A Fork in the Road Read online

  The most contentious debate of the meeting concerned the desirability of supporting the international cultural boycott of South Africa. I had always been strongly opposed to it: an economic boycott, yes by all means. A boycott of foreign investments: yes, indeed. A sports boycott: yes. But a cultural boycott? If one has faith in culture as a territory where meaning is produced, and in its power of changing minds and attitudes, I still believe that one should bombard a recalcitrant country with culture, not isolate it. But I was persuaded in the end that as an emergency short-term measure, and as a means of demonstrating solidarity of black and white cultural workers, it might deserve support.

  Among the most unforgettable contributions to the sessions were those of the fine, and immensely likeable, poet Keorapetse ‘Willie’ Kgositsile, who was subsequently named as the first Poet Laureate of the new South Africa, and Albie Sachs, whose early achievements as a lawyer and his impeccable credentials during the Struggle and being blown up in a car-bomb attack in Mozambique that left him permanently scarred, resulted in his elevation to the post-liberation Constitutional Court. Albie is one of those rare people whom you can meet after an absence of many years and continue from where you last left off. His love of art, his appreciation of women, his clear and incisive mind, and his sense of humour have, over many years, made him particularly dear to me. As for Willie, the Falls marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship. What I shall never forget is his account of reactions from friends within the ANC to some of his writing. There was one poem especially, dedicated to his wife and using the moon as his central image, that had elicited much negative comment. How could he, his friends argued, write about the moon, and a woman, and love, while he carried on his body and in his mind the scars of imprisonment and torture, of an escape from South Africa to Botswana, of unimaginable deprivation and suffering? It was the old dilemma Brecht outlined: how to write about flowers when that implied remaining silent about people being tortured and killed. (Neruda again: Come and see the blood in the streets.)

  But I am not silent about such things, Willie insisted. For me, being a poet means being able write about the moon and to tell a woman that I love her in such a way that everything else – the suffering and torture and deaths and misery – that I have witnessed or experienced, can be sensed in what I’ve written. What I write down on paper must bear the full weight of what I have not written explicitly.

  Many years later, at a London launch reading by J. M. Coetzee of his novel Disgrace, I was told by our mutual publisher, someone in the audience asked the author, ‘Mr Coetzee, don’t you find it strange that we should be here tonight discussing literature while bombs are falling in Kosovo?’ And John laconically replied, ‘Frankly, no.’

  A year later, at the Marly-le-Roi meeting, it was Albie Sachs who brilliantly took up this theme in what was intended as a discussion paper within the ANC, ‘Preparing Ourselves for Freedom’, which stimulated one of the major cultural polemics in the transition towards the New South Africa. ‘What are we fighting for,’ asks Albie in this seminal paper,

  if not the right to express our humanity in all its forms, including our sense of fun and capacity for love and tenderness and our appreciation of the beauty of the world? … A.N.C. members are full of fun and romanticism and dreams, we enjoy and wonder at the beauties of nature and the marvels of human creation, yet if you look at most of our art and literature you would think we were living in the greyest and most sombre of all worlds, completely shut in by apartheid.

  There were several new faces among the participants too: the effervescent and delightfully affirmative Cheryl Carolus, later to become our high commissioner in London; the urbane and smiling Trevor Manuel with his rapier mind and his built-in bullshit detector; Stuart Saunders, vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town with his broad cultural background and his surgeon’s eye for detail, who a year later made it possible for me to make the move from Rhodes to the Cape.

  Although by this time such encounters no longer had the gloss and surprise of the first, it had, in retrospect, a dynamism that infused all the discussions with moral and mental electricity. Although we had no idea of the changes that were to happen a mere three months later, there was a vibration in the air that sharpened the senses and created a sense of expectation. Nobody really expected anything dramatic from F. W. de Klerk, but the tide of history seemed to be turning. Govan Mbeki and Walter Sisulu had already been set free; there were huge marches in all the major cities, change seemed unstoppable. This meant that many of our discussions had a nuts-and-bolts quality, and through the meeting a future that was already much more than wishful thinking was being prepared.

