South Africa is a complicated country for ordinary people to live in. This week we carry a report about white music teachers who are resigning or lodging grievance procedures against the Gauteng department of education to avoid being deployed where they are needed most — schools in townships.
Because of South Africa’s history of racial divisions, mistrust and stereotypes some of the teachers have a real fear, justified or not, of being white in Soweto. Some are simply claiming that Soweto is too far from their homes in the suburbs of Johannesburg. These are ordinary fears and concerns.
However, it must be pointed out that many whites travel safely into Soweto, and other townships across the country, to work every day.
In the meantime, ordinary black students, who have the same right as their white counterparts in better-off schools to be offered formal lessons in the arts, among other subjects, are deprived of an opportunity to learn. Their violins, violas and other musical instruments lie gathering dust in schools.
The Gauteng department of education, facing the frustration of watching a key programme to transform township schools into real institutions of learning collapse, is taking disciplinary steps against some of the teachers. It sees the teachers’ action as subtle resistance to “transformation and equity” in the Gauteng education system, although it has stopped short of outright accusations of racism.
Like any ordinary government bureaucracy, the department also appears to have taken its time about sorting out the teachers’ concerns about job security, resulting in many of them leaving the public education system for private schools.
Who is to blame for this failure? Are fears about the dangers of the townships an understandable reason for effectively sabotaging a transformation initiative, or are they paranoid distortions? Are the teachers failing in their professional duty to develop youthful talent? Are they perpetuating the gross maldistribution of educational opportunities inherited from apartheid? Further compounding the complexities is the question of how much occupational freedom government employees should enjoy, and whether it is right for the state to dictate their place of work.
This story is about one of thousands of small battles being fought every day in key public and private institutions across the country to turn South Africa into an ordinary country. The hope is that with a little bit of goodwill and courage from all concerned the pathological racial suspicions and misconceptions bred by apartheid will gradually break down.
Pity he’s Australian now
So JM Coetzee missed out on a Booker Prize hat-trick this year but got the Nobel Prize for Literature. This is surprising, in that the Nobel committee has usually been seen to award the prize for quasi-ideological reasons — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for instance, got it at a time when it was necessary to highlight oppression in the Soviet Union; Nadine Gordimer’s award was an endorsement of democratic forces in South Africa.
That is not to say such winners are not great writers, but not since Samuel Beckett (one of Coetzee’s key influences) got the prize in 1969 has it gone to an author so unattached to any cause, so pessimistic about the possibility of redemption, so sceptical about humanity’s progress and its capacity for ethical action. In the mid-1980s in South Africa, as this country seemed locked in a terrible war between oppressors and liberators, Coetzee refused to allow his protagonist Michael K to join the freedom fighters. Unlike Nadine Gordimer’s characters, who usually opted (though not without deep inner struggle) to join the forces of liberation, whatever their failures, Michael K decided instead to look after his vegetables. It is as though a novel such as Life and Times of Michael K operates in the gap of doubt present in Gordimer — the gap she closes but Coetzee leaves open, even widens. He took a lot of flak for that.
Likewise, Coetzee’s most famous novel, Disgrace, and his first to be set explicitly in post-apartheid South Africa, is not a hopeful or comforting book. It seems to argue, via the shape of its narrative, that the promise of a new dispensation in South Africa —Â the promise of a new ethical space — is unfulfilled. It drew cries of baffled outrage from some of the less sophisticated readers in the African National Congress.
But Coetzee’s relentless deconstruction of our self-delusions, including our pretensions to knowledge and mastery, rediscovers the fundamentals of our humanity in the quality of empathy. For that reason, and because he writes with such cold beauty, the award to him should be widely hailed in South Africa.
Pity he’s an Australian now. We still need his limpid gaze.