For SA to achieve true reconciliation, white people need to face the truth about our part in apartheid, writes Hamilton Wende.
“Did you know her?” a friend of mine asked me the other day. She was talking about apartheid spy Olivia Forsyth who was spying on, and betraying, her fellow students at Rhodes in the early 1980s.
I didn’t know her, I’m very glad to say. Although I believe we were both at Wits in 1980, our paths never crossed.
A lot has been said about Forsyth after her book was published, and one thing that struck me when I heard her speaking on a radio talk show was her claim that she grew up as a white girl here not understanding anything about apartheid. She went on to make the preposterous assertion that even at Wits University, she was somehow shielded from the reality of apartheid.
She may have chosen to ignore the almost daily evidence of lectures, posters, furious debates, the demonstrations going on around her, but she cannot claim not to have known about what was happening to black people in our country.
This narrative of white people not knowing about apartheid is something that cannot go unchallenged. Today on campuses across the country, young black people are talking openly about entering “a post-reconciliation” period where the all-too-easy narrative of unity and white ignorance of the past are going to be actively disputed.
This is a healthy challenge that white people, particularly those over 40, must actively engage with. I remember during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a white man, some 20 years older than me, saying at a suburban cocktail party that the revelations of torture and killing “bored him”. Such callousness is a time bomb inside our national consciousness.
People like him may have been able to get away with saying, and believing, such things during the time of active reconciliation when black people under the leadership of Nelson Mandela reached out for years to white people. But no longer.
Reconciliation is by no means dead. Justice Minister Michael Masutha’s release of Eugene de Kock on parole “in the interests of nation building” is the latest high-profile example of this.
However, today, reconciliation requires something more from white people. It requires a commitment to listen to the narrative of black people, and a commitment to facing up to the truth of our deep complicity in the racial brutality of the past.
It was at Wits in the early 1980s that I learnt much about what was happening. I remember the shock and horror so many of us felt when the Security Police fired bullets into the door of the student representative office as a warning of what we might expect. I remember well Brigadier Theunis “Rooi Rus” Swanepoel leading the riot police in their camouflage with tear gas and sjamboks onto the campus. I remember vividly the beatings that many students endured as they scattered across the Library Lawns. We all knew, too, that in relative terms we were lucky. Black students were almost always shot at. “Rooi Rus” was notorious for being the man who ordered the shooting of students in Soweto in 1976.
I will never forget walking onto campus and hearing that Neil Aggett had been found hanging in his cell after being beaten, blindfolded and given electric shocks. The inquest at the time found that he had committed suicide and the police were not to blame. We knew that wasn’t true. And I challenge any white person of my age to say otherwise. The police knew it wasn’t true. The government knew it wasn’t true. They simply lied and too many of us accepted their lies. That is a reality we cannot now, decades later, simply deny.
We can say that many of us were scared, that the brutal death of someone like Aggett achieved its objective – it terrified many white people of the consequences of speaking out. Many white people – like people all over the world in conflict zones today – simply wanted to get on with their lives as best we could. We wanted to live, love, get married, and raise and educate our children as best we could. We can say that, because of this, we closed our eyes too often. We can also say – and we must admit this shocking reality – that many of us actively supported the National Party, and repeatedly voted it back into power for nearly 50 years.
We must say that many white people believed in the racist doctrines that underlay apartheid. I was there; I heard these disgusting beliefs being uttered. Racial hatred and an unquestioning belief in white supremacy were woven into our social fabric. The consequence of this was our devastating cruelty. There were some white people – few in the beginning – who opposed these notions and who fought against apartheid. There were white people like Aggett who bravely risked their lives to stand up for their beliefs. There were white lawyers and judges who fought for justice and decency. There were journalists and writers who told the truth about our oppression of black people. There were thousands of ordinary white people, who in just trying to live their lives, tried also to treat black people with fairness and dignity.
We have all come on a long journey. There is much good that has emerged through our road of reconciliation, but, as we go forward we, as white people, cannot say we never knew. We owe it to our children, and to their future in this country, to face the truth and to tell it to them, so that they know their past, and crucially, understand the past of black people.
* Hamilton Wende is a commentator, freelance writer and television producer. He has covered wars in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. He has worked for international networks including the BBC, NBC, ABC (Australia), SBS (Australia), NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) and Al Jazeera English.
** The views expressed heer are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
The Star