I date the development of my consciousness of being South African rather than having any other social identity from the birth into that second consciousness. The process is essentially the discovery of the lie. The great South African lie. In disagreement with popular beliefs, I myself don’t equate this consciousness with guilt – that famous guilt white-anting the South African personality comes later, with the age of reason and the shame of consent … What comes of the immediate discovery of the lie is revelation: you cannot feel guilt for being conned. From the time I discovered that what was being concealed by my society was that blacks were people – not mine-boys, not our Lettie, but people, I had the opportunity to become what I think of as a South African. I had the responsibility to accept what I now knew. Which is to say that I believe that is where the identity is to be formed: working one’s way through the central, definitive experience of black and white as people, with undifferentiated claims on life, whatever else – skin, language, culture – makes them differ from one another. Of course, I don’t have to say that it is not as brusquely attainable and clear-cut as it sounds. When I reached the awkward age of reason, I sought ideological and political explanations and formulations for what whites were doing to blacks. To be a South African is to be one for whom none of these theories is abstract; long before you or I are old enough to read politics and economics we have demonstrated in ourselves capitalist exploitation of a peasantry and proletariat, lived this in our lives, going to a free school while our black siblings caddied for our fathers on the golf course or herded their cattle on the farms; long before we have heard of the race theories of a Gobineau or a Hitler, we have been part of a demonstration of the counter-Marxist, Western democratic theory that race discrimination and not class exploitation is the basis of oppression in our country.
For me, the black mine-workers were in the compound before the term migratory labour was stored in my mind. I heard in the mouth of a grown-up in that small town the words ‘white kaffir’ as an ordinary term of abuse between two quarrelling whites before complex analyses of the projection of fears, before the concept of the Other who epitomises one’s own obstreperous idea came my way. Now I began to interpret. I began to understand that I was, as a white South African, in terms of social evolution, and to ask how – if – one might break out into another social role. Most important, contact with blacks as people and equals, sometimes very close and personal contact, shaped my consciousness through their ideas about whites, about me; rounded it out through their demands upon me and my dependencies upon them.
In this period of intense give-and-take between idea and flesh, between the theory and the daily reality not only of aspiring to something called justice but of aspiring to become human in the ways South African society was and is not, I was beguiled by the charm of a ‘free society’ within four walls, so to speak. But outside that room the iron colour bar remained on black backs, not mine. Like many others, I granted too much counterweight to the groups where there was no ‘they’ and ‘we’, only Us.
During this period – and it lasted more than a decade – I also had new relationships with whites that developed my awareness of what might be involved in being a South African. In particular there was my close friendship with a woman who already lived in a way that seemed to be evolved in particular response to the situation. She was an Afrikaner, but there were others like her, Jewish or of English descent. She was a white prepared to take full responsibility for the past that can’t be changed and the future that must be. Through her I came to understand that we whites are not European and that in order to be anything we must change profoundly. It was in the 1950s, long before we had been frightened by the concept of black consciousness and before the concept of white consciousness had begun to be considered as anything but white supremacy. At the time it was still possible to work with blacks; she did just that: not for them. She considered proxy a crippling thing to those on whose behalf concessions were asked. She believed no one could assess black needs but blacks themselves: no one could decide for them how they could free themselves from white oppression: only they knew what it really was. She would argue political tactics passionately with blacks, but she did not expect to prevail by assumption of white-knows-best, if not out of despotism then out of an equally despotic compassion. I watched her in her daily life, as an organiser of a mixed trade union, then running a co-operative, willing and able to work under blacks in political activities on their terms, astonishingly free of any sense of self-sacrifice or nobility in the risks she ran, the naming and banning and periods of detention – in simple, unshakeable acceptance that if she suffered it was as much to remake the meaning of being a white South African as to remake that of being black.
A lot of cant is talked in the context of whites like you and me suffering on full stomachs the psychic damage of over-privilege; but if we are to try to discover if there is any validity in a concept of white consciousness, we have to examine how privilege subconsciously hampers the will to change. And it still seems to me that people like my friend saw the real aspects of this and took their own hard way towards curing it.
Today men and women such as Beyers Naudé and some young people who have been student leaders show that same courage.
Jean Paul Sartre, as an old man in his middle seventies, says his only regret in life is that he was not more radical; I think it is likely that I, too, from that safe shore, may say the same. Certainly I am aware that I have not been nearly as brave as being a South African has turned out to require, and it so happens that active radicals and bravery have gone together, in South Africa.
How much can I blame on the tumbril of history, whose destination is unlikely to be that rendezvous where there is room for all? How much must I blame on the lingering sloth of privilege, convictions not matched by courage; the writer’s fiercely exclusive sense of his existence through his work? It is hard to be honest about these things, even with oneself.
