Author offers chilling account of apartheid years
Bridget Hilton-Barber will be in Mbombela on January 26 to speak about her latest book, Student Comrade Prisoner Spy, a memoir about her political involvement during the anti-apartheid struggle.
MBOMBELA – “I hold my head in my hands. I feel powerless, repulsed, terrified. I knock my tea over the papers, drenching them in the tepid brown liquid, and I push them furiously away. I get up and throw the empty cup at the floor and it smashes.
The students sitting at the next table look up, startled. I can’t believe this, I cry out, to no one in particular, I can’t believe how sick this country is – people being brutalised just because they’re black… and I pick up my bag and run sobbing down the street.”
These are the words of Bridget Hilton-Barber. Her reaction to a court affidavit about the routine police torture and abuse of political detainees in South Africa during the apartheid regime.
She had become involved in anti-apartheid organisations and was caught up in the massive resistance sweeping through the Eastern Cape soon after her enrolment at Rhodes University in Grahamstown in 1982.
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The court affidavit had been made available to her by a member of the Black Sash, the non-violent white women’s resistance organisation. Hilton-Barber was sitting in the Student Union, “with a cup of sweet tea” and “a great sad sickness in (her) soul”.
It was a photostat copy and as she read hot tears plopped onto the sheets of paper.
It is just one of the many chilling accounts contained in her memoir, Student Comrade Prisoner Spy; a story of university “digs” life, parties, student activism, violence, fear,
brutality and betrayal during the apartheid years.
She would end up spending three months in detention without trial along with many of her contemporaries. After her release she discovered she had been betrayed by one of her best friends, Olivia Forsyth, a spy for the South African security police.
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Hers is a tale of her involvement in the struggle and her opposition to the military conscription, her meeting with Matthew Goniwe of the Cradock Four, the horror of what happened to the four men, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission proceedings.
Thirty years later flashbacks about that period in her life would take her on a journey back to the Eastern Cape to see if she could forgive her betrayer and make peace with the extraordinary violence she witnessed, and was confronted with in the final days of apartheid.
• Journalist and author, Bridget Hilton-Barber, will be speaking at Lowvelder’s next Pen in my Hand book club event on Thursday January 26 at 17:30 for 18:00.
The venue is to be confirmed. For any enquiries or to RSVP, email Linda Pieters at marketing@lowvelder.co.za or Philippa Francis at philippa@lowvelder.co.za. All members of the public are most welcome.
