On Violence and On Violence Against Women

by Jacqueline Rose

  As the conference skirted this hallucinatory dimension, it was as if all of us, in the face of past atrocity and the ever-receding horizon of social justice, were scrambling for a language of sanity. Lindiwe Hani, who also spoke, is the daughter of Chris Hani, one of the most famous ANC activists and the much-loved leader of the South African Communist Party. He was murdered in 1993 by a hired killer, migrant Janusz Waluś, in flight from Polish Communism, in the countdown to the first democratic elections as part of an attempt to provoke a civil war: ‘an explosion of carnage and race war’, as Joe Slovo said at his funeral, ‘a massive spilling of blood and the end of negotiations’ (instead the almost immediate consequence was that the ANC secured the date, 27 April 1994, for the elections).24 Lindiwe Hani was twelve years old. In the months after his death, every time someone asked her how she was doing, she would reply ‘robotically’: ‘Fine.’ As she puts it in her 2017 memoir, Being Chris Hani’s Daughter, it took years for her to realise that ‘fine’ is an acronym for ‘Fucking Insane’.25

  Madness can be generative (which does not mean that it is a condition to be either welcomed or sought). In an attempt to confront her demons, Lindiwe Hani visited Waluś several times in prison; she had already met Clive Derby-Lewis, the ‘mastermind’ behind the killing who provided Waluś with the gun. She had, she writes, been living in a ‘shroud of death’.26 In the years after her father’s murder her first serious boyfriend, with whom she had been planning her future, died after accidentally crashing his car into a wall; her sister, Khwezi, who had heard the shooting and was the first to discover her father’s body, died of a cocaine overdose in 2001 (Lindiwe is adamant that drugs were involved even though the autopsy stated asphyxiation from an asthma attack). Lindiwe herself was in recovery from years of major addiction to alcohol and cocaine. One of the things Waluś disclosed to her, she told us at the conference, was that the summer before the killing he had gone to see his own twelve-year-old daughter, who was living in Norway, because he knew he would never see her again (in the event his death sentence was commuted when the death penalty was declared unconstitutional by the South African Constitutional Court in June 1995). Why, Hani found herself asking, in what seemed like an act of astounding generosity, should another twelve-year-old daughter lose her father as she had lost hers? ‘I would wish for five minutes with my father, so why should not this little girl have five years with hers?’

  Waluś was reapplying for parole, which had been granted and then overturned. He remains in prison to this day. His and Derby-Lewis’s applications to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for amnesty were refused on the grounds they had not shown they were acting for a political organisation and had not fully disclosed the background to their crime. Lindiwe Hani, on the other hand, accepted Waluś’s apology, even began to like him, although she was not inclined to forgive. Hatred and forgiveness would come over her in waves. ‘Don’t forget you killed my father,’ she would throw into the conversation with Waluś whenever things got too cosy – at one point, he weirdly asked permission to be able to say he was ‘proud of her’. But she did not want to ‘perpetrate the anger’. Like ‘doing of sorry’, the wording struck me with its sheer inventiveness (a state of mind can surely be perpetrated as much as any deed).

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  Where is trauma meant to house itself when the mind, like the body, in shreds or shot to pieces, is no longer recognisable, no longer bears the faintest resemblance to anything that might remotely be called home? The very persistence of horror in South Africa tells us that thinking about trauma in relation to language, circling endlessly round whether or not it can be spoken, which has tended to dominate academic discourse, is not enough. In South Africa, Nomonde Calata is famous for the wailing, almost inhuman cry she emitted at the start of the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which momentarily brought the hearing to a complete halt (Tutu asked for a ten-minute break). The cry has become iconic. Gobodo-Madikizela’s March 2017 lecture was called ‘The Cry of Nomonde Calata’. For poet Antjie Krog, who had been sent by the SABC to report on the Commission’s proceedings, the cry marked its true beginning. She felt she was witnessing the ‘destruction of language’. ‘To remember the past of this country is to be thrown back into a time before language […] to be present at the birth of language itself’ (way before a time when individual speech is even an issue).27

