I spent the morning staring, staring at the sea, the Indian Ocean
actually, and at a flotilla of freighters parked, many at the horizon,
waiting for their turn to enter the port of Durban on the east coast of
South Africa. The ships seem to defy the chop of the turbulent waters,
and appear anchored and steady.
I am at the beachfront, in a small ocean-side clubhouse/restaurant
that used to belong only to White surfers in the days when the beach was
segregated, Apartheid-style, with unequal slices of sand designated for
Whites, Indians and, sometimes, Blacks. There are no African names on
the Surf Club’s roster of the men – all men – who ran the show here for
decades.
Overhead, the loud noise of the wind and the waves is interrupted by
two military helicopters probably carrying the South Africa’s president
Jacob Zulu whose pricey homestead at Nkandla is about 100 kilometers up
the beach in the rolling hills of what is now Kwazulu Natal.
I learned later that he spent the day there at a ceremony asking his ancestors to support his bid for re-election.’’
Like many of the country’s elite and leadership, he seems more
comfortable flying above the fray and looking down. At the moment, he is
distracted by charges that the government spent 250 million rand
enhancng security at his private home. His defenders call it his
‘compound,’ which he did or did not build with personal funds for his
four wives with his own funds, a “national key point” that must be
defended against any and all threats, domestic, foreign and probably
extra-terrestrial.
Otherwise, politics at the beach does not intrude except in my own
mind as I reflect on what brought me here 45 years ago, at the height of
the State of Emergency to do my bit, on a clandestine anti-apartheid
mission. I saw the whole area then as enemy territory, a battleground in
a holy war against racism.
Surrounding me now is the new, post apartheid South Africa, a work
in progress twenty plus years on. Back in 1967, I was at the beach in
Durban with signs telling people where they belonged. Today I am in the
Northern suburb of Umhlanga that shot up around a huge mall for all with
office parks and ritzy residential towers like the one I am staying in.
It is modeled in design after a world famous hotel in Dubai; its four
levels of parking look like a BMW/Mercedes dealership.
An economic apartheid replaced the racial one, Northern suburbs here
and in Johannesburg became epicenters for concentrated wealth and
industry. The center cities have been abandoned to their own devices as
the big money and then new money flock to a new homeland-like enclave.
The part time black maid assigned to my rented apartment tells me
that she can only get jobs cleaning, and that many young people are
dropping out of school because there are so few opportunities for them.
Soon, this area has become a hub of the “festive season,” a time for
vacations and downtime. There are rows of spiffy hotels just waiting
for the onslaught of sun-hungry holiday-makers. Most are foreign-owned
so the profits don’t stay in South Africa but are remitted back to their
owners overseas.
This new South Africa looks and feels familiar to Americans like
myself. The fast food restaurants are everywhere. And so are the brands
and movies that I am supposedly comfortable with. Ten percent of the
population prosper in privilege like affluent Californians.
Unfortunately, more than 50 percent are still trapped in desperate
poverty, often without food, or much hope.
The revolution fought in their name has yet to reach them.
It’s hard not to be disillusioned as I search for the fading fumes
of the freedom struggle that has become, like the civil rights movement I
was part of in the States, part of the past, a subject found more in
museums and classrooms than in the active thoughts of millions of South
Africans under the age of 25.
Nelson Mandela’s face is now on the currency but his ideals seem distant from many minds.
All I hear is grumbling and contempt for politicians, especially
those in the ANC, whose honeymoon is long over. The media seems to have
joined the opposition and is brimming with non-stop stories of betrayal,
greed, and corruption. They are as hostile as the apartheid media was
in the days when the movement was ritually denounced as terrorist and
rarely quoted. Today, it is only quoted in stories that make it look
bad.
This is not new, say veterans of the ANC including an old friend who
was part of the “struggle” in its long years in exile. (I am not naming
her or others I quote because I interviewed them for a still unreleased
film,
not this essay.) “Danny we always had that. We had people who were very
rich in the movement. A lot of the whites who came into the movement in
the 50s had money, were highly educated. There were a few cases, there
weren’t as many cases as there are now, but there were cases of
corruption. There’s nothing new about all of this. And there were always
dissatisfied comrades. And there was always moaning and groaning. We’re
not moving fast enough, we’re not moving in the right direction, we’re
selling out. Always...”
Back in 1994, on the very day of the country’s first democratic
election I sat with ANC leader Joe Slovo, who even then worried and
prophetically warning about the dangers of corruption by comrades who
feel “the struggle owes them a living.”
