Glad to be alive
André Brinktexten på engelska:
The scene is a small restaurant in a peaceful suburb in the town of Somerset West near Cape Town, on a quiet weekday night. It is quite late in the evening. Several of the patrons have already gone home, others are preparing to leave. Among the remaining dozen or so are my daughter Sonja and her husband Graham. They are discussing their two small children and how to occupy them during the winter holidays which have just begun; and reminiscing about the reception at the French embassy earlier in the evening, where they went, with us, to meet the members of the French rugby team who are to play against the South African Springboks this Saturday. The world seems to be a pleasant, relaxed and generous place.
A sudden commotion interrupts the conversation. Five men, armed with pistols, burst into the restaurant and start shouting, in a cacophony of voices, orders and instructions which are at first quite incomprehensible, as they take up positions from where they have everybody covered. The next five or ten minutes is a turmoil of conflicting impressions. First, the patrons are ordered to lie down and ‘sleep’. Almost immediately afterwards they are ordered to ‘wake up’ again. One man who tries to protest is summarily attacked, beaten to the floor and savagely kicked in the face. Everybody is ordered to strip themselves of rings and jewellery, watches, cell phones, wallets. As the loot is handed over, the women and smaller men are indiscriminately beaten; for some reason the larger men are left alone. The manager is forced to hand over the keys to the safe; the cash register is smashed. Then they are herded into a small, windowless store room at the back, and locked up. Outside, the commotion continues as the premises are searched and trashed.
The manager, it turns out, has somehow slid his cell phone into his shoe. Shaking, but contained, he dials 10111, the emergency number of the police. Sighs and muted exclamations of relief all round. This is where drama collapses into dark farce. Three times running the police place the call on hold, and every time the manager is required to provide full details of name and address before the call is transferred to somebody else, who repeats the procedure. By the time the cops finally arrive the thugs have disappeared. It takes about four hours before Sonja and Graham, along with the other hostages, are allowed to wend their way home.
Apart from a single paragraph on an inside page of the small local newspaper, the incident will not even be reported in the press: it is too insignificant, too banal, too commonplace in the New South Africa. No-one has been killed, no-one raped. It will not even rate as a statistic.
On their way home, under a lamp post, Sonja and Graham pass a newspaper poster bearing the large, beaming, bearded face of the Minister of Safety and Security, Charles Nqakula. (A Ministry of Safety and Security in South Africa, it occurs to me, makes about as much sense as would a Ministry of Maritime Affairs in Switzerland, or a Department of Justice in the USA of George W. Bush.) After a singularly unremarkable career as a politician, Mr Nqakula has recently been catapulted into the headlines with his remark that he is not interested in widespread complaints against violence, and that people (mostly whites) who ‘winge’ about the level of violence in South Africa would do better to leave the country.
A storm of protest against his almost criminal indifference culminated in an accusation in parliament that the minister’s dismissal of the countrywide anger was reminiscent of the infamous remark by the then Minister of Justice, Jimmy Kruger, that the murder of Steve Biko by Security Police in September 1977, ‘left him cold’. In response to this accusation Nqakula compounded his earlier remark by insisting that he had absolutely no knowledge of the said Jimmy Kruger, except that this name had appeared in a signature on a banning order served on Nqakula at the time. One expects, of course, lapses of intelligence or plain common sense in politicians. And experience in recent times has revealed in Mr Nqakula both a limited capacity for understanding and an unlimited capacity for arrogance. He does not seem to consider that his professed ignorance about the unlamented Kruger implies also an ignorance about the life and death of Biko: surely the one memory cannot exist without the other. And this may be a key to the full scandal of Nqakula’s attitude. He is ignorant about his own history. And in the process he betrays everything the ANC has for so long claimed to stand for: non-racialism, collaboration and understanding between black and white, a shared responsibility towards past and future. In one callous, off-the-cuff remark, he has betrayed the legacy of Mandela.
Of course not all members of the power establishment are like him: there are other members of the government who are humane and generous and understanding, and dedicate their considerable talents to realising Mandela’s dream. But unfortunately he is no exception either. I remember how, only weeks after the political changeover in the country, on a visit to a supermarket I drove along a narrow one-way lane beside the main building to the parking lot at the back. Halfway down I had to stop in my tracks as a car approached from the front. There were four or five very hefty gentlemen in dark suits in the car. I rolled down my window, leaned out and pointed out – very cautiously, because they were very big – that it was a one-way. Whereupon the driver said, ‘We are members of parliament, we have right of way.’ Trying to remain as composed as possible, I switched off my car, got out, closed the door and walked away, fully realising that I was taking quite a risk. But when I gingerly returned ten minutes or so later, the rogue car was gone. I may have won that round, but they had made their point. And Nqakula is clearly a worthy follower in their footsteps.
