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LRB, Vol. 41 No. 10 · 23 May 2019
One Long Scream
Jacqueline Rose on trauma and justice in South Africa
On 27 June 2016, Lukhanyo Calata issued a public statement about
corruption at the South African Broadcasting Corporation, where he had
worked as a journalist for several years. He knew that it would probably
result in his dismissal. The corporation had succumbed to what has come
to be known in South Africa as ‘state capture’: working in the interests
of Zuma’s government, which had itself been captured by big business.
Zuma had especially close ties to the notorious Gupta brothers, who now
face possible extradition from the UAE to answer criminal charges in
South Africa. Calata spoke out against the ‘despotic rule’ of the SABC’s
chief operating officer, Hlaudi Motsoeneng. On the day of his
disciplinary hearing, Calata joined a picket outside SABC opposing the
corporation’s decision not to report on a rising wave of violent
protests across the country. The aim of the protests was to secure
better housing, job opportunities, municipal governance and social
services, and to force the ANC government to reverse policies – so
remote from the vision it had when it came to power – that were
manifestly failing those citizens, mainly black, who were most socially
vulnerable. In fact, the writing had been on the wall for Calata since
February 2014, when, following Zuma’s annual state of the nation
address, he was grabbed by the scruff of his jacket by SABC’s head of
news, Jimi Matthews, told not to get Matthews ‘into shit’ and ordered to
put together soundbites of opposition politicians’ positive reactions to
Zuma’s speech. He refused (even had he wished to, he could hardly have
complied as no such soundbites existed). The resonances with the
apartheid era were chilling. Under the regime of P.W. Botha, the SABC
had been known as ‘his master’s voice’.
Calata had chosen his moment carefully. The day he spoke out was the
31st anniversary of the state-ordered murder of the anti-apartheid
activists from the Eastern Cape known as the Cradock Four: his father,
Fort Calata, Matthew Goniwe, Sparro Mkonto and Sicelo Mhlauli. The men
were tortured by blowtorch, and stabbed multiple times. The fingers on
Fort Calata’s left hand were severed; on one severed finger was his
wife’s wedding band, which she had removed because her fingers had
swollen – she was six months pregnant. This wasn’t merely torture, the
activist Allan Boesak recalled, but a ‘demonstration’. The attackers –
it is believed – were from the Security Police, specifically the
notorious ‘Hammer Unit’, whose members used their own personal weapons
and would drive into the townships ‘dressed as kaffirs, with our faces
and heads blackened’. Sixty thousand South Africans defied a banning
order to attend the funeral, along with dignitaries from all over the
world. In response, Botha called a national state of emergency, granting
‘complete indemnity against any civil or criminal proceedings’ to the
state and all its functionaries. Lawyers in London working with the
anti-apartheid United Democratic Front and the Cradock Residents
Association issued a statement to alert the international community: the
South African government’s failure to contain the people’s anger, they
said, had ‘given rise to a new phase of terror against the people’.
Today it is generally recognised that Botha’s move was an act of
desperation that brought about the beginning of the end of apartheid.
Lukhanyo Calata was three at the time of the murders; his older sister,
Dorothy, was ten; his younger sister, Tumani, was born a few weeks after
the funeral. Lukhanyo grew up with no conscious memory of his father. At
the end of My Father Died for This, the remarkable book he has produced
with his wife, Abigail Calata (they took it in turns to write different
sections), he can offer only an imaginary reconstruction of the
murders.[*] He pieces the story together from partial records, from
conversations with people who had first-hand knowledge of the security
apparatus, and from the inconclusive legal hearings which have prevented
both the family and the nation from putting the case behind them. At the
first judicial inquest in 1989, state involvement in the killings was
denied, but then in 1992 the New Nation newspaper published a copy of
the ‘signal’ sent by Colonel Lourens du Plessis ordering the ‘permanent
removal from society’ of Matthew Goniwe, Fort Calata (two of the Cradock
Four) and Mbulelo Goniwe (another ANC activist). Du Plessis now says
that, when he was called to Pretoria after the story broke, he had the
impression that the state attorneys wanted him ‘to say what I didn’t
think was the truth’. At the second inquest in 1994, Judge Zietsman
ruled that the killers were members of the security forces but declared
himself incapable, on the basis of the evidence before him, of
identifying the murderer or murderers, who have never been named. It has
become a cliché of the post-apartheid dispensation to say that, in order
to secure the transition to democracy, the new South Africa opted for
truth rather than justice. In the case of the Cradock Four, there has
been neither.
