Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century

HOW SHALL WE LOOK AT EACH OTHER THEN?

Our poet, Mongane Wally Serote, writes:

So we shall have buried apartheid—

How shall we look at each other then,

How shall we shake hands. .

What shall we look like

When that sunrise comes

. . I ask my people

For we have said

South Africa belongs to all

who live in it.

And an American analyst of world problems wrote recently:

The choice of what to remember. . is also a way of recommending choices for the present and the future.

There is a lot of forgetting to do, in South Africa. Yet it should not begin before we face what we are in relation to what we wish to become. Progressive forces in our country are pledged to one of the extraordinary events in world social history: the complete reversal of everything that, for centuries, has ordered the lives of all our people, under all the successive governmental avatars of racism — conquest, colonialism, white republicanism — and that has culminated, again and again, in violence.

We know we have to face the kind of legacy, in terms of human relations, apartheid is leaving us. There is, there will be, an aftermath which can’t be tackled without majority rule under a bill of rights, but which won’t evanesce because of these legal victories over oppression. Just as there are people physically maimed by the struggle between white power and black liberation, there is psychological, behavioural damage that all of us in South Africa have been subject to in some degree, whether we know it or not, whether we are whites who have shut eyes and electronically-controlled gates on what was happening to blacks, or whether we are blacks who have been transported and dumped where the government wished, tear-gassed and shot, detained, forced into exile, or have left to join the liberation army which came into being when no other choice remained. Violence has become the South African way of life.

Violence has been with us a long, long time as a pure expression of racism. In its latest avatars, it is still surely a manipulation of that same racism: an end product of old colonialist ideas of divide and rule in the sophisticated Verwoerdian version of grab and rule — take the land and make kinglets of those given a backing of white government’s power in ethnic enclaves. But more of that later.

Does violence imply hate? Personally, I’m prepared to say that hatred towards whites — and in the extreme conditions of racism in South Africa — has been and is rare among South African blacks. I have lived here all my life, I have been in many situations where hate could have revealed itself, I have talked in open mood with many people, when we have been sober and when we have had our inhibitions loosened by a drink or two: I have seen and read much — and, yes, I’ve met bitterness, hard words, but hate — so unmistakable, so frightening, has not been there.

Hate kills. It is ugly to have to quantify deaths. But how many white civilians have been killed by black Freedom Fighters between 1990 and the time when the liberation movement resorted to arms in 1961?

Sixty-six.

The precise figure comes from no less an authority than Major-General Herman Stadler, given in August 1990.

The figure for black civilians killed by whites, beginning, if you like, with the Sharpville massacre in 1960, runs into many thousands; no-one really knows how many, counting deaths in detention along with those brought about by direct police action.

And now we have four thousand contemporary deaths in which black people have killed one another. These kinds of bloody disputes, described by the media as ‘black on black violence’, with the implication that such violence must be tribal, are, we know, basically political. To put it bluntly but not simplistically, without the migratory labour system where, in single-sex hostels, thousands of men have no bonding but herdbonding, without the chaotic overcrowding of black townships and squatter camps where these men are set down among people who themselves have been herded together, dispossessed under the Group Areas act of the places where they used to live, the unbearable tensions that arise over anything — often something as basic as the communal use of a water tap — would not come about. Without the division of the country into so-called national states, which the de Klerk government has abandoned as a failure without being energetic about seeking to undo the damage that has been done, there would have been no personal power base of a Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi from which a private army, strengthened by the third fist of white extremists and mercenaries, could attack trade unionists and the mass democratic movement, inevitably drawing counter-violence from these, and spilling over into a Terror comprised of further partisan tensions among the surrounding populace.

But the habit of violence has been instilled, and this is a problem we know will be inherited by a new South Africa. The vocabulary of violence has become the common speech of both black and white.

Among whites, with the phenomenon of no less than seventy white extremist organizations (some consisting of a handful of people, others of considerable numbers), I would say that hate is the motive of violence. We have seen the disgusting banners these people hold up. We have heard the venom towards blacks shouted under the sign of a new version of the swastika. But apart from this white minority, I believe destructive emotions among whites stop short of hate. For fear does not always go inextricably with hate. And the prevailing emotion among whites is fear; fear of retribution for all that has been done to blacks by whites’ forefathers, by governments for whom they themselves have voted; for all that they themselves have done by their own actions and — for their silence, their turning away with closed eyes. Fear of losing privilege; if they can be convinced that they won’t lose their lives, they yet see themselves about to be skinned of their privileges of being white. But subconsciously they understand hate as the useless emotion it is — even if this is understood only in terms of what it could do for them, now: precisely nothing.

