A Fork in the Road Read online

  Extending one soft round hand first to me, then to Gerrit, he sighed, ‘My condolences, sir.’

  I explained our business. Mr Inggs came as close to beaming as was proper in the circumstances.

  After that we had to find suitable outfits for the funeral. Gerrit and Marina, being on holiday, had nothing formal to wear, and Gerrit and I were nowhere near the same size. Some friends were approached and we duly retired home to mix and match – Alta’s experience as wardrobe mistress came in useful – and the next morning we tried our best to look solemn and dignified. Gerrit wore a black jacket, the sleeves of which barely came down to his elbows, and he couldn’t do up his shirt buttons. He had to make do with sandals.

  The day broke wet and wretched. In pouring rain we drove to the cemetery. There were only the four of us, Marina and Gerrit, Alta and I. And Mr Inggs, of course, who approached with the small white coffin, barely the size of a shoebox, in his arms. Gerrit took it from him. For a minute or so we stood waiting, not sure about what to do next. Then Gerrit handed the coffin back to Mr Inggs, and the small hole was filled with mud. All the while the rain came down steadily.

  Nobody could face going home. As we drove around for a while, the rain unexpectedly started clearing up. In the uncomfortably bright new sunshine we drove out of town and found a small stream under wet, dripping trees. There we stopped. It was too wet to get out. We just sat quietly together. Nobody spoke. What could there possibly be left to say?

  Yet there was something unbelievably wholesome about the togetherness in the car. An awareness of a bond of friendship that gathered up the time we had spent together and the years ahead. The image of that slithery, dark, muddy hole where we’d stood together in the cemetery. The half-repressed memory of the baby we’d buried. Knowing that this would remain with us, till death us did part.

  BLACK AND WHITE AFTER THE FALL

  AT A RECENT cape town book fair, I spent some time in conversation with Fred Khumalo, the Insight and Opinion editor of the Sunday Times. For many years, one of the most depressing aspects of returning to South Africa after a trip abroad used to be exposure to the standard of local newspaper reporting. This has changed considerably in recent years; and Fred is one of the bright stars in the new firmament. After spending much of his teenage years among criminals, dagga smokers and scavengers of various kinds – ‘in a crazy swirl of booze and drugs and sex’ as his publisher describes it in the blurb to his autobiography, Touch My Blood – he turned to journalism.

  What makes Fred special, is his ability to mingle the hilarious and the deeply serious. Many of the darker moments, in his essays, his weekly column in the Sunday Times, his autobiography and his novel, Witches’ Brew, are illuminated by flashes of often irreverent comedy, whereas his humour often careens on a bedrock of human need or greed.

  On this occasion, something in our conversation triggered a memory to make me realise, anew, the extent to which this country has changed in recent years. When I came back from Paris at the end of 1968, I was adamant that one thing that had to change in my life was interaction with black people. What particularly interested me was, predictably, the world of writing and journalism. And within a week or so of my return, just after my first newspaper interview about the year in France had been published, there was an opportunity I couldn’t miss under any circumstances. It was a request for an interview from a black journalist, Harry Mashabela, working for the Star in Johannesburg. And talking, now, to Fred Khumalo, that memory hit me between the eyes. What was now so easy and relaxed – so ‘normal’, in fact, that one needn’t think twice about it – had been, in the last days of 1968, a major enterprise. First of all, Harry Mashabela and I could not meet in a public place: the lounge or foyer of a hotel, a restaurant, a pub, whatever. He was black, I was white. We were not even allowed to have a drink together. Which meant that we had to arrange a meeting in the house of friends. Harry felt that it would not be advisable for me to come to Soweto, so I turned to the few friends I had in Johannesburg. They were writers, publishers, journalists, people of culture and open minds. Or so I’d thought. After Paris, it hadn’t even occurred to me that there might be a problem. Only when the first one I approached started fidgeting with embarrassment did I realise that meeting Mr Mashabela might not be as straightforward as I had anticipated. Some of the excuses and explanations had to do with the family (‘Well, you see, we have small children in the house. They won’t understand.’ Or: ‘Look, you know me, I don’t mind. But my wife …’). Some with social relations (‘I hope you’ll understand, but if my friends found out about this I’ll be in trouble.’ Or even: ‘I’m not sure how I can explain such a visit to my domestic. I mean, how can I expect her to come into the lounge and serve a black man?’). Or with work (‘You must realise that I work in public relations. We depend on our clients. My job may be on the line.’).

