The Mirror at Midnight

Adam Hochschild

Description

A “stunning blend of reportage, travelogue, history and meditation” by the New York Times–bestselling author of King Leopold’s Ghost (Publishers Weekly).

National Book Award finalist Adam Hochschild brings a lifetime’s familiarity with South Africa to bear in this eye-opening examination of a critical turning point in that nation’s history: the Great Trek of 1836–39, during which Dutch-speaking white settlers, known as Boers, journeyed deep into the country’s interior to escape the British colonial administration.
 
The mass migration culminated with the massacre of indigenous Zulus in the 1838 Battle of Blood River. Looking at the tensions of modern South Africa through the dramatic prism of the nineteenth century, Hochschild vividly recreates the battle—and its contentious commemoration by rival groups 150 years later. In his epilogue, Hochschild extends his view to the astonishing political changes that have occurred in the country in recent decades—and the changes yet to be made.
 
Hochschild’s incisive take on these events, noted Nadine Gordimer, “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.”
 
“A good book for anyone who wants a succinct and precise account of how this fascinating country has got where it is. . . . This is a book I recommend warmly.” —Archbishop Desmond Tutu
 
“One of the most illuminating books ever written on contemporary South Africa.” —Publishers Weekly
 
“Thoroughly researched, immensely readable . . . A work of vivid reportage and astute political analysis.” —San Francisco Chronicle

Sujets

• ANC
• Andries Pretorius
• Voortrekkers
• Colonization
• Piet Retief
• Dingane
• Ségrégation
• Afrikaners
• Apartheid
• Cape Town
• Colonialism
• Racism
• History of South Africa
• Scramble for Africa
• Battle of Blood River
• Hudson Brothers
• Boer Wars
• List of sovereign states and dependent territories in Africa
• Mandela
• Racial politics
• White Africans of European ancestry
• Neonazi
• Madiba

Informations

• Publié par: Open Road Media
• Date de parution: 24 avril 2007
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9780547525228
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Contents
Title Page
Contents
Front Matter
Copyright
Dedication
Preface to the Mariner Edition
Beginnings
Part One
Summer Folk
“Laugh Like We’ve Been Laughing