  The talks were led, as before, by an ebullient van Zyl Slabbert and a trenchant and determined Alex Boraine on the ‘internal’ side and Thabo Mbeki on the other. The high point of the visit was a session in the Assemblée Nationale attended by French parliamentarians and journalists and almost the entire diplomatic corps. This was very different from our debates in Accra or Burkina Faso. This was a true meeting of Europe and Africa – and we were right in the middle of it.

  Long before this event, Marly-le-Roi had been, for me, the magnificent green park where Grandpère Maurice, on the first Sunday of every month, arranged for the fountain, the tallest jet d’eau in France, to be turned on at his expense, and he played host to the Sunday crowds that converted the park into a live and vibrant Seurat painting. But through this visit a dimension was added, not only to Marly, but to Paris. And certainly to my awareness of Africa in France, and France in Africa.

  It is not easy to capture, today, the mood in South Africa in those last years of the eighties. On the one hand, the situation seemed to be getting completely out of hand. The pressure from the United Democratic Front became more and more irresistible, yet the government’s only response was violence and more violence. The murders committed by the SB became more frequent. Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party, funded by the government, was becoming increasingly bloody-minded and provocative. The generals in the security establishment seemed to have become a law unto the themselves. And as invariably happens when a small man finds himself in power, surrounded by big bullies and a seemingly endless supply of weapons and strategies of mass destruction, P. W. Botha grew more arrogant by the day, his lust for apocalypse ever more unquenchable.

  Yet at the same time the forces of resistance were growing. A kind of general madness was informing public life. Botha’s attempts at playing two games at the same time – the man of violence, and the great reformer – were heading for disaster. Even as he was pushing his henchmen to acts of more outrageous violence, he was having clandestine discussions with Mandela about change; and he started setting free leaders of the struggle. Mandela having refused to leave prison before all his colleagues and comrades had been allowed to go, Botha initiated, in November 1987, his own programme of ‘atonement’ by liberating Govan Mbeki. Very strict regulations about his freedom of movement, access to public forums, the right to address meetings were imposed. But Govan Mbeki simply refused to pay any heed and went ahead with impunity.

  When Mbeki visited Port Elizabeth he received a tumultuous welcome. At the end of the rally he sent a message that he wanted to meet me. I was whisked away to a back room where I came face to face with one of the legends of the struggle. There wasn’t much time to talk, but his interest – in what was happening among whites, among Afrikaners, in my writing – was astounding. I told him that I was planning a trip into Africa and hoped to see Thabo soon. At that time Govan hadn’t seen his son for over twenty years. Was there any message he would like me to convey to Thabo?

  ‘Tell my son,’ he said holding his forefinger straight up in front of my eyes, ‘tell him his father is like this.’ Then he bent the finger at the knuckle. ‘Not like this.’

  His eyes were lit up with fire, but they were smiling too.

  I did see Thabo. During 1988 I planned a visit to Lusaka to meet those members of the ANC in exile who had b
y then become close friends. Also, I had begun my new novel, based on the imagined assassination of P. W. Botha and for that it was imperative that I visit Lusaka.

  While I was at it, I decided to stop over in Gaborone, in Botswana as well, and in Harare. At that time Mugabe was still widely regarded as a messianic figure on the continent. And I remember that when I was trying to arrange a writers’ conference at Cold Comfort Farm in Zimbabwe, the priority wish on the list of all the South Africans was to meet Mugabe. The second was to meet the Cuban ambassador. But it was the visit to Lusaka that meant most to me. It was, by then, almost a year after the Victoria Falls meeting, and I couldn’t wait to see Thabo, and Barbara, and Lindiwe, and Steve, and Penuell, and so many others again. We spent a few unforgettable days together, surrounded by the shrilling of cicadas, or by the flapping of huge, exotic moths that fluttered past like falling flowers. Again, we spoke breathlessly, incessantly, about that distant – and yet so close – country in the south which was the main focus of all our thoughts, and about our yesterdays, and our present, and above all about our tomorrows. I met Barbara’s husband, Henry, scarred and wizened by pain; and a breezy Reggie September, who at the time of the first free elections, was delegated to invite me to stand for parliament. Once again there was the feeling of being embraced and enfolded, with warmth and generosity and enthusiasm. Once again there was the conviction that soon, soon, we would all be home again, together.

