Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century

CRACK THE NUT: THE FUTURE BETWEEN YOUR TEETH

It is usual in a graduation address to tell the graduates how they ought to live. But I can’t tell you that. My own generation has not been able to make of our country a sane society aiming for social justice. After a foreign war in which white and black South Africans died to defeat world domination based on racism, the survivors came back and with those who had stayed behind created systematically, out of the same blood-prejudices they had fought, the ideology and practice of apartheid. Some of our thinkers, graduates of South African universities, claim for this most primitive and atavistic social theory that it is so boldly progressive it can’t be grasped by those whose nineteenth-century liberalism, born of the principles of 1789, it outdates; and that its white theologicallyendorsed justice is beyond any that could be envisaged by the materialist concepts of the Left. Those who opposed apartheid have been, in the case of whites, too few to prevail; with highly courageous exceptions, many of whom ended in jail, exile, or remain among us silenced under bans, they have been opponents weak in conviction, strong on caution. In the case of blacks, their numerical superiority and moral force — the right of the wronged and oppressed that ploughs down palaces and towers — have not been able to prevail against arms dug in behind an implacably discriminating economy.

This university has, in the foyer of the Great Hall in which we are gathered, a plaque which avows:

At a general assembly of the university held on the 16th April, 1959 the following dedication was affirmed:

We are gathered here today to affirm in the name of the University of the Witwatersrand that it is our duty

To uphold the principle that a university is a place where men and women without regard to race or colour are welcome to join in the acquisition and advancement of knowledge.

And to continue faithfully to defend this ideal against all who have sought by legislative enactment to curtail the autonomy of the University.

Now therefore we dedicate ourselves to the maintenance of this ideal and to the restoration of the autonomy of our university.

That plaque was put in place twenty-one years ago, but its dedication has not been fulfilled. It has not been fulfilled despite the efforts of a series of just and enlightened chancellors and principals, a student body that with each successive intake has included young men and women who have worked through the Students’ Representative Council to that end, and thousands of graduates, some of whom have become prominent citizens, who should not have lost sight of it in the influential positions they hold in South African society. I cannot tell you to cherish what we have; I can only turn around the proposition and ask you to try to create something worth cherishing.

To attempt this it seems to me you will first have to come to a clear and honest understanding of your position. I use the word ‘position’ in the singular, although there are some black graduates at Wits (about ten percent of the student body represents the hard-won progress made since the plaque was set up) and although the situations of black and white are totally different, because both black and white do inherit in common a state of underdevelopment of a specific kind. We have the most highly-industrialized state in Africa, we have gold, diamonds, uranium, coal, etc., a technology and achievements in science and medicine second to none on this continent and in many countries beyond, but we are also in the state of underdevelopment defined by the Cuban novelist Edmundo Desnoes and described of his own country as an inability to relate things, to accumulate experience meaningfully. What happened to South Africa after the Second World War is the most obvious example. But experience is an accretion of day-to-day life rather than the sum of large events. It is the failure to relate that experience to historical change, on the one hand, and to a fixed and unalterable sense of the rights of human existence, on the other, that is symptomatic of this kind of underdevelopment.

Now, what do I mean by historical change, vis-a-vis your life?

I mean quite simply and unequivocally that you have been brought up on the white side or the black side of whatever so-called community you have been born to; you have gone to a segregated school during your most malleable years; you have unthinkingly, as we all have, climbed on buses and entered cinemas and numerous other public places reserved for people of your skin-color — able as they are to go anywhere, whites, certainly, even the most aware, cannot be conscious twenty-four hours a day of the bizarre and unnatural character of what is commonplace in their lives, and even blacks, chafed into greater awareness by the restrictions that debar them everywhere, and perhaps even more by the patronising concessions that now allow them into the public library in this town but not in that, seat them beside a white on South African Airways but not on trains and buses, must often take these circumstances for granted. Yet from these daily acceptances comes the sense of self, of one’s place in the world, of a recognized identity; and in your case, a very peculiar one, as consciously conditioned as if you were to have been born into one of those science fiction worlds where people are cloned to function as drones, soldiers, or breeders. This historical identity that my generation has handed on to you is a thing of the past; an immature image of self, a contradiction of your humanity; useless to you; an encumbrance to be consciously shed.

What do I mean by a fixed and unalterable sense of the rights of human existence? Don’t these change from country to country and ideology to ideology? And don’t all countries and ideologies claim sole guardianship of them?

