Peter Randall (1935 - 2024) on escaping from John Vorster Square
By James Findlay, 23 August 2024
We’re in the entrance hall of the handsome Beaux Arts-style building. ‘Does the Rand Club permit communists, Wilson?’ I ask the veteran porter – our gatekeeper for 35 years. ‘Of course, of course, welcome,’ he beams, and ushers in my lunch guest.
They say that you shrink a couple of millimetres every year after the age of 70 and my colleague is almost two decades on the wrong side of that metric. When he isn’t shuffling, he stands just higher than my waist. Even so, Peter Randall is a man I hold in high esteem.
It’s been a while since we last had a social catch up. At 89 years of age, he has his wits about him and his satire is sharp. He admits to me that, at one time, he was almost a card-carrying communist – but not anymore, he says, pinching his lips as if tasting something bitter.
‘Why?’ I ask.
‘It’s not the same, Jamesie.’ He shakes his head and dismisses the topic. No more needs to be said. If there was once a flame firing up that defiant vision, the fiction is no more. The noble idea was that, through revolution, the people would share in the vast riches of our country and condemn the exclusionary capitalist system. The people now cast their ballots, but it seems that another oppressive government merely replaced ‘the Nats’, as Peter calls his arch nemesis, the apartheid-era National Party.
We stroll into the grand bar. ‘Goodness, Jamesie!’ Peter exhales at sight of the magnificent 38-metre long mahogany counter. He called me ‘Jamesie’ as a term of endearment. Many lucky souls have been bestowed with nicknames – even the family pet is summoned with a special name. Scanning the columns and the Ardmore wallpaper that modernise the space, Peter nods his head, processing where he is.
Peter Randall was awarded a PhD degree from the University of the Witwatersrand for his thesis on the role of the history of education in the training of teachers and worked at the university until his retirement in 1995. During lunch, he makes it clear to me, for the record, that he never identified politically as a communist but rather as a social democrat. ‘The Nats’ might have thought the two movements were indistinguishable. Both were red flags to the bull – but, in truth, there are crucial differences between the systems. Both reject capitalism in favour of wealth equality, public control of the means of production and economic power for the working class. But socialism encompasses a broader spectrum of political beliefs. Its programmes and policies can exist alongside capitalism in a society.
To say that Peter is disappointed with the state of our country in 2024 is merely to rub salt in his wounds. This from a left-wing luminary with impeccable struggle credentials, such as a banning order that was issued against him by then Minister of Justice, Jimmy Kruger, in 1977. When I think about Kruger, I can’t help thinking of Freddy Krueger, the evil antagonist in the 1984 horror movie Nightmare on Elm Street. The so-called ‘justice’ and the villain seem to have had a lot more in common than a similar surname.
We pause at the south side of the huge bar and order soft drinks. Visiting this once-exclusive institution is a novelty for him. It wasn’t just the Nats that disapproved of Peter’s political leanings. Back in the day, he might not have been all that welcome here either.
Peter was the mastermind behind the subversive publishing house Ravan Press. From 1973 to 1977, he served as its director. The press’s co-founders were Beyers Naudé and Danie van Zyl. ‘Ravan’ is a portmanteau, made up of the initial letters of Randall, Van Zyl and Naudé. Some of the books that Ravan Press produced were banned – and very likely destroyed by the apartheid censors. I delight in having some very rare copies of these publications in my collection.
Peter and I are ushered in to the members-only dining area named ‘Tommy’s Bar’. I’ve made a booking for the occasion. Apparently, in generations gone by, this room is where the more senior members of this former gentlemen’s club would gather during rush hour. The anti-apartheid activist in Peter loves the fact that this panelled room is now playing host to patrons other than the lords of capitalism. He swoons at the irony.
Starters are served. Of course, I have to order the marrowbone on toast. This famous dish is reputed to have been a staple since the gold-rush days.
Peter points to a pile of books that I’ve brought along as props. ‘It’s The Black Interpreters,’ I say, tracing his line of sight. ‘Do you remember it?’
‘It’s familiar, but…’ He scratches his head. There is a reason why it takes a bit of brainwork. The first edition was banned and all but a couple of copies survived. He pages through the paperback that he once gifted to his best friend, Jonathan Paton, son of Alan Paton. ‘Amazing that this survived!’ Peter is in his element. I bought this copy from Meredith Kempthorne, the Pretoria-based bookseller. Extremely rare, it has been signed by Nobel Prize-winning writer Nadine Gordimer and legendary photographer David Goldblatt, who contributed an image for the cover.
