Living in Hope and History

by Nadine Gordimer

  Everyone who ponders the Universal Declaration of Human Rights inevitably will give particular attention to those Articles that pertain to circumstances with which he or she is personally involved. For me as a writer, Article 19—Freedom of Expression—has a special significance. But this is not a professional privilege that seeks exclusive protection: literature is one of the most enduring means by which ideas cross frontiers and become universal, but freedom of expression, to impart and receive information ‘through any media’, is the first condition of freedom in civilised governance. Suppression by censorship, banning, imprisonment, and even edicts of death continue to exist in many countries, imposed by both secular and religious authorities. Article 19 established these means as a primary contravention of everyone’s birthright to read, to listen, to regard, and speak out.

  Article 26 is fundamental to Article 19: its Clauses 1 and 2 declare: ‘Everyone has the right to education’, ‘Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality’. Freedom of expression is an empty phrase unless education equips every individual with freedom of the word, the ability to read and write. Although the right to literacy surely is implied in Article 26, it is not specifically named. I believe it ought to be. This Article brings the hope of justice to the millions excluded—by ignorance which is no fault of their own—from participation and benefit in the making of our world.

  For me, the most important Article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has no number, is not an Article at all. It is a paragraph of the Preamble. ‘Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law.’ (My italics).

  I have lived through a time in my own country, South Africa, when this ‘last resort’ compelled the majority of the people to turn to rebellion, first in the form of civil disobedience and passive resistance and finally in the form of armed struggle, against tyranny and oppression that denied them human rights. I have seen how to be compelled to take this last resort not only brings tragic self-sacrifice and suffering to those who assume the burden, even though freedom is finally achieved as a result, but has long-term consequences which threaten the democracy so attained.

  When people are deprived over years of any recourse to the provisions of civil society as a means of seeking redress for their material and spiritual deprivations, they lose the faculty of using the law when, at last, such recourse is open to them. The result of this conditioning now is fashionably called ‘the culture of violence’; an oxymoron, for culture implies enlightenment, to aim towards attaining the fullness of life, not its destruction.

  The tactics of a desperate liberation struggle are all that many people know how to employ. In my country, students dissatisfied with the performance of their teachers retaliate by destroying the equipment of their own schools. Taxi-bus owners, in dispute over transport routes each considers his exclusively, attack one another at gunpoint. Workers forcibly occupy managers’ offices and destroy plants as protest against unsatisfactory working conditions and low pay. It takes time and education in, understanding of, the protection of human rights, for a formerly oppressed people to learn to use this protection through the means provided, in civil societies, by the law. Students had no structures to deal with their grievances, before. The means of settling disputes by forming a code for the transport industry was not open to, offered no peaceful resolution to those who had no civil rights of any kind. The denial of the right to form trade unions, over many years, meant that workers’ violent reactions to their problems were the only ones that brought results in the political liberation struggle. The paths by which people have the right to be protected by the rule of law, not persecuted by its wrongful application, have to be learned. It is in this that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is and shall remain the essential document, the touchstone, the creed of humanity that surely sums up all other creeds directing human behavior if we are to occupy this world together now and in the twenty-first century.

  —1997

  AS OTHERS SEE US

  There is nothing more presumptuous than a foreigner telling other people what is wrong with their country. I know how I react when pundits who are not South African make flip judgments of our problems on the basis of the slim experience of visits to our country. This does not mean that a reasoned, critical look is not useful; just that the onlooker understands not most, but only half of the game. So it is right that I provide my modest credentials for an opinion on race relations in the U.S.A. in contrast to race relations in my own country—relations I have been part of since birth.

  I have visited America once a year or more since the 1950s, usually only for several weeks but twice for several months, spent in New York and Cambridge, with forays to the Midwest, the West Coast, and the South. I began in the McCarthy era and have gathered my impressions through the eras of Martin Luther King, Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Andy Young, Louis Farrakhan, and your roster of presidents up to the present incumbent. In my early visits as a young writer I mixed in an easy fashion with a good number of my peers, black men and women whose interests in the arts and in Africa coincided with mine. I remember parties in Queens, welcoming visits to homey apartments, jazz evenings in Harlem not as a gaping tourist but as an individual sharing the leisure diversion of new-found friends themselves. These were not people with big names; all of us were starting out.

  As time went by, on subsequent visits to the U.S., I found I was meeting fewer and fewer black Americans. Those that I did meet—and much enjoyed—were Du Bois’s Talented Tenth: Harry Belafonte, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Jamaica Kincaid, Randall Robinson, Toni Morrison, Henry Louis Gates and Cornel West, for example.

