A Fork in the Road Read online

  The impression of the theatrical is heightened when the dapper little man makes his entrance: so small that when he takes his seat on the beautifully carved chaise longue those dainty black shoes do not even reach the plush carpet. Whenever emotion takes over, which constantly happens where the Caribbean and the French are in charge, his small feet start swinging and swirling excitedly, describing complicated pirouettes above the floral carpet. Behind him, through the large windows, something of the cityscape is visible, as well as vistas of luxuriant tropical vegetation. And far in the background, like a painted cloth, the Prussian blue sea. Inside, the walls are covered with paintings, including a few beautiful canvases from Haiti; there are also masks and carvings from Africa, and huge arrangements of massed flowers which on closer inspection turn out to be fake.

  The tête-à-tête I had been led to expect is somewhat dampened by the presence of several other writers, from Martinique and Guadeloupe and Haiti and France, as well as a bustling press contingent. In addition, in spite of his brightness and alertness, Césaire is hard of hearing, which is not conducive to an easy conversation.

  The Caribbean writers metaphorically wriggle and sail on their stomachs as they offer the gold, myrrh and incense of their adulation, and every utterance is repeated at least three times, each time more loudly than before, to ensure that His Excellency will not miss anything.

  Césaire patiently listens to it all, his eyes gleaming with amusement behind the shiny gold frames of his spectacles. And his replies suggest that he is fully aware of the exaggerations and absurdities of the audience. When somebody asks what he thinks about entreaties for the West to write off the debt of the Third World, he quietly responds, ‘That is your problem, not mine.’

  Later in the morning I manage to draw Césaire aside as I have a small private homage to pay. It concerns something that goes back many years and has played a special role in my life: the long poem, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, written as early as 1939, which I still regard as his greatest work, with its plethora of images and rhythms and surrealist inventions, celebrating his own rediscovery of the Caribbean, which many years later inspired much of The First Life of Adamastor. More specifically, it concerns my return to Paris for that year of 1968, and ultimately the decision to go back to South Africa. As I have said, many things contributed to this step that changed the course of my life: the discussions with Breyten, the shipwreck of the relationship with H, the student revolt … But in the heart of it all was Césaire’s Cahier, and the way in which it helped me realise the need to return to the land of my own birth. While we are alone, I can finally thank him for his role in that turning point.

  Back with the others, there is, inevitably, much talk about Haiti, where the cause of freedom in the Caribbean is being betrayed, like so many times before – this time by the unscrupulous Aristide who, like Mugabe in Zimbabwe, arrived with messianic visions and promises, and turned into a monster.

  There is talk about Césaire’s Tragédie du Roi Christophe, which has become a fixed part of the repertoire of the Comédie Française: the early history of Haiti examined in the story of a runaway slave and cook, who becomes general of the revolutionaries in his country and has himself crowned as king – an astounding piece, somewhere between Shakespeare’s Henry IV and Jarry’s Ubu Roi, ranging from brutal satire to shocking seriousness, timeless in its understanding and portrayal of the political power game.

  For some time Césaire entertains us with anecdotes from his long life, among them his first meeting with Senghor, on his very first day as a student in Paris: ‘Senghor,’ he declares, ‘gave me the key to myself.’ There are many snippets of wisdom, as in his Mandela-like response to a question about why there seems to be no hatred or bitterness in him. ‘Hate?’ he asks. ‘That would make me dependent on someone else. I refused, once and forever, to be a slave like my ancestors. And so I will not allow hate to make me a slave again.’

  When somebody ventures to ask how he sees himself – as a Frenchman? a Haiitian? a Martiniquais? – Aimé Césaire replies with the shadow of a smile, ‘I am a human being.’

  And that is probably my most lasting impression of that morning, framed in the comic theatricality of the long audience: the encounter with a human being.

  In the New South Africa itself, I had met a few people of comparable stature. Among them, without doubt, two of the most unforgettable of our time.

  I have shared less time with Archbishop Desmond Tutu than with Mandela. But in his case, too, there was, every time, a glow of happiness deep inside: the happiness of knowing that one is with one of those rare individuals in this world who has found his way through darkness and sorrow to understanding and joy. I don’t think I have ever known a person who has packed so much joy into such a small body. Those, like Antjie Krog, who have been privileged to spend a long time with him during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, who have seen him break into tears in his suffering with others, have experienced this much more profoundly than I ever could. But even in small shared moments I have seen – and felt – the joy he radiates, as if he himself is a source of warmth and light which is beamed to whoever is with him. One knows from many sources that when he faces dishonesty or injustice, his heat can also be scorching: on such occasions, however gracious and generous he may be in other situations, he does not mince his words when he is enraged, that in his totally fearless anger he will not allow anything to stop him. But what I have experienced of him, has always been joy: the joy of being alive, of being human; as if nothing in this world can match the miraculous rediscovery, every day, of what it means just to be.