I later chatted about this situation with one of South Africa’s top
writers, a world famous figure. She was besides herself, expressing a
deep sense of personal loss:
“I find it very painful. Very disillusioning. It looks worse every
day and every week. And then this terrible massacre going on between the
police and workers at the Platinum Mines. So it’s very difficult not to
feel discouraged. But I just say, now look, if we got through and rid
of apartheid, somehow or another we must be able to get through and get
rid of this corruption.’
She then put events in a historical context of conquest and colonialism, a context hardly on the minds of many whites:
“I think that without making any excuse for this, it is partly the
legacy, not just of apartheid, but going back to 1652, when the first
man from the Dutch East India Company landed on what is now the Cape.
That was the beginning of the colonist period, the moment the foot of a
white man went on the shore there. And the black population in SA, the
indigenous people, have indeed been deprived of 90% of what life should
mean for these centuries.
“And so then we had apartheid which was really the epitome of everything.
”Was been done to black people for centuries. I can only think it’s
in the DNA, if you’re black. So there is this push to say, well we had
nothing, now we must have everything. At any cost! And that leads to
terrible corruption. I’m not excusing it, because the saddest thing for
me is that some of our great heroes from the struggle have fallen into
this mode of accepting corruption as part of what they were fighting
for. And it’s the absolute opposite. It’s complete denial of everything
the struggle meant.”
Another writer, a black literary lion who has appeared in some of my films, shares her view:
“It is precisely because of the high moral ground that the ANC is
deeply associated with that there is a sense that the ANC, of all
organizations, should have known better. And should have better prepared
for the hurdles that we’re going through now.
“I have an understanding for black economic empowerment. I have an
understanding of the attractions of wealth to people who have had a long
history of depravation and suddenly are in power. But always there is
another angle to this. That often when people suddenly have a lot of
money, there is a history of them not knowing what to do with it. And
then, all of it vaporizing, and disappearing within a short space of
time.
“That is the danger... I don’t think that the ANC, as a party of
liberation, can be free from the accountability of having not handled
that issue very well.”
Oddly, on the literary right, an Afrikaner writer who makes a living
coming up with gripping stories that eloquently unmask what he sees as
the pretensions and hypocrisy of a struggle he condemns as fraudulent on
almost every level, concludes his recent collection of stories that
seem driven by fury if not bile, by realizing that he has no more cheap
shots to share.
He refers his own bromides as “the same old what-ifs chas(ing) the
same old “if only’s” around the same old obstacle course usually working
their way toward conclusions so dismaying that I want to shoot myself.”
In the end, Rian Malan is hopeful that “the issues that divide us
now will seem absurd in retrospect. The good that white men did will be
acknowledged; the evil forgotten. The wounds of history will be healed.
Would that I could live to see it.”
For me, I feel at times like I am at the end of my time here
politically. I don’t think it’s my place to rage and rail against the
government and the flawed system that it upholds. Or, that there is
anyone really who wants to listen. I have plenty to criticize at home.
I still write and make films now about South Africa in hopes my work is relevant in some way.
I started out with a passion to change my own country and found
myself somehow immersed with/supporting/reporting on a movement so many
miles away that was hospitably supportive of my desire to be helpful.
I served, as best as I could, over more than four decades. I am not sorry I did.
Great things were accomplished that many of us never expected. Some
think it was a miracle; I see it as the product of so many working so
hard, and on so many levels. for so long.
Surely, larger than life leaders like Mandela, Sisulu, Tambo and
Slovo. Mbeki, and other key ‘comrades’ played the big role, but in the
end, it was the people they inspired that brought down the old system
with their blood, sweat and sacrifice.
Many of the people once viewed as the “masses” now want to move on,
want to be optimistic but are trapped in structural poverty reinforced
by a globally enforced system of neo-liberalism and remote control.
The “Washington Consensus” has an unspoken consensus that they must stay where they are.
When they protest – and many do in a growing number of increasingly
violent township and labor “incidents,” they end up fighting against the
very government they once struggled for.
Yes, parts of it came out badly, but look around the world, and name
a country and a popular struggle that has achieved so much.
Years ago, after the old government unbanned the ANC, I was, in
effect, still banned, forbidden to come back here in the early 90’s. I
considered it a badge of honor, and I persevered.
And like an old dog, grayer now and slower afoot, I still persevere
to say we were right to fight what we fought for, and now, to fight to
make it right.
Saharareporters
