THE JOYS AND SORROWS OF THE AMATEUR VIOLIST

My efforts to find or form a string quartet have thus far failed to produce results.  Rather than just put the viola away for another five and a half years, however, I have decided to continue practicing until I can find someone to play with me.  My first choice has been a wonderful Mozart duet for violin and viola, K423.  I went to the Shar Music website and ordered the sheet music.  Several days ago it arrived, and I have started learning the first movement.

This is serious music, not like the little Haydn duets I pulled out and played through two weeks ago.  One of my treasured CDs is a recording of Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zuckerman playing violin/viola duets, the first of which on the CD is K423.  As you might expect, their performance is to die for.

Now, let us be perfectly clear.  There is no discernible musical relationship between what I am doing and Zuckerman's playing of the viola part in K423.  Or rather, there is, I suppose, something like the relationship between the Form of a Bed and a drawing of a physical bed, which, as Plato tells us, is at a third remove from the Form.  Still and all, as I get the sixteenth note runs under my fingers and work out manageable fingerings for the double stops, I begin to achieve some facility, and as I play through the movement, in my head I can hear Perlman playing the violin part along with me. 

Why, you might ask, do I bother, inasmuch as I will never play this one duet well enough even to perform it for anyone else, let alone match the performance of Perlman and Zuckerman?  It is rather hard to explain.  One reason is that studying something like K423 gives me an insight into what Mozart was doing that I, at least, cannot acquire merely from listening to it.  Oh, I can hear when Mozart moves into the development section, and when he returns to the statement of the original theme, but it is quite different actually to feel the sense of recognition [and relief] as I reach the restatement after a page and a half and get to play again the notes I have already mastered.

I have taken to starting each rather brief practice session by playing the series of twelve three-octave major scales, C major to B major.  [Well, to be honest, I cannot quite play the very last notes of the third octave of the B major scale since I am so high up on the A string that my left hand is wrapped around the body of the viola like a boa constrictor, my thumb locked under the neck of the instrument.  Fortunately, no one ever writes those notes for a viola part.]  On the first day of practicing, I play every note on a different bow.  The next day, I play two notes on a bow, the day after that three notes on a bow, and so on until on the twelfth day of practicing I play the series of twelve scales twelve notes on a bow.  [Seven notes on a bow and eleven notes on a bow are rather tricky to keep in your head.]  If I am being really serious, as I was back when I lived in Massachusetts, I then spend twelve days in the same rotation playing natural minor scales, then twelve days of melodic minor scales, and twelve days of harmonic minor scales.  Finally, I play one day of scales in which I play the C major scale one note on a bow, the C sharp natural minor scale two notes on a bow, the D melodic minor scale three notes on a bow, the D sharp harmonic minor scale four notes on a bow, and so on through three rotations, ending with the B harmonic minor scale twelve notes on a bow.  Later today I will play the major scales three notes on a bow.  There is something very peaceful about those scales. [Fortunately, I am no longer in psychotherapy, because if I ever told all of this to an analyst, I would be diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and put on medication.]

AN IMPORTANT GUEST POST BY AN OLD FRIEND

Twenty-six years ago, I visited Cape Town, South Africa for the first time.  There I had lunch with the Rector of the University of the Western Cape and his senior staff, among whom was a plump middle-aged man with an engaging manner and a somewhat unclear role at the university.  Later, as I was walking across the campus with him, I learned to my astonishment that he had recently come out of prison, where he had spent seven years for spying on a South African nuclear energy plant that was later successfully blown up by ANC commandos.  He had been released from prison on condition that someone would give him a job, and UCT had stepped up.  He held a doctorate in Politics from Oxford University.  That man, Dr. Renfrew Christie, became one of my very closest friends in South Africa, and though I see him  only rarely, I think of him as one of my closest friends in the world.  He has for many years been Dean of Research at The University of the Western Cape, the university originally created for the Coloured population of the Western Cape and now the leading Historically Black University in South Africa.  It is to UWC that I have been sending the money from my charitable organization, University Scholarships for South African Students, for a number of years.

Recently, Renfrew gave the keynote address to a meeting convened to address the subject of judicial torture in South Africa.  I reproduce it here exactly as he sent it to me.  It is long, and it is deeply distressing, but I urge all of you read it from start to finish.

