Although the Progressive Reform Party has demanded a national convention and the release of all people from detention, it was still necessary, before its 1976 congress agreed to change its education policy to enforced desegregation, for Helen Suzman to remind rank-and-file members that the separate-but-equal dictum for education had been ‘thrown out by the United States twenty years ago’.
With unprecedentedly strong criticism of the government coming from its own newspapers and prominent Afrikaners as well as the opposition, it is baffling to read that at the same time 60 per cent of whites – an increase of 5 per cent over the majority gained by the government in the 1974 election – support Mr Vorster’s National Party. The reliability of this particular poll is in some doubt; but perhaps the contradiction is not so unlikely after all. It is possible to see a dire necessity for change and fear it so greatly that one runs to give oneself to the father figure who will forbid one to act.
For months the white political opposition parties – Progressive Reform, United Party, and Democratic Party – have been trying to agree to some sort of realignment. If a liberal front comes about, it will trample the old sandcastle fort of the United Party, the conservative official parliamentary opposition, already eroded by the departure of most of its politically vigorous members to the Progressive Reform Party.
The numerical strength of such a front cannot be measured until it is known whether a major part of the United Party, which still polled 31.49 per cent in the 1974 elections, will enter it alongside the Progressive Reform Party, in the last few years grown from a pressure group to a real presence in parliament, with twelve seats and 6.25 per cent of the vote. (The crankish Democratic Party has a minute following.) Only when the extent of United Party commitment is revealed will it be possible to estimate roughly what percentage of the 40 per cent who voted against the government in the last election are liberals. There are rumours that some disaffected verligte (‘enlightened’) National Party MPs may defect to the front too.
The declared aim of the front is to protect the rights of whites while giving blacks, coloureds and Indians a direct say in government – which careful phrasing suggests its policy will be to the right of the present Progressive Reform Party. The spectral raison d‘être of such a realignment is surely not the chance of ousting Vorster’s government but of getting ready a white ‘negotiating party’ to treat with blacks on a shared-power basis when he finds he can no longer govern. The viewpoint of enlightened white politics now includes urgently the wide angle of acceptability to blacks, although they have no vote to be wooed. When Mr Vorster can no longer govern, it is not likely any other white government will be able to.
No one knows whether the Bantustan leaders are, in their different circumstances, preparing themselves for a particular role on that day. They meet at a Holiday Inn at Johannesburg’s airport, exactly like Holiday Inns all over the world, down to its orgy-sized beds and cosy smell of French fried potatoes piped along with muzak, but deriving its peculiar status as neutral country outside apartheid from the time when it was the first hotel here to be declared ‘international’: not segregated – for foreign blacks, anyway.
From there the Bantustan leaders demand ‘full human rights for blacks and not concessions’. With the exception of the Transkei and Bophuthatswana – the former having celebrated the homeland brand of independence on 26 October, the latter soon to do so – they reject ethnic partitions of South Africa. Which means they walk out on the many-mansions theory of apartheid, abandoning the white government which set them up inside; and they identify themselves as part of the liberation movement for an undivided South Africa. They present themselves to the black population in general as black leaders, not tribal leaders. Is this a bid for power? If Nelson Mandela were to come back from the prison island, would they step aside for him? Has the most imposing of them, Gatsha Buthelezi, a following cutting across his Zulu tribal lines?
Whites believe so. He attracts large audiences when he speaks in cosmopolitan black townships. Many blacks say no; and the African National Congress in exile continues to deride the Bantustan leaders as collaborators, making no exceptions. Other blacks imply that the best of the Bantustan men are keeping warm the seats of leaders in prison. Among politically articulate blacks, this year is their (Southern hemisphere) hot summer of brotherhood. Tsietsi Mashinini, the student leader who fled the police to exile in Britain, suggests that the tremendous force his movement shows itself to represent is loyal to Mandela. It does not seem to matter to blacks whether it is a Gatsha Buthelezi or anyone else who is the one to say to whites, as he has, ‘The future is a Black future and we Blacks want our future now.’
