On Violence and On Violence Against Women

by Jacqueline Rose

  In fact the Calata story, as told in My Father Died for This, would suggest that, in the transition to democracy, truth was not the alternative to justice, but just as much a casualty. The ‘once glorious liberation movement of the ANC’, Lukhanyo concludes in a final bitter chapter, ‘A Life Betrayed’, ‘has not honoured the pain of our people in its politics’. Interviewed by Lukhanyo in September 2017, John Jeffrey, the current Deputy Minister of Justice, admitted that turning a blind eye to the murder of the Cradock Four and others like Steve Biko (Bantu Stephen Biko) ‘was the price that had to be paid’. Partly for budgetary reasons, he explained, there would be no further investigation, as he had to prioritise present-day crimes. Such frank admissions are surely rare, most likely drawn out of Jeffrey as his way of honouring Lukhanyo Calata as his father’s son. Even those who see the forfeit of criminal justice by the Commission as a historic error, or who argue, in the face of that critique, that amnesty was the only way of averting civil war, do not put it quite like this. For Allan Boesak, old comrade and family friend, there can be no doubt that the Cradock Four would have been part of the secret negotiations between the ANC and the apartheid leaders: ‘The generals and architects of apartheid had negotiated themselves out of murder.’ This brings the case of the Cradock Four crashing into the present. ‘The perpetrators’, Father Paul Verryn writes in his foreword to the book, ‘should meet this family face to face.’ ‘I don’t know’, Boesak told Calata, ‘how any leader in the ANC can look your mother in the eye, without feeling they must be damned to hell for what they did and continue to do … How can people walk through this country, how can we walk our streets, how can we walk through our townships and not see the blood still on the soil.’8

  Calata devoted a central part of My Father Died for This to his great-grandfather Canon James Calata, president of the Cape ANC and National Secretary General from 1936 to 1949, who famously brought his politics to the pulpit and was central in making Cradock the politically conscious and active community for which it was still being punished in the early 1990s (he was also a dedicated musician who made it part of his politics to infuse the harsh early years of apartheid in the 1950s with song). Fort, James Calata’s grandson, was named after the Old Fort Prison where James was imprisoned for treason in 1956. The book feeds the voices from the past through the new generation, as a way of enacting its core belief – one shared today by many across South Africa – that the past has not been assuaged and that the present dispensation or social order is a form of treachery. South Africa has been transformed, above all, legally and constitutionally, but the need for vigilance is unending as aspects of the apartheid era are starting to repeat themselves. In what must be a deliberate allusion to the Cradock Four and the Gugulethu Seven (another group of ANC activists, killed by the security forces in March 1986), the SABC protesters have come to be known as the ‘SABC8’. Having been dismissed by the Corporation for ‘disrespect’ and for undermining ‘the authority’ of its management, they were all finally reinstated on appeal (bar one on a technicality, although on appeal the Corporation had to pay his legal costs). ‘How’, Lukhanyo asks on the opening pages of the book, do the former leaders of the liberation movement ‘watch as the rights and freedom [which] the “Cradock Four” were brutally murdered for are systematically being undone?’9

  As the SABC story makes clear, freedom is indivisible, meaningless without freedom of expression and of knowledge. By refusing to broadcast the protests, the Corporation was trying to render silent and invisible the fault lines in post-apartheid South Africa (another historic instance of the violence of those in power taking cover from the light). The picket outside the Corporation was organised by the Cape Town advocacy group Right2Know. Silencing social protest and not naming the state functionaries who killed the Cradock Four are reverse sides of the same coin (truth and social redistribution are not bargaining chips to be weighed against each other in the scales). Both are acts of censorship, sinister forms of quietism, negating the mind’s capacity for judgement in a bid to make the world feel easier with itself. The year before the conference, I had attended a public lecture given by Gobodo-Madikizela at the Gordon Institute of Performing and Creative Arts at Cape Town University, in which she used the word ‘perpetrators’ to refer to the beneficiaries of the current economic regime. Barely before she had finished speaking, a member of the Helen Suzman Trust, the South African NGO for human rights, rose to her feet to object. But Gobodo-Madikizela’s allusion had been neither casual nor sloppy. She knows more than most what a perpetrator looks like. Outside South Africa, she is best known for her book of interviews with Eugene de Kock, the apartheid death squad chief who was called ‘Prime Evil’ by his own men, and who she believed was at least partly rehumanised by their encounter.10 Naming today’s beneficiaries as ‘perpetrators’ was a way of bringing violently to the surface, with deliberate provocation, I imagine, the failure and corruption of South Africa’s present social order. ‘To insist that the public should not see the effects of the anger of service delivery protests,’ writes Verryn, ‘but should somehow be protected from what our reality is, is a denial of our fundamental right to know.’11 This too has its historical echo. On the night of the killing, Fort Calata and his comrades would almost definitely have been transported to the notorious municipal training college called uMtombolwazi, which means ‘the fountain of knowledge’.12 The title of the book – My Father Died for This – is ironic. Underscore ‘This’, add a question mark, and its despair becomes palpable.

