Living in Hope and History (22 page)

I am incredulous when people in the outside world call us to account in the quantitative terms
they
have decided. How many houses have we built? Too few, yes, too few, we are well aware. But how many do these South Africa watchers calculate, of the thousands required by several million shack and slum dwellers, could be built in a year?

This is not a game of Monopoly, where a house is a counter you put down on a chosen square.

Do they realize that land has to be legally acquired, in relation to where people have their work-places, that electricity and water reticulation have to be installed where during apartheid they never existed, that—above all—banks have to be negotiated into providing low-cost housing loans for people who, because they were black and low-income earners, never before were eligible for bonds? These preparations are what takes up time before a brick is laid. The fact that in the region where I live eighty thousand existing houses have been connected to electricity may mean little to you, who have been taking for granted electrical power ever since you were grown enough to reach a switch; but to people who live in those eighty thousand houses, touching a switch is indeed the beginning of a new life: let there be light.

For myself, I have been troubled by some unforeseen turns of events, this year, but I have been neither disappointed nor disillusioned; it's been a year of awesome achievement, set against what preceded it for generations, here.

To maintain a healthy balance, of course, I quote Leibniz's gibe, that Descartes' Rules were ‘like the precepts of some chemist; take what you need and do what you should, and you will get what you want.'

Well, I continue to believe it shall be so.

—
1995

 

 

 

 

E
veryone who ponders the Universal Declaration of Human Rights inevitably will give particular attention to those Articles that pertain to circumstances with which he or she is personally involved. For me as a writer, Article 19—Freedom of Expression—has a special significance. But this is not a professional privilege that seeks exclusive protection: literature is one of the most enduring means by which ideas cross frontiers and become universal, but freedom of expression, to impart and receive information ‘through any media', is the first condition of freedom in civilised governance. Suppression by censorship, banning, imprisonment, and even edicts of death continue to exist in many countries, imposed by both secular and religious authorities. Article 19 established these means as a primary contravention of everyone's birthright to read, to listen, to regard, and speak out.

Article 26 is fundamental to Article 19: its Clauses 1 and 2
declare: ‘Everyone has the right to education', ‘Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality'. Freedom of expression is an empty phrase unless education equips every individual with freedom of the word, the ability to read and write. Although the right to literacy surely is implied in Article 26, it is not specifically named. I believe it ought to be. This Article brings the hope of justice to the millions excluded—by ignorance which is no fault of their own—from participation and benefit in the making of our world.

For me, the most important Article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has no number, is not an Article at all. It is a paragraph of the Preamble. ‘Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to
rebellion against tyranny and oppression
, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law.' (My italics).

I have lived through a time in my own country, South Africa, when this ‘last resort' compelled the majority of the people to turn to rebellion, first in the form of civil disobedience and passive resistance and finally in the form of armed struggle, against tyranny and oppression that denied them human rights. I have seen how to be compelled to take this last resort not only brings tragic self-sacrifice and suffering to those who assume the burden, even though freedom is finally achieved as a result, but has long-term consequences which threaten the democracy so attained.

When people are deprived over years of any recourse to the provisions of civil society as a means of seeking redress for their material and spiritual deprivations, they
lose the faculty
of using the law when, at last, such recourse is open to them. The result of this conditioning now is fashionably called ‘the culture of violence'; an oxymoron, for culture implies enlightenment, to aim towards attaining the fullness of life, not its destruction.

The tactics of a desperate liberation struggle are all that many people know how to employ. In my country, students dissatisfied with the performance of their teachers retaliate by destroying the equipment of their own schools. Taxi-bus owners, in dispute over transport routes each considers his exclusively, attack one another at gunpoint. Workers forcibly occupy managers' offices and destroy plants as protest against unsatisfactory working conditions and low pay. It takes time and education in, understanding of, the protection of human rights, for a formerly oppressed people to learn to use this protection through the means provided, in civil societies, by the law. Students had no structures to deal with their grievances, before. The means of settling disputes by forming a code for the transport industry was not open to, offered no peaceful resolution to those who had no civil rights of any kind. The denial of the right to form trade unions, over many years, meant that workers' violent reactions to their problems were the only ones that brought results in the political liberation struggle. The paths by which people have the right to be protected by the rule of law, not persecuted by its wrongful application, have to be learned. It is in this that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is and shall remain the essential document, the touchstone, the creed of humanity that surely sums up all other creeds directing human behavior if we are to occupy this world together now and in the twenty-first century.

—
1997

 

 

 

 

T
here is nothing more presumptuous than a foreigner telling other people what is wrong with their country. I know how I react when pundits who are not South African make flip judgments of our problems on the basis of the slim experience of visits to our country. This does not mean that a reasoned, critical look is not useful; just that the onlooker understands not most, but only half of the game. So it is right that I provide my modest credentials for an opinion on race relations in the U.S.A. in contrast to race relations in my own country—relations I have been part of since birth.