I met the Calata family in December 2018 at a conference on
‘Recognition, Reparation and Reconciliation’ in Stellenbosch, organised
by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela of Stellenbosch University, who served on the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission and has worked ceaselessly over the
past twenty years to keep something of its spirit alive. The title of
the conference gestured towards healing, but all three of its terms also
touch an open wound.[†] Any call for recognition has to start from the
premise that there are things we cannot bear to know or see. Reparation
remains a sore point, as substantive reparations for past wrongdoing
fell outside the commission’s brief (the Mbeki government all but
rejected every recommendation it did make). And what are the chances of
reconciliation when racial inequality in South Africa has barely
diminished – some would say it has worsened – since the first democratic
elections of 1993? In the words of Mark Solms, psychoanalyst,
neuroscientist and owner of a farm in nearby Franschhoek, who also
attended the conference, the question for the white beneficiaries of
apartheid is ‘how we had sort of got away with it’ (not the outcome he
personally had sought: over the past 17 years he has tried to establish
a new racially inclusive model of land distribution).
In fact, the story told in My Father Died for This would suggest that,
in the transition to democracy, truth was not the alternative to
justice, but just as much a casualty. The ‘once glorious liberation
movement’ of the ANC, Calata concludes in a bitter final chapter, ‘has
not honoured the pain of our people in its politics’. John Jeffrey, the
current deputy minister of justice, told him in September 2017 that
turning a blind eye to the murder of the Cradock Four and others such as
the activist Steve (Bantu) Biko ‘was the price that had to be paid’.
Partly for budgetary reasons, he explained, there would be no further
investigation: he had to prioritise present-day crimes. Such frank
admissions are surely rare, most likely drawn out of Jeffrey as his way
of honouring Lukhanyo as his father’s son. Even those who see the
forfeit of criminal justice by the commission as a historic error, or
who argue, in the face of that critique, that amnesty was the only way
of averting civil war, do not put it quite like this. There is no doubt
in Allan Boesak’s mind that the question of the Cradock Four would have
been part of the secret negotiations between the ANC and the apartheid
leaders: ‘The generals and architects of apartheid had negotiated
themselves out of murder.’ This brings the case crashing into the
present. ‘I don’t know,’ Boesak told Calata, ‘how any leader in the ANC
can look your mother in the eye, without feeling they must be damned to
hell for what they did and continue to do … How can people walk through
this country, how can we walk our streets, how can we walk through our
townships and not see the blood still on the soil?’
Calata devotes a significant part of My Father Died for This to his
great-grandfather Canon James Calata, secretary general of the ANC from
1936 to 1949, who brought his politics to the pulpit and was central in
making Cradock the politically conscious and active community for which
it was still being punished in the early 1990s. Fort, James Calata’s
grandson, was named after the Old Fort Prison, where James was
imprisoned for treason in 1956. The book calls on voices from the past
as a way of enacting the Calatas’ belief – shared by many – that the
past has not been assuaged and that the present dispensation is a form
of treachery. South Africa has been transformed, above all, legally and
constitutionally but the need for vigilance remains, as aspects of the
apartheid era are repeating themselves. In what is presumably a
deliberate allusion to the Cradock Four and the Gugulethu Seven (another
group of ANC activists, killed by the security forces in March 1986),
the SABC protesters have come to be known as the ‘SABC8’. Having been
dismissed by the corporation for ‘disrespect’ and for undermining ‘the
authority’ of its management, all but one were finally reinstated on appeal.
By refusing to report on the protests, the corporation was trying to
render invisible the faultlines in post-apartheid South Africa. The
picket outside the corporation was organised by the Cape Town advocacy
group Right2Know. Silencing social protest and not naming the state
functionaries who killed the Cradock Four are both acts of censorship,
sinister forms of quietism, negating the mind’s capacity for judgment in
a bid to make the world feel easier with itself. They are also two sides
of the same coin (truth and social redistribution are not bargaining
chips to be played off, one against the other). In March 2017 I attended
a lecture given by Gobodo-Madikizela in Cape Town in which she used the
word ‘perpetrators’ to describe the beneficiaries of the current
economic regime. There were objections, but Gobodo-Madikizela’s allusion
wasn’t casual or sloppy. It was, I imagine, a deliberate provocation, a
way of bringing to the surface the failure and corruption of South
Africa’s ruling class.
*
The place of Stellenbosch in South African history could not be more
different from that of Cradock, which for a long time was a small and
relatively poor service centre for the surrounding white-owned farms,
before becoming a pivot of black migration in the face of forced
removals and a byword for resistance to the apartheid regime. Cradock is
recognised as the ‘Cradle of the Freedom Charter’, an idea first mooted
at an ANC conference held there in 1953. Today unemployment in Cradock
is above 50 per cent, poverty is endemic (especially in the squatter
camps that ring the townships), and education is underfunded – blacks
who can afford it send their children to former whites-only schools.
