David Beresford
ANOTHER COUNTRY
There is a curious document identified as “MC/M353” in the Oliver Tambo collection of papers at the University of Fort Hare in the Eastern Cape.
The document, it should be said at the outset, is undoubtedly a fake. It is written as a “memorandum” in the form of minutes of a meeting at Cape Town’s Pollsmoor Prison in May 1986 between Nelson Mandela, Winnie Mandela and their lawyer, Ismail Ayob.
A single paragraph makes it startling reading – for those, at least, who are unaware that it is a fake. It is to be found on the penultimate page of the 10- page document and reads: “NM approved of WM’s necklace speech. He said that it was a good thing as there has not been one black person who has attacked WM.”
The “necklace” reference is seemingly to that notorious speech made by Mrs Mandela at the height of the “townships rebellion” when she indicated her support for the burning alive of alleged “collaborators”.
Ayob, speaking for both himself and the former president, has denied any knowledge of the meeting, or the document, and has pointed out that Madiba has never supported necklacing.
Mrs Mandela’s view is not worth seeking; she rarely, if ever, answers her telephone, virtually never for the press and her credibility is so shot to pieces that her words have no weight or value except as a curiosity.
It is nice to know the truth – and that is a truism which perhaps contributed to the popularity of the anti-apartheid struggle as an international cause. The issues were black and white, the “baddies” and “goodies” easily distinguishable thanks to variations in melanin deficiency.
When Madiba walked out of the prison gates, the moment confirmed those certainties – the anticipated moral victory offering a fitting climax to what seemed like a morality tale enjoyed by millions watching television.
In retrospect it was something of a fake orgasm in fairyland, because truth is not so easy. Winnie Mandela was a case in point, her manifold sins combining with her immense physical charms to offer a neatly packaged reminder that virtue, like beauty, is often only skin-deep. There was also the African National Congress “camps” scandal which so muddied the human rights flag under which the liberation cause mustered.
Other blows to the truths of political correctness have followed with the emergence of contrary truths – such as the truth that Nelson Mandela was, from an early age, an enthusiastic supporter of capitalism, a truth covered up by leading Marxists in the party who censored his writing (ironically helping the apartheid regime to exploit the communist bogey).
Similarly the truth about the unity of purpose that Robben Island has come to represent is that divisions within the ANC leadership on the island as to ideological truths were so bitter that Mandela and Govan Mbeki would not speak to each other for three years of their incarceration.
But so confident was South Africa at its competence to discover “the truth” that the country had the chutzpah to set up a “truth commission”, which celebrated liberation from the lies of the apartheid era by producing five volumes of truth on the subject.
According to Anthea Jeffery at the Institute of Race Relations – whose analysis, as far as I am aware, has not been repudiated by anything more than polemic – those volumes were based on some 21E300 victims’ statements, recording about 38E000 gross violations of human rights, of which 90% were not even given on oath, much less subject to cross-examination, making it unlikely that even 100 “passed muster as factual evidence” … at least by her account.
Of course Jeffery’s attack on the commission amounts to an assertion of the truth itself, for example in her complaint that the commission failed in its duty to “contextualise” state violence, saying that it “gave scant regard to the government’s perspective that normal legal processes were ineffective against evolutionary violence and that law and order had to be restored”.
That is a truth which – when juxtaposed with familiar television images such as those of South African police rifles blasting away at township children with the nonchalance of clay-pigeon enthusiasts – can only give force to the “obscenity of understanding”.
More recently we have had attempts by such as Bonile Jack and Christine Qunta to set previously unchallengeable truth on its head, by denouncing the likes of Helena Dolny and the liberal press as racists.
And now we have the many truths of our national cricket captain, Hansie Cronje’s involvement in match-fixing as conveyed by denunciation, confession, denial and petition.
The truth commission being more of a clerical than a judicial commission, Desmond Tutu and his fellow commissioners were clearly sensitive to the dangers inherent in the rash promise of “the truth” implicit in its title. So they began their work by hurriedly erecting a defence by way of definition.
There were four manifestations of “the truth”, they argued in a lengthy introduction to their report: factual or forensic truth (presumably that which obsesses Dr Jeffery); a narrative or “story-telling” truth familiar to oral traditions of history (to which pigeon- hole the 21E300, or at least 21E200, statements of the truth commission can perhaps be consigned); a “social” or “dialogue” truth “established through interaction, discussion and debate” (by which mechanism Qunta tried to foist her truth on society, to considerable financial advantage to herself); and, finally, “healing” or “restorative” truth, which contains the important ingredient of “acknowledgment” (to the cause of which the Reverend Ray McCauley won Hansie, although it is not clear at all how it fits in with the subsequent reduction of the resulting nine-page confession to a burnt offering).
All of which goes to show that truth is a many-splendoured thing.