A Song in the Night (24 page)

Still, while I was there, I wanted to see things with my own eyes, and that desire took me all over the country. I took a special tour of a South African gold mine which plunged me two and a half kilometers below the surface into a dark and sweltering world where I was invited to try my hand at the hydraulic drills, march through miles of subterranean tunnels, watch the building-sized machinery crush and filter the rocks into powder, and witness the final pouring of molten gold into ingots. Thousands of men labored around me in tunnels stretching for miles in every direction, and yet even when I was down in their midst, I could get only the tiniest glimpse of the harsh conditions that humanity imposed on them in search of the ultimate symbol of human greed. Later the Chamber of Mines treated all the foreign visitors to a fancy lunch, to which they invited some of the white mine supervisors. The supervisors were delighted to be out of the mine for an afternoon, and after they had each downed three or four beers, they happily shared their wisdom with me, particularly with regard to the differing characters of the thousands of African men still working miles below us as we ate.

“The Shangaans, the Zulus from Mozambique, they’re the best,” said one man, grabbing me by the shoulder to get my attention and waving a big finger in my face to make his point. “The Xhosas, they are big, strong, and stupid. The Zulus are hard workers, but you have to watch your back. The Tswanas and the Sothos, they’re shit. They are all political, all ANC—they always want something, and they cause trouble.” Then he laughed congenially and slapped me on the back, as though I, as a white person, certainly knew what he meant.

Given the rage and fear that gripped people of all races in every corner of the country, I wondered how anyone could rise above this cauldron of misery and hate in order to create a genuinely new nation. While Africans yearned desperately for rapid progress, whites worried about everything they might lose, and the members of other ethnic groups—the Coloureds and Indians and other peoples of South Africa—felt that they were inevitably going to be caught in the crossfire. Yet through all of this, leaders like Nelson Mandela, only recently released from prison, and even his counterpart, F. W. de Klerk, the head of the apartheid National Party, had decided to guide their nation into a new future, to move forward with a measured, careful, and inspired commitment to creating a democracy. They were joined in this effort by thousands of people trying to contribute to peaceful change. I traveled the country seeking out the exceptional men and women who seemed able both to sense the terrible longings and fears around them and to patiently chart a new course.

I came to know and love Barney Pityana, one of the martyr
Steve Biko’s closest friends, who had been imprisoned, then eventually left for England, where he became both a lawyer and an Anglican priest before returning to South Africa. He eventually became the head of the Human Rights Commission and then vice chancellor of South Africa’s largest university. I met and sometimes had dinner with Albie Sachs, a brilliant Jewish lawyer who had joined the ANC as a young man, had argued for the creation of a nonracial democracy, and was nearly killed by a car bomb in Mozambique. The blast blinded him in one eye and tore off his right hand. He later became the equivalent of a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. I spent a long time in conversation with Desmond Tutu, the archbishop of Cape Town and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, who had been vilified in the press as “that black Communist bug” and yet laughed with joy at the thought of the new nation being born. I met theologians, business leaders, teachers, community activists, and men and women who had been tortured or whose family members had died in prison or been shot on lonely roads at night by the security forces. I even met the president of the country, F. W. de Klerk, at a reception at the U.S. embassy. I told him that I was studying the effect of sanctions on the South African economy, and he asked me pleasantly if I was finding good data.

“It depends on the industry,” I said diplomatically. “As you know, Mr. President, some industries are not currently permitted to release such data.” (It was, in fact, still a crime for South Africans even to ask.)

“It will be interesting to see what you discover,” he said.

This was my moment, and I seized it. Plucking up my
courage, I asked him point-blank, “Did your religious convictions play an important part in your decisions of the last few years?”

“Yes, yes!” he said emphatically, to my astonishment. “People keep calling me a pragmatist, but that’s not right. If anything, I have to struggle with not being a fundamentalist. I belong to a church that takes the Bible very seriously. I am always looking, always searching, for the basic foundation, the underlying
principle
, from which one can build an idea of the future, from which one can construct an action plan. As a Christian, I have always been preoccupied with this question of principle, of what is the right thing to do.”

For a moment I found myself speechless, staring at a man who was both the head of one of the most brutal regimes in the world and someone actively seeking to bend his country’s history toward justice. How could I ever communicate such human contradictions in my writing? I wondered.

The most elusive person in the country was, of course, Nelson Mandela. After he was imprisoned, in 1962, his name and his face were officially banned from every South African publication. I had visited South Africa just before his release, and since there were no known pictures of him since he had been in his forties, the newspapers had hired artists to imagine what the seventy-two-year-old man would look like when he stepped out of prison. The South African government even decided to minimize the shock of his sudden launch into freedom by driving him around the area in an unmarked car, and on more than one occasion they pulled over and allowed him to go into a corner store to buy a newspaper.

Many remember the image of Mandela finally leaving prison on February 11, 1990: the tall, gray-haired man dressed in an impeccable suit, surrounded by triumphant assistants, walking with measured steps toward the gates of the prison, hand in hand with his long-suffering wife, Winnie. The image was carried live on television around the world. He had spent nineteen of his more than twenty-seven years in prison in a tiny cell on barren Robben Island, surrounded by rapid ocean currents and marooned just six miles offshore yet in full view of Cape Town’s beautiful cityscape. After Mandela was released, I had the opportunity to visit his old cell in the company of the United States ambassador, Princeton Lyman. The building was still being operated as a prison at that time, and the authorities had to clear the prisoners from that cell and from that block when we went. When I walked in, my heart rose to my throat. It was a tiny room, no more than eight by ten feet in dimension, with a small metal bed and a tiny desk. The ambassador and I could not fit inside at the same time. I tried, in the few moments I was there, to project backward through nineteen winters and summers, to wonder how anyone could have survived in this space without going mad. I looked at the thick, heavy bars that covered the window and realized that all I could see was a naked stone courtyard.

