THEY WERE ONLY OBEYING ORDERS
John Simpson discloses that, all of a
sudden, everyone in South Africa had been in the secret resistance to apartheid
Cape Town THE STRUGGLE for democracy has never,' said Nelson Mandela, leaning in his dignified way towards the microphone, been a matter pursued by one race, class, colour, religion, or gender among South Africans.' Each word, enunciated carefully, seemed to roll round the packed square and to echo off the face of Table Moun- tain above us. The heads in the crowd — a bearded, toothless old African, a beautiful young coloured woman, a white man in a striped shirt who might have been an accountant — nodded.
Not far away I saw something I had never thought to see: an Afrikaans police- man moved to tears by the emotion of the moment. They, we, all wanted to believe this new myth that was being created for us from the balcony of the City Hall: there was no guilt, there were no enemies, there would be no witch-hunts, no trials for ret- rospective thought-crime. Everyone, by association if not in person, was now offi- cially absolved from the sins of the past. Just as no one, after the deNazification process in Germany, had been a supporter of Hitler, and no Frenchman or woman had collaborated with the Germans after de Gaulle returned, so no South African had sympathised with apartheid: everyone, in his or her way, had been a resistance fighter. I looked at the statue of Edward VII as it faced the balcony from which Mandela was speaking. Its expression seemed distinctly sardonic. When the rally was over and everyone
streamed away, the smiles stayed on the faces around us ('Do put that into your article,' someone said to me; 'you know, how nice everyone is being'). Four of us headed for lunch at the charming, small, expensive Town House Hotel nearby. The dining- room was filled with heavily built old-time National Party stalwarts who had broken away to join the far-right Conservatives, then switched to the Freedom Front when it decided not to boycott the election. Now they'd won their seats, and had the grins to prove it. The myth of the new, guiltless South Africa was exposed. If men like these had secretly opposed apartheid from Within, then Hendrick Verwoerd was a
covert member of the ANC's Youth Wing.
Yet the myth is still useful. It is probably the only way a peaceable, multiracial South Africa can be made to work and prosper. Perhaps in time people will even come to believe it; that is, until the revi- sionists come along and report truth again. But for the moment there is a powerful, all-encompassing conspiracy to forget the past. When I interviewed Hernus Kriel he is premier-elect of the Western Cape, a tough old Nat who was minister of law and order in the ancien regime and neverthe- less succeeded in getting himself and his party voted in with the help of the coloured population, whose interests the Nationalists once existed to frustrate — I broached this whole question of the change of heart. 'Bit of an irony?' I sug- gested. But irony is, as Raymond Chandler might have put it, something the National Party is clean out of. Mr Kriel explained blandly that they had apologised to the coloureds (and anyone else they thought might vote for them) for what had hap- pened in the past. It all reminded me strongly of the senior editorial figure in the South African Broadcasting Corporation who, 17 years earlier, would summon me to his office to complain about some outrage I, or the BBC in general, had committed in the reporting of events in South Africa. My work permit could be revoked, he said, if I continued to perpetuate these falsehoods. (They included, if I recall, the use of the word 'bulldozer' to describe the vehicles which the police used to knock down the pitiful shacks of the poor at the crossroads squatter camp; the correct expression was, it seemed, 'front-end loader'.) Years later I met this man again. Now the political cli- mate had changed, and he positively fawned on me. 'You must teach us how to be better, more objective,' said the defender of journalistic ethics. He was 'I've got a plan to exhibit Damien Hirst.' understandably anxious about going the way of his brother, one of the most notori- ously unpleasant policemen in the country, who was now judged tobe surplus to requirements in the new South Africa.
Still, if this new South Africa is prepared to accept even Hernus Kriel and my old sparring partner from the SABC as fellow- builders of the future interracial state, then it is no business of an outsider like myself to question these things. The Afrikaans for 'I was only obeying orders' — 'Ek het maar net gedoen wat daar vir my gese is om to doen', though it's not an expression you hear used like this — would seem to be a pretty watertight defence nowadays. And not only for Afrikaners, but for all the English-speaking whites who went along enthusiastically with the whole thing, and for the African, Indian and coloured police and petty officials who ensured that apartheid worked efficiently.
But Nelson Mandela seems to have grasped a deeper truth than all this; he has realised that even among the people who kept the old system in place there were genuinely decent, thoughtful, honourable individuals who helped to redeem the rest. The other day in Cape Town I went to see one of them: James Gregory, Mandela's former gaoler on Robben Island. The prison was a brutal, dehumanised place, but Warrant Officer Gregory was neither. Slowly, he and Mandela built up a close friendship which became even stronger when Gregory's son, like Mandela's some years earlier, was killed in a car crash. 'I had been there for him then,' Gregory said, 'and he was there for me when I needed it.' The expression may derive from an Ameri- can television script, but the emotions are no less real for that.
A surprisingly enlightened government minister (not Hernus Kriel) saw the value of this friendship between the political pris- oner and his warder, and James Gregory, despite the often vicious hatred of his col- leagues in the prison service, who called him Wafferboetie', 'nigger-lover', was moved from gaol to gaol with Mandela, keeping a line of communication open to the centre of white power in case it might some day be needed. Eventually it was.
'You drew the sting from Mandela's bit- terness towards white people,' Gregory's boss told him when he retired. In fact Nel- son Mandela — it is South Africa's extraor- dinary good fortune — seems never to have had any bitterness towards white people. Now he is making them out to be an entire race of James Gregorys. And even as I write these words, I think of Mandela's speech at the City Hall here, and the tears in the white policeman's eyes, and the curt nod he gave me when he saw me looking at him; and, like all the others, I too want the myth of righteous white man to be true whether it really is or not.
John Simpson is foreign affairs editor of the BBC.
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