Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  Matla’s methods in this work have been so successful that the trust has run intensive courses to train field workers, as many as 500 at a time, from other voter-education programmes as well as its own. Brief informative dialogues, following the mode with which people are familiar in commercial advertising, are aired on radio stations. A fourteen-part TV mini-series featuring a popular black comedian was commissioned according to the ideas of the trust and has been shown on TV weekly at a peak hour in the run-up to the election. For the comic-book literate, a picture-story booklet in nine languages was distributed widely.

  Perhaps the most original means of voter education has been the creation of six travelling theatre troupes of black actors who have both devised and acted a play, adapting it multilingually to areas and audiences throughout the country. I have seen the play evolve fascinatingly in response to the participation of audiences. With song and humour it presents a mock-up of a polling station, with the actors going through all the actual procedures – body-search for weapons, presentation of identity document, placing of hands under ultra-violet light and, after voting, into a special liquid, so that no one can vote twice – in the personae of various characters: the sceptical old crone, the swaggering youth carrying his deafening cassette player, the confidence trickster, the militant student, etc. People from the audience are invited to come up and make their mark on a board representing a ballot paper. The need for voter education has been startlingly clear when I have seen some cross out the names of parties they don’t wish to vote for.

  A jazzy song and dance about ‘spoilt’ papers deals with this sort of confusion. However, one must not conclude the confusion about the voting process means lack of understanding of political issues; many thousands of people are politically aware and informed of party policies, while simply never having had the chance to practise ordinary civic procedures. Which is what voter education is all about.

  Matla Trust, like other voter educators, has been funded by overseas aid organisations and governments wishing to promote a democratic future in South Africa. If there is the great voter turn-out now expected on election day, donors can feel satisfied that their money was well used, for without these imaginative and effective programmes a vast number of South Africans would have missed the first opportunity to exercise the right to govern their own lives.

  Matla, for itself, knows that the task is not over. Voter education is only the first step towards democracy; all its other processes, in community organisation, in accountability from those who govern to the people governed, will need to be learned during the five years of a government of national unity that begins after this week’s election. Democracy is not an on-off affair; it has to be learned, day by day.

  1994

  Letter from South Africa

  When I return to South Africa from abroad, now, I don’t step down on to the earth of my old stamping ground, the Transvaal, where I was born, but on to new territory. It’s named ‘Gauteng’ – ‘Place of Gold’.

  The airport itself is renamed. It used to be ‘Jan Smuts Airport’, now it is ‘Johannesburg International Airport’.74

  The former name – Transvaal – of my natal region derived, way back, from the geographical boundaries recognised by the Boer Republics: Transvaal – ‘across the Vaal River’ – was where the water divided the Boer Republic of Orange Free State from its counterpart on the other side, the Boer Republic of Transvaal. The former name of the airport commemorated General Jan Smuts, one of the heroes of the white regimes, who led South Africa into the war against Nazi racism but continued to head a racist government at home.

  Now ‘Gauteng’ stoutly asserts not only that there will be no more white republics here, but that their latter-day apartheid counterpart, the slicing and chopping of the country into ethnic enclaves is over, for good. If ‘Place of Gold’ trails any historical trappings, these commemorate the labour of the black men who brought the underground metal to the surface, and made the country rich, as much as the Europeans who made the discoveries and supplied the technology. In abandoning the naming of an airport for some people’s hero, I hope a principle is indicated whereby the naming of public utilities in honour of individuals will not be favoured – even if they are safely dead. The world is full of statues cast down on their broken noses, streets renamed for leaders celebrated and then deposed, requiring yet another street-name change, so that we may lose our sense of direction, in more ways than one. Of course I make an exception, in the inconsistent manner of all human beings. My exception is Nelson Mandela.75 He is no transient figure in human progress; one of the few mortals, like Mohandas Gandhi, whose name is invoked and will be, and whose image is revered and will be, even by his enemies.

  I’ve become easily accustomed to the new Johannesburg, but when I’ve been away and I come home, fresh to it, my vision flashes back to the way it was, for fascinated comparison. I’ve lived here since 1949, and at most levels of that segregation reserved for whites. I’ve been a struggling young writer, divorced, with a child to support. I’ve ended up in a beautiful old tin-roofed house with room for my books. But wherever and however I lived, during the past regimes, it was where no black person could rent a room, a flat, or buy a house. When I went into the central city, it was one vast, white businessmen’s club, with blacks coming in to run the errands, shine the doorknobs of the banks and insurance houses, sweep the streets, and keep out of any restaurant or coffee shop where clients could sit down. Of course they were more than welcome to spend their money in the businessmen’s shops – so long as they cleared off, out of sight, to their segregated black townships, after hours.