From the Market Theatre, newly opened in what was the Covent Garden of Johannesburg, comes a strange echo – Cucurucu, Kokol, Polpoch and Rossignol, asylum clowns in Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, singing: ‘Give us our rights … and we don’t care how – We want – our re-vo-lu-tion – NOW.’ The author granted performances on condition everyone could see the work and has donated his royalties to a Soweto riot victims fund. His play has never been performed before in a city atmosphere such as ours, it has never been heard as we hear it.
During the ‘quiet’ years of successful police repression, before the young emptied the Dutch courage of shebeens down the drain and sent through people’s veins the firewater of a new spirit, there have been political trials in progress continually in South Africa. Not only those of blacks who have left the country for military training and re-entered illegally, but also those reflecting aspects of the struggle against apartheid carried on by an intellectual elite.
While the riots have been taking place, two young white university lecturers in Cape Town have given the black power clench and, avowing ‘no regrets’, have accepted long sentences under the Terrorism and Internal Security Acts; their uncompromising personal suffering serves as proof of solidarity with blacks that must be granted even by those whites who abhor the white far left. In Johannesburg I have been to hear the trial of four white university students and a lecturer accused of trying ‘to change South Africa’ by organising black workers, who have no recognised trade unions. The five were charged under the Suppression of Communism Act, and the state’s principal evidence consisted of papers read at a seminar.
The backs of these young men in blue jean outfits suggested a pop group; but when they turned in the witness stand it was not to greet fans but to smile at the wife of one of them, whose hands, while she followed the proceedings, were working at a complicated length of knitting – the danger of active dissent does make risk of imprisonment part of the daily life of courageous people. Yet I felt events had overtaken them. The segregated public gallery was almost empty of white and black spectators. The struggle was a few miles away in the streets of Soweto.
But it is another trial, which has gone on almost two years, that seems to have the opposite relation to present events. Four years ago, the nine black members of the South African Students’ Organisation accused under the Terrorism Act seemed to the ordinary public, black and white, to represent a radical fringe movement on the far side of the generation gap. The state’s evidence against them was literary and clumsily esoteric – it consisted of black plays in the idiom of New York black theatre of seven years ago, mimeographed Black Consciousness doggerel that couldn’t compete with comic books, poetry readings that surely could appeal only to the educated young.
The paper flowers of literary rhetoric have come alive in the atmosphere of tragic exaltation and discipline that can’t be explained.
In the city streets of Johannesburg black people go about their white-town working lives as they always did: the neat clerks, waiters in their baggy parody of mess dress, dashing messengers in bright helmets on motor scooters, shop-cleaners, smart girls who make tea in offices or shampoo the clients’ hair in white hairdressing salons. Polished shoes, clean clothes; and most of the time, when the youngsters don’t stop them from boarding township trains, people get to
work every day.
How do they do it? Daily life in Soweto is in hellish disruption. One-third of the country’s school-leavers may not be able to write the final exams of the school year that ends in December; not all schools in the Johannesburg area have reopened. Those that have function irregularly, either because militant pupils stop classes, or teachers suspected of sympathetic alignment with them are detained. Buses and trains don’t run when stoning and burning start; commuters crush into the big old American cars that serve as taxis or walk to stations outside the area. No one knows when his neighbour’s house may cave in, set alight because he is a policeman. If he himself owns a precious car, it too may burn, should he be suspected of being, or even be mistaken for, some less obvious form of collaborator.
While we white people picnic, Sundays are the most dreadful days of all in Soweto: funerals, the only category of public gathering not banned, have become huge mass meetings where the obsequies of the riot victim being buried are marked by new deaths and fresh wounds as the police attack mourners singing freedom songs and shaking black power salutes. A black intellectual whose commitment to liberation no one would question, although he risks the violent disapproval of blacks by still having contact with whites, tells me, ‘When I go home tonight, I don’t know which to be more afraid of – the police getting me when they shoot at anything that moves, or my own people getting me when I walk across the yard to the lavatory.’
