Barney Pityana, chairman of the Human Rights Commission, in The Mark Gevisser Profile
WHEN Geoff Budlender visited one of the many trials of Barney Pityana in the early 1970s, he ran into his fellow student-leader’s mother, whom he did not recognise but who clearly seemed to know him. She revealed herself as Budlender’s aunt’s domestic worker, and told Geoff that he and Barney often used to play together as kids.
At the time, Budlender was a leader of the National Union of South African Students (Nusas), and Pityana was a leader of the South African Students Organisation (Saso) — the organisation, founded by himself and Steve Biko, that had led black students out of “nonracial” union with Nusas. Relations between the two organisations were immensely fraught and, remembers Budlender, “what amazed me about Barney is that in our debates he never used it against me that I was the madam’s child who didn’t remember the nanny. What made Barney so extraordinary is that he showed us that you could be pro-black without being anti-white. He never personalised the issues …”
Twenty-five years later, Barney Pityana has attained notoriety (or fame, depending on which way you look at it), by going onto national television, in the very week he was appointed chairman of the Human Rights Commission (HRC), and branding legal academic Dennis Davis a “racist”.
Davis is one of South Africa’s most
celebrated left-wing lawyers, a pro bono legal counsel to the labour movement, a stalwart of the United Democratic Front. Pityana is an ordained priest, a theology Ph.D, a political visionary and the former head of the World Council of Churches’ Programme to Combat Racism. Both are mensches; the former an archetypal Jewish intellectual, the latter an archetypal Anglican cleric. If Davis is volatile, impassioned and not a little shrill, then Pityana is temperate, modulated and not a little sanctimonious.
Their public row was a searing and painful spectacle of the dominant political debate of our times. Both men came to embody racial composites representing Black Rage and White Racism, Grasping Black Arrogance and Sneering White Cynicism. There on our TV screens, hovering over the befuddled head of Max du Preez, were all the genies we thought had been tightly bottled by our official ideologies of Reconciliation and Nonracialism. There was the dreadful reality writ large: democracy has not freed us from the race-bound shackles of our past; we all still live in Potgietersrus.
The accusations are even more acute than they were during the Wits University debate, but the lines are less clearly drawn. Political columnists Mondli Makhanya and Wilmot James, both black, have slammed Pityana for ill- advisedly playing the race card against a man who, they believe, has displayed no evidence of racism. One black colleague of mine believes Pityana’s attack is “the right battle, but badly fought”.
On Sunday, however, I listened to Radio Metro deejay Grant Shokoane tell hundreds of thousand of listeners about how Pityana had made his week by telling Davis exactly where to get off. If Davis wanted to leave the country, said Grant, well “good riddance”. Either Shokoane and I watched different debates or we truly live in different countries: in the Focus debate I saw, Pityana was manifestly unable to substantiate his claims that Davis had been motivated by racism into criticising the HRC’s composition.
Last week, however, Pityana’s phone was ringing off the hook. ANC officials who know Davis might be “horrified”, as one very senior (black) source told me, at Pityana’s “error of judgment”; many others see him as the standard-bearer of a new campaign against racism.
The Barney Pityana I met was clever, engaging, affable, not in the slightest bit defensive, and imbued with a quiet strength that gives way, very frequently, to a hearty guffaw. Around 50, he is of youthful demeanour yet well on his way to clerical avuncularity: if he were my shepherd I’d feel safe in his flock.
He will go back and read the offending article, he says, and if he was wrong he will publicly apologise. In the meanwhile, he is “delighted” that this has all happened in the very week of his inauguration because “as the Human Rights Commission, we have an obligation to raise awareness of how things work in our society or we’ll never be able to deal with them …”
Pityana’s mission is to to get South Africans to acknowledge that we are all victims or perpetrators of more subtle manifestations of racism than the crude Potgietersrus variety. Pityana, remember, was Steve Biko’s other political half. Together they pioneered the notion, in South Africa, of racism as a culturally embedded phenomenon rather than simply a political force. Although he entered the Black Consciousness Movement via the ANC at Lovedale and in his native New Brighton township, and although he strenuously resisted the notion of black separatism to begin with, his political work in the student movement was to challenge not the brute force of the apartheid regime, but the more subliminal racism of “our liberal friends in Nusas”.
Budlender writes, in a collection on the legacy of Steve Biko co-edited by Pityana, that “the feeling of rejection was painful and profound” for white liberals. “Part of the pain was caused by the fact that so much of the Black Consciousness rhetoric and argument seemed to be aimed directly at white liberals rather than at government supporters.”
