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As we commemorate National Heroes Week in Sri Lanka we are reminded of other countries in our recent past that have ended an armed struggle and sought to win peace.  The world cheered when South Africa emerged from its long struggle against the injustices of the Apartheid regime.  Nelson Mandela became an international hero. There were also others who stood by him in South Africa.

The South-African born writer Gillian Slovo recently visited Sri Lanka and spoke at the Galle Literary Festival.  She is perhaps best known as the daughter of two of these South African national heroes. Her mother was Ruth First, a journalist, activist and scholar.  Her father Joe Slovo was a lawyer, long-time leader of the South African Communist Party, Member of the National Executive of the African National Congress and Chief of Staff of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC. Both were imprisoned in South Africa and both had subsequently to live and work in exile for many years.  Ruth First was working from Mozambique in 1982 when she was killed by a letter bomb, by order of the South African police.  Joe Slovo lived to negotiate South Africa’s transition to democracy and to become Minister for Housing in Nelson Mandela’s first government.  Of the two, it was only Joe Slovo whose heroism could be celebrated in public, at the very end of his life.

When Gillian Slovo was growing up, her parents were publicly vilified for who they were: white South Africans fighting against Apartheid.   Yet she tells a different story of post-Apartheid South Africa.  Once, promoting a new book she was interviewed by a succession of young, white, women journalists she found them all saying to her, ‘you think you’ve had a difficult life with what your parents did?  Imagine if you were me…and you have to turn to your parents and say ‘why didn’t you do anything?  Why didn’t you say anything?’  ‘You can feel proud of your parents,’ said these women, ‘we have to feel utterly ashamed.’

Heroic Choices

Gillian Slovo explains that she has made very different choices from her parents; she explores through art some of the same convictions that drove her parents to change their country’s history.  Her heroic parents cast giant shadows and while she was in Sri Lanka, Gillian Slovo also spoke about the searching family memoir she wrote about them: Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country.

The book is, if anything, about the fact that heroism is difficult.   Yet here is a daughter who, knowing that she has paid a personal price for her parents choices, is proud in just the way described by the young journalists she met.  She says, ‘they made choices, brave choices, that others in their country did not make.  For this they were heroic.’ (p.40).  In fact it was not before she had a daughter of her own that Gillian Slovo really began to learn more about her parents’ work, so much of which had to be conducted in secret.  She describes being almost taken aback when her ‘peanut-crunching’ father showed himself to be a master politician.  She says ‘Blow me down, he turned out to be one of the people in the 20^th century who changed history’.  She pays tribute to her parents’ contemporaries, whom she calls ‘the Mandela Generation’:  ‘what all of them had in common was that they valued human life’.  Indeed it is striking on how simple a basis their heroism is founded – what sets them apart is that they were not willing to give up on this principle.

The Hardest Part

And yet, as always, the final proof is in the transition – and it is in describing this that Slovo’s book reaches its most powerful.  She quotes her father saying, on the eve of the first elections in a democratic South Africa:  ‘If you think it was hard to win a liberation struggle, wait until you get into government, then you will see what hard is’.

Because it wasn’t enough that they won.  Slovo is never jubilant, but instead thoughtful.  She shows a different sort of heroism in respecting her family and her country enough to ask honest questions of them.   When she, with her partner and daughter, is driven into Johannesburg by one of her father’s Ministerial staff, Slovo asks the young Afrikaner man what it is like to be guarding the life of a man who, very few years before, he would have had orders to shoot on sight.  The policeman says ‘Ag, it’s not a problem.  After all, I’m not the kind of man to carry a grudge’.  Slovo is dissatisfied with the expression of the answer while aware that it is extraordinary.  She pays great tribute to black South Africans for allowing their country a predominantly peaceful transition, even after generations of injustice.  She probes, no less respectfully, whether white South Africans have really changed with their country.

There is also the very painful personal tension in the Slovo family – where Joe Slovo must, for the sake of the country, concede to amnesties that will exonerate his wife’s killers.  This is not something Gillian discusses with her father.  But one of the most poignant moments in her book comes when she learns, after her father’s death, that when the then South African government and the ANC were deciding the terms of their first indemnity agreement Joe Slovo had left the room to drink whisky at the bar.  Hearing the news that agreement had been reached, he’d described the moment as one of his most difficult.

Facing Up to the Past

Gillian Slovo herself meets one of her mother’s killers.  He describes himself to have been ‘in the loop’ that killed her mother. She can’t find a way to access his humanity.  The meeting is anything but cathartic; even to read the account of it is to feel deadened by something that is just too difficult.  Indeed Slovo is dissatisfied both with this encounter and in this aspect of her country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).  She knows that the TRC was a part of the political compromise, without which the South African government would not have relinquished power for fear its officers would have to stand trial for the crimes they committed.  She is disappointed that the high officials of the government were never called to the hearings (‘only the henchmen had to go’) and – though she only says this of her mothers’ killers, not the Commission as a whole – she appears to be genuinely disheartened that it did not produce remorse.  She describes how a forensic psychologist told her ‘you are asking too much,’ pointing out how difficult it would be for people to live with their past actions if they were fully to admit them.

Yet Slovo also describes what she valued about the TRC. First, she says, the conditions had to be right.  For the Commission to exist, and for it to mean something, she says you had to have the sort of real peace of which you could say ‘this is better than what we had’.  She describes the Commission as ‘a writing of the history of contemporary South Africa that wouldn’t have been possible without it…a place that people could go and say what had happened in the past’.  She clarifies why this was so important: because it is ‘a way of people never being able to say it didn’t happen’.

Moving Ahead

Gillian Slovo believes that while individuals who committed crimes against South Africa may not be able to confess their wrongdoings, broader South African society has faced up to its past because it had to listen to the hearings of the TRC. Nor was it immediate but rather a ‘drip-drip effect’ into the national consciousness.  She talks about the importance of a country having to face its recent past if it is really to move on.

Towards the end of her book there is an incident when Gillian Slovo and Joe Slovo are driving together in a South Africa they have both returned to after years in exile, now on the brink of transition.  As they pull out of a petrol station they encounter another car.  The Afrikaner man in the car says to Gillian’s father ‘Did anybody ever tell you that you bear the most remarkable resemblance to Joe Slovo?’  Gillian, still scarred by a past in which her parents were public enemies, silently wills her father to say nothing and drive on.  Instead he says with a grin ‘That’s because I am Joe Slovo.’  Once again Gillian notes anxiously the look of amazement that crosses the man’s face, anticipating his anger.  Instead the stranger holds out his hand to shake Joe Slovo’s and says, ‘Welcome back’.

Gillian Slovo’s personal and political journey with South Africa’s history, and the difficult choices entailed in the process of coming to terms with it, begs the question Who is a Real Hero?

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