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).
ACT TWO: ONE YEAR LATER
1. Accept nothing as true which I did not clearly recognise to be so; that is to say, to avoid carefully precipitation and prejudice, and to accept nothing in my judgments beyond what presented itself so clearly and distinctly to my mind, that I should have no occasion to doubt it.
2. Divide each of the difficulties which I examined into as many parts as possible, and might be necessary in order best to resolve them.
3. Carry on my reflections in order, starting with those objects that were the most simple and easy to understand, so as to rise little by little, by degrees, to the knowledge of the most complex: assuming an order among those that did not naturally fall into a series.
4. Last, in all cases make enumerations so complete and reviews so general that should be sure of leaving nothing out.
May I be at all sure that I can follow Descartes’ method when gathering together this single year that has taken up within its unique newness all that was held back, accumulating in the conflicting stalemates of the past? It’s a toppling wave; twelve months is hardly enough time to regain breath. I’ll have a go.
Best for me to begin with Rule 3. The order of my reflection cannot be chronological, but rises to mind idiosyncratically, generally, the public events see-sawing with the private ones, so the personal value system has to be sorted out from the politico-social one. It is simple and easy to enumerate high on the list my own sense of joy when, again and again, I’ve seen friends whom I’ve known as exiles, prisoners, hunted occupants of the Underground, now bearing high office and deferred to by international dignitaries, their formerly banned voices quoted in the press and their forbidden faces blooming on the TV screen.
Albie Sachs, maimed by the apartheid government’s attempt to kill him, now sitting as a judge on the Constitutional Court. Barbara Masekela, exiled for years, soon to take up an important diplomatic post. Mongane Wally Serote, Freedom Fighter, poet in exile working for the African National Congress around the world, now taking his seat as a duly elected member of parliament. To measure up to Rule 1, here: I accept as true, and clearly recognise to be so, that justice has come about in the person of these individuals, as it has supremely to that ex-political prisoner, now President Nelson Mandela. And justice is sweeter to see than revenge.
When I return to South Africa from abroad, now, I don’t step down onto the earth of my old stamping ground, the Transvaal, where I was born, but onto new territory. It’s named Gauteng — Place of Gold. The airport itself is renamed. It used to be Jan Smuts Airport; now it is Johannesburg International Airport. The former name — Transvaal — derived, way back, from the geographical boundaries recognised by the Boer Republics: Transvaal — across the Vaal River — was where the water divided the Boer Republic of Orange Free State from its counterpart, the Boer Republic of Transvaal. The former name of the airport commemorated General Jan Smuts, one of the heroes of the white regime, who sat with Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin, led South Africa boldly into the war against Nazi racism, but continued to head a racist government back home.
Now Gauteng stoutly asserts not only that there will be no more white republics here, but that their latter-day apartheid counterpart, the slicing of the country into ethnic enclaves, is over, for good. If Place of Gold trails any historical trappings, these commemorate the labour of the black men who brought the underground metal to the surface and made the country rich, as much as the Europeans who made the ore discoveries, supplied the technology, and took the profits.
I’ve become easily accustomed to the new Johannesburg. But when I’ve been away and come home, fresh to it, my vision zigzags back to the way it was, for fascinated comparison. I’ve lived here since 1949, and at most levels that segregation reserved for whites. I’ve been a struggling young writer, divorced, with a child to support. I’ve ended up in a beautiful old tin-roofed house with room for my books. But whenever and however I’ve lived, during the past regimes, it was where no black person could rent a room, a flat, or buy a house.
On to the most complex of what happened. The general public events; still with Rule 3. In the eighties, things began to change. People in other countries tend to think that the elections in April 1994 achieved this from zero, overnight. It was not so. During the eighties, even while the state repression resorted to vile and savage hit-squad tactics to assassinate liberation leaders, the theatres, cinemas, and restaurants were declared open to everybody. Blacks could sit down to eat. Public transport was desegregated. Blacks could ride. Although a lot of legalistic pussy-footing to retain residential segregation remained, it was ignored by the growing confidence of black people moving into white high-density areas, and white landlords eager to fill vacancies where whites had retreated to the suburbs. Back in the city, the white government’s lack of interest or success in providing transport to serve blacks in their daily to-and-fro between the white city and the black ghettoes was replaced by a most disorderly but effective form of transport provided by thousands of minibuses owned by black private enterprise.