Advancing Human Rights in South Africa

I think it was Shakespeare in Twelfth Night, who used the phrase 'appetite grows by what it feeds on'. So I had that lovely book published, Protecting Human Rights in the New South Africa, and I thought, I must follow up with another book now that we're preparing for negotiations, we're thinking about constitutional texts, we're thinking about structures of government, and we're thinking about living under a constitution. Themes have been included: freedom of speech, children's rights, gender rights, land rights, a whole range of different things, but now we need a kind of hard nitty gritty, particularly in the economic sphere. I had come up with the theme of preparing ourselves for freedom, and I felt we needed to balance it with now preparing ourselves for power. Freedom meant liberating our minds, opening up, being more engaging, taking more risks, culturally, intellectually, delving deeper, seeking out contradictions, rather than avoiding them. But now our Constitution means structuring power, and I'm invited by the University of Cape Town to be an honorary professor there, and I get an honorary degree. So, my main base is University of the Western Cape where I have an office and am assisted by Dorothy Williams, to whom I'd been whistling in prison years and years before, and I'm working now on basically the theme of preparing ourselves for power.

I give my inaugural lecture on perfectibility and corruptibility. All constitutions are based on aiming for perfectibility and guarding against corruption. So, we didn't have this idea of ‘We're coming back. We’ll liberate South Africa. We'll be in charge,’ and ‘To you, the political kingdom, and all else will be given unto thee,' as Kwame Nkrumah said. We knew, from our own organisation’s problems and from what we'd experienced elsewhere in Africa and other parts of the world, that even heroic freedom fighters could go on to become authoritarian people dominating their states, benefiting their families, creating cliques around them. We'd seen that happening. I know how strongly our generation felt that our biggest gift to South Africa, especially those of us who've been abroad and been able to think about things, not with that daily survival in prison, in the underground, working with this struggle and that struggle, but the broader kind of vision. We really had to do something for the ages, for good weather and bad. And that would be a major historic vision. It went well beyond any idea of just getting the ANC into office and into power. It was our biggest gift to honour those who've struggled, to the nation in general: a new constitutional order.

I had been very skeptical of constitutions as being lawyer-dominated, and bills of rights as being property-oriented; too much power for judiciary: a class of people belonging to the upper reaches of society, identifying with the interests of the wealthy families and so on. Now, like many converts, I'm super enthusiastic about the idea of a bill of rights, constitutions and fundamental rights for everybody. I'm writing now for people in the struggle, and I'm writing for people outside. What are our positions on property, on land and redistribution, on affirmative action, which is a big theme that came from America: how to deal with systemic forms of disadvantage, so that even when you take away the official law that says 'whites only, whites only, whites only', you remove all that, but the structures still benefit those who had created these weapons to be supreme and to be dominant. How to deal with that. And you have to acknowledge the existence of racism, to tackle racism. You simply couldn't say non-racism; we don't pay any regard to race whatsoever. This was an enormous area of contestation. The question of property: We wanted property rights for people, for the poor. They had been dispossessed of their land and chucked out of their homes. They had a right to feel this is my home, this is my space. So, property rights shouldn't be seen simply as the rights of the wealthy to own huge tracts of land and to buy and sin as they wish and dispose of human beings like they dispose of old motor cars and worn-out tyres. We needed to find ways of dealing with the injustice of the past that didn't involve new forms of injustice, simply because the aim was a good one. These are the kinds of issues that are now developed.

This time, I'm aware now I'm writing for a book. The whole issue of federalism... We needed strong national government for national tasks, but we also needed strong local government. And there was a deep tension inside the ANC, the liberation movement, because we always believed in the masses, the grass roots, not top down. On the other hand, we wanted a strong central government to redistribute land, to provide education for everybody, health for everybody, and it was being projected about the 'F-word’, 'federalism', which was being advanced by people who were building up support on a tribalistic basis, wanting to have spheres of sovereignty belonging to their traditional communities, as they saw it, also by language groups, and also by white industrialists and others who were scared of a strong state - which they had created: a strong state to have the pass laws, domination, control and all the formal structures of apartheid, but now they wanted a weak state, so that the formal structures of apartheid couldn't be dismantled.