Stellenbosch, by contrast, is a fiefdom of Afrikaner and, increasingly,
expatriate wealth. Nestling in the heart of vineyard country, the town
has an aura of unreality. Chic cafés and restaurants, with mainly white,
English or Afrikaans-speaking clientele, spill onto the pavements of
streets lined with stores selling fine art and jewellery, mohair
scarves, handbags made of antelope. African goods hover in dark recesses
or are cluttered on stands as you pass. As Gobodo-Madikizela pointed out
in her opening remarks at the conference, squatter homes, mainly built
today by the young generation, are growing in number and creeping closer
and closer to the vineyards of Stellenbosch. The next generation of
Africans weren’t meant to be living in squatter homes.
At one of these vineyards, Lanzerac, a celebration was held on the last
night of the conference to mark twenty years since the appearance of the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report and to honour Archbishop
Desmond Tutu and his wife, Leah, both of whom attended the evening,
along with many others including Albie Sachs, the ANC freedom fighter
and retired justice, who earlier in the week gave an impromptu speech at
Dornier, another vineyard. He insisted that the achievement of a
non-racial democracy had to remain the priority, and defended the
constitution, which he had played a key role in drawing up. The
constitution has been fiercely criticised in light of the failure to
live up to its promise, but it was, Sachs argued, an ‘activist’
document: there must be an unceasing struggle to ensure that its clauses
on everything, from non-discrimination to the redistribution of land and
resources, are put into effect.
But it was above all the university’s history that made the hosting of
the conference at the Theology School in Stellenbosch so meaningful.
Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid, had been a theology
student at the university in the early 1920s before turning to
psychology and sociology. After a few years studying in Europe and the
US, he returned to Stellenbosch in 1928 as a professor, but by 1937 had
left to pursue a career in politics, becoming editor of the Afrikaner
nationalist newspaper Die Transvaler and committing himself to the
National Party. Eventually, in 1958, he would become the prime minister
of South Africa, in office until his assassination in 1966. Before that,
as minister of native affairs, he had been responsible for some of
apartheid’s most inhuman laws: the 1952 Pass Laws Act, the 1953 Separate
Reservations Act and the 1953 Bantu Education Act, whose purpose, by his
own account, was to ensure that blacks received only enough education to
work as skilled labourers (he described apartheid as ‘good
neighbourliness’). Not until May 2015, in response to the
#RhodesMustFall student protests, was a large plaque honouring him
removed from the campus at Stellenbosch.
It is Stellenbosch University to which Gobodo-Madikizela’s centre for
Historical Trauma and Transformation has recently moved from the
University of the Free State, and which, since 2006, has hosted a
conference every three years – with the exception of 2015, when there
were widespread student protests – on the theme of reconciliation and
reparation. In December I was there to present my work and thoughts on
psychoanalysis and justice, but the stories told over the five days of
the conference by those still living in the aftermath made clear that
thinking was not enough. Not that ‘feeling’ will do it either, in a
context where expressions of empathy – ‘I feel your pain’ – are so often
a pretext for doing nothing.
Everyone was friendly. The project of understanding and transformation
was held in common. Some of the most famous dignitaries of the
anti-apartheid struggle mingled and shared platforms with young
activists and students, treating them as the comrades and friends they
were. I never felt that I wasn’t included, even when a black caucus was
called to give the Africans and African Americans attending the
conference more room for their collective voice. And yet one reason this
was different from any other academic event I have attended was the way
it pushed in your face the suffering that was meant to be over and done
with. Whether giving and continuing to give a voice to a family such as
the Calatas can be redemptive was a question the conference raised but
did not pretend to resolve.
Perpetrators and the sons and daughters of perpetrators were welcome,
and given space to speak. Verwoerd’s grandson, Wilhelm (a political
philosopher also based at Stellenbosch), has loudly disowned his
grandfather’s legacy; he is an ANC supporter and social activist working
with former Northern Ireland combatants who have become peace advocates.
To his family – his own father proudly collects the memorabilia of
Verwoerd’s legacy – Wilhelm is a bloodline traitor. In his presentation,
he described the pressure put on him to embrace his repellent family
history and the effort of repudiation he has had to make. ‘I don’t take
for granted,’ he said about talking in public, ‘that I will be able to
speak.’ The overriding question, as he sees it, is what whites ‘are
willing to do by way of white work’. It was the question that pretty
much every white person attending the conference had to ask of
themselves. ‘You are not fit to touch the hem of Africa,’ a voice
pronounces in the middle of Eliza Kentridge’s poetic grief-sequence
Signs for an Exhibition. (Kentridge is the daughter of two
anti-apartheid lawyers; her father defended Nelson Mandela in the
Treason Trial of 1956.) Unlike other moments in the poem, it does not
seem as if this is the voice of a mother speaking to her daughter, but
the daughter, punishingly, addressing herself. When I look back at the
conference, in fact pretty much whenever I write about or visit South
Africa, it is a version of this voice that I hear resounding, or that I
think should be resounding, in my head.
