Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  But we know what you absolutely must not do is allow the shadow of a world economic recession that fell upon the last decade of the twentieth century, reaching from Asia over West, North and South, to become an excuse to postpone the inescapable responsibility of the developed world, in the new millennium, to pursue the eradication, rather than the traditional band-aid amelioration, of poverty which exists alongside the globalisation of economic power.

  Send not to ask for whom the bell tolls – when it sounds in one stock exchange its note reverberates throughout the world, shaking the Haves as well as casting down even further the Have-nots.

  Global free markets mean nothing in the end, if there is no one able to come to buy. The hazard of decline through the very interdependence created by globalisation of world economies: this negative impact upon the progressive and positive in the concept is what surely must cause even the most complacent acceptors of the time-disgraced division of the world’s resources between rich and poor, to realise that the billions of fellow men and women in abject poverty are in coexistence with them, not safely quarantined in isolation. The financier George Soros has come to the reflection: ‘There are collective interests that don’t find expression in market values’.94

  And perhaps those five permanent members of the Security Council – Britain, China, France, Russia, the USA – who among others enrich their national economies by selling arms for the globe’s conflicts and wars, will hear when Amartya Sen, 1998 Nobel Laureate in Economics, says of production of arms, ‘Human benefits that flow by redirecting these forces can be remarkably large’,95 and when Kofi Annan says, ‘No development without peace; no peace without development’.96

  No globalisation without a human face.

  The twenty-first century will achieve a new and radiant definition of progress if you can work to put that face upon your world.

  1999

  Five Years into Freedom

  My New South African Identity

  When I was young, in South Africa during the Second World War, I was far removed from the bombs, the nights in underground shelters, the rationed food, in Europe. I read reflections by those living through this experience, and these were not what I had in my mind as the way life must be, there; I had constructed their lives out of a projection of my own priorities in what makes life, my own fears of what would be most threatened in imagined circumstances.

  Our war – South Africa’s liberation struggle – is over. On 2 June, we shall cast our votes in our second post-apartheid elections. We have been led to that day by one of the great men of this century. He now displays the ultimate wisdom in closing his era at his peak of accomplishments, the final one being the assurance that his successor is the one equal to the era about to begin. We have lived five years of freedom. Whatever the frustrations as well as triumphs we’ve tackled, it is an achievement placed toweringly beside the years of apartheid racism and before them the years of colonial racism – five years against three centuries. Yet I see that this period is often the object of the same kind of subjective projection I imposed on the reality of wartime Europe fifty years ago.

  Again and again, when I am interviewed or find myself in encounters with other people abroad, the burning question is, ‘What is happening to whites?’

  And again and again, my genuinely surprised response is: ‘What about blacks? Don’t you believe there are challenges to be met in their new lives?’

  There are two obvious assumptions to be made of this approach to South Africa by Europeans and North Americans. The majority of them being white, they identify only with whites, whether consciously or subconsciously. Because I am white, they assume I do the same. It’s the Old Boys/Old Girls Club producing its dog-eared membership card. The projection is of the priorities of their lives, along with the old colonial conditioning that these belong with whiteness and are incontrovertibly, always, for ever, threatened by the Otherness – blackness.

  Five years into freedom. What kind of fossil should I be, unearthed from the cave of bones that was apartheid, if my essential sense of self were to be as a white?

  There are some who still have this sense – suffer it, I would say, and unnecessarily, so it becomes a form of self-flagellation. I don’t posit this in any assertion of smug superiority; I should just wish to prod them into freedom from confinement. And there is also the other – unadmitted – side of feeling superior as white: being ashamed of being white. An over-compensation for the past, useless for living fully in the present.

  If you put the question to me, I hear it as, ‘What about us?’ – South Africans going as best we can about the business of living together. Being white as a state determining my existence is simply not operative. I was privileged through racism, I rejected and actively opposed racism, I played my small part in the liberation struggle and I know that as a result I am a South African and nobody else, living in a country we are in the difficult, thrilling process of creating. That we must create; for despite its natural resources, its sophisticated infrastructure, its advanced technology, what we want never existed for us before: a truly human society.

  Grand words. How does it feel to live day to day under their imperative? Five years into freedom: for me, the great change comes from others, from the change in atmosphere in the cities, the streets. It is nothing new for me to ‘mix’ with people of all colours; my closest friendships and working relationships have been in this context for many years. But the old life existed counter to everything that defined and characterised the country. It was – even if triumphantly always in opposition – surrounded by the laws, the state, secular and religious traditions that represented everything it was not. Although we said ‘our country’, this was in reference to that which people were suffering, striving, surviving to bring about – there was no identity with the official entity called South Africa. We had no country.

