Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

‘What about this line here? – you said it was meaningless but I think what he’s getting at here –’ And so he sometimes caught me out.

  Once he plonked down a poem – ‘Now that’s really got something!’

  I read it over; ‘Yes, but what it’s got is not its own,’ and I fetched down the Lorca and showed him the poem from which the other had borrowed the form and imagery that distinguished it.

  He was not at all touchy about gaps in his knowledge and experience; he had none of the limitations of false pride. He sat down to Lorca with the pleasure of discovery. One of the reasons why he hoped to go to Harvard was because he wanted time to read the great poets and imaginative writers; he felt strongly that he needed a wider intellectual context than the day-to-day, politically orientated, African-centred one in which he had become a thinking person, and on which, so far, even his artistic judgements must be empirically based. I wonder if he ever found that time to read; somehow, I don’t think he did. Too many well-meant invitations to speak here and there about Africa, too many well-meant requests to appear on television programmes about Africa, too many requests to write articles about how an African looks at American this and that. Nat remained trapped in the preoccupations of his time – the time measured by those multiple clocks in airports, showing simultaneously what hour it is at Karachi, Vladivostok, Nairobi and New York, and not the dimension in which one can sit down and read. There seems to be no fellowship that provides for that.

  Nat was a good talker and had the unusual ability to tell an anecdote in such a way that he himself was presented as the ‘feed’, and the bright lights illuminated the character of someone else. The oblique picture that emerged of him was one of wit and calm, sometimes in bizarre situations. He was given to analysis – of himself and others – rather than accusations and self-pity, and so did not react with self-dramatisation to the daily encounters with white laws and prejudices. White people used to say of him that he, unlike others, was not ‘bitter’; I don’t know quite what they meant by this – because he was as bitterly hurt by the colour bar as the next man – unless they mistook for resignation the fact that he managed to keep his self-respect intact.

  In the years I knew him fragments and segments of his life came out in talk, without chronology, as these things do between friends; he was telling me, one Sunday, how as a small boy he used to be up at four in the morning to be first on the streets with the newspapers. He was not telling me about his hardships as a poor black child, but of how mysterious and exciting Durban was at that hour, for a little boy – the deserted city coming up with the sun out of the mist from the sea. Then, last year while I was in London, I met his younger brother, who was about to go up to Oxford. When I told Nat – who had helped to pay for the boy’s schooling – how impressed I had been by his brother’s keen mind, he told me how he had been in the room when the boy was born, and how, since the mother became ill soon after and was never again able to look after her children, he had simply ‘taken the baby around with me until he could walk’. Again, it was the quality of the experience he was conveying, not a hard-luck story presenting himself as a victim. Of course, he was a victim of this country; but never accepted the character of the victimised in himself.

  I always hoped that one day he would write about these things – the child in Durban, the life he and Lewis Nkosi shared, homeless and yet, curiously, more at home in Johannesburg than those behind their suburban front doors. I think that the writing in his weekly column in the Johannesburg Rand Daily Mail was a beginning, and is the best writing he did. It was journalism, yes, but journalism of a highly personal kind; all the news came from inside Nat. He dredged into his mind and feelings as he had never done before, he wrote only of what was real to him, throwing away all the labels conveniently provided by both protest writing and government handouts, accepting without embarrassment all the apparent contradictions in the complexity of his reactions to his situation – and ours, black and white. (He didn’t even balk at coming out with the pronouncement that he felt sorry for young Afrikaners!) ‘Bitterness’; ‘resentment’; ‘prejudice’; these terms are as easy to use as the airmail stickers free for the taking in post offices. Nat presented the reality, in daily life and thought, from which these abstractions are run off. He showed us what it was all about, for one man living through it.

  This writing – reflecting the gaiety of a serious person – came from his central personality and, in giving himself the fullest expression he had yet known, during the year that he was writing his column and concurrently running Classic he developed amazingly. It was a strange time, that last year in South Africa. On the one hand, he was making a name for himself in a small but special way that no African had done before; his opinions and ideas were being considered seriously by white newspaper-readers whose dialogue across the colour line had never exceeded the command, do-this-or-that, and the response, yes-baas. On the other hand, he had been awarded a fellowship to Harvard and was involved in the process of trying to get a passport – for an African, a year-long game in which the sporting element seems to be that the applicant is never told what you have to do to win, or what it was he did that made him lose. Knowing the nature of the game, Nat had to consider from the start how the refusal of a passport would affect his life. He had to decide whether the place he had made for himself, astride the colour bar, merited electing to stay, should the passport be refused; or whether he should, like others, accept exile as the price of a breath of the open world. It was not a decision to be dictated only by personal ambition; part of his development was that he had come to the stage, now, when he had to weigh up the possible usefulness to his people of the position he had gained. It was not, of course, a political position, and its value was not something that could easily be measured; there is no scale for the intangibles of the human spirit.