I was developing the themes of 'it's not the national versus the local.' We need the national, the regional and the local, and getting people to think creatively, constructively about that. When I look at the themes I see reshaping South Africa, problems of federalism, minorities and property rights, and a section on civil society. Will there be civil society in the new democratic South Africa? Will the state do everything? I was arguing very strongly in favour of not the state versus civil society. It's the state having to perform state function, but civil society to enable communities and groups to influence the state, to demand things of the state, and to work with the state. They're not inherently in competition. Affirmative action is such a critical thing with people who've been the biggest racist their whole life suddenly becoming the biggest non-racist by saying race doesn't matter anymore, apartheid's gone, what's the problem? And those of us who've been anti-racist and strongly non-racist saying that if you don't look at the reality of race, you're not looking at the reality of oppression and exploitation in this country; you've got to take account of it. And it doesn't automatically go, because advantaged people continue to have children who are advantaged, and their grandchildren who're advantaged: they're advantaged in education, in wealth, in confidence and everything. You need targeted, conscious, intentional interventions, but those interventions mustn't be cruel, they mustn't be unduly abrasive, but they must be very effective and very, very real. And the objective always is to create a sense of social cohesion, of national identity, of pride in being part of this thing called South Africa.

Then there is a whole chunk on culture: Such as ‘Black is beautiful, Brown is beautiful, White is beautiful’, ‘A Bill of Rights for South African Artists,’ from when I wrote a paper for the ANC conference on culture. There are two strong themes: One is we must ban saying 'Art is a weapon of struggle', and the other theme is 'Black is beautiful,' and the other theme is 'White is beautiful.' I thought there would be uproar about 'White is beautiful.' There wasn't. Nobody seemed to even notice it. I deliberately used that provocative title because in Mozambique, I'd heard one of the leaders there, who was asked by Comrade Sergio what's Frelimo's position on the phrase 'Black is beautiful'? And he said, *'Black is beautiful, brown is beautiful, white is beautiful. All people are capable of being beautiful. Whites have made whiteness ugly because it's been used for exclusion, for oppression, for areas of practices of superiority. But intrinsically, there's no reason why it shouldn't recapture beauty.’ *

The book is then published, it's circulating, it's being read, it's helping to change the debate. It's creating different points of reference, a different tonality, and it is inherently revolutionary. It's looking at a country of massive disadvantage, associated with race, and it's calling for pervasive change. But not threatening with AK47s and raised fists and ‘we're going to enforce this’ and bustle. It's encouraging people from the oppressed communities to have a vision of human solidarity and of an opening up future and a sense of connection, responsibility, bringing about the change, and for the oppressors to feel they don't have to fight to the death, they don't have to say 'to the last drop of blood,' and in fact, this is actually quite reasonable and, yes, you know, let's think about it in these terms: For the one to live the other doesn't have to die. There are ways we can live together, but we won't be able to live together if we simply carry on with the status quo, and we won't live together if one group now goes in for a counter revenge and new forms of disposition and so on. There are constitutional ways, organised ways, principled ways of bringing about change. So in a sense, this book is a good testimony to the nature of the debate in those days. It certainly refutes the idea that we were all starry-eyed and thinking that with freedom, everything changes automatically, and we've got wonderful leaders like Mandela and there is nothing to worry about. We didn't have that in mind at all. On the contrary, we very much had in mind the temptations, the seductions, the insecurities of power. We'd seen it working in our own ranks. We'd seen it affecting countries we'd lived in. We'd even seen it in countries like Tanganyika, Tanzania, with Julius Nyerere, the very decent, wonderful, totally non-corrupt person, idealistic, a good leader. But problems occurred there, and there were difficulties. Things don't unroll automatically, you have to work at it, think about it, work with others, be intelligent and full of heart all the way through. Advancing Human Rights in South Africa captures those moments, and those kinds of thinking.