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VIOLENCE PROCESSING
Fighting Words
and South Africa
What makes
you suddenly so interested in South Africa? Does the stench of our
corpses start to bother you? —Sipho
Sepamla South Africa
is once again on the tube, in the flashbulb afterburn of Nelson Mandela's
release from jail after twenty- seven years out of the public eye.
He walked through the gates of Victor Verster Prison in early February.
During his last year of captivity, he was a "faceless man with
a fax machine,"(1) negotiating the shots with the lameduck though
ironfisted government as they prepared for "talks about talks."
Mandela came
to light in the edenic wine country near Paarl. It was a short drive
to Cape Town, where in a speech he reaffirmed his dedication to the
principles for which he had been sentenced to life imprisonment. A
few days later, a quick flight north took him home to Soweto, a couple
dozen kilometers from Johannesburg. At one to two million people (precise
figures, due to the exigencies of apartheid, are impossible to produce),
Soweto is the most populous urban area in Southern Africa, an acronymic
concentration city—SOuthWEst TOwnship. It has been
a long haul, but the struggle isn't over yet. In an historic moment,
the ANC held its first talks with the government in May. The genie
of change, once loosed, is awfully hard to coax back into the bottle.
The African
National Congress (ANC), established in 1912, is Africa's oldest liberation
movement. With Namibia attaining independence in March, South Africa
will be last on the continent to shake off the racist vestiges of
colonialism, palefaced minority rule. The dry white
"season of violence" is supposed to be over, according to
President F.W. de Klerk's surprisingly conciliatory speech opening
Parliament in Cape Town, on February 2nd of this year. Yet "unrest"
continues, as the tortured skein of apartheid is riven by its own
contradictions. War is being fought in Natal against a riveting green
backdrop, in and around the Valley of the Thousand Hills, outside
Pietermaritzburg. The United Democratic Front (UDF), a coalition aligned
with the ANC, is in conflict with Inkatha, a chauvinistic Zulu tribal
organization. Thousands have been killed in the crossfire in the last
three years. The bantustans,
or so-called independent homelands are convulsed by coups (in Transkei,
Ciskei, and now Venda); four of the six main homeland leaders refuse
to meet with de Klerk. These homelands were a costly mistake, a segregationist
effort to create cheap labor reserves on an unmatched scale. 17 million
people, out of the total South African population of 30 million people
live in the homelands—3 1/2 million are there as the result of
forced relocations. Nowhere else
has a government sought to denationalize its racial majority—stripping
them of South African citizenship—then renationalizing them along
forced tribal lines. Ultimately, they are going to have to be reincorporated
with South Africa, in bizarre contrast to the independence movements
of the Baltic states and the myriad popular fronts emerging in the
southern Soviet republics, seeking deannexation. Some are quick
to paint de Klerk, the white President (representing South Africa's
National Party), a reformist ala Gorbachev. While there may not be
much risk of de Klerkomania sweeping the world, it would be well to
take "Pretoriastroika" with a word of caution from de Tocqueville:
The most dangerous time for a bad government is when it starts
to reform itself. Mandela has
journeyed to Lusaka, Zambia, where he was appointed Deputy President
of the exiled African National Congress. This is a short-term position,
from which he can soon be expected to become President of "the
new South Africa." His release
marks a southern symmetry with the freeing of Vaclav Havel, whose
accession to President of Czechoslovakia, shows what a short walk
it can be from prison to leadership. And, just as
impressive, is the well of human kindness which marks a new,
more benign style of leadership. Neither Havel nor Mandela show bitterness
towards their erstwhile captors. "An eye for an eye and the nation
is blind," says one Civic Forum slogan—a pithy and persuasive
argument opposing vengeance against the ousted morally bankrupt Czechoslovak
Communist authorities. Nelson Mandela
has shown himself to be a rare and self- effacing man of great subtlety,
patience and power. He is very much in contrast with the whites, particularly
the ruling tribe. In stereotypical fashion, many of the older Afrikaners
rail at length about their many grievances, enmities that can be dated
generations, if not centuries:
"Remember
that Queen Victoria? A bigger mass murderer than Adolf Hitler!"
says Frank de Klerk, an elderly legal clerk living in Pretoria. In
many ways, he is a classic example of the verkrampte (hardline)
Afrikaner. He speaks with a thick, almost German, Transvaal accent
that rolls his rrrs. "My grandfather
fought in 14 kaffir wars," he continued. My aunt and cousin both
winced, having heard this spleen ad nauseam. "And I can tell
you, before I'm ruled by a black, I'll shoot every bloody black bastard
in sight." In 1900, three
of the de Klerk family farms were burned by the British. (deKlerk
is a common Boer name; Frank is not directly related to the current
President, F.W.) Afrikaner women and children—mostly of the rebel
Boer republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State—were put
in concentration camps, where 26,000 died. Relatively few—7,000—of
the Boer fighters died, while British casualties numbered about 22,000.
