African Pathos continued....

The newsmen in that room knew I would want the footage of that lone blackman begging for death broadcast to the world at large. What they did not appreciate and stubbornly never would, was why I wanted transparency on such damning action. They believed that strong police action was the only language Africans understood and that they world beyond had grasp of the difficulties in Africa. To them a step out of a mud hut onto a concrete floor, no matter how stark the new might be, was step up the evolutionary ladder which black Africa, owed to the whiteman and had to be eternally grateful for.

Not only Afrikaners, but white South Africans in general had no internal grasp of the depth of black consciousness. Few whites spoke a Bantu tongue. Even fewer read black literature. The cultural divide was one-sided. They lived and worked on our properties, spoke our languages reared our children; heard our conversations; listened to our music; saw our movies and television programs. They knew us intimately and we did not know them at all. We had no genuine feeling for the pathos of a third generation of African children who aspired to move out of their cramped locations, own a piece of the pie themselves and could find no way to do that short of rebellion. After a century of serfdom; laboring in the gold mines; sweeping streets; carrying shit buckets; washing clothes; scrubbing floors and nursing our children for almost no pay; blocked from economic advancement by job-reservation; forced to carry passbooks; continuously hassled by the police; all the while helping to build up South Africa's modern infrastructure, they were now seeking a stronger form of representation in the country's government than they had at present.

The government could not or would not accept that the urban blacks were a detribalized society of self-determined individuals who had moved away from the security of their tribal customs and deliberately sought a life in the white man's world. They had seen the survival advantages of superior technology and wanted their children to learn how to master them. They desired to move forward in time - not be relocated back in the tribal homelands. In response, the Afrikaner psyche remained fixed on the conflicts of the past - focused on their historical fears of numbers. The black/white ratio inside the country was six to one. Another six hundred millions loomed beyond our borders, ready to pounce on any sign of weakness. Die Swart Gevaar. Keep the blackman down. "Give a kaffir a finger and he will take the whole hand"

Every white born in Africa was fully conscious of the racial divide. Very few, myself included, wanted majority rule by blacks. Most were blind to the reality that it was inevitable. I had lived and worked elsewhere in Africa and knew that the winds of change would not an could die out on the Limpopo. Africa was for Africans. I accepted that. But to me, black rule remained generations too premature. They were not ready to run highly industrialized nations. We needed to keep our focus on improving the quality of their technological education, not be politically afraid of their electoral numbers. The entire international out-cry against Apartheid was centered on the demand for democracy. The demand was naïve in the extreme. If after eighty generations of civilized development in Europe, two white cultures in South Africa could not find it within themselves to transcend their own language and custom barriers and vote along purely ideological lines, how in the world where thirteen inimical tribal cultures in South Africa supposed to accomplish that feat? The international demand for democratic rule throughout tribal Africa was so utterly pseudo-intellectually out of touch with reality it made me question whether there was anyone outside of Africa left with any base of common sense.

The practical reality that had to be faced on the ground was that the vast majority of blacks inside South Africa were still only semi-educated. Only a primary school education was compulsory. This was not a deliberate educational policy of racial subjugation. The general education level of the country was poor for both races. There was simply not enough teachers and classroom in the country to do more than what was already being done. White students were crowded forty or more to the classroom. Most entered the trades at age sixteen. Less then 10% of them made it to university. As it stood, the industrial know-how of less then four million Europeans was not only educating the primary education of thirty million blacks, it also formed the bread-basket for a hundred million Africans surrounding South Africa's borders. A collapse of the white government had enormous ramifications, all of them potentially disastrous.

I was one of the few English-speakers to realize that the Apartheid master plan of creating thirteen separate self-governing Bantustans within the traditional tribal homelands was the only logical social and spiritual developmental policy to pursue. Leap-froging from a Bronze Age of agricultural traditions and tribal lore into a sophisticated Steel Age of high technology, without experiencing an Iron Age of basic industrial craftsmanship and orthodox religious observances, would leave a black-ruled nation in a confused evolutionary time warp. One simply cannot go from primary school to university. This hard fact of life was already apparent in the chaos of the rest of black-ruled post-colonial Africa. If, say, something as simple as a windowpane gets broken in the middle of Africa today, it cannot be replaced without an import from Europe six thousand miles away. The entire infrastructures of post-colonial Africa is on its last legs and nobody is repairing it. In 1976 the genocide in Ruanda, the Congo, Sudan, Somalia and Dafar had yet to erupt. But the signs of Africa's post-colonial degeneration into her own medieval Dark Age were already clearly apparent.