  And this is matched with his ever-bubbling sense of humour. On the very first occasion I met him, he told a story with himself cast as villain – he’d had a dream, he said, and in the dream he’d died and gone to hell, either because of some mistake or because he really deserved it. But he caused so much trouble in hell, he said, that after three days the devil couldn’t stand it any more – causing him to flee to heaven and ask for political asylum. I’ve heard him tell this story the other way round as well: creating such chaos in heaven that God was driven out to seek asylum in hell. There is truth in both versions.

  The first time we met was on the tarmac at the airport in Johannesburg. We’d just boarded the plane when the flight was aborted and everybody was ordered out to spend an hour in the hot sun identifying their baggage because of some mix-up. Tempers flared. The only person on the plane who was not only unflappable but actually seemed to enjoy himself, was Desmond Tutu. That was where we started talking, a conversation that seems to have continued effortlessly on every subsequent occasion we met.

  I can think of no other person quite so well equipped to head the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. There are critics who – justifiably perhaps – complain that the commission never went far enough in its work to arrive at some kind of closure; and that together with ‘truth’ and ‘reconciliation’ it could never fully succeed without including at least some sense of ‘justice’ in its brief as well. The consequences are there for all to see today, and they are corroborated by the little I have seen of the comparable process in Chile. But what I do know, is that, without the South African TRC, we could never have progressed to where we find ourselves today. It may not be nearly far enough; but without the TRC we would have been bogged down in a much, much greater mess and misery than the one we are in. And what measure of success the TRC has known, is overwhelmingly due to the presence of Desmond Tutu: his understanding, his empathy, his human warmth, his capacity to laugh, and his capacity to cry – for and with others. I am not a Christian. But of the very few true Christians I have met in my life who have made me feel that – maybe, just maybe – there is something to say for it, Tutu was one. I should add Beyers Naudé. And there was Rob Antonissen. But surely the first among them, for me, will remain this small package of unadulterated joy, Desmond Tutu.

  Before the elections I’d met Mandela only once, at the home of
Allan Boesak. This was before Allan was charged, and convicted, for the theft of monies contributed specifically for the alleviation of poverty among black children. This came as a heavy blow, because during the apartheid years he had been a beacon of light in the struggle against oppression, and had been particularly active as a leader of the United Democratic Front during the eighties. We were never close friends, but we had good relations, and I admired him for his unwavering dedication and his energy. Ever since the 1976 youth revolt, whenever I was abroad and people would ask me what they could do in the international campaigns against apartheid, I would suggest that, among other things, they could send money to Tutu and Boesak. I don’t know how much of this ended up in Boesak’s pocket; but I do know that when he was convicted, I felt that at least to some extent I had let down many ordinary people. Local reaction, particularly among coloured people to whom Boesak had been something of a saint, is illustrated by a small event in Cape Town, when a crowd gathered in front of Tuynhuys, an official residence of the president. While they were waiting for a particular dignitary to arrive at the gate, a cry went up that Boesak was on his way to join them. Previously, he would have received a hero’s welcome. This time, the moment the news broke, a cry went up: ‘Hold on to your handbags: Boesak is coming!’

  But when Elna Boesak invited us for dinner to meet Mandela, all of this still lay, mercifully, in the future. There were only eight of us at the table, among them also Antjie Krog, all of us Afrikaans-speaking, as Mandela had a special wish to meet more Afrikaners. And we were all so much in awe that the conversation was not particularly glittering. Not that it mattered much. Wearing one of his trademark loose shirts in muted reds and blues, what most impressed us was his gentleness, his subdued wry humour. The most unexpected moment of the evening came when Mandela had to leave the table to take a telephone call from Elizabeth Taylor.

  Afterwards, there were a few more occasions for meeting and talking, sometimes about the most ordinary things. In our most recent meeting, when he welcomed Karina and me to his house in Cape Town, he regaled us on the amusing and poignant story about an occasion when the queen had prevailed on him to spend the night in Buckingham Palace, and how he was unable to sleep a wink because of the oppressive presence of guards in the palace all night, which he found too disturbingly reminiscent of prison.

  There were other meetings. Among them was an occasion for the handing over of a collection of essays on the first free elections which I’d edited, followed a year later by another, this time a series of reflections on the interim. Towards the end of his term as president, I approached him to write an introduction to my own volume of essays, Reinventing a Continent, which in the midst of an impossibly busy schedule he graciously accepted to do. And when the time came to present him with a copy, just before he handed over the reins to Thabo Mbeki, Mandela invited me to tea at his Cape Town residence, Genadendal. This time there were only the two of us, and the conversation flowed smoothly and happily. He was in an expansive mood, reminiscing freely about his last few years in prison and the negotiations between him, P. W. Botha, FW and others, to prepare for the transition; he spoke about efforts of many individuals in power to wreck the negotiations; about the struggle within himself to decide on entering into discussions with ‘the enemy’ without officially notifying the ANC or drawing them into the process. There were moments, he made clear, when being a leader meant taking the risk of making decisions on his own, relying only on his personal faith in the future and his conviction of doing the right thing – not for himself, but for the country and its people.

  And this faith, he insisted, came not just from inside, but was fed by years of interacting with others; and years of reading. This was when the crucial moment came – the moment when he finally became, for me, not just the leader and statesman, but a human being. I remember him leaning over – he was sitting on a sofa, I on an easy chair right next to it – and placing his left hand on my wrist. And then he said:

  ‘When I was in prison, you changed the way I saw the world.’

