Among contemporary thinkers there are works by Herbert Marcuse, Oscar Lewis, Salvador Allende, Wilhelm Reich, Louis Althusser, and Leszek Kolakowski.
Some of the bannings of the new censorship organization were too recent yet to have found their place in jacobsen’s Index. Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince was one. Wopko Jensma’s Where White Is the Colour, Black Is the Number, Mary Benson’s The Sun Will Rise, and Breyten Breytenbach’s latest work, were others. And the day after I spent my morning in the library reading about what we may not read, our new and greatly enlarged team of censors showed nothing if not extraordinary breadth of literary judgment — at one eclectic stroke they banned George Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness and thirteen pairs of men’s underpants bearing legends such as ‘Long John Silver’.
If you don’t believe me, you can go to our library and look it all up in the Book of Books.
HEROES AND VILLAINS
Pascale, my French granddaughter, aged four and enraged at not getting her own way, would shriek at her mother, ‘Vilaine!’ It seems to me there’s something both childish and archaic about the word ‘villain’, although the English epithet has a harsher meaning. More or less dropped out of common usage, it belongs to vanished melodrama and has somehow reverted to that definition listed in the OED as ‘now rare’: someone boorish, clownish rather than evil. But if I am to accept the word as current coinage for an evil person, I’m not sure I know any villains personally. And we all know that so far as public figures are concerned, one individual’s villain is the next one’s hero. Many of us live or have lived under regimes whose morality has never been described better than by Chinua Achebe in his novel A Man of the People: ‘Overnight, everyone began to shake their heads at the excesses of the last regime, at its graft, oppression and corrupt government. . everybody said what a terrible lot; and it became public opinion next morning. And these were the same people that only the other day owned a thousand names of adulation, whom praise-singers followed with song and talking drum wherever they went. In such a regime, I say, you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murderers in the chest — without asking to be paid.’
Substitute the front page and CNN for those societies lacking song and talking drums, and you have a description of wide and timely application, eh.
In a novel I wrote in the seventies I had one of my characters remark that it was strange to live in a country where there were still heroes. Her country was mine, and this is something I, too, am aware of. To sit out more than two decades as a prisoner of conscience, as my heroes Mandela, Sisulu, and others whose names wouldn’t mean anything to you, have done, and come out whole, sane, wise, and humorous, is unambiguously heroic. To endure the amputation of exile is heroic; I see that in men and women who are returning home to South Africa now.
I have known some of these heroes quite well; a wonderful and salutary experience I count as one of the most important even among the intimacies of my life. This is because such people cut one to size in terms of one’s own worth and yet assert with authority, in their very existence, that life is passionately worth living. Is this where heroism and villainy meet, in the electrically-charged field of avid energy? We look on from the outside, aghast in the one instance, admiring in the other. The persistence of evil appalling, the endurance of good awe-inspiring.
But some heroes present a categorical enigma. They started off in the ranks of evil, so far as the judgment of people who reject any practice of racism is concerned, and then they rebelled against and rejected the convictions of those ranks.
This was not an easy matter of making statements, resigning from some political formation; often it meant losing professional position, livelihood, and being prepared to face a probation of suspicion in the ranks of opposition to racism.
In a house not far from mine there is one of my heroes who lived for some years as, in my apartheid code, a villain. Dr. Beyers Naude is an Afrikaner who was brought up in the era when the National Party was still avenging the defeat of the Boer War and seeking through that pious villainy, nationalism claiming authority from religion, to restore its dignity by coming to power. He became a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church and a member of the Broederbond, the band of brothers, a secret society of ideological guerrillas who dominated successive apartheid governments under prime ministers who were their Broeders. When he was a young man with a wife and children he committed the heresy of declaring apartheid sinful and he was stripped of his ministry; he rejected the Broederbond and consequently was blackballed from any secular position in Afrikanerdom.
He looked, and still looks, like the prototype Afrikaner dominee, wearing the Afrikaner outfit of safari suit, with plastered-down hair above his earnestly smiling face. But out of this (believe me) endearing image — which somehow subconsciously demonstrates his belief that within the conventional Afrikaners he resembles outwardly there is light like his own waiting to be self-realized — has come amazing courage. He was banned, vilified, and harassed by apartheid governments. He had no ministry, but we were all, all of us in the struggle against racism, his congregation. The enormous risks he has taken to support black liberation can’t yet be fully told, because that liberation is not by any means fully achieved, but to the black liberation movement he has become the most trusted white individual in South Africa.
How is it that ‘villain’ and ‘hero’ have existed in one man in one lifetime? He would put his conversion down to God, I know. But as I have no god, I am still looking for an explanation. Conscience? Isn’t that an atavistic conditioning that comes from the thou shalts and thou shalt nots, even in unbelievers? Sense of justice, that spirit-level indicator, origin unknown?
— 1991
CRACK THE NUT: THE FUTURE BETWEEN YOUR TEETH
It is usual in a graduation address to tell the graduates how they ought to live. But I can’t tell you that. My own generation has not been able to make of our country a sane society aiming for social justice. After a foreign war in which white and black South Africans died to defeat world domination based on racism, the survivors came back and with those who had stayed behind created systematically, out of the same blood-prejudices they had fought, the ideology and practice of apartheid. Some of our thinkers, graduates of South African universities, claim for this most primitive and atavistic social theory that it is so boldly progressive it can’t be grasped by those whose nineteenth-century liberalism, born of the principles of 1789, it outdates; and that its white theologicallyendorsed justice is beyond any that could be envisaged by the materialist concepts of the Left. Those who opposed apartheid have been, in the case of whites, too few to prevail; with highly courageous exceptions, many of whom ended in jail, exile, or remain among us silenced under bans, they have been opponents weak in conviction, strong on caution. In the case of blacks, their numerical superiority and moral force — the right of the wronged and oppressed that ploughs down palaces and towers — have not been able to prevail against arms dug in behind an implacably discriminating economy.