Among the new power-élite in South Africa his attitude appears to be gaining ground, in direct proportion to the escalating violence of the country. Ignoring the profound needs of the country – rampant crime, the AIDS pandemic, poverty and deprivation - their primary concern appears to be lining their pockets and those of family and friends, oiling the wheels of the gravy train, even if that train runs over the bodies of the victims of murder and rape and violence; and those of us who dare to protest are advised to shut up or leave. Unfortunately for Nqakula, I shall not leave. Not because if you are on the right side of power you can, like him, it is easy to get fatter and richer, but because this is the place of my birth and my ancestors, and I happen to love it – for richer or poorer, in sickness or in health, until death us do part.
In the present state of the country, I may meet that death sooner rather than later. But, as Sonja said the morning after her ordeal, ‘I refuse to become a victim.’
The problem is that while such incidents (with all the emotional and mental scars they leave behind them for months, for years) characterise the present evolution of South Africa, the real suffering of our new democracy is not addressed. The swaggering Jacob Zuma, once vice-president of the country and unabashedly ambitious to become the next president, takes a shower after unprotected sex to counter the danger of AIDS; Charles Nqakula washes his hands of rape and murder. Nqakula pretends that the only ‘squealers’ are previously advantaged whites who cannot adapt to democratic change. For him it is easy to deny the plight of innumerable victims, black and brown and white, who live in townships and informal settlements and squatter camps, and whose clamouring for help over the years also fall on deaf ears. What is lost is not only a generation of the murdered and the maimed and the deprived, but the opportunity to set up our democracy as the example to the world it was once claimed to be.
‘At least,’ Sonja wryly said after the event, ‘we should be grateful that we are still alive.’
In a curious way that remark was what angered me most. What kind of a country is this in which life is not a normal given, a norm, a status guaranteed (by our admirable constitution among others things), but something exceptional and remarkable, a privilege so extraordinary that it deserves special consideration and gratitude?
For me this ‘insignificant’ episode, marked as it was by the minister’s apocalyptic arrogance, has become a watershed in my own thinking about the New South Africa. During the years of darkness under apartheid, when the ANC, banned and in exile, was not allowed to put its case openly in front of the people of South Africa, I saw it as part of my mission as a writer to explain what dared not be spoken openly by the silenced, to speak what was forbidden - in order to ensure that the truth could be brought into the open. And in recent years, whenever on my travels I have been asked about the many ills that beset the New South Africa, I have always insisted that while they could not be denied, they are merely the flotsam and jetsam on the surface of a strong positive stream flowing in the right direction: comparing where we find ourselves today with where we were a mere twelve years ago, at the time of the first free elections, I have taken pains to insist what a dramatic change there has been in the country, and that there is good reason to be essentially, if cautiously, optimistic.
I can no longer do that. It would be a betrayal of the most important values I believe in, and which were once, in a dream, exemplified by the ANC. Through people like Nqakula, who have now begun to define the image of the ANC, I feel myself left in the lurch. The violence we are experiencing at the moment, and which grows worse by the day, by the hour, has become the defining characteristic of the new dispensation, because there appears to be no will to control it from above. In fact, the staggering indifference of those who argue and think like Nqakula, allows – and even encourages - the violence to persist and to grow worse. And until, and unless, the government – and the president – openly and squarely repudiates it and starts acting decisively to change it, our brief hope of the past twelve years will have been in vain. (One wonders for how long FIFA can continue to contemplate sending its soccer teams in 2010 to a World Cup presented in a country that has lost the ability to guarantee the safety of players, officials and spectators, turning what should be a world-class spectacle into a potential massacre which could make the Munich Olympics of a few decades ago look like a picnic outing.)
Mr Nqakula can, of course, not care less. He has paid his price in the Struggle, hasn’t he? When others were tortured and killed, he, too, suffered. He was hit by a banning order, remember: persecuted, on a piece of paper, by the man who was left cold by the death of a fellow human being – just as Nqakula himself is now left cold by the suffering and death of innumerable fellow South Africans, whose only desire was to enjoy the blessings of a generous land in a model democracy. Like his colleague, the Minister of Health, Manto Tsabalala-Msimang, who babbles incoherently about curing AIDS with wild garlic and herbal concoctions, the Honourable Minister of Safety and Security is concerned only with assuring the prosperity of a small group of associates and confidants built on the suffering and deprivation of a huge majority.
We can still salvage those human and African values that have shaped the New South Africa – not the values that brought forth monsters like Nqakula or Zuma or Tsabalala-Msimang, but those that have produced a Mandela or a Tutu. But there is not much more time to lose.
