Living in Hope and History (29 page)

Would 1916 have the resonance, in the history of our era, without Yeats's poem of that date whose line ‘a terrible beauty is born' rings on down our years, tolling the awesome pain and exaltation of disparate struggles for freedom. You heard it in India, you heard it, on and on, in Cuba, in Vietnam, in South Africa.

I can speak of literature and politics, pass from one to the other in one breath, so to say, because the former—literature—is created inescapably
within
the destined context of politics. Even literary style, which Proust defines as ‘the moment of identification
between the author and his subject', is also the identification between the author and this destined political context.

We are not only children of our time but of our place. My own consciousness and subconscious, from which I write, come even in the most personal aspects of mind and spirit from destiny shaped by the historico-political matrix into which I was born. The unspeakable shame and horror of the Holocaust and Hiroshima: this heading to our century stands. Beside it, my personal sense of the defining events of our century is dominated by two: the fall of Communism, and the end of colonialism. And the two extraordinary developments are linked subjectively, even contradictorily, for me, since I was born a second-generation colonial in a capitalist-racist society and as I grew up I looked to the Left as the solution to the oppression of the poor and powerless all around me, in my home country and the world.

Satyajit Ray the Indian film-maker and writer has said, ‘It is the presence of the essential thing in a very small detail which one must catch in order to expose larger things.'

This principle I believe applies beyond art, to the general level of awareness of your world with which you were presented when you opened your eyes. The essential detail that exposes the larger things in my life begins very early. I was taken as a toddler to wave a flag at the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII, on his imperial visit to the then British Dominion, South Africa. As I grew, I was told again and again of this momentous occasion, with a sense of values to be inculcated: loyalty in homage to imperial power, white man's power.

Nobody presented for the formation of my sense of values the fact that Mohandas Gandhi had lived in and developed his philosophy in and through the country where I was born and was to live my life; the man who was to leave behind in that country principles of liberation that were to be fundamental to
the struggle for freedom by the black people, my brothers and sisters unacknowledged by the values of the whites who took me to make obeisance to an English prince. The essence of the colonial ethos in which I was brought up is contained in a detail: the flag I was given to wave.

South Africa raised an army to fight Nazism, which it did with distinction; and the same brave white men and women under the command of Prime Minister General Smuts came back to practise racism contentedly at home. In that war, South Africa had suffered neither invasion nor bombardment, but there was a shortage of nurses. As a seventeen-year-old Red Cross recruit, I was sent to a first-aid station at a gold mine in the town where I lived. There I saw the mine's white Medical Aid worker stitch, without anaesthetic, the gaping wounds black miners had suffered from falling rock underground. He grinned and told me: ‘They don't feel like we do.'

Not the shootings at Sharpeville in 1960, the deaths in prison by torture and neglect, of Steve Biko and nameless others, or the herding of people from their homes with guns and dogs at their heels in the mass removals of black populations off land whites coveted, in the sixties and seventies, epitomise racism, for me, as does that single utterance at the mine.

It has become a truism to shake one's head in wonder at the end of apartheid and the emergence of a free South Africa the twentieth century has just seen.

A miracle; and coming to pass at the time when a new miracle is yearningly needed to compensate for the miracle the first quarter of the century promised—now a fallen star, the red star, flickered out.

Human beings will always have the imperative to believe in the possibility of a better world of their own making. In the words of one of the most influential thinkers of the mid-century, Jean-Paul Sartre, socialism was ‘man in the process of creating
himself.' The end of the human's identity as a beast of burden on the dreadful journey from feudal slavery through wage slavery. The Communist Manifesto, its enactment in the Soviet Union, promised the miracle in what seemed to be the culmination of all the world's revolutionary attempts to end exploitation, poverty, degradation. It was the Red Flag and not the Statue of Liberty that summoned all to bread and justice, when I was young.

The depth of the sense of abandonment, now, not only among those who were Communists but among all of us to whom the Left, the ideals of socialism remain, although these have been betrayed and desecrated in many countries, as well as in the Gulags of the founding one—it is this
sense of abandonment
that the collapse of the Soviet Union brings to our century, rather than the disillusion the West would triumphantly claim.

Whatever one's judgment of its consequences, the most momentous single date in the social organization of our century was unquestionably the October Revolution, as a result of which one-third of humanity found itself living under regimes derived from it. The disintegration of the Soviet world before the end of the same century that saw its beginning: has it brought the triumph of democracy or only the return of the liberalism that failed, after the First World War, to prevent the poor and unemployed of Italy and Germany from turning to fascism as the solution of their circumstances, many of which exist again today?

It is conveniently overlooked that the Soviet Union's communist army, in the Second World War, was definitive in defeating the Nazis; it is the evil you do that lives after you, not the good. Yet the
great positive achievement of our century, the end of colonialism
, that has come to realization in contrast to the tragedy of the Russian attempt to improve our human lot, owes much to the thought crystallized in Marx and Lenin, and cast in different lights by Rosa Luxemburg, Gramsci, Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh, Fanon—to turn the prism about to reveal only a few of its facets.

This does not apply alone to the colonial ‘possessions' that set up declared Marxist-Leninist states when they attained their freedom from colonial powers.

Those who were purely nationalist or ethnic in their concept of freedom from colonial rule also were inspired by the precept of power in the hands of the people—‘Freedom for the huts! Wars to the palaces!'—which released them, ready to act, from the spell of overlordship in which governors and commissioners held them convinced of their helplessness. The liberal alleviations on option came from the same countries that had cast the spell over three hundred years of colonisation; little wonder reform was distrusted.

