Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century

29 OCTOBER 1989 — A BEAUTIFUL DAY, COM

The gawky tripods of television cameras stalked the green of the field at Soccer City, photographers in their many-pocketed vests imported from Banana Republic stores in New York took aim from contorted positions along the curving tiers of people who were there to participate and not to report. But I saw notebooks and even the reverse sides of posters balanced on knees while hands carefully managed ball-pens.

For all of us who shared a sense of occasion without precedent in our lives there must have been differences in the lens of experience, memory, through which we saw ourselves and others in that vast congress. Not even the novelist in me can imagine what the senses of Walter Sisulu and his wife, Albertina, were receiving as they walked round the perimeter of the field, protected from the sun by vivid Congress of South African Trade Unions umbrellas — a process like a durbar, exposed to the single, enormous throat of joy opening around them. And how did Ahmed Kathrada see the faces, caps, flags, saluting raised fists, banners, massed as bright spores grown over the huge amphitheater? What were Elias Motsoaledi and Wilton Mkwayi thinking — all these released prisoners of conscience moving along this strangest of ceremonial aisles, that led around a soccer field from decades of prison and silence to a rostrum under the sky where they would speak, and be heard by thousands, and the words would circle away by satellite, beyond the miserable range of police helicopters?

Sitting beside me was a boy of about ten or eleven. He was eating chips and held tightly a length of wire with a home-made ANC flag tied to it. What was he feeling? Was he the kid I saw, enjoying the Sunday outing, the band and singers who prepared us for the arrival of the leaders, or was he a child who was more mature, in his terrible experience of facing police guns, than I — old enough to be his grandmother — will ever be?

For me, the context of what I was seeing and hearing expanded its meaning, both from within myself and in the actual physical setting. The stadium, although it belongs to Soweto, is not embedded in its endless streets. It is outside, on the open veld. Its great bowl is partly sunk in the ground; I could see the pale yellow mountains of gold-mine waste dumps rising beyond its rim, and between them, the towers of Johannesburg, gauzy in the heat haze, but present. An entire history was displayed there, no vision but concrete reality; a history in which this Sunday was some sort of culmination of justice — certainly not the final one, but surely the first. There were the mine dumps thrown up by the blacks’ labour; there was the greatest city in Africa, built with the whites’ profit from that labour; and here, in this stadium, were black leaders, incarcerated for a generation, emerged at last to claim what belongs to their people.

I’ve been attending courts at which the right to this claim has been arraigned as criminal, for many years. The first time was in 1956, the first major treason trial. In the sixties I heard Nelson Mandela make his speech from the dock — become a classic liberation text — when he was sentenced to life imprisonment. I was there when Bram Fischer spoke as a prisoner and not as a distinguished advocate, repudiating the right of an apartheid court to administer justice, and went away to imprisonment ended only by death. Last December I was honoured to give evidence in mitigation in the Delmas treason trial of United Democratic Front leaders Patrick Lekota, Popo Molefe, and others. For me, the sight of the seven leaders whom I remembered going to prison years ago, now coming out with the possibility of being greeted as they should be, with the triumphantly open homage of all of us who care for the liberation of South Africa, was something I privately received as part of the fulfilment of my life as a South African. I felt this, I write this, as one of the crowd.

And by the way, there were seventy thousand of us — different figures have been published (South African television reportedly reduced us to ten thousand. .) — but I have it from a soccer official himself, who knows the total capacity of Soccer City stadium, and from my own evidence of the extent to which it overflowed that Sunday.

Everyone has remarked on the efficiency — and what’s more, the style and dignity — of the way the rally was arranged and conducted. I have my own view of that, because I happen to know that this extraordinary occasion and the gigantic task it represented was made possible, in the main, by a handful of people of whom three are my young colleagues in the Congress of South African Writers: Junaid Ahmed, Raks Seakhoa, and Menzi Ndaba. The marshals recruited from youth organisations presented a very different picture of black youths from that in the minds of whites who see them as stone-throwers and arsonists. Armed only with patience and friendliness, addressing everyone as “Com” (“Comrade”: in our passion, in the mass democratic movement, for humanising grandiose terms into diminutives), they kept firm order and didn’t find it demeaning to tidy away discarded paper cups.

Who were the people who made up the enormous gathering-in of celebrants? Outside the stadium were what looked, from the height of the exit stairways, like a residential quarter of curved-roof habitations: they were parked buses. They came from all over the country, some travelling all night, and they had brought the majority of the crowd. The form of transport was confirmation of what I remarked in the stadium; this crowd was overwhelmingly black working-class. I didn’t see many in the smart outfits of the black middle class; someone said they had stayed away because of the threats of white extremists to attack the rally. There were white faces dotted about in every section of the stands; grey heads of some of the pioneer leftists, Black Sash women, representatives of the National Union of South African Students, the Johannesburg Democratic Action Committee, people representing other radical or progressive groups or simply their own solidarity with the ANC; even a new association of Afrikaner democrats announced last week. No, we whites didn’t ‘stand out’ at all.

Nobody, least of all the released leaders, thinks the continuation to liberation is going to be easy. But whatever is to come, Sunday was a beautiful day, Com. It made a definition of beauty new to me: harmony and trust between human beings of all colours, peace in a gathering huge as a soccer crowd.

— October 1989