Yet another reason is that fellow intellectuals abroad, specifically those who espouse socialism or radical reforms in their own capitalist states, often march with placards denouncing tyranny in countries like Greece, Spain, Brazil or Chile, but none of these people seems to have noticed what is happening in Czechoslovakia. This is because Czechoslovakia is already a socialist country. And for this reason too the writer’s wife smiles as cutely as she does and the writer himself shows no sign of surprise as the couple stands together in the water. Indeed, there is yet another reason for their expressions—namely, that the writer has for many years been advocating communism.
If the photograph could have been much wider, it would have revealed a veritable crowd of writers, professors, and intellectuals and their families, standing in the water. Not a few of these would be authors whose works come out in France, England, America—other places and other languages. For this these artists are not punished, although the government tries to discourage foreign publishers. Also, royalties are specially taxed so as to leave the artists with next to nothing. Thus they are quite successful in other countries but are forbidden to publish in their own language. And this also helps explain why the writer and his wife do not feel it so extraordinary to be standing hip-deep in water with their clothes on.
In Russia, quite otherwise, writers do not have themselves photographed in this curious way, because the Soviet government simply forbids their publishing abroad without official permission to do so. So Russian writers are photographed on perfectly dry land. The unique situation has therefore arisen whereby Czech writers would be delighted if foreign publishers or foundations would put out their work not only in foreign languages but in Czech. So persecuted a national pride is unequaled in any of the other socialist countries!
As matters stand, Czech writers can never read their work in other than strange languages, and this makes some of these writers feel they are instead the authors of translations. This is also why the couple is photographed standing hip-deep in water with their clothes on.
The man in the picture has had half a dozen plays produced abroad and receives press notices now and then from Paris, London, Frankfurt or New York, but he does not feel he has ever finished a play, since a play is usually finished inside a theater and he is not allowed inside a theater in Czechoslovakia to work with actors and a production. This is also why he is standing in the water with his clothes on.
At the risk of overelaborating on so simple a picture, it is nevertheless necessary to add that a path, so to speak, lies open before this couple, if they would only take it. It would be the work of half an hour for this playwright to secure for himself a place on dry land. He need only appear before the proper authorities and deliver a confession that he was wrong in 1968 to oppose the Russian invasion, the elimination of human rights, et cetera, ending with praise for the present regime and a confirmation of its correct and humane position. His confession would then be widely published—in Czech, of course—and with it his condemnation of friends who still insist on standing in water, calling upon them to come out against alien, imperialist ideas and to take up their part in the building of a new Czechoslovakia instead of pretending, as they do now, that their consciences are more valuable and right than the wisdom of the present rulers. With a few well-chosen words, the couple and the dog could dry off and become real Czechs.
That the playwright finds himself unable either to accommodate the government in this or to emigrate and write freely in a foreign country indicates a certain stubborn affection for his own land. This is also why his wife smiles as she does and why he seems on the verge of either laughing or crying, it is not clear which.
It is not to be assumed, however, that his seeming imperturbability extends into the depths of his heart, let alone that the scores of other writers who would be visible in a wider picture have left to them the humor which this playwright is still capable of showing. Some, for example, will say that they are writing more purely, more personally, now that they can only write for their circle of friends. But others feel reality is closing down around them, that in their enforced isolation they are losing their grasp on life itself. These last, if photographed, would be shown farther out, in deeper water, with only their noses visible.
If the whole crowd of intellectuals could be shown where they are—in the water, that is, and fully clothed—and if they could be heard announcing their preference as to what sort of system they would want for their country, hardly one would not declare for socialism. But a socialism that is not confused with absolutism. This leaves the government in the awkward position of having to forbid these people to publish in their own language. Awkward because it is doubtful that so total a silence was enforced even by the czars or Hitler himself. Yet the present regime is certainly anticzarist and violently opposed to Hitlerism.
And so the writer and his wife and their dog wish us all a Happy New Year. Needless to say—but possibly advisable to say to the Czech police—all these interpretations are entirely my own and not those of the subjects in the photograph, who were doubtless moved by their very Czech sense of humor to send out such a New Year’s card, whose symbolism, in all fairness, applies to many other countries, and not all of them Eastern or socialist. It’s simply that in certain countries at certain times a rather universal condition is more palpable and clear. Where, after all, are the waters not rising? Who does not feel, as he positions himself to speak his mind in public, a certain dampness around his ankles? In the days of his glory, did not the United States president propose to dismantle the television news organizations in order to get himself a still more silent majority? Was he not setting in place a secret police force responsible only to himself?
All this photo does is rather wittily inform us of how infinitely adaptable man is to whatever climatic conditions, firstly; and secondly, that—as the numbers on the life preserver make so terribly clear—the year is 1974 rather than, let’s say, 1836, 1709, 1617, or 1237 in, for example, Turkey.
