Listening to the silent majority

[46]

I had just finished reading, at the advice of another friend, Soweto psychiatrist Dr Solly Rataemane (who incidentally teaches white doctors in a Hillbrow Hospital), Don Mattera's book, Memory Is The Weapon.^31. Mattera (54), a coloured writer, effectively recounted his experiences in the native township of Sophiatown. He described what he called ‘the metamorphosis from a veritable violent beast to a human being’ at the age of 20, ‘when the first seeds of political awareness were sown at a historic anti-removal campaign mass meeting’. Don's recollections make shocking and moving reading. I asked myself to what extent whites in South Africa bother to read some of the publications by the black or coloured majority. My impression is that in classic ostrich fashion, most whites simply ignore the expressions of black souls and black minds, and that, while it is an absolute certainty that they will have to share this corner of the earth with blacks, coloureds and Indians in the foreseeable future, they are largely ignorant of how their fellow countrymen experienced and processed the hardships, insults, and what they considered ‘dehumanizing circumstances’ under which they grew up and lived all their lives. What do whites really know about the pain, the suffering, or in general, the psychological damage, that have been inflicted for genera-

31. Ravan Press, Johannesburg (1987) 151 pages

[p. 56]

tions on black minds? I wonder. I also don't think, that to reach a modus vivendi between blacks and whites is a matter of scrapping the Separate Amenities Act now or a year later. My deepest concern about the establishment of a way of life acceptable to all in South Africa is how to establish an armistice in the battle of the mind that is now being waged and is steadily increasing in ferocity and intensity. Racial laws must and will be scrapped for sure. But it is peace of mind, this fine tuning between the minds of blacks and whites, I am thinking about, so that the music they will make no longer resembles displeasing cacophony, but a harmony of attitudes for everyone, regardless of colour or group, to enjoy, to understand and to be a pleasure to think about.