A woman soldier’s beautiful book reclaims the MK mantle

Marion Sparg’s story starts in her Hillbrow apartment in the mid-Eighties. She puts on a sensible suit, slings a bag over her shoulder and heads to the police station where she plants a bomb, the first of several. It is a sweeping memoir of a woman soldier.  

Sparg went on to be charged and found guilty of treason, with her race and steadfast commitment to uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) found to be an aggravating factor by the apartheid judge. As the MK party of former president Jacob Zuma shapes a contemporary political narrative, the book (inadvertently) reclaims the mantle of the true MK, showing up the newbies as fong kong interlocutors.  

Ferial Haffajee: What a beautiful story. Why was it so difficult to tell?  You write that your editors and muses had to keep telling you that you couldn’t write yourself out of your own memoir.

Marion Sparg: I had written most of the book a long time ago but as they say, life keeps on getting in the way. After publishing Bulelani’s story (Ngcuka’s The Sting in the Tale) in 2022, I finally got down to finishing the manuscript. The response I got from my publishers when I first submitted it was very positive. But they said they “wanted more of Marion”. I’m not a person who spends a lot of time on introspection and it was a challenge to recall my own thoughts and feelings. I was determined at the same time to tell the stories of those I met along the way and the challenge lay in getting this balance right, which I believe we did in the end, with the assistance of a wonderful editor (Gillian Warren-Brown). 

Along with a number of other former MK cadres who have written about our experiences, it is also difficult at times to have to focus on oneself as an individual when you are part of a collective. It almost feels wrong at times to focus on oneself. But I had to tell the full story of course after the stance I took at my trial all those years ago, where I decided to plead guilty and to attempt to explain why I joined the ANC and MK as a white woman. There is only so much I could say in the confines of a courtroom.

FH: In the end, it is both a story of MK (and its leaders who most influenced you like Chris Hani, Joe Slovo and Jack Simons) and your story. Why was this important to you? 

MS: It was extremely important for me to be able to write about the comrades I met along the way. Individuals like Chris, Joe, Jack all had an enormous influence on me. And as I say somewhere in the book, it was meeting and getting to know individuals like this that cemented my commitment to the ANC and MK. It is one thing to agree with an organisation’s policies and programmes, but if one is going to lay one’s life on the line it is the people who make up the organisation that count. As I said at my trial: No matter how much I believed in the aims of the ANC, “I would have had very serious doubts about laying down my life for that organisation if I did not know its leaders to be capable, rational, sensitive people”. 

FH: In one of the forewords, former president Thabo Mbeki writes that you didn’t emerge in the Struggle through conventional routes – student resistance and student organisations. Instead, you became a journalist and thus began your political journey. What was it about the newsrooms you worked in that made journalism a limited profession to bring change? 

MS: In the end, I suppose it was the self-censorship… Much has since been written about people like Tertius Myburgh, the editor of the Sunday Times, at the time. He actively collaborated with the apartheid regime. I had a very short career as a journalist and the straw that broke the camel’s back, I guess, was the response from Myburgh when I joined a few colleagues at SA Associated Newspapers in a one-day solidarity strike with our black colleagues who had gone on strike for fair wages and equal treatment. Myburgh told me in no uncertain terms that if he had his way he would fire me and that if I ever contemplated similar actions in the future, I should pack my bags and leave. Our strike seemed such a small, insignificant action: a few white journalists expressing solidarity with their striking black colleagues. Myburgh’s response seemed extreme. I had had a number of run-ins with him before this. And after this experience I felt that it was time to leave journalism.

FH: You learnt to make bombs in a bathroom in Bellevue. Tell us more. 

MS: Well. It was petrol bombs we made, just to clarify. We had some idea about how they were made but it was Damian (de Lange, a fellow journalist and later MK combatant) who had the most knowledge. So, it really was just filling bottles with petrol, stuffing the top with rags and “testing” them in the bathroom of Damian’s flat. 

