Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  In the work of white writers, you often get the same gap in experience between black and white lives compensated for by the projection of emotions about blacks into the creation of a black typology. Guilt is the prevailing emotion there; often it produces cardboard and unconscious caricature just as resentment does.

  The eminent authority on comparative literature, Professor Harry Levin, defines cultural identity as ‘nothing more nor less than the mean between selfhood and otherness, between our respect for ourselves and our relationship with our fellow men and women’. The dilemma of a literature in a country like South Africa, where the law effectively prevents any real identification of the writer with his society as a whole, so that ultimately he can identify only with his colour, distorts this mean irreparably. And cultural identity is the ground on which the exploration of self in the imaginative writer makes a national literature.

  1976

  Letter from Soweto

  I flew out of Johannesburg on a visit abroad two and a half months after the first black schoolchild was killed by a police bullet in Soweto. Since 16 June, when the issue of protest against the use of the Afrikaans language as a teaching medium in black schools, long ignored by the white authorities, finally received from them this brutal answer, concern had been the prevailing emotion in South Africa.

  Concern is an overall bundle of like feelings in unlike people: horror, distress, anguish, anger – at its slackest manifestation, pity.

  There was no white so condemnatory of black aspirations, so sure of a Communist plot as their sole source, that he or (more likely) she didn’t feel ‘sorry’ children had died in the streets. Black children traditionally have been the object of white sentimentality; it is only after the girls grow breasts and the boys have to carry the passbook that chocolate suddenly turns black.

  There was no black so militant, or so weary of waiting to seize the day, that he or she did not feel anguish of regret at the sacrifice of children to the cause. Not even a mighty rage at the loathed police could block that out.

  I was away for the month of September. Henry Kissinger came to South Africa to discuss the Rhodesia settlement with Mr Vorster; six children were killed while demonstrating against his presence. A day or two after I arrived home in October, a girl of fifteen was shot by police at the Cape. The six were already merely a unit of the (disputed) official figures of the dead (now 358), some adult but in the main overwhelmingly the young, in unrest that has spread from blacks to those of mixed blood, and all over the country by means of arson, homemade bomb attacks, boycotts and strikes. The fifteen-year-old girl was added to the list of fatalities; no one, I found, was shocked afresh at the specific nature of this casualty: the killing of a child by a police bullet.

  Like the passing of a season, there was something no longer in the air. People had become accustomed, along with so much else unthinkable, to the death of children in revolt.

  I try to recognise and set out the reasons for this acclimation before daily life here, however bizarre, makes me part of it.

  When striking children met the police that Wednesday morning in June in the dirt streets of Soweto and threw stones that promptly drew bullets in return, who would have believed that the terrible lesson of white power would not be learned? The lesson for these children wasn’t free, any more than their schoolbooks are (white children get theirs for nothing); they paid with the short lives of some of their number. No one could conceive they would ever present themselves again, adolescent girls bobbing in gym frocks, youths in jeans, little barefoot boys with shirts hanging out as in a wild game of cops and robbers – to police who had shown they would shoot real bullets. But the children did. Again and again. They had taken an entirely different lesson: they had learned fearlessness.

  Of course, white attitudes towards them began to change, even then. It was immediately assumed by the government and the majority of white people that since the issue of the Afrikaans language had been quickly conceded, and the children now demanded the abolition of the entire separate educational system for blacks, and then bluntly ‘everything whites get’, such intransigence must be the work of agitators. Among black people – among the outlawed liberation organisations inside and outside the country, and those perforce confined to balancing cultural liberation on a hair’s breadth of legality within it – all began to claim credit for the first popular uprising since the early sixties. No one will know, for years perhaps, how to apportion the influence of the banned African National Congress and Pan-Africanist Congress – their leadership in prison and exile – in the development of schoolchildren’s defiance into the classic manifestations of a general uprising.

  Neither can one measure how much of the children’s determined strategy was planned by older students of the black university-based South African Students’ Organisation. There surely were – there are – agitators; if agitators are individuals able and articulate enough to transform the sufferings and grievances of their people into tactics for their liberation. There surely was – there is, has never ceased to be – the spirit of the banned political movements in the conceptual political attitudes and sense of self, passing unnamed and without attribution to their children from the tens of thousands who once belonged to the mass movements.

  What neither the accusations of the white government nor the claims of black adult leadership will ever explain is how those children learned, in a morning, to free themselves of the fear of death.

  Revolutionaries of all times, who know this is the freedom that brings with it the possibility of attaining all others, have despaired of finding a way of teaching it to more than a handful among their trained cadres. To ordinary people it is a state beyond understanding. We knew how to feel outrage or pity when we saw newspaper photographs of the first corpses of children caught by the horrible surprise of a death nobody believed, even in South Africa, would be meted out by the police. Blacks still burn with an anger whose depth has not yet been fathomed – it continues to show itself as it did at the Soweto funeral of Dumisani Mbatha, sixteen, who died in detention. Seven hundred mourners swelled to a crowd of 10,000 youths that burned 100,000 rands worth of the Johannesburg municipality’s vehicles and buildings. Yet – not without bewilderment, not without shame – black people have accepted that the weakest among them are the strongest, and thus by grim extension also accept the inconceivable: the death of children and adolescents has become a part of the struggle.