  Quite suddenly, he made the decision to go, although he had been refused a passport. He took what every other young man of outstanding ability – but of a different colour – takes for granted, and gets without the necessity of an agonising decision to exile himself from home, country, friends and family – a chance to travel and seek education. I saw him off at the airport – twice. The first time he missed the plane (no, it was not what white people call African time; it was a hitch over the issue of traveller’s cheques) and the crowd of friends who had come to say goodbye dispersed rather flatly. Not all could come back again next day; but this time it went without a hitch, weigh-in, customs, finally passport control and the exit permit open on the counter. I looked at it; it was valid for one exit only, and the undersigned, Nathaniel Nakasa, was debarred from ‘entering the Republic of South Africa or South West Africa’ again. There was the printed admonition: ‘This is a valuable document. Keep it in a safe place.’

  Nat was gone. He never came back. But he was the beginning, not the end of something. In so many ways he was starting where others left off. I have heard that shortly before his death he made an impassioned anti-white speech before a Washington audience; but the report comes third-hand and I do not know whether this interpretation of his address is a true one. Similarly, if in direct contradiction, I have heard it said that through his association with white friends he had become a ‘white’ black man. The truth is that he was a new kind of man in South Africa – he accepted without question and with easy dignity and natural pride his Africanness, and he took equally for granted that his identity as a man among men, a human among fellow humans, could not be legislated out of existence even by all the apartheid laws in the statute book, or all the racial prejudice in this country. He did not calculate the population as thirteen million or three million, but as sixteen. He belonged not between two worlds, but to both. And in him one could see the hope of one world. He has left that hope behind; there will be others to take it up.

  1966

  Why Did Bram Fischer Choose Jail?

  In South Africa on May 9 1966, Abram Fischer, Queen’s Counsel, a proud Afrikaner and self-affirmed Co
mmunist, was sentenced to imprisonment for life. The main counts against him (conspiring to commit sabotage and being a member of, and furthering the aims of, the Communist Party) were framed under the Suppression of Communism Act, but anti-Communists could take no comfort from that: this Act is the much-extended one under which all extra-parliamentary opposition to apartheid, whether inspired by socialism, capitalism, religious principles, a sense of justice or just plain human feeling, is at least under suspicion in South Africa.

  In his address to the court a few days before, Fischer himself had pointed out, ‘The laws under which I am being prosecuted were enacted by a wholly unrepresentative body …in which three-quarters of the people of this country have no voice whatever.’ He went on to say, ‘These laws were enacted not to prevent the spread of Communism, but for the purpose of silencing the opposition of a large majority of our citizens to a Government intent upon depriving them, solely on account of their colour, of the most elementary human rights.’

  All through his trial, Fischer listened and took notes – even when some erstwhile friends turned state witnesses stood a few feet away, testifying against him – with the same composed alertness that had been his demeanour when appearing as counsel in this same Palace of Justice at Pretoria. The smile, beginning in the brilliant, flecked blue eyes, was his familiar one, as he turned from the dock to face the public gallery, and sought the faces of family or friends. The panoply of the court, the shouts drifting up from the cells below, the press tiptoeing restlessly in and out, his colleagues in their robes, Mr Justice Wessel Boshoff on the bench – all this was the everyday scene of his professional working life as an advocate. But he stood in the prisoner’s dock. Hemmed in by the intimidating presence of plain-clothes security men and scrutinised by uniformed policemen, the spectators in the gallery stared into the well of the court as into Fischer’s private nightmare, where all appeared normal except for this one glaring displacement.

  Yet it was clear that Abram Fischer recognised the reality of his position, and knew it to be the climax of the collision course upon which he and his countrymen were set, nearly thirty years ago, the day he rejected his student belief in segregation. He told the court:

  All the conduct with which I have been charged has been directed towards maintaining contact and understanding between the races of this country. If one day it may help to establish a bridge across which white leaders and the real leaders of the non-whites can meet to settle the destinies of all of us by negotiation and not by force of arms, I shall be able to bear with fortitude any sentence which this court may impose on me. It will be a fortitude strengthened by this knowledge at least, that for twenty-five years I have taken no part, not even by passive acceptance, in that hideous system of discrimination which we have erected in this country and which has become a byword in the civilised world today.

  Not even those Afrikaners who regard Abram Fischer as the arch-traitor to Afrikanerdom would deny that if he had been able to stomach white overlordship and the colour bar there would have been no limit to the honours and high office he might today have attained in the republic his forebears won from British imperialism. He comes from the right stock, with not only the brains but also the intellectual savoir-faire coveted by a people who sometimes feel, even at the peak of their political power, some veld-bred disadvantage in their dealings with the sophistications of the outside world.

  He was born in 1908 in the Orange River Colony – formerly the old Boer republic of the Orange Free State – grandson of its only Prime Minister before Union in 1910. His father became Judge-President of the Orange Free State – after Union a province of South Africa. The Boer War defeat at the hands of the British remained a bitter taste in the mouth of the grandfather; as a school cadet, it is said that the grandson refused to be seen in the British conqueror’s military uniform.

  He was a brilliant scholar, and when he had taken his law degree at Bloemfontein, won a Rhodes scholarship to New College, Oxford. At twenty-nine he married the daughter of another distinguished Afrikaner family, Susannah (Molly) Krige, and began a thirty-year career at the bar in Johannesburg. He reached the top of his profession and was regarded as an expert on mining law. His services were engaged by the insurance companies, the newspaper consortiums and the big mining houses.

