Living in Hope and History (19 page)

I believe we must create material justice before we can hope to eliminate the kind of violence that has become a tragic habit in South Africa. Given that base, I believe there is a good chance of decent relations between black and black, black and white in our country, whatever languages they speak, whatever their ethnic origins may be. For I can think of no other country in Africa where, in spite of our extraordinary racism, a comparable proportion of people of all races have committed themselves to the black struggle for freedom, recognizing it as their own. Now we need a politics that will nurture material justice before we can hope to live in peace. A new constitution, new laws must change the economic circumstances of the majority; healing can take place only on that honesty of purpose. And that healing will need all the patience and tolerance I believe many blacks and whites are prepared to give it.

—1990

 

 

 

 

T
he gawky tripods of television cameras stalked the green of the field at Soccer City, photographers in their many-pocketed vests imported from Banana Republic stores in New York took aim from contorted positions along the curving tiers of people who were there to participate and not to report. But I saw notebooks and even the reverse sides of posters balanced on knees while hands carefully managed ball-pens.

For all of us who shared a sense of occasion without precedent in our lives there must have been differences in the lens of experience, memory, through which we saw ourselves and others in that vast congress. Not even the novelist in me can imagine what the senses of Walter Sisulu and his wife, Albertina, were receiving as they walked round the perimeter of the field, protected from the sun by vivid Congress of South African Trade Unions umbrellas—a process like a
durbar
, exposed to the single, enormous throat of joy opening around them. And
how did Ahmed Kathrada see the faces, caps, flags, saluting raised fists, banners, massed as bright spores grown over the huge amphitheater? What were Elias Motsoaledi and Wilton Mkwayi thinking—all these released prisoners of conscience moving along this strangest of ceremonial aisles, that led around a soccer field from decades of prison and silence to a rostrum under the sky where they would speak, and be heard by thousands, and the words would circle away by satellite, beyond the miserable range of police helicopters?

Sitting beside me was a boy of about ten or eleven. He was eating chips and held tightly a length of wire with a home-made ANC flag tied to it. What was he feeling? Was he the kid I saw, enjoying the Sunday outing, the band and singers who prepared us for the arrival of the leaders, or was he a child who was more mature, in his terrible experience of facing police guns, than I—old enough to be his grandmother—will ever be?

For me, the context of what I was seeing and hearing expanded its meaning, both from within myself and in the actual physical setting. The stadium, although it belongs to Soweto, is not embedded in its endless streets. It is outside, on the open veld. Its great bowl is partly sunk in the ground; I could see the pale yellow mountains of gold-mine waste dumps rising beyond its rim, and between them, the towers of Johannesburg, gauzy in the heat haze, but present. An entire history was displayed there, no vision but concrete reality; a history in which this Sunday was some sort of culmination of justice—certainly not the final one, but surely the first. There were the mine dumps thrown up by the blacks' labour; there was the greatest city in Africa, built with the whites' profit from that labour; and here, in this stadium, were black leaders, incarcerated for a generation, emerged at last to claim what belongs to their people.

I've been attending courts at which the right to this claim has been arraigned as criminal, for many years. The first time was in 1956, the first major treason trial. In the sixties I heard Nelson Mandela make his speech from the dock—become a classic liberation text—when he was sentenced to life imprisonment. I was there when Bram Fischer spoke as a prisoner and not as a distinguished advocate, repudiating the right of an apartheid court to administer justice, and went away to imprisonment ended only by death. Last December I was honoured to give evidence in mitigation in the Delmas treason trial of United Democratic Front leaders Patrick Lekota, Popo Molefe, and others. For me, the sight of the seven leaders whom I remembered going to prison years ago, now coming out with the possibility of being greeted as they should be, with the triumphantly open homage of all of us who care for the liberation of South Africa, was something I privately received as part of the fulfilment of my life as a South African. I felt this, I write this, as one of the crowd.

And by the way, there were seventy thousand of us—different figures have been published (South African television reportedly reduced us to ten thousand . . . )—but I have it from a soccer official himself, who knows the total capacity of Soccer City stadium, and from my own evidence of the extent to which it overflowed that Sunday.

Everyone has remarked on the efficiency—and what's more, the style and dignity—of the way the rally was arranged and conducted. I have my own view of that, because I happen to know that this extraordinary occasion and the gigantic task it represented was made possible, in the main, by a handful of people of whom three are my young colleagues in the Congress of South African Writers: Junaid Ahmed, Raks Seakhoa, and Menzi Ndaba. The marshals recruited from youth organisations
presented a very different picture of black youths from that in the minds of whites who see them as stone-throwers and arsonists. Armed only with patience and friendliness, addressing everyone as “Com” (“Comrade”: in our passion, in the mass democratic movement, for humanising grandiose terms into diminutives), they kept firm order and didn't find it demeaning to tidy away discarded paper cups.

