From Afar ? Part 3
Assistant
A New Country
Part 3
For the first year or so in the United States I was obsessed about South Africa. Despite trying to settle into a new life, I thought about the situation every day and remained overwhelmed by it. While notoriously inward looking, Americans were hearing the news coming out of the country, and were asking me about the prospects for a peaceful future there. I was always pessimistic in my appraisal. In truth I hid my worst fears. This may sound warped but I had no doubt that the place would collapse into anarchy and widespread bloodshed before the decade was out. Avril feels that I had some sort of neurosis. I certainly was not operating like a normal person and was difficult to live with. I was enrolled in a challenging post-graduate program. We had no support system, a small child to take care of, an impossible climate and not much money. Avril was very homesick, having been wrenched from a safe and loving Jewish family environment and thrust into a lonely wilderness. But I knew that I could not go back. It surely was a low point in our lives. I am eternally grateful to her that she stuck by me. There were many times when she was tempted to leave.
I followed the news looking for signs of a crack in what my father used to call the ?granite?, a reference to Nationalist party attitudes. In my view this would be an essential start if the situation would ever be resolved peacefully, an prospect I had almost no hope for. Yet there were signs. The Wiehahn report advocating some minor relaxation of labour laws for black people was released or at least discussed some time in 1978. Vorster was replaced by P. W. Botha, amongst the most despicable of all Nationalist politicians, yet he seemed to flag the prospect of some reform. Pik Botha made promsing noises. But they would never willingly abdicate power. Had that ever happened in the history of the world? And this was the only way to avoid bloodshed.
Time wore on. I began to notice that I was thinking less about the place. I had started to let go. Feelings of guilt and anxiety began to subside. I am reminded here of the last scene in Woodie Allen?s ?Crimes and Misdemeanors? when the character played by Martin Landau muses about the murder he had organised and how, over time, fear and guilt gradually fade.
The eighties were a period of tumult and further revolt. Protests organised by Alan Boesak and the UDF led to riots and unrest across the Cape and the the country seemed to be in a grip of violence that dwarfed that of the seventies. The accession to the presidency of F.W. de Klerk toward the end of the decade seemed to me to be a backward step. I had remembered him as a dour verkrampte Nat, unlike his more liberal brother Wimpie who had been editor of Die Transvaler.
I continue to be amazed at what transpired next. But curiously, the events of 1990 and onward are less vivid for me than those of the preceding decades. The very events that I had been hoping for since the early seventies, starting with de Klerk?s speech in Parliament signalling his intention to revoke the ban on the ANC, the release of Nelson Mandela, the drawn-out but vital negotiations that followed and the lead-up to the election of 1994 are quite vague for me now.
My last trip to South Africa was in 1984. I have therefore only second-hand accounts of life there since then. There has been no relief for the poverty-stricken still living in tin shanties in the townships or in squatter settlements along the highways that I hear about. There has been no let-up in the rampant crime, conducted by people whose every experience growing up must have taught them that life was cheap. The scourge of AIDS has cleaved a generational gap in the population. Despite this the entire story is something of a miracle to be celebrated by anyone who remembers the darkness of those days the way I do and who appreciates how differently things might have turned out.
For what we have is a country with a constitution that leads the world, a nation that tried to heal itself innovatively by means of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, one that can perhaps look to the future with confidence. Many from South Africa have talked to me of a place bursting with energy, creativity and optimism. We can only hope.
I privately salute and perhaps even envy those who stayed, who risked and who fought for a future they never lost sight of. It was a future I never once even glimpsed. And there are days when I feel the urge to do something meaningful. To run workshops for young South Africans needing the sort of skills I teach here. To feel appreciated, needed and contributing to the country that gave me my start in life.
I know that down the years and across the world both the left and right have jumped at their opportunities to screw things up, to allow the very worst of our instincts to express themselves in some form of totalitarian policy. Despite this and the sickening paucity of intellectual honesty from both sides in almost all political debate, my natural sympathy is with the progressive side of politics. I have always felt a deep mistrust bordering on hostility toward conservative parties and their leaders especially figures like Reagan, Thatcher, George W Bush and John Howard. I am continually surprised and sometimes even hurt when good and decent people I know vote conservative. Unfair though this may be, I cannot break some sort of nexus that I think I see between contemporary conservative politicians and those thugs who heartlessly ruined millions of lives all those years ago, and whose legacy is a continued misery in much of the country. If this perception constitutes a twisted view, so be it. If that is the extent of the residual damage I carry from those years, I have got off lightly. Others were not so lucky.
End