A Song in the Night

by Bob Massie

  I came to know and love Barney Pityana, one of the martyr Steve Biko’s closest friends, who had been imprisoned, then eventually left for England, where he became both a lawyer and an Anglican priest before returning to South Africa. He eventually became the head of the Human Rights Commission and then vice chancellor of South Africa’s largest university. I met and sometimes had dinner with Albie Sachs, a brilliant Jewish lawyer who had joined the ANC as a young man, had argued for the creation of a nonracial democracy, and was nearly killed by a car bomb in Mozambique. The blast blinded him in one eye and tore off his right hand. He later became the equivalent of a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. I spent a long time in conversation with Desmond Tutu, the archbishop of Cape Town and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, who had been vilified in the press as “that black Communist bug” and yet laughed with joy at the thought of the new nation being born. I met theologians, business leaders, teachers, community activists, and men and women who had been tortured or whose family members had died in prison or been shot on lonely roads at night by the security forces. I even met the president of the country, F. W. de Klerk, at a reception at the U.S. embassy. I told him that I was studying the effect of sanctions on the South African economy, and he asked me pleasantly if I was finding good data.

  “It depends on the industry,” I said diplomatically. “As you know, Mr. President, some industries are not currently permitted to release such data.” (It was, in fact, still a crime for South Africans even to ask.)

  “It will be interesting to see what you discover,” he said.

  This was my moment, and I seized it. Plucking up my courage, I asked him point-blank, “Did your religious convictions play an important part in your decisions of the last few years?”

  “Yes, yes!” he said emphatically, to my astonishment. “People keep calling me a pragmatist, but that’s not right. If anything, I have to struggle with not being a fundamentalist. I belong to a church that takes the Bible very seriously. I am always looking, always searching, for the basic foundation, the underlying principle, from which one can build an idea of the future, from which one can construct an action plan. As a Christian, I have always been preoccupied with this question of principle, of what is the right thing to do.”

  For a moment I found myself speechless, staring at a man who was both the head of one of the most brutal regimes in the world and someone actively seeking to bend his country’s history toward justice. How could I ever communicate such human contradictions in my writing? I wondered.

  The most elusive person in the country was, of course, Nelson Mandela. After he was imprisoned, in 1962, his name and his face were officially banned from every South African publication. I had visited South Africa just before his release, and since there were no known pictures of him since he had been in his forties, the newspapers had hired artists to imagine what the seventy-two-year-old man would look like when he stepped out of prison. The South African government even decided to minimize the shock of his sudden launch into freedom by driving him around the area in an unmarked car, and on more than one occasion they pulled over and allowed him to go into a corner store to buy a newspaper.

  Many remember the image of Mandela finally leaving prison on February 11, 1990: the tall, gray-haired man dressed in an impeccable suit, surrounded by triumphant assistants, walking with measured steps toward the gates of the prison, hand in hand with his long-suffering wife, Winnie. The image was carried live on television around the world. He had spent nineteen of his more than twenty-seven years in prison in a tiny cell on barren Robben Island, surrounded by rapid ocean currents and marooned just six miles offshore yet in full view of Cape Town’s beautiful cityscape. After Mandela was released, I had the opportunity to visit his old cell in the company of the United States ambassador, Princeton Lyman. The building was still being operated as a prison at that time, and the authorities had to clear the prisoners from that cell and from that block when we went. When I walked in, my heart rose to my throat. It was a tiny room, no more than eight by ten feet in dimension, with a small metal bed and a tiny desk. The ambassador and I could not fit inside at the same time. I tried, in the few moments I was there, to project backward through nineteen winters and summers, to wonder how anyone could have survived in this space without going mad. I looked at the thick, heavy bars that covered the window and realized that all I could see was a naked stone courtyard.

  Yet Mandela had somehow remained internally free. After he left the prison, he instantly became the central figure in the South Africa story and an international beacon of hope. During my visit I arranged to meet with his personal attaché, a woman named Barbara Masekela, who later became minister of culture and ambassador to France. She had traveled with Mandela when he began to make foreign trips to support the transition to democracy in South Africa. She told me in particular about a recent trip to Tanzania, when thousands of people were lined up along the roads to the cities to catch a glimpse of Mandela. “We were traveling in an open four-wheel-drive truck,” she said, “and if you listened carefully, you could hear the people saying ‘Mandela, Mandela.’ As soon as they saw him they said his name, as though they couldn’t believe it. So as we drove, we heard the name, Mandela, Mandela, wave after wave, repeated like an echo. Everyone who sees him for the first time suddenly realizes ‘There he is,’ and for that moment they are alone in history with Mandela.”