UNIVERSITY OF THE WESTERN CAPE

DEPARTMENT OF RESEARCH DEVELOPMENT

 

 

KEYNOTE ADDRESS

 

Domesticating the UN Convention against Torture and the Robben Island Guidelines for the Prevention of Torture in Africa

 

ARTICLE 5 FORUM

WEDNESDAY & THURSDAY, 13 & 14 NOVEMBER 2013

 

UWC Community Law Centre Civil Society Prison Reform Institute

UCT Gender, Health and Justice Research Unit

University of Bristol Human Rights Implementation Centre

African Policy and Oversight Forum

 

 

 

Professor Renfrew Christie DPhil Oxford, FRSSAf, MASSAf
Dean of Research, University of the Western Cape

Keynote Address to the

Community Law Centre Conference on

The Law of Torture

 

Domesticating the UN Convention against Torture

And the

Robben Island Guidelines for the Prevention of Torture in Africa

 

 

 

On the evening of 23 October 1979, I had a date to take a fair maiden to dinner. Instead, that afternoon, I was arrested by eight very large South African policemen. Perforce, I stood the fair maiden up. Not being stupid, she promptly disappeared before she too could be arrested. I spent the next seven and a bit years behind bars. A month or two after my release, I met the fair maiden. She did not greet me. The kind words, “Hello, how are you?” did not escape her lips. All she said was, “You’re late!”

I was told by the police to put on a tracksuit because I had a hard night ahead of me. I put on a suit and tie. I had been buying crockery for my new flat. I was told I would never get to use it. Seven years later, I used it with glee!

I was taken to Caledon Square Police Station where I was forcibly made to stand all night.  I was prevented from sleeping, until I wrote a “confession”, eighteen hours later.

I was then moved to John Vorster Police Station in Johannesburg.  I was kept there for six months, incommunicado and in solitary confinement, until I was charged under the Terrorism Act.  After being charged, I was moved to the old Pretoria Central Prison building to await trial, still in solitary, but now in the condemned cells of what had been the old hanging prison in the time of Herman Charles Bosman and Cold Stone Jug.  In total, I was in solitary for about seven months.

In John Vorster Square, at first I was in a cell sealed with inch-thick transparent Perspex on all the windows, with a one-inch gap for air. It was very hot in summer. I lost ten kilograms in weight on the sparse diet they fed me.

But one day they arrived and moved me to another cell, because the sealed cell was for those who they really wanted answers from, and they now had a new victim.

During the weekdays, the Special Branch would take me for showers alone; but over weekends, the ordinary police were a bit lazy, and saved time by putting people in showers together.

One weekend I was naked in a multiple-head shower room, when the new prisoner was put in naked beside me. Picture two startled men, suddenly together naked in a shower. He screamed: “I am not a terrorist! I am not a Terrorist! Tell them I am not!” He did not trust me at first. He thought I was a nark, an impimpi. But over successive weekends, we were showered together and he came to realise that I too was accused of Terrorism.

His name was Mordecai Tatsa. And over the weeks he appeared naked in the showers, each time with more evidence of gruesome tortures on his body. They beat his feet to the size of rugby balls. He had rope-burn marks on his neck, where they tightened a noose until he was nearly strangled, then released it, and then tightened it again.

I could do nothing except watch in horror, as each week he was in a worse condition. Eventually, I understand, they had tortured him so badly that they could not put him in front of even one of their own tame judges. I am told that Mrs Helen Suzman did a deal by which he was released into twenty-four hour house arrest, provided he kept his mouth shut about the torture. I have never seen him again.

Also in John Vorster Square, I could look across a courtyard into cells of ordinary alleged criminals. One day a policeman had two men handcuffed to each other. He would hit one hard in the face; then knee the other in the balls; punch the first in the stomach; then kick the second in the face bent over.  He kept at it for some time, clearly trying to get an answer that did not come. At night, I would hear a young person being flogged in a cell below me. I would hear feet running up; then the sound of a cane or whip thrashing a body; and a scream.  This went on and on, seemingly forever, and night after night.

At my “trial”, the onus of proof was reversed so that I had to prove my innocence.  The judge decided to admit my so-called “confession” as evidence, despite accepting that I was tortured to get it.  State versus Christie was much criticised by the academic lawyers, but it was used as precedent in later political trials, in which tortured “confessions” were admitted as “evidence”.