I have visited America once a year or more since the 1950s, usually only for several weeks but twice for several months, spent in New York and Cambridge, with forays to the Midwest, the West Coast, and the South. I began in the McCarthy era and have gathered my impressions through the eras of Martin Luther King, Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Andy Young, Louis Farrakhan,
and your roster of presidents up to the present incumbent. In my early visits as a young writer I mixed in an easy fashion with a good number of my peers, black men and women whose interests in the arts and in Africa coincided with mine. I remember parties in Queens, welcoming visits to homey apartments, jazz evenings in Harlem not as a gaping tourist but as an individual sharing the leisure diversion of new-found friends themselves. These were not people with big names; all of us were starting out.

As time went by, on subsequent visits to the U.S., I found I was meeting fewer and fewer black Americans. Those that I did meet—and much enjoyed—were Du Bois's Talented Tenth: Harry Belafonte, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Jamaica Kincaid, Randall Robinson, Toni Morrison, Henry Louis Gates and Cornel West, for example.

While housed in an apartment adjacent to a student residence at Harvard, in 1995, when I gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, almost the only black Americans I met were through the efforts of Skip Gates. The Talented Tenth again. At the homes of my white American friends, people to whom colour truly means nothing, I now find I meet blacks from Africa, but rarely a black American. Whites from Africa who came from active anti-racist backgrounds, and now live in the States, have no black men and women among their friends. Why? A paradox, since back home in South Africa they mixed in tough friendship with blacks, and were totally accepted by them, under conditions that made this difficult, to say the least. The reason seems to be that black Americans do not want to mix with whites, however much compatibility is beckoning to be recognized. The old, old answer I think not only survives but seems to have grown in bitterness, for reasons (of economics and opportunity?) Americans know best: when you have been so
long rejected, your collective consciousness tells you that the open door, open arms, have come too late. You assert your self-respect only by saying ‘no'. No no no: I read that playwright August Wilson wants black theatre for
blacks only
—black writers, actors, audiences. If even the doors of the arts are slammed shut, how shall people find their common humanity? And how to live together, in the end, without it? This theatre is Greek tragedy where wars and violence become the only means of communication, the curse of gods on humans.

Why does self-respect, identity, rest on this ancient and terrible tragedy of white rejection of black?

One has to look at race relations in South Africa for an explanation of the U.S.A.'s realities. Over three hundred and fifty years of oppression and racist exploitation unequalled in place or time, black South Africans nevertheless have had their own earth under their feet. Despite neglect in official education, their languages have remained intact as mother tongues. Their names are their own ancestral names. Nothing—neither cruel apartheid denigration nor liberal paternalism—has destroyed their identity.
They know who they are
. In relations with whites, now that everyone is equal before the law, they do not have to say ‘no' in order to assert pride of identity and self-respect. It is for the average white to discover, earn, and affirm a valid identity in a society with a black majority. There are those whites to whom this is anathema, but surprising numbers who followed the white flock in racism before are making the adjustment. What matter that the process begins as pragmatism. Groups of extremists who cannot adjust will die out with the present middle-aged generation, I believe. And as for those whites who threw in their lot with the black struggle—they are recognized as brothers and sisters and are active in all areas of reconstruction: they are long accustomed to contributing under the direction of blacks.

Unemployment, inequalities in employment opportunities are a heritage of the hopelessly inadequate, segregated education of blacks under apartheid. There is frustration, over this, among blacks, but at the same time black empowerment is a reality moving both at government level (in the civil service and police, more slowly than one would wish, but there are valid reasons in the problems of transition) and the new black private sector. There, black empowerment is moving boldly into the white enclaves round the stock market. If the black entrepreneurs are in some way a home-grown product out of black poverty, like the ‘Tough Love Crowd' of successful black American capitalists, the neo-conservatists who advocate unsparing self-criticism as the way to empower blacks, the resemblance ends there. Black South Africans ‘climbing the corporate ladder', because of their records of active participation in the liberation struggle, including political detention and imprisonment in many cases, can rightfully maintain their brotherhood with the masses, and defy any questioning of their motives in empowering their people through infiltration of capitalist enterprises within a state where capitalist exploitation was allied with racism. While some say they are betraying the revolution, others see these moves as a necessary phase of struggle: first came the political kingdom, now comes the economic one, to be fought, inevitably, on white economic supremacy's home ground. Lack of capital inhibits these entrepreneurs; they have to borrow finance from whites, but are alert to the way the balance must be precariously held, the frontier of black ownership must be pushed hard and continuously against shareholdings that still entrench white economic power.