We place our vision of a new constitutional order for South Africa on the table not as conquerors, prescribing to the conquered. We speak as fellow citizens to heal the wounds of the past with the intent of constructing a new order based on justice for all.
President Nelson Mandela (10 May 1994)
In Central Station an elderly Afrikaner Spoornet clerk, tall, thin and bald, helped me to lock Chris to a window bar in the luggage van. The recent lessening of violence has impressed him. ‘This is what Mandela promised. Let him go on keeping his promises and I’ll have nothing against a black government. There’s a new feeling now in this country. If blacks can govern, why shouldn’t they? If our kids have to work harder to compete, that’s how life’s meant to be!’
I have a six-berth compartment to myself; few chose to be away from their TV on Inauguration Day. Spoornet’s second-class carriages are luxurious. A shelf-table covers the wash-basin (running H & C), the heater is controllable, the window spotless. Each coach has its shower-cubicle and drinking water is available from drums on the walls between coaches. The air-conditioned restaurant serves good food at reasonable prices, beer is no dearer than in a Drankwinkel and at sunrise a waiter brings coffee around – or what passes for coffee in South Africa.
Slow trains are my favourite conveyances and this ‘express’ takes twenty-five hours to cover approximately 900 miles. Beyond Cape Town lies flat farmland where sheep were grazing on old-gold stubble fields and distant irregular hazy mountains rise sheer from the plain. The beginning of the long climb is marked by a gigantic outcrop of jagged red-grey rock sporting patches of orange and green lichen. Here the mountainside is so close one can lean out and pick souvenir leaves. (I favour free souvenirs: leaves, stones, oddly shaped bits of wood.) As we climbed the blueness of the sky deepened and on both sides mountains crowded in – before receding to the left, making space for green pastures and small farmhouses snuggled among fir trees. Beyond Worcester stretched miles of autumn-red vineyards, then we were crawling around the base of strange slab-like mountains, all leaning one way as though carefully stacked.
Up on the Karoo, in the tiny dorp of Touwsrivier, groves of willows shone pale gold against a steep olive-green mountain flank; near this summit, white letters painted on flat boulders spell out JESUS REG. In the elegant little dorp of Matjiesfontein, the Anglo-Boer War headquarters of the Cape Western Command, it seems memories are long and attitudes not flexible. Above the Lord Milner Hotel the baasskap flag still flew between two Union Jacks – on Inauguration Day! Near Laingsburg I recognized the Swartberg, looming massively magnificent along the horizon. A fertile region surrounds Leeu-Gamka: three fine dams, clusters of windpumps, fields of bright green alfalfa, huge expanses of new-ploughed land, many overcrowded ostrich enclosures. Here the lambing season has begun – some newborns so minute they look like toys.
All day blacks from the third-class coaches sauntered up and down the corridors looking happily arrogant; now none can dispute their right to use the restaurant car. Not many could afford a meal, mostly they bought sandwiches at the bar.
‘They’ve no culture,’ observed a young Afrikaner mining foreman with whom I shared a table. If his ancestors could see the Inauguration ‘they would drop dead again’. Then rhetorically he demanded, ‘How can I accept being ruled by kaffirs and coons and coolies?’ Yet plainly he does accept it; he was merely saying what he felt obliged to say, what all his mates will be saying this evening in the bars – not meaning it either. His fear of the right-wingers’ destabilizing potential was palpable, his priority is peace. When he concluded, ‘We’re finished now, there’s no hope for us’ his tone conveyed neither resentment nor anger.
I stood by a corridor window watching the sun decline in a cloudless sky while a dusky pink tinged the long low ridges to the west. Soon the distended blood-orange globe had dropped behind a koppie, leaving a golden haze lingering over an arrangement of navy-blue sculpted summits. Then I was distracted from the matchless beauty of the Karoo by a smirking Afrikaner, aged fortyish, who suggested that I might like to find space for him in my compartment. He was not at all abashed when I scoffed at him for lusting after someone who could be his mother. Some South African white males are incomprehensibly indiscriminate; not for twenty years have I had as many ‘suitors’ as since crossing the Limpopo.
