Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  That there can be, at least, this coincident cooperation is reassuring; that, at least, should be a straightforward form of activism. But it is not; for in this time of morbid symptoms there are contradictions within the black liberation struggle itself, based not only, as would be expected, on the opposing ideological alignments of the world outside, but on the moral confusion of claims – on land, on peoples – from the pre-colonial past in relation to the unitary state the majority of blacks and the segment of whites are avowed to. So, for whites, it is not simply a matter of follow-the-leader behind blacks; it’s taking on, as blacks do, choices to be made out of confusion, empirically, pragmatically, ideologically or idealistically about the practical moralities of the struggle. This is the condition, imposed by history, if you like, in those areas of action where black and white participation coincides.

  I am at a public meeting at the Johannesburg City Hall one night, after working at this paper during the day. The meeting is held under the auspices of the Progressive Federal Party, the official opposition in the all-white South African parliament. The issue is a deal being made between the South African government and the kingdom of Swaziland whereby 3,000 square miles of South African territory and 850,000 South African citizens, part of the Zulu ‘homeland’ KwaZulu, would be given to Swaziland. The principal speakers are Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, leader of 5.5 million Zulus, Bishop Desmond Tutu, and Mr Ray Swart, a white liberal and a leader of the Progressive Federal Party. Chief Buthelezi has consistently refused to take so-called independence for KwaZulu, but – although declaring himself for the banned African National Congress – by accepting all stages of so-called self-government up to the final one has transgressed the non-negotiable principle of the African National Congress, a unitary South Africa.

  Bishop Tutu upholds the principle of a unitary South Africa. The Progressive Federal Party’s constitution provides for a federal structure in a new, non-racial South Africa, recognising as de facto entities the ‘homelands’ whose creation by the apartheid government the party nevertheless opposes. Also on the platform are members of the Black Sash, the white women’s organisation that has taken a radical stand as a white ally of the black struggle; these women support a unitary South Africa. In the audience of about two thousand, a small number of whites is lost among exuberant, ululating, applauding Zulus. Order – and what’s more, amicability – is kept by Buthelezi’s marshals, equipped, beneath the garb of a private militia drawn from his tribal Inkatha movement, with Zulu muscle in place of guns.

  What is Bishop Tutu doing here? He doesn’t recognise the ‘homelands’.

  What are the Black Sash women doing here? They don’t recognise the ‘homelands’.

  What is the Progressive Federal Party doing – a party firmly dedicated to constitutional action only – hosting a meeting where the banned black liberation salute and battle cry – ‘Amandhla! Awethu!’: ‘Power – to the people!’ – is shaking the columns of municipal doric, and a black man’s tribal army instead of the South African police is keeping the peace?

  What am I doing here, applauding Gatsha Buthelezi and Ray Swart? I don’t recognise the homelands nor do I support a federal South Africa.

  I was there – they were there – because, removed from its areas of special interest (KwaZulu’s ‘national’ concern with land and people belonging to the Zulus), the issue was yet another government device to buy support for a proposed ‘constellation’ of southern African states gathered protectively around the present South African regime, and to disposses black South Africans of their South African citizenship, thus reducing the ratio of black to white population.

  Yet the glow of my stinging palms cooled; what a paradox I had accommodated in myself! Moved by a display of tribal loyalty when I believe in black unity, applauding a ‘homelands’ leader, above all, scandalised by the excision of part of a ‘homeland’ from South Africa when the ‘homelands’ policy is itself the destruction of the country as an entity. But these are the confusions blacks have to live with, and if I am making any claim to accompany them beyond apartheid, so must I.

  The state of interregnum is a state of Hegel’s disintegrated consciousness, of contradictions. It is from its internal friction that energy somehow must be struck, for us whites; energy to break the vacuum of which we are subconsciously aware, for however hated and shameful the collective life of apartheid and its structures has been to us, there is, now, the unadmitted fear of being without structures. The interregnum is not only between two social orders but between two identities, one known and discarded, the other unknown and undetermined.

  Whatever the human cost of the liberation struggle, whatever ‘Manichaean poisons’18 must be absorbed as stimulants in the interregnum, the black knows he will be at home, at last, in the future. The white who has declared himself or herself for that future, who belongs to the white segment that was never at home in white supremacy, does not know whether he will find his home at last. It is assumed, not only by racists, that this depends entirely on the willingness of blacks to let him in; but we, if we live out our situation consciously, proceeding from the Pascalian wager that that home of the white African exists, know that this depends also on our finding our way there out of the perceptual clutter of curled photographs of master and servant relationships, the 78 rpms of history repeating the conditioning of the past.