“Terrorism” in 1980 in South Africa was a capital offence. The headlines on 5 June 1980, around the world, read something like, “White scientist may face gallows”. The headlines on 6 June 1980 read: “White scientist escapes gallows.” I was quite pleased that I was finally not going not to be hanged!

Nevertheless, after the trial, I was taken from the old hanging prison to the new hanging prison.  I was placed on the Death Row closest to the gallows in the Pretoria Maximum Security Prison, along with five other “white” male political prisoners, some of whom had been in jail for almost twenty years. We were not to be hanged. They just wanted us to listen to the hangings. Over the next two and a half years I listened to perhaps three hundred people being hanged.

The whole prison would sing for two or three days before the hanging, to ease the terror of the victims. “Senzeni-na? Senzeni-na? What have we done? What have we done?” It was the most beautiful music on earth, sung in a vile place. Then, at zero dark hundred, the hanging party would come through the corridors to the gallows, slamming the gates behind them on the road to death. Once they were at the gallows there was a long pause. Then “crack!” the trapdoors would open, and the neck or necks of the condemned would snap. A bit later came the hammering, presumably of nails into the coffins. And another day in Pretoria went on – for the living. (We were later moved to the re-built Pretoria Security Prison, where we did not hear the hangings.)

The warders queued to be members of the hanging party. They put their names down on a list, and waited impatiently for months or years, till the day came when they could help to snap a neck. They left a little model of a gallows, with a hanged effigy in it, in our living space. They gloried in their power; they gloated.

Yet seven of my warders committed suicide while I was in prison. They were fresh off the farms, “white” boys chosen for their ideological party. They had been taught that all authority comes from God, to the State President, to Mammie, Pappie, die Dominee and die Onderwyser. They had been taught that the big city was a sin; that sex was a sin; and that all liberals were communists and terrorists who would rape their sisters.

They discovered that the big city was nice. Sex was fantastic! (They were eighteen.) And as for those liberal, communist, terrorist, sister-rapers: we were human. We were not monsters. They could talk to us. If they were studying, we might help them with their studies.

They would end up in a guard tower at minus two degrees Centigrade in a Pretoria winter. Their entire cosmology had collapsed. Everything they had been taught was false. And their girlfriend had dropped them, as happens at the age of eighteen. They would put the rifle barrel into their mouths and pull the trigger.

One poor kid wisely shot himself in the shoulder. He lay on the floor of the tower, screaming, “Help me! Help me!” The only people who could hear him were his prisoners. The International Committee of the Red Cross had insisted that we should have intercoms, with which to summon help if we were, say, having a heart attack. In those days we called the warders “Boers”. The problem with the intercoms that night was that either the Boers had switched them off, or they were not listening. So the kid lay on the floor of his tower, bleeding until the shift changed. I think he lived.

During my seven years in prison I had a wisdom tooth removed. There were twenty Boers in a truck in front, with rifles. There were twenty Boers in a truck behind, with rifles. I was in the prison ambulance in leg irons. I was handcuffed to Sergeant Arendse. Sirens blaring, we screamed from one end of Pretoria to the other, from the Pretoria Security Prison to the HF Verwoerd Hospital, stopping all the traffic for my wisdom tooth. At the hospital, the parking lot had been cleared of cars and was surrounded by armed Boers. There were snipers on the roof of the hospital. Inside, the passageways were empty, except for Boers with rifles.

The ward had forty beds, all empty, except mine. Sergeant Arendse put on little green sterile booties, sterile green trousers, a sterile green smock, and a sterile green cap. Overall he put his unsterile service pistol in its unsterile holster. The last thing I saw as I went under the anaesthetic was his snorr moustache, as he beamed down at me.

Going back to the prison was the same: sirens, snipers, armed guards by the truckload, and handcuffed to Sergeant Arendse. I was in pain, and nauseous from the anaesthetic. I threw up. I vomited all over Sergeant Arendse. I could do nothing else: we were shackled together! 

Today, of course the Verwoerd Hospital is named for Steve Biko.  We have a democracy; a Constitution; a Bill of Rights; and an independent judiciary.  Nonetheless, we still have torture. We meet today to work out how to reduce torture; perhaps to get rid of it entirely, although I believe that is impossible.

