Invictus - Carlin [48]
On the farm, he stepped up his political involvement as he began to become aware of what apartheid meant for the lowest of the low: black people in the rural areas. By the early 1980s, as black protest escalated all over the country, he became actively involved with what he found himself describing as “the freedom struggle,” conspiring with the very same black political leaders that his brother, as head of the SADF, was committed to defeating. He was also up to his neck with the South African Council of Churches, a body that the security forces considered a front for the terrorists of the ANC. The more powerful his brother became, the keener Braam’s understanding of the brutal methods that Constand’s boss was sanctioning. He had known the system was evil, but he had not realized until now how murderous it could be. “I was shocked and horrified. My brother’s very own people killing and torturing people!” In fact, Braam was lucky not to be tortured and killed himself. After Mandela’s release, he discovered that he had been on the hit list of the CCB, the secret military intelligence unit that had assassinated Anton Lubowski.
“I do not think my brother knew about that,” he insisted with conviction. But Constand must have suspected that something was up. “He got a message to me via our mother,” Braam recalled, “warning me that ‘if I knew what was good for me’ I would quit the committees of the South African Council of Churches.”
Braam did not quit. Throughout the eighties, he continued to work with the SACC. In 1987, he even went with fifty other open-minded Afrikaner intellectuals to Dakar, Senegal, for a pioneering meeting with the exiled leadership of the ANC. One of the key figures behind that meeting was Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, Morné du Plessis’s first political hero. After Braam Viljoen returned from Dakar, Niël Barnard’s NIS interrogated him, but still he kept going, That same year he joined the small but plucky Progressive Federal Party (another link with Morné du Plessis, for this was the party Morné supported). He even stood for parliament for the PFP, before throwing in his lot with a borderline legal anti-apartheid think tank called the Institute for Democracy in South Africa that Van Zyl Slabbert, who had now quit active politics, had set up.
Despite their profound disparities (“we lived in different worlds” was how Braam put it), Braam and Constand shared many qualities. Both were honest and scrupulously dedicated to their work. Constand was an upright, no-nonsense, soldiers’ soldier who spent his professional life inside a moral bubble, convinced that it was as honorable to serve in the SADF as in the army of New Zealand. He was greatly admired by those who’d served under him, as millions of white South Africans had during his long tenure as head of the army and then all the armed forces. He cemented his reputation during the mid-seventies as the senior officer in charge of South Africa’s expeditionary Angolan war, fighting on the side of Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA guerrillas against Angola’s Marxist government. It was one of dozens of proxy Cold War conflicts going on around the world. The Angolan government received help from Cuba and the Soviet Union, and UNITA from the United States. South Africa joined the fray because its rulers were as anti-Communist as the ones in Washington, and because the Angolan government