  I am aware now, every day, in so many ways, big and small, happy and troubling, that I can speak of ‘our country’. If the air of taking possession can be palpable, I feel it when I walk out of my gate. I hear it in the volume of traffic. I know it when I pick my way between vendors of everything from mobile phones and fake French perfume to tomatoes and toilet rolls on the pavements. I see it out of the corner of my eye when I stand in a queue at my local post office and eavesdrop on the black postmaster giving instruction to the young Afrikaans employee at the counter. I hear it in the accents of our many languages, listeners speaking English on radio phone-in programmes. It is that indefinable quality called confidence; even the member of the vast number of unemployed who guides me theatrically into a parking bay has it – yes, a contradiction of his actual circumstances.

  Well, I live in Johannesburg. A city in transition is full of such contradictions.

  Recently my bag was snatched from the car when the friend driving stopped at a traffic light; I had forgotten to lock the passenger-seat door – our routine precaution, like the free distribution of condoms against Aids. I was indignant. House keys, credit card, ATM card – the fact that they were filched by someone living on the streets who had no middle-class status to own such things did not assuage me. But on the same streets in the press of people flowing and dodging round one another, the great mass who had been shut out of the city in ghettos and ‘ethnic homelands’, if someone jostles me, I hear, ‘Sorry, maGogo’ (‘I apologise, Grandmother’). Ordinary good manners, you will say. No. He apologises. He accepts me as a common relative in the human family; after he and his forebears have been decreed outcast from it for generations, both subtly and brutally, colonialist patronage to apartheid rejection. The benison of human feeling at once shines out against, and is threatened by, violent crime. The second question fired by individuals from abroad is one with a target that can’t be missed. Back to the first proposition of the contradiction: the snatched bag. ‘What about crime?’ I shall not duck. The impersonal statistics are there, never mind my credit card. The city I live in is among those with the highest crime rat
es in the world. That my French granddaughter, a student in Nice, has had her little old car stolen is an incident of urban crime all over the world, but it doesn’t add up to the indicting total in one city, one country, the way the loss of my bag will in the calculation of those passing judgement on the progress of a country with a five-year commitment to democracy as against the several hundred years’ experience of its evolution in the West.

  The curious view from abroad is that only whites are threatened by, and concerned about, street crime, hijackings and housebreaking and the violence these involve. Again and again, there are descriptions of suburban razor wire and Rottweilers as the prevailing flora and fauna of the white suburbs. The facts are that homes, humble as well as substantial and even complete with swimming pool, in what are still the black townships of greater Johannesburg, are also armed with wire and dogs. Black professional and businessmen and women who now take a place among the affluent owners of fine cars (regarded primly as suspect conspicuous consumers by observers who do not have the same moral judgement of whites driving the same models) are also victims of hijacking. We face the problems together.

  But if you move about in my city, you don’t need a criminologist to identify the reason for crime’s prevalence. And it is not a bleeding-heart apologist response when the blunt answer is: unemployment.

  I have taught myself to drive, all over again, fifty or so years after I was first licensed, because there has to be a new, nippy know-how and understanding of an unwritten code among drivers to weave among the buffalo herd of the road, the minibuses. We call them ‘combis’ because they are combination buses and taxis and conduct themselves as a hybrid, which is confusing to the uninitiated driver of a car. They hoot continuously, to attract the attention of potential passengers; they stop anywhere at the signal of a raised finger from the kerbside, the way a hailed taxi responds; they have regular routes they follow like a bus but no obligation to restrict themselves to any designated bus stops. They are always packed to suffocation limit: they have solved the transport question, which a succession of white regimes dealt with as the decision that blacks use their legs. To me, the combis are symbols of the immeasurable influx of people to the city since freedom was confirmed at the ballot box in 1994, the trek of many thousands who come to find work, and for whom there will be little or no possibility of finding it. When the humiliation of begging fails, desperation offers one way to survive – crime.

  This phenomenon of crime is not, as some observers take smug satisfaction in regarding it, the phenomenon of freedom.

  Things were not better in the old days of the apartheid regime: they were kept out of sight. The unemployed and underemployed who come to the city hungry in every way for a better life now were corralled in that extraordinary experiment in social engineering, poverty-ridden ‘ethnic homelands’. The social disease, unemployment, was quarantined; migratory labour from the rural areas, and from one province to another, was permitted to enter the city only in numbers determined healthy by the needs of industry. And these workers were legally forbidden to take their families with them. I have to remind myself of this when I see among us that sad developing-world category of childhood, street children; now they are there before our eyes instead of underfed and undereducated in the ‘homelands’ of apartheid.

  It is not a politically correct convenience to blame the past, apartheid, for unemployment. The plain fact is that dammed-up unemployment has burst upon us from the inhuman confines of the past; it is not something inherent in freedom, a kind of punishment for our people’s audacity in defeating whites-only rule. As a result of the policies of the past, black people come to the city doubly disadvantaged. First, industrial development, hampered through sanctions that were necessary to end apartheid, has only limited employment to provide in a period when, despite every effort towards expansion, such development is affected by quaking conditions in world finance. Second, the majority of the unemployed do not have the education or skills to take on such jobs as are available. Many are illiterate or semi-literate, the products of the contemptible level of education apartheid decreed for blacks. Few have any of the basic skills demanded by an increasingly technological labour market.