© André Brink 2006
The scene is a small restaurant in a peaceful suburb in the town of Somerset West near Cape Town, on a quiet weekday night. It is quite late in the evening. Several of the patrons have already gone home, others are preparing to leave. Among the remaining dozen or so are my daughter Sonja and her husband Graham. They are discussing their two small children and how to occupy them during the winter holidays which have just begun; and reminiscing about the reception at the French embassy earlier in the evening, where they went, with us, to meet the members of the French rugby team who are to play against the South African Springboks this Saturday. The world seems to be a pleasant, relaxed and generous place.
A sudden commotion interrupts the conversation. Five men, armed with pistols, burst into the restaurant and start shouting, in a cacophony of voices, orders and instructions which are at first quite incomprehensible, as they take up positions from where they have everybody covered. The next five or ten minutes is a turmoil of conflicting impressions. First, the patrons are ordered to lie down and ‘sleep’. Almost immediately afterwards they are ordered to ‘wake up’ again. One man who tries to protest is summarily attacked, beaten to the floor and savagely kicked in the face. Everybody is ordered to strip themselves of rings and jewellery, watches, cell phones, wallets. As the loot is handed over, the women and smaller men are indiscriminately beaten; for some reason the larger men are left alone. The manager is forced to hand over the keys to the safe; the cash register is smashed. Then they are herded into a small, windowless store room at the back, and locked up. Outside, the commotion continues as the premises are searched and trashed.
The manager, it turns out, has somehow slid his cell phone into his shoe. Shaking, but contained, he dials 10111, the emergency number of the police. Sighs and muted exclamations of relief all round. This is where drama collapses into dark farce. Three times running the police place the call on hold, and every time the manager is required to provide full details of name and address before the call is transferred to somebody else, who repeats the procedure. By the time the cops finally arrive the thugs have disappeared. It takes about four hours before Sonja and Graham, along with the other hostages, are allowed to wend their way home.
Apart from a single paragraph on an inside page of the small local newspaper, the incident will not even be reported in the press: it is too insignificant, too banal, too commonplace in the New South Africa. No-one has been killed, no-one raped. It will not even rate as a statistic.
On their way home, under a lamp post, Sonja and Graham pass a newspaper poster bearing the large, beaming, bearded face of the Minister of Safety and Security, Charles Nqakula. (A Ministry of Safety and Security in South Africa, it occurs to me, makes about as much sense as would a Ministry of Maritime Affairs in Switzerland, or a Department of Justice in the USA of George W. Bush.) After a singularly unremarkable career as a politician, Mr Nqakula has recently been catapulted into the headlines with his remark that he is not interested in widespread complaints against violence, and that people (mostly whites) who ‘winge’ about the level of violence in South Africa would do better to leave the country.
A storm of protest against his almost criminal indifference culminated in an accusation in parliament that the minister’s dismissal of the countrywide anger was reminiscent of the infamous remark by the then Minister of Justice, Jimmy Kruger, that the murder of Steve Biko by Security Police in September 1977, ‘left him cold’. In response to this accusation Nqakula compounded his earlier remark by insisting that he had absolutely no knowledge of the said Jimmy Kruger, except that this name had appeared in a signature on a banning order served on Nqakula at the time. One expects, of course, lapses of intelligence or plain common sense in politicians. And experience in recent times has revealed in Mr Nqakula both a limited capacity for understanding and an unlimited capacity for arrogance. He does not seem to consider that his professed ignorance about the unlamented Kruger implies also an ignorance about the life and death of Biko: surely the one memory cannot exist without the other. And this may be a key to the full scandal of Nqakula’s attitude. He is ignorant about his own history. And in the process he betrays everything the ANC has for so long claimed to stand for: non-racialism, collaboration and understanding between black and white, a shared responsibility towards past and future. In one callous, off-the-cuff remark, he has betrayed the legacy of Mandela.
Of course not all members of the power establishment are like him: there are other members of the government who are humane and generous and understanding, and dedicate their considerable talents to realising Mandela’s dream. But unfortunately he is no exception either. I remember how, only weeks after the political changeover in the country, on a visit to a supermarket I drove along a narrow one-way lane beside the main building to the parking lot at the back. Halfway down I had to stop in my tracks as a car approached from the front. There were four or five very hefty gentlemen in dark suits in the car. I rolled down my window, leaned out and pointed out – very cautiously, because they were very big – that it was a one-way. Whereupon the driver said, ‘We are members of parliament, we have right of way.’ Trying to remain as composed as possible, I switched off my car, got out, closed the door and walked away, fully realising that I was taking quite a risk. But when I gingerly returned ten minutes or so later, the rogue car was gone. I may have won that round, but they had made their point. And Nqakula is clearly a worthy follower in their footsteps.
