To ensure that his children found a similar refuge in the church, Joseph made religion a principal feature of their lives. He insisted they attend church services and Sunday school. On Wednesday nights, Joseph took them to interdenominational prayer meetings at private houses in the neighborhood. Saturday nights were given over to gatherings of the Independent Order of True Templars, a teetotalist group. The children’s branch, the Band of Hope, presented plays and concerts and held picnics. The older boys joined the Methodist Young Men’s Guild. They sang in the church choir. For a brief time, Mpho considered studying for the ministry. They all admired Joseph who, with tears coursing down his face, could enrapture a congregation with his preaching. (Dee believed that Mashinini men cried at the slightest provocation; it was as though they carried an overflowing tank of tears around on their backs.)
Their religious training left a deep impression on all the children. (Even as a freedom fighter years later, Rocks would pray in the guerrilla camps of Angola.) But the very education that their parents championed made the boys turn away from the church; they came to see it as something that blinded Joseph to South Africa’s political realities. With few exceptions, the various denominations discouraged resistance to apartheid. Liberation theology, which provided the moral justification for so many rebellions in Latin America, was virtually unknown in South Africa until the 1970s. Instead, the children saw a Church that urged prayer as the path to a better future. In their view, Joseph was waiting for a miracle that would never happen.
The boys also came to believe such passiveness perpetuated a sense of impotence among blacks. Joseph himself felt helpless to protect his children from the arbitrariness of apartheid; the political repression following the Rivonia Trial terrified him. He found security in the daily routine of work, home and church. In a world gone mad, the unvarying procedure provided a feeling of control in his life. It also, in his children’s view, bound him: Joseph could not see how things could possibly change. To upset the existing state of affairs was to invite disaster. Better to accept the daily injustices and find the beauty and glory of life elsewhere.
His children had a different sense of their place in the world. By the end of the 1960s, a new ideology began to sprout among university students: called Black Consciousness, it came into being as a rejection of white student leadership. (The youth organizations, with their multiracial membership, were virtually the only groups that actively protested injustices against blacks during the quiescence of the 1960s.) The ‘black power’ movement in the US greatly influenced the proponents of Black Consciousness, both in ideology and rhetoric. Black Consciousness insisted on the primacy of regaining self-confidence and a sense of independence. ‘Black man, you are on your own’, became its rallying cry.
The Black Consciousness activists launched education and community action campaigns throughout South Africa, aimed at reviving self-reliance among blacks. Their approach shocked white liberals. The refusal to accept white assistance of any sort and the insistance on creating exclusively black-run organizations seemed a kind of reverse apartheid. The movement’s most eloquent and potent proponent was Steve Biko, a medical student at Natal University. (His death in 1977, after being beaten and tortured while in police detention, would cause an international outcry.) With echoes of its counterpart in the US, the concepts of Black Consciousness seized a generation of youngsters who knew little of the ANC.
They saw the ideology’s practical application in the ascendance of a black government in neighbouring Mozambique. In 1974, the dictatorship in Portugal collapsed, bringing to a halt the independence wars being waged in its African colonies. In Mozambique, the Portuguese withdrew and the Mozambican Liberation Front (FRELIMO, in Portuguese) took power in 1975. It was a stunning event. Here was an example on South Africa’s own doorstep of a black nationalist movement that had succeeded. White colonialists had been expelled, black freedom fighters had assumed control. Victory was possible. On black campuses across the country students devoured FRELIMO propaganda. Graffiti of ‘Viva FRELIMO!’ suddenly appeared on walls. The takeover also captured the imagination of liberal white youths: the Mozambican flag was raised on the central administration building of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where it fluttered briefly before being pulled down by right-wing students.
Unknown to Nomkhitha or Joseph, their two oldest sons had become involved in politics. It seemed inevitable: the high school Rocks and Tsietsi attended, Morris Issacson, was one of the most politically active in the township. Abraham Tiro, a charismatic Black Consciousness leader taught there for a while; he had a profound influence that continued long after his departure. (Tiro was later killed by a letter bomb in Botswana.) The school’s principal, although not outwardly an activist, permitted his pupils to form political organizations. (At other schools, more conservative administrators suppressed anything vaguely resembling opposition to the government.)
The boys’ political inclinations were as different as their personalities. Rocks embraced Black Consciousness while in high school. But he became disillusioned with the politics of protest; swayed by the writings of American black militants such as Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, Rocks concluded that armed struggle was the only way to liberate South Africa. That view was reinforced after he surreptitiously obtained banned literature on the ANC. (The students who had the forbidden books would pass them to Rocks, covered in brown paper to hide the titles, in the lavatory.) Rocks adhered to his conviction after he received a scholarship in 1974 from Joseph’s employer and went to study civil engineering at a technical college in Pietersburg, in the north.
There, having realized his parents’ dream of a chance at an education, Rocks decided to join the ANC. He knew the organization had a representative in Swaziland. One day, he and a friend rented a car and drove over the border to Mbabane. They managed to meet with the representative, who directed them to people in Johannesburg. Eventually, Rocks made contact with Indres Naidoo, a third-generation member of the ANC who was among the first Umkhonto recruits. In 1963, Indres had been sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for sabotage; on his release in 1973, he was put under house arrest. Still, Indres organized political classes for Rocks and several other young men. The tutorials met for one hour on Saturday afternoons in Dornfontein, a commercial section of Johannesburg. A black woman who ran a large furniture store and was sympathetic to the ANC allowed them to use a back room. Indres demanded strict punctuality from his pupils. The first lesson examined the Freedom Charter; Indres dissected it, clause by clause. The next lesson analysed the alliance between the ANC and the South African Communist Party. Then Indres discussed the Defiance Campaign. And so on, until he had covered the whole modern history of the ANC.
At the same time, Indres was setting up an underground organization to send recruits abroad for military training. He worked with Joe Gqabi, another early Umkhonto volunteer who had also recently been released from prison. Indres would sit on a bench in a downtown park, eating his lunch; Joe, strolling by, casually joined him. There they discussed potential enlistments to their guerrilla army. (The underground group also had an office on Commissioner Street, in the heart of Johannesburg’s business district. Ostensibly an insurance company, the site was considered too unsafe to carry on such sensitive conversations.)
Despite Rocks’ repeated request to be sent overseas for military instruction, Indres and Joe decided to keep him in the country. They were eager to build cells that would operate within South Africa and wanted Rocks to be a part of those structures. Indres entrusted him with distributing smuggled ANC and South African Communist Party literature. The illicit material had to be photocopied, then delivered to the appropriate people. It was dangerous but vital work. Virtually unknown in the townships, the ANC could not compete with the Black Consciousness movement without disseminating its own propaganda. Indres thought Rocks perfect for the job. From their first meeting, the youth had