I was last in Amsterdam in 1987. The world was still in the grip of the Cold War. The Berlin Wall was still standing. Nelson Mandela was still in jail. God was in his heaven and the devil was still in hell. Or so the theory went, anyway.
Fourteen years later the world seems to have exploded, like a clock that has been wound up too
tight, for too long. The springs and arms have burst out of their reliable casing and scattered to the four points of the compass. The world has been turned on its head. Or so it seems.
That Dutch winter of 1987 was the climax of the anti-apartheid years. The Dutch Anti-Apartheid Movement had capped its already brilliant track record by holding a huge arts festival, called Culture in Another South Africa (Casa), that brazenly took over the whole of the thriving, stoned, deeply serious and liberally self-mocking centre of that timeless, winding, canalled capital of The Netherlands.
Exiles and inziles came face-to-face, locked in the embrace of a premature celebration of the dawn of a new South Africa. We showed off the best and the worst of our politics and our poetry. The Amandla Cultural Ensemble, out of the war zone of Angola, played head-to-head with the African Jazz Pioneers and The Genuines and Basil “Mannenberg” Coetzee’s earthy, indignant jazz from the front line of the State of Emergency.
We were ridiculously, extravagantly optimistic. Amsterdam does that to you. I remember walking in the rain with a group of young activists from the United Democratic Front (UDF), all of us talking too fast, too breathless, because there was too much to catch up on. We didn’t know how close we were to victory. It was something that skipped across a dangerous bridge and became a reckless kind of love, a forbidden intimacy with strangers, comrades you had only just met, but whom you trusted implicitly.
God knows how many spies and potential traitors had mingled themselves surreptitiously in among our revels. It didn’t matter at that stage. The show would go on regardless.
I wrote a poem. I wrote lots of poems, most of them now lost. My favourite was about a comrade from Cape Town who took her yellow UDF T-shirt off and gave it to me as we stood in the Amsterdam rain. Something to remember her by, to remember the bloody struggle that she and all those other bright young things would be fearlessly returning to. I think (and hope) that I was gallant enough to return the compliment, and give her my own revolutionary T-shirt in exchange.
When the festivities came to an end, I accompanied them on their coach to the airport. Zane Meas recalls that I bought them all hamburgers. I couldn’t bear the impending separation.
There was a crazy moment when I thought of smuggling myself on to the plane, to take my chances in a homeland I didn’t know, side by side, until final victory was won.
And so it went on.
Today, the cobbled stones of Amsterdam have forgotten us. Or have they? Have they forgotten anything? Stones don’t forget. They simply absorb it all and become wiser. Whereas we stumble on, having learned nothing.
I am standing in the apartment of an old friend from those Amsterdam struggle days. We used to read poetry together in bars and coffee-houses. I look into his old eyes and remember how we used to laugh ourselves silly at the pain of exile. What a waste of time it all was.
“So-and-so never kept that appointment,” I’d say.
“It’s your fault for being so hopeful,” he would reply. “There are no appointments in South Africa: only disappointments.” And we would laugh ourselves to death and move on to the next bar.
Now we barely have enough time to talk about the disappointments of the recent past. We do not dare to mull over the gap between our boastful posturings at Casa, what we claimed would be the vibrant culture of a free South Africa, and the reality of the world that we have now made our own.
I am now a restless homeboy. He is still in exile, talking about coming back, never really planning to do so. How can he? Amsterdam, the exile capital of the world, has sucked in his most productive years. Better to remain there and become part of the memory of those stones. The rest is too risky.
So I’m standing on the landing of his apartment, suitcase in hand. He can’t bear to spend too much time with me. We will never be able to catch up with the past, so he wants me to go, although he can’t articulate that thought. Instead, he makes some vague excuse and runs out of his own apartment, goes off on some trumped-up errand, leaving his wife to see me out.
His wife smiles at me out of her deep, sad eyes that have looked into the bottom of the Holocaust. She is also an exile who will never leave Amsterdam. She is a Jew. Her grandmother was transported out of Holland on a Nazi train and died at Auschwitz. Her grandfather and her mother were hidden for five years under the floorboards of a Protestant family home, somewhere in the south of Holland, and were finally able to step back out into the light when the terror subsided. Because her mother survived, she could be born. She has a blood bond with Amsterdam.
I, too, have a blood bond with Amsterdam. Finally, after 14 years, I have been able to come back and face it.
The world has been turned on its head. The devil has left his hell and settled for an energetic retirement home in the fairest Cape. The Berlin Wall has gone, but Amsterdam is still the same. There is no debt and nothing to regret.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza