On Violence and On Violence Against Women

by Jacqueline Rose

  Published in 2016 to enormous acclaim, winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, Hisham Matar’s The Return recounts his search for knowledge of his father, who disappeared in 1995 and was almost definitely killed by Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi’s henchmen in the notorious Abu Salim prison massacre of dissidents in 1996. The search seems interminable, endlessly thwarted by the remnants of Gaddafi’s fallen regime – no truth commission to solve the enigma or to lay, or at least attempt to lay, the historic ghost to rest. What matters, however, is not the outcome of a search, which is in fact allowed some type of closure by the end of the book, but the process, and what it teaches him about the cunning ruse of the perpetrators, the gamble they take on the malleability of the human spirit in the face of the most corrupt, deadly forms of political power. As the news about the massacre started to dribble out into the open, the threatened grief was so intense that no one really wanted to know (unrelenting as he was in his search, Matar realises that this is no less true of himself). ‘Power’, he writes, ‘must know this […] Power must know that, ultimately, we would rather not know.’ ‘Power must believe, given how things proceed, that the world was better made for the perpetrator than for those who arrive after the fact, seeking justice, or accountability or truth.’ This was one of the critiques of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the fact that so many of the perpetrators lost nothing and got off scot-free. On this Matar is eloquent. As they try ‘to make reason of the diabolical mess’, the bereaved, the witness, the investigator and the chronicler rush every which way, ‘like ants after a picnic, attending to the crumbs.’45

  And yet, as time rolls on, and the chance of ever fully knowing what happened dwindles with every passing day, something happens to bring the thwarted, agonised past – a past on the brink of extinction – back to life: ‘the point from which life changed irrevocably, comes to resemble a living presence, having its own force and temperament.’46 For me, this is one of the most powerful evocations of what Nwadeyi described as the ‘ghosts of our very present past’. In the face of impossible knowledge, the mind retreats. But that very same mind is also the place where such knowledge finds its most palpable, endlessly beating incarnation. Matar is writing about forms of psychic endurance, for better or worse, to which no Truth Commission could possibly expect to be equal. And he is writing about the perpetrator for whom – against every fibre of our being, every impulse to justice – the world, we are shockingly told, is ‘better made’ (‘The world was better made for the perpetrator than for those who arrive after the fact, seeking justice, or accountability or truth’).

  It is this mortal gamble of the perpetrator that leads to the award-winning South Korean writer Han Kang’s Human Acts, also published in 2016, and which unexpectedly allowed me to make the link back to South Africa. I read the novel on the recommendation of South African novelist and playwright Gillian Slovo, when I told her about my visit to Cape Town and the difficulty I was having trying to think of the process of reconciliation and whether, as the protests might be taken to assert, history would judge that reconciliation had finally failed. She suggested that Han Kang’s book might be helpful on that topic in relation to the healing of the past. What followed I was utterly unprepared for. Human Acts is one of the most disturbing novels about atrocity – if not the most disturbing – that I have ever read (the Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins would be another47). It tells the story of the massacre of students in the southern city of Gwangju in the summer of 1980 at the command of Chun Doo-hwan, the army general who had replaced the dictator Park Chung-hee the previous year. Using the excuse of rumoured North Korean infiltration, Chun had extended martial law across the whole country, closed universities, banned political parties and further curtailed freedom of the press, provoking mass student demonstrations in response.

  This is a novel that spares its readers nothing – the translator, Deborah Smith, describes the immense difficulty she had faced with the constant slide between ‘corpse’, ‘dead body’, ‘dead person’ and ‘body’.48 It begins with a young boy volunteering to lay out the bodies – corpses, dead persons – for identification in the morgue. He is looking for his best friend, pretending he is one of hundreds of students to have gone missing, although, as we slowly uncover, he was there with him when he was gunned down at the demonstration and saw him die. One of the novel’s worst moments comes when a young woman, the victim of sexual torture – it is crucial that this is a novel written by a woman – is asked blandly and coercively by an academic researcher to ‘face up to those memories’, ‘to bear witness’, so she, the investigator, can write her report. The victim responds by repeating the question: ‘Is it possible to bear witness to the fact…’ before recounting in harrowing detail what was done to her.49 With this format of question and chilling counter-reply, Han Kang seems to have found the perfect literary form for reluctantly disclosed knowledge, for memory and its repression lived in the same moment.

