A Song in the Night (22 page)

In the late 1980s I finished my doctorate at Harvard Business School, which included a long technical dissertation that examined how some of America’s largest investors—pension funds, church and university endowments, and foundations—made decisions about their investments in South Africa. While working on this project I read hundreds of articles on every aspect of this debate, and I pored through archives in different institutions and libraries around the country. Oddly, though everyone I interviewed told me that it was an extremely important topic, no one seemed to be working on a single comprehensive book on the subject.

One afternoon as I was nearing the end of my dissertation, I stopped by the office of Rosabeth Moss Kanter, one of the business school’s most creative and distinguished faculty members. She asked me where I was in my studies, and
I told her that I was nearly finished. I then shared with her the mystery of the missing book. It was peculiar, she admitted, but maybe the comprehensive book could only be written by a person with the right background. I thought about my own training—as a historian and an economist, as a minister who understood the passion for justice, and as a business school graduate who understood the mechanics of foreign investment—and I found myself wondering if perhaps this wasn’t the perfect opportunity for me. I mentioned this to her.

“Well,” she commented, “I have always felt that life is too short for small projects.”

And that’s all it took. As I walked out of her office, I knew what I was going to be doing for the next few years: writing a full account of the struggle for racial justice in the United States and South Africa in the era of apartheid.

After a valuable stint at the Kennedy School of Government in a new and creative program on ethics, I was hired by Harvard Divinity School to teach a range of crossover courses (the kinds of courses I’d dreamed of at Yale Divinity School) on the divestment movement, on how to create social change, on how communities in conflict could be reconciled. The dean encouraged me to establish a new venture called the Project on Business, Values, and the Economy. I settled into a small office on the second floor of an old carriage house on a back street in Cambridge. I organized monthly lunch discussions for faculty from across the whole university to discuss everything from the decision to close a major auto plant in Michigan (taught by an associate dean at the business school) to the pope’s encyclical
on capitalism (taught by a leading professor at the divinity school). Soon I had a flood of passionate and brilliant students, mostly from the divinity school but also from across the university and the region.

I set out to assemble a project of research on South Africa. I began collecting information across many topics: foreign investment, American politics, civil rights, and African history. I developed files on U.S. presidential policy toward Africa from the time of Harry Truman through Ronald Reagan. Because many South Africans passed through Boston and Cambridge, I made a point of asking to meet them and interview them. One of the couples, André and Maretha du Toit, became dear friends. André was one of the most prominent political philosophers in South Africa, an Afrikaner who had left a post at the University of Stellenbosch because of his fierce opposition to apartheid and was now teaching at the University of Cape Town. His wife, Maretha, the daughter of an Afrikaner minister, had also rejected the entire system of racial injustice, and she radiated enthusiasm and affection toward everyone around her, including me. The two of them took me under their wing, and soon I was regularly eating dinner in their small sublet apartment with South Africa’s most distinguished leaders, white and black, as they stopped in Cambridge for a few days.

After a few years Dana and I realized that we would both benefit from a research year in another country, and we picked South Africa. I had already been there several times for research, and it seemed an ideal time to go as a family. Nelson Mandela had been released from prison two years before,
and the exiled members of the African National Congress had returned to South Africa to begin the arduous process of negotiating a new constitution and a transition of power. Dana and I each applied for a senior Fulbright scholarship, which would give us just enough money to move there for six months with our young boys. In 1992 we received the award, and we scheduled our departure for early January 1993, a few weeks before Bill Clinton was to be sworn in as the new president of the United States.

The day arrived in late December, we handed over our keys to our house sitters, and we boarded a series of flights that would take us to the southern tip of Africa. When we arrived in Johannesburg, we traveled to the home of a gentle Afrikaner couple, Jacques and Carol Kriel, whom I had met on an earlier visit. It had been in their kitchen that I first encountered South African gastronomic peculiarities like rooibos tea, made from the red leaves of a South African bush, and the strangely delicious yeast spread imported from England known as Marmite. They also fed me mielie pap, a cornmeal porridge, and rusks, which are slightly sweet hunks of dry raisin bread served and dunked at teatime. It was in their home that I first noticed that though South Africans never have screens on their windows, there are remarkably few bugs at night. It was in their garden that I first saw great African birds sweep through the sky and watched monkeys pick through a compost heap. Flanking their driveway stood two six-foot-tall jade plants, magnificent tropical plants that had taken decades to reach that height.

As we were driving along their street I noticed the tight security around most of the homes. Every residence was surrounded
by a tall fence, and every gate announced that a security company known as “Armed Response” or some other frightening name was protecting the premises. Everyone had added two or three feet of stones or fencing or razor wire on top of their walls—a physical barometer of the fear rising among Johannesburg’s white elite. The one exception to this neighborhood trend was the Kriel home, which had such a low wall that a child could have hopped over it in a flash.

I asked Jacques about his wall, and he said that he did not want to make it any higher, even though they had already experienced a theft. Several months before, a group of thieves had entered their home while the Kriels were asleep and stolen the only two pieces of electronic equipment they owned, their television and stereo. Their immense dog, Bassie, a mixture of Great Dane and Rhodesian ridgeback who stood as tall as a pony and normally emitted a giant bark that struck terror into newcomers, had slept through the whole incident.

I asked Jacques whether things were becoming better or worse. Crime was definitely worse, Jacques replied, but on the whole this was a better South Africa than I had seen on my earlier trips. “You turn on the television and you see the neo-Nazis and the Communists debating each other,” he said. “That was inconceivable a few years ago. So we are seeing an improvement.”

