a trivial sense. It was all so blindingly obvious. The truth was hidden plain view, in plain sight. Capitalism was based on expropriation of surplus value, on theft, on wage slavery, and so on and so forth. He was not saying anything new, he was just repackaging in a new way what had already become conventional wisdom by over stating and exaggeration out of all proportion what was indeed trivially true about the political economy of Capitalism. In the capitalistic mode of production capital naturally accumulates into fewer and fewer hands, nothing could be more obvious. In 2014 we know this to be true.

I got a bit side tracked there. I lost my original train of thought. What was it again that I wanted to say? Oh yes the painting of Bathsheba.

When I discussed my painting of Bathsheba with Wanetta it was my artistic intention to provoke critical thought about the applicability of Darwin's theory of selection in the explanation of human romantic or seductive behaviour. I told her that Thomas Hardy had flirted with using ideas from Darwin's _Descent of Man_ in the development of evolutionary narratives of sex in his novels. This interested her greatly. It turned out that she had studied the novels of Thomas Hardy for her BA honours dissertation and had explored Hardy's attempts at a literary depiction of female desire in a Victorian rural setting, which had some resonance with the ideas communicated in my paintings of the Sakabula Bird and of Bathsheba.

I had to modify my impressions of Wanetta, not only did she have a perfect face and perfect body, but she also had a beautiful mind. This made her even more erotic and desirable, but also made her enigmatic, or sort of mysterious, I don't know if you can imagine what I mean. We don't usually expect women to be enigmatic or mysterious or have beautiful souls or beautiful minds. We know that women are just as devious as we are. But it became clear to me that she while she was interested in me as a person she was not going to let me rush her into my bed, she was not going to be an easy pushover and let me have my way with her. She listened carefully with genuine interest to everything I had to say and I began to find this a bit unnerving. An intelligent woman can be intimidating. But then again an intelligent woman can be exciting. In fact intelligence in a woman does have an erotic allure.

By 9.30 pm everybody had left and we were alone. The cassette for the light classical music that had been playing came to an end. She began to look at the collection of music cassettes that I had stashed in the box. She picked up a cassette and said: 'Oh my gosh I don't believe it, _Crimson and Clover_ by Tommy James and the Shondells, can I play it.'

You say that you have never heard of the hit pop song _Crimson and Clover_?

With the opening beat of the music I asked if she would like to dance. From the look on her face the invitation took her by complete surprise, after hesitating for a second or two she said: 'yes, why not.' Crisscrossing my left hand fingers with her right hand fingers, placing my right hand on her left hip, and with her left hand placed lightly on my right shoulder, we tentatively moved into each other's embrace, maintaining a gap between our bodies. Following a simple slow rhythmic step-touch-step dance routine we danced in a small circle. The gap separating our bodies soon narrowed and we found ourselves in a closed embrace dancing intimately cheek to cheek. I gently caressed her hip with my free hand, kissed her gently on the cheek; she moved her head so that I could kiss her on her lips. Disentangling our fingers, I placed both hands on her hips, and she responded by slipping her arms around my neck. I slipped my hands down interlocking my fingers across the small of her back, pressing her against me. That was the beginning of our incredible relationship. Our relationship turned out to be an unimaginable dream until it came to an untimely end. I know that one has to keep the plot of a story taut. It is the tension which locks the listener.

V

So you want to know how it all ended. The night is still young. Like me you are not married and you don't seem to be in a great hurry to go anywhere soon. I am easy, I have no pressing commitments, we could talk until dawn, you could stay over and in the morning we can go to East Gate for breakfast.

Maybe the good Zulu will keep his bar open until the break of dawn. Who knows? I will pay him to keep the bar open until I have finished my story of the tale of the Sakabula Bird if it must come to that.

Well I am happy to go on talking, if you are genuinely not getting tired of my ramblings? You are good listener, so why not, I am willing, so I will continue with story of the _Tale of the Sakabula Bird_. But I must make Wanetta the central protagonist of the story.

Good, I will tell you the story of Wanetta and the deep love we shared. Should we order another round of beers?

I must warn you in advance that the story I am about to tell is a long story.

Will there be enough time to finish the story?

If you really interested in hearing the full story until the end, then I will make the time.

Yes I am serious, we can retire to my flat when the bar closes. In the morning we will go have breakfast, we will go in my Ferrari. No I am not joking. I drive a Ferrari. All my life I have loved beautiful cars and beautiful women. But first let me first tell you the story of our love.

After I locked up the gallery and we retired upstairs to my apartment. We spoke through the night into the early hours of Sunday morning. She did not go to bed with me that night even though she spent the whole night with me before leaving at 5.00 am in the morning. I discovered that she was 21 years. She was completing her diploma in higher education. A teaching post had been offered to her at Brakpan High School which she had accepted. She was living in a commune in Bellevue with a whole lot of student activists, trade unionists and people working in legal aid and so. Anyway as soon as her final exams were over we made love for the first time after going out for about six weeks. It was the longest I have waited to sleep with someone. For six weeks I lived as a celibate. Afterwards she told me that she had heard about my reputation as a womanizer, an immoral philanderer, and had been warned by many not to become involved with me as she would only end up being hurt. So she had decided to make me wait for my reward to see if what was happening between us was really something genuine. But I knew from experience that this was only part of the game. She wanted to give herself to me, she was no different to Bathsheba, but she wanted make me wait, she wanted to see the Sakabula Bird in his full courtship display, she wanted to see the long shining scimitar of his magnificent black tail shimmer in the bright sunlight, only then would she give herself to him, or rather me, but you know what I mean.

We became a couple and she moved in with me in January 1981. Like Charles Dickens once wrote it was the best of times and worst of times. But it was the start of the happiest time of our lives. After the turbulent 1970s South Africa was on the brink of a decade-long catastrophic descend into a political quagmire that would end with the destruction of the Nationalist Party government and the complete ideological and political demolition of Apartheid.

Our love affair became intertwined with the liberation struggle against apartheid. She was a committed revolutionary and our bohemian life style suited her.

In August 1983 the mass action organization called the United Democratic Front (UDF) was launched at Mitchell's Plain. More than 500 organizations became affiliated to the UDF. It was truly a popular mass movement that proved to be extremely effective in the successful mobilization of popular support for the liberation struggle on multiple fronts across the country. Protest campaigns involving rolling mass action in response to a wide range of social, political and economic issues erupted simultaneously across the country. All kinds of protest campaigns were launched in every province, in every city, in every township. There were rent boycott campaigns, stay at home campaigns, school boycott campaigns, election boycott campaigns and mass funerals when activists were killed by the security forces. At any given time millions of UDF supporters were active throughout the country in some initiative to destabilize and make the Apartheid state ungovernable. South Africa became ungovernable. The townships were literally burning.

From 1984 onwards the popular mass uprising against Apartheid continued to gather momentum gradually weakening every pillar of white power. The ideology of Apartheid was finally shattered. The belief that Apartheid could guarantee the survival of white political power was shown to be based on an illusion. The Apartheid state was becoming increasing desperate as it began to realize that it could not hold onto power indefinitely. It was becoming increasing evident that the complete collapse of Apartheid was imminent. The Nationalist Party government under PW Botha started the piece-meal dismantling of Apartheid or at least they made an attempt to modernize Apartheid by repealing a whole gambit of Apartheid legislation. They embarked on a programme of reform and repression, or authoritarian reform if you like. But it did not work, it was too little too late, so instead of stabilizing the political situation, the initiation of authoritarian reform under the control of the National Party government triggered a tidal wave of political unrest which could not be contained or pacified.

There was something I wanted to say but it completely slipped my mind. Oh, I now remember I wanted to say something about the role of reason in political deliberation and political action or agency. The point is: Did reason start to prevail over irrationality as the country slipped into a state of ungovernable anarchy?

I believe that irrationality ruled in South Africa right from the earliest days of colonialism. Race relations were shaped by irrational beliefs and irrational prejudices.

Was Apartheid a completely irrational ideology right from its inception? You must remember Apartheid was successfully used as a very popular ideology to mobilize the white masses from as early as the 1930s. So was the programme involving the authoritarian reform of Apartheid that was launched in the 1980s based on a sudden miraculous comprehension of the existence of a rational relation between reason and reality? I don't really know, but I don't think so. Apartheid as an ideology was always based on an irrational relationship between a collection of popularly held myths and a false or deluded perception of reality. Apartheid as an ideology was invented not only to justify the continued perpetuation of the already pre-existing system of racial separation and segregation that had taken root in South Africa since the 17th century. It was more ambitious than a purely secular condoning and secular re-enforcement of what had developed over time into a historically rooted reality of practice, practice centred on the social separation and segregation of the races. A practice that was essentially discriminatory and exploitative. A practice which served the interests of a white minority. The political and social objectives of Apartheid ideology was to defend and rationalize the further expansion, entrenchment and enforcement of an even more radical form of social separation and segregation in order to secure the political power and dominance of whites. Apartheid ideology was no longer a secular apologetics for an existing state of affairs, it developed into a political theology, seeking a metaphysical or rather a mythological justification for the practice of racism in every dimension of human life. Racist mythology shaped white perceptions of reality. The rule of reason and evidence was jettisoned and instead the reign of darkness enveloped the country.

After the 1930s the relationship between myth and reality was taken to be literal. It was amazing that Apartheid mythology could co-exist with modernism in South Africa.

Modernism did not prevent the rise of Apartheid and the political system which institutionalized the separation and segregation of people according race with respect to differential access to political and economic power. That Apartheid actually happened is now hard to comprehend. That it did indeed happen is almost unbelievable looking back now with the wisdom of hindsight. No white person in the 1950s or 1960s or 1970s could comprehend or even conceptualize the eventual collapse of Apartheid. No white person thought that this could ever happen or that it was inevitable. No white person who supported Apartheid by voting for the Nationalist Party at the polls had the moral foresight or the moral sensibility or the moral awareness to comprehend that Apartheid was a crime against humanity. This is what was so mystifying. There was this mass-based white cognitive dissonance. Racism was so deeply ingrained in the white psyche that it was impossible to imagine any kind of non-racial co-existence between black and white. We can speak all night about the psycho-social pathologies of racism, but let's leave that aside. Let's focus on the irrational and the flight of reason.

Well going back to the collapse of Apartheid which was eventually brought about by the popular mass uprising during the 1980s, there are many ironies which demonstrate just how irrational the Apartheid state had become. For example, the Apartheid state and its politicians and the whites in general could never quite comprehend the nature of the liberation war. A liberation war which in actual fact had been finally triggered, and set motion as a reaction against the unbearable repressive and oppressive state of affairs which had been imposed lives of blacks for generations. Rejection of Apartheid by blacks had not been factored into the political equation. It was simply assumed that the blacks would comply, and fall into line, and accept the imposition of Apartheid by violence and force if necessary. How was it possible that mass black resistance, rebellion and revolution was not foreseen by the majority of whites? The 1976 mass student uprising caught the Apartheid politicians, the police, the military and the majority of whites by surprise. It was completely unanticipated. While the Apartheid political leaders spoke about a total onslaught they were unable to perceive that they themselves were the real instigators, the actual catalysts, of the total onslaught. The real total onslaught against Apartheid was due to the rational self-initiated uprising of the masses against the reign of irrationality, against the reign of 'un-reason', for the want of a better word. It was not externally imposed or driven or controlled or directed, it was a genuine people's war, it was entirely internally initiated, and internally driven, and it was an independent and autonomous mass-based eruption of an intensive and extensive liberation struggle carried out by the masses for sake of achieving their own freedom. It was initiated by the people of South Africa, and by no one else, by not external party or force. It was never an externally imposed threat which had been initiated, controlled and master-minded by the Russians. There was no external agency involved. The war was being waged from within the country and not externally waged from outside the borders of the country. The actual theatre of the war from a geo-political perspective was completely internal, the battle fronts which demarcated zones of conflict were internal, and never across national borders. The politicians and the military misunderstood and also misconceived the nature of the war which was been waged. If politicians and the military could not conceptualize the nature of war which was overwhelming the Apartheid state how they could fight it? And indeed, the way they waged the war was an exercise in self-defeat, in was completely futile. They could not comprehend or understand where the actual battle frontiers lay, where the battle lines had been drawn.

So while the real front of the war against the Apartheid state was been waged internally within the perimeters of the town and cities of South Africa, the Nationalist Party was waging with its military forces a semi-conventional war on an external front within the national boundaries of a foreign countries in order to preserve white political power and pre-empt what they imagined to be an external communist threat bent on over throwing the white state. They were fighting in Namibia and in Angola in the vain hope of stemming the rising tide of history in South Africa. The real war and battle fields was inside South Africa, not outside South Africa. They were fighting and winning battles in the wrong theatre of war. As I said, the theatre of the real war was in South Africa, it had been going on within the borders of South Africa since the whites first settled in the country, and it had never ever really ceased. The black townships had never stopped simmering and seething under the jack boot of separation and segregation. The black masses working in the white owned and white controlled economy were filled with hostility and discontent towards racial discrimination and racial exploitation. The anger, the discontent, the hostility, the opposition, the non-compliance, the resistance, the rebellion was always there, it was never going to go away. It could not be wished away. No amount of Apartheid force or violence would make it go away. No amount of repression would make it go away. The struggle involved rationality against irrationality. The masses were driven by the dictates of reason and evidence.

So you can now appreciate the irony, while the South African military forces were winning numerous military battles that were been bravely fought and won in Angola by out-fighting and by out-manoeuvring an enemy that was locked into a rigid and inflexible Soviet inspired doctrine of conventional war, the real non-conventional war of national liberation by other means was being fought and waged very effectively within the internal frontiers on the battle fields in the streets, factories, towns and cities within the borders of South Africa against the Apartheid state.

In fact while the SADF was winning all of its battles through superior military skills and competence on the battle fields in Angola, the invisible but more real people's war that was been waged on the internal fronts of conflict within South Africa by the UDF were being lost by the Apartheid state through its sheer political ineptitude, ideological blindness, tactical blunders and strategic failure at every level of engagement within the internal theatre of war.

So much for the government's security campaign against the threat of the total onslaught!

While the SADF was taking towns, cities and bridges in Angola, at the same time, within South Africa, in the very heart of its streets, factories, towns and cities the Apartheid state was been outfought, outflanked, outmanoeuvred by a highly mobile streetwise UDF, whose cadres were fighting bare-handed against the massive state repressive apparatus, the UDF cadres were waging a successful war without guns, bombs, artillery, armoured vehicles, tanks and planes. While the SADF was making Angola ungovernable for MPLA, the UDF operating within South Africa was through brilliant tactical and resourceful strategic engagement making the South African state ungovernable. The Apartheid state had completely underestimated its enemy, the UDF, who were the people of South Africa. It had underestimated UDF intelligence, courage, patience, steadfastness, determination, persistence, endurance, morale, flexibility and it failed to grasp the profoundly important fact that all enemies of the Apartheid state held the moral higher ground, and had won the propaganda war. They were also the agents of reason, they were the agents of rationality against the irrational. The people of South Africa fought the Apartheid state with their hearts and minds, making then unbeatable, invincible, and undefeatable, the Apartheid state was facing an opponent who refused to be vanquished. The only option the Apartheid state had was genocide. It was an option they could no longer consider; it was too late for genocide. It was a war of good against evil, where the Apartheid state had become the agent of evil.

There was no way that the Apartheid state could shake off its mantle of evil. It had become the incarnation of evil, plain and simple.

In my own mind there where many factors and processes acting in concert that brought about the inevitable political collapse of the Apartheid state. Also in my own mind the sustained low intensity bare-handed war of attrition and resistance which erupted in the early 1980s and continued until the 1994 election was fought and won by the ordinary people of South Africa. What no one realized or could even grasp was that the war of liberation being fought by the UDF through non-violent means against the Apartheid state had the support of two very powerful allies, who had always been shadowing the progress of the peoples' liberation struggles against racial domination from the darkest days of the 19th century until the gloom finally lifted at the close of the 20th century.

The unlikely alliance partner or ally of the people of South Africa was Reason and Science. It was Reason and Science that provided the evidence and compelling arguments that Apartheid was an irrational ideology that was not grounded in reality nor was it grounded in justice, it was based on a grand mythology and the defenders of Apartheid were living in a land of fantasy.

There is a lot of things about Apartheid which make it a fascinating phenomenon for sociological, psychological, economic, political and theological research. There can be no doubt that it was an inherently evil system. The ideology inspired the collective collusion of whites in the commission of evil against the majority of the population in South Africa. Apartheid, like Nazism or Fascism, provides important subject material for the investigation of the how the obsession with identity can be linked to collective evil, moral corrosion, racially based moral entitlement, racial segregation and the possibility of genocide.

