We, the People. Albie Sachs
sense of society, your sense of your country, and your willingness to listen to your colleagues. We have to forge and shape something extremely precious and extremely pressurised, something durable. That was my job, my life, my way of earning my living.
To me that is part of the soft vengeance. And it’s extremely powerful.
The power of validating your life’s aspirations, the power of having a society with strong moral foundations that unite people and bring them together and connect them, is well beyond the power that comes out of the barrel of a gun or the placement of electrodes or the force of a boot, or even sending someone to jail.
The story’s almost over. Someone’s making a film of my life, and she decides we must go to Maputo and film me at the site where I was blown up. And I say, that’s fine, but Vanessa and Oliver must come as well. Oliver’s now about three and a half. He climbs into bed in the morning, lies between Vanessa and myself, and we play a game with short arm and long arm. He loves short arm. And long arm is speaking to short arm, saying, ‘Wakey, wakey, wakey!’ and short arm jumps up in surprise. And I want him to understand why his daddy looks funny and different, and I want him to hear it from me.
We go to the spot, and the understanding is that if the film comes out corny or false, we’re not going to use it. And I sit down on the pavement where my body lay on the ground, and hold Oliver with my left arm, and tell him how I walk down the stairs of that building, I’m on my way to the beach, my car is parked over there, and boooom! I’m hit, and I don’t know what’s happening. I find I can tell him about that, about the bomb, I can tell him all that, and also that some TV journalists happened to come by and put me in their van and took me to the hospital. I can tell him all that. I can tell him about the doctors deciding my arm is so messed up, that I’d be much happier and be in less pain, if they cut off and put bandages on the broken part. I can tell him about that. But I can’t tell him why it happened. I find I can’t.
I don’t want to tell him about apartheid. I don’t want to tell him that his mummy and I, his daddy, wouldn’t have been allowed to live together, to love each other, to conceive him. I don’t want to. I don’t want to tell him about that world where everybody’s lives were defined by race. He’ll learn – of course he’ll learn! Racism is still everywhere in the world. But I don’t want him to learn it from me. I feel it will be pulling me back emotionally, and pulling him back, from the world in which he’s growing up as a young, free child.
And I wonder to myself if possibly the time hasn’t come to stop even talking about soft vengeance, and not to think of vengeance at all, not even in this benign, transformative form. Maybe the experience of living soft vengeance has become so pervasive, that even the ambiguous phrase itself should disappear. Maybe the time has come to just live in, explore and develop the society – enjoy the society – that soft vengeance has created.
SIX
Reconciling the Past and the Future
Archives, Truth and Reconciliation
1ST NATIONAL ARCHIVES LECTURE | SENATE HOUSE, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON | 24 OCTOBER 2005
I woke up this morning feeling extremely queasy and everything around me seemed a bit unreal. I would reach for something and just as I was about to seize it, it seemed to disappear.
Naturally I was quite alarmed and I went to the doctor and the doctor looked at me and said:
‘You’re from South Africa, aren’t you?’
And I said, ‘Yes’.
He said, ‘I can tell from your accent, and I can tell from just the way you’re relating these symptoms to me; immediately I know what your ailment is, it’s endemic in South Africa, I’m sad to say it’s incurable, but it can be managed’.
And I said, ‘Well what is it?’
And he said, ‘It’s archive fever’.
‘I’ve had many patients from South Africa with that ailment’, he continued, ‘and I’m not surprised, because people entering the realm of archives feel they’re entering a realm of security where facts are facts, where things are collected and classified in a completely neutral way, where there’s no hierarchy of importance, and chunks – nuggets – of social reality from one period are stored forever, for examination, certainly for as long as the materials last. And instead of feeling more secure as a result of entering this realm, they find themselves totally displaced. To begin with, the documents are as partial as you can get. They were documents that were collected by a ruling minority, confident and assured in relation to its right to rule, and not only to rule but to the right to record their own history, the story of the world in which they functioned, from their own point of view, which they saw as the natural point of view’.
‘As for the majority of the population, they weren’t agents of history; they were subjects of anthropology. They didn’t live in time, but existed as units of unchanging social structures. And if any information at all was collected from what were called the native people, it was assembled not with the view to understanding their society as it understood itself, but with a view to more effective administration through control and subordination. And so this apparently neutral collection of documents called the archive immediately appears to be as partial as you can get. The silences become far more dramatic than the speech, the absences from the record more resonant than anything you read. You want to know what has been left out, but how do we find out what’s not there? How can we interpret what is there without knowing about the silences and the gaps? And to make it worse, huge quantities of these documents that would seem to be particularly revealing were destroyed – deliberately, intentionally destroyed, to ensure that the picture that came through was a partial picture of a partial picture. Can you be surprised that your head seems split and your vision blurred?’
‘If that’s not enough’, he continued relentlessly, ‘Jacques Derrida came to Johannesburg at the height of the ferment and left behind him a blazing trail of contestation and irreverence. It was he who introduced the very words “archive fever”. The very act of taking a document, a piece of information, and placing it in a file is, in its own way, betraying that document as a source of information. You’re detaching it from its context, you’re placing it in a different context, you’re giving it an eternal real life of its own, when in fact it had a transitory, integrated, consequential relationship with the context in which it was generated. A severed limb has all the physical features of an arm or a leg, but its formaldehyde immortality is its functional mortality. It no longer moves, feels pain, touches the ground or the arm or the leg of another.’
The doctor looked sadly and sympathetically at me. I felt disturbed. As anybody here would know, archive fever is very, very contagious. And if that wasn’t enough, archivists found themselves confronted by people from the Liberation Movement, saying:
The only reference to us, fighting for the rights of the majority of the people, in the documents that you claim to be neutral, are to us as a group of gangsters, terrorists. We are seen through the optic of police investigations aimed at destroying us. Everything we say and did is collected, not with a view to honouring what we stood for, but with a view to prosecuting us, maybe sending us to the gallows. The information is all distorted.
On the other hand, our own story of ourselves is not there at all: it was forbidden even to quote the whole list of banned people, it was a criminal offence to distribute their materials. One needed permission as a librarian to have a copy of Justice in South Africa by Albie Sachs, PhD, University of Sussex, my thesis, and it wasn’t easily granted.
If that’s not enough, other voices are coming forward: ‘What about the oral tradition? That is how memory is transmitted amongst our people: stories, parables, through oratory, praise singers, multiple different ways of interpreting legends, family narratives and stories from the Bible, tales passed from grandparents to parents to grandchildren, from generation to generation. A rich store of information and knowledge, it’s not in the archives at all’.
And