  I remember a lazy morning with Thabo and his wife Zanele: in the shady garden overgrown with flowers, and in the lounge with its paintings and lithographs on the walls, and Beethoven’s Ninth in the background; and Thabo’s impish smile behind his pipe as he said, ‘Don’t forget to tell the people back home what it was like to visit a terrorist in his house.’

  The only disappointment about the visit was that Oliver Tambo could not make it to Thabo’s house in time before I had to catch my plane home.

  THE RUINS OF SARAJEVO

  FROM THE ASSASSINATION of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914 until the recent ravages of ethnic cleansing Sarajevo has been the very image of the torn city.

  When the invitation came to an annual literary festival in the fractured Bosnian city, neither Karina nor I had any hesitation about accepting; not even the chaotic arrangements for getting there, and obtaining visas and permissions and God knows what else, could put us off. And in mid-May of 2006 we set out. All went well as far as Belgrade. There, rather than waiting at the airport for eight hours to catch a connecting flight of less than an hour to Sarajevo, we arranged to be taken by car over the last lap. The organisers provided a driver and a car, but nobody warned us of the state of the road, which condemned us to five and a half hours of shaking and shuddering hell. But that was only part of the ordeal. Because so much of Sarajevo was still in ruins after the war, it took another hour of tortuous winding along narrow one-way lanes before our good-humoured young driver, Vito, deposited us in the middle of the city, in a deserted and derelict market beside a dug-up main road, led us into a foul-smelling backyard, up a shaky staircase to the second floor of what remained of a wretched-looking building that turned out to be quite beautiful on the inside. This, we learned, was the Centre André Malraux, where we were handed over into the trembling hands of the festival organiser and director of the centre, Monsieur Francis Bueb.

  It took Monsieur Bueb a while to realise what was going on as he was very much the worse for wear, having evidently spent most of the day exercising his right arm. He was clutching a glass. To his lower lip an extinct cigarette was stuck as a permanent fixture. Through fumes of alcohol so thick they could be cut with a knife, he stared at us with eyes the colour of raw pork liver. After some time Vito, still unruffled and smiling, managed to convey to Monsieur Bueb who we were, whereupon we were welcomed with a theatrical gesture that caused most of the contents of his glass to spill on the floor. With the help of the driver he managed to stagger to his feet and start picking his way across the floor past haphazard piles of books and boxes. This took a considerable amount of time, but at long last, our host lunged forward to embrace, first myself, and then Karina, licking our cheeks, first left, then right, from chin to eyebrows. Once the slobbering was over, he grabbed my right hand and started pumping it as if to draw water from a well, while trying to pick his way through a long sentence. He had problems pronouncing all the consonants that had formed in his mind; at the same time it required his utmost concentration to remain standing. What he tried to say was, quite simply, that this was the French way of showing hospitality. However, the demonstrations of his hospitality were marred by disappointment upon his discovery that I was not black, and that, even though he had been fully informed of the fact since the beginning of our correspondence about the festival months before, I was not single.

  We still had to go from the Centre to the French ambassador’s residence where, as Monsieur Bueb had informed us well in advance, we were to be lodged. But he insisted on first filling us in on all the details of the pending festival and his role in it. As he himself did not appear to have much clarity about the organisation, and as several laborious refills of his glass were necessary to nudge him on the tortuous way from one word to the next, we seemed stuck there for the night.