The articulate and poised Wilhelm Verwoerd made a stark contrast to
Stefaans Coetzee, one of the bombers of the Worcester Shopping Mall in
1996, who came across as a wrecked man. Four people died in Worcester
and 67 were injured, many of them seriously. Coetzee had been a member
of the white Afrikaans Weerstandsbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance
Movement) and an admirer of Wit Wolf Barend Strydom, who in 1988
massacred seven black people and injured more than a dozen others on
what was then called Strijdom Square in Pretoria. (A few weeks earlier
he had randomly killed a black woman in an informal settlement in De
Deur, outside Johannesburg, to test his resolve.) Coetzee had felt
unable to accept the new ANC government: ‘I was filled with hatred and I
still don’t know why.’ He was 17 at the time. In 2016, he ran the
Comrades’ Marathon with the number 67 – the number of the injured –
inked on his arm (at the end of the run, he handed his medal to one of
the victims). Before he spoke, we were shown a film clip in which, head
bowed, he muttered compulsively: ‘I apologise.’ But ‘saying sorry’, he
also insisted, was not enough: ‘There must be doing of sorry.’
Several people I spoke to after Verwoerd’s session said that, moved
though they were, they could not bring themselves to shake his hand (an
odd idea in any case; there had been no handshaking at any of the other
sessions I attended). Gobodo-Madikizela is best known for A Human Being
Died That Night: Forgiving Apartheid’s Chief Killer (2003), a book of
interviews with Eugene de Kock, the apartheid death squad leader who was
called ‘Prime Evil’ by his own men. The day after she first shook his
hand, she woke up to find that she could not lift her right forearm,
which had gone completely numb, ‘as if my body were rejecting a foreign
organ illegitimately planted’. At their next meeting, de Kock too seemed
panicked about the physical contact – as though, she thought, he were
struggling to split off his ‘killer hand’ from his body. The vocabulary
– frozen limbs, splitting – owes more than a little to the language and
history of psychoanalysis, which began with the case of hysteria of Anna
O., the patient whose arm froze into the petrified shape of a snake as
she sat with it wrapped around the back of her dying father’s chair;
while terms like ‘splitting’, ‘scotomisation’ and ‘derealisation’
(mental self-blinding) slowly crept into Freud’s late vocabulary as he
began to confront minds whose only recourse in the face of mental pain
was to take flight from themselves. No surprise that such a conference
should find itself brushing up against the worst of psychic trouble –
from hysterical paralysis to psychotic modes of defence. In her
presentation, Cathy Caruth, a leading figure in the study of trauma,
seemed to be shifting her ground, away from trauma as something that
defies representation – an idea which not uncontroversially has very
nearly come to be orthodoxy – to trauma as something which shatters the
very basis of human communication, since there is no one either inside
or outside the head to address, no one there to listen. In perhaps his
most famous essay, written in 1959, W.R. Bion, one of the first
psychoanalysts to bring psychoanalysis into the world of psychosis,
called this ‘attacks on linking’.
As the conference skirted this hallucinatory dimension, it was as if all
of us, faced with past atrocity and an ever receding horizon of social
justice, were scrambling for a language of sanity. Lindiwe Hani, who
also spoke, is the daughter of the ANC activist Chris Hani, much loved
leader of the South African Communist Party. He was murdered in 1993 by
a hired killer, Janusz Waluś, a migrant in flight from Polish communism,
in the countdown to South Africa’s first democratic elections, as part
of an attempt to provoke a civil war: ‘an explosion of carnage and race
war’, as Joe Slovo said at his funeral, ‘a massive spilling of blood and
the end of negotiations’. (Instead the almost immediate consequence was
that the ANC secured a date, 27 April 1994, for the elections.) Hani was
12 years old at the time. In the months after his death, every time
someone asked her how she was doing, she would reply ‘robotically’:
‘Fine.’ As she puts it in her memoir, it took years for her to realise
that ‘fine’ is shorthand for ‘fucking insane’.
Madness can be generative (which does not mean that it is a condition to
be welcomed, or sought). In an attempt to confront her demons, Hani
visited Waluś several times in prison; she had already met Clive
Derby-Lewis, the ‘mastermind’ behind the killing, who provided Waluś
with the gun. She had, she writes, been living in a ‘shroud of death’.
