Apartheid Pathos

June 16th. !976. SOWETO
Two hours before the outside world knew that over a hundred protesting school children had been gunned down and massacred by the police during a peace march, the first film rushes taken at the scene arrived in the editing rooms of the South African Broadcasting Corporation.

I happened to be passing through the Afrikaans News department when I noticed a group of reporters crowded around one of the editing tables watching the rushes. Though their bodies obscured the screen, I could still hear the sound effects recorded at the scene of the massacre. Over the speakers I could hear a car racing towards the camera position at high speed. Then came short burst of machinegun fire; followed by the squeal of tortured tires on tarmac and the heavy crash of metal slamming into a barrier. For a second or two there was silence. Then came the hoarse out-worldly cry of a young African male. "Kill me! Kill me!"

It was not the painful cry of a broken body begging for relief, or the defiant cry of a black revolutionary. It came from a beaten and broken spirit that had lost all its will to live. Within that ravaged tone I could hear and feel all the pathos of Africa's writhing soul, trapped for generations in the twilight zone between two Ages of human evolution. It encompassed the paralysis of continent that had been rudely jerked out of the slow pace of a pastoral Bronze Age.

For two centuries and more, an entire race of eight hundred million souls had been forced to watch their sacred clan totems trampled on and defiled. They had to bear the shame of tribal customs ridiculed, see their people rounded up, chained, enslaved, beaten down, raped, frustrated, colonized, exploited and emasculated. The had been treated by their slave masters and colonizers more like beasts of burden than as members of the human family. All of this executed against them by the hardened initiates of an Iron Age culture that gave them no clear understanding of why such a mass upheaval was necessary. The gross inequities of a technologically more advanced culture against a lesser were clear. Paradoxically, neither the master, who thought of himself as fair and reasonable, nor the servant who thought the same of himself, really knew why they where behaving so unkindly towards each other.

After his final charge into the hail of police machinegun bullets that heartbroken call for death, echoing inside the editing room, was all that was left for that young man. Without knowledge of larger evolutionary purpose and the Gods apparently failing him, life had no meaning.
"Kill me! Kill me!"
I waited for the mercy shot that would end his anguish and bring oblivion to his lost soul. It never came. The terrible lament died down. In the awful silence that followed, my presence in the room was noticed for the first time.

A dozen pairs of accusatory eyes turned from the screen. Added to the emotional echo of the black man's cry, was now the cultural antipathy of contrary colonials, forced by our own history of war and circumstance to share an unbalanced alliance in the same land. As a member of the minority English-speaking white group, there was no question of me exercising any of my broadcast authority as a producer, ordering the public exposure of that newsreel .A dozen staunch members of the Afrikaner race barred any further exposure to the news reels. Their bodies made a laager around the table. To them I was a rooinek, an interfering Engelesman, eavesdropping on a racial event of potentially devastating domestic and international consequences. It was not my business.

It did not matter that I was born and bred in South Africa just like them. Or that the Scottish side of my family had invested six generations helping to pioneer and develop the nation. As the bearer of a British surname, I was and always would be an uitlander, born and raised without a trustworthy appreciation of national values. Afrikaners were the only true patriots.

Behind those young newsmen loomed the unassailable might of the Nationalist Party Government with its two-thirds majority Parliamentary vote to determine the fate of all South Africans without reference to the hearts and minds of the other thirteen language groups that shared the land.

Democracy is a sham in a multi-lingual country with a history of ethnic dissension. In a climate where sentiment rules and rationalized argument takes second place, emotional cultural affiliations rather than logic governs the psyche of the electorate. A parliamentary majority of the largest ethnic group imposes a life sentence of political impotence on the minority language groups of every democratic country so divided. That reality had effectively quashed all opposition in South Africa since 1948. Their electoral victory in that year allowed a two million Afrikaners legal license to practice cultural totalitarianism over twenty million others. They had ruled the country with an iron hand since, for nearly two generations. The future of now thirty million souls was caught up in a representative trap that has made a mockery of the democratic revolutionary slogans that spawned it. Everything but Freedom/ Fraternity/Equality existed in South Africa's Republic.