There can be no doubt that an Afrikaans speaking intellectual elite played a central role in the political mobilization of a socially, politically and economically fragmented community of poor white Afrikaners who had been undergoing rapid proletarianization from the late 19th century until the end of the 1930s. Apartheid as an ideology and as a comprehensive system of segregation, separation and discrimination was used by a political elite as a cohesive force to create de novo this thing called Afrikanerdom or the Volk. Before that event, Afrikanerdom and the Volk did not exist. It never existed until it came into full artificial fruition after 1948.

The Nationalist Party electoral victory in 1948 turned out to be the great betrayal of the Afrikaner people.

VI

You find all this fascinating?

Well then let me continue with the Tale of the Sakabula Bird, if you like.

Between 1983 and 1986 Wanetta and I became part of a huge circle of friends that included academics, students, trade unionists, artists, musicians, actors, journalists, and lawyers who were all involved in one way or another with the UDF and the mass struggle. Our wide circle of friends represented almost every possible shade of Leftist persuasion that one could image. We attended study groups, discussion groups and there was even a regular seminar on Neo-Marxism that went on for months on end. We were drawn into all kinds of political activism through volunteerism. In fact the UDF consisted of an army of volunteers. It would not be an exaggeration to conclude that the Apartheid state was brought down by the concerted actions of volunteers, and part-time revolutionaries.

As an artist I became increasing involved in working for the UDF publicity campaign helping with the rapid production and distribution of posters, banners and T-shirts, all of which I personally financed.

Many of our friends who were activists in UDF were also underground members of the ANC and the Communist Party. Wanetta and I were initially not members of the ANC or the Communist Party, but this did not stop us from participating actively in many of the UDF programmes. Because I was a very active participant in the Neo-Marxist Seminar our friends took it for granted that I was a Marxist. Wanetta and myself initially resisted the persistent attempts that were made to recruit us into the South African Communist Party .We were not interested in being involved in the underground side of the liberation struggle.

In this sense I was a true rebel. I treasured my intellection freedom and independence. I did not want to bow under the yoke of party discipline. Initially we chose to be friendly comrades and fellow travellers.

However in the end we felt morally compelled to become Communists so we joined the South African Communist Party. Of course everything was underground. I became the East Rand cell leader of the Communist Party. Our cell members lived in Wattville, Daveyton and Reiger Park.

In due course some of her trade union and legal aid friends who originally came from the same commune in Bellevue as Wanetta also became my tenants. Many of them were also members of the Communist Party. On the 20th of July 1985 the Apartheid government declared a state of emergency. Shortly after the declaration of the state of emergency more than 8000 activists were arrested. During the political upheaval that held South Africa in a vice grip the bonds of our relationship deepened and our love for each other remained passionate. In 1986, we had been together for 6 years and we decided to get married. A new national state of emergency was declared on the 12th of June 1986.

Before we could finalize the arrangements for our wedding the officers of the newly established state security police division for what was called the war against subversion aptly named the Bureau for Peace and Stability (BPS) arrived at our apartment at 2.00 am in the morning bashing loudly on the front door on the 15th of June 1986. We were told that we were being detained under the Internal Security Act, Act 72 of 1982.

They allowed us to get dressed and we sat in the lounge under the watchful eyes of two young BPS officers while the other five ransacked the flat, my studio and the gallery until 4.00 am. They carried away heaps of stuff, loading it all into the back of a police van .They took almost my entire library of books; they also took the typewriters and every scrap of paper they could find they stuffed into cardboard boxes. They searched every nook and cranny, lifting up carpets, pulling up the floor boards, climbing into the ceiling, tapping on the walls for hollow cavities, empting the contents of cupboards and drawers onto the floor. They trashed the flat completely. They took all the posters and paintings that I exhibited in my recent _The Aesthetics of Oppression_ art exhibition. Canvases were removed from their frames and rolled up. When it seemed like they were finished the person in charge asked if he could use my phone. I told him 'to be my guest'. I didn't know who he was phoning but it was definitely someone very high up, maybe it was the Minister of Police, I don't know, but I distinctly heard him say they have now rounded up everybody.

Who could everybody be was the question that rang through my head at that moment? Had they smashed the entire East Rand underground organization?

Wanetta and I were escorted out of the flat down the stairs, through the arcade past my Gallery into Leeupoort Street. The streets were deserted. It was still dark. I had my arm around Wanetta. We stood on the pavement while the security police milled around opening and closing car doors. There was a fleet of police cars parked outside. Two SAP squad cars had also arrived with their flashing blue lights. They were parked on the other side of the road, with their police radios crackling away. The uniform police were engaged in a discussion with the BPS officers. It seemed that one of my tenants had phoned the police suspecting that a break-in was in progress in the arcade.

We were roughly pulled apart and bundled into the back seats of separate cars. We were not given a chance to hug each other or say good bye. The car that she was in made a screeching U-turn and with spinning tires burning rubber on the tarmac it accelerated away. I caught a flashing glimpse of her raised hand, ashen face and wide eyes. As the car speed away I could see that she had turned her head trying to glance through the back window to see what was happening to me. She was taken to some unknown destination and I was driven to Vereeniging where I was held overnight in a cell at the police station.

The next morning I was transferred to a cell in the Vereeniging Prison. I was locked up in a small isolated prison cell. The cell had a toilet and a tiny basin. There was no bed or mattress, just a dirty pillow and a heap of stinking blankets lying in the corner. I was left there in solitary confinement for six weeks. Every third day I was marched off to the shower block where I had a cold shower and a shave. I was kept incommunicado and was completely in the dark with respect to what was happening in outside world. No visitors were allowed to see me. I also had no idea what was going on with my business, and this began to worry me a lot. Of course I was also extremely worried about Wanetta. She was constantly on my mind. I needed to get in touch with my lawyer. The only people that I saw were the prison wardens. They were the only link through which I could establish contact and communications with the outside world, so I began to use every opportunity to strike up some kind of friendly repartee with them. Eventually through joking, light hearted banter and friendliness I managed establish a connection with one of the younger wardens. In the end I succeeded in persuading him to phone my lawyer. Of course I arranged for him to be paid a sum of money. I managed to organise that my lawyer had power of attorney over my business affairs. With the assistance of the young warden I managed to get decent food, regular changes of clothing, a sketch pad and pencils, pens and note pad, and books.

After six weeks of detention I was finally fetched from my cell, loaded into the back of a police van and driven every day for the next two weeks to the Vereeniging Police Station. Two uniform policemen marched me off to a large office containing several tables and chairs. In the office I recognized two members of the BPS. One was a major. He was present at the raid made on my flat. The other was a captain. Also present were two plain clothes policemen who belonged to the commercial crimes unit.

Stacked on the tables inside the office at the police station were piles and piles of files filled with the documents, accounts, bank statements, income statements all of which belonged to Lake View Investments Pty Ltd which was the company that I owned. All the income that I earned from the sale of my art was invested through this company. The main investments involved the purchase of rental property in the form of houses, office buildings and flats. I was making a lot of money. I had a huge property portfolio. On paper my collection of assets and the income I earned from them made me a millionaire.

For the next 10 days I entered into the moral underworld of the BPS as a bystander and guiding observer, if there can be such thing. Even though everything in the office was about me, I was nevertheless still a kind of bystander that was obliged by the circumstances to assist them in their investigation into the finances of my business. The two policemen from commercial crimes branch who had been seconded to assist the BPS in the analysis of every single business transaction that Lake View Investments had made over the past 8 years of its existence as a business. They pored over documents and accounts, scrutinizing everything, leaving no stone unturned. It was a tedious and time consuming exercise. It turned out to be an exhausting and fruitless exercise for the police. They asked question after question on the why, what, how and wherefore of any transaction or letter or communication that could be remotely linked to any kind of subversive activity. They had lists and lists of tenants that had rented office space, flats and houses which were owned by Lake View Investments.

By the early 1980s the Group Areas Act and other Apartheid legislation was being openly contravened without the risk of prosecution. When they discovered that some of the tenants were UDF activists who were Black, Indian and Coloured they thought they were onto something. But in reality they were just rent paying tenants. There was no concrete evidence that any of my flats or houses were being used as safe houses or for storing arms caches. There was no evidence that money was been laundered through my business or banks accounts to support any subversive underground liberation campaign.

In the end they could find nothing that was dodgy. Every single item, every single transaction was legitimate and above board. To their chagrin which they could not hide, nothing illegal or subversive could be found. Also to their great vexation and envy they discovered that I was actually a very wealthy and successful businessman. They could not understand why I was involved in the UDF. They suspected that I was a member of the Communist Party but they had not confronted me yet with any evidence supporting their suspicions.

They could not understand why I had chosen to live in such a modest flat in Cinderella's Arcade. The fact that I was not living a lavish life style even though I was literally rolling in money puzzled them immensely. This frugality with regard to my lifestyle convinced them that I was a Communist. Well I tried to convince them as best as I could that strictly speaking it was not true that I was absolutely frugal in my all ways. There were limits to my austerity. I took great care with regard to personal grooming and the way I dressed. I was very conscious of style and quality with regard to the clothes and shoes that I wore. I was concerned about the impression that I made on women. I had a good instinct on what women liked with regard to how a man should dress. I knew what turned them on. I also knew that wealth or money in plentiful supply was one of the most potent aphrodisiacs when it came to women. In fact it was a supplementary secondary sexual characteristic that charmed and mesmerized women.

The two BPS men were well aware that money was the magical charm that drew women to a man. I sensed their envy towards me because they did not have access to the kind of financial resources that I took for granted. This I sensed made them feel inferior. I could also sense that they were envious of me.

I was amused that these two BPS men who, wearing conspicuous golden marriage bands that shone brightly on the ring fingers of their left hands, were blatant in their obsessive preoccupation like two school boys with the fantasy of having sex with a very attractive young woman who was working in an administrative capacity at the police station. That was all they spoke about. They were most probably _ouderlings_ in their church. She could not have been older than nineteen.

She was called in to make photocopies. She volunteered to bring us tea. She took an instant liking to me. The BPS men noticed that she was attracted to me and openly flirted with me. I could see that this vexed them. I drew a sketch of her which depicted her in an exceptionally sexy and beautiful manner. I signed my name on the drawing and gave it to her. She was thrilled with the sketch.

When the investigation of my business affairs was completed I was taken back to the small cell at the Vereeniging Prison and left there for three weeks. I was again practically in solitary confinement. I was the only inmate in a long corridor of cells. I was in the last cell at the end of the corridor. For 24 hours a day it was deathly quiet. The silence and absence of all distraction made my mind wonder. I began to think about my life, trying to make sense of it, putting the pieces of the puzzle together. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how I got to be who I was and what I had become.

VII

It was at Wits that I discovered Marxism. As a student I became a Marxist. I took to Marxism like a duck to water. I am still a kind of a Marxist. I have never really stopped being a Marxist of sorts. Marx's _Das Kapital_ was the key that unlocked the mysteries of the world. Later I discovered Charles Darwin and everything fell into place, Darwin explained everything about sex, what made women so attractive, so beautiful, and why women where so pleasurable to gaze upon. With Darwin, the desire that beauty provoked was morally unproblematic. With Darwin the reality of evil vanishes.

The world viewed through the lens or prism of Marx's _Capital_ turned out to be a horrible nightmare. While the orthodox economists conceptualized the Capitalist system as conforming to a God ordained eternal and unchanging natural ordering of the economic relationship between men, Marx revealed that the Capitalism was built on the unstable foundations of an irreconcilable conflict of interests between the owners of property who did not work and the proletariat who do all the work but who owned no property. With Marx the idea of evil was an empty paradox.

There was also a certain mystique attached to being a Marxist. There was also this glamorous notoriety to being a Marxist. It was sexy to be a Marxist. It did not necessarily imply that you were a Communist. Some of my friends took great pride in calling themselves Communists or Marxist-Leninists or Trotskyites or even Anarchists.

At Wits I met up again with Carol Rosenberg and Janet Mendelowitz. They were also doing Fine Arts. Between lectures I would generally find them huddled around a table with all the comrades. Always enveloped in a thick haze of cigarette smoke, they would be picking at plates of chips covered in tomato sauce and slugging back cups of strong coffee. They had both taken up smoking. Carol was always wearing a Budenovka, a Russian red army cap with a beak and folded earflaps. It was decorated with a red star. I wondered where in hell she had obtained the cap. A smoking cigarette would invariably be hanging from the corner of her mouth as she stirred her coffee. They stayed in the Sunnyside girl's residence on campus. They had become born again Marxists. They had also become atheists casting off the yoke of Judaism. I had unwittingly become a regular lunch time attendee of the invisible University of Revolution that assembled around the same table in the corner of the canteen on the ground floor of the Student Union building. From the elevated vantage point of our table in the canteen we had a panoramic view of leafy northern suburbs of the Johannesburg bourgeoisie.

All my friends belonged to this motley brigade of canteen atheists and revolutionaries wearing an assortment of hats. Aaron Kaplan who had gone to a Yeshiva College in Yeoville was quite conspicuous wearing a kind of Bolshevik fur hat with ear flaps.

From the political discourses that took place round the canteen table I gradually learnt a new language, with its specialized semantics, logic and pragmatics. A language populated with words, concepts and phrases like bourgeoisie, proletariat, class consciousness, false consciousness, capitalists and capital, wage labour, revolutionary conscious, vanguard party, reification, the masses, the working class, exchange value, extraction of surplus value, class interests, liquidation of the bourgeoisie, means of production, commodity exchange, two stage theory of revolution, relations of production, means of exchange, forces of production, alienation, class conflict.

I also learnt about the ANC and SACP. I learnt about Mandela and Bram Fischer. Bram Fischer became my hero.

When I started my career as a professional artist I decided that I would make my living by painting the proletariat. I would try and paint the class struggle. For my project I began to spend a lot of time at the Cinderella Mine Compound which was quite close to my studio. I spent months studying mine workers, making sketches of everything I saw. I studied closely and meticulously everything that was going on in the compound and in the lives of the proletariat. I was never sure what I was looking for or what I actually wanted to paint.

There was always something interesting going on at the mine compound. There was always something interesting to sketch. Business was always bustling at the Compound Trading Stores. A constant stream of proud owners of brand new bicycles decorated with mirrors, hooters, bells, red and silver reflectors, lamps, carrier baskets, and mud flaps peddled up and down the road. From an artistic perspective I marvelled at what they did to their bicycles. The handle bars and frames of the bicycles would be covered with the most amazing coloured wire and bead work. Each bicycle was a mobile work of art, a sculpture in motion. Mine workers returning from their shifts would inevitably have to dodge some random mine worker learning to ride a bicycle. Often there would be a friend jogging behind the bicycle, gripping the saddle from behind, supporting the wobbling moving bicycle so that it would not topple over. Sometimes the friend would run as fast as possible behind the bicycle pushing the bike forward until it had gained sufficient forward momentum. He would then release the learner bike rider after giving the bike one final powerful thrust. Usually the rider would immediately start to wobble and zig-zag madly trying to maintain his balance before crashing into a heap in the veld. Everyone would shake with laughter.

All kinds of dramatic scenes drew my attention, and I studied them carefully.

Always under one of the large ubiquitous oak trees surrounding the outer perimeter of the compound dormitories there would be a crowd gathered round a game of dice. Also in the shade cast by the high hostel dormitory walls there was always a game of cards in progress.

I often noticed the same compound administration clerk wearing spectacles and dressed in a white shirt, khaki pants and shiny black shoes sitting on a bench under a large mulberry tree writing a letter for some mine worker. In a flowing stylish but legible cursive writing he drafted the letters with a fountain pen. The mine worker sitting next to him, would lean forward with elbows on knees, supporting his chin in cupped hands, and watch the page gradually fill up with neat long-hand writing. He would concentrate intensely as he formulated in his mind the messages that he wished to dictate to the letter writer.

These scenes of letter writing intrigued me.

I had read an interesting article on ancient letter writing. It was about ancient documents including private letters that had been dug up. Many of these private letters had been perfectly preserved after being buried for more than 2000 years in the dry desert sands of Egypt. For more than a thousand years the people living in some ancient town called Oxyrhynchus near the Nile River in Egypt had dumped all the domestic garbage into holes that had been dug in the dry desert sands some distance beyond the town limits. It was a kind of ancient municipal dump I suppose. I never thought that the people living in towns more than 2000s years ago could generate such huge quantities of trash. Egypt was conquered by the Greeks and then by the Romans. Oxyrhynchus also fell under the bureaucratic control and administration of these foreign conquerors so some of the letters were written in Greek and others were written in Latin on papyrus. One papyrus fragment recovered from an ancient trash dump was a private letter written in the second century (200 AD). It had been written by a woman named Thaius to a relative or friend called Tigrius, who had instructed in the letter to take care of some agricultural business for Thaius. The translation of the fragment reads as follows, I can still remember the full contents of the letter because it astonished me so much.

