Sheena Duncan, former president of the Black Sash, responds to allegations in a new book that her organisation compromised liberal principles
Jill Wentzel says in her Author’s Note that her book The Liberal Slideaway is a “subjective account of life in the liberal community during the last 14 years.” Of course, it has to be a subjective account just as this response has to be subjective. None of us are yet far enough away from the debates and events of the eighties and nineties to be anything other than subjective about them.
Objectivity will no doubt be possible when historians of the future are able to look at our documents and debates from a longer distance and assess what we did and what we achieved and make some kind of judgement upon us about where we failed and where we were mistaken.
This book will be of value to them as one person’s view of the white liberal community in the dying years of the apartheid system.
Certainly, I think we in the Black Sash did struggle to maintain a steady course in those turbulent years. We were pulled in all directions. We did “slide away” sometimes. It was never easy to know what was the next right thing to do and I have never been able to achieve that absolute certainty of rectitude which is attributed to the “liberals who did not slide away” in the last chapter of this book.
In arguing that slideaway liberals in the 1980s lost the ability to maintain a balance between flexibility and adherence to a set of humane values, which Wentzel argues may be the most attractive aspect of liberalism, she says we also seemed to lose some of the qualities such as common sense; tolerance of unfashionable opinion; willingness to exercise one’s critical faculties; and she argues that “rigid sanctimony towards those who did exercise their critical faculties was a characteristic of the slideaway.”
“Rigid sanctimony” is also one of the characteristics attributed to the non- slideaway liberals by other “subjective” thinkers in this debate. The tragedy is that it has not been a debate but a mutually critical talking past each other.
The author says that “…political differences began to affect personal relationships within the organisation” (the Black Sash). That is also true and these painful differences were made acute by the terminal illness and tragic death in 1986 of Ernie Wentzel whose thinking is evident throughout this book from the foreword by Judith Mason to the appendices.
He was also a friend to many Black Sash members and dearly loved by many people which made objectivity impossible and subjectivity inevitable.
But, apart from being subjective, the book is also selective. Perhaps that is also inevitable when an author has a theory to propound and support. A real history of the liberal community in South Africa needs a much longer view than just the last fifteen years and very much more detailed examination of the volume of written documents and recorded statements.
The lack of an index makes it extremely difficult to follow the author’s themes from one chapter to another, but examples of selectivity are the references to the Black Sash’s attitude towards incremental change which are scattered in different places. The theme of these comments seems to be that the Black Sash ignored incremental change and the “silent revolution” although it is admitted that we did “sometimes” protest or campaign with limited objectives in mind.
That is quite breathtaking in light of the fact that our whole history has been one of taking issues one at a time and setting ourselves limited objectives. We were working with the people in informal settlements, in areas threatened with removal, with people in the cities who stayed there whether or not they had a permit to do so — all those who were determinedly making the silent revolution long before the director of the Institute of Race Relations coined the phrase and discovered the phenomenon.
It is ironic that it was members of the Liberal Party who were also members of the Black Sash who were totally opposed to the idea of advice offices and who would have nothing to do with them in the late fifties and early sixties when the first offices were established. They argued that it was nothing but assisting the government to enforce influx control.That was very useful criticism for us because it made us determined that whatever we learned from individuals sitting in those long and hopeless queues must be translated into campaigning for the repeal of the laws which brought them there and which denied them the most basic of rights.
Adherence to unbridled free market principles seems to be a required characteristic of non-slideaway liberals in the post-modern definition. I have problems with that. Economic booms in South Africa in the past did not lead to justice and equity but, on the contrary, were periods in which the apartheid system was entrenched and codified.
Liberalism has been defined in so many different ways over the years that it is impossible to know whether one is a liberal or a slideaway or something else. Liberals like labels so read this book and judge for yourself.
THE LIBERAL SLIDEAWAY by Jill Wentzel (South African Institute of Race Relations)