  Slowly it dawned on me that I had misunderstood what Gillian Slovo was telling me, and that reconciliation and healing were the last thing that this novel was about: ‘What is humanity?’ ‘Some memories never heal.’ ‘“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” I forgive nothing and no one forgives me.’50 When I expressed my bafflement to her, she directed me to the open letter she had recently written, partly in response to Kang’s novel, to her mother, the anti-apartheid activist Ruth First, who was murdered by a letter-bomb in Maputo, Mozambique in 1982.51 What Han Kang’s novel had confronted her with was the perpetrator. She then recounts a story, which she heard many years after her mother’s death, of a young woman who, like First, had been detained and tortured, in this case not just mentally but also physically and for longer periods of time. Arriving in Maputo, she described her experiences to First, having sought her out, because of her unique quality of listening and the way she asked questions (unlike the blunt investigator in Kang’s novel). And then, when the woman reflected that her torturers could not have possibly known what they had done and still be human, First unhesitatingly replied: ‘They knew exactly what they were doing.’ So, I understood, the point of Han Kang’s novel, what I should have picked up above all else, was the title – Human Acts – its unflinching depiction of what human beings, in the fullest knowledge of what they are doing, are capable of. As the novel itself tells us, this is the hardest issue, not just personally but also politically, to face: the question – ‘What is humanity?’ – appears inside a book on the student movement in lines that were scored through by the censors.52 ‘You were able’, Slovo addresses her mother, ‘to tell this victim that her torturers had done what they did to her deliberately and your words helped release her from their thrall.’ This is not reconciliation, but it is a way of confronting impossible knowledge. That was, she told me, what she had seen in Kang’s novel. You have given me my lecture, I said.

  And yet, there is a thread running through the novel which opens up a different imaginative possibility, not counter to the horror, but which grows out of it, like tender shoots of foliage or blades of life poking out from the cooled lava of an atrocious history, to evoke Gobodo-Madikizela’s poetic description of the girls from Mlungisi once more. We are inside the mind and body of the dying friend, dumped from the back of a lorry with a pile of other corpses – it is here that the ambiguity of ‘corpse’, ‘body’, ‘dead person’ comes into its own – when he feels a presence, ‘that breath-soft slip of incorporeal something, that faceless shadow, lacking even language, now, to give it body.’ It is an intangible, barely imaginable, form of connection between two bodies, one dead, the other not quite alive: ‘Without the familiar bulwark of language, still we sensed, as a physical force, our existence in the mind of the other.’ ‘My shadow’s edges became aware of a quiet touch; the presence of another soul.’ This is not a flight into false lyricism or religious sentiment. It is rather a form of linkage across space, bodies and time (Nwadeyi’s ‘gho
sts of our present past’ again, or maybe ancestors on the cusp of being born). Perhaps, in a world of such cruelty, human and inhuman, the only place where we can envisage such Utopian being – the idea of really existing, without let or discrimination, in the mind of the other – is the world of the dead. Or else in the fleeting moments of recognition between those who have survived, but only if they are able to look fully at each other without the faintest intent of wiping the shadows from the other’s face: ‘As we each enquired how the other had been, something like transparent feelers reached tentatively out from our eyes, confirming the shadows held by the other’s face, the track marks of suffering which no amount of forced jollity could paper over.’53 I see these transparent feelers, the breath-soft slip, the touching at a shadow’s edge, as this novel’s answer to the rigidity of the bodies in the morgue. In such moments, only if we entertain our ghosts, will we have the remotest chance of moving forward into the next stage of historical time.