The whole notion of Uhuru in Africa was a pseudo-intellectual pipe dream smoked up by lawyers with no practical training in civil management and as such was clearly premature. The European powers who abandoned their colonies in Africa, did so mainly because of the immense drain of maintaining existing infrastructures. Their Imperial ambitions in Africa had turned out to be a net loss, state burdens that they were only too happy to relinquish. For the new leaders of black Africa, the governing reality was that none of them - to a man - were equipped to realize and come to grips with, was that at least a generation or two of conscientious craftsmanship was needed throughout the continent in order to establish a large enough base of technical training able to manage and maintain industrialized infrastructures. This same fact of live was relevant in South Africa, the most advanced of all the colonial nations on the continent. That same anti-colonial notion that the thirteen dispirit tribal groups in South Africa could govern the country democratically and run its nuclear powered national infrastructure as efficiently as the whites was patently preposterous.

The major problem facing the creation of viable self-governing Bantustans inside South Africa was in finding ways and means to create sustainable economic systems in each of them. Without the ability to gainfully employ their own populations and train them to bridge the transition period until they were capable of running the machinery of an industrialized nation, the Bantustan program was untenable. To this end, the Apartheid master plan encouraged, via tax incentives, for large international corporations like General Motors and Ford to establish their manufacturing plants on the borders of the Bantustans. This economic stimulus may well have worked if the rest of the investing world had joined in to support it. But the pseudo-intellectual cries of the anti-Apartheid movement drowned out and quashed the practical applications of the Bantustan master plan. Nelson Mandella remained the revolutionary hero locked up in prison and the Apartheid government the evil Empire.

In any event, the Bantustan policy did nothing to address the growing problem of three generations of detribalized people crammed into the urban locations and ghettos that surrounded every town and city in the country. The reality the government could not face and did not know how to deal with, other than mass relocation, was that some six million of South Africa's black population were no longer culturally connected to or interested in being sent back to their tribal lands. The urban blacks and the generations of sophisticated cultural reorientation that they had undergone needed to hear and experience their own voice travel beyond the jazz of location music and protest slogans. Exactly how far and how loud their political voice could be heard, needed to be urgently negotiated. The growing pressure of millions of school graduates seeking something more than just sweating in the mines, sweeping the streets and washing colonial clothes had to be met with a realistic policy of gradated economic and political advancement. Persecuting and jailing their leaders and enforcing petty Apartheid laws only emphasized and exacerbated the emotions of racial discrimination.

On the other hand the arguments of their black leaders like Nelson Mandella, trained to be lawyers and not civil engineers, crying against injustice were one-sided in the extreme. Zero credit was being given to the advances in black consciousness already achieved and how difficult it had been to do so. As far as I was concerned the resentment against white privileges needed to be addressed more holistically and nobody was doing that effectively. Blacks and the anti-apartheid movement in general needed to be reminded that Europeans had served for eighty long generations as unpaid serfs and minions in Europe, living in hovels beneath the castle-walls of our overlords. They had sweated blood and tears and suffered torture on the rack for our privileged position. No pain, no gain. All cultures and races had to serve a degree of allotted time. Certainly not for another two thousand years like Europe did, but at least one or two more generations.

To me the conflict between the races was a matter of semantics. If, instead, the current attitude of master/servant, could be changed to a mutual dialogue between teacher/student, that more realistic approach would encourage a kinder, more enlightened domestic atmosphere. Pressure would be relieved if every black child believed in a future of graduated advance, of hope and promise - not one of stagnancy, of perpetual servitude, of military confrontation and hopeless pleas for on honorable death rather than a disgraceful life. This mass change had to be initiated in improved technical educational and job opportunities, not at the polls. Freedom to vote, without the skill to be gainfully employed was a Christmas wrapping without a present inside.