Through force of Empire, and "a bumper crop of burnt farms,"(2)
Britain eventually wore the Boer guerrillas down, and peace was negotiated.
After "a
century of wrong" at the hands of the British, many of the Boer
bittereinders wanted to fight to the absolute end. As Frank
de Klerk made clear to me over dinner—at least for those who
could remember oppression when they were on the receiving end—there
can be no overestimating the depths of Afrikaner rage. I listened,
for that is why I went to South Africa: to hear South Africans talk
about what possesses them, as they grope their way to the end of a
nationalist nightmare. And as you
see at night, far in the Bay reflections
of the stars and city lamps so in the dark
depths of our people sway images of the
concentration camps.(3) It was more
than just a holiday in Pretoria. Partly I went because of an irresistable
need to step beyond the narrow confines of my life as an information
worker. From 8 to 5, I work cloistered in the desert groves of academe,
a sanctum sanctorum, the very rarefied atmosphere of a special
collections library. Books were
part of my displacement, for it was reading that took me beyond
the pettiness of narrow nationalism. I plundered the collections for
a sense of history, to fill out the outlines of what I knew from the
all-pervasive media web. To ease the infernal pain that convulsed
those early days of estrangement from the Love of My Life, I turned
to the videocool inner climes of TV, with all its basic peripherals—at
least that is how I got through the first hellish days and nights
alone. The tube punched a hole through distance—an amazing if
illusory form of armchair travel. One can only
trek so far in a reading room, or as a couch potato. After a while,
even trips to the kitchen get old, to say nothing of Richard Attenborough,
or, however well-intentioned, Public Television. After six
months of heavy tubal stimulation, it was time to broaden other horizons.
The South African
Question had a particularly strong resonance. There were personal
motivations that made this an especially important point for departure.
When my wife abandoned our marriage with the cliched seven years'
itch, there wasn't much left to moor me except dread routine. Our
breakup was due I'm sure in part to my native stubbornness, a self-defeating
obstinacy that I could easily relate to my paternalistic Afrikaner
family background. My father left
South Africa in the early fifties. After working many years in the
Copper Belt (Zambia), he emigrated to pursue his education with a
doctorate at McGill University in Montreal. His peripatetic career
has involved exploration of the largely untapped mineral wealth of
Canada. Without understanding
why, I've always felt a strong identification with him, though we
have not always been the best of friends. One of my chief parental
imperatives was to attain bilingualism in French and English, but
Afrikaans remained a secret language my father used in moments of
rare mellowness or intimacy. It wasn't till I was nearing teens that
I even realized he spoke with an accent. My own feet are itchy to
match his. After a decade in the U.S., I still feel far from "home"—wherever
that is. As the "no
fault" divorce shunted its way through the legal bureaucracy
of the state of California, I was rarin' to go ... somewhere.
Obstacles abound
to our understanding of what goes on in the world today, from the
realignments of Mittel- and Osteuropa, to the liberation
of Southern Africa. As long as South Africa can give good tube, it
has the guaranteed G spot in our circuit of consciousness. The sight
of Mandela free is certainly one of the great images of our day, although
fifteen minutes of fame cannot begin to cover this story. People power
and the Velvet Revolution were more than just flickers on the cave
wall, they took us to a new level of broadcast, a tube beyond its
traditional role as electronic phenothiazine. It's no longer "news
from nowhere" that we see—from the American shores, it appears
that history is happening ... elsewhere. Reactions were none
too encouraging when I announced to my Berkeley colleagues that I
was going to South Africa. "But you're
not supposed to go there." "Better
take a bulletproof vest." "Are you
crazy?!" Family was
no more supportive. My father couldn't understand why I'd bother;
he wasn't close to his many relatives there, and was a bit uneasy
about my meeting them, or perhaps concerned at what they might think
meeting me. My brother viewed this plan as further proof of my death
wish: "They'll kill you—" meaning, I suppose,
that I could be a tempting target for whatever transgressions I might
commit on this existential errand. I was willing
to risk it. What did I have to lose? I'd never been one to toe a party
line, and was not noted for political correctness—it would be
a pleasure to commit this sin of a mission. Although I believed in
divestment and sanctions, I also thought information was essential
to a peaceful transition. It was my first
vacation in many years. I looked at it, strangely, as a liberation
to get away from my job, even if that meant going to a garrison state
to search for myself in a distant fatherland. Beyond the
romance of embarking on this telemachiad, South Africa drew
me in a way I associated with the Spanish Civil War of the thirties,
or, I suppose, the internationalism of the sandalista brigades
of the eighties trooping down to Nicaragua to work in the coffee fields
and take flak from the contras. These new crusades are by nature revolutionary,
to offset the imperialist adventures Westerners are better known for.