  His success coincided with the growth of Afrikaner political power, but his recognition of the subjection of the black man on which this power was built precluded him from taking any part in it. While he saw his people as the first in Africa to win liberation from colonial domination and therefore well able to understand and fitted to encourage African aspirations, they were busy codifying the traditional race prejudice of white South Africans, whether of Boer, British or any other descent, as an ideology and the ‘South African way of life’.

  It was within this situation that Fischer, as a young man, had become a Communist. The rise of Fascism in the world at that time was turning many of his contemporaries in other countries to the left. In England, for example, his counterpart would have gone off to fight with the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. But Fischer’s battle was to be fought at home. His instigation was not youthful idealism, but the injustice and indifference to injustice that he saw around him every day, and that, indeed, as the first Nationalist prime minister of a student parliament, and a segregationist, he had been party to. It was Hitler’s sinister theory of race superiority, combined with a ‘strange revulsion’ that Fischer experienced when, as a formality at a philanthropic meeting he had to take a black man’s hand, that had opened his eyes. Since the days when, as a child, he had made clay oxen with black children on his family’s farm, he had been conditioned to develop an antagonism for which he could find no reason. He came to understand colour prejudice as a wholly irrational phenomenon.

  At his trial in Pretoria, he told the court why he had been attracted to the Communist Party. There was this

  glaring injustice which exists and has existed for a long time in South African society …This is not even a question of the degree of humiliation or poverty or misery imposed by discrimination …It is simply and plainly that discrimination should be imposed as a matter of deliberate policy, solely because of the colour which a man’s skin happens to be, irrespective of his merits as a man.

  Three decades ago there was certainly not much choice for a young man looking for participation in political activity unequivocally aimed to change all this. The Communist Party was then, and for many years, the only political party that observed no colour bar and advocated universal franchise. (Today, more than thirty years later, there is only one other white political party advocating universal franchise – the Liberal Party, founded in 1953.) At his trial Fischer explained:

  My attraction to the Communist Party was a matter of personal observation. By that time the Communist Party had already for two decades stood avowedly and unconditionally for political rights for non-whites, and its white members were, save for a handful of courageous individuals, the only whites who showed complete disregard for the hatred which this attitude attracted from their fellow white South Africans. These members …were whites who could have taken full advantage of all the privileges open to them because of their colour …They were not prepared to flourish on the deprivations suffered by others.

  But apart from the example of white members, it was always the Communists of all races who were prepared to give of their time and their energy and such means as they had, to help …with night schools and feeding schemes, who assisted trade unions fighting desperately to preserve standards of living …It was African Communists who constantly risked arrest …in order to gain or retain some rights …This fearless adherence to principle must always exercise a strong appeal to those who wish to take part in politics, not for personal advantage, but in the hope of making some positive contribution.

  Fischer’s contemporaries among the angry young men in the Western world of the thirties have lived to see a peaceful social revolutio
n in England and the vigorous pursuit of civil-rights legislation against segregation in the United States. Within the same span, in South Africa, Fischer has seen the deeply felt grievances of the non-white population of his country increasingly ignored, their non-violent campaigns against discriminatory laws in the fifties ruthlessly put down, in the sixties their Congresses banned, responsible leaders jailed and house-arrested, along with white people of many political beliefs who have supported them, and a year-by-year piling up of legislation – Bantustans, job reservation, ghetto acts – increasing restriction by colour in every aspect of human activity.

  Those contemporaries who shared what now seems to them a hot-headed youth may sit back in good conscience and ask why Fischer did not leave behind leftist beliefs, as they did, in the disillusion of the Stalinist era. One can only state the facts. Though Fischer never proselytised, he was and remains a doctrinaire Marxist; South Africa, in her political development in relation to the colour problem, has never offered him an acceptable alternative to his socialist beliefs.

  At his trial he affirmed in orthodox Marxist terms the theory that political change occurs inevitably when a political form ceases to serve the needs of people who are living under new circumstances created by the development of new economic forces and relations. He obviously sees the colour problem in South Africa as basically an economic one: the white man’s fear of losing his job to the overwhelming numbers of Africans, the black man so insecure economically that the numbers of unemployed Africans are never even recorded accurately. Fischer said, ‘South Africa today is a clear example of a society in which the political forms do not serve the needs of most of the people’, and pointed out that ownership of factories, mines and land used for productive purposes is becoming more and more concentrated – in the hands of whites, of course.

  Outside the banned Communist Party, there is no group or party open to whites that, however it proposes to go about removing colour discrimination, also visualises radical change in the ownership of the means of production which underpins the present system of white supremacy. Fischer openly told the court: ‘I believe that socialism in the long term has an answer to the problem of race relations. But by negotiation, other immediate solutions can be found …Immediate dangers [a civil war which he visualised as dwarfing the horrors of Algeria] can be avoided by bringing our state at this stage into line with the needs of today by abolishing discrimination, extending political rights, and then allowing our people to settle their own future.’