"Thais to her own Tigrius, greeting.

I wrote to Apolinarius to come to Petne for the measuring. Apolinarius will tell you how the situation stands concerning the deposits and public dues. He will let you know the name of the person involved. If you come, take out six measures of vegetable seed and seal them in the sacks, so that they may be ready. And if you can, please go up and find out about the donkey. Sarapodora and Sabinus salute you. Do not sell the young pigs without consulting me. Good bye."

Who was Thais? Who was Tigrius? The letter was composed about 1800 years ago possibly by her hand from thoughts that were once present in her brain. Her absence creates such an unfathomable void. The writing is filled with such a collection of mundane everyday details. The message appears so dislocated, with all the connections to her lived world severed from us forever. Can you imagine, tens of thousands of similar private messages were being written thousands of years ago? They give us a profound window into their private lives. Many of them containing details written by someone in their own personal and characteristic style of handwriting about the most banal affairs associated with their daily lives. Eventually they all ended up buried in the trash dumps under the desert sands. Most of these papyruses that had been buried in the ancient dumps were later dug up by the Arabs who gathered load after load of papyruses filled with writing to be burnt as fuel in fires. We will never know whether Tigrius answered the letter. I don't think the Arabs that dug up the papyruses for burning gave the writing a second glance or thought.

It was possible that the mine worker that I was observing with a green plastic band round his left wrist sitting next to the letter writer was also dictating a similar kind of message for his letter. Maybe he was dictating something along the lines: Use the money that I have sent back to buy another ox that can be used for ploughing. Or it could contain instructions to buy a sheep, or a goat or a cow.

It is interesting to note that while the mine workers were connected to the land they were in reality resisting proletarianization.

There were also the letter readers.

Often I would observe sitting on the lawn nearby another clerk wearing a yellow plastic band round his right wrist. He would be reading a letter to another random mine worker also wearing a green plastic band round his right wrist. The mine worker listened intently as the letter was read out aloud. It sounded like it had been written in Portuguese. Every now and then he smiled, sometimes he chuckled, other times he face became serious, now and then he frowned. He asked the reader to read the letter again, and again. He then took the letter back from the letter reader and carefully folded the letter, placed it back into the envelope.

Mine workers on crutches and with limbs bound up in white bandages lounged on the veranda of the Compound clinic. On the front veranda by the compound administration offices mine workers sat on benches around a table looking at a blackboard mounted on a large wooden easel. Another mine clerk was teaching them to read and write. He had written out the alphabet on the black board. They were practicing the writing of letters by writing each letter several times into their A5 Croxley exercise books.

There were always so many activities to observe, so many scenes to sketch. It was always fascinating for me.
For instance, there would be two mine workers playing _morabaraba_ on a board scratched onto a paving slab, using stones for cows, taking turns to move a cow to an empty adjacent intersection. Three men passing by stopped to watch the game. Two men left the store carrying a brand new brightly decorated trunk. Another left the store pushing a brand new bicycle. Yet another walked out of the store carrying a new piano accordion. Other mine workers pressing their noses against the display window of the Central Native Trading Store gazed at penny whistles, guitars, harmonicas, transistor radios, pocket knives, primes stoves, bicycles, blankets, shoes, belts, hats.

So many different scenes to sketch. It was incredible.

Two men holding hands walked to the football field. Soccer players on the field knocked a ball around. A bunch of white teenagers joined in the game with the mine workers. One white boy headed the ball into the goal.

I would watch the mine workers arriving back at the end of their underground shift congregating around a kiosk next to the entrance of the hostel, gulping down mugs of _mageu_ to quench their thirst and eating chunks of coarse grain bread. Under a huge oak tree a mine worker stood playing a mouth harmonica. Another walking along Location road played a Jewish harp. Near the Compound perimeter a group mine workers stood in the veld in knee deep grass. They shouted words like _Ngiyakuthanda_ and other sweet proposals to the women walking across the veld on a winding sand foot path back to their homes in the Location, the women shouted back _suku wena._

Often a mine worker would shout to a passing the women. _I am a strong and handsome bull, I wish to mount you_. Mine compound police men continually chased away women loitering among the blue gum at the perimeter of the compound. The compound manager complained that these women brought all kinds of bad diseases to the compound, and they also robbed the mine workers of their hard earned wages.

The scene of activities in the compound that were unfolding under my gaze reminded me of Breughel's painting called _Children' Games_. In Breughel's painting all the children's faces were similar. You could only tell them apart by their clothing which was slightly different. Like the children's faces in _Children's Games_ to the untrained eye the faces of the mine workers were not easily distinguishable one from the next.

On the other side of the road I recognized the mine worker sitting on his haunches in the shade of a blue gum tree near compound amphitheatre. I recognized his two touts as well. One was standing on the veranda of the Trading Store and the other one was talking to a group of mine workers across road in front of the main entrance of the dormitory.

On a swept patch of ground in front of the mine worker sitting on his haunches laid a flat smooth out rectangular piece of cardboard. Three small plastic cups and little red ball were set up on the sheet cardboard. They were used in an ancient game which we called the three cups and a ball game or just cup and ball game. This game was performed by Egyptian conjurers more than 2500 years BC. It was also played by the ancient Greeks and then the Romans about 2000 years ago. In fact I laughed at one of the Latin translations that we had to do in an exam because it was actually about this ancient cup and ball game which was also been played at all the mine worker compounds in South Africa since the 1880s or earlier.

The passage for the Latin translation was taken from Seneca's 45th Epistle to Lucilius: " _Sic ista sine noxa decipiunt quomodo praestigiatorum acetabula et calculi, in quibus me fallacia ipsa delectat. Effice ut quomodo fiat intellegam: perdidi lusum_."

Which when roughly translated into English reads: Such quibbles are just as harmlessly deceptive as the juggler's cups and balls in which it is the very trickery that pleases me. But show me how the trick is done, and I have lost my interest therein. The Latin phrase _acetabula_ _et calculi_ means the cups and balls.

There is also a wonderful painting by the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch called _The Conjurer_ possibly painted between 1475 and 1480 which depicts this game being played.

I followed the tout and his entourage across the road to the cups and ball game. We all stood in a semi-circle around the board. They all spoke in Shangaan. The game started. The conjuror turned the cups upside down to show that they were empty. He then set the 3 cups in a neat row with the little red ball in front of them. He took the middle cup and placed it over the small red ball. The cups were now arranged in a triangle, two empty cups marking the corners of the base of the triangle and the cup covering the ball forming the vertex of the triangle.

He began to slowly shuffle the cups. His hand moved slow enough so that you could follow the cup that was covering the ball. He then re-arranged the cups in a row and called for bets on which cup was covering the ball. It was the middle cup. I think he was inviting bets by saying: Put down 10c and it you select the right cup I will give you 20c.

A mine worker threw 10c down and pointed to the middle cup. The conjuror without batting an eyelid gave him 20c. He started the game again, shuffling the cups a bit slightly faster this time round. He called for bets and another mine worker successfully selected the correct cup and he also got back his winnings of 20c.

I recognized that the first two mine workers who had placed bets; they were actually members of the conjuror's gambling syndicate. The stage had now been set for more players to lay bets. Those two players would continue to bet money and lose bets. But that money belonged already to the syndicate. It was working as bait money. More spectators and potential punters joined our circle.

The conjuror began to switch the ball by a very quick and smooth sleight of hand to another cup. If you bet on the cup that you had been carefully following with your eyes while he shuffled the cups you would lose. I began to play now as well.

The best strategy to follow when playing this game was to follow with your eyes the cup that was used to cover the ball and then bet on one of the other two cups. This strategy would give you a 50% probability of being right.

Many of the mine workers gathered round the circle continued to bet on the cup that was initially used to cover the ball. They began to lose consistently on each round of betting. The more they lost the angrier they became. Many of the non-betting spectators found the game entertaining and bouts of loud laughter and mirth would break out at the end of each round of betting as the punters stared in disbelief when it was shown that the cup they thought covered the ball turned out to be empty when the conjuror lifted the cup.

The gambling continued into the late afternoon. The shadows of the blue gum trees stretched across compound ground.

I sketched everything.

I often thought about the antiquity of the game, and I thought about the antiquity of letter writing and the letter reading. Written communications between the rural homestead and the compound was important in the lives of the mine worker. All of this reminded me of the myth about writing in Plato's _Phaedrus_. In Plato's _Phaedrus_ Socrates tells Phaedrus a story about a god called Theuth. The Ibis was the sacred bird of Theuth. Theuth was a great inventor. He discovered numbers, calculations, geometry, and astronomy. He also invented games like checkers or drafts. He also invented the dice or die. So then in the myth he may also have invented the cup and ball game. But most importantly he invented writing. Theuth went and showed all his discoveries and inventions to a great god called Thamus who happened to be the king of Egypt. Thamus was very impressed with all of Theuth's discoveries and inventions except for writing.

For Theuth writing was equivalent to a _pharmakon_. In Greek the word _pharmakon_ stood for a potion or remedy or recipe that could be used in a fashion analogous to medicine for the treatment of some ailment. He viewed writing as a kind of medicinal potion, which could cure an ailment such as a bad memory and thus prevent forgetfulness. Theuth tried to explain to Thamus all the benefits that writing would make possible to mankind. But Thamus was aware that the word _pharmakon_ had ambiguous meanings. It fact it had multiple meanings each corresponding to different applications. Usually the word _pharmakon_ stands for a medicinal drug or a remedy for curing an ailment. In certain contexts it can also stand for poison and in other situations it could be used as a magical potion like _muti_. Theuth proposed that writing as a medicinal remedy will help to increase memory. As a remedy it could be used to overcome forgetfulness by restoring memory. Writing may even be used as an extremely powerful magical potion for increasing knowledge and wisdom.

But Thamus remained unconvinced about the positive power of Theuth's new potion. Strange as it may be for us today, Thamus could not overcome his doubts about the value of writing. In contrast to Theuth, Thamus in fact felt the exact opposite about writing. For him writing as a potion was not at all a remedy for learning and remembering, it was actually a potent poison for memory, which would prevent learning and block the achievement of true knowledge.

I think Socrates's use of this myth to criticize writing in favour of speech was not very compelling. The ambiguity of the meaning of the word _pharmakon_ was contrived. The either/or of ambiguity was imposed. In homeopathy a poison in low doses is used to cure an ailment. But there is nothing ambiguous about this. At high doses a _pharmakon_ becomes a poison and at low doses it becomes a remedy. What so ambiguous about this? The word _pharmakon_ does not embody relativity or alternatively contradictory differences in meaning, but a rather rational continuity of meanings all of which are dependent on a single variable such as dosage concentration in this instance. Ambiguity can be cured with supplementary information. I don't think the meaning of _pharmakon_ can be resolved in a binary either/or fashion as Derrida would have it. The meaning of the word varies on continuum of possible meanings, which change in degree and not in kind.

In Plato's _Phaedrus_ Socrates proposes to Phaedrus that writing involves a similar disadvantage to painting. Socrates argues that the products or pictures of painting look like living beings, but if you ask them a question they maintain a solemn silence. To this Socrates adds that the same holds true for written words. He argues that written words do not understand what they say. This is the problem of confession, especially confession extracted under duress. If you ask the written words of writing what they mean by anything they will simply return the same answer over and over again. With respect to the meaning written words cannot answer or defend themselves. For Socrates spoken speech has priority of writing.

You have surprised me. So you are familiar with Plato's _Phaedrus_?

Did Socrates believe in these myths literal from a literal point of view? No obviously not. He believed they were myths. Theuth and Thamus did not literally exist. But Socrates did take seriously the propositional claims of the myths.

And speaking about Derrida I think his attempted deconstruction of Plato's _pharmakon_ was contrived.

Yes he is the rage.

VIII

Apart from my student days at Wits I began to remember all kinds of other incidents that had occurred in my life. Sometimes I was not even sure whether I was remembering something that had actually occurred in my past or whether I had dreamt it.

The police station in Vereeniging reminded of my old primary school in Boksburg North. It had the same atmosphere of grimness and gloom as the corridors and offices of the police station. It reminded me of my first serious clash with authority when I was in standard five. I had sort of become completely delinquent with my schoolwork. Too many afternoons were spent playing rugby, doing wrestling and hanging out at the amateur boxing club. All my good intentions to turn over a new leaf came to nothing. Things went from bad to worse. Eventually everything finally came to head when I repeatedly failed to my homework. It was a freezing cold June winters morning when the four of us were marched off to the Principal's office for not doing our homework. After all these years I can still remember their names. It was Daleen Viljoen, Christo van Buuren, Willie Wessels and I. Daleen was as thin and frail as a waif. She had dull sad pale blue eyes through which she stared listlessly at the world. Her blond hair was straggly and lustreless. She always spoke in whisper and you had to really strain yours ears to hear what she was saying. During breaks she stood alone in some corner. She lived with her sister and three brothers in Boksburg North a few blocks away from the school. The Viljoens lived in a run-down dilapidated semi-detached house under conditions of appalling poverty.

There were many poor Afrikaans families in Boksburg North. It was a rough neighbourhood. But there were exceptions. I came from an upper middle class family and so did Christo. Every day Christo's mom drove him to school. She would get out of the car and stand with him at the school gate until the bell rang. At the end of the school day when the final bell rang, she would be standing at the school gate waiting for him. Christo was a frail boy who did not participate in playing rugby before school and during school breaks. He stood always on side lines watching us play while eating his lunch.

Willie Wessels was your typical poor Afrikaans boy from a working class family of blue collar artisans who spent their weekly pay at the Boksburg North Hotel on Friday and Saturday nights. He was one of my boxing and wrestling companions.

The principal's office was small, cramped and dim. Most of the office space was taken up a large rectangular desk. On the desk was a large ink blotting pad, a pile of white papers, some brown files, a bottle of ink, a fountain pen, a pencil, a rubber band, a box filled with paper clips, a stapler, a pair of spectacles, an ash tray, a pipe, and a telephone. A single naked 60 watt light bulb hung from the ceiling. The weak winter sunlight streaming through the small round east facing window did little to brighten up the room. An atmosphere of bleakness, mingled with a mood of tension and menace pervaded the office. That morning Mr Gouws had probably forgotten to switch on the light in his office. The thought crossed my mind that he was probably trying to save electricity. Anyway, the teacher explained to Mr Gouws that we had been consistently and delinquently recalcitrant in not doing our homework and she had now given completely up on us. She also added that the four of us hardly ever paid attention in class.

She then left us in the office with Mr Gouws. Mr Gouws was actually a retired school principal who was on pension. He was the acting principal filling in until Mr Myburgh the current school principal had recovered from his illness. Mr Gouws pushed back his chair, got up from behind his desk, and standing to his full height, he stood there for a while, towering over us. He glared at us over his glasses. He was a tall grey thin old man with a bird-like face that had a remarkable resemblance to the philosopher Bertrand Russell.

Looking exceedingly stern and grave he asked each of us in turn why we had not done our homework. Daleen, Christo and Willie all gave the same answer. They all said that they did not know why they had not done their homework. Even after his gruelling interrogation they could not come up with a single good reason why they had not done their homework. I was the last one to be asked. I don't know what came over me or what prompted me. When my turn came I found myself telling him that I decided not do my homework because it seemed to be such a pointless task. I could see that he was completely taken aback by my reply. He began to shake with anger and started to yell at me, telling me that I was a typical case of the kind of insolent rubbish that would not amount to everything in life.

After he had calmed down he asked Daleen to put out her right hand. He lifted the cane and then swished it down towards her hand. Daleen's reflexes were incredibly fast. She jerked her hand away and the cane swished through empty air. She pulled her hand away a second time, the swishing cane missed again. On third stroke the cane struck her open palm and fingers of her hand with a loud stinging clap. She winced in pain. Her emaciated body trembled and shuddered with shock. Tears welled up in her eyes. Out of a total of 11 strokes the cane was only faster than her retracting hand for five of the strikes. She should have only received 4 strokes, two on the right and two on the left, but ended up getting 6 strokes.

