Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  But I have put the Lesotho pot up on the desk before me and I know what I did not know until I began to think about my pots in the way one thinks anew of something one is going to write about. This pot is my favourite. Or rather, it favours me by answering some need. Perhaps it makes visible and concrete some proportion and wholeness I can’t attain in my life. It’s a large pot, yes, and the material of which it is made provides not only its shape but also its decoration. The base of sunset-rose clay is met at the widest part of the belly by dun bronze clay and is smeared over it in sweeping upwards strokes to form a calm garland of curves, like four suns rising above or sinking below a dim horizon. Its wide mouth is rimmed with the same sunset colour. The outline of the suns is not neat, and if I turn my pot I see gradations of colour, like the heart of flames, round its base. It stands firm if I rock it; and yet I know that integral to its beauty is its fragility, a thing of the earth meant to return to the earth. Enjoy it until it breaks.

  To write about something is to remake it. I am now closer to my pot, to the maker of my pot, dead or alive, than I have ever been.

  1989

  The 1990s

  A Writer’s Vital Gift to a Free Society

  The Satanic Verses

  1990. A new decade, freedoms rising – and while a writer comes out of prison to become president in one country, another writer is being hounded to death throughout the world.

  As we move towards the end of the twentieth century we carry the abomination of the pillory of Salman Rushdie with us as the mark of Cain.

  The ‘anniversary’ this week is not some celebration of the end of horrors that our century had overcome but the ghoulish reminder of a return of the repressed: the Nazi book-burnings of our time re-enacted only a year ago in an English city.

  Salman Rushdie has not been seen for – how long? He has become one of the Disappeared, like those who vanished during a recent era in Argentina, and those who vanish under apartheid in South Africa. Repressive governments have the power to destroy lives in their own countries; when religions take over these methods, they have the power to terrorise, through their followers, anywhere in the world. The edict of the dead Ayatollah has jurisdiction everywhere, contemptuous of the laws of any country. Political refugees from repressive regimes can seek political asylum elsewhere; Salman Rushdie has nowhere to go. His oppression is unique. It is contemptible to read that some cultured people – including a few of his fellow writers – blame the victim for the savage and evil intolerance of his persecutors: he should have known that he would cause ‘offence’. And this ‘offence’ is equated with the counter ‘offence’ of destroying the book and pronouncing death on the author – a punishment he should have expected.

  As for the wrigglings of ecumenical ‘understanding’ of the Muslim position, it is incomprehensible that anyone in modern times who believes in God, under any name or avatar, could ‘understand’ the claim of divine authority to destroy a writer’s creativity and end his life. No doubt the cry will go up: you are not a Muslim; you don’t know our faith. But no erudite citations of text from the Koran or any other holy work can alter the fact that the basic tenet of all religions is the love of God manifest in the brotherhood of man. What did this writer commit against man? Does his novel anywhere suggest that people should harm one another? Does he, through his characters, advocate racism, fascism, hatred? There is no line in his pages that does anything of the kind. If those who are still baying after him had the ability, unblinkered by their prejudices, to read this book with the intelligence it deserves, they would receive its rewards.

  The Italian writer, Primo Levi, who disappeared into Auschwitz for years because his Jewishness offended against the good Christian Nazis, has described ‘a metamir … a metaphysical mirror that does not obey the law of optics but reproduces your image as it is seen by the person who stands before you’. A writer is a metamir. What Salman Rushdie sees, of his people Indian and British, their mores religious and secular, is something to be faced, not smashed. The crime against Rushdie is also a crime against the artist’s vital gift to a free society, self-knowledge.

  1990

  Freedom Struggles out of the Chrysalis

  1990. Euphoria: to be alive was – not exactly bliss, but certainly a high, as we saw and heard President de Klerk declare the African National Congress, the Pan-Africanist Congress and other liberation movements unbanned. The morning had begun with a more personal preoccupation for me and my three young comrades from the Congress of South African Writers. We’d set off early for the courts in Soweto, to attend a hearing of political charges against Mzwakhe Mbuli, our immensely popular musician and extraordinary poet-activist.

  I took a small radio, so that we could hear de Klerk’s speech in the long wait that invariably comes before a case is called before the magistrate. But as soon as the court opened it was merely remanded to a later date. So, somewhat downcast, we found ourselves able to get back to the city in time to watch on television the de Klerk speech at the opening of parliament.

  We sat with mugs of tea in a backyard cottage occupied illegally in a white suburb by a black man. (The pressure of population and the mood of confidence among blacks is breaking down city segregation.) Of the four of us, I, the white, was the only one with the right to vote for the three-colour parliament we were looking at. Of the three black men, Mxolisi Godana, Raks Seakhoa and Menzi Nbaba, Raks had spent five years as a political prisoner on Robben Island, and Menzi had endured months in solitary detention in 1988.

  De Klerk’s address was skilfully divided for delivery alternately in English and Afrikaans. It was a cliffhanger. We waited a long time for him to come to any pronouncement on the banned organisations and Nelson Mandela. ‘That’ll be in English,’ Menzi predicted wryly; and when it came, it was – perhaps to ensure there would be no mistranslation for the outside world, perhaps to protect the Afrikaner right wing at least from the affront of hearing the Afrikaans language soiled by the expression of such a statement.