‘Only connect’ was a fragile bond. Part of my continuing consciousness of being a South African has been to accept, quite long ago, without sneering at the limited but undoubted value it had, that that bond between black and white has broken, defiled by ‘dialogue’, the zoo tea party at which noises remarkably like human exchanges are made. That bond has been rent like gossamer by brutish removals, medieval detentions, and finally, the shooting of children.
At no time in my life has my sense of being a South African been final and definitive, and it is not, now. Being a South African is a constant state of response to demands; continuing and changing demands. I often mark how different is the social state of being of American or English friends. They begin to seem to me a protected species; in one way, I could define my South Africanness by the extent to which they differ from me in their secure sense of what they are. Once mature, they may have to make adaptive changes to outward circumstances, they may have to face slumps and unemployment, changes in the standard of living, even the possibility of atomic annihilation together, but they will never have to change the concept of who and what they are in relation to their country.
This is exactly what is being demanded of whites in South Africa now: to change the concept of who and what they are in relation to South Africa now. After more than three hundred years, blacks are demanding it of whites; whites such as the students who have organised this series of discussions and inquiries are demanding it of themselves. In the political parties’ understanding of the nature of the demand, there are varying degrees of sincerity and realism; what we have to keep foremost in our South African consciousness, there, is that although some wild things have come out of the mouth of Mr Andrew Young, and although the diplomatic notes of protest from the big powers as well as those of Mr Pik Botha fell thick upon Mr Andrew Young’s head when he said South Africa’s government was illegal, only legalistic, sophistic arguments can prove him wrong. Morally, our government is illegal. When our Nuremberg comes – and the trials go on in private, inside us, already –
no one will be able to deny that the ‘legality’ of our government consists in its being legal in our country for a parliament representing only a white minority to make the laws …
I don’t think the public platform is the place for me, but I am here because I take seriously the Student Representative Council’s intention to examine the feasibility and validity of a white consciousness concept as a response to our present situation, psychological and practical. I am not prepared to dismiss white consciousness out of hand as merely the acceptance, black-dictated, of racialism in reverse. The rejection by young and not-so-young blacks of the white spectrum from liberal to radical is a traumatic experience, make no mistake about it, for whites. For myself, I can say that rationally I understand it and consider it necessary, but as individual experience I find it as wounding as anyone else does. It is not easy to take as a new starting point. Black thought insists that, beginning again from rejection, whites must work out a social and psychic route based on the idea that they will arrive so changed back at the point of departure that it will be possible, then, for there to be equality of acceptance. For blacks will emerge from their great pilgrimage into full selfhood; and the thread that leads out of the labyrinth of struggle will turn out to have been in the hands of both and to have brought them to a meeting place, not some hall where the petty apartheid signs have been hastily taken down.
Is this just a ghastly mirror-version of ‘separate development’? I fervently hope not. I don’t think so. Mongane Serote once wrote a little poem: ‘White people are white people, they must learn to listen; black people are black people, they must learn to talk.’ It has happened. But we must not expect blacks to tell us what we must do, or even what they want of us. It is frustrating that they will not, cannot.
If we declare an intention to identify fully with the struggle for a single, common South African consciousness, if there is such a thing as white consciousness as a way to human justice and honest self-realisation, whites will have to take their attitudes apart and assemble afresh their ideas of themselves. We shall have to accept the black premise that the entire standpoint of being white will have to shift, whether it is under the feet of those who loathe racialism and have opposed it all their lives, or those to whom race discrimination is holy writ.
One of the most difficult things of all to face is that black thinkers talk at the moment as if they prefer, in principle, white racialists and conservatives, those who have decreed and pursued the persecution of blacks with pious cruelty and detached hubris, to those whites of the liberal-to-radical spectrum who have pursued the cause of black liberation, at worst, yes, out of self-interest disguised as paternalism, at best out of commitment to destroy self-interest as whites have known it, along with apartheid. There is no objective reason why the ugly sincerity of white racialists should be regarded as more ‘sincere’ than the sincerity of whites who want to ditch racialism. But the thing is those whites failed: failure in the ranks of those who have power is not forgiven by those without power. Yet this failure of whites has become one of the most important factors in black consciousness – in the form of the realisation that liberation cannot be gained on one’s behalf, by others. Could white consciousness – once you have decided what it is and how to put it into practice – provide a means for whites to participate in the legal and economic and spiritual liberation of blacks? Will it find a way in which whites themselves may at the same time be liberated from the image of the Janus Oppressor, the two archetypal stereo-faces, grinning racialist or weeping liberal, of the same tyrant? Is this what consciousness is? You are making a Pascalian wager on it; and that’s the only way to find out.
