Two years of transition: A series by leading South African authors, celebrating the second birthday of our democracy
Njabulo Ndebele
AFTER some 20 years of absence, I returned home with a family in 1991. On the first Saturday of our return, I took them on a drive to see the house in which I was born at 925 John Mohohlo Street, Western Native Township.
We didn’t find it. When Africans were removed to make way for “coloureds”, the township was redesigned so that it could be made more spacious, more comfortable, more livable. Clearly, my home did not survive the demolition. And so it was that an historic event was to translate into a personal failure to demonstrate to my children that my life began somewhere.
Returning home, I did not find my home. But then again, I have returned home. Yet, it is true that I am still looking for a home to stay. (Where in this vast country will I finally live?)
These contradictions force home the question: what is a home? Surely it is not merely a house. Is it a place associated with long memories? Somewhere to dig up roots? If so, is it still possible for me at 47, and those of my generation, to sink in roots to dig up later? When is “later”? What experiences will add up to “later”? Perhaps home for us can only be some concept of belonging to some historic process; some sense of historic
justice assuming, on the day of liberation, the physical space of a country.
Where so many homes have been demolished, people moved to strange places, home temporarily becomes the shared experience of homelessness, the fellow-feeling of loss and the desperate need to regain something.
It is this sense of home as homelessness that began to take a different shape on April 27 1994. Home became the experience of the reality of national boundaries, the setting up of new institutions of governance, and yes, the building of private homes. It is this meaning of April 27 1994 that will stretch far into the years ahead.
One of my abiding memories of the old South Africa is my experience of space and the sense of distance and time through travel. In travelling from point A to point B, I remember not so much the pleasure of movement and anticipation; the pleasure of reflecting at the end of the journey, why the journey was undertaken.
What I do remember is that the intervening physical space between A and B was something to endure, because of the fear of being stopped and having my existence questioned by those who enforced oppression. No journey was undertaken with the certainty that the destination would be reached. Thus, the journey was experienced not as distance to be traversed, but as a series of anxieties to be endured. Time was not distance and speed, but the intensity of anxiety. The longer the distance the more intense was the anxiety. Nothing else existed between A and B but mental and emotional trauma.
In this situation, the concept of tourism is impossible. Tourism was something white people did. They could drag their caravans at a leisurely pace; stop along the way to view endless vistas of physical beauty; eat leisurely at a roadside cafe, while I searched for a small window to buy food to eat in the car in motion. The distance between A and B in my world was not filled with trees and mountains and rivers. It was psychological time without space. I had to endure the absence of space; to endure the possibility of a challenge to my existence, a challenge that could come at any time and take any form.
How different the situation is now! There is something exhilarating about being able to stop at any time and enjoy the physical beauty of my country. I can adjust the speed of travel according to my needs. I can take as long as I like to traverse the shortest distance.
This is my newly found home; not a building with rooms, but a country full of people, trees, mountains, rivers, houses, factories, farms, mines, roads, the coastline, parliament, schools and universities, military bases, the museum, the art gallery, theatres, the research foundations, the observatory, the stock exchange, the airline … everything!
But I needn’t have left South Africa to feel this way. Millions of people had to endure long years of internal exile. There must be relatively few South Africans who can still point to a home that they associate with rootedness. At some point in their lives the roots of social memory cut, and traumatic fresh beginnings had to be made and endured. Individual and social growth became a series of interrupted experiences. Is that why I have resorted, in the last two years, to thinking of home as the entire country instead of a particular place where I grew up, among neighbours?
South Africans have an intriguing capacity to be disarmingly kind and hospitable at the same time as they are capable of the most horrifying cruelty. We have continued in the last two years in fits of violence, to wipe out our families and whole communities; we have abandoned patients to their deaths in hospitals because we are on strike; we humiliate and hold university officials hostage, and trash campuses; we block highways; we burn people suspected of being witches; we abuse our children and rape our women; we engage in brutal taxi wars from which, if passengers miraculously escape being killed, they will surely die once the minibuses of death, in a display of recklessness, charge down the highway in a frenzy of speed.