  So what, to conclude, is the tentative message of this chapter? To hold in the mind what is hardest. To acknowledge that the past has not gone away. Write it, breathe it, because we are already doing so. Stare straight in the eye of the perpetrator still at large who knows, but takes no responsibility for, what he has done (weigh on the body of the torturer, as Fanon would say). Above all do not blame those who erupt because they were burdened with an injunction to transcend history, an impossible demand that can have no place in any attempt to build a better world. In the end what I heard most loudly in the student protests was a plea to the previous generation which might go something like this: Reopen your minds, even if, perhaps especially if, it means returning to where you never wanted to tread once more. Not least because that is where we, the next generation, are still living. None of it has gone away. Such knowledge is the only way to understanding, the only path to justice.

  8

  ONE LONG SCREAM

  Trauma and Justice in South Africa

  In the afterlife of atrocity, two faces of injustice call out for redress. The student protesters of the last chapter were ‘alerting’ the nation to ongoing inequality, the persistence of racism, the failure of government to bring corruption to an end. Tearing down statues, they were felling illusions: for many, the much-loved concept of the ‘rainbow nation’ – or ‘post-racial’ world – was an affront, a mantra of hope draped over the cruel schisms of the new South Africa. Even more harrowingly, some declare, in an image resonant of apartheid atrocity, that the corpse of justice is lying in plain sight on the roadside for those willing to see. At the same time, they were presenting the authorities with a form of political anger, all the more powerful for bringing back to the surface the pain of the past. They were carrying a double burden. How to acknowledge grief and cry freedom?

  In December 2018, I returned to South Africa for a gathering of apartheid survivors and perpetrators, psychiatrists and thinkers to try and understand more deeply the cross-generational persistence of trauma, just how far and in what insidious ways it entrenches itself in body and soul. In the process I learnt how taking a political stand in the present can be a way of remembering, how healing is an interminable process that can never be taken for granted, that political and psychic struggle can be one and the same thing. To accept responsibility for the past is agonising. We should never underestimate the lengths human subjects, governments and nations, will go to turn their back on a violent history and to silence disaster.

  On 27 June 2016, Lukhanyo Calata issued a public statement on corruption at the South African Broadcasting Corporation where he had worked as a journalist for several years. He knew that it would probably result in his dismissal. The Corporation had succumbed to what has come to be known in South Africa as ‘state capture’: working in the interests of Jacob Zuma’s government, in itself allegedly prey to big business. Zuma had especially close ties to the notorious Gupta brothers who face possible extradition from the UAE to answer criminal charges in South Africa, charges which they deny. Calata had dared to speak out against the ‘despotic rule’ of the chief operating officer, Hlaudi Motsoeneng. On the day of his disciplinary hearing, he also joined a picket outside SABC opposing the Corporation’s decision not to report on a rising wave of violent ‘service delivery’ protests across the country. The aim of the protests was to secure better housing, job opportunities, municipal governance and social services, and to force the ANC government to reverse policies – far from the vision which had first brought it to power – that were manifestly failing those citizens, mainly black, who were most socially vulnerable. In fact the writing had been on the wall for Calata since February 2014 when, following Zuma’s annual State of the Nation Address, he was grabbed by the scruff of his jacket by the head of news, Jimi Matthews. Matthews told Calata not to get him ‘into shit’ and ordered him to cut positive soundbites of reactions from opposition parties to Zuma’s speech. Calata refused (even had he wished to, he could hardly have complied as no such soundbites existed). Motsoeneng was subsequently dismissed from the SABC. The resonances with the apartheid era were, however, chilling. Under the regime of P. W. Botha, the SABC had been known as ‘his master’s voice’.1

