Since I always had a fascination of South Africa since I first really learned about it as a boy, there was always the desire to learn more about it. Over the years, some sources have been better for that purpose than others. This book, however, was truly a gem in that regard. More than pretty much all of the other journalistic books which I have read about South Africa (during the years of apartheid) over the years, this one really felt like it was written by someone who is intelligent, serious, and trying to portray the country and the situation it found itself in while he was there. There is little to no exaggeration or dramatization, which is not as much the case with another book that I reviewed not too long ago with Richard Manning's "They Cannot Kill Us All". That was a book which I liked as well. Yet it felt at times like Manning was almost showing off at times (about the house and garden that he had during his stay in South Africa), and being a bit too dramatic at other times.
Yes, Lelyveld takes a serious approach. He writes about South Africa with a relative sense of detachment - repeatedly reminding the reader that he was not from here, and that this was one of many places to which he had been assigned over the years - yet also, perhaps paradoxically, with an approach that betrayed just how much and how seriously he studied the issues.
Racism has existed in South Africa since the first ship of Dutch settlers came midway in the 17th century. From the early days under Jan Van Riebeeck to the development of Boers (Dutch for "farmers") slowly expanding from the original Cape colony, and eventually to the arrival of the British, which eventually forced the Boers to move into the interior of the continent during their Great Trek, then on through the years of the Boer Republics, to the Boer War and the unification of South Africa as a country, and finally to the 1948 election victory of the National Party (largely representing the Afrikaners, formerly known as the Boers), racism has evolved in South Africa. Strange as it may seem, apartheid in the 1980's - the time during which Lelyveld was in the country - was already far different than it had been in the formative years, or during the 1960's, when Prime Minister Verwoerd laid out a sort of "grand plan" for how apartheid in South Africa was to work.
Verwoerd is probably the central figure for the first phase of apartheid. In the minds of many Afrikaners, he clarified the racial questions and the solutions which the National Party (NP) set out to resolve these issues. Verwoerd baldly stated racist theories, which were pretty much unquestioningly taken as fact for many white South Africans. He did not believe that blacks needed education, since they were pretty much going to be groomed for lives of menial, low-paying jobs with little to no hope of betterment at any point. Verwoerd also was the one who championed the system of “homelands” to make complete racial segregation a reality. This was a plan to give certain black "homelands" a level of official independence, where they would be recognized as independent nations. Four of them, I believe, actually went ahead with their independence, and as soon as they did, the "citizens" of these newly independent "homelands" lost their status as South African citizens. Indeed, it was a bureaucratic plan to ensure that there would be no black South Africans, at some point. Verwoerd tried to intellectually justify this plan, saying of the blacks that there was “no place for (them) in the European community above the level of certain forms of labor.” As Lelyveld pointed out, the rationale also was to save the blacks in South Africa from the frustration of too much exposure to “the green pastures of European society on which he was no allowed to graze.”
Lelyveld wrote about the absurdity of the "independent homelands" within South Africa's borders. First of all, they were not large territories of land with definitive boundaries, but rather, they were a bunch of separated chunks of land scattered throughout parts of South Africa. In many parts which the author traveled through, there were not even any signs indicating a border between two countries. Instead, it was just understood that if you were seeing farm fields, you were in South Africa, while if you were traveling through tribal villages & shanty towns, it was understood that this was a “national state.”
South Africa was absolutely determined to make this system of "homelands" work. To that end, they implemented harsh policies, effectively regarding blacks within the country as foreigners belonging to one of these "homelands," and thus justified denying them the benefits of South African citizenship. But there were problems. First of all, there was resistance from blacks themselves. Also, no other country in the world recognized the independence of these "homelands." Also, this was a bureaucratic dream that turned into a nightmare for many people. It proved almost impossible to orchestrate in reality, mostly because the whites had reserved the worst, least productive lands for blacks to inhabit in these "homelands." That meant that most blacks living in homelands had to supposedly cross international boundaries - sometimes several times in the same trip - in order to get to their jobs, which were almost always inside of what was recognized outright as South Africa, before they would have to go back to their "homelands" later that evening. After all, the whole point of the "homelands" system was that blacks who belonged to independent homelands were no longer legally recognized as being South Africans. It was imagined to work by many white South Africa, who wanted to believe. But the reality was that the execution of this plan made things worse, and forced many blacks to try and migrate closer to jobs in cities illegally, thus risking having their homes and communities raided and destroyed on a fairly regular basis by police. There were mass arrests, and bulldozers often present in these seemingly temporary shantytowns. Yet, they were rebuilt almost as quickly as the police would tear them down.