Yet Mandela had somehow remained internally free. After he left the prison, he instantly became the central figure in the South Africa story and an international beacon of hope. During my visit I arranged to meet with his personal attaché, a woman named Barbara Masekela, who later became minister
of culture and ambassador to France. She had traveled with Mandela when he began to make foreign trips to support the transition to democracy in South Africa. She told me in particular about a recent trip to Tanzania, when thousands of people were lined up along the roads to the cities to catch a glimpse of Mandela. “We were traveling in an open four-wheel-drive truck,” she said, “and if you listened carefully, you could hear the people saying ‘Mandela, Mandela.’ As soon as they saw him they said his name, as though they couldn’t believe it. So as we drove, we heard the name,
Mandela, Mandela
, wave after wave, repeated like an echo. Everyone who sees him for the first time suddenly realizes ‘There he is,’ and for that moment they are alone in history with Mandela.”

“They are alone in history with Mandela.” The phrase struck me as profound. Most of us think of history as something that other people, important people, make. We read about it, we follow behind it, we bend to its force. We are like small boats tethered to the stern of an ocean liner, bouncing around in the boiling wake as we are dragged along. But for those standing on the bridge, there is no history; there is no wake; there is only the sea stretching forward, only the destination ahead. Everything happens in the present; there is no need to look back. Masekela said that this was something that amazed her about Mandela, Sisulu, and the others who endured Robben Island. “One cannot help looking at him,” she said, “and thinking that he was robbed of his life. Yet he never mentions this. It is the same with all of them—Sisulu, Mbeki, all of them—they never allude to the fact that twenty-eight
years of their lives were taken away. They are just going forward with what has to be done now.”

And as she finished her sentence, the door behind her popped open, and Mandela himself stepped in.

“Madiba,”
she said, using the name of both affection and respect favored by his inner circle, “this is Dr. Massie from the United States.”

Mandela stepped forward and shook my hand, beaming. The only thing I could remember to say was that the secretary to the dean of the Harvard Divinity School, an African-American woman named Gwen Hawke, had made me promise that if I ever met him, I would give him her personal expression of gratitude.

“Please thank her very much,” he said. “Tell her I find her words most encouraging.”

And then he turned, papers in hand, and went back to his office, signaling to Masekela to join him. I watched the door close and realized that the camera I had brought all the way from the United States just in case anything like this ever happened lay unused in my briefcase beside me on the floor. But whether or not I had the visual proof, I had for a moment been alone in history with Mandela.

When asked about the personal adulation that was his constant fare, Mandela was always scrupulously modest. “I serve as one small human peg on which the nations of the world hang their admiration for the African National Congress,” he told one
American television reporter. In some ways it was true. Mandela had not made the revolution himself. Yet he also enabled some extraordinary things to happen because, not unlike another tall, reticent figure who played a key role in the birth of his nation—George Washington—Mandela gave subtle approval or discouragement to many impulses that had been let loose in the complex negotiations for the transfer of power.

For several years South Africa had been slowly and steadily working to define both a new form of government and a pathway that would enable it to get there. It was a devilishly complicated problem. The Afrikaners had felt brutally oppressed by the British, and the key to their decision to impose apartheid was not so much that they hated blacks—though many of them did—but that they wanted to design a structure under which their political, cultural, and economic dominance would never be threatened by anyone. As a result of this insecurity, people of other races in South Africa had been systematically excluded and brutalized. Property had been stolen, families annihilated, futures destroyed, parents and children killed. Though the violence was mostly on the part of the white government, Africans had sometimes fought back, stealing cars and shooting their drivers, tossing hand grenades into truck cabs, and sweeping down on farmers and settlers in the depths of night. The South African military and police routinely tortured and murdered civilians, planted bombs, and drove opponents of all races off the roads into fiery deaths in ravines. To shatter the political unity of their opposition, the South African government also set up stooge governments in fake
black “homelands,” where petty tyrants, wallowing in government cash and using their guards and militias to demand tribute, drove around in Mercedes and lived in luxury while their enforcers dragged men and women from their homes to beat and kill anyone who dared to object.

At about this time, my son John asked, “Are there any dinosaurs in the world?”

“No, John,” I replied. “There are no longer any dinosaurs in the world.”

“Are there any ghosts in the world?” he asked.

“No, there are no ghosts,” I said.

“And Daddy,” he said, his face filled with earnestness and anxiety, “are there any
monsters
in the world?”

Suddenly I felt a pang of anguish. What I said was “No, John, there are no monsters in the world.” But the voice in my mind said, “Only human ones, John. Only human ones.”

Later that night John’s voice came back to me—“Are there any monsters in the world?”—as I tried to fall asleep. A rapid stream of images from the last few months roared through my mind: the elderly white farmer strangled by thieves and left in a cupboard for days; the four township women lined up against a wall and shot through the back of the head; the hollow eyes of abandoned urban children begging for coins; the humiliated faces of the men who shuffled to our door pleading for food and work; the man screaming as he burned to death in the trunk of his car just a few miles from our home.