  A black man I may surely call my friend because we have survived a time when he did not find it possible to accept a white’s friendship, and a time when I didn’t think I could accept that he should decide when that time was past, said to me this year, ‘Whites have to learn to struggle.’ It was not an admonition but a sincere encouragement. Expressed in political terms, the course of our friendship, his words and his attitude, signify the phasing out or passing usefulness of the extreme wing of the Black Consciousness movement, with its separatism of the past ten years, and the return to the tenets of the most broadly based and prestigious of black movements, the banned African National Congress. These are non-racialism, belief that race oppression is part of the class struggle, and recognition that it is possible for whites to opt out of class and race privilege and identify with black liberation.

  My friend was not, needless to say, referring to those whites, from Abram Fischer to Helen Joseph and Neil Aggett, who have risked and in some cases lost their lives in the political struggle with apartheid. It would be comfortable to assume that he was not referring, either, to the articulate outriders of the white segment, intellectuals, writers, lawyers, students, church and civil rights progressives, who keep the whips of protest cracking. But I know he was, after all, addressing those of us belonging to the outriders on whose actions the newspapers report and the secret police keep watch, as we prance back and forth ever closer to the fine line between being concerned citizens and social revolutionaries. Perhaps the encouragement was meant for us as well as the base of the segment – those in the audience but not up on the platform, young people and their parents’ generation, who must look for some effective way, in the living of their own personal lives, to join the struggle for liberation from racism.

  For a long time, such whites have felt that we are doing all we can, short of violence – a terrible threshold none of us is willing to cross, though aware that all this may mean is that it will be left to blacks to do so. But now blacks are asking a question to which every white must have a personal answer, on an issue that cannot be dealt with by a show of hands at a meeting or a signature to a petition; an issue that comes home and enters every family. Blacks are now asking why whites who believe apartheid is something that must be abolished, not defended, continue to submit to army call-up.

  We whites have assumed that army service was an example of Czeslaw Milosz’s ‘powerlessness of the individual involved in a mechanism that works independently of his will’. If you refuse military service your only options are to leave the country or go to prison. Conscientious objection is not recognised in South Africa at present;
legislation may establish it in some form soon, but if this is to be, is working as an army clerk not functioning as part of the war machine?

  These are reasons enough for all – except a handful of men who choose prison on religious rather than on political grounds – to go into the South African army despite their opposition to apartheid. These are not reasons enough for them to do so, on the condition on which blacks can accept whites’ dedication to mutual liberation. Between black and white attitudes to struggle there stands the overheard remark of a young black woman: ‘I break the law because I am alive.’ We whites have still to thrust the spade under the roots of our lives; for most of us, including myself, struggle is still something that has a place. But for blacks it is everywhere or nowhere.

  What is poetry which does not save nations or peoples?

  Czeslaw Milosz

  I have already delineated my presence in my home country on the scale of a minority within a minority. Now I shall reduce my claim to significance still further. A white; a dissident white; a white writer. I must presume that although the problems of a white writer are of no importance compared with the liberation of 23.5 million black people, the peculiar relation of the writer in South Africa as interpreter, both to South Africans and to the world, of a society in struggle, makes the narrow corridor I can lead down one in which doors fly open on the tremendous happening experienced by blacks.

  For longer than the first half of this century the experience of blacks in South Africa was known to the world as it was interpreted by whites. The first widely read imaginative works exploring the central fact of South African life – racism – were written in the 1920s by whites, William Plomer and Sarah Gertrude Millin. What have been recognised now as the classics of early black literature, the works of Herbert and Rolfes Dhlomo, Thomas Mofolo and Sol Plaatje, were read by the literate section of the South African black population, were little known among South African whites, and unknown outside South Africa. These writers’ moralistic works dealt with contemporary black life, but their fiction was mainly historical, a desperate attempt to secure, in art forms of an imposed culture, an identity and history discounted and torn up by that culture.

  In the fifties, urban blacks – Es’kia Mphahlele, Lewis Nkosi, Can Themba, Bloke Modisane, following Peter Abrahams – began to write in English only, and about the urban industrialised experience in which black and white chafed against one another across colour barriers. The work of these black writers interested both black and white at that improvised level known as intellectual, in South Africa: aware would be a more accurate term, designating awareness that the white middle-class establishment was not, as it claimed, the paradigm of South African life and white culture was not the definitive South African culture. Somewhere at the black writers’ elbows, as they wrote, was the joggle of independence coming to one colonised country after another, north of South Africa. But they wrote ironically of their lives under oppression; as victims, not fighters. And even those black writers who were political activists, like the novelist Alex la Guma and the poet Dennis Brutus, made of their ideologically channelled bitterness not more than the Aristotelian catharsis, creating in the reader empathy with the oppressed rather than rousing rebellion against repression.

