C.J. Driver….The Man with the Suitcase. The Life, Execution and rehabilitation of John Harris, Liberal Terrorist (Crane River, Cape Town) 2015. 89pp. R170. ISBN 978-0-620-66852-1.
On 24 July 1964 a young South African white liberal, John Harris, placed a suitcase loaded with dynamite and petrol on the main concourse of Johannesburg station. Harris, though a member of the African Resistance Movement, an anti-apartheid guerrilla organization, was acting entirely on his own. The idea was to shock the white population into seeing the necessity to end apartheid and Harris’s rationale was that it was better to take a few lives now if it saved more lives later.
He then phoned the press (whom he hoped would alert the police, which they did) to say a bomb was there and would go off within fifteen minutes. Either because this interval was simply too short or perhaps even because it suited the apartheid police to let the bomb explode, the bomb went off, killing an old lady and injuring 20 others, mostly as a result of burns inflicted by the petrol that Harris had included to ensure a pyrotechnic ball of flame. One young girl was burnt almost to the bone. She recovered but with her face and whole life disfigured.
Harris was caught, tortured (his jaw broken with a rugby kick, his testicles turned black and blue with kicking) and hanged. The defence tried hard to plead that he had not been of sound mind but no one on either side believed that. Most of Harris’s fellow members of the Liberal party, like Alan Paton, were shocked by his act of violence and refused to have anything to do with him. Paton even refused to plead in mitigation.
Recently, however, there has been a resurgence in interest in Harris. Driver’s book follows David Beresford’s Truth is a Strange Fruit (Jacana, 2010), while the death in 2013 of Adrian Leftwich, one of the founders of the ARM (and also its main betrayer) caused many further reflections on this ill-fated movement. Already, in April 2005, Harris was, so to speak, officially canonized when a meeting took place in Freedom Park, Pretoria, to commemorate him as a hero of the struggle.
The government was represented by General Andrew Masondo, a former ANC guerrilla, and by Albie Sachs, by then a judge on the Constitutional Court. A few old Liberals who had been friends of the family attended but in general Communists attended and Liberals stayed away. The presence of Masondo and Sachs occasioned considerable cynicism. Masondo stands accused in official documents and before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of having been one of the worst torturers in the ANC prison camps while Sachs notably failed to speak out against these atrocities at the time.
Part of the interest in Harris derives from the fact that many white radicals, unnerved by the ANC’s anti-white racial nationalism, are keen to exhume white martyrs of the anti-apartheid struggle. But the interest of the Harris case lies far beyond that. Driver presents the facts very fairly. There was no doubt that Harris had a decidedly ruthless streak.
Once his young wife, Ann, fell pregnant at an inconvenient time, the baby was quickly handed out for adoption. Harris was, by all accounts, very much the dominant partner in this relationship so this decision was almost certainly his. He was able and wanted his place in the sun. He badgered the Liberal lawyer, Ernie Wentzel: “It’s all very well for you, Ernie. You’re already famous. But what about me?” And, without any authorisation by the ARM he drew up a document to be sent to the prime minister in which he claimed that the government would “only be moved by the killing of white people”. He threatened that his (non-existent) group already had plans for such killings which it would put into operation if its ultimatum was ignored.
He then greatly distressed many Liberals by hawking around the party the notion that it would be better to kill a few whites now rather than see far more die later. He received a unanimous thumbs-down but he had a large ego and, convinced of his own righteousness, pressed ahead regardless. If he was after a place in the sun, he got it: Ernie Wentzel, perhaps the most prominent anti-apartheid lawyer in the country, is now largely forgotten, while the name of John Harris lives on.
Jonty Driver’s book is a reliable and balanced account. He knew all the main actors in the tragedy, including Harris and Leftwich. He has been attacked for the word “rehabilitation” in his title, but this is a shot from the hip. In fact Driver weighs all the arguments and makes none in favour of rehabilitating Harris. Driver, who is a poet of some stature, includes a poem he wrote about these events in 1966 and even that is finely balanced.
Harris’s act had large consequences. The fact that an anti-apartheid activist had killed and harmed innocent civilians sent a huge wave of revulsion through South Africa, especially amongst whites, and greatly strengthened the apartheid regime – exactly the opposite of what Harris had intended. The security police, infuriated and now sure the gloves were off, immediately began to treat white prisoners as badly as they already treated black ones.
Many of Harris’s own closest comrades in the ARM were tortured as a result. Ernie Wentzel, who had been appalled by Harris’s act and had not wished to represent him, did so in the end because no other lawyer would. The effect on Wentzel’s career was devastating – after that no one would brief him. It is, indeed, difficult to find any single positive consequence of his act. Harris was undoubtedly very brave: even under torture he would give no names at all to the police. But his death, and the harm he did to others, was not merely pointless but counter-productive.
