You make the true and terrible observation ‘all the children of the world, in their perception and consciousness of their era, are the mirrors upon which the massive universal violence is reflected’. You are rightly most concerned about the situation of children, and I’ll come to that, but first I must comment on the extraordinary, blinkered attitude to violence which I have just recently been subjected to rather than encountered, in Europe and the United States.
Whenever I was interviewed, journalists would propose the question of violence in South Africa as an isolated phenomenon, as if street muggings, burglaries, campus ‘date rapes’, brawls resulting in serious injuries, and even death, between so-called fans at sports matches, were not part of everyday life in their countries.
Let me admit at once that South African cities have at present a high place on the deplorable list of those with the worst crime rate in the world. Some South American cities have been prominent on that list so long that this has come to be regarded cynically by the rest of the world as a national characteristic, a kind of folk custom rather than a tragedy. Conversely, South Africa’s violent crime is seen as a phenomenon of freedom—interpreted among racists everywhere (and there are still plenty of them) as evidence that blacks should have been kept under white hegemony for ever.
The reasons for the rise of crime in South Africa, however, are not those of black people’s abuse of freedom. They are our heritage from apartheid. What the world does not know, or chose not to know, was that during the apartheid regime from 1948, State violence was quotidian and rampant. To be victims of State violence was the way of life for black men, women, and children. Violence is nothing new to us; it was simply confined to daily perpetration against blacks. They were shut away outside the cities in their black townships at night, or permanently banished to ethnically-defined territory euphemistically known as ‘homelands’, from where only male contract workers were allowed to come to the cities. This was how urban law-and-order was maintained. Violence, and the desperate devaluation of life it called forth, was out of sight. Now that the people of our country are free in their own country to seek work and homes wherever they please, they flock to the cities. But the cities were not built for them; there is no housing for such vast numbers, and their presence on the labour market has swelled the ranks of the unemployed enormously. Their home is the streets; hunger turns them, as it would most of us who deplore crime on full stomachs, to crime, and degradation degenerates into violence. These are the historical facts which make the reasons for violence in South Africa exceptional; economic development has a chance to deal with them to a significant extent, but not entirely.
As for the matter of guns as domestic possessions in South Africa, along with the house cat — while I was in the U.S.A. two schoolboys aged eleven and thirteen shot dead several classmates and their teacher, and while I was in Paris a schoolboy shot and killed his classmate. Why did these children have access to guns? Where did they get them? The American children took the guns from the house of their grandfather; the French child from that of his father. The guns were simply there, in these family homes, commonplace objects, evidently not kept under lock and key, if they had any legitimate place at all in household equipment. I’ve just read American statistics revealing that a gun in the house is forty-three times more likely to kill a member of the household than an intruder.
And now you tell me that a Japanese boy killed a companion and hung up the victim’s head in public; a boy fatally stabbed his teacher; an old man was beaten to death by two girls, and a father was killed by his son and the son’s friend.
This brings us to what is the ultimate responsibility of adults in your country, in mine, in the whole world: why could children cold-bloodedly kill? What has made them horrifically indifferent to the pain and death of others, so that they themselves are prepared to inflict these? What has happened to their ‘tender years’?
Setting aside the particular experience of South Africa, I think the woman who challenged you, citing environmental causes — an environment created entirely by the power and will of adults — was correct. If you look back at your own childhood experience, Kenzaburo, and I look back at mine, surely we shall see how our morality, our humanity was distorted by the agenda of adults, something we had to struggle with and shed by our own efforts as we grew: a confirmation of your conviction that there is the ‘power of recovery inherent in children themselves’, yes. You were brain-washed — no less — into believing that the immortal worth of the Emperor was such that you must be prepared to kill yourself at his command. I was brainwashed — no less — into believing that my white skin gave me superiority and absolute authority over anyone of another colour.
Children are not subjected to this sort of evil conditioning today. Then what is it, in countries dedicated to peace and democracy, reformed in aversion to the authoritarian cruelties of the past, that makes violence acceptable to children? I know it’s easy to lay responsibility on the most obvious — the visual media, television and certain electronic games, now also part of home furnishings. But the fact is that these household presences have become the third parent. They raise the child according to a set of values of equal influence to that of the biological parents. The power of the image has become greater than the word; you can tell a child that a bullet in the head kills, a knife in the heart kills. The child sees the ‘dead’ actor appear, swaggering in another role, next day. This devaluation of pain, with its consequent blunting of inhibitions against committing violence, has become, through the acts of glamorous gangsters, mortal-ray-breathing heroes of outer space, the daily, hourly formation of youthful attitudes. It is hauntingly clear to me that these children who kill do not have — it’s like an atrophied faculty — the capacity to relate to pain and destruction experienced in the flesh of others. I think this is what has happened to the ‘inner psyche of these juvenile delinquents’ you speak of.
What can we do, all of us adults, to take up the responsibility to children to ‘restore their normal selves’, how rouse ‘the power of self-respect inherent in them originally’?
If we place a large share of the blame for their condition upon the media, are we then advocating censorship? The idea is repugnant and frightening to me, who spent decades fighting censorship of information, literature, the arts, in my country. I have in mind something so difficult to bring about that it may seem naïve to mention it. Is it not possible that writers, actors, directors, and producers of these programmes that make violence acceptably banal could reconsider their own values? It is said in what is known as the ‘entertainment industry’—it has also become a brain-washing industry — that the industry simply gives the public what it wants. But the public is long conditioned to want what the industry dictates. And why is that public so passive under this self-appointed authority? Is it because the visual media are the representation of much accepted adult behaviour? The violence in the air is the exhalation of our being?