1977
Transkei
A Vision of Two Blood-Red Suns
Coming into the new ‘black republic’ of Transkei2 from the north, I was out of it again almost at once and then in again. The road leads through an area and town ‘excised’ for whites. On the map these blobs and trickles of black and white, marking off the 87 per cent of the Republic of South Africa reserved by 4 million whites for themselves from the 13 per cent offered to 18 million blacks, are an ethnic Rorschach test whose logic is to be understood only by initiates of the political ideology of apartheid; from the road, it’s suddenly easy for anyone. Passing before one’s eyes, the perfect contours of vast lands ploughed and crops reaped by machine, the barns full of bright farming equipment, the pedigree stock, the privacy of trees and gardens drawn round the fine farmstead of the white area change abruptly to the black area’s uneven strips cultivated by hand-plough, the bare hills with their discs of mud huts and squares of spiky agave enclosures for motley beasts herded by children. The only machinery is the occasional wrecked car, dragged off the road and picked clean.
A torchlight procession of hundreds of winter-blooming aloes – red-flame, blue-flame, white-flame – passes a church upon a hill in an infinity of empty hills. A range of shadows – the Drakensberg Mountains that form Transkei’s north-east border – fades with the light that is leaving a feminine landscape of classical curves broken here and there by ravines intimately furred with virgin forest. Where this has been replaced by afforestation already there is the inappropriate European dusk gathered by Northern pine. A slope is a football field because racing youngsters are using it for that purpose, and marks one of the ‘rehabilitation’ villages established to control landless people and soil erosion caused by random grazing: several hundred rounds of mud and thatch instead of hilltop crowns of two or three, the new tin flash of a windmill, kilometres of wire fencing. Many women carrying across their heads loads of wood twice their height, and one or two elderly men in old business suits on horseback are making their way along concourses undefined as the football field. Broad tracks made by ox-drawn sleds lead only to sources of firewood and water. For me, on the way to places with onomatopoeic names, Tabankulu, Lusikisiki, there is the one fierce road. Stones and ruts; no signposts. As if to confuse an invader – but the invader is merely one who doesn’t know the signs of the terrain so firmly staked within the lifetime range of the people who live here that they walk alone, in the dark, old, female, as surely as and much more securely than Western contemporaries find the way home from a suburban bus stop.
Great space; and human intimacy. To think one has found it even here is an illusion, so far as the sense of space is concerned. This 1976 creation of a country (4.4 million hectares) larger than Switzerland is so overcrowded in terms of agricultural potential that it cannot survive unless enough industry can be established to take half the people off the land.
But the human intimacy is no illusion. These people are innocent; innocent of alienation, our crime against ourselves. One midday I was received in the empty round mud room that was the home of a woman so poor there were not even any of the usual home-made utensils to be seen. Her children had the peculiar, still sad air of malnutrition. She apologised with social grace for not being able to offer food to her white guests, as if home freezer supplies just happened to have run out – but no, I am projecting my own kind of situation on one I couldn’t conceive of: she assumed, without loss of pride or self-respect, perfect understanding of shared circumstances. Like the majority of families, hers had no adult male living at home – the men are away working on the mines or canefields of South Africa – but three youths had dropped in to visit. She was animated and charming in her rags. The youngsters shared a cigarette rolled from a piece of newspaper none of the company could read, but tranquil communication was strongly present as the smell of grass-thatch and woodsmoke that comes from the skin and hair of these people as you sit among them.
On a mountain-top with a view no multimillionaire could secure to himself in Europe, I found three little girls alone in possession of two huts, a tethered calf, a hen coop made of woven branches and a field where mealies had been reaped. A figure out of Grimm climbed into view with a load of wood and a bunch of wild asparagus fern she had cut to make a broom. A child ran off reverently to fetch a tin of wat
er. The quizzically intelligent old woman quenched her thirst. What did white people want to visit a dirty homestead like hers for? A confident, welcoming joke. To submit at her invitation to the dim, wide, conical engulfment of her hut was to find the order of good housekeeping. Apart from the grindstone and pestle for maize and the huge clay pot for brewing maize beer that are the standard furnishings, there were gourd dippers and enamel store plates; the careful luxury of a bottle of paraffin hung among the hoe and scythe hooked under the eaves of the thatch. Around one curve the base of the wall extended to make a low clay bench like a window seat, and there were a couple of stacked carved stools: the men’s side of the house. The grandmother and the children sank at once into a calm unit, close together, on the sleeping mats of the women’s side. In place of the ticking of a clock, in these houses silence is the piping chip-chip of chicks whose tiny blur carries the light from the single source of the doorway as they pick grains of meal from the smooth mud-and-dung floor.
The old woman’s son is in the mines; she provides and cares for the grandchildren out of her yearly R144 old age pension. What about the money her son earns? That pays taxes and supports his wife and their smallest children. A relative comes to plough the grandmother’s steep field; she cultivates and harvests herself, just as she walks the mountains to fetch wood and water. The ideal love between women and children I see everywhere here – that is what it is made of: that great burden of toil. The sturdy little girls each find some surface of their grandmother’s body to make tender contact with; this thin woman with the blue-black darkening of age in the wrinkles of capability is their bedrock. Grimmest facts of economic hardship are the ugly secret of such love.
Telling Times Page 31