to force to ensure that adults honoured the stay-away. They got into several brawls with the Zulu workers over the issue. One such encounter involved a labourer whose ear lobes had been pierced and weighted in the traditional Zulu fashion so that they hung down like large hoop earrings. Mpho and his colleagues pushed the man’s head onto a gate and locked one of his lobes to the post. There they left him, as though in stocks, for passers-by to see.
The youngsters understood they needed adult participation. Without the support of their parents and other workers, the stay-aways would fail; on their own, the students wielded little power over the government. They had to convince adults, especially the migrant labourers, that this was their struggle too. Drake Koka helped to issue a circular after the Zulu disturbances, imploring brother not to attack brother; but the task of including the older generation required a finesse that, at times, seemed beyond the students. Even Nomkhitha and Joseph were reluctant to jeopardize their jobs further by remaining at home. Their resistance appalled Mpho and Dee. You are the parents of Tsietsi Mashinini, the boys chided them. Of all the adults in the township, you are the very ones who shouldn’t go to work. In the end, they observed the stay-away, as did many Zulu labourers. And the strike turned out to be the most successful one yet.
Rocks went underground after his encounter with the police at his parents’ house. He did not lack for places to stay; horrified by the government’s killing of their children, people in the township opened their homes, and meagre larders, to virtually anyone being pursued by the police. Rocks slept on all manner of improvised beds: couches, cots, bedrolls, floors. After only a night or two in one house, he would change to another to ensure his safety.
He resumed working with Indres Naidoo, the leader of his African National Congress cell. The ANC, like the Pan Africanist Congress, was caught unawares by the June 16 uprising and its aftermath. Neither group had enough strength inside the country to offer much support to the students. But Indres’ clandestine organization that sent youngsters abroad for military training was suddenly overwhelmed with potential recruits; emboldened by their victories against the authorities, the teenagers wanted nothing more than to learn how to shoot a gun, then return to South Africa to overthrow the government. The trickle of perhaps ten persons a month asking for training turned into a torrent of 100 or more. About 4,000 youths would leave the country by the end of the year. Rocks, with his contacts in the township, helped to recruit many of them.
Desperate for resources, Indres sought out Reinhard Brueckner, a Lutheran minister who was a great supporter of the anti-apartheid struggle. The minister gave him money to create a kind of self-help organization. They hired minivans, or kombis, ostensibly to transport youngsters who had been shot by the police to hospital. In fact, the organization was a front for Indres’ recruiting efforts. The vehicles ferried enlistees, using secret routes, to neighbouring countries where Umkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC’s military wing, had set up offices. Rocks’ recruits went to Swaziland. He hid them in various places in the township until Indres determined it was safe to send them across the border.
Rocks also worked as one of the numerous advisers to the SSRC. (Others were Winnie Mandela, the Black Parents’ Association and various church leaders.) He counselled a handful of youths within the organization known as the Suicide Squad. The teenagers had made contact with Umkhonto guerrillas in Swaziland and Johannesburg for rudimentary training; often their instruction consisted of nothing more than a pamphlet that was circulating underground. One such publication, written and illustrated like a comic book to mislead the police, recounted the story of Simon and Jane. These were no ordinary cartoon characters: Simon and Jane had very special friends, who educated them in the art of manufacturing Molotov cocktails.
Paul Langa, the Suicide Squad’s leader, was told by his mentors to seek out Rocks. The latter became a kind of scout for the group, identifying potential targets and urging the youths to take their war to the white areas of Johannesburg. Rocks also taught them about explosives. He had acquired his knowledge from a mining engineer and from Joe Gqabi, a Communist and one of the first Umkhonto guerrillas, who had trained for eighteen months in the Chinese city of Nanking. Of course, Rocks’ knowledge was purely theoretical. He knew, for instance, that a dynamite fuse should take about six minutes to explode after being lit. Rocks decided to test this one night while instructing the Suicide Squad in a friend’s backyard in Soweto; the youths needed to know how much time they would have to escape. With Paul holding the device and his colleagues gathered round, Rocks lit the fuse. He expected it to burn with a proper flame; instead, the device smouldered and smoked like a cigarette. Thinking it defective, Rocks returned to the house to find a torch so he could examine the fuse. He presumed he had several minutes until it detonated.
The next thing he heard was a loud bang. Rocks rushed outside; there he saw Paul, whose thumb and first finger on his right hand had been blown off, bleeding profusely. Rocks bundled him into a car and drove off in search of a doctor. It was long after midnight and he had to wake up a physician who had a clinic in the township. Rocks pointed a gun at the doctor’s head while he dressed Paul’s wound. ‘You do not go to the police about this,’ Rocks warned him. ‘If you tell anyone, you are a dead man.’
Despite the mishap, the Suicide Squad succeeded in blowing up several targets, including a railway signal box. The saboteurs considered the halting of trains essential to their cause. Railroad cars conveyed South Africa’s workers and goods; paralyse the trains, and you paralyse the economy. Even Rocks tried his hand at such sabotage. He and another member of his ANC cell attempted to derail a freight train near the township of Lenasia. They fixed a hook-like device to the track, but the locomotive easily ran over it, crushing the contraption.
Rocks did most of his underground work in a blue Volkswagen Beetle that he bought with money saved from his stipend while at college. He cut a rather conspicuous figure careering around the township in his brightly coloured car; the police, who had become aware of his clandestine activities, soon identified him as the vehicle’s owner. Rocks took to parking the car at one house and sleeping at another. Often, neighbourhood children would rouse him in the middle of the night, saying that the authorities had been around, looking for the driver of the blue Beetle. Rocks decided he would have to jettison the car: one night he parked it at his cousin’s house, removed the tyres and put the body on blocks so that the Beetle looked as though it were inoperative.
People were now frightened to let him stay in their homes. The police had arrested several activists who apparently mentioned Rocks’ name while being interrogated; a newspaper story reported that the authorities were searching for him. If Rocks were detained, he could have implicated vital figures in the ANC’s underground structures. Rocks judged that it was time to leave the country. He had decided long before that he would go abroad for military training after completing his studies; the idea was never far from his thoughts. This seemed an opportune moment to flee.
But just as Rocks was preparing to leave, the government sealed the borders in search of Umkhonto guerrillas. Rocks organized a meeting with Indres to show him the newspaper article that named him as a fugitive and explained his thwarted attempt to escape. ‘I’m too hot,’ he told Indres. ‘You’ve got to hide me.’
Indres agreed that Rocks was in danger. He knew several people whom he could ask to hide Rocks, people who were not directly involved in the anti-apartheid struggle but whose political or moral beliefs made them supporters of the cause. After some thought, Indres decided to ask Jennifer Hyman, a white journalist. She seemed a perfect choice. Indres and his family had known her for years and he trusted her completely. Sydenham, the all-white suburb in northern Johannesburg where she lived, was perhaps the last place the police would look for a black activist.
Jenny seemed predisposed to help Indres when he approached her with a request to shelter someone important, but she had several stipulations. She would not do anything to jeopardize her job, nor would she do anything illegal. And she was not about to drive anyone to the border. (Jenny had a friend who had gone to prison for helping an activist to escape.) Indres disclosed Rocks’ identity to Jenny with a plea not to reveal
