In the car, we drive for a while in silence. Then Zeng punches me on the arm. ‘Whoa! That’s why you’re normally such a scaredy-cat! When you lose it, you lose it, hey?’
She sighs with the wisdom of someone far older than her seventeen years. ‘They really, really aren’t worth it, babes.’
She is right, of course, but I have just come from America where whites seldom try that sort of thing any more and where, if they do, black people put them in their place swiftly and with little sentiment. South Africa is not yet that country.
I am aware, however, that much of South Africa’s new endeavour as a nation rests on proving Zeng wrong. South Africa is trying to become a place where everyone is worth it, where even the worst among us is worth the time and the effort and the love it will take to explain.
This is the premise of the new deal. The racists aren’t nonsense. They are fucked up, but they are not beyond redemption. The compromise required to end apartheid through a negotiated settlement means none of us get to write others off.
That is the theory, of course, but I struggle with it. Having narrowly escaped the need for white approval when I left Canada, and having learnt not to fear hurting white people’s feelings in America, when I finally come home I am ambivalent about white people.
Having been raised on the mantra of non-racialism I recognise the push for forgiveness but I find it hard to be patient all the time. It is well past time for black people to dictate the terms of engagement with their white compatriots. I often myself bristling when whites huff and puff and fling their exasperated entitlement around in queues and in public spaces. They always have something to complain about and I wonder how this is possible, given that they are still here, with their houses untouched and their schools and offices uncharred. It is a constant source of tension – managing my anger and disciplining my agitation, while figuring out how to be part of the new country I have waited for in a way that is appropriate to the historical moment.
I have a feeling this time will soon pass and that the decisions I make – even the small ones, like whether to extend a hand of friendship – will matter very much in the long run.
* * *
Night after night on TV, the victims of apartheid are broadcasting their stories. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is South Africa’s attempt to reckon with its past even as it is racing headlong into its future.
Most nights the news bulletin carries a small clip of the proceedings of the day – especially if something explosive has been revealed. There is a longer in-depth weekly analysis on one of the national broadcaster’s TV stations, in which Max du Preez provides some commentary and a team does additional reporting on the perpetrators or the victims of the crimes under the spotlight.
Night after night we watch as the perpetrators deny having done anything. They don’t say they did nothing wrong – they deny having done anything at all. It is remarkable, as though apartheid was a series of years that unfolded as white men in uniform twiddled their thumbs and did nothing to cause untold misery and violence. Almost all those called before the Commission deny responsibility, pointing the finger either at higher-ups or at junior-level staff. There was so much bloodshed, such an abundance of lives lost, yet these crimes seem to have been perpetrated by shadows. Ghosts had bludgeoned victims to death and buried them alive. Zombies had done it: the walking dead.
In my new job at AusAID, I identify projects to be funded in South Africa and recommend them to head office in Canberra. I also have to update head office about social and political developments that may affect our funding relationships and our partnership with the South African government. For my first big assignment, I have to report on a special set of hearings of the TRC that focus on the experiences of women activists during the apartheid era. The office is interested in looking at areas where Australian funding may be useful.
I arrive at the venue on the first day and immediately feel out of place. I am in my new work clothes and suddenly the heels that work so well in the office make me look too dressed up. I am attending as an observer and the word suddenly feels like an accurate reflection of who I am: an outsider.
Because the hearings specifically focus on women, the male commissioners and researchers recuse themselves. They recognise that the women who will testify need to feel comfortable to speak in an uninhibited manner. The audience is almost entirely female.
Gcina Mhlophe, the nation’s foremost public storyteller, opens the session. She is tall and stately. She looks a little bit like me – and I am still getting used to this feeling, of looking so much like people on the street but knowing nothing about them. Being home means bumping into mirror images of myself everywhere after a lifetime of being in African countries but never quite looking like an archetypal Kenyan or Zambian. Being home, I am acutely aware of the dissonance between being of a place by virtue of physiological heritage and being from a place by virtue of memory and experience. I look like I belong, but I don’t.
Mhlophe’s voice is resonant, almost manly in its depths; tailor-made for this role. She speaks a poem and very quickly my eyes are filled with tears.
Watch my eyes, hear my voice, I tell you true, I talk about the bones of memory [. . .] This is the time of the story-teller and every single person in this room has got a story to tell and more must be told.
* * *
Over the next two days I listen to many stories. I sit alone because I am not there as a family member or as a victim. Others are clustered together because they have come in groups and across distances. Attending is important. The women have come to speak and to ask questions. They have come to testify.
The women speak of lovers they last saw slipping out of their homes at dawn, of sons and daughters who said goodbye and headed for school and never came back. They have come to ask if anyone has seen them, to check if anyone knows where they went.
When Thandi Shezi’s testimony begins, I don’t know what to do with myself. Shezi tells the commission she was detained by the Security Police in 1988. She spent a year in solitary confinement, under ‘suspicion of being a terrorist’. While in detention, she was tortured multiple times. She endured the water torture for which the security branch was notorious – and, in her instance, the bucket of water in which her head was dunked was laced with acid. She had electric shocks applied all over her body. She was gang-raped. Her tongue swelled massive from the effects of the electrocution.