  What we had been conditioned to expect of de Klerk, by the media and our own speculations, was the announcement of Mandela’s release. Put bluntly, Mandela is what the world wants from de Klerk in return for the lifting of sanctions. What Mandela and the Mass Democratic Movement want was somehow not in the barter. So it was with amazement, a singing in the ears, that we in that small room heard the leader of the South African government announce that the ANC, the PAC – even the South African Communist Party! – were henceforth unbanned.

  We looked to one another, eager for confirmation – politicians are so clever, had we missed some catch? No. The plain words were coming out of the mouth of a South African white president. And I was hearing them in the company of three young blacks who were born after black liberation movements were banned at the beginning of the 1960s. They had never known what it was to have political loyalties and aspirations that do not break the law and lead to prison.

  It was as if they were coming out of a chrysalis. Their movements, in the excitement, were the awkward ones of drying wings. Back-slapping and grasping hands wouldn’t do. Everything seemed inadequate to express an event with so many consequences.

  Maybe later in the day, after we’d parted, they joined celebrating crowds, but there among the tea mugs, the exhilaration snatched at personal possibilities. Mxolisi’s mind flew to close friends in exile: ‘They’ll be able to come home! Bring their kids!’ And we swapped the names of our writers who could soon be among us, as well as the politicians, away for a lifetime. And Mandela. For us, as for the great and revered man himself, it had never been what would have satisfied the world – his messianic deliverance from apartheid – but the freeing of the people, no less. Of course, what de Klerk had conceded in meeting some of the conditions of the Harare agreement was less … but still so much. Our minds flew through the stages by which, once the ANC was free to organise and the exiles return, with Mandela and Sisulu and the others together in leadership, the remaining conditions f
or negotiation would follow. Inevitably. Unstoppably. We locked the cottage door behind us and walked out into streets that surely couldn’t, shouldn’t look familiar?

  I stopped by a liquor store to buy some celebratory libation, and a white man waiting for his beer asked the proprietor whether he knew if anything had happened there in Cape Town today? The white man behind the counter hadn’t heard.

  ‘The ANC and the PAC are unbanned,’ I offered.

  ‘Oh my God, all hell’s going to break loose for us now!’ – the customer loped out with averted eyes.

  ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry!’ the white proprietor yelled after him, not wanting a customer to leave with a bad memory of a moment in his shop. And he turned to me: ‘I don’t know about you, but the trouble is we’ve been told and told, since I was a kid, we just the only ones, we just everything here.’

  The morning after: the chaff of euphoria has blown away. I still believe the unbanning of the liberation movement is the real beginning of the great release. But studying de Klerk’s speech instead of listening to it, reading the comments of leaders at home and in exile, one sees what was left unsaid and undone. The President, dazzling us with the unbannings, said little or nothing about abolishing apartheid legislation. He did not speak of the Group Areas or the Population Registration Act; he did not touch upon the basis of apartheid that is under my feet as I write this – the land whose ownership remains forbidden to the blacks from whom it was taken by conquest, and by laws they had no part in making. The exiles my friends and I were so happy to welcome home, yesterday – some have already reminded us that they will not come back to live under apartheid laws of any kind, under apartheid justice. And I remind myself this morning that while de Klerk has said he is releasing Mandela unconditionally, he has not met all the conditions that Mandela himself set for his own release – in particular the repeal of apartheid laws.

  The important move towards negotiated change that came about yesterday did so because of the growing power of the black people of South Africa to influence the economy and lifestyle of white South Africans, and the pressure of sanctions.

  Mrs Thatcher is wrong when, in self-congratulation and hubris, she attributes change to her opposition to sanctions. Exactly the reverse is true. Without sanctions, there would have been no such speech in the House of Assembly yesterday. Within South Africa, we have to thank young people like the three with whom I heard the speech, who have never known freedom and have suffered imprisonment for a new South Africa; and in the outside world, we have to thank those who brought South Africa to some sense of reality through economic and political pressure, and who would serve our freedom best by continuing this policy until there are no gaps or silences in the momentous speeches to come.

  1990

  Sorting the Images from the Man

  Nelson Mandela

  I have just come home from the rally that welcomed Nelson Mandela back to Soweto. It was the occasion of a lifetime for everyone there; including the dot in the crowd that was myself, as one of the whites who have identified with the African National Congress through the years when it was a crime to do so. Overwhelmingly, the joyous gyrating mass that filled Soccer City Stadium, clung to retaining structures like swarming bees, even somehow hoisted one another up on old gold-mine headgear outside the fences, had been born and grown to adulthood – young whites as well as blacks – while Mandela spent twenty-seven years in prison. Yet all that time there was no black child in whose face, at the mention of his name, there was not instant recognition. And there were no whites – enemies of the cause of black freedom as well as its supporters – who did not know who this man was. His body was hidden behind walls; his presence was never obliterated by them.

