BRYAN ROSTRON
ROBERT
MCBRIDE
The Struggle Continues
TAFELBERG
As always,
for my wondrous wife, Sunny,
and
Ntshuxeko, 12 years old: the future
And a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone,
and cast it into the sea, saying,
Thus with violence shall that great city Babylon be thrown down,
and shall be found no more at all.
Revelations 18:21
Author’s Note
All dialogue is taken either from the accounts given by the protagonists to the author or from the three trial transcripts.
While the Introduction and Afterword of this book were written in 2019, most of the original descriptions such as that of Pietermartizburg or words such as ‘Natal’, ‘African’ and ‘Supreme Court’ have been retained in the main narrative because that was the terminology of the time that the book, under the title Till Babylon Falls, was first published in 1991.
My heartfelt thanks to Tanja, Zolsa, Patrick and all those other families of political prisoners on Robben Island who many years ago courageously, and at great risk to their own precious visits, went ‘on strike’ to enable me to carry off mine too.
Introduction
Recently I mentioned to a friend that I was about see Robert McBride again after many years. ‘Aha,’ he replied. ‘The poacher turned gamekeeper!’
At first glance, that rings true: an outlaw on the run from apartheid police, who spent years on Death Row, since 1994 McBride has held several vital official positions: most notably, even ironically, as head of the elite unit that investigates police abuses. In fact, he doesn’t fit the role of poacher turned gamekeeper at all. From freedom fighter to battling corruption, he has remained remarkably consistent: always courageous, always controversial.
It is an extraordinary story. With dramatic twists and shocking turns, it mirrors so much of our turbulent past and uncertain present. Given the moral choices that it forces us to make, this is also a uniquely South African story.
Robert, as I shall call him, has long represented a stark gauge of our attitudes to apartheid and its confused aftermath. Mention his name and most people react strongly, remembering his guerrilla actions which culminated in the fatal bombing of a popular beachfront bar in Durban. There’s little middle ground: hero or villain. As a result, the man himself tends to get lost in a mass of old, entrenched attitudes, as if he were a symbol of our enduring prejudices.
Nearly 30 years ago, attempting to record the lives of one MK unit, my research was conducted in tricky circumstances. I interviewed Robert several times on Death Row. With a thick glass partition between us, a warder stood behind Robert, while a concrete ledge obscured the notepad on my knee as I furtively scribbled our conversation so that the warder could not see.
My visit to his close friend, Gordon Webster, imprisoned on Robben Island, was even more fraught. At the appointed time I presented myself at the shed-like building in Cape Town harbour through which prisoners and visiting relatives were processed to board the ferry for the long, choppy trip to the island. There were about 50 other visitors that day, all black, many elderly women who had travelled a long way for this rare chance to see their sons.
As we queued at the counter to have our permits stamped, my turn came at last. A white prison official glared at me from behind a glass partition.
‘Don’t see any permit for you,’ he said with open distaste.
I pointed through the glass partition at a form which clearly had my name on it. The warder made a pretence of shuffling through the forms.
‘No, not here,’ he smiled mirthlessly.
At the next counter a tall, smartly dressed young black woman, a small boy beside her, was getting the same treatment. It wasn’t hard to work out why. I was the only white prison visitor and she was plainly well educated and proud. Both were qualities resented by the lowly white gatekeepers of apartheid. As the prison ferry pulled away from Jetty One, her young son understood that he was not going to be allowed to see his father. He knew exactly who to blame. In despairing fury, he turned on the nearest white person – and bit me. That’s what the malicious distortions of apartheid taught even three-year-olds.
I drove us back to the NGO lodge in Woodstock where most families of political prisoners stayed on their way to visit Robben Island. We sat in silent despair, our plans crushed by this everyday tyranny. Then a startling call came from the Prisons department, with no explanation: ‘Return urgently!’
We raced back, baffled, to find a prison supply boat waiting. Only as we docked at Robben Island did the reason for that mysterious summons become apparent, when a cheer went up from the other prison visitors. All of them had sat down on the wind-swept quayside, bravely refusing to move despite being surrounded by warders with rifles. In selfless solidarity, they had risked their own rare and precious visits so that we could carry out ours.
In order to convey the risks and tension of those dangerous times, my account of this one MK unit – and the distinctive role of Robert McBride – has been largely kept as it was originally published. In retrospect, the account remains remarkably accurate. What was not known then, or could not be said, has now been added in an Afterword, along with catching up with what has happened subsequently to the main members of that remarkable unit.
Very different times; today, however, not always different attitudes.
As in the past, some of our highest state officials act simultaneously as both poacher and gamekeeper. Previously, in the name of white supremacy, the National Party stole black South Africans’ land, their rights, and in many, many thousands of cases their very lives; then the enforcers of apartheid acted as ruthless gamekeepers, employing censorship to hide as much of their racial viciousness as possible. Today, under an entirely different government, we still find bureaucrats, policemen, politicians, as well as cabinet ministers, looting budgets meant for the poor, all the while using their power as gamekeepers to conceal their venality – even using corrupt policemen to persecute with false accusations the very people attempting to expose such rampant kleptomania.
The hair-raising skullduggery of a brazen attempt to siphon off massive state funds for bribes, aimed at swaying votes for the Jacob Zuma faction to triumph at the tense ANC elective conference in 2017, was only foiled with days to go by Robert and a team of honest investigators. That criminal plot – where fraud, treachery and treason mix queasily – reaches into the very highest levels of our police and politicians. It is a battle that is not yet won.
This book was first published in the UK as Till Babylon Falls, and when it came out Robert was still in prison. The current update, Afterword – 2019, takes the story forward to the present, where once again he is involved in yet another titanic struggle.
So a troubling question remains: has Babylon truly fallen?
PROLOGUE
Invitation to a Wedding
‘Attend my fable if your ears be clean
In fair Banana Land we lay our scene –
South Africa, renowned both far and wide
For politics and little else beside.’
Roy Campbell: The Wayzgoose
It