White Johannesburg appears as it always was. Across the veld to the south-west Soweto has been severed from the city, to drift in its fury and misery. Refuse, carted away in municipal vehicles that are vulnerable symbols of white rule, is collected when it can be. The Johannesburg medical officer of health has warned of possible outbreaks of measles and diphtheria in Soweto, and the reappearance of poliomyelitis; the white doctors and nurses who staffed most clinics have had to be withdrawn. It is no longer safe for any white to enter there. Only the white police go in; stand guard, their chrome whiplash aerials giving away the presence of riot-squad cars and men in leaf-spattered jumpsuits at the crossroads where Soweto leads to Johannesburg. And the black workers come out every morning and go back every night, presenting faces that won’t distress the white city.
What may the clean, ironed clothes and calm faces carry concealed, of disease and violence, to a city that has cut such things loose from itself?
Postscript: A Johannesburg newspaper asks if I will accept nomination for the ‘Woman of the Year’. I decline. Someone else will have that honour, perhaps even a black woman from the small black professional elite. But this year the only candidates are surely Winnie Mandela, who came out of house arrest to stand between the police and the schoolchildren and be imprisoned, or any one of the black township women who have walked beside their marching children, carrying water to wash the tear gas from their eyes.
1976
What Being a South African Means to Me
Address at the University of Cape Town
What does it mean to be a South African? Who decides?
What does it mean to me to be a South African? Do I qualify? Of course, only white people in South Africa ever feel the need to ask themselves or each other such questions. And this leads to the last one we shall ever have to find the answer to: Is there such a being as a white African? Who decides?
You will have had, or will have before these sessions are over, many criteria set up in answer to the first question. The geographical criterion will be generally taken for granted as inadequate; living here under Capricorn is not enough. The circumstantial one also is inadequate: living here under apartheid is not enough. The evidence is in a state of being that has passed, from some people of my grandfather’s generation of locals who called Europe ‘home’ to some people of your generation who feel so detached from our ideologically dense environment that they are again no longer at home. There is an internal emigration that can be said to have lasted for four generations. A section of the white population has lived from conquest to decline without ever becoming South African-conscious.
But you don’t want generalisations; you will want to garner your own, from various views. What does being a South African mean to me? First of all, what are my objective claims to be one?
I was born here, yes, and to me that is a fact of deeply emotional importance, because I not only believe along with the Jesuits and Freud that the early years of a child’s life are carried within that child for always, he may live and discard many phases of experience, but that one, never. I also believe that the shock of confrontation with the physical world, the first landscape you open your eyes on, the first piece of earth you stagger to your feet on, the first faces that bend over you, although they pass beyond conscious recall, put a certain stamp on your perception and interpretation of the world. When I am in Europe or America, or anywhere away from Africa, my vision of home – in that half-waking state when time and distance don’t exist – is burned veld round mine-dumps and coal-mine slag hills. Not a romantic vision. Not one that most Europeans would recognise as Africa. But Africa it is. Although I find it harsh and ugly, and Africa and her landscapes have come to mean many other things to me, it signifies to me a primary impact of being; all else that I have seen and know is built upon it. Many questions to which I shall die while still working out my answers began there.
I have found that my claim to regard myself as South African by virtue of the pre-memory perceptions of birth and infancy are sometimes contested – by fellow whites. I may have been born here more than fifty years ago, but that does not mean I have been here long enough. I am the daughter of immigrants, my mother from England, my father from Lithuania. They weren’t the sort who called Europe ‘home’, but that doesn’t help. In the opinion of some whites, it is necessary to be able to trace one’s ancestry back to the Voortrekkers or the 1820 British Settlers in order to be accepted as South African.