Yet the thing that is interesting about Harris – who went to the gallows singing “We Shall Overcome” – was his immense righteousness. At the launch of Driver’s book in Cape Town I heard a struggle veteran (this time a Trotskyite) declare with huge certainty that “John Harris was and is a hero”. Again, more righteousness and with it what the speaker clearly considers his authority to pronounce on moral questions, not as opinion but as fact.
No inner doubts, no questioning: he or she knows. And with a strange circularity, the fact that such a person just knows (not thinks) what is right, in turn the possession of that knowledge gives them the authority to pronounce with such certainty. It turned out, indeed, that the whole book launch audience was full of such righteous folk.
Depictions of the righteous moral world of the terrorist or anarchist may be found in Dostoevsky’sDemons, Conrad’s The Secret Agent and in Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist. But my own long acquaintance with the South African struggle (which began for me in the early 1960s) has made me think long and hard about this righteousness. To be sure, there was a time when I felt that fierce righteousness myself. It was quite clear that racial discrimination and apartheid were utterly wrong, that the Afrikaners who practiced it were all beasts and the Africans all victims.
But before long you met Afrikaner farmers who cracked jokes in fluent Zulu with their farm-workers, something I couldn’t do myself. Then you met plenty of Africans who positively wanted segregation. They set up associations for black students, black lawyers, black businessmen and set up black caucuses inside almost every organisation. These exist in profusion today and there is fierce anti-white racial discrimination. My own views haven’t changed: I still dislike racial discrimination of any kind and I still believe in a non-racial democracy though this seems to be a distinctly minority view.
It turns out that African nationalists hate liberals at least as much as Afrikaner nationalists did. They also seem to be considerably more corrupt and more willing to rig elections. And there is far more torture in South Africa’s police cells today than there was under apartheid.
Of course the historical fact of white supremacy means that the two sides were not equal but if you talk to visiting Nigerians or Zimbabweans they all laugh and say this is the only place in Africa where people don’t care about the future, only about the past. Increasingly, it is possible to look back at that past not so much as a moral struggle, more as a contest between equally ruthless elites with only one possible winner.
One can’t help but wonder what John Harris might feel about all that. Perhaps he would still feel righteous. There are still plenty of people like that in today’s South Africa, though you often get the feeling that they do so because it enables them to disapprove of others so powerfully. Personally, I regard with a certain nostalgia my youthful sense of righteousness. It belongs with being in love for the first few times, with the early Beatles and the time before we got to the moon. That doesn’t mean that right and wrong don’t still exist. They do. The mistake was to affix those things to political movements.
But it’s funny thing, this righteousness thing. Some people still have it at an advanced age, like the struggle veteran who, with such vehemence, pronounced Harris to be an eternal hero. But, as I say, he was hardly alone and the weirdest thing was that it became evident that most of that book launch audience was still living in 1965 with all their anti-apartheid verities intact. The security police of that time were still the principal enemy. There was careful discussion of the details of the torture inflicted then, had Harris’s jaw been broken by a kick or an elbow?
There was no concession to the world of fifty years later: only a few miles from where we sat lies Khayelitsha where better than one person a week was burnt alive last year. But there was no concession to that. It was as if the audience had decided to stay frozen in time in order to retain their certainty, their righteousness. It was that important to them.
I remembered how in the 1980s in London I had interviewed old South African exiles who’d all left the country by 1960. Once or twice I averred that I had been back to South Africa recently and that much had changed, as is true of any country over twenty-five years. To a man they wouldn’t hear of it: it couldn’t change, it wouldn’t change, not ever. It was just as they’d left it. They too had decided to be in a time capsule so that they could preserve their righteousness, like the Holy Grail. An interesting thing about righteousness, that: it’s time bound, threatened by history.
One of the people who helped send Harris to the gallows was his old friend John Lloyd, who testified against him in court, having earlier incriminated many of his other friends in statements to the police. I knew John Lloyd, indeed at the 1963 congress of the National Union of South African Students, he and I had sat next to one another, he representing the Pietermaritzburg campus of the University of Natal and I its Durban campus.
The Durban campus had been racked for years by the question of the racial integration/segregation of its facilities (for we had a satellite black campus, with its own representatives). In the end we had attempted to settle the matter with a referendum and the Durban students had voted to segregate everything, despite much passionate campaigning in the opposite direction by myself and fellow liberals. We were roundly denounced at NUSAS for allowing such a vote and John joined in the denunciations. I remember him almost bristling with righteousness as he did this, standing about a foot away from me. He was too righteous to speak to me again.
After John had betrayed Harris he went to England, developed a career as a barrister and put himself forward as a Labour candidate for Exeter – when, of course, his previous history came to light and he was hurriedly de-selected, many complaining that he had depicted himself as a hero of the anti-apartheid struggle without adding the complications about his commitment to the use of violence or his betrayal of friends. And yet look what happened when Mandela died. There in the Exeter Express and Echo of 6 December 2013 is a picture of the be-gowned and be-wigged Lloyd under the headline Exeter barrister leads tributes to Mandela. Lloyd, we are now told, was de-selected simply because of his membership of an “anti-apartheid group which was involved in acts of sabotage”. He records that when Mandela died “I woke up the next morning crying for him”. And then, of course, the obligatory pilgrimage back to Cape Town as a hero of the struggle, enjoying the euphoria. There is no doubt that John is still very righteous.
