Читать книгу We, the People - Albie Sachs - Страница 17

Preparing Ourselves for Power

FROM TOWARDS A NEW CONSTITUTION FOR SOUTH AFRICA: ADVANCING HUMAN RIGHTS IN SOUTH AFRICA | OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS | 1992

I start with two poignant sayings I brought back home to South Africa with me after years of exile elsewhere in Africa. The first is: the beautiful people are not yet born. It is the deeply sad observation of a Ghanaian novelist on the disappointments of independence in his country, applicable to Zimbabwe today. The second is even harsher: a rich man’s fart smells sweet.

The Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o felt this phrase was so apposite to the situation in his country that he used it several times in a recent novel. Young Kenyans could not imagine that the Father of the Nation, Jomo Kenyatta, patriarch, autocrat and amasser of fortunes, had once been a famous freedom fighter who had spent a decade in prison for opposing British colonial domination.

Will the post-apartheid generation feel the same about us?

We who have spent all our lives fighting power, now suddenly face the prospect of exercising it. Many of us are as fearful at the prospect of finding ourselves in office as those presently there are alarmed about giving it up.

At the moment when we are about to see the achievement of what we dreamt of, a kind of sadness rather than joy settles upon us. Where there should be a feeling of elated accomplishment, there is an emotion of disenchantment, in some cases even cynicism. Can it be that apartheid, by depriving us of the satisfaction that should go with its overthrow, will be winning its last victory?

We cannot recapture the élan and conviction of the earlier period. We should not even try. It is as though the political and social pluralism that we now acknowledge in a diverse civil society reflects itself in a corresponding deconcentration and dispersion of our joy.

There is no moment of victory, no VE [Victory in Europe] Day (when we celebrated the defeat of Nazism and end of the Second World War). We move with emotional difficulty from the heroic project of insurrection on a certain day, to the banal scheme of creating good government over a period of time. Is this what all the dreams and pain were for?

Were we wrong in the dark and bitter days of the 1960s and 1970s to declare ‘no middle road’? Today we are on the middle road, we help to construct it, eager to demonstrate the broadness of our vision. We even accept it as praise to be called flexible, though we might still flinch a little at being referred to as moderate.

And what is it about authority that causes so many of us to turn our backs on it? The truth is that a great number of us are as fearful of winning as we are of losing. We are confronted with crises of lifestyle. We find ourselves torn from old networks and plunged into new ones.

What is it that we are afraid of?

The dangers as I see them are of a subtle kind, as befits a country that is really far more sophisticated than one would believe from the bizarre caricatures of our people that still unfortunately seem to inhabit the imaginations of most whites.

I worry that the years of protracted struggle will have made us intellectually weary, so that our principal objective becomes that of getting into office and little more.

We should not, of course, underestimate the symbolic value simply of having a government based on majority rule. It is the visible embodiment of the achievement of our slogan: freedom in our lifetime. It is the foundation for allowing a country at peace with itself to evolve. It is the key to South-Africanising South Africa. Indeed, for many of us, taking part in the first democratic elections will be the highpoint of our lives. Yet voting, and even winning the elections, is not enough.

We need a programme, not just the words of a programme, but an actual programme, a coherent programme based on a clear vision, one that will function and that will proceed rapidly and systematically to improve the lives of those who have suffered the most under apartheid.

I fear for intellectual fatigue, a loss of imagination and élan, a gradual descent into an ad hoc approach and improvisation.

We are correctly concerned about not making promises that we cannot fulfil. Perhaps this is the good that comes out of disaster, that emanates from the collapse of unsustainable dreams of perfection. Yet the poor are still poor, the oppressed still oppressed.

We enter the Union Buildings and take our places in parliament, sing the longest anthem in the world, with verses from ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ and ‘Die Stem’, win debate after debate, pass law after law, and still the poor remain poor and the oppressed oppressed.

We become masters and mistresses of defending our positions, explaining away our inability to tackle the problems of the country. We refer quite correctly to the terrible legacy of apartheid and the continuing resistance of the civil service, the selfishness of the business sector and the drag on progress imposed by all the many conservative elements in the country.

Deprived of the vision that we once thought would solve everything at a stroke, and reluctant to replace it with what we had formerly rejected as reformist solutions, we end up with nothing, and the poor remain poor and the oppressed oppressed.

We commemorate days of heroic memory, give each other decorations of one sort or another, remind the people of the years of struggle and sacrifice, launch campaign after highly publicised campaign to deal with all the problems of the country, and the poor still stay poor and the oppressed still stay oppressed.

Having resisted the bullets and bombs of lead, we now face the bullets and bombs of sugar, and slowly we succumb to their sweetness. A job for a friend here, a place for a relative there. Advance knowledge of government decisions, buying up land, directing contracts.

After all, the Nationalists did it to great effect, not to help themselves, of course, but to assist the Afrikaner people. Now-it’s-our-turn-ism takes over from ad-hoc-ism. There is no form of corruption that we will be inventing, every variety will already have been used in what will be referred to by some as the good old days. We will simply be carrying on the well-tried practices of previous governments.

If all power corrupts, then people’s power corrupts in a popular way. A lucre continua! The poor become angry, the oppressed chafe. We point out that it is not through adventurist actions that they will get their rights, that they must take their place in the queue like everybody else. They are obstinate, occupy land, go on strike, refuse to pay taxes. We send in the police, lock up the persons who are agitating them, appeal for national unity, remind them of the struggle.

We have achieved a great victory. We have deracialised oppression. We have done something that apartheid never succeeded in doing – we have legitimised inequality.

The rich man’s fart smells sweet. May it never happen in South Africa that if a once noble veteran of the struggle passes wind, the people declare: what a victory.

The beautiful people are not yet born. Ayi Kwei Armah was right. He might have added: nor will they ever be. Each generation struggles to produce its own beautiful people. We can inherit riches or poverty, power or oppression, but beauty, never. We have to find it in ourselves, generation after generation.