She sits at the front of the room and says:
Then the four of them started raping me, the four of them. The whole four of them started raping me whilst they were insulting me and using vulgar words and said I must tell them the truth. They said if I don’t tell them the truth about where the guns are and where is this other person they’re looking for, they will do their utmost worst.
But after they finished raping me, they took me to Sunset Prison, Diepkloof Prison … The way I had been assaulted and had been injured, I couldn’t speak for myself, I couldn’t talk. When the doctor asked me what had happened, I couldn’t even explain to the doctor what has happened to me, because my tongue was swollen in my mouth. I couldn’t speak. So they told the doctor that I was a prostitute, that I’d been arrested in Hillbrow and when they were trying to arrest me, I ran away, so that’s why I got injured.
At the end of the hearings, on the final day of the week, I drive away in tears. I drive across the long highway and into Pretoria, looking at the perfectly erected streetlights and the immaculately cut grass, at the arcing bridges and the perfectly fading sky. Everything around me is so beautiful and orderly, and yet Thandi Shezi’s testimony will not leave my head and nothing could be uglier than what was done to her. The disjuncture between what the two cities look like underneath their clean exteriors and what had happened in defence of their wealth feels overwhelming. I think about Thandi Shezi alone in the police cells and it feels like I might split in half from the tension of it, from trying to hold both the country’s history and its
tenuous present together in my mind; trying to reconcile what has been done with how we plan a future together.
I can’t go home. Instead I go to my office. It is dark but there is a security guard there so I feel safe. I switch on the lights and turn on my computer. I need to write this report while it is still fresh, before the days pass and dull the emotion.
My colleagues on the other side of the Indian Ocean are not expecting such a soulful report from the frontlines. They have no idea what to do with the pieces of my heart that land on their computer screens. It doesn’t matter, though: I am writing for myself. Scattered throughout my memo are notes, a blueprint for how I will make myself South African. I report on the TRC thoughtfully, analytically and with an outsider’s eye. This is how – in the years to come – I will work my way into the heart of this country. This job will help me to go to places I would not go on my own – to townships where I know no one and to rural parts of the country where I am a stranger. It will be awkward every time I introduce myself, when I appear lost, when I have to tell a long backstory to explain why I don’t speak the language, how I am still learning. The TRC makes me want to be South African even as it shows me how lightly I got off – how lucky my childhood was. It eases the longing I had as a child, even as it ignites a curiosity that I know will never fully be satisfied – a longing for answers about how people survived and how they would make it into the future without tearing themselves apart.
South Africa pulls at the parts of me that are the softest, and appeals to my toughest instincts. Like Jason, the country is manic and self-involved and consumed by its own logic. And, like Jason, this only makes me love it more – I want to save South Africa. Of course, like Jason, South Africa doesn’t need saving. She only needs to be loved without judgement, to be accepted for who she is. To be cried with and tolerated when she is awful and to be embraced when she is at her best. It takes me twenty years to understand this: South Africa doesn’t need heroes; she needs the best type of friends – those who bear witness.
Simon
We meet in my office on a warm winter’s morning in 1997.
He is handsome – tall with blue eyes and a slightly floppy haircut and a smile that stays in his eyes just like in the movies. He has a great chin – with a cleft like a character in a Mills & Boon novel. There is something reserved in him, something lovely and kind that seems unaware of or uninterested in the coincidental way in which his mouth and his nose line up on his face. I warm to him immediately. He has none of the white saviour sanctimony I have already encountered in other experts I’ve been assigned to work with in my new job with the Australian High Commission, and so we hit it off.
He is in the country to help with the drafting of South Africa’s first national youth policy. So we talk shop, and in the context of the discussion, he asks me if I want to attend the launch of the policy in Cape Town. He’s flying back to Australia – where he’s from – the following evening but I say I’ll get back to him about it in a few days over e-mail. As we part he promises to get me a formal invite and I find myself smiling, thinking it would be nice to talk to him again.
A few days after he leaves, South Africa’s first national census results are released. It’s the first time most black people in the country have been counted and it has been a massive and important undertaking. Over a hundred thousand people have been employed as enumerators; for a year there have been television and radio ads urging people to participate and explaining the importance of the day.
In previous censuses, the townships where black people lived had been ignored. Census gazettes simply hadn’t listed townships. Millions of black people had disappeared. They had been real enough to work in white homes and businesses as domestic workers and labourers, but for purposes of planning and infrastructure, they were ghosts.