People with
antiapartheid inclinations were expected to show their credentials
by jumping on the boycott bandwagon. I agree that performers should
not play Sun City, but when Paul Simon brought out Graceland,
I was delighted by the fruitful and ear-opening collaboration. It saddened
me to see a man like Conor Cruise O'Brien—someone I don't necessarily
agree with—shouted down by angry demonstrators when he gave a
series of guest lectures at the University of Cape Town in 1986. They
protested his breaking the boycott ... yet in the case of an academic
and educator, is it right to limit the free flow of ideas? Isn't the
banning of people and ideas a sanction employed by the
South African government? The same inflexible
dogmatism is evident on the right, as exemplified by the Afrikaner
Resistance Movement leader Eugene Terre-Blanche. The AWB (Afrikaner
Weerstandsbeweging) is infamous for the swastika-like emblem on its
flag, often seen at rallies, of the three interlocking sevens, reputed
to be a millenarian solution to the 666 Beast of the Apocalypse. Terre-Blanche
and his boerjes tarred and feathered the historian, Floors
van Jaarsveld during a 1979 speech at the University of South Africa
in Pretoria. An example was made of this professor because he questioned
the Afrikaans version of manifest destiny, the divinity of their Day
of the Covenant. A former policeman
and bodyguard to Prime Minister John Vorster, Terre Blanche (the "White
Earth") has been charged at various times for having arms caches,
illegal possession of weapons and ammunition. To date, he and his
followers have never had worse than their wrists slapped. This may
soon change, as the AWB and conservative whites are increasing their
militance in reaction to the release of Mandela, and the government's
meeting with the ANC. The Conservative Party leader Andries Treurnicht
recently called for "a third freedom struggle"—a thinly-veiled
call to arms—at a rally of 50,000 right-wing whites in Pretoria.
In the sacred
history of the tribe, the Boers made a pact with God—”if He gave
the Voortrekkers victory against Dingaan's Zulu impis at Ncome
River in 1838, they would forever mark that as the Day of the Covenant.
In Afrikaner history, it is referred to as the Battle of Blood River,
and it demonstrated God's recognition and support for the justice
of their cause. One essential
feature of Afrikaner civil tradition is for men to go on commando.
Breyten Breytenbach, the renegade Afrikaner poet and painter, writes
of "this
mythical concept in modern-day White South African awareness... Not
so modern after all. The history of the Afrikaner has been one of
borders, of the enemy lurking just over the horizon, of buffer states
used against the world wanting to take over the lands their ancestors
conquered. They were proud of their periods on the border, of the
hunts they participated in."(4) In recent years,
particularly under de Klerk's pugnacious predecessor, P.W.Botha, these
hunts have gone far beyond South Africa's borders, the "rogue
elephant of Southern Africa."(5) Yet Botha was regarded as a
moderate! The verkrampte (hardliners) were actually concerned
that South Africa might be afflicted by a "psychosis of peace"(6)
in the early eighties. Newspeak—the
deliberate simplification of vocabulary and linguistic complexity
as a means of limiting crimes in thought and speech—is alive
and well, both at home and abroad. Words can be made to betray their
meanings without having to pass through Room 101 of 1984. "Words
tossed around as if/denied location by the wind/...that stalk our
lives like policemen" runs a poem by Sipho Sepamla. The U.S. Pentagon
is a prime purveyor of such malignant wordage, with "permanent
prehostility" (peace), "lethal aid" for supplying proxie
forces with weapons, "violence processing" (combat), and
best of all, the "Peacekeeper" (MX) Missile. In Eastern
Europe, people did not wait in line, they joined "socialist waiting
collectives."(7) While we may
identify the violence of apartheid with forced relocations, peaceful
marchers being gassed, or fired upon by soldiers in casspirs (not
the friendly ghost, but armored personnel carriers), there are many
more subtle and insidious components to that "Frankenstein-Madison
Avenue cauldron of wordsmithing."(8) For a time
the government had its Bantu Administration Department, which was
responsible for administering townships and the homelands. It was
responsible for forced relocations, but underwent a name-change when
bureaucrats realized that its acronym was not contributing to its
effectiveness. It became the Ministry of Cooperation of Development.
After the Sharpeville
massacre in 1960, and through the seventies, South Africa became a
model police state, with a powerful secret police (BOSS—Bureau
of State Security) operating around the world...and at home. In the late
seventies, South Africa underwent a quiet military coup when the Minister
of Defense, P.W. Botha, became Prime Minister. He retained the Defense
Minister portfolio until he was able to install his handpicked head
of the Defense Force, General Magnus Malan, as the new Defense Minister.
