In the South African theatre, a cross-pollination of European experimental dramatic structures and African resources of mime, living experiences, shared body-language with whites produces a theatre that is non-racial not only in mixed casting that reflects the tensions and truth of our mixed society, but also in that ‘black’ plays and ‘white’ plays are recognized as opportunities opening to each the experience of the other. And all are welcome in the audience.
It is unfortunate to have to say it: history is against you, in the U.S.A. Alas, Martin Luther King is dead and you have no Nelson Mandela. White Americans cannot give back to blacks a stolen and lost identity; black Americans are reluctant to accept that it cannot be found in an avatar of apartheid in reverse. They are Americans, and whether whites like it or not, and whether blacks like it or not, a common destiny has to be worked out. This is not simple, in South Africa either, but in my observation and participation we are doing rather better than the U.S.A., despite our staggering problems of poverty, unemployment, and vast number of the homeless, a legacy from the apartheid regime.
As Wislawa Szymborska, the Polish Nobel Laureate poet, writes: ‘We know how to divide ourselves. But to put ourselves together?’
— 1997
LABOUR WELL THE TEEMING EARTH
The poor are always with us.
The eradication of poverty.
These are the poles of perception, the oppositions of the phenomenon of want.
The poor are always with us.
The first is ancient, an implied acceptance of a destined lot, everyone conditioned by class (each in his place), by religion (the meek shall inherit the earth), to be content to have no place and inherit nothing.
The eradication of poverty.
The second proposition refuses to accept poverty as part of human destiny. The United Nations General Assembly’s designation of the International Decade for the Eradication of Poverty is a mission statement in the true sense. It is surely the boldest expression of faith in human endeavour ever made? It comes from the most representative body in the world. It posits perhaps the greatest human advancement ever embarked upon, an adventure greater than any attempted in the progress of humankind since we could define ourselves as such. And most important, it asserts convincing proof that the goal could be attainable.
Beginning last year, the United Nations Development Programme has launched an exhaustive, world-wide initiative to debunk poverty as destiny; with its partners, the United Nations system, organizations of civil society, academic institutions, the private sectors and international donor community, research has been produced which identifies the extent and nature of poverty in its many forms — and destiny is not one of them.
I do not propose to cite the statistics of the world of want. They are all there, devastating, in the invaluable publications of the United Nations Development Programme — the staggering material facts of race, racial prejudice, political and social administration, geography, gender, ethnicity, agricultural practice, technological practice, industrial production, health services — everything — from the drying up of a stream to the closing down of an arms factory — that produces the phenomena of poverty as lived by the world’s 1.3 billion poor.
When you read this evidence of physical, mental, and spiritual deprivation, you can reach only one conclusion: poverty is a trap. Brought about by many factors other than the obvious ones you may always have had in mind, poverty is the nadir of disempowerment.
It is a disempowerment that has existed and does exist in democracies as well as dictatorships, links them, in a way we are reluctant to have to admit. The ballot box of free and fair elections has failed to empower the poor in most of the democratic countries. The dictatorship of the people failed to do so in most countries of the Soviet empire. And since the fall of Communism the West’s claim of freeing those countries to the establishment of a market economy and prosperity means nothing to the old people who now beg in the streets of Moscow, as the homeless do in the streets of cities of the only great power left in the world, the United States of America. In Brazil, in Argentina, in Africa, in India, in Bangladesh — where in this world except for the small welfare states of the north, are there not people in the nadir of poverty? No need to enter into ideological differences, no need to make any value judgments, here: each country has produced — or failed to end — the shameful human end-product, poverty.
What is a decade — in terms of centuries of acceptance, the poor are always with us?
Our answer surely is that the world now has the knowledge, the scientific and technological ability to do away with most of the causes of poverty, and to turn around the consequences of causes it cannot prevent. There are identified practical means: what is needed is the money and commitment of governments, regional, national, and bodies of world governance, to cooperate and carry out these means. And what is needed to bring this about is a roused awareness and admittance among the peoples of the world that whether there is proved to be life on Mars, and whether you may conduct your affairs electronically without leaving your armchair, the new century is not going to be a new century at all in terms of the progress of humanity if we take along with us acceptance of the shameful shackles of the past — over a billion men, women, and children in poverty, eighty-two countries unable to produce or buy sufficient food for their population — and we offer only charity, that palliative to satisfy the conscience and keep the same old system of haves and have-nots quietly contained.
In view of this need for roused awareness, I think it is useful for us to consider: How do different people conceive poverty? How do they think about it? Historically, where did it begin?
In prehistory early humans lived by what we would call now a subsistence economy: you hunted, you gathered, and when these resources of your group ran out in one place, you moved on; only nature discriminated, making one area more salubrious than another, but there was space enough to make of this an advantage rather than a deprivation. It was with the arrival of surplus value that the phenomenon of rich and poor began; with the cultivation of the valleys of the Euphrates and the Nile, when food was grown and could be stored instead of foraged and hunted, able to satisfy only short-term needs. As soon as there was more than sufficient unto the day, those who grew more than they could eat became the haves, while those whose harvest provided no surplus became the have-nots.
Basically, nothing has changed since then. Except that it is no longer possible for societies to move on from one disadvantaged environment to a more salubrious one — the colonial era of the European powers was perhaps the last such movement to take place successfully, the final enactment of an obsolete solution to social problems. On an individual scale, immigrants in contemporary days generally find themselves received by locals with resentment as competitors in the labour market of the country of their aspirations, and quickly sink to a place among the poor of that country. Nothing much has changed, over the centuries, except that we have evolved what might be called a philosophy of acceptance of poverty.
First, there is the question of different class perceptions of what poverty is, and how these are arrived at. There is the upper-class perception. There is the middle-class perception. And there is that of the poor themselves.