A Real-Life Spy Story

The ANC Spy Bible: Surviving across enemy lines by Moe Shaik
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A real-life spy story that is as gripping and exciting as any novel.

But I very nearly didn't read this book. I picked it off the library shelf and when I saw the name of the author, and immediately a phrase sprang to mind: "a generally corrupt relationship". 

Those were the words of a High Court judge speaking about Schabir Shaik, brother of the author, and his relationship with a prominent politician, Jacob Zuma. I very nearly put the book back on the shelf. I didn't want to read about sleaze, and nothing more could be more sleazy than the dealings of corrupt politicians and businessmen. 

And then I thought, aren't you being prejudiced? Take it out and read it, and if it's too sleazy, you can change it for another book in a fortnight's time -- you're not buying the book. So I took it out, and I'm glad I did. It is well worth reading and raises a lot of interesting and important questions.

Moe Shaik was a member of the African National Congress (ANC) underground in South Africa in the 1980s when the movement was banned and being a member was illegal. He was arrested and detained for questioning about the whereabouts of an ANC courier, and after being tortured by the Special Branch was eventually released, but not before making contact with someone in the Special Branch (SB) who was sympathetic, and after his release began feeding him with information from within the SB.

This resulted in Moe Shaik starting a special intelligence unit within the ANC. Just as the Special Branch tried to collect information on the ANC, so the ANC began collecting information on the SB -- what they knew and what they didn't know, and some of their sources of informatio0n within the ANC. It was dangerous work, and there was always the risk of being caught.

When the ANC was unbanned in 1990, and political prisoners were released, people like Moe Shaik had to continue underground for a while. The National Party politicians might be willing to negotiate with the ANC, but there were many in the security services who continued to fight the war, perhaps in the hope that they could change the minds of their political bosses.

As the new democratic South Africa was born, Moe Shaik and his colleagues were faced with a different question: what was the role of an intelligence and security service in a democratic society?

This is one man's view of events, one man's memoir, but it is just such personal views that make history come alive and be more than a boring chronicle that reads like minutes of a meeting. It gives valuable insights into the history of the period, and if you like spy fiction, you'll probably also enjoy it.

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Tales from Dystopia X: The banality of evil | Khanya

It's my other blog's fifth blogiversary today, so I'm referring everyone to the story at Tales from Dystopia X: The banality of evil | Khanya:

It's about bureaucratic machinations in a conspiracy to stop one sick old lady from receiving communion.

It's one of a series of posts on memories from the apartheid era in South Africa. The other posts in the series are:

• Tales from Dystopia I: Epukululo Lovawambo
• Tales from Dystopia II: Enemies of the State
• Tales from Dystopia III: Theological education in a totalitarian state
• Tales from Dystopia IV: Dennis Brutus and political interference in sporting affairs
• Tales from Dystopia V: Sophiatown and ethnic cleansing
• Tales from Dystopia VI: 1960 was a very bad year
• Tales from Dystopia VII: Amazing grace
• Tales from Dystopia VIII: Deportation from Namibia
• Tales from Dystopia IX: SACC Consultation on Racism 11-14 February 1980
• Tales from Dystopia X: The banality of evil

And you can find the full list at Tales from Dystopia | Khanya

What is Union Spirit?

Union Spirit is (or was) biofuel made as a by-product of sugar refining in Natal, South Africa.

Someone asked the question "What is Union Spirit" in a newsgroup devoted to human rights, and I think it was a reference to some political slogan being used in Burma alias Myanmar.

But I remember it as a brand of petrol.

It was originally (in the 1940s) sold only in Natal, and mainly in and around Durban, where many garages would have a Union pump. In those days garages sold several brands of petrol. There were no "one brand" garages. The commonest brands were Caltex, Shell, Pegasus and Atlantic. Pegasus later became Mobil and is now Engen. Atlantic became BP.