  Recently, as I was reading the magnificent autobiography of the human-rights lawyer George Bizos, it struck me in an almost sickening way: how easily, how naturally, it came to him, in the circumstances in which he entered South African society, even as an immigrant from Greece, to campaign for the victims of apartheid, to find himself surrounded by other people who shared his outrage about oppression. This was true for many others – academics or writers with an English background. Very dear friends like Nadine Gordimer and Athol Fugard. Not for a moment do I underestimate the effort it cost them to identify with the deprived and persecuted majority in the country. The obstacles they had to overcome, the humiliations they had to suffer. But whatever the cost, all they had to do was to follow their natural instinct. ‘Human rights’ was what they breathed in every day of their lives. There might be endless hurdles placed in their way by ‘the system’. But they could always count on the solidarity of like-minded people. On the other hand, to be an Afrikaner, to come from a family and a home and a social environment where apartheid was not a hateful idea or a foreign concept, but something that defined the parameters of the ‘normal’ – that was something else altogether. And because Afrikaners had such a beleaguered sense of identity, of identity under threat, the possibilities for normal discussion and argument were almost non-existent.

  It went further than what theorists have called ‘colonial cringe’: one felt that in such conditions the individual’s very existence was at stake in every utterance, every attempt at compromise, every attempt at reasoning. And over the years Afrikanerdom had devised diabolically efficient ways of dealing with ‘aberration’. During the Anglo-Boer War, dissidents were summarily dealt with – often executed. To be branded a ‘traitor of the volk’ was devastating. Since identity itself was tied up with, determined by, the volk, expulsion from that safe laager was a form of death. Very few individuals could deal with it. Which was why it was so much more difficult for a man like the Afrikaner Bram Fischer to campaign for the oppressed than for someone like Sydney Kentridge. If Nadine wanted to talk to a black writer, she could invite him or her to her home. At the time I returned from Paris and found myself in a strange city, Johannesburg, this was not possible.

  In the end we did find a solution. If I remember correctly it was my friend Naas who offered us his lounge. And then everything went smoothly. Harry Mashabela and I spent a most stimulating and heart-warming afternoon together. He filled me in about what had been happening in South Africa in my absence. I told him about Paris. About Mbella. About Gerard Sekoto. Harry was particularly interested to hear about the student revolt. Not just the events themselves, but the inspiration behind them. The writings of Che Guevara, of Régis Debray, of Fidel Castro. We spoke about Marcuse and Camus. I told him about Amiri Baraka, then still writing under the name of Leroy Jones, and his recent volume of essays, Home.

  Meeting Harry was a prelude to the new chapter in my life that began with my return to South Africa. I was eager not to lose the momentum I’d found in Paris. And over the following years it did become easier to cross the barriers into a territory where a notion of ‘belonging�
� was not determined by political or racial prejudice, but by shared interest, by privately formulated choice. Even so, it remained difficult. I lost a number of friends, several of whom I had previously regarded as ‘close’ or ‘good’ friends. But this was a price I was prepared to pay: having made my choice in Paris, I knew what I was returning to, and accepted that it would not be plain sailing.