What can we learn from my story, for the laws against torture?

From the depths of hell, let me assure you that there is no practical difference between “Torture” and “Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment”. I have been there.  I am a witness and a victim. It is all torture, whatever the silly lawyers say.

Forced standing is torture; sleep deprivation is torture; bastinado of the feet is torture; near-strangulation is torture whether it is done with ropes or by water-boarding; incommunicado is torture; solitary is torture; death row is torture even if they are not going to hang you.  Death row is torture, all the more so, if they are (or might be) going to hang you.

Imprisonment itself is torture, especially indefinite imprisonment. The sexual deprivation implicit in imprisonment is torture. Whether carried out by prisoners or police or warders, assault behind bars is torture. Rape in prison is torture. It did not happen to me; but prison rape of men or women is patently torture. Serious overcrowding is torture. Gang domination in prison builds up an overwhelming fear and a paranoia amounting to torture.

The mental effects of all this are as devastating as the physical effects and both are torture. The torture goes on for the rest of one’s life, be it short or long. You do not “get over it”. The terror and the nightmares do not wear off; they do not go away. I gave my torturers no names; but to this day if you ask me my mother’s name I will not be able to answer you for twenty-four hours. Moreover, the effects of torture can be as bad for the torturers as for the tortured. Seven of my warders killed themselves.

Torture does not work, as I shall show; but every State on earth today tortures willy-nilly, as they always have done. Humans have tortured since the dawn of time and they will torture until the end of time. All we can do is seek by all legal means at our disposal to diminish it.

In one of my remand hearings, I was put in a cell with a blond, blue-eyed sixteen year old. While hitchhiking, he had broken into an empty caravan to sleep. For this he had been sentenced to a judicial flogging. He was rightly terrified out of his wits. I think they put me in with him to help to calm him. I could do nothing. He was about to be judicially tortured, and every lawyer in the land was complicit in his torture. At least today we no longer officially flog people, but I do not kid myself that the inmates of our cells do not get “unofficially” thrashed, bashed or beaten. We have a long way to go.

But if we no longer judicially flog, we still imprison. The United Nations Convention on Torture says that, legally, torture “does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to, lawful sanctions to the extent consistent with the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners”. So imprisonment is torture, unless the imprisonment is a lawful punishment to minimum standards. Then it is no longer torture, except perhaps in the mind and body of the prisoner, who undoubtedly thinks it is a torture.

But even if we accept that lawful, minimum standard imprisonment is somehow necessary and therefore not torture, the moment we imprison unlawfully, before or after trial, or if we do not imprison to minimum standards, we are torturing.

Just as every lawyer in Apartheid South Africa was complicit in the torturing of flogged juveniles, so today every lawyer in the country is complicit in torture when people are held awaiting trial for too long; when minimum standards are not met, either for awaiting trial or for sentenced prisoners; and especially when people are raped or otherwise assaulted behind bars. And whenever we imprison an innocent person we commit torture.

If rape is a standard occurrence in our police and prison cells, then every lawyer in the country is complicit in that rape. If gross overcrowding is standard in our cells, then the imprisonment becomes torture and every lawyer in the country is complicit in that torture. If juveniles are imprisoned with adults, minimum standards are not met, and the imprisonment becomes torture, in which the whole judicial system is complicit. Be careful what you wish for. Becoming a legal officer of the court makes you complicit if the legal system commits torture, as it undoubtedly does. The better we make our whole justice system, the less torture we will be committing. That is why we are meeting today.

Torture does not work.  I do not believe the torturers got anything useful out of Mordecai Tatsa. They ended up with the option of killing him or of releasing his mangled ruin into house arrest and silence.

In my own case I was able to use my so-called confession as a way to communicate with my African National Congress control, to pass on the results of my spying. I put into my “confession” exactly how I believed the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station could be attacked with explosives without endangering the people of Cape Town.  The idea was to plant the bombs and set them off just before the radioactive fuel was brought to the site. Bombs on the reactor heads and in the pipe works would ruin the quality control which is essential in a nuclear plant. The damage would cost hundreds of millions of dollars.  And so it did.

