TRANSCRIPT: ROSES AND LILIES WILL GROW FROM MY ARM
The war was just getting worse and worse. We could hear the gun fire from across the bay. A little bomb went off in our garage, parking area. And I sensed my car would be a possible point of attack. And I went to my human rights lawyer friend who taught at Columbia University in New York, Jack Greenberg. Thinking, well, in America you can buy anything. I haven’t got a lot of money but the little bit I’ve got, if it’s going to save my life, I’ll use it. What can I do? He knew nothing about assassinations. It wasn’t part of his human rights course. So, he put me on to the Human Rights Commission of the New York Police who said go to Precinct 39 or something and ask for Sergeant Smart.
And so there I am, I go to Precinct 39 and it’s full of people carrying styrofoam cups with steaming coffee and going through swing doors and shouting at each other, I’m like in a Kojak movie. And I ask for Sergeant Smart, and it turns out he’s African-American and he is connected with the human rights division but he’s also part of the anti-terrorism squad. And it soon becomes clear he assumes that the ANC are trying to assassinate me – because I’m a white guy. And I never quite got it through to him that it’s the white South African government that wants to kill me. And he said, ‘You got to be very careful about your movements to and from work every day. Don’t follow the same route. Is your front door barricaded? Can they get up on the outside? Have you thought about the ceiling? They can come through the ceiling.’ I’d never thought of that. And I said, ‘Well, do you have to be paranoid?’ He said, ‘That’s about it.’ I was paranoid already. So, it didn’t help me very much. But I was persuaded to buy a very sophisticated alarm for my car.
I bring the alarm back with me. There’s no one in Maputo who can do the electronics. There’s one Danish guy and eventually the alarm was put in. It would go off at inconvenient times. And I lent my car to Indres Naidoo when I’m away. Before handing the car back he washes it down and it kills the alarm. And the Danish guy is on holiday, and no-one can fix the alarm. Oh well, that’s fate.
It was the 7<sup>th</sup> of April 1988, the Day of the Mozambican Women, a public holiday. It’s the morning and I’m going to the beach and BOOM! I don’t hear a sound, just suddenly everything goes dark, dark, dark, dark, dark. And I know something terrible is happening to me – I don’t know what it is. And I’m waiting for it to clear, and it doesn’t clear. And I feel arms pulling me from underneath and I say, ‘Leave me, leave me, I’d rather die here.’ I’m speaking English and Portuguese, and I vaguely remember not shouting too loud. I’m a lawyer in a public place and I mustn’t make a noise. And then I feel I’m in a car and it’s very bumpy and… If they’re kidnapping me to throw me into jail in South Africa, at least they could have a car with decent springs. And then – total silence. And I hear a voice in the darkness saying, ‘Albie, this is Ivo Garrido. You’re in the Maputo Central Hospital. Your arm is in lamentable condition. You must face the future with courage.’ And I say into the darkness, ‘What happened?’ And a woman’s voice says, ‘It was a car bomb.’ And I feel joyous. I know I’m safe, I’m in the hands of Frelimo! And I sink back into the darkness, but with a sense of joy. They’d come to kill me – that moment every freedom fighter’s waiting for. Will they come for me – will they come for me today? Will I be strong, will I be brave, will I get through? They’d come for me, they’d tried to kill me, and I had survived. I just felt triumphant.
Some time must have passed and I’m lying on my back and I’m feeling very light. And my eyes are covered, I can’t see anything. And I tell myself a joke. It’s an old joke about Hymie Cohen. Like me, he’s a Jew. He falls off a bus and he makes a sign that looks like the sign of the cross. And someone says, ‘Hymie, I didn’t know you were Catholic.’ ‘What do you mean Catholic?’ ‘Spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch.’ And for some reason I started with testicles. I’ve tried all my life to be macho, I failed completely but the word went round the ANC camps afterwards: the first thing Comrade Albie did was reach for his balls! Seemed to be all in place… wallet... my heart (if that’s damaged, I’m in big trouble) … seemed to be okay... spectacles, my head… brain damage, that’s very serious. There was a crater there, but I couldn’t feel anything. And then my left arm slides down my right arm. And I feel I’ve… realise I’ve lost my right arm. My eyes covered with a bandage. The retina was detached. They tried to reconnect it. But eventually the bandage is taken off. I can see through one eye... I can see my short arm. I’ve only lost an arm. I felt… delirious with joy. I’d only lost an arm. And I had that total conviction: as I got better my country would get better. I faint back into the darkness.
