Unrequited Infatuations

by Stevie Van Zandt

  Any ethnocide has two essential initial components: take the land and kill the language.

  The divide-and-conquer strategy of the US government worked beyond the wars of the nineteenth century. In the late twentieth century, when I came on the scene, there was very little communication between the surviving 350 Indian Nations.

  To address these issues, I started the Solidarity Foundation with my Native-blood friend Alex Ewen to serve as an information-gathering and networking service between the Indian Nations themselves, the Indian Nations and the non-Indian public, and the Indian Nations and environmental groups. One of our most important goals was to encourage economic development in harmony with the Earth.

  This eventually led to the only disagreement I ever had with the Elder’s Circle, the far more spiritual Native American version of the Mafia Commission. The issue of gambling had become a major internal struggle in Indian country. The elders of the National Treaty Council were against it for general reasons of morality, but I thought the potential for new revenue was too good to resist.

  Maybe it was my New Jersey / Italian American / Rat Pack upbringing, but legal gambling on Indian land seemed to me the answer to all their problems. I figured it’s a nonpolluting, enormous source of revenue, and it sure beat selling beads by the roadside to backpackers looking for a weekend commune with nature.

  If it was handled properly, I thought it could turn things around for the whole culture. That meant owning and controlling it, using the money to build and maintain Indian-oriented schools and to cure the rampant poverty, unemployment, increasing drug problems, and devastated infrastructure.

  I found myself uncharacteristically disagreeing with the Elders, so out of respect, Solidarity Foundation pretty much stayed away from the subject.

  As usual, the Elders’ instincts were more right than wrong. They were taken advantage of left and right until a kid from New Jersey named Jimmy Allen was brought in by the Seminole Tribe in Florida to help out a small casino of no great consequence that had recently licensed the Hard Rock name.

  But more about that later.

  eighteen

  The Breathless Projectionist

  (1984)

  I feel like I’m in the world, but not of it.

  —THE UNWRITTEN BOOK

  I was in Los Angeles in 1983 and went to an Art theater on Melrose to see Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless.

  Before the movie started, a song was playing. It was different somehow, oddly evocative. After the movie I knocked on the projectionist’s door and asked him what it was. “Peter Gabriel,” he said. “Biko.” I had never heard of either one of them.

  A little research revealed that Peter Gabriel had been in Genesis, a Prog Rock group, a genre I had never found my way into, and was now on his own as a solo artist. And Stephen Biko was a black anti-apartheid activist in South Africa who had been murdered in 1977 in prison.

  I had already made a list of America’s dubious and mostly hidden foreign entanglements since World War II. I added South Africa to the list.

  I had a hard time researching the South African situation. The New York Times was saying there was reform going on, but it was unclear how much or what it was leading toward.

  The history was easy enough.

  The Apartheid Policy—the classification and separation of the races—was officially put in place in South Africa in 1948 when the National (white supremacist) Party took power, although the practice dated back as far as the 1800s. The white invaders—first Dutch (Afrikaners), then British and others—decided they were so outnumbered that they’d better figure out a way of controlling what became, basically, slave labor in the mines.

  Their solution? They banned black Africans from “Church and State,” meaning they couldn’t vote, and made virtually all crossing of racial lines illegal.

  This policy didn’t sit so well with the rest of the world. Beginning in the late 1960s, the United Nations imposed a boycott to isolate South Africa. The National Party needed to figure out a way around the boycott. So they came up with a solution inspired by our Indian reservations.

  They divided the unimportant parts of the country into tribal “homelands” (Bantustans), forcibly moved the black population into them by their tribal affiliation, and declared those areas independent countries. Never mind that South Africa was the least tribal of all the African countries, with the Zulu Nation the only exception. When the black Africans had been removed to these Bantustans, the Nationalists would declare South Africa a democracy and bring the blacks back in as foreign immigrant labor, with no political rights.

  Evil brilliance, right?

  They forcibly removed over three million black Africans. Knocked their houses down, put their belongings on trucks, and dropped them off in the wasteland of these Bantustans—many of which, by the way, were shaped like no country had ever been shaped. Fragmented, discontinuous, spatter patterns of land whose only purpose was to further divide and weaken the black population.

  Much of the world supported the boycott, with three major exceptions: our president, Ronald Reagan, along with the British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and the German chancellor Helmut Kohl. They opposed any significant economic sanctions and isolation, instead favoring a policy they called “constructive engagement,” which was little more than a bullshit way of maintaining the status quo in South Africa and pretending things were getting better.

  So that was the central question. Was the boycott the right thing to do or not? In 1984, after Nicaragua, I went to South Africa for two weeks. My motive was nonadversarial, at least at first. I went with an open mind, hoping to find proof of the “reforms” the newspapers were talking about.

  It was on that flight that it finally hit me. I had blown my life. All my aspirations big and small were finally coming to fruition with the success of the E Street Band, and I blew it. I never liked flying. Suddenly my fear of flying was gone. Completely. Just like that. In fact, my fear of everything was gone. I would express my feelings about suicide in the song “Guns, Drugs, and Gasoline” a few years later, but for now, I would continue down the road to see where it led and try and accomplish something before I ran into the inevitable unbreachable castle wall my once-upon-a-time career lived behind.

