TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/092490/0924005.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.3 KB | 173 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 62

SOUTH AFRICA

Still Crying Freedom


An antiapartheid editor, visiting home after a long exile, finds
that whites have begun to accept the inevitable

By DONALD WOODS


    More than 700 people have died in the townships around
Johannesburg since fighting broke out in mid-August, largely
between supporters of Nelson Mandela's African National
Congress and Zulus belonging to Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi's
Inkatha movement. Last week the bloodshed reached a numbing
climax, when black men rampaged through a Soweto-bound commuter
train with guns, pangas and knives, killing at least 26 people.
The violence poses a threat to the fundamental change promised
by President F.W. de Klerk, whose efforts to dismantle
apartheid nonetheless achieve an important milestone next week
when he meets with President Bush. Not since Jan Smuts visited
the U.S. in 1945 -- three years before De Klerk's National
Party wrote racism into the statute books -- has Washington
deemed it appropriate to receive a South African head of state.

    Donald Woods, the white newspaper editor whose writings
about his friendship with black activist Steve Biko became the
subject of the film Cry Freedom, returned to South Africa last
month from exile in Britain -- his first visit since fleeing
the country after Biko's death in police custody in 1977. TIME
asked Woods to write about his personal encounter with the
changing country.


    I parked my car outside Security Police headquarters,
remembering past interrogations and harassments. Think
Gershwin, I said to myself, as I had in those days 12 years
ago, when mentally humming a piece of music helped ease the
fear. During the last scary session with Colonel Andries van
der Merwe in 1977, I had countered his aggression with the
finale of Gershwin's Concerto in F. And now I had made an
appointment with his successors to judge the extent of change
among the dread Security Police in the new South Africa. Though
I was no longer too scared to go in there, I was sufficiently
apprehensive to resort mentally to Fascinating Rhythm as I
pressed the button beside the familiar steel grille.

    That I was no longer scared to go in there was itself a
measure of the atmospheric change I had experienced after two
weeks back in South Africa. On first impression, it looked a
very different country indeed: blacks being allowed into
hotels, bars, theaters and schools previously denied them by
law, no more segregated beaches, toilets, parks or benches.
This very week the governing National Party had voted to open
its membership to blacks, an organizational turnaround
analogous to a P.L.O. recruitment drive among Jews. If not
entirely dead, apartheid was clearly in the intensive care unit
with the oxygen turned off.

    The steel grille clanked open with awful familiarity, and
moments later, Colonel Nel, a dark-haired young man, smiling
amiably, held out his hand. He looked too young to be a
colonel, and I remembered the saying that we are getting old
when policemen and doctors start looking like teenagers.

    I was given a comfortable chair and a fresh cup of tea, and
wondered if this was how a returning Soviet dissident would
feel on revisiting Lubyanka prison. As I talked with Colonel
Nel, it seemed to me that the biggest change in Security Police
thinking was the death of the old obsession that international
communism was all powerful and that opponents of apartheid were
putative communists if not actual paid agents of the Kremlin.
The young colonel agreed. The whole approach was more
sophisticated these days, he said, and the country faced a
different set of perceived challenges embodied by the alienated
black youth in the townships.

    It seemed a massive irony. Through four decades of
apartheid, the Afrikaner Nationalists had outlawed effective
political structures in the townships and devastated black
family life, creating in the process a generation of scary kids
ready to burn, maim and hack to pieces real or fancied enemies
-- kids who had never known a home with parents, never been to
school or followed any rule but the rule of survival by
violence. Now to save the whites from this Frankenstein monster
of their creation, the government was counting on the recently
legalized African National Congress (A.N.C.) and leaders like
Nelson Mandela to bring these wild ones into some sort of
discipline.

    On my first morning back in the country, I drove into one
of the worst townships in terms of squalor, poverty and
juvenile rage, and was alarmed on being surrounded by several
dozen tough-looking young blacks who demanded to know who the
white man was and what he was doing there. My instant fear
turned to instant relief when on hearing my identity they
literally opened their arms to "our brother." Astonishingly,
all had seen Cry Freedom, and their questions had less to do
with the national situation than with what the stars of the
movie, Kevin Kline and Denzel Washington, were like and how the
crowd scenes had been filmed.

    It was the first of many moving welcomes from a wide range
of South Africans, including a number of conservative whites
who had resented my editorials back in the '70s. This didn't
mean their views had changed radically, but what was
significant was the number of whites who, while still against
one person, one vote, now accepted that as inevitable. This
indeed was a sea change.

    In the South Africa I had left in 1977 only a small
percentage of whites -- probably less than 2% -- supported the
notion of full democratic rights for blacks, and most whites
were vociferously ready to fight to the death against the very
idea. But now a great many seemed resigned to the idea,
provided a democratic constitution could guarantee protection
for minorities -- whites, in the new code language.

    Up to the late '70s, liberal white advocates of equal rights
for blacks had been overwhelmingly English speaking, led by the
likes of Alan Paton, Helen Suzman and Nadine Gordimer. Today
younger Afrikaners are taking the lead among whites in the
campaign for democracy and racial reconciliation, notably
Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, a brilliant academic and former
rugby star; Max du Preez, editor of the crusading paper Vrye
Weekblad; and Tian van der Merwe, campaigning to close the gap
between white parliamentarians and the A.N.C.

    Most remarkable of all is the case of the President himself,
F.W. de Klerk, who on the morning of my visit to the Security
Police was shown on national television greeting blacks in
Soweto with the black-solidarity handshake -- palm enclosing
palm, thumb and then palm again -- and being applauded by black
bystanders of all ages.

    In the end, perhaps the biggest change for me was the
absence of the sense of being followed, monitored and under
constant threat by the Security Police, and its absence after
only two weeks back in the country was so perceptible that here
I was doing the unthinkable -- actually walking voluntarily
into their offices.

    I asked after all my old enemies. Colonel Goosen? Dead.
Colonel Van der Merwe? Retired. Captain Hansen? Transferred.
Captain Schoeman? Somewhere up-country. I already knew that
Lieut. Jan Marais, who had once mailed an acid-tainted T-shirt
to my five-year-old daughter Mary, had been found drowned in
his own swimming pool in 1988.

    I asked if I could have my old file as a souvenir, and
Colonel Nel burst out laughing: "We don't even have it
anymore!" Irrationally, I felt slightly peeved at being
regarded as harmless so soon, but on balance was more than
happy about it. As he walked me out to my car, he said, "Please
drop in anytime. You're most welcome. Good luck!"

    Good luck to us all, I thought, in light of the escalating
violence in the country. If we can bury the past, rectify
decades of oppression, reclaim the lost generation, overcome
the dangerous death throes of right-wing and left-wing
extremism and create a real democracy in this country, there
would be a great future for South Africa. A colossal task, with
colossal challenges. But a start had been made by brave men,
and I hoped and believed they would gain the support they
deserved.