A Writer's World

by Jan Morris

  But if the scholars devised it idealistically, the politicians interpreted it in expedience. For them it was a device of white supremacy. The delineated black ‘homelands’ were small and poor, and anyway more black people lived in the huge rich areas reserved for the whites, where their labour was indispensable: these people were to be deprived of all citizenship rights for ever, remaining there as convenient helots. The Grand Plan was to be upheld too, when the politicians put it into practice, by a vast and preposterous edifice of racial discrimination, legalizing the basest instincts of the bigots, and ensuring that in death as in life, in urinating as in buying a postage stamp, in boarding a bus, in making love, in writing a sonnet on a bench, black and white were to be irrevocably kept apart. As the years passed the whole project became more obviously delusory. By 1970, the year of the last census, well under half the black people lived in their own allotted territories, and today even some of the Stellenbosch theorists admit that the whole idea was an enormous miscalculation, almost a historical hoax.

  Yet it is still being laboriously implemented, as though nobody knows how to stop it, while the resentment of the blacks surges toward explosion, and the South African government, in shiny brochure and policy broadcast, insistently declare it the True Way of racial progress.

  *

  Far away beyond the Drakensberg mountains, beyond the wide pastoral uplands of the Orange Free State, so heartless in winter, so delicately flowered in spring, there stands a very different creation of apartheid: Soweto, Southwest Townships, the vast black ghetto, several segregated cities splotched into one, which supplies the labour force for Johannesburg and the gold mines of the Rand.

  There is nowhere else in the world like Soweto. It is something like a disused exhibition, something like an open prison, something like a gypsy encampment, something like a construction camp and something like a slum. With a population of more than a million – twice the size of Johannesburg itself – Soweto is one of the great cities of Africa, but it does not feel like a city at all, for it has no centre. Mile after mile, in interminable geometrical lines, curves and circles, the shabby little brick houses of the blacks extend across the treeless veld, linked by rutted mud roads, unkempt, unpainted, each section indistinguishable from the next, the whole seeming to possess no recognizable shape or limit. There is no focus to Soweto, no complex of stores and offices, no cathedral tower or television mast: it is like a haggard dream, in which one is always on the edge of somewhere, but never ever gets there. In Soweto, in the summer of 1976, began the series of township riots which have already changed everything in South Africa, giving notice, so to speak, that the great black reactor was going critical. Here the whole structure of apartheid is seen as no more than a tyrannical device, and Matanzima and his kind are branded not merely as Uncle Toms, but as traitors. The black dynamic burns furiously in Soweto now. White people may enter the township only with special permits, prominently stamped AT OWN RISK, and the security forces watch the place almost as they might watch an enemy salient on a battlefront. Deep in that shabby maze the unknown revolutionaries are at work, and the place seethes with plots and rivalries and vendettas, and crawls with police informers.

  A few years ago the Soweto blacks seemed like shadow people. They seemed to have no fervours of their own, except when they indulged in tribal dances, football matches or violent crime. In the daytime one saw them expressionless at their menial tasks in Johannesburg, at night-time they vanished altogether. Now they seem very different. They crowd uninhibitedly through the shops of Jo’burg. They say very nearly seditious things at public meetings. They riot. They visibly grope out of their poverty toward a contemporary elegance, and have already achieved, in their command of the gaudy and the surprising, an excitement of bearing beyond the range of the whites. They are beginning to seem the salt of the place, the fizz of it, providing just those elements of brilliance, fun and response that white South Africans, on the whole the least vivacious people I know, so dispiritingly lack.

  The young people of the townships are the first blacks of South Africa to achieve a revolutionary cohesion. ‘We don’t need any communists to teach us,’ as one burning young activist told me in Soweto. ‘We know what we want, and we know what to do about it.’ They are as much like Puritans as they are like Maoists – contemptuous of their elders’ servility, austere and earnest in their lifestyles. They have furiously attacked the township speakeasies, the ‘shebeens’, which have been for generations the emblems of black degradation, and they have imposed upon the townships a macabre regime of mourning for the victims of the riots. Thousands of them have boycotted school, in protest against the educational system, thousands more have escaped from the country altogether, over the borders into the independent states of Lesotho, Botswana or Swaziland. They have been imprisoned by the hundreds, beaten up, reviled, herded about like animals, tear-gassed and snatched from their homes by security police: yet in all the years of apartheid theirs has been the first group of citizens to risk all in opposing the system, and to resist institutional violence by violence in the streets.

  *

  It is not all sublime idealism. It has often been vicious. Innocent blacks have been bullied and intimidated. Children have been frightened out of school. Above all, black racialism, which for so long seemed almost a contradiction in terms, has been given an ominous new impetus.

  There was a moment in the 1930s when observers of the Indian scene realized that, though the British Empire still held all the guns, in a deeper sense the Indians had already won their struggle for independence. I think this is true in South Africa now. Though their oppressors are far more ruthless than the British ever were, already the black Africans feel like winners. They see Black Power supreme throughout most of Africa; they observe the world unanimous in their support; they realize at last that though the white South African looks powerful and important when he towers across the charge desk, bullies you from the prosecutor’s stand or floods your school with poison gas, he is not important really, nor anything like omnipotent. The White Man’s Magic has evaporated in this last segment of his empire.

