Anton Krueger, the noted playwright, has just come out with a first, slim work of fiction called Sunnyside Sal – which also counts as a rare work of prose from poet Robert Berold’s publishing outfit, Deep South.
The work is “a jauntily narrated novella set in the tumultuous early 1990s, when a whole generation was discovering that everything they’d been taught to believe was wrong”.
In the following excerpt, two fifteen year olds find themselves at the centre, first of the SAPF’s attention, and then of BOSS’s:
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Church Square, 1987
Later in Form III, Sal began to cultivate an interest in politics. I was fifteen, and although I suspected that there was something not altogether right with Apartheid, I didn’t really have any idea what was happening in South Africa at the time. Sal wanted me to accompany him to protest against an AWB rally which was going to be held on Church Square. I’d never heard of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging and Sal couldn’t tell me much about them, except that they were a fascist faction and that their emblem was a Nazi swastika with three spokes instead of four.
This was during the second State of Emergency of the year, the townships were in uproar and the border war was raging on. The AWB were opposed to the reform movements which had begun, claiming that the government was becoming too liberal. Conservative? Liberal? Who knew what these meant. But since we had missed out on the 60s (and there was absolutely nothing that we could do about that now) we would have to make up for lost time by accosting the most convenient symbol of the establishment to hand. After thinking the situation through carefully, I decided to go along with Sal, provided that we could find suitably hippy clothes to wear.
So we rifled through a bag of old clothes Tracy’s parents had left over from the 70s. Sal found a bedraggled black wig, and I wore a dirty blonde. He put on a huge Hawaiian shirt with out-sized lapels and was soon clattering with cowry shell necklaces. I squeezed into an asphyxiating red number and a pair of large bronze bell-bottoms. And so we set off on my golden ten-speeder for the city centre.
Sal didn’t have a bike, so he had to sit across my handlebars, effectively impairing my vision almost completely. Our progress from his parents’ flat in Arcadia was further hampered every fifty-odd metres by my bell-bottoms flapping into the bicycle chain. We stopped en route to make ourselves protest banners from an old cardboard box we found in Queen Street and by the time we eventually got there, the rally itself was over; but the noisy aftermath of the event had yet to be cleared up. We saw a few scared white kids from the UDF wearing End Conscription Campaign T-shirts being bullied into police vans. A number of black ANC supporters had also showed up. It was illegal to wear a shirt with UDF, ANC or Mandela’s face on it, and everybody was being rounded up by baton-wielding policemen who surrounded the perimeter of the square. The air was filled with shouts and screams and the squeal of sirens as the dissidents were carted off.
With deliberate resolve, Sal tightened a red bandanna around his black wig and loosened the last of the buttons on his unreasonably orange sunflower shirt. Without another word, we hauled out the makeshift posters we’d made. On mine, I’d written “Is there intelligent life on earth?” while Sal had come up with the rather more obscure “Plight of the Pimpled Peruvians.” I didn’t ask.
In the atmosphere of mayhem which now prevailed around the dour statue of the last president of the Transvaal Republic, we moved towards the Square, holding our appeals aloft. While crossing the street which circles the square, our path was blocked by a policeman wearing a bullet-proof jacket, wielding an R4 rifle.
“Vat daai fiets hier weg en gaan huis toe,” was what he said to us. Sal and I looked at each other blankly. I tried to raise one eyebrow in mock consternation (a trick I’d been practising in front of the mirror for just such an occasion). “Ek’s ernstig!” The policeman was becoming increasingly agitated. “Fokof!”
We didn’t really know what to do, so we just sort of stood there aimlessly in the middle of the street, our placards limp in our hands. We watched the police vans going by, as they rounded up the occasional unruly mob which had been converging on the Square. We didn’t have to stand around for long, however, because suddenly, we were surrounded by uniforms as we were swept up in a bustle of burly blue. A few moments of complete confusion followed – as if we were caught up in a wave and were tumbling blindly in white foam – as they pummelled us into a yellow van.
“Haal af daai fokken pruike julle moffies!” one of the police insisted, as others stripped us of wigs and wallets the while. “Wat de fok dink julle maak julle?” another wanted to know as he locked the door of the van.
The policemen seemed rather excitable. This was their time to shine. One of them barked boisterously as he ripped the film from Sal’s camera and the others gave exuberant encouragement as they looked on. They howled, they whooped, they were having an excellent time of it.
We had to do our best to dodge the fingers poked at us when we got too close to the grating. As soon as there was a lull in the jeering we tried to apologise. We tried to explain to them that we had no political affiliations, that we were just trying to be silly. Really.
“Ja, julle is fokken dom,” said one, “Dis State of Emergency. Ons kan julle opsluit vir ses maande sonder ‘n trial.”
“But we’re only fifteen,” Sal said.
“Maak nie saak nie…ons het boys daar binne van dertien. Ons sluit julle op net so. Julle knapies moenie moeilikheid soek met ons nie. Julle sal dit kry!”