  Each one of these words has been branded into my memory for ever.

  I certainly do not believe that he was, at that moment, speaking to me as a specific and individual writer: he was thinking of ‘you’ as a collective, as the writers of the books he had read in prison. And so he may have spoken these very words to others – other writers, other individuals – on other occasions. He was paying homage to literature. To the written word. To the experience of reading.

  But that did not alter the fact that, at that moment, he was addressing himself to me.

  And what I felt at the time came to me in the words of the old man Simeon from the Bible, when he held the infant Jesus in his arms and raised his ancient eyes to the heavens: ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.’ As a writer, nothing that could happen to me after this moment could ever go beyond this. So to die then would be to be most happy.

  Just as well perhaps. For as it happened, things certainly started going downhill from there.

  As early as 1996, in the Epilogue to the essays collected in Reinventing a Continent, I outlined the shift that was happening in South Africa, following the initial euphoria about ‘the rainbow nation’: a shift, first, towards what was called ‘realism’, followed by disillusionment, resentment, and rage tinged with despair.

  This shift I saw as the ANC’s ‘turn for the worse’ in its ‘failure of integrity’ and the weakness, indeed the rottenness, at the heart of what used to be its main strength: its commitment to transparency and democratic values, the premium it placed on morality, the tolerance it displayed toward a diversity of opinions, its regard for human dignity. What I found then was that the new government ‘had become suspect, demonstrating all too often an arrogance, obtuseness, mendacity, and callousness dramatically at variance with its historical image.’ And to illustrate the shift, I referred to eight specific examples. These deserve, I think, to be reiterated – amplified where necessary by remarks provoked by more recent events.

  There was the debacle caused by the way in which the then minister of health, Nkosazana Zuma, flaunted all regulations and prescribed procedures in paying a preposterous amount to the playwright Mbongeni Ngema to write and produce an anti-Aids play. The venture came at vast expense at a time when many hospitals had to close down for lack of funds and doctors and nurses resigned in droves because of bad pay; but instead of investigating the matter the ANC closed ranks around the minister and arrogantly refused to acknowledge any hint of culpability. In due course the minister was moved into a more powerful position as minister of foreign affairs. In her first post she has been replaced by an even more grossly incompetent and more stupidly arrogant person, the infamous Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, who has made South Africa the laughing stock of the world through her espousal of ‘alternative’ remedies for Aids, including beetroot and wild garlic. Which could be cause for mirth if it hadn’t already caused the death of thousands. Once again the ANC refused to take seriously accusations of incompetence – even including, in this case, allegations of alcohol abuse and theft – against a cabinet minister. On its front page the Sunday Times openly called Tshabalala-Msimang ‘a thief and a drunk’. The response from the government was to block any discussion of the matter in parliament, and to threaten the editor of the Sunday Times and one of his journalists with arrest. And the president assured the nation that no stone would be left unturned in trying to find the person or persons responsible for the disappearance of the minister’s medical files after her discharge from hospital where she had had a liver transplant. ‘If people steal,’ he said, ‘they must expect the full power of the law, regardless of their status in society.’ But no word was allowed to be said about the reports on Tshabalala-Msimang’s alleged theft of patients’ watches and other possessions while, a number of years ago, she had been in charge of a hospital in Botswana.

  Another gripe was the way in which the boundar
ies of certain provinces, particularly Mpumalanga, were drawn, and promises of post-election referendums broken with impunity. That particular gripe is still festering, and remains only one instance among many of the way in which the government has been riding roughshod over the interests and the explicit demands of the electorate. The old Calvinist approach of the Nationalist regime has come back to robust life: that is, the attitude that the vox populi expressed through the ballot box turns immediately afterwards into the vox dei, ruling out any influence from the electorate.

  This attitude was also demonstrated by the interference of the ANC in appointing leaders in top positions, against the expressed will of the electorates concerned. Thabo Mbeki’s regime has made this even more apparent than before, and it is taken several steps further: it is not just the ANC as a body that bulldozes through demands and protests, but specifically the person of the president. In numerous instances Mbeki has been using state organs to silence opposition to his style of ruling. This extends particularly into the domain of jurisprudence, as in his vendetta against Jacob Zuma who, shady character as he may be, still deserves to be treated within the parameters of the constitution.

  Another example is the provocative and frequently purely obtuse way in which ‘affirmative action’ was steamrollered through, allegedly to redress iniquitous imbalances in the past, in itself a praiseworthy ideal, but not when it is implemented at paralysing cost, in money and efficacy, throughout the Civil Service and in many companies. I gave the example of a publishing company which was ‘restructured’ by firing all the whites in top positions, replacing them with blacks, and then re-employing the dismissed staff, at double their previous salaries, as ‘consultants’. Any criticism against such practices is invariably dismissed as ‘racist’ – the kind of reflex which has, unfortunately, come to characterise many of Thabo Mbeki’s reactions. This has contributed to a serious lack of informed and intelligent debate among black and white intellectuals in the country.