This is not unusual. Lionel Gay turned on all his comrades and testified against them at the second Rivonia Trial, sending some of them, like Dave Kitson, to jail for twenty years. (“By the time I got out”, Dave told me, “I was being guarded by young men who hadn’t been born when I went in.”) But after he’d done that, Gay too went to England and re-invented himself as an Anti-Apartheid activist.
He was particularly friendly with Brian and Sylvia Bunting, thus provoking the indignation of Norma Kitson who naturally objected that Gay had helped put her husband away. But the Buntings would make excuses for Gay, who continued as a strugglista. In the milder circumstances of England he had, so to speak, re-discovered his righteousness and was desperately keen to hang on to it.
Most remarkable of all was Bob Hepple, a member of the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party and an original Rivonia trialist. Hepple, who died last month, agreed to turn state’s evidence against Mandela and all his erstwhile comrades, which could very likely have resulted in death sentences for them all. In the end Bram Fischer managed to smuggle Hepple out of the country as the only way to protect the accused from the very worst.
In exile Hepple prospered, became Sir Bob Hepple QC, Master of Clare College, Cambridge and threatened to sue anyone who alluded to his previous career. Since, the legal fraternity being what it is, he was backed by all manner of big legal guns, this was a potent threat. When Walter Sisulu, no less, called him a traitor, even he had to apologise and back down. After that, no one dared query his credentials as he came out to South Africa to pose as one of the righteous. Around me I hear the sound of tongues wagging, loosened by his death.
Personally, I can always forgive someone who gave names under torture – I know I wouldn’t have lasted long myself under that. I still feel great admiration for the way John Harris stood up to that. But people who deliberately chose to get involved in the sort of violence which any state in the world will punish – and then, when apprehended, give away all their comrades in their first twenty-four hours of detention, as both Leftwich and Lloyd did, seem to belong in a different category.
Neither man was tortured and the speed with which they changed sides suggests they were never very serious about their original commitment, that it was mainly posturing. But even that I can forgive, not knowing, after all, how I would have behaved myself. What makes it harder to forgive is all this righteousness. Anyone who behaves like Leftwich, Lloyd, Hepple or Gay might at least have a little humility and accept (as I do) that we are all sinners.
So this righteousness thing is a bit like the King’s Ankus in the Mowgli stories. Men want it, very badly. If they have it, it enables them to look down on others and, even more, to disapprove of them. For the people who have the righteousness thing believe and know that they are morally superior. I suspect that in South Africa this whole business has been greatly strengthened by the power of the missionary tradition and of Calvinism. The anti-apartheid struggle was, from first to last, dominated by messianic churchmen, from Huddlestone to Tutu, all of them possessed with great righteousness as well as, often, enormous egos. And the concern to be one of the Righteous was very much the same as being one of the Elect.
But Mowgli finally throws away the King’s Ankus because he sees how it leads to a trail of dead bodies, that it kills. Righteousness, as the example of Harris shows, can also do that. But even when it is less powerful it causes people to re-invent themselves and their careers in order that they can keep it, or at least pretend to keep it. And it causes many others to live in time capsules where they once had it, and which they’re scared to leave in case that means facing up to a world unarmed by righteousness.
No doubt it is just an accident that I ended up like Mowgli, happily abandoning the thing before it bit back at me. Through no particular merit of my own I seem to have survived the revolution, but every revolution devours its children and John Harris and Adrian Leftwich both count among the devoured. Of course, people like to say that “So-and-so’s life was not in vain. He/she died so that this or that good thing could happen” – but this is often just not true. Many do die completely in vain. John Harris is but one example. The heroism of his death cannot be doubted but he did much harm and no good.
Perhaps the more pertinent truth is that few, if any Africans, Coloureds or Indians are much concerned one way or the other about Harris, Leftwich, Hepple et al. The people for whom these names conjure up strong feelings and a vivid history are all whites of my generation whose lives were turned upside down because of our common revulsion from apartheid.
The interesting thing is that although we all felt approximately the same about it, it did very different things to our lives. Some died, some were tortured, some were detained, some betrayed their comrades and their cause, others were jailed for long terms, still others spent long years in exile, many never returning.
There is no particular sense to the mess that history made of so many lives, particularly since we whites were, after all, marginal to the main story. Yet the fact is that those years of the early 1960s in South Africa were filled with fear, furious commitment, tension and excitement. They were, without doubt, the most intense years of all our lives. This, I’m sure, is why so many of that book launch audience were living still in 1965. It’s the intensity that counts, a flame that flickers on inside us all.
http://www.politicsweb.co.za/news-and-analysis/reflections-on-white-righteousness