The Masque of Africa Page 24

  It was a livelihood of a sort, but then there came the South African offer from a Gandhi family friend. A year in South Africa, first-class return fare, a wage of £105, everything found. Gandhi had the wit to see that with these terms he was going out more as a servant than a lawyer. He also would have seen that the business folk were getting a lawyer cheap. But he didn’t mind; he liked the idea of the adventure, and he didn’t haggle.

  In the beginning it was like adventure: a slow sea journey: Lamu, Mombasa, Mozambique, and then Durban. There he met his employer, and the employer told him he was going to be a white elephant for the firm, since there wasn’t much for him to do. Gandhi discovered that the legal case hinged on accounts. He bought a book and began to study it, and he soon knew as much as he needed.

  After eight days a first-class ticket to Pretoria (in the north) was bought for him. His employer thought that Gandhi should have a five-shilling ticket for bedding. Gandhi preferred to save the money, and thought that this obstinacy and meanness brought on everything—though it is hard to see why he should have thought so. And so began the Calvary. Every stop on the way—Maritzburg, Charlestown, Standerton: every name remembered thirty years later when Gandhi was writing his autobiography (though not all of them survive in the modern atlas)—was full of shame and fear and insult, such bad treatment, such violence, that he wondered whether he would arrive in one piece.

  At Maritzburg the railway attendant asked if Gandhi required bedding. He said, “I have one with me.” And though he doesn’t say, he believes this started the trouble. Two officials came, and then a third, and it was this third who told him he should move to the van compartment. When Gandhi refused, and said they would have to remove him, the official called a police constable; the constable pushed him and his luggage away. Gandhi settled down to waiting through the night. It was very cold. He had an overcoat in his luggage, but thought that if he asked for it he would be insulted. He did a lot of heart-searching that night. Should he go back to India? Should he stay and fight? Should he go on to Pretoria and not mind? He thought he should stay and fight the disease of prejudice, suffering in the process if he had to. At the end of this heart-searching he decided to take the next available train to Pretoria.

  If that was all about him in a crisis he would not be Gandhi. But he was already Gandhi—in addition to everything else, a man of forms, a man of the law, with faith in the law (not yet faith in the faith), and the next morning he sent a long telegram to the general manager of the railway. The train he boarded (with the bedding ticket he had refused at Maritzburg) took him to Charlestown. The Calvary continued there. There was no railway between Charlestown and Johannesburg in those days; there was only a stage coach, and the man in charge of it was an absolute thug. He tormented Gandhi, not allowing him to sit inside, and then requiring him to sit not on the box beside the driver but on the footboard. He knocked Gandhi about so badly that the other passengers objected.

  The coach stopped for the night in the small village of Standerton (not on any biggish map now). There were Indians there, sent by Gandhi’s employer to receive Gandhi. So there was protection, and Gandhi used the lull to write a full letter to the agent of the coach company. He got an encouraging reply: the coach from Standerton would be bigger, and the thuggish leader would not be on it. The Indians who were looking after him took him to the coach in the evening, found him a good seat, and so, at last, he reached Johannesburg safely. To do the final leg of the journey, to Pretoria, in the style he insisted on as a lawyer—first class—he took the precaution of writing a note to the station master telling him who and what he was, going in person to buy the ticket (one sovereign) and wearing a frock-coat and necktie (there is a photograph of Gandhi in South Africa in this garb, and if we assume that his wardrobe was limited, it is possible that this photograph shows Gandhi as he went to the Johannesburg ticket office). And then, as so often happens when we prepare too much for trouble, there was none. The man in the ticket office was not South African. He was from Holland, and he was all courtesy and friendship.

  Gandhi at this stage believed in the British Empire. He believed that Indians in South Africa were discriminated against because they were politically indifferent, made no representations and were not organised. When the legal work that had brought him to South Africa was done (he persuaded the parties in dispute to accept arbitration), he prepared to go back to India. He went to Durban to wait for a ship. While he was there he saw an item in the local newspaper about the Indian Franchise: there was before the Natal legislature a bill that sought to disenfranchise the Indians of the province. Gandhi was shocked, but the rich Indian businessmen he spoke to knew nothing about it, and were not too concerned. That was even more shocking; and what they decided to do after a little discussion was to shift the burden of protest to Gandhi.

  So Gandhi postponed his return to India. It happened like that again and again; his vision of Indian disabilities widened; Gandhi’s one year in South Africa stretched in the end to twenty years. He had been very young and untrained, absurdly shy, only a lawyer who could draft memorials, when he came to South Africa; he was in middle life when he left, the lawyer subsumed in the mahatma, his political tools perfected: civil disobedience, the fast, his own spirituality.

  It had all begun to happen on that terrible journey from Durban to Maritzburg to Charlestown to Standerton to Johannesburg to Pretoria. In forty-eight hours his shyness fell away like a garment; young as he was, he became a leader of men. Many Europeans, German Jews especially, helped him in Johannesburg. This would have been a revelation to him. His cause was Indian and local; this outside encouragement would have made him less parochial, and opened him up to the world, politically and in religious matters. When he wrote later of Johannesburg it was with love. Though it has to be said that Gandhi had trouble with Africans; he found it hard to see them, to fit them into his world picture.