  I cannot shrug and dismiss them as a lost generation. I am one who will press for innovative large-scale government projects that will institute skills training and employment at the same time. When the adults are providers, the children will not be on the streets. And I am encouraged by the government’s chivying of business to give training in financial processes, and the condition laid down to foreign investors that there must be a training component in their most welcome decisions to profit from investment opportunities here.

  There is enthusiasm among Haves in the city to see a solution to the unemployment of Have-nots in what they call, broadly, small business, and there are formations that commendably provide modest finance for this. Yet when I pass, near a supermarket, a young man mending shoes in a booth he has been supplied with, I can’t help thinking this is something of a dead end for him: couldn’t he be learning to be an electrician or plumber, even if he cannot become one of the millennium’s computer-literate? His ‘small business’ venture doesn’t seem to have the vigour of self-initiated brisk trading by those pavement vendors whom I note, month by month, acquiring the acumen of what will arrest the gaze of customers beyond a mere pile of bananas – the latest sports-club logo on a cap, the look-alike Nikes. South African blacks are new to shopkeeping, having been barred from owning shops in the city. They don’t have the capital to do so, yet, but you can see they’re learning fast – the hard way.

  In awareness of sharing as a post-apartheid ethos, at what levels is this evident? At the top economic level, which used to be exclusively that occupied by whites, like begins to live beside like. It was a pejorative – aimed at white privilege in general – to refer to ‘Houghton’, but now our President Mandela lives in that residential area, more modestly than he would if he made the conventional choice of the official residence occupied by the white regimes’ presidents in Pretoria. Sandton – the most luxurious of garden suburbs – can’t really be regarded as the generic symbol of white capitalist living any longer, because black dignitaries in professions, business, communications and the arts now also favour the landscaped town house complexes complete with security service. They are a minority among blacks, of course. At the broadest, basic level of the new social pyramid there are changes that are not less contrasting, in their way, with the living conditions of the past. Late last year, I was in the city’s old black township of Alexandra, in the brand-new three-room house, built with government subsidy and a low-interest bank loan, into which the Mashabela family of five had just moved after seventeen years in a one-room shack housing fourteen people. This kind of levelling of material conditions is my primary criterion of justice in my country, the city I live in.

  I know it could not possibly be brought about in five years, or ever can be completely achieved, on the evidence of the chasms between the life of rich and poor in developed capitalist countries that have declared themselves dedicated to it for several hundred years, and the failure of socialist countries (of socialism – so far in human history, but not for ever, in my belief) to avoid making freedom a prisoner of its own dictates. South Africa – like its combis – has had to choose pragmatically to be a hybrid: a mixed economy, with every bias it can afford towards making the legal equality, now achieved, meaningful in economic, material form for the impoverished majority.

  It follows that community of purpose is particularly decisive for us, coming as we do, rawly, from our divided, racist past. My own natural preoccupations, within my life as I see it as a responsible citizen, have always been in the arts, what are called (rather embarrassingly for my taste) cultural formations, in which race or colour or even language differences were an irrelevance in common enthusiasms, the realm of the imagination that couldn’t be annexed, even by apartheid. But now, as it should be, in pursuit of So
uth Africa as an African country rather than an Africanised outpost of the West, the initiatives and much of the innovation in culture are taken up by blacks – a form of unofficial, organic affirmative action that creates a balance that was missing while partnerships between black and white were always weighted by the fact that whites, by law, in the ordinary pursuits of daily life, had access to opportunities blacks did not have. I feel at home – in the real sense of the concept – as never before, even in working with my long-time close friend Mongane Wally Serote, poet, former freedom fighter, now a member of parliament with a high position in the Department of Arts and Culture, and with Walter Chakela, director of the Windybrow Centre for the Arts, in a total context that didn’t exist for them and for me before.

  Perhaps that may be regarded as a rather special area of race relations, far from ‘Sorry, maGogo’ in the street. In between, I reflect on my feelings when, moving about the city and suburbs, I pass a school at the hour when classes end. It was a whites-only school I knew well. I see the kids coming out, the small boys scuffling with one another, the little girls tangling hands and giggling together. They are all shades of colour – South African black, South African Indian, South African mélange, South African white. They are growing up with a common initiating experience, into life. They will never be subject to the unspeakable horrors that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has exposed to us, and that have been so vital for us to face, what we did or what we allowed to happen. These children are not being kept apart to learn to hate, to fear the unknown, the untouched in one another.

  One of the generation that was the victim of the horrors of apartheid, Tokyo Sexwale, lately Premier of Gauteng, of which Johannesburg is the capital, and now a black-empowerment crusader married to a white woman, said something this month that could be our rubric to live by: ‘If blacks get hurt, I get hurt. If whites get hurt, that’s my wife, and if you harm coloured people, you’re looking for my children. Your unity embodies who I am.’