The Masque of Africa (32 page)

In 1987 Colin went to Paris for the first time. He was “blown away.” Some things he could relate to, but there were things he could not understand at all. Still, the experience gave him a new way of looking.

He said, “We will have to go through a very violent post-colonial period to become human. You don’t have to go to a university to become an intellectual. There are organic traditions here too. Biko called it
buntu
, and it is the idea that you are a person because of another person. It gives the wish to aspire. My hope lies in the aspiration, not in the flaws all around us—though the idea of aspiring can bring its own flaws.”

He couldn’t escape conscription into the South African army. He was sent to Angola and there he had to guard refugee camps. The camps had black women and children, coloured women, and some blonde white women and children—Portuguese families who had been abandoned by their men.

“It was in this camp, while we were wearing the hated uniform, that I realised that men have a moral choice to do what they do. There were men who raped, exploited and did terrible things, and there were also men, like me, who made a small group who tried to make things better for these women, who were ready to do anything to protect their children. I saw moral shades in this army. There was, and is, a moral choice always. But I feel that being white is a debt you can’t pay even if you fought in the struggle.”

I
ASKED
Phillip whether there could be an idea of possibility in the society. I thought it was an important idea both for the society and the individual.

He said, “In my view the idea of possibility has to do with humanity. In my own small way I think that our transition from apartheid to democracy through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has provided the sense of humanity to some extent. It may have been flawed in some ways or not enough, but at least we did not have a civil war like Zimbabwe, where they wanted to get rid of the whites. This brings a sense of possibility.”

He worked professionally with a mixed group. “I don’t feel that because I am not black I don’t have possibility here. In a strange way it is and is not a disaster area. Maybe it’s like being in denial. Yet in another way I am trying to do what I can do as a South African for my country. I also know that I live with the constant dilemma of: should I go or stay? Sometimes I even wonder if this is a carry-over or part of my Jewish ancestry. My mother’s ancestors came in the 1900s to escape the Eastern European pogroms. There was a big Jewish community here pre-1994, and there was a dramatic drop in this community after ’94. It was really a dramatic drop. Many left and went abroad. When I feel there is no hope, seeing the crime, corruption and general decay, I feel I am behaving like the white whingers. But I always have this at the back of my head: should I go?”

This freedom to move out was like a privilege. Colin didn’t have this privilege.

Phillip said, “When Zuma [the new, 2009 president, a Zulu] came into power and had all this rape and arms-corruption controversy and tribal air all around him there was another exodus. I thought that even though I did not like Zuma I would stay, because maybe it is a good thing. Maybe he will connect us to the populist movement in the country.”

Unlike Colin, he saw no philosophical side to his predicament.

“Part of me says it was bound to happen. Maybe I’m making excuses, but the people here have suffered so much as ‘inferiors’ that this inverted black racism has to happen in order to heal in the long run. I believe it may take another generation to develop a philosophical resolution to our predicament. And that can only happen if our educational system improves. That is a big ‘if’ here.”

It was a universal complaint. Poor African education (no dictionaries for Franz, and no atlases) was part of the apparatus of apartheid; fifteen years later its effects were still being felt right through the society.

Phillip said, “At the moment American consumerism is consuming us—malls, long streets, and cars to drive everywhere. It is very ironic. I have become more reclusive because I don’t like what I see in the city. There is a climate of fear, and I have seen what it is to live in a city without fear. When I go to Europe I see what a big city can be—small shops, people walking, a street culture. Not everyone is in a mall and they are not driving everywhere. I still try to walk into town some days, because I cannot live in a car all day, and if I cannot do this then I will have to leave. There is a move to reclaim our city and areas in it where the whites simply moved out. They moved because of fear.”

J
OSEPH WAS
said to be a Zulu traditionalist. I thought I should go to see him, to connect again with some of the earlier religious inquiries I had made elsewhere for this book. I had no idea what to expect. He lived in a low concrete house in what looked like a pacific mixed area. That was ordinary enough, but he had guard dogs in a wire enclosure, like rich people, and there were young men in his back yard (many plastic chairs there) and in the street outside his house. These young men were his followers: Joseph was famous and well-to-do, and the people who were his followers tried to walk as he did and tried to talk as he did. A certain amount of what passed for political and cultural
thought in the townships came from Joseph. He was in his thirties. He knew his reputation. He talked a lot, always provocatively. The upholstered chairs in his sitting room looked a little rumpled; they had been much used that day. A middle-aged woman secretary sat at a computer with her back to the room; she was working out or tabulating Joseph’s appointments. He was in demand.

He said that whites owned most of the media, and he spoke the well-known fact like one who had earned the right to speak it. He went on to say that foreign media had no regard for local traditions. This was much more the kind of thing he was expected to say; and having got there, he became easier, and his speech flowed. He knew, what foreigners didn’t always know, that when you were working in an area you had to ask permission of the local chief, and when it was given you had to make a gift to the chief: a bottle of brandy and 200 rand. And when you had done your work you couldn’t just go away. If the chief wanted you to stay for a farewell feast, you had to do it. White and Indian producers didn’t understand this, and they created problems. Sometimes as a result the chief fined them, and this fine had to be paid. It was an African tradition, and it covered many mistakes—getting a girl pregnant, stealing someone’s goods, getting drunk and abusing an elder. In this way you completely by-pass the white man’s law. It was the African way.

Quite abruptly, then, he broke off and asked me, “Where do you come from?”

I said, “Trinidad.”

And he was completely thrown.

I said, “Near Jamaica.”

He said, “Bob Marley.” And then, reflectively, he said, “The slave trade.”

I said, “Yes.”

“Has Britain apologised for the slave trade?”

I said, “It was a long time ago, and many nations were involved.”

