Living in Hope and History

by Nadine Gordimer

  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

  MANDELA:

  WHAT HE MEANS TO US

  Let 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.

  For there are two kinds of leaders. There is the man or woman who creates the self—his/her life—out of the drive of personal ambition, and there is the man or woman wh
o creates a self out of response to people’s needs. To the one, the drive comes narrowly from within; to the other, it is a charge of energy that comes of others’ needs and the demands these make. Mandela’s dynamism of leadership is that he has within him the selfless quality to receive and act upon this charge of energy. He has been a revolutionary leader of enormous courage, is a political negotiator of extraordinary skill and wisdom, a statesman in the cause of peaceful change. He has suffered and survived more than a third of his life in prison and emerged without uttering one word of revenge. He has had many personal family sorrows as a result of his imprisonment. He has borne all this, it is evident, not only because the cause of freedom in South Africa for his people has been the breath of his life, but because he is that rare being for whom the human family is his family. When he speaks of South Africa as the home of all South Africans, black and white, he means what he says. Just as he did when he stood in court and vowed that he was prepared to die for this ideal.

  At the rendezvous of victory there is room for all. Mandela’s actions and words show he knows that without that proviso there is no victory, for anyone.

  —On the occasion of Nelson Mandela’s

  receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, 1993

  THE FIRST TIME

  April 27, 1994

  Standing in the queue this morning; businessmen in their jogging outfits, nurses in uniform (two, near me, still wearing the plastic mob-caps that cover their hair in the cloistered asepsis of the operating theatre), black women in their Zionist Church outfits, white women and black women who shared the mothering of white and black children winding about their legs, people who had brought folding stools to support their patient old bones, night watchmen just off duty, girl students tossing long hair the way horses switch their tails—here we all were as we have never been. We have stood in line in banks and post offices together, yes, since the desegregation of public places; but until this day there was always the unseen difference between us, far more decisive than the different colours of our skins: some of us had the right that is the basis of all rights, the symbolic X, the sign of a touch on the controls of polity, the mark of citizenship, and others did not. But today we stood on new ground.

  The abstract term ‘equality’ took on materiality as we moved towards the church hall polling station and the simple act, the drawing of an X, that ended over three centuries of privilege for some, deprivation of human dignity for others.

  The first signature of the illiterate is the X. Before that there was only the thumb-print, the skin-impression of the powerless. I realized this with something like awe when, assigned by my local branch of the African National Congress to monitor procedures at a polling booth, I encountered black people who could not read or write. A member of the Independent Electoral Commission would guide them through what took on the solemnity of a ritual; tattered identity document presented, hands outstretched under the ultra-violet light, hands sprayed with invisible ink, and meticulously folded ballot paper—a missive ready to be despatched for the future—placed in those hands. Then an uncertain few steps towards a booth, accompanied by the IEC person and one of the various Party agents to make sure that, when the voter said which party he or she wished to vote for, the X would be placed in the appropriate square. Several times I was that Party agent and witnessed a man or woman giving this signature to citizenship. The first time man scratched the mark of his identity, the conscious proof of his existence, on a stone, must have been rather like this.

  Nearby in city streets there were still destitute black children sniffing glue as the only substitute for nourishment and care; there were homeless families existing in rigged-up shelters in the crannies of the city. The law places the ground of equality underfoot; it did not feed the hungry or put a roof over the head of the homeless, today, but it changed the base on which South African society was for so long built. The poor are still there, round the corner. But they are not the Outcast. They no longer can be decreed to be forcibly removed, deprived of land, and of the opportunity to change their lives. They count. The meaning of the counting of the vote, whoever wins the majority, is this, and not just the calculation of the contents of ballot boxes.

  If to be alive on this day was not Wordsworth’s ‘very heaven’ for those who have been crushed to the level of wretchedness by the decades of apartheid and the other structures of racism that preceded it, standing in line to be living at this hour has been extraordinary. The day has been captured for me by the men and women who couldn’t read or write, but underwrote it, at last, with their kind of signature. May it also be the seal on the end of illiteracy, of the pain of imposed ignorance.