All this while we celebrate democracy, human rights, victories in sport. We have abolished the death sentence, are working on the best constitution in the world, have declared free medical care for pregnant women, and continue to receive and welcome guests into our houses with the most moving hospitality.
Has this got anything to do with the dislocating traumas of “interrupted experiences”? How is the growth of the imagination or the nurturing of human sensibility affected by the dramatic oscillation of individuals and communities between comfort and discomfort, between home and homelessness, between love and hate, between hope and despair, between knowledge and ignorance, between progress and regression, between fame and ignominy, between heroism and roguery, between honour and dishonour, between marriage and divorce, between sophistication and crudeness, between life and death?
Has this dislocation become part of the structure of thinking and feeling that characterise our society? How long can we continue to use past traumas as an excuse to justify forms of political action which may have the effect of trivialising, rather than strengthening, democracy? A nation of extremes!
If my home is the whole of this land, because I have rediscovered the physical space between A and B, and that this discovery has become some basis for reconstituting my imagination, for reconciling extremes, I have also become uncomfortably aware that I may no longer have the keen and vital sense or feeling for home as a specific place and a house with so many number of rooms, so many number of brothers and sisters and relatives, with family and community experiences stretching many years back.
That kind of home has for now been a mere convenience for me to live from day to day. This thought has frightened me as I have begun to wonder about the fate of intimacy. Can there be any society without private lives; without homes wherein individuals can flourish through histories of intimacy?
Intimacy! When Madiba came out of prison on February 11 1990 to return home, what did he find? His struggle to rebuild a home was never to succeed. That way, the people of his country became his family. But then again, is it possible for a country to be one’s family? The impossibility of such a thing must hit home every evening when, after a day of hard work, he has to return home in search of intimacy to face the silence of loneliness.
It is the loneliness of millions of South Africans who lost their homes. The loss of homes! It is one of the greatest of South African stories yet to be told. The demise of intimacy in our history of sensibility.
Intimacy! A dangerous word which has the capacity to imply banality or profundity. Yet, when we gave up the AK-47 for the discourse of negotiation, we opted for intimacy. In the choice between negotiation and revolutionary violence we opted for feelings and the intellect. We committed ourselves to posing questions and researching them for solutions. We opted for complexity, ambiguity, and nuance.
It is here that we will develop new political meanings and values. It is here that we will find new homes. It is here that we come to terms with the disturbing truth that both the friends and enemies of yesterday can no longer be taken for granted. The heroes of the revolution may reveal distressing flaws, while the devils of repression may become disturbingly lovable.
Enter the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Through it, we seek to understand the particular nature of our state and how the fluid boundaries between state-induced behaviour and personal volition so destroyed the sense of both personal and public morality that there was nothing left in the end but self-perpetuating violence without transcendent goals.
The truth commission is really not about truth, but about the revelation of hidden facts leading to knowledge and interpretation in the public domain. It is about enriching ethical consciousness in the public domain. It is not so much about judgment, but about the process of formulating judgment. It is about reconstituting the public domain through social insight.
And so it is that the rebuilding of homes and communities is something far more than the political act of meeting the needs of “the constituency”. There is something more fundamental at play. The rebuilding of homes and communities may have become the most compelling factor in enabling us to sustain our nationhood. That way me may yet prevent our democracy from being an event in which extremes of behaviour can dangerously ossify into spectacles of superficiality, where verbal assertion becomes coincident with reality.
I dream that my children can build homes of the kind that eluded me; homes that can never be demolished by the state in order to make memories impossible; homes that can sustain public life because they infuse into it the values of honour, integrity, compassion, intelligence, and creativity. Public intimacies do need private intimacies. This is the discovery of personal and social meaning through the pains and the joys of belonging, participating, trusting, and just feeling at home.
And what have we regained since we voted? Certainly our voices. Our speech. We have yet to regain our homes; our neighbourhoods. We have yet to feel at home.
Njabulo Ndebele is an educator and author, known for his much-loved volume of stories,
Fools (published by Ravan)