Easter is as good a time as any for reflection. Following this line of thought I try today to say something about the flow of time, rather than of water (though I refer to rivers); of statues and similar large emblems of human history; and of whatever “right to life” we may have.
The theme of Human Rights is appropriate as at this time of year we ponder the communism (commune-ism) of Jesus. Jesus’s thinking, of course, has nothing to do with party-political forms. Having recently completed a new play – Maria, Moeder van God– which centres on the crucifixion, I was struck again by Jesus’s way of caring for others. He was caring up to the very end, when He took a thief to his heart. This man’s compassion was timeless and we do well trying to join the flow of it, by way, also, of the stories we tell. One such story is Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey:
On July 20, 1714 at 12 noon – a sultry day – the bridge broke. There were five people crossing it. They were thrown into the stony riverbed far below. It was the most noted and cherished thoroughfare in Peru, San Luis Rey being a “stop on the high road between Lima and Cuzco”. Large numbers of people “passed over it every day”. The bridge was made simply and sparingly of “thin slats (of osier), with handrails of dried vine”, artistically crafted by the Incas. Wilder’s story must be one of the most moving ever written, its concluding lines unforgettable poetry.
Important personages had travelled across “the famous bridge’, the Archbishop of Lima, for instance; and the walkway was “protected (by) St Louis of France himself”. The mishap was witnessed by Brother Juniper, a sparsely-built monk who in the past had often wondered about why things happen the way they do, and why just at the time they do. But this was the first time he came face to face with an event of this import, and he was taken with excitement. Being of a scientific mind, he believed he was blessed now with laboratory conditions favouring pointed research.
He started by finding out the names of the five dead. He catalogued these: the Marquesa de Montemayor; Pepita; Esteban; Uncle Pio; Don Jaime. Next he enquired into the lives of the five victims: Who was the Marquesa; who was Pepita; who was Esteban… What did they do in life? What relationships did each of them have? What were their hopes, fears, loves? He searched through their personal histories and sketched out the five biographies.
All this having been done, inevitably there came the crucial moment of his self-imposed task: He had to make up his mind (like a judge) as to what was what, objectively as it is said. Should he, after the “recess” (during which he brooded over the “facts”) return with a sentence condemning these five for having lived bad lives? Were there extenuating circumstances? What should the punishment be?
Brother Juniper was confused (as, I think, judges often are). His finding, ultimately, was the incomplete but wise one: What we have on our hands is “an act of God”. No one is to blame (all five having lived exemplary lives); no one was guilty of anything – not even the osier-and-vine weavers of the bridge.
We are left unsatisfied, with a lump in the throat – but also relieved.
Let us consider: Bridges are symbols of movement, of passing onward to a desired place. With hindsight, we could blame the flimsy twining of the bridge, from sprigs of willow and vine, and the carelessness of people who should have avoided using it; but in truth this was the shortest way to desired destinations. Bridges are also monuments (statues of a sort), and normally don’t just fall: But when they do, there is cause for serious thought.
A case in point, at the moment, is the storm-in-an-academic-teacup controversy about Cecil John Rhodes’s statue on UCT’s Jameson Hall steps. Generations of students have gone and come at UCT. The churn now is about “transformation”, a buzz-idea not in vogue in my student days. We had equivalents, though.
The principal of UCT has been patiently at pains to call all the institution’s cadres to consider a demise or not of the statue. I have noticed his charitably complex call for a scheduling of times, for scheduling, with students and others, schedules of times for considering the need for the removal of the statue! But some student spokesperson maintains that the students “are not interested in what Max Price has to say”. I thought this was a niggardly response to the principal’s patience! One would think an interest in what the other party has to say is precisely the point of university life and of democracy. Another student voice proclaims firmly, dictatorially: “The statue must come down (period). We will occupy the Bremner Building” – which, I mused, “we” would have to leave again, hopefully for lectures. (Also, why just the Bremner? What about the Jagger; Smuts Hall; Belsen – with its worse than colonialist Naziistic connotation?) Yet another plaint – according to “experts” on radio – maintains more comprehensively that not only the hapless statue on the steps but UCT’s entire style of building is “colonialist”. And another’s “logic” is that the statue marginalises blacks. How does a statue manage this?
A white Afrikaans political commentator, coming out on the side of the students, believes they deserve praise for their non-violent way of doing things, in spite of their bitter anger. Really? Is the dumping of faeces over the statue non-violent? Clearly enough the protesters are guilty of public violence; of damage to others’ property (which the statue is); of blackmail, given their stance of “Unless you do as we demand, we’ll…” ; and, intellectually, of grossly laughable syllogistics; perhaps of racism.
I am no apologist for Rhodes’s philosophy. But am I wrong to think that without the colonialist’s gifts some of these students might not have been able to register for tertiary study at all. We might also ponder the fact that Nelson Mandela found it appropriate to have his name linked to Rhodes’s for a trust from which – by way of bursaries – some of these students benefit. I suggest that the students, young and not so young, expending their time the way they do here, use their hours more profitably at study.
