Luthando Dyasop - a veteran of the ANC’s participation in the Cold War in Angola and an artist with a gift for evocation, has written the most compelling, thoughtful, sometimes lyrical, sometimes terrifying autobiography of a central thread in South Africa’s history of his lifetime.
Out of Quatro: From Exile to Exoneration, published by Kwela Books, takes the reader from the author’s happy childhood in Mthatha, through his night-time solitary journey up the Drakensberg to join the ANC and uMkhonto we Sizwe in Lesotho, and from there to combat on the Eastern Front in Angola against the guerrillas of Unita, who were supported by the defence force of apartheid South Africa.
The memoir starts with a vivid account of a young life as a black artist in apartheid South Africa. From the Wild Coast, at times idyllic despite the frustrations of Bantu Education, the author takes us on a journey beyond the Drakensberg Mountains, where an idealistic Dyasop joins uMkhonto we Sizwe, the banned ANC’s military wing.
Soon disillusioned by the autocratic rule within the training camps, Dyasop falls out of favour with the powers that be. Implicated in a comrade’s suicide attempt, then suspected of mutiny, he is sent to the Quatro detention centre.
After years of daily beatings and gruelling physical labour, Dyasop is eventually released and finds himself in Tanzania, where he begins his battle for vindication.
Out of Quatro is a story, not only about Dyasop’s extraordinary life, but also about a tumultuous time in ANC history, the resonance of which is still being felt today. Decades after his release from Quatro, Dyasop has found his voice to tell his story.
The book is made up of 34 chapters divided into eight sections. It offers a detailed, first-hand account of the war against Unita and the 1976 generation who were in MK’s June 16 and Moncada detachments, and of the reasons for their wholesale withdrawal from combat in February 1984. Refusing to continue fighting, they returned en masse to Viana camp outside Luanda to put their case to MK’s High Command, saying this was not their war, it was not the war they had left South Africa to fight, together with their demand to be sent back to South Africa to fight. For this, they have never been forgiven by the ANC, and remain a “lost” generation in South Africa’s public life.
Speaking about sharing his experiences in exile, and the atrocities perpetrated by the autocratic rule, he said had there been accountability, transparency, democratic practices in place, then possibilities of gross abuse of power and the subsequent corruption would have been curtailed.
“I would be silent, just as all those before me had been silent. But for how long? I needed counselling, and how does one heal without revealing everything one has experienced? It was an open secret that Quatro was the ANC's version of a Nazi concentration camp, or as I later learnt, the Gulag of the Soviet Union.”
Professor Thula Simpson, at the University of Pretoria, considers it “beautifully written, humane in judgment, an essential account from a front-line soldier of the ambiguities of South Africa’s unfinished struggle for liberation”.
It’s a deeply layered book that easily goes as a must-read because of its simplicity and sheer honesty in its delivery.
Out of Quatro: From Exile to Exoneration is available at all major bookstores countrywide.