  April 29, 1994

  ‘J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais milk am.’

  Baudelaire’s words. I woke this morning with an over-flowing sense of continuity; today is three days run into one. Voting was still in progress for the first elections ever, in the history of my country, in which everyone, whatever the colour of skin, at last has the franchise.

  It’s been impossible to think of anything but the experience we are living through; I have not been able to write or even read anything other than newspapers. The second volume of Naguib Mahfouz’s wonderful Cairo Trilogy lies with a bookmark halfway through the pages. The newspapers’ interviews with politicians and people in the streets, the editorial speculation on the outcome of this election—which is not Europe’s or America’s customary recurrent event of the exchange of power between one party and another within an accepted polity that respects both—are part of the epic of our transformation: to us, prophesy rather than reportage. Forecasts of the results come from the television box as from the mouth of an oracle. I feel that I understand the meaning of ‘destiny’ for the first time: one of those grandiose quasi-religious concepts I have always regarded with scepticism. But these three days, in which millions of people have moved in those slow queues as pilgrims to their future, carry the weight of the word.

  Their procession has continued to pass through my mind, it has no relation to the span of days, it extends through the waiting years, decades, the centuries during which black people have toiled their way on the farms, in the gold and diamond and platinum mines that made the country rich and gave its original inhabitants so little; toiled their way through banishment from their homes because whites wanted their land; risen again from where they had fallen under tear-gas and police batons; buried those who fell before police gun-fire, and gathered again to march in strikes, in mass protest, a generations-long procession on the way—at last, at last!—to the polling booth. I have preferred to think of the inevitable final arrival as a process of history, but call it history or destiny, it has the meaning of people coming into their own. Something ordained, yet only to be achieved by suffering and endurance.

  For me, in the queues, there are the black migratory mineworkers with their clay-covered locks and blankets worn like togas I used to see on my way to my convent school in a gold-mining town sixty years ago; there is the old woman who worked in my mother’s kitchen and whose cup my mother forbade me to drink from for fear of the contagion of a black skin; there is the ebullient jazz composer, Todd Matshikiza, who was the first black man in whose arms I danced; there is the writer, my other dear friend, Nat Nakasa, who in the despair of exile jumped from a skyscraper window in New York; there is the painter, Gerard Sekoto, who was the Goya of life in the black townships and died, far from home, in Paris. And there are, among whites mingled there, those who gave their lives along with blacks in the trek towards liberation: blue-eyed Afrikaner Bram Fischer serving a life sentence as a revolutionary, dying too soon to see this day, this end of the procession. And in the faces of old black men there is the likeness of Oliver Tambo, the Moses who with Mandela, for so long, first from home and then from exile, led his people out of bondage.

  In the image of Tambo also came my change of mood, to celebration. Later in the day I was a guest of Adelaide Tambo, his wife, at the suburban house wit
h its garden and swimmingpool—formerly the jealous preserve of whites—that the African National Congress bought for Tambo to honour and provide him with comfort in the short period between his return from exile and his death in 1993. The place was ringing with joy; a choir, from the segregated black township in the mining district where I was born in the segregated white township, was singing before guests assembled in the house. They sang with the power of the whole body; it was impossible not to begin to move one’s muscles and flesh with theirs—the rooms and outer hall were caught up in the current of emotion. Adelaide was regally flamboyant in African robes. Foreign guests of honour—prominent individuals from Europe and the United States, including David Dinkins, former mayor of New York, who have supported the struggle against apartheid—queued (once again) round tables set out with food and drink, and everyone drifted to eat and talk in the garden. The beat of liberation changed again. One of our best bands was playing African jazz, the wild music expressive of the irrepressible embrace of life that never loosened in the grasp of black people, no matter what drudgery and humiliation were there to extinguish their spirit. It’s our music; it reconciled black and white, even among those conditioned by racial prejudice, even while the law kept black and white apart, long before reconciliation became official policy. Listening, I wondered how much liberation owes to this language that never lies because it has no words.