Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  And ‘yes’ said the Reagan government, entering into constructive engagement with a policy destructive of justice and human dignity, while mumbling obeisance to abhorrence of apartheid like those lapsed believers who cross themselves when entering a church.

  There is no such special position as ‘one in which non-Afrikaners find themselves’ now, nor has there been for a very long time. The categories do not fall so neatly into place. The actual division among whites falls between those – the majority – Afrikaner and English-speaking who support, whether directly or circuitously, the new constitution as a valid move towards ‘accommodating black aspirations’ (let us not invoke justice), and those – the minority – English-speaking and Afrikaner who oppose the constitution as irremediably unjust and unjustifiable. There are fewer Afrikaners than English-speakers in the latter category, but the support of English-speakers in the former represents a majority in their language group. When blacks speak about the ‘Boere’ these days, the term has become a generic rather than an ethnic one: it is likely to refer to a mode of behaviour, an attitude of mind, a position in which the nomenclature encompasses all whites who voluntarily and knowingly collaborate in oppression of blacks. Not all Afrikaners are ‘Boere’, and many English-speakers with pedigrees dating back to the 1820 Settlers are …

  States of mind and ways of life under crisis would be expected more or less to follow the lines of division, and I believe that states of mind do. Everywhere I go I sense a relaxation of the facial muscles among whites who had appeared to be tasting the ashes of the good life when Soweto was on fire in the week before the State of Emergency was declared. Approval of the state’s action is not often explicit in my company because it is known that I belong to the minority-within-the-white-minority that opposes the constitution as a new order of oppression in contempt of justice, and sees the State of Emergency as an act of desperation: a demonstration of the failure of the government’s atrocious ‘new deal’ only a few months after it was instituted. The general feeling among whites is that fear has been staved off – at least for a while. The police dogs are guarding the gates of paradise. Keep away from roads that pass where the blacks and the police/army are contained in their vortex of violence, and life can go on as usual. One can turn one’s attention to matters that affect one directly and can be dealt with without bloodying one’s hands: lobbying all over the world against disinvestment and sports boycotts – an area where sophisticated people understand one another in economic and leisure self-interests; for many, the only brotherhood that transcends nation and race. There is a physical and mental cordoning-off of ‘areas of unrest’. The police and army take care of the first, and that extraordinary sense of whiteness, of having always been different, always favoured, always shielded from the vulnerabilities of poverty and powerlessness, takes care of the second. We whites in South Africa present an updated version of the tale of the Emperor’s clothes; we are not aware of our nakedness – ethical, moral, and fatal – clothed as we are in our own skin. This morning on the radio the news of the withdrawal of more foreign diplomats from South Africa, and the continuing threat of the withdrawal by foreign banks, was followed by a burst of pop-music defiance by the state-owned South African Broadcasting Corporation, on behalf of Afrikaner and English-speaking whites. Allies, yelled a disco idol, We’re allies, with our backs against the w-a-ll …

  As for the less worldly among the white majority, they express openly their approval of government violence in the last few months, and there is a group that believes there has not been enough of it. ‘The government should shoot the lot.’ This remark was offered to my friend the photographer David Goldblatt in all crazy seriousness, not as a manner of speaking: there are whites in whose subconscious the power of the gun in a white man’s hand is magical (like his skin?) and could wipe out an entire population nearly four times as large as that of the whites. This, in bizarre historical twinship, is the obverse of the belief of the mid-nineteenth-century Xhosa prophetess, Nongquase, who told her people that by following her instructions they could cause all those who wore trousers (the white men) to be swept away by a whirlwind …

  It is not true that the South African government is bent on genocide, as some black demagogues have averred (the black man is too useful for that); but it is true that the unconscious will to genocide is there, in some whites. So is belief in the old biblical justification for apartheid that has been embarrassedly repudiated by even the Dutch Reformed Church. Over lunch on his father’s Transvaal farm recently, I met a handsome young Afrikaner on leave from military service. Grace was said; when the young man lifted his bowed head he began an exposition of biblical justification that was all his own, I think: blacks are the descendants of Cain and a curse on humankind. I did not rise to the bait; but my eyes must have betrayed that I could scarcely believe my ears. When, among the women of the family, I was being shown their new acquisition, a pristine white dishwasher that had replaced the black maid, he took the opportunity to fire at me: ‘Yes, it’s a good white kaffir girl.’

  During the weeks that led up to the State of Emergency, the Eastern Cape black townships had become ungovernable – even in the streets of Grahamstown, the English 1820 Settlers’ Association show-piece answer to the Afrikaner Voortrekker Monument at Pretoria, soldiers and armoured vehicles had taken the place of festival visitors. Most whites in South Africa were in a state of anguish: over the outcome of the New Zealand government’s determination to stop the All Blacks’ rugby tour of South Africa. It was only when Soweto became a hell to which Johannesburg’s black workers returned each night as best they could (buses would not venture farther than Soweto boundaries) that white faces in Johannesburg became strained.

