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Book reviews |
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BEING THERE AS THE LAAGER COMES TUMBLING DOWN
Bibliographic details: Now is the time: a personal
account of South Africa's historic transition from apartheid to democracy,
by Marius Benson. Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 1994.ISBN
0 7333 0357 9 Category: Non-fiction |
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BEING THERE AS THE LAAGER COMES TUMBLING DOWN THE events of the last five years in South Africa have been truly remarkable and have defied prediction. As I look back over news cuttings from the period I can chart the seismic waves of cautious optimism and doomy pessimism. Today there is a new flag, Nelson Mandela is the first president to be elected by a fully democratic process, the new ANC-led government includes elements as diverse Inkatha Freedom Party leader Gatsha Buthelezi and Winnie Mandela, South African teams are welcome on cricket pitches and rugby fields around the world and fears of a right-wing guerilla revolt have proved to be unfounded - so far, the pessimists would say darkly. For decades journalists regarded South Africa as a 'good' bad story, the source of increasingly more outrageous reports of police-state excesses, human rights abuses, racist extremism and courageous defiance of the apartheid regime. South Africa made dictators around the world look moderate and reasonable by comparison. When Mandela and other black leaders were released in February 1990 and negotiations began between F. W. de Klerk's National Party government, things changed faster than anyone had imagined possible and the world's press descended for what promised to be an even stranger story, possibly ending in the Mother of all Bloodbaths. Australian journalist Marius Benson, working for ABC Radio and TV, was posted to Johannesburg in July 1993. In the next year he observed South Africa's final transition to democracy. Benson's 'Now Is the Time' is an exhilarating and insightful frontline impression of this climactic year. It's not a particularly long book, just 154 pages, but Benson picks his moments to illustrate the complexity, irony and emotional content of each incident and observation. On arrival, he notes: 'It's traditional for visitors to decide that any new city has the worst drivers in the world, whether it's Rome, Paris, or Bangkok, or wherever. But Johannesburg really does. And if there is any doubt about the national character behind the wheel, look at the statistics. Every year South African roads claim 11,000 lives. It's part of a sort of damn the torpedoes... forget the seatbelt... don't worry about the child restraints... have another cigarette life at the edge feeling.' Benson finds that, while there are fewer armed police and soldiers on the streets than he had expected, it is a very violent city, but the locals don't see it that way. When he is told by a PRO that Jo'burg is not more violent than New York, he tells his informant that he was recently in the Big Apple, and while he felt safe to walk around there at night, he would never do so in Johannesburg - ' "Well, maybe, but you wouldn't walk round Harlem after dark." I was left to ponder a South African promotional campaign based on the theme "Come to South Africa - as safe as Harlem after dark." ' As the negotiations on the new constitution and the election process lurch from brink to abyss and back again, the extremists on the Left and right become ever more excitable. Benson speaks to Afrikaans men and women who are proud of their skills with weapons and love to dwell on violent possibilities: 'Bosnia will look like a picnic... even the women is getting armed.' He asks one woman: ' "What will you do with your weapons when the armoured vehicles arrive?" - "Huh- huh," she laughed softly. "I think they will get a surprise." ' At the other polarity, Benson attends the trial in Cape Town of six young black men accused of the brutal killing of Amy Bhiel, an American exchange student, in the Guguleto township. Despite the pleas of black friends that she was working with them for the black cause, her killers stoned and then butchered her with knives, simply because she was white, a 'settler'. 'As awful as that murder was, the court case seemed to give an even more depressing view of race relations in South Africa. When Amy Bhiel's death was described in court, there was laughter from the public gallery, packed with young supporters of the accused. At every adjournment they would leave the court and gather in the street outside. They would refuse to talk to reporters but would dance and chant: "One settler, one bullet... One settler, one bullet... Settler, settler, settler... bullet, bullet, bullet." ' He also finds that despite the merchants of doom and the on- going daily violence, there is a fair amount of ironic humour in the situation: 'As the walls built by cultural boycotts imposed on the apartheid regime fell, over the tumbled battlements scrambled a motley army of international celebrities, their careers in varying states of radiance. Rock performers who at their peak were barely visible headed for South Africa for a final, an unasked-for encore. Tours were announced for groups like Smokie and Foreigner, an old Bay City Roller