Where righteous anger meets rigid allegiance
Alan Paton would not have shrunk from crucial change whatever the cost, writes Tony Leon
BACK in 1974, in the village of Botha’s Hill, when KwaZulu-Natal was called Natal and apartheid was at its apogee, the boarding school I attended there played host to its most distinguished resident.
Alan Paton glared at our matric class through his half-rimmed glasses and delivered a lecture of grace, passion and anger.
Years later, but long before Penny Sparrow’s infamy made such observations unsayable, Irish writer Conor Cruise O’Brien memorialised Paton’s scowl as “the countenance of an angry baboon”.
A visit to the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town recently to watch Ralph Lawson’s mesmerising performance as Paton in the play he co-wrote, A Voice I Cannot Silence, was a reminder of the accuracy of O’Brien’s observation. The actor brought both his frown and his words back to life perfectly.
There are profound paradoxes in the life and work of Paton and it is timely to reflect on some of them, especially since, other than this newspaper’s literary award named in his honour, little is heard of him these days, and even less about the creed and causes he championed.
The first of these anomalies is that Cry, the Beloved Country was actually published a few months before the National Party won power in May 1948.
This book, which has sold more than 15 million copies — more than any other chronicle of the perils and tragedies of race segregation in South Africa — became an international moral sword against a regime not yet in place.
The play commences in 1969, a year of special significance in the long night of apartheid. Paton was by then leader of the small Liberal Party, which, alone in the arena of white politics, proposed that every South African should enjoy full civil rights, including the right to vote, without qualification.
Its moral clarity on this issue and its nonracial membership ensured both its lack of electoral success and the wrath of the National Party government.
Thus, the Prohibition of Political Interference Act was rammed through parliament to prohibit mixed-race political parties.
Paton had no truck with this legislative mischief and decided to close the Liberal Party rather than temporise with its core political faith.
This was moral certitude in action heedless of consequence. The more successful Progressive Party of Helen Suzman compromised on the issue, purged its multiracial membership rolls and eventually, some 10 years later, achieved the status of official opposition.
Detractors of the DA, an offspring of the Progressive Party, can be heard accusing the party of lacking intellectual moorings and moral vigour. But building a broad political tent, not a pressure group, often requires compromise.
Another irony in the life of Paton occurred with the timing of his death. He had long prophesied on the need for racial reconciliation and the virtues of constitutional safeguards against the tyrannies of state power.
Yet this often lonely champion of freedom died in 1988, just two years shy of the changes that FW de Klerk, the nephew of Paton’s great nemesis, white supremacist leader JG Strijdom, inaugurated.
In the play, Paton’s second wife, Anne Hopkins Paton, is played with a no-nonsense sensibility by Clare Mortimer. She speculates about how much pleasure Paton would have derived from witnessing the realisation of his quest in the form of the first all-race elections in 1994.
But, speaking directly to the audience in the present tense — presumably with a nod to Guptanomics, Nkandla excesses and the unburied past of the Marikana massacre — Anne Paton offers a more rueful thought: “I’m glad he is not alive to see all this now.”
A few days after attending the play I had the opportunity to meet with an acquaintance, now retired, who had held high office in the ANC. Vehemently opposed to her party’s president, she remains unflinching in her loyalty to his party.
I thought, here was a paradox that Paton himself would have found hard to unlock. The thesis is that an electorally weakened ANC would be even more injurious to the economic and political health of South Africa than the current version. The easy target that the opposition sees in President Jacob Zuma is offset by the fierce party loyalty that still animates his critics in his movement.
One of the dividing lines between Paton and those in whose defence he spoke at the Rivonia Trial was their fealty to communism and his detestation of it. Paton had a sceptical faith when it came to political labels and parties, although he might have appreciated just how deep such attachments remain.
Historian Tony Judt wrote of one of Stalin’s victims being ferried off to the gulag at the height of the Soviet leader’s tyrannical purges in 1936, and how she still remained attached to the movement.
“The system could still be fixed,” he writes. “This capacity, this profound need to believe well in the Soviet project, was so firmly embedded in 1936, that even its victims did not lose faith.”
The election results here on August 3 should indicate just how many local true believers remain of the faith.
But Paton would not resile from the prospects of change, however bleak. He noted: “To give up the task of reforming society is to give up one’s responsibility as a free man.”
To give up the task of reforming society is to give up one’s responsibility as a free man