Certainly I have sympathy with the insistent clamour: To the devil with Max Price! for UCT was “built on the sweat and blood of black people”. There is also the sweat and blood of others, whites to boot, who – over long years – were also involved. If I’m right, the students have poverty in mind (or at least they should have, in spite of their middle-classiness). I am speaking of whites and others who have lived and keep living on and below the (old) “poverty-datum line”. There are such people. I am thinking of poverty such as imaged by the great author of Crime and Punishment, as he pictured the hell on earth of the Marmeladovs which, against most bitter odds, is survived by the family’s daughter Sonja. (The “Poverty Datum Line” was the brainchild of a well-known UCT professor of Sociology of the mid-90s. How much of this history of UCT do our students know?)
The Afrikaans commentator mentioned points out that most of the protesters are not English and are uncomfortable with English culture. But why, then, had they come to UCT at all? When I started out on my tertiary education, I would have preferred an Afrikaans world, the University of Stellenbosch. Apartheid shut that out and I was compelled to attend UCT, where, in that foreign “English world”, I delighted in exploring connotations of university life. I did not scream. Indeed I had this blessing added to my person, that in the process I was completely liberated from a musty, claustrophobic Afrikaans and only Afrikaans culture – to which as a consequence, I could later return the compliment of this freedom through my writing. (What a pity that I have to be this personal, but I find it difficult to down my frustration at the self-indulgence of the students.)
Let us be wary of “rude judgments” (crude judgments). University life goes beyond posturing and wielding slogans. Whether or not Rhodes keeps sitting on those tiring-to-negotiate steps, the real question at issue is schooling and learning, whatever the style of the university’s architecture. After all, once the protesters have qualified, they will seek and find jobs and slot into the “system” mundanely, some to teach, willingly enough, in its architecturally speaking, miserable classrooms.
In passing, my former student and later academic colleague and intellectual friend, the late Professor Jakes Gerwel, has said all this as I do here, only with more derogation of the protesters.
This hubbub ties in with human rights (which day we celebrated recently). It is a philosophy to which I subscribe – with wide-open eyes. There is nothing absolute about the concept: It is fair, for instance, to wonder whether rapists have a “right to life”: Why should these destroyers of other people’s lives, themselves be privileged with life? I risk thinking – in my worst thought? – that, in law, capital punishment should hold compulsorily here (even if this is the only crime to be classified thus).
Writers of import have overviewed the concept, some with consideration of the merits of “collective leadership”, others favouring Kierkegaardian individualism (for which I have high regard). Collective leadership may well be a damp-squib idea. Individualism, again, can throw up a Stalin or a Verwoerd, but then also an Abraham Lincoln or Bram Fischer. (Where does a Napoleon or Mandela fit into this picture?) Best, it seems, would be a blend of the two approaches – a summation of wisdom which is hard to come by. Still, our country has not fared badly in the matter of human rights – we are staying afloat, in spite of the underground current of a will to dictatorship.
Returning to bridges: The concept of a bridge is built into our language, symbolising – among other things – relationship between generations, as institutions also do. A university, for instance, binds together students of the moment and those of years (and years) gone by, from which fact the idea of “alumni” is derived.
A thought or two aside (as things occur to me): Considering the removal or destruction of statues, conceivably someone might get it into her or his head that the mermaid sculpture in Copenhagen harbour is objectionable for its imaging of an incomplete womanhood, of failed sexual being – and start clamouring for it to be brought down. The “logic” might go like this: Denmark is European and Europe is colonialist, therefore the mermaid statue is undesirable! (What a syllogism!) And what about the French-American Statue of Liberty – in spite of the historical context of the work – might fall foul of our protesters. One can only laugh wryly: Who would wager the effort to remove the sheer weight of this colossus?
And whereto? The relationship between seriousness and humour (which ties in with satire) cannot be gainsaid, and I have succumbed to it again in this writing. I grant that we interpret – and experience – things differently: The students and I do not speak the same language – and perhaps I am ungenerous in satirising their shenanigans. Anyway, in my book, UCT is a provider of useful education – to the extent that today I can (even) practise a brand of satire worthy of, and indeed worthier than, Charlie Hebdo’s! But I am disappointed at UCT’s handling of matters (apparently final for now): I have noticed Senate’s voting for and against the removal of the statue, and sense intellectual cowardice.
I offer these young and not-so-young people, black and white, the sage words of Rabindranath Tagore on education. After more than a century and a half they still ring clear as bells from a tower – and he was speaking precisely about education in a culturally foreign, even hostile environment, an English environment in fact. “The power of thought and the power of imagination,” writes Tagore, “are indispensible to us for discharging the duties of life. We cannot do without those two powers…” My impression sadly is that our students in this mêlée around Rhodes do not have this appreciation of education, and do not possess these powers.
In conclusion, I put forward the poet Yannis Ritsos, in a verse titled Stones:
Days come, go, without effort, no surprises.
The stones soak in the light and memory.
One makes a stone a pillow.
Another puts a stone on his clothes before swimming
to keep them from being blown away by the wind.
Another uses a stone as his stool
or to mark something in his field, in the cemetery,
in the wall, in the woods.
Later, after sunset, when you return home
any pebble from the beach you place on your table
is a statuette …
Only, I think that every day comes with good surprises (reconciliation may well lie on the dawn’s horizon), and the pebbles are, symbolically, statues – large symbols of worthwhile life that no colonialistic Rhodes can sully.
As for ourselves, making up our minds about what I have risked to say here (a kind of voting): Shall we cross the bridge of decision when we get there? But what if, when we “get there”, we are too late, the bridge being gone, having fallen like that of San Luis Rey?