Living in Hope and History

by Nadine Gordimer

  ‘The imagination has been numbed.’ You are right. Our task, laid heavily upon us by whatever talent we possess, is to attempt to bring it back to life. We are the bearers of that invisible chalk ring round the eye that the great Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe, says marks the creative mind of those who know the power of the imagination to enrich existence. If violence is a means of expression, there is an alternative means of expression to satisfy that urgent human need. Therein is the common ground of what seems to be the tragic no-man’s-land of the impoverished spirit, the wasteland between two irreconcilables, violence and the writer.

  What then should we do, you ask? You raise on the eve of a new century a most chilling, foreboding aspect of mass media’s manipulative distortion of the imagination, where it uses it at all. You speak of the ‘representation of chaotic future society . . . In images of a violent future world prevalent in the visual media are reflected . . . the society common to the present world.’ In a word, the futuristic vision children and adults are being conditioned to is of a world where, expanded in space and continuing on earth, violence is normal, counter-violence is heroic. How do we go about bringing to our society awareness of the life-giving, life-enhancing alternative? Well, we have first to recognize the disagreeable fact that the grasp of mass media upon contemporary consciousness far exceeds our own engagement with it through serious literature. Writers, publishers, booksellers—our fraternity—cannot hope to challenge this head-on; what should be achievable is to infiltrate the media, in particular the aural and visual media. We shall have to lobby the culture ministries of our governments, the cultural administrators, the directors of TV and radio programmes, the advertisers whose money influences programme choices—all of these, to press for a phasing-out of the dominance of visual and aural pulp fiction and its replacement with the sight and sound of works that will revivify the capacities of the imagination in viewers/listeners who are stunned by the endless depiction of violence as an accepted means of expression in human relationships, whether between children or adults.

  As novelists, you and I naturally think of the place of the novel in this context of imaginative literary forms. The novel is the most intellectually accessible to a general public, since it retains the advantage of the ancient roots of popular culture, story-telling. Would it be possible, you ask, for the novel to regain children and youths as its readers? And you make the important reservation: ‘I am conceiving of the novel not as mere verbalisation of the visual media . . . I wish to regain the reader who will be reading this kind of novel with much wished-for intensity’.

  It is true that the cultivation of imaginative power will not be attained by relying alone on introducing real literature in place of pulp fiction as the basis of television plays, or air-time, visual and oral, given to live readings instead of chat-shows. For a renaissance of the power of the imagination to bring the individual to re-examine his/her life, to restore the healing and humanising faculty of empathy—living beyond your own mind and flesh to feel with and identify with those of other people—we have to bring the individual back to the pleasures of what is written and printed between the covers of books. I emphasize ‘pleasure’ as what the reading of serious literature offers because ‘serious’ doesn’t mean ‘dull’. Humour is serious; playfulness is serious; satire is serious; all these are part of the means with which we equip ourselves to understand and deal with tragedy, love, anger, joy, disappointment, doubt. As novelists we have the whole range of human emotions and preoccupations in the abundance of the creative imagination. I am wary of any obligation to write ‘down’, to simplify these, as a supposed bait to attract children and youths. On the contrary, if we are both to infiltrate the media with literature and restore the unmatched experience of taking up a book and reading it oneself, we can do this only with integrity to the highest standards of our writing, the widest and deepest exploration of this life we share with our readers. We have to be equal to our aim of setting the imagination free through our own creative imagination, as great literature has always done, so that the reader, too, can visualize his/her own life beyond the bounds of publicity hype and the solution of violence.

  To say goodbye, for the present; you hope for an encouraging word on the future, dear Kenzaburo. Am I a pessimist? A utopian? No; only a realistic optimist. So I’m putting together a modest book of some of the non-fiction pieces I’ve written, a reflection of how I’ve looked at this century I’ve lived in. The epigraph will reveal to you my conclusion of how it’s been. The quote comes from a poem by our fellow Nobel laureate, Seamus Heaney:

  History says, don’t hope

  On this side of the grave,

  But then, once in a life-time

  The longed-for tidal wave

  Of justice can rise up,

  And hope and history rhyme.

