How do you tell a man his courage has run out?

I am staring out the window of a Wits University lecture hall at the dying of the day. Ebrahim Ebrahim's monotonous voice drones on about the valiant heroics of the movement's cadres who did not break under torture.

Ebrahim is a legend in the ANC. He paid a high price for fighting apartheid.

He was viciously tortured by the security police after being kidnapped from Swaziland in December 1986.

I have a friend who was an officer in the security police at the time Ebrahim was tortured. At the time, I mistook my friend for an activist. Our friendship is still trying to survive the revelation. My grandfather was a Dutch immigrant who left Holland in 1952 after being ostracised on suspicions of being a Nazi collaborator. The whispers of betrayal followed him across the ocean to his death.

Because of my interest in what collaboration and betrayal does to families and friendships, I am attending the launch of a book on the subject called Askari, written by Jacob Dlamini. The central character of the book, Glory Sedibe, was an ANC soldier who was captured by the police, tortured and turned into a collaborator. Sedibe helped to interrogate Ebrahim. Sedibe's brother is in the audience. He speaks poignantly, on how the family loved their son but were ashamed of what he had done.

It seems to me that Ebrahim remains angry at the traitors. He says it is "despicable" to betray your people. I think of my grandfather. Dlamini asks why it is hard for us to talk about collaboration more than two decades after the torture ended. He suggests it has to do with intimacy. Things are complex, even messy. What is collaboration? Is to do nothing in the face of evil collaborative of evil? Why do we collaborate? When do we stop and start collaborating?

It does not seem to me that Ebrahim regards these as complex questions. The valiant heroes of Umkhonto weSizwe had character. They had balls. Even though their balls were crunched. These heroes did not break. Except those who did. Ebrahim invokes the torture of Phila Ndwandwe as an example. When she refused to be turned, she was shot in the head in a shallow grave, naked but for a plastic bag worn as underwear. I was 20 at the time, she not much older.

Ebrahim's story is told in the binary language of the '80s. There are good people and bad. Victims and perpetrators. Heroes and villains. It's all black and white.

I wonder why he agreed to talk at Dlamini's book launch. The two men occupy different universes. Dlamini is the quintessential clever black. He is a menace to the party line. His stories are of shades of grey.

Ebrahim's stories are all about yesterday, and its heroics and treachery. He does not explain why today he enthusiastically serves a suspected crook. He has a free pass to abrogate his current moral responsibilities. No one dares to challenge him. No one has the language. How do you tell a man who was tortured 28 years ago that his courage seems to have run out? That it appears easier to have fought the boers than to stand up to your thieving comrades?

I walk to my car. The campus glows in the early evening. This is a hotbed of young, clever blacks. My daughters should come study here one day, I think. My daughters grow up in a free country. I get into my car. Safely nestled, my balls are un-crunched. My skin is unscarred.