These were the concessions made, and the changes helplessly accepted by the last days of apartheid, holed up in its bunker but determined not to swallow the cyanide capsule.
Rule 2. It would take more pages than the quota I’ve given myself to divide each of the difficulties I ought to examine — or rather my own reaction to them — and to resolve all within myself. There is a shambling off the scene of the white Right-wing extremists whom I feared, last year, when they used bombs in an attempt to prevent the elections from taking place; by contrast, the continuing trouble-making of Mangosuthu Buthelezi that was to be expected; and the unexpected dangers of Winnie Mandela’s will to power. To turn back the clock is not something I should ever wish to do, with exception in respect of Winnie Mandela. I wish we could re-run her emergence, hand in hand with Nelson Mandela, from his prison, so that this extraordinary woman whom I have known and admired through many early years could see that if she had kept beside him she would have been no mere consort, as her ambition perhaps misled her to believe. He is the greatest statesman and leader in the world, today — a fulfilment of everything we could have hoped for, from him, on the 27th April last year. The couple would have doubled the impact, a unique combination in the world and our part of it. That was where her power lay.
A difficulty to be faced in my mind is what is known as labour ‘unrest’. We have had a great number of strikes this year, and we shall have many more to come. The most important ones are those in the mines and related industries, because these are bound up with the colonial-established employment practice of migratory labour that, in turn, is related to the recurrent violence which spills from the frustration of hostel living conditions to adjacent black communities. This strife is often fuelled by the political ambitions of the former Good Black Man of the apartheid government, Buthelezi, recklessly stirring the power-brew of ethnic differences. Other workers have come out on strike — supermarket employees, transport drivers, even gravediggers.
These actions are deplored because they affect production (not the gravediggers, of course. .) and growth of the economy, but we have to remind ourselves: under the old regime, police, dogs, and guns were the only answer to workers’ assertion of their rights. Yet workers’ actions are represented in the press at home and abroad as the sure sign that things are going wrong in our country; overseas investors withdraw their heads into their corporate shells.
A failure of democracy that workers go on strike?
What do we want — the ‘industrial peace’ of our old police state?
The consequences of these industrial actions are one of the heritages of apartheid that will continue to plague us, for a long time. While rightfully taking up demands for a living wage, safe working conditions in mines and factories, a say in management, and the opening of company books to scrutiny, the trade unions have not yet educated their members on the relation between production, profits, and wages. And the bosses have not wished to educate themselves on the relation between workers and bosses in a democracy; after decades where all you had to do was bring in a load of migratory workers and set them before the right levers, like Chaplin in Modern Times, the men in the boardroom find it difficult to understand that in a democracy there can be a chance for industrial peace only if the workers are represented in policy-making and management decisions. The next issue of contention to arise surely will be between workers and government: the exhilarating gale of change is blowing privatisation our way, if we want to attract the foreign investment we need.
Some of what we apprehensively anticipated to be the most complex (Rule 3 again) in the series of events in our first year has happily disproved fear, for me. The opening of the 1995 school year in January was one such.
Here was the transformation of our world beginning at the real beginning: with children. Large numbers of black children — both those who live with their parents in the city as part of the exodus from black townships, and those whose parents brought them that morning from those segregated townships — were registered at what had been white schools. It wasn’t necessary to have these children escorted by police or army, as happened when schools were desegregated in the U.S.A. There occurred less than a handful of incidents where white people gathered in protest. Of course, the majority of black children in the urban and rural ghettoes apartheid created are still without enough schools or teachers — a vast lack. But each time, at the end of a school day, I pass a school near where I live and see black and white children streaming out of class, the small boys scuffling joyfully, the girls giggling together, I know that something at the very base of our lives has changed, from the shameful, to the genesis of human fulfilment.
Early this year I attended the inaugural sitting of our Constitutional Court — the first such body in our history. The case was brought by two men on death row, on the grounds that the death penalty violates South Africa’s new Constitution. It was a test case of tremendous significance to the Constitution as final arbiter of individual human rights. Among the judges, black and white, was Albie Sachs, the liberation activist whose arm was blown off and one eye blinded by a car bomb placed to kill him by the apartheid government’s hit squads; he, who might be thought to want to see assassins die, was eloquent for abolition of the death penalty. The court finally declared it a contravention of the Constitution and it has been abolished. Eighty percent of whites and forty-nine percent of blacks had wanted it retained. Judge President Arthur Chaskalson said, ‘This court cannot allow itself to be diverted from its duty to act as an independent arbiter of the Constitution by the public’. We now have, and need to have, this kind of protection of individual rights where we had so few. Those who kill will go to prison for life; the state will not become a murderer.
We have other kinds of murderers among us; political murderers who have never been brought to justice. President Mandela recently signed into law a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It is a country of reconciliation’s preferred alternative to Germany’s Nuremberg trials or Chile’s blanket amnesty. Those who come forward and confess fully what they did and why, in the past, may be granted forgiveness and in some cases amnesty. It’s going to be a process full of doubts and difficulties, both for the perpetrators of ghastly deeds and for the families of those they killed or maimed. But it is surely the way to deal with the past of a people who have to live with it, together; a dedicated move towards making South Africa a human place to live in, today.
The injunction (Rule 4) to be sure to leave nothing out? I couldn’t attempt to follow that because, in the period of a single year, so much remains to be redressed, so much has had to be ‘left out’ for another year; years. What is before my eyes is that the streets of this city, Johannesburg, where I live, are now totally transformed. A perpetual crowd scene on a Cecil B. DeMille scale has taken over what was a swept, empty stage on which a few self-appointed leading actors performed for one another. The pavements are a market where your progress is a step-dance between pyramids of fruit and vegetables, racks of second-hand jeans, spreads of dog-eared paperback lives from Marx to Mandela and Monroe, rickety tables set with peanuts, sweets, sunglasses, backyard concoctions labelled Chanel and Dior, hair straighteners, Swatches and earrings. Traffic fumes are spiced by the smell of boerewors, a greasy farm sausage that is as much our national dish as thick mealie-meal, the African polenta, for on every corner there are carts frying circles of gut-encased meat over gas burners. You can have your shoes re-soled while you stand in your socks; you can even have your hair cut, right there. Like everyone else who has a car, I have had to acquire new skills as a driver after forty-seven years on the road: the minibuses we call combis — a combination between a bus and a taxi — stop on request signalled by a raised finger, anywhere and everywhere. You have to be ready with the foot on the brake and a quick swerve to make it to the parallel lane, and usually the lane is full, anyway.