Bryan Rostron
Returning home after many years, I have discovered a rudimentary litmus test for gauging how the political land lies. Mention the name Robert McBride.
A litmus test, you will recall, produces simple either/or results. In this case: a hero or villain.
The reaction seldom has anything to do with McBride. It’s like holding up a mirror: private beliefs, often carefully masked, tend to be reflected.
McBride’s continued incarceration in Mozambique has only intensified this bizarre syndrome: most people tend to assume his guilt, or protest his innocence, according to their own experience of South Africa.
A litmus test, of course, is also colour-coded and sadly the divide here is pretty predictable. No prizes for guessing which way the cookie crumbles.
For example, I have found many whites who would normally disguise their real political beliefs let rip at the sound of the “M” word. It seems to act as a release mechanism, allowing them to express deep-seated fears, even hatred, for the changes in our society.
This is not to minimise genuine distress about the Magoo Bar bombing, for which McBride took responsibility during his trial in 1987. It is strange, however, how many whites can calmly discuss acts of state-sponsored apartheid violence, explaining that one must understand the traumas of the time – then, at the mention of McBride, suddenly froth at the mouth.
On a wider level, when he was arrested five months ago, the bile spewed out by otherwise sober newspapers was breathtaking. There was a feeding frenzy of rumour and defamation, a journalistic disgrace which vividly reminded me, after years as a reporter in London, of the British tabloid vilification of Irish Republican Army suspects later proved to be innocent.
Such intemperate reactions merely reveal competing prejudices. The person gets lost as opposing sides project on to him, like a blank screen, their own political assumptions.
I met McBride in 1990. I was writing a book about his Umkhonto weSizwe unit which attempted to describe why thoughtful, decent young men took up the armed struggle. It was not a morally easy story, and I wanted readers to make up their own minds. But if whites could not at least understand this, I felt, then they could understand very little about their own country.
From that perspective, the continued virulence of white reactions to McBride is not reassuring. It is, I believe, a pathological symptom: legitimising otherwise suppressed feelings about this “new” South Africa.
Instructively, such people are not affronted by the crudity of the attempt to frame him, nor do they appear to be offended by the succession of flat- footed white cops who first leaked disinformation to the press, then to the Maputo authorities. There have been no howls of outrage from “law and order” folk at the transparent attempts, by South African officials, to pervert the course of justice.
By the same token, what are we to make of the passivity of the African National Congress in this important case?
Let’s put it simply. There was a treasonous attempt to destabilise the government. A fictitious plot was concocted. The only repercussion so far? The forced resignation of General Georg Meiring. Those who invented this farrago of lies remain in place; the victim of their conspiracy remains in jail.
This is pitiful. Here is one of the ANC’s most loyal members – a man who during his trial not only shielded his co-accused but his own organisation, thus guaranteeing himself a death sentence. The fact the ANC would rather let him rot in jail than move decisively against the officials who helped frame him is a mistake.
This manifests itself in even small ways. Since returning to South Africa, I have faced an assault course of bureaucratic obstructionism. There is another litmus test here. Helpful have been “new regime” officials; unhelpful, antagonistic and even hostile, the “old”.
I’ve been struck by the arrogance of these dinosaurs. How can they get away with behaving like petty tyrants? The answer, I suggest, is simple. Purging Meiring sends a message only to a few top officials. Those lower down the pecking order do not feel under any threat. And if the kind of minor civil servants I am battling with appear to be so cocksure – my god, what’s going on in the police and army?
Having plied my trade as a journalist for some years, I am entirely in sympathy with the one offence McBride appears to have committed: trying to expose arms smuggling As a foreign affairs official, he probably deserves a rap over the knuckles for this chancy foray. Nevertheless, let me stick my neck out and predict two things: in the short term, McBride will be vindicated; in the long term, he will play an important role in our national life. Meanwhile, those South Africans tempted to rush to righteous judgment might do better to examine the mote in their own eye.
After he had been condemned to death, McBride turned to the packed public gallery. “I have taken you quite a distance along the road,” he said. “Freedom is just around the corner. I am leaving you at the corner – and you must take that corner to find freedom on the other side.”
Well, we have turned that corner, but McBride is back where he began: in prison. In 1987, as the policemen led him away, McBride raised his fist and shouted: “The struggle continues till Babylon falls!” Today I’m not sure we can confidently boast that Babylon has truly fallen.
Bryan Rostron is a journalist and playwright, and the author of Till Babylon Falls