Willie was the first to bend down. He was hit so hard that the cane shattered into a thousand splinters and Mr Gouws had to search everywhere for a new cane. A few minutes later he returned with a new cane. Willie, Christo and I each received four cuts on our backsides. The bell rang for first break. We were dismissed from the office and we went back to the class room to fetch our lunches. A strange thing then happened. After collecting our lunches the four of us stuck together. We walked to the bicycle shed behind the corrugated iron school hall and just stood there in state of stunned shock, trying to recover emotionally from the violence and pain of our beating. It was bitterly cold and the air was frosty. Daleen was shivering and trembling. Her whole body shook. Her teeth were chattering, her nose was red, her lips and fingers were blue. She bowed her head and began to sob uncontrollably. Willie tried to comfort her. She was ice cold. He put an arm around her shoulder and held her close. I looked at Daleen. She actually had quite pretty features. She was not an unattractive girl. I think all three of us felt deeply sorry for her. It was really a wretched situation that we found ourselves in. We all gave Daleen a share of our `sandwiches. We stood there silently, eating our sandwiches. Between sobs Daleen munched away at the sandwiches that we had given her. She did not say a word. She just stood there with us, staring at the ground. Christo had been fighting back the tears. His eyes were red and puffy. He kept on pushing back his spectacles as they slipped down his nose. This was the first time in my life that I felt a deep sense of solidarity. I also put my arm around Daleen's shoulders.

It was ironical that at the height of Apartheid there were poor whites. There were vulnerable and powerless young people like Daleen the little white girl who was trapped in incredible poverty and as a consequence had to endure all kinds of cruelty and abuse.

It was the first time in my life that I had tested the limits of going against authority. It was a pattern that I would repeat but more subtly in high school and in the army. I don't think I lost this rebellious streak in my character. I suppose later in life I may have been subconsciously controlling it by channelling it into my art, and then into revolutionary social action.

IX

Well these are some of the stories of my youth. Now where was I again before I became side tracked?

OK, I remember. I was still in the Vereeniging Prison.

The young warden warned me of my imminent transfer to John Vorster Square. He must have heard about it somehow. So I was mentally prepared and my morale was high, I was ready for my transfer. I felt that I had won the psychological battle for the first round. They also sensed that I was not intimidated by them.

After my transfer to John Vorster Square, nothing happened for the first 2 days. My cell was opposite the cell of Kevin Stopforth who was a trade unionist. We could communicate at night across the passage. We soon established that he had also been detained in the same security police swoop. His interrogation was over and he had also been tortured. He had no news regarding Wanetta or any of the others. He signalled that they had broken him and that he confessed everything, but he had refused to turn state witness and he was now waiting for his trial date. I had no knowledge about what had happened to Wanetta. I knew from communications with my lawyer that Wanetta and some of others had vanished. No one knew where they were being detained.

On the third day I was taken to an office on the 10th floor where I was re-united with the major and the captain, and a new face, a very ordinary looking colonel in his early fifties. When he saw me his very ordinary looking face became transformed into a disparaging smirk.

" _Jy dink jy is 'n groot meneer maar jy beteken vokol_ ," he said

(You think you such a big shot but you actually count of fuck-all.)

Again as was the case in Vereeniging the tables in the office were covered with piles of files. The files were now full of photographs. They had photographs of practically everything to which I was connected to. They began to open the files in a set order and arranged the photographs on top of the desk in some kind of exhibition. In the montage there were photographs of the piles of copies of the Workers Vanguard published by the Spartacist League of the US that they had found in my studio. It was a bit of joke because they were a Trotskyite publication, and none of us were remotely followers of Trotsky. There were also photographs of all the books taken from my library. The photographs included pictures of the full set of the works of Lenin. Ironically they had also taken photographs of Leszek Kolakowski's three volumes with the title: Main Currents of Marxism. And then there were photographs of my paintings and posters from the exhibition of The Aesthetics of Oppression.

They had photographs of me and Wanetta socializing with various UDF activists, trade unionists, lawyers, artists, journalists and writers. The photographs were of us at various meeting, marches, funerals and parties.

I spent the next couple of days staring at photograph after photograph, trying to answer question after question concerning the contents of each photo. It reminded about what Socrates had said about the silence of paintings or pictures in Plato's Phaedrus. By themselves the photos could say nothing, they could not speak. They wanted me to make each photo speak, they wanted me to be a kind of self-incriminating ventriloquist and make the pictures speak, they wanted to hear what the photos had to say, and they wanted to hear the message from the photos that would confirm what they believed the photos wanted to scream out for all to hear. They wanted the pictures to speak the truth. I had to write a statement for each of the photographs that had been handed to me to examine. I could not figure out the game that they were playing with me. A paper clip was used to attach the statement to the back of the photograph and then it was filed as evidence into a brown folder. The brown folders of evidence grew into a large pile on one side of the desk.

Finally the colonel's very ordinary face with its very everyday mundane demeanour broke into an ugly smirk. He told me that Wanetta and all of our friends who had been arrested had all eventually confessed to being Marxist-Leninists, in addition they had all confessed to being committed Communists, furthermore they all supported the revolutionary aims and agenda of the Communist Party and the ANC, and lastly they were engaged in activities that promoted and furthered the aims and objectives of the two organizations.

According to him they also confessed that they had knowingly and intentionally participated in joint actions of conspiracy and subversion to destabilize the country and create chaos that would eventually lead to the violent overthrow of the government. He reiterated that they had all signed written confessions to this effect. He wanted to hear from me whether I in all honesty did not know anything about the communist conspiracy to bring about the revolutionary overthrow of the government.

He wanted to know what my role was. He said I was in very serious trouble and that I would most certainly be convicted under the changes and I would definitely get a jail sentence of fifteen or more years. He went on to add that I might even get a life sentence. I could see he was trying to scare me.

But I could make all this go away if I turned state witness!

I could see that the great pile of evidence in the brown folders arranged on the table was going to be used as some of theatrical prop to impress upon me the gravity of my situation. They were supposed to prove that I was a Communist, that I had worked to overthrow the government by revolutionary means and that I had to be member of the ANC and the Communist Party.

They tried to convince me that the evidence in the towering heaps of brown folders on the table was compelling, unshakable and it pointed clearly to my involvement in a Communist inspired conspiracy to ignite a people's war that will result in the revolutionary and violent overthrow of the government. The evidence proved that I was Communist terrorist.

I could see what was going on in their minds. Why would I be reading the works of Marx and Lenin if I was not a Marxist-Leninist or a Communist? Why would I create works for an art exhibition called The Aesthetics of Oppression, if I did not want to incite the revolt of the masses against the state? Why would I design and produce T-Shirt, posters and campaign banners with revolutionary slogans if I did not intend to ignite a people's war. Why would I have so many activist tenants if I was not providing safe houses for underground liberation fighters and for arm caches? Why would I participate in the Neo-Marxist Seminars if I was not propagating Communism?

Then came the trick questions, the curved balls.

Was I only inadvertently furthering the aims and objectives of the revolutionary forces as some kind of useful idiot? Ignorance of the law does rule out one's culpability. I guessed they would also be happy with such an admission because it would give them something to build a case on. I sensed that what they wanted from me was some kind of admission of culpability, even if it was inadvertent culpability.

If I conceded this possibility then I would have walked into the trap that they had set. And then they would try and bend me or break me psychologically without resorting to torture. I guessed that they would they try to intimidate me with the severity of changes that were being brought against me and remind me of consequences that would follow if I were found guilty.

Everything boiled down to one thing. They wanted me to give some kind of positive indication or admission that what I was doing could have incited a people's war. The fact that these kinds of activities were being carried out by me under the auspices of the UDF meant that I was acting in common purpose with all others who had already confessed that they trying to provoke the ignition of a people's liberation war.

They kept on reminding me that I was in very deep and serious trouble, but I could make this all go away and resume my life as an artist.

They reminded me that I had a lot to lose. They said they would make sure that I would never paint another picture again.

They said I must chose between my art and jail.

I also knew that if I made the slightest admission that I had knowingly done something that could have incited a people's war then they would turn this into the thin edge of the wedge and trap me into admitting further admissions of subversive activities.

Their approach was a stick and carrot approach. They played good cop and bad cop. There was the understanding empathetic BPS guy and then there was the threatening BPS guy, who said also said in passing that there were sufficient grounds for sending me to the gallows.

The next step would be to show that my actions were premeditated because they were carried out while I was fully aware that I could be found guilty of inadvertently furthering the aims and objectives of a banned organization. If I knew beforehand that any action which I planned to commit could be construed as inadvertently furthering the aims of a banned organization then I should have refrained from carrying out such an action.

I guessed that this was game that was being played.

I decided to hedge my bets that this was the game that they were going to play. So I stuck to the argument that all I was interested was only in exploring how the aesthetics of oppression could be expressed and appreciated. I stressed that I was only interest in art for art's sake. I tried to explain that possession of Marxist literature does not make one a Marxist. I tried to explain that participation in a Neo-Marxist Seminar does not mean that I was guilty of propagating Communism.

I was given a pen and paper and told to draft a statement explaining my involvement in the UDF over the past three years. Instead of composing a confession or a statement I ended up writing a complicated thesis on the aesthetics of oppression with a proof that it was a legitimate and lawful exercise in sculpture, drawing and painting.

The colonel rejected my statement, and I refused to change my statement. The colonel tried to strike me; I dodged and grabbed his wrist in an iron grip. I don't know what came over me but I started to shout a lot of stuff in Afrikaans. I shouted that I was still Boer and being a Boer does not mean that I have conform to the Nationalist Party or the Broeder Bond's graven image of what a Boer should be. I told them that I did not fear physical violence and that I had means and resources to have him taken out. To this day I don't know why I said that.

I don't know what possessed me to say that I could organize a contract and take him out. He turned livid when I threatened to have him murdered.

I began shout:

"Fok julle, fok julle..."

(Fuck all of you, fuck all of you.....)

Everyone in the office tackled me. I landed a number of blows. Chaos and bedlam broke out in the office, a chair was broken and the piles of files went flying. The colonel had a bloody nose and looked badly shaken.

Anyway when the shouting and commotion had ended I was taken back to my cell. Nothing happened after that incident. I got a whiff that something was up. It turned out that the BPS was under pressure from the Minister of Police to wrap up the case and bring it to trial as a matter of supreme urgency. A trial date was set for March 1987. We were denied bail and were kept in custody until the trial and during the trial.

All the time they taunted me that I would be going to the gallows.

After being detained for 211 days we were eventually charged under the Terrorism Act and brought to trial. When we arrived at the court and took our seats on the dock I was shocked to see to how much Wanetta's health had deteriorated. She had lost a lot weight and looked very frail. Her face was drawn. There were dark rings below her eyes. She sat down on the bench beside me. We hugged and kissed. She was very tearful but happy to see me. When I asked her if she was going to be OK, she smiled and said she was going to be OK because she had discovered God.

She must have seen the worried look on face after she had said that she had discovered God. She wanted to reassure me that she had not become mentally ill. She keep on whispering to me, I am OK, I am OK, there is nothing wrong with my mind, I have not gone mad, I am perfectly rational.

She explained to me that she had discovered God in the ordeal of torture, in the ordeal of solitary confinement. She said that it was her belief and trust in God's goodness that had saved her. She then whispered that we would all be acquitted. I asked how she could be certain of this and she said, just wait and see.

I was confused and perplexed. How was it possible that Wanetta had become religious? Her personality had not really changed, she was still the same sincere and sensitive person, only more sincere and more sensitive.

I found it disturbing that Wanetta had become religious. I found it disturbing that she was talking about God, especially after what we had been through in the hands of God believers.

We were all briefed by our legal counsel that the evidence of Wanetta's testimony was going to win us the case because her testimony would show that all evidence against us was inadmissible. I was the only one who may go to jail. All the others who had been tortured would walk.

X

The prosecution's case against us was that we had conspired together in the planning and the initiation of all kinds of activities that shared one common objective and that was to provoke and escalate the development of a Vietnam style people's war. It was clear that they could not pin anything more specific on any of us, except for me. So for days on end we had to listen to the opinion of expert witnesses on the theory and practice of the people's war. We had to listen to academics and professors giving testimony on the principles of Marxist-Leninism and how we could have been applying these principles in the facilitation and promotion of a people's war in South Africa. We heard that the revolutionary war conducted by the people against the state does not depend for its success on an armed struggle as was the case in Mozambique, Namibia, Zimbabwe or Angola. It does not depend on the clash of well-armed insurrectionists or terrorists against a conventional national army. We had been conducting war against the people and the state of South Africa by other means.

My _cher ami_ how could we be conducting a peoples war against the people of South Africa? It was absurd. Who were the people of South Africa? All the people of South Africa were at war against the National Party government. All the people of South Africa were at war against Apartheid, all the people of South Africa were at war against the Apartheid State.

After hearing the evidence of the State's expert witnesses that all our activities were consistent with us being dangerous Leninist Bolsheviks, our defence team led by a prominent advocate then set out to debunk the claims of the State. He made it clear in his arguments that the state had no compelling evidence other than the testimony of an informer and the confessions of Wanetta and our other friends, as for me, he told the court, I was only an artist, doing what artist do.

We had guessed who the informer was. He was one of those dagga-smoking hanger-on's or Leftist groupie who was a frequent presence at our parties. He was an agent provocateur who always came up with the most outrageous plans to stir up conflict.

The defence set out to prove that the confessions that the state was using as evidence in the trial were inadmissible and fraudulent, because the accused had been forced under the pain and suffering of torture to write self-incriminating statements. The confessions were full of the most contradictory and nonsensical claims and admissions. Wanetta was put on the stand as the first witness for the defence.

After she had entered the witness box our advocate asked her what she was holding in her hand. She replied that it was a Bible. He then asked her whether she believed that the Bible that she held in her had was the inspired, authoritative, inerrant and infallible Word of God. Her answer was yes. He then asked whether she believed in God and the Bible before her arrest. She confirmed that she did not because she was an atheist before her arrest. He then asked how she came to believe in God and the Bible. Her reply created a stir in the court. She said that she discovered God at Golgotha, and as a consequence of this discovery she had been able to endure and survive the most extreme torture. Under conditions of incredible fear, extreme anxiety, overwhelming stress, excruciating pain and prolonged suffering she underwent a most dramatic and profound conversion to Christianity.

The judge coughed, the prosecutor loudly cleared his throat, and our Advocate quickly informed the judge that it was necessary for the court to hear her testimony as it had a direct bearing on establishing her credibility as a witness with respect to her claim that the confessions were made under duress in response to life-threating torture, and was therefore inadmissible and false. He also had a file of medical reports that showed that all of the accused, except for me, had sustained injuries which were consistent with exposure to the kinds of torture that they had suffered as stated under oath in their affidavits.

The judge allowed our advocate to pursue his line of leading evidence.

He asked her to describe to the court how the Bible came into her possession. It was a small pocket black leather bound NIV Bible with old and new testaments, and the name of the previous owner was Bongani Twala and was inscribed on the inner cover of the Bible in his own writing in black ball point ink. A handwriting expert confirmed that it was his handwriting. He had been a Pentecostal lay minister and a UDF activist before he had disappeared after he had been detained by the BPS.

Our defence advocate presented evidence that no record had been kept on where Wanetta had been held while in detention. It was established by private detectives hired by the defence team that she had been detained at some secret detention centre in a remote and inaccessible location deep in the Northern Transvaal bushveld close to the Limpopo River and near the border of the Kruger National Park. When she was arrested she had only the clothes on her back and nothing else in her possession, and definitively no Bible. When she arrived at John Vorster Square after being detained at the secret detention centre she was still wearing the same track suit and T-shit that she had on when she was first detained. However, when she was searched before being locked in her cell at John Vorster Square they discovered that she had a Bible in her possession which the police warden allowed her to keep after she pleaded with him. The advocated then asked Wanetta how the Bible came into her possession.

He told her to describe to the court all the events that had occurred before the Bible came into her possession.

Over the next two days the court heard the chilling story about how the Bible eventually came into her possession. She told the court her story from the beginning. After been driven away on the morning of our arrest her hands were handcuffed behind her back and her head was covered with a hood. She was made to lie down on the back seat. The hood that was pulled over her head was the same kind of hood that was pulled over the heads of the condemned after had they had stepped onto the gallows to be hung at Pretoria Central Prison. She was told the hood which had been pulled over her head and been also worn by several condemned prisoners that had been hung. They drove in silence on a tar road for most of the journey. Then they travelled for some time on a gravel road before the car stopped. She was dragged out of the car with hood still covering her head and was transferred into twin cab 4x4 bakkie. The last leg of the journey was travelled on a very bumpy sand road to a remote destination that smelt, sounded and felt like somewhere in the bushveld. She could hear branches scratching against the sides and roof of the bakkie, so she knew they were driving on a narrow rocky track through very dense thorn bush.

