It is racist politics and laws which have caused morbid mutations, in favour of violence, in our behaviour. We must recognize this. Race has become a catch-all for every form of personal conflict, at home, in the work-place, in the street. All ordinary, individual human failings become attributable to the race of the culprit in societies where people are defined by colour. All of us, black and white, are caught out at some time in this kind of conditioned thinking. Part of the anxiety among whites to have minority rights — group rights — written into a new constitution despite (or in my view, in contradiction of) a bill of rights to guard the individual, comes from these morbid mutations which have come about among us. Whites surely need to realize that group rights would categorise them still within the dead apartheid structure, single them out, perpetuate the memory of racism and lead to the possibility of continuing violence?
I welcome this chance to open discussion of the historical and psychological problems of violence we inherit from the past, and to face them not as some immutable curse but as forms of conditioning we can unlearn, learn to shed, casting the skin of the old skin differences from which a dictatorship of the skin, a political system, a system of religious beliefs, a bizarre social order, was devised, and from which so much suffering has come.
The perceptions of others about violence in general in the contemporary world may give us some helpful perspectives. At a recent conference in Norway it became clear that we delegates fell into two distinct categories of priority in dealing with violent conflict. There were those subjectivists who believe that a spiritual change of heart is the basis of peaceful resolution, and those, the objectivists — among whom I numbered — who believe that the basis has to be just economic conditions. Vÿclav Havel said violent hatred ‘. . is a diabolical attribute of the fallen angel; a state of the spirit that aspires to be God, that may even think it is God, and cannot be.’ Love one another or perish. But can you love me while I have a full stomach and you are hungry? The American economist John Kenneth Galbraith said, ‘Hard, visible circumstance defines reality. Out of poverty comes conflict.’ And Elena Bonner said, ‘Moral concepts are lovely, but the key is governing things by just law.’
I believe we must create material justice before we can hope to eliminate the kind of violence that has become a tragic habit in South Africa. Given that base, I believe there is a good chance of decent relations between black and black, black and white in our country, whatever languages they speak, whatever their ethnic origins may be. For I can think of no other country in Africa where, in spite of our extraordinary racism, a comparable proportion of people of all races have committed themselves to the black struggle for freedom, recognizing it as their own. Now we need a politics that will nurture material justice before we can hope to live in peace. A new constitution, new laws must change the economic circumstances of the majority; healing can take place only on that honesty of purpose. And that healing will need all the patience and tolerance I believe many blacks and whites are prepared to give it.
— 1990
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.