Helen Moffett

Twenty years ago – is it that long? – the entire political landscape shifted. The political system of apartheid – for so long apparently graven in stone – suddenly looked rather sandy.

I’ve been meaning for two decades to write down the parallel events that took place in my life on that day. A Joburg friend had put me on a Greyhound bus the evening before, calling anxiously, “Phone when you get there so I know you haven’t crashed.” I was an innocent in those days: “Whoever heard of a Greyhound bus crashing?” I said (a stupidly portentous thing to say if this was a work of fiction, which it isn’t).

Round about 4am on 2 February, I woke to a loud bang and a lurch. One muffled scream, then I was hurtling through the air along with flying bits of overhead luggage. Then I hit my seat again, and for a long moment of disbelief, assumed we had a puncture. Then the sobbing began, and I realised the bus was leaning at a peculiar angle.

I got up in the dark, peering round for the cabin attendants. Next I called out, asking if there was a doctor on board. No response. A nurse? No response. Okay, surely there was a first-aid kit on board? I began to inch my way down the tilted aisle in the dark. Broken glass crunched underfoot. I got to the doors, twisted closed, and began to realise the enormity of our predicament – we’d need an axe to get off the bus. Plus I was starting to worry about fire.

I found one of the Greyhound stewardesses crouched in the stairwell. I asked her what the procedure was for emergencies: where was the first-aid box, the fire extinguisher?

“Don’t talk to me about fucking Greyhound, I’ve resigned as of this minute,” she wailed, crystals glinting in her hair. We both thought it was glass – later we realised it was sugar. She’d been making herself a cup of tea when nemesis struck.

Then someone in uniform stepped forward. Friedrich was in the Air Force. In all that chaos, he was a vision of sanity, the braid on his uniform and cap gleaming along with his white-blond hair. “We have to get these people out of here,” he said. A wiry, dark-haired guy rose from the ruined seats. He was an officer with the Paras, and was bending the rules by travelling back to camp in civvies. His name was Rolf, and he wanted to help.

It goes without saying that Friedrich and Rolf were white, but not everyone on the bus was. The tides of the old South Africa had been creeping out imperceptibly, and a third of the passengers were black. Next, Brandon, who was coloured, joined us, also impeccably turned out in uniform. He was part of the Presidential guard, and deeply worried that he might not reach Cape Town in time to march at the opening of Parliament.

For the next aeon, the four of us cleared people off the bus, carrying some of them when necessary, literally posting them through the windows, now gaping empty. That’s probably what caused most of the superficial cuts and bleeding. The moon had set, and we couldn’t see to avoid the jags of glass still in the frames.

I was a member of the End Conscription Campaign, and I had never expected to be grateful for army training, but in the early hours of that morning, I was beyond thankful. Rolf, Friedrich and Brandon worked like automatons, firm, practical, swift.

We found the other stewardess weeping under a seat, with what seemed to be a broken arm, but she was able to tell us there was no first-aid kit on board. No axe, no emergency protocol, no fire extinguisher either. We ended up tearing the little onboard pillows into strips for bandages. We did it so easily then, but you try tearing up a pillow-slip.

We kept expecting to find horrors, but no-one seemed to be terribly injured. Shock was the biggest problem, especially among the more elderly passengers. We were constantly detaching hands that clutched, at us, at seats, at anything stable.

When everyone was out, we clambered out the windows into a scene from Dante’s Purgatorio: moaning people rambling around in the blackness. This was a pre-cellphone era. We were alone in the middle of the Great Karoo, at an ungodly hour of the morning. Help was a very long way off.

Friedrich and I went round to look at the front of the bus: the driver’s section had concertina-ed into a crumple of metal maybe two foot wide. Worse, black liquid seeped from the area. We looked at each other in horror: we knew we had to try and get the driver out. Friedrich stuck a hand in gingerly – another indicator of how times have changed, the risk of HIV-infection never even crossed our minds. He couldn’t feel a body, so we decided to try again when it was lighter – dawn wasn’t that far away.

What we discovered when the blackness began to lift was that the bus-driver had been thrown clear, and was lying unconscious in the veld. Meanwhile, a bakkie stopped – the first car to pass in the 45 minutes since the crash. The driver, appalled by the scene he found, agreed to drive hell-for-leather to the nearest town and rustle up the police and ambulances. Brandon begged a ride – he had six hours left to get to Cape Town and Parliament – and shook hands with our small team before disappearing into the grey.

As it got lighter, we were able to organize people into groups, placing more competent and uninjured people in charge, sharing out fruit juice and water salvaged from the wreck. Unbelievably, few seemed to be seriously injured, but there were some nasty cuts and people were becoming extremely emotional as the shock wore off. We were worried about concussion and internal injuries – it was impossible to tell whether crying or catatonic people were badly hurt or not.

I had my first physical reaction when the rising sun revealed the state of the bus. It lay across a donga at a 60-degree angle, with the entire undercarriage peeled back. It had rained earlier that night, softening the soil, so that the donga had acted as a brake into which the bus had sunk, instead of somersaulting. I was suddenly desperate to vomit, but then Rolf set up a glad cry. The doctor from the nearest small town had arrived, slewing his car to a stop, and running towards us with his medical bag.