  We whites do not know how to deal with the fact of this death when children, in full knowledge of what can happen to them, continue to go out to meet it at the hands of the law for which we are solely responsible, whether we support white supremacy or, opposing, have failed to unseat it.

  When you make men slaves you deprive them of half their virtue, you set them in your own conduct an example of fraud, rapine and cruelty, and compel them to live with you in a state of war …

  Olaudah Equiano, eighteenth-century black writer

  White people have turned away from concern to a matter-of-fact preoccupation with self-protection. A Johannesburg parents’ committee has a meeting to discuss whether or not teachers at a suburban school should be armed, as they might once have planned a school fête. I bump into a friend who tells me, as if he were mentioning arrangements for a cattle show, that he and fellow farmers from a district on the outskirts of Johannesburg are gathering next day to set up an early warning system among themselves – one of them uses a two-way radio for cattle control, the gadget may come in handy.

  Now it is not only the pistol-club matrons of Pretoria who regard guns as necessary domestic appliances. At the house of a liberal white couple an ancient rifle was produced the other evening, the gentle wife in dismay and confusion at having got her husband to buy it. Gunsmiths have long waiting lists for revolvers; 50 per cent of small arms come illegally from Iron Curtain countries who call for a total arms embargo against South Africa at the UN.

  Certainly, in that house a gun was an astonishing sig
ht. Pamphlets appear with threats to whites and their children; although the black movements repudiate such threats, this woman feels she cannot allow her anti-apartheid convictions to license failure to protect her children from physical harm. She needn’t have felt so ashamed. We are all afraid. How will the rest of us end up? Hers is the conflict of whites who hate apartheid and have worked in ‘constitutional’ ways to get rid of it. The quotes are there because there’s not much law-abiding virtue in sticking to a constitution like the South African one, in which only the rights of a white minority are guaranteed. Gandhi had our country in mind when he wrote, ‘The convenience of the powers that be is the law in the final analysis.’

  My friend Professor John Dugard, Dean of the Faculty of Law at the Witwatersrand University, says that if whites do not show solidarity with blacks against apartheid, their choice is to ‘join the white laager or emigrate’. Few, belonging to a country that is neither in the Commonwealth nor the Common Market, have the chance to emigrate. Of the laager – armed encampment – my friend David Goldblatt, the photographer, says to me: ‘How can we live in the position where, because we are white, there’s no place for us but thrust among whites whose racism we have rejected with disgust all our lives?’

  There is not much sign that whites who want to commit themselves to solidarity with blacks will be received by the young anonymous blacks who daily prove the hand that holds the stone is the whip hand. They refuse to meet members of the Progressive Reform Party, who, while assuming any new society will be a capitalist one, go farther than any other white constitutional group in genuine willingness to share power with blacks. They will not even talk to white persons (there are still no white parties that recognise the basic principle of Western democracy although they would all call themselves upholders of the Western democratic system) who accept one man one vote and the rule by a black majority government as the aim of any solidarity, and understand, as John Dugard puts it, that ‘the free enterprise system is not the only system’ to be discussed.

  The black moderate Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, whose position as a Bantustan leader fiercely attacking the government that appointed him has made him exactly the figure – legal but courageous – to whom whites have talked and through whom they hope to reach blacks, lately is reported to have made a remark about ‘white ultra-liberals who behave as though they are making friends with the crocodile so they will be the last to be eaten’. He also said, ‘Nobody will begrudge the Afrikaner his heritage if it is no threat to the heritage and freedom of other people.’ It seems old white adversaries might be accepted but white liberals will never be forgiven their inability to come to power and free blacks.

  Nevertheless, I don’t think the whites he referred to would be those with the outstanding fighting record of Helen Suzman, let alone radical activists like Beyers Naude of the Christian Institute, and others, of the earlier generation of Bram Fischer, who have endured imprisonment and exile alongside blacks in the struggle.

  If fear has taken over from concern among whites, it has rushed in to fill a vacuum. In nearly six months, nothing has been done to meet the desperate need of blacks that seems finally to have overcome every threat of punishment and repression: the need, once and for all and no less, to take their lives out of the hands of whites. The first week of the riots, Gatsha Buthelezi called for a national convention and the release of black leaders in prison to attend it. As the weeks go by in the smell of burning, the call for a national convention has been taken up by other Bantustan leaders, black urban spokesmen, the press, the white political opposition. After five months, the Prime Minister, Mr Vorster, answered: ‘There will be no national convention so far as this government is concerned.’ Most of the time he leaves comment to his Minister of Justice, Police and Prisons, Mr Jimmy Kruger. The only attempt to deal with a national crisis is punitive. It is Mr Kruger’s affair. He continues to project an equation that is no more than a turn of phrase: ‘South Africa will fight violence with violence.’