Potato-famine Irish or pogrom-Jewish lineage is parvenu. As time goes by, and the tenure even of whites who can trace their family lines to van Riebeck is challenged by blacks, who for so long would not have been thought to have any say in the matter at all, the question of how many generations a white must have behind him in order to qualify as a South African seems quaintly irrelevant. I have an urbane Afrikaner intellectual friend, educated at Oxford and Leyden, who used to like to annoy me by clinching an argument with the observation, ‘How European you are, Nadine!’ Whereas he, of course – his covered-wagon pedigree and free-running childhood on a farm among black children who now live not in South Africa at all but shunted off to Gazankulu or Bophutatswana – was a real South African. I wonder how he feels about being polarised, along with the parvenu, as white, simply white, to the proposition of black consciousness …
Having staked a territorial claim that goes further and further than a mere birth certificate, how does it seem to me my consciousness of being a South African took shape? Well, to go back to childhood: subconsciously, and innocently – by which I mean that the subconscious was storing impressions and experiences that were taken at face value. When you are a child, whatever is around you, in terms of human behaviour as well as physical environment, is the way the world is. Immutable. Adults present you with a manner of life; you know of no other. For this child there is a four-roomed house with a red stoep, a lawn in front and in the back yard a pepper tree, a room where a black servant lives. The father goes on a bicycle every day to open his shop. The child walks through the suburb of bungalows across the veld to school. Once a week she wakes to the sound of drumming and knows it is Sunday because the mine-boys are dancing at the compound. They are black, wear blankets and sometimes white ladies’ church hats that have been thrown away; they pee by the roadside, they are always wandering between the mine and the town. A schoolfriend is the daughter of the mine secretary and invites the child to the Christmas party for staff children. The children are white, like her, like all the children at school. A pet dog is run over by a neighbour; the black servant
goes to see a sick brother. That is the way things are.
There is another place where things are different: overseas; snow and robins and cowboys, a king and queen, read about in children’s books. That place – the faraway – is a mystery; everything here is exactly what it is: the given facts are perfectly congruous, none stands out of category, the way an object would catch a bright child’s eye in one of those puzzle pictures, meant to train the power of cognitive distinction, where a tool must be singled out among toys, or a fish on land. A long time goes by before the facts of daily life in that small Reef town begin to be sorted into heaps, in a tentative taxonomy. The dead pet will never reappear. The mine-boys are in fact men (there’s evidence of that) although they don’t know men don’t wear ladies’ hats, and although they aren’t members of the Mine Recreation Club. The servant is a woman with a brother – another life – she’s not only ‘our Lettie’ who embroiders pillowcases in the sun on the step of her room. The men and Lettie are black. They don’t belong to clubs, they don’t come on picnics, their children don’t go to the Convent of Our Lady of Mercy, across the veld. The fact-sorting process speeds up; the little heaps mount, some merge. In the principle of selection, a norm is the set of facts governing the life of the child herself: if you are white, you begin from the premise of being white. Are they different because they are black? Or are they black because they are different?
To be born a South African is to be presented with given facts of race on the same level of reality as the absolute facts of birth and death. Perhaps that is what whites mean when they speak of the unfairness of black resentment against even ‘innocent white women and children’ (women being honorary children); and perhaps it is what blacks mean when they argue that every white is guilty, by birth, of oppression of blacks. I have spoken and written often, in my life, of the second or rebirth many South African whites go through. I mean by this simply what happens when the child begins to realise the fact that the black does not enter through the white’s front door is not in the same category as the fact that the dead will never come back. From the childhood memories of black friends and from the writings of blacks I gather that, until very recently, and no doubt still, in vast areas of the country, young blacks have a converse emergence into a second consciousness – when they realise that it is not in any natural and immutable order of things to call the white children’s father ‘Baas’ and ‘Master’.
Telling Times Page 30