Among the new power-élite in South Africa his attitude appears to be gaining ground, in direct proportion to the escalating violence of the country. Ignoring the profound needs of the country – rampant crime, the AIDS pandemic, poverty and deprivation - their primary concern appears to be lining their pockets and those of family and friends, oiling the wheels of the gravy train, even if that train runs over the bodies of the victims of murder and rape and violence; and those of us who dare to protest are advised to shut up or leave. Unfortunately for Nqakula, I shall not leave. Not because if you are on the right side of power you can, like him, it is easy to get fatter and richer, but because this is the place of my birth and my ancestors, and I happen to love it – for richer or poorer, in sickness or in health, until death us do part.
In the present state of the country, I may meet that death sooner rather than later. But, as Sonja said the morning after her ordeal, ‘I refuse to become a victim.’
The problem is that while such incidents (with all the emotional and mental scars they leave behind them for months, for years) characterise the present evolution of South Africa, the real suffering of our new democracy is not addressed. The swaggering Jacob Zuma, once vice-president of the country and unabashedly ambitious to become the next president, takes a shower after unprotected sex to counter the danger of AIDS; Charles Nqakula washes his hands of rape and murder. Nqakula pretends that the only ‘squealers’ are previously advantaged whites who cannot adapt to democratic change. For him it is easy to deny the plight of innumerable victims, black and brown and white, who live in townships and informal settlements and squatter camps, and whose clamouring for help over the years also fall on deaf ears. What is lost is not only a generation of the murdered and the maimed and the deprived, but the opportunity to set up our democracy as the example to the world it was once claimed to be.
‘At least,’ Sonja wryly said after the event, ‘we should be grateful that we are still alive.’
In a curious way that remark was what angered me most. What kind of a country is this in which life is not a normal given, a norm, a status guaranteed (by our admirable constitution among others things), but something exceptional and remarkable, a privilege so extraordinary that it deserves special consideration and gratitude?
For me this ‘insignificant’ episode, marked as it was by the minister’s apocalyptic arrogance, has become a watershed in my own thinking about the New South Africa. During the years of darkness under apartheid, when the ANC, banned and in exile, was not allowed to put its case openly in front of the people of South Africa, I saw it as part of my mission as a writer to explain what dared not be spoken openly by the silenced, to speak what was forbidden - in order to ensure that the truth could be brought into the open. And in recent years, whenever on my travels I have been asked about the many ills that beset the New South Africa, I have always insisted that while they could not be denied, they are merely the flotsam and jetsam on the surface of a strong positive stream flowing in the right direction: comparing where we find ourselves today with where we were a mere twelve years ago, at the time of the first free elections, I have taken pains to insist what a dramatic change there has been in the country, and that there is good reason to be essentially, if cautiously, optimistic.
I can no longer do that. It would be a betrayal of the most important values I believe in, and which were once, in a dream, exemplified by the ANC. Through people like Nqakula, who have now begun to define the image of the ANC, I feel myself left in the lurch. The violence we are experiencing at the moment, and which grows worse by the day, by the hour, has become the defining characteristic of the new dispensation, because there appears to be no will to control it from above. In fact, the staggering indifference of those who argue and think like Nqakula, allows – and even encourages - the violence to persist and to grow worse. And until, and unless, the government – and the president – openly and squarely repudiates it and starts acting decisively to change it, our brief hope of the past twelve years will have been in vain. (One wonders for how long FIFA can continue to contemplate sending its soccer teams in 2010 to a World Cup presented in a country that has lost the ability to guarantee the safety of players, officials and spectators, turning what should be a world-class spectacle into a potential massacre which could make the Munich Olympics of a few decades ago look like a picnic outing.)
Mr Nqakula can, of course, not care less. He has paid his price in the Struggle, hasn’t he? When others were tortured and killed, he, too, suffered. He was hit by a banning order, remember: persecuted, on a piece of paper, by the man who was left cold by the death of a fellow human being – just as Nqakula himself is now left cold by the suffering and death of innumerable fellow South Africans, whose only desire was to enjoy the blessings of a generous land in a model democracy. Like his colleague, the Minister of Health, Manto Tsabalala-Msimang, who babbles incoherently about curing AIDS with wild garlic and herbal concoctions, the Honourable Minister of Safety and Security is concerned only with assuring the prosperity of a small group of associates and confidants built on the suffering and deprivation of a huge majority.
We can still salvage those human and African values that have shaped the New South Africa – not the values that brought forth monsters like Nqakula or Zuma or Tsabalala-Msimang, but those that have produced a Mandela or a Tutu. But there is not much more time to lose.
© André Brink 2006
Inlagd 2006-08-24, kl 14:55 | Verkligheten
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