  But the state of mind of the minority-within-the-white-minority did not have to wait for any declaration to be aware of an emergency beyond the national rugby fields. People like Bishop Tutu, Reverend Beyers Naudé and Sheena Duncan of the Black Sash – a women’s organisation that has done more than any other source to expose the appalling forced removals of black rural people – had been warning for months that an uprising was inevitable: built into the new constitution as its own consequence. The government was arresting trade union leaders and leaders of the non-racial United Democratic Front. Just as, abroad, one may mutter abhorrence of apartheid and go on funding it morally and materially, so the government continued (as it continues) to reiterate a litany of dedication to consultation and change while arresting almost every black leader with any claim to be consulted about change. On the minority side of the dividing line between white and white, a new organisation had grown in urgent response to the use of army recruits against the people of the black township of Sebokeng last October. Resistance to conscription was suddenly no longer some fringe defection on religious grounds by a handful of Seventh Day Adventists, but a wave of revulsion against ‘defending one’s country’ by maiming, killing, and breaking into the humble homes of black people. In this horrifying domestic context, the End Conscription Campaign held a three-day gathering in Johannnesburg where a large crowd of young men and their families debated the moral issues of conscientious objection and defined their position not as pacifist but as a refusal to defend apartheid. I gave a reading there of poetry by South African writers black and white in whose work, like that of playwrights, lately, this has been the theme. The subject has to be handled gingerly, whether in poetry or platform prose; it is a treasonable offence, in South Africa, to incite anyone to refuse military service. The ECC is not yet a mass movement, and maybe will not be, but the government is sufficently alarmed by it to have detained several members.

  For years, when one asked blacks why they allowed black police to raid and arrest them, they would answer: ‘Our brothers have to do what whites tell them. We are all victims together.’ Now, black youths are confronted with what surely always was clear would be the ultimate distortion of their lives by apartheid: brothers, co-opted as police informers and City Fathers by white power,
becoming enemies.

  Many of us who belong to the minority-within-the-white-minority already were accustomed, before the State of Emergency, to using the telephone for the kind of call not made outside thriller movies in your country. When the South African Defence Force raided the capital of one of our neighbouring countries, Botswana, earlier this year, we feared for the lives of friends living in exile there. For some days, we could piece together their fate only by exchanging guarded word-of-mouth news. For my fellow writer, Sipho Sepamla, the news was bad; he travelled across the border to Botswana to the funeral of a relative murdered in the raid, and we were nervous about his doing so, since the brutal raid – which resulted in indiscriminate killing, so that even children died – was purportedly against African National Congress revolutionaries, and the demonstration of any connection with even random victims could rub off as guilt by association. With the beginning of the State of Emergency there came mass arrests, and severe penalties for revealing without authority the identity of any detainee. The names we know are confined to those permitted by the police to be published. Who can say how many others there are? So our ominous kind of morning gossip has increased – and there remains the fear that the individual one calls may not answer because he or she has been taken.

  Some of us have friends among those who are the accused in the treason trials, mainly trade unionists and leaders of the United Democratic Front, in session or about to commence. I telephone my old friend, Cassim Saloojee, a social worker, and an office-bearer in the United Democratic Front. He is at home on bail after many weeks of detention before being formally charged with treason. One discovers, these days, that genuine cheerfulness exists, and it is a by-product of courage. He has only one complaint, which is expressed in a way that catches me out: ‘I’ve been spending my time watching pornographic films.’ And with my tactfully unshockable laugh, I remember that active resistance to apartheid is political pornography in South Africa. The state has seized video cassettes of public meetings made by the United Democratic Front as records of their activities. For the purposes of their defence, the accused must study what may now be used as evidence against them. ‘Ninety hours of viewing …’

  The case is sub judice, so I suppose I cannot give here my version of whether the particular meetings I attended (the UDF is a non-racial, non-violent and legally constituted movement) could possibly be construed as violent and treasonous, but I hope that among all that footage there is at least recorded the time when the crowd in a Johannesburg hall heard that there was police harassment of some supporters in the foyer, and from the platform Cassim Saloojee succeeded in preventing the crowd from streaming out to seek a confrontation that doubtless would have resulted in police violence.

  While writing this letter I have had a call from a young white student at the University of the Witwatersrand, down the road, who himself is a veteran of detention, and whose brother is now in detention for the second time. At last, after more than two weeks, Colin Coleman’s parents have managed to get permission to visit Neil Coleman in prison – like well over a thousand others, he has not been charged. The parents are founder members of the well-established Detainees Parents’ Committee, a title and status that indicate the enduring state of mind, stoic but unintimidatedly active on the part of all prisoners of conscience, black and white, whether or not in the family, that prevails among white people like these. Colin has called to ask me to take part in a panel discussion on South African culture to be held by the students’ Academic Freedom Committee. Irrelevant while we are in a State of Emergency? Concurrently with engagement in the political struggle for the end of apartheid, there exists an awareness of the need for a new conception of culture, particularly among whites. Young people like these are aware that a change of consciousness, of the white sense of self, has to be achieved along with a change of regime, if, when blacks do sit down to consult with whites, there is to be anything to talk about. The arts in South Africa sometimes do bear relation to the real entities of South African life in the way that the euphemisms and evasions of white politics do not.