I treasure a story of a young lawyer, Penuel Maduna, faxing a copy of my “confession” from Johannesburg to London.  The police arrived as he was doing so; he put the “confession” in his shirt and clung to the iron work under the fire escape until the police went away. He ended up Minister of Justice in the democratic South Africa.

My Judge was kind enough to read out my whole confession to the press of the world in the courtroom, including my recommendations to the ANC.  Everything I spied on was eventually bombed or blown up: the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station, Sasol, and other coal fired power stations. Of course, no spy ever knows how or whether his data is actually used. I take no blame and I claim no credit. I was just a spy. I cannot know whether the information I passed back was useful. The heroes were the Umkhonto we Sizwe cadres who bombed the targets. But what I do know is that in my case, torture backfired.

The Koeberg Nuclear Power Station was bombed by the ANC in December 1982, three years after my arrest, by Rodney and Heather Wilkinson. They got jobs in building the power station; they hid bombs in their back packs; they placed the bombs where and when I had recommended; the radioactive fuel was not yet on site; and the bombs did damage which cost $519 million, in 1982 United States dollars, much as I expected.  Wonderfully the auditors forced Escom to publish the cost of repairing the damage. Rodney and Heather later told all this to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

My confession had dealt with my supplying data to the ANC about Sasol. The bombing of the Sasol plants happened the night before my trial.  My lawyer came into my cell with front page photo in the Rand Daily Mail, of Sasol burning.  There was a plume of smoke going up a hundred thousand feet, almost like a nuclear explosion. The total cost of the damage to Sasol and to Koeberg and to the other targets, on which I spied, came to about a billion dollars, US 1982. Other power stations, fired by coal, were mentioned in my confession and someone blew them up. Even the Calueque/ Ruacana hydroelectric schemes, the subject of my 1975 UCT master’s thesis, which I had sent to Swapo, was blown up by someone. 

These explosions had nothing proven to do with me: “it was two other guys and it fell off the back of a bus”. But I do know in my case that torture was completely counterproductive.  They got an outcome exactly the opposite of what they wanted.

This all feeds into the debate about the “ticking bomb” argument, in favour of torture in the United States. David Luban has written a cogent article destroying the “ticking bomb” argument, published in 2005 Virginia Law Review, pages 1425 to 1461. Essentially, it was argued after 9/11 that torture was justified in a liberal democracy if it could prevent a “ticking bomb” from exploding and killing people.  Torture the person you think has placed the bomb; you will be told where it is and you will defuse it in time.  Luban shows beyond reasonable doubt that this argument is nonsense.

The man may be the wrong man; he may send you to the wrong place even if he is the right man; tortured people will say anything they think may stop the torture, so they are unreliable; and so on.  You could torture a thousand innocents and still not get to defuse the bomb. Read Luban yourselves: he is persuasive that torture does not work. It certainly was no use to my captors: quite the opposite.

Torture does not work; but every nation on earth has tortured in my lifetime. Spies were tortured on both sides of the cold war. NATO soldiers tortured each other on exercises in the cold war. Police of every nation have beaten so-called “confessions” out of prisoners. Gangs routinely torture inside and out of prisons.  Organised criminals torture the world over. In prisons, the warders torture the inmates.  The torturers act with impunity. And states do this as policy; or they turn blind eyes to it; or they secretly connive at it.  Torture happened on all sides in all the many hundreds of wars since 1945, from Korea to Vietnam to the Gulf.

To take just one example, John T Parry has published a conclusive torture case against the United States, showing in irrefutable detail that America has tortured from the beginning of its history to the present. His title says all you need to know: “Torture Nation, Torture Law”, The Georgetown Law Journal 2009, Volume 97, pages 1001 – 1056. Torture does not work but all states do it. Impunity reigns, OK?

Our task today is to make it possible to reduce torture by using the composite tool which is called the Domestication and Implementation Package.  We must get co-ordinated action; we must institutionalise collaboration; we must ensure that research is done; we must increase monitoring across the board.  Governments at all levels and in all relevant departments; national human rights institutions; and civil society organisations must be made to work together to reduce torture and to prosecute and punish torturers. We must work together to prevent torture; to combat impunity; to bring redress to the tortured and their families; and we must report properly under the Convention Against Torture and the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights. As but one of the millions of tortured people, I ask you to do this, with passion, professionalism and vigour.[1]

---

[1] I am grateful to Lukas Muntingh for suggestions regarding this keynote address; any errors are mine, not his.