  May we see history fulfil rather than betray our hopes for restoration of the power of the imagination in the new millennium.

  Sincerely,

  Nadine

  How shall we look at each other then?

  —Mongane Wally Serote

  1959: WHAT IS APARTHEID?

  Men are not born brothers; they have to discover each other, and it is this discovery that apartheid seeks to prevent.

  What is apartheid?

  It depends who’s answering. If you ask a member of the South African government, he will tell you that it is separate and parallel development of white and black. If you ask an ordinary white man who supports the policy, he will tell you that it is the means of keeping South Africa white. If you ask a black man . . . well, he may give you any of a dozen answers arising out of whatever aspect of apartheid he has been brought up short against that day, for to him it is neither an ideological concept nor a policy, but a context in which his whole life, learning, working, loving, is rigidly enclosed. He could give you a list of the laws that restrict him from aspiring to most of the aims of any civilised person, or enjoying the pleasures that everyone else takes for granted. But it is unlikely that he will. What may be on his mind at the moment is the problem of how to save his bright child from the watered down ‘Bantu Education’ which is now being substituted for standard education in schools for black children. Or perhaps you’ve merely caught him on the morning after he’s spent a night in the police cells because he was out after curfew hours without a piece of paper bearing a white man’s signature permitting him to do so. Perhaps (if he’s a man who cares for such things) he’s feeling resentful because there’s a concert in town he’d not be permitted to attend, or (if he’s the kind of man who isn’t) he’s irked at having to pay a black market price for a bottle of brandy he’s debarred from buying legitimately. That’s apartheid, to him.

  All these things, big and little, and many more.

  If you want to know how Africans—black men and women—live in South Africa, you will get in return for your curiosity an exposition of apartheid in action, for in all of a black man’s life, all his life, rejection by the white man has the last word. With this word of rejection apartheid began, long before it hardened into laws and legislation, long before it became a theory of racial selectiveness and the policy of a government. The Afrikaner Nationalists did not invent it, they merely developed it, and the impulse of Cain from which they worked was and is present in many white South Africans, English-speaking as well as Afrikaner.

  Shall I forget that when I was a child I was taught that I must never use a cup from which our servant had drunk?

  I live in the white city of Johannesburg, the biggest city in South Africa. Around the white city, particularly to the west and north, is another city, black Johannesburg. This clear picture of black and white is blurred only a little at the edges by the presence of small Coloured (mixed blood) and Indian communities, also segregated, both from each other and the rest. You will see Africans in every house in the white city, of course, for every house has its servants’ quarters, built not less than a certain minimum regulation distance from the white
house. Sophisticated Africans call this backyard life ‘living dogs-meat’—closer to the kennel and the outhouses than to the humans in the house. But no black man has his home in the white city; neither wealth nor honour or distinction of any kind could entitle him to move into a house in the street where I or any other white persons live. So it easily happens that thousands of white people live their whole lives without ever exchanging a word with a black man who is like themselves, on their own social and cultural level; and for them, the whole African people is composed of servants and the great army of “boys” who cart away or deliver things—the butcher’s boy, the grocer’s boy, the milk boy, the dust boy. On the basis of this experience, you will see that it is simple for white men and women to deduct that the black men and women are an inferior race. Out of this experience all the platitudes of apartheid sound endlessly, like the bogus sea from the convolutions of a big shell: they’re like children . . . they don’t think the way we do . . . they’re not ready . . .