Another piece of the puzzle is that I managed to track down a police brigadier who once owned a docket on Peter. Here, in this single artefact, are the autographs of several historical characters, all directly connected. As a book collector, this treasure is a prized piece in my library. ‘Amazing,’ says Peter, somewhat stumped by the item before him.
He was forced to jettison his personal library years ago. The cull started way back in the 1970s when the Security Branch would raid Ravan Press’s offices and the Randall home for seditious material. If they’d found this banned book in Peter’s possession, he could have been charged with aiding and abetting banned organisations, which might have resulted in him being ‘a guest of the apartheid prison system for up to five years’, as puts it. An unpleasant thought.
‘What’s your favourite Ravan press book?’ I quiz him.
‘I don’t know.’ Peter draws out the sentence. A very modest man, he cringes at the thought of tributes. ‘Tell me what your favourite is?’ he shoots back at me.
‘My favourite is A Taste of Power.’ This book was published in partnership with Spro-cas (The Study Project on Christianity in Apartheid Society). Spro-cas was above the radar with the Nats. On the cover is a series of vignettes of a man with a hammer beating an anvil. With a chuckle, Peter points to the covert hammer and sickle. ‘The censors missed that one!’ We both laugh. Being associated with the church gave Peter and his comrades a sense of pseudo kinship with the church-going Nats. Bizarrely enough, they were both claiming the moral high ground. The Dutch Reformed Church used the Bible to justify apartheid.
Prompted by my mention of A Taste of Power, Peter, who describes himself as a ‘skinny runt’, tells me the following story…
The year was 1973 and South Africa was a political tinder box. The idea of the publication was to highlight the injustices of apartheid and to serve as a handbook for the disenfranchised. The censors flagged it and highlighted the offensive paragraphs. A reprint of A Taste of Power would have been too costly – besides, Peter saw this as an opportunity to make a statement. While having communal lunch in the office, he and his wife, Izzy, blacked out the offensive words and passages with indelible pen. ‘Funny thought,’ he muses. ‘Me censoring my own work.’
Page 67 reads like a visceral Mark Rothko abstract. Looking at the pages, evokes an emotional response in Peter. He frowns and the corners of his mouth drop as he takes in the abstract black box that looms heavy over the exposed text. I can’t help but be intrigued as to what was blanked out.
‘I can’t remember, Jamesie. Who cares’. He holds the book up to the light. ‘Once, the Nat censor even mixed up two people. Mandla Langa got a banning order instead of his brother Bheki Langa. So The Black Interpreters has a collection of black Rothko abstracts throughout it. Mandla Langa got a lot of street cred for that, I imagine.’ Peter loves to ridicule his former apartheid antagonists for their ‘room temperature IQs’, as he puts it.
The ins and outs of current politics are passé and repetitive. The past is electrifying. Our lunch-table conversation takes on an autobiographical storytelling bent as we turn to Peter’s wife, Isobel Randall. In deep disguise as a regular northern suburbs grandmother these days, Izzy also has her fair share of courageous stories. She was the graphic designer of several of the Ravan Press book covers. The security branch were often perched in cars outside their house in Westcliff, Johannesburg. Once an African resistance leader arrived unannounced and rattled the bell at the gate. Izzy recognised him immediately but knew that their home was under surveillance. Welcoming an anti-apartheid pariah would have put them both in extreme danger. From the front door, she chased him away, performatively shouting, ‘Go away, go away’ – all the time scanning the street for the nefarious Security Branch. The poor man must have had his fears confirmed – that even the liberal whites were racists, she mused when narrating the tale to me.
At times, their children were terrified. David, their son, once recounted to me with satirical humour how, in the dead of night, someone tried to kick in their front door.
Being a militant freedom fighter and taking up arms against apartheid was not Peter’s style. He might not have the physicality of a bare-knuckle cage fighter, but in the realm of media and publishing, he was formidable – a heavyweight champion with a pen.
A thought comes to mind. Peter was bullied at school and teased about the Coke-bottle lenses of his spectacles. I can’t help thinking that, like a fine sword, he was forged in the fire of a dysfunctional society. Refusing to be broken, he chose to weaponise his adversarial upbringing and went from taking on school-yard bullies to parrying with no less vicious an opponent than the apartheid regime.