  Three hundred and sixty people have died, of whom two were white. The police, who carry guns and still do not wear riot-protective clothing but army camouflage dress and floppy little-boy hats that could be penetrated by a slingshot, have not lost a single man.

  Neither the Prime Minister nor his minister in charge of black lives, M. C. Botha (Bantu Administration, Development and Education), has yet talked to urban black leaders more representative than members of the collapsed Urban Bantu Councils. (They do not have normal municipal powers.) On their own doleful admittance, these are dubbed ‘Useless Boys’ Clubs’ by the youths who run the black townships now.

  Of the black leaders whom the vast majority of urban blacks would give a mandate to speak for them, Nelson Mandela and his lieutenants Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki, of the banned African National Congress, are still imprisoned for life on Robben Island. Robert Sobukwe of the Pan-Africanist Congress is banished and silenced.

  Black intellectuals who might stand in for these have been detained one by one, even while whites of unlikely political shades continue to affirm a fervent desire to talk to blacks, just talk to them – as if 300 years of oppression were a family misunderstanding that could be explained away, and as if everyone did not know, in the small dark room where he meets himself, exactly what is wrong with South African ‘race relations’.

  The government leaders refuse to meet the Black People’s Convention, perhaps in the belief that by not recognising Black Consciousness organisations the power of blacks to disrupt their own despised conditions of life and (at the very least) the economy that sustains the white one will cease to exist. Fanonist theory of the black man as an image projected upon him by the white man takes a new twist; the white man goes to the door of his shop in central Johannesburg one September morning this year and fails to recognise the black man marching down the street shouting, in his own image, ‘This is our country.’

  The government won’t speak to the Black Parents’ Association, formed originally to finance the burial of Soweto children in June. In this ghastly bond, the association moved on under the leadership of Nelson Mandela’s wife, Winnie Mandela, and Dr Manas Buthelezi, an important Black Consciousness leader about to be consecrated Lutheran Bishop of Johannesburg. It became a united front combining youthful black consciousness inspiration with the convictions of older people who followed the African National Congress and Pan-Africanist Congress.

  Finally, the government does not consider speaking to the militant students themselves who are still effectively in leadership, sometimes preventing their parents from going to work (two successful strikes in Johannesburg). Daily and determinedly, they pour into the gutters the shebeen liquor they consider their elders have long allowed themselves to be unmanned by.

  Meanwhile, since June 926 black schoolchildren have received punishments ranging from fines or suspended sentences to jail (five years for a seventeen-year-old boy) and caning (five cuts with a light cane for an eleven-year-old who gave the black power salute, shouted at the police and stoned a bus). They are some of the 4,200 people charged with offences arising out of the riots, including incitement, arson, public violence and sabotage. Many students are also among the 697 people, including Mrs Winnie Mandela, detained in jail for ‘security reasons’; the other week one hanged himself by his shirt in the Johannesburg prison, an old fort two kilometres from the white suburban house where I write this.6 Several students, not twenty years old, have just begun that reliable apprenticeship for African presidents, exile and education in Britain. When, in September, Mr Vorster met blacks with whom he will talk – his appointed Bantustan leaders – he would not discuss urban unrest or agree to a national conference of blacks and whites to decide what ought to be done about it.

  There is a one-man commission of inquiry into the riots, sitting now. Mr Justice Cillie, the white judge who constitutes it, complains that few people actually present at these events have volunteered evidence. In fact, the schoolchildren and students themselves
boycott it, and for the rest, South Africans’ faith in the efficacy of commissions to lead to positive action has long gone into the waste-paper basket along with the recommendations the government steadily rejects. The Cillie Commission keeps extending the period in which it will sit, as the riots continue to be part of the present and not a matter of calm recollection. 27 January next year is the latest limit announced. Historical analogies are easily ominous. But a commission of inquiry was Tsar Nicholas II’s way of dealing with the implications of the ‘unrest’ of Bloody Sunday, the beginning of the 1905 revolution. A chain-store owner whose business has been disrupted by strikes and the gutting of a store has burst out of the conventions of his annual report to shareholders to say, ‘Decades of selfishness and smugness by South African whites is the principal reason for widespread unrest among blacks.’

  Yet most changes suggested by whites do not approach a call for a national convention, with its implication of a new constitution and the end of white supremacy. Black certainty that nothing will bring equality without power is dismantled by whites into component injustices they can admit and could redress without touching the power structure. The Federated Chamber of Industries calls for job ‘reservations’ discriminating against blacks in industry to be ended, and has the support of the most powerful trade union group and the opposition parties. The National Development and Management Foundation goes further and calls for the ending of business and residential apartheid as well. Afrikaner big business, government supporters all, in their Afrikaanse Handelsinstituut ask for blacks to be given ‘greater’ rights in their own urban areas and training to increase their skills.