The Mirror at Midnight: A South African Journey - Hardcover

Hochschild, Adam

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670835390 ISBN 13: 9780670835393

Publisher: Viking, 1990

Synopsis

Analyzes the turmoil of present-day South Africa in terms of its turbulent and violent past, traces the history of the Boers in the country, and profiles a diversity of Black and white South Africans

About this title

About the Author

Adam Hochschild was born in New York City in 1942. His first book, Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son, was published in 1986. It was followed by The Mirror at Midnight: A South African Journey, and The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin. The Unquiet Ghost won the Madeline Dane Ross Award of the Overseas Press Club of America, given to "the best foreign correspondent in any medium showing concern for the human condition." Hochschild's work has also won prizes from the World Affairs Council, the Eugene V. Debs Foundation and the Society of American Travel Writers. An anthology of his shorter pieces, Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels, won the 1998 PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award for the Art of the Essay.

Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa is a finalst for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It, Half the Way Home, and The Unquiet Ghost were all named Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review. His books have been translated into six languages.

Besides his books, Hochschild has also written for The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, The Nation, and many other newspapers and magazines. He is a former commentator on Nation- al Public Radio's "All Things Considered."

Hochschild teaches writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, and has been a guest teacher at other campuses in the U.S. and abroad. In 1997- 98, he was a Fulbright Lecturer in India. He lives in San Francisco with his wife Arlie, the sociologist and author. They have two sons.

From the Back Cover

"Adam Hochschild is the most astute yet disarming of travelers. Through the prism of a strangely special personal relationship with South Africa, his is far more than an outsider's perception of the drama of our country. Read him, in particular, to understand the rise of white extremism which is threatening the democratic vision of the African National Congress and its allied progressive constituency among people of all colors. One of his own observations serves best to sum up what he captures so graphically throughout his book: this is 'South Africa caught naked.'" --Nadine Gordimer

"When I saw The Mirror at Midnight I groaned and said, 'Oh dear, not another instant "American expert" on South Africa'; but I was happily disabused of my disillusionment, be- cause this is a good book for anyone who wants a succinct and precise account of how this fascinating country has got where it is. Adam Hochschild has a perceptive insight into the workings of the minds of black, white, coloured and Indian South Africans and has woven contemporary and historical events skillfully. This is a book I recommend warmly." --Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Reviews

YA-- A plethora of books about apartheid and South Africa have appeared in this column recently, but Hochschild's book puts forth a historical outlook explaining modern South African problems. By retelling the story of the 1838 Battle of Blood River, he focuses on conflicts between Dutch and English settlers as they moved into "unclaimed" land and thus uprooted and killed native blacks. Hochschild indicates that feelings of apartheid had their beginnings here. This is a strong addition to African history sections, and bright, mature YAs will draw comparisons to this continent's white man and the Native American.
- Mike Printz, Topeka West High School, KS
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In a stunning blend of reportage, travelogue, history and meditation, Hochschild focuses on the Great Trek of 1836-1839, when Boer coastal settlers, armed with muskets, ox whips and Bibles, staked out the borders of modern South Africa. He reenacts the pivotal Battle of Blood River in 1838, in which countless Zulus were massacred, and explains how Dingane, tall, stout chief of the Zulus' military kingdom, was demonized later by white historians. Today the Great Trek is part of "the 150-year-old national myth of Afrikaners- as-victims." Turning to reportage, Hochschild ( Half the Way Home ), who visited South Africa in 1988, interviewed the head of a neo-Nazi group, a "coloured" (racially mixed) teacher who spent 10 years in a black-only prison, and the four Watson brothers, rugby stars who have been targets of repeated assassination attempts for refusing to play on all-white teams. An epilogue covers events up to the present. One of the most illuminating books ever written on contemporary South Africa, this biopsy probes the racial divide in razor-sharp prose.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Hochschild, a cofounder of Mother Jones magazine and author of the acclaimed memoir Half Way Home ( LJ 5/15/86; an LJ "Best Book of 1986"), here takes readers on a journey back to the Battle of Blood River in 1838. This was a pivotal point in South African history, Hochschild says, since it was the beginning of white South Africans' sense of manifest destiny and the root of their current apartheid policies. Antagonism between Dutch and English settlers in South Africa led to a great trek to supposedly unclaimed land; Hochschild shows how this was really achieved by displacing (and killing) the native black inhabitants. In the retelling of this history, Hochschild gives readers food for thought and reassessment about modern South Africa, and provides American readers with some uncomfortable parallels to our own sense of manifest destiny and treatment of natives. Many good books on South Africa have been published recently, but this offers an intriguing new perspective. A good choice for all libraries.
- Louise Leonard, Univ. of Florida Libs., Gainesville
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The most unexpected thing about going to South Africa is that the plane is full. I had hoped that a half-decade of well-publicized bloodshed would discourage enough travelers so that I could stretch out across a few empty seats and get a good night's sleep. But every seat on my 747 from Europe to South Africa is occupied. One of my seatmates is a cheerful German who visits the country twice a year on business, but whose real enthusiasm is for its hunting:

