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always wavering. I was too easily drawn to the other person’s side. Half the time I was trying to convince myself, through my posturing, that I knew what I was talking about, that I got it.
    I went to demonstrations against detention without trial, the pass laws, forced removals. I helped to scrawl slogans on sheets of cardboard and carry them over to Jan Smuts Avenue. But then I hung back, making sure there were two or three students to hide behind. My girlfriend Linda was always in front; her parents were proud of her for doing these things. I was not made for the front line. The police on the opposite kerb scared me, it’s true, but I was more afraid of the men with cameras and flashguns. I did not want to see my photograph in the security police files. More importantly, I did not want to see it, I did not want anyone else to see it, on the front page of the Rand Daily Mail .
    The world beyond the campus, where the real politicians operated rather than the student replicas, was a mystery to me. Realpolitik. The new term with its foreign accent clarified nothing. People I knew from campus, writers on the student paper, the members of theatre companies and vegetable co-ops, were finding their way into the Movement, as they called it, but I had no idea how to seek out such a path, and no inclination either, to be honest. The Movement. It sounded like a machine, not quite a juggernaut but a piece of earthmoving equipment for running down anyone who stood in the way, crushing the obstacles pragmatically into the churned-up demolition site of history. Construction site, they would have insisted.
    Towards the end of my university days, a farmer near the Botswana border drove his bakkie over a landmine and his daughter was killed. The newspapers carried photographs of the child’s body and the parents’ anguish. The gory details. Soon afterwards, an activist recently released from prison came to speak on campus. He spoke passionately, provocatively, about the bitter realities of the struggle, quoting Lenin on revolutionary violence without mentioning his name. ‘There will be casualties,’ he said more than once. When a girl in the audience questioned the killing of soft targets, the murder of babies, he rounded on her as if she were a spoilt child: ‘This isn’t a party game – it’s a revolution! There are no innocent bystanders.’ She sat down as if she’d been slapped.
    Thoughts like these must have run through my mind while my father was lecturing me about dirty politics and the things the security police did to detainees at John Vorster Square. He was looking for reassurance, you see, but I felt it necessary to fuel his unease, acting up, dropping in phrases from books – ‘the ruling class’ – repeating points made by radical students on the hustings during SRC elections. The need to Africanize ourselves and our culture, the morality of taking up arms against an oppressive regime, colonialism of a special kind. I may have mentioned Frelimo. No doubt I quoted Prof Sherman – Hegemony Cricket, we used to call him.
    The button eyes in the leather couch winked as if they were in on the game.
    After a while my father changed the subject. He began to talk about my national service. ‘If you’re not planning to go back to university,’ he said, ‘you should go into the army in July. Get it over with sooner.’ He knew my feelings on this subject. He was just reminding me of the unpleasant consequences of my decisions and it was a pretty good strategy. I began to watch my words.
    The talk wound down. When I was on the point of leaving, he said, ‘Are you busy Thursday?’
    â€˜Well, I’m working with Jaco as usual.’
    â€˜Take a day’s leave. Tell him you have to go to a funeral. There’s something I want you to do for me.’
    It was not a question. My first thought was that he wanted me to help with the stocktaking