Together, these
two "securocrats" dominated South African politics for the
next decade. They presided over a tremendous build-up of the military—today
South Africa is one of the top ten arms exporters in the world—and
adopted the concept of the "total strategy" for a long term
counterinsurgency. This "triumvirate of 'totality': total strategy,
total onslaught, total involvement" were the keywords of this
era.(9) The totalitarian blueprint for the militarization of society
was conducted with characteristic, even absurd attention to detail.
It included a "Leisure Time Utilization Unit" to promote
"spiritual defensibility" in the ranks.(10) The "total
strategy" of P.W. Botha and his protegéGeneral Malan can
at last be found on the same ashheap as trickle-down Reaganomics,
and lately, Stalinism. As details of their dirty tricks come to light,
F.W. de Klerk has, with visible reluctance, been compelled to launch
an investigation of the innocuous-sounding "Civil Cooperation
Bureau." This unit, operated by the military, was a death squad.
In any situation of social or political polarity, debate is all too
susceptible to reductio ad absurdum. Ideas become slogans,
some inspirational ("An injury to one is an injury to all"
or "Strike a woman, you have struck a rock"), some unrealistic
and self-defeating ("No education before liberation"), and
some virulently racist ("Sit die kaffir op sy plek" = "Put
the nigger in his place"). To move freely
across the lines, or to more easily slip through the strictures of
cant is one of the virtues of being an outsider. Travel is a way to
remain outside. As a writer,
another kind of outsider, I went to hear how writers and poets sustained
themselves in life under Emergency conditions. The timing of my visit
was nestled in the brief period between the '85/'86 Emergency, and
the June '86 Emergency (which continues to this day). Much has happened
to the people I spoke with: at least two have gone into exile; some
were detained; others have had their organizations banned—the
UDF and the End Conscription Campaign are only now able to resurface
after Botha and the Minister of Law and Order, Adriaan Vlok, clamped
down on them earlier in the Emergency. As censorship
has been applied to the arts, black writers have borne the brunt of
bannings and persecution. Beginning in the fifties, with Bantu Education,
teachers and writers (e.g. Ezekiel Mphahlahle), journalists (Nat Nakasa)
and so many others have had to flee "the beloved land."
Musicians and singers (Hugh Masakela, Miriam Makeba), poets (Dennis
Brutus, Arthur Nortje, Wally Serote) have continued this flight through
the sixties after Sharpeville, the seventies with Soweto, and in the
eighties' semi-permanent Emergency. Simply putting
distance between themselves and the casspirs, hippos, banning, detention,
and Robben Island is not always enough. Exile has its own dangers:
"Life
abroad lacks the challenge that faces us in South Africa. After a
lifetime of illegal living in the Republic's shebeens, the exiles
are suddenly called upon to become respectable, law-abiding citizens.
Not a law to break in sight. I have broken too many ... regulations
to change so easily. Even if I did change, I would miss the experience
of illegal living." wrote Nat Nakasa.
He, Arthur Nortje and Ingrid Jonker are writers who committed suicide
in exile. Wally Serote narrowly escaped assassination in the South
Africa Defense Force's 1986 raid on Gaborone, Botswana. Whites, of
course, have an entirely different tolerance of conditions in an abnormal
society. One of my relatives said, with a certain smugness, "I
am as opportunistic as any white person in this country; while it
lasts, I enjoy it. "Heart disease, suicide, and alcoholism are
three of the greatest dangers facing whites in South Africa. Mike Kirkwood,
an editor at Ravan Press, put it another way: "... [T]he
writer who is living in an insulated white suburb, backed up by very
good video resources, television, all the literature he can read,
good food, continental cuisine, fresh french bread every morning,
doesn't have to see a black person if he doesn't want to. He goes
shopping in the most elaborate malls all tucked underground like bunkers—even
that writer, who can be totally insulated from the political reality
of South Africa, is aware that that very experience is a deeply political
one. It's almost impossible for him to keep out of mind the fact that
the existence he is leading is dependent on the flames in the township." At the time—April
1986—Ravan was situated in a dilapidated old house in the Berea
district of Johannesburg. Berea and Hillbrow are adjoining residential
neighborhoods with valleys of hi-rises running through them. These
"grey areas" were often referred to with shudders by my
relatives, for they are now home to tens of thousands of blacks illegally
living in parts of town reserved for whites. Ravan is one of the more
progressive imprints in South Africa; its writers include J.M. Coetzee
and Njabulo Ndebele. The office
I visited was firebombed a few years later. Although a considerable
amount of stock was lost, Ravan endures as a publishing entity, issuing
books and periodicals like Work In Progress and Staffrider.
Mike was one
of the chief editors, and had been the firm's director since 1977.
Since the State of Emergency was reimposed following my visit, he
has left the country, moving to England. MK: You will find in South Africa numerous pockets
of communication, which are very full inside that particular pocket.