Plus a change: Pityana used the inauguration of the commission last Thursday to eulogise the Freedom Front’s Chris De Jager, who has since left the HRC for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Davis had slammed the Volkstater’s appointment, but, says Pityana, De Yager was “a model member of the HRC … we actually marvelled at his capacity — and this is part of my anger with Davis – — to really come to understand, to work within what the changes of our country are about”.
He allows that conservative Afrikaners, for reasons both cultural (they respect authority) and strategic (they understand where the new power lies), are more likely to be acquiescent to the new power elite than bolshy lefties like Dennis Davis. But sometimes, says Pityana, “my liberal friends still seem to operate from a paradigm of the past. They’ve contributed so much to the struggle that they’ve now become intolerant of viewpoints different to their own. They’re intolerant of Afrikaners coming in to participate, and they’re intolerant of the class they often perjoratively call the black elite.”
After their televised row, Pityana and Davis had something of a rapprochement in the SABC parking lot: “I told him,” says Davis, “that I found it deeply ironic that he should lash out at me in this way. When I came to university in 1970, the Black Consciousness Movement had just got going, and it had a profound effect on me — it made me rethink liberalism and moved me towards Marxism. What is ironic is that I’m not a liberal because of you, Barney Pityana!”
The point, says Davis — who stands by his criticism of the HRC — is that “there’s a huge dichotomy between nation-building and democratic culture. Pityana is angry with me for criticising nation-building. Of course you’ve got to have nation-building, the Bafana Bafana thing, but if you run away with that and get intoxicated by it, you lose the context of a democratic culture. You cheer thoughtlessly for the home team rather than holding it accountable.”
If indeed Pityana is to be a thoughtless cheerleader for the government policy, then he is the wrong person to head a statutory body that has been set up to protect ordinary South Africans against human rights violations. A project that will, sooner rather than later, bring it into conflict with the state. But the vision Pityana articulates for his commission is precisely one that will hold the government to account. The commission has more powers than any other of its kind worldwide — not only powers of search and seizure, but the right to intervene directly in the legislative process and to call government officials to account for policy decisions.
Under his guidance, it has expanded its
brief “beyond just taking complaints of violations. We’re going to find out what socio-economic human rights are being violated, and be proactive about solutions.” By the end of this year, he envisages a head office staff of 39, and offices in every province. If there has been a slow start, he says, this is because of bureaucratic red tape.
There is a bigheartedness, a broadness
of vision, to Pityana that is difficult to square with the extremity of his rage over Davis’s criticism. He is, in fact, an ecumenical humanist at heart. In his doctoral thesis on transition and theology, accepted by the University of Cape Town last year, he exclaims in a delightfully unscholarly way, “I love freedom. Being free to think and act according to one’s conscience. A religion that imprisons the mind will fail to capture my imagination.”
He is, in fact, a lawyer by training, but he soon came to see its limitations. He recounts a seminal moment in his life — when Desmond Tutu, chaplain at Fort Hare, crossed a barricade of policemen, to be with protesting students in 1968: “I saw that as a lawyer, I’d always be pushing against the bounds of possibility, fighting with a law intent on limiting my sphere of activity … But for meaningful human existence, you have to be transcendent, you have to think beyond what is possible.” The transcendent image of a levitating Bishop Tutu, faith-sailing over the barricades, seems to have powered his decision to become a cleric: in 1978 he left the country after five years of banning and detention to study theology at London University.
Now, say those who know him, much of his ire at Dennis Davis is rooted in an irritation at the self-righteousness of white leftie lawyers who think they liberated the country, and who are currently writing the Constitution in a process to which blacks remain marginal. Fellow commissioners recall that, at roughly the same moment he fired his salvo at the Mail & Guardian and Davis, he lost his temper for the first and only time within the commission: in response to some white members’ complaints that they were being deliberately left out of the appointments process. He even snapped at Helen Suzman: “You thought we couldn’t make a good appointment without you.”
His approach, says one commissioner, “was to deal, there and then, with what he perceived to be ingrained racism.” A friend talks about the racial slights he and his family — used to the gentility of Milton Keynes (where he was a curate) and Geneva — have endured since returning to South Africa: “The Davis criticism was the last straw,” the friend says. “And while I personally believe Barney maybe acted ill-advisedly, I know one thing for sure: he gets angry so rarely, that when it happens, you need to sit up and take notice. There’s something going on.”
There is most definitely something going on. It’s the second wave of Black Consciousness, and it makes sense that one of the prime originators of the first wave has emerged as its most strident advocate. He is a man intent on linking the tenets of an earlier age of struggle —psychological liberation, the combating of racist culture — to the current reality of the political power that black people have and the economic empowerment and control over their destinies many of them seek. He is a Steve Biko for the Nineties.
