A Song in the Night (9 page)

One day when I was fifteen, our friend Phyllis Glaeser asked if we would like to come that evening to see the rough cut of a documentary by a friend of hers. In the small screening room we met a quiet and intense black director named Nelson (“Nana”) Mahomo. The film, called
Last Grave at Dimbaza
, depicted the brutal system of racial segregation that governed a country I had never heard of—South Africa. The focus of the film was the policy of resettlement, under which black citizens, particularly women and children, who had moved to towns and squatter camps near South Africa’s major cities were forcibly relocated to distant spots in their “homelands”—in fact, little more than bleak, waterless dumping grounds. The South African minister of justice argued that the breakup of families was justified because “black workers must not be burdened with superfluous appendages like women and children.” The
resulting misery, poverty, malnutrition, and disease decimated the population, so much so that in some parts of the country only half the babies lived past the age of five.

Apartheid was a system specially designed for the twentieth century and aggressively defended as a positive good. It was administered by an intelligent, mechanized modern government controlled by an all-white political group known as the National Party. In addition, this government frequently proclaimed itself a democratic ally of the United States, something that American presidents seemed to tolerate. And judging from the numerous shots of American corporate facilities that popped up throughout the film, the United States apparently had extensive and unapologetic commercial arrangements with the white rulers of this regional power on the tip of the great continent.

The message of the film struck me powerfully. What impressed me even more, however, was Nana Mahomo’s attitude. While we fidgeted in our seats, flinching at the grotesque truths that the film implacably laid before us, Nana sat quietly. When the movie was over and the small audience asked him questions, he answered with an intensity both quiet and strangely majestic.

Though he was reluctant to talk about his own experience, we gradually pieced together his story. He was a member of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), a vigorous rival to the African National Congress. On March 21, 1960, seeking to spark a national uprising against white rule—and to gain the upper hand over the ANC—the PAC called for a general strike. Robert Sobukwe, the head of the PAC, personally
asked Mahomo to leave the country the day before in order to serve as an ambassador extraordinaire, ready to explain the new regime to foreign governments and to negotiate relationships for the new government among the family of nations. Instead, the uprising failed. Not enough people learned of it in time. Those who did congregate met a murderous South African police and military.

In the town of Sharpeville, white forces fired rifles, pistols, and machine guns directly into a packed crowd of protesters. Sixty-nine fell dead, including more than a dozen women and children—many shot in the back—in what became known as the “Sharpeville massacre.” Robert Sobukwe, in an act of brash courage, turned himself in to the police for violating the official “pass laws”; they happily arrested him and jailed him for the rest of his life. His colleagues were hunted down, imprisoned, or shot. Mahomo, watching these events from abroad, realized that he was now completely cut off from everything and everyone to which he had devoted his life.

For the next decade Mahomo traveled and spoke about the injustices unfolding in his home country. He encountered wide disbelief among his audiences. Beginning in 1969 he and a group of British film students spent three years getting various friends to obtain and smuggle out clandestine footage. He maintained his composure and resolve through innumerable setbacks. Slowly he assembled enough images and money to craft a full documentary. He knew that he faced potentially deadly retaliation. South African secret agents regularly assassinated “Communists” and “terrorists” all over the world.

The experience opened my eyes even more to the reality
of oppression and tyranny. It was not just the people of the Soviet Union or Communist China who endured mindless cruelty from their own governments; governments that cloaked themselves in the language of democratic rights were also guilty. Nana’s patience and reserve introduced me to the realities of South Africa but also showed me how raw outrage was not enough to create change. The pursuit of lasting justice requires a depth of commitment that transcends the emotion of the moment. I could see that real leaders had to learn how to live with a slow, deep, burning passion for justice that was both a source of motivation and a wound. One never knew whether one’s actions would really have effect, whether one would live to see the transformation for which one longed. The dedication itself—ringed and supported with a hope and trust in the direction of history—had to be enough.

For some, the burden was too much or the answers never came. For others, including Nana, the frustration was rewarded with occasional moments of triumph that helped refuel the effort. A few months after we saw the film,
The Last Grave at Dimbaza
was shown on national television in the United States and won an Emmy. The debate over America’s political and commercial entanglement with apartheid intensified. New opponents of apartheid appeared among student, religious, and civil rights groups. And Nana went back to many more years in his restless and sometimes controversial search for political allies, personal advancement, ideological justification, and fundamental change in the country from which he was barred. After a few conversations, I never saw him again.

But I never forgot him.

I
n September 1972 we left Paris for good and returned to the rambling old house in Irvington. I was sixteen and enrolled in a nearby high school, Hackley School. Because of the intensity of French education, I found that I was a full year ahead of my peers, so I was bumped up into my senior year. I did my best to stay above water academically. I also continued to be interested in human rights. I learned of Vladimir Bukovsky, a Russian neurophysiologist who had been arrested in the 1960s. The Soviet police sent him to one of their many psychiatric prisons on the grounds that anyone who opposed the Soviet Union’s policies must by definition be mentally ill, since the Soviet system was self-evidently the best in the world.