But I am talking of something comparable only to the middle ear in the human head, an aural organ but also the seat of balance, by which we find our way upright; I don’t know where the seat of a fixed and unalterable sense of the rights of human existence lies, and how many millennia of successive descents into and emergings from barbarism have gone to establish it through how many media, instinctive, mythical, religious, philosophical — but I am convinced this sense does exist between the fire and ice, the dreadful polar caps of human behavior. It is not a mystery, it’s a balance. We know what we are; we know what we might be. At the axis of the propositions is the sense of the rights of human existence, and that sense is never quite lost, as evidenced in the elaborate justification for its distortion, propped up by Hansard volumes, Commission reports, by rhetoric, bombast, and propaganda of all kinds and from all sides. The sense of the rights of human existence is there inside you, like your unseen middle ear — a collective conscience painfully arrived at, characteristic of your humankind, if you prefer. And it is to this sense — the true sense, your own sanity — that your daily accumulation of experience needs to be measured and related, and not to the shifty accommodations of a dying experiment called separate development and about to be renamed a ‘constellation of states’.

If you are going to graduate only by means of your degree, you may count yourself well-educated but I do not think you will be fully equipped to live your life in South Africa now. A few years ago I was on a television programme in the United States, and the black South African actor Winston Ntshona, also taking part, was asked by the interviewer: ‘What advice would you give Nadine Gordimer as a white South African?’

Ntshona thought for a moment and said, ‘I’d tell her, live like a man.’

The interviewer got his laugh even if he hadn’t managed to draw blood as he’d no doubt hoped. But I didn’t laugh and Ntshona didn’t laugh. We understood each other; I knew what he meant, and so do you. Without any apologies to my sisters in this gathering, I am conscious of how far I have failed to ‘live like a man’. To attempt to be fully human in South Africa it is necessary to examine your actions and their consequences, to view your private experience in relation not only to the section of society, the enclave in which it has been accumulating, but in relation to the complexity of the society as a whole in which you live; to see your existence not only in relation to nuclear family, friends, economic, professional, and social group, but to the human matrix in which these, and you, are embedded. That is where you are — not, as apartheid has made it seem, safe in your commune on an old mining property, in chambers where you receive your clients, the consulting rooms and wards where you examine your patients, the speech clinics and social welfare offices where you help people overcome their personal problems, the disco where only the lights change, the country club or suburban garden where everything seems to stay the same.

As you leave this university, you need to look back and think about what your presence here for a number of years has signified. Everyone will tell you you have been privileged. This is a platitude taken over unquestioningly from other societies where class, a flexible concept, or exceptional ability, arguably a determinant of congenital and/or environmental origin, is the criterion. The implication is that you are privileged because higher education will put up your worth in the market-place and/or qualify you to serve the community at a high level of skill; and the intellectual stimulation you have received will bloom as your capacity for living fully. But in South Africa the concept of ‘privilege’ has acquired stronger negative than positive associations. The privilege of a good education is not one that can be earned by exceptional ability, hard work, or even parents’ will to pay for it. You have first to be born white; and if you are, you have to remain aware that this ‘privilege’ from which so many others are spawned is also a mark of Cain; while some are embracing you in congratulation, others are cursing you. If you are white, that is your sober heritage. That is the truth of your situation on this day.

If you are a black graduate, you have to be aware that you have been made an exception of rather than given the right to the same education for black South Africans as for white. That is the truth of your situation on this day.

I cannot tell you — all of you, black and white — you have nothing to fear from the truth. There is plenty to fear in South Africa; but it is no pious platitude to say that the greatest danger lies in not seeing facts, not admitting them, walking out of here in your new-found, qualified adulthood to take up life the way it is. Because life the way it is in South Africa is over. Young blacks don’t need telling; indeed, they are the ones who are spelling out, thinking out, acting out the message. The old laws are still there, the old forms are still there, but the laws are hollow and the men and women are not. They are purposeful and mutually supportive, eager to prepare themselves for the future. It is for young white men and women that I want to put up a banner over the exits of the Great Hall, near the plaque: Don’t walk out of this university into the past. You will not be going into the old family business that grew from slavery to apartheid. Free yourself gladly of the mentality that went with that kind of enterprise.