An internationally accepted system of human management allowed the Afrikaners to keep all the other ethnic groups locked behind political lines of demarcation from which there was no legitimate escape. It unfairly and effectively silenced the voice of one million opposing European voters who, since Roman times, had also struggled for eighty generations for freedom of expression and the ability to exercise their own free will. Republican ideology and its governing system of party politics simply works against itself in bilingual countries. English-speakers could protest against Apartheid in South Africa's Parliament all we liked, our objections were simply out-voted and the Afrikaner policy of legalized group separation remained unchanged. The Laws of Apartheid ruled over all of us, black and white, via ethnic-division. The net result was that I was personally and culturally as helpless in the larger decisions of the country as any disenfranchised black, and could not order that damning newsreel to go on the airways.

As far as Afrikaners were concerned, their absolute rule was poetic justice. This was the way God meant it to be. It was they who had pioneered and civilized the country. They had trekked and struggled and suffered with Africa's harsh climate, deadly diseases, wild animals and savage tribes more than all others. They had fought and won the Kaffir Wars. The treacherous massacre of Retief and his party by Dingaan's army when the trekkers peacefully petitioned him for settler-ship in Zululand, gave them in their minds both the moral right and the military might to take the whole country by force. When the British annexed their Boer Republics, they had fought the Anglo/Boer War. Forty thousand farmers on horseback armed only with rifles, were the first to invent commando raids, guerilla tactics and trench warfare. Those new tactics confounded and bogged down a traditional British army of two hundred thousand professional soldiers equipped with heavy artillery. Though unbeaten, the Boers were eventually forced to surrendered in the field; but only after Kitchener's "Scorched Earth" policy burnt down their farms and incarcerated their women and children in concentrations camps where they died of dysentery and typhoid by the tens of thousands in unsanitary conditions.

The Boers survived to fight again less than a decade later, at the ballot box for the independent Union of South Africa. They won back full Afrikaner control in 1948. As far as the mind-state of the twelve young men standing in front of me, they represented a victorious volk who had made an ancestral Covenant with Almighty God to settle in their promised land and to retain Afrikaner rule in South Africa for ever. From their perspective, I could not possibly understand or appreciate why the Afrikaner culture had to stand strong against the liberal English and hold back the black tide of Africa and the encroachment of the world beyond.

That history of dislike hung heavy in the atmosphere between us. Defiance was reflected in their eyes and on their faces. There was an element of shame present as well. Underlying our cultural confrontation, remained the awful and potentially explosive event on the newsreel. Political rule, ordained by God or not, could not drown out the resounding echoes of machinegun fire and the terrible pathos of a fellow human being crying out for the finality of death rather than the continuation of a hopeless life. That cry echoed beyond political debate, ethnic confrontations and racial division. It came from a broken human heart that had lost its faith in humankind. If allowed broadcast on television it would undoubtedly pierce the soul of all who heard it. There was no defense or excuse that could negate such a desolate tone. It damned the inequities of Apartheid in a manner beyond all artificial argument.

Nobody spoke a word. The was no need to. All of our shared history was present in that editing room at the fateful moment. We all knew full well that not a frame of that film would ever be made public. Such stark reality was not for public consumption. The dosen editors remained in a semi-circle barring me from the editing table; a laager of determined young Boers, hardening their hearts; protecting their volk.

The public communicator in me should have been outraged by their censorship. That lone voice crying in the streets of Soweto, pleading for death rather than life, could have reached the heart of all South Africans. It could have given all of us pause - Afrikaner, English, Bantu. Had not a single snap shot of a naked little Vietnamese girl, with her napalmed skin hanging from her body, changed the course of an international war? I knew that I could leave the room and verbally spread the news in the English Department of the SABC as well as the English Press that such emotive footage existed. But I could not find it in me to do that. I was gripped instead by a deep sense of melancholy.

The irony of the situation was that I had more ancestral rights than any present in that room to view the news footage and decide what to do with it. I had English, Afrikaner as well as Bantu blood in my veins. My paternal grandfather, a Scottish descendent of the 1820 English Settlers, had dared, in the midst of the Boer War seventy years earlier, to cross the cultural line that separated English and Afrikaner colonials, and married the grand-daughter of a Boer Voortrekker. Both sides of my family had fought against each other in the war. Some of these newsmen were undoubtedly distant cousins. A quarter of me shared the same pioneering blood that had forged an Afrikaner culture in the African veldt. On top of that, was even an older claim to the land. My maternal Grandfather was a Jew who had fled from a Russian pogram in Lithuania, and ended up in Pondoland, married to a local maid of mixed Irish and Xhosa blood.