I go through the census summary closely, cross-checking it against the much larger report that had been sent to the office. There is an incredible amount of detail in there – a lot of it I think might be important for the new youth policy. I get excited when I think about the fact that South Africa is literally remaking itself. Every new policy, every bureaucratic process feels revolutionary because it is done in the name of democracy. This is not a state intent on counting us in to destroy us, it is a state that wants to know its citizens better to understand their needs. In my enthusiasm, I fax Simon a summary document that outlines what the census is telling the nation. It’s about thirty pages long although, of course, when he tells the story he will insist it was at least fifty pages and it finished the toner in his home fax machine. I stand at the machine late at night after digesting the contents of the census. I am oblivious to the fact that it is 3 a.m. in Perth and the sound of a fax machine whirring in the study has just woken up a man I like, thousands of kilometres and an ocean away.
Still, he is gracious. He sends me a warm and funny thank-you note that teases me about the fax that was so urgent it needed to be sent at 3 a.m. He makes me smile and now I am curious about him. I think about him the whole day, opening the message a few times unnecessarily and finally realising I might like him a bit.
A few weeks later he is back in the country – this time in Cape Town for the national youth policy launch. I don’t go but I like the fact that he called to say hi on his way through to Cape Town.
On his next trip, we agree to go out to lunch. I wear a maroon business suit which looks great but I am worried my forehead is breaking out in pimples. Still, I am pleased with the intimidating height of my head wrap. He pretends not to notice the spots and compliments the head wrap. I am impressed he doesn’t call it a turban. Over lunch, I wait for an awkward moment, a misstep when he says or does the wrong thing, but it never comes. He’s easy and funny and self-deprecating. There’s no pathos as there was with Jason.
He goes back and we start to send each other daily e-mails. He writes things like, ‘It was good to see you yesterday. I wondered whether you have seen Leunig’s cartoons? He expresses vulnerability so well. That whole thing I was telling you about fatal optimism … Here is a scan of one of my favourite illustrations.’
We flirt in those notes, saying more on the computer than we might face to face. Still, we are restrained. These are the days before the widespread use of laptops. I check e-mail only when I am in the office and there is something about being in the company of others when I write to him that keeps me from saying everything I want to.
He is in and out of the country all the time so it feels fun and light despite the fact that he is so clearly perfect for me. His absence helps to slow things down as well. I don’t need to see him all the time. I don’t have to think about where it is all going. I can hang out with everyone else and not have a boyfriend. We become friends. We are attracted to each other and the attraction makes the hanging out more fun but this is new territory for us both.
Then it happens. We are no longer checking each other out. We go out to dinner at a restaurant in a pretty suburb of Pretoria one evening. The place is called Giovanni’s – a converted old house that had been grand and charming and is not a favourite haunt of the diplomatic corps and international NGOs in Pretoria. It is raining and we sit on the veranda. The raindrops are big, the kind that always fall at the end of a humid day during a Highveld summer.
We order and get comfortable. I slip off my shoes and I’m barefoot under the table. We dig into a conversation about his divorce, about his two children; about heartbreak and loneliness. My feet find his and they rest on the tops of his shoes. My hands clasp his and, if I could, I would sit on his lap, curl into him as though we were alone. It’s the first time I’ve ever felt so connected to a man. Everything he says strikes me as poignant. Our fingers twist and play, and I can smell his neck and I want to sit closer to him and it is clear that we are now an us.
Of course, the feeling is one thing. The reality is another.
Simon is a decade older than me and he has kids and he is white and none of these things are part of my ga
me plan. I raged against whiteness in college; I poured my heart into poems about beautiful black love. I am in South Africa, where we have just defeated white supremacy, and I am in love with a white boy. It makes no sense.
I want him to be black but he is not and this is South Africa where white people have collectively done some fucked-up shit to black people and he can never ever be angry enough about it to satisfy me. How could he be? He grew up on the beach in Perth, in a city on the other side of the Indian Ocean where it was always sunny. What does he know of suffering?
In my self-righteousness, in my search for a frame to suit the politics I’ve embraced in the past few years, I don’t ask what I know of suffering let alone what love has to do with suffering. I stew and I steam. I rage and, eventually, I decide it can’t work.
The conversation is hard, more so because it’s not about him, or about me, but about an ideology, an idea of myself I’d like to hold onto as the sort of radical young woman whose politics and life are pure and clean.
‘Let’s take a break,’ I say. ‘I can’t do this.’
He has seen this coming for weeks. It’s been almost a year and he’s met my sisters and he’s met Mummy once. I have not been able to introduce him yet to Baba. We have had fight after fight about racism. I’ve snapped at him for smiling too hard at the car guard and for making conversation with waiters. ‘Patronising,’ I spit out. He can’t do anything right. I am starting to dislike myself, and who I become when I am trying to perform my politics.
He is heartbroken and, in a different way, I am too.
I am alone again. Suddenly the self-righteousness that propelled me to break up feels hollow. There is nothing satisfactory about walking into a restaurant without the stares and the titters that used to accompany us. I miss him.
Still, I sustain my position. I date a bit. Nothing serious. I keep the door open to him. I don’t want him to disappear completely in spite of my words to the contrary. Something inside me is cleverer than my brain.
Always Another Country Page 21