She had no idea where the BPS had taken her. Only once she had been locked in her prison cell was she allowed to take the hood off. In the cell there was no bed, no mattress, no pillow, no wash basin, no water tap and no toilet. The only items in the cell were a plastic bucket which was meant to serve as her toilet and two old ragged blankets. She had to sleep on the concrete floor. A 100 watt light bulb in the cell was never switched off. It was kept on 24 hours a day for the duration of her incarceration at the secret detention centre. In the back ground she could hear the continuous drone of a diesel generator.

In her cell there was a drawing that had been somehow deeply etched into the wall. It immediately caught her attention and she proceeded to examine it. It was a picture filled with stick-figure people. A crowd of stick-figures stood at the base of a smooth round hill. Three cross stuck out starkly on the summit of the hill. They dominated the picture. What drew the eye was the larger cross standing midway between the two smaller crosses, on the left and right hand sides. Three stick figures were being crucified on the crosses. The middle stick figure had a crown of thorns. The crowd of stick figures standing at the base of the hill consisted of women and soldiers. The words, _this place is like Golgotha, the place of suffering, torture and death_ , had been neatly etched beneath the picture. Beneath the title of the etching was the name: Bongani Twala. He was apparently the artist who had created the etched picture on the cell wall _._

She was left alone for the first three days in the cell. At six in the morning and four o' clock in the afternoon the heavy steel door was noisily unbolted and through the open gap an enamel plate containing a lump of cold _stywe pap_ covered with a bit of sugar and sitting in a thin pool of milk, plus a large enamel mug of sweet lukewarm black coffee, were placed on the concrete cell floor. At night she covered her eyes with a narrow strip of blanket that she had torn from one of the blankets and slept in a foetal position on one of the blankets that she had folded into a thin mattress. She covered herself with the other blanket. During the day she sat on a cushion made from blankets in the corner, huddled against the wall with her knees drawn up to her chest. She spent much of the time staring at the etched drawing of the crucifixion of Jesus at Golgotha. She also noticed that she also had a constant companion in the cell. It was gecko on the wall which lived on the insects that were attracted into the cell at night by the bright 100 watt light bulb. The insects managed to get through the steel grid that covered a small window which was situated 2.5 meters above the floor.

For the first two nights the terrifying loud clanking and crashing metallic sounds of steel cell doors being unbolted and flung open or slammed shut, reverberated like explosive gun shots throughout the night. It was impossible to sleep. Her watch had been taken away so she guessed that the time must be around midnight. Over the next few hours until the crack of dawn the silence of the night was constantly punctuated with shouting, foul mouth swearing, threats, questions, blood curdling screams, loud sobbing, emotional pleadings, and hoarse cries. Unable to sleep she listened, her heart throbbing with fear.

On the third night she heard her cell being door being unbolted. Before she could sit up it crashed open with a loud bang. Two BPS men wearing military camouflage uniforms and ski masks stepped into her cell. One of them screamed at her: _trek jou klere uit jou hoer se kind_. She sat up looking confused. The one that shouted at her stepped forward, bending over he struck the side of her face with a stinging blow with the open palm of his of hand. The force of the blow knocked her head hard against the wall. The other man also stepped into the small cell and began to shock her with a cattle prod, stunned and shocked she writhed around on the floor. The man who smacked her in the face gave her a few sharp kick on the buttocks. They kept screaming at her _trek jou klere uit_.

Shaking with shock, hands trembling, she struggled to undress. After she had undressed they bound her hands behind her back with a nylon ski rope and pushed her stark naked into the corridor, each one grabbing her by an upper arm they marched her down the corridor, her bare feet barely touching the floor. After kicking a steel door open and they thrust her so hard into the room that when they let go of her, she lost her balance, and fell onto her knees, grazing the skin off her knees on the rough concrete floor. _Staan op jou foken hoer_ they shouted at her as she struggled to get onto her feet with her hands bound behind her back.

The room was brightly lit with spot lights. In the middle of the room stood an old enamel bath tub almost brim full with ice cold water. They forced her sit on the rim at the end of bath tub with her back towards the water, at the end opposite to the taps. One of the men knelt down and bound her legs together just above her ankles. One of them told her that tonight she would be starting her first lessons in submarine training. In an aggressive and threatening manner they asked her repeatedly whether she was a Communist, and whether she was a member of the South African Communist Party and whether she was a member of the ANC, and whether she was a member of _Umkhonto we Sizwe_ (MK). Each time they asked her, she denied that she was a member of any of the organization, and she denied that she was a Communist.

Suddenly without any warning one of the men quickly grabbed her ankles, lifting her legs up he toppled her over backwards into the bath, her head instantly becoming submerged under the icy water. They held her under water while roughing pawing her breasts and fingering her genitals. Blind terror gripped her. She couldn't move her head, it was pressed down on the bottom of the bath, she held her breath for as long as possible, and in the end she could not bear the lack of oxygen any longer and began to swallow water. Just before she blacked out they pulled her from the ice cold bath, dumped her roughly on the floor, and with their boots they pushed her onto her side. She laid naked on the concrete floor, choking, coughing up water, she gasped for air. Before she had fully recovered they jerked her up so that she was again sitting on the edge of bathtub, one of the man slapped her in the face, her nose started to bleed. The questions began again, are you a Communist, are you a member of the party, are you working for MK? Her body shivering, her lips trembling, she began to cry, sobbing that she was not a Communist or a member of any of the organizations; they tipped her back into the bath. After the fourth submergence, lying on the hard concrete floor, crying constantly in hopeless desperation, and in fear of a fifth submergence, she began to tearfully confess. To each of their questions she confessed that she was a Communist, that she was a member of the party and that she worked for MK. They dragged her to a chair at the table next to the wall. They undid the cords, put a wad of paper and a pen before her, instructing her to write a detailed statement providing everything in great detail about her affiliations to the banned organizations and the kind of work she did for the organizations. They also wanted to know who recruited her, who her cell mates were, and who was the person that she reported to? She began to cry when she could not provide them with the requested information. Happy with the progress of their nights work, they said they will give her until the next night to come up with the information.

The next morning when her food was brought to her cell, she jumped up and before the door could be closed she put her hand over the edge of the door and asked the ski masked person if she could please have a Bible.

This is what he said to Wanetta, we don't keep any Bibles here, the Bible is not going to help you here, you are as good as dead, few people leave this place alive, that is why this place has been called Golgotha, like that graffiti on the wall over there. Why do you think that Jesus cried out at the nine hour: _My God my God, why have you forsaken me_? You are not going to find God at Golgotha; you are going to find suffering and maybe death at this God- forsaken place which we call now Golgotha. But that was your choice. What is happening to you has been self-inflicted; I don't feel sorry for you. I don't give a shit for you, so don't come with some bullshit story that you suddenly want to read the Bible. It is one of your commie tricks to win sympathy.

XI

She told the court that she was convinced that she would not survive another submarine ordeal and she would in all likelihood drown that night. But she was spared that night, everyone was spared that night. The smell of wood smoke and braai vleis drifted into her prison cell. Listening carefully she could hear voices coming from outside, men talking, and the intermittent ruptures of loud laughter, and back slapping, the BPS men were having a party, taking some time off for a bit of R and R.

Tiredness soon overwhelmed her and she fell into a deep sleep oblivious of the hard concrete floor pressing against her body through the thin layers of the blanket which she had folded into a makeshift mattress.

You could hear a pin drop in the court as Wanetta spoke calmly, but also defiantly, precisely, elegantly and articulately in a clear voice that did not tremble, tremor or quaver once.

The next morning when she woke up, while still lying on the floor she saw a Bible lying on the floor near the door. Someone had slipped the Bible into her cell while she was asleep. It was the same Bible that she had with her on the witness stand, the Bible had Bongani Twala's name inscribed on the top of the inner cover. She kept the Bible hidden under the blankets and read it at every opportunity.

A few days later they again woke her up in the middle night, like before they slapped her and shocked her with the cattle prod forcing her to undress. She was taken to another room. There was a metal framed bed in the middle of the room, it had no mattress. Instead a steel grid was placed on top of the metal bed frame. They force her down onto the steel grid and bound her legs and arms tightly to the four corners of the steel grid, so that she was lying spread-eagled on her back. There was a metal box with knobs, switches and dials on a small table close to the bed. A cable from the box was plugged into a wall plug socket. Also connected to the terminals on the box were two electrical cables. They fixed a metal rod shaped electrode to the crocodile clip on one of cables which they inserted into her vagina. The other cable had bare exposed copper wires sticking out of its end. A hood was placed over her head so that she could not see.

They said they were going to teach her how to sing like a Ho Chi Minh slut. They began to touch various parts of her body with the exposed wires of the moveable second electrode. They touched her feet, mouth, nipples, breasts and genitals with the exposed wires causing excruciating pain and violent contractions. Being blinded folded it was impossible for her know when and where the moving electrode would next touch her body. The pain was so intense that she fainted; also the loss of control over her bowels caused her to defecate and urinate. They keep on asking for names of cell members, cell leaders and underground members. Unable to withstand the continuation of the electrical shock torture she finally succumbed to their demands for information on members and their roles of her friends in the UDF. Again she sat at the table writing the names of her recruiters, cell mates and cell leader.

After the electric shock torture she was made to clean up her urine and faeces from under the metal framed bed.

The cycles of submarine and electric shock torture were repeated until she had managed to fabricate a detailed and comprehensive self-incriminating confession that included almost her entire circle of close friends as her accomplices.

She said it was a miracle that she survived the torture.

_Cher ami_ what could she do under these extreme circumstances. She gave my name as a cell member and as a cell leader. She gave the names of our circle of close friends who were linked to the UDF. By sheer luck all the people that she named as her accomplices had all been arrested and where in detention. Some of them had also been detained at the same secret location and had suffered the same kinds of torture. She was not aware of this at the time of detention. Others had also named her and me as accomplices.

After she had given a graphic account of the torture that she underwent, our advocate asked whether she was a Marxist. Of course she said no. He then asked her to describe Marxism to the court.

Smiling, she explained to the court that the word Marxism was a noun, standing either for the political ideology of various socialist movements including communism or for a theory used by social and political scientists at universities to analyse, describe and research the nature of the dynamics of political economies, including the political economy of South Africa, and if used in this academic manner its findings could be proven objectively valid within certain bounds of social-historical inquiry.

When asked what were her views on Marxism as a political ideology her answer made the court burst out laughing and the judge had to angrily call for order several times. She said like Apartheid, Marxism as an ideology had become one of the biggest political fantasies of the twentieth century.

Keeping a straight face and cocking a questioning eyebrow the advocate asked her why she thought that the ideology of Apartheid was one of the biggest political fantasies of the twentieth century.

She answered by arguing that all political ideologies whether they underpinned Nationalism, Socialism, Apartheid or Communism were all generically similar in the sense that they were based on fantasies which promised the masses the fulfilment of all their needs and desires. Fantasy generating ideologies are always irrational because they are based on patent nonsense and myths. In fact ideologies represent desires that can never be satisfied; therefore ideologies always traffic in illusions and fantasy. By virtue of the fact that ideologies stimulate fantasies and illusions in the minds of followers they are able to function as powerful mobilizing forces. Ideologies which are all-embracive such as Apartheid or Communism are only potent in a magical sense because they are able to facilitate an illusionary perception of the constitution of the identity of their followers, not only by creating a fantasy of the essence and being of their followers, but also in the sense of promising the satisfying of the existential and material needs of their followers. In this sense ideologies are also able to perform a religious function by confirming and reinforcing in their followers the illusions, fantasies and myths of what it is that constitutes the essential nature of their true being, and thereby also provide them with an existential sense of meaning for their lives. But as Heidegger would say, followers who are caught and trapped in the web of belief spun by ideology are not living their own lives, they are living in a state of alienation and estrangement, and they are living inauthentically. When ideologies fail to fulfil the promised dream, they will wane and vanish in the minds of their followers, leaving the followers with nothing in the end, except hopelessness, despair, bitterness and cynicism. This will be the future of those who believe in Apartheid, and who have invested their hopes in Apartheid.

_Cher ami_ , the whites in South Africa had been living for forty years in a fantasy world; they were prisoners to all kinds of mind-blowing illusions, which were completely divorced from reality. It did not seem to register in the minds of whites that the blacks were resisting Apartheid, and furthermore, that they were not being compliant, and that tensions were simmering beneath the perceived tranquillity.

I apologize, I am going off at a tangent again, it is a fault of old age, my minds jumps around a lot, never wanting to settle for too long on one topic, so you want to hear more about the trial?

I could see that the judge and prosecutor were getting impatient with Wanetta's testimony. The impatient demeanour of the judge, his frowning brow, his impatient drumming of his fingers, his knuckles going white as his hand grip tightened on the handle of the wooden mallet all seemed to be out of keeping with the lofty virtues of impartiality required by his office, which was to apply the law without fear or favour, and how could he apply the law if he did not listen the subtleties and nuances of truth that only speech can reveal.

I began to have doubts about integrity of the judge and the court. In my mind I began to count the years that we will have serve for being subversive Bolsheviks.

What she had said suggested that the prosecutor and judge were also living in a fantasy world and this did not seem to sit comfortably with judge. He was the judge, not Wanetta.

The court room was quite tense. It was quite clear that the judge had taken an adversarial attitude to Wanetta.

Our advocate then went on to ask her about what she thought of the current existing forms of Communism. Wanetta first explained that she had been influenced by the writings of Hannah Arendt. Then in her answers to the questions, she went into lengthy arguments proving that there were in fact significant similarities between Western Capitalism and existing Communism with regard to the actual realities of the formal structures and functioning of political power in both systems. She also showed in her testimony that were generic similarities with regard to the nature of political representation and state sovereignty as experienced by ordinary citizens in both systems. She said that she was critical of the modern state in all its forms, whether in its current Capitalistic or Communistic manifestations. In every manifestation of the modern state the citizens are ruled by a sovereign authority that almost exercises unlimited power which benefit only the elite members of the establishment. Nowhere in the world are the people sovereign. Nowhere in the world was popular political power a reality for the masses. Ideologically speaking, state sovereignty in all instances has been uniformly interpreted and justified in the form of apparent political representation, or in the illusion of popular political representation. The state which is always controlled by a political elite presents itself ideologically as a power that is exercised for and on behalf of its citizens. But in reality the modern state has stripped its citizens of the sovereignty over their lives and it has also stripped its citizens of any meaningful kind of political power, freedom and autonomy. In all cases popular political power has been hijacked by a political elite and the elite have invented ideologies to justify this stripping of popular sovereignty and popular political power from the ordinary citizens of a country by claiming that the political elite actually represents the will of the masses and that the political elite knows what the people really want. The system of sovereign rule embodied in all the various forms of the modern state have substituted 'representation' for the popular participation of its citizens in the actual political governance of their lives. And because of this the existence of genuine democracy under currently existing Capitalism, Socialism or Communism remains a fiction or fantasy in the modern world.

Our advocate continued in his relaxed manner to lead evidence from Wanetta. He asked her whether she thought that Marxism was a rational and informative social theory for studying the dynamics of political economy.

She answered yes. Both the prosecutor and the judge involuntarily raised their eyebrows in surprise.

The advocate explained again that this line of questioning was important to demonstrate the integrity and reliability of the witness. She had shot down Marxism in flames as a political ideology, now she was been asked to explain why she thought Marxism as a social theory could provide be valuable insights and reliable knowledge regarding the structure and functioning of any system of political economy.

In response to the advocate's question Wanetta calmly and without any hesitation explained why Marxism should be viewed as a useful and valid social theory.

Listening to Wanetta testimony left us bewildered. It seemed that she was helping the court to dig our grave. We could clearly see that Wanetta testimony on Marxism being a useful social theory had brought dark scowls to the faces of the prosecution and the judge.

When Wanetta had finished giving her evidence the advocate in his summing up said to the judge. I put it to you my lord that my clients in fighting against the evil of Apartheid have themselves in turn suffered unimaginably cruel and evil acts of state sponsored and state condoned evil in the form of torture.

The advocate continued he said:

I would further put it to you my lord that the focus of this trail is ultimately on doing good in the face of evil. My clients have been charged by the state for doing what was morally good in the face of evil. And this brings me to the question of what is good and what is evil. And knowing the difference between good and evil, it is the duty and responsibility of every citizen with integrity, to do good by resisting and combating evil. The moral duty of a good citizen, who is not a coward and also happens to be person of integrity, would be to resist and combat evil in all its manifestations.

What is evil? Can evil be defined? Can there be such a thing as a valid theory of evil? Can the state be an agent of evil? Can a person be an agent of evil on behalf of the state? All evil acts are immoral. To act immorally is to intentionally commit an act that is evil. Any act is evil in so far as that act involves the infliction of pain and suffering on a victim or any other human being, against her will, and thereby causing serious and foreseeable injury and harm to her.

