David Beresford : A Second Look
Life tends to be made up of a series of images, snapshots from the past. One particularly powerful image from my past is of cricket. It was the early 1970s and I was living in Richmond, near the park. I had shaken the dust of South Africa off my shoes in 1974 and emigrated to England with no intention of returning.
My country was a basket case, or about to become one. But like most expatriates, I suffered from nostalgia which found its focus, curiously, in the Hampshire county cricket team.
At the time the opening batsmen with Hampshire were Barry Richards and the West Indian, Gordon Greenidge. The county matches are regularly broadcast on BBC television and on weekends I would excitedly consult the newspaper listings to see if Hampshire were playing. If they were, I would spend a delirious few hours in front of the goggle box, watching Richards and Greenidge bat, to the music of that unforgettable voice of John Arlott.
But it was not Hampshire I was watching. I was playing out a fantasy, that the slim, blonde-haired D’Artagnan that was Richards and the lithe black panther that was Greenidge were the opening pair for South Africa and they were busy savaging Australia, destroying the MCC, eviscerating India … They were the symbols of my hopeless dream of South African unity, of the creation of a racial partnership which could take on the world.
I did come back to South Africa, in the mid-1980s. It was a career decision and had nothing to do with nostalgia. The country was heading for the long-anticipated train smash. It is said that foreign correspondents tend to be vultures and I can pick over the carrion with the best of them.
I did see plenty of corpses, of course. But tragedy was overtaken by the transformation that culminated in the miraculous moment when Nelson Mandela took the salute from the armed forces at his presidential inauguration. Unbelievably my fantasy had been realised. The partnership had been created with which we could take on the world!
But now something seems to be going terribly wrong. It is as if Greenidge has turned on Richards in the middle of the pitch, threatened him with his cricket bat and demanded that he make atonement for his pigmentation.
That, at least, is how I see the fulminations over the last year by Jon Qwelane, aided and abetted by Thami Mazwai, which reached something of an apogee over the festive season with an extraordinary outburst by both of them in the pages of the Saturday Star.
In a lengthy article — which, were it not so confused, might be characterised as incitement — the two men warned whites that “power has changed hands” and that “we will meet them bullet for bullet”.
Exactly why they anticipate such an exchange of bullets and what is going to trigger this racial Armageddon is not made clear in the article. But the juxtaposition of blood-curdling images with warnings that whites “hold the key … to their own security” suggests “Barry Richards” would do well to at least retire from the field of play before there is a bloodbath.
Mazwai and Qwelane make much of the inadequacies of the “white-led” and “white- owned” media in South Africa. Ironically their point is made by the fact that the self-same media has been responsible for their own emergence as national opinion- leaders.
Last week, for instance, Qwelane was making much, on Radio 702, of Louis Farrakhan — the African-American crackpot who once described Jews as “bloodsuckers”, the Pope a “no-good cracker” and supported a call to South Africa’s “blacks” to butcher the “whites”. By his friends be he known …
But, if the representation of Qwelane and Mazwai as the “voices” of black South Africa is a myth irresponsibly cultivated by the media, their views are nevertheless symptomatic of what seems to be a worrying drift towards racial polarisation, if not on the part of the population, then at least its political leadership.
The latest manifestation of this is the drive by the African National Congress for a merger with Inkatha. The merger was rationalised with an exercise in chop-logic by the president’s representative, Parks Mankahlana, in an article in the Sunday Independent at the weekend. Blaming past hostility between the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party on PW Botha (Inkathagate, by Mankahlana’s account, was the work of agents provocateurs), his argument culminates with the puzzling assertion that unity between the country’s largest and third-largest political parties is necessary “so that we can have an even more vibrant multi-party system”.
Mankahlana holds out Angola as an example of how valuable unity between the ANC and the IFP would be to South Africa, as a means of defusing what he coyly refers to as the “national question”. But although equating Jonas Savimbi with Mangosuthu Buthelezi may have some merit, the continued failure of the Angolans to settle anything makes of that country something of a dubious model.
A more telling parallel would be Zimbabwe, where the amalgamation of Zanu and Zapu was also justified as a means of resolving the “national question” with the results which have become only too well known by way of corruption, despotism and racial polarisation.
Governments should be presumed guilty until they prove themselves innocent and the same rule of thumb needs to be applied to political leaders. On that basis I suspect the achievement of a de facto one-party state is the goal of Thabo Mbeki, whose articulation of the non-racial ideal, however poetic, I find unconvincing, and whose political instincts I fear were shaped during his years in exile by the outmoded traditions of “Africanism” as practised by the likes of Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda, Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta.
Whether or not this is true, I take comfort from my fantasy of “Gordon Greenidge” — representative of the black South Africans in whose company I long to march in partnership and a shared contempt for racism. I am convinced they are there, behind the babbling of the Qwelanes and the Mazwais.
I heard them this week in a statement from the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal bluntly dismissive of a merger with Inkatha. I saw them at Mafikeng, determinedly electing Terror Lekota chair of the party.
I, too, have dreamed a dream, my friends. Admittedly it was only in front of a goggle box in far-off Richmond. But it has progressed too far towards the realisation to give it up now.