was found to open a new shopping centre. The invasion soon prompted an article in the Weekly Mail newspaper pleading 'Bring Back the Cultural Boycott'. He also bumps into John Mortimer, author of the Rumpole series, who although he acknowledges he is honorary chairman of Atheists for Christ, observes: 'I think the Christian ethic's superb. I think the idea that every individual soul is of enormous importance is what should be tried out in South Africa.' As the pace builds towards the elections, the situation becomes more volatile and Benson is hard-pressed to stay with the action. The police and military in the pseudo-independent homeland of BophuthaTswana revolt, and as the former president Lucas Mangope flees the capital by helicopter, forces of the right-wing Afrikaner Weerstand Beweging (AWB) rides to the rescue to 'save the people from the Communists and the African National Congress'. However, in the streets of Mmabatho/Mafikeng drunk AWB storm troopers are riding around in bakkies (pick-ups/utes) shooting blacks at random and assaulting journalists. Benson and his colleagues are stopped by the supremacist vigilantes and told: 'You get out of here... You tell the world shit about us. You fuck off out of here. We see you here in town again in five minutes we shoot you.' However, 'Even in the midst of the tension it had a comic side. People running down streets unable to see for the huge bundles of menswear in their arms, others desperately trying to fit a microwave into a too-small car boot.' However the grimmest irony comes when a group of AWB men '...had been firing on crowds of the black people they were supposedly there to liberate. Their notional allies, the BophuthaTswana police, fire back. One man was killed, three others wounded. One escaped, the remaining two lay on the ground by their car for more than half an hour, pleading for their lives, calling for an ambulance. "Black Bastards," on muttered under his breath. And then, "Sorry, sorry, sorry." And later, "Please get us an ambulance." Cameramen and still photographers crowded around the wounded men in an undeniably vulturine group. With the passing minutes the fever of killing and fear seemed to ebb and the atmosphere grew more relaxed. Then a black Bop policeman, armed with an automatic rifle, stepped forward and pumped bullets into the wounded men.' This one incident was really the AWB's Waterloo. As the South African Defence Force took over, they retreated rapidly - their first mass mobilisation and armed action had ended in humiliation. However their neo-Nazi leader Eugene Terre'Blanche 'claimed BophuthaTswana as a "brilliant victory", expressing the death toll as a football score, he claimed his side had won 50-3.' The final act of this potentially apocalyptic drama was the election process - regarded by many as a miracle because Inkatha had boycotted the process until the last minute, threatening all kinds of dire violent consequences if its additional demands about regional autonomy were not met. Already 15,000 had died in the four years since Mandela's release, and the possibility of Buthelezi leading hordes of conservative Zulus against the ANC-supporting Zulus remained a worst-case scenario almost to the end. Hence the confused optimism expressed thus: 'The outgoing Foreign Minister, Pik Botha, provided an accurate summation of the election process when he gave this assessment of the first day of voting: "My impression is, by and large, more or less, so far, touch wood, it's been going well, despite the bomb explosions." ' In all, 19,533,498 South Africans voted in the 1994 election - most of them for the first time in a national election, and although there were allegations of fraud, particularly in Inkatha's KwaZulu homeland, the consensus was that under the circumstances the process had been free and fair. The demons of doubt and despair had been bested. To the ANC victors the spoils and the responsibility for undoing decades of inequality, exploitation and cruelty. As Benson concludes, it won't be easy: 'It is possible to prove with almost mathematical certainty that the new South Africa will not work. A nation of 40 million people has an economy the size of New South Wales. Unemployment stands officially at just under 50 per cent. A hoped-for-growth rate of 3 per cent will barely produce jobs for new arrivals in the work force let alone the millions left unemployed and unskilled by apartheid and the battle to end it. A budget deficit of 6.5 per cent and an inflation rate of over 7 per cent mean the local and international business community will take fright at any big- spending initiatives of the government. The socio-economic equation may seem irrefutable, but it is even easier to prove that South Africa could not have had a democratic election on 27 April. The country's recent history is studded with impossibilities and its future with imponderables.' Benson's personal record of this amazing year has captured the turbulent the spirit of the times: from fear to loathing, from persistent apprehension to sudden joyful awareness that the 'impossible' had happened, South Africa was a democratic state led by the man most of us never imagined we would see alive in our lifetimes. A miracle indeed - God Bless Africa! |
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