Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999

by J. M. Coetzee

  Helen Suzman herself entered politics at the ground floor as a party worker for the United Party of Jan Christiaan Smuts. In 1952 she was put forward as a candidate for a prosperous Johannesburg constituency and won. From then until 1989, when she retired, she represented the same suburban white voters, though in 1959 she left the increasingly sclerotic, backward-looking United Party to become a founder member of a liberal-democratic party which, under the name of the Democratic Party, still existed at the turn of the century, claiming the support of some ten per cent of the South African electorate.

  Suzman had become a party worker in the wake of the electoral shock of 1948, when Smuts, who had taken South Africa through the Second World War as part of the Allied camp, was defeated by the forces of Afrikaner nationalism. The victory of the Afrikaner Right, with its deep grudge against the British and British culture, its retrogressive race policies and its barely submerged anti-Semitism, alarmed the Suzmans (Helen had married at an early age) enough to make them think of emigrating. But, as she candidly admits in her memoir In No Uncertain Terms, the ‘sunny comforts’ of the country, including ‘excellent domestic help, who attended to all the chores I hated’, proved too seductive.5

  The all-white Parliament of 1952 in which Suzman took her seat, dominated by middle-aged Afrikaner men, was not an environment, one would have thought, in which a young Jewish woman from an academic background would have felt comfortable. From its mother parliament in Westminster the South African lower house had inherited conventions of debate that permitted the heckling of speakers with often puerile gibes and interjections. Of the taunts thrown at Suzman across the floor, many of them anti-Semitic or sexist, one is worth pausing over: ‘Neo-Communist, sickly humanist!’ hissed one antagonist every time she spoke. (p. 113) It is a measure of the insularity of Calvinist Afrikanerdom of the time that the term ‘humanist’ could have been intended as an insult.

  In fact, Suzman flourished in Parliament. Among her opponents, she records, there were some who regarded her ‘with amazed fascination. [They] had large, docile wives brought up in Calvinist fashion to be respectful to their parents and to their husbands. Here was this small, cheeky female with a sharp tongue which she used without regard to rank and gender. Some were shocked, but a few were amused and one or two actually liked me.’ (p. 114)

  It would be hard to overstate what Helen Suzman achieved during her thirty-six years in Parliament, for thirteen of them as the sole representative of her party. Operating within a near-totalitarian political system, she cannily exploited a structural weakness of that system – parliamentary privilege – to bring into the open abuses of power which, by means of bans on public speech and restrictions on reporting, the government would otherwise successfully have kept hidden. Backed by sympathetic liberal newspapers, she conducted campaigns from Parliament against the use of torture by the police and against the practice of ‘forced removals’ – the shifting of black communities from one part of the country to another in the interest of ethnic homogeneity. Of these removals she warned, ‘A vast problem . . . is going to have to be solved by our children, because the conditions which are being set in the urban areas of South Africa for the African people are going to lead to the most terrible conditions of crime and delinquency.’ (p. 79) In the crime-ridden South Africa of the 1990s, these words, spoken in 1969, came to have a prophetic ring.

  Suzman made use of her right as a Member of Parliament to visit prisons to hear the grievances of prisoners and urge improvements in prison conditions. She visited Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela and other leaders of resistance movements were held, and complained vocally (and to good effect) about the wretched conditions there. Breyten Breytenbach, himself incarcerated during the 1970s, wrote, ‘The prisoners, both political and common law, consider her as Our Lady of the Prisons. She is indeed a living myth among the people inhabiting the world of shadows.’ (p. 146)

  During the darkest years of State repression, the years of the notorious and aptly-named Terrorism Act, which allowed the security police to detain suspects indefinitely without charging them or bringing them to trial and made even the publication of their names an offence, Suzman was subjected to an orchestrated campaign of vilification in the House, a campaign clearly intended to break her nerve. Her mail was also intercepted (a defector later revealed her security police file number: W/V 24596, W/V standing for wit vrou, white woman). (p. 191)

  Suzman is at pains to spell out the ideals that sustained her through these years and informed her activities on behalf of the oppressed. She acted for the sake of ‘individual liberty, civil rights and the rule of law’, ‘to keep alive . . . democratic values’. ‘My job in Parliament . . . was to provide an outlet, a means of expression, for all those people who were not prepared to conform to the bizarre practices known of as “the South African way of life”.’ ‘I certainly was used by people who had political views and aims very different from my own, ranging from those who supported the banned Communist Party to extreme black nationalists. But . . . as long as [the government] locked people up without trial, I had no option.’ (pp. 132, 3, 73) She was indeed a freedom fighter: a fighter for the principle of freedom rather than on the side of any specific group.

  From her long parliamentary career, Suzman has emerged with unrivalled authority to comment on the series of autocratic Afrikaner leaders who built and steered the juggernaut of apartheid. Hendrik Verwoerd, ideologue of separate freedoms for separate races and mastermind behind the deliberately impoverished education system for blacks, was, she writes, ‘a fanatic’, ‘the only man who has scared me stiff’. He and his immediate successors, John Balthazar Vorster and P.W. Botha, were ‘as nasty a trio as you could encounter in your worst nightmares’. Between Botha and herself there was no love lost. ‘An irascible bully’, she calls him, ‘spiteful [and] retributive’. F.W. de Klerk was, by contrast, ‘a pragmatic, intelligent man’. (pp. 42, 65, 198, 238, 267)

  That, unfortunately, is pretty much as far as the moral analysis goes. If one had expected an insider’s insight into how pious, respectable, family men could decade after decade have hardened their hearts to the daily suffering they were causing, one will be disappointed. Suzman is no Hannah Arendt. She detects the callousness, the numbing of the moral faculty, that characterised the legislators of apartheid – she even reminds us that Verwoerd had written a doctoral thesis on the blunting of the emotions – but she does not explore any further the attrition of their human sympathies. She recognises the nihilism at the core of apartheid, an essentially uncreative system never intended to achieve more than postpone the inevitable. She quotes a telling remark by a cynically frank Nationalist politician: ‘We can hold the situation for my generation and for my children’s generation, and after that, who cares?’ (p. 106) But she has nothing new to say about the amorality of a group of men who, too selfish and too limited to confront creatively the demands of postcolonial Africa, chose instead to bequeath the problem to their grandchildren.

  There are other opportunities not taken up in Suzman’s memoir. In 1966 Verwoerd was assassinated in the House of Assembly before her eyes. She spends three pages on the episode, but they are devoted mainly to a malicious insult flung at her by P.W. Botha in the heat of the moment, and to her subsequent efforts to extract an apology. There is no attempt to bring the events to life, and no reflection on the assassin, one of the more intriguing minor actors in South African history, a man with no political agenda, a drifter struggling with phantasmatic demons of his own.

  In such episodes as her first visit to Pretoria Central Prison or the funeral of Robert Sobukwe (attended by Paton as well), one again feels the opportunity beckoning for Suzman to let the pen flow, to tell the story properly and make it live; but the challenge – that of becoming a writer rather than just a recorder – is declined. There is in the end a tired and incurious quality to Suzman’s memoir. It has the air of a recital given so many times before that it has become affectless.

  Suzma
n is by no means shy about quoting testimonials. The text is studded with tributes to her, from Albert Luthuli, Alan Paton, Robert Kennedy, Winnie Mandela, Gatsha Buthelezi, and many others. She is palpably upset when Andrew Young, US Ambassador to the United Nations, remarks of her that he ‘can deal with cold hatred but . . . can’t stand paternal liberalism’, and she describes at length her efforts to get Young to change his opinion of her (‘Simple justice was ever my motivation, not “paternal liberalism”.’ she protests). (p. 181)

  High-minded liberalism in fact turned Suzman into an increasingly lonely figure by the mid-1980s, both inside and outside South Africa. She found this to her cost when she spoke against Western economic sanctions against South Africa and was shouted down on previously hospitable American campuses. Her argument – a perfectly reasonable one, on the face of it – was that sanctions would hit black workers before they hit white bosses; but the argument cut no ice when black leaders at home, including the respected Desmond Tutu, were of the sanctions party. ‘We liberals were becoming a truly endangered species,’ she writes, ‘for many years under attack from the right, we were now attacked by the left as well, especially by bitter exiles.’ (p. 162)

  The truth is, the marginalisation of liberals like Suzman had begun even earlier. After the 1976 Soweto uprising she found that young blacks wanted no truck with her; even white students dismissed her as irrelevant. The middle ground had begun to shrink; soon there would be nowhere left for her to stand. It was only after the country had been saved by the 1990 settlement that she could be restored to her place as a beacon of personal courage and integrity.

  27 Noël Mostert and the Eastern Cape Frontier

  IN 1797 A YOUNG Englishman, John Barrow, made a 500-mile tour from Cape Town at the south-west tip of Africa to the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony on an assignment to report to the British Crown on the territory it had acquired, sight unseen, from the Dutch. A man of the European Enlightenment, an eager-minded amateur scientist, naturalist and geographer, Barrow visited the kraal of the twenty-year-old Xhosa chief Ngqika and was much taken with what he saw. ‘No nation on earth . . . produces so fine a race of men,’ he wrote. Raised on the simplest of diets, living vigorous outdoor lives, unashamedly naked, free of the vices of civilisation, the Xhosa were the very embodiment of the noble savage; whereas the Dutch colonists, after generations of isolation from Europe, seemed only to have degenerated. Given the benefits of science, Barrow saw every prospect that the Xhosa would become an ornament to the Crown, as long as their land could be protected from the encroachments of the colonists.

  The Cape Colony had been annexed for reasons that had everything to do with geopolitics and nothing to do with the colony itself. Once the threat of Napoleon was past, Britain saw no need to maintain more than a naval base at or near Cape Town to guard the sea route to the east. Drawing in the boundaries of the Colony in this way, however, would be tantamount to abandoning its indigenous peoples to the mercies of the Dutch colonists; and this public opinion in Britain would not allow. The boundaries were therefore maintained; but in a self-defeating move the military garrison was reduced to a level at which policing of the frontier could not be properly carried out.

  The Enlightenment, as represented by Barrow, was one of two great currents of thought to reach southern Africa with the British. The other was evangelism. Born out of the anti-slavery movement, drawing upon the energies of nonconformist Protestant fervour and the ethical convictions of humanitarian philanthropism, the missionary movement turned to southern Africa as its main theatre of operations after the West African climate turned out to be more than the missionary constitution could handle.

  The missionaries who came to the Cape Colony scored considerable successes with the demoralised remnants of the Khoi peoples, but the Xhosa were another story. ‘Secure in their culture, in the wholeness of their society . . . loyal to the shadows of their ancestors,’ writes Noël Mostert in Frontiers, a history of a hundred years of conflict on the Colony’s eastern border, the Xhosa ‘regarded [Christianity] from a position of severe, disciplined cultural reserve’.1 The missionaries made no converts worth speaking of. In some cases their impact was the opposite of what they had expected. Prophets along biblical lines arose among the Xhosa. One, Makanna, spread the word that there were two gods, a god of the whites and a god of the blacks. The black god should be worshipped not as the cunning missionaries taught, but by dancing and making love ‘so that the black people would multiply and fill the earth’. (p. 473)

  Nevertheless, as the evangelical movement grew in strength in Britain, more and more mission stations were opened on the frontier, and in the name of Christianity a broad assault was launched on traditional Xhosa culture. As time passed and the vision of mass conversions faded, the ambitions of the missionaries became narrower but more intense: the Xhosa must give up their more outrageous practices; they must become monogamous, wear clothes, deport themselves more soberly, own and care for property. Evangelism mutated into a campaign to impose Victorian moral standards on the natives, but also – and some of the missionaries were frank about this – to bring the natives into the colonial economy. Within mere decades, missionaries found themselves working in concert with the colonial government, acting as its eyes and ears and sometimes its voice. As in England, where evangelical Christianity had helped to turn the restless masses against radical agitators, so, Mostert argues, the missionaries in the Colony became a political force.