  “They are alone in history with Mandela.” The phrase struck me as profound. Most of us think of history as something that other people, important people, make. We read about it, we follow behind it, we bend to its force. We are like small boats tethered to the stern of an ocean liner, bouncing around in the boiling wake as we are dragged along. But for those standing on the bridge, there is no history; there is no wake; there is only the sea stretching forward, only the destination ahead. Everything happens in the present; there is no need to look back. Masekela said that this was something that amazed her about Mandela, Sisulu, and the others who endured Robben Island. “One cannot help looking at him,” she said, “and thinking that he was robbed of his life. Yet he never mentions this. It is the same with all of them—Sisulu, Mbeki, all of them—they never allude to the fact that twenty-eight years of their lives were taken away. They are just going forward with what has to be done now.”

  And as she finished her sentence, the door behind her popped open, and Mandela himself stepped in.

  “Madiba,” she said, using the name of both affection and respect favored by his inner circle, “this is Dr. Massie from the United States.”

  Mandela stepped forward and shook my hand, beaming. The only thing I could remember to say was that the secretary to the dean of the Harvard Divinity School, an African-American woman named Gwen Hawke, had made me promise that if I ever met him, I would give him her personal expression of gratitude.

  “Please thank her very much,” he said. “Tell her I find her words most encouraging.”

  And then he turned, papers in hand, and went back to his office, signaling to Masekela to join him. I watched the door close and realized that the camera I had brought all the way from the United States just in case anything like this ever happened lay unused in my briefcase beside me on the floor. But whether or not I had the visual proof, I had for a moment been alone in history with Mandela.

  When asked about the personal adulation that was his constant fare, Mandela was always scrupulously modest. “I serve as one small human peg on which the nations of the world hang their admiration for the African National Congress,” he told one American television reporter. In some ways it was true. Mandela had not made the revolution himself. Yet he also enabled some extraordinary things to happen because, not unlike another tall, reticent figure who played a key role in the birth of his nation—George Washington—Mandela gave subtle approval or discouragement to many impulses that had been let loose in the complex negotiations for the transfer of power.

  For several years South Africa had been slowly and s
teadily working to define both a new form of government and a pathway that would enable it to get there. It was a devilishly complicated problem. The Afrikaners had felt brutally oppressed by the British, and the key to their decision to impose apartheid was not so much that they hated blacks—though many of them did—but that they wanted to design a structure under which their political, cultural, and economic dominance would never be threatened by anyone. As a result of this insecurity, people of other races in South Africa had been systematically excluded and brutalized. Property had been stolen, families annihilated, futures destroyed, parents and children killed. Though the violence was mostly on the part of the white government, Africans had sometimes fought back, stealing cars and shooting their drivers, tossing hand grenades into truck cabs, and sweeping down on farmers and settlers in the depths of night. The South African military and police routinely tortured and murdered civilians, planted bombs, and drove opponents of all races off the roads into fiery deaths in ravines. To shatter the political unity of their opposition, the South African government also set up stooge governments in fake black “homelands,” where petty tyrants, wallowing in government cash and using their guards and militias to demand tribute, drove around in Mercedes and lived in luxury while their enforcers dragged men and women from their homes to beat and kill anyone who dared to object.

  At about this time, my son John asked, “Are there any dinosaurs in the world?”

  “No, John,” I replied. “There are no longer any dinosaurs in the world.”

  “Are there any ghosts in the world?” he asked.

  “No, there are no ghosts,” I said.

  “And Daddy,” he said, his face filled with earnestness and anxiety, “are there any monsters in the world?”

  Suddenly I felt a pang of anguish. What I said was “No, John, there are no monsters in the world.” But the voice in my mind said, “Only human ones, John. Only human ones.”

  Later that night John’s voice came back to me—“Are there any monsters in the world?”—as I tried to fall asleep. A rapid stream of images from the last few months roared through my mind: the elderly white farmer strangled by thieves and left in a cupboard for days; the four township women lined up against a wall and shot through the back of the head; the hollow eyes of abandoned urban children begging for coins; the humiliated faces of the men who shuffled to our door pleading for food and work; the man screaming as he burned to death in the trunk of his car just a few miles from our home.

  Suffering of any kind is terrible, but needless suffering is worse, and deliberately inflicted suffering is a specially hideous evil. The world abounds in deliberate, calculated cruelty wrought by rational persons on other persons. As the images rocketed past, my intellectual explanations and psychological defenses deflated and I felt only horror. John’s voice and mine intermingled, ringing like bell changes from a distant cathedral: “Are there any monsters in the world?” “Only human ones”—again and again, until I fell asleep.

  F. W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela, and the thousands of people who pulled together to build a new nation, woke every morning during this period and looked out at millions of people still boiling with deep historical grievances, reacting to current incidents of violence and gripped with fear that the future would only be worse.

