Nadine Gordimer - A Sport of Nature

No-one is on record for feeling any remorse. Neither the police and soldiers who shoot blacks every day, nor the blacks who kill — no, not their own people, which is what whites are saying — but those who are not their own, anymore: who have lost all identity but that of enemy. There’s colour-blindness for you, at last …

What excuse is there for that? The madness. How do you feel about that? The whites want the madness to be the last, the final, triumphant vindication of all they themselves have done to blacks for hundreds of years .

There’s no excuse .

There’s only the evidence: if over hundreds of years you distort law and order as repression, you get frenzy. If you won’t attempt to do justice, you cut morality, human feeling, pity — you cut the heart out .

White kids are being killed in landmine explosions and supermarket bombings, on Sunday rides and shopping trips with their loving parents. The mines and petrol bombs are planted by blacks, but it’s the whites who have killed their own children. The loving parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. The white family tree .

How is it possible to live like that; well, how was it possible to have lived like that. They can go away from what’s happening now, but they can never go away from the way we lived for so many generations. On little floating islands, it exists still, that life like patches of blue water hyacinths that used to choke the rivers, broken from their moorings now and being carried out by heavy seas. (Sentence sounds odd because, in fact, it’s the beginning of a poem I tried to write; break up the lines and you’ll see it’s not so bad.) I hired a cottage — only eighteen months ago — along the North Coast. It was on, wooden stilts and built of corrugated iron with a wooden stoep and a water-tank. White miners used to save up and retire on pension in little pondokkies like that, but they’ve nearly all been pulled down for time-sharing condominiums for richer whites. This one was in an area the Indians have got declared for them since they’ve had a House in Parliament, and their development scheme hasn’t started yet — so an Indian friend found it for me. (You see, there’s privilege even among revolutionaries.) Between the strikes and the funerals I was going there regularly whenever I could. It was my Safe House. The Gandhi settlement nearby was burned down and Buthelezi’s government-approved private army was fighting our United Democratic Front people in a black township just over the hills. In my cottage there was perfect peace. The wasps buzzed their mantras. I ate the shad I caught and drank my Lion lager like every South African male. At night I sat out in what the darkness reverted to the miner’s garden. I couldn’t see the weeds and broken chairs and rusted pots, and the frangipani trees, that had survived neglect and the black women’s search for firewood, were a constellation of scented stars just at my head. The frogs throbbing on and the sea hissing. I’d walk down to the beach. Nothing. Nothing but gentleness, you know how the Indian Ocean seems to evaporate into the sky at night. In the middle of my witness of the horror of this country, I experienced the white man’s peace. I did. I woke up at night and heard the heavy sea, the other sea, pounding on the land. But that was only a line for the ending of the poem; although I was being carried out on it, it was bringing me here .

There has been madness since the beginning, in the whites. Our great-grandfather Hillel was in it from the moment he came up from the steerage deck in Cape Town harbour with his cardboard suitcase, landing anywhere to get away from the Little Father’s quotas and the cossacks’ pogroms. It’s in the blood you and I share. Since the beginning. Whites couldn’t have done what they’ve done, otherwise. Madness has appeared among blacks in the final stage of repression. It is, in fact, the unrecognized last act of repression, transferred to them to enact upon themselves. It is the horrible end of all whites have done .

The Major is triumphant. Well, how do you feel about your blacks now? What about your savages hacking each other to death? What about the end of capitalist exploitation and the great dawn of freedom and peace?

But my position is sane. I’m without doubts about that .

This cell, at this moment, seems full to me, brimming, this empty cell is fuller than the other rooms I’ve had. My room in the house always looked as if Bettie had just cleared someone’s stuff away. I never hung it with sports pennants and school photographs and pop stars the way you girls did yours. I didn’t keep things, didn’t want to remember. What have I got of my life? Only what is here. D’you remember the toy car? It belonged to that kid. I kept that .

Hendrik/Mercury/Icarus, don’t fall into the sea with this. From jail, from here I’m free to say everything. I love you .

Sasha

*United Democratic Front

The letter was produced at Sasha’s trial.

He must have bribed the young son of a farmer ruined by the ’80s drought in the Koster district who had said there were opportunities for advancement in the prison services. But what could the prisoner have had to offer? It is the wretched thieves and prostitutes, not the politicals, who traffic in the prison economy of drugs. Maybe he had even tried to convert the boy to the cause; it is known to prison officers that those trained by the Left are taught to subvert the Christian values inculcated by the Dutch Reformed Church.

Hendrik Gerhardus Munnik had never written a letter in his life, except as a school exercise. The letter he smuggled out of prison (it was ‘under the plastic’ in his warder’s cap, he told the court) was very thick, he didn’t know what was inside. He kept it for three days before handing it over to the Commandant. And why did he decide to surrender it to prison authorities?

Because he was afraid of what his father would say if he lost his job.

Did the prisoner promise him any reward or remuneration for smuggling the letter?

No.

Why did he agree to take it?

Because he thought it was a love-letter.

Sasha was accused with three others, Burtwell Nyaka, Makekene Conco, Thabo Poswao, on five counts, which the Defence conducted by Joe’s most distinguished colleagues succeeded in getting reduced to the two principal ones: conspiring to overthrow the State and furthering the aims of the African National Congress. The ‘love-letter’, the Prosecution submitted, contained a clear statement of the accused’s intention to commit high treason. The passage was read out and the exhibit, numbered 14, passed to the judge: ‘Yes … I want to overthrow the State … that is the meaning of my life’. The whole tenor of the letter, the Prosecution continued, made clear that for the accused the ‘solution’ to South Africa’s problems was revolution. In this context, he lauded violent uprisings, lawlessness in the black townships, strikes and boycotts, as the blacks’ understanding of means to ‘overthrow that (the) South African way of life’. He blamed whites for the murder of white children. These sentiments he had already expressed on public platforms, in the trade union and other journals to which he contributed, in the pamphlets it would be alleged he had conspired to distribute by pamphlet bombs, in fact in his record of revolutionary activities that could be proved as far back as 1979. And his convictions were so strong that he would even risk sending subversive material out of prison by clandestine means — some love-letter!

The Defence submitted that the letter was, in fact, ‘a moving credo’ from a man whose sense of justice and humanity had found no structures within which to redress the misery he was aware of in South Africa. He had been brought up in a family where a social conscience was the foundation of personal morality, his father had been for many years what would be known in Western countries as a civil rights lawyer, his mother had been an active liberal; their son had seen them leave their country in despair at the fruitlessness of their efforts to assist meaningful constitutional changes. It was, indeed, out of love — love for fellow human beings, for the poorest and most disadvantaged, the majority of the South African population, that the son had given up the promise of a lucrative career in law and a high social and economic position among whites in order to put his life at the service of black workers.