  Even at that moment of crisis on the Charlestown coach he can find a cruel word, Hottentot, for the coach-leader’s African servant sitting beside the coach-driver. It is a strange word to come out of Gandhi’s mouth, when he is complaining of race prejudice. But there may be an explanation. Gandhi was dictating his autobiography in Gujarati to his Gujarati secretary, Mahadev Desai. Desai did the translation into English, and it is possible that Hottentot is the dictionary English word, a kind of synonym, that Desai alighted on.

  6

  YOU CAN be some time in Johannesburg—the great avenues, the motor-car showrooms, the parks—without seeing the townships. You know they are in the background, of course—so much has been written about them—but still the first township you see can be quite startling: the little houses of brick or concrete, one like the other, the straight rows, the small yards, the treelessness. When you are far enough away in bad areas the houses or huts become the merest shacks of old corrugated iron sheets, roughly daubed with a number, for the purposes of identification alone. It is amazing that people can live and thrive in such dwellings, but they do, and they make one think of Oscar Wilde: “One can survive anything except death.”

  When life was done there was the road to the cemetery at Avalon, named as if in jest after the cemetery of King Arthur’s knights: acre upon acre of low tombstones that appeared to repeat the pattern of the petty houses, completing in this way the cycle of life and death. Saturday was the great day for funerals here. The motorcars going there flashed their hazard lights, to tell people that they were on solemn business and required priority. It required only a flick of a switch to put on hazard lights, but the effect of the rich-looking cars, the merging traffic lanes and the dancing lights was so jolly that one had the idea that the drivers, out of their Saturday joy, were playing with the switches as they drove.

  Walls on the way to the cemetery were painted with the names of undertakers. Death was big business here; it never failed; every Saturday brought fresh customers. In the openness of Avalon, below the high bright sky you could see the dark-suited groups of men
and the women in red and white whose presence marked the spots of fresh graves and funerals. The soil was red and stony. Sometimes—I suppose it depended on the stylishness and the charges of the undertakers—a little tent (flat-roofed, without walls) had been put up not far from the grave, and below this tent (and not really in shade) were women connected with the dead person. These women sat on chairs and some of them wore blankets. The blanket here, Fatima said, was a ceremonial garb, a development from the flayed skin of the sacrificed cow, which was sometimes used to wrap around the corpse to keep it warm.

  The new graves were close together, the earth mounds almost touching, and each grave was marked with a provisional identifying slab, to be replaced in time, I supposed, with a proper tombstone. Many of the slabs were for young people, perhaps carried away by the HIV pandemic, a further twist in the chronicle of pain of these people.

  Considering the extent of Avalon, the abundant grief it represented, I thought of what Fatima (and others) had told me: that without apartheid, there was no further cause for South Africa in the world, nothing for its writers to explore, nothing to attract attention, no true motive for loss or tragedy. Was there not some deeper, more universal motif, apart from the obviousness of apartheid? Something that continued pure, and of itself alone? It seemed unlikely. D. H. Lawrence (to take a name at random) could get away from the coal pits of Nottinghamshire; but he had the rest of England to contemplate (though he remained a provincial at heart), and then he had the rest of the world. That couldn’t be said of South African writers: they remained bound to their wheel of fire.

  I asked Fatima whether she thought people might change.

  She said, “The present government wants people to move away, but the people don’t want to. People sound the same as they did before, and the grievances of apartheid are kept alive so as to fob off responsibility. When you have no better answer you will use that. It supports our film industry: ‘Once we were black …’ ”

  I wanted to know what she felt in Avalon, seeing the blankets on the women, and the mourners dancing on the graves. What I was seeing was new to me, and I thought that for other people as well there must have been something more immediate and personal than thoughts of apartheid.

  She said, in her remarkable open way, “It reminds me of my past. It makes me think of my grandmother who wore the white-and-red uniform. It also reminds me that even if you are a Christian you will sacrifice an ox for the ancestors. In some places they sacrifice the ox or cow and wrap the body in the skin for burial. The animal has to scream so that the ancestors hear it, but I cannot do it. I could not even watch my own goat being sacrificed when I did the pilgrimage.”

  And that idea of the cow being made to bellow in death was so painful that I thought of the way they killed cats in the Ivory Coast, putting them in a sack and then dumping the sack in boiling water. And just as that Ivory Coast way of preparing cats for table made everything else in the country seem unimportant, so that sacrificial way with cattle darkened everything else here.

  7

  TO BE BLACK in South Africa was to be an inheritor, or at any rate to have that possibility. To be white and sensitive was to wonder about one’s place in the new scheme of things, and almost immediately, when a situation was too difficult, to start dealing in ideas that were perhaps too large for the brutal subject of survival.

