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Kwa Thema is a sprawling black township some 50 kilometres from Johannesburg, with 110 000 inhabitants. The mayor, Mrs Matilda Mothlaping, received me in her office at the township's Civic Centre. She was very open when I began asking her how she saw the situation in South Africa.
‘What is heartbreaking to me,’ she said, ‘is the total lack of unity among blacks in this country. We will never reach a consensus as long as our opinions remain as fragmented as they are. We blacks are utterly divided. We make it our business to criticise each other constantly, so that we never come to an agreement. Yet it is only through working together that we will achieve a complete change away from apartheid. If we only had a leader like Mahatma Gandhi, we would be climbing our mountain together.’
To outsiders it may sound like a cliché to talk of South Africa's problems as demanding unique solutions in the late eighties. However, three years of reporting in this magnificent land have convinced me that the complexity arising from such an incredible mixture of cultures, traditions and psychologies does demand the closest scrutiny if its true realities are to be grasped. Before putting a single line about South Africa down on paper, I remained silent, listening, observing, and processing information, because the ways in which the different peoples of South Africa live, think and feel are immensely diverse.
In my observations, I have come to the conclusion that South Africa's inhabitants - black, white, coloured and Indian - operate with entirely different ‘mindscapes’, or cultural insights. Mayor Mothlaping had come to this insight about her own black community. ‘We blacks must recognise the importance of the next man. We must make an all-out effort to understand how he thinks and views the problems common to all of us here. Only by carefully listening to each other will we eventually be able to find common ground. The art of negotiation is based on the search for reconciliation. There must be room left for disagreement - we must be able to agree to disagree on certain points, without it preventing us from moving together towards our common goal - the liberation from apartheid. We must learn to respect the other man's views - that is the basis of political democracy. Even if we do belong to different ethnic and cultural groups, we are blacks and we urgently need a leader to unite us as a nation. As long as there are blacks who refuse to support a particular road to liberation, the people are left confused, without true
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