  How did they make progress? They designed a disciplined process and set clear expectations. Though their organizations had been enemies and were still in competition with each other, they found ways to work together. They promised that all the issues would be discussed until people around the country felt they had been heard. Accordingly, hundreds of groups pulled together in forums and debates and lecture halls and meeting rooms to announce their preferences. In retrospect, I can hardly believe how much time was spent talking. There were “national forums” on housing, on education, on a bill of rights, on a free press, on the role of the judiciary, which would sometimes draw in two or three hundred people for several days every few months. Everyone got the chance to speak, and then to speak again, and to keep going, on and on, until people finally decided that the issue had been talked to extinction. This didn’t mean that every effort led to agreement, but it certainly meant that most people felt they had been given the chance to speak their minds.

  As in the United States during our own revolutionary period, every political decision carried an attached theory. The natural tendency in political systems toward tyranny meant that there had to be checks and balances. Clarity of national purpose and efficiency of execution meant that there had to be a strong central government. Yet regional and ethnic differences needed to be acknowledged through smaller political boundaries, which Americans call states and South Africans decided to name provinces. The South Africans allowed their eyes to roam over the other constitutions of the world, and they adopted features from those of the United States, Canada, and Sweden. They worried about how to balance executive and judicial power. They debated for years about how to identify and preserve the individual rights of citizens.

  Every morning I would rise from the bedroom that looked out over a piece of Table Mountain, descend to the kitchen, make a cup of coffee, and open the newspaper to read documents that reminded me of the Federalist Papers. In how many places in the world could one follow daily debates over fundamental constitutional issues at the moment of a nation’s birth on the front page, in the editorials, and even in the comics?

  And in how many places in the world could one see an entire nation looking for a method that would enable the country to mix justice with mercy? In most cases in which a war has taken place, especially a civil war, the victors expend their newfound power in hunting down and punishing the leaders of the other side as well as the perpetrators of the worst atrocities. The battles may no longer be military, but the sense of outrage and blame continues apace, with one side seeking openly to force the other to acknowledge their mistakes and pay the price.

  South Africa had endured so many terrible acts over so many years, many of them in secret, that the truth, even after decades of efforts, thousands of prison sentences, and tens of millions in expenses, might still never be known. The need for justice in the most egregious cases was never doubted, but eventually the South Africans realized that an even deeper political and, more important, human need might be met through the creation of a commission that sought not punishment but truth, not vindication but understanding.

  Thus the South Africans, borrowing from earlier experience in Chile, created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or TRC. Cochaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and made up of leaders of all races and backgrounds, the TRC was given clear instructions. Anyone who had committed a crime could be freed from prosecution by stepping before the commission and offering a full and complete confession. If a person offered only part of the story, he or she could still be charged and punished by a prosecutor for the unnamed part. Only through a full explanation of what had happened would the hand of justice be stayed.

  The process was only just being organized during 1993, and it was deeply controversial. It sounded to some like cheap forgiveness. Wiser heads pointed out that for a nation to begin anew, the secrecy needed to end. And the designers and participants understood a deeper truth: that in many cases, the families of victims wanted more than anything to know what had happened and why. Prosecution was only one tool to obtain that information. And now that South Africa was changing, many of the perpetrators were feeling troubled by their own decisions and actions. Over the months and years ahead, hundreds of men and women came forward to ask their questions, tell their stories, and bow, figuratively and literally, before the horror of what had happened. The testimony produced moments of excruciating human suffering and of remarkable courage. The process created the opportunity for those who had done something grotesquely wrong to ask their victims and their listeners, in all humility, for what they knew they did not deserve: forgiveness. It did not happen in every case, and perhaps it should not have happened in some, but when it did
, it unleashed a healing power that took everyone by surprise and often left them in tears.

  Though events continued to unfold at a blistering pace, with major decisions about the future of the country being made every day in the paper, our sojourn as a family drew to a close. I attended the memorial service for the assassinated South African Communist leader—and surprising peacemaker—Chris Hani in Desmond Tutu’s cathedral in downtown Cape Town. After the service I joined an initially peaceful march that turned ugly as the police surrounded the central square with soldiers who carried military weapons loaded with live ammunition. I walked past burning cars and smashed shop windows into a huge rally, where I found myself caught between dancing, chanting, angry young African men and the white soldiers fingering the triggers on their machine guns. I realized uncomfortably that, unlike in the movies, there would be no background music to warn me when the shooting was about to start, and that I could there and then be killed by a bullet without ever being aware of what had hit me. I gradually withdrew and found my way back to my car. Eventually the protest ended without a massacre.

  A few days later the negotiating parties took a major step and committed themselves to a firm date—April 1994—for the first countrywide elections to determine the future government and president. That move gave all the citizens a specific focus for their concerns and activism. The energy in the country shifted to making rules for the elections and analyzing the politics of various races. In the midst of all of this, Dana and I and the boys packed up and returned to the United States, at the end of June 1993. The weather in Cape Town was becoming cold and rainy as the region entered its dark winter period. Within a few weeks, however, we were sitting on the porch of an airy summer cottage in the Catskill Mountains, where we sometimes went for part of the summer. There was almost no news about South Africa, even in the New York Times. It was as though we had awoken from a long, remote, and impossibly detailed dream.