In other words, lots of dialects—not simply in a language sense, but in terms
of idiom, in terms of a way people have of understanding each other.
For instance, if you were to go around Berea, and talk to guys who
live on the roof tops for a long time, you would find that they have
an amazing pattern of communication. Let me give
you an example. I wake up late in the night in my block of flats,
which is just over here. I hear a guy whistling—this is two o'clock
in the morning. He is whistling in the most incredible way, the way
guys whistle cattle, but it clearly has a pattern to it. After a while,
you hear a door opening somewhere, a gruff voice calling out in Zulu:
"Hi. We're over here. Come this way." What this guy's been
doing is a bit like Richard the Lionhearted and his troubadour, singing
outside the castle walls. He's identified his own boys, which is the
word that people use. PW: And he doesn't know necessarily which building
they'll be on, but if they hear the noise he makes— MK: Right, somebody's going to come running, and he's going to find
his way. He might have come from miles and miles, from a distant part
of the country—a rural boy new to the city. He's using his cattle whistle as a way
of finding his home-boy connections. That's one
example. Their whole world is very well-knit. It's a sort of support
structure, one of the things that turns the whole "blacks are
victims in South Africa" cliche upside down, because people are
not just victims; they do find ways to support each other in an oppressive
situation. There you have quite a tight knit pocket of communication.
I'd suggest that South Africa, as a country, is relatively richer
in pockets like that, which are not accessible. If you put
a tape recorder in front of those guys, they'd probably beat you up—they'd
assume you were from the State, and that you were trying to get them
to commit a felony of some kind, they'd wonder what they hell you
were doing. PW: However well ordered a society you have, there are always going
to be these cracks, and subcultures. In this case, it is literally
the supra culture. MK: I think that's really an interesting point, because I think that's
true. We're talking about a different level now, and for me the thing
goes back to the theme of storytelling, really. What you're talking
about when you talk about subcultures developing in the cracks of
a media-penetrated, media-inundated society is something similar to
storytelling, but at a whole new level of development. In other words,
I'm inclined to take a phrase like "the global village"
quite seriously, in the sense that one is talking about a new possibility
of communication between tightly knit groups of people, but at a whole
new level. I don't think one should just skip the levels. Those guys
on the roof tops—it's going to take them quite a lot of time,
quite a lot of community organization, political organization, before
they can plug into some sort of world network of communication, and
talk to Processed World, to you guys in San Francisco, or a
group somewhere else in the world. ... If one is black,
however, the possibilities are fewer. Another writer, Sipho Sepamla
(author of the novel Ride the Whirlwind, and numerous books
of poetry) spoke with me about prospects for change. SS: I'm the last person to say "Revolution is the answer."
Because I'm for life, rather than destroying life. I'm scared
of violence, because I think it's anti-human to be violent. But, you see,
I'm fairly all right. I look at the person who's not in a similar
position to me, and I wonder what are the chances of that person improving
his lot? The answer is that they're very small. Some people—I
think this is the majority—are caught up in a situation where
some of them wish they were never born. If they'd had a choice, they
would have said to God, "Please, I don't want to go and live
down there. I'd rather be where I am," in whatever form that
is. When you look
at the situation in the country—not at the black man, like me,
who is able to sit with you, and talk your language—it is that
man who is not able to articulate what's inside him. And you know
he lives a pain, which he cannot bring out, and that is killing him.
This bottling up—it's a pity, because it's going to kill him
in the end. What then was the purpose in bringing him to Earth? To
work for mere wages, to live under poor conditions? ... I visited Sipho
in Johannesburg, at Fuba, an art studio/exhibit space where he worked
as an educator, and senior administrator. SS: There are very few people who buy books by black writers; you have
to be known to be bought. A new writer will not find it easy to enter
the market.
PW: Where would their energies be going if they're creative, but feel
too disillusioned to write or publish? Would they write for the desk
drawer, do you think; are they self-publishing, samizdat, type
work; do they channel the energy into political action, or is it bottled
up? SS: I think most of our feelings are bottled up. There is no way we
could do what the Russians are doing with samizdat because
the South African security system is very efficient—sooner or
later they would catch up with anyone doing that kind of thing. I don't think
many blacks would write stuff that they put away. It may be happening
with whites, but I don't think blacks would do that. Our writing is
immediate—we address ourselves to immediate issues, and we want
to be published immediately. PW: How would you hope the writer affects the world? SS: I hope to God that more and more people would read the works I've
written, but then there are so many things working against the tradition
of writing and reading in this country. As a result, we don't have
many people who read our works. Unfortunately, it is true that most
of the readers are white, so we're caught up in a very ironic situation
because although we claim we are not writing for Whitey, we find that
Whitey is the one who reads our works. The Group Areas
Act just consolidated what was there already. I grew up before the
time of apartheid, but apartheid was in full swing even then—I
grew up in a location that was miles from town. I don't think it is
correct to blame apartheid for that kind of thing [divisions between
black and white writers]; apartheid merely made it worse. Also, I
suppose apartheid exposed the fallacy of a friendship that was in
fact one-sided, because whites always expected us to go to them. Very
few came to where we lived, even when the law was silent about that.
