The Unlikely Secret Agent

RONNIE KASRILS’S TRIBUTE TO HIS WIFE ELEANOR AND THE ANC STRUGGLE SHORTLISTED FOR AWARD

Eleanor and Ronnie Kasrils at the 2005 Sinn Féin Ard Fheis as representatives of the ANC

IT IS 1963. South Africa is in crisis and the white state is under siege. On 19th August, the dreaded Security Police swoop on the Griggs bookstore in downtown Durban and arrest Eleanor, the daughter of the manageress. They threaten to ‘break her or hang her’ if she does not lead them to her lover, ‘Red’ Ronnie Kasrils, who is wanted on suspicion of involvement in recent acts of sabotage, including the toppling of electricity pylons and explosions at a Security Police office in Durban.
Though she comes under intense pressure during interrogation, Eleanor has her own secret to conceal.

She has been acting as a clandestine agent for the underground ANC and must protect her handlers and Ronnie at all costs. Astutely, she convinces the police that she is on the verge of a nervous breakdown and, still a prisoner, is sent off to a mental hospital in Pietermaritzburg for assessment. It is here that she plots her escape . . .

REVIEW BY DECLAN KEARNEY
SINN FÉIN NATIONAL CHAIRPERSON

RONNIE KASRILS’S The Unlikely Secret Agent provides an insight to the earliest days of the armed struggle in South Africa and the workings of the embryonic African National Congress underground through four of the earlier years in the life of his wife, Eleanor.
Ronnie recounts in the preface how they spoke months prior to her sudden death in November 2009 about jointly writing the story of this period in their lives.
Somehow, in the months after Eleanor’s death, Ronnie summed up the will to author this chapter in the life of one of the first female recruits to the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”, also known as “MK”).
The Unlikely Secret Agent tells of the threat posed by state agents, and betrayal; Eleanor’s own imprisonment, escape and then exile.
The Unlikely Secret Agent contains all the ingredients of a political thriller. But it is also a love story.
Eleanor was Ronnie’s “anam cara”. He writes with a palpable affection and love, and even at times some awe, for his companion and comrade of almost 40 years.
I first met Eleanor in 2005. She and Ronnie came to Ireland as ANC representatives during Sinn Féin’s Céad celebrations. On the second day of the visit, Ronnie launched Cunamh’s pioneering research into the experience of former H-Block POWs in Derry City.
Eleanor decided spontaneously that she would go shopping. I was intrigued by her quiet self-confidence and lack of concern at setting off on her own in a strange city.
Later on, I learned that Eleanor was a long-standing and substantial activist in her own right. The story gradually revealed itself of our slightly-built visitor, a former political soldier who was central to the ANC’s clandestine support structures in Durban, and who from exile then helped to co-ordinate logistical back-up to the liberation struggle.
Eleanor was an ‘Unlikely Secret Agent’ in one way, for sure. But yet, in another, she possessed all the attributes of resourcefulness, discretion and an understated manner that ensured a valuable contribution to the armed struggle.
This book is the prelude to a life story of a woman activist who, like so many the world over, turned multi-tasking into a science: by rearing children, managing a home, and still making her own political contribution, whilst Ronnie was away for long periods on active service with MK in Africa and beyond.
The metaphor in Gaeilge of “an crann taca”, which so evocatively captures the role of Irish republican women, aptly describes Eleanor Kasrils. She was indeed a great oak in Ronnie and her family’s life.
She forsook a life of privilege for a life of struggle. Her incarceration and escape to exile unavoidably sundered contact with her young daughter, Brigid, for many years. Yet this and many other hardships never diminished her friendly, outgoing, loving nature. All these qualities repeatedly come alive in the pages of this volume.
She, like so many women of struggle - from Ireland to South Africa and Cuba to Euskadi - have confounded Yeats’s reflection that “too long a sacrifice can make a heart of stone”.
Instead, women kept love alive in the revolution, reminding us all that without love there is no struggle for a new and better Ireland, Africa, and the world.
The Unlikely Secret Agent tells well why that is such a universal truism.
This book is an inspirational tribute to a mother, wife, an activist, and an example . . . a crann taca.
Read it, and share it with your friends.

• The Unlikely Secret Agent (Jacana) has been shortlisted for South Africa’s Sunday Times Alan Patton Award for Non-Fiction.