  We need to redraw the cartography of the mind, to venture beyond the paths on which Freud, safely and unsafely, was willing to tread. We need insane visionary moments, including the world of dream and hallucination, to be credited as part of the landscape of trauma – the psychic equivalents of ‘upsurge’ and ‘turbulence’, evocative terms used by the South African literary and cultural critic Sarah Nuttall to capture the increasing outbursts of rage and protest that are spreading across South Africa today.28 Such moments arrive unbidden, erupting from what feels like another world. Abigail Calata tells a story that when she was dating Lukhanyo but had not yet met her future mother-in-law, Nomonde, she felt the presence of Fort Calata in her bathroom. Without hesitating, she picked up the phone to tell Nomonde, at that point a complete stranger, that she had a message to give her from her dead husband: he had never intended to leave her in that way. The same night, it emerged, he had also appeared to Nomonde in a dream (a genius mode of introduction, as it turned out, for the two women). On another occasion, when Fort appeared in a dream telling Nomonde to go home, she rushed back to Cradock to find that his grave had been vandalised. Impossible links across the geographic landscape, or between people barely known to each other, these moments of cross- and inter-generational transmission will not be held to normal protocols of space and time. In the end the simplest message of the whole conference was perhaps the most far-reaching premise of psychoanalysis and also its most banal. Nothing perishes inside the body or the mind, which is why the suggestion that South Africa has left apartheid behind is as psychologically as it is politically inept.

  Allan Boesak is convinced that the political faith of Canon Calata, Lukhanyo’s great-grandfather, played a decisive role in the challenge Lukhanyo mounted to the SABC and in every political move or protest any member of his family has ever made: ‘Otherwise you would not have made that decision. Your father would not have made that decision, otherwise your mom would not have made that decision. It’s in your DNA.’29 Today epigenetics tells us that such forms of ghostly transmission, traces of history in the bloodstream, are biologically possible. Oddly, in the context of South Africa, this might be grounds for the very optimism that has so visibly faltered. In one of the best-received papers I attended, Jaco Barnard-Naudé, legal scholar and activist on freedom for sexual minorities and same-sex marriage, offered a rereading, after Jane Harrison, of the classic story of Pandora in which the evils that spill from her box are the ghosts of past wrongs unavenged and forgotten. The one item left in her box, when evil has thus been exhumed, is hope. Ghosts stalked the corridors of this conference. Perhaps its most important task was to give them room to do so.

  But it was not just the ghosts who were calling out for recognition, or the story of the Cradock Four that lingered like a body uncased. The ethos of the heroic freedom fighter and his family has also played its part in clamping down on psychic pain. Lindiwe Hani’s mother, Limpho, saw it as a slur on the family honour when she checked into rehab under her real name (owning the name in fact played a key part in Lindiwe’s recovery). At one point in My Father Died for This, Lukhanyo calls Nomonde ‘a mighty soldier of a woman’. Abigail describes her as the ‘true hero’ of the whole story.30 At the conference, Siyah Mgoduka, whose father, Warrant Officer Mbalala Glen Mgoduka, was one of many killed under instruction from Eugene de Kock, described his mother, Doreen, as ‘a better man than I could ever be’. As if, in each of these cases, lack of frailty – of ‘woman’s’ frailty – was the highest possible praise, though Siyah Mgoduka also repeated three times that, as the years have passed, he has slowly become ‘s
ofter’ as a man (Doreen forgave De Kock, who designed the bomb placed under her husband’s car; Siyah refused). By staging their dialogue for us to hear, they seemed to be demonstrating that in today’s South Africa, such barely perceptible, momentous shifts of the heart can only be spoken in front of a witness. A conversation between the two has also been made into a split-screen film, a technique which perfectly conveyed the barrier, the slowly moving closeness and distance between them (the film had one of its first screenings at the conference).31 By means of this strange format, they were summoning a symbolic ‘third’ presence into the room. For the psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin, speaking of her work with perpetrators and victims in Gaza, such a ‘third’ is the only possible basis for any non-violent form of political recognition, whereas in a direct encounter, identities tend to entrench themselves.32

  As the widows of fighters, Nomonde Calata and Limpho Hani were never allowed to show grief. ‘One does not cry for a hero,’ Nomonde was told: ‘I had to put up the face.’ Again, ‘put up the face’ feels right (as opposed to the more familiar version of ‘put on a face’). Even in the presence of her children, only one mask of unwavering courage and fortitude was acceptable. Nor has she been offered therapy, or indeed anything close. ‘I would love’, she said in conversation with Gobodo-Madikizela, ‘to have a one-to-one conversation. I want someone to listen.’ She is famous for her role in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but it was another type of listening that she was asking for here (the lack of any such follow-up is seen as one of the Commission’s most serious failings). Some time later, I discovered that Nomonde’s remark had provoked in both Eliza Kentridge and me the same wild fantasy or wish: that someone would step out of the audience to offer her their services, or at the very least guide her to someone who could.