The Measure of the Man
1991
What struck me strongly about Nelson Mandela in his American public appearances, as well as our Soweto interview for BBC TV, was the absence in him of any sign of bitterness. After twenty-seven and a half years with his nose against the bars he seemed uninterested in cursing out the whites who had put him there for the crime of demanding the vote in a country where his people outnumber their rulers by about six to one.
I suppose his rather majestic poise, unmarred by rancor, lowered white defensiveness to the point where reactionaries could join with liberals in applauding his speech to Congress. But such unanimous appreciation is bound to be suspect when an honest man can hardly please everyone with his views; after all, with all his charm and civility he was still the man who had organized the African National Congress’s guerrilla force, for one thing.
Watching from a distance I had found him extraordinarily straightforward in his persistent refusal to pulverize his history to suit current American tastes, crediting communists for being the first whites to befriend his movement, sometimes at the risk of their lives. Likewise, he criticized Israel and in the same breath reminded us that the overwhelming majority of his earliest supporters had been Jews.
In short, he allows himself to remain complicated; with a grandson named Gadafi (which was not his idea, however), he has written that the highest expression of democracy is the British House of Commons and the best legal system the American, with its written Bill of Rights. To me in our interview he would say that he had never joined the Communist Party. He did not add that he had never been a Marxist, but whether or not he thought he had been, I judge that he sees people in all their variety of character and deed in the foreground of events, rather than as shadowy creatures manipulated by forces, as a Marxist usually must.
I agreed to a conversation with Mandela after much hesitation, lasting a couple of weeks. The whole thing had begun with a Londo
n phone call from one Beverly Marcus, through whose South African English I discerned that she had proposed to the BBC that they film Mandela and me talking about life rather than politics, and that Mandela was receptive to the idea because he had called a halt to any more interviews in which the same simple-minded questions would inevitably be asked.
Lacking a reporter’s killer instinct or investigative techniques I was simply very curious about the roots of this man’s unusual character. How does one manage to emerge from nearly three decades in prison with such hopefulness, such inner calm?
But my main impulse came out of my background in New York, a racially splintered city with more than 2,000 people murdered last year. It has next to no inspiring black leadership, and so Mandela’s success or failure seemed far from an academic question for me. If he can lead his riven country into a multiracial democracy the ripples could rock New York, Chicago, Detroit—and London and Europe and Israel, where the most explosive social problem is ethnicity and its unmet, often incoherent demands.
South Africa was full of surprises, the first being the fact that Beverly Marcus’s younger sister, Gill, is Nelson Mandela’s veritable right hand and a spokesperson for the ANC, and that their father was his accountant. I suppose I should have felt my integrity put at risk by this news, but I had never had any intention of drawing and quartering Mandela. I sought only a pathway into his nature and that of his movement. Gill, with her inside knowledge of the movement and unabashed admissions of its amateurish failings, as well as of the constantly shifting so-called tribal conflict, turned out, in fact, to be of great help in my grasping this situation.
Cape Town and the Cape area, which Beverly suggested my wife, Inge Morath, and I visit for a few days to unwind from the fourteen-hour plane trip, is an unlikely place to begin preparing for a talk with a revolutionary leader, since it is as close to Beverly Hills and the California littoral as you can get without tripping over a movie studio. Balmy air, a lazy Atlantic surf lapping white beaches, swimming pools and very good fish restaurants—I felt myself beginning to sink into its lovely lethargy.
But then one climbs a dune a hundred yards across a beach road in Hought Bay that fronts some extremely lavish homes and their tennis courts—and from the dune’s ridge one looks down into a squatter town of hundreds of cardboard and tin shacks thrown one against the other right up to the edge of the sea. Don’t the rich who live nearby object? Not all do—some happily sell drinking water to the blacks here who have no supply of their own. But of course this shantytown will have to go, for the view of the sea is superb here and the sand as white as sugar, a piece of prime real estate that will not be denied its promise forever.
One can drive around the Cape and Cape Town and indeed South Africa end to end without the slightest awareness that this sanitized prosperity involves only five million of its thirty million inhabitants. The famous South African schizophrenia is not hard to understand. To be sure, the back pages of the papers display ads for razor wire with which to surround one’s home, and the walls surrounding most whites’ homes show a metal sign reading “Instant Armed Response,” and in many areas you are instructed not to stop at red lights at night lest your car be hijacked. But you quickly get used to this palpable fear, just as we have in New York, where as a child in Harlem I always carried my belongings with me to the blackboard or they’d be gone when I got back to my seat.
But South Africa is unique; it has state socialism for the whites—until very recent privatizations, sixty percent of all jobs were in state enterprises—and fascism for the blacks. Still, by the time we got back to Johannesburg after five days in the country I felt the place strange but comprehensible as merely one more kingdom of denial, unusual mainly for the immense proportion of its majority ghettoized and stripped of all civil rights.
