History is often mistakenly thought to be only about the past.
But the arguments of the past week over apartheid’s being declared a crime against humanity amplify the sense in which history not only shadows the present, but is integral to it, to ‘us’, our identity, our ideals, our foibles and flaws, achievements and errors. Moving on always means taking it with us, even if it seems at times like an old stuffed suitcase too small for its contents, baggage we’d be better off without. Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t leave it behind.
Which is why arguing about our history is much less of a problem than not arguing about it. We ought to cherish these episodes of dispute, if only because our history is too important, too ‘present’, to risk being taken out of our hands, or reduced to an approved version that invites only public assent.
At the very least, our arguments, as long as we have them, affirm that we live in a free and open society that values exercising its freedom to disagree openly and so be equipped to understand itself better, and be better.
It’s not easy. Then again, it’s not as risky as the alternative, for an enforced unanimity on what is approved and permissible is the hallmark of unfree societies – societies where people are afraid to say what is true for them, to test ‘truths’ or to have their ‘truths’ tested. They are societies of forgetting.
Yet, in the wake of former president FW de Klerk’s statements about apartheid and its classification as a crime against humanity – even his retraction and apology – too many South Africans seemed overly willing to make argumentation itself impermissible, and to affirm the ‘heresy’ rather than contest the merits.
Organisations professing faith in our democratic freedoms seemed to draw back from encouraging us to exercise them.
Worse, no less a person than President Cyril Ramaphosa surely marred a sentiment none could dispute – that apartheid ‘was so immoral in its conception and so devastating in its execution that there is no South African living today who is not touched by its legacy’ – by adding: ‘I would even go on to say that to deny this is even treasonous.’
In a free society, to rely on criminal law to determine the adjudication of history is a grave contradiction.
Of course, the impulse to criminalise ‘wrong’ ideas about history is not new. It ought to be a matter of greater notoriety than it is that in no fewer than 16 European countries and in Israel, Holocaust denial is illegal.
The objection cannot be better put than in the words of Noam Chomsky, who wrote: ‘It seems to me something of a scandal that it is even necessary to debate these issues two centuries after Voltaire defended the right of free expression for views he detested. It is a poor service to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust to adopt a central doctrine of their murderers.’
It’s surely a delusion to think that using the law to compel obedience to facts succeeds in strengthening truth or society’s attachment to it. It’s not as easy as that, and it shouldn’t be.
In our case, imagine the alternative responses to the moral indignation we have been served with. What if the education authorities had sponsored a national essay competition among the country’s senior schools on the question: Was apartheid a crime against humanity? The winning essay would have to demonstrate not only rigour of argument and research, but evidence of the writer having sought out first-hand testimony to illuminate his or her argument, one way or the other. I picture a sponsored lecture circuit by South Africa’s leading historians; special exhibitions by the country’s exceptional museums and archives of popular memory (how many of us know the treasures they contain?); university debates; library initiatives; newspapers inviting readers to tell it as it was, for them.
I have long believed that apartheid was so ordinary to so many of us that we still fail to appreciate its scale and impact – even as we struggle under its lasting burdens.
That such an effort against forgetting might seem unthinkable is because it is, assuredly, not easy.
If verifiable facts are the authority of history, its freight is something else, a jostling assembly of notions, memories, sensations. These are truths, too, which cannot lightly be shrugged off.
In a column published in Rapport earlier this year, I recalled what I described as ‘one of the most discomforting – and, I later knew, ill-judged – differences of opinion I have ever had’.
‘It was with an elderly woman in a museum, about a decade ago,’ I wrote. ‘She had a tattoo on her arm. It wasn’t just any tattoo, and it wasn’t just any museum, either.’
The piece goes on:
Yad Vashem left me with an impression of extraordinary, almost jarring, tranquillity on that 2011 visit, a light breeze sifting through the trees on the western slope of Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl providing some relief from the heat. It was cooler inside, and very quiet. But there is nothing tranquil about this memorial to the defining catastrophe of what historian Max Hastings has described as the ‘greatest human disaster in history’.
Visiting the preeminent monument to the Holocaust is – properly, in my view – a deeply unsettling experience.
Thoughtlessly, though not without conviction, I contrived to make it more so by picking an argument with our guide, the woman with the tattoo on her arm.
The tattoo was, of course, a number. When I think of it now, I should have kept my mouth shut when I saw that tattoo for the first time as she lifted her thin arm to point at a photograph of German soldiers, turned to us visitors and – understandably, perhaps even justifiably – declared: ‘They were animals!’
‘No’, I blurted, ‘they were humans. Isn’t that the point? They were humans, like us.’
In that instant I knew I’d triggered a tremor in her fragile frame, which, for all the purity of my intention, was unkind; in hindsight, I realised she was expressing a feeling, not an idea, but that I, determined to test the idea, was content to disregard the feeling.
I believe, and I said so then, that the problem of evil – the awful things we do to other people – is a human problem, not an un-human one. But I could have chosen a better moment.’
At the time of writing the column, I had just finished reading Richard Overy’s 2002 Interrogations – Inside the Minds of the Nazi Elite, a compendium of pre-Nuremberg interviews with Reich leaders and functionaries who, many of them, were responsible for unspeakable things.
As I wrote in the column: ‘They emerge as thoroughly human figures, fallible, dissembling, capable of reason, not unaccomplished, not without affection and humour, calculating. Some come across as undisguisedly thuggish, others as worldly, reflective, possessed of a certain selflessness. But all, in one way or another, were players in an episode of atrocity conducted on an industrial scale.’
And I noted that the book contains a brief mention of apartheid. Touching on the national soul-searching following the collapse of ‘corrupt’ regimes since 1945, Overy writes: ‘For the victims of oppression there is the added difficulty of living afterwards with those who stood by and did nothing, whose lack of civil courage or crude self-interest or political naiveté allowed them to tolerate without protest a regime whose actions were manifestly criminal.’
I ended by saying: ‘Reading this, I thought not only of my impetuous response to the woman with the tattoo, but of my own flawed South Africanness, and of the testing idea that being our best rational selves means acknowledging that history is a sum not just of events but of sensations, too.’
These considerations are valid, I believe, in the context of South Africa’s response to the uproar over De Klerk’s comments.
It must be possible, as the British liberal Maajid Nawaz puts it, to adhere to the principle – as a unitary concept, not a compromise between the one and the other – that ‘no idea is above scrutiny and no people are beneath dignity’.
It’s a high standard, and a worthwhile one, but it can only be achieved by argument – by openness, honesty, and a conviction that free discussion is the benchmark both of scrutiny and of dignity. It is an undertaking among citizens that this is how we live, and how we hope to live. It does not stop short at outrage, but nor does it discount human pain and anguish.
For all the political cynicism and expedience in the circumstances that led to the formal declaration of apartheid as a crime against humanity – on the part, for instance, of sponsoring Cold War states whose own flagrant human rights abuses were immense and shameful – we can put the declaration aside and find it impossible not to acknowledge that in its intentions, scale and impact, apartheid was indeed a crime against humanity.
But this is not a good reason not to have the argument.
In the interests of avoiding amnesia and the cynicism of thinking that we know enough to disregard further enquiry into what really happened, we are rewarded by steeling ourselves to always be willing to see the claims of history tested, for that is also a guarantee against forgetting, and an assurance of showing respect for those who never will forget, even if they wished to.
[Picture: Painting of the Sharpeville massacre on 21 March 1960, currently located in the South African Consulate in London. Wikipedia.]
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