  When Bishop Desmond Tutu received the Nobel Peace Prize in the twentieth year of Mandela’s imprisonment, he said he accepted it for Mandela, for all prisoners of conscience, and for all those ordinary black people whose employers do not know their workers’ surnames. And on the day of Mandela’s release, when Dr Nthato Motlana, himself a symbolic figure of resistance, was asked whether he didn’t think Mandela should now come to live in Soweto ‘among his people’, Motlana said: ‘He’s not a Sowetan, he’s a South African. Wherever he lives in our country he is among his own people.’

  That may have sounded like a grandiose put-down but it is strangely true. Apart from the Afrikaner right wing, whose fringe of Nazi crazies give the swastika on their flag a new twist and wave ‘Hang Mandela’ posters at each other, whites have not merely accepted Mandela’s return but turn to him now as the only one who can absolve and resolve: absolve the sin of apartheid and resolve the problems of reconciliation and integration. President de Klerk’s boldness in freeing Mandela has as its ironic obverse a fervent submission to this idea. He counts on Mandela: without him, the legendary bird rising out of the bars, blue-winged and with a sprig of olive held ready for three decades in its beak, the transformation of South Africa into a place where de Klerk’s white electorate can still live can’t be realised. The blacks’ personification of the hidden Mandela as the image of their ultimate liberation is superimposed by the whites’ picture of him as their salvation, forming a single image.

  So there were the faded photographs of a tall young man with smiling eyes and an old-fashioned part in his hair, umpteenth-generation reproductions that looked like ectoplasmic evidence, and there was the vision of the generic hero who (our Che Guevara if not messiah) could never be dead even if, as sometimes seemed only too likely, he were to die unseen. On the cover of Time his Identikit portrait appeared in final apotheosis in the guise of a beaming idol, something between Harry Belafonte and Howard Rollins.

  And then there walked out of prison a man unrecognisable as any of these. The real man, with a face sculpted and drawn by the spirit within himself enduring through thirty years, by the marks of incredible self-discipline, of deep thought, suffering, and the unmistakable confidence of faith in the claims of human dignity. An awesome face.

  Now he’s here. He confronts us, the man among us. He spoke bluntly, in Soweto, to black and white, sparing us nothing. He cut through the adulation of the crowd to demand from blacks an end to violence between black people. He spelled out to whites their responsibility for the consequences of poverty, homelessness and unemployment caused by the laws they made and must abolish.

  By contrast, few care to interpret in equally plain language the staggering responsibility that expectations lay upon Mandela. ‘Reconciliation’ in a ‘new South Africa’ by him ultimately means finding houses for hundreds of thousands of blacks whose needs dating back to World War II have never been met. It means finding the 4,000 skilled personnel the dwindling economy desperately needs, from among a population whose majority has received a hopelessly inadequate, segregated education. It means – turning up only one among monster problems the big buzzwords hide – transforming a police force and army which have been the brutal enemies of the people of South Africa for generations.

  Big words: a kind of helplessness among whites – the government – has dumped on Mandela the problems of the moment as well as the long-term: violence, crowd control, black school attendance. The mantra is Mandela; the hum is everywhere, but does it really represent the guru? The man himself is not carried away. He reiterates firmly that ‘no individual leader’ can take on the enormous task of creating unity and remaking South Africa on his own, that any decision by which the bread of negotiation will be broken with the government will be made by the combined leadership of the ANC, of which he is ‘a loyal and disciplined member’. The onus rests on whites; they must accept the policies of the ANC as a standpoint for negotiation as they accept Mandela. And he makes it absolutely clear that whether there will be feast or famine at that symbolic table depends on the whites’ and blacks’ understanding of what the big words really mean if they are to spell a united, non-racist, democratic and free South Africa. Mandela doesn’t want to be worshipped. He wants the people of South Africa to re
make themselves together. That’s his greatness.

  1990

  Censorship and its Aftermath

  It has been a long time since censorship could be symbolised by the blue pencil; even the word processor with its superhuman capacity for total erasure won’t do.

  We who read Index on Censorship and – in countries like my own, South Africa – the local pamphlets keeping track of what can’t be printed, read or said, know that over vast tracts of the world censorship actually has been maintained by laws far beyond the control of any duly constituted Board of Censors. The vision of retired persons trying out on one another what passages may be sexually exciting or cause trembling at the prospect of subversion of the state are not the principal threat to the word. With television’s banalisation of sex, half the mandate of the sedentary censor has gone the way of those dashes between first and last letters.

  Political censorship has taken place of first importance since before the second half of our century. And it has been taken over, surely as never before, by the knuckle-duster imprisonment of writers and journalists, the banning of individual writers, the closure of newspapers, the prosecution of editors, the exclusion of television crews and journalists from the scene of events – all under laws that make conventional censorship appear namby-pamby. Repressive regimes from Hitler’s, Stalin’s, Franco’s, to Verwoerd’s and Botha’s, taking in so many others on the way, East to West, from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere, have maintained themselves with these laws that, at first appearing ancillary to censorship, ended by rendering it old hat, almost redundant.