Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century

THE FIRST TIME

April 27, 1994

Standing in the queue this morning; businessmen in their jogging outfits, nurses in uniform (two, near me, still wearing the plastic mob-caps that cover their hair in the cloistered asepsis of the operating theatre), black women in their Zionist Church outfits, white women and black women who shared the mothering of white and black children winding about their legs, people who had brought folding stools to support their patient old bones, night watchmen just off duty, girl students tossing long hair the way horses switch their tails — here we all were as we have never been. We have stood in line in banks and post offices together, yes, since the desegregation of public places; but until this day there was always the unseen difference between us, far more decisive than the different colours of our skins: some of us had the right that is the basis of all rights, the symbolic X, the sign of a touch on the controls of polity, the mark of citizenship, and others did not. But today we stood on new ground.

The abstract term ‘equality’ took on materiality as we moved towards the church hall polling station and the simple act, the drawing of an X, that ended over three centuries of privilege for some, deprivation of human dignity for others.

The first signature of the illiterate is the X. Before that there was only the thumb-print, the skin-impression of the powerless. I realized this with something like awe when, assigned by my local branch of the African National Congress to monitor procedures at a polling booth, I encountered black people who could not read or write. A member of the Independent Electoral Commission would guide them through what took on the solemnity of a ritual; tattered identity document presented, hands outstretched under the ultra-violet light, hands sprayed with invisible ink, and meticulously folded ballot paper — a missive ready to be despatched for the future — placed in those hands. Then an uncertain few steps towards a booth, accompanied by the IEC person and one of the various Party agents to make sure that, when the voter said which party he or she wished to vote for, the X would be placed in the appropriate square. Several times I was that Party agent and witnessed a man or woman giving this signature to citizenship. The first time man scratched the mark of his identity, the conscious proof of his existence, on a stone, must have been rather like this.

Nearby in city streets there were still destitute black children sniffing glue as the only substitute for nourishment and care; there were homeless families existing in rigged-up shelters in the crannies of the city. The law places the ground of equality underfoot; it did not feed the hungry or put a roof over the head of the homeless, today, but it changed the base on which South African society was for so long built. The poor are still there, round the corner. But they are not the Outcast. They no longer can be decreed to be forcibly removed, deprived of land, and of the opportunity to change their lives. They count. The meaning of the counting of the vote, whoever wins the majority, is this, and not just the calculation of the contents of ballot boxes.

If to be alive on this day was not Wordsworth’s ‘very heaven’ for those who have been crushed to the level of wretchedness by the decades of apartheid and the other structures of racism that preceded it, standing in line to be living at this hour has been extraordinary. The day has been captured for me by the men and women who couldn’t read or write, but underwrote it, at last, with their kind of signature. May it also be the seal on the end of illiteracy, of the pain of imposed ignorance.

April 29, 1994

‘J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais milk am.’

Baudelaire’s words. I woke this morning with an over-flowing sense of continuity; today is three days run into one. Voting was still in progress for the first elections ever, in the history of my country, in which everyone, whatever the colour of skin, at last has the franchise.

It’s been impossible to think of anything but the experience we are living through; I have not been able to write or even read anything other than newspapers. The second volume of Naguib Mahfouz’s wonderful Cairo Trilogy lies with a bookmark halfway through the pages. The newspapers’ interviews with politicians and people in the streets, the editorial speculation on the outcome of this election — which is not Europe’s or America’s customary recurrent event of the exchange of power between one party and another within an accepted polity that respects both — are part of the epic of our transformation: to us, prophesy rather than reportage. Forecasts of the results come from the television box as from the mouth of an oracle. I feel that I understand the meaning of ‘destiny’ for the first time: one of those grandiose quasi-religious concepts I have always regarded with scepticism. But these three days, in which millions of people have moved in those slow queues as pilgrims to their future, carry the weight of the word.

Their procession has continued to pass through my mind, it has no relation to the span of days, it extends through the waiting years, decades, the centuries during which black people have toiled their way on the farms, in the gold and diamond and platinum mines that made the country rich and gave its original inhabitants so little; toiled their way through banishment from their homes because whites wanted their land; risen again from where they had fallen under tear-gas and police batons; buried those who fell before police gun-fire, and gathered again to march in strikes, in mass protest, a generations-long procession on the way — at last, at last! — to the polling booth. I have preferred to think of the inevitable final arrival as a process of history, but call it history or destiny, it has the meaning of people coming into their own. Something ordained, yet only to be achieved by suffering and endurance.

For me, in the queues, there are the black migratory mineworkers with their clay-covered locks and blankets worn like togas I used to see on my way to my convent school in a gold-mining town sixty years ago; there is the old woman who worked in my mother’s kitchen and whose cup my mother forbade me to drink from for fear of the contagion of a black skin; there is the ebullient jazz composer, Todd Matshikiza, who was the first black man in whose arms I danced; there is the writer, my other dear friend, Nat Nakasa, who in the despair of exile jumped from a skyscraper window in New York; there is the painter, Gerard Sekoto, who was the Goya of life in the black townships and died, far from home, in Paris. And there are, among whites mingled there, those who gave their lives along with blacks in the trek towards liberation: blue-eyed Afrikaner Bram Fischer serving a life sentence as a revolutionary, dying too soon to see this day, this end of the procession. And in the faces of old black men there is the likeness of Oliver Tambo, the Moses who with Mandela, for so long, first from home and then from exile, led his people out of bondage.

In the image of Tambo also came my change of mood, to celebration. Later in the day I was a guest of Adelaide Tambo, his wife, at the suburban house with its garden and swimmingpool — formerly the jealous preserve of whites — that the African National Congress bought for Tambo to honour and provide him with comfort in the short period between his return from exile and his death in 1993. The place was ringing with joy; a choir, from the segregated black township in the mining district where I was born in the segregated white township, was singing before guests assembled in the house. They sang with the power of the whole body; it was impossible not to begin to move one’s muscles and flesh with theirs — the rooms and outer hall were caught up in the current of emotion. Adelaide was regally flamboyant in African robes. Foreign guests of honour — prominent individuals from Europe and the United States, including David Dinkins, former mayor of New York, who have supported the struggle against apartheid — queued (once again) round tables set out with food and drink, and everyone drifted to eat and talk in the garden. The beat of liberation changed again. One of our best bands was playing African jazz, the wild music expressive of the irrepressible embrace of life that never loosened in the grasp of black people, no matter what drudgery and humiliation were there to extinguish their spirit. It’s our music; it reconciled black and white, even among those conditioned by racial prejudice, even while the law kept black and white apart, long before reconciliation became official policy. Listening, I wondered how much liberation owes to this language that never lies because it has no words.

We were feasting, as people have done to celebrate fulfilment since before recorded history. In my mind the procession to the polling stations kept unwinding. I thought how what we were celebrating in the garden was the hope that the simple feast of life in peace and in justice before the law might be gained for all the people in that procession; that, at least, at last, ‘They shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig-tree’ (Micah 4.4).