Living in Hope and History (21 page)

Albie Sachs, maimed by the apartheid government's attempt to kill him, now sitting as a judge on the Constitutional Court. Barbara Masekela, exiled for years, soon to take up an important diplomatic post. Mongane Wally Serote, Freedom Fighter, poet in exile working for the African National Congress around the world, now taking his seat as a duly elected member of parliament. To measure up to Rule 1, here: I accept as true, and clearly recognise to be so, that justice has come about in the person of these individuals, as it has supremely to that ex-political prisoner, now President Nelson Mandela. And justice is sweeter to see than revenge.

When I return to South Africa from abroad, now, I don't step down onto the earth of my old stamping ground, the Transvaal, where I was born, but onto new territory. It's named Gauteng—Place of Gold. The airport itself is renamed. It used to be Jan Smuts Airport; now it is Johannesburg International Airport. The former name—Transvaal—derived, way back, from the geographical boundaries recognised by the Boer Republics: Transvaal—across the Vaal River—was where the water divided the Boer Republic of Orange Free State from its
counterpart, the Boer Republic of Transvaal. The former name of the airport commemorated General Jan Smuts, one of the heroes of the white regime, who sat with Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin, led South Africa boldly into the war against Nazi racism, but continued to head a racist government back home.

Now Gauteng stoutly asserts not only that there will be no more white republics here, but that their latter-day apartheid counterpart, the slicing of the country into ethnic enclaves, is over, for good. If Place of Gold trails any historical trappings, these commemorate the labour of the black men who brought the underground metal to the surface and made the country rich, as much as the Europeans who made the ore discoveries, supplied the technology, and took the profits.

I've become easily accustomed to the new Johannesburg. But when I've been away and come home, fresh to it, my vision zigzags back to the way it was, for fascinated comparison. I've lived here since 1949, and at most levels that segregation reserved for whites. I've been a struggling young writer, divorced, with a child to support. I've ended up in a beautiful old tin-roofed house with room for my books. But whenever and however I've lived, during the past regimes, it was where no black person could rent a room, a flat, or buy a house.

On to the most complex of what happened. The general public events; still with Rule 3. In the eighties, things began to change. People in other countries tend to think that the elections in April 1994 achieved this from zero, overnight. It was not so. During the eighties, even while the state repression resorted to vile and savage hit-squad tactics to assassinate liberation leaders, the theatres, cinemas, and restaurants were declared open to everybody. Blacks could sit down to eat. Public transport was desegregated. Blacks could ride. Although a lot of legalistic pussy-footing to retain residential segregation
remained, it was ignored by the growing confidence of black people moving into white high-density areas, and white landlords eager to fill vacancies where whites had retreated to the suburbs. Back in the city, the white government's lack of interest or success in providing transport to serve blacks in their daily to-and-fro between the white city and the black ghettoes was replaced by a most disorderly but effective form of transport provided by thousands of minibuses owned by black private enterprise.

These were the concessions made, and the changes helplessly accepted by the last days of apartheid, holed up in its bunker but determined not to swallow the cyanide capsule.

Rule 2. It would take more pages than the quota I've given myself to divide each of the difficulties I ought to examine—or rather my own reaction to them—and to resolve all within myself. There is a shambling off the scene of the white Right-wing extremists whom I feared, last year, when they used bombs in an attempt to prevent the elections from taking place; by contrast, the continuing trouble-making of Mangosuthu Buthelezi that was to be expected; and the unexpected dangers of Winnie Mandela's will to power. To turn back the clock is not something I should ever wish to do, with exception in respect of Winnie Mandela. I wish we could re-run her emergence, hand in hand with Nelson Mandela, from his prison, so that this extraordinary woman whom I have known and admired through many early years could see that if she had kept beside him she would have been no mere consort, as her ambition perhaps misled her to believe. He is the greatest statesman and leader in the world, today—a fulfilment of everything we could have hoped for, from him, on the 27th April last year. The couple would have doubled the impact, a unique combination in the world and our part of it. That was where her power lay.

A difficulty to be faced in my mind is what is known as labour ‘unrest'. We have had a great number of strikes this year, and we shall have many more to come. The most important ones are those in the mines and related industries, because these are bound up with the colonial-established employment practice of migratory labour that, in turn, is related to the recurrent violence which spills from the frustration of hostel living conditions to adjacent black communities. This strife is often fuelled by the political ambitions of the former Good Black Man of the apartheid government, Buthelezi, recklessly stirring the power-brew of ethnic differences. Other workers have come out on strike—supermarket employees, transport drivers, even gravediggers.