This has been a soothing day, slowly traversing vast silent spaces with few people visible at the infrequent stations and little traffic flowing where the N1 can be seen – while in Pretoria multitudes were making merry. An emotional day, too – especially for those who can remember Nelson Mandela’s 1964 trial and his speech from the dock.
It was a leisurely, complex dawn: solid towers of dark cloud being lit first from their base, then the light slowly seeping up, purple merging into pale yellow and russet – then an explosion of crimson filling the whole sky, briefly dyeing the Karoo’s sombre expanses of grey scrub and brown earth.
Behind me in the restaurant car four elderly English-speakers (first class) bewailed their uncomfortable night. The train, they complained, swayed as it never used to in the old days. At a nearby table two Afrikaner Spoornet officials were mocking their new President, imitating his voice and sniggering. One of the English-speakers quoted a calculation that the amount spent on the elections (R1 billion, R300 million more than expected) would have built 40,000 three-roomed houses. ‘And don’t they need houses more than democracy?’
Last week it was revealed that President Mandela will be one of the three most highly paid Heads of State in the world, earning R734,350 per annum including expenses and allowances. All parliamentary salaries and allowances have been set, by the TEC-appointed Melamet Committee, at private-sector levels. This is rumoured to have been part of the ‘deal’ with the Nats. South Africa however is not a profit-making corporation run to benefit shareholders. Most of its citizens lucky enough to have jobs earn about R10,000 per annum while millions of jobless go permanently hungry. Nor is this a naturally rich country; the whites’ lifestyle gives a false impression. South Africa’s gold is dwindling fast and has always been harder to mine than other countries’ deposits. Its manufacturing industry has a poor reputation for both productivity and quality. Its black population rapidly increased during the period when modern farming methods were throwing thousands out of work. Much of the land is arid and becoming more so by the decade. In Cape Town I heard several veteran observers of the Struggle attributing its ‘happy ending’ – the much-admired negotiated revolution – to Nat shrewdness. When a country’s problems reach a critical mass, it makes sense to let someone else try to stop the explosion.
Watching the Inauguration video, provided by Margaret, I much preferred the clumsy SABC camerawork, and Madiba’s late arrival, to the slick perfection of Western filming and ceremonial timing. Today the commentators’ failure to identify all VIPs is being rather unfairly criticized – not long ago most VIPs had South Africa on their boycott list. Yet I did slightly take umbrage at the overlooking of President Mary Robinson who was probably assumed to be somebody’s wife.
Throughout the formal rituals, followed by the informal jollifications, President Mandela (writing those two words still thrills me) looked happy and relaxed. Physical stamina is not the least of his leadership assets. Three of his ex-warders were among the VIPs and to them he paid a generous tribute.
My favourite participant was the praise-poet. His contribution had an ancient significance – was no mere ‘romantic colourful tribal custom’ – and this gave his functioning within the precincts of the Union Buildings an extra piquancy. My least favourite participant was the SAAF, but it seems this puts me in a minority of one.
According to commentators both black and white, the highlight of the day’s events was the helicopter fly-past, trailing the new national colours and thus proclaiming that now the armed forces belong to ‘everyone’. The crowd responded rapturously to this imaginative display and I might have done likewise had I been present. But perhaps not; both the SAAF fly-pasts (fighter planes and helicopters) and the twenty-one-gun salute seemed more appropriate to the old militaristic South Africa than to the new peace-seeking regime. And they suggested the armed forces’ determination to remain in the forefront of national life when logically their status should be radically changed. Nor is it irrelevant that fly-pasts are costly gestures.
Even the poorest blacks approve of extravagance when a chief is being installed; it is seen to be honouring them as well as their leader. But does this justify the new South Africa’s stepping onto the world stage disguised as a rich man? Could not the extraordinary celebrations demanded by President Mandela’s inauguration have been organized otherwise, nationwide, with street parties and village parties on a simple scale? The TV Spectacular may be seen as a unique extravagance. But it is more likely to be taken as a tone-setter for the new South Africa, sending the wrong subliminal message to the general public.