I can affirm that in my own country, South Africa, Communism's revelation of the class and economic basis of the Colour Bar was one of the formative influences that joined the people's natural, inevitable will towards liberation. From the Freedom Charter of 1955 to the Constitution of the new South Africa in 1994, incorporations derived from the best of socialism's provisions for a truly human society can be traced and are being devolved, attempted in practice, in the country's reconstruction and development plans. Perhaps we are not doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past so long as we look at our century critically and have the courage to pick up again and use what was misused but is not invalidated, belongs still to hard-won increment of human advancement.

The other formative influence on the liberation movement in South Africa was one of the truly great individuals of our century whose lifetime within it we set against the monsters the century has produced.

A young Indian lawyer who came to South Africa to defend South African Indians against discriminatory laws became Mahatma Gandhi, an original thinker on
the nature of power
, as distinct from power confined to the purely political Leftist conception
as the tool for liberation, yet able to serve this tool as part of a high moral consciousness.

This original thinking is an important component of the intellectual advancement of our century and perhaps the only genuine spiritual advancement in an era of religious decline marked by crack-pot distortions of faith, and, finally, by savage fundamentalism. It was within his South African experience that Gandhi formulated a concept of power that he called Satyagraha, contracted from its linguistic combination, ‘satya'—truth, ‘agraha'—firmness, which he defined as ‘the force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence'. It was a force he went on to develop in India and which was to bring about India's freedom from British rule.

Mohandas Gandhi's philosophy, which gained freedom for India, became part of the struggle that gained freedom for my own country, South Africa.

‘Satyagraha postulates the conquest of the adversary by suffering in one's own person.'

For the South African liberation movement, Gandhi's dictum supplied not only tactics for the non-violent resistance campaigns against the unjust laws of apartheid in the 1950s, it became a text for endurance of the enormous suffering of blacks
in their own person
that was the price of their armed resistance when that phase came, whether in exchange of stones against the agony of police bullets in the townships, or in the heat and thirst of guerrilla battle in the bush.

Apartheid was an avatar of Nazism. The theories of racial superiority and most of the repulsive and cruel ways of implementing them were the same in both regimes, except that instead of being perpetrated on Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals, in South Africa these were perpetrated on the majority of the population—any, all who were not white-skinned.

Apartheid was also an avatar of fascism, if that means, as Umberto Eco writes, ‘a regime that subordinates every act of the individual to the state and its ideology'.

Apartheid contained, concealed within its own evil, these two, which the poverty the First World War brought about by its human devastation, and the Second World War was supposed to have banished by means of
its
human devastation. Apartheid was, finally, the last act in civilisation's shameful saga of colonialism, where, decked out in different guises by the colonial powers and those without colonial possessions who benefited from cheap primary products, the theory of racial superiority and the theory of subordination of every act of the individual to the ideology of state rule, had leading roles.

Nelson Mandela's unmatched, unchallengeable prestige and honour in the world today is recognition not only of his achievement, with and for his people, in defeat of the dire twentieth-century experiment in social engineering called apartheid. It is recognition that other ghastly forms of social engineering tried in our century were defeated where they had taken refuge; finally, it is homage paid to him in recognition that what was at stake was something greater by far than the fate of a single country: it was victory gained for humankind over centuries-old bondage of colonisation.

In the world-wide, immediate context of cataclysmic cracks which have opened with the earthquake of old national conflicts exploding surface solutions once imposed by now defunct political powers of East and West, President Mandela is looked to as the man of the century who, alone of others, knows how to bring about reconciliation between people who regard one another as enemies but must learn to live together.

Yet Mandela, at home, takes up every day the peace-time struggle with aleatory circumstances bequeathed by a former regime: the landless, the workless, the homeless. His ethos is
that freedom in democracy must somehow be made real for the people in their daily lives.

The sum of our century may be looked at in a number of ways.

The wars that were fought, the military defeats that turned into economic victories, the ideologies that rose and fell, the technology that telescoped time and distance.

Women's rights have at last been recognized as full
human
rights entrenched in many contemporary constitutions, an emancipation from gender oppression that went back beyond the male dominance enshrined in holy texts of many religions, all the way to club-wielding cave-man.

And there are ironies in our history: such as that of the twentieth-century State of Israel. Driven about the world for two thousand years, Jews returned home to ancient ancestral territory won back from Britain, which had occupied it under that form of colonial oppression known as a mandate, only for the Jewish people to find itself inheriting a colonialist position of an occupying power over another people with ancient ancestral claims to the land, the Palestinians. Israelis and Palestinians have been living through the tragic consequences, both suffering and causing suffering in appalling exchange. And Europe conveniently forgets its basic responsibility for this: the British disposal as they pleased of their spoils-of-war mandate over the lives of the Palestinian people, to salve the conscience of the world's two-thousand-year crimes of vile anti-Semitism against the Jewish people, that culminated in the Holocaust.

Freud and Jung changed self-perception and emotional cognition—furthered the possibility of understanding the mysteries of human behaviour. Another kind of perception moved from Picasso's
Guernica
to a Campbell's Soup can, to the Reichstag wrapped in plastic, illustrating our cycles—worship of
force and destruction, worship of materialism, desire to cover up and forget these choices we have made.

But what are the factors that affect those daily lives—ours—running across calendar events, a continuous element of end-of-the-century existence, over trade winds and continents and national frontiers, in which haves and have-nots in the world all live, if far from alike in respect of other circumstances? What influences the late-twentieth-century world most widely, you and me, now?