THE DUKE SEMINAR

Yesterday afternoon, I spend three hours at Duke University discussing my paper, A Unified Reading of Marx, with twenty-five faculty and graduate students from four or five different departments.  It was an extremely enjoyable experience for me [they were, after all, talking about my work -- how could it be otherwise?]  The only drawback, from my point of view, was that by prior agreement everyone left after three hours.  I mean, I had not even told a tenth of the stories I wanted to tell, and with a glass of wine, provided by Professor Michael Gillespie, the organizer of the event, I was ready to go another three hours.

There were a great many good questions and comments, including several from my old students, Allan Buchanan and Alexander Rosenberg, now unaccountably senior members of the Philosophy Department [how did that happen so fast?], but the most interesting comment, to my mind, came from Darren Beattie, a graduate student.  [I think I found it the most interesting because Beattie suggested something that had never occurred to me before, and that does not happen to me very often after almost sixty years at this game.]

Some of you may have read my essay, "The Future of Socialism" [archived at box.net], in which I observe that Marx failed to foresee the continuing ethnic, racial, religious, and nationalist sentiments that divide the working class and impede solidarity.  Beattie reminded us all that in the several generations after World War II, while working class solidarity in the United States has frayed and dissipated, a series of liberation movements have taken the place of economic mobilization on the left -- the Civil Rights Movement, the Women's Liberation Movement, the LGBT Liberation Movement, among others.  Perhaps, he suggested, these movements will dissolve the forces separating segments of the working class from one another and thus prepare the way for a rebirth of a mass movement of the dispossessed [I hope I am capturing his idea correctly.]

Now, those who know me are aware that I am an incurable optimist, a Tigger rather than an Eeyore.  If there is even a drop in the glass, I am prepared to declare it half full.  I have been dismayed for decades by the substitution of cultural liberation movements for serious economic attacks on capitalism, viewing them as merely perfections of the capitalist labor market rather than challenges to capitalism.  If Darrin Beattie is right, perhaps I have reason to hope.  As I say, it only takes a drop in the glass for me to see it as half full, if not on the brink of overflowing.

All in all, a splendid event.  I hope I don't have to wait eighty more years for another!

MORE ON MANDELA

There has been a great deal of finger-pointing and tut-tutting in the blovosphere [if I may so label the world of opinion-offerers] about the refusal of some on the right to honor the memory of Nelson Mandeal.  Dick Cheney remains unrepentant about his opposition to Mandela.  A South Carolina sheriff refuses to lower the flag in honor of Mandela.  Ted Cruz issues a bland message about Mandela and is slammed by his fervent supporters for saying anything nice about a communist and terrorist.  And so forth.

I am actually rather pleased by this reaction on  the right.  Mandela was not Father Christmas, nor was he the Tooth Fairy.  He was for his entire life a fighter against apartheid who took up arms and formed a lasting alliance with the South African Communist Party.  He was not himself a communist -- that claim is just an expression of the ignorance of those who make it.  The SACP and the ANC were allies.  But he was everything that his detractors say he was -- that is why I honor him now.

There is a long-standing tendency in the White American community to pick one Black man or woman at any given time and celebrate him or her, while condemning all the others.  When W. E. B. Du Bois was condemned as a dangerous radical, Booker T. Washington was embraced by America's racists as our "Good Negro."  Eventually, Du Bois, safely dead, was resurrected and accepted by polite White society as a Good Negro.  Martin Luther King was an enemy of the people, so far as J. Edgar Hoover and his ilk were concerned, condemned for inciting Black men and women to resistance, until he too died, whereupon America declared his birthday a public holiday.  Even Malcolm X has been sanitized, purified, and sanctified in some circles, played in the movies by our most beloved Black actor.

I much prefer to remember them all as Enemies of the State, as revolutionaries who inspired fear and loathing in the entrenched powers.  Dick Cheney is right to hate Mandela.  Mandela fought against everything Cheney stands for.  A strong progressive movement needs at all times to remember its enemies as well as its heroes.

