Listening to the silent majority

[57]

Mentioning ‘change’ to Don Mattera got him off on another spirited cadenza. ‘You mean the Quislings that they are trying to get into this parliament? These people are handpicked puppets. Is that change? Is it change, when our leaders sit in jail, and are almost dying? What constitutes a terrorist? The man who has a uniform and has been given the right to shoot down children in the townships? White people carry guns in the streets. Even blacks have been given licences for firearms. My memory captures and remembers that and then I am being told I am an enemy of the state!’

‘Do you look upon John Mavuso or Gatsha Buthelezi as Quislings?’ I asked. ‘No, a Quisling is not a person or a group that propagates government policy, or is being used within that field to support government policy. Enos Mabuza, Chief Minister of the KaNgwane homeland, for instance, is a good man, but he is functioning in the wrong place. He should not be a Chief Minister and should not serve in the KaNgwane

[p. 72]

parliament. He should not be there. I know, because I was in the coloured Labour Party during 1969. At that time, it was an anti-apartheid organisation. I was detained. Even at that time, we should not have been there, no matter what we say now. So, the less I say about John Mavuso or Gatsha Buthelezi on your tape, the better.’ At this point I turned off the recorder and writer Mattera produced an absolutely devastating indictment of all those blacks who operated from within the system. Why does the government like to play with phrases, that Buthelezi is the leader of 6 million Zulus? Let him walk alone without body-guards. Let him go alone in the townships. I walk any time, anywhere in Soweto. These so-called black leaders ride around in bullet-proof cars. So, I am saying, as much as we are compassionate and forgiving people our memories will not allow us to forget easily, and push these things aside. The Jews are still remembering the very first Masada. They live by that and have built a monument to its memory.’

‘Indeed,’ I said, ‘that's why we now speak of the “Masada complex”. Demosthenes found a way to overcome his stammer by speaking on the seashore with pebbles in his mouth. He became one of the greatest orators of Greece. What I am saying is, why should anyone continue generation after generation to aggrandize or abet the miserable crimes of forefathers and deliberately turn them into a kind of permanent affliction as in the case of the Masada complex? It leads to conceited fantasies and discourages the acceptance of new realities. In short, it leads to damaged and sick minds. You are a different man, Don: although the biology and neurophysiology of our brains is the same, the input and the structuring takes us worlds apart from each other. You are coloured, which tells us something about bonding blacks and whites. But mind and body are one, so what we should really be working on is the symbiosis of our brains. Are you hopeful about your country?’

Mattera: ‘I am excited, because black people have overcome the fear of death. Once you overcome that, you are moving on the right path. The white man has not overcome his fear of death. The white man has not overcome his greed. He has not overcome the fact that he must relinquish power. Why does Margaret Thatcher all of a sudden speak up about us? Why America? Why is the whole world all of a sudden worried about us? Why do they worry only now about dispensation and negotiation? Because memory is a weapon. They have seen that no other country in the world has been saved when men do these bad things to

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other men. They have had a chance, like Ronald Reagan, who was at one stage the most powerful man in the world. He let the opportunity slip through his fingers: I mean the opportunity to help South Africa to come to sanity. Who is going to save us now? I wouldn't like to see that moment come.’

Don Mattera continued, ‘You know the difference between the South African government, its military and its police force on one side and the activists and the people on the other? The difference is guns. Guns are the sole difference. But blacks no longer fear them. Whites are not cleverer than us. They are not more talented than us. They are not more humane than us. They have nothing we do not have. The difference is the machine-guns, their fire-power. I am not saying, we must have fire-power. I am saying, that somewhere along the line sanity must prevail over greed and apartheid. I love my country. I love my people, Afrikaners included, because they have the right to live as human beings, like us. Therefore, I believe that the change must be more in people's hearts than in people's brains.’

I realized that my ardent plea to my fellow writer from South Africa, to please make a clear distinction between ‘brain’ and ‘heart’ had fallen on deaf ears. Soul and body, mind and brain are one inseperable unit. A change of heart is possible only when changing our mind includes restructuring the input in our brains and replacing them with new realities.