They channel their fears more pragmatically. In Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s famous novel about the decaying Sicilian aristocracy’s tactics during the invasion of Garibaldi’s republican troops, one of the princelings says: ‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.’ In other words, ‘Let’s make all the changes necessary to hold off losing our privilege.’

We have to learn to see the paradox there.

Resentment is a potential source of violence among us. Resentment, while distinct from hate, distorts and maims human relations. Resentment comes to the privileged after privilege has been justly taken away; resentment is something that has been with the oppressed all their lives, for generations, and that is likely to remain, blown upon by freedom to glow from under the ashes of past oppression, in the attitudes of many blacks towards whites, after apartheid. We shall have to find ways other than violence to resolve both kinds of resentment.

Much is made, in the outside world and at home, among those in opposition to real change or determined to manage it for their own ends, of cultural differences as a source of violence between blacks and whites in South Africa. But if we turn away from the obsession with group categories and the neglect of everyday, individual relationships upon which, in the end, human relationships depend, we find that ways of life, mores and manners forced upon us by apartheid laws, down to the details of which toilet we could use, and by custom, to the grading of butchers’ meat between general cuts, ‘servants’ meat’ and ‘pets’ meat’—these ways of life that we’ve been born to have created differences between black and white that are neither the product of any separate tradition, religion, etc., nor a matter of ethnic temperament.

It is racist politics and laws which have caused morbid mutations, in favour of violence, in our behaviour. We must recognize this. Race has become a catch-all for every form of personal conflict, at home, in the work-place, in the street. All ordinary, individual human failings become attributable to the race of the culprit in societies where people are defined by colour. All of us, black and white, are caught out at some time in this kind of conditioned thinking. Part of the anxiety among whites to have minority rights — group rights — written into a new constitution despite (or in my view, in contradiction of) a bill of rights to guard the individual, comes from these morbid mutations which have come about among us. Whites surely need to realize that group rights would categorise them still within the dead apartheid structure, single them out, perpetuate the memory of racism and lead to the possibility of continuing violence?

I welcome this chance to open discussion of the historical and psychological problems of violence we inherit from the past, and to face them not as some immutable curse but as forms of conditioning we can unlearn, learn to shed, casting the skin of the old skin differences from which a dictatorship of the skin, a political system, a system of religious beliefs, a bizarre social order, was devised, and from which so much suffering has come.

The perceptions of others about violence in general in the contemporary world may give us some helpful perspectives. At a recent conference in Norway it became clear that we delegates fell into two distinct categories of priority in dealing with violent conflict. There were those subjectivists who believe that a spiritual change of heart is the basis of peaceful resolution, and those, the objectivists — among whom I numbered — who believe that the basis has to be just economic conditions. Vÿclav Havel said violent hatred ‘. . is a diabolical attribute of the fallen angel; a state of the spirit that aspires to be God, that may even think it is God, and cannot be.’ Love one another or perish. But can you love me while I have a full stomach and you are hungry? The American economist John Kenneth Galbraith said, ‘Hard, visible circumstance defines reality. Out of poverty comes conflict.’ And Elena Bonner said, ‘Moral concepts are lovely, but the key is governing things by just law.’

I believe we must create material justice before we can hope to eliminate the kind of violence that has become a tragic habit in South Africa. Given that base, I believe there is a good chance of decent relations between black and black, black and white in our country, whatever languages they speak, whatever their ethnic origins may be. For I can think of no other country in Africa where, in spite of our extraordinary racism, a comparable proportion of people of all races have committed themselves to the black struggle for freedom, recognizing it as their own. Now we need a politics that will nurture material justice before we can hope to live in peace. A new constitution, new laws must change the economic circumstances of the majority; healing can take place only on that honesty of purpose. And that healing will need all the patience and tolerance I believe many blacks and whites are prepared to give it.

— 1990