In the years after her father’s murder her first serious boyfriend died
after accidentally crashing his car into a wall; her sister, Khwezi, who
had heard the shooting and was the first to discover her father’s body,
died of a cocaine overdose. She herself was in recovery from years of
addiction to alcohol and cocaine. One of the things Waluś told her was
that, the summer before the killing, he had gone to see his own
12-year-old daughter, who was living in Norway, because he knew he would
never see her again (in the event, his death sentence was commuted when
the death penalty was declared unconstitutional by the South African
Constitutional Court in June 1995). Why, Hani found herself asking in
what seems like an act of astounding generosity, should another
12-year-old lose her father as she had lost hers?
She accepted his apology, even began to like him, though she was not
inclined to forgive – hatred and forgiveness would come over her in
waves. ‘Don’t forget you killed my father,’ she would throw into the
conversation with Waluś whenever things got too cosy. But she did not
want to ‘perpetrate the anger’. Like ‘doing of sorry’, the inventiveness
of the wording struck me (a state of mind can surely be perpetrated as
much as any deed).
*
Where is trauma meant to lodge itself when the mind, like the body, in
shreds or shot to pieces, is no longer anything that might remotely be
called home? The very persistence of horror in South Africa tells us
that thinking about trauma in relation to language, circling endlessly
around the question of whether or not it can be spoken, which has tended
to dominate academic discourse, is not enough. In South Africa, Nomonde
Calata is famous for the wailing, almost inhuman, cry she emitted at the
start of the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
which momentarily brought the hearing to a complete halt.
Gobodo-Madikizela’s lecture in March 2017 was called ‘The Cry of Nomonde
Calata’. For the poet Antjie Krog, who was sent by the SABC to report on
the commission’s proceedings (in the better days of the SABC, we might
say), the cry marked its true beginning. She felt she was witnessing the
‘destruction of language’: ‘To remember the past of this country is to
be thrown back into a time before language … to be present at the birth
of language itself’ (before a time when individual speech could even be
an issue).
We need to redraw the cartography of the mind, to venture beyond the
paths on which Freud, safely and unsafely, was willing to tread. We need
insane visionary moments, including the world of dream and
hallucination, to be credited as part of the landscape of trauma – the
psychic equivalents of ‘upsurge’ and ‘turbulence’, evocative terms used
by the South African literary and cultural critic Sarah Nuttall to
capture the increasing outbursts of rage and protest that are spreading
across South Africa today. Such moments arrive unbidden, erupting from
what feels like another world. Abigail Calata tells a story that when
she was dating Lukhanyo but hadn’t yet met her future mother-in-law,
Nomonde, she felt the presence of Fort Calata in her bathroom. Without
hesitating, she picked up the phone to tell Nomonde, at that point a
complete stranger, that she had a message to give her from her dead
husband: he had never intended to leave her in that way. The same night,
it turned out, he had also appeared to Nomonde in a dream. On another
occasion, when Fort appeared to Nomonde in a dream telling her to go
home, she rushed back to Cradock to find that his grave had been
vandalised. Impossible links across the geographic landscape, or between
people barely known to each other: these moments of cross and
intergenerational transmission will not be held to the usual protocols
of space and time. The simplest message of the whole conference was also
perhaps the most far-reaching premise of psychoanalysis. Nothing
perishes inside the body or the mind, which is why the suggestion that
South Africa has left apartheid behind is as psychologically as it is
politically inept. Oddly, this might be grounds for the very optimism
that has so visibly faltered. In one of the best received papers I
attended, the legal scholar and activist Jaco Barnard-Naudé offered a
rereading, after Jane Harrison, of the story of Pandora, in which the
evils that spill from her box are the ghosts of past wrongs unavenged
and forgotten. The one item left in her box, when evil has thus been
exhumed, is hope. Ghosts walked the corridors of this conference.
Perhaps its most important task was to give them room to do so.
But it wasn’t just the ghosts who were calling out for recognition. The
ethos of the heroic freedom fighter and his family has also played its
part in clamping down on psychic pain. Lindiwe Hani’s mother, Limpho,
saw it as a slur on the family honour when Lindiwe checked into rehab
under her real name (owning the name in fact played a key part in her
recovery). At one point in My Father Died for This, Lukhanyo Calata
calls Nomonde ‘a mighty soldier of a woman’; Abigail describes her as
the ‘true hero’ of the whole story. Siyah Mgoduka’s father, Warrant
Officer Mbalala Glen Mgoduka, was one of many killed on the instruction
of Eugene de Kock (he designed the bomb placed under his father’s car).
