-
Postlude: Surviving 350 Years
- Ohio University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
194 postlude Surviving 350 Years t was in 1976, when Desmond Tutu, who would later be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, had just been appointed the first black Anglican Dean of Johannesburg in South Africa, that he wrote a letter to then Prime Minister John Vorster, an Afrikaner, who had, as minister of justice, passed a law allowing for indefinite detention in solitary confinement without charge or trial. Tutu wrote, “We all, black and white together, belong to South Africa and blacks yield place to no one in their passionate love for this our beloved land. We belong together—we will survive or be destroyed together.” That was on May 6, 1976: in no way would Vorster’s white regime ever countenance such an audacious scheme. But twenty years later, in 1994, echoing Tutu, the African National Congress called for establishment by the Government of a “commission of truth” to investigate abuses of power by state officials as well as by others. In 1995, the South African government initiated a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate political crimes by all parties between 1960 and December 1993. It would consider violations of human rights, amnesty, and reparations for and rehabilitation of victims. And it would do this by hearing the stories of those who had suffered, by those who had inflicted the suffering. We have to be able to tell our story. Speaking of one petitioner who appeared before South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a supplicator who failed in his quest to communicate his experience, an observer wrote, “It was a pity—and an irony—that George Dube, the victim in question, failed to seize the dramatic moment afforded by the present occasion. The man simply couldn’t tell a story.”1 When I was conducting research in Swaziland, a Swati storyteller was performing a I Surviving 350 Years S 195 story, but he was having a difficult time ordering the various parts of the story, and after a time, the audience interrupted, sounding the closing formula of the story to let the storyteller know that his awkward performance was at an end. Time collapses, and we are in the presence of history . . . it is a time of masks. Reality, the present, is here, but with these explosive, emotional images giving it a context. This is the storyteller’s art: to mask the past, making it mysterious, seeming inaccessible. But it is inaccessible only to our present intellect. It is always available to our hearts and souls, our emotions. The storyteller combines our present waking state and our past condition of semiconsciousness, and so we walk again in history , we join our forebears. And history, always more than an academic subject, becomes our collapsing of time, our memory and reliving of the past. We never live wholly in the present—much of our temperament, our nature, our character is rooted in the past, for our emotional life has its origins in and its impetus from the experiences and images of history. The storyteller brings us unerringly into those spiritual centers of our lives, making us for the moment consciously aware of something that is a constant part of our unconscious lives. This emotional core is what largely dictates our actions and our thought, our decision making, our vision. Storytelling contains the humanism of the people, and it keeps them and their traditions alive despite life’s daily vicissitudes. Time obliterates history. The storyteller arrests time and brings her audience into the presence of history, the heart and substance of the culture. We are all storytellers: we all have our stories, each one of us. Our stories unfold within the embrace of storytelling traditions that have been with us for centuries. Our world and our lives make no sense outside the framework of story. Apartheid in South Africa is one moment in history, a moment the significance of which is revealed through stories —stories by professional storytellers and stories by those who lived that event. This storytelling instant is a moment in all time, in all of the world’s cultures and people. We hear the storytellers, people who lived the moment, people who reported it, and people who renewed it in fiction . It is a moment during which an entire people are defined on the basis of the color of their skin. Consider the power of the written word and the spoken word, consider the effect of stories, think of how stories work to communicate the dimensions of any...