James Whyle's Blog

Bandiet: Seven Years In A South African Prison by Hugh Lewin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The Bandiet has left us. RIP Hugh Lewin.

This piece was first published by Style Magazine in 1996.


One morning in 1982 I woke up with a Security Policeman in my room. I was sharing a house in Mons Rd in Bellevue East with my friend the painter, Carl Becker, and a beautiful young woman, since emigrated to Australia, Carol Constançon.
The Security Policeman was bearded and casually dressed. He demeanour was relaxed, even warm. He seemed pleasantly surprised at the tastefulness of my quarters. The empty whisky bottle was placed just so on the rat-arsed Persian rug. The packet of Camels somehow highlighted the Becker etching on the mantelpiece. He spoke without looking at me.
"Where's Keith?"
"Huh?"
Keith was Carol's lover. But I was trying to figure out who the hell my visitor was. Had I met him during the course of some revelry and then forgotten all? But the previous night had been abstemious. The whisky was demolished two days previously.
"Where's Carol?"
"Isn't she in her room?"
"No."
I could only presume that he was a friend of hers.
"Where's Keith?"
"I don't know."
"What's your name?
"James."
"James who?"
"James Whyle."
"Thanks." He smiled pleasantly, left the room. I went back to sleep.

Keith worked for the South African Students Press Union. (SASPU.) The union put out a newspaper advocating obscure, evil notions like democracy. Keith knew the Branch were after him. He laid low for a few days and then decided to give himself up. He went round to John Voster Square on a Friday afternoon and handed himself in.
Look, its really busy, they said, can you come back on Monday.
He did and they locked him up for many months.

It was around that time someone slipped me a battered, banned, coverless copy of Hugh Lewin's Bandiet. I devoured it. The book told tales that we weren't allowed to hear. Stories that were the opposite of what was coming out of Cliff Saunders' mouth on the television during the eight o'clock news.

Hugh Lewin was in Pretoria Central, right next to gallows, when he first read Herman Charles Bosman's Cold Stone Jug. Bosman had been in Central for killing his step-brother, Lewin was in for blowing up electricity pylons. Sentences and 40 years separated the prisoners. Other than that nothing had changed. The men in married quarters still grasped each other in the darkness. Dagga and tobacco were still the currency. The place still had a spooky evil feel whenever there was a hanging.

Lewin was there when they hanged the man he knew as Deysel, a rare white among the many blacks who occupied the cells of the condemned. Lewin sat in his cell and listened to the special programme that the secretary of the entertainment committee played over the loud speakers the night before Deysel stepped into the void. The secretary played Home on the Range, and Don't Fence Me In, and finally, at the end of the programme, I'll see You in my Dreams.

Lewin heard horrible stories about hangings in Central. Stories about the noose sticking and taking someone's face off, dropping him maimed and alive onto the sawdust covered concrete. Stories of women strapped between their legs because of the way the blood would gush from them. One dark, shivery morning he heard a woman sobbing as she was taken, straight-jacketed, to the gallows. She didn't go well, they told him afterwards.

Lewin was picked up after the Rivonia trial. His organization, the African Resistance Movement (A.R.M.) had ceased sabotage for the duration. The plan was that when government had locked up the Rivonia men, A.R.M. would ride again, showing the state that the forces of resistance were still alive. Blowing up electricity pylons. Not harming any people. Just a signal really: You haven't stamped us out. They never got a chance to do it.
Adrian Leftwitch, who had been Lewin's best man, and who had recruited Lewin into A.R.M., was picked up. He talked. Leftwitch, who always insisted that members keep no records, had not followed his own orders. The Branch knew a lot about A.R.M. After twelve hours of interrogation, Lewin also talked. But he talked selectively, only confirming information the police already had. They threw him in a cell and forgot about him.
Then a bomb went off on Johannesburg Station.
Tonight, the interrogators told Lewin, we'll kill you.
They pulled off his glasses and started beating him. Close, personal stuff, using bare fists. When he fell over they kicked him upright again. To stop the beating, Lewin gave them what he though was the name of a further A.R.M. member: John Harris. But John Harris was the station bomber. He was already in the building.