  Black men do all the physical labour in our country, because no white man wants to dig a road or load a truck. But for every kind of work a white man wants to do, there are sanctions and job reservations to shut the black man out. In the building trade, and in industry, the Africans are the unskilled and semi-skilled workers, and they cannot, by law, become anything else. They cannot serve behind the counters in the shops, and cannot be employed alongside white clerks. Wherever they work, they cannot share the washrooms or the canteens of the white workers. But they may buy in the shops. Oh yes, once the counter is between the black customer and the white shopkeeper, the hollow murmur of the apartheid shell is silenced—they are ready, indeed, to provide a splendid market, they do think enough like white people to want most of the things that white people want, from LP recordings to no-iron shirts.

  The real life of any community—restaurants, bars, hotels, clubs, and coffee bars—has no place for the African man or woman. They serve in all these, but they cannot come in and sit down. Art galleries, cinemas, theatres, golf courses, and sports clubs, even the libraries are closed to them. In the post offices and all other government offices, they are served at segregated counters.

  What it means to live like this, from the day you are born until the day you die, I cannot tell you. No white person can. I think I know the lives of my African friends, but time and time again I find that I have assumed, since it was so ordinary a part of average experience, the knowledge in them of some commonplace experience that, in fact, they could never have had. How am I to remember that Danny, who is writing his Ph.D. thesis on industrial psychology, has never seen the inside of a museum? How am I to remember that John, who is a journalist on a lively newspaper, can never hope to see the film I am urging him not to miss, since the township cinemas are doubly censored and do not show what one might call adult films? How am I to remember that Alice’s charming children, playing with my child’s toy elephant, will never be able to ride on the elephant in the Johannesburg Zoo?

  The humblest labourer will find his life the meaner for being black. If he were a white man, at least there would be no ceiling to his children’s ambitions. But it is in the educated man that want and need stand highest on the wrong side of the colour bar. Whatever he achieves as a man of learning, as a man he still has as little say in the community as a child or a lunatic. Outside the gates of the university (soon he may not be able to enter them at all; the two ‘open’ universities are threatened by legislation that will close them to all who are not white) white men will hail him as ‘boy’. When the first African advocate was called to the Johannesburg Bar, just over a year ago, government officials raised objections to his robing and disrobing in the same chamber as the white advocates. His colleagues accepted him as a man of the law; but the laws of apartheid saw him only as a black man. Neither by genius nor cunning, by sainthood or thuggery, is there a way in which a black man can earn the right to be regarded as any other man.

  Of course, the Africans have made some sort of life of their own. It’s a slum life, a make-do life, because, although I speak of black cities outside white cities, these black cities are no Harlems. They are bleak rectangular patterns of glum municipal housing, or great smoky proliferations of crazy, chipped brick and tin huts, with a few street-lights and few shops. The life there is robust, ribald, and candid. All human exchange of the extrovert sort flourishes; standing in a wretched alley, you feel the exciting blast of a great vitality. Here and there, in small rooms where a candle makes big shadows, there is good talk. It is attractive, specially if you are white; but it is also sad, bleak, and terrible. It may not be a bad thing to be a Sophiatown Villon; but it is tragic if you can never be anything else. The penny whistle is a charming piece of musical ingenuity; but it should not always be necessary for a man to make his music out of nothing.

  Some Africans are born, into their segregated townships, light enough to pass as Coloured. They play Coloured for the few privileges—better jobs, better housing, more freedom of movement—that this brings, for the nearer you can get to being white, the less restricted your life is. Some Coloureds are born, into their segregated townships, light enough to pass as white. A fair skin is the equivalent of a golden spoon in the child’s mouth; in other countries coloured people may be tempted to play white for social reasons, but in South Africa a pale face and straight hair can gain the basic things—a good school, acceptance instead of rejection all the way along the line. It is the ambition of many coloured parents to have a child light enough to cross the colour bar and live the precarious life of pretending to be white; their only fear is that the subterfuge will be discovered. But, the other night, I was made aware of a different sort of fear and a new twist to the old game of play-white. An Indian acquaintance confessed to me that he was uneasy because his thirteen-year-old son has turned out to have the sort of face and complexion that could pass for white. ‘He’s only got to slip into a white cinema or somewhere, just once, for the fun of it. The next thing my wife and I know he’ll be starting to play white. Once they’ve tried what it’s like to be a white man, how are you to stop them? Then it’s the lies, and not wanting to know their own families, and misery all round. That’s one of the reasons why I want to leave South Africa, so’s my kids won’t want to grow up to be something they’re not.’