  Calata had chosen his moment carefully. The day he spoke out was the thirty-first anniversary of the 1985 state-ordered murder of the anti-apartheid activists from the Eastern Cape known as the ‘Cradock Four’ – his father, Fort Calata, Matthew Goniwe, Sparrow Mkonto and Sicelo Mhlauli. In South Africa, the killing of the Cradock Four is legendary. Its brutality – torture by blowtorch, as well as multiple stabbings – provoked a national and international outcry. The fingers on Fort Calata’s left hand were severed. He had been wearing the wedding band of his wife, Nomonde, which she had removed when her fingers became swollen during her pregnancy with their third child. This was not torture, anti-apartheid activist Allan Boesak recalled, but a ‘demonstration’.2 Most likely the attackers were from the Security Police, specifically the notorious ‘Hammer Unit’ whose members used their own personal weapons and who, by their own account, would drive into the townships ‘dressed as kaffirs, with our faces and heads blackened’.3 Sixty thousand people defied banning orders to attend the funeral, along with dignitaries from all over the world. In response, President Botha declared a national state of emergency, granting ‘complete indemnity against any civil or criminal proceedings’ to the state and all its functionaries. Lawyers working in London with the anti-apartheid United Democratic Front and the Cradock Residents Association issued a statement to alert the international community: the South African government’s failure ‘to contain the people’s anger’, they said, had ‘given rise to a new phase of terror against the people’.4 Today it is generally recognised that Botha’s move was an act of desperation that signalled the beginning of the end of apartheid.

  Lukhanyo Calata was three at the time of the murders; his elder sister, Dorothy, was ten; his younger sister, Tumani, was born a few weeks after the funeral. Though Lukhanyo grew up with no conscious memory of his father, he is convinced he became the journalist he is today as a result of years watching journalists flocking to his family home in an attempt to uncover the truth behind the killing of the Cradock Four. The full story has never been told. At the end of My Father Died for This, the remarkable book he has co-written with his wife, Abigail Calata (they took turns to write different sections), he can offer only an imaginative reconstruction of the murders. He pieces the story together from partial records, from conversations with people who had first-hand knowledge of the security apparatus, and from the inconclusive legal hearings which have prevented both the family and the nation from achieving any kind of closure on this case. At the first judicial inquest in 1989, any state involvement was denied, but in 1992 the New Nation newspaper published on its front page a copy of the ‘signal’ sent by Colonel Lourens du Plessis ordering the ‘permanent removal from society’ of Matthew Goniwe, Fort Calata (two of the Cradock Four) and Mbulelo Goniwe (another ANC activist). Du Plessis no
w says that, when he was called to Pretoria after the story broke, he had the impression that the state attorneys wanted him ‘to say what I didn’t think was the truth’.5 At the second inquest in 1994, Judge Zietsman ruled that the killers were members of the security forces but declared himself incapable, on the basis of the evidence before him, of identifying the murderer or murderers, who have never been named.6 It has become a truism of post-apartheid South Africa to say that, in order to secure the transition to democracy, the new nation opted for truth rather than justice. In the case of the Cradock Four, there has been neither.

  I met the Calata family in December 2018 at a conference on ‘Recognition, Reparation and Reconciliation’ in Stellenbosch, organised by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela at the Historical Trauma and Transformation Centre which she chairs at Stellenbosch University.7 Having served on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Gobodo-Madikizela, who we encountered in the last chapter, has worked ceaselessly over the past two decades to keep its best spirit alive.* The title of the conference gestures towards healing, but a closer glance suggests that all three of its terms touch an open wound. Any call for recognition has to start from the premise that there are things which we cannot bear to know and see. Reparation remains one of the sore points in relation to the Commission, as substantive reparations for past wrongdoing fell outside its brief (the Thabo Mbeki government effectively rejected the recommendations it did make). And what are the chances of reconciliation in conditions of rampant racial inequality which have barely diminished – some would say have worsened – since the first democratic elections of 1994? In the words of Mark Solms, psychoanalyst, neuroscientist and owner of a farm in nearby Franschhoek, who also attended the conference, the question for the white beneficiaries of apartheid is ‘how we had sort of got away with it’ (not the outcome he personally had sought as over the past seventeen years he has tried to initiate a new racially inclusive model of land ownership on the farm neighbouring his own).