  The conversation was not helped much by the lapses of memory that impeded Monsieur Bueb’s progress through the syntactical difficulties of his peroration. During one of the long pauses, when we began to fear that he might have fallen asleep, I made the mistake of trying to keep the conversation going by enquiring about Vito who had excused himself for a while.

  In response to the question, Monsieur Bueb slumped from his chair and landed on the floor. Before we could rush to his side, he rose to his knees in a very histrionic manner, started digging into his pockets, dropping, once again, his glass, and brought out a knife. Anxious not to provoke, we remained glued to our seats. As we sat watching, Bueb held out the knife towards us. I was expecting him at any moment to start declaiming, Is this a dagger which I see before me? when he suddenly dropped on all fours and started digging into the slits between the floorboards, muttering to himself all the while. After several long minutes a wide smile formed on Bueb’s red, wet lips, and he launched into a convoluted explanation from which we finally gleaned that Vito was driving errands for the Centre only in his spare time: his real occupation was to dig for unexploded bombs after the war and dismantle them.

  At this stage the young sapper returned and patiently, but clearly with barely suppressed hilarity, helped Bueb back to his seat; in his presence there was some progress in the conversation. We learned, thanks to eager promptings from Vito, some of the basic facts about the arrangements made for our lodgings and for the unfolding of the festival. And soon afterwards we eagerly rose to be driven to the résidence. But not before Bueb had once more demonstrated his version of ‘the French way’ by working in long, liquid movements with his copiously salivating tongue across most of the surfaces of our faces.

  Once again Vito picked his way through a veritable maze of streets, until he reached the résidence high up on a hill from where the lights of Sarajevo lay spread out below us. Strange to think how such a sad and scarred landscape can be camouflaged by the graceful concern of the night.

  For the rest of our visit we were entertained lavishly and with the kind of grace one readily associates with la belle France. By the time we left, the ambassador, Henry Zipper de Fabiani, had been joined by his vivacious wife, Geneviève, who had come from Paris, where she mostly resides with their children, to be the perfect hostess. And on the Sunday in the middle of our stay the ambassadorial couple took us and the poet Antjie Krog, who also attended the festival, on a wonderful excursion by car to the art village of Mostar. We were enchanted by the beautifully rebuilt bridge of the town. It did not take much effort to imagine it as the architectural jewel Ivo Andrić had immortalised in The Bridge over the Drina.

  The events of the festival were badly organised and badly attended, the microphones d
idn’t work properly, the simultaneous translations were chaotic and unreliable. Most of the time we spent trying to dodge the unbelievable Bueb, a caricature of officiousness and bad taste. We found that several other guests were in the same boat. Antjie confided to us that when she’d first been approached by the man, she’d desperately tried to evade him, believing he was a beggar off the street.

  The opening ceremony took place in the shell of the library, a magnificent old building with galleries and arches and the melancholy splendour of an interrupted past, when hundreds of thousands of books were destroyed by fire. Part of the building was deliberately left unrestored, to keep the memory of the recent war alive. The solemn atmosphere of the place was disturbed by the presence of Bueb, stumbling about in the background, from one pillar to the next, occasionally talking loudly to himself or invisible interlocutors, commenting on the events, gesticulating, stopping only from time to time to refill his glass or locate a new one. I constantly had to remind myself that this person was here to represent France and its culture.

  How could such an obscenity have come about? Bueb himself was most voluble in filling in the background at length: it transpired that at the height of the war, or in its immediate aftermath, in some way or another, for some reason or another, Bueb had decided to drive from Paris to Sarajevo with a carload of books. While everybody else was occupied with providing essential services, rescuing the wounded, restoring water supplies or electricity, Bueb turned up in the devastated war zone and began to distribute books – an act that immediately captured the imagination. And as the violence settled down and the city gradually groped its way back to a semblance of normality, Bueb stayed on. Perhaps, initially, and in those circumstances, it had not been so far-fetched an idea to install him in a position of cultural influence. But how it could have outlasted the public embarrassment, the lasting insult to the reputation of one of the world’s great cultures, remains a mystery.