The covenant - James A. Michener [580]
BOSS was a semi-secret agency with power to arrest and detain without warrants of any kind. Any black or Coloured or Indian or even white who did anything that might conceivably endanger society could be investigated, and if shown to be a threat to apartheid, imprisoned on Robben Island, a speck of rocky land in Table Bay with a fine view of Table Mountain. Because of its mysteriousness, the legend grew that it was a hellhole. 'It makes Devil's Island look like a fete champetre,' a French journalist wrote, but he was wrong. It was merely a strongly guarded prison for political dissidents, and was much more lenient than Alcatraz or even the best jails in Russia.
Blacks were sent there with shocking frequency, and there they stayed for having promoted the concept that their people should be freed from serfdom ... or for having imported machine guns from Mozambique. Some were Communist revolutionaries, but too often that label had been pasted onto men who merely sought to be the Martin Luther King or Vernon Jordan of South Africa. Had Andrew Young been a citizen of the Transvaal, he would more likely have ended up on Robben Island than as an ambassador in the United Nations.
It was not easy for an involved black scholar to stay clear of BOSS, and by the time Daniel Nxumalo left Fort Hare he had entered their notebooks in four instances: (i) at a student gathering, as reported by the same spy who had turned in the history professor, he had given a rather pointed talk when someone mentioned Brazil; if he had said nothing, the topic in itself would have alerted suspicions, because Brazil had a mainly black population, but he reviewed a book by the Brazilian professor Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves, which contained ominous parallels to South Africa; (2) at a mock United Nations convention he was assigned the role of Gromyko; he hadn't sought it, but someone had to be the Russian, so he accepted, and as a good student, studied Gromyko's life and opinion; his speech was quite Slavic; (3) at a cricket match in Port Elizabeth he was noted as having cheered not for the South African team but for England; (4) on several occasions he was observed singing the Freedom Hymn, popular with students, 'with more than necessary enthusiasm.'
At the end of his student days at Fort Hare it seemed pretty clear that eventually Daniel Nxumalo would be sent to Robben Island, but when he reported to Witwatersrand University to take his master's degree in sociology he fell in with quite a different kind of professor, a white man trained in England who summoned him to his office one day and roared at him, 'You damned fool! Keep your mouth shut. How can you exercise any leverage if you're in jail? Your task is to learn. Make yourself the brightest black in South Africa, then teach others.'
The professor was careful to avoid stating specifically the end purpose of such education and never explicated his ideas of revolutionary change through superior knowledge, for this would project him also into BOSS territory, but he did defuse Nxumalo's exhibitionism, converting him into a solid, knowing scholar.
The days at Wits were like the rich summer days of February in a good year; the enthusiasms of spring were gone, but the fruition of the ripening season was at hand. Daniel met students from all over the country, and professors of extraordinary brilliance from all over the world. Many of the students were Jewish, a group he had not known before, and their keen analysis of things he took for granted enlightened him; he was particularly impressed by the way many Wits students ridiculed apartheid, defying the segregation laws in private and infuriating the more conservative citizens of Jo'burg by lining the sides of Jan Smuts Avenue outside the university and waving at them, as they streamed