It was a busy night. Next door, Lewin's flat mate, John Loyd was been interrogated. Later he would turn state witness. A man with bloody hands came into the room.
That Harris, he said, another one who wouldn't talk without a lawyer.
And then, says Lewin, he wiped the blood off his fists and laughed. A couple of hours later John Harris jaw was broken. Four months later, John Loyd's evidence put a noose round his neck. The word in Central was that he went well.

It was the beginning of a seven year education for Lewin. Its lessons were simple. Hanging doesn't work and prison makes criminals. Survival in prison demands that you lie and cheat and steal. The Government was taking one out of four black South Africans, jailing them for pass offences, and training them in criminality.

But the people Lewin was in with did not end up criminals. For most of the seven years he was part of an elite company. Bram Fischer was Afrikaans aristocracy. Dennis Godlberg was a civil engineer. Jock Strachan was the prisoners' hero. On his release he published an expose of prison conditions, which improved dramatically as a result. Irritated, the security police framed him and put him back inside.

No, the people Lewin was in with were not criminals. They were middle class whites, intellectuals. They studied through UNISA and staged classic plays. They had acted because they had faith that a better future was possible, and they suffered for their faith. In the early stages their isolation was almost complete. Outside the world continued, their children died, their wives made lives in England. They were adrift in the wash of history.

At the end of the seventies John Lloyd, flat mate turned state witness, re-emerged as chairman of the Anti-Apartheid group in Exeter, England. At the time of writing (1996) the Labour Party executive is deciding whether he should be allowed to stand under their banner. He claims that the ANC have effectively given him amnesty. Lewin feels he should face the Truth Commission before he makes such claims. If A.R.M. had been as efficient as the ANC, says Lewin, Lloyd would have been dead a long time ago. Despite his protestations, an old Bandiet anger burns against the men who shopped him.

The past is relentless. It seeps into the present like water finding its way to the sea. Marius Schoon, a fellow prisoner, is suing Craig Williamson, the fat spy who admitted responsibility for the murder of Schoon's wife and child.

Lewin is back in South Africa now, teaching journalism. He has never again been a member of a political organization. He came back as soon as he could. He was always coming back. He only blew up the pylons because he loved the place. He seems a quiet, methodical man. But every now and then he uses a word like ouens, a bit of Bandiet-speak, a hint that a middle-class boy was changed by years in prison.



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Today's Literary Dystopian Hit Parade on Kindle

1 The Excavations
2 Fallow Park
3 After the EMP
4 Atlas Shrugged
5 Citizens of Logan Pond
6 The Way the World Ends
7 The Handmaid's Tale
8 Resistance
9 Annihilation
10 Chemicals
12 Brave New World

#SciFi #ebook

The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began by Stephen Greenblatt

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


What a story, what a tale. Of how we, the literate ape, conspire to hide truth from ourselves. And of how the truth will out. 300 years before the birth of Christ, a Greek philosopher, Epicurus, after pondering the nature of things, comes to the conclusion that we, and everything else, are formed of indivisible units, atoms. He lays down the beginnings of the notion of evolution and concludes that while gods might exist, they have no interest in humans who are just one animal among many.

Just after the birth of Christ, a Roman poet, Titus Lucretius Carus, develops these ideas in a an ambitious poem, De Rurum Natura. The Roman Empire crumbles, and Christianity rises, bringing an age of darkness when "atomists" are burnt at the stake. But the church has uses for scribal monks, and they practice by copying old books in Latin. So the heretic text survives …

Lucretius's poem is rediscovered in the 1400s by Florentine intellectual called Poggio. It is set free to influence Galileo, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and usher in the modern world.

This is a must read.



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This is all very amateur, I'm afraid, but what the hell. I've always liked art in its raw forms. I remember the happy astonishment I felt in a bedroom in Yeoville in the 80s when Carl Becker and Michael Rudolf played Sally for me. It was a little Joburg pop song for a band they were thinking of forming. I loved the tune and the lyrics and it made me want to dance. I had been into pop music for quite a few years but I had never, not once, heard a song that was about my world. Songs were about people in England and America, not love among the Joburg mine dumps.

When the Aeroplanes, after minimal practice, got out of the garage and played in public, I was there as an Ur-fan, an Uber-fan, so convinced of the pure lilting genius of what I was hearing through the noise of the desperate musicians, that Michael invited me onto stage with them. He had an instinct that my passionate belief might be communicated to the other bemused listeners.

