Albie Sachs made it embarrassing to be a Swede
Yesterday Albie Sachs gave a lecture at the UWC on current South African cultural expressions. Just having taken off his wide brimmed hat he asked the Rector who had welcomed him if he would be allowed to sit on the white cloth table in front while talking. Sachs has been a judge at the Constitutional Court, but is above all known as the young Jewish freedom fighter who joined the ANC and therefore had to leave the country. In Maputo, Mozambique, a parcel bomb, with sincere greetings from the apartheid regime in Pretoria, blew up in his face. He was seriously injured and lost most of his right arm.
Having served us with perhaps the best metaphor for liberation (see my blog on how he ran from the prison straight out into the sea), he is indeed the personified freedom fighter. But he all the same comes through as a very soft spoken and humble person. He also does not shy away from speaking his mind, even against what might be ANC police at the time. He said yesterday: “Having nearly died and having lost parts of the body in the struggle, I have nothing to lose; I am free to speak my mind at any time.”
He had to be hospitalized for quite some time, I think in London as well as in New York. He was also offered a position to teach law at a university in New York. While there he received an invitation from the Culture House (Kulturhuset) in Stockholm to come and speak at the opening of an art exhibition with art from Southern Africa. This was in the late 1980s. He was delighted for having been invited as this might be the occasion for him to return to public life and politics. He was initially asked to give a lecture of about 45 minutes. However, as time drew closer he was advised that the time slot was less, only 30 minutes, and then even less. When he arrived, and that is what he said yesterday, he was only given five minutes to speak. It was to say the least outrageous: “Here I have travelled all the way from New York and they will only give me five minutes!” He decided to say something that would not easily be forgotten.
The previous speakers, all from Sweden, emphasized one thing in particular. Art is an indomitable tool in the struggle for liberation. When Sachs got the word, he started off saying: “Art could not possibly be a tool in such a struggle, it is much more than such a tool could ever possibly be. Art is powerfully related to freedom, but also contradictory, just as life. There are no absolutely clear cut demarcation lines between good and evil, between the oppressor and the oppressed” (this is not verbatim, but I here try to reflect what Sachs said as well as I can). Some of those faces that previously had been so self-assured as to the role of art in the struggle, frose.
Hearing this yesterday I became very embarrassed and his words hit me head on in the face. My immediate interpretation was namely that he probably was dead right. Here was I, as a Swede, having been involved in solidarity work with Southern Africa for so many years; and he was right. The self-assured association with those who sought liberation came through as a little pat on the back: we know what is good for you, and we are going to give it to you. How difficult it is to take oneself out of the role of besser-wisser and välgörare. We will even tell how art should be used in order to achieve the set-up aims. And it became utterly clear to me what is missing in any such Swedish attitude: we do not have a struggle of our own, we uppträder as if we did not need to have one either, we are somehow beyond that. To my mind this is a totally false description of Swedish society today, which is well on its way to accept segregation in effect, because of lack of interest and will to create an integrated pattern of life for all, especially also for those who are relatively recent immigrants (and refugees) to Sweden.
As it happened Albie Sachs made use of his stint in Stockholm and produced a paper that later was thoroughly discussed within the ANC, in fact just in time for the remarkable changes that came in South Africa from 1990 onwards. In his lecture that was wholly oral, no manuscript in sight, he surveyed the various art forms prevalent in South Africa, visual art, music, film, television, dance etc. He also gave a telling example of how one could avoid being trapped into a perceived cultural pattern and be encouraged to throw everything open in a consistent way. Without saying it, many of us would take for granted that ‘African music if for Africans’, that is to say, if you are a black African person you are supposed to go for certain kinds of African music and one would look askance at you would you prefer Wagner’s operas. However this kind of attitude is fast evaporating. Young blacks in South Africa already show that they decide for themselves what they want to listen to or sing and they take in all sorts of things in a broad way. Sachs told about a friend in the ANC who used to be a tap dancer (tap dance: a dance performed wearing shoes fitted with metal taps, characterized by rhythmical tapping of the toes and heels). The dancer perceived this to a bit upper class white kind of style and stayed away from it for a long while. Having however read Sachs’ comments on art and liberation there was a complete about turn and he said to himself: “I am going to show off just as such a tap dancer in the midst of an ANC meeting (jump out of a cake)”.
So we learnt something this Friday afternoon at a time when many on the UWC campus already were heading for home and the week end. Sachs makes one impressed through his absolute honesty (as he said himself, thanks to him having been maimed for life) and humility. One better take what he says seriously. There is also this sense of uncertainty, not expressed but lying underneath the whole time. Whither the South African liberation? If it is allowed to dissipate because of a leadership that now seems to have quite a different set of ideals, where entitlement and economic and political empowerment for its own sake have become paramount, where would he rest his head?
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