You need to have a smoke. OK let's go stand outside.

Our advocate hit the nail on the head. There could be no doubt that philosophically, theologically and morally Apartheid happens to be a thoroughly evil system. Its emphasis on demanding, securing, safe-guarding and protecting what was considered the moral entitlements of whites when the benefits of this entitlements could only be obtained at the expense of the blacks depended on a numbness, an indifference, a lack of conscience, an incapacity to have empathy, towards others who were not white. For Apartheid to work it was essential that a collective condition of moral incapacitation should prevail among whites in South Africa. Moral incapacitation involves a state of numbness, insensitivity, absence of empathy, and lack of conscience towards blacks. Such a state of moral incapacitation had to exist in this country as a necessary condition in all individual white persons who supported and benefitted from Apartheid. This makes Apartheid a thoroughly and intrinsically evil system, and calls for brave men and women of courage and integrity to take a moral stand against the system of Apartheid. Taking a moral stand against Apartheid requires doing something that will lead to the reversal of the moral stagnation that has overpowered this country.

This was the defences closing argument on our behalf. We doing our moral duty as citizens in our fight to overthrow the system of Apartheid. We were following a moral imperative. We were being obedient to a transcendental moral imperative without which no civilization could last a single day. We were under the compulsion of a transcendental moral imperative.

What more can I say _Mon Cher._

As you can appreciate, between 1948 and until the collapse of Apartheid, this evil had taken hold of the entire fabric of white society, permeating and corrupting it to its very core. Under these conditions evil became normality. In the words of Hannah Arendt, the evil that could be attributed to the overwhelming majority of whites who supported Apartheid in all kinds of ways, who were both Afrikaans and English speaking, had the character of being banal. The evil of Apartheid had an ordinary everyday quality, and was committed by ordinary people, who did not believe that they were actively engaged in the perpetration of evil. Apartheid depended on this immoral predisposition. In a similar fashion, the Nazis depended on this kind of immoral predisposition, of numbness, insensitivity, indifference, lack of empathy and lack of conscience in the everyday behaviour of ordinary Germans in order for the Holocaust against the Jews to succeed. Apartheid co-opted the conscience of the majority of whites in the same way that the National Socialist co-opted the conscience of the German people. Apartheid destroyed the voice of conscience in whites. Ordinariness or banality of both kinds of evil, Apartheid or Nazism, depended strongly on the moral indifference of the majority of whites or Germans to the pain and suffering of others, the blacks or the Jews, respectively.

Forgive me, _Mon Cher compatriot_. I can see from the dark expression on your face, that I have touched an exposed nerve, I have opened up old wounds. The sins of our fathers lie heavy on our shoulders. In one way or another, both of us have been co-opted into the commission of evil against our fellow man. If we both have a bad conscience tonight, there is hope for you and me. To be irredeemably evil is to lack even a bad conscience. To be irredeemably evil is to have no guilt for, or to be indifferent to, the wrong, injury, suffering and harm done to others. To be irredeemable evil is to be a psychopath. The men of the BPS had to be psychopaths in order to do the dirty work of the Nationalist Party government.

One thing that has astonished me throughout my life is that the people who profess the strongest belief in God or in some ideology have somehow acquired the inflexible predisposition to be irredeemably evil in their conduct towards others who do not share their beliefs or do not belong to the same race or ethnic group.

Do you still want me to continue with the story?

You do. OK. After Wanetta left the witness stand the advocate ended his speech in defence of his clients.

But he was not finished. The speech was only the beginning of the end.

He said that it was his contention that not only had his clients acted morally as responsible citizens by opposing the evil that reigns in our country, but they themselves have suffered a horrific evil in the form of torture by agents acting on behalf of the state. It is well known that when any state loses its political and social legitimacy it becomes unstable and unstable states engage in the torture of its citizens in the name of state security.

This is what our advocate actually said to the court.

After concluding his argument our advocate then picked up a large envelop. He said that in the sealed envelope which he had received only this morning he had indisputable evidence that the state had been instrumental through its agents in the torturing of his clients into making false statements that were self-incriminatory.

He approached the bench and gave the envelope to the judge. The judge opened the envelope. It contained a thick wad of A4 size coloured and black and photographs. He also gave the Judge a video cassette. He also gave the judge an international newspaper carrying the story of the secret political detention centre with its torture chambers and mass graves. Our story had become international news. The judge's face went white. He called the prosecutor to the bench. After whispered exchanges between the three parties the judge announced an adjournment of the court until three o' clock.

Our advocate, the prosecutor and the judge retired to the judge's chambers for a meeting. We were all taken back to our cells.

At three o' clock sharp we returned to the court. The judge marched into the court. We all stood up while he took his seat. After the court has settled down the judge announced that the state has decided to dismiss the case, all charges had been withdrawn with immediate effect, and we were free get up and go immediately. The judge stood up and left the court. We stood up and also left the court as well, walking into freedom in the bright afternoon sunlight on the streets of Johannesburg.

We later learned that when Wanetta mentioned to the advocate in an interview with him while he was preparing our defence that she had a gecko living in her cell he had brainwave. There was no evidence or record that she had been kept in detention at any particular prison in South Africa. It was possible that she had been detained secretly in a detention centre close to the site where this gecko was to be found and it was at this location that she obtained the Bible.

He got pictures and drawings of every kind of species of gecko in South Africa. She finally pointed out one particular gecko, _Afroedura transvaalica transvaalica_ . The gecko on her cell wall had a striking resemblance to _Afroedura transvaalica transvaalica_ which has to date been found only between the Levubu and Limpopo rivers. He had a gut feeling that if they could find the place where she had been secretly detained it was going to help the case especially if they could find evidence which corroborated the affidavit she made regarding her torture.

A private detective agency put him touch with a free-lance special investigator who had been in the Selous Scouts and had also done service in the South Africa Recces and in Koevoet. He was a very reserved Afrikaner in his late thirties. Within a couple of days he found the detention camp that the BPS started nicknaming Golgotha. Near the Pafuri Gate of the Kruger National Park he turned off onto a sand road and drove northwards towards the Limpopo River exploring every side track and back road, stopping to speak with the local population that he encountered. Eventually at the end of a remote track he located the detention centre which because of the almost impassable rocky two track dirt road and the encroachment of thick vegetation had become with time totally inaccessible without a 4x4. It was situated in a clearing surrounded by thick bush and rocky hills about half a kilometre from the Limpopo River. It had been built in the late sixties as a police detention centre for counter insurgency operations.

XII

We returned to Cinderella's Arcade, and began to pick up the pieces of our lives again. Wanetta had lost her job. Her health continued to deteriorate. Weeks went by and she was not getting any better, she continued to lose weight. We went to see several doctors, physicians and specialists. In the end it was recommended that Wanetta see an oncologist. After visiting the oncologist Wanetta underwent an intensive battery of tests. Being fearful of the outcome of tests she asked me to go with her to get the results from the oncologist. The news was not good; she had been diagnosed with a rare but highly aggressive and unusual form of a viral induced disease. The specialist was vague but tried to explain as best as he could to us what kind of viral disease Wanetta had acquired.

Apparently, most humans are carriers of endogenous retroviruses which are usually completely harmless to their host. However under the influence of unknown inducing factors some of these viruses can become activated and can cause cancer or leukaemia or other debilitating conditions which are inevitably fatal. In other words they become oncogenic viruses or pathogenic viruses. He could not confirm that she had cancer or leukaemia but the viral illness that she had was very serious and untreatable, and was the cause of her declining health, and in all likelihood her illness was terminal, it was going to be fatal.

Wanetta listened quietly and stoically to what the doctor had to say. When he had finished she asked him how long she had to live. He told her anything from three to six months. She received the news calmly. He gave her a script for medication that would provide relief from many of the symptoms associated with this form of viral infection, and we left with her carrying the script in her hand. We were both stunned. We sat silently in the car for a while digesting the news of the doctor's prognosis. She looked at me earnestly and seriously while telling me that she had two simple wishes before she dies. First she wanted to get baptised as soon as possible and second she wanted us to go ahead with our planned marriage, also as soon as possible.

And then she said we must try to live as normally as possible. She said did not want me to act differently towards her. She wanted me to treat her as a normal person, as if she were not going to die, as if she were not sick. She did not want to be treated as an invalid. She did not want us to be sad and become all emotional. I must behave normally in my relationship with her at all times, as if she were not ill. This was what she wanted.

I asked her in what church or denomination did she want to be baptised. She replied that it did not really matter as long as it was a proper Christian Church. We were not sure about what procedure to follow in order for an adult to become baptised or convert to Christianity. She had had a secular upbringing and did not belong to any denomination and had never attended any church. As we drove back to Boksburg we started looking at all the churches that we passed. None of them felt right.

Once in Boksburg we drove around looking at churches. We would park outside a church for a while so that she could decide on whether this was the right church. We eventually ended up parked outside St Dominic's Catholic Church in Trichardt Street. After a while she decided that this was the right church. Not knowing what to do we went inside and sat down in a pew at the back. She bowed her head and clasping her hands in her lap she started to pray silently. I could see her lips moving. We sat there until the 7.00 pm Mass started. We sat through the Mass. At the end of the Mass after everyone had gone she approached the Priest. She told him that she wanted to be baptised. He was quite puzzled by this out of the blue request from an adult woman who was a complete stranger to him. He asked her if she wanted to convert to Catholicism.

After thinking for a moment she looked at me and then she looked at the priest and answered yes. Tears started to well up in her eyes, she explained to the priest that she had had a secular upbringing and had only recently found God. Regaining her composure she said that she was desperate, she wanted to be baptised immediately, she could not wait. She explained that she was suffering from an incurable illness and was dying. She showed him the script and the doctors contact details, so that he, if he wanted, he could verify her condition, he could check up to see if she was telling the truth about her illness. Speaking in a soft voice that now bordered on a whisper she also told him that both of us had been detained under the Internal Security Act but that we had been acquitted on all charges under the Terrorism Act. The priest then realized who we were. The priest seemed to be obviously moved, but he was hesitant as well. I think we were both aware of this.

Sensing the priest's reluctance to baptise her, Wanetta then told the priest that in the _Acts of the Apostles_ when Philip was travelling alongside the road with the Ethiopian eunuch on a chariot the eunuch said: 'Look, here is water. Why shouldn't I be baptised?' Wanetta then pointed to a font of holy water standing near the entrance and said to the Priest there is water, what is stopping you from baptising me now in the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

The priest was taken aback. While scratching his head thoughtfully, he said something about some Catholic Church canon which authorizes a priest to baptise any adult immediately who was in imminent danger of death if the candidate has some knowledge of the truths of the faith and if that person has in some manner demonstrated a genuine and sincere desire to receive baptism and also promises to observe the requirements of the Christian faith.

When he saw the hope lighting up on Wanetta's face after he spoke about the church canon the priest decided to baptise her immediately. He told us to wait at the back of the church while he made the necessary preparations for the baptismal rite. After he returned carrying a small porcelain basin, porcelain oil jar, a candle and some cards we followed him to the fount which was in fact a baptismal fount filled with holy water. Wanetta quickly tied her hair up in pony tail and then deftly rolled the pony tail into a tight bun at the back of her head which she fixed in place with some hair pins that she took from her bag.

He gave her a card which had the words and instructions for the baptism ceremony. It turned out to be very solemn, humble, and moving ceremony. He spoke warmly and kindly to Wanetta referring to her as his dear sister. He asked her a whole series of questions and she answered each in the affirmative without any hesitation. He then asked her to step forward and bend her head over the baptism font. While pouring water three times over her head he announced in voice that was both gentle and full of authority: I baptise you Wanetta my dear sister in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. He gave her a small white towel and she dried off the excess water from her head. He put oil on his thumb and signed the sign of the cross on her forehead. He lit a candle and gave it to her saying it was a symbol of Christ's resurrection and of the eternal life that we have in Jesus Christ. He invited her to make an appointment for her first confession and for a chat about the Catholic Mass which he said she should start receiving as soon as possible. If she had enough strength she could also join the adult confirmation classes that had just started.

Soon after her baptism and first communion we got married in a short civil ceremony at the Boksburg Magistrates Courts. She completed the confirmation classes and was confirmed in the Catholic Faith. While she had sufficient strength I took her to Mass every morning. I had grown up in the Reformed Faith. I knew absolutely nothing about Catholicism, so it was quite a steep learning curve for me to learn all the ins and outs of the Catholic Faith. After being an atheist for most of her adult life she now found peace, meaning and fulfilment in Roman Catholicism.

Her conversion to Catholicism definitely helped her to cope with being terminally ill and also helped her to make peace with the prospect of her imminent extinction. I think I was the one that needed help more than she did. In retrospect I realized that I definitely needed some kind of psychological training or whatever to cope with the emotional stress and anxiety that I was experiencing while living with a loved one who was terminally ill. In South Africa during our military training we used the word _vasbyt_ to describe the ability to maintain one's morale and focus while enduring the onslaught of extreme physical and emotional hardship. For me all I could do was to _vasbyt_.

Throughout the icy cold winter she sat wrapped in warm soft blankets in a big comfortable leather armchair. She spent the winter days watching me paint. When she could no longer go to mass, the priest would come over to Cinderella's Arcade and give her holy communion. Day after day she sat patiently watching me while I worked. She spoke about her faith, she spoke about how she discovered while reading the Bible in her prison cell that the Gospels consistently advocated and proclaimed solidarity with the poor, the exploited, the oppressed, the weak, the marginalized, the hungry, and the imprisoned.

What surprised her about the Bible and especially about the Gospels was that nowhere did Gospels or the rest Bible promise a world without evil, or suffering, or inequality. The diversity of the Biblical narratives, their multivalent messages, surprised her, intrigued her, delighted her and sustained her.

Her faith was deeper than the desire for personal salvation, deeper than the desire for immortality. She even accepted that a finite life could still be meaningful without the prospect of immortality or the afterlife.

After her torture during the lengthy time spent alone in solitary confinement the Bible became her constant companion. It sustained her, even though she felt sickly and emotionally worn out, she somehow managed to submerge herself in her reading of the Bible for hours and hours on end. She also had difficulties in sleeping and during these sleepless nights in prison bathed in the cold light of the 100 watt light bulb her thoughts often drifted to philosophy. A lot of the philosophy that she had learnt as an undergraduate came back to her and she started to remember many of the ideas that she been exposed to. Reflecting on everything she began to see a lot of things in a new light.

Our conversation often returned to the paradox of evil. Evil as a phenomenon was paradoxical in our minds precisely because there was no epistemic or ontological foundation for the existence of evil in matter, which was the stuff out of which everything in the Universe was made up of. Evil cannot come from matter. All matter in all of its forms is neutral with regard to ethics and morals. Evil cannot be reduced to matter. Evil is always an act of free will. Without free will evil would not exist, so we had debates about the existence of freewill and moral agency.

During the periods and moments when she had sufficient strength she would read the Bible, sitting in her leather armchair, while I painted. She had also developed a deep interest in Catholic philosophy and theology. When she was too weak she would ask me to read the Bible or some Catholic book on theology to her. I almost read the entire Bible to her from Genesis to Revelation, and I also read the entire Catholic Catechism twice over to her. We had long theological and philosophical discussions about how it was possible that God who being all powerful, all knowing and infinity good could allow all the suffering and evil that had occurred in the world. I once asked her how she could believe in God after what had happened to her. In detention she endured the most horrific torture, she had been accused of political crimes against the state on the basis of extremely flimsy evidence and now she was dying of some strange and unknown disease that I felt had been triggered by the ordeals that she had suffered while in detention. So given her tragic situation how was it possible that God could feature as a positive force in her life? This was my question to her.

She would just smile when I asked her this.

After days of meditation on my question she finally gave me the most profound and astonishing answer. She said that the Christian theory of monotheism was based on the revolutionary discovery that intrinsic to the nature of the Trinitarian God was God's capacity to engage in a self-emptying and suffering love for His creation without any diminishing of his omnipotence or omniscience or infinite goodness. It turned out to be a most amazing non-Calvinist statement about the nature of God's omnipotence and omniscience. She explained that God intrinsic goodness consists in God's free decision to deliberately limit Himself, by providing and sustaining all the conditions that make it possible for the Cosmos to exist in full autonomy and freedom as an independent being, as a separate self-governing entity, that is completely other than Himself.

