In the Shadow of The Giant
My English Traits - Chapter 5
A lot of people on the planet must have woken up on the first day of the new year of 1961 with more hope in their hearts and more of a spring in their steps than usual. Green shoots seemed everywhere to be promising a kinder, more cooperative world order, the fulfilment of many long-sought social and national aspirations, and redemption at last for the season-ticket holders at White Hart Lane.
One John F. Kennedy was about to be sworn in as President of the United States. Soon he would be proposing a long-term “Alliance for Progress” between the United States and Latin America, meeting with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna to discuss nuclear tests, disarmament, and “the German problem”, and announcing before a special joint session of Congress his goal to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade.
Anyone and everyone with a moderate supply of ammonium perchlorate would soon be launching something more interesting than the thing last launched. When the Americans rocketed Ham the chimpanzee into space aboard Mercury-Redstone 2, the Russians would match and raise them with Yuri Gagarin in Vostok 1, which triumph of Soviet ingenuity would promptly be trumped by the Americans with the test flight of the first Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile, so that when the Israelis launched Shavit-2 into orbit, hardly anybody noticed.
Elsewhere, in this new spirit of fellowship, the United Kingdom would apply for membership of the European Economic Community; France would recognise the independence of Algeria; Portugal would relax its colonial grip on Angola and Mozambique, and Jomo Kenyatta would be released from prison in Kenya.
There would be signs that the world had come into possession of a conscience. The United Nations would establish The World Food Programme, New Zealand would abolish the death penalty, and the publication of Peter Benenson’s article The Forgotten Prisoners in several international newspapers would lead to the founding of Amnesty International.
In the same year, Mr and Mrs Obama would have a son and name him Barack, Viscount Althorp and his first wife Frances would have a daughter and name her Diana, and Mr and Mrs Clooney would have a son and call him George. Erwin, the son of Mr and Mrs Schrödinger, would die or not die, depending on your location in the space-time continuum. A boy-band formerly known as the Quarrymen would perform for the first time in The Cavern Club in Liverpool, and 19-year-old Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota, would arrive in New York City with a harmonica and a second-hand guitar.
On New Dell farm, a long way from where any of this mattered, and while parental attention was absorbed by the marvellous arrival of a baby brother named Andy, the hopes of Bruce and I were firmly fixed on the fires, floods and earthquakes that God in his infinite mercy would surely unleash on the district to Hidcote to render all roads and railways impassable between our rural homestead and Merchiston’s dreaded gates.
God in his infinite wisdom appeared not to notice or care about our prayers any more than the wider world noticed or cared about the convulsions of South Africa’s body politic that had been precipitated by the referendum of the previous October.
The sky remained irritatingly blue. The dreaded gates swallowed me whole. I met a boy who had a transistor radio. I met Robert and Mobbs and Freddy Strachan. I became Torr Two. I discovered just how profoundly I had misjudged the distance between Bruce’s description of what to expect of it and the anatomical reality of a lashing from Mr Lang.
On 31st May, the day we were sent home with our flags to celebrate our long-sought freedom from the shackles of an unelected monarchy, The Pretoria News marked the occasion with what surely has to be the most breath-takingly disingenuous headline ever to disgrace the front page of a major national newspaper: FREEDOM WILL BE PASSWORD OF REPUBLIC.
Then there were the stamps.
There’s been some amicable inter-sibling debate about the reliability of my memory since I circulated my description of the incident on the bridge. Observing, quite rightly, that the chances of meeting a Zulu dressed in an elegant suit in the environs of Hidcote circa 1961 were vanishingly small, my sister Debby went on to question, in the nicest possible way, whether the whole episode might not have been the convenient figment of an overwrought imagination.
It’s true, of course, that time, vanity, and wishful thinking can combine to make large dishonourable untruths out of very small truths accurately remembered. Indeed, if the 21st century has taught us anything at all, it’s that the tinier the grain of veracity at the heart of any lie, the bigger the snowball of mendacity than can accumulate around it. So it turns out, bye the bye, that what we choose to believe about history is less a matter of verifiable fact than a question of personal preference. Perhaps it always was.
Bruce isn’t here to back me up, but I submit to Debby, in the nicest possible way, that the reverse of her supposition is more likely to be the case — that it was the very incongruity of his attire, in all its striking unlikelihood, which fixed the rest of the incident so vividly in my mind’s eye.
I didn’t have much to go on apart from the date, place and nature of the encounter, the said suit, and the look in his eyes that I clearly remember as being neither intimidated nor intimidating. But with a little help from Google I am now convinced that he was on his way back from the meeting of the All-In African National Action Council in Pietermaritzburg, convened several days earlier to protest the Republic’s imminent proclamation.
White English-speaking Natalians had good reasons to be alarmed by the prospect of a republic, just as the Scots today have good reasons to be alarmed by the prospect of leaving the E.U. They didn’t want it, they didn’t vote for it, and they saw it as an unfair constraint on their right to self-determination imposed by a majority whose cultural and political aspirations they didn’t share.
But even through the rosy lenses of my English Natalian heritage it’s impossible to see anything in the motivation of the Natal Covenant beyond a parochial self-interest blinkered to the hopes and wishes of the majority black population of Natal, or anything in the sentiment not suffused with a pinkish nostalgia for Empire.
Black South Africans had far more to lose than the notional safeguards afforded by an undisturbed association with the UK. But they reacted with a composure that in the light of everything they had endured since 1948 can only be described as extraordinary.
The following extract is from the letter sent to Prime Minster Hendrik Verwoerd, the chief architect of apartheid, to inform him of the resolution adopted unanimously by the A-I.A.N.C.A:
Conference noted that your Government, after receiving a mandate from a section of the European population, decided to proclaim a Republic on 31 May.
