Читать книгу Memory Against Forgetting - Rusty Bernstein - Страница 12

Prologue

1987. I am in Moscow on behalf of the African National Congress (ANC) and Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) to conduct a series of seminars on the history of South Africa’s liberation struggles. My students are young men and women of all races, mostly of the ‘Soweto Generation’.¹

They are fresh from street battles with the police and are training to be guerrilla fighters. They are self-confident, self-assured, very sharp and questioning, anxious to learn. We have only two weeks together. I have planned to have two teaching sessions per day. They insist on three. They take nothing for granted, challenge everything and let no casual phrase or imprecision pass.

I enjoy the challenge. I try to convince myself that it is doing them good, although it is exhausting me.

My Russian interpreter has a request. Would I agree to a filmed interview for a TV documentary? I would, reluctantly. The interview takes place in a meeting room in the hotel. The director and crew speak no English. I speak no Russian. My interpreter is competent to deal with menus, travelling and shopping, but struggles with political concepts. The director knows little about me or about South Africa but thinks the interview will be useful for a film he is only thinking of making.

He wants to explore why people take political action which runs counter to their own class interests.

‘Take the Decembrists, for instance,’ he says. All I know about the Decembrists is that they were aristocrats and officers of the Tsar who staged a revolt against him in the late 19th century, challenging the feudal order which provided their own privileged position. I suspected that most of them had been executed.

I don’t think he is giving me warning of my fate. He is just drawing a tentative analogy between Decembrists and white South African anti-apartheid radicals, though talk of ‘aristocrats’ and ‘martyrs’ seemed somewhat inappropriate.

Question: ‘Why do you, a privileged white South African, risk your life to end white rule, and so bring your own comfort and privilege to an end?’

I have been expecting questions about political history and have no ready answers. I say that I can give no explanation for the origins of my politics. My childhood was fairly ordinary and my family unexceptional. He is clearly disappointed. I suggest that he consider instead the life of Bram Fischer, who had exchanged prestige and privilege for a life in the communist underground. And had died in a Pretoria prison, serving a term of life imprisonment.

He had been as near to an aristocrat as a South African can get – grandson of a president of a Boer Republic, son of a judge president and, in his own right, a Rhodes Scholar and advocate destined to become a judge. If there is an answer to the question ‘Why?’ it could well be found here.

The director is dissatisfied. He says something in Russian which my interpreter doesn’t bother to translate. I assume it means: ‘Don’t call us. We’ll call you.’

On my last night in Moscow I am having dinner with the doyen of Soviet scholars of contemporary South Africa, Professor Apollon Davidson of Moscow University, who has a formidable knowledge of people and politics.

Hotel table service is Soviet-leisurely; we are drinking mineral water in accordance with Gorbachev’s recent reform of the liquor laws, and talking. He tells me many things about the history of our liberation movement which I should know but don’t, and I tell him a few things I know which he doesn’t.

He wants to know whether I have written my memoir. I have not. His face wrinkles up as though he is about to cry.

‘But you must!’ he says. ‘You must! It’s a tragedy, an absolute tragedy, all you chaps dying off – Moses [Kotane], J B [Marks], Yusuf [Dadoo]² – without writing anything. You must! You really must!’

I make vague noises of agreement. I have lived through a time when people have been tortured and killed for their memories of names, places, times. Survival has required that memory be deliberately suppressed and every written record burnt, shredded, flushed away or even swallowed. I have no records, no diaries, no appointment books, no letters, no minutes of meetings, no copies of anything I have written. Lives depended on silence and forgetting.

In South Africa there are indications that things might be about to change. The time may be coming when forgetting is no longer essential and remembering may start to contribute to the overthrow of apartheid.

Davidson has started me remembering some of the things I have been disciplining myself to forget.

I have been shocked at how completely the apartheid years have robbed my Moscow students of their own history. They have little understanding of what has really happened in their own country.

In school they have learnt only what was permissible under ‘Bantu Education’ and its mission to support white supremacy. Their elders have told them little, preferring silence and forgetting as protection for themselves and their families. They know little more than the anecdotal accounts of their own generation’s street battles in the black townships over schooling. They have justifiable pride in their own resistance, but their knowledge of the wider resistance movement ends with the liberation songs and political slogans.

I am thinking of ways to help them fill that void when the ANC calls for help. There is a need for the political education of young South African refugees who have made their way to the ‘front line states’. In 1989 Hilda and I agree to spend a year at Somafco³ in Tanzania, doing what we can. Facilities are limited and there is little we can do. I have a lot of spare time on my hands and start making notes.

The notes, which are fragmentary, filling some of the gaps in my memory, but not all, are the basis of my memoir. They have not been derived from research or cross-referencing but are purely personal memories of some political events in which I participated.

Memory is no substitute for history. But where there are no other records, memory may provide an insight which research cannot, or may miss altogether. My memory is, admittedly, subjective. It promotes my own version of things at the expense, perhaps, of aspects which are more important. Memory is selective and eclectic. My memoir is neither an autobiography nor a history of the times. It is only a personal recalling of a small part played in some big political dramas. Many events of equal or greater historical importance find no place in it.

It is more than ten years since Davidson made his plea for my memoir. In that time many more of the men and women who made the history of those times have passed away, leaving no personal written records. Among them, in addition to those Davidson cited, are Albert Luthuli, Z K Matthews, Oliver Tambo, Tom Nkobi, Michael Harmel, Abram (Bram) Fischer, Helen Joseph, Duma Nokwe, Ruth First, Joe Slovo, Harold Wolpe, J N Singh, Jack Hodgson, Cecil Williams … the list goes on and on. If the memory of them is not recorded now, when will it be?

I know only part of all their histories. I feel an obligation to record that part on behalf of those who did not survive to do so themselves. I am one of the lucky ones. I survived what an old Chinese curse would call ‘a life in interesting times’. I have the privilege of looking back to those times of tension, terror and forgetting and remembering times which might be beyond the understanding of generations who did not live through them.

Among those are my own children, who were shielded from our secret lives but had to pay the personal and emotional cost of living with them. If this memoir helps them to make sense of what was happening to them and around them it can scarcely compensate them for their childhood in ‘interesting times’.