As a television producer directly involved with modern mass communication, I believed that only through transparency, admission of mistakes on both sides, could we achieve racial understanding, prolong benevolent white administration and make South Africa strong for all its people. But I also knew that all of my hopes were seen by others as too naïve - too idealistic, that given the opportunity, black power leaders would not wait another generation - that it could and would be even more ruthless, more savage than white power. The political chaos and acts of genocide in rest of independent Africa bore witness to that. With the fall of colonial rule, as with the fall of Rome, Africa was entering her own Dark Ages and would remain there for centuries.

The weight of all I have mentioned above, bore down on all of the public communicators caught in the time-warp inside that editing room. There was no question that they would suppress the news. There was nothing I could do about it. I knew then that would leave Africa soon and find a more hospitable home elsewhere on the planet. But I wanted confirmation that I was doing the right thing. I needed to know exactly what had happened in Soweto that morning. I owed that young black man, begging hopelessly for death, at least that.

I left the editing room, went down to my car and drove six miles out of town to the giant location. I had a fully loaded 16mm movie camera lying on the seat beside me. I wanted to investigate and report on what had happened for myself. The road out to the location was strangely deserted. I had been going into Soweto every morning for the past three months, documenting urban shamanism. Over a thousand witchdoctors, mostly women, still found enough customers in the shadow of the giant Baragwanath hospital, to practice the ancient Bronze Age art of psychic healing.

The focus of the documentary was; who in black society became a witchdoctor? What made anyone decide to become one? How were they trained? Via public television I hoped to dispel among white South African viewers the prevalent superstition, fostered initially by the Christian Church, that witchcraft was the Devil's work. During the months spent documenting the forty shamans (sangomas) who participated in the program. I could not help but be impressed, not only by the uncanny nature of their psychic powers, but also by their down-to-earth grasp of basic human psychology.

Instead of just mystical hocus-pocus, I found myself among forty of the most intelligent and analytically insightful Africans I had ever met. The finished documentary revealed to some extent the subtle nature of the spiritual empathy that exists between psychic healers and their patients. I saw that African witchdoctors were duplicates of the ancient alchemists of Europe, the forerunners of modern science. The spiritual message I got was that the true art of human kindness is to empathize so deeply with the spirit of another pilgrim in life, as to actually feel the pains of fellow human being. It made me realize that if sensitive mediums were able. with a little training, to care enough to feel the pain of another and could reach out a healing hand, mankind in general had the capacity for the same degree of empathy and compassion. Potentially we had the internal power to heal our nations of all our ailments.

During the final days of filming one of the female shamans I was working with warned me that she sensed danger ahead and that I should stay out of Soweto. A few days later, Credo Mutwa, a Zulu witchdoctor made famous by the well-received publication of a book on African mythology: Indaba My Children had told me that he had a dream about blood flowing in the streets. In genuine distress he had naively asked me to warn the government that some awful disaster lay ahead.

In the weeks after, while editing the film inside the huge broadcasting complex, knowing that I had the power to talk to the whole nation, I wrestled with his plea. How was I to transmit psychic premonitions through a modern news medium and get a white audience who viewed African superstitions with general disgust, to take the warnings seriously? Without denigrating my source, I cautiously tried to warn top administration officials within the SABC that I had been given information about violence brewing in Soweto. My reluctance to provide the source of my information was taken the wrong way.

A previous documentary of mine, which featured the early life of Mohandes Ghandi in South Africa and his fight against race discrimination, had included anti-Apartheid interviews with Dr Alan Paton and Professor Fatima Meer. It had been banned from public broadcast. This, among other attempts of mine to bring black consciousness to the fore, had placed me on the lists of BOSS, the Bureau of State Security, as a potential anti-Apartheid activist. So my warning that something was brewing inside Soweto was interpreted that I had some form of contact with the banned ANC movement and had inside information on an up-coming subversive demonstration. When I eventually confessed that my source was the intuition of witchdoctors, one can imagine the derisive response.

