Student Comrade Prisoner Spy: A Memoir, by Bridget Hilton-Barber

Student Comrade Prisoner Spy: A Memoir, by Bridget Hilton-Barber. Penguin Random House South Africa, Zebra Press. Cape Town, South Africa 2016. ISBN 9781770228009 / ISBN 978-1-77-022800-9

Student Comrade Prisoner Spy: A Memoir, by Bridget Hilton-Barber. From the prologue.

[...] I am on the road to hell. The Nio from Port Elizabeth to Cradock, paved not with good intentions, in fact barely paved at all, but pot-holed and crumbling at the shoulders, truncated with an annoyance of stop-and-goes. Its the middle of winter in the middle of nowhere where the mountains are the colour of burnt toast and the flaming-orange roadside aloes hurt my bleary, hungover eyes. I am researching this book, my book, our book, about the apartheid days, a time when I was a student in the Eastern Cape. When the land was caught in an evil magic, and the security police unleashed their snapping-snarling-slavering dogs: the roadblocks, the round-ups, the raids, the torture and screening centres, the splash rooms, the scrubby badlands behind desolate sand dunes. I am not just on the road to hell, but flashbacking to the time when this road's signposts read Imprisonment, Poisoning, Disappearances, Murders, Torture. All about me in the burnt-toast mountains hangs the ghastly soundscape of history as people were shocked and helicoptered, dangled over cliffs, beaten into comas, shot in the back, all in the name of racist apartheid. I have left the dregs of the whisky at my cousin in PE and I am worn down from what she calls a hondnaaipoesfok hangover. Its appropriate to travel the road to hell with a hangover from hell, I guess - a real son of a bitch. 'Ever since I can remember,' wrote Laurens van der Post in The Lost World of the Kalahari, 'I have been struck by the profound quality of melancholy which lies at the heart of the physical scene in Southern Africa. I recollect clearly asking my father once: "Why do the vlaktes and koppies always look so sad?" He replied with unexpected feeling: "The sadness is not in the plains and hills but in ourselves". I am not the only person on the road to hell. Behind me, and he'll be behind me all the way from the Port Elizabeth turn-off to Cradock to Cradock itself, is the most grim-faced truck driver I have ever seen. He is concrete-jawed, hollow-eyed, his brow an anxious concertina. At every stop-and-go he just stares straight ahead. He doesn't acknowledge me. Even when I get out at one, shivering in the miserable winter as I give him a desultory thumbs-up, he just stares straight ahead. The road to hell is suitably hellish. I nearly get mugged in Cookhouse at a garage off the highway. As I drive into the forecourt my car is surrounded by a gang of feral tik-head okes, guys they used to call 'Bushies' in the bad old days - half-coloured, half-Xhosa. As my windows darken, I put foot and drive away, heart thumping, adrenaline pumping. The final stop-and-go is just before Cradock and Lingelihle township, on the outskirts of which stands the monument to the Cradock Four, soul epicentre of my book in many ways. Four giant perpendicular slabs for four men who were murdered by the Eastern Cape security police in 1985. They were beaten, set upon by dogs, stabbed, doused with acid, burnt. It's a peculiar monument, stark and Stalinist, windblown, empty but full of stories about embezzlement and mismanagement. Stinking of whisky and thinking of the sadness of the Cradock Four, I sit doleful in my car, reflecting. None of the widows ever remarried, you know. [...]

This is an excerpt from Student Comrade Prisoner Spy: A Memoir, by Bridget Hilton-Barber.

Title: Student Comrade Prisoner Spy
Subtitle: A Memoir
Author: Bridget Hilton-Barber
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Imprint: Zebra Press
Cape Town, South Africa 2016
ISBN 9781770228009 / ISBN 978-1-77-022800-9
Softcover, 15 x 24 cm, 246 pages, several colour and b/w photographs