There's no
running away from it. The South Africa situation is like somebody
sitting on a powder keg. ... Apparently
contradicting his earlier assertion, Sipho gave a different forecast
for change: SS: I think revolution is our only solution. You know the
whites are so entrenched, man, because ... what are people talking
about? They can't be talking of Western values, because there
are no Western values in this country. People are merely concerned
about their material possessions, and I don't think anyone can expect
whites to give up anything, because for us to rise they've got halt
the development of the growth of white people. PW: When majority rule is attained, do you see a rapprochement between
the hard lines that are now drawn in the dust? SS: Unavoidable. I think we live by natural laws, rather than laws made
by man. The laws made by man, somewhere along the line, they break
down. Apartheid was so rigid many years back, but the natural way
of life has broken it down. The realities, economics, whatever, have
broken apartheid down. PW: You think it will break down the Afrikaners' intransigence? SS: I think so. I've found it very interesting that among the Afrikaners,
some of these chaps that I've heard express so- called liberal ideas
are people that I know have traveled a great deal. As more and more
of them get money, and move around, and find that there are black
people outside who are having white women, who are moving in all circles
of life, they must come back here and ask themselves, "What's
so bad about what I saw out there?" And they will fall in line.
I don't think they like being condemned by the world like they are
being condemned right now. It takes some time for the majority to
reach that point. That is what we are playing for. I think what
is happening in this country is that the black people have now set
the pace for how things have to move. Even if the white man is changing,
those changes are invisible, because the people who are calling the
tune are not the white people any more; they are the black people.
To be acceptable, the white people will have to be in line with the
pace set by the blacks. But change—unavoidable. PW: But they will get swept up in that pace? SS: If they don't, they will get crushed under. ... Many models
are invoked in discussions of South Africa—the violence and unrest
suggest the specter of a Lebanon. The real white nightmare is revolution.
The poet James
Matthews, who lives in Athlone, outside Cape Town, told me of the
hopelessness that was taking hold among the younger generation: "We
can accommodate any violence. Now we come back again to the existentialism
of the young. That is why our kids don't worry, they say, 'Fuck, I
don't care if I don't come home today.'" Proposed solutions
include a federation of cantons, on a Swiss model, as a means of protecting
whites from black domination. Even more far-fetched are the secessionary
white movements, like the extremist AWB, or the Friends of Oranje,
whose ideas of a white homeland (a Boerestaat comprised, naturally,
of the best and richest land) are no more tenable than the fragmentary
black homelands Bophuthatswana or Ciskei. While de Klerk
and his predecessor P.W. Botha have done much to dismantle "petty
apartheid" with repeals of the Separate Amenities Act, Mixed
Marriages and Immorality Acts, and the passbook laws, "grand
apartheid" remains substantially intact. People continue to be
classified by race (Population Registration Act) and in theory have
their places of residence, the government services available to them,
and their employment opportunities determined by this classification.
Apartheid ("separateness")
was given its name by the National Party, elected in 1948. As Sipho
mentioned, the "colour bar" was nothing new. By 1936, 87%
of the land was reserved for white settlement and development. The
rest, largely inhospitable, was set aside for what was then 67% of
the population—now more than 75% of South Africans are black. Under
the Group Areas Act, blacks are viewed as "temporary sojourners"
in the white areas, tolerated only to the extent they were needed
to work in the mines, on the farms, and in the pantries of white society.