  * * *

  It felt both strange and appropriate that such a conference should be held in Stellenbosch, whose resonance in South African history could not be more different from that of Cradock. For a long time, Cradock was a small and relatively poor service centre for the surrounding white-owned farms, before becoming a pivot of black migration in the face of forced removals and a by-word for sustained political agitation and resistance to the apartheid regime. Cradock is recognised as the ‘Cradle of the Freedom Charter’, an idea first mooted at an ANC conference hosted there in 1953 (in fact its history of political resistance to racial injustice is generally dated back way before, to the arrival in the town of Canon James Calata in 1928).13 Today unemployment in Cradock is above fifty per cent, poverty is endemic, especially in the squatter camps that ring the townships, and education is underfunded as black residents who can afford it send their children to formerly whites-only schools.14 Stellenbosch, on the other hand, is a fiefdom of Afrikaner and, increasingly, expatriate wealth. Nestling in the heart of vineyard country, the town has an aura of unreality. Chic cafes and restaurants, with mainly white English- or Afrikaans-speaking clientele, spill onto the pavements of streets lined with stores selling fine art and jewellery, mohair scarves and garments, handbags made of antelope. African goods hover in dark recesses or are cluttered on stands as you pass. As Gobodo-Madikizela pointed out in her opening remarks at the conference, squatter homes, mainly built today by the young generation, are growing in number and creeping closer and closer to the vineyards of Stellenbosch. Needless to say, the next generation of Africans were not meant to be living in squatter homes.

  At one of these vineyards, Lanzerac, described on its website as ‘the ultimate experience in the Cape Winelands’, a celebration was held on the last night of the conference to mark twenty years since the publication of the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and to honour Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his wife, Leah Tutu, both in attendance along with commissioners, the conference delegates, activists from Ireland, and the Calata family. Anyone who wanted could have their photo taken standing behind Desmond and Leah Tutu in their wheelchairs, who generously smiled for the camera, even though there was no reason why they should know who many of us were.

  Earlier in the week, we had gathered in the evening at Dornier, another vineyard, where Albie Sachs, ANC freedom fighter and retired justice, who played such a key role in drawing up the new Constitution, gave an impromptu s
peech on the hillside in the fading light. He reminded us why ‘soft vengeance’, as he himself had coined the term – the achievement of a non-racial democracy – had had to be the priority, at the same time as he recognises the harsh, unresolved, injustices confronting the nation today.15 Sachs is an eternal optimist. Perhaps that is why the beautifully incongruous landscape and his speech did not finally jar. He defends the Constitution, fiercely critiqued for failing to deliver its promise, as an ‘activist Constitution’, which now demands a ceaseless struggle to ensure that its clauses on everything from non-discrimination to redistribution of land and resources are put into effect. Drawn up by 490 people – mostly black, many of whom had been in prison – it was far from the stitch-up between de Klerk and Mandela that it is often reputed to be.16

