A proud MK soldier opens up — a little

Marion Sparg’s memoir, Guilty and Proud, is the latest in a growing list of books by anti-apartheid activists, soldiers or victims. In many respects they tell similar stories, and so — given the passage of time, but, also, sadly, the fact that newer generations of South Africans are less inclined to learn about what it was like to live in a dangerous, disconnected, near-dystopian state — there needs to be a point of difference to entice readers and to keep them engaged.

Certainly, Sparg represents interesting differences. As one of relatively few white uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) soldiers, and an even smaller group of white women resistance fighters, her bravery in committing body and soul to the anti-apartheid struggle was almost unique among her cohort. It sounds almost trifling, today, to read of what she actually did as a soldier, but her sentence of 25 years in prison was one of the longest imposed on treasonous, so-called enemies of the state, because, as the trial judge told her, “the fact that as a white South African you have espoused the cause of revolution I regard as an aggravating feature”.

More than the actual damage her acts caused, her symbolic significance and impact can also be gleaned by the fact that there are two glowing forewords to the book, one by former president Thabo Mbeki, the other by MK’s intelligence chief and later the country’s minister of intelligence, Ronnie Kasrils.

However, as she tells it in Guilty and Proud, her story does not necessarily translate into a rounded and rewarding read.

Early pages covering her formative years briefly but successfully portray a very ordinary, sheltered white South African life in the Eastern Cape in the 1970s. Something shifted for her, however, when Steve Biko was killed in detention in 1977.

“I began to realise I did not belong in the world into which I was born,” she writes. It’s one of too few snippets throughout the book where she drops her emotional guard. A few pages later, we glimpse something more of the mixture of anger, confusion and disgust she had started to feel: “It was not black versus white. It was a fight for common humanity.” But it’s unclear whether these are her own words; the paragraph structure implies she is referencing an editorial by Daily Dispatch editor Donald Woods after Biko’s funeral. This dampened, abstract vantage is different to other struggle heroes’ stories, and it weighs her book down.

Subsequent chapters about her time in exile orientation in Zambia, then military training camps in Angola, are ponderous. Her main point is that she realises her experiences there to be uneventful compared to those of many other soldiers in training or activists in exile — possibly, she accepts, precisely because she was a white woman.   

The memoir becomes more engaging later, in selected passages. Sparg relates the bare bones of the MK attack on the Sasol 2 plant in May 1980, and then in more detail she reprints Tokyo Sexwale’s words at the 2020 funeral of David Moisi, one of the soldiers responsible: “As a revolutionary you have to ask the question not just whether you are prepared to die ... but whether you are prepared to kill.”

She jogs the memories of older readers in recounting the furore among whites when Bruce Fordyce won the Comrades Marathon in May 1981 wearing a black armband in a symbolic protest; at about the same time she was being introduced to then ANC president Oliver Tambo at an event in Lusaka.   

One short tale elicits the realisation that there is nothing as bizarre as ordinary people caught in a mad system. After capture, part of her interrogation involved being taken to the Lesotho border and instructed to point out guerrilla infiltration points. However, her security police escorts are scared stiff that they will get shot at from across the border, and park very far away. En route back they decide on steak for lunch, and Sparg is made entirely welcome to join them at a restaurant. Here, Sparg’s point is well made: apartheid’s machinations were mundane. Paraphrasing one of political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt’s concepts in explaining Nazism and the implementation of the Holocaust, the workings of evil are often banal.     

But these and other anecdotes don’t cohere into a narrative. Other recent books themed around the struggle are more nuanced and complex, such as Patric Tariq Mellet’s search for identity in Cleaner’s Boy. Harrowing state-sponsored violence is better conveyed in, for example, The Gugulethu Seven by academic and former anti-apartheid activist Beverley Roos-Muller. Sparg refers to the dastardly event on the day these entirely innocent young men were assassinated, March 3 1986, because it was the day before she bombed John Vorster Square. But it feels too cursory, a missed opportunity to illustrate for newer generations the awful, real-life impact of apartheid.   

While Guilty and Proud matches Oyama Mabandla’s Soul of a Nation in its minutiae of life in exile and the documentation of a litany of cadres and comrades who participated in the resistance, it lacks the latter’s lyricism and forthrightness about the post-liberation ANC.   

This unwillingness to address the deep post-1994 travails that have eaten away at democracy, and are the responsibility of the leaders under which she served, feels like a cop-out. The closest she comes is to bookend the memoir with a salute, in her introduction, to veterans who “find themselves destitute, or living hand to mouth, nearly 30 years into our democracy”, and a final reflection (or is it an admonishment to those who criticise too overtly?) that it is incumbent on us to remember Nelson Mandela’s long walk to freedom, and that “I, for one, am still walking”.

Ultimately, what was Sparg’s crime? Sadly, she spent five years in prison for targeting apartheid infrastructure by detonating three small bombs at separate police stations, causing physical damage but no loss of life and only a handful of minor injuries. In the context of the viciousness of the state, she has nothing to feel guilty about, and her pride in her brave stance is justified.

Paradoxically, this reduces the creativity — the potential for contrasts and tension — in her book.