A Sport of Nature

by Nadine Gordimer

  Then why do I say I’m incommunicado.

  You couldn’t experience it, of course, being more or less a lucky orphan, but hearing from outside exclusively in the voice of your mother, it’s like being thrust up back again into the womb.

  I can never guess whether you’ll be interested or not. Because I can’t imagine what your life is. If I think of you in the morning, for instance, I can’t imagine where you get up out of bed as you used to in your short pyjamas, that kind of baby dress with bikini pants, you having breakfast—what sort of room, not a kitchen!—you going off to do what? What do you do all day in a President’s house? State House—Groote Schuur’s the only one I’ve ever seen, and I’ll bet yours isn’t Cape Dutch-gabled. I’m lodged with the State, myself, so we’ve both landed up in the same boat, but you’re at the Captain’s table, and I’m pulling the oars down in the galley. That’s supposed to be funny, in case you think I’m dramatizing myself. I was going to say—I don’t know if you’re interested in how I got here. I don’t think it will be any surprise to you that I am. I was on my way while we were still kids, although I made a kind of nihilistic show of kicking against it. Pauline’s Great Search for Meaning. It was a pain in the arse. You went off and plink-plonked on your guitar. I sneered at her. My school—the one she chose for me, did Joe ever decide anything for us?—its Swazi name meant ‘the world’, one of those great African omnibus concepts (I love them), the nearest synonym in our language is a microcosm, I suppose. Nobody at home knew how happy I was there—certainly not you. Carole may have suspected. It was the world (and the world’s South Africa for us) the way we wanted it to be, the way Pauline longed for it to be, and into which she projected me. But it had no reality in the world we had to grow up into, less and less, now none at all. It was all back-to-front. When I went to school, I went home —to that ‘world’; when I came to the house in Johannesburg, I was cast out. Good god, even you were more at home in that house than I was. Alpheus in the garage, Pauline and Joe’s pals bemoaning the latest oppressive law on the terrace under that creeper with the orange trumpet flowers. At Kamhlaba blacks were just other boys in the same class, in the dormitory beds, you could fight with them or confide in them, masturbate with them, they were friends or schoolboy enemies. At the house, my mother’s blacks were like Aunt Olga’s whatnots, they were handled with such care not to say or do anything that might chip the friendship they allowed her to claim—and she had some awful layabouts and spivs among them. I smelt them out, because where I was at ‘home’, that sort of relationship, carrying its own death, didn’t have to exist. Poor Pauline. I hated South Africa so much.

  When I was older—by the time you left the house—I hated them all, or I thought I did. Maybe even Joe. I expected them to have solutions but they only had questions. Do you realize I was the only answer Pauline ever had? She knew what to do about me: sent me to Kamhlaba, ‘the world’. But I had to come back. Joe half-believed his answer: the kind of work he was doing, but you know how she was the one who took away half the certainty. And she was right, in her way, you can’t find justice in a country with our kind of laws. I feel as Bram Fischer did, that if I come to trial it’s going to be before a court whose authority I don’t recognize, under laws made by a minority government of whites. I’d like to reject that white privilege, too, but how can I take away from Joe the half he believes in? It’s all my father has. And of course if I can get off and live to fight another day, so to speak, I want that. No sense in a white being a martyr. There’s not enough popular appeal involved.

  I’ve no way of knowing how much you know. I mean, you certainly know the facts of what has happened in this country since you left. After all, you were married to a revolutionary. You probably knew more about it, from a politico-analytical point of view, than I did, at least during the years you were with him—and that’s why I can’t imagine you, Hillela, that’s it, I can’t imagine you living your life in the tremendous preoccupation that is liberation politics. Yet it seems this has been your solution, in your own way—and I never thought of you as in need of a solution at all, I still don’t, I never shall. You know, in these places one suffers from something called sensory deprivation (Pauline’s crowd apparently have published an extensive study of this which has horrified even people who think those like me ought to be kept locked up: they’ve revised their punitive premise, they think we deserve all we get, but nobody deserves quite that). I have it, too, ‘sensory deprivation’, I won’t go into the symptoms but the incoherent jumps in this letter are well known to be one. As I said, I’m not really crazy, and they won’t get me that way. Thoughts are wonderfully free when you’re in this state of sensory deprivation. Some hallucinate but it’s not that with me. It makes me know things I didn’t know. About you, Hillela. You were always in the opposite state. You received everything through your skin, understood everything that way. I suppose you still do. One can’t judge change in others by change in oneself.

