The Masque of Africa (33 page)

Just beyond the dining room was a big room with upholstered chairs: the sitting room, clearly. A sliding glass door was open, and a cool winter wind blew in. The glass door looked out on to the inside of the rock garden, where some men were weeding and some were using water-hoses. Without this watering the garden would have been dry, like the rest of Johannesburg.

We sat with the man who had arranged the meeting, and this simple act of waiting gave a regal touch to Mrs. Mandela when she appeared, quite modest, soft in body, in a grey trouser suit, with her famous wig and with pearls around her neck and wrists. It was hard not to be affected by her, seeing her close, a woman whom one had seen in countless photographs, and in varying moods, a woman to some extent bypassed now by the great events that had come to South Africa.

She was still full of political passion, still close to the fears she felt in the bad times.

“You have no idea what the name Mandela meant. It meant imprisonment and interrogation. This was a period where people vanished or were killed by the security forces for being members of the ANC. The greatest danger was that the leadership would perish in prison, and that people would get disheartened and lose faith. So I exposed myself, and did it quite deliberately. I had by then lost all fear. When you undergo every possible humiliation or torture there is nothing left. You lose all fear. One night they just came and threw all my things in a van, and I was banished to a desolate place for nine years.”

She used the banishment and the remoteness to recruit people and to send them out of the country for training.

It was in Soweto in 1976 that the revolution became critical. “This is where it began, and I still live here. I cannot dream of leaving my people and going to live in a grand suburb.”

She was referring obliquely to the larger-than-life statue of Mandela that had been put up in a rich Johannesburg square. She thought it was a “foolish” statue; and the day I went to see it two white children were playing on the chunky feet.

She said, “You must remember that the Mandela who went in”—went in: went to jail—“was a revolutionary, and the Mandela who came out was preaching peace and compromise. In fact, the statue should have been here in Soweto, where it all began and where he lived. The way to dilute a person is to commercialise him, and they have. The man who went to prison would not have allowed this commercialisation or being a brand name for a Foundation. My grandchildren are deeply hurt by all this commercialisation, and it is an albatross round their necks.”

The greater hurt was the “compromised” freedom that had come to South Africa. “I feel that we were short-changed. It was a freedom based on compromises and concessions, and that is what Mandela accepted. Black economic empowerment is a joke. It was a white confidence measure made up by local white capitalists. They took malleable blacks and made them partners. But those who had struggled
and had given blood were left with nothing. They are still in shacks: no electricity, no sanitation, and no chance of an education.”

When she spoke Mandela’s name she didn’t use the first name, Nelson; and she had two distinct ways of enunciating the name Mandela. Mandela the revolutionary was pronounced in one way; the later Mandela was pronounced in another way.

She said, “I felt very bad when he went to get the Nobel Prize with his jailer De Klerk. Why did he go with the oppressor in tow? De Klerk had done nothing to release Mandela. Time dictated that it was necessary to release him, and there was always the promise of great violence to come if things had carried on as before.”

We talked about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This was meant to heal the racial divisions in the country, but Winnie Mandela (and others) were scornful. She thought it was especially hard for black people, who had suffered so much, to appear before that Commission and condemn themselves for resisting.

She said, “It should be an individual process and not forced on a society. I think it is a terrible insult to women and men who sacrificed their lives for removing apartheid. They had to go and account for their actions. Not many people know what it was like living under that regime day in and day out. What they forget is that for over four decades black people had lived as non-people. The abnormality of racism had become a normal reality for them. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was not a realistic idea. It opened up wounds that could not heal. You learned about atrocities and the method and means of your loved one’s death. How and where they were killed. What was done to them and their bodies. How can you forgive or forget something like that? Bishop Tutu came up with this fairytale-like concept. When Tutu came to see me I said I was not going to say sorry so that everyone should feel good, and in my case I was not the least bit sorry for what I did. I told him that he and the other Commissioners were only sitting there in my living room because of people like me. It was our struggle, what we had done and had been ready to do, that
gave us this freedom. Tutu turned all this into some sort of religious confession, and he should know that people who come to church and confess readily go out and do exactly the same. So much for confession, but then peace throws up heroes like Tutu.”

It occurred to me then, thinking of her long life and all that she had lived through, to ask how much had survived in her of her tribal Xhosa culture.

I was astonished by her reply, and her passion.

She said, “I am defined by my culture and I know that I am from Xhosa land. I know that I am an African, and we know what to do from our grandmothers. The advent of European culture has affected our people, but our men still go to initiation schools. In my case it is a personal choice, and I will give you an example. If something is not going well for my children or grandchildren, I will go home to the graves of my ancestors and ask them for their help. We believe that the ancestor works with God.”

When she was a girl she thought she would have liked to be a doctor. But she didn’t know what it meant, and the ambition fell away. “Now you have affluent blacks who send their children to posh white schools. They want their children to have the kind of education they dreamt about, and why not?”

So she was content?

“When I see my grandchildren I feel like a billionaire. There is nothing like it. But then when I am alone in my bedroom I think about being in death row and the long solitary confinement they put you in to break your spirit. The brain recalls everything.”

N
OT FAR
from this house of Winnie Mandela’s there was a monument or memorial which I had been told I should see. It was the memorial to Hector Pieterson, a twelve-year-old schoolboy who, with nineteen others, had been shot dead in June 1976 during a protest in Soweto against the imposition of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in township schools. This would have been part of the
great 1976 uprising in Soweto, the tide-turner Winnie Mandela had talked about.

At the back of the memorial was a stall selling animal skins. I was sorry to see it. I thought this trade had been outlawed in South Africa; the zebra skin seemed very white, as though it had been washed in bleach or some fierce detergent.