"Springbok, antelope, an incredible variety! The professional hunter takes along his boy; they're out in the bush together all day; they've been working together for years. No race problems there. . . . Politics? Oh, South Africa just needs time to solve its problems."

Judging from the tennis racquets they carry, many other passengers are tourists, among the several hundred thousand, I later learn, who visit South Africa each year, heading for the country's beaches and game parks. And judging from other statistics, some of my fellow passengers must be immigrants. Years of upheaval have reduced that number, but some 10,000 newcomers still arrive in the country each year, lured by skilled jobs and good pay, and black house servants at $30 a week or less.

After my plane lands at Cape Town, the pilot announces, "The safest part of your journey is now over. On leaving the airport, please drive carefully." There is a burst of nervous laughter from the passengers: the road between Cape Town and its airport runs past a number of black townships, and at times in the last few years when tensions have been high, black youths have stoned vehicles driving past. At the airport, an armored car with the bright yellow paint of the South African Police is parked on the tarmac; its hull, high and V-shaped to deflect the blast of land mines, gives it the look of a steel sailboat on wheels. On the freeway into the city, some buses have wire mesh over the driver's windows, against the stones. How do builders overcome a brick shortage? runs one South African joke. Answer: They send a couple of buses through a township. But today things are quiet, and from the freeway I can see black teenagers playing soccer on gravelly patches of dirt.

Cape Town is heartbreakingly lovely, its setting, as the intrepid traveler Anthony Trollope observed in 1877, "one of the most picturesque things to be seen on the face of the earth." The flat-topped Table Mountain looms above the city, its famous "tablecloth" of fog rolling off the top and dissolving into the air. The mountain throws a protective, tree-covered spur around Table Bay, a beckoning arm of land which welcomed ashore the first Dutch settlers more than three centuries ago. To the south stretches the rocky, surf-fringed Cape Peninsula, pointing downward like a finger toward the junction of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Surely it was not only the Cape's strategic location that made those sailors stop here, but also its uncanny beauty.

This hillside sea-city's charm haunted me when I lived here for part of that summer 26 years ago, and it still does so today. Perhaps because it is in such contrast to what goes on here. For the full panoply of apartheid has been legislated into being in a setting of transcendant loveliness. By night the lights of the Alpine cable car station on the summit of Table Mountain twinkle like an earthbound star. By day a wash of brilliant sunlight covers arcaded 19th-century streets, stately public buildings, statues of white statesmen and generals, and a Botanical Gardens with palm trees and aviaries full of chirping birds.

At the edge of all this greenery stands the majestic Parliament building. One afternoon I sit in the press gallery and listen to a "reading" (a formality; almost anything the President wants is passed) of a bill asking for some $100 million worth of extra funds for the police, army and prisons. All the members rise in silence as a white-gloved functionary carries in a huge gold mace, preceded by other officials in black tail coats. The Speaker wears a black gown, and the building's walls are filled with gilt-framed paintings of other white men in wigs, gowns or old uniforms. Pages in green jackets with gold braid carry messages. Later on, Honorable Members from here or there rise to ask questions of the Minister of this or that: is such and such an item covered by the supplementary appropriation or the general appropriation? So solemn is the sense of ceremony, so dark and cathedral-like is the wood paneling of the chamber's walls, so respectfully hushed are the white schoolchildren in shorts and blazers who watch from the visitor's balcony, that for a moment you can almost believe the whole thing is legitimate.

* * *

Outside Parliament, trees protect the streets from the summer sun; a few blocks away, the air is filled with fresh smells from open air flower stalls near the cobblestones of Greenmarket Square. Immaculate parks are laced with walking paths. At first glance there is little to remind you that the scene is not some exceptionally unspoiled city in southern Europe.