  While housed in an apartment adjacent to a student residence at Harvard, in 1995, when I gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, almost the only black Americans I met were through the efforts of Skip Gates. The Talented Tenth again. At the homes of my white American friends, people to whom colour truly means nothing, I now find I meet blacks from Africa, but rarely a black American. Whites from Africa who came from active anti-racist backgrounds, and now live in the States, have no black men and women among their friends. Why? A paradox, since back home in South Africa they mixed in tough friendship with blacks, and were totally accepted by them, under conditions that made this difficult, to say the least. The reason seems to be that black Americans do not want to mix with whites, however much compatibility is beckoning to be recognized. The old, old answer I think not only survives but seems to have grown in bitterness, for reasons (of economics and opportunity?) Americans know best: when you have been so long rejected, your collective consciousness tells you that the open door, open arms, have come too late. You assert your self-respect only by saying ‘no’. No no no: I read that playwright August Wilson wants black theatre for blacks only—black writers, actors, audiences. If even the doors of the arts are slammed shut, how shall people find their common humanity? And how to live together, in the end, without it? This theatre is Greek tragedy where wars and violence become the only means of communication, the curse of gods on humans.

  Why does self-respect, identity, rest on this ancient and terrible tragedy of white rejection of black?

  One has to look at race relations in South Africa for an explanation of the U.S.A.’s realities. Over three hundred and fifty years of oppression and racist exploitation unequalled in place or time, black South Africans nevertheless have had their own earth under their feet. Despite neglect in official education, their languages have remained intact as mother tongues. Their names are their own ancestral names. Nothing—neither cruel apartheid denigration nor liberal paternalism—has destroyed their identity. They know who they are. In relations with whites, now that everyone is equal before the law, they do not have to say ‘no’ in order to assert pride of identity and self-respect. It is for the average white to discover, earn, and affirm a valid identity in a socie
ty with a black majority. There are those whites to whom this is anathema, but surprising numbers who followed the white flock in racism before are making the adjustment. What matter that the process begins as pragmatism. Groups of extremists who cannot adjust will die out with the present middle-aged generation, I believe. And as for those whites who threw in their lot with the black struggle—they are recognized as brothers and sisters and are active in all areas of reconstruction: they are long accustomed to contributing under the direction of blacks.

  Unemployment, inequalities in employment opportunities are a heritage of the hopelessly inadequate, segregated education of blacks under apartheid. There is frustration, over this, among blacks, but at the same time black empowerment is a reality moving both at government level (in the civil service and police, more slowly than one would wish, but there are valid reasons in the problems of transition) and the new black private sector. There, black empowerment is moving boldly into the white enclaves round the stock market. If the black entrepreneurs are in some way a home-grown product out of black poverty, like the ‘Tough Love Crowd’ of successful black American capitalists, the neo-conservatists who advocate unsparing self-criticism as the way to empower blacks, the resemblance ends there. Black South Africans ‘climbing the corporate ladder’, because of their records of active participation in the liberation struggle, including political detention and imprisonment in many cases, can rightfully maintain their brotherhood with the masses, and defy any questioning of their motives in empowering their people through infiltration of capitalist enterprises within a state where capitalist exploitation was allied with racism. While some say they are betraying the revolution, others see these moves as a necessary phase of struggle: first came the political kingdom, now comes the economic one, to be fought, inevitably, on white economic supremacy’s home ground. Lack of capital inhibits these entrepreneurs; they have to borrow finance from whites, but are alert to the way the balance must be precariously held, the frontier of black ownership must be pushed hard and continuously against shareholdings that still entrench white economic power.

  In the South African theatre, a cross-pollination of European experimental dramatic structures and African resources of mime, living experiences, shared body-language with whites produces a theatre that is non-racial not only in mixed casting that reflects the tensions and truth of our mixed society, but also in that ‘black’ plays and ‘white’ plays are recognized as opportunities opening to each the experience of the other. And all are welcome in the audience.

  It is unfortunate to have to say it: history is against you, in the U.S.A. Alas, Martin Luther King is dead and you have no Nelson Mandela. White Americans cannot give back to blacks a stolen and lost identity; black Americans are reluctant to accept that it cannot be found in an avatar of apartheid in reverse. They are Americans, and whether whites like it or not, and whether blacks like it or not, a common destiny has to be worked out. This is not simple, in South Africa either, but in my observation and participation we are doing rather better than the U.S.A., despite our staggering problems of poverty, unemployment, and vast number of the homeless, a legacy from the apartheid regime.

  As Wislawa Szymborska, the Polish Nobel Laureate poet, writes: ‘We know how to divide ourselves. But to put ourselves together?’

  —1997

  LABOUR WELL

  THE TEEMING EARTH

  The poor are always with us.

  The eradication of poverty.

  These are the poles of perception, the oppositions of the phenomenon of want.

  The poor are always with us.

  The first is ancient, an implied acceptance of a destined lot, everyone conditioned by class (each in his place), by religion (the meek shall inherit the earth), to be content to have no place and inherit nothing.

  The eradication of poverty.