Once locked away, the prisoners faced solitary confinement, physical restraint, forced injection with drugs, beatings, starvation, and death. In the face of such horrific treatment, Bukovsky proved particularly courageous. His first crime had been organizing a poetry reading; for that he was sent to psychiatric prison for three years. The second time he led a gathering to protest the arrest of other dissidents, and he was again jailed. In 1971 he secretly conveyed 150 pages of documents about the Soviet abuse of psychiatry to the West. He then received what was likely to be a permanent sentence. From the Soviet government’s standpoint, he had been crushed; once he was out of sight, they assumed he would disappear from everyone’s mind.

Amnesia is a tool of injustice, and memory is one of the most important means to combat it. Bukovsky might be sitting in some hidden prison, and I might only be a high school student worrying about grades, SAT’s, and girlfriends, but I was determined to play some tiny part in keeping his name and his cause from fading away. And so I launched my own haphazard campaign to free him. I persuaded my classmates to write letters to the Soviet ambassador. I drafted petitions and took them whenever my parents attended gatherings of other activists.

Even though I doubt anything I did benefited Bukovsky directly, the process became something of a spiritual discipline for me. I found a large picture of him and posted it in my room, and later in my college dormitory. I glanced at it every morning when I left and every evening when I returned. It served
as a visual tuning fork to keep me from being distracted. It reminded me that every day I lived in freedom, he languished in prison. In this manner, he never became invisible. He was a living being, who woke each morning and shivered with cold and reached out every day to touch his prison bars. My actions might have seemed pointless to some, but they were not worthless to me.

Nor, in the end, to him. Many years later, after he had been freed and when he made his first trip to the United States, I met him. I had the chance to shake that long-imprisoned hand—and he thanked me.

I finished Hackley School in the spring of 1973, earlier than I had expected, and I decided to take an extra year before going to college. I worked a few odd jobs and used the money to take flying lessons. Looking for something to do in the spring, I sent out dozens of letters and was lucky enough to be hired as an intern for U.S. Senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson. Jackson had been elected to Congress in 1940. When war broke out, he enlisted in the military, but President Roosevelt sent word to the Pentagon to kick out all the congressmen and send them back to their jobs. Jackson was an old-school Democrat, a New Deal progressive who had cautious foreign policy views. In some circles he was viewed as a hawk on Vietnam, but he was also one of the leading proponents of human rights in the Soviet Union and around the world.

I was installed as the most junior possible intern in the
Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, a roiling bullpen of investigators presided over by the great foreign policy expert Dorothy Fosdick. My job was to make photocopies, get coffee, attend hearings, take notes, and just soak up as much of the culture of the U.S. Senate as possible.

It was a turbulent time, because just upstairs, in the Russell Senate Caucus Room, the brilliant lights of live television were shining down on the hot and hapless witnesses who were appearing before the Senate select committee on Watergate. Occasionally I got into the office early enough to get a seat at the very back of the room, where I watched the great crocodile of the Senate, Sam Ervin of North Carolina, preside over the tawdry story that was unfolding in front of him with the skill of a wily country judge. Day after day, week after week, month after month, the hearings went on, as it became clear that the culture of corruption in American politics had stained more deeply than anyone had previously been willing to admit. My rosy and enthusiastic view of the glories of democracy began to fade as I listened to men and women who worked for President Nixon testify to a long litany of lying, cover-ups, bribery, and other crimes. It all came to a head just as I was leaving Washington, when it became clear that the president of the United States himself had been part of the conspiracy. Impeachment proceedings jumped forward, and in August 1974 the president dramatically resigned.

My role in Washington did not end at that moment, however, because I became involved in a project that took me back for the two following summers. Senator Jackson had become
increasingly interested in the way large companies traded raw materials through international markets, rewarding some and punishing others as a way to increase their profits. He was in the midst of using the staff skills in the Investigations Subcommittee to probe the dealings of international oil companies.

When I went back to work for him in the summer of 1975, I became interested in the global trade in blood products, and I researched how products such as Factor VIII were collected, how they were made, and where they were sold. As I learned more and more about the industry, I became alarmed about how these firms were collecting blood from the poorest, most vulnerable, and often least healthy people in the world, from impoverished Nicaraguan peasants to skid-row bums in American cities. I learned that even though the products were thought to be infected with hepatitis (we only knew about hepatitis A and B then), they were being marketed aggressively in Europe and elsewhere as the most advanced form of treatment for hemophilia and other bleeding disorders. They were in fact very convenient for someone who could get a needle into his own veins, yet they came from a system so blinded by the desire for profit that the growing dangers of contamination were ignored.