It was the firm view of delegates that your Government, which represents only a minority of the population in this country, is not entitled to take such a decision without first seeking the views and obtaining the express consent of the African people. Conference feared that under this proposed Republic your Government, which is already notorious the world over for its obnoxious policies, would continue to make even more savage attacks on the rights and living conditions of the African people…
It was the earnest opinion of Conference that this dangerous situation could be averted only by the calling of a sovereign national convention representative of all South Africans, to draw up a new non-racial and democratic Constitution. Such a convention would discuss our national problems in a sane and sober manner, and would work out solutions which sought to preserve and safeguard the interests of all sections of the population.
Set aside the letter’s lucid prose and its pellucid purpose. Set aside, just for a minute, the concatenation of events that followed its arrogant dismissal. It’s enough to know that the Natal Covenant was the plagiarized version of a document written by a group of English Protestants in 1912, and the letter above was written by a 42-year-old lawyer with the name of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, who only one year later would be escorted down Commercial Road by a convoy of Saracens watched by wide-eyed schoolboys at the Merchiston fence.
When I read that the conference was “attended by 1,500 delegates from town and country, representing 145 religious, social, cultural, sporting, and political bodies”, I imagine the man in the suit to have been a headmaster, or a community leader of some kind, or both; that he would probably have walked most of the way back from the city, and that he intended walking the remaining thirty or forty miles that separated Hidcote from his school and family settlement somewhere up north beneath the long afternoon shadows of the Giant.
I imagine his ears still ringing with cries of protest and ululations of praise. I imagine him hopeful yet that Verwoerd would wake up one of these nights to a vision of his naked self standing at the crossroads of history, and like Saul of Tarsus he would be blinded by heaven’s righteous light, and reason would prevail over obduracy, and compassion over dogma, and he would call a sovereign national convention representative of all South Africans to draw up a new non-racial democratic Constitution.
Then I imagine my headmaster thinking the words that Alan Paton put into the mouth of Stephen Kumalo: “I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find that we are turned to hating.”
And at about this moment he would see two little white boys on the bridge ahead of him, and one of them would be waving a flag of the republic at the train passing beneath it.
I didn’t want to talk about apartheid. No one wants to talk about apartheid or hear about apartheid or think about apartheid. The general view seems to be that it was a bad thing that happened long ago, but it’s over now and best forgotten, like the measles, or some embarrassing adolescent affliction.
Which put me in mind of something a Japanese colleague told me when I was in Tokyo fourteen or fifteen years ago. He said that after the Second World War the Japanese government instituted an educational policy called “Deliberate Forgetting”, which was an approach to teaching Japanese history to Japanese children that focused, let’s say, on the positives. It struck me then as highly excusable under the circumstances, and I gave it no more thought until I got to writing that last paragraph.
I looked it up but found nothing matching the entry, in any combination or variation of tense, of the words Japan, deliberate and forgetting. It occurred to me that Japan may have wanted everyone, including the Japanese people, to forget, quite deliberately, that they ever had a policy called “Deliberate Forgetting”, and had taken steps to remove all references to it from the internet. After much frustrated digging I finally discovered an article by a certain Mariko Oi confirming that my colleague hadn’t made it up.
Schooled in Japan but now living in Australia, Oi recounts that of the 357 pages of her high school history book, only nineteen dealt with world events between 1931 and 1945. More pages were devoted to the Pleistocene Age than to the Sino-Japanese War. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were dealt with in a single sentence. Deliberate or not, it’s certainly economical.
The point of this digression is that you can’t assume that just because a person comes from a certain identifiable country or culture, he or she will necessarily know something about the impact his or her country or culture has had on its friends, its enemies, its neighbours, its colonies, or the larger world — for better or for worse. And even if he or she is naturally inclined to talk more freely about the former, you’d think they’d know at least a little about the latter.
I always assumed that most English men and women with reasonable educations would know something about Britain’s colonial legacy in South Africa. If nothing else, the sheer scale and prominence of South Africa House on Trafalgar Square seemed to stand solidly in the way of any deliberate attempt to forget it. I always assumed, too, that these same English men and women would have gleaned, from sources either formal or informal, sufficient scraps of South African history to piece together a relatively undistorted picture of the who, how and what of apartheid.
Always, that is, until a few days ago when an English acquaintance with a better than average education asked me, very politely and with all due deference, as is their wont, where I had learned to speak English.
In the heart-sinking seconds that followed I saw a vast, unbridgeable gulf opening up between my conception of myself as English and his perception of me as something strange and foreign, an interloper with as little claim to Englishness as any immigrant with a less than proper accent or of a darker shade of pale; or perhaps to his eyes and ears something more unsettling than that precisely because of my blue eyes and my white skin, as if I were a living, breathing reminder of an atavistic complicity in something he’d rather have forgotten.
The B-side of 1961 isn’t as cheery as the A-side.
Race riots and racially motivated attacks on civil rights protesters by the Ku Klux Klan spread like wildfire throughout the southern states of the U.S.
The construction of the Berlin Wall began in August, officially dividing Western Europe from Eastern Europe.
In what became known as the October Massacre, French police attacked a crowd of 30,000 protesting a curfew applied solely to Algerians, killing as many as 240 people.
The Soviet Union detonated a 58-megaton yield hydrogen bomb known as Tsar Bomba over Novaya Zemlya, still today the biggest ever man-made explosion.
The failed, CIA-sponsored invasion of Cuba at a beach named Playa Girón in the Bay of Pigs would lead a year later to that moment in history when we came closer than we’ve ever come to the total annihilation of homo-so-called-sapiens.
And in South Africa, now free from the interference of Westminster, Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd began to implement what was to become the world’s longest, cruellest, and least understood experiment in the politics of identity. Which is why I have to talk about it.
Thank you