Pretoria’s ‘party to end all parties’, designed to be viewed by billions, has certainly contributed to misleading the outside world. By now the mass media set the agenda in every sphere – sport, war, politics, financial crises, natural disasters. And they encourage the homogenization of public reactions, the thought-stopping glamorization of complicated events. The birth of the new South Africa is a very complicated event. The phrase ‘Successful Democratic Multi-Racial Elections’ does not sum it up. Nor does ‘Mandela’s Victory!’ In Madiba the media have an ideal hero, someone whose image needs no touching up. Yet every leader deserves some criticism and may be rendered less effective by a media canonization that stifles it.
Nelson Mandela’s dedication to reconciliation – that supremely civilized concept – is often seen as the keystone of the new South Africa. His reconciliation campaign began years before his release and by the mid-’80s was having an effect within Afrikanerdom. Since 1990 he has been tirelessly preaching: ‘Let everybody start from the premise that we are one country, one nation, whether we are white, Coloured, Indian or black.’ From most politicians this might sound like an expedient exhortation, from Madiba it sounds like the expression of a passionate, personal longing for harmony. His sincerity seems to have touched all but the most fanatical right-wingers; even those who continue to revile him verbally have been reassured, within themselves. They know they are not going to be victimized in the new South Africa. But – is Madiba attempting the impossible? It takes two to reconcile. If only one is dancing to that tune, does ‘reconciliation’ become a euphemism for ‘appeasement’?
Yesterday President Mandela spoke of the need to ‘heal the wounds of the past’ and construct ‘a new order based on justice for all’. Those wounds were inflicted by whites in pursuit of wealth. And in 1994 the fragile national ‘prosperity’ remains dependent on the exploitation of black labour. An increasing number of blacks will now have access to wealth but rich blacks are no more (sometimes less) sensitive to the needs of the poor than rich whites. Constructing a new order must involve wealth-sharing and that would sink the reconciliation boat. In the real world, ‘justice for all’ and Madiba’s noble ideal of reconciliation are incompatible. And because this incompatibility is built into the foundations of the new South Africa no political construction engineer would certify it as a sound edifice.
Here and now, these may seem inappropriate – even heretical – reflections. But South Africa is like that. It spawns inappropriate reflections and irrational mood-swings and intellectual culs-de-sac. It is the most confusing country I have ever travelled through – not surprisingly, given its past, present and future.
Recalling last year’s atmosphere, the Afrikaners’ placid acceptance of change astonishes me. Among them one now senses an immense relief and many have said to me, wonderingly, ‘The tension is gone.’ They might be referring to that neurotic pre-election fear of blacks running amok, which is how some do interpret their new calm. But obviously a greater tension was involved, a guilty tension.
Yesterday, on the telephone, one of my Boer friends summed it up: ‘Now everything’s different, we needn’t hate each other any more.’
Those ten words, from a man who in May 1993 admitted to AWB sympathies, prove that the elections generated more than a transient euphoria. Yes, the country is at present on Cloud Nine – but there have also been deep psychological shifts. The implications of ‘We needn’t hate each other any more’ are staggering. Apartheid did indeed make it necessary to hate blacks; only hatred could have fuelled such a machine. But Afrikaners are ‘decent people who have been misled by their leaders’ (Madiba’s words), and decent people cannot live at ease within a system based on hatred. For all South Africans, 27 April 1994 was Liberation Day.
During the Anglo-Boer War Lord Wolseley dismissed the enemy as ‘The only white race that has been steadily going backwards into barbarism.’ Ever since, Afrikaners have had a bad press. Latterly their loud-mouthed right-wingers, staging camera-attracting melodramas, have compounded that. Yet, as Fergal Keane has recently observed, ‘Hidden by the simplifications of the mass media are the stoic majority who work hard and obey their God.’