  Way beyond the remit of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Constitution had called for the prosecution decades later of a policeman who had covered up the murder of anti-apartheid activist Ahmed Timol in 1971, and for any prosecutions dampened by political interference to be resumed, although this clearly did not happen in the case of the Cradock Four.17 Above all, Sachs describes how the new dispensation is demanding radical changes in the practice and spirit of the law: the ‘interpretative dance’ it initiates, the challenge to traditional modes of legal reasoning (all this is the ‘agony of law’).18 In a famous 2004 judgement – Port Elizabeth Municipality versus various occupiers – Sachs, writing for a unanimous Constitutional Court, ruled against the eviction of fifteen African families squatting on vacant ground close to an upmarket suburb of the city, on the grounds that the task of the court was to introduce ‘grace and compassion into the formal elements of law’.19

  But it was above all the university’s history that made the location of the conference in the Theology School of Stellenbosch so meaningful for our theme. Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid, had been a theology student at the university in the 1920s. He was unable to join the School of Theology itself because the minister of his home town, Brandfort, with a foresight of which he can hardly have been aware, felt unable to provide the requisite statement on his suitability (Brandfort would later become famous as the town to which Winnie Mandela was banished and placed under house arrest from 1977 to 1986). After a few years studying in Europe and the US, he returned to Stellenbosch in 1928 as a professor, first of applied psychology and psychotechnics (sic), then of sociology and social work. By 1937 he had left to pursue a career in politics, becoming editor of the Afrikaner nationalist newspaper Die Transvaler and committing himself to the Nationalist Party.

  Prime Minister of South Africa from 1958 until his assassination in 1966, as Minister of Native Affairs before that, Verwoerd had been responsible for some of apartheid’s most inhuman laws: the Pass Laws of the 1950s, the 1953 Reservation of Separate Amenities Act and the 1953 Bantu Education Act whose purpose, by his own account, was to ensure that blacks only had enough education to work as skilled labourers (he famously described apartheid as ‘good neighbourliness’). Not until May 2015, in response to the Rhodes Must Fall student protests, was a large plaque honouring Verwoerd removed from the campus.

  It is this university to which Gobodo-Madikizela’s Historical Trauma and Transformation Centre has recently moved from the University of the Free State. Since 2006, the Centre has hosted a conference every three years on its topic in increasingly sombre mood, apart from 2015 at the height of the student protests. Not quite singlehandedly – the feeling is of the widest imaginable co-operation of disparate voices – she has set herself the task of trying to understand the persistence of historical pain, the cross-generational psychic legacy of apartheid. The space felt as fragile as it was resolute. If I was there to present my work and thoughts on these matters, the stories told over the five days of the conference by those still living the aftermath soon established that thinking was not enough. Not that ‘feeling’ will do it either, a term deeply suspect in this context where expressions of empathy – ‘I feel your pain’ – can be the best pretext for doing nothing.

  Everyone was friendly. The project of understanding and transformation was held in common. Some of the most famous dignitaries of the anti-apartheid struggle mingled and shared platforms with young activists and students, treating them as the comrades and friends that they clearly were. I never felt I was not included, even when a black caucus was called to give the Africans and African-Americans attending the conference more room for their own collective voice. And yet, one reason this conference was different from any other academic event I have ever attended was the way it pushed in your face suffering which was meant to be over and done (trauma studies made flesh). Whether to do so, whether giving and continuing to give a voice to a family such as the Calatas can be redemptive, was a question the conference raised but did not pretend to resolve.

  Perpetrators and the sons and daughters of perpetrators were welcome and given the space to speak – unsurprisingly given Gobodo-Madikizela’s experience with De Kock. Hendrik Verwoerd’s grandson, Wilhelm Verwoerd, a political philosopher also based at Stellenbosch, has loudly disowned his grandfather’s legacy to become an ANC supporter and social activist working with former combatants in Northern Ireland who are now advocates for peace (he supported and was present at the removal of the plaque honouring Verwoerd). To his family – his own father proudly collects the memorabilia of the illustrious Hendrik’s legacy – Wilhelm is a bloodline traitor to the dead. In his presentation, he used the vocabulary of ‘thick relationships’ to designate the pressure on him to embrace his repellent family history and the effort of repudiation he has had to make. ‘I don’t take for granted’, he said about talking in public, ‘that I will be able to speak’ (this did not feel like special pleading or pathos but a statement of fact). The overriding question for him is what whites ‘are willing to do by way of white work?’