A GREAT MAN HAS DIED

This evening it was reported on Television that Nelson Mandela had passed away, several hours earlier, at the age of ninety-five.  A great man has died, and something must be said by way of recognition of his passing. 

The word "great" is used promiscuously these days.  Winston Churchill was not a great man.  Ronald Reagan was not a great man.  John F. Kennedy was not a great man.  Margaret Thatcher was not a great woman.  But Nelson Mandela was truly a great man.

I never had the honor of meeting Mandela, though he was an enormous presence during my visits to South Africa, starting in 1986 and continuing until last year, when I made what may well be my last real trip to that country, to receive an honorary degree at the University of the Western Cape.  In order to make clear the lineaments of his greatness, some detailed history is required.  I should caution you that what follows is very much my own view, not at all the official hagiography associated with his name.

The struggle against South African apartheid took many forms, as did the lives of those in the struggle.  Some, Like Thabo Mbeki, fled the country and went into exile, fighting against the regime from abroad.  Some, like Mandela and Mbkei's father, Govan, went to prison, and fought the regime from their cells on Robben Island.  And some remained unimprisoned in South Africa to form what became the Mass Democratic Movement, fighting the regime from within the country.  Those outside the country formed Umkhonto we sizwe ["The Spear of the Nation"], the armed wing of the struggle.  Those elsewhere in the world organized boycotts of South Africa -- academic boycotts, sports boycotts, cultural boycotts -- and, most effective of all, economic boycotts.  Both the disinvestment movement [pulling investment capital out of the country] and the divestment movement -- urging funds to sell stocks of companies doing business in South Africa] had by the early eighties brought enormous pressure to bear on the business community, which in turn pressured the Afrikaner government to make some sort of settlement with the Black [i.e., African, Indian, and Coloured] population.  My introduction to the movement came through my decision to take part in a demonstration at Harvard to try to get that august institution to divest.  [We failed.  Even after I succeeded in getting Archbishop Desmond Tutu elected to the Harvard Board of Overseers, Harvard did not divest.  Instead it changed the rules for electing Overseers so that nothing like that would happen again.  Naturally after the struggle was over and Mandela had been released from prison, Harvard gave him an honorary degree.  That university is really a piece of work!]

The manifesto of the movement was a document called The Freedom Charter, adopted at a mass meeting in 1955.  The two most controversial demands of the Freedom Charter were nationalization [which is to say, socialism] and land reform.  The former should be clear enough, but the latter requires some explanation.  The Afrikaner Nationalist government had implemented a policy of apartheid, or "separateness,' according to which South Africa was to be disaggregated into "homelands," each of which would be the separate and rightful place of one of the many peoples living within the borders of the country.  The Whites, needless to say, would get all the good stuff -- cities, factories, mines, and the rest.  The Africans would be divided into cultural and linguistic fragments and consigned to Homelands ruled by puppet Black governments, complete with all the trappings of pseudo-governmental status -- KwaZulu, Lebowa, Bophutatswana, Ciskei, Transkei, and so on.  Africans were ordered to go to their "homelands," in many cases breaking up families on the grounds that this member was a Northern Sotho and that member was a Zulu.  The borders of the Homelands were carefully drawn so that the richest and most fertile land was reserved for the White homeland -- South Africa -- while the leavings were allocated to this or that homeland.  Thus land reform, the return of fertile land to African farmers, whose ancestors had cultivated the land for generations, was one of the key demands of the Freedom Charter.

By the early eighties, the armed struggle was pretty much a failure.  The government had successfully infiltrated the ranks of the Umkhonto we Siswe, and the Mass Democratic Movement, crippled by bannings and imprisonments, was stalled.  But the economic boycott was cutting very deeply indeed, and the business community was pressuring the government to do something to regularize economic affairs.  South Africa, one must recall, was far and away the best developed and most economically advanced country in Southern Africa, and its further development required integration into the world capitalist system.

At this point, a draft of a revised Freedom Charter began to circulate, although to the best of my knowledge it was never officially promulgated.  A friend of mine bootlegged a copy to me.  The biggest changes were the omission from the demands of both nationalization and land reform.  Instead, there was a heavy emphasis on formal democracy -- one person, one vote.  In effect, the new Charter was prepared to trade the key economic demands for an almost assured shot at control of the State.  I was very disappointed in the changes, but it seemed pretty clear to me that Mandela and his colleagues had made a hard-eyed choice.  They might just be strong enough to take control of the State through free elections if they agreed to leave ownership of the means of production in the hands of the business community and the good land in the hands of the Afrikaner farmers.

