The city centre is dirty, yes. That private white club, that stage-set for principal actors only, was not designed for nonmembers, for the use of the crowd, the entire population of this city. The dainty bins overflow with trash. And perhaps there is even an unconscious euphoria among black people, in showing you may toss your cigarette pack and a Coke can, even your old T-shirt, onto what white people kept so tidy, for themselves alone. It will take some time before people want to have clean streets because they have now claimed them. I use the word ‘unconscious’ of this careless abandon in the streets because there is so little general resentment of whites, in black South Africans. I reflect on this as I write: when I walk about Johannesburg these days I don’t do so as a white among blacks, I’m not conscious of this at all, it’s not there in the eyes, in the gait of the people as they approach or pass me. And if we happen to bump into one another, before I can apologise, the other will say, ‘Sorry, ma-Gogo’—apologise, grandmother—in respect for my grey hair. .
There are muggings, house robberies, and hijacks to fear, oh yes. And although it is easy for me to say these are the hazards of city life in many countries, certainly (but not only) the developing, post-colonial ones, it is a statistical fact that our city ranks very high on the crime scale. In one of the paradoxes of freedom, our country is no exception. For all those years of apartheid, we were isolated from the world, rightly shunned; now we are accepted with open arms and we ourselves are also open to arrival from other countries of drug dealers and scam-men, and on a humbler but nevertheless damaging level, illegal immigrants from as far afield as Nigeria, Korea, and China, who compete with our own unemployed in the struggle to earn and eat.
The vast number of unemployed we inherited from the apartheid regime, like the millions in need of houses and schools, have created a vocation of crime, with, as apprentices, homeless street children. It’s a Dickensian situation apartheid bequeathed us and foreigners exacerbate, ironically, in our freedom. It’s an inheritance not only from the years of apartheid since 1948, but of the more than three and a half centuries of colonial racist rule under different names.
What has our Government of National Unity been able to do about this inheritance, this social malediction, in the short months of its existence in power?
I am incredulous when people in the outside world call us to account in the quantitative terms they have decided. How many houses have we built? Too few, yes, too few, we are well aware. But how many do these South Africa watchers calculate, of the thousands required by several million shack and slum dwellers, could be built in a year?
This is not a game of Monopoly, where a house is a counter you put down on a chosen square.
Do they realize that land has to be legally acquired, in relation to where people have their work-places, that electricity and water reticulation have to be installed where during apartheid they never existed, that — above all — banks have to be negotiated into providing low-cost housing loans for people who, because they were black and low-income earners, never before were eligible for bonds? These preparations are what takes up time before a brick is laid. The fact that in the region where I live eighty thousand existing houses have been connected to electricity may mean little to you, who have been taking for granted electrical power ever since you were grown enough to reach a switch; but to people who live in those eighty thousand houses, touching a switch is indeed the beginning of a new life: let there be light.
For myself, I have been troubled by some unforeseen turns of events, this year, but I have been neither disappointed nor disillusioned; it’s been a year of awesome achievement, set against what preceded it for generations, here.
To maintain a healthy balance, of course, I quote Leibniz’s gibe, that Descartes’ Rules were ‘like the precepts of some chemist; take what you need and do what you should, and you will get what you want.’
Well, I continue to believe it shall be so.
— 1995
THE ESSENTIAL DOCUMENT
Everyone who ponders the Universal Declaration of Human Rights inevitably will give particular attention to those Articles that pertain to circumstances with which he or she is personally involved. For me as a writer, Article 19—Freedom of Expression — has a special significance. But this is not a professional privilege that seeks exclusive protection: literature is one of the most enduring means by which ideas cross frontiers and become universal, but freedom of expression, to impart and receive information ‘through any media’, is the first condition of freedom in civilised governance. Suppression by censorship, banning, imprisonment, and even edicts of death continue to exist in many countries, imposed by both secular and religious authorities. Article 19 established these means as a primary contravention of everyone’s birthright to read, to listen, to regard, and speak out.
Article 26 is fundamental to Article 19: its Clauses 1 and 2 declare: ‘Everyone has the right to education’, ‘Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality’. Freedom of expression is an empty phrase unless education equips every individual with freedom of the word, the ability to read and write. Although the right to literacy surely is implied in Article 26, it is not specifically named. I believe it ought to be. This Article brings the hope of justice to the millions excluded — by ignorance which is no fault of their own — from participation and benefit in the making of our world.
For me, the most important Article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has no number, is not an Article at all. It is a paragraph of the Preamble. ‘Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law.’ (My italics).
I have lived through a time in my own country, South Africa, when this ‘last resort’ compelled the majority of the people to turn to rebellion, first in the form of civil disobedience and passive resistance and finally in the form of armed struggle, against tyranny and oppression that denied them human rights. I have seen how to be compelled to take this last resort not only brings tragic self-sacrifice and suffering to those who assume the burden, even though freedom is finally achieved as a result, but has long-term consequences which threaten the democracy so attained.
When people are deprived over years of any recourse to the provisions of civil society as a means of seeking redress for their material and spiritual deprivations, they lose the faculty of using the law when, at last, such recourse is open to them. The result of this conditioning now is fashionably called ‘the culture of violence’; an oxymoron, for culture implies enlightenment, to aim towards attaining the fullness of life, not its destruction.