  In the eighties, things began to change. People in other countries tend to think that the elections in April last year achieved this from zero, overnight. It was not so. During this time, libraries, theatres and cinemas had been declared by law as open to everybody. Blacks could sit down to eat in a restaurant. Public transport was desegregated, and although a lot of legalistic pussy-footing to retain residential segregation remained, it was simply ignored by the growing confidence of black people moving into white high-density areas, and white landlords eager to fill vacancies where whites had retreated to the suburbs. Gradually, in the suburbs themselves, that old solvent of prejudices, class solidarity, discovered for whites that black neighbours – lawyers, doctors, advertising executives, journalists, board members of white companies that were covering their backs for the future, followed the same approved routine of driving their children to private schools in the morning, and protected their property with the same intercoms installed at electronic gates. Back in the city, the white government’s lack of interest or success in providing transport to serve black people in their daily to-and-fro between the white city and the black ghettoes was replaced by a most disorderly but effective form of transport, provided by thousands of minibuses owned by black private enterprise.

  These were the concessions made, and the changes helplessly accepted, by the last days of apartheid, holed up in its bunker but determined not to swallow the cyanide capsule.

  The streets of Johannesburg’s city centre are now totally transformed. A perpetual crowd scene has taken over what was a swept, empty stage on which a few self-appointed leading actors performed for one another. The pavements are a market where your progress is a step-dance between pyramids of fruit and vegetables, racks of second-hand jeans, spreads of dog-eared paperback lives from Marx to Mandela, rickety tables set out with peanuts, sweets, sunglasses, backyard concoctions labelled Chanel and Dior, hair straighteners, Swatches and earrings. Traffic fumes are spiced by the smell of boerewors, a greasy farm sausage that is as much our national dish as thick mealie-meal, the African polenta, for on every corner there are carts frying circles of gut-encased meat over gas burners. You can have your shoes re-soled while you stand in your socks; you can even have your hair cut, right there. Like everyone else who has a car, I have had to acquire new skills as a driver, after forty-seven years on the road: the mi
nibuses we call combis – a combination between a bus and a taxi – stop on request signalled by a raised finger anywhere and everywhere. You have to be ready with a foot on the brake and a quick swerve to make it to the parallel lane, and usually that lane is full, anyway.

  The city centre is dirty, yes. That private white club, that stage-set for principal actors only, was not designed for non-members, the use of the crowd, the entire population of this city. The dainty bins overflow with trash. And perhaps there is even an unconscious euphoria among black people, in showing you can toss your cigarette pack and Coke can, even your old T-shirt, on to what whites kept so tidy, for themselves alone. It will take some time before people want to have clean streets because they have now claimed them.

  I use the word ‘unconscious’ of this careless abandon in the streets because there is so little resentment of whites, in black South Africans. Not to be evidenced because, more importantly, simply not there, to be felt. I reflect on this as I write; but when I walk about Johannesburg these days I don’t do so as a white among blacks, I’m not conscious of this at all, it’s not there in the eyes, in the gait of people as they approach or pass me. And if we happen to bump one another, before I can apologise, the other will say ‘Sorry, ma-Gogo’, I apologize, Grandmother – in respect for my grey hair … I don’t know of any other city in the world I’ve been in where you’d meet such courtesy on the street.

  There are muggings, hijacks and house robberies to fear. And although it is easy for me to say these are the hazards of city life in many countries, certainly the developing post-colonial ones, it is a statistical fact that our city ranks very high on the crime scale. In one of the paradoxes of freedom, our country is no exception. For all the years of apartheid, we were isolated from the world, rightly shunned; now we are accepted with open arms and we ourselves are also open to the arrival from other countries of drug dealers and scam-men, and on a humbler but nevertheless damaging level, illegal immigrants from as far afield as Nigeria, Korea and China who compete with our own unemployed in the struggle to earn and eat.

  The vast number of unemployed we inherited from the apartheid regime, like the millions in need of houses and schools, have created an industry of crime, with, as apprentices, homeless street children. It’s a Dickensian situation apartheid bequeathed us and foreigners exacerbate, ironically, in our freedom. It’s an inheritance not only from the years of apartheid, since 1948, but of the more than three and a half centuries of colonial racist rule under different names.

  What has the Government of National Unity been able to do about this inheritance, this social malediction, no less, in a mere eighteen months of its existence in power?

  I am surprised, somewhat incredulous, when people in the outside world call us to account in the quantitative terms they have decided. How many houses have we built? Too few, yes, too few, we are well aware. But how many do these South Africa watchers calculate, of the thousands required by several million shack and slum dwellers, could be built in a year?

  This is not a game of Monopoly, where a house is a counter you put down on a chosen square.

  Do they realise that land has to be legally acquired, in relation to where people have their work, that electricity and water reticulation have to be installed where they never existed, that – above all – banks have to be negotiated into providing low-cost housing loans for people who, because they were black and low-income earners, never before were eligible for bonds? These preparations are what has taken up the time. The fact that in the region where I live eighty thousand existing houses have been connected to electricity may mean little to you, who have been taking for granted electrical power ever since you were grown enough to reach a switch; but to people who live in those eighty thousand houses, touching a switch is indeed the beginning of a new life: let there be light.

  We still lack schools and teachers better qualified than apartheid turned out. But in January, when the school year begins in the southern hemisphere, something happened that heartens me whenever I contemplate the vast problems we have to tackle. The schools were desegregated. Black children in their brand new uniforms registered along with white children and there were no police, army personnel or dogs necessary to protect black children, as there had to be, you will remember, when the American South opened its schools to all races. When I happen to pass a local, once all-white school at the end of the school day and see small children streaming out, the girls giggling together, the boys scuffling and shouting together, I know that statistics are only part of progress.