  The second proposition refuses to accept poverty as part of human destiny. The United Nations General Assembly’s designation of the International Decade for the Eradication of Poverty is a mission statement in the true sense. It is surely the boldest expression of faith in human endeavour ever made? It comes from the most representative body in the world. It posits perhaps the greatest human advancement ever embarked upon, an adventure greater than any attempted in the progress of humankind since we could define ourselves as such. And most important, it asserts convincing proof that the goal could be attainable.

  Beginning last year, the United Nations Development Programme has launched an exhaustive, world-wide initiative to debunk poverty as destiny; with its partners, the United Nations system, organizations of civil society, academic institutions, the private sectors and international donor community, research has been produced which identifies the extent and nature of poverty in its many forms—and destiny is not one of them.

  I do not propose to cite the statistics of the world of want. They are all there, devastating, in the invaluable publications of the United Nations Development Programme—the staggering material facts of race, racial prejudice, political and social administration, geography, gender, ethnicity, agricultural practice, technological practice, industrial production, health services—everything—from the drying up of a stream to the closing down of an arms factory—that produces the phenomena of poverty as lived by the world’s 1.3 billion poor.

  When you read this evidence of physical, mental, and spiritual deprivation, you can reach only one conclusion: poverty is a trap. Brought about by many factors other than the obvious ones you may always have had in mind, poverty is the nadir of disempowerment.

  It is a disempowerment that has existed and does exist in democracies as well as dictatorships, links them, in a way we are reluctant to have to admit. The ballot box of free and fair elections has failed to empower the poor in most of the democratic countries. The dictatorship of the people failed to do so in most countries of the Soviet empire. And since the fall of Communism the West’s claim of freeing those countries to the establishment of a market economy and prosperity means nothing to the old people who now beg in the streets of Moscow, as the homeless do in the streets of cities of the only great power left in the world, the United States of America. In Brazil, in Argentina, in Africa, in India, in Bangladesh—where in this world except for the small welfare states of the north, are there not people in the nadir of poverty? No need to enter into ideological differences, no need to make any value judgments, here: each country has produced—or failed to end—the shameful human end-product, poverty.

  What is a decade—in terms of centuries of acceptance, the poor are always with us?

  Our answer surely is that the world now has the knowledge, the scientific and technological ability to do away with most of the causes of poverty, and to turn around the consequences of causes it cannot prevent. There are identified practical means: what is needed is the money and commitment of governments, regional, national, and bodies of world governance, to cooperate and carry out these means. And what is needed to bring this about is a roused awareness and admittance among the peoples of the world that whether there is proved to be life on Mars, and whether you may conduct your affairs electronically without leaving your armchair, the new century is not going to be a new century at all in terms of the progress of humanity if we take along with us acceptance of the shameful shackles of the past—over a billion men, women, and children in poverty, eighty-two countries unable to produce or buy sufficient food for their population—and we offer only charity, that palliative to satisfy the conscience and keep the same old system of haves and have-nots quietly contained.

  In view of this need for roused awareness, I think it is useful for us to consider: How do different people conceive poverty? How do they think about it? Historically, where did it begin?

  In prehistory early humans lived by what we would call now a subsistence economy: you hunted, you gathered, and when these resources of your group ran out in one place, you moved on; only nature discriminated, making one area more salubrious than anot
her, but there was space enough to make of this an advantage rather than a deprivation. It was with the arrival of surplus value that the phenomenon of rich and poor began; with the cultivation of the valleys of the Euphrates and the Nile, when food was grown and could be stored instead of foraged and hunted, able to satisfy only short-term needs. As soon as there was more than sufficient unto the day, those who grew more than they could eat became the haves, while those whose harvest provided no surplus became the have-nots.

  Basically, nothing has changed since then. Except that it is no longer possible for societies to move on from one disadvantaged environment to a more salubrious one—the colonial era of the European powers was perhaps the last such movement to take place successfully, the final enactment of an obsolete solution to social problems. On an individual scale, immigrants in contemporary days generally find themselves received by locals with resentment as competitors in the labour market of the country of their aspirations, and quickly sink to a place among the poor of that country. Nothing much has changed, over the centuries, except that we have evolved what might be called a philosophy of acceptance of poverty.

  First, there is the question of different class perceptions of what poverty is, and how these are arrived at. There is the upper-class perception. There is the middle-class perception. And there is that of the poor themselves.

  For the rich, any contingency that they themselves might sink into poverty is so remote that it need not enter their minds. They are also in the position of being bountiful; so that, curiously, while they may be genuinely concerned about the existence of the poor, poverty is also a source of self-esteem. Do not be shocked by this remark; without the philanthropy of wealth, the manner in which the world has dealt with, alleviated, poverty up till now could not have been maintained at all. But this over-spill of wealth is too sporadic, too personally dependent on what aspects of poverty, piece-meal, donors happen to favour, to be a solution.