  The fiction of white writers also produced the Aristotelian effect – and included in the price of hardback or paperback a catharsis of white guilt, for writer and reader. (It was at this stage, incidentally, that reviewers abroad added their dime’s worth of morbid symptoms to our own by creating ‘courageous’ as a literary value for South African writers …) The subject of both black and white writers – which was the actual entities of South African life instead of those defined by separate entrances for white and black – was startingly new and important; whatever any writer, black or white, could dare to explore there was considered ground gained for advance in the scope of all writers. There had been no iconoclastic tradition; only a single novel, William Plomer’s Turbott Wolfe, written thirty years before, whose understanding of what our subject really was was still a decade ahead of our time when he phrased the total apothegm: ‘The native question – it’s not a question, it’s an answer.’

  In the seventies black writers began to give that answer – for themselves. It had been vociferous in the consciousness of resistance politics, manifest in political action – black mass organisations, the African National Congress, the Pan-Africanist Congress, and others – in the sixties. But except at the oral folk-literature level of ‘freedom’ songs, it was an answer that had not come, yet, from the one source that had never been in conquered territory, not even when industrialisation conscripted where military conquest had already devastated: the territory of the subconscious, where a people’s own particular way of making sense and dignity of life – the base of its culture – remains unget-at-able. Writers, and not politicians, are its spokespeople.

  With the outlawing of black political organisations, the banning of freedom songs and platform speeches, there came from blacks a changed attitude towards culture, and towards literature as verbal, easily accessible culture. Many black writers had been in conflict – and challenged by political activists: are you going to fight or write? Now they were told, in the rhetoric of the time: there is no conflict if you make your pen our people’s weapon.

  The Aristotelian catharsis, relieving black self-pity and white guilt, was clearly not the mode in which black writers could give the answer black resistance required from them. The iconoclastic mode, though it had its function where race fetishists had set up their china idols in place of ‘heathen’ wooden ones, was too ironic and detached, other-directed. Black people had to be brought back to themselves. Black writers arrived, out of their own situation, at Brecht’s discovery: their audience needed to be educated to be astonished at the circumstances under which they functioned.19 They began to show blacks that their living conditions are their story.

  South Africa does not lack its Chernyshevskys to point out that the highroad of history is not the sidewalks of fashionable white Johannesburg’s suburban shopping malls any more than it was that of the Nevsky Prospekt.20 In the bunks of migratory labourers, the 4 a.m. queues between one-room family and factory, the drunken dreams argued round braziers, is the history of blacks’ defeat by conquest, the scale of the lack of value placed on them by whites, the degradation of their own acquiescence in that value; the salvation of revolt is there, too, a match dropped by the builders of every ghetto, waiting to be struck.

  The reason for the difficulty, even boredom, many whites experience when reading stories or watching plays by blacks in which, as they say, ‘nothing happens’, is that the experience conveyed is not ‘the development of actions’ but ‘the representation of conditions’, a mode of artistic revelation and experience for those in whose life dramatic content is in its conditions.21

  This mode of writing was the beginning of the black writer’s function as a revolutionary; it was also the beginning of a conception of himself differing from that of the white writer’s self-image. The black writer’s consciousness of himself as a writer comes now from his participation in those living conditions; in the judgement of his people, that is what makes him a writer – the authority of the experience itself, not the way he perceives it and transforms it into words. Tenets of criticism are accordingly based on the critic’s participation in those same living conditions, not on his ability to judge how well the writer has achieved ‘the disposition of natural material to a formal end that shall enlighten the imagination’ – this definition of art by Anthony Burgess would be regarded by many blacks as arising from premises based on white living conditions and the thought patterns these determine: an arabesque of smoke from an expensive cigar. If we have our Chernyshevskys we are short on Herzens. Literary standards and standards of human justice are hopelessly confused in the interregnum. Bad enough that in the case of white South African writers some critics at home and abroad are afraid to reject sensationalism and crass ba
nality of execution so long as the subject of a work is ‘courageous’. For black writers the syllogism of talent goes like this: all blacks are brothers; all brothers are equal; therefore you cannot be a better writer than I am. The black writer who questions the last proposition is betraying the first two.

  As a fellow writer, I myself find it difficult to accept, even for the cause of black liberation to which I am committed as a white South African citizen, that a black writer of imaginative power, whose craftsmanship is equal to what he has to say, must not be regarded above someone who has emerged – admirably – from political imprisonment with a scrap of paper on which there is jotted an alliterative arrangement of protest slogans. For me, the necessity for the black writer to find imaginative modes equal to his existential reality goes without question. But I cannot accept that he must deny, as proof of solidarity with his people’s struggle, the torturous inner qualities of prescience and perception that will always differentiate him from others and which make of him – a writer. I cannot accept, either, that he should have served on him, as the black writer now has, an orthodoxy – a kit of emotive phrases, an unwritten index of subjects, a typology.