Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century

HEROES AND VILLAINS

Pascale, my French granddaughter, aged four and enraged at not getting her own way, would shriek at her mother, ‘Vilaine!’ It seems to me there’s something both childish and archaic about the word ‘villain’, although the English epithet has a harsher meaning. More or less dropped out of common usage, it belongs to vanished melodrama and has somehow reverted to that definition listed in the OED as ‘now rare’: someone boorish, clownish rather than evil. But if I am to accept the word as current coinage for an evil person, I’m not sure I know any villains personally. And we all know that so far as public figures are concerned, one individual’s villain is the next one’s hero. Many of us live or have lived under regimes whose morality has never been described better than by Chinua Achebe in his novel A Man of the People: ‘Overnight, everyone began to shake their heads at the excesses of the last regime, at its graft, oppression and corrupt government. . everybody said what a terrible lot; and it became public opinion next morning. And these were the same people that only the other day owned a thousand names of adulation, whom praise-singers followed with song and talking drum wherever they went. In such a regime, I say, you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murderers in the chest — without asking to be paid.’

Substitute the front page and CNN for those societies lacking song and talking drums, and you have a description of wide and timely application, eh.

In a novel I wrote in the seventies I had one of my characters remark that it was strange to live in a country where there were still heroes. Her country was mine, and this is something I, too, am aware of. To sit out more than two decades as a prisoner of conscience, as my heroes Mandela, Sisulu, and others whose names wouldn’t mean anything to you, have done, and come out whole, sane, wise, and humorous, is unambiguously heroic. To endure the amputation of exile is heroic; I see that in men and women who are returning home to South Africa now.

I have known some of these heroes quite well; a wonderful and salutary experience I count as one of the most important even among the intimacies of my life. This is because such people cut one to size in terms of one’s own worth and yet assert with authority, in their very existence, that life is passionately worth living. Is this where heroism and villainy meet, in the electrically-charged field of avid energy? We look on from the outside, aghast in the one instance, admiring in the other. The persistence of evil appalling, the endurance of good awe-inspiring.

But some heroes present a categorical enigma. They started off in the ranks of evil, so far as the judgment of people who reject any practice of racism is concerned, and then they rebelled against and rejected the convictions of those ranks.

This was not an easy matter of making statements, resigning from some political formation; often it meant losing professional position, livelihood, and being prepared to face a probation of suspicion in the ranks of opposition to racism.

In a house not far from mine there is one of my heroes who lived for some years as, in my apartheid code, a villain. Dr. Beyers Naude is an Afrikaner who was brought up in the era when the National Party was still avenging the defeat of the Boer War and seeking through that pious villainy, nationalism claiming authority from religion, to restore its dignity by coming to power. He became a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church and a member of the Broederbond, the band of brothers, a secret society of ideological guerrillas who dominated successive apartheid governments under prime ministers who were their Broeders. When he was a young man with a wife and children he committed the heresy of declaring apartheid sinful and he was stripped of his ministry; he rejected the Broederbond and consequently was blackballed from any secular position in Afrikanerdom.

He looked, and still looks, like the prototype Afrikaner dominee, wearing the Afrikaner outfit of safari suit, with plastered-down hair above his earnestly smiling face. But out of this (believe me) endearing image — which somehow subconsciously demonstrates his belief that within the conventional Afrikaners he resembles outwardly there is light like his own waiting to be self-realized — has come amazing courage. He was banned, vilified, and harassed by apartheid governments. He had no ministry, but we were all, all of us in the struggle against racism, his congregation. The enormous risks he has taken to support black liberation can’t yet be fully told, because that liberation is not by any means fully achieved, but to the black liberation movement he has become the most trusted white individual in South Africa.

How is it that ‘villain’ and ‘hero’ have existed in one man in one lifetime? He would put his conversion down to God, I know. But as I have no god, I am still looking for an explanation. Conscience? Isn’t that an atavistic conditioning that comes from the thou shalts and thou shalt nots, even in unbelievers? Sense of justice, that spirit-level indicator, origin unknown?

— 1991