Our political chickens, in different guises, are coming home to roost. Perhaps it is time to consider what the repercussions could be if we continue to reject and to ridicule those who try to deal with the consequences of their political actions. Quite apart from the sentence of the court, the behaviour of the accused too often condemns them to the ranks of fools.
It was not always like this.
In the early Nineties South Africa became famous for the ”counter-intuitive way” to use Njabulo Ndebele’s term, it dealt with the apartheid government in particular and white people in general. Dignified spaces were created in which minds could be changed and negotiations take place while an ethical vocabulary of understanding, forgiving and accepting was developed.
The best example of such a dignified space was provided by Archbishop Desmond Tutu when, instead of condemning Winnie Mandela as so many others had, he led her, step by step, into uttering words of responsibility, guilt and subsequent contrition before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Have we lost this ability to deal with the disgraced? Don’t we reject them more resoundingly than murderers? Can’t we see anything human past their distorted faces, punned names and mangled expressions?
When they try to face the consequences of their deeds, we say: too little, too late. We say: fraudulent. We say: the law.
I am not saying that the problem lies with legal prosecutions, but that we need simultaneous spaces in civil society in which people can create a vocabulary of admitting to wrong-doing without being trashed.
We have seen Tony Yengeni in front of the prison, microphone in hand. He was clearly scrambling for the right words to address the all-important camera and the energetic crowd, but neither he, nor apparently anybody else around him, seemed able to formulate, as Tutu did for Mandela, those difficult words of acknowledgment and regret. Under pressure, he reverted to what he knew best: the role of the defiant political victim — remembering a past when political context could turn a wrong into a right.
We see Jacob Zuma addressing a crowd and notice how his facial expression has changed since the rape case. It’s as if he’s saying: you have raised a monster and you will bear the consequences. I will find my support among those South Africans excluded from your ranks of privilege; those who find themselves neglected, poor, unemployed, uneducated, ill and unfamiliar with constitutional demands; those who once were gathered under the guidance of solidarity, but are now forgotten under the principle of exclusion. Let me side with the rejected and the ridiculed. Our backs may be against the wall, but our numbers are increasing and could soon create a new context that would turn our wrong into a right.
We hope you’ve noticed in the remarks of the ANC Youth League how fluent we also have become in the language of exclusion and threat.
Which brings me to Adriaan Vlok.
Since the TRC started its work, there has been a need for a white man to respond adequately to the convincing reconciliation gestures of people like Mandela and Tutu. Because of them, every South African has in his or her head a picture of a powerful black man reaching out to whites on behalf of blacks.
After World War II the German chancellor, Willie Brandt, visited the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial. While laying a wreath, he suddenly went on to his knees. For many Jews that was the most important moment of the post-war era — the moment that the repentance of the German nation was made visible.
Who made whites’ rejection of and regret about apartheid visible? What picture is living in the backs of millions of South Africans’ heads? Those who were so quick to torture and kill in our name were nowhere to be found to say sorry in our name. During the Home for All campaign whites fought so viciously among themselves, about who was guilty of what, that it lost all potential impact.
Black, coloured and white, ordinary men and women had asked, given or refused forgiveness in many visible and less visible ways, but in a patriarchal society such as ours, a ”white prince of reconciliation” was needed.
I myself had hoped that FW de Klerk, during the time when he had stature, power and support, would be big enough to take, like Willie Brandt, all the guilt on himself. I had hoped that he would be imaginative enough to do it in a way more powerful than words. He didn’t. And as regular as clockwork, every year around Reconciliation Day, someone would say: the whites have never asked for forgiveness. Before long, De Klerk’s name would come up, and he, or lately the head of his foundation, would reiterate his long, dry legal explanation.
In his way Vlok did what De Klerk could not. Although most of us would have preferred a more innocent scapegoat, his gesture was surprising and effective for three reasons.
He is the first once-powerful, guilty, white male to make an act of contrition that had nothing to do with an amnesty application or a TRC submission.
Second, without inviting television cameras, he chose a gesture that everybody instinctively could understand and picture, calling up not only biblical connotations, but a time when South African slaves washed the feet of their owners.
Third, Vlok didn’t say he was doing it on behalf of whites, but that he was reaching out to all those he had hurt, an acceptance of interconnectedness that is in stark contrast to those who use legal individualism to evade collective guilt. However inadequate and pathetic some may deem his act, it is, after 10 years, the best that whites have come up with.
What I want to know is: why is he being so ridiculed and spurned? Are we saying that we don’t want the guilty to change? Even if they go to jail, like Allan Boesak and Yengeni, or are found innocent like Zuma, will we continue to reject them?
Are we saying that we won’t accept Zuma, but Judge Willem van der Merwe, who simply sounded like a more sophisticated version of Zuma, is okay? Are we saying that because we are not guilty, because our hands are clean, we do not want someone as guilty as Vlok to suddenly join the holy ranks of the righteous and the self-righteous? Are we, who say it was not enough, saying that we actually know what would be enough? Are we, who say he should wash many other feet, saying that we have already washed all the feet we should have washed? Are we, who say: too little too late, saying that anybody who ever contemplated dealing with his guilt should shut up, because any act of contrition is useless?
How are we treating those who did not do right? Do the clean-hands people think they can go it alone? That the law will pull them through? In our admirable efforts to entrench a culture of rights within a society that is very much still in conflict, we are forgetting Simone Weil’s warning that ”(t)o place the notion of rights at the centre of social conflicts, is to inhibit any possible impulse of charity on both sides”.
Simply to discard and ridicule Yengeni and Zuma is too easy. To allow their past and recent deeds, criminal and misguided as they were, to turn them into people so despicable that no one with any sense of moral responsibility dare talk about the moral complexity of their lives, is an abdication of responsibility.
Are we not creating the kind of people once described by Jung: ”One does not really know who one is: one feels inferior somewhere and yet does not wish to know where the inferiority lies, with the result that a new inferiority is added to the original one. This sense of insecurity is the source of the hysteric’s prestige psychology, of his need to make an impression, to flaunt his merits and insist on them, of his insatiable thirst for recognition, admiration, adulation, and longing to be loved.”
In the post-Mandela period we have thought less about tolerance, and sought less urgently a vocabulary of inclusiveness. Instead we find ourselves in a country of unsolvable and mutually exclusive terms: black/white, two nations, two economies — always at each other’s throats.
For many decades it was believed that the guiding principle for moral maturity was justice, that mature moral reasoning always involved appeals to moral notions of justice. In the early Eighties psychologist Carol Gilligan interviewed a large group of women and found that the ways in which women thought about morality revealed a different, but equally mature and plausible, moral voice: one that relied primarily on the language of care, and on the notion of responsibility in caring relationships. In other words, people took decisions based, not on justice, but on the caring relationships they were involved in. A mother would stand by her convicted son. A daughter with her disgraced father. The term ”an ethics of care” was coined.
In a country emerging from centuries of fractured morality, we will destroy everything we have achieved over the past 16 years if we assume that we do not need a vocabulary of care — also and especially for the disgraced.
Antjie Krog is the author of Country of My Skull and A Change of Tongue. Her most recent volume of poetry is Verweerskrif/Body Bereft