In conversation at the conference with his mother, Doreen, Siyah said:
‘She is a better man than I could ever be.’ It is as if, in each of
these cases, lack of frailty – of ‘woman’s’ frailty – were the highest
possible praise, though Siyah also repeated three times during the
session that, as the years have passed, he has slowly become ‘softer’ as
a man (Doreen forgave de Kock; Siyah refused). By staging their dialogue
for us to listen, they seemed to be demonstrating that in today’s South
Africa such barely perceptible but momentous shifts of the heart can
only be spoken in front of a witness. A conversation between the two has
been made into a split-screen film, a technique that perfectly conveys
the barrier between them, the slowly moving closeness and distance. As
if, by means of this unusual format, they were summoning a symbolic
‘third’ presence into the room. For the psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin,
who spoke of her work with perpetrators and victims in Gaza, such a
third is the only possible basis for any form of political recognition
between enemies. In a one-to-one encounter, identities tend violently to
entrench themselves.
*
As the widows of fighters, Nomonde Calata and Limpho Hani were never
allowed to show grief. ‘One does not cry for a hero,’ Nomonde was told.
‘I had to put up the face.’ ‘Put up the face’ feels right (as distinct
from the more familiar ‘put on a face’). Even in the presence of her
children, only one mask of unwavering courage and fortitude was
acceptable. She has not been offered therapy, or anything close. ‘I
would love,’ she said in discussion with Gobodo-Madikizela, ‘to have a
one-to-one conversation. I want someone to listen.’ She is famous for
her role in the Truth Commission, but it was clearly another type of
listening that she was asking for here (the lack of any such follow-up
is seen as one of the commission’s most serious failings).
In South Africa, psychoanalysis came to a halt in 1949, the year after
apartheid was established, with the death of its only training analyst,
the Lithuanian Wulf Sachs, who had come from the UK (a flourishing
psychoanalytic community of South African exiles has been present in
London ever since). Mark Solms and Tony Hamburger, the two figures who
have done the most to give psychoanalysis new life after apartheid, both
spoke at the conference. But like pretty much everywhere else in the
world, and despite best efforts to the contrary, psychoanalysis remains
out of reach for the many – in South Africa, the racial majority and the
poor. ‘To establish psychoanalysis in South Africa,’ Solms remarked,
‘without confronting its elite status is to create a still-birth.’
There is a long history, which resonated across the conference, of
wives, often themselves activists, who were left behind while their
husbands took part in undercover work, were imprisoned, fled into exile.
James Calata’s wife was a leader in her own right, an equal partner, but
she rarely saw him because he was always on the move. After her
marriage, Limpho Hani became involved with the ANC and in 1977-78 was
detained for several months for her role in ferrying recruits across the
border to Swaziland. But the family hardly ever saw Chris Hani, who was
dedicated to armed struggle. He had crossed the border and lived for
long stretches of time in Zambia, Lesotho, Tanganyika, Bechuanaland (now
Botswana), Angola and what was then called Rhodesia. Limpho Hani raised
her three daughters more or less single-handed. When her husband was in
prison, Nomonde Calata had to scrape together a living for her family.
She had worked in the canteen at the Cradock Provincial Hospital, but
was sacked after being reported by a police officer who spotted her on a
bus wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan ‘Free Mandela’. Her husband had
never talked to her about his activities in the ANC underground. In this
context, the killing of these men can be understood as a sinister type
of continuity, enshrining an absence that was already there in these
women’s lives. ‘I do want my time,’ Nomonde said as she sat with her
three children, ‘all the time I lived for others, for fear, for protection.’
Of these stranded, abandoned wives the most famous is of course Winnie
Mandela, who, though barely mentioned at the conference, seemed to be
stalking the halls. Sometimes this was explicit: Winnie Mandela was a
family friend, heroine and role model for Lindiwe Hani; ‘The Hani girls
with Big Mummy Winnie at Mama’s fiftieth’ is one of the photographs in
her memoir. But she is also there, implicitly and far more awkwardly, in
the fact that Lukhanyo and Abigail Calata chose Father Paul Verryn – a
family friend since the 1980s, when he visited Fort Calata in Diepkloof
Prison – to write the foreword to their book. Verryn is the minister
Winnie Mandela charged with paedophilia, without any evidence, as the
net started to close around her infamous team of bodyguards, the Mandela
United Football Club, who terrorised Soweto, the township to which she
moved in 1986 at the end of nine years’ banishment in Brandfort. In
1988, members of the club kidnapped three young boys, including Stompie
Moeketsi (or Stompie Sepei), who was murdered by Jerry Richardson, the
football club’s chief coach. In 1991 she was sentenced by a Johannesburg
court to six years in prison for ordering the kidnap and for her active
part in the assault, commuted on appeal to a fine and two-year suspended
sentence.