  My family was part of the problem. Among my siblings, Marita and Johan had an almost immediate sympathy and understanding for my situation. Not Elbie. And politics remained a bone of contention between us until the end. My parents were mortified by the shift Paris had occasioned inside me. My mother’s somewhat more relaxed, liberal attitude made contact easier. But my father, the member of the Broederbond, son of a Boer who had fought against the English and whose whole life had been tied up with the struggle for Afrikaner identity, was not to be swayed. His sense of right and wrong, which had inspired his career as a magistrate, could make him understand reason. But that was intellectually, never emotionally. On my return from Paris in 1968 I quite simply represented everything he found abhorrent. What had happened in many other families might have torn us apart. And within the family we deeply loved one another! In the end, after a long and painstaking process, we did arrive at the only solution that could possibly have worked: having discussed all the implications of our respective positions, we acknowledged that we could never agree on politics in South Africa again. The only course past that irremediable difference was to agree, rationally, that we would never, ever discuss politics at home again. It was, and would remain, off-limits. And in this way we navigated a careful route that took us through the straits.

  Only once after that, I remember, my father discussed one of my books with me. He faithfully continued reading them all as they appeared; but he would never refer to them, not ever. My mother could do that without any problem. She might differ, even object. But it would never be an obstacle between us. The exception, for my father, was A Dry White Season. As a magistrate who’d worked with the police all his life, he was shocked to his foundations by the portrayal of the SB in the book. ‘All I want to know,’ he asked me, ‘is this: is it true, or did you make it up?’ ‘It is fiction,’ I told him. ‘But every single fact in it is based on the truth. Everything has been documented and presented in one court or another.’ He never referred to it again.

  That was the situation within the family. In my working environment things were made a bit easier by the fact that Rhodes University had a long tradition of liberalism, which meant that, at the very least, contact across the barriers of class and race was not automatically frowned on. Although Rhodes could not match the ideological openness of large universities like Wits or UCT or possibly Natal, it did offer a space where people of different ideologies could meet and interact and discuss; and a broadly based opposition to apartheid imposed an awareness of shared interest. Yet the fact that some of the most enlightened minds, including some of the most principled opponents to apartheid on campus were Afrikaners, encouraged an accommodation of divergent views. One of these, Daantjie Oosthuizen, professor of philosophy, provoked an unprecedented furore in Afrikanerdom, by divulging in a scholarly article something which subsequently became generally accepted as historical fact: that the revered president of the Transvaal Republic, Paul Kruger, who had led the Boers into war against Britain at the turn of the century, had had a black ancestor. Today I can foresee a time when many white Afrikaners may go out of their way to claim ‘authenticity’ by unearthing black ancestors. It is something I myself have quite eagerly pursued. And although, so far, I have only found some fascinating near misses, I have not yet given up.

  At one extreme, on the Rhodes campus, there were still old colonial types who habitually looked down on ‘locals’, and even more so on ‘natives’; at the other, there were a number of extremist diehard Afrikaners who were heroically carrying the torch for God’s own people bent on defending their small, threatened, white territory against foreigners and black, indigenous, heathen masses. And at both extremes the Anglo-Boer War was still being fought every single day. But in between there was a broad, tolerant, even generous, space where open discussion was possible, resistance to government policies ethically and philosophically grounded, and a shared future for an as yet only dreamt of South African nation a viable topic for negotiation. In this space there were even a few black individuals. Not all of them were members of the academic staff, or of the student body. But at least some of them were accessible. They could be drawn into discussion. Their opinions and contributions were regarded as vital.

  For quite some time such contact inevitably remained fairly restricted; nevertheless, there were open windows that provided views of the other side of the South African moon, something almost wholly unthinkable on an Afrikaans campus.

  Sometimes I became despondent: why should it be such an effort for a white person to go in search of opportunities to meet black people? After the publication of Looking on Darkness this changed drastically, and effortlessly. But even before that there had been some events that cast new – and often deeply unsettling – light on ‘the South African situation’. One of the first was an invitation, in the second half of 1970, to deliver the Gandhi Memorial Lecture at the Phoenix settlement outside Durban.

  I was invited by a man with an overwhelming personality, Mewa Ramgobin, who was married to Gandhi’s granddaughter; and for many reasons it was to me an occasion not to be missed. There was also something celebratory about the visit as it was the first weekend Alta and I spent away from home after our marriage. As it turned out, our son Danie was conceived there.