One dearly-held
belief among the whites is that the blacks can't rule themselves,
they are still savages: "You can take 'em out of the bush, but
you can't take the jungle out of their hearts." Or, as National
Party MP Glenn Babb put it: "There is a survival ethic in South
Africa which is important, because we have stood on the Limpopo and
looked north and seen that Africa has not worked in the way in which
we would like justice to work." The whites
call this bogey the swart gevaar, or black danger. More proof
that the "kaffirs" are unable to govern themselves, let
alone take the reins of the whites' jealously guarded first world
society. Because of
the bold lines drawn reserving property and capital for the "civilized"
whites—apartheid is an unusually cruel, if transparent mechanism
to assure economic as well as racial hegemony for a privileged few—South
Africa lends itself readily to a Marxist analysis, with blacks the
working class. While this form of racial capitalism may have been
effective up to a point, it cannot be maintained. For the economy
to grow, apartheid must go, as it limits the education and placement
of a skilled workforce. With the added stress of sanctions, and the
drying-up of investment, the economy has slowed while the population
and unemployment have soared. Ampie Coetzee,
a professor of Afrikaans at the University of the Witwatersrand in
1986 (now at the University of the Western Cape), commented on this
phenomenon: "That's the strangest thing about South Africa: apartheid
has actually strengthened capitalism. It has made a definite class
distinction between the worker and the bourgeois. The worker is the
black man, and we whites are the bourgeois. And the worker is keeping
this country going. "On the
one hand, that's the strength of apartheid, but it could also be the
weakness. When trade unions become more and more mobilized—”that's
where I think eventually we will probably see big changes. COSATU
(11) was only formed this year. "That's
very, very powerful. That's where this South African brand of capitalism
could actually be broken—by the workers. Because the workers are
all oppressed, and racially oppressed. They have ample motivation;
it's just a case of mobilization." Schools have
long been crucibles of resistance. They have been viewed by the black
youth with understandable wariness. Bantu Education, promulgated in
the fifties by the future Prime Minister, H.F. Verwoerd, was training
for enslavement. It was a policy of deliberately limiting blacks to
roles as the wood hewers and mine-fodder for white society. Verwoerd
was quite blunt in his views: "... [T]he native child must be
taught subjects which will enable him to work with and among his own
people; therefore there is no use misleading him by showing him the
green pastures of European society, in which he is not allowed to
graze. Bantu Education should not be used to create imitation whites."
Through subtle
and not-so subtle conditioning, the students were indoctrinated with
a view of a world in which they had precisely defined functions, with
opportunities circumscribed by "job reservation" of skilled
positions for whites, a much-lower pay scale for blacks, commutes
which could last 6 hours or more, and other impossible conditions.
After the Soweto uprising of 1976, there followed a period of tense
calm, but then school strikes flared around the country in 1980, as
the crisis in education deepened. One writer,
Jaki Seroke, of Skotaville Press told me about some of the difficulties
he had to deal with as a writer and editor. PW: You are involved in a writers' union? Which one is it? JS: It's called the African Writers Association. It's not a union in
the popular sense. It's an association of people who come together
as writers, some as beginner writers. PW: Do you discuss works in progress? JS: Yes, we discuss works in progress. It's a loose association. Skotaville
Publishing was formed by the association. We'll be publishing
really topical books. Some will be political, and so on, but on the
literary side, we don't want to be seen to be pushing writers who
have not necessarily grasped the art of writing. The association has
consciously been trying to influence Skotaville to exercise literary
merit on each case. We don't want to publish a play because it will
have a sociological interest. PW: ... or because it's topical ... JS: Not that we say art for art's sake, but the craft of writing has
to be done properly. There are drawbacks on that level. The influence
of Bantu Education in the past thirty years has destroyed a lot of
things here. The writers who are established or who could write properly
are the writers of the fifties, because they never underwent that
educational process. That's why most of our writers are in prison
or the ones inside the country are not doing much. PW: Why would you say the ones in the country are silent, what silences
them? JS: Basically, it was repression. A lot of our people are in prison.
... One of the
greatest weapons against tyranny, apart from sabotage and insurrection,
is for people to live and work together as they wish, without
regard for insane decrees handed down by the state. It is by this
means that grey areas like Hillbrow in Johannesburg wear down the
teeth of apartheid. Where law is unenforceable, it falls into disrepute,
and is rendered ultimately irrelevant. The Group Areas
Act, the legislation that underpins the bantustans and townships by
tribal division, may be the last pillar of apartheid to fall; already
it is beginning to totter through resistance in the homelands (coups
and armed insurrections) and people, black and white, increasingly
ignoring it in the once white cities. After centuries
of wrong, apartheid is withering away. Archbishop Desmond Tutu and
Reverend Allan Boesak are right to ask to see its corpse. A death
blow may still be needed, although the armed struggle waged by the
military wing of the ANC—Umkhonto we Sizwe—has never been,
and probably never will be capable of engaging the South Africa Defense
Force decisively. The linguistic
battlefield is where the future of South Africa may ultimately be
decided. The Afrikaners attained power owing in large part to the
development of their own language as a separate and distinct voice
in Africa. They succeeded in unifying a white tribal power base, and
used it to divide the country. SACHED, the
South African Committee on Higher Education, is another organization
which has struggled to counter the intellectual depredations of Bantu
Education. One of its directors, Neville Alexander, views culture
as a process, and language policy as a baseline on which to develop
a new national consensus. Encouraging the use of English by the black
majority (usually as a second or third language) assumes a critical
importance, ironically, in the interests of decolonization. It serves
to unify a people split across many language lines, and provides access
to the world at large. "[The acquisition of English] represents
... a form of capital accumulation. But this is a very special kind
of capital since it is an instrument of communication and not one
of production. It is nevertheless this instrument, and generally this
instrument alone, which makes possible the organization of the entire
modern sector of production and distribution of goods. In other words,
the more English you know ... the more likely you are to get a well-paying
job, the more likely you are to accumulate capital, to gain economic
power and thus political power."(12) The transition
of South Africa from garrison state to majority rule will not be as
swift as the opening up of Eastern Europe—to follow it requires
more sustained attention than we can hope for from a week on Nightline.
