The Political Life of Children by Robert Coles

Author:Robert Coles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 1986-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

VI

RACE AND NATIONALISM: SOUTH AFRICA

FOR more than a decade I have been working in South Africa, and even now I find it painful to distill what I think I know into words — not only the frustrations, the inadequacies, the melancholy, the outrage such a country inspires in visitors, but the feelings I sense in its own people, as I hear them (Alan Paton’s chosen verb) cry,1 and cry, and cry. An Afrikaner by ancestry, a teacher who has broken with his fellow Afrikaners, with his own family even, on the question of apartheid, says: “There are no tears left, only the saddest feeling imaginable in the gut, an emptiness that means all hope is gone.” It might be best to begin with him, with those Afrikaners, with their children.

On my first visit, in 1974, to that beleaguered, tormented, utterly perplexing country, I was introduced to a black South African who had been “banned” for two years.2 He could receive one visitor at a time, under specified conditions. I was driven to his home, in Cape Town, which was, in effect, a continuing prison. (He could not leave it.) I sat there with him for several hours, and he was brilliantly knowing about not only his own country, but mine. He asked me many questions about how black people were doing in the United States, about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, whose visit to South Africa in 1966 he well remembered; and he kept asking me to ask him questions. I put to him the first-time visitor’s usual ones (I was then trying to learn how the crazy apartheid system got going in the first place) and I was offered the usual answers, though with patience and consideration. How boring the effort must have been! Another of these ever-so-sympathetic whites, oozing compassion and moral indignation but lacking any notion at all of what either he or anyone else might do!

I made my nervous, guilty declarations and avowals, which included a determination to stay longer, to return and document what is happening, to tell others in “the States” what was seen and heard. Meanwhile, he listened and listened, this stoic, soft-spoken, shrewdly watchful man, with a broad smile that covered (I would later begin to realize) years of terrible pain, torture and more torture, and no doubt, smouldering rage reserved for — whom? I suspect, from what I’ve heard him say over the years, that even the dreams he remembers preclude direct expression of that rage. Once, with a wry turn to his smile, and after posing some questions to me about dreams, their nature and purpose (and thereby awakening my professional curiosity, of course, as to why these questions), he made an end of that segment of that day’s conversation with a brisk wave of his right hand: “Then the dreams we don’t remember — they are the ones that protect us!” I didn’t know what to say. Besides, I realized that he wasn’t asking for one of those smug nods that we psychiatrists occasionally peddle to our eager consumers.

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