  In many ways it was a strangely unnerving visit. We hadn’t realised that Mewa was under banning orders, which meant that he was not allowed to receive visitors. As a result, there was little opportunity, apart from the lecture, to meet people from outside the settlement. Mewa himself showed only too clearly the emotional scars inflicted by his solitary lifestyle. Fifteen years later, when he published the novel Waiting to Live, I recognised in it much of the repressed emotion and anger which we’d witnessed from the outside, at a distance, during that weekend in 1970. But at the time there was only the unforgiving hardness of a still-unresolved rage. And I remember thinking: this, more than the blatant suffering inflicted through imprisonment and persecution and torture and humiliation and even death, may ultimately be among the cruellest testimonies to apartheid – the fact that it deprived innumerable people all over the country of a full emotional life; the way it has restricted and inhibited the range of their human possibilities.

  The way in which Mewa reacted to what had been inflicted on him, was to become harsh and domineering in his relations with others; his need always to be in command, to make decisions on their behalf, to inhibit their freedom. In the daytime Alta and I were barely allowed to be alone on our own for even a minute. He insisted on reading every word of the lecture I had prepared for the gathering; he wanted to impose changes and additions – and he was offended when I refused. For better or for worse, I told him, this was my speech.

  This is the place where Gandhi spent much of his time in South Africa. And something of his spirit – the much misunderstood ‘passive resistance’ of satyagraha, the non-violence of ahimsa – can still be imagined there. Even though during that depressing weekend there was little sign of his greatness of mind, his humility, his blitheness, his sense of humour. His memory, I felt disturbingly, had become harnessed to a predictable and definable cause, to a narrow, personal interpretation of a specific doctrine of resistance. Part of the secret of Gandhi, I have always believed, was that he was not only against certain things – but that he could also, wholeheartedly and positively, even exuberantly, be for the things he truly believed in. In some respects he might be regarded as a forerunner of Tutu.

  What in some ways made a more lasting impression on me than the smouldering anger in Mewa, was the reactions of his two young sons, eight and six years old, to the conditions
under which they were forced to live as black people in a country dominated by a white minority. Before his banning, Mewa told me, they had once taken a walk along a beach in Durban where children were cavorting on the swings. The two boys wanted to join the other kids, but Mewa stopped them.

  ‘You can’t go there,’ he said.

  ‘But why, Daddy?’

  ‘Because those swings are for white children only.’

  That, said Mewa, was where the political consciousness of the younger boy began: a virulent hatred for all whites. On one occasion he even asked his father not to give him any toys for his next birthday.

  ‘Why not?’ Mewa had asked.

  ‘I want you to buy me a gun so that I can shoot a white man.’

  The reaction of the older boy had been quite different. ‘You know what?’ he told Mewa after the walk on the beach. ‘When we get home I want you to make us a swing too. And then we’ll invite all the children, the white ones too, so that they can see we’re not as bad as they are.’

  What I did realise after that conversation, was that I certainly could not blame Mewa for holding the views he did. Through his account of what his younger son had said on the beach, I came closer to understanding the father.

  There was a huge audience at the lecture. I met Griffiths Mxenge there, the lawyer who later supplied me with hundreds of pages of court documents on deaths in detention, which I used for A Dry White Season; and his wife Victoria, impressive in her dignity and fire; and Rick Turner, a charismatic activist and lecturer, murdered a few years later in front of his family by the security police; and numerous others who in later years helped to shape my consciousness. The lecture itself began as an exploration of Gandhi’s philosophy, the way it shaped his life, and its possible application to our dire circumstances of that time. Towards the end, the focus moved to Bram Fischer who was by then terminally ill in prison; and I added my voice to the many others that had begun to clamour for his release. What this country needed right then, I argued, was precisely a man like Fischer: someone with his integrity, his belief in what black and white shared in South Africa, his unshakeable faith in human dignity that transcended racial difference, and in the freedom that would inevitably, and gloriously, come to this benighted land.