At this point Sal began to grow noticeably nervous. He grimly buttoned up his shirt as he stared through the bars of the van at the genuine protestors who were being manhandled off the Square. When they saw what had happened to us, they raised clenched fists in our direction. “Amandla!” they called out to us, “Amandla awethu! Be strong!” Little did they know that we had no idea who they were, what they stood for, nor what they were saying to us.
“Please,” we pleaded with the police, adopting distinctly whiny tones. “If you don’t like our clothes we can change them. We haven’t done anything wrong. Please.”
Just then a plainclothesman was brought onto the scene. After consulting with the others in muffled whispers and secretive gestures, he took us to change our clothes. The man led us to the public toilets on the Square, next to the booth where they used to sell bus tickets and timetables when the depot was still on Church Square. Luckily we’d brought along a kit-bag with ordinary jeans and T-shirts. As we were changing, an AWB supporter came in, clad in khaki from top to toe. He was sporting a sort of weird vierkleur nurse’s cap on his forehead and Sal was visibly startled. “Look at that!” he said, furtively pointing the man out to our captor. “Why don’t you ask him to change his funny clothes as well?”
Our man sighed as he stood at the urinals. With a long-suffering shake of his head he zipped up and – delivering a casual blow to the back of Sal’s head, almost as an afterthought – he told us “Julle verstaan niks nie.” Sal rubbed his head. “Julle weet nie wat hier aangaan nie.”
The man then lead us to his car. He was still convinced that we must be in cahoots with the forces of resistance, and he wanted to see where we lived. He’d also discovered a video in Sal’s kitbag, which he cared to view. So we left my golden ten-speeder locked up near the Square and drove with the man to Sal’s flat. As we were driving down Church Street, the man explained to us that nobody wanted to hurt the black man. With an expansive gesture he included all the African workers on the streets who were painting buildings, sweeping driveways and washing cars. “Ons wil net vriende met almal wees,” he said. Ja right, I thought, otherwise who else are you going to get to do your painting, sweeping, washing.
Sal’s parents were living in Lisbon at the time, and over weekends he stayed in a flat his father owned in Sunnyside. It was straight opposite the vast gardens of the Union Buildings, and we imagined that we could see State President P.W. Botha glowering out at us from his office. Neither Sal, myself, and least of all die Groot Krokodil himself could possibly have imagined that Nelson Mandela was to be inaugurated in those selfsame gardens in seven years’ time.
Before Sal would let the man into his flat he insisted on seeing some ID. Sal’s stance – palms firmly planted on the hips and with a well-rehearsed Sid Vicious sneer – looked more comical than threatening, and the man smiled indulgently as he produced his card. He let us know that he was part of BOSS, and he covered half of his card in order to protect his personal details. We didn’t have the heart to tell him that he was sporting a bronze badge announcing his name as Mannie Meintjies. “Julle kan my maar Jan Spies noem,” said Mannie.
Mannie was disappointed to discover that Sal’s video turned out to be of the Pink Floyd concert, Delicate Sound of Thunder, and not the illicit pornography he’d clearly been hoping it might be. “As dit blou was sou ek dit vir myself gehou het,” he explained, although he did make use of the opportunity to remark that he understood how we might have been led astray. “Ja,” he said, “nou verstaan ek hoekom julle so skeef is – as julle vir hierdie rubbish sit en luister.”
“Maar hou jy dan nie van musiek nie, Mannie?” asked Sal.
Mnr Meintjies’ eyes widened when Sal called him by his real name. Disconcerted, he asked for a glass of water. When Sal brought it, Mannie regarded it suspiciously. He sniffed at the glass warily, as if the water might be poisoned, which confirmed that he was probably paranoid enough to be working for the secret services after all.
After having searched the room for drugs or incriminating literature, Mannie was soon satisfied that we were not an immanent danger to the Republic. Nevertheless, I think he suspected that we might have been harbouring slightly leftist tendencies, so he made himself comfortable and began to hold forth. He told us that he could have left us with the police. They would have locked us up for a while just to give us a fright, but he’d taken pity on us because we were young, because we were white, and because he felt that there might be hope for us yet. Mannie wanted us to “see the light” and so he set about methodically explaining to us why we were superior to all the other races on God’s green earth. He said that this was purely a matter of genetics, and that we were, in fact, a completely different species to any other race. Mannie told us that the African was destined to always be a follower, and never a leader.
“What about Jesse Jackson?” Sal asked. (Jackson had run for U.S. president on the Democratic ticket in 1984, and he would run again in 1988.) Mannie Meintjies thought long and hard about Sal’s question as he made ready to leave. We could see the cogs turning over as he ruminated over this pressing dilemma. Finally, he paused and – turning at the door – fired off a final retort: “Ja, you boys listen probably also to his music as well.” Sadly shaking his head, Mannie closed the door behind him as we clapped hands to our mouths and collapsed with laughter.
We went over the episode again and again, savouring every detail of the escapade. Sal told me that he’d panicked when Mannie suspected there might have been something in the water. As it turned out, my friend had carefully spat in the glass and mixed in the spittle with his finger, before serving it up to Mannie Meintjies from the Bureau of State Security.
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Book details
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