1 Dr Anthony (Tony) Turton Light Horse Regiment & National Intelligence Service Missing Voices Project Interviewed by Mike Cadman 26 & 28/04/08 TAPE ONE SIDE A Interviewer Tony, I’ve been through your book so I’ve got a good idea of your background, but can you give me just a brief, brief background of where you grew up, what your family was like, was it English speaking or Afrikaans speaking, how big and so on? Tony I don’t know if I can give you that briefly but I’ll be as brief as I possibly can. Firstly I welcome this project very much, I think it’s a hugely important project and when I first heard about it I got quite thrilled because this book that you’re talking about, I’m actually intending, if I can get all my ducks in a row, to in fact record it a sort of tape made for the blind kind of thing, sort of CD, so I’m actually looking for that. I had a very unusual upbringing in many ways, and even now at the age of 52, 53 I still ponder back on my life and think about this upbringing. Part of the unusualness of my upbringing, is the fact that I had a profound father who was a very, very interesting man. He learned Zulu as a first language, he never went to formal school as a small child and his father was, I now subsequently know, the product of the diamond rush, in fact the product of the Anglo Boer War. He was born in Kimberley during the siege of Kimberley. And my father grew up in rural Zululand where there were no schools, and he had a governess and he grew up in a place called Hlabisa and he could speak fluent colloquial Zulu. And that is quite amazing because as a young boy, I learned from him so many things, but he was also very distant to me in many ways. But he was a profound man and I think what I’m grappling to sort of say now is that in my adult life as I look back, I see my father very much as a Hemingway kind of fellow. You know the Old Man and the Sea and this kind of…my father was very much a Hemingway sort of man. And at the moment I’m dealing with issues where I have to second guess what I call the base line of what a man is. Base line of masculinity. Because I took that base line off my father, and looking back on life now, I’ve realised that my father was a profoundly unusual man. And part of that unusualness was the fact that firstly he was a larger than life figure, but secondly, and this is the main point, he grew up in the bush and he took me to the bush on many occasions – I’ve spent times in the bush hunting elephant, hunting buffalo…I’m not a hunter, and that was a source of great consternation for my father, because I was in many ways a journalist, in many ways the photographer, a scientist. He was the hunter and he wanted me to be the hunter and yes, I’ve shot things and I never took any pleasure taking any life, and that’s an important part of my story. But having said that what I learned from my father was this schizophrenia that has come to imbue our generation. We are a schizophrenic generation. And part of that schizophrenia was the illogicality, if 2 such a word exist, of our upbringing. What we thought was a normal life, in fact was profoundly abnormal. And it’s that schizophrenia that I learned from my father, I think has given me a profound respect for African culture, for African traditional leadership, for being an African…I regard myself as an African in every conceivable way you can think of, and in fact I know Thabo Mbeki, and I will take Thabo Mbeki on…I’m busy writing a book at the moment called “Bones”. How many bones do we need to bury before we can call ourselves an African. And the opening paragraph of that is Thabo Mbeki’s ‘I Am an African’. Because every word that he says there I can buy into, and I can reflect back. So I’m not afraid of taking on these leaders, and I’m not afraid of telling the story, because ultimately I’ve got in me the spirit of my father, uMqangabhodwe was his name. “iBhubezi The Lion, uMqangabhodwe, the one that stands above. And in learning inside me I’ve got that spirit. If anything I’m the young uMqangabhodwe, and I’m not ashamed of being that, although that’s not my traditional name. my traditional name is Qabalaza, always in a hurry, always in a rush. So looking back at it now, I remember as a small boy being in school, and say, grade one, grade two, and talking to my buddies at school laughs and they were all confused about what I was, because I would tell them what I did last weekend or during the last school holidays. We went and we shot an elephant, they just wouldn’t believe me, they thought I was lying. And of course the bottom line is this, I’ve learned through that experience that we’ve got a very, very multi- faceted identity as a nation, and I think the important thing is I learned from that, the schizophrenia of on the one hand, society was training us, bringing us up to eventually serve society’s purposes, and unfortunately the tragedy of that was to become soldiers, to fight for a cause that we didn’t understand, to die and bleed for a cause we didn’t understand. But on the other hand there was this other side of life, there’s almost this impervious barrier that we could not cross, this invisible something out there that was different. And where I first encountered that was my first deployment in the townships. So the township story is a very important part of the story, because that was the invisible other half, more than the other half in fact. That was what we were. So in a nutshell that’s pretty much what my upbringing was. It was an unusual upbringing, my father was not an educated man, he only had a standard 8 education, but he was very wise in traditional knowledge, and just recently I spoke to an old friend of his, Professor Rod Connacher, I gave him a copy of my book, and Rod Connacher, there are photographs of Rod in the book here with my father, measuring the one elephant that he’d shot, etc. And Rod is a retired professor and he speaks very highly of my father to this day. Stating that the wisdom that he had was way, way beyond what a man with Standard 8 education should have. And I’ve now come to learn that my father was a highly traumatised individual because he was a front line soldier in the battle of El Alamein at the age of 18 years. And I’ve now come to understand what it means to be exposed to the trauma of war 3 and I just realise now that I was simply a product on the one hand of society, but also of a family that had been deeply, deeply damaged by the cyclicity of violence. And I’m now doing our family history, going back to the 1500s, and I can now show with high levels of confidence what that cyclicity of violence means. And we can go into that later on. Interviewer Did your dad ever talk about his war experiences? Tony My father never spoke about his war experiences...the only time he spoke about it was just before the end of his life when I was now becoming a young man, and we were in the Kalahari together, and I remember one night in the Kalahari it was bitterly cold and we were shivering and then my father told a story about this flying jacket – I’ve got it in my memoirs, this is the flying jacket story – and then I realised that there was this really big piece of historia, and then slowly during those years I was becoming a young man, I was going into the bush and he had very bad arthritis at that stage, he couldn’t work with his hands anymore – I became his hands, I became his engineer, I was fixing up his land rover and getting him into places that he couldn’t otherwise go to. And he just generally never spoke about that, but later on when I went on to do my National Service, it was a very disappointing time for him because I wasn’t a particularly spectacular National Serviceman, I was just what I would call a sleg troep. And that disappointed him very, very much because he hoped that I would become more, he hoped that I would become an officer, that I would become somebody, and eventually and of course in my National Service years I didn’t do that at all. And bottom line is, I think I disappointed him in that sense, but having said that, the question that you asked was, did he talk about it? No, he didn’t talk about it.