Despite the questionable nature of privilege in our country, I think there has been a certain element of unquestionable privilege about your years at Wits, and I rejoice in it for all of you, black and white. This is a segregated university, it has only a token if growing presence of black students, and while race laws remain this cannot be otherwise; and I know that repeating the die-stamp of the immediate world outside the campus, student life tends to equate like-seeking-like with pigment seeking like pigment — so that there are clubs and groups who see their interests as defensively racially-defined. In present circumstances in South Africa this is not surprising. Under apartheid, the fact that you are African black or Indian black or Chinese or white is the most important characteristic you have. The full preposterousness of this morbid phenomenon will be booming our shame loud-mouthed through ages when all else about life the way it is among us has long been forgotten.

But in spite of all this, you have lived a less absurd and corrupting life for the hours you have spent on this campus every day than is lived outside it. I hope for your own sakes the difference has marked you deeply. I hope you will never disavow it; I hope you won’t cover it with some sleazy, fashionable life-style; I hope even more that you will not regard it as a campaign medal to be trotted out for the rest of your life in lieu of any further thought and action — that there won’t come from any of you that vapid death-rattle: Oh, when I was a student I used to get steamed up about things—

At this university you have had the chance to be stirred and informed, to wake up and muster the momentum of doubts, questionings, polemical argument in public in a way that is not possible outside these gates. For study purposes at least you have had access to works expressing ideas — the movement of modern thought, the expression of changing concepts of man in his sexual, political, religious, and social being — that are banned from libraries and bookshops outside. You have been able at least to take a breath in an atmosphere where, in some intellectual disciplines, a new concept of South African culture is being explored — as, for example, in Professor John Dugard’s Applied Legal Studies; in work being done in the fields of social science, psychology, and film; in T. J. Couzens’ establishment in our literature of the journalism and other writings by early black writers, and Professor Charles van Onselen’s social history of this extraordinary area in which we live — the Witwatersrand — as an analytic assertion of values of other than the gold price.

These are the inklings of a new idea of yourself to be realized in relation not to the inherited illusions strung around your neck but to the real entities of the life that has always been there, about you; the understanding that an exclusively white-based culture has been and is as foreign and sterile for white South Africans as for black, and that there is a huge new cultural energy ready to blow — our popular hero-figure doesn’t have to be Kojak, and our humour isn’t really Carol Burnett’s.

Here at this university you have had a chance to learn how you have been manipulated by the forces of a particular social order, and the more general social forces in conflict in the world. You have come to question, many of you, the politics, economics, and mores of home and class as well as colour, that you were born to, outside the university. You have had a chance to make contact as equals, however tenuously, across the colour taboos maintained by harsh penalty outside. If you have not made use of these opportunities to remake yourself, the loss is yours, the lack is yours. If you have made use of them, you have gained a foothold in independence of mind from which arbitrary doctrines will find it difficult to coax you down, and ministerial demagogues to cow you.

In 1971, when I gave the Academic Freedom Lecture at the University of Natal, I remarked that the places of public assembly in South Africa were by then open only to dog shows and pop groups. In 1980 this has not changed — except to get worse, since there were to be further restrictions after 1976 and these have just been renewed. Because you were a student at this university, last month you were able to be present at a public meeting that could not take place in a public square, and you heard the free and fearless expression of ideas about the state of your country, the future of your country, that would be most unlikely to be given a platform outside the environment of a university. And because you were there, openly expressing your solidarity on an issue openly stated, you know that it is not true that your signature on an appeal to free Nelson Mandela is an approval of urban terrorism. You know that your signature among more than fifty thousand others was consciously and responsibly an action to create a real alternative to the horrors of terrorism. Unlike hundreds of thousands of other South Africans who only get the chance to hear what the government wants them to hear, you will know that what the Minister of Police has implied of your action is not the truth. And that is important. A single meeting; a single issue; but with significance for your whole life to come, where you will again and again be faced with the need to examine your facts and hold your convictions on that evidence alone, against pervasive and persuasive interpretations that others will try to sell you, if not to brand you with.

Take all these advantages away with you from the university, along with your professional skill; use them, develop them along with it. Graduation from the peculiarly South African state of underdevelopment has not been accomplished as your degree has been granted, once and for all. People will taunt you fearfully — you yourself will not be without fear — how do you know, if you must abandon South Africa the way it is, the way it will be is going to be just and human? The answer is you don’t know; speaking for Africa, you can only say with Wole Soyinka, you have to crack the nut and take the future between your teeth; and with Albert Camus, himself born into a dying colonial situation and writing under Nazi occupation in Europe: ‘We have chosen to accept human justice with its terrible imperfections, careful only to correct it through a desperately maintained honesty.’

— Graduation Address to the University of the Witwatersrand, 1980