Born in 1935, Peter’s life has spanned some of the most fascinating periods in South African history. Nowadays, he is silver-haired and wears a sizeable pair of black-framed spectacles.
My favourite story is about him having been summoned to John Vorster Square, the notorious headquarters of the South African Police, ‘for tea’ with Colonel Coetzee, as he puts it. ‘I went into a tailspin.’ Peter laughs as if in prelude to the kind of regular story people might tell around a braai. Today, this brut Modernist-style building is not particularly ominous at face value, but in those days you wouldn’t have wanted to end up inside of it. John Vorster Square was known as a site of interrogation, torture and abuse of anti-apartheid activists.
For a man who had a preoccupation with doing the right thing, I find it ironic that Peter found himself on the wrong side of the Law. The year was 1977 and a registered letter was delivered to Peter’s Westcliff home. The summons gave a date, a time, an office and a floor. ‘Gosh, it was the ninth floor, Jamesie!’ Peter wrings his hands as he relives this terrifying time. ‘I said to Izzy: people escape out of the windows from those high floors.’
The micro-expressions on Peter’s face signal his distress. He wipes his forehead with his handkerchief, even though there isn’t any sweat there. ‘You see, Jamesie, I was in what they called radical politics. Being a professor at Wits shielded me from physical brutality from the police, but you never know… After all, Neill Aggett checked out in a body bag. Perhaps it was to be that that day they were to finally be rid of me and assist me in escaping out of the ninth-storey window!’
At this point in his life, Peter had ‘gone rogue’ or ‘under the wire’, as they say – which is to say, he no longer took orders from a specific organisation but rather engaged in his own fight against what he saw as the enemy. The apartheid government responded in kind.
‘So, what happened?’ I broke his pause of deep recollection. ‘Well, Jamesie, I arrived at the entrance, which is on the south side and cold, like a meat locker. I showed the armed policeman at the door that venomous summons. The ceilings were high and the long counter foreboding. Many constables officiated in various tasks. It seemed so efficient, so organised. Was this a good sign? Is justice about efficiency?’
‘The constable at the charge office pointed to the lift and instructed me. “Negende vloer, dan links, en met die gang af.” His uniform was a crisp navy blue. My heart was beating.’ Now, as back then, Peter’s heart appears to be beating faster. His breath has intensified.
‘There weren’t any allies there. I was marooned in a parallel universe! The lift arrived. What greeted me was an image of horror that I’ll never forget. Like a pantomime at a resort where they shower you with garlands of flowers to set the mood… Well this place – this hell – had its own very special welcoming committee for me. It was as if the following incident was choreographed for my unique version of Dante’s Inferno. For most in this building, that was an everyday occurrence, but for me, I was in hell!’
Peter pauses to catch his breath and then continues in his effort to cathartically exorcise the experience from his system. ‘I was, at the time, only pensive – just a little tense, like waiting for a dentist operation. I used mantras to calm myself. This is just routine – like paying a traffic fine, I lied to myself.
‘The steel lift doors opened with a motorised familiarity and there, at the back of the lift, facing me, were two burly white men with moustaches standing either side of a half-naked black man who lifted his head. His terrified eyes grappled with mine and his head dropped back to his chin. He was shackled. His captors weren’t even in police uniform! The sight sent a chill down my spine. I was powerless: I was him. I stepped back and caught the next lift, tormented by uncertainty.
‘I announced myself to a secretary. Her hair was taken up in a bun, as was the fashion of the time. She was nice – so normal – and instructed me to sit down. A few minutes later, I was summoned and, as if walking to the gallows, I submissively entered Colonel Coetzee’s spacious office. Ashen faced, I greeted him: “Morning Colonel.” I didn’t want to taunt him. I was submissive and contrite. Clutching the now buckled piece of paper, I handed it to Colonel Coetzee. He glanced over it and drew down on me with his menacing eyes. He never blinked. Not once! I was like a rat that carried some plague.’
At this stage, I am transfixed by this master storyteller.
‘The oppressive stillness was broken with: “Ja, Randall, you make a lot of kak for me, you know!”’ Peter contrives an Afrikaans accent as he relays the moment to me. ‘I was absolutely terrified. All I could say was, “Yes Colonel, I’m sorry.” I was a schoolboy in the headmaster’s office, except the consequences were far worse than a mere caning.’
Peter is in character, cringing like a worm. ‘“Randall, you are a public menace!”’