The memorial itself was an affair of dry-walling and water slipping into a pool: the standard metaphors of this kind of memorial. It would have meant nothing without the blown-up newspaper photograph of the death of Hector Pieterson: the dead or dying boy being carried in the arms of a young man, his distraught sister walking beside them. As it happened, she was there that morning, talking to a group of overseas visitors; and when she was done with them she came to us, a woman in middle life, thirty-three years older than in the photograph, ready to re-live the incidents of that day.

Even with the animal skins in the background it was intensely moving; and yet the memorial seemed a passing thing, wasteful of space; the photograph, its centre piece, seemed destined to fade; and I wondered how much longer this memorial to real pain would last. It was only seven years old, and had already been vandalised more than once by local children, to whom its architectural metaphors meant nothing. Elsewhere in Soweto, outside a café, the newspaper photograph had been rendered quite effectively in sculpture, without comment; that seemed more likely to last.

I
N
S
OUTH
A
FRICA
, with its many groups, its many passions, its abiding tensions, the visitor, seeking a necessary point of rest, moves from group to group, saying, rather like a Zen student: “Not this, not this.” It is the method in small of Rian Malan’s great book,
My Traitor’s Heart;
but the division in his heart—an Afrikaner for nine generations—is the basic and bloody division between black and
white. The book begins with a brief and incomplete account of an eighteenth-century ancestor who, in defiance of law and custom, runs away with a slave woman. When this ancestor reappears he has no slave woman beside him; more than that, he has become a complete white leader. The writer can give no reason; the records give none; there is no story of the life of the ancestor with his slave lover. The whole thing is a mystery; and
My Traitor’s Heart
suggests, but only suggests, that the writer’s waverings have this quality of old mystery.

This unusual back-and-forth method, of autobiography and reportage, works because Rian Malan is a master of landscape and a master of narrative, with a gift of living language that bubbles up from a full heart and an active mind. But a book is a book; it has narrative needs. The back-and-forth method will not take a book through to the end; it needs some kind of resolution. The reader has to be sent away with a feeling of purpose, of something achieved. Rian Malan is enough of a writer to understand this. The bulk of the book took two years to write; but the last few pages took six months. Language wouldn’t have been a problem; the writer’s worry would have been the resolution of the material he has laid out, as big a problem in his book as in real life.

When we talked about things he said, “This is a history of victims. There are no real heroes aside from Mandela, who suffered nobly. There is no one who will spell it out. Apartheid is over, and you have the abyss before you, and the only thing that will get you out is work, work, and work.” He was not an admirer of Winnie Mandela’s; but I thought this idea of work (which was also Joseph Conrad’s) would have coincided with hers. (From
Heart of Darkness:
“Their talk, however, was the talk of sordid buccaneers: it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage; there was not an atom of foresight or of serious intention in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem aware these things are wanted for the work of the world.”)

Rian Malan said, “I am obsessed with what came after apartheid. One legacy of apartheid is that this is the only country where the
economy works and there are solid skyscrapers on the skyline. The rest of Africa is such a mess. If these African countries want to see how it works they should look at South Africa.”

So
My Traitor’s Heart
ends with a parable (the author actually uses the word). It is the story of a white (or English) couple who seek through a life of work and sacrifice in a desolate and heartbreaking landscape to get to the heart of Africa (if it can be put like that). Nothing in Rian Malan is straight, however, and this parable of apparent triumph is actually a story of a tragedy, of two wasted lives; but Rian Malan, while acknowledging that, in his unbending way rises above his story, and suggests that this might be a way ahead for white South Africa: a place where whites have no guarantees.

The couple in his parable are Neil and Creina Alcock. They move to a piece of church land on the boundary of white South Africa and they begin to practise there the simple, machineless agriculture that might attract Africans. It is a terrible piece of land. It will never—like parts of white farmland—look like central California. It is rocky and arid, and is liable to repeated drought that can wipe out the work of years. The land carries too many people. It is also full of borderland hate: white for black, and all the unreasoning hate—often blazing up into full-scale war—that the Zulu factions have for one another. Still, Neil and Creina work this unpromising land until the church (fighting its own war, and unhappy with Creina for giving birth-control pills to African women) asks them to leave. They have the good fortune to get a piece of land, sixty miles away, from a South African corporation, and they continue their work there.

Their first idea had been to start a cattle co-operative. Pasturage could then be controlled by segments in this badly eroded land and the grass could revive. But there was a tradition of cattle-rustling among the Zulus; hundreds of unprotected cattle would be a standing provocation. So the idea of the cattle co-operative was laid aside, and Neil and Creina looked instead to develop a self-sustaining agricultural project. The river would provide water; there would be experimental solar cookers and methane-digesters. The project was housed in eleven
Zulu-style huts, mud and stone and thatch. Neil and Creina were living on fifty dollars a month. Visitors began to come, some to spend a night in a hut, and it began to look as though the difficult project was taking off.

It seemed at one time that the danger to Neil would come from white farmers on the other side of the border. They thought that Neil was giving his Africans too much encouragement, especially during times of drought when he cut down fences on the border and sent the cattle and goats of Africans to feed on the lusher grass on the other side. But, in fact, Neil seemed to have enjoyed some degree of licence as a madman on both sides of the border. And the danger, when it came, was from a random source that no one could have predicted: a factional Zulu war that had almost no cause, and was principally an expression of the Zulu love of fighting.

And, final, dreadful irony, it was because he had agreed to try to end a little Zulu war that he was killed. He was killed in an ambush by warriors from one side. He was driving his microbus to a peace meeting. The warriors, rising from behind boulders at the side of the road, aimed at him, the peace-maker. He was hit in the neck; he opened the microbus door and fell out on the road, dead.