And yet one of the most surprising things I discovered during my visit
is that in today’s South Africa, blighted by persistent, glaring,
social, economic and racial injustice, the star of Winnie Mandela is
once again on the rise. For many it has never waned: not for those who
always considered the historic 1994 compromise between Nelson Mandela
and de Klerk a betrayal that sacrificed justice at the altar of a
freedom and has turned out to be a travesty for the oppressed; or for
those of the new generation who believe decolonisation was pushed aside
in favour of democracy. At the core of the student protests of past
years was the charge that the halls of learning, as bastions of white
privilege, had been left more or less intact; until the Rhodes Must Fall
campaign of 2015 brought down the statues and demanded free education,
which Zuma finally conceded as one of his last acts before he was forced
to resign. The gesture is now widely regarded as a political stunt –
there had been no prior consultation with the Treasury – and is today
the cause of further protests on campus. Seen in this light, Winnie
Mandela’s obduracy, her refusal to bow to the commission, becomes her
foresight. Only when Tutu pleaded with her did she offer a paltry
apology, her parting gift to proceedings for which she had never hidden
her contempt.
Like the hysteric who ushers in the birth of psychoanalysis, and who so
often carries the malaise of a whole family, Winnie Mandela can be seen
as a figure who embodied the unhealed sickness of the nation on behalf
of everyone. ‘The past must be opened,’ Sisonke Msimang concludes her
book The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela (2018), ‘not just to grief, but
to the structural nature of racism … Just there, in the recent past,
like the body of a wounded animal hit by a speeding car, there lies the
corpse of justice.’ Whatever her crimes, Winnie Mandela will remain on a
pedestal, Msimang argues, ‘until there is a harder, sterner form of
justice … until all the apartheid murderers are named on a public roster
so that they are known to the world.’ ‘The perpetrators should meet this
family face to face,’ Paul Verryn writes in his foreword to My Father
Died for This. Neatly, and troublingly, Msimang aligns her defence of
Winnie Mandela with the grief at the heart of the conference and with
the call for justice and accountability that drives Lukhanyo and Abigail
Calata’s book.
In fact Winnie Mandela has already been granted re-entry into a communal
world, at least symbolically, in Njabulo Ndebele’s novel The Cry of
Winnie Mandela (2003), in which she narrates her own story after four
other women, each of them abandoned by their husband for a different
reason, have offered their story to her. One of the men is a disappeared
mineworker, others seek educational or marital advancement (a new, white
wife), or sexual freedom. The women embrace Winnie Mandela for her
brazen flouting of the myth of the ever patient Penelope, waiting for
Ulysses’ return – a cruel, centuries-old European hoax, Ndebele implies,
against African women. The novel ends with all five women welcoming
Penelope, in the modern guise of a hitchhiker, into the car in which,
joyously and with fierce independence, they have taken to the road
together (shades of Thelma and Louise). ‘You personify extreme political
perception unmediated by nuance,’ one of the women says, addressing
herself to Winnie, ‘nuance having been drained out of us by the blatant
obscenity of apartheid, which reduced life to one long scream.’
*
We should expect no thanks from those who suffered under apartheid if we
reduce them to mere victims of history, especially the women caught up
in the struggle (which must include Winnie Mandela), despite or because
of the enforced passivity and subjugation they endured. The random
violence of the security forces whenever they raided activists’ homes
was notorious. It did not stop Nomonde Calata refusing to leave her
house when ordered to do so by a police officer, or telling him to get
off her bed: ‘“You will have to take your gun and shoot me, and take me
out of the house.” Well, they stood up and left.’ Their sexual taunts
also failed to deter her: ‘You’ve got a baby without a father,’ one of
them mocked, noticing that she was pregnant. ‘Don’t you want us to be
the father of the baby?’
In 1969, Winnie Mandela was held in detention without charge for 491
days, subject to beatings and torture, often in solitary confinement,
sleeping on a blood-soaked mat, her cell next to the torture chamber (at
other times she was held in the ‘death cell’). Such details emerged only
as recently as 2013 with the publication of her prison diaries and
letters. She is eloquent on the subject of how much better prison
conditions are for a prisoner – her husband, say – compared with a
detainee. ‘I’d communicate with the ants,’ she recalled, ‘anything that
has life. If I had lice, I would have … even nursed them.’ ‘You are
going to talk against your will,’ Major Ferreira, one of her
interrogators, told her (the other was the torturer Major Swanepoel).
‘We can go to the torture room now,’ she replied. ‘My defence has my
instructions on my prospective inquest.’ She also snubbed a request that
she address her captors in Afrikaans, telling them she preferred to use
the language of her ‘first oppressors’.
