nights

INTRODUCTION

The rainbow in the rain

‘I trace the rainbow in the rain and know the promise is not vain.’ GEORGE MATHESON, 1882

The message on my Facebook page was heartrending: ‘Professor Jansen, please say something to us people in Lindley to give us some hope, please.’ I did not know the woman writing from this rural, eastern Free State town; it’s what happens when you accept all the ‘friend requests’ that come your way on this social network facility called Facebook. But while the woman was a stranger, the context of her desperate appeal was not. Just the day before a gang of men had viciously murdered the Potgieter family and their little daughter Willemien.

Instead of a deep search for answers, such as ‘How could this happen?’, the punters fell back on convenience thinking – race. The problem with such convenience thinking is that an identical murder took place near Mariannhill around the same time: a black family burnt to death, with toddlers inside the flaming house, at the hands of fellow black South Africans. Clearly, the phenomenon of random and extreme violence calls for pause and reflection. How, indeed, could this happen so often, so intensely, so indiscriminately, so ubiquitously in our country? It requires, more than ever, that we talk about the rain and the rainbow, the pain and the hope.

For the past eighteen months I have done just that, travelling up and down the beloved country, talking to farmers, farm labourers, rural students, urban students, black and white citizens, rich and poor, old and young, Muslim and Jew, Christian and atheist, the angry and the contented … in fact, talking to anyone who would listen, or who wanted to talk. While the immediate objectives of these visits were to represent the university; to rebuild its image in the broadest community; to win back the trust of alumni and to recruit future students, the longer-term objective was to understand this wonderful and wretched country and, on this basis, to contribute in a small way to its transformation after the cataclysm of apartheid.

I not only talked; I observed, watching how people respond to crises and how everyday life unfolds – from rural towns, where only the liquor store doubling as a butchery is the main source of economic activity in a town long deserted by the politicians, to a sophisticated company of JSE executives over dinner in classy chambers overlooking the most scenic night views of Johannesburg. I sat with primary school children on the ground in Douglas, and with the deputy president of the country in a university waiting room before we spoke. I watched how white people responded to my silly questions at the shop till: ‘Do you have any discounts for black people?’ And I examined closely the anxiety on the face of my black friend when she heard my daughter had a boyfriend: ‘Is he black?’. When I hesitated (how on earth could his colour be important?), she followed up with a signifier: ‘What is his name?’

Nothing is more revealing than talking to thousands of high school youth throughout the country. There is a liveliness there, an openness to the future, a desire for much more hopefulness about what kind of country this could be. Without exception, these young people are tired of hearing about the sins of the fathers (and mothers). They’re shocked and despondent about what they see as the degradation of society by political youth, those thugs masked in party-political clothing and operating under cover of ‘youth festivals’, thus giving all young people a bad name. The energy, drive and optimism of these youth are what give impetus to so many of the stories recounted week after week in these columns reprinted from The Times.

What moved me most, however, were the ordinary South Africans living their lives well below the radar screen of mainstream media. These are the ‘salt of the earth’ people, hard-working citizens who eat their bread by the sweat of their collective brows. They are those single mothers abandoned by wayward men and who yet find the will and resources to put children through school. These are mothers who hold families together against unbelievable odds on the basis of a small set of core values – the virtues of hard work, the importance of respect, the necessity of discipline and the vitality of faith.

These mothers are seen in both townships and cities, and their offspring are easily recognised. Theirs are the children who wear the same clothes every day, but whose clothes are always clean with not a button missing, even though the buttons may not always match in colour or size. These are the people who keep those thin threads called the ‘fabric of society’ together with little, if any, assistance from the bling-wielding nouveau riche that occupy newly found positions of status and power in government and business.

This does not mean that I am not intrigued by excess. Half-naked men and women slurping food from each other’s bodies does raise questions about levels of depravity in one of the two most unequal countries on the planet. I find it incredible that the national lottery could give R40 million rand to a group of youngsters without the financial, organisational or social competence to run a spaza shop, and then wonder why this meeting of ‘socialists’ disintegrates into chaos.