In the Transvaal province in the 1950s there was Satmar, which was made from torbanite (oil shale) and later Sasol (made from coal).

In the 1960s there was one garage in Johannesburg that sold Union Spirit. It was in Jeppestown, and was in demand among sports car drivers because at that time the regular petrol sold at other garages was 87 octane, and not suitable for high-compression engines, even at Johannesburg's altitude

Union Spirit was 100 octane.

Growing up in Durban

I've just finished reading Barbara Trapido's Frankie and Stankie -- a semi-autobiographical account of growing up in Durban. A few days ago I wrote about it in Notes from underground: Evocation of a Durban childhood. That was after I'd just read the first few chapters.

I found it quite fascinating, and it made me put my project of reading Ulysses on hold, because it gripped me so much. There was so much that I could identify with, especially my own childhood up to the age of seven, and then the university parts in the early 1960s, because though I wasn't on the Durban campus, but in Pietermaritzburg, it was the same university, and I knew some people from there.

Plus, as Trapido would say, some of the people were real people with real names, like Ken and Jean Hill, whom I did not know well, but I had met them a few times. And Francis Cull, whom she referred to as a 35-year-old Anglican priest, and who in my time, three years later, was doing English Honours in Pietermaritzburg, and seemed nearer to 70 than 60, as old as I am now, perhaps, except that I don't feel as old as he seemed to me then.

There were some anachronisms, or at least so they seemed to me -- she referred to the university as "uni", an Australianism that came in long after the time. Perhaps people speak of it as the "uni" today, but in my -- our-- time it was always "varsity". Another term I don't remember using at that period is "airhead", though the description is accurate enough. John Vorster did not become Minister of Justice until 1961, though the book suggests that he held that position in 1960, at the time of the Sharpeville massacre.

Her description of the freshers reception committee also rang true, though since I was somewhat older by the time I got to the University of Natal, I was in a position not to take it very seriously, unlike the 17-year-olds straight out of school. But I think she had them well sussed out, and the thing about freshers having to wear hair ribbons and bow ties was spot on, though in my day they were yellow and purple, which for various reasons entirely unrelated to fresher integration, I happened to like. On the Durban campus the Philistines were the engineers, while in Pietermaritzburg they were the agrics. I remember an agric friend once railing against "liberals" and how he hated them, and when I asked him why he replied, "Because they're against integration". It was just the opposite of the usual complaint -- that liberals were against segregation -- so I was quite gobsmacked (yes, that's an anachronism too), but it turned out that he was talking about fresher integration, not racial integration.

I couldn't identify quite so much with the high-school period of the late 1950s, perhaps because by then my family had moved to the Witwatersrand and we lived on a smallholding in Sunningdale, just outside Johannesburg, whose expansion into the surrounding countryside I viewed as an assault on my freedom. Plus (is that term catching or what?) I was at a boys' boarding school, so fashion in clothing played a much smaller role in my life as a teenager than it did at a Durban girls' day school. Nevertheless, there were enough parallels to make it interesting.

I suppose the book is what the Germans call a Bildungsroman, a novel about growing up, or a "coming of age" novel. And in that it succeeds. It may be fiction (or at least semi-fiction), but it is also a piece of social history, a memoir. Such was the segregated nature of South African society in those days that it is the memoir only of a Woozer [1] upbringing in the post-war era, the period 1945-1965. Trapido (whose husband was the well-known South African historian Stan Trapido) sets her story of growing up against a background of real historical events. She tells it as it really was; much of it is just as I remember it.

In my earlier post I noted that I had met Babara Trapido, and now I'm rather puzzled, having come to the end of the book, since that was nine years after she had left South Africa for good. So now I wonder just who it was that I met.

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[1] Woozer - a White Urban English-speaking South African (WUESA). The experience of other South African cultural groups might be quite different. For White Rural English-speaking South Africans of roughly that period, for example, the classic Bildungsroman is The power of one by Bruce Courtenay.