  They said you went because of the journalist chap. A solution. D’you know he was almost certainly working for the security police? The whole business of raiding the cottage where you lived with him was a put-up job, to keep his credibility and make him appear to have to flee the country so he could carry on his slimy trade in Dar es Salaam? Apparently the ANC blew his cover there, I heard the whole story only recently. Well, at least nothing happened to you. What do you look like, Hillela. I didn’t see the newspaper photograph with you sitting next to Yasir Arafat (imagine Olga’s face).

  I got lost somewhere a few pages back. Even now—specially now—you must know just about everything, in terms of events, and the reactions of white power to events, here; and the precipitation of events by that power. But you can’t know what it has been to live here, I hated everyone in the house for not having a solution, because I was like Pauline, I was looking for one myself. Pretending not to be. Not arriving at one, through my skin. I’ve always been afraid to feel too much, the only time I did it was all so painful, such a mess. But in the Seventies everything changed. Pauline and her crowd were told they could not look for a solution—it was not for them: something like a state of grace, they couldn’t attain it. You knew that, before then. Long before. Well, whatever your view of the Black Consciousness movement (you may be politically sympathetic or not, for all I know, it’ll be a matter of alliances, now, although you were a loyal kid in your own way and surely your ANC ties prevail, whichever way your President/husband inclines)—whatever you think, Black Consciousness, black withdrawal freed us whites as much as it reduced us to despair. Despair for my mother; she packed up Joe and Carole and went to London. Me—it freed me. There was nothinga white could do in ’76 when the black students had the brilliant idea of beginning the revolution at the beginning of blacks’ lives: in school. Don’t believe anybody who claims to know who exactly should take the credit. SASO has a good share, underground ANC has some, but there were so many little groups with long titles that became proper nouns in the acronymic language we communicate in now. It was spontaneity that created its own structures, but the form action took was old as revolt itself, as oppression itself. The demands arose first from the apparently narrow orbit of children’s lives—the third-rate education, the prohibition of students’ councils, the objection to Afrikaans as a medium of instruction. But this was another Kamhlaba—‘a world’ of a different kind from Pauline’s failed solution for me, a real microcosm of real social conditions under which blacks live. These childish demands could be met only by adult answers. What the young really were doing was beginning to put their small or half-formed bodies under the centuries’ millstone. And they have lifted it as no adult was able to do, by the process of growing under the weight, something so elemental that it can no more be stopped than time can be turned back. They have lifted it by the measure of more than ten years of continuous revolt—pausing to take breath in one part of the country, heaving with a surge of energy in another—and by showing their parents how it can be done,
making room through the ’80s for new adult liberation organizations—you’ve heard about the UDF*—for militancy in the trade unions and churches.