Both my grandmothers had suffered life-times of estrangement from their relatives. No one on the Afrikaans side of her family had ever spoken to my father's mother her after her marriage. And no one ever once mentioned my mother's black blood. That mix of South African bloods and the conflicts it brought to the surface was too involved, too painful, too complex. I saw no point right then in revealing my more wide-ranging ancestral rights. All I felt was this depressing melancholy. I felt sad, for them: for my family; for the helpless blacks; for our country; and especially for the estrangement I felt within myself and the lack of passion I had for any of the values they were all willing to fight and die for.

I knew then, in that moment, for the first time in my life that I was a complete outsider. I was not a true South African, I did not share any of the values of any of the groups in my country. None of the Afrikaner, English or African, cultural, political or economic aspirations resonated with me. I knew exactly where all of them were coming from and what each hoped to achieve and agreed with none of it. I stood apart from the fray. I could see that all of us who were caught up in an artificial political mind-set that made human beings lose sight of our common evolutionary destiny.

Was the murderous parable of Cain and Abel an endless brotherhood tragedy? Could we all never live together as equals? Was the ejection from Eden an eternal damnation of the human spirit? Was the Christ call of love for our neighbor as an expression of our larger self never to be answered?
"Kill me! Kill me!"
How many more millions of souls had to still die in despair, with their minds and hearts torn apart by the disgrace of mans inhumanity to man?

But mostly my sadness was for these young descendants of a tiny cultural colony of lowland Dutch farmers that had been deposited thirteen generations ago in the wilderness of the southern tip of Africa, as part of a business venture by the Dutch East India Company. They were trying to hold back an evolutionary tide of human development that was infinitely larger then them. All they could see was their own small history. Their culture formed their only reality; their group consensus their only base of sanity. The world beyond and its anti-Apartheid sanctions and boycotts had to be withstood; like their Dutch forebears, the dykes keeping back the floods of the ocean had to hold strong.

But beyond all that was the greater irony of a common evolutionary thread that has been entirely lost in the world of superficial political, religious and economic arguments that has thrust the human tide back and forth across the oceans of emotion since the middle of the Bronze Age.

Not ten miles from were we stood inside that editing room, in the dark recesses of a dolomite cave at Sterkfontein, the remains of a hominid, mankind's earliest ancestor had been discovered. Since then, science, via the examination of Mitachondrial DNA, had traced the origins of every man and woman alive on the planet, back to South Africa. Here after a million and more years of gradual migration up through central and northern Africa, across to the Middle East, then Europe and Asia and on to the Americas, experiencing development through long Ages of Stone and Bronze and Iron and Steel, was the Nuclear Age son of our original parents, a hundred thousand generations removed, returned to his Motherland.

Here, at the very same spot where he had experienced the first dim glimmerings of a separate self - where an ape-man and become a hu-man, a descendent of Adam was now vehemently disclaiming the fact that the black-skinned man who had remained in Africa, was his blood brother. This small archaic Calvinistic culture, speaking a quaint Walloon patois', clinging to Old Testament values, was fighting against a huge evolutionary tide which, via colonialism, was affecting a mass reunification of human brotherhood - a force of Nature that would eventually and inexorably sweep over their Afrikanerdom and absorb everything they ever stood for.

At that moment, in that room, staring at my compatriots and their protection of what they believed to be best for the country, I had a sudden epiphany. I knew that thirteen generations of white power had come to an end. That all our ancestors hopes and dreams where in the process of being crushed. Like colonials elsewhere, we did not belong in South Africa, that Europe was no longer welcome in Africa itself. I did not belong. No matter how personally I might be sympathetic to the black man's cause - I was one of the white elite - a colonial oppressor. A slaver and exploiter, seeking profit and private gain on a Black continent that no longer wanted my expertise.

Anti-colonialism - that was the essence of the pathos that I could hear in that young black voice - the frustration of a black man unable to stand tall on his own continent, knowing that the white over-lord with his superior technology would not go and that there was no way of removing him without violence. I knew then, in that moment, that I would leave Africa soon and find a more hospitable home elsewhere on the planet........

{to be continued}