For that stoic majority I have come to feel a genuine affection. Behind their now demolished façade of Christian Nationalism they are less implacably racist than the British settlers’ descendants, the tribe we have always been led to believe are the more liberal – or the less illiberal. In general those English-speakers, handicapped by colonial snobbery, are likely to find it harder to accept the new South Africa. They never needed to hate, they simply despised the natives here as elsewhere. This was part of their cultural conditioning, whereas the Afrikaners’ hatred was nurtured for political reasons. Turn the political scene upside down and ‘We needn’t hate each other any more.’ Cultural conditioning is less easily reversed.
During this visit, at a few mixed parties in Pietermaritzburg and Cape Town, I have noticed English-speakers and blacks being politely on edge with each other – the former straining to be nice to the latter (influential people, now!) while the blacks eyed them with cynical amusement, well aware of the effort being made. In contrast, most blacks and Afrikaners seemed genuinely relaxed together.
In 1971 scaffolding went up around the Voortrekker Monument near Pretoria and rumours of its imminent collapse sent shock waves throughout Afrikanerdom. The Chairman of the Monument Control Board hastened to reassure – ‘There’s no need to panic. The structure is being made safe for the future.’ However, what it represented could not be ‘made safe’ and this morning I approached it feeling merely curious about Christian Nationalism’s ‘cathedral’.
Margaret dropped me off at the base of that low bare hill on which the Monument was built between 1937 and 1949. Although Afrikanerdom’s exclusive property, tax-payers of all colours and opinions paid most of the costs (R719,202 – what did the last two buy?). The DRC described it as ‘a sacred shrine where God is thanked each year for the maintenance of white civilisation’. In 1974 a man was ejected for not removing his hat inside the sacred portals and until recently only those attired as though for attendance at DRC services were admitted. The Monument has been variously likened to an elaborately moulded jelly, a pop-up toaster and a 1940s wireless. It is 120 feet high, built of greyish-brown granite and supremely ugly – almost comically ugly, I thought, light-heartedly climbing the many wide steps.
I did not long remain light-hearted. Even now, three days after Madiba’s Inauguration, the psychic impact of this sinister edifice is deeply disturbing. Within those oppressive walls, beneath that high dome, one feels – like a Presence – a concentrated essence of evil.
The Hall of Heroes is vast and circular, its floor of sombre mottled marble. Heavy webs of concrete trellis-work embellish four giant arched windows of dirty-yellow glass. In the centre one leans over a waist-high wall, also circular, to look far down into a dim cellar-like space surrounded by grey pillars, squat and square. There a granite cenotaph commemorates all who died during the Great Trek. At noon on 16 December, through an aperture in the remote dome, a sunray falls on an Afrikaans inscription. (Translation – ‘We for thee, South Africa.’) According to Riana Heyman’s 1986 booklet, this ray ‘symbolises God’s blessing on the work and aspirations of the Voortrekkers … The Monument was built as a tribute to those who brought civilisation to the interior. Order, geometrical precision and symmetry are therefore basic to its design.’ One page contains seven references to this ‘bringing of civilisation’. And we are informed that ‘the black wildebeest symbolises both the barbarism that yielded to civilisation and Dingane’s warriors’.
Before those warriors were defeated at the Battle of Blood River, on 16 December 1838, the Voortrekkers had made a covenant with the Lord. If victorious, they and their descendants would always commemorate that date with prayerful gratitude. However, this covenant was not generally observed until 1886 when the British threat inspired its use as a device to unite squabbling Boer factions. Subsequently the actual events of December 1838 were ‘readjusted’ by certain historians and 16 December acquired a sacred aura. In 1952 it officially became a ‘Sabbath’, within the terms of the Sabbath Act, and had to be observed by the whole population – Zulus included. (Hark to an echo of the Orangemen’s Twalfth.) Eventually the ‘readjustments’ came to be questioned by a brave minority of historians, among them Professor Floris van Jaarsveld who in 1979 gave a lecture in the University of South Africa entitled ‘A Historical Mirror of Blood River’. That lecture was never finished, ET led an AWB gang into the Senate Hall, the unfortunate professor was tarred and feathered on the spot, an outsize Vierkleur was flown high and ET thundered that such blasphemy would always and everywhere be punished.