Who were the people who made up the enormous gathering-in of celebrants? Outside the stadium were what looked, from the height of the exit stairways, like a residential quarter of curved-roof habitations: they were parked buses. They came from all over the country, some travelling all night, and they had brought the majority of the crowd. The form of transport was confirmation of what I remarked in the stadium; this crowd was overwhelmingly black working-class. I didn't see many in the smart outfits of the black middle class; someone said they had stayed away because of the threats of white extremists to attack the rally. There were white faces dotted about in every section of the stands; grey heads of some of the pioneer leftists, Black Sash women, representatives of the National Union of South African Students, the Johannesburg Democratic Action Committee, people representing other radical or progressive groups or simply their own solidarity with the ANC; even a new association of Afrikaner democrats announced last week. No, we whites didn't ‘stand out' at all.

Nobody, least of all the released leaders, thinks the continuation to liberation is going to be easy. But whatever is to come, Sunday was a beautiful day, Com. It made a definition of beauty new to me: harmony and trust between human beings of all colours, peace in a gathering huge as a soccer crowd.

—
October 1989

 

 

 

 

L
et us now praise famous men

Nelson Mandela is
the
famous man, today. One of the few who, in contrast with those who have made our twentieth century infamous for fascism, racism, and war, will mark it as an era that achieved advancement for humanity. So will his name live in history, the context in which he belongs to the world.

Of course, we South Africans are part of that context and share this perception of him. But he belongs to us, and—above all—we belong to him on another and different level of experience.

There are those who knew him in childhood in his home, the Transkei, and see, beneath the ageing face formed by extraordinary experiences of Underground existence and imprisonment, the soft contours of a lively youth unaware of the qualities within him beyond a commonplace appetite for life. There are those who knew him as a colleague with whom they shared food
when he, as a black man, could not be served in a restaurant; as a young lawyer whose very presence in court was challenged by white presiding magistrates. There are Freedom Fighters who sacrificed their lives and are not with us to match the image of the leader, in the struggle they shared, with the statesman who has brought it to fulfilment. There are those who see, superimposed upon his public appearances, his face in newspapers and on television today, the memory of his face, figure, and bearing as he spoke from the dock when he was given a life sentence for his actions against apartheid, and declared a commitment he has lived up to since, many times, through many dangers:
I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die
.

It's a temptation to be anecdotal about Mandela. To speak, each of us who has had even some brief point of contact with him, of the pleasure of being remembered as well as remembering. For this man with the Atlas-like weight of our future borne on his erect shoulders does have what appears to be some kind of mind-reading facility to pick up identities, some card-index mnemonic system (perhaps developed in the long contemplative years in prison) that enables him to recognize people he may not have seen for years, or whom he may have met fleetingly during recent weeks of hand-shaking encounters. But this is no trick of political showmanship. Seemingly insignificant, it is a sign of something profound: a remove from self-centredness; the capacity to live for others that is central to his character.

He moves about the country now and is a flesh-and-blood presence to millions. For twenty-seven years he was imprisoned; in our midst—for Robben Island is in sight of Table Mountain, in Cape Town, and Pollsmoor Prison and the house which was
made into a private prison for him, ultimately, are part of the city—and yet, in social terms, entombed. Silenced. Even his image removed; it was forbidden to reproduce his photograph in newspapers or other media.

He could so easily have become legendary, his features recomposed as the ikon of hopes that never would be realized and a freedom that always receded as each wave of resistance within our country was crushed and seemed defeated, and the outside world was indifferent. But the people had a sense of his
enduring what they knew
: the harsh humiliations of prison were everyday experiences to black people under the apartheid pass laws and innumerable other civil restrictions that for generations created a vast non-criminal prison population in South Africa. When he and his colleagues were sent to break stones and pull seaweed out of the Atlantic Ocean, ordinary people among the black population were being hired out by prison authorities as slave farm labour. His people kept him among them in the words of their songs and chants, in the examples of forms of resistance he had passed on to them, and in the demands for his release which were part of the liberation platform, maintained both by leadership in exile and the people themselves, at home. In such news of him that came out of prison, we came to know that his sense of himself was always part of all this, of living it with his people; he received them through prison walls, as they kept him with them.

This double sense was instrinsic to the very stuff of resistance. The strong possibility that he would die in prison was never considered for acceptance. There never was the psychological defeat, for the liberation movement, of his becoming a mythical figure, a Che Guevara, who might reappear someday only in a mystical resurrection on a white horse, since once a personage becomes a myth he has disappeared forever as a leader to take on the present in vulnerable flesh.

Of course, it remains difficult to write of a phenomenon like Mandela in terms other than hagiography. But he is not a god-like figure, despite his enormous popularity—and this popularity, in the era of successful negotiation between black and white, extends in all kinds of directions beyond the trust and reverence in which he is held by blacks and those whites who have been active in liberation from apartheid. I heard on the news while I was writing this that a poll of South African businessmen has revealed that 68 percent wished to see Nelson Mandela as the future president of South Africa . . . Far from assuming a celestial status, Mandela has a quality that is, on the contrary, so fully and absolutely that of a man, the essence of a human being in all the term should mean, could mean, but seldom does. He belongs completely to a real life lived in a particular place and era, and in its relation to the world. He is at the epicentre of our time; ours in South Africa, and yours, wherever you are.