J.M. Coetzee by J. C. Kannemeyer

Author:J. C. Kannemeyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO000000, BIO007000, FIC019000
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2012-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

A FIRST BOOKER PRIZE AND A ROBINSONADE

I

In the 1980s the protest actions by black South Africans escalated, fanned by the crisis in black education, the hostility to the tricameral parliament making no provision for black people, and the increased rents levied by the discredited and corrupt controlling bodies in the local black management councils. Within the ranks of the ANC and its military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (the Spear of the Nation), individuals branded as agents of the government or sell-outs were savagely dealt with. Black members of the police were primary targets. In 1985 the ANC changed to a strategy of ‘people’s war’, aimed at making the country ungovernable. The guerrilla activities of earlier were linked with mass mobilisation.1 Strikes, processions, boycotts and attacks proliferated, the houses of black policemen were firebombed and police informants were killed by having a petrol-filled car tyre ‘necklace’ put around their neck and set alight.

When Nadine Gordimer spoke before the New York Institute of the Humanities in 1982, the title of her address was ‘Living in the Interregnum’. She started by sketching the stormy atmosphere in Johannesburg in those days: ‘I live at 6 000 feet in a society whirling, stamping, swaying with the force of revolutionary change. [...] It is not for nothing that I chose as an epigraph for my novel July’s People a quotation from Gramsci: “The old is dying, and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.”’2

In an attempt to contain the riots, the burning of schools, the gang violence of a ‘lost generation’, the necklace murders and other militant situations, P.W. Botha in 1985 declared a state of emergency in certain districts, granting the government well-nigh unlimited powers. The state of emergency was imposed on the whole country in 1986, in terms of which the United Democratic Front (UDF) and other affiliated organisations were banned in 1988 and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) was prohibited from involving itself in political activities.3 The extent of the intervention can be deduced from a statement by the minister of law and order that in 1985 close to 19000 people (of whom 72% were under the age of 20) were arrrested on unrest-related charges, including public violence, arson and murder. In spite of its sweeping powers to detain suspected activists, the government could not contain the resistance. This led to the escalating liquidation of people seen as enemies of the state. ‘Many of the killers who formed the death squads,’ David Welsh writes, ‘were psychopaths with criminal records who appeared to derive considerable job satisfaction from their activities. The most notorious of the death squad camps was Vlakplaas, a farm near Pretoria that had been acquired by the police in the late 1970s for the purpose of “turning” so-called “askaris” – that is, inducing captured black guerrillas – to work for the security forces, invariably by none-too-gentle methods. Two of Vlakplaas’s commanders, Dirk Coetzee and Eugene de Kock, became legendary killers.

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