John Berger - G.

The Grand Duke: Ferdinando Primo. He was the father of Livorno.

He founded the city and he came from Firenze, said Umberto.

What is it made of?

I do not understand.

Is it made of stone? asked the boy.

It is made in bronze, a metal precioso .

Why are the men chained?

They are slaves. Slaves from Africa.

They look very strong.

They must be strong. They — how you say? Umberto mimed a man rowing.

Rowing a boat?

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Why did they want to make a statue of them?

Ma perché son magnifici . They are beautiful.

Beatrice laid aside the silver-backed, mermaid-embossed hairbrush and going to the window stopped by the vase of lilac.

When the boy came into the room she said: I cannot ever remember any lilac having a scent like this lot Then she asked him whether he would please find out whether the second cowman was still sick. After he had left the room, she thought: I am more than twice as old as he is.

POEM FOR BEATRICE

Continually mists change my size

Only territories on a map are measured

The sounds I make are made elsewhere

I am enveloped in the astonishing silence of my breasts

I plait my hair into sentences

Never let loose

I walk where I wish

My cuffs admit my wrists alone

Break

Break the astonishing silence of my breasts.

THE BOERS

‘Our century is a huge cauldron in which all historical eras are boiling and mingling.’ Octavio Paz

African civilization in South Africa was destroyed by the Boers. The Boers colonized South Africa for the later benefit of the British. The British intermittently aided them in this colonization but the essential relation between the colonizers and the colonized was created by the Boers. Yet the Boers were themselves fugitives — in both a geographical and a historical sense. They defeated in the name of defeat. When, in the eighteenth century, they began to penetrate into the High Veld, they did so to escape the controls of the Dutch East India Company in Cape Town, and as soon as they did so, they regressed historically. They abandoned fixed farms; they became nomadic herdsmen and hunters.

The Great Trek of 1835 which led the Boers into Natal, the Transvaal and Orange Free State was a retreat from the demands and disciplines in all spheres of social activity — productive, political, moral — of nineteenth-century Europe. Unlike other colonizers it could not occur to the Boers that they were taking ‘civilization’ into ‘the dark continent’: they themselves were withdrawing from that ‘civilization’.

Their productive means were no more advanced than those of the Bantu whose land they seized, whose crops they burnt and whose herds they stole. Their fire-arms, fast horses and wagons gave them the necessary tactical advantages. But they were incapable of developing what they seized. They were even incapable of exploiting the labour force of impoverished squatters which they created. With all their rights of mastery and property, which they held to be sacred and God-given, they could do nothing. They were impotent; and they were alone among those whom they had uselessly defeated.

In the rest of the world which Europe colonized, enslaved and exploited, native populations were massacred and destroyed (in Australia, in North America): deported elsewhere (from West Africa as slaves): or else they were accommodated within a moral, religious, social system which rationalized and justified the colonizations (catholicism in Latin America, the princely kingdoms and the caste system integrated into the imperial rule of India). In South Africa the Boers were unable to establish such a self-justifying ‘moral’ hegemony. They could accommodate neither victory nor victims. They could draw up no treaty with those whom they had dispossessed. There was no settlement possible, because they were unable to use what they had taken. There was consequently less hypocrisy or complacency or corruption among the Boers than among other colonizers. But it seemed to them that the existence of every African was an incitement to that great black avenging which they continually feared. And since no settlement was possible, the justification, the explanation of their position had to be continually reaffirmed through individual emotion. Day and night every Boer had to insure that his feeling of mastery was stronger than his fear. All that could relieve the fear was hatred.

Politics, so far as Beatrice was concerned, was one of the careers open to men: no more and no less. (She saw Laura’s devotion to politics as proof of her heartlessness.) She was interested in the stories and characters of Greek mythology — but not in history. She knew nothing of the fate of the Amaxosa. When people spoke, as they did continually in Musgrave Road, Durban, or at the Royal Hotel, of the ‘treachery of the Boers’ and the ‘Boer atrocities’, she had the impression that everyone was waiting their opportunity to compete, like singers at an audition, in saying the necessary phrases with their own individual gestures and signs of emotion. The competition never ended so long as there was a second person present. Other subjects included The Empire, The Character of the Kaffir, The Qualities of The British Soldier, The Role of the Missionary. She never questioned the assumptions which underlay the phrases. Both assumptions and competition bored her. She acquired the habit of appearing to listen whilst studying the speaker’s fingers, or looking out of the window or wondering what she herself would be doing in half an hour. Thus her time and her attention were frequently unoccupied. And this is what led to her disturbance, to the possibility of the sub-continent haunting her.

Precisely because she lacked the protection of ready-made generalizations and judgements, because she allowed her thoughts to wander aimlessly, because she lacked what all administrators and troops oppressing another nation must always maintain — a sense of duty without end, she began to feel, between the interstices of formal social convention, the violence of the hatred, the violence of what would be avenged.

In Pietermaritzburg she saw a loyal Dutchman (loyal to the Queen) beating his kaffir servant. As he beat him he made a noise in his throat like a laugh. His mouth was open and his tongue was between his teeth. His passion was such that he did not wish to stop until he had annihilated the body he was beating: yet however hard he beat it, he could not annihilate it. From this arose the necessity of his cry which resembled a laugh. His expression was like that of a small child deliberately shitting himself. The servant, absolutely silent, hunched himself against the blows.

Sometimes in the way an African ran she saw the defiance of all his race.

She could not explain her feelings to herself. There is an historical equivalent to the psychological process of repression into the unconscious. Certain experiences cannot be formulated because they have occurred too soon. This happens when an inherited world-view is unable to contain or resolve certain emotions or intuitions which have been provoked by a new situation or an extremity of experience unforeseen by that world-view. ‘Mysteries’ grow up within or around the ideological system. Eventually these mysteries destroy it by providing the basis for a new world-view. Medieval witchcraft, for example, may be seen in this light.

A moment’s introspection shows that a large part of our own experience cannot be adequately formulated: it awaits further understanding of the total human situation. In certain respects we are likely to be better understood by those who follow us than by ourselves. Nevertheless their understanding will be expressed in terms which would now be alien to us. They will change our unformulated experience beyond our recognition. As we have changed Beatrice’s.