He dropped the conversational mode and began to make a speech, clearly one he had made many times before, that nothing was known
of African stories or history or traditions. All African children, on the other hand, knew about Cinderella and pixies and Western soaps and Western history. This made them “confused.”

He said, “We have anglicised our children and we feed them selective information which is always lauding the West. Do you know that people here have forgotten their own funeral songs? They bring big ghetto-blasters and play a CD at the grave or wake. If you tell them that Christianity and Islam were part of our colonisation, they get very mad. Even when they go for a white wedding and walk up the aisle, all that is part of our colonisation. The twenty-first-birthday party is not African. We have lost all our traditions and we are doing the wrong thing.”

People talked against polygamy. That irritated him. He was a product of polygamy and had no problems with it. In Africa the gender ratio was one man to thirteen women. “It was part of the African wealth. Our wealth was land, women, cattle, crops and children. To be an elder we had to have these, and now all that is gone.”

He did the talking; he raised the topics. And very soon he was talking about Christianity and contrasting it with the traditional African beliefs which he said were his own.

He said, “I am a modern man.” He meant a modern African man, someone who had shed much colonial baggage; he used certain words in his own way. He said, “I am not a Christian. My mother was a priest and my father was also in the church, but they could not give me an identity. Only when I went out and found my ancestors did I get a feeling that I belonged somewhere. The old ways summoned me and I found peace. We have many Christian churches here and they all straddle and suffocate our African identity.”

It was possible, putting everything together, to understand why he was thought to be a Zulu traditionalist, and why he had such a hold on the young. A poorly educated person from the township, knowing no history and having hardly any idea of his place in the world, would be given something to hold on to, and Joseph’s special style would make it attractive.

He was fierce about the need to sacrifice cows and goats in the traditional way; the animal rights people had to stay away. “They make a noise only when low- or middle-income people do it. You should see when a big wig does it. He does not hide it, and everyone comes in cars, limos and helicopters to be part of the ritual. When we slaughter a goat we have to stab it in the side many times to get the bad omen to go. Look at my body. It is full of scars. It is not child abuse. A witchdoctor came and cut me with a razor blade and then rubbed and filled the cut with the ashes of a snake. It is our way. And I must, as a traditional man, cut or slaughter a cow in our way. Why do you want the animal to be slaughtered in another way which you think is more humane? First of all, the animal which is to be sacrificed belongs to the ancestor, and so it has to alert the ancestor by crying out loud. I am sick of black people censoring or condemning our culture. They are doing it because they are so diluted. They do not know who they are and what the rituals mean. I question Christianity right down to its roots. Who are they to say that we must do these things in a hygienic way? We will arrive there ourselves. Do we go and film their circumcisions? Why do they come here and pay poor people to allow them to film their sacred rituals? They, the Christians, created apartheid and they enslaved my people despite the Bible. I practise the old ways. I go to the townships to slaughter the animal, and if the ritual is very complicated then I will go to my ancestral village. I have my shrines and I worship there.”

He had a pair of rusting handcuffs on the wall behind him. Rusting, but not very old: I was sure they were there as a conversation piece, a token of the slavery he liked to talk about. He said he had bought the cuffs in a junk-shop. He took them down from the wall and began to play with them, as though he had made them harmless. He asked me, “Are these things older than you?” I examined the question, fearing a trap, but could find none, and then I said I didn’t know. It must have been the correct reply, because he gave up the subject and sought to re-affix the cuffs to the wall.

He continued to talk, making a leap from the cuffs to the fast-food
chains of Johannesburg. He wondered why they didn’t do African fast food. He had exhausted his proper subjects and was now only speaking at random. The fast-food people and everybody else came to Africa only to make money, he said, and as a result Africa was “a quagmire of wars.” In the old days there used to be tribal wars, but they burnt themselves out very quickly. Now, when there was no tradition, and people had no idea where they came from, they had very little regard for the tombs of their kings, and things were generally deplorable. The ancient graves of the Zulu kings—buried in a sitting position and wrapped in a cowskin—were neglected.

He said, “I really feel we have paid a great deal for our freedom. Mandela let us down. He let the white people keep their wealth and lifestyle and walk into democracy. Rainbow nation is rubbish. Black people are still called kaffirs, and coloured people are nowhere. They have no heroes and are called ‘woolly hair.’ They had to endure the pencil test.”

It was becoming too random and glib. I felt it was time to go. He followed me into the yard.

He said, “I’ve always wanted to do this.”

I had no idea what he meant; and then he held the car door open for me. His followers—in jeans and tee shirt—were relaxed in the traffic-less street, in a cool mid-afternoon light. They could see us through the open gate; but he was so secure in their affection he could afford to do this clowning with the car door.

O
N MY FIRST
trip to Soweto (or through Soweto) I had seen the Mandela house, from the front and the side, and then, as the road had climbed, from the top. It had seemed to me impressive. It wasn’t small. It was in dark-red brick, with a fence of the same material, and it had an outer rock garden. This garden was an oddity in Soweto, and its
purpose was no doubt to give additional privacy and protection to the people of the house.

Now an appointment had been made with Winnie Mandela, and on this Monday morning we were able to enter the Mandela yard from the front, through one of the two big gates. There were five or six security men in dark suits.

In the entrance to the house were many artefacts and photographs. They were laid out on the floor, as they might have been laid out on a display table. They partially blocked the doorway to what was furnished like a dining room. The photographs looked personal; they were of the family. The artefacts looked like official gifts. There were a surprising number of Indian pieces among them: modern versions of Indian deities, with faces and bodies much influenced by photographs and the cinema, all done with an artificial bronze-seeming finish. Among the photographs were big ones of Nelson Mandela, some in colour. He didn’t live in the house, but one felt that his was the guiding presence; and the house felt bereft of its master.