For most whites, it is Europe. "Read Gorky's Summer Folk," a friend here tells me, "It's the best thing written about white South Africa today." When I read this play about turn-of-the- century Russian gentry, I see what he means. Maxim Gorky's characters are families on vacation in the country. They read poetry aloud, play the piano, and prepare endlessly for some amateur theatricals which never come off. The characters talk of flamelike love and prisonlike marriage; everyone is having an affair with someone else's mate. From time to time they argue about the country's dreadful poverty, which they vaguely know exists somewhere off in the distance; then they go back to their piano-playing and love affairs. All the while, watchmen patrol the woods around the summer houses, cleaning up picnic debris, chasing away beggars, blowing their whistles to scare off thieves. We rarely see the watchmen, but the sound of their whistles recurs; it is the last sound in the play.

I'm reminded of these summer folk when I look at the South African newspapers. By now, I would have expected, no matter how much distortion or censorship, their pages would be dominat- ed by the ongoing violence and political upheaval: the country has been in non-stop termoil since 1984, after all, and thousands of Army conscripts have been patrolling the black townships during most of that time. But most newspapers are filled with the same kind of stories that I remember from being here many years ago, stories that evoke that nation of dreams most white South Africans try to imagine they live in. It is the country the tourist brochures call Sunny South Africa.

Sunny South Africa's inhabitants, judging by the newspaper photos, are almost all white, although a sprinkling of them are unthreatening blacks--Zulu dancers, cute children, an Indian cricket champion, an African businessman in a three-piece suit gratefully receiving an award. In clothing advertisements, only one model in three or four is black, a proportion doubtless calculated to catch the eye of black buyers without scaring off white ones.

Above all, the Sunny South Africa of the newspapers is relentlessly normal. There are ads for computer matchmaking, advice-to-the-lovelorn columns, articles about beauty tips, lost cats, high school reunions, tennis matches and even one piece on an all-white bank robbery, long and lavishly illustrated, as if the editors were relieved at finding some violence that was not racial. A personals column: "White male professional, 35; likes wine, sports; seeks female companionship." "Selective top quality Jewish only introductions. Miriam 783-5892." Human interest features: a water-skiing dog; a story, WOMAN MARRIES HER FATHER; and another, URBAN MAN IN A CAGE: "With grunting rhinos and roaring lions for neighbors, Bernard Rich quietly goes about his business of living in a cage in the Johannesburg Zoo. The 27- year-old salesman is being exhibited as Homo Sapiens Urbanus. . .' The hardest part will be having to ignore the public,' says Bernard."

Why has the Sunny South Africa of the newspapers always so fascinated me? As a cocky 19-year-old, I think, it was because I, with my superior knowledge, knew this country was about to have a violent revolution, and the insensitive, carefree whites who lived here didn't. Reading their newspapers was like having a window onto the last days of Louis XVI. Now, of course, the revolution hasn't happened, but few whites are unaware that big changes are inevitable. And so the fascination lies in something else: in how they choose to ignore that awareness. And in how the whole society is arranged to make that an easy thing to do.

For white South Africans, as for Gorky's summer folk, the simmering violence is out of sight. Of the more than 5,000 people who have died in the upheavals since 1984, less than half a dozen have been white. Only now and then can Sunny South Africa hear the watchmen's whistles. In the post office, for example, a poster shows a picture of a limpet mine and warns in the two official languages, English and Afrikaans: SO LYK DIE DOOD! / THE LOOK OF DEATH! But the actual warfare is almost entirely con- fined to the black townships. And to the summer folk, the town- ships are almost invisible.

Indeed, many whites go through the average day encountering no blacks at all--except those who are maids, waiters, or the nannies that I can see accompanying almost every white child on the grass of those downtown parks. There is a moving song about the nannies, by Thembi Mtshali and Barney Simon:

My sister breast-fed my baby
While I took care of you
We met when you were three months old
and I a woman of 42. . .
Your first word was my name
Your first song was in Zulu . . . .

My children watched Soweto burn
while I took care of you
My children breathed teargas smoke
while I took care of you

Your eyes are bright and clever now
Your legs are straight and strong. . . .
my children sing at funerals
while I take care of you. . .
child of my flesh
May God protect my children from you.