Though our eventual destination was Cape Town, a thousand miles to the southwest, where we had rented a home, we took a few days to drive around the area, including a visit to
the nation’s capital, Pretoria. The great irony of South Africa was that its discriminatory structure had arisen because of the ardent desire of a particular ethnic group for freedom. The Afrikaner people, who numbered barely more than a million, were descendants of the original Dutch settlers who had built their homes in the Cape Province. After a hundred and fifty years, as part of the wars with Napoleon, the British navy sailed into Table Bay and took control. The British quickly established their own language, laws, and customs as the rule of the land, and they treated the Afrikaners as second-class citizens with regard to land and political rights. Afrikaners had a long history of importing slaves and subjugating local African groups, and the British insisted that they could not punish or kill their workers without proper judicial review. Eventually the Afrikaners decided that they had had enough, and they organized the “Great Trek,” an enormous wagon train in which thousands of people moved all their portable belongings across the huge desert to find a home outside British rule.

These “Fore-Travelers”—Voortrekkers—settled in Pretoria, nearly a thousand miles to the northeast of Cape Town, only to find, to their horror, that within a generation the discovery of gold in nearby Johannesburg prompted the British to come rushing into their new republic in search of new wealth. The Afrikaners wanted freedom; the British responded by conquering them with force. At the end of the nineteenth century, they sent an imperial army to crush the resistance of these farmers, or Boers, in a brutal war of attrition aimed partly at the civilian population.

This experience burned for decades in the living memories of the Afrikaners, who swore that one day they would regain control from the British and be free to do what they wanted with “their” land and “their” blacks. A huge wave of nationalist rallies began in the 1930s, and some of the major Afrikaner leaders, including one future prime minister, were jailed by the British for favoring the defeat of Britain by Hitler. After the war, however, the Afrikaners finally achieved what they wanted: they won a majority in the whites-only election for Parliament. Led by a charismatic and demented professor named Hendrik Verwoerd, they wiped out the remnants of British law and changed the voting structures to secure permanent power for themselves.

To make sure they had no future opposition of any kind, they constructed a comprehensive legal and police system to control the majority black population. Africans were denied the right to vote, to own businesses, to travel without permission and identity documents, to live anywhere except in designated areas, to speak in public or to protest, to attend universities, or to resist the government in any way. They were to remain in a permanent state of “apartness,” or apartheid, excluded from every chance to participate and to prosper. And thus the Afrikaners’ desire to preserve their culture in freedom and their generational grievances against the English justified the creation and enforcement of the most modern and aggressive system of racism in the world.

To see some of the monuments of this troubled history, we drove north on a major highway cutting through green
and yellow rolling terrain dotted with industrial parks that reminded us of east Texas. We went first to the Voortrekker Monument. Built in 1938 as a neofascist shrine to Afrikaner victory, the monument is one of the most visually powerful and politically controversial structures in the country. We climbed a hundred steps to the central chamber, where Afrikaner settler mythology is laid out in a large frieze around a central crypt. The building is built so that each year on the sixteenth of December—the date in 1838 on which five hundred Afrikaners rebuffed an attack by thousands of Zulus—a shaft of sunlight streaks through the window and illuminates a stone table at the center. The table resembles a sarcophagus; carved deeply in the top are the words “
Ons Vir Jou Suid Afrika”:
“We (Are) for You, South Africa.”

The place evoked many sentiments. It bothered me that the settler imagery seemed so familiar. If the bearded white men had been wearing Pilgrim hats or cowboy boots, I wondered, would I have found it as appalling?

We climbed more steps to obtain a sweeping view of Pretoria. There my mind shifted back to college. During my senior year, in the same spring as my bout with the eating clubs, I had also become deeply involved with the student divestment movement to protest apartheid. We had spent weeks marching in front of Nassau Hall, the student administration building, shouting, “Princeton—Pretoria! Break the connection
now
!” During my final months at Princeton, hundreds of students had joined this daily protest. I had admired the top student leaders greatly and wondered how they had acquired so much
detailed knowledge about the business connections of the university. We handed out flyers and took buses into New York City to see one of our classmates testify against apartheid at the United Nations. In April 1978 more than two hundred students, including me, had seized and occupied Nassau Hall and spent twenty-four hours singing songs, holding teach-ins, and sleeping in the corridors to provoke a response from the university trustees, which never came. That incident, as much as any, launched me on a lifetime of study and activism on corporate and investment policy.

As the sun beat down on my little family nearly fifteen years later, I thought how far away Princeton seemed—a small town now locked in the snows of an opposite season on the other side of the world. The claim that there had been a connection between Princeton and Pretoria had at first seemed unlikely. It had required squeezing a long and complicated set of relationships into a single binary pair. “It’s not that simple,” administrators and trustees had told us in the 1970s, and in one sense they had been right. And yet they had also been wrong. Firms from around the globe—from the United States, France, Great Britain, West Germany, and Japan—had provided South Africa’s white leaders with large amounts of money and technology to build their racist state. When I was at Princeton, nearly four hundred American companies owned subsidiaries in South Africa. Even though these firms never accounted for more than a fifth of South Africa’s direct foreign investment, they dominated such key sectors as electronics, automobile manufacturing, financial services, and petroleum refining and
distribution. Dividends from these companies had flowed into Princeton’s bank accounts, and some of their executives sat on the university’s board of trustees. The connection had been real.