  In his account of contacts between missionaries and pagans, Mostert is clearly on the pagan side. The picture he gives of traditional Xhosa culture is, if not idealised, certainly rosy. Though not a particularly pacific people, the Xhosa, in his account, were too committed to an ideal of ubuntu, humanness, to conduct warfare in the merciless manner of the Zulu or the British. Their system of chiefly rule was democratic, in the sense that the chief had to earn the respect of the people whose loyalty he inherited. Their culture was based on what Mostert calls polygamy, but is more accurately called polygyny (men might take several wives; women might not take several husbands). Mostert gives a vigorous defence of this institution as a stabilising force, as he does of the free and frank sexual mores of the Xhosa in general.

  He has a harder job defending the practice of scapegoating: diviners would be ordered to ‘smell out’ the person responsible for some piece of ill fortune, and the ‘witch’ would then be cruelly put to death. In his defence of scapegoating, Mostert elides questions of right and wrong by taking a functionalist approach: scapegoating was a mechanism for maintaining social ‘balances’, for eliminating ‘any who diverge[d] widely from the social norm’. (p. 205)

  Mostert defends scapegoating not because he likes it but because it was the feature of Xhosa culture most abhorred by the missionaries. The same missionaries who sought to root out witch-hunting among the Xhosa, he points out, failed to acknowledge that not long before witches had been lynched in Europe. Given Mostert’s general outlook – secular humanist with a dash of romantic primitivism – it is perhaps inevitable that he should regard as faintly ridiculous the project of travelling thousands of miles to save the souls of people one has never laid eyes on. To him the missionaries are no more than the front-line troops in a campaign of cultural imperialism hard to distinguish from economic and military imperialism. He concentrates his ridicule on the endeavours of zealots ‘hatted, clad in their long black coats and leggings, choked in their cravats, steaming and suffering in the heat’, to clothe the Xhosa like themselves. (p. 597)

  Among the few individual missionaries who gain his approval are Johannes van der Kemp and James Read, both of whom went native in respect of sexual mores, while remaining vociferous (and much-vilified) advocates for the human rights of their charges.

  As Barrow had observed in the course of his travels, the Dutch frontiersmen had lost touch with Europe to the extent of becoming indistinguishable from Africans: most were illiterate, counted their wealth in cattle, migrated from place to
place according to the seasons. They had families on a large scale, often with black wives and concubines, and their descendants spread far and wide. In the course of time some of them, their genetic inheritance by now utterly scrambled – they called themselves, without shame, ‘Bastards’ though they still spoke Dutch – migrated beyond the northern border of the Colony and established themselves among the warring tribes of what would later become the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. Mostert calls these ‘the real pioneers’, in contrast to the Voortrekkers, the pioneers sanctified in official Afrikaner historiography, whom he sees as informed by a particularly bigoted, exclusive strain of Calvinism. (p. 416) One of his larger objectives is to rehabilitate ‘the alternative course of frontier history’, the bastard history that has been written out of the story of South Africa. (pp. 610–12) Among his unlikely heroes is therefore the frontiersman Coenraad Buys, patriarch and paterfamilias on a giant scale, whose mixed-blood progeny, so numerous that they came to be called the Buys Nation, settled the far northern Transvaal long before the Voortrekkers.

  In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars Britain faced unemployment and concomitant social upheaval. Trying to kill two birds with one stone – export surplus population and cut the expense of maintaining a large garrison in the Cape Colony – the authorities offered free land on the eastern Cape frontier to suitable British settlers. Some 4,000 volunteers sailed for Africa, among them the Scottish poet Thomas Pringle, who was shocked to discover what company he was keeping, describing his fellow passengers as ‘for the most part . . . low in morals or desperate in circumstances . . . idle, insolent, and drunken, and mutinously disposed towards their masters and superiors’. (p. 529) It was hoped that these specimens of British humanity would in time form a human buffer against mutual Boer and Xhosa encroachments.