These actions are deplored because they affect production (not the gravediggers, of course . . . ) and growth of the economy, but we have to remind ourselves: under the old regime, police, dogs, and guns were the only answer to workers' assertion of their rights. Yet workers' actions are represented in the press at home and abroad as the sure sign that things are going wrong in our country; overseas investors withdraw their heads into their corporate shells.

A failure of democracy that workers go on strike?

What do we want—the ‘industrial peace' of our old police state?

The consequences of these industrial actions are one of the heritages of apartheid that will continue to plague us, for a long time. While rightfully taking up demands for a living wage, safe working conditions in mines and factories, a say in management, and the opening of company books to scrutiny, the trade unions have not yet educated their members on the relation between production, profits, and wages. And the bosses have not wished to educate themselves on the relation between workers and bosses in a democracy; after decades where all you had to do was bring in a load of migratory workers and set them before
the right levers, like Chaplin in
Modern Times
, the men in the boardroom find it difficult to understand that in a democracy there can be a chance for industrial peace only if the workers are represented in policy-making and management decisions. The next issue of contention to arise surely will be between workers and government: the exhilarating gale of change is blowing privatisation our way, if we want to attract the foreign investment we need.

Some of what we apprehensively anticipated to be the most complex (Rule 3 again) in the series of events in our first year has happily disproved fear, for me. The opening of the 1995 school year in January was one such.

Here was the transformation of our world beginning at the
real beginning:
with children. Large numbers of black children—both those who live with their parents in the city as part of the exodus from black townships, and those whose parents brought them that morning from those segregated townships—were registered at what had been white schools. It wasn't necessary to have these children escorted by police or army, as happened when schools were desegregated in the U.S.A. There occurred less than a handful of incidents where white people gathered in protest. Of course, the majority of black children in the urban and rural ghettoes apartheid created are still without enough schools or teachers—a vast lack. But each time, at the end of a school day, I pass a school near where I live and see black and white children streaming out of class, the small boys scuffling joyfully, the girls giggling together, I know that something at the very base of our lives has changed, from the shameful, to the genesis of human fulfilment.

Early this year I attended the inaugural sitting of our Constitutional Court—the first such body in our history. The case was brought by two men on death row, on the grounds that the
death penalty violates South Africa's new Constitution. It was a test case of tremendous significance to the Constitution as final arbiter of individual human rights. Among the judges, black and white, was Albie Sachs, the liberation activist whose arm was blown off and one eye blinded by a car bomb placed to kill him by the apartheid government's hit squads; he, who might be thought to want to see assassins die, was eloquent for abolition of the death penalty. The court finally declared it a contravention of the Constitution and it has been abolished. Eighty percent of whites and forty-nine percent of blacks had wanted it retained. Judge President Arthur Chaskalson said, ‘This court cannot allow itself to be diverted from its duty to act as an independent arbiter of the Constitution by the public'. We now have, and need to have, this kind of protection of individual rights where we had so few. Those who kill will go to prison for life; the state will not become a murderer.

We have other kinds of murderers among us; political murderers who have never been brought to justice. President Mandela recently signed into law a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It is a country of reconciliation's preferred alternative to Germany's Nuremberg trials or Chile's blanket amnesty. Those who come forward and confess fully what they did and why, in the past, may be granted forgiveness and in some cases amnesty. It's going to be a process full of doubts and difficulties, both for the perpetrators of ghastly deeds and for the families of those they killed or maimed. But it is surely the way to deal with the past of a people who have to live with it, together; a dedicated move towards making South Africa a human place to live in, today.

The injunction (Rule 4) to be sure to leave nothing out? I couldn't attempt to follow that because, in the period of a single year, so much remains to be redressed, so much has had to be
‘left out' for another year; years. What is before my eyes is that the streets of this city, Johannesburg, where I live, are now totally transformed. A perpetual crowd scene on a Cecil B. DeMille scale has taken over what was a swept, empty stage on which a few self-appointed leading actors performed for one another. The pavements are a market where your progress is a step-dance between pyramids of fruit and vegetables, racks of second-hand jeans, spreads of dog-eared paperback lives from Marx to Mandela and Monroe, rickety tables set with peanuts, sweets, sunglasses, backyard concoctions labelled Chanel and Dior, hair straighteners, Swatches and earrings. Traffic fumes are spiced by the smell of
boerewors
, a greasy farm sausage that is as much our national dish as thick mealie-meal, the African polenta, for on every corner there are carts frying circles of gut-encased meat over gas burners. You can have your shoes re-soled while you stand in your socks; you can even have your hair cut, right there. Like everyone else who has a car, I have had to acquire new skills as a driver after forty-seven years on the road: the minibuses we call combis—a combination between a bus and a taxi—stop on request signalled by a raised finger, anywhere and everywhere. You have to be ready with the foot on the brake and a quick swerve to make it to the parallel lane, and usually the lane is full, anyway.

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?