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42 | denis beckett<br />
I made up for lost time on the flight. My boss and my deputy<br />
were both in jail, what awaited? It didn’t help that I sat next to<br />
a guy from Water affairs who chatted amiably until it came up<br />
that I was at World and he frosted over.<br />
I was a bundle of nerves at Jan Smuts, but no hard men with<br />
handcuffs marched down the aisle. Nobody was ransacking my<br />
house, no suspicious cars were lurking outside. a bit of an anticlimax.<br />
The office next day was in confusion, no surprise. What was<br />
a surprise was a lot of hostility towards me. I couldn’t figure it.<br />
Duma Ndlovu explained: Percy and aggrey were behind bars<br />
while my pseudo-vintage Jaguar sat calmly in the carport as<br />
per normal. If I’d escaped because I was, um, white, it wasn’t<br />
nice. If it was because I was, um, helpful to the other side. . .<br />
that was bad.<br />
Duma didn’t take that seriously, he said, he was raising<br />
hypotheses. But the raising was yeccch. Questions caroomed<br />
all through the anti-apartheid media, and beyond: Why had the<br />
net missed X? Because he was collaborating? Why had the net<br />
caught Z? To make him look like he wasn’t collaborating? “Sick<br />
society” was not just an idiom; this was sick. for a vulnerable<br />
while I saw Marcus’s point: how’d it have looked if I got off Pik’s<br />
plane? But I recovered, and remain recovered. I talk to anyone,<br />
catch anyone’s plane; upfront independence is my armour, all<br />
the armour I seek.<br />
Percy and aggrey put in several months at Modderbee prison,<br />
along with Motlana and the Ten and half the rest of the Soweto<br />
establishment, and although I have no doubt it wasn’t fun at<br />
the time there was many an entertaining tale told afterwards.<br />
I went to see them fairly often. I was allowed to on the<br />
grounds of theoretically being aggrey’s employer, which<br />
became a total fiction within a week, when I was quietly sacked.<br />
But I’d got in my first visit within the week, which made the<br />
repeat performances relatively easy. You had to get a permit<br />
for each visit, and each permit had to be got from the infamous<br />
tenth floor of John Vorster Square, Johannesburg’s police HQ.
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