Nadine Gordimer - Telling Times - Writing and Living, 1950-2008

And perhaps those five permanent members of the Security Council — Britain, China, France, Russia, the USA — who among others enrich their national economies by selling arms for the globe’s conflicts and wars, will hear when Amartya Sen, 1998 Nobel Laureate in Economics, says of production of arms, ‘Human benefits that flow by redirecting these forces can be remarkably large’, 95and when Kofi Annan says, ‘No development without peace; no peace without development’. 96

No globalisation without a human face.

The twenty-first century will achieve a new and radiant definition of progress if you can work to put that face upon your world.

1999

When I was young, in South Africa during the Second World War, I was far removed from the bombs, the nights in underground shelters, the rationed food, in Europe. I read reflections by those living through this experience, and these were not what I had in my mind as the way life must be, there; I had constructed their lives out of a projection of my own priorities in what makes life, my own fears of what would be most threatened in imagined circumstances.

Our war — South Africa’s liberation struggle — is over. On 2 June, we shall cast our votes in our second post-apartheid elections. We have been led to that day by one of the great men of this century. He now displays the ultimate wisdom in closing his era at his peak of accomplishments, the final one being the assurance that his successor is the one equal to the era about to begin. We have lived five years of freedom. Whatever the frustrations as well as triumphs we’ve tackled, it is an achievement placed toweringly beside the years of apartheid racism and before them the years of colonial racism — five years against three centuries. Yet I see that this period is often the object of the same kind of subjective projection I imposed on the reality of wartime Europe fifty years ago.

Again and again, when I am interviewed or find myself in encounters with other people abroad, the burning question is, ‘What is happening to whites?’

And again and again, my genuinely surprised response is: ‘What about blacks? Don’t you believe there are challenges to be met in their new lives?’

There are two obvious assumptions to be made of this approach to South Africa by Europeans and North Americans. The majority of them being white, they identify only with whites, whether consciously or subconsciously. Because I am white, they assume I do the same. It’s the Old Boys/Old Girls Club producing its dog-eared membership card. The projection is of the priorities of their lives, along with the old colonial conditioning that these belong with whiteness and are incontrovertibly, always, for ever, threatened by the Otherness — blackness.

Five years into freedom. What kind of fossil should I be, unearthed from the cave of bones that was apartheid, if my essential sense of self were to be as a white?

There are some who still have this sense — suffer it, I would say, and unnecessarily, so it becomes a form of self-flagellation. I don’t posit this in any assertion of smug superiority; I should just wish to prod them into freedom from confinement. And there is also the other — unadmitted — side of feeling superior as white: being ashamed of being white. An over-compensation for the past, useless for living fully in the present.

If you put the question to me, I hear it as, ‘What about us?’ — South Africans going as best we can about the business of living together. Being white as a state determining my existence is simply not operative. I was privileged through racism, I rejected and actively opposed racism, I played my small part in the liberation struggle and I know that as a result I am a South African and nobody else, living in a country we are in the difficult, thrilling process of creating. That we must create; for despite its natural resources, its sophisticated infrastructure, its advanced technology, what we want never existed for us before: a truly human society.

Grand words. How does it feel to live day to day under their imperative? Five years into freedom: for me, the great change comes from others, from the change in atmosphere in the cities, the streets. It is nothing new for me to ‘mix’ with people of all colours; my closest friendships and working relationships have been in this context for many years. But the old life existed counter to everything that defined and characterised the country. It was — even if triumphantly always in opposition — surrounded by the laws, the state, secular and religious traditions that represented everything it was not. Although we said ‘our country’, this was in reference to that which people were suffering, striving, surviving to bring about — there was no identity with the official entity called South Africa. We had no country.

I am aware now, every day, in so many ways, big and small, happy and troubling, that I can speak of ‘our country’. If the air of taking possession can be palpable, I feel it when I walk out of my gate. I hear it in the volume of traffic. I know it when I pick my way between vendors of everything from mobile phones and fake French perfume to tomatoes and toilet rolls on the pavements. I see it out of the corner of my eye when I stand in a queue at my local post office and eavesdrop on the black postmaster giving instruction to the young Afrikaans employee at the counter. I hear it in the accents of our many languages, listeners speaking English on radio phone-in programmes. It is that indefinable quality called confidence; even the member of the vast number of unemployed who guides me theatrically into a parking bay has it — yes, a contradiction of his actual circumstances.

Well, I live in Johannesburg. A city in transition is full of such contradictions.

Recently my bag was snatched from the car when the friend driving stopped at a traffic light; I had forgotten to lock the passenger-seat door — our routine precaution, like the free distribution of condoms against Aids. I was indignant. House keys, credit card, ATM card — the fact that they were filched by someone living on the streets who had no middle-class status to own such things did not assuage me. But on the same streets in the press of people flowing and dodging round one another, the great mass who had been shut out of the city in ghettos and ‘ethnic homelands’, if someone jostles me, I hear, ‘Sorry, maGogo’ (‘I apologise, Grandmother’). Ordinary good manners, you will say. No. He apologises. He accepts me as a common relative in the human family; after he and his forebears have been decreed outcast from it for generations, both subtly and brutally, colonialist patronage to apartheid rejection. The benison of human feeling at once shines out against, and is threatened by, violent crime. The second question fired by individuals from abroad is one with a target that can’t be missed. Back to the first proposition of the contradiction: the snatched bag. ‘What about crime?’ I shall not duck. The impersonal statistics are there, never mind my credit card. The city I live in is among those with the highest crime rates in the world. That my French granddaughter, a student in Nice, has had her little old car stolen is an incident of urban crime all over the world, but it doesn’t add up to the indicting total in one city, one country, the way the loss of my bag will in the calculation of those passing judgement on the progress of a country with a five-year commitment to democracy as against the several hundred years’ experience of its evolution in the West.

The curious view from abroad is that only whites are threatened by, and concerned about, street crime, hijackings and housebreaking and the violence these involve. Again and again, there are descriptions of suburban razor wire and Rottweilers as the prevailing flora and fauna of the white suburbs. The facts are that homes, humble as well as substantial and even complete with swimming pool, in what are still the black townships of greater Johannesburg, are also armed with wire and dogs. Black professional and businessmen and women who now take a place among the affluent owners of fine cars (regarded primly as suspect conspicuous consumers by observers who do not have the same moral judgement of whites driving the same models) are also victims of hijacking. We face the problems together.