I had learned to take the premonitions of the shamans seriously. So I took a different tack. I held meetings with my fellow producers in the English documentary department, arguing that our programs should concentrate on the variety of unnecessary hardships blacks were experiencing inside Soweto. I pointed out that any genuine act of concern shown by the whites, especially if broadcast nation-wide, would go a long way towards ameliorating the growing sense of resentment inside the townships. Violent demonstrations in one form or another could be avoided if we worked together to appeal to public sympathy. My colleague's response was disheartening. That were convinced that I as over-reacting. They did not feel that even if they wanted to, a mass change of race relations in the country was not at all possible. The under-lying reality was that the government controlled the SABC and they did not want their careers jeopardized as black sympathizers. These thoughts were in my mind as I drove out of town to investigate for myself and find out why and how Credo's dream had come true.

There was a heavily armed police road block at the entrance into Soweto. The police were backed by army troops. They would not let me through. So I drove around the perimeter of the vast location, looking for another way in. It took me a while to realized that there was only one road leading in and out of that vast township. One throughway for a population of over one million! The strategic reason was now obvious. When the government bulldozed down Sophiatown the vast unsanitary shanty town that once crowded Johannesburg's city center, and built the huge location of Soweto (an acronym for South Western Area Township) six miles further out of Johannesburg, and then and relocated a million black workers inside it. they had made sure that any future mass unrest within it could be fully contained. With the road block in place, no one but the police could get in or out.

After an hour of circling the location and finding no other road in, I was about to turn around and go back to the station, when a young African man stepped out of some bushes on the road-side and waved me down. He was in obvious distress. Tears streamed down his face. I pulled over and picked him up, hoping for information. At that time I still had no idea that several hundred children had just been massacred. The man beside me smelled of kaffir beer. He continued for some time to sob beside me. Finally he spoke: "I left her there! My girl-friend! She was facing the police guns! She was brave. She would not leave! Children were dying right in front of me. I was frightened, so I ran!" We rode on in silence. After a while he stopped crying and spoke soberly. "You know Baas, Dingaan made a big mistake." His historical observation should not have surprised me. Africans in general have a vast oral tradition of their history and tribal lore. Most knew the names of tribal chiefs going back ten to fifteen generations. Dingaan, who had assassinated his step brother Shaka, the founder of the Zulu nation, was paramount chief in 1830's. He had invited seventy Boer pioneers seeking his permission to settle in Zululand, for a conference at his palace. The Boer leaders had entered his compound unarmed. At a signal from Dingaan, they were surrounded and butchered. A Zulu impi of five thousand warriors was dispatched to kill the four hundred voortrekkers waiting to hear if their petition had been granted. Luckily they were warned in time by the daughter of missionary and managed to defeat Zulu regiment. The Battle of Blood River that followed was a turning pint in Black/white relations. The Afrikaners decided that the whole country had to be taken over and held by force. It was that single act of Dingaan's treachery, determining the future course of black/white relations a century and a half earlier, that the young man beside me had put his finger on.
I sighed. There was nothing more to be said, by him or me. I gave him some money and let him off in Randsburg.

There was no way of suppressing the news of the massacre. Four hundred school children staging a peaceful protest march for their right to be taught in English rather than Afrikaans, had been ruthlessly gunned down by the police. The entire world was out-raged and the anti-Apartheid pressures of boycotts and sanctions against South Africa was tightened. I was left with three options. Do nothing, like the rest of my English-speaking compatriots. Keep having my work banned and possibly end up under house-arrest. Or leave the country and find a more welcome home some where else in the world. It was clear to me that Apartheid would eventually collapse and the country go under black rule. To me that was the worse of two evils. Much as it outraged the basic human right to a fair political system of government, white rule remained the only viable economic rationale. It was only a matter of time before thirteen generations of pioneering effort came to an end. I could do nothing about stopping it. Three months latter I sold my house and car, packed up, bought a round the world air ticket, and left the land of my birth for good.

My maternal grandfather was a Jew. My first stop would be Israel. I had some claim there. Maybe they would give me sanctuary. I had no idea that I would be stepping out of an Apartheid frying pan into an Apartheid fire.
To be continued.....




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