  My record company at the time, EMI, was accommodating. They undoubtedly assumed that I was willing to violate the boycott and play there. They hooked me up with two guys, one white, one black, to guide me through the country and connect me with whoever I wanted to meet. Both of them were incredibly courageous and helpful, and they shall remain nameless to protect them from repercussions for the multiple crimes they committed on my behalf. Just by being there I was violating the boycott.

  I traveled from Johannesburg to Cape Town and ended up in Pretoria. I met with everyone I could, from the labor unions to religious leaders and everybody in between. I met with Archbishop (then Bishop) Desmond Tutu and Cyril Ramaphosa (then head of the Miner’s Union, now president of the country). While I was in Cape Town, my guides tried to arrange a meeting with Nelson Mandela, imprisoned on Robben Island, but the authorities wouldn’t let me see him. And I couldn’t get to the prime minister either.

  We even managed a side trip to one of the so-called homelands, one they were promoting as a separate country called Bophuthatswana, and its main attraction, the gambling resort of Sun City.

  My companions explained that Sun City had been built by Nationalist investors, principally a man named Sol Kerzner, in collaboration with the apartheid regime, and was an irresistible temptation to those willing to buy the elaborate con and score either a big payday or some inexpensive sex. There was no gambling in South Africa proper, but Bophuthatswana was an “independent country” with its own rules.

  My new friends were surprised when I passed on the gambling and hookers and went up to my hotel room. I was absorbing lots of information, so I had to be constantly evaluating whether I had heard something merely interesting or something important. I had just he
ard something important.

  Over the next days, I spoke to as many people on the street as I could, meaning as many as would talk to me. They were reluctant at first. The problem was that it was illegal to say that you were in favor of the boycott. If you did, you could go to jail, which in those days could be a death sentence.

  Luckily, they’d never seen anyone like me. My Rock and Roll appearance helped loosen them up, and many of them ended up telling me that they did in fact support the boycott. I played devil’s advocate, explaining that boycotts often hurt the very people they are trying to help. Most South Africans didn’t care. They felt they were in prison. How much worse could things get? And most of the political parties were in favor of it. Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC), the opposition Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), and even the young, militaristic Azanian People’s Organization (AZAPO), which had been founded by Steve Biko.

  I also spent a good amount of time with a wonderful righteous cat named Johnny Clegg, a local music star whose group, Juluka, fused Zulu styles like maskanda and mbaqanga with Western Folk and Rock. His feelings about the boycott were more mixed. He understood certain aspects of it, but he wanted his music to be heard worldwide.

  If I wanted simple answers, I was in the wrong place. Views were mixed because the situation was more than complex—human rights, politics, and economics were wound around each other, choking off the air supply.

  Just before that first trip ended, an incident provided the clarity I needed.

  I was in Pretoria, riding in a taxi at dusk. A black man stepped off the curb and my taxi swerved—not to miss him but to hit him. “Fucking kaffir,” the driver said. (“Kaffir” means “nigger” in the Afrikaans dialect.)

  I was frozen in shock. “Uh, you can let me out here,” I managed to mutter.

  I walked and walked around the main part of town, absorbing what I’d just seen and what I had seen before that, trying to make sense of all the opinions I had heard. I ended up in a town square staring up at statues of South African military icons. I decided that this evil system couldn’t be reformed. The government and its criminal apartheid policy had to be exterminated.

  I looked up at the nearest statue. I’m taking you down, motherfucker!

  I didn’t know how yet.

  But I meant it.

  I studied my notes on the long flight home—in those days, it was eighteen hours, with connections in Lagos and Paris.

  I was determined to keep my promise to the military icon in that Pretoria square. A picture was forming in my unusually clear head. It was obvious that the South African government should not have lasted as long as it had. And I didn’t mean for moral reasons.

  I was discovering a part of my brain I didn’t know existed. The ability to analyze had shown itself in little ways as a kid. I figured out that the way to win at Risk was to capture Australia first. I figured out that the most important part of a football team isn’t the quarterback or running back or wide receiver. It’s the offensive line that makes all the difference. (And when are they going to stop being called the unskilled part of the team?) It showed up as I took apart songs to understand them better. But never analysis like this. On a global stage.

  In spite of all the false bravado presented to a gullible world, a closer inspection revealed that the stability of the South African government was far more fragile than the world was being led to believe.

  They couldn’t trust their own cops anymore. They were employing the military to keep the increasing unrest down. Little old Cuba was kicking their asses in Angola. And their economy was hanging by a thread, entirely dependent on the kindness of three white supremacist world leaders.

  They were surviving in part because the world was ignorant. Nobody knew the extent of the modern slavery that was going on down there. A little publicity and this whole thing would fold like the house of cards that it was.

  I began formulating a plan.

