I just read that this is the anniversary in South Africa of what one news report called “another step from apartheid to democracy by adopting a constitution that guaranteed equal rights for blacks and whites.”
If the past informs the present, then we could use a few more guarantees about equal rights ourselves.
We learned last week that a woman’s right to choose looks likely to be unconscionably crushed, and with that on the horizon, that right-wing politicians and commentators already are saying they would use the principle that has been cited to abolish abortion rights— the disingenuous principle that such rights are not expressly permitted in the Constitution— to challenge gay rights, marriage rights, voting rights, racial rights.
To hear these people thirsting to return to a nation of white, straight, Christian, authoritarian dominion, the sky is the limit.
Which brings me back to lessons from South Africa. Lessons I learned occasionally covering the country as a reporter.
For at least two decades, most Western news organizations maintained bureaus in South Africa, not because there was so much news to cover there on a daily basis, but because it seemed inevitable that as black protests grew against the restrictive regimen of apartheid, there would be a war. The government of the white minority would not give an inch, and the black majority would not forever tolerate its official classification as third class citizens. There were predictions that blacks would choose revenge over reconciliation, that the swimming pools behind white-owned mansions would run red with blood.
Their anger was no surprise.
The first time I ever traveled to South Africa to spend time in ABC News’s bureau, I checked into my hotel in downtown Johannesburg after the long overnight flight from London, then went outside to get some fresh air. Just across the street was a department store where a good-sized crowd had collected in front of its picture windows, all black people, peering at appliances on the other side of the glass.
I then taxied to the bureau and happened to mention the department store crowd to a local staffer, and she explained it. Johannesburg blacks were confined to living in the township called Soweto (which simply stood for South West Township)… but because they were third class citizens, the government hadn’t bothered to run electricity into Soweto. So these people were longingly looking at appliances that they could never expect to use. She said it was as if they were looking at Mars which, like electricity in their homes, they were never likely to see for themselves.
In another story of black life during apartheid, a correspondent for a British newspaper who I happened to know flew in to substitute for the vacationing resident correspondent, and stayed in the resident correspondent’s home. But since the visitor always parked in the driveway, he didn’t enter the garage until he’d been there a week and when he did he was flabbergasted by what he found: the maid who normally served the home’s owner was cowering in a large cardboard appliance crate. Because she didn’t have a pass permitting her to even be on the street, she was afraid to leave the garage.
That was the burden for black women and men in South Africa.
Nelson Mandela suffered mightily trying to change that. In 1964 he was sentenced, along with other anti-apartheid revolutionaries, to life imprisonment at hard labor, and spent 18 years of his punishment on Robben Island, the Alcatraz of South Africa. It was within sight of the gorgeous city of Cape Town, but nonetheless, for political prisoners, an impossible distance away.
That’s where he was the driving force behind that constitution in place for 26 years now that today guarantees equal rights for all.
I found out how, 12 years after apartheid finally faded out. I had gone back to do an hour-long program about post-apartheid South Africa, and as a part of it, I interviewed a man named Ahmed Khatrada. On Robben Island, he was Nelson Mandela’s cellmate during the intermittent periods when prisoners were not interned in isolation.
What he told me about equal rights in South Africa, and how they came about, should inform the present.
As prisoners chopped rocks in a limestone quarry on the island, Mandela would go to a guard and tell him, “I gotta piss.” To which the guard typically would say, “Go into that cavity in the quarry but be quick about it.”
Meantime, others in Mandela’s circle would go to other guards and do the same thing.
They didn’t have but minutes at a time in the cavity, but while secretively assembled there, they would talk about a South Africa without apartheid, the South Africa of their dreams. And they’d talk about the constitution in a South Africa like that. Although some thought it ought to deprive whites of their rights the way blacks had long been marginalized, it was Mandela who pushed against them, arguing for equal rights for all, black, white, and in-between. Eventually, on scraps of paper they had to hide in their clothing, they furtively wrote passages for that constitution, passages about a nation not only where the long-dominant whites no longer would be favored, but where the newly empowered blacks would not be favored either.
A South Africa where all would share in its fortunes, and in its future.
Things haven’t worked out the way they dreamed. Last time I was there, about a half-dozen years ago, there still were massive settlements where many blacks only had thin slats of wood for their walls and tin or tarpaper for their roofs. Plenty didn’t have electricity and many who did had pilfered it by running wires from someplace else. Nor did everyone have running water. People had to survive with what they called the “bucket system,” filling buckets from public taps and hauling these heavy loads of water back home. In one settlement called Khayelitsha, there was one concrete communal toilet for every 106 inhabitants.
Not the South Africa of people’s expectations. Not the South Africa of people’s dreams. And yet, although it still has a bitter taste for some, people are free. On paper and, in principle, they have equal rights. They still are oppressed by their poverty, but not by their constitution.
Here in the United States, today, we are looking at a return to our own state of oppression, thanks to a narrow and obsolete view of our Constitution, and, albeit a minority, a self-serving passel of politicians who have forgotten the sacrifices that won us our cherished Constitutional protections in the first place. With the composition of the Supreme Court and, according to current polls, the composition of the next Congress, that minority might soon be in the driver’s seat.
It makes this year’s elections all the more important. Supporting honest candidates, getting out the vote. Because any rights they take away— any guarantees we once felt were foolproof— won’t soon be restored.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.