The one puzzle was why De Klerk, the President, would agree to such a deal.  By this time, the state was the power base of the Afrikaners.  An unusually large proportion of Afrikaner men held government jobs -- sinecures, in effect.  A deal along the lines of the revised Freedom Charter would be acceptable to the business community -- they didn't care about the color of anyone's skin, so long as they could retain control of capital.  The Afrikaner farmers could keep their land.  But De Klerk and his retainers would be out on their ear if a Black government was elected.  What was in it for them?

I puzzled over this a good deal, and here is the explanation I came up with.  This is largely speculation, but it may well be true.  At this time, the Black population was divided.  The large majority supported the African National Congress, the ANC, Mandela's organization.  But a significant minority, based in KwaZulu with supporters on the mines and factories, owed allegiance to Mangosuthu Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom Party, the IFP.  In the middle 1980's, De Klerk's government was feeding weapons and money to the IFP, encouraging its attacks on ANC supporters.  De Klerk was positioning himself as a neutral party capable of making peace between the factions.  I think that he actually thought he could ride that role into a victory in an election in which the Black vote would be split and the White [and Coloured] vote would go to the Nationalist party.  In the end, of course, Mandela was elected overwhelmingly as the first President of a free and democratic South Africa.

It would be natural, but wrong, to suppose that Mandela had an easy time of it handling the transition to the new South Africa.  The example of other successful liberation struggles in Southern Africa was not promising.  What is more, there was a great deal of scary talk about Afrikaner commando units forming to wreak havoc on the newly liberated Blacks.  In retrospect, it is obvious that there was never much danger of that.  The Afrikaners talked a good game, but they were fat and pampered and accustomed to having their way without much effort, and the few attempts were pathetic and easily put down.  Much more serious was the threat of internecine warfare among the liberated peoples of South Africa.

The true greatness of Mandela was revealed in the way in which he guided the country into a new, free era without violence, and for the most part, without the corruption that had so bedeviled other Southern African nations.

The story after Mandela is not a terribly happy one.  The scourge of HIV-AIDS, the failure of the corporate world to create real opportunity for the impoverished African population, the inadequacies of Thabo Mbeki and the clownishness of Jacob Zuma have done much to tarnish Mandela's accomplishments.  But with wisdom and skill and great strength, he brought South Africa into the modern world.  He was a truly great man, and I count myself fortunate to have lived to see him .

 

BOOK ALERT

One of America's great historians, Professor Jacqueline Jones of the University of Texas at Austin, whom I am proud to call a friend, has just published a new book, A Dreadful Deceit:  The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama's America.  As soon as I saw it mentioned I ordered it, and today it arrived.  I have this moment finished reading the Introduction.  It is stunningly brilliant, managing to say with power and precision in nine pages what I tried in my feeble way to suggest in my one book-length effort to address the subject.  I look forward with great excitement to reading the book, and I strongly recommend it to all of you.  Jackie, the very deserving recipient of a MacArthur genius award, somehow manages to do consistently extraordinary historiographical work while projecting the image of a soccer mom.  She was at Brandeis for many years and some while ago moved to Austin with her husband, Jeffrey Abramson, who is himself a distinguished professor of Law and Government at Austin.  Jackie's book, American Work, is an indispensable source for anyone seriously interested in American labor history.

PRELIMINARY POST ON CROWDSOURCING

Well, I got an interesting answer to the question, How does soap work?  I got a not really helpful answer to the question How can an airplane fly upside down?  And as for friction, not much help there save to say that it is complicated.  I would still like to really understand how a plane can fly upside down.  I guess friction will remain a mystery.  But on another matter entirely, my general sense was confirmed that no matter what you say on a blog, someone out there will care about it.  In passing I referred to Great Pyrenees, which are utterly hugable dogs, and sure enough one of my readers owns a Great Pyrenees.  It never fails.

Enough of light-hearted posts.  I must try to return to serious stuff.  Maybe the event tomorrow will provoke some deep thoughts.  We shall see.