It is so clear to me that ‘public service’ does not exist in our country and that, for most, being elected to a government position is a simple matter of personal enrichment and political egotism – it never was about service to the public. I spend a lot of time wondering how my former heroes who fought the struggle on an elevated platform of ethics and morality, putting their bodies and families on the line for our freedom, could participate in the most astounding decisions, such as denying access to the Dalai Lama, supporting the Aids policies of a president that led millions of the poorest among us to suffer and die needlessly, and vetoing votes in the United Nations against known tyrants from Burma to Zimbabwe. Where did our moral consciousness go?

The stories in this book will reveal my fascination with anger. Why are South Africans so angry? We not only protest, we also burn down and break down; we turn over garbage cans and beat each other senseless with chairs at political rallies; we threaten and, yes, we kill; we slander and we demean. Our soldiers, in anger, turn on the Union Buildings, the residence of their commander-in-chief. Where does this deep-seated anger come from? Why are we so prone to what appears to be spontaneous combustion? As I have argued through these columns, the anger comes from somewhere deep within ourselves and our history. This is something to be explained, for all around us there are poorer countries with more brutal colonial histories, but nothing compares with the anger and brutality of the citizens of the rainbow nation.

So, what is going on? There are at least three reasons for this extreme anger, violence and brutality in our society.

First, we may be more traumatised than we think. Because of the longevity and intensity of apartheid brutality, we did not recover. We were the last country in post-colonial Africa to taste freedom and democracy. The sheer duration of colonialism and apartheid over centuries stripped us of our dignity and so much of our humanity. Think back to grown men undressed under apartheid showers while their genitals were played with by the white police for the crime of not carrying a pass in the country of their birth. Think back to the systematic harassment of families night after night, year after year, decade after decade, and you begin to sense not only the duration, but also the intensity of the brutality. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was not going to undo this damage; what we need is a national trauma unit.

Second, we internalised the brutality that we had to bear. Burning people inside petrol-filled tyres is only possible when the perpetrator has lost his or her own humanity through earlier events. It is not only a response to the violence and violation of the human spirit; it is also the internalisation of that violence and violation. In the terms of that struggle, ‘we became like them’. And that is why I have said over and over again that the only way out of this mess is together; yet the terms of engagement at the moment assume that the moral high ground belongs to the pure, unadulterated black victim laying material and symbolic claim and control over the impure, adulterated white perpetrator. That is a recipe for mutual annihilation of co-inhabitants of a common geographical space; of mutual burden-bearers of an intertwined trauma.

Third, we did not mourn enough. The Cypriot scholar and humanist, Michalinos Zembylas, talks about the necessity of victims of earlier conflicts, such as Greek and Turkish Cypriots, to mourn. Mourning the loss of the dead, which is so crucial to many cultures, especially African ones, is fundamental to both personal and societal recovery and transformation. We did not mourn, and where we did, it was not enough. We were rushed into a hurried TRC process in the hope that all would be revealed and we could start the process of mourning. But too many people still seek answers to the torture, murders and disappearances. We forced closure before those who suffered were ready for it. We urged ordinary people into rainbow thinking when all they could see was the rain.

There is only one way out of this moral and political quagmire. We must talk. In churches, mosques, temples and synagogues; in schools and universities; in government and in civil society; in families and sports clubs; on buses, in taxis and on trains. We must talk about our troubles. Too many South Africans murmur the words of that Negro spiritual: ‘Nobody knows the troubles I’ve seen.’ That’s the problem; nobody knows.

This was the raison d’être for the column in The Times. It was to prise open hearts and minds, and for this the strategy was simple. ‘What,’ asked a friend, ‘is the key to being a successful columnist?’ I proposed two rules. Rule #1: Always upset 50 per cent of your reading audience. Rule #2: Make sure it’s not the same 50 per cent as the previous week. One of the pedagogical techniques used for this purpose is to pose complex dilemmas for discussion. The dilemmas should be provocative enough to draw out immediate responses, but subtle enough to require thought. Take, for example, a recent entry on my Facebook status page, the aim of which is to draw my several hundred (mainly) student friends into engaging in tough political dilemmas. Here it is:

I have just returned from a disturbing visit to the National War Museum in Bloemfontein, formerly the Anglo-Boer War Museum. I looked into the haunting eyes of a 16-year-old Afrikaner boy called Johannes Petrus Coetzee who was executed by the English in 1901 for resistance to the Imperialist invasion. Here’s my question: should he be afforded the same status in history as Solomon Mahlangu?

And yet, for productive and hopeful talking to take place, a number of things first have to be in place.

