What a lucid patch I’ve struck. But where I came in: I wrote you about that, in the letter that was returned. I saw no point in becoming Joe (though I still admire my father) but the legal studies I’d been dragging myself through were a good background for what did come up. Something blacks did turn out to want was whites to work for them in the formation of unions, people with a knowledge of industrial legislation. They gave me a job. When the United Democratic Front was launched, and the unions I was working for affiliated, I got drawn in along with them, by then, blacks had sufficient confidence to invite whites to join the liberation struggle with them, again. They have no fear it’ll ever be on the old terms. Those’ve gone for good. So you’re not the only one who’s spoken on public platforms. I was up there, too. There’s not much corporate unionism among blacks — you know what that means? Unions that stick to negotiating wage agreements, safety, canteen facilities and so on. Our unions don’t see their responsibility for the worker ending when he leaves the factory gates every day. Their demands aren’t only for the baas, they’re addressed to the government, black worker power confronting white economic power, and they’re for an end to the South African way of life.
There’ve been a great many funerals. The law can stop the public meetings but not always the rallies at funerals of riot dead — although the law tries. Sometimes the police Casspirs and the army follow people back to the washing of the hands at the family’s house, and the crowd gathered there is angry at the intrusion on this custom and throws stones, and the army or police fire. Then there is another funeral. This has become a country where the dead breed more dead. But you’ve seen these scenes of home on your television in State House. There were plenty of television crews to record them before the law banned coverage. And clandestine filming still goes on. I can imagine that, Hillela — you sitting watching us — but of course you look about eighteen years old, and now — good god, you must be forty. You also see the madness that this long-drawn-out struggle has bred. Your traitor was lucky, he was white and he flitted long ago. The blacks who inform have roused madness in ordinary people. Necklaces of burning tyres placed over informers’ heads, collaborators’ heads, and packs turning on a suspect among themselves and kicking him to death. ‘Her’, too; I was at a funeral of a unionist, shot by the police, and some youngsters followed the cry that a girl had been recognized as an informer and each brought down upon her blows that combined to kill her. You know how people come up to a grave one by one and throw their flower in, as a tribute? Well, each gave their blow. Mistakes are made sometimes; that is sure. I don’t know if that girl was what the crowd thought she was, or if she just happened to resemble a culprit. And the manner of dealing with culprits. What happened to the smiling grateful kids who used to come to free classes at the old church on Saturdays — even you gave them a Saturday or two, didn’t you, before you found there were better things to pass the time. They boycotted the Bantu Education that made it necessary for them to receive white charity coaching, they got shot at and tear-gassed after you’d gone, there’ve been funerals for many of them. Does bravery, awesome contempt for your own death take away all feeling? (White kids don’t even know what death is, we were kept away from funerals for fear of upsetting us psychologically.) Can you kill others as you may be killed — and do even worse? And is this death really worse than death by police torture? Whites don’t call their fellow whites savages for what goes on in this building.
No-one is on record for feeling any remorse. Neither the police and soldiers who shoot blacks every day, nor the blacks who kill — no, not their own people, which is what whites are saying — but those who are not their own, anymore: who have lost all identity but that of enemy. There’s colour-blindness for you, at last …
What excuse is there for that? The madness. How do you feel about that? The whites want the madness to be the last, the final, triumphant vindication of all they themselves have done to blacks for hundreds of years.
There’s no excuse.
There’s only the evidence: if over hundreds of years you distort law and order as repression, you get frenzy. If you won’t attempt to do justice, you cut morality, human feeling, pity — you cut the heart out.
White kids are being killed in landmine explosions and supermarket bombings, on Sunday rides and shopping trips with their loving parents. The mines and petrol bombs are planted by blacks, but it’s the whites who have killed their own children. The loving parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. The white family tree.
How is it possible to live like that; well, how was it possible to have lived like that. They can go away from what’s happening now, but they can never go away from the way we lived for so many generations. On little floating islands, it exists still, that life like patches of blue water hyacinths that used to choke the rivers, broken from their moorings now and being carried out by heavy seas. (Sentence sounds odd because, in fact, it’s the beginning of a poem I tried to write; break up the lines and you’ll see it’s not so bad.) I hired a cottage — only eighteen months ago — along the North Coast. It was on, wooden stilts and built of corrugated iron with a wooden stoep and a water-tank. White miners used to save up and retire on pension in little pondokkies like that, but they’ve nearly all been pulled down for time-sharing condominiums for richer whites. This one was in an area the Indians have got declared for them since they’ve had a House in Parliament, and their development scheme hasn’t started yet — so an Indian friend found it for me. (You see, there’s privilege even among revolutionaries.) Between the strikes and the funerals I was going there regularly whenever I could. It was my Safe House. The Gandhi settlement nearby was burned down and Buthelezi’s government-approved private army was fighting our United Democratic Front people in a black township just over the hills. In my cottage there was perfect peace. The wasps buzzed their mantras. I ate the shad I caught and drank my Lion lager like every South African male. At night I sat out in what the darkness reverted to the miner’s garden. I couldn’t see the weeds and broken chairs and rusted pots, and the frangipani trees, that had survived neglect and the black women’s search for firewood, were a constellation of scented stars just at my head. The frogs throbbing on and the sea hissing. I’d walk down to the beach. Nothing. Nothing but gentleness, you know how the Indian Ocean seems to evaporate into the sky at night. In the middle of my witness of the horror of this country, I experienced the white man’s peace. I did. I woke up at night and heard the heavy sea, the other sea, pounding on the land. But that was only a line for the ending of the poem; although I was being carried out on it, it was bringing me here.