Mandela’s new house in the middle of Soweto has been criticized by some as one of Winnie Mandela’s ostentations, standing as it does in the midst of the Soweto slum. Actually, donations built it. And there is a scattering of other quite good middle-class homes in the midst of the squalor, since the few successful middle-class blacks have been barred from white areas along with the poor. It is all part of a hopeless muddle of a modern technological state trying to sustain the most primitive, chest-pounding, Nazi master-race dogmas. So surrealism looms at every turn—a BMW dealership, black-owned, stands at the center of Soweto, a glass cube showroom exploding beams of white light toward houses yards away that have neither water nor sewers and whose occupants are no doubt unemployed and probably illiterate.
From the outside the Mandela house seems less elaborate than odd, a large chesty configuration of obliquely angular brick walls, an impromptu sort of construction until one is inside and realizes that it is a kind of fortress, its vulnerable dining and living rooms with their glass doors protected by a deep brick veranda extending outward some thirty feet. One drives into a receiving yard surrounded, as with so many other homes in this scared country, by a high wall with a steel, electronically controlled sliding door. And the doors of the main rooms are double-hinged to support a steel inner gate painted a discreet ivory to match the walls. Presumably these are barriers to an invading force.
Mandela’s daughter, Zindzi, came into the living room pursuing her three-year-old son, both of them handsome, round-faced and no doubt accustomed to crowds of strangers in the place. Our crew was stringing its cables out; Gill Marcus was already on the phone; the floors and walls seemed covered with gifts, trophies and bric-a-brac; and now Winnie was here, explaining that she would not be eating with us because Nelson kept watching her calories and she liked to eat what she liked. Whereupon Mandela appeared, making a round gesture with both hands referring to her weight and saying “Africa!,” both of them laughing while she bent to lift her rampaging grandson, whom she handed to a nurse. Even in his quick glances at her one saw his overwhelming love for his still-young wife, and she clearly basked in it. But her indictment in a murder case and impending trial seemed to hang in the air despite her tired jocularity.
Mandela was not wearing one of his formal London suits but a collarless short-sleeved African blouse with a gold-embroidered yoke—a chief’s blouse, it looked to me. Gill hoped he would relax with me, and after a while he did come quite close. But he is by nature a formal, conservative man who in a peaceful country would have been chief justice of its Supreme Court or perhaps the head of a large law firm. My first question to him—after we had walked out on his veranda and looked down at Soweto, the dumping ground for human beings—was how he had been raised.
At first he sat pressed against the back of his couch, somewhat on guard, having been cornered by interviewers who find it impossible to believe that he simply means what he says. He was the son of a chief, and one could see how serious it was to be a chief’s son; he had been taught early on that he would have the responsibilities of governing and judging. Even now he straightened a bit as he told with pride how, when he was ten and his father died, an uncle had taken over his education and his life. “My father occupied a position equivalent to that of prime minister in the tribe. . . . To me as a child the Transkei was the center of the entire world. . . . The missionaries tried to destroy the belief in custom and they created the perception that we have no history or culture.” And with an amused grin: “When the 1939 war began we felt we were loyal subjects of the British monarch. That was the atmosphere in which we were brought up.”
“And what went on inside you when the missionaries told you you had no history?”
“I’m not so sure I knew that I had a history.” And later, “I must confess that Africa remained a dark continent in that I knew very little about it and I knew better about Europe, especially Britain.”
This meticulous specificity, and his staid, almost Victorian structure of speech and demeanor suddenly had a root and expressed an innate authority which no doubt helped to keep him together through his prison decades. Mandela, to pu
t it simply, is a chief.
And this may help explain why it has been so difficult for him to deign to confer with Mangosuthu Buthelezi of the Zulus, who have recently been on the attack against the ANC Xhosa people. Buthelezi, it is felt, helped to justify apartheid by accepting the headship of a concocted homeland where his people were dumped. It is the equivalent of a French maquisard guerrilla accepting political equality with a Vichy collaborator; there is not only a moral issue but his pride. Nevertheless, when Mandela did appear at a recent press conference with Buthelezi, the latter’s people so threatened him that he was forced to leave the area.
The tribe, he insists, is basically an extended family. And in modern times there is no “natural” conflict between tribes, which are largely urbanized now, living side by side and intermarrying, joining the same unions and attending the same schools. It was the British and then the apartheid government that had always tried to tribalize Africa, pitting one against the other, setting up so-called homelands, newly founded territories that had never existed before. “There is one Africa and there will be one,” Mandela said, creating a ball with his two hands.
The present conflict is “simply a conflict between two political organizations,” a conflict that has failed to make headway in Soweto, as one example, because Soweto is more politically sophisticated rather than because the people are mainly Xhosa. “But when Zulus attack they never ask whether you are Zulu or something else, like the recent attack on people in the train, who do not sit according to tribes. They attack anyone.”
And who would be interested in orchestrating these attacks?
He pauses before his answer, which goes to the heart of his hopes. “My belief is that Mr. de Klerk wants South Africa to take a new direction, and it is therefore difficult . . . to say that the government itself is orchestrating this violence.”
Collected Essays Page 55