David Beresford
another country
A letter landed up in my mailbox this week a few centuries late. At least that would be my wild guess as to the magnitude of its “lateness”, relative to expectations as to delivery time via the old postal system. In fact it was sent by e-mail on November 29 last year, at 5.03pm, and instead of taking a few seconds to reach me crossed the finishing line in my computer at 11.59am on March 8 this year.
It was a pity because limited though I am as to what I can do nowadays it contained an invitation that would have tempted me if it had arrived in time. It was to contribute a chapter to a book on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, specifically on the Sharpeville Six.
As a journalist I was in a sense wrong-footed by timing where the Sharpeville Six case was concerned. I missed their trial and later became embroiled in a small spat on a legal side issue, the tenet of “common purpose” under which they had been convicted. Common purpose was represented by the foreign media, led by The Times, as a concept foreign to international law dreamed up by the South African judiciary as an excuse to murder black people. The truth of the matter was that it was devised by the British courts and only after it had been “legitimised” by English law, imported to South Africa. But that nicety was understandably lost on the condemned and their relatives, one of whom angrily denounced me in a “letter to the editor”.
The case over which I did wax indignant was that of the Upington 25, where I did attend their trial and witness the drama as the judge sentenced 14 to death. So far as I am aware there were no significant differences between the two cases. In retrospect I attribute my sympathy for those condemned at Upington, as opposed to my almost academic interest in those from Sharpeville, to the fact I had met the former, but not the latter. I had, in effect, been able to share their perspective if only to a very limited degree.
The lesson of perspective was also brought home by a later development in the case of the Upington 25, with publication of the truth commission report. The report recorded the testimony of Beatrice Sethwale, the mother of the policeman whose burning alive with petrol led to the Upington trial.
Her son’s name was “Jetta” and its coincidence with a model of petrol-driven saloon car seemingly was not overlooked in Upington. Seizing her own “moment of truth” she testified: “The songs, that you sang for me, that really affected me badly. It happened not that long ago. The last song was u-Jetta and that was such a thing for me, because some of you who sang that song, you go to the same church as I do, and some of you have very high posts as you sit here … Paballelo community, the community killed my child and they burnt him to death. That is the truth.”
Perspective would seem to tie in with stereotyping, a human shortcoming that, of course, has been banned in this non-racist, non-sexist, non-everything-unfair, post-Jetta society.
Recently I came across a curious instance of apparent stereotyping related to Parkinson’s. As I mentioned recently in this column, a friend of mine has just undergone deep brain surgery for alleviation of the condition and it seems to have been a striking success. His Parkinson’s is several years more advanced than mine, but the out- come obviously makes the option a tempting one. At the same time the prospect of such an ordeal 11 hours, fully conscious and bolted down is such as to encourage one to keep an eye open for other options emerging from the world’s research labs.
One interesting line of research arises from what is apparently known as the “dopamine hypothesis”. My understanding of this hypothesis (and I hurry to stress such “understanding” is not authoritative) is that, just as a shortage of the neuro-transmitter, dopamine, in the brain is responsible for Parkinson’s, so an over-supply of dopamine is responsible for schizophrenia. Which would suggest that the two problems are the reverse sides of the same chemical coin. Which in turn raises the question as to why schizophrenia is considered a psychiatric disorder of the mind with its associations of “insanity” and Parkinson’s a neurological disorder of the brain.
Many people particularly those with experience of mind-altering drugs would answer, I suspect, by arguing that it is all a chemical continuum, from “disorder” to “personality”, from “habit” to “insanity”, perhaps from life to death. The argument would have it that categorisation is merely a rough-and-ready, eternally out-of-date conceptual framework to facilitate the medical profession (not to mention the funeral industry). In other words, it is another instance of the stereotyping with which society tries to order a fundamentally chaotic world an ordering that is a denial of the individual and the uniqueness of his or her perspective.
Which makes the Sharpeville Six an interesting subject, particularly when it’s raised by a letter centuries late.