In this manner God deliberately limits His own freedom while sustaining all the conditions that are necessary for the independent existence of the Cosmos. God sustains the Universe as a dynamically evolving system by providing the conditions of possibility for the existence of every possible kind of thing and process that contributes to the structure and functioning of the Cosmos, including every single thermal fluctuation that has ever occurred. God has also demonstrated and revealed his solidarity and love for both man and the Universe through his self-limitation, his self-emptying and his self-offering in the most exemplary fashion through His own self-incarnation in the form of finite man, which made it possible for him to suffer death and to experience his own resurrection from the dead, in Jesus Christ, in order to give us hope that we have not lived a life of suffering in vain. The triune God through Jesus Christ has expressed solidarity with his creation and with mankind. Through the life, work, death and resurrection of Jesus, God has decisively demonstrated His love for man and the Cosmos.

It was weird for me to be listening to all of this stuff coming from Wanetta. What could I do? I just listened to her and I debated with her. She wanted me to treat as normal so I debated with her. What else could I do?

Wanetta had shown such incredible courage. She kept on saying that in spite of the pain and the prospect of her own self-extinction she felt joy and peace, and that she knew that one day we will be together again, that the parting of ours ways was going to be only temporary. She said she felt blessed because she had found God and that God had given her the most gorgeous man as her husband. God had given her the most perfect husband

Gorgeous man! That is what she said. No one has every referred to me in my face as being a gorgeous man. My response to her was that she was the most gorgeous woman that I had ever laid my eyes on, and that was the truth Cher ami.

She was not only a gorgeous woman, she also had a beautiful mind.

She had this marvellous insight into the irony of the Bible. She argued that the Bible never makes any claims that the Universe is governed by moral laws. Instead the Bible proposes quite clearly that the Universe is governed only by physical and biological laws, for example, Jesus said that God lets the sun shine on the good and the evil and sends the rain on the just and the unjust alike. The unjust are not punished and the victims of injustice are not compensated.

As the days went by she became progressively weaker. Realizing that her time was running out she began to set herself milestones. She promised that she will hold out until she could smell the spring fragrance of Jasmine. On a warm full moon August night I wrapped her in a blanket and we drove around Boksburg the Porsche in search of Jasmine in full bloom. Eventually we parked in a street in Boksburg near a house that was renowned for its fabulous garden. We wound down the car windows and the sweet smell of Jasmine that filled the night air began to permeate into the car. She breathed in deeply, closing her eyes and she smiled the most beatific smile. We sat there for an hour talking about various things. She laughed when I recounted some incident that we had found funny in the past. For a moment everything felt so normal, it was as if nothing was going to happen, that we would be together forever. In the dark interior of the car her eyes shone brightly. Something so simple as the fragrance of Jasmine had momentarily transformed her mood in one of elation.

She savoured the pleasant experience of the moment and this simple act put her in a state of happiness which was palpable to me. My own mood lifted on these occasions.

She turned her head so that she could see the full moon through her window. Smiling an enchanted smile, she looked at me and said that the moon looked like a communion wafer shining with the real presence of God after the priest had consecrated it in the Mass. I could not help chuckling, she had a developed a way of seeing the presence of God in everything.

She would often look at me thoughtfully for a while and then say that she knew that deep down I was a Christian even though I was a Communist. I always replied that it was impossible for me not to be a Christian, and she would then give me a radiant smile. After saying that I would wonder what does it takes to be a real Christian.

I also looked at the moon. It was so bright and splendid, even though it was so far away, so unfathomably mysterious. She asked what I thought of the moon. It was such a strange question. What possibly can we think of the moon?

I answered her, saying that the whole Universe was God's theatre, so if she sees the full moon as a communion wafer filled with the real presence of God then the drama of the Holy Eucharistic was reflected in the whole Universe.

This proposal made her laugh, she enjoyed what I had said, I could see that it resonated deeply with her.

The evening felt sacred. The Jasmine was like incense. She looked at me with a childlike earnestness and asked what I thought about transubstantiation and the sacrifice of the Mass which was a kind of Holocaust. Over the past few weeks I had time to digest and assimilate much about Catholicism from reading to her from both the Bible and the Catholic Catechism.

Out of blue she suddenly said as if speaking aloud to herself: Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.

I must have got that worried look on my face because she laughed. She asked if I thought the virus was affecting her brain, making her go mad.

Of course I said no.

For all I knew at the moment was that she could be going mad and this was the first sign of the onset of her madness. I did not want her to go mad because of something the virus might be doing to her brain. I actually began to feel the cold grip of fear that the virus may be attacking her brain. Her eyes were shining. There was something deeply mystical about her at the moment. She seemed to know something that I could not grasp. I even got goose flesh. For a moment I thought it was possible that an angel would appear at any moment.

She asked me what I was thinking. It was relief to hear her speak normally. She was rational, lucid; there was nothing wrong with her brain.

What could I say, Mon cher ami? The words my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed were ringing in my head.

Well I answered that I did believe in transubstantiation, that when the priest consecrates the mass and the wine, they become the real flesh and blood of Christ.

She laughed. She teased me and asked me if I really did believe that or was I just saying it because I wanted to please her. Then she said that because it was such a lovely night why don't we just drive to Durban right that very moment, in the moonlight, and gun the Porsche full blast right to 200 km/h and watch the sunrise tomorrow morning on some beach on the south coast.

Mon cher I would have driven the Porsche to the moon that night for her sake. I had money and credit card in my wallet, so we hit the road to the Durban. The moonlight was bright, the tar road to Durban shown like quicksilver; I could have driven with the headlights off. On the clear open stretches with no other vehicle on the road for miles, I pushed the accelerator down and we sped through the night. We sped past mile upon mile of freshly ploughed maize fields. We reached Durban at two o clock in the morning. She wanted to visit the beach at Manzimtoti on the Natal south coast. As a teenager it had always been one of her favourite family December holiday destinations. At the beach we sat talking in the car. She was not feeling any pain, nor did she feel fatigued and the constant flu-like symptoms had subsided. For a moment I entertained the thought that the disease was going into some kind of remission.

At 5.30 am she felt strong enough for I us to take a walk on the beach. The tide was going out so we walked on the smooth firm wet beach sand. The morning star, the planet Venus, shone brightly in the east, reflecting a triangle of light across the ocean. The predawn night sky began to light up into a deep purple-blue colour. A band of light pastel blue colour appeared on the horizon, below the blue a halo of orange- red started to slowly grow, and then at 6.30 the sun started to rise as a red ball above the horizon. We sat on the beach watching the dawn break into a new day. We watched the incoming waves crushing into boiling white foam. She suddenly asked me if I had read Virginia Woolf's book called The Waves. I hadn't read the book. She said the book had been one of the works she had studied for the third year BA English elective which she had selected. The elective focused on the theme of modernist literature.

She sighed and looked at me, and asked: 'Why do I have to die? I am not afraid to die, I just feel so sad suddenly.' My face must have betrayed anxiety or desperation, I don't know, but she said that she did not want to be a burden to me. All I could do was to take her in my arms and hold her. We stood there in silence on the beach for a long while. I held her frail body close to me. I struggled to fight the tears from welling up in my eyes; I struggled to keep my voice from becoming all choked-up with emotion, I did not want at that moment to weep with sadness and grief. In my mind I kept on telling myself: you got to be strong, you have to be strong for her sake.

XIII

She finally broke the silence. She whispered: 'If only I can live until November, then I will be able to see the Jacaranda trees in full bloom again.' She looked at me and said that she was going to hold out so that she could see the purple Jacaranda blossoms. Her mood started to lift again and she said that she had managed to hold on long enough for the early spring flowering of the Jasmine. She felt happy that she had managed to stay alive until she could once more enjoy the fragrance of Jasmine. And now she was happy to be still alive so that she could to see the sun rise once more over the ocean, and she was happy that she could hear once more the rhythmic percussion of the waves breaking on the beach.

We booked into a hotel and she slept peacefully until sunset, and we then drove through the night back to Boksburg. _Cher ami_ I cannot tell you how heavy my heart was on that journey back. I struggled to keep my spirits up.

On the trip back she spoke openly about death and dying. She said that had she died many times before, so she knew what it was like to die, she knew what to expect, she was not afraid of dying, she had blacked out several times while being held under water, each time before blacking she thought that her life was finally going to end, and then she had regained consciousness lying bound and naked in a pool of water on the hard cold concrete floor. She also spoke for the first time about the electric shock torture, the severe pain, the convulsions, the involuntary defecation and urination, and she had expected that if they continued with the electric shock torture she would eventually be electrocuted and die, and that she would not live to see the sun rise again.

Then she said something profound about death, because in a way she had been there before, at the very door step of death. She said we cannot experience our own death. Death cannot be experienced, as long as there is life, as long as we are in life there is no death. If our life is in Christ then there is no death or experience of death. She said that even Wittgenstein had something profound to say about death. As long as we have conscious self-awareness death is not a reality since it cannot occur to us, death is not an event in life. She also spoke about Heidegger and the French philosophy Derrida with the respect to the idea of the undying subject who while he or she can foresee their own death as an event happening in the future they will never experience its actual happening as an event for them. It will not be experienced as an event which anyone can consciously go through. She said that she knew that this was true, so no one should be afraid of death and dying.

She asked: How many times can a person die?

When she became too weak I would read the Bible to her as it brought her immense comfort. I remember reading somewhere in the Book of Hebrews, something we all know, that is, it is appointed unto men once to die. We all know that we are appointed to die. Nobody can die for us, and you cannot die more than once. It is the destiny of every man to die his own death. We are certain of this one thing in life, and that is we will have to die our own death. We are all condemned to die sometime in the unknown future, but when our death becomes imminent, everything changes, as depicted in the experience of the character in Dostoevsky's book _The Idiot,_ who was condemned to die.

If we die our own deaths, do we live our own lives? If we are not living our own lives then whose life are we living?

She spoke about her first confession. She was surprised that it did not involve sitting in a small dark enclosed booth. Instead the two of them, she and priest, sat around a small table. He made some tea and they chatted about her life, her sadness, her heartache, her fears, her anger, her disappointments, her sense of hopelessness, her despair and her torture. When she asked him what she needed to confess, he replied anything that she felt was important enough, anything that troubled her, anything that worried her, anything that was on her mind, and anything that was making her unhappy, whatever she felt guilty about, whatever personal problems she was experiencing. She spoke for more than an hour about her life, about what had happened to her at the detention centre, about her terminal illness. The priest listened attentively, patiently, never interrupting, always maintaining an empathetic demeanour, his brow creased in deep concentration, his attentive eyes remained fixed on her. In the end, emotionally exhausted she broke down and began to weep, she could not stop crying, she cried her heart out.

He let her cry. She was filled with so much anger and despair about what had been done to her when she was in detention. Her life had been shattered by the unimaginable brutality and pain that she had to endure and from which she had somehow miraculous survived, only to discover that she was going to die anyway from an extremely rare and highly improbable terminal disease. In her mind there was a causal link between the exposure to the extreme stress, pain, terror, anxiety and fear associated with being repeated tortured and the onset of her illness. When the torture finally came to an end, she developed flu like symptoms, she felt weak, exhausted and feverish.

After she had regained her composure and dried her eyes with the tissues that the priest had given her, he said that she should forgive her torturers; she said she couldn't, but he gently said that was the only way that she will experience healing. He also said that she should forgive the Apartheid regime. He reminded her that Jesus as God incarnate forgave his executioners while suffering pain and humiliation on the cross at Golgotha. In the end she forgave her torturers, and she received absolution.

I remember the poignancy of the scene when I fetched her from the church; they were outside standing on the steps, waiting for me. Her eyes were still red from the crying. Standing next to the priest she looked incredibly frail, her face was filled with the pathos of someone who had finally embraced the inescapable prospect of the imminent stark certainty of their own death.

When I got out the car and walked up the stairs to fetch her her face broke into smile that became radiant, I could see that she had found peace in the face of the inevitable.

A few days after her tearful confession she began to talk about Forgiveness.

She said: There is something I need to tell you. She wanted to share what she had discovered.

She explained that when she first began to read the Gospels after having suffered extreme torture she could not help feeling astonished, agitated, angry and extremely perturbed by the paradoxical, enigmatic and counter-intuitive nature of Jesus's command to forgive the offending party no matter what. She said that she knew immediately that the history of interpretation of Jesus's injunction to forgive and turn the other cheek had never been truly understood in terms of it real meaning and significance. Everything in the Gospel and in the stories of the Bible revolved around forgiveness. The concept or the idea of forgiveness was one of the most important underlying dramatic themes that run throughout the Bible from beginning to end. Personal redemption and salvation could only be realized through the drama of forgiveness, but the act of forgiveness has profound political consequences, forgiveness results in a dramatic dissolution, a radical undoing and an irrevocable reversal of mythic violence. Mythic violence is a metaphor for political power relationships that depend on the violence of force. Walter Benjamin introduced the idea of mythic violence in relation to politics and the sovereignty of the state. Wanetta discovered that this underlying theme of forgiveness in the Bible and the Gospels revolved around the reversal and the undoing of political power, state sovereignty and ultimately the questioning of all Law and morality. It was a frightening discovery. It made absolutely no sense. The Bible was subversive precisely because it is rationally and logically impossible to use the literature out of which the Bible is comprised as a foundation on which one could erect a religious doctrinal edifice or political ideology. Even the so-called Abrahamic religions that have been inspired by a non-disinterested reading of the stories of the Bible are all ultimately idolatrous.

Yes _Mon cher ami_ , she did actually say a non-disinterested reading, that is a reading that intentionally seeks to undermine all preconceptions, therefore it has to be a reading which not only subverts, but also violates, undoes, dissolves, questions, destroys and deconstructs the traditional or conventional reading in the sense of a Heideggerian or Derridean re-reading of a literary text.

She said that it had became increasingly clear to her, as a first time reader of the Bible, that is, as a person with no religious background, that everything that was revolutionary, profound and significant in the message of Gospels had been covered-up or circumvented by a dedicated and intentional misreading. It became increasing clear to her that idolatry did not only rule in the very heart of all religions, idolatry was not only constitutive of all religious, but idolatry also ruled all facets of political life and idolatry was the fountain of all politically self-serving ideologies.

All the apparent paradoxes, enigmas, contradictions and ambiguities surrounding Jesus's injunctions regarding forgiveness and turning the other cheek vanished when it become evident to her that the divine imperative of forgiveness was precisely an imperative, a moral obligation, because forgiveness was always an action of divine violence, and divine violence always represents an irrevocable expression of judgement on political idolatry. An act of divine violence always results in an undoing of what Walter Benjamin called mythic violence. Mythic violence as I have implied represents the kind of violence which he associated with the political and with the ideological conceptions of sovereignty. It was this realization that transformed her into a Christian, into a believer and follower of Jesus, and also inspired her to remain a committed Communist with a new vision and understanding of socialism.

It is only through this dramatic messianic and eschatological act of divine violence which erupts from the fountain of forgiveness that the political in terms of true and authentic human freedom through solidarity can be achieved, and this achievement is a direct consequence of the decentering of sovereignty. Divine violence results in the transfer of sovereignty to the people by placing popular political power directly in the hands of the people. This means that in divine violence political power is taken from hands of the political elite who supposedly or falsely represent the power of the people, and who pretend to exercise political power on behalf of the people, for the people.

_Mon cher ami_ , now you can see that the turning of the other cheek is a dramatic messianic and eschatological action of divine violence which undoes and in its undoing, destroys what Walter Benjamin called mythic violence and the idolatry of political sovereignty. This was how Wanetta re-read and re-interpreted Walter Benjamin's _Critique of Violence_ from the perspective of her newly acquired Christian consciousness.

Her confession and the priest's insistence that she forgive her torturers was an extremely painful but also a very liberating experience. It was personally liberating for her because it also confirmed her own political-theology that grew from her readings of the Bible during the time of her torture while in detention. She now had reassurance in her heart regarding her new found faith.

In the end November finally arrived. Wanetta's morale was high. She was in a cheerful mood; she wanted to see the Jacaranda trees in full bloom. We speed off to Pretoria and drove down kilometre after kilometre of Jacaranda lined streets. She gazed in awe at the streets wreathed in a glow of purple. In long tree lined avenues and boulevards the pavements and streets were covered in a blanket of purple petals.

After our visit to Pretoria she wanted us to go the University of the Witwatersrand and stand under the Jacaranda trees outside the Wartenweiler Library. She wanted to feel the November mood on Wits campus by the Wartenweiler Library. She wanted to see the spectacular Corinthian columns of the Great Hall at Wits. She wanted to sit on the stairs of the magnificent entrance of the Great Hall and try to re-capture the wonderful feeling of what it was like to be a student again. She wanted to breathe in the atmosphere of Wits campus where she had once been a student, where her journey as an activist had started.