  In South Africa, psychoanalysis came to a shuddering halt in 1949, the year after apartheid was established, with the death of its only training analyst, the Lithuanian Wulf Sachs, who had come to the country from the UK (a flourishing psychoanalytic community of South African exiles has been present in London ever since). Mark Solms and Tony Hamburger, the two figures who have done most to give psychoanalysis new life post-apartheid, both spoke at the conference. But like pretty much everywhere else in the world, and despite best efforts to the contrary – notably the Ubelele psychotherapy centre – psychoanalysis as an option remains out of reach for the many – in South Africa, the racial majority and the poor.33 ‘To establish psychoanalysis in South Africa’, Solms remarked, ‘without confronting its elite status is to create a still-birth.’

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  When Abigail Calata first heard on 27 June 2016 that Lukhanyo had released his statement on corruption at the South Africa Broadcasting Company, she was not happy. She felt she should have been consulted before he took such a momentous step in her life and in the life of their four-year-old son, Kwezi. Once she let him know her feelings, and his statement had gone viral, followed by numerous media interviews, she felt proud. From that point on, Lukhanyo involved her in every political decision that he made. But by allowing us that glimpse of anger at the start of their book, Abigail Calata briefly opens the window on a long history, one that also resonated across the conference, of wives, often themselves activists, who were nonetheless left behind while their husbands engaged in undercover work, were imprisoned, fled into exile. James Calata’s wife Miltha was a leader in her own right, an equal partner whose bravery, according to the memory of a close friend, matched that of her husband – they were awarded the Silver and Gold Luthuli medals for their part in the struggle respectively (Fort also receiving the Silver).34 But she rarely saw him because he was always on the move. After her marriage, Limpho Hani became involved with the ANC and in 1977–8 was detained for several months for her role in ferrying recruits across the border to Swaziland. But the family hardly ever saw Chris Hani. Dedicated to armed struggle, he had crossed the border and lived for long stretches of time in Zambia, Lesotho, Tanganyika (now mainland Tanzania), Bechuanaland (now Botswana), Angola and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).35 Lindiwe Hani describes how her mother raised her three daughters more or less single-handed.36 When her husband was in prison, Nomonde Calata had to scrape together a living for her family. She had been working in the canteen at Cradock Provinicial Hospital, but was sacked after being reported by a police officer who spotted her on a bus wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan ‘Free Mandela’. Her husband had never talked to her about his activities in the ANC underground.37 In this context, the killing of these men can be understood as a sinister type of continuity, enshrining an absence that was already at the core of so many of these women’s lives. ‘I do want my time,’ Nomonde stated as she sat there with her three children, ‘all the time I lived for others, for fear, for protection.’ As if the most basic feminist demand – to be able to live one’s own life, without fear, and not just for others – had been soaked in the blood of a whole people.

  Of these stranded, abandoned wives the most famous is of course Winnie Mandela, who, though barely ever mentioned at the conference, also seemed to be stalking the halls. Sometimes this was explicit: Winnie Mandela was a family friend, heroine and role model for Lindiwe Hani, someone she ‘channels’, to use her own term. ‘The Hani girls with Big Mummy Winnie at Mama’s 50th’ is the caption for one of the photographs in her memoir. But she was also there implicitly and far more awkwardly in the fact that Lukhanyo and Abigail chose Father Paul Verryn – a family friend since the 1980s, when he had visited Fort Calata in Diepkloof Prison – to write the foreword to their book. Verryn is the Methodist minister Winnie Mandela charged with paedophilia, on the basis of no evidence, as the net started to close around her infamous team of bodyguards, the Mandela United Football Club, who terrorised the township of Soweto, where she had moved after Brandfort. In 1988, members of the club kidnapped four teenage boys who were living at Verryn’s manse, including Stompie Moeketsi, also known as Stompie Seipei, who was murdered by Jerry Richardson, ‘Chief Coach’ and Winnie Mandela’s bodyguard. In 1991 she was sentenced by a Johannesburg court to six years in prison for ordering the kidnap and for her active part in the assault, commuted on appeal to a fine and two-year suspended sentence. No South African reading the Calatas’ book is likely to miss the reference.