The Aeroplanes got better, as happens when you play regularly. The songs were good, simple three chord tunes with lyrics written for and about the disaffected pale youth. They made your feet move. I was working as an actor then, meeting Sean Taylor and Nicky Rebelo and Irene Stephanou at the Market Theatre. I did some bridging work, folk like Robert Coleman came on board, and the Aeroplanes turned into a show, a cabaret, a concert in the dark. It was a lot of fun and you ended up writing for performance, testing new material with live audiences. It was a privilege and a joy. And it brings me, finally, to the point.

These little recordings are made in a similar spirit, an urge to test a piece of writing, in which you believe, about which you are serious (but not, hopefully, earnest) on an audience. The first one is bit soft, both are probably better with ear phones. Both are far from perfect, amateur like I said, and sometimes I get led astray by my own rhythms.

You can, if you want, open the book (just to the right of the video, click preview) and read along with me. No pressure.

There are two bits:

Chapter 0 - For Those in the past in the world above.

If, like me, you tend to leave prologues for last, you can skip this and jump straight to the action:

Chapter 1 - The Creed. In which a son is delivered to Jack Delfan.

Well, it's an extract from Chapter 1. I ran out of breath.

"A biblical comedy, a millennial carnival, a strange dispatch from beyond the rapture."

"A crazy-ass futuristic book."

Jack Delfan is an unwitting Noah who has turned his back on the world of men. He lives in an oil tanker in a sea of sand. He believes in digging. When a son, Hob, is delivered to him, Delfan teaches the boy how to use a spade and read the book. Delfan is a difficult father and refuses to tell Hob who his mother is. Then the Gcwi come.

Hob and the Gcwi set out on a quest to find Hob's mother. It is a journey that is destined to break Hob's heart. There are times when a broken heart is what it takes.

The Excavations is coming of age tale which delves into the history of the world, and into its future. It is an allegory, a prophecy of what will come if we fail to confront climate change and imploding capitalism.

delve (v.)

From old English delfan "to dig"
From Proto-Indo-European root dhelbh - source also of Lithuanian delba "crowbar," Russian dolbit, Czech dlabati, Polish dłubać "to chisel".

Related: Delved; delving.

Can also be an instruction:

Delve.

Dig.

Excavate.

Sometime in the 1980s, my friend and cousin, Ian Roberts (actor and front man of the Radio Kalahari Orkes) visited my half-brother, Lochart Whyle,in Botswana. Ian borrowed a 4 by 4 from Lochart and traveled into the desert. He met a group of San bushmen and shared some adventures with them. On his return to Johannesburg, Ian wrote for seven days and seven nights and then he brought me what he had written. It was called Dig and was aimed at the screen, but it looked to me like a book. Dig was the story of the end of the world, a tale so strange and shocking that it has been whispering to me, as it has to Ian, ever since. Over the years we have written it, separately and together, in various forms. In 2013, with Ian's permission, I wrote it as a novel, The Excavations.

In 2014 Jacana Media, who published The Book of War and Walk, agreed to publish The Excavations. Then Maggie Davey "left the building for a time" and I became despondent and a little arrogant. With the contract ready to be signed, I took the novel to Umuzi where Fourie Botha was interested but unable to fly its outrages past his committee. Jacana were, justifiably, not happy with me. The project was dead, and I shifted gear from arrogance to despond. At the end of 2015 I bumped into Maggie Davey at an art exhibition. She was back at Jacana. I told her I had not found a publisher. Suddenly the "wonderfully strong and completely captivating" book was under consideration again. But fate was only flirting. Jacana's second answer, couched in the kindest terms, was no.

This is the age of Trump, however. The climate is changing, nothing is impossible, and there's a whiff of extinction in the air.

The Excavations will be FREE TO DOWNLOAD, on Kindle only, on the 30th and 31st of May.

Here's the deal.

The Excavations, currently ranked at #1 in the literary, dystopian category, will be free on Kindle on the 30th and 31 of May.

If it bores you, ignore it. Love it or hate it, write a review.

"The singularity herself, from which all sprang, demonstrates that nothing is impossible."