  That’s where I come in—came in. If you couldn’t wait, I suppose you had to go: Pauline went. There was nothing for whites to do but wait to see what blacks might want them to do. There was a lot of shit to take from them—blacks. Why should I be called whitey? I didn’t ever say ‘kaffir’ in my life. Not being needed at all is the biggest shit of the lot. But everything was changing—no, the main thing was changing. Not the laws, the whites were only tinselling them up for travel brochures. (You could marry your black husband here, now, but you couldn’t buy our old house and move in. Though you could live illegally in a Hillbrow that and get away with it; apartheid is breaking down strangely where everyone said it never would—among the less affluent whose jobs are at risk from black competition …) The main other thing was changing, the thing far more important than the laws, in the end. Blacks of all kinds and ages were deciding what had to be done and how to do it. Even the white communists, people like Fischer and Lionel Burger, hadn’t recognized quite that degree of initiative in blacks, before, they’d always at least told blacks how they thought it could be done; and even the ANC in its mass campaigns had responded to what whites had done rather than forced whites into situations where they were the ones who had to respond to blacks. Now it didn’t matter whether it was one of the black bourgeoisie the radicals said were being co-opted by the white system, a businessman like Sam Motsuenyane getting British banks to make their South African operation acceptable by putting up capital for a black bank and training blacks to run it, or whether it was kids willing to be shot rather than educated for exploitation, or whether, from ’79, it was the bosses forced to admit they couldn’t run industry without a majority of unionised labour with which to negotiate. It wasn’t any longer a question of justice, it was a question of power the whites were confronted with. Justice is high-minded and relative, hey. You can give people justice or withhold it, but power they find out how to take for themselves. There are precedents for them to go by—and whites on the black side had tried to establish these—but no rules except those that arise pragmalically from the circumstances of people’s lives. That’s why text-book revolutions fail, and this one won’t. Castro made a revolution with fifteen followers. Marcos was driven out to exile by Filipinos who simply swarmed around his military vehicles like ants carrying away dead vermin—they’d judged by then he couldn’t will his soldiers to fire into crowds. I know it’s said that Reagan saw the game was up for Marcos and that’s why the troops didn’t shoot—but that’s not the whole story. The slave knows best how to test his chains, the prisoner knows best his jailer. (How did I persuade Hendrik to bring me this paper!) The way we’ve lived here hasn’t been quite like anything anywhere else in the world. The blacks came to understand that to overthrow that South African way of life they’d have to find methods not quite like anything that’s succeeded anywhere else in the world.

  What a lucid patch I’ve struck. But where I came in: I wrote you about that, in the letter that was returned. I saw no point in becoming Joe (though I still admire my father) but the legal studies I’d been dragging myself through were a good background for what did come up. Something blacks did turn out to want was whites to work for them in the formation of unions, people with a knowledge of industrial legislation. They gave me a job. When the United Democratic Front was launched, and the unions I was working for affiliated, I got drawn in along with them, by then, blacks had sufficient confidence to invite whites to join the liberation struggle with them, again. They have no fear it’ll ever be on the old terms. Those’ve gone for good. So you’re not the only one who’s spoken on public platforms. I was up there, too. There’s not much corporate unionism among blacks—you know what that means? Unions that stick to negotiating wage agreements, safety, canteen facilities and so on. Our unions don’t see their responsibility for the worker ending when he leaves the factory gates every day. Their demands aren’t only for the baas, they’re addressed to the government, black worker power confronting white economic power, and they’re for an end to the South African way of life.

  There’ve been a great many funerals. The law can stop the public meetings but not always the rallies at funerals of riot dead—although the law tries. Sometimes the police Casspirs and the army follow people back to the washing of the hands at the family’s house, and the crowd gathered there is angry at the intrusion on this custom and throws stones, and the army or police fire. Then there is another funeral. This has become a country where the dead breed more dead. But you’ve seen these scenes of home on your television in State House. There were plenty of television crews to record them before the law banned coverage. And clandestine filming still goes on. I can imagine that, Hillela—you sitting watching us—but of course you look about eighteen years old, and now—good god, you must be forty. You also see the madness that this long-drawn-out struggle has bred. Your traitor was lucky, he was white and he flitted long ago. The blacks who inform have roused madness in ordinary people. Necklaces of burning tyres placed over informers’ heads, collaborators’ heads, and packs turning on a suspect among themselves and kicking him to death. ‘Her’, too; I was at a funeral of a unionist, shot by the police, and some youngsters followed the cry that a girl had been recognized as an informer and each brought down upon her blows that combined to kill her. You know how people come up to a grave one by one and throw their flower in, as a tribute? Well, each gave their blow. Mistakes are made sometimes; that is sure. I don’t know if that girl was what the crowd thought she was, or if she just happened to resemble a culprit. And the manner of dealing with culprits. What happened to the smiling grateful kids who used to come to free classes at the old church on Saturdays—even you gave them a Saturday or two, didn’t you, before you found there were better things to pass the time. They boycotted the Bantu Education that made it necessary for them to receive white charity coaching, they got shot at and tear-gassed after you’d gone, there’ve been funerals for many of them. Does bravery, awesome contempt for your own death take away all feeling? (White kids don’t even know what death is, we were kept away from funerals for fear of upsetting us psychologically.) Can you kill others as you may be killed—and do even worse? And is this death really worse than death by police torture? Whites don’t call their fellow whites savages for what goes on in this building.