Faith that this dream was working had largely eroded by the 1980's, when Lelyveld was in South Africa for a second time (he had also spent time there in the 1960's, during the Verwoerd era). By that time, South Africa had seen turbulent times in the 1960's, with the Sharpville massacre, and in the late 1970's during the Soweto youth uprisings. There were often violent protests, as well as some bombings, by the 1980's, and there was also increased international scrutiny and pressure for reform. Indeed, Lelyveld suggested that South Africa was quite different in the 1980's than it had been decades earlier during his previous reporting assignment there. he explained that something had "definitely slipped loose, but whatever it was, it wasn’t political power."
The issue was how to proceed with reform. There was recognition and talk of reform by President P.W. Botha in the 1980's. Yet, he tried too hard not to offend anyone, either the world community that demanded reform, or the hardline (mostly Afrikaner) whites within South Africa who were dead set opposed to any kind of reform of apartheid. For all intents and purposes, the whites were divided about reforms, which caused tensions within the country. Yet, even whites who seemed on the surface to want reforms on the surface, Lelyveld points out, really only wanted apartheid itself reformed, not scrapped entirely. Most white South Africans were worried about losing power, and that, to them, was what "one man, one vote" multiracial democracy would effectively translate to. It would mean an end to white power, and they feared (and often rationalized) that handing power to the black majority would inevitably lead to disasters, as it had all across Africa. They pointed to the former Rhodesia (by then already Zimbabwe), among many other examples, and warned that the entire region would be destabilized.
No longer did whites really believe in "apartheid," which had become one of their least favorite words by that point. They had largely abandoned the hardline ideology of old, and they believed the government of Botha when it boasted of the major reforms that took place during his tenure. Officially, segregated buses and trains and bathrooms and such had been scrapped, although everybody knew that in reality, they had only changed the outward appearance, as Lelyveld illustrates in this book. Nothing had really changed, only the hardline language and literal signs. Also, while non-whites were given representation in the government, so that Botha could boast that it was no longer an exclusively white government, the non-whites were not given much power, and lacked any real teeth. Besides, the black majority had still been excluded.
So the struggle had changed shape by the 1980's. Most whites recognized that something was going to happen, that some serious change was inevitable. It felt at the time to many South Africans that the country was a powder keg set to explode. Yet, the white government still somehow managed to hang onto power, and the white population - even those who expressed support for further reforms - seemed unable or unwilling to commit to an actual solution to the myriad problems which apartheid was creating in the nation. In this book, Lelyveld gets us to meet some of the people on all sides. We read about activists, including Winnie Mandela, as well as some prominent players, yet lesser known to people outside of South Africa. He also interviews many whites, with different positions themselves on the situation. Some were all in favor of reform, while others still felt that some version or other of apartheid needed to be kept in place.
With this book, the reader really gets a solid feel for the paradoxes and difficulties of living under apartheid. One of the things which I remembered best from the first reading of this book was how Lelyveld (and another reporter) went on the buses which transported blacks in one homeland to their jobs in Pretoria, South Africa, which was officially another country, according to the laws which then existed. People would get on the bus in the wee hours in the morning, congregating in the complete dark in what was a makeshift bus stop in what appeared to be the middle of a farm field. The bus would come, and it would quickly grow crowded. Some people would be forced to stand for the hours that they would be on the bus. Many - almost all of the people - would sleep. They would go on these buses to get closer to the city in order to take more buses, where they then would go to work. Then, they would have to board buses heading back, which would require still more hours of travel. So they often would leave incredibly early in the morning and get back late, before getting a few hours of sleep so that they could do it all again the next day.
That is just one of the examples which I remember best. There are plenty of others in this book. Collectively, they show that the system of apartheid back then just was not working. Yet, the road to reform was tricky and bumpy. Few people really were able to illustrate this quite the way that Lelyveld does in this book, which is why it feels important to say that this book is one of the best ones which I know to read and get a good idea of how apartheid had evolved from the hardline of the 1960's to a white population which knew that something had to change in a meaningful way, yet there was just too much fear to make such meaningful reform a reality at the time.
Of course, we now know, it would come.
Still, this book is great and illuminating to read, if you are interested in the subject of apartheid in South Africa, particularly in the 1980's.
Highly recommended.
No comments:
Post a Comment