  Colin lived with a feeling of fear. He said, “It is extremely difficult to voice anything without looking over your shoulder. There is a complete absence of discourse. I feel I am unable to speak and I am reacting endlessly to a situation without being able to take a step back and thinking about the situation or my reactions. I took another look at humanism in the hope of finding something to clutch at. You can have Africans contributing to humanism, but you cannot have African humanism. But you can’t say that. I live with fear and the paralysis it brings. The suffocation is very present. I look back and I think of the 80s, and the struggle to do the right. I persisted in the struggle because I came from a family full of conflicts. Now it is only a memory, but that memory sustains me.”

  The conflicts in Colin’s family came from his divided ancestry. He was half English and half Afrikaner. He had a grandmother who talked a lot about the British concentration camps during the Boer War. He understood the Afrikaner rage about the camps; at the same time, through his father, he had a feeling for British liberalism. When he was twelve Colin was sent to stay with an uncle in a small country town. In those towns segregation was not as severe as in other places, and Colin became friendly with a black boy, Franz, of his own age. This friendship was very important in Colin’s intellectual development. Colin said of it, “I saw Franz and me and our connection as a humanist moment in time.” And Colin could talk like that because he was completely serious.

  He talked to Franz about the city, and Franz in return showed him Nature, the desert and the forest and grasshoppers. One day Franz was stung by bees. Colin pulled the dead bees out of his hair: the memory was fresh all these years later.

  The time came for Colin to go back to his family. He thought that he and Franz should write to each other. But that wasn’t possible. Franz, though, had a favour to ask: he wanted Colin to post him a dictionary and an atlas. White schoolchildren were given these things as a matter of course; black children weren’t. And it happened that Colin had the money to buy those books for Franz.

  For the fear that continued to nag him, and perhaps also for his unfulfilled humanist yearnings, Colin now consoled himself with nature and his work and—unexpectedly—his cat’s “very intense personal relationship with me.”

  I felt, though, that in Africa, where cats and animals generally are given such a hard time, even in a protected place like the Kruger Park, Colin’s relationship with his cat might open up a whole new area of pain. Colin himself told this story:

  “Some time ago there was a major football championship match in the stadium here. Some time during the match someone threw a black cat in the midst of the rival team. Of course, the cat was killed, and the rival team was up in arms, saying that there was magic and an evil spell put on them. I keep thinking about it, and the only rational answer I have is that the proximity between animals and animism itself allows such brutal behaviour. Also, you have to understand that while all societies have metaphors which dilute the emotion connected with what is unpleasant, or with frustration or anger, here in South Africa the distance between metaphor and reality is very little. During the elections the ANC and its rival call each other cockroaches, snakes and dogs. You can get into real trouble very quickly here, using metaphors, and during intense debates where animal metaphors are used, real blood will flow. This is very frightening and depressing for me.”

  In 1987 Colin went to Paris for the first time. He was “blown away.” Some things he could relate to, but there were things he could not understand at all. Still, the experience gave him a new way of looking.

  He said, “We will have to go through a very violent post-colonial period to become human. You don’t have to go to a university to become an intellectual. There are organic traditions here too. Biko called it buntu, and it is the idea that you are a person because of another person. It gives the wish to aspire. My hope lies in the aspiration, not in the flaws all around us—though the idea of aspiring can bring its own flaws.”

  He couldn’t escape conscription into the South African army. He was sent to Angola and there he had to guard refugee camps. The camps had black women and children, coloured women, and some blonde white women and children—Portuguese families who had been abandoned by their men.

  “It was in this camp, while we were wearing the hated uniform, that I realised that men have a moral choice to do what they do. There were men who raped, exploited and did terrible things, and there were also men, like me, who made a small group who tried to make things better for these women, who were ready to do anything to protect their children. I saw moral shades in this army. There was, and is, a moral choice always
. But I feel that being white is a debt you can’t pay even if you fought in the struggle.”

  8

  I ASKED Phillip whether there could be an idea of possibility in the society. I thought it was an important idea both for the society and the individual.

  He said, “In my view the idea of possibility has to do with humanity. In my own small way I think that our transition from apartheid to democracy through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has provided the sense of humanity to some extent. It may have been flawed in some ways or not enough, but at least we did not have a civil war like Zimbabwe, where they wanted to get rid of the whites. This brings a sense of possibility.”

  He worked professionally with a mixed group. “I don’t feel that because I am not black I don’t have possibility here. In a strange way it is and is not a disaster area. Maybe it’s like being in denial. Yet in another way I am trying to do what I can do as a South African for my country. I also know that I live with the constant dilemma of: should I go or stay? Sometimes I even wonder if this is a carry-over or part of my Jewish ancestry. My mother’s ancestors came in the 1900s to escape the Eastern European pogroms. There was a big Jewish community here pre-1994, and there was a dramatic drop in this community after ’94. It was really a dramatic drop. Many left and went abroad. When I feel there is no hope, seeing the crime, corruption and general decay, I feel I am behaving like the white whingers. But I always have this at the back of my head: should I go?”