He pauses for dramatic effect, then his voice goes up an octave. ‘And so… We are forced to give you a banning order. See!’ Peter tries to find amusement in the harrowing moment. In accord, I laugh.
‘He rolled his Rs a lot and all I could say was something like: “Yes, thank you, Colonel.” Because you see, Jamesie, I was actually thankful. I was relieved that I was not going to be free-falling toward the tarmac’.
‘It was a slap on the wrist then, Peter,’ I said.
‘It was slap on the wrist, Jamesie,’ declared our maestro of gallows humour. ‘There wasn’t a debate, nor did I try to argue with the indictment. I was no longer condemned to being tossed out of the window. I had been granted a reprieve. This banning order was a fabulous second prize. I left, taking the stairs and feeling somewhat elated. I was banished, but banished from what? Daily life actually just continued, with the only exception being that I didn’t make kak anymore.’
Peter grins and I chuckle. The timbre of his voice is that of an old man as he stands up to physically shake off the grave emotion. His self-deprecating characterisation is not lost on me. This is an enormously brave man recounting an epic brush with a beast otherwise known as the Security Branch. Peter long ago gave up his fight against moral decrepitude, but he did his bit with astonishing personal sacrifice. No tree can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell – or so Carl Gustav Jung apparently said.
‘Was it all worth it?’ Peter mutters and then answers his own question. ‘I was a useful idiot.’ He refers to the once-proud liberation organisation – the African National Congress (ANC). The use of janissaries in times of war is a phenomenon the world over. The National Party recruited black operatives who became known as ‘askaris’. Similarly, the ANC enlisted many white liberals. Peter, it seems, is wallowing in regret for not having predicted the future.
I peal in: ‘Peter, if many who followed did not hold the moral high ground but chose instead to plunder our country, this has nothing to do with you. You fought for justice. The fact that the next generation squandered their inheritance is no reflection on you. What you did in shining a moral spotlight on the wrongs of apartheid was all you could do.’
A comparison comes to mind and I invite Peter to picture a meadow. ‘On top of a blade of grass is an ant. Of what benefit is this strenuous and unlikely activity? There’s no apparent biological benefit to the ant – no mating display. Nor is it seeking food. What is happening is that the ant’s brain has been hijacked by a tiny parasite – Dicrocoelium dendriticum – that needs to get itself into the stomach of a sheep or cow in order to complete its reproductive cycle. This tiny worm, like a homunculus, is steering the ant into position to benefit its progeny, not the ant’s.’
‘Just like I was!’ Peter snorted.
I went on: ‘This manipulative parasite is a bit like an idea that causes its hosts to behave in a sometimes self-sacrificial way – all for the benefit of the parasite not the host. How do you feel about having put aside your health, your career and your family to further the interests of an idea that had lodged in your brain? After all, you were almost thrown out of the window because of an idea.’
‘Interesting point – and there’s some truth to it. To use your meadow analogy, all I was was a blade of grass in the wind. Our social democratic movement flexed a little in a lawn of grass blades, but after the wind passed, it was as if nothing had ever happened. What was the point of it all, I now ask myself. Was I attempting to hold onto the tenets of a Constitution that was yet to come? To give voice to the voiceless? I was driven by altruism to do what I thought was the right thing.’
‘It’s not in the outcomes, it’s in the doing,’ I chime in. ‘Did you get a high, a dopamine rush, from being David to the apartheid goliath?’ My challenge to him is a veiled compliment.
‘Well, I was moved by a cause – a sense of duty, of justice,’ he asserts, the activist archetype sneaking in again. ‘But remember: while you compare me to biblical heroes, my rendering to insignificance, too, was as such.’
He never went on to single-handedly defeat apartheid, nor did he even receive much acknowledgement after its demise.
‘During the presidencies of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki the country thrived,’ I proffer.
He doesn’t disagree, but steers the conversation back to the days of the cause when everything was a clearer case of good vs evil. We speak about books, about printing and about publishing – more stories for another day…
* * *
Now, when I look back on our lunch, which happened a few months ago, it occurs to me that we closed the circle that day. Peter passed on the afternoon of the 5 June 2024. With a sweeping bow, I feel honoured to have known such a great man. Peter Randall lived a full and meaningful life. A visionary champion of justice, he punched way above his weight. He was one of my favourites – and from one storyteller to another, I thank him. He lives on.
* This story is not a police statement. The dialogue, tales and sequence of events have been massaged at the whim of the author.