The Excavations: A History of the End of the World

Sometime in the 1980s, my friend and cousin, Ian Roberts (actor and front man of the Radio Kalahari Orkes) visited my half-brother, Lochart Whyle,in Botswana. Ian borrowed a 4×4 from Lochart and traveled into the desert. He met a group of San bushmen and shared some adventures with them. On his return to Johannesburg, Ian wrote for seven days and seven nights and then he brought me what he had written. It was called Dig and was aimed at the screen, but it looked to me like a book. Dig was the story of the end of the world, link: a tale so strange and shocking that it has been whispering to me, as it has to Ian, ever since. Over the years we have written it, separately and together, in various forms. In 2013, with Ian's permission, I wrote it as a novel, The Excavations.


In 2014 Jacana, who published The Book of War and Walk, agreed to publish The Excavations. Then Maggie Davey "left the building for a time" and I became despondent and a little arrogant. With the contract ready to be signed, I took the novel to Umuzi where Fourie Botha was interested but unable to fly its outrages past his committee. Jacana were, justifiably, not happy with me. The project was dead, and I shifted gear from arrogance to despond. At the end of 2015 I bumped into Maggie Davey at an art exhibition. She was back at Jacana. I told her I had not found a publisher. For a time the "wonderfully strong and completely captivating" book was under consideration again. But fate was only flirting. Jacana's second answer, couched in the kindest terms, was no.


This is the age of Trump, however. The climate is changing, nothing is impossible, and there's a whiff of extinction in the air. link: The Excavations will be available, on Kindle only, at a bargain basement price, from Tuesday the 21st of March.

It was more a smoulder than a spark, a long smoulder, like the fires that burn for decades in disused coal mines, inhibited only by scarcity of oxygen.

Sometime in the 1980s, the film maker, Guy Spiller, approached me with an idea for a project. He gave me a book with an unwieldy title, A Source Book on the Wreck of the Grosvenor East Indiaman. Buried deep inside it was William Hubberly’s journal, which recounts, day by day, his walk from the shipwreck in northern Pondoland, down the Transkei Wild Coast, to the great dune deserts just east of Port Elizabeth. It is a tale of unspeakable suffering and it has a fine and simple plot. Stranded in a strange land, 150 castaways set out for home and one by one they are left behind or they starve or they are murdered until in the end there is only one left and that last survivor must surely be accounted the loneliest person in the world.

At the beginning of 2012 had just finished an MA at Stellenbosch and the novel I had written for the course, The Book of War, was making its way into book shops and the world. I went to Stellenbosch on the recommendation of a friend, novelist and playwright Harry Kalmer, and I was lucky because The Book of War book found the best mentors it could have had in Marlene van Niekerk and Willem Anker. I inferred from them that there was some hope if I was prepared to keep writing. But what?

It was Cormac McCarthy that convinced me I should try my hand at fiction. Reading him I mean, we’re not friends or anything. Although God knows he feels like one sometimes but then so do Willie Shakspere and Norman Mailer. In any event, I came back to William Hubberly’s story with a thought. What if the book had, at its centre, an emotional relationship as powerful as that between the father and the son in McCarthy’s The Road? So I started writing, reworking the account of the shipwreck that is given in the Source Book and following William Hubberly step by step. In my mind was the hope that characters, as had been the case with The Book of War, might arise naturally out of the source material and take action to enrich the story. As I worked, however, I came to realize that any novelization, any icing on the narrative, was fraudulent and unnecessary. I wanted to stick as close to the truth as possible, and I came to love the way Hubberly mentioned people’s names only when the died or were left behind. “In the night,” he writes, “John Howse, a seaman, died through great weariness.” It seemed senseless to try and improve on that.

There’s a mystery in William Hubberly’s story, and in Walk....

Read the rest at Lauren Beukes' Spark

In other hands these encounters between Europe and Africa would be lousy with meaning and allegory and retrospective wisdom, but there are no morals here. Everything is an inexplicable sequence of often terrible events without cause and effect, the way life can be. Things just happen, one after the other like feet walking, and the sand and salt scour away symbolism and significance until what's left is a brutal poetry of indifference, another verse of a violent song of a violent land, neither consoling nor too pessimistic.
Whyle's writing is lean and spare - a much abused phrase when describing male South African prose stylists - but it generates hard beauty: "They were weak and very thin, like assemblies of driftwood draped in tattered cloth and knocked about by the wind, jerking puppet mendicants on a fine firm sandy beach in the rain. Each one carrying fire."

Read whole review . here

Other reviews can be found on the Walk home page

And for those who like their litarature with pictures...