A new Israeli poll says that one in four Israelis is depressed, and that levels of anxiety are rising. Of course. Their society is in crisis. In the New York Review of Books last summer the South African novelist J.M. Coetzee published a portion of his latest novel, Summertime, purportedly a South African man’s notebooks from 1972. [Earlier today I wrongly characterized the work as actual notebooks of the writer.] They include a wonderful description, below, of his response to a raid carried out by the South African security services on a house of South African black refugees in neighboring Botswana in which a family were killed. The scene is breakfast, and divisions between a father and son over apartheid.
I pass it along today because you will see the rage and despair Coetzee’s protagonist has about the white colonialist leadership of South Africa retreating from history and rationalizing its power by references to Christianity and terrorism. The analogies here are not perfect, at all, but Coetzee’s piece captures many of the feelings writers on this site have about Israel’s military response to threats, its caricature of the Arab world, its blundering into a cul-de-sac of nationalism, and the divisions that these events are creating in the Jewish family.
A couple other notes. The piece is from 1972. It took another 17 years for a great leader to take power in South Africa, who understood that apartheid was the wrong path. F.W. de Klerk–who sought to lead his country out of the swamp, and who unbanned the terrorist organization Mandela was the head of. South Africa’s emergence has been a painful process, of course. Lately I reflected on my own apprehension of what is in store for privileged Israelis here; and you need only read Coetzee’s great novel Disgrace to understand the racial violence and prejudice that persisted even in free South Africa. No one says this is easy. But the key to this excerpt is Coetzee’s understanding, a very true one, that South Africa’s leaders had blundered out of the course of history.
His father has nothing but disdain for the continent to the north of them. Buffoons is the word he uses to dismiss the leaders of African states: petty tyrants who can barely spell their own names, chauffeured from one banquet to another in their Rolls-Royces, wearing Ruritanian uniforms festooned with medals they have awarded themselves. Africa: a place of starving masses with homicidal buffoons lording it over them.
"They broke into a house in Francistown and killed everyone," he [the son] presses on nonetheless. "Executed them. Including the children. Look. Read the report. It’s on the front page."
His father shrugs. His father can find no form of words spacious enough to cover his distaste for, on the one hand, thugs who slaughter defenseless women and children and, on the other, terrorists who wage war from havens across the border. He resolves the problem by immersing himself in the cricket scores. As a response to a moral dilemma it is feeble; yet is his own response—fits of rage and despair—any better?
Once upon a time he used to think that the men who dreamed up the South African version of public order, who brought into being the vast system of labor reserves and internal passports and satellite townships, had based their vision on a tragic misreading of history. They had misread history because, born on farms or in small towns in the hinterland, and isolated within a language spoken nowhere else in the world, they had no appreciation of the scale of the forces that had since 1945 been sweeping away the old colonial world.
Yet to say they had misread history was in itself misleading. For they read no history at all. On the contrary, they turned their backs on it, dismissing it as a mass of slanders put together by foreigners who held Afrikaners in contempt and would turn a blind eye if they were massacred by the blacks, down to the last woman and child. Alone and friendless at the remote tip of a hostile continent, they erected their fortress state and retreated behind its walls: there they would keep the flame of Western Christian civilization burning until finally the world came to its senses.
That was the way they spoke, more or less, the men who ran the National Party and the security state, and for a long time he thought they spoke from the heart. But not anymore. Their talk of saving civilization, he now tends to think, has never been anything but a bluff. Behind a smokescreen of patriotism they are at this very moment sitting and calculating how long they can keep the show running (the mines, the factories) before they will need to pack their bags, shred any incriminating documents, and fly off to Zurich or Monaco or San Diego, where under the cover of holding companies with names like Algro Trading or Handfast Securities they years ago bought themselves villas and apartments as insurance against the day of reckoning (dies irae, dies illa).
According to his new, revised way of thinking, the men who ordered the killer squad into Francistown have no mistaken vision of history, much less a tragic one. Indeed, they most likely laugh up their sleeves at folk so silly as to have visions of any kind. As for the fate of Christian civilization in Africa, they have never given two hoots about it. And these—these!—are the men under whose dirty thumb he lives!
