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

The preliminary hearing of the Treason Trial (the first in the history of peacetime South Africa) began in January 1957, and the trial has been in progress, in one form and another — nine months of preliminary hearing, several sessions of the trial itself, with a number of adjournments — for two years. ‘Treason’ is a word with ugly associations. They have become uglier still during the years since the war, now that the word has become part of the vocabulary of the witch hunters of the world. Like ‘Communist’, ‘treason’ may be used, in certain countries and circumstances, to blot out the name of anyone who puts up any sort of opposition to race discrimination and the denial of freedom of movement, opportunity and education.

Among the 156 of the original accused, there was a sprinkling of ex-Communists and fellow travellers — almost exclusively among the twenty-three whites — but the great majority were simply people who abhor the injustice and misery of apartheid and want all races in South Africa to share freely in the life of the country. At various stages in the trial, the number of accused has been reduced, and the government has not yet succeeded in formulating a satisfactory statement of the charge against them; but the trial drags on and, at the time of writing, the Attorney General has just made a statement that he intends to draw up a fresh indictment against the remaining accused.

The first list of those against whom charges had been withdrawn was announced in December 1957, when the preliminary inquiry was in recess. Among the names was that of Chief A. J. Luthuli, President-General of the African National Congress. Chief was at home in Groutville after the nine-month ordeal in court, preparing for the wedding of his medical-student daughter, when the news came, followed by a paper storm of congratulatory telegrams. His feelings were mixed: he could not see why he should be freed while his colleagues in the liberation movement were held; on the other hand, he was glad to be able to get on with Congress work outside the Drill Hall. A few weeks later, charges were withdrawn against some more accused, bringing down to ninety-one the number of those who were committed for trial for high treason in January 1958.

The particulars of the ‘hostile acts’ which were read under the charge of high treason included ‘the hampering or hindering of the said Government [of the Union of South Africa] in its lawful administration by organising or taking part in campaigns against existing laws’. The laws named included the Natives Resettlement Act and the Group Areas Act, which involve the uprooting of African, Indian and coloured communities in order to move them out of white areas; the Bantu Education Act, which has lowered the standard of education available to African children; and the Bantu Authorities Act.

The defence applied for the discharge of the ninety-one, saying that the Crown, by the way it had formulated the charges, had established ‘nothing other than a desire to put an end to any form of effective opposition to the Government of this country — a desire to outlaw free expression of thought and ideas which people in all democratic countries of the West assert the right to hold and utter’. The application for discharge was refused. In the public gallery of the Drill Hall (divided down the middle by a token barrier of low chains and posts to ensure that whites sat on one side and blacks on the other) Luthuli heard the magistrate’s decision. Why he was not still among the accused in the dock was as much of a mystery to him as to anyone else. Whatever the reason, Chief sat in the Drill Hall as a spectator and a free man that day, and many heads, black and white, turned to look at him. When the court adjourned, he walked out among the free men, too; free to travel about the country and address meetings and attend gatherings where he pleased. For how long, of course, he could not guess.

So far — a year later — he has not been served with a ban again, though he has not minced words, whether addressing the small white Liberal Party or Congress. At a meeting before a white audience he was beaten up by white hooligans. At angry meetings of the Transvaal Branch of Congress in Johannesburg Africanists attempted to oust Chief and his kind from leadership and commit the African National Congress to what he calls ‘a dangerously narrow African nationalism’. In April 1959 this group broke away to form the Pan-Africanist Congress.

But that day at the beginning of 1958, when he walked out of the Drill Hall, the sudden release of his freedom was fresh upon him, lightheaded, like a weakness, though the weight of the ordeal of trial to which his colleagues were committed oppressed him, and he even looked a little lonely. And such are the paradoxes of human behaviour that, as Luthuli crossed the street, two of the white police officers who had become familiar figures on duty in the Drill Hall all through the preparatory examination came around the corner and called out, forgetful, across the barrier of apartheid that seeks to legislate against all human contact between black and white and across the barrier of hate that the pass and the baton have built between the police and the black man in South Africa, ‘Well, hullo! You look fine! What are you doing around here? Can’t you keep away from the old Drill Hall, after all?’ And rather gingerly, Chief was amiable in reply.

1959

Postscript: Chief Albert Luthuli received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1960. He died in 1967.

Men are not born brothers; they have to discover each other, and it is this discovery that apartheid seeks to prevent … What is apartheid?

It depends who’s answering. If you ask a member of the South African government, he will tell you that it is separate and parallel development of white and black — that is the official, legal definition. If you ask an ordinary white man who supports the policy, he will tell you that it is the means of keeping South Africa white. If you ask a black man, he may give you any one of a dozen answers, arising out of whatever aspect of apartheid he has been brought up short against that day, for to him it is neither an ideological concept nor a policy, but a context in which his whole life, learning, working, loving, is rigidly enclosed.

He could give you a list of the laws that restrict him from aspiring to most of the aims of any civilised person, or enjoying the pleasures that every white person takes for granted. But it is unlikely that he will. What may be on his mind at the moment is the problem of how to save his child from the watered-down ‘Bantu Education’ which is now standard in schools for black children — inferior schooling based on a reduced syllabus that insists the black child cannot attain the same standard of education as the white child, and places emphasis on practical and menial skills. Or perhaps you’ve merely caught him on the morning after he’s spent a night in the police cells because he was out after curfew hours without a piece of paper bearing a white man’s signature permitting him to be so. Perhaps (if he’s a man who cares for such things) he’s feeling resentful because there’s a concert in town he would not be permitted to attend, or (if he’s that kind of man, and who isn’t?) he’s irked at having to pay a black-market price for the bottle of brandy he is debarred from buying legitimately. That’s apartheid, to him. All these things, big and little, and many more.

If you want to know how Africans — black men — live in South Africa, you will get in return for your curiosity an exposition of apartheid in action, for in all of a black man’s life — all his life — rejection by the white man has the last word. With this word of rejection apartheid began, long before it hardened into laws and legislation, long before it became a theory of racial selectiveness and the policy of a government. The Afrikaner Nationalists (an Afrikaner is a white person of Dutch descent whose mother tongue is Afrikaans; a Nationalist is a member or supporter of the National Party, at present in power) did not invent it, they merely developed it, and the impulse of Cain from which they worked lives in many white South Africans today, English-speaking as well as Afrikaner.