Eventually I’m removed from the Maputo Central Hospital that saved my life. It turns out they feared there’d be another attempt using poison to kill me. And I’m taken to the Maputo airport and I’m lying flat, it’s at night and I see all the lights there, I see the people waving to me. It’s wonderful, it was marvellous. People were cheering me on. I’d survived, I’d survived. And I see a soldier standing with a gun, very close to where I’d seen the soldier standing with a gun when I arrived. And I’m saying to myself, no more guns, no more guns, no more guns. Too many guns, too much killing. And I get into the plane, and I fall asleep and I’m flying first class for the first time in my life and I’m unconscious. And I arrive in England – a second time as a refugee, a second time. Before with my spirit severely damaged, recovering there. Now with my body severely damaged but recovering in England the second time as a refugee.
I’d wake up at four, three, four am. Everything’s dark. The pain killers have worn off. And I feel a little bit lonely, and I would sing to myself. And I grew up in a very secular non-religious home, but the song I’m singing is what we used to call a Negro spiritual I’d first heard sung by Paul Robeson, the great African American singer and freedom fighter. ‘It’s me, it’s me oh lord, standing in the need of prayer. It’s me, it’s me oh Lord, standing in the need of prayer. It’s not my brother nor my sister but it’s me oh Lord…’ And I’d go, ‘It’s not my uncle nor my aunty but it’s me oh Lord, standing in the need of prayer.’ And then I’d fall asleep again, wake up, be very, very cheerful.
And one day the nurses bring me a letter. And it says, ‘Don’t worry Comrade Albie, we will avenge you!’ And it’s signed Comrade Bobby, Bobby Naidoo. And I think, avenge me? We’re going to cut off the arm, we’re gonna blind in one eye. Is that the country we want? But if we get freedom, if we get democracy, if we get the rule of law, that will be my soft vengeance. Roses and lilies will grow out of my arm.
And I found later on I’m using that term ‘soft vengeance’. If we get the rule of law, if we get justice in South Africa, that will be my soft vengeance. And that theme of soft vengeance became the theme of my life from then onwards. It’s not doing to them what they did to us – then we’re the same as them, only we’re stronger. It’s the triumph of our ideals, of our values. It’s much more powerful than simply smiting them, throwing them into jail, blowing them up. It’s much, much more powerful.
The violence against me – it did two things. The fact that I survived. And you’re living with dread, you’re living in expectation all the time. And I got through. I felt joy, I felt absolute triumph. And it blew away fears and anxieties and levels of unhappiness that had been there. All the sadness, the heaviness I’d had from solitary confinement, torture by sleep deprivation, going into exile, blown away, blown away… And a sense of recovery, of learning to stand, to walk, to write, to tie a shoelace, come back to me, it’s like I’m born again. ‘Look mommy, I can stand!’ With that same sense of excitement, I’d had when I was maybe three or four standing for the first time.
Another way that it impacted on me very strongly was it completely transformed my understanding of disability.
In terms of my attitude to armed struggle, I supported the armed struggle. Historically, there was no other way. And one can’t pay enough tribute to the people who put themselves on the line. Those who died and who risked being killed for the sake of our freedom in South Africa. And my own personal experience – in a sense, I was just another of literally millions of people who’d been traumatised by violence.
And it’s a sad thing, but you know, for the white world, they see a white man with their arm hanging down. They can identify with me. And it angered me a lot that so many black people in South Africa, Southern Africa were being injured and physically bodies torn apart. And my white body would count for more. But my feeling was, well, if I can be an ambassador in that sense – a stepping stone for the imagination of people from outside who identify themselves more easily with someone who looks like them – that’s a role I must play, and I mustn’t be half-hearted about it.
And all of this encouraged me to think in terms of finding space for contention, for different points of view. The need for our society not just to be democratic – to be open and democratic. For pluralism, for finding other ways, other than through what we used to call people’s power, to bring about social change and transformation. I became convinced of that. And if you want to deal with reaction, you deal with it not simply by suppressing them, but by being smarter than them, getting more support than that they get and you’re playing the game if you like, the game of democracy. And I’m using ‘the game’ not in a cynical way – in an artful way. And winning the support of the people because you’re right, because what you stand for is something that represents what they really want. Becoming experts of that rather than experts of locking up people and crushing the enemy.
