Memories of memories, and the truth

Novelist Alan Hollinghurst describes a young biographer in search of his late subject’s legacy. He writes of someone who

“was asking for memories, too young himself to know that memories were only memories of memories”.

Two recent South

African deaths and their memorialisations have provided both a personal and national perspective on Hollinghurst’s universal truth, even if his subject was the stuff of fiction.

The furious narrative and counternarrative on the consequential life of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela drew to mind the words of another novelist who also, in his own country’s struggle for freedom, moved from protest to power. Vaclav Havel’s take on Soviet tyranny was how the regime tried “to create an outpost of the state in the mind of every citizen”.

I found myself drawn again into the controversies around the George Fivaz police investigations of one of the kidnapped members of the Mandela United Football Club, although this too was utterly miscast. There was no secret plot in which I and nefarious or shadowy operatives were machinating behind the scenes.

In London in March 1995 I met with Baroness Emma Nicholson who had provided safe passage and refuge in England for Katiza Cebekhulu, and had managed to secure his release from a jail in Zambia. But the very serious charges he had levelled against Mrs Mandela were hardly new. They had been chronicled in a book by journalist Fred Bridgland.

I suggested to the baroness that she allow access to Cebekhulu to allow the veracity of his claims against Mrs Mandela to be tested by either the police or the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She simply refused, stating: “I insist on assurances from the authorities before I do so.”

It is for this reason, after my return to South Africa, that I approached Fivaz and he quite correctly sent a team to interview the sequestered Cebekhulu in England. But of course — postmortem — all that detail is omitted and elided.

But two things amazed me in this brazen attempt to clumsily rewrite history. First, on receiving Fivaz’s response to me — a year later — that

Cebekhulu was an

“unreliable witness”, it was I who provided his letter to this newspaper, which aptly gave it front-page splash treatment. And then Mrs

Mandela herself, and notwithstanding very public and parliamentary clashes between us, sent me a handwritten note of appreciation.

It sits — should any of the angry revisionists be of mind to search — with my papers housed at the Archive for Contemporary Affairs at University of the Free State. And the entire episode appears in granular detail in my biography.

But of course scoring a point, revealing a nonexistent plot, casting or recasting “the usual suspects” is the name of this danse macabre, not history, memory or understanding.

As Madikizela-Mandela’s daughters were coming to terms with their grief, my own dear father passed away.

But in his case, or rather cases, the rabid Twitterati revisionists went into overdrive. They managed the feat of placing my father, a Supreme Court judge, in a court in which he never sat, delivering a judgment he never gave to an accused person (Solomon Mahlangu) he never tried!

On another judicial controversy in which he was the judge, the case of Andrew Zondo, it was presented last week as though this was some new revelation. In fact — courtesy of the ANC’s attempt at filial demonisation — it has been in the court of public opinion these past two decades.

But there is something far more hopeful than the cacophonous virtue-signalling which constitutes the “noise of time”. My father lived until the great age of 93. He was born just before the Great Depression. In his lifetime he saw Nazism, communism, apartheid and the great evils of the last century arrive and depart. He witnessed massive improvements in the human condition, here and everywhere.

And having never used a computer, he thought Twitter was what birds did. In that respect he was very fortunate.

But of course scoring a point is the name of this danse macabre