* * *

One morning I leave the land of the summer folk and visit the African squatter settlement of Crossroads. It is surprising how how swift is the passage from one South Africa to another. Twenty minutes drive from downtown Cape Town, with its elegant seafood restaurants and well-stocked delicatessens displaying half a dozen varieties of ham, are the sand streets of Crossroads, where women are going door-to-door selling sheep's and pigs' heads, the very cheapest type of meat. At an intersection at the edge of Crossroads, several dozen men are sitting on rocks, waiting, in the hope that pickup trucks will come by and collect crews for temporary labor, paying 10 or 12 rand (less than $5) for a day's work.

The African huts I walk past here are made of corrugated zinc, tarpaulins, plastic sheeting, or pieces of the walls of demolished buildings, with painted advertisements still on them. Cocks are crowing. The sand streets and shack floors are dry today, but in the rainy season they will be mud.

In one two-room dwelling I visit, the ceiling is black from the smoke of a kerosene stove and the room smells of its fumes. There is no room for a closet: clothes, in plastic bags, are hung high up near the ceiling. Twelve adults and children share four beds in these two rooms. But what strikes me most is the walls. They are wallpapered with the shiny paper from Sunday newspaper ad supplements. And so lining this pair of cramped rooms are hundreds upon hundreds of color photos of dishwashers, remo- deled kitchens, dining table-and-chairs sets, dishwashers, sofas, stereos, deck chairs, and Jacuzzi tubs.

On the street outside this house, I see a giant Casspir armored car following a small white truck. "That's the post office truck," explains a woman who lives in these rooms. "Without the Casspir the comrades would burn it." The war here is still on.

These days, however, the "comrades"--the young militants--are in retreat here; in most of the Cape Town African townships a conservative black vigilante group is in control, backed up by the armored cars of the army and the police. And that police force itself is now more than half black. An unemployment rate of more than 50% in places like Crossroads means the police have little trouble recruiting. But at the height of the current wave of violence a number of black policemen were "necklaced" by angry crowds; nation-wide, more than 900 others had their homes burned. In some parts of the country, black police and their families had to be evacuated from townships in the middle of the night, and moved to special tent villages behind barbed wire, next to police stations. As they now take revenge for homes destroyed and companions burned alive, they become as feared as the white police.

Standing outside a clinic in Crossroads, I see some of that history in the grim face of a black policeman, looking down from an open-topped armored car that suddenly roars into view along a winding sand path--in search of someone? or just on patrol? His eyes are narrowed; he is holding a submachine gun. Children shrink away from the vehicle's path.

Inside the clinic this morning, a white pediatrician is seeing patients. She is instructing some medical students as she does so. She explains to them that the swollen cheeks on some of these children are not due to infection, as medical textbooks would have them believe, but to kwashiorkor, a disease of malnutrition. The doctor examines each child carefully, hands out packets of protein powder, explains the importance of vegetables, then fishes into a big box of old clothing and gives each mother a wool blanket or sweater. Incongruously, a shelf behind the packed benches of mothers and babies waiting to see her holds some children's books donated from some household in Sunny South Africa: Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Knowledge, Black Beauty, and The Young Ballet Dancer. Bottle baby syndrome is a major problem here, the doctor tells me: this is the tragic near-starvation that occurs when a mother does not breast-feed, then can't afford enough baby formula or the fuel to boil water for it. "Mothers have so little confidence they can't believe that something they produce themselves is what's best for their baby."

* * *

Back in Sunny South Africa one afternoon, I am jogging through the beautiful pine and eucalyptus forest on the slopes of Table Mountain. I round a bend and come upon some stone ruins. A plaque explains that this was the house of a local dignitary, built in 1797. Throughout the Cape Town area I constantly stumble onto vine-covered houses, museums, 300-year-old farms, all with brass plaques celebrating the longevity of white settlement in this corner of the country. Hundreds of monuments and oil portraits show the early Dutch burgers of this city, stern-looking men with ruffled lace collars and a somber, righteous gaze. Scores of history books record the conflicts between the English and the Dutch and the activities of the Dutch East India Company, to whom the colony for its first 150 years actually belonged. But, until recently, nobody paid much attention to the fact that this was a society built not only on conquest, but on slavery. When I was here in 1962, I lived in a rented room off cobble- stoned Greenmarket Square, unaware that it had once been the city's slave market.

The threat of punishment kept the slaves in line, and those who revolted or escaped were dealt with harshly. A major instrument of control, then as it is now, was Robben Island, one of the oldest penal colonies on earth. You can see it from the hill above Cape Town harbor, a low smudge on the horizon. Even before Dutch settlers arrived at the Cape, both British and Dutch ships left mutinous sailors on Robben Island to die. The Dutch later used the island as a prison for rebellious slaves, and for members of the Cape's native population who resisted Dutch rule. Two prisoners stole a leaky boat and escaped to shore in 1659.