Sitting on the steps of the Great Hall she looked at me. Her eyes were intense. She said that she had learnt so much, discovered so much, during these past few months. She smiled and said she now sees the whole world, the whole of reality with new eyes. I remember that she started talking about the Apostle Paul at the Areopagus in Athens. Saint Paul said that God was not far from any one of us, for in Him we live and move and have our being. She said that God was omnipresent. God was everywhere at once. He was immanent in all things.

And then while sitting on the stairs of the Great Hall she said that she wanted to make a promise to both of us, to me and her. Her promise was that she would hold out until she could see the bright African blue December skies and the flight of the Sakabula Bird across a Highveld grassland.

She kept her promise. She hung on.

XIV

Early one warm and sunny Sunday morning in December Wanetta said she felt strong enough for us to go out and look for a Sakabula Bird. She said that the Sakabula Bird had become a very special bird to her; it was because of the Sakabula Bird that she had found me. She wanted to see the Sakabula Bird flying over the grassland in the sun. All she wanted now from life was to see the bird floating suspended over the grassland in the sun with its long black tail.

Cher ami that morning I had to be strong. I was very close to breaking down. I fought back the tears.

I wrapped her in a soft warm blanket and carried her to the car. We drove along the old main Heidelberg – Durban road in search of a grassland with a resident Sakabula Bird. I found a gravel road that run westwards just south of the hills of the Suikerbosrand. Eventually I spotted in the distance a Sakabula Bird floating above a tall sward of beautiful pristine Highveld grassland. This particular field of grassland had never been ploughed. I stopped the car and parked on the side of the road. I opened the passenger door and lifted her up and carried her to the barbwire fence. I lifted her carefully and gently over the fence. She managed to stand by herself, supporting herself by holding onto a sturdy fence post while I climbed through the fence. I felt incredibly strong. I lifted her up and cradled her in my arms. I strode through the tall grass towards the Sakabula Bird while carrying her effortlessly in my arms. As we drew closer it flew off again. After flapping off for a short distance it would alight on a reed or on a fence, but we continued to follow it relentlessly. Wanetta seemed to have recovered some extra strength. A bit of colour had returned to her face. There was a sparkle in her eyes and she began to laugh at what had become a comical pursuit of the Sakabula Bird. It eventually allowed us to get quite close without flying away. We stopped and watched it in silence for what seemed to be a long time. Its black glossy plumage shone in the bright sunlight, it kept a constant wary eye on us.

The warm sun shone on her face as she gazed up at the infinite blue skies. Lifted up by the upward thrust of the raising convective columns of warm air a huge flock of white storks soared high overhead in a spiral in the sky. She also noticed the storks. We both stood for a while with our heads turned up so that we could watch the storks. Supported by the thermals the storks glided slowly and effortlessly in wide circles without flapping a wing. Swifts and swallows swooped low over the tall grass intercepting any flying insect. Around us in every direction a constant silent unending armada of white butterflies drifted over the country side, floating steadily eastwards.

She smiled up at me and said that she was feeling very tired and wanted to close her eyes for a while if I didn't mind. When I turned round to carry her back to the car she said she would like to stay a bit longer in the veld in the warm sun. She said the warmth of the sun felt very pleasant. I stood there in the middle of the open veld holding her body cradled in my arms. She fell asleep. Her face looked so tranquil and peaceful. There was a soft smile on her lips. Her eyes opened briefly and she stared deeply into my eyes, she gave such an intense and meaningful look, and then she whispered that she loved me very much. I told her I loved her too. She closed her eyes again. I held her tightly against my chest.

I looked around, I noticed that wild flowers had blossomed and were in full bloom everywhere in the surrounding veld, transforming it into a rich and colourful patchwork of white, yellow, orange, red, purple, blue and purple-blue flowers. There was such a rich diversity of flowering perennials, also bees buzzed and butterflies flittered about constantly from one flower to the next. It was quiet, but then the silence was broken by the distant calls of guinea fowl drifting over the veld, carried by a slight breeze that had just begun to blow. 'Wanetta do you hear the guinea fowl,' I asked her. She was silent. I called out a bit louder to her. Wanetta, Wanetta, wake up, wake up, I called. I could hear the sudden state of panic in my own voice. But her eyes remained closed. I realized then that she had passed away peacefully in my arms. I began to sob uncontrollably. I had been in state of suppressed grief from the time that the oncologist had first announced her diagnosis, but I could not contain the tide of grief that began to well up in me. I had been preparing myself for this moment. But when the reality of her death finally arrived I soon realized how unprepared I really was. It was difficult to comprehend the fact that she was finally gone, gone forever, it was like an abyss had open up in front of me. I stumbled across the veld back to the car with Wanetta's limp body in arms.

I suddenly felt incredibly and painfully alone. Wanetta was gone forever. It was incomprehensible. Her limp body was in my arms, but she was gone, she was no longer with me.

_Mon cher ami_ , I do humbly apologise most profusely to you. I notice that your eyes have also started to glisten with tears. I feel my eyes are also brimming with tears. I am also struggling not to weep after all these years.

All this happened such a long time ago. I have never spoken to anyone about the final moments of Wanetta's passing. Do you want me to continue? OK if you insist, I will, but let me first order for both of us another draft of beer. No put your wallet away. It is my pleasure. Talking like this to you has been of great therapeutic value to me. Tonight I am most deeply indebted to you; the price of the beer is insignificant compared to the value of your companionship.

Would you like something to eat? No, no I will pay, don't worry.

The noble Zulu will arrange that we get our T-bone and chips; actually this bar makes the best T-bone steak one can find in Boksburg. Yes, medium rare, that is the only way to have a T-bone steak. OK it is settled, I have already signalled to him that we will have our meal here in the bar. He knows what we want; as you have seen he is very efficient in satisfying all the needs of the patrons of this establishment. The good man knows my wishes even before I have spoken.

Many times I have wondered whether everything that has happened in my life was actually inevitable. Or was the occurrence of everything in the Universe ultimately contingent. Contingency, the very meaning of this word I have always struggled grasp. Contingency means that something, like some existing reality, like some event, or like some state of affairs, could have been different. If something is contingent it means that it need not have happened. So the way something actually turns out to be, that is, the way things actually are, is not in fact necessarily bound to be as such, or in other words it was not in fact the inevitable outcome of some overriding necessity.

This fact holds true for Wanetta's untimely death which was caused by an extremely rare cancer that was in all likelihood induced by a very rare virus. She got cancer by sheer chance, it was not inevitable.

After her death I fell into a deep black depression. The Masonic Hotel became my second home. For months I tried unsuccessfully to drown my sorrows in the bar. I stopped painting. I found myself in a dark tunnel. It was also a black time in South Africa's history. The country was on the verge of economic collapse. The government was under siege. It was being pounded by rolling waves of social and political unrest. It was just a question of time before it would collapse. When I watched on TV the smashing down of the Berlin wall on the night of August 13, 1989, I felt completely numb and unmoved. It signalled the end of socialism, it signalled the end of Communism and the Marxist Project. Apartheid was on the brink of political collapse and socialism had gone down the tube as well.

XV

A year later on one icy cold winter's night after the pub at the Masonic Hotel had closed instead of going back to my studio at Cinderella's Arcade I walked over to the lake. I stepped onto the raft that was chained to the willow tree at the edge of lake and contemplated suicide. I stared into the dark waters.

Incredibly at the moment, I had a sudden flash back of my childhood memory of Kobus Groenewald's lifeless body lying on the raft. I could see my own lifeless body lying on the raft after it had been fished out of the lake.

The scenes of that morning had become imprinted on my mind. When I returned to the raft that afternoon, everything had returned to normal, the body was gone, the sun was shining, a coot was making its distinctive calls, a dabchick was diving and re-surfacing, a cormorant flew low over the surface of the lake and the swan was nowhere to be seen.

It was at that moment that I decided as a child that I wanted become a painter and paint what no photograph could preserve, what no photograph could show. I wanted to paint desolation, suffering, and loss. I wanted to paint the God-forsakenness of life. That day I decided that I would become a painter. After my Matric and national service in the army I went to Wits and studied fine arts. If I did not decide to become a painter that day, I would never have meet Wanetta, and I would never have suffered the pain and grief of her death, and I would never have painted _Tale of the Sakabula Bird_ and I would never be telling you this story on this particular night.

I have never been religious, even though I was baptised and confirmed in the _Dopper Kerk_ , which was a strongly Calvinist Church, also known as the _Gereformeerde Kerk._

Standing on the raft that night the impressions of those memories slowly faded from my mind and the dark cold night once again enveloped me. I found myself still staring fixedly at the cold dark waters. I remembered what Wanetta had said about dying, that you won't know that you have died.

Before I left the studio earlier that evening, I slipped a box of sleeping tables into my jacket pocket. I locked the studio door behind me, descended the stairs, and walked out of the arcade into Commissioner Street with the thought in the back of my mind that I was going to commit suicide later that night. I decided I would first have a few beers at the Masonic. I walked to the pub, my decision had been made, and my resolve was unshaken. I felt numb. Pushing through the swing doors, as I had done countless times throughout my life, I stepped into the bar. It was warm inside, the heaters were on. I nodded at the many familiar black faces of the regular patrons, and sitting down I ordered my usual draught of ale.

I had lost count of the number of beers that I had drunk. Standing on the raft looking at the black depths of the lake, suicide seemed to be so simple. I decided to swallow all of the sleeping pills. I would wait until I started to feel drowsy and only then would I dive into the cold lake and just swim until I passed out and drowned. I decided that I was going to end it all. I put my hand into my jacket and felt the box of tablets lying snug and safe in the depths of my jacket pocket. I took the box out from my pocket and poured some pills into the palm of my hand.

While gazing at the pile of white pills in the open palm of my hand in the dim light cast by a nearly street lamp I heard a woman's voice. It came from the balcony of flats across the road. A woman was standing in her nightgown on the balcony calling her cat. Kitsy, kisty, kitsy, come Tippy, Tippy, Tippy. It struck me as odd that she was calling her cat which seemed to be out somewhere in the street or in the park as she was on the fourth floor and the glass doors of the main entrance foyer of the block flat were shut, possibly locked for the night. How was the cat going to get to the fourth floor? From the dark I heard a meow and then I saw a shadow bounding across the frosty grass towards the flat. It run across the road and run up the stairs and stood by the glass doors until the woman came down and pushed open the door.

I threw the handful of sleeping pills into the Lake and walked back to the studio. There were still two sleeping pills left in the box which I swallowed. Just before I sunk into a deep sleep I prayed to God that I would never wake up again. My sleep of the dead was interrupted by a dream.

In the dream I was again standing on the moored raft by the edge of the lake. It was night. I noticed that the chain which moored the raft to the tree was no longer there. When I grabbed the overhead cable to keep my balance I felt the raft move forward away from the bank. I discovered that I could use the overhead cable to pull the raft across the lake towards the island. The island glowed brilliantly; it was lit by an amazing blaze of lights. As the raft approached the island I noticed that all the willow trees on the island were full of Sakabula Birds. There were Sakabula Birds everywhere. I also noticed that there was also a lone figure standing on the bank of island. As I drew nearer I saw it was Wanetta. She was dressed in that black satin cocktail dress. For some unknown reason I made an exceedingly strange request. It was odd because I was not at all religious. I was an unbeliever. Anyway I called out to her to pray for me. She replied that she had been praying all the time for me. Again from the raft I called out to her and asked her if I had died. She called back saying that I was still alive and that I was not dead. The raft then bumped sharply against the bank of the island and I struggled up the steep bank to reach her. She said that she was also alive. I embraced her and she was warm and very much alive in my arms. I became strongly aroused, monsieur I am not embarrassed to say that I had developed the most powerful erection, and wanted to make love to her. We began kissing passionately and I began to feel, caress and fondle her firm breasts. I started to pull off her dress. I was extremely aroused and desperately wanted to have intercourse with her. I entered her and experienced the most exquisite sex with her, climaxing uncontrollably.

Oh here comes our steak and beers, can you believe it, the Zulu has kept the kitchen open for us. Cheers. Don't wait for me go ahead and start eating before it gets cold.

I see that I have really got your attention. People hardly ever talk about their dreams. You want to know what happened next. Well the scene changed, after the orgasm, she vanished from my dream. Next I noticed the ground was covered in a carpet of long black Sakabula Bird tail feathers. Sakabula Bird tail feathers were raining like autumn leaves from the trees. When they had all lost their tail feathers the Sakabula Bird flew away. They formed a flock so huge it was like a black cloud in the sky. They flew away over mine dump behind the old Cinderella vertical mine shaft, they continued flying onwards to Cinderella Dam. I could see the entire geography and layout of Boksburg in my dream.

Standing among the carpet of black feathers a man called Mr Patterson suddenly appeared on the island before me. He used to be the Cinderella Mine Compound manager when I was still a kid. What always amazed me was how fluently he spoke isiZulu, Shangaan and Sesotho. In my dream he began to ramble on about the different kinds of African music that was played by the mine workers who worked on the ERPM mine. He was extremely knowledgeable about traditional African musical instruments and in the dream he was describing the different traditional musical instruments such as the Basuto _lekolulo_ and _setolo-tolo_ ; the Tsonga-Shangaan _umqangala_ , also called the Zulu flute bow; thumb pianos called variously, a _lekembe_ or _mbira_ or _kalimba_ or _sansa_. And then he started going on about syncopation in African music and how syncopation involves playing off beat by the shifting of accents to between beats where you do not expect them to be, that is, playing an accented beat in places where an unaccented beat would normally be played. He kept on saying that syncopating involves playing off the beat.

Like any kid who had grown up on the gold mines and had hung out at the mine compounds I knew that syncopating or syncopation was what gives African music its feel, its rhythm, its drive, its energy and excitement. I had grown up feeling the syncopation that gives African music its rich texture, its density, its timbre, its complex interweaving of parts and it's emotionally moving quality. I suppose this why the 'mine compound music' had been living a kind of afterlife in my own dream world, stuck away somewhere deep in the hidden recesses of my brain, waiting to be reactivated.

Sorry I am drifting off the topic of the dream that I had. I am not boring you? No. OK that is good. Should we order another round?

No, no, put away your wallet. Tonight everything is on me.

The Zulu knows that I am going to pay him for keeping the bar open until we finish.

How do I know this?

I told you he can read minds, he has read my mind. It is a done deal I will pay the good Zulu.

Let me continue, and then..... I hate saying and then. Well anyway, and then suddenly there were mine workers on the island in the middle of the Lake syncopating away on their drums and other musical instruments. Some stood up and came forward dancing and singing some tribal chorus in the typical African antiphonal manner which involved the alternative call-and-response singing between a lead singer and a chorus. Everybody began to dance. African music transcends the separation between audience and performers, it can never merely be watched from the outside or listened to from afar, and it always invites the listener to get up and participate, to join in. I joined the dancers and began to dance with them.

And then, you know how dreams are, there is always this incongruous surrealistic juxta positioning of events.

Well anyway, in the early hours of the morning I eventually woke up drenched in sweat and sticky all over with my own semen. The sheets, mattress and blankets were cold and wet from sweat. After drying off the sweat with a towel from my body, I washed my face and brushed my teeth. I changed into old jeans and a tatty T shirt. I put on a warm jersey and went into my studio. I switched on the studio flood lights and spot lights. I stood in the centre of the studio. I kept on lifting and feeling my arms and whispering to myself 'I am alive, I am alive', 'what does it mean to be alive.' In spite of the bright lights the studio was icy cold, the windows were frosted over and it was dark outside. After switching on the oil heater I sat for an hour in the leather armchair that I had bought for Wanetta. I felt the inspiration to paint coming back to me. I got from the chair and I began to paint the scenes of the dream that I had dreamt of. I did not stop to eat or drink. I drew, mixed paint and painted oblivious to the passing of time. I painted throughout the day, and then right through the night. I don't know how long I painted for. When I became too exhausted to continue, I would fall into a deep dreamless sleep, when woke I would carry on painting.

On the third day of the painting marathon I felt like listening to music. While Wanetta was sick she would find relief and comfort while listening to Handel's Messiah. I took the record out of its jacket and placed it on the Hi Fi turntable and sat down in Wanetta's armchair. I listened to the Messiah over and over again as I stared at the painting that I just completed. I began to weep uncontrollably, and I could not stop weeping for Wanetta.

Well that's all I have to say. What is the time?

Its 2.00 am in the morning and it is just the two of us in the pub. We better make this our final round of beer.

I see our friend wants to close the bar. He has kept the bar open for us. He is a good man, Well then, that's my story. The story of the tail of the Sakabula Bird if you like.

It has been a long night, and a long life.