  There is no missing this new black assurance. It is everywhere, in the swagger of young men in the street, in the startling outspokenness of black leaders, in the progressive collapse, absurdity by insult, of petty apartheid. ‘We will take no more nonsense,’ one young black swore to me, assuring me that he no longer even bothered to carry his pass book, once the sine qua non of black existence in South Africa, ‘no more nonsense at all.’ Even the housemaid at my hotel in Johannesburg, when I asked her how she felt about her situation in life, answered me in one conclusive word: ‘Angry.’

  The tables are turning. To the black militants the concessions already won are contemptible, and the slow relaxing of petty apartheid means nothing – it is not separate lavatories or demarcated bathing beaches that matter, but the realities of power. The blacks no longer wish merely to enter the white man’s world, but actually to take it over. The papers are full of terrorist training camps, of schoolboys spirited away for Marxist indoctrination, of border infiltrations and secret armoires. Sometimes casualty lists appear from the running conflict, misted in secrecy, being waged by the South African security forces on their northern borders, or heroes of the battle are honoured with bands, medals and patriotic addresses. Gatsha Buthelezi, leader of the 4 million Zulus, openly and with impunity calls for mass civil disobedience, and says of himself, as a man speaking not out of weakness but of strength: ‘I am the hand that my people offer in friendship, but I am also the hand they will withdraw in their anger.’ Sometimes the rioters of the townships will let a white man pass if he gives the Black Power salute; and this seems proper enough, for the most profound recognition in South Africa today is the dawning realization, among blacks and whites alike, that force majeure works both ways.

  There are still moderate, liberal blacks about, pro-white blacks even, but they begin to seem indecisive, dated people. The convic
tion of compromise lacks bite, and no fiery black evangelist has yet made the middle way, the conciliatory way, seem virile and exciting. A Christ might achieve it, but not even a Gandhi, I fear, could convince the blacks of South Africa that moderation is the best policy. The very suggestion of cooperation with whites, even the most enlightened whites, is enough to blight a reputation among the fiercest of the young black patriots.

  It is not one of your planned revolutions, organized from some central cell. It is happening organically, almost seismically, as though Nature herself is restoring a balance. In twenty years, by current trends, there will be 37 million black people in South Africa, outnumbering the whites seven to one. ‘What will happen to us then?’ replied a government official when I asked him the eternal South African question. ‘We’ll be bred into the sea, that’s what!’

  *

  Still, it is upon the Afrikaners, they of the Sacred Flame, that the whole future of South Africa depends: they hold the power still, they have the jets and the machine guns, and they alone can dictate, by opting for conciliation with the blacks or persevering with oppression, what becomes of this marvellous and miserable country. The issue is gigantic – who is going to be boss, the black man or the white? – and the Afrikaner understands it instinctively, as part of his heritage.

  Among all the tribes of Africa, the most formidable is this white tribe of the Afrikaners, who have a right to be called Africans since they have been indigenous to this soil almost as long as there have been white men living in North America. They are truly tribal people. They have their own atavistic version of the Christian god, their own distinctive mores, their own colourful language – not a very old one, it is true, having started life in the eighteenth century as a kind of kitchen Dutch, but still recognizably a tongue of its own, with a lively, growing literature and a fine lexicon of phrases like Foeitog (‘What a pity!’) or Reddingsbaadjie Onder U Sitplek (‘Life Vest under Your Seat’). They are bound by a rigid sense of kin and origin, and the concept of the Volk, which enters so many of their usages, is more than just ‘the people’ in the American constitutional sense, but is something nearer to cult or fraternity – the innermost society of Afrikanerdom is actually called the Broederbond.

  There are only 2.5 million Afrikaners. They form a very introspective community, and the development of their culture, the fostering of their history, the formation of their national purpose, have all been highly self-conscious processes. Little in Afrikaner history is haphazard. It is a history of extremes and abruptness, a constant instinct toward separateness – no blurs, no blends, no overlaps. Until now the Volk have prospered by these uncompromising techniques, and have turned all their disadvantages into success. Having been defeated by the British in war, they used the subsequent peace to turn the tables. Being vastly outnumbered by the blacks, they subdued them by sheer arrogance. Every attempt to dominate or alter their society they have fought off or sidestepped – by trekking ever deeper into the African hinterland, by starting their own business enterprises, by the calculated instrument of apartheid. They have fought their battles all alone, and so far they have won through.

  All is now at risk, because of the one great error in the Afrikaner creed. Those forces of darkness, so graphically conjured in the mysteries of the Voortrekker Monument, are not the black men after all. God did not mean it that way. The revelation is mistaken, and the conviction that Afrikaner society can survive only by the perpetual subjection of the black African is the one fatal flaw in the courageous outlook of the Volk. It has brought out the worst in them, the narrowness, the intolerance, the bigotry that goes with their patriotism and their religion. It has muddled their thinking and coarsened their merits. And though it has served them well enough during the first 300 years of their history, it is almost inconceivable that it can succeed much longer. They are in their last laager, symbolically represented in that circle of ox wagons around the monument. They have nowhere else to retreat, and they cannot fight on for ever.