The turmoil of apartheid has been clicking the counter towards critical
mass, an ever intensifying revolution of rising expectations, with
urgency written large on the world stage since Sharpeville, 1960.
The reforms
announced at the beginning of 1990 are motivated in large part by
the desperate economic situation, due both to internal factors and
international pressure. As Sipho Sepamla pointed out, whites are going
to have to surrender some of the privileges accorded them by color
to arrive at a deeper security. Men like my Uncle Frank de Klerk will
have to compete on equal terms with people he might consider his racial
inferiors. The Broederbond tradition of baantjies vir boeties
(jobs for friends) has led to half of all employable Afrikaners working
in some capacity for the State. Job reservation will have to end,
followed by an affirmative action to correct labor and property inequities,
the "redistribution of wealth" which whites dread, but increasingly
accept as inevitable. After four
years of harsh Emergency rule, some press restrictions have been lifted;
media workers such as Zwelake Sisulu (editor of the New Nation)
has been released from lengthy detention—in time for the innumerable
photo opportunities afforded by the returning exiles, as African National
Congress leaders have whisked through Jan Smuts Airport in Johannesburg
en route to the "talks about talks" in Cape Town. Western media
have to a large degree complied with restrictions imposed during the
Emergency, which is why little was heard about South Africa in the
mainstream press from 1986 through 1989. Even worse, news reports
in both the American and British media too often blandly repeat the
language of the South African Bureau of Information, apparent in the
expression "black on black violence." That stock phrase
has shades of the swart gevaar, along with the tribal sleight
of hand by which the ruling National Party has used a trick of apartheid
to divide and rule on lines of its own devising. "It's just more
faction fighting, showing these uncivilized blacks aren't fit to rule"
is the message implicit in such terminology. So we navigate
across a slipstream mediascape littered by Knowledge McNuggets, warped
by the sudden combustion of televised blipverts, and a media necklaced
either by state control, or the self-censorship of monopolistic corporate
ownership. It is a strain just to keep track of all the bright and
dark threads on this world skein, if we are to tie up some of the
loose ends before the millenium. As 1989 segued
into the nineties, it reached the point where there was a Country
of the Week, or in the last weeks of the year, several countries had
to vie for world attention: Panama under siege by a U.S. surgical
sledge hammer, while Romania fought to drive a stake through the heart
of its "Vampirescu" leader, Nicolae Ceausescu ("that
Genius of the Carpathians"), after decades of hemophiliac Stalinist
rule. Some day I
will return to South Africa. For all its strangeness, it had a familiarity
which was almost supernatural, and I suppose, highly personal. My
hope in writing on this subject has been to show that the issues are
not duochromatic, just black and white, and that resolution lies in
the struggle to free captive hearts and minds with human decency,
and new channels of communication. As apartheid
crumbles, South African society will be remade in the wake of protean
change. This story has staying power, with special relevance to Americans.
It represents one of the great unanswered questions of this century:
how does a rich and powerful elite, with centuries of inbred intolerance,
and a defiant isolationism, accept or adapt to parity with its neighbors?
Can centuries of bloody-minded determination to call all the shots
be reasoned into reality? For South African whites, the answer to
these questions will decide their future in Africa. A new page
is turning on South Africa. When Mandela steps through the pearly
gates of Pretoria, and takes the nation's capitol with him, the people
will finally come together after centuries of struggle. —by William Brummer
1)
Comedian Pieter-Dirk Uys, quoted in The New York Times, 30
Jan. 1990
2)
Pakenham, Thomas. The Boer War. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1979.
3)
Opperman, D.J. "Camera."
4)
Breytenbach, Breyten. The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist.
New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1983. p.52
5)
Crocker, Chester A. South Africa's defense posture: coping with
vulnerability. Beverly Hills : Published for the Center for Strategic
and International Studies, Georgetown University [by] Sage Publications,
c1981. (Washington papers ; 84) (Sage policy paper)
6)
Grundy, Kenneth W. The Militarization of South African Politics.
Bloomington, IN : Indiana University Press, 1986. p.58
7)
The New York Times, 12 Sept. 1989
8)
The New York Times, 28 Sept. 1985
9)
Frankel, Philip. Pretoria's Praetorians: civil-military relations
in South Africa. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1984. p.54
10)
Frankel, p. 96
11)
Congress of South African Trade Unions
12)
Alexander, Neville. "Language Policy and National Unity"
in Language Projects' Review, v.4:3 (Nov. 1989).
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