  No-one is on record for feeling any remorse. Neither the police and soldiers who shoot blacks every day, nor the blacks who kill—no, not their own people, which is what whites are saying—but those who are not their own, anymore: who have lost all identity but that of enemy. There’s colour-blindness for you, at last …

  What excuse is there for that? The madness. How do you feel about that? The whites want the madness to be the last, the final, triumphant vindication of all they themselves have done to blacks for hundreds of years.

  There’s no excuse.

  There’s only the evidence: if over hundreds of years you distort law and order as repression, you get frenzy. If you won’t attempt to do justice, you cut morality, human feeling, pity—you cut the heart out.

  White kids are being killed in landmine explosions and supermarket bombings, on Sunday rides and shopping trips with their loving parents. The mines and petrol bombs are planted by blacks, but it’s the whites who have killed their own children. The loving parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. The white family tree.

  How is it possible to live like that; well, how was it possible to have lived like that. They can go away from what’s happening now, but they can never go away from the way we lived for so many generations. On little floating islands, it exists still, that life like patches of blue water hyacinths that used to choke the rivers, broken from their moorings now and being carried out by heavy seas. (Sentence sounds odd because, in fact, it’s the beginning of a poem I tried to write; break up the lines and you’ll se
e it’s not so bad.) I hired a cottage—only eighteen months ago—along the North Coast. It was on, wooden stilts and built of corrugated iron with a wooden stoep and a water-tank. White miners used to save up and retire on pension in little pondokkies like that, but they’ve nearly all been pulled down for time-sharing condominiums for richer whites. This one was in an area the Indians have got declared for them since they’ve had a House in Parliament, and their development scheme hasn’t started yet—so an Indian friend found it for me. (You see, there’s privilege even among revolutionaries.) Between the strikes and the funerals I was going there regularly whenever I could. It was my Safe House. The Gandhi settlement nearby was burned down and Buthelezi’s government-approved private army was fighting our United Democratic Front people in a black township just over the hills. In my cottage there was perfect peace. The wasps buzzed their mantras. I ate the shad I caught and drank my Lion lager like every South African male. At night I sat out in what the darkness reverted to the miner’s garden. I couldn’t see the weeds and broken chairs and rusted pots, and the frangipani trees, that had survived neglect and the black women’s search for firewood, were a constellation of scented stars just at my head. The frogs throbbing on and the sea hissing. I’d walk down to the beach. Nothing. Nothing but gentleness, you know how the Indian Ocean seems to evaporate into the sky at night. In the middle of my witness of the horror of this country, I experienced the white man’s peace. I did. I woke up at night and heard the heavy sea, the other sea, pounding on the land. But that was only a line for the ending of the poem; although I was being carried out on it, it was bringing me here.

  There has been madness since the beginning, in the whites. Our great-grandfather Hillel was in it from the moment he came up from the steerage deck in Cape Town harbour with his cardboard suitcase, landing anywhere to get away from the Little Father’s quotas and the cossacks’ pogroms. It’s in the blood you and I share. Since the beginning. Whites couldn’t have done what they’ve done, otherwise. Madness has appeared among blacks in the final stage of repression. It is, in fact, the unrecognized last act of repression, transferred to them to enact upon themselves. It is the horrible end of all whites have done.