Ronnie Kasrils, “Red Ronnie,” scourge of the old regime, freedom fighter and cabinet minister, biker and spy, turns out to be a likeable guy. And a dab hand at writing, too.
The Unlikely Secret Agent ,which he wrote about his wife, Eleanor (“beloved wife of 48 years”), won this year’s coveted Sunday Times Alan Paton award. Topping that, the cover carries an endorsement from the fabled writer John le Carré, praising the “courageous and extraordinary woman who was highly principled, yet endowed by nature with all the clandestine skills”.
As a die-hard fan of Le Carré. I can’t wait to ask Kasrils – how did you manage to nail that? He describes a trip he made to England in 2005 as Minister of Intelligence Services, when he and Eleanor met the author at a “do” and were invited to lunch at his home in Cornwall, near Land’s End.
There they swopped war stories. Le Carré, as is well known, was a spy during the early days of the Cold War. “Eleanor had read all his books and had an uncle who fought in the Battle of Britain. He was so impressed with her,” says Kasrils.
The Oxbridge ex-spy and the Communist “rough diamond from Yeoville”, as Kasrils enjoys labelling himself? Oh, to have been a fly on the wall at that event.
We are sitting in a Kalk Bay coffee shop and the early spring morning is much chillier than Kasrils anticipated. He’s arrived, walking, without any bodyguards or fuss, greeting locals as he bustles past in a thin Bafana T-shirt, and my first response is to tell him that he should have worn something warmer. Talk about shades of my mother.
But he’s that easy to chat to, a smiling, avuncular figure whose self-depreciating manner almost, but not quite, disguises a shrewd mind that misses little.
He needed those skills to stay alive, as once one of the most hunted men in apartheid South Africa.
The Unlikely Secret Agent is the story of Eleanor’s dramatic arrest and adroit escape from imprisonment, interrogation and finally incarceration in a mental institution in 1963, when security police threatened to “break her or hang her” if she did not lead them to her lover, Ronnie.
Under extreme pressure she kept her wits about her and simply outsmarted them.Then, with help, she and Kasrils were smuggled into exile.
“I always told her that her story was one of the most dramatic of that period; it should be a film. When I resigned from the government in 2008, I said: ‘Let’s write it together.’ “
But fate intervened. They moved to their dream sea-view home along the Kalk Bay coastline to enjoy the fruits of a long life together. Within a year, by the end of 2009, Eleanor had died.
“I was facing a long, hard Cape winter on the water on my own. I just thought: ‘I’ve got to write this as a tribute to her.’ I wrote like a man possessed, and felt incredibly close to her as I did, as if I was talking to her – though I’m an atheist,” he quickly adds, with a smile.
It is one of the most accessible books of that period: Kasrils stripped it down to the essential story with the focus never wavering from his wife, and kept it to a snappy 180 pages. The result is a smooth, well-driven book, devoid of jargon or doctrine, at heart a very human story of a brave woman and a man who loved her deeply and is not afraid to say so.
“At the end of the day, there’s nothing more important than your close relationships and there’s no one closer than your lifelong partner. We should guard that treasure jealously. How important is love.” There can be few women, I think as I listen to him talk about her, who would not envy such devotion.
l Ronnie Kasrils will be talking at the Open Book Festival in Cape Town on Friday, September 23 at 10am, with Jay Naidoo and Trevor Manuel, on The Rise of the Political Memoir at the Townhouse Imbizo. See www.openbookfestival.co.za for more details of this and 150 other literary events. – Cape Argus