  Time passes, the whole towering edifice of white supremacy sways, and apartheid proves itself to have been one of the most terrible of all historical miscalculations. Its system is cracking anyway, by the momentum of history, and the blacks are forcing their way into the white man’s world by plain force of circumstance. ‘Change’, which Afrikaner last-ditchers call a communist word, is nevertheless on every politician’s lips, for it is evident that the apparatus of racialism is doomed. Three decades of apartheid have been a tragic waste of time and life and passion. It has not worked. It is a fateful moment, a breathless moment, for nobody knows whether the Afrikaners will submit to history or defy it. Perhaps they are going to hang on after all, whatever happens elsewhere. They are unlikely to be toppled by internal revolution, however inflamed the blacks, and they may well be right when they claim that the capitalist West will save them from invasion. Besides, the spirit of laager still excites the Afrikaners, the urge to ultimate defiance, even to national self-immolation perhaps, holding the Eternal Flame while savagery, atheism, communism and barbarism burn the wagons and storm the shrine.

  But they will be defeated in the end anyway, if not by force then by the misery of it all, by the relentless threat of catastrophe which debilitates the life of the country, by the demoralizing boycott of the world, by the slow decay of their own certainties and the awful realization of error. Why, I asked an old black man once, did not Mr Vorster, the Prime Minister of South Africa, frankly admit the misjudgement of apartheid and make a fresh start while there was still time? His answer I suspect, came somewhere near the truth. ‘Because,’ he said, ‘it would make him look a fool.’

  It would make him look silly: more pertinently still, it would reveal the whole Afrikaner mystique, so full of pride and achievement, so inspired and so genuinely inspiring, to be fallible after all – as though that mystic sunshaft, one fine December noonday, were to miss the hole in the roof altogether, owing to an inaccuracy in the mathematics.

  Three decades later the blacks control South Africa. It happened without violence after all, but we have yet to see if the races will ever be truly reconciled.

  During one of my visits to the country I drove in a rented convertible to Stellenbosch University, the intellectual cradle of apartheid, where I had arranged to meet a group of intensely segregationist intellectuals. The weather was lovely, the sunshine benign, and I found those stern theorists awaiting me on the steps of their department as I drove showily into the campus with the roof down. They looked disapproving already, perhaps because my radio was blaring a hit song of the day, Cole Porter’s ‘Love Forever True’.

  In the 1980s the Cold War came to an end with the symbolical opening of the Berlin Wall, but it was not altogether an easy decade. There were troubles in the Middle East, as usual, there was a small war in the Falkland Islands – the last British imperial war. And there were the first portents of a hazy world-wide movement towards terrorism as an instrument of politics – assassinations and assassination attempts, the taking of innocent hostages and the hijacking of aircraft. I felt myself to be well out of it all, and the books I wrote took me, by and large, into more peaceable parts of the world – or in some cases, into dream-places.

  22

  On Wistful Whims: Virtual Places

  Feeling myself rather bewildered by the state of everything, and suspecting that I had never scratched below the surface of places I had written about, in the 1980s I sometimes turned to virtual places, so to speak – places that did not seem quite real in the context of the time. For example I went searching, on a wistful whim, for Anthony Trollope’s fictional cathedral city of Barchester, which I seemed to find half-reincarnated in Somerset.

  Wells

  I craved the Trollopian scene not for itself exactly, but for its myth of a Golden Age. Of course I wanted the incidentals too, the bells across the close, the fine old ladies taking tea beneath college rowing groups featuring, at stroke, their uncle the late Precentor. I wanted the mingled smel
l of dry rot and market cabbage. I hoped to catch a glimpse of the Organist and Choirmaster, pulling his gown over his shoulders as he hurried across to evensong. But like many other romantics, all over the Western world, I hungered really for the hierarchal certainty of the old England, that amalgam of faith, diligence, loyalty, independence and authority which Trollope mischievously enshrined in the legends of his little city.

  At least Wells looks impeccably the part. As one descends from the spooky heights of Mendip, haunted by speleologists and Roman snails, it lies there in the lee of the hills infinitely snug and wholesome. No motorway thunders anywhere near. It is fourteen miles to the nearest railway station. Though Wells has been a city since the tenth century, it is still hardly more than an ample village, dutifully assembled around the towers of the cathedral: and although beyond it one may see the arcane bumps and declivities of the Glastonbury plain, there is nothing very mystical to one’s first impression of the place. Its accent is homely Somerset, and its aspect rubicund.

  In no time at all I had found myself a room, low-beamed and flower-patterned, in the Crown Hotel overlooking the Market Square, where a rivulet swims limpidly down the gutter past the old town conduit: and hardly less promptly, as it happened, I found myself fined £2 for parking too long outside Penniless Porch, through whose squinted archway the great grey mass of the cathedral itself looked benignly down upon traffic-warden and miscreant alike.