I had the monument to myself, apart from an elderly Afrikaner gentleman behind the reception desk. Feeling both physically and spiritually chilled, I dutifully examined ‘the largest existing marble frieze in the world’ – 92 by 2.3 metres, carved in Italy. Twenty-seven panels depict the hardships endured and battles fought during the Great Trek, with much emphasis on the ‘barbarians” treachery and cruelty.
Last year, a consortium of Afrikaner cultural organizations formed a private company to run the Monument. Explained Christo Kuun, its chairman, ‘We realize the Voortrekker Monument will be a very sensitive issue in the future. We want to keep it out of politics.’ His words caused some amusement, this ‘issue’ being South Africa’s loudest political statement in granite. At once the ANC protested against a private company’s appropriation of State property ‘just before a democratic government takes over’. Said André Odendaal, ‘The intention is not to demolish it but there is a need to contextualize it’, (ANC spokespersons are woefully addicted to such jargon.) Someone is going to have fun ‘contextualizing’ that frieze.
From the Hall of Heroes 169 steps lead to the roof. It seems the architect, at this point, couldn’t think what to do next, how to present the desired external effect without the whole monstrosity collapsing inward on itself. So he contrived all manner of grotesque reinforcements – crude protuberances and sweeps of barren concrete, awkward curves and angles which have grievously wounded the aesthetic sensibilities of thousands of foreign visitors.
On the roof, four corner viewpoints overlooked the mid-Rand, its flatness criss-crossed by freeways and humming with engine noises beneath a hazy yellow-brown industrial smog. A nearby army base provides the appropriately aggressive sound of gunfire. Long gloomy walkways connect the corners; one paces between quasi-medieval arches and here, within aimless embrasures, the less reverent visitors are – it is very apparent – wont to pee.
Sitting on a parapet in the sunshine, I probed my unexpected reaction to the Monument – why, in the new South Africa, should its atmosphere have so shaken me? Is it because the evil spirit informing apartheid has not yet been exorcized? Afrikaners raised the Monument and it has always been associated with their traditions. Yet its perversion of religion to justify frenzied racism and its sick glorification of cruelty have never been resolutely repudiated by your average English-speaker. The extremism of the Monument’s message is no longer lekker. But the sediment remains, after the extremism has been poured away. A noxious sediment, feeding the universal human reluctance to admit ‘I did wrong …’
Too many whites still find it impossible to acknowledge that apartheid was evil – as evil as the Holocaust. Others are already in denial mode – ‘Of course we never liked apartheid …’ Obviously some did not. But very few disliked it enough to join in the struggle against it. And the majority so relished their apartheid-generated prosperity that they repeatedly voted for the Nats – or, at best, for parties offering only timid modifications, changes essentially unthreatening to white supremacy. Within the past year, some details illustrating the system’s most vicious excesses have been revealed and many are claiming to be shocked and distressed about ‘what was going on and we never knew!’ Granted, the media were muzzled in a variety of ways and the government’s worst crimes either hidden from the general public or presented as ‘necessary to defend the State’. Yet there was no legitimate State – legitimate in international law – to be defended. And the legitimacy of the Struggle was repeatedly affirmed: e.g., in 1979 by Resolution 183L of the UN General Assembly which confirmed that the liberation movement was entitled to use ‘all available and appropriate means, including armed struggle’ to overthrow the apartheid regime. The concealed barbarities sustaining that regime were not the aberrations of a few psychopaths but the hideously logical consequences of a government policy which had been clearly spelled out, decade after decade, by a succession of the whites’ chosen political leaders. Moreover, the routine enforcing of the apartheid laws took place in broad daylight, hidden from no one. Hence the whites’ heavy burden of collective guilt. Only their support, consistently given in election after election, enabled apartheid to survive for so long. Even Pretoria’s formidable resources, military and otherwise, could not have prevailed against an anti-apartheid white electorate. Yet even I find it hard by now to keep in mind this collective guilt. Having acquired so many white friends, there is a temptation for me to slide into forgetfulness of the old South Africa in which all whites benefited directly from the merciless, institutionalized oppression of the majority. If the oppressors themselves persist in cultivating this soothing amnesia – encouraged by their First World ‘constructive engagement’ allies – true reconciliation cannot be achieved. That requires more than smooth speeches, cordial handshakes and cosmetic festivities.