  These are the states of mind of the majority of white South Africans, and of the minority within the white population. In the first, the preoccupations of the second are no more than newspaper stories you, too, read thousands of miles away: so long as the Casspir armoured monsters patrol the black townships and even mass funerals are banned, the majority feel safe, since there is no possibility that they may be imprisoned for a too-active sense of justice, or find any member of their families or their friends in detention, on trial, or in danger of losing a life in right-wing terrorist attacks. Nor is there any possibility that one of their lawyers might be gunned down, as was a member of a treason trial defence team outside her home a few nights ago.

  The conditions of life, for whites, are a different matter. Even those few whites who have members of their families in prison themselves continue to wake up every morning as I do, to the song of weaver birds and mechanical-sounding whirr of crested barbets in a white suburb. Soweto is only eight miles from my house; if I did not have friends living there, I should not be aware of the battles of stones against guns and tear gas that are going on in its streets, for images on a TV screen come by satellite as easily from the other side of the world as from eight miles away, and may be comprehended as equally distanced from the viewer. How is it possible that the winter sun is shining, the randy doves are announcing spring, the domestic workers from the back yards are placing bets on the numbers game, Fah-Fee, with the Chinese runner, as usual every afternoon? In terms of ways of life, conditions of daily living are sinisterly much the same for all whites, those who manage to ignore the crisis in our country, and those for whom it is the determining state of mind. Some go to protest meetings, others play golf. All of us go home to quiet streets, outings to the theatre and cinema, good meals and secure shelter for the night, while in the black townships thousands of children no longer go to school, fathers and sons disappear into police vans or lie shot in the dark streets, social gatherings are around coffins and social intercourse is confined to mourning.

  The night the State of Emergency was declared I was at a party held at an alternative education centre, the Open School, in the downtown area where banks and the glass palaces of mining companies run down into Indian stores and black bus queues. The school is directed by Colin and Dolphine Smuts (black, despite their Afrikaans surname) for black youths and children who study drama, painting, dance and music there – subjects not offered by government ‘Bantu’ education. The occasion was a celebration: the school, which had been in danger of closure for lack of funds, had received a Ford Foundation grant. Colin had not known until the evening began whether the new ban on gatherings might not be served on the celebration; Dolphine had gone ahead and prepared food. There were polite speeches, music, drumming, and the declamatory performance of poetry that has been part of resistance rhetoric since young people began to compose in prison in 1976, and which sets such gatherings apart from their counterparts in other countries. Soweto was sealed off by military roadblocks. Yet the black guests had come through somehow, thoroughly frisked in the ‘elegantly casual’ clothes we all, black and white, wear to honour this kind of occasion. I asked a couple I had not met before what it was like to be in Soweto now, looking at them in the inhibited, slightly awed way one tries not to reveal to people who have emerged alive from some unimaginable ordeal. The man took a bite from a leg of chicken and washed it down with his drink. ‘In your street, one day it’s all right. The next day, you can cross the street when a Casspir comes round the corner, and you’ll die. It’s like Beirut.’

  Yes, if you want to know what it’s like here, it’s more like Beirut than he knew. I remember a film I once saw, where the camera moved from destruction and its hateful cacophony in the streets to a villa where people were lunching on a terrace, and there were birds and flowers. That’s what it’s like. I also remember something said by a character in a novel I wrote
ten years ago. ‘How long can we go on getting away scot free?’

  1985

  Huddleston: A Sign

  Above this desk at which I write there are children’s paintings, a poster showing Marcel Proust as a small boy with a large bow tie and a watch-chain, a carving from the Central African Republic that looks like a human sundial, and a photograph. These are my treasures, under whose signs I spend my working life.

  The photograph was taken by my friend David Goldblatt at the beginning of his career, in 1952, at the Newclare squatter camp, Johannesburg. It is a night scene, lit only by a tin brazier. The light from lozenges of incandescent coal brings forward out of the dark a pair of gaunt, tightly clasped hands, the long fingers tautly interlaced, making a great double fist. They are the hands of a white man. Above them there is darkness again, until the furthermost reach of light leaps on the bright white band of a clerical collar, and, more softly, brings from oblivion the three-quarter face. There is a pointed ear standing alertly away from the head and lean jaw, and the tendon from behind the ear down the neck is prominent and tense. The ear is cocked intently and the eyes are concentrated.