  I’ve talked about the wrong side of the colour bar, but the truth is that both are the wrong sides. Do not think that we, on the white side of privilege, are the people we might be in a society that had no sides at all. We do not suffer, but we are coarsened. Even to continue to live here is to acquiesce in some measure to apartheid—to a sealing-off of responses, the cauterisation of the human heart, as well as to withholding the vote from those who outnumber us, eight to one. Our children grow up accepting as part of natural phenomena the fact that they are well-clothed and well-fed, while black children are ragged and skinny. It cannot occur to the white child that the black one has any rights outside of charity; you must explain to your child, if you have the mind to, that men have decided this, that the white shall have, and the black shall have not, and it is not an immutable law, like the rising of the sun in the morning. Even then it is not possible entirely to counter with facts an emotional climate of privilege. We have the better part of everything; how difficult it is for us not to feel, somewhere secretly, that we are better?

  Hundreds of thousands of white South Africans are concerned only with holding on to white privilege. They believe that they would rather die holding on to it than give up the smallest part; and I believe they would. They cannot imagine a life that would be neither their life, nor the black man’s life, but another life altogether. How can they imagine freedom, who for years have had to be so vigilant to keep it only to themselves?

  No one of us, black or white, can promise them that black domination will not be the alternative to white domination, and black revenge the long if not the last answer to all that the whites have done to the blacks. For such is apartheid that, like
many whites, many blacks cannot imagine a life that would be neither a black man’s life or a white man’s life.

  Those white South Africans who want to let go—leave hold—are either afraid of having held on too long, or are disgusted and ashamed to go on living as we do. These last have become colour-blind, perhaps by one of those freaks by which desperate nature hits upon a new species. They want another life altogether, in South Africa. They want people of all colours to use the same doors, share the same learning, and give and take the same respect from each other. They don’t care if the government that guarantees these things is white or black. A few of these people go so far as to go to prison, in the name of one political cause or another, in attempts that they believe will help to bring about this sort of life. The rest make, in one degree or another, an effort to live, within an apartheid community, the decent life that apartheid prohibits.

  Of course, I know that no African attaches much importance to what apartheid does to the white man, and no-one could blame him for this. What does it signify that your sense of justice is outraged, your conscience troubled, and your friendships restricted by the colour bar? All very commendable that your finer feelings are affronted—he’s the one who gets it in the solar plexus. All this lies heavily, mostly unspoken, between black and white friends. My own friends among black men and women are people I happen to like, my kind of people, whose friendship I am not prepared to forego because of some racial theory that I find meaningless and absurd. Like that of many others, my opposition to apartheid is compounded not only out of a sense of justice, but also out of a personal, selfish, and extreme distaste for having the choice of my friends dictated to me, and the range of human intercourse proscribed for me. I am aware that, because of this, I sometimes expect African friends to take lightly, in the ordinary course of friendship, risks that simply are not worth it, to them, who have so many more basic things to risk themselves for. I remember a day last year when some African friends and I went to the airport to see off a close friend of us all. I had brought a picnic lunch with me, and so had Alice, my friend, for we knew that we shouldn’t be able to lunch together in the airport restaurant. What we hadn’t realised was that we shouldn’t be allowed to sit outside on the grass together and eat, either; “non-Europeans” were not supposed to be admitted to the lawns. I wanted to brazen it out, sit there until we were ordered off into segregation; it was easy for me, I am white and not sensitised by daily humiliations. But Alice, who has to find words to explain to her children why they cannot ride the elephant at the zoo, did not want to seek the sort of rebuff that comes to her all the time, unsought.