What I wrote a few days ago, about the elections having liberated all South Africans, was perhaps too facile – though an understandable (certainly a widely felt) emotional response to the peaceful transition. To liberate themselves fully, the whites must do more than quietly accept the inevitable. They must contribute to reconciliation by confessing their collective guilt, both to themselves and publicly. They must abandon their favourite fudge, their pretence that anti-apartheid violence justified pro-apartheid violence; and this will involve recognizing that those criminalized by an illegitimate government (including their new President) never were criminals. But – are these demands unreasonable? Is such an exorcizing of the evil enshrined in the Monument beyond the average white’s capacity? Yet what is the alternative? A new South Africa debilitated by the Monument’s miasma can never grow up healthy.
Descending to the Monument’s shrub-bright grounds, I strolled beside the laager-wall of sixty-four ox-wagons; above them flew the new flag and the Transvaal flag. A Tswana gardener had two large ‘Mandela for President’ badges pinned to his dungarees. He chuckled when I muttered – glancing up at the Monument – ‘What a vile place!’ Said he, ‘Now it doesn’t matter. Our President says no thinking about the past, only all working together for our new South Africa. No hating or having revenge, no more racism!’
Elsewhere, during this season of euphoria, his beaming face and cheerful words would have elated me. In the shadow of the Monument, they increased my unease about the gloss being put on the new South Africa. Glossing began in 1990 when the release of Madiba and his comrades, and the initiation of all-party negotiations, prompted much of the world to applaud F. W. de Klerk. This was bizarre. Would Hitler have been applauded, had he at some point decided to halt the Holocaust?
While the long-drawn-out negotiations were taking place the Nats continued desperately to hope that they could divide and discredit the ANC and so ‘manage’ the transition to give themselves an undemocratic share of post-election power. Between July 1990 and December 1993 more than 12,000 civilians were killed and at least 20,000 injured in countless incidents engineered by the Third Force. In the 1991/92 financial year operations designed to sabotage the ANC cost taxpayers over R21 million. This State-organized violence against black civilians exceeded even the ferocity of the ’80s and horrors previously unknown appalled the nation – drive-by shootings, frequent murders on commuter trains, well-organized attacks by armed hostel-dwellers on township folk. Last year I travelled through a country unnerved and bewildered by what was then tendentiously described as ‘mindless black-on-black violence’. Now the motive for this elaborate destabilization campaign is clear. Yet while the State was thus occupied, the naive Nobel Peace Prize committee – deluded as so often before by media hype – chose the State President, F. W. de Klerk, as a man worthy to share their annual award with Nelson Mandela. Many saw this equating of the ANC leader and the Nats’ leader as an insult to the former. In an essay on the assassination of Chris Hani, André Brink succinctly summed up the then State President: ‘Nothing has exposed this man so mercilessly for the petty and vicious little securocrat he is at heart than the events that have shaken South Africa since 10 April [1993].’
As I walked away, down that slope where those still loyal to Afrikanerdom gather on the Day of the Vow, a few families were arriving: young silent couples, impassive, with wide-eyed small children likely to be excited by the sheer scale of the Monument, the detailed frieze, the climb to the roof. But if they learn their history here they’ll not be happy citizens of the new South Africa.
Looking back from a little distance, one is struck by the Monument’s darkness. At noon today, in brilliant sunshine, there was no hint of brightness, no glittering reflection from those huge windows. It seemed to be repelling and rejecting light – and that I found even spookier than all the rest.
Tomorrow I fly home, wondering how the liberated of all races will use their freedom. And what will happen in kwaZulu/Natal? On my return in September I plan to tour that problem province, see more of the Transkei and at last visit the Free State. Meanwhile Chris can relax, hanging from the ceiling of Margaret’s garage.