This intensely personal and powerful memoir is notable as one of the first to display a welcome new freedom in writing about the liberation struggle against apartheid and its continuing, often fraught, aftermath. Many readers will know that genre of apartheid-era literature where the theme is pretty much, literally, black and white: the baddies are clearly identifiable and rotten to the core, while all the resisters are noble spirits, fired with idealism and unbreakable solidarity.
In the heat of the struggle, most writers did not feel at liberty to engage, or perhaps indulge, in a greater complexity, especially about the confusions and ambiguities of those fighting against tyranny.
In a book I wrote about an ANC guerrilla unit, for example, the main protagonist was still on Death Row and another on Robben Island.
While wishing to be as honest as I could, I wasn’t going to reveal anything that would make their dire situation worse. Only recently, on the 25th anniversary of the notorious bomb blast which still arouses controversy in South Africa, was I able to write about the more complex motives and divisions in what had once seemed an homogenous team.
Hugh Lewin wrote Bandiet, a classic of South African prison literature, published in Britain in the mid-1970s and banned in South Africa. It graphically relates his experience of seven years in Pretoria Central Prison after being sentenced for sabotage. On his release, Lewin spent 20 years in exile, half of that time in London. Now, in this new book, he digs much deeper and looks back at the events that led to his arrest. This is a story, as the subtitle states, of friendship. It is also, unsettlingly, a story of betrayal.
“My closest friend was Adrian. We met as students”, he begins, adding: “I grew to think of him as my twin brother.” Adrian Leftwich was a dashing, even glamorous figure. The pair worked together, first as activists, then as undergrounders in increasingly dangerous activities creating, inevitably, an even closer bond.
In July 1964, Adrian was detained by the security police in Cape Town. Five days later, they picked up Hugh in Johannesburg. “He had given my name”, writes Lewin in his forthright, laconic style. “A couple of months later, he was a state witness in the trial that sent me to prison for seven years for anti-apartheid sabotage. We were both 25 years old.”
They were members of the African Resistance Movement, a small group of mostly whites, who felt they needed to shock the overwhelming complacency of South Africa’s pigmentocracy with acts of sabotage, but with an aim never to harm people. Most of the prominent black leaders had already been caught
or had fled into exile. It was a time
of stifling repression and white conformity.
Lewin’s story revolves around two railway stations. Park Station in Johannesburg where, shortly after their arrest, John Harris, another member of their group, placed a bomb which – despite a telephone warning to police – killed an elderly woman and injured
22 others. The other is York Station, where nearly 40 years later Lewin journeys to meet Adrian, his former closest comrade, who had betrayed him.
It’s a complicated tangle of emotion and memories; Lewin goes well beyond the traditional anti-apartheid genre. For this is also a journey, as Nadine Gordimer points out in her endorsement, trying to answer “the lifetime question of whether one would have betrayed that same friend under such circumstances, oneself”.
It is a dilemma those in settled, democratic societies do not have to face. Yet it is one that these angry young white men, cosseted by their pigment-defined privilege, never properly confronted before becoming involved in such activities. Another member of the group who turned state evidence – and helped condemn Lewin to jail and Harris to the gallows – was John Lloyd. Readers may remember the controversy when Tribune revealed that Lloyd, a local councillor, was Labour’s prospective parliamentary candidate for Exeter. Lloyd was forced to stand down in 1996 – he was replaced by Ben Bradshaw – and it is interesting that, while Lewin reconciles with Leftwich, he appears to have no desire to do so with Lloyd.
One lacuna is that it is not absolutely clear why the author feels he can get over the betrayal of one friend and not the other. But perhaps that is an expectation of our age of personal revelation and neat resolutions. This is not that kind of book. As Lewin admits: “I trespass on the stories of others.” It is a more intimate confrontation of the past and its aftermath. “Let me open the cell doors”, he writes. “Open my heart, or it will burst.”
Stones against the Mirror is a reflection of how far we have come; it is now possible to go beyond clear-cut tales to explore the ambiguities. From Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, it is evident that in prison he often wrestled with the agonising question: is it possible to be a beacon to your people yet not a hero to your own wife and children? Hugh Lewin gets to grips with some of the ghosts which haunt all of us who lived through that abominable period. It’s a terrific book, worthy to stand alongside Bandiet.