No prisoner has successfully escaped since. For a time the island was put to other uses--a lunatic asylum, a leper colony, a military base. But when South African jails began filling with long-term political prisoners in the early 1960s, Robben Island, a blacks-only prison, was where most of them went.

One evening, I talk to one of them, Neville Alexander. He spent ten years on Robben Island. For four years after that, he was under house arrest. His large, alert eyes are touched with humor and intelligence as they take in everything around him; his brown face is gentle, scholarly, easily forming into a quizzical smile. Classified as "Coloured", or of mixed-race, he works today as an author and teacher. With the cachet of being a veteran of "the Island," he is an influential strategist of the resistance movement in the Cape Town area. When a wave of preventive detentions began a few years ago, the police came looking for him and he lived in other peoples' houses for some months. But for the moment things seem to have cooled off, and, wearing sandals and a tan windbreaker, he is willing to spend a few hours at a friend's house talking. After a decade of confinement in a no- toriously harsh prison, I would have expected an angry or bitter man. But instead, Alexander talks of the experience almost as a privilege, and one that he was able to learn a great deal from:

"Of course that time on the Island was a bit long. But it was never boring, never uninteresting. To come to one's maturity under those circumstances was an important experience. I found myself among older people who had thought deeply." Though Alexander has degrees from universities in both South Africa and Germany, he says, "Robben Island was certainly the best university I could have gone to."

Alexander describes the psychological effect of prison as a closed space: things you say rebound back to you; you cannot run away from anyone or from any opinion you've voiced. "The impetuosity of a young person runs up against those you are in close contact with. You realize the seriousness of words. For instance, if out of a sense of pride, vanity, immaturity, you push a particular polemic too far, it leads to strained relations. That affects the unity of the whole group. And you are responsible to the whole group; you have to stand together against the authori- ties.

"Through exchanging hints and opinions we were able to teach one another how to learn, the best way of making notes, the best way of writing an essay, and so on. We were able to have seminars and tutorials even while we were working. Although most talk has to take place while you are working in the lime quarry. People would make sure that they worked together. Everyone was picking and shoveling, but we'd use lunchtimes or weekends to do diagrams and things like that.

"The other thing about maturing was to be with people like Mandela, Sisulu, and Mbeki, who have had decades of experience. Amidst the petty quarrels you find in all prisons, they were people who ennobled their environment. Mandela even the warders treated with great deference.

"In prison you have a lot of time. I had a two-year discussion with Mandela about what a 'nation' means in South Africa--is there an African 'nation'? A Coloured 'nation'? And so on. He is a man with a judicial temperament and an abiding interest in people. Even when you disagree with him, you never feel offended. I learned a hell of a lot from him, even though I disagree with some ANC policies. I admired particularly his lack of sectarianism. You can always reopen a question. It is an event in one's life to meet someone like that."

"On an emotional level, I discovered things about myself. I think the thing I missed most was children, not women. I remember the first time all of us heard children's voices in the quarry. They were from the warder's village there; they're normally kept well out of sight of prisoners. It was as though we'd been struck by lightning. All of us. We all stood dead still. The warder quickly went and made sure we didn't actually see the kids. But that reminded me, those lone voices, that that was the one occasion in ten years when I actually heard the voice of a child."

* * *

In downtown Cape Town, however, the fog rolls off Table Mountain like a silent waterfall, and Crossroads and Robben Island are out of sight. The newspaper announces public events: Captain Steven Banks, chairman of the SA Antique Collectors' Society, will speak on miniature paintings. The Kennel Association will hold its all-breed championship dog show at the Cape Hunt and Polo Grounds. Swami Yatiishvarananda will lecture on meditation and self-realization. Charlie Parker's Fully Licensed Restau-rant and Disco will present the Miss SA Wet T-Shirt Contest. In the center of the city, a few blocks from Parliament, inside a gate guarded by plaster lions, white schoolboys are playing cricket: red knee socks, white shorts, and a satisfying thock as bat hits ball. For the moment, the watchmen's whistles are still in the distance, and the summer folk are still at play.

Edition details

• Publisher: Viking
• Publication date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0670835390
• ISBN 13: 9780670835393
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 309