To begin with, we need to recognise our mutual pain. As long as the historical narrative retains ‘good black victims’ versus ‘bad white perpetrators’, we don’t stand a chance of reconstructing and reconciling in the beloved country. I see, feel and fear daily the relentless one-line, anti-white narrative in circles in which I move and, disturbingly, among young black South Africans. This is bad news over the long term, unless we change the story about the past and the vision about the future. We must tell our children that the perpetrators of apartheid were black and white, and that stories of interracial solidarity were as much a reality in the struggle against apartheid as the brute oppression by a white minority government. And that history is more complex and messed up than we tell our inheritors, and that it must change.

Black anger and the thirst for vengeance must be dealt with. In this regard, we must recognise an important phenomenon – the race card. I have noticed that the wolf-cry of racism often has nothing to do with race or racial affrontation. More often than not, the immediate reasons for the invocation of race has to do with other things, like incompetence, poverty, general hardship, feeling stuck in one’s dire circumstances, and sheer laziness. Then, and for all these reasons, a culprit must be found. Nothing is more convenient and more devastating (for the one charged) than the accusation of racism against a historical enemy.

We must also deal with the knowledge streams that filter messages about the past and the future into the minds of our young people. Places of learning, both formal and non-formal, must be charged with telling the stories of both despair and hope, of oppression and freedom, of reconciliation and social justice, of struggle and responsibility, of fairness and forgiveness, of ethnic nationalism and non-racial solidarity. These twin themes of history must be interwoven in the way we tell our stories. Narratives of bitterness and retaliation that reboot the human memory to restore the tired storyline of white enemies and black victims are dangerous. This storyline labels black people who refuse to fall into this narrative trap with vicious tags, such as ‘coconuts’, ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and (believe it or not) racists. It is a tactic designed to intimidate and humiliate those who step out of the prescribed lines of the old racial narrative.

We must then deal with political language; those messages that come from powerful citizens, and that shape in powerful ways the attitudes and behaviours of ordinary citizens. In poor countries with large numbers of illiterate citizens, a special responsibility rests on those in political power to be vigilant and careful when using racial language. One success story that illustrates this point was when the government with one voice and with consistent language spoke out against xenophobia. Slowly, the tension eased.

One catastrophic story of failure was when the government deliberately sent mixed messages about HIV/Aids and the efficacy of drug treatments, with tens of thousands marching to their graves. What the president, his cabinet and all political office-bearers at the three levels of government say makes a huge difference on the ground. Take a hypothetical case: a Minister of Agriculture who dismisses the deaths of white farmers and their families on farms or smallholdings with contemptuous statements, such as ‘Black people are also murdered daily’, does much more harm to race relations than an undiluted, compassionate response to both situations.

When a sitting president continues to sing ‘Bring me my machine gun’, it might indeed hold wonderful struggle remembrances for political blacks. But it is, quite frankly, provocative this side of democracy. It breeds racial distrust and suspicion, and it lays the groundwork for racial retaliation when the economic or political chips are down. It ignores the fact that black people now hold power. This is the danger of not thinking long term; of presuming innocence in the words we use; of being one-sided in our celebration of history and our perspective on society.

We urgently have to deal with the underlying distress among the poor, especially the education system. The longer the school system fails hundreds of thousands of Grade 12 learners every year, the more inevitable becomes the resurgence of race identities and race thinking among black South Africans. As I have regularly argued, young people do not just drop out, they drop into lives of desperation, poverty, anger, hatred, crime and violence. Those layers of angry youth have been piling up steadily before and since 1994. I hate this metaphor, but we are definitely sitting on a time bomb. I warn all South Africans: there is racial trouble ahead if we do not solve the crisis of having two school systems in a sea of inequality – a small, elite, well-functioning system for the black and white middle classes, and a massive, dysfunctional, impoverished system for the majority of poor black children.

We must open up channels allowing us to deal effectively with the wrongdoings of the past. There is too much trauma underlying the tragedy of a violent and angry citizenry. Tens of thousands of middle-aged white men suffer daily the double tragedy of having done terrible things during the war inside the country, on its borders and through ‘incursions’ into the region; and of having no release valve for their anger, confusion and bitterness. There is a dangerous post-traumatic stress present that I witnessed during 2010 as I spoke at men’s conferences around the country.

It is