‘The bloody bitch has sucked the saliva of all the white communists,’
Swanepoel snaps at her during one interrogation. ‘[She would have]
seduced the pope if she had wanted to use him politically,’ his
‘partner’ adds. (‘They roared with laughter.’) This is a prisoner who
suffered frequent blackouts, palpitations, breathlessness, who woke up
screaming in the night, would mutter the names of her children, and at
one point almost starved herself to death (for political reasons she did
everything possible to hide the fact that this was an attempted
suicide). ‘And they wonder,’ she writes, ‘why I am like I am’ – a
statement I see as undiminished in its impact by the fact that she is
clearly trying to exonerate herself.
At moments it has seemed as if her refusal to retire as a sexual being
is the worst of her crimes. In the early 1990s, I went to visit a
well-known writer on South Africa then based in Oxford. My plan had been
to discuss his take on the violence spreading across the country in the
run-up to the 1993 elections. Instead, I was regaled with endless
stories of Winnie Mandela’s sex life as I gazed out at the college
lawns. She was meant to be carrying the flag for her husband’s and the
nation’s freedom. Instead she became the sinner to his saint. ‘That
Winnie began her fall from grace just as Nelson was beginning his ascent
to sainthood,’ Msimang writes, ‘is both a tragedy and another sort of
fiction.’ Or, in the words of the eponymous character in The Cry of
Winnie Mandela: ‘Whereas imprisonment had prepared him for the language
of transcendence, I was too grounded in the muck of folly’ (both,
surely, tragic outcomes).
Why do we expect, in situations of political injustice, that virtue will
accumulate on the side of the oppressed? At the very least, Winnie
Mandela does us the favour of demonstrating how misguided that belief
is. Why, then, do we rush to divest the downtrodden of the ethical
ambiguity that must be everyone’s birthright? It is a truism of
psychoanalysis that nobody’s thoughts are pure. We are all traitors
inside our heads. Lindiwe Hani is a model of generosity in relation to
the man who shot her father, but the day after meeting his mastermind
she had woken up with a ‘pure and clear urge to kill’. Even de Kock is
permitted ambiguity, and not only in Gobodo-Madikizela’s book. Siyah
Mgoduka told us at the conference that his feelings towards de Kock
started to soften when he stepped forward to say that he had issued the
command to kill Mgoduka’s father, just when the presiding magistrate,
for lack of evidence, had been about to close the case. Only the woman,
it seems, has to be one thing or the other. Only she is hurled into the
vortex of her collapsed moral grace. ‘The woman who greeted him on that
sunny day in February 1990,’ Msimang writes about Winnie on the day of
Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, ‘was morally ambiguous … she
spoiled the picture of the perfect revolution that the ANC was intent on
creating. She was a reminder that the country was burning.’ Unlike
Winnie Mandela, neither Botha nor de Klerk has ever been convicted in
law for any crime.
Given all that we had seen and heard, it struck me as nothing short of
miraculous, or at least wholly against the grain, that towards the end
of the conference the philosopher and activist Achille Mbembe managed to
talk of beauty. He was not being sentimental. ‘The Trauma of the World
and the World as Trauma’ was the title of his paper. Mincing no words,
he spoke of the ‘traumatogenic’ institutions of capitalism and liberal
democracy, which to this day have never delivered racial equality, and
of the ‘genocidal unconscious’, which turns humans, first among them the
racial ‘other’, into disposable commodities. A more viable future will
emerge, he suggested, only out of rupture, only if we begin by
recognising the brokenness all around. We need a new political subject,
no longer in flight from interiority, who deploys multiple selves,
inhabits the cracks and crevices of the world, who knows how to be
nobody, knows when she has nothing to hide, and when to rush to the
other side to meet her double. At first I thought that this version of
political hope, grounded in brokenness, belonged to a different universe
from that of Tumani Calata, the youngest daughter of Fort and Nomonde
Calata. Growing up, she had wanted to know nothing about her father, a
stranger whom she never grieved. Then, slowly, she started down the path
which finally allowed her to begin again, to take possession of the
utterance, ‘I am the daughter of a hero. I know who I am.’ In the end,
despite the apparent contrast between self-affirmation and breakage, it
seemed to me that they were both saying the same thing. Something
unprecedented still has to happen. There will be no political
emancipation for anyone till we all recognise the corpse still lying on
the road, the continuing injustice, the work that remains to be done.
[*] Tafelberg, 271 pp., £14.99, March 2018, 978 0 624 0 8164 7.
[†] The conference’s brief extended to consideration of trauma across
Africa and beyond to include Zimbabwe, Nigeria/Biafra, Rwanda, and
Israel-Palestine. Following objections to their presence from members of
the Palestine Solidarity Committee in support of BDS, the Israeli
participants withdrew.
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