FH: A comrade told you that whites left the country by plane, usually. You and Damian de Lange left on foot. That was quite a journey. 

MS: Yes, it was a journey. I remember so much of that walk (and ride) across the desert in Botswana. The most unexpected, and delightful, part, which I write about in the book was bumping into friendly donkeys on the road in the dark. They were curious and kept us company for some distance.  

FH: You write that Steve Biko’s life and death were shape-shifting for you. You were inspired by his words that skin colour is not the only quotient of black consciousness. I read through the book your striving and struggling for an identity outside of race, to live nonracialism. In the end, it’s not possible? Or is it? 

MS: I do believe that it’s possible to have an identity beyond race. It’s my experience in the MK camps that convinces me of that, the fact that I did forget, for a short while, that I was white. I only realised this after leaving the camp and realised I would never experience that again, but the fact that I was able to forget my white skin even for that short while, was remarkable and testimony to the calibre of cadres I was so privileged to be in camp with; the kind of politics that was taught and lived in the camps.  

FH: In court, the apartheid state tried to paint you as a lonely (and obese) young white woman open to being exploited by “terrorists”. The Sunday Times amplified the narrative. Was it painful to relive this in your story? 

MS: More frustrating than painful. I am comfortable with who I am, the body that I occupy. I didn’t see much of this coverage until much later… and as I say in the book, it was frustrating (but not surprising) to see how the Sunday Times was once again so willing to do the bidding of the security police with the narrative they carried. But perhaps they too could only make sense of me and my actions by painting me in this light. 

FH: A Black Sash activist writes you a poem in prison; she reclaims and rewrites you with words that made my hair stand on end. “Beautiful, brave, fat, white woman. Viva.” The book’s title, Guilty and Proud, is born from the poem. What did this mean to you? 

MS: I was very moved when I received Annemarie Hendrikz’s poem in prison. It is a beautiful poem, written in response to the way the Sunday Times chose to cover my trial. I remain indebted to Annemarie for this remarkable piece of writing and couldn’t have asked for a better title for the book. 

FH: In prison, you form a close sisters’ community with Trish Hanekom, Barbara Hogan, Jansie Lourens (my teacher ahead of her jailing on treason charges), Héléne Pastoors and others. You overturn power relationships with the warders and fight and fight and fight for better conditions. How important was this to surviving your sentence and emerging stronger? 

MS: The bonds I formed with my fellow prisoners, and with Barbara Hogan in particular, were very special. Barbara had had to fight prison conditions on her own for so long. She is one of the bravest people I know. She inspired me at the time and continues to inspire me. 

FH: I know it’s not your intention, but the book was published just as the MK party juggernaut settled into our polity. Who knows what it will bring? I read the book, thus, as a reclaiming of the mantle, a telling of the true MK story as pretenders hijack the name and history. Is this an interpretation too far? 

MS: As you say, the appearance of my book at the same time as the so-called MK party emerged, was a coincidence. But your interpretation is not taking it too far. From the start, when I started writing the book over 20 years ago, I wanted to ensure that I didn’t only tell my story, but as much of the much bigger story of MK as I could. Like many former cadres of MK, I am outraged at the way the name and legacy of MK are being abused and if my book is one small part of reclaiming that proud legacy and telling the true MK story, I would be very proud. 

The Ahmed Kathrada Foundation organised a book launch for Guilty and Proud, and panel discussion, on 9 August. What was particularly special for me was to hear from the young people who attended and those who formed part of the panel.

One of the young women who participated in the discussion said she was reluctant at first to read the book. She didn’t normally read books about politics, but she said reading it was important. It took her out of her comfort zone. “I felt like I was in exile,” she commented at one point.

She asked me what I find most rewarding having written the book? My answer was hearing from young people like her about their response to the book. DM

Guilty and Proud by Marion Sparg is published by NB Publishers (2024).