  We have had a great number of strikes this year. The most important ones are those in the mines and related industries, because they are bound up with the colonial-established employment practice of migratory labour, that, in turn, is related to the recurrent violence which spills from the frustrations of hostel living conditions to adjacent black communities; violence begun by the fanatical determination of the individual who represents a danger to peace in South Africa, Mangosutho Buthelezi, to stir ethnic differences in reckless pursuit of his personal political ambitions. Other workers have been on strike – supermarket employees, transport drivers, even grave-diggers. These actions are deplored because they affect production (not the grave-diggers, of course …) and growth of the economy, but we have to remind ourselves, this is democracy in action … Under the old regime, police, dogs and guns were the only answer to workers’ assertion of their rights.

  Early this year I attended the inaugural sitting of the Constitutional Court. The case was brought by two men on death row, on the grounds that the death penalty violates South Africa’s new constitution. It was a test case of tremendous significance to the constitution as the final arbiter of individual human rights. Among the judges, black and white, was Albie Sachs, the liberation activist whose arm was blown off and one eye blinded by a car bomb placed to kill him by the apartheid government’s secret service; he, who might be thought to want to see assassins die, was eloquent for abolition of the death penalty. The court finally declared it a contravention of the constitution and it has been abolished. Eighty per cent of whites and 49 per cent of blacks, in a poll, had wanted it retained. Judge President Arthur Chaskelson said, ‘This court cannot allow itself to be diverted from its duty to act as an independent arbiter of the constitution by making choices on the basis that they will find favour with the public.’ We have, and need to have, this kind of protection of individual rights where we had so few. Those who kill will go to prison for life; the state will not become a murderer by killing them.

  We have other kinds of murderers among us: political murderers who have never been brought to justice. In 1995 President Mandela signed into law a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It is a country of reconciliation’s preferred alternative to Germany’s Nuremburg Trials. Those who come forward and confess what they did in the past may be granted indemnity. It’s going to be a process full of questions and difficulties, both for the perpetrators of ugly and mortal deeds and for the families of those they killed or maimed. But it is surely a rare and civilised way of dealing with the past of a people who have to live with it, together. South Africa is a human place to live in, today.

  1995

  Cannes Epilogue

  Forrest Gump as the culmination of a hundred years of the art of cinema: this appalling thought prompted me to accept an invitation to serve on the jury of the 1995 Cannes Film Festival. I belong to the first generation for whom film has been an art form, along with literature, music, painting and sculpture, rather than a technical discovery, the cinematograph, made in 1895 by two French brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumière. The century has been one of so much delight and revelation in the development of this unique medium. How could we allow it to be marked by a laurel wreath of confectioners’ sugar placed upon the head of the only hero an apparently weary civilisation, dwindled into sentimentality, could conceive of – a hero based on the premise that you have to be brain-damaged to be fully human in this world?


  So I went to Cannes hoping for a masterpiece: a film that goes for all the possibilities in multimedia filmmaking; a film that extends boundaries already attained by the great makers, from Chaplin and Welles through Truffaut, Buñuel, Bergman and Bertolucci. (Everyone may substitute her or his own list of those I revere but have no space for.) Then there is, in the words of Satyajit Ray, ‘the presence of the essential thing in a very small detail which one (screenwriter, director, cameraman, actor) must catch in order to expose the larger things’.

  I was intrigued to discover what the criteria of others on the jury might be. My companions under the president, Jeanne Moreau, were the French cinematographer Philippe Rousselot, the Italian director Gianni Amelio, the African director Gaston Kaboré, the Mexican critic Emilio García Riera, the Russian screenwriter Maria Zvereva, the French producer Michèle Ray-Gavras, the French actor/director Jean-Claude Brialy, and John Waters, about whom no American reader will ask, ‘And who the hell is he?’

  A mixed piece of casting – to some, even daring. The Times remarked that I might ‘just be the one person in the world with whom Mr Waters has least in common’. Well, the Times was wrong. Though we may have differed now and then about the nature of masterpieces, we laughed together such a lot that we thought of having a photograph taken of ourselves, suitably enlaced, for the press.

  The seclusion of the jury was not quite on the level of that which was prevailing concurrently for a certain trial jury on another continent. But it was a relief to have strict rules to adhere to when journalists pestered us for tips about which film was out in front in the laps of jury viewing. An icon of cinema glamour, immensely intelligent, truly literate in many cultural dimensions, Jeanne Moreau was a president from whose discipline we would not have dared to stray in blab. Her personality is an unlikely combination, at once imperious and lovable. She worked us hard, yet never once did she try to influence the opinion of any jury member. For myself, I learned from the exchange of preoccupations with others. A cinematographer reads the language of images while I receive the language of the script, an actor intuits where performance betrays or transcends a role, directors see structure, and producers see how much ingenuity and imagination are achieved in proportion to a little or a lot of money spent. To become aware of all these component aspects was to understand better what film sets out to do and how far it succeeds.