  And yet, one of the most surprising things I discovered during my visit is that in today’s South Africa, blighted by persistent, glaring social, economic and racial injustice, the star of Winnie Mandela is once again on the rise. For many it has never waned: not for those who always considered the historic 1994 compromise between Nelson Mandela and De Klerk a betrayal which sacrificed justice at the altar of freedom and which has turned out to be a travesty of freedom for the oppressed; nor for those of the new generation who believe decolonisation was bartered for democracy. This was at the core of the student protests of the past years, the charge that the halls of learning, as bastions of white privilege, had been left intact; until, that is, as we saw in the last chapter, the Rhodes Must Fall campaign took matters into their own hands. Seen in this light, Winnie Mandela’s obduracy, her refusal to bow to the Commission, becomes her foresight. Only when Tutu pleaded with her did she offer a paltry apology, her parting gift to proceedings for which she had never hidden her contempt (a moment which, in its own way, has also become ‘iconic’).

  Like the hysteric who ushers in the birth of psychoanalysis, and who so often carries the malaise of a whole family, Winnie Mandela might then be seen as a figure who, on behalf of everyone, sported in Technicolor the unhealed sickness of the nation. With almost uncanny links to everything raised at the conference, Sisonke Msimang concludes her 2018 book The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela: ‘The past must be opened, not just to grief, but to the structural nature of racism.’ ‘Just there, in the recent past, like the body of a wounded animal hit by a speeding car, there lies the corpse of justice.’ Whatever her crimes, Msimang argues, Winnie Mandela will remain on a pedestal ‘until there is a harder, ster
ner form of justice […] until all the apartheid murderers are named on a public roster so that they are known to the world.’38 Remember Verryn in relation to the Calatas: ‘The perpetrators should meet this family face to face.’ Thus neatly and troublingly, although I imagine unknowingly, Msimang aligns her defence of Winnie Mandela with the grief at the heart of the conference and with the call for justice and accountability which is the driving premise of Lukhanyo and Abigail Calata’s book.

  The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela was pressed into my hands by Mervyn Sloman, the owner of the Cape Town Book Lounge – renowned independent bookstore and venue for cultural events – where I had been invited to talk about mothers. In the discussion, I had been asked what I made of Winnie Mandela as ‘Mother of the Nation’, a crushing idealisation, I responded, which, it can be no surprise, she failed so spectacularly to live up to. Certainly, in those days running up to the conference, I was completely unprepared for the latent affiliation – lines of potential if not actual solidarity – between the life of Winnie Mandela and the lives of the women I listened to throughout the week as they described the personal and political horrors they had experienced under apartheid. In fact Winnie Mandela has already been granted, at least symbolically, re-entry into a communal world in Njabulo Ndebele’s 2003 novel The Cry of Winnie Mandela, in which she narrates her own story after four other women, each one abandoned by her husband for a distinct reason, have offered their story to her (a huge success in South Africa, the book was republished in a new edition in 2013). One of the men is a disappeared mine worker, others leave in search of educational or marital advancement (a new white wife) or sexual freedom. The women embrace Mandela for her brazen flouting of the myth of the ever-patient, virtuous Penelope, waiting for Ulysses to return – a cruel centuries-old European hoax, Ndebele implies, against African women. The novel ends with all five women welcoming Penelope, in the modern guise of a hitchhiker, into the car in which, joyously and with fierce independence, they have taken to the road together (definite shades of the 1991 feminist road movie Thelma and Louise). ‘You personify extreme political perception unmediated by nuance,’ the third narrative voice of Mamello Molete, aka Patience Mamello Letlala, addresses Winnie, ‘nuance having been drained out of us by the blatant obscenity of apartheid, which reduced life to one long scream.’39 Impossible to know if these lines are deliberately evoking the cry of Nomonde Calata.