  My thought was to hot-wire the existing boycott structure. The United Nations had established the basic boycott, but it was moving along at a low hum, largely because the United States, the UK, and Germany were practicing constructive engagement.

  The boycott was most effective when it was most visible. That had worked in sports. South Africa had been kept out of the Olympics for decades, which pissed them off profoundly. The grand slam, obviously, would be an enforced economic boycott. If banks cut the country off, it would put a knife in the heart of apartheid and maybe get Mandela out of jail.

  And while I couldn’t affect the banks directly, I was standing on the bridge that led from the sports boycott to the economic boycott: the broader cultural boycott.

  The best course, I figured, was to expose the evil brilliance of the Bantustans: the way black South Africans were shipped off to these phony homelands, stripped of their citizenry, and converted into immigrant labor with no political rights. And the perfect symbol of this policy was the Sun City resort.

  Because Sun City was a con!

  It was one of the great cons of all time.

  It wasn’t in a different country. It was the clever way South Africa fooled everybody into thinking they were not violating the boycott by playing in Sun City. That’s why all the entertainers were vastly overpaid to play it.

  That would be my target.

  We expose the con, we win.

  And with respectful apologies to my man Gil Scott-Heron, this revolution would be televised.

  I was only home for a little while when I decided I didn’t feel I’d covered the subject completely enough to write what I needed. I had to go back. This time I wanted to meet the guys nobody wanted me to meet.

  I knew I had to pitch my idea to all the opposition parties, Mandela’s ANC, the PAC, AZAPO. After being engaged in research and meetings and politics for the previous three years or so, I’d started to get the hang of it. Just because individuals or groups were on the same side didn’t necessarily mean they liked one another.

  The conventional wisdom of conflict resolution was to get everybody in the same room and work out differences and negotiate. Not only was that method impossible in this case, with half the parties on the lam, but I didn’t believe it would work.

  I decided the better strategy was to present a plan and have them all endorse it separately. If everybody agreed with me, they’d be agreeing with each other without the ego conflicts and general infighting and drama that go on with virtually all pro-democracy, anti-fascist groups worldwide. That kind of petty backstabbing is why the bad guys usually win. I wanted to avoid that.

  I managed to meet the PAC in New York. They endorsed the idea. That was a big one, one of the two main opposition parties. Once I got back to Johannesburg, I immediately flew to Zimbabwe to meet with the other one, Mandela’s ANC.

  It was a good thing I had lost my fear of flying, because that flight from Joburg to Harare was one I’ll never forget. It was a twenty-seat propeller job, bad enough, but we somehow managed to fly inside a storm the entire time, which meant being hit constantly by monstrous African lightning.

  I didn’t think I was going to die.

  I knew I was going to die.

  When we somehow made it to blessed terra firma, I saw that the plane had black marks all over the fuselage where the lightning had struck. At that moment, I felt that Destiny had something in mind for me. There’s no way that little piece-of-shit crop duster should have survived that flight.

  In Harare I floated my Sun City idea to the ANC representative. I explained that publicity, not violence, was the only way to win the war. If nothing else, I would be publicizing their cause and supporting the ANC as the official voice of the opposition. Of course I had said the same thing to the PAC!

  The ANC representative liked my plan, as had the representative of the PAC. After a few days of consultation, he gave me its blessing.

  I now had an official mandate from the leading revolutionary groups in my back pocket. It would come in handy.

  I ask
ed both organizations to give me six months and to try and minimize the violence in the meantime. They said they’d see what they could do.

  Back in Johannesburg, I told my (now trusted) companions about my meeting with the ANC. They were impressed. Then I made my request. “OK, boys,” I said. “I’ve been trying to keep you away from the heavy stuff, but I need you to set up one more meeting. And you’re going to have to break the law to do it.”

  “Are you kidding?” one said. “Half the meetings we’ve already arranged have been illegal. We’re in all the way.”

  What I needed from them was a meeting with AZAPO.

  AZAPO was among the most violent of the younger revolutionary groups. Meeting with them was risky, at the very least, and might be fatal.

  Word went out, and a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy sent word back that a meeting could be arranged in Soweto. But getting into Soweto was easier said than done. Since violence was on the rise, the government had established a military blockade around the massive ghetto.

  Clearly defining and separating neighborhoods was a strategy designed to anticipate the revolution and give the greatly outnumbered government an advantage to commit mass eradication once the revolution inevitably started.

  We drove out to Soweto. My white companion and I were covered by a blanket on the floor of the back seat as our black conspirator drove through the blockade.

  We stopped.

  “We’re here.”

  A ghost emerged from fog, dressed all in white. He motioned for us to follow. The machete in his waistband did not bode well.

  My companions took a last glance my way. Their look seemed to say, Are you sure?

  I took a moment to fully absorb the absurdity of the situation. Just a few minutes ago in my timeless mind I was sixteen, slowing down my record player to learn Eric Clapton’s solo on “Steppin’ Out.” And now here I was… steppin’ way the fuck out. I had the urge to laugh out loud. I suppressed it.