  This was the question that pretty much every white person attending the conference had to ask of themselves. Poet and artist Eliza Kentridge, also present, is the daughter of the leading anti-apartheid lawyer Felicia Geffen, who died in 2015 (her father is Sydney Kentridge, who defended Nelson Mandela in the 1956 Treason Trial). In the middle of her poetic grief-sequence, Signs for an Exhibition, a voice pronounces in a capitalised one-liner: ‘YOU ARE NOT FIT TO TOUCH THE HEM OF AFRICA.’20 Unlike other moments in the poem, it does not seem here as if this is the voice of the mother speaking to her daughter, but the daughter, punishingly, addressing herself. When I look back on the conference, in fact pretty much whenever I write about or visit South Africa, it is a version of this voice that I hear resounding, or that I think should be resounding, in my own head.

  Articulate, poised, Verwoerd made a stark contrast to Stefaans Coetzee, one of the bombers of the Worcester shopping mall in 1996, who came across as a wrecked man. Four people died in the blast and sixty-seven were injured, many seriously. Coetzee had been a member of the white Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (‘Afrikaner Resistance Movement’) and an admirer of ‘Wit Wolf’ Barend Strydom, who in 1988 massacred seven black people and injured more than a dozen others at Strijdom Square in the centre of Pretoria. (A few weeks earlier he had randomly killed a black woman in an informal settlement in De Deur, outside Johannesburg, to test his resolve.) Coetzee had felt unable to accept the new ANC government: ‘I was filled with hatred and I still don’t know why.’ He was seventeen at the time.

  In 2016, Coetzee ran the Comrades Marathon in KwaZulu-Natal with the number 67 – the number of the injured – tattooed on his arm (at the end of the run, he handed his medal to one of the victims). Before he spoke, we were shown a film clip in which, head bowed, he muttered compulsively ‘I apologise.’ A failing sound system gave the impression of someone more or less talking to himself. But ‘saying sorry’, he also insisted, was not enough: ‘There must be doing of sorry.’ His suggestion might usefully be communicated to the killers of the Cradock Four, who have faced neither accountability nor justice. ‘Our theology’, he
stated from his time deep within the Christian far right of the country, ‘taught us a cheap form of forgiveness.’ Only legislation, he suggested, will enforce responsibility. Asked by a member of the audience if he had found love – a brutally intrusive question which also felt like the question we all wanted to ask – he replied that he takes humility, patience and friendliness as his ethos of love from the Bible, but that marriage was impossible as he was not the kind of guy that any woman would ever want to introduce as her boyfriend.

  Can you touch a perpetrator, or their descendants? Several people who I spoke to after Wilhelm Verwoerd’s session said that, moved as they were, they could not bring themselves to shake his hand (an odd idea in itself as there had been no hand-shaking at the end of any of the other sessions I had attended). The day after she touched the hand of De Kock, Gobodo-Madikizela woke up to find that she could not lift her right forearm, which had gone completely numb, ‘as if my body were rejecting a foreign organ illegitimately planted’. At their next meeting, De Kock too seemed panicked after the physical contact as though, she thought, he were struggling to split off from his body his ‘killer hand’.21 The vocabulary – frozen limbs, splitting – makes more than a gesture to the language and history of psychoanalysis which began with the case of hysteria of Anna O, the patient whose arm froze into the petrified shape of a snake as she sat with it wrapped round the back of her dying father’s chair; while terms like splitting, scotomisation or derealisation (mental self-blinding), which were discussed in Chapter Five, slowly crept into Freud’s late vocabulary as he began to confront minds whose only recourse in the face of mental pain was to take complete flight from themselves.22 No surprise that such a conference should find itself skirting the worst of psychic trouble – from hysterical paralysis to psychotic modes of defence. In her presentation, Cathy Caruth, a leading figure in the study of trauma, seemed to be shifting her ground, away from trauma as a story that defies representation – an idea which not uncontroversially has almost become orthodoxy – to trauma as a tale which shatters the very basis of human communication because there is no one either inside or outside the head to address, no one there to listen. In perhaps his best-known essay, written in 1959, W. R. Bion, one of the first psychoanalysts to bring psychoanalysis into the world of psychosis, called this ‘attacks on linking’.23