As the light became more pitiless, more and more help arrived, including the ambulance (all the way from Beaufort West, 150 kms away), police from three Karoo towns, concerned citizens. The bus-driver, the stewardess with the suspected fracture, a backpacker with a horrible scalp wound, some students with bad cuts and contusions, and the more distressed elderly folk were whisked away first. The rescue fleet made four trips back and forth, gallantly taking the non-injured on a “ladies first” basis. But I refused to be parted from Friedrich and Rolf, my comrades in blood and arms: “We’re a team,” we declared. Everyone was eventually decanted at the local hospital, in the nearest small town, where the more badly hurt were stabilised before being sent on to better medical facilities further on down the N1.

But now we had a new problem. The hospital was racially segregated, and the seriously injured bus-driver was being carried round to the “Nie-blankes” ward. We were outraged. One tannie with a tight perm was particularly incensed: “We were all in this together, how can they separate us now?” The local hotel owner had no such strictures: we were all welcome back at the hotel, hot food would be served, we could take baths and rest until a replacement coach was sent.

Friedrich, Rolf and I went from bed to bed collecting phone numbers and messages. We agreed that I’d place the calls. Unbelievable as this may seem to the Twitter generation, no-one knew about the crash yet. Greyhound had no 24-hour emergency number, and I had to wait till office hours to call them, getting the runaround first from the switchboard, then from a dragon secretary: “He’s in a meeting, can I take a message?”

The tiny town had a manual exchange. There were no public phones. The hospital let me use their single phone on condition all the calls charges were reversed. To make a call, I would pick up the receiver and crank a handle until I raised the operator. They then had to call the operator in whatever town I was trying to reach, and persuade them to make a call to a specific number, where whoever answered had to agree to accept the charges before I could be connected. Most of the people I was trying to reach were already at work, so I was trying, via operators, to place reverse charge calls through switchboards, some of which hung up the minute the request was made. Remembering it, I take back every nasty thing I’ve ever said about cellphones.

Friedrich and Rolf were proverbial towers of strength. They didn’t slacken so much as their postures until everyone was comfortable, their relatives informed, the more seriously injured en route to hospitals in bigger towns, and everyone else ferried to the hotel. At some point, one of them pointed out a huge bump on my head. I probed and yelped, but didn’t want to harass the already swamped medical staff. I decided, with a casualness that appalls me in retrospect, to wait until I got back to Cape Town before going to a hospital.

At last we were done. The local constable drove us to the hotel, where round-eyed staff cooked us a mammoth late breakfast. The three of us were high, babbling. We kept toasting with tea and thick moerkoffie in even thicker cups.

We also found the townsfolk had driven to the bus, cleared out all the luggage they could find, and brought it back to the hotel lobby. Some things were missing (including my handbag), but this act of kindness meant a great deal. In a quiet, dusty room with an elderly enamel bath, I realised for the first time that my clothes were splashed with blood. Bending to open my rescued suitcase, a spasm shot through my back, the first intimation that something was wrong.

Back in the musty lounge with Marmite-coloured walls, I became aware of the burble of the radio coming from the bar. A student at Wits, a tiny intense Jewish girl, asked if I wanted to come and listen to the news. Quite a few passengers were keen to know if our accident a news item yet, but the bar was dense with smoke, and I was finding it hard to move. Rolf and Friedrich stayed with me, solicitous, bringing glasses of water.

There was a commotion from the bar. I assumed we’d made the lunchtime news. Maya, the Wits student, burst into the lounge, her face alight: “FW’s unbanned the ANC!” she screamed. “He’s going to free Mandela!”

Our trio was on its feet, roaring. I was ecstatic, weeping, my new comrades seized with rage and dismay. Friedrich, aghast at the enormity of the betrayal, kept shouting “No way! The fucking verraier!” Rolf, face twisted, was yelling, “It’s a good thing! Now we can kill the fuckers openly! Now we can go to war properly, not with one hand behind our backs.”

There was a long moment when we all looked at each other. There was still blood under Friedrich’s fingernails. They drew together, then away from me as if I smelled bad.

All through the long day we waited for a replacement coach, all through the long journey back home, my back now frighteningly sore, every jolt a knife, they refused to speak to me again.

In the papers the following day, the headlines, in enormous fonts, read ANC UNBANNED. Our accident was relegated to a paragraph somewhere on an inside page. The driver, who saved our lives by keeping his head after a tyre burst, had a ruptured spleen, along with multiple fractures. I was told he was doing well following surgery.

I suffered a compression fracture that turned my fifth lumbar vertebra into a handful of fragments, and spent the next decade shuttling in and out of doctors’ and physiotherapists’ offices. Greyhound offered no compensation whatsoever for medical expenses incurred. I grumbled until Tim Noakes explained the mechanics of my injury: I had hit the roof of the bus head-first so hard that the stress of the impact had travelled down my spine, finally imploding my vertebra and exiting that way. Apparently, if I hadn’t been asleep and completely relaxed, either my skull would have caved in, or the impact would have escaped via one of my cervical vertebrae, rendering me quadriplegic. I stopped whingeing after that. But I still wonder if Greyhound now has seatbelts in its coaches.

That day, the ANC was unbanned, along with the PAC and the SACP. That day, this country turned in its path and set its feet another way – and Nelson Mandela began packing a suitcase. That day, Brandon marched to a session of Parliament that would lead to his getting the right not just to die for his country, but to vote for its government. That day marked the end of my youth, and the beginning of something huge, new and still unfolding.