Marion Sparg, Guilty and Proud: An MK Soldier’s Memoir of Exile, Prison and Freedom (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2024)
EXTRAORDINARY and challenging circumstances raising matters of conscience can have unpredictable outcomes. Among the small group of white South Africans who joined the armed resistance to apartheid, MK, Marion Sparg stands out. From a conservative background in the eastern Cape, she attended Rhodes University as a journalism student and was uninvolved in student politics. But the 1976 Soweto uprising and the inspiring local examples of Steve Biko and Donald Woods provided sufficient inspiration.
Her short newspaper career involved the Daily Dispatch (East London) and Sunday Times (Johannesburg) where her editor was Tertius Myburgh, later exposed as a police security branch asset. With the launch of the Release Mandela Campaign and protest around the twentieth anniversary of the republic in 1981 there was heightened tension that sparked broader involvement for many people. With Damian de Lange and Arnold Geyer, Sparg decided to target the Progressive Federal Party for its anaemic response and they petrol bombed several of its offices in Johannesburg in the name of the South African Liberation Support Cadres.
Geyer departed for Europe and Sparg and De Lange jumped the Botswana border. After processing by the ANC and a move to Lusaka, Sparg by now known as Michelle Brown was transferred to Caxito camp in Angola for full training. There she met Mildred, in another life Geraldine Fraser (later Moleketi). But her journalism skills were more highly regarded and she was deployed back to Lusaka to Voice of Women and here she worked with Jack Simons on a book that remained unfinished.
Much of Sparg’s book is occupied with portraits of ANC personalities such as Simons, Joe Slovo, Thabo Mbeki and Chris Hani. These are based on personal memory, contain a fair amount of detail available elsewhere, and hint at hagiography. Sparg has clearly tried to be even-handed in her treatment of the position of women in ANC camps and the mutiny in Angola, but these are nevertheless partial accounts.
She experienced Pango camp not long after the mutiny, having volunteered for the special operations unit of MK. After a false start, she moved to Lesotho and was sent on several, seemingly pointless, errands in South Africa. One was to contact Peter Mokaba in Limpopo when the ANC must have known he was detained. Sparg suggests this was a test. Back in Maseru during the December 1985 South African raid, she escaped the deadly ambushes after a party by sheer chance and was evacuated.
Back two months later she teamed up with Stephen Marais to smuggle limpet mines into South Africa. The operations that followed were essentially armed propaganda in the long ANC tradition, although placing mines in police station toilets was risky. First, Cambridge police station in East London, not far from Sparg’s high school, was bombed. Then, with immense symbolism, on 6 March 1986 Sparg detonated a mine at John Vorster Square (JVS), headquarters of the police security branch and nerve centre of their reign of terror where eight detainees, including Ahmed Timol and Neil Aggett, died. Sparg regretted not being able to reach the notorious tenth floor. She immediately left another mine at Hillbrow police station, but this failed to go off and was found only after her arrest which followed quite swiftly.
Her short campaign was a major morale boost to most anti-apartheid organisations. As planned, she admitted her responsibility as a MK soldier. Detained under s.29 of the Internal Security Act she endured interrogation, for which she had no training, on the JVS tenth floor. Leading her questioning was Alfred Oosthuizen, a duplicitous egoist with shallow political understanding whom it seems Sparg was able to handle. She was not physically assaulted, but the psychological pressures were considerable. She suggests that questions by Helen Suzman in parliament protected her up to a point; and since the death of Aggett, the police had become more circumspect. She cautions, however, against taking the account of Paul Erasmus, who was peripherally involved in her case, too seriously.
After six months’ detention, Sparg appeared in court on 29 August 1986 charged with three counts of arson and one of treason. She was now an awaiting-trial prisoner held at Diepkloof (Sun City). There was a conflict of opinion with her advocate Jules Browde over trial tactics, which Sparg won. She argued that she was a soldier in a legitimate struggle who had hit hard targets for propaganda purposes and caused no fatalities. The judge appeared to agree, but handed down an effective 25-year sentence with her white skin an aggravating factor. In the event she served five and a half years at Pretoria Central with a handful of other female politicals like Barbara Hogan before release in April 1991 as part of the post-apartheid negotiations.
The mainline press, particularly the Sunday Times, treated Sparg poorly suggesting that she had been a friendless university student who had been looking for an emotional haven. She does indeed refer to the ANC as family and seems to have had a largely uncritical view of some of its luminaries. But she was clearly an accomplished and disciplined soldier and saboteur who pulled off a remarkable campaign with great aplomb. Whatever her original motives, and all anti-apartheid activists had their tipping point, she fulfilled the task for which she was trained. Her book title is well justified. And she is quite open to the fact that being a white female was an asset in operations.
A feature of this book is the insight it provides to the state of mind of members of the security establishment as apartheid crumbled. Many clearly knew the game was up. During her detention she agreed to point out various sites that featured in her operations such as crossings from Lesotho. The police accompanying her were surprisingly nervous near the border perhaps because their car kept breaking down. And elsewhere she was received at police stations with tea, biscuits and utmost decorum, although shackled. There was also an attempt to recruit her as a double agent, presumably another Olivia Forsyth.
The 35 years since release are dealt with sketchily and there are snapshots from the various positions she held with the ANC during the transition period. Nothing is said about her later rigged departure from the National Prosecuting Authority, although she makes plain her disgust at state capture and the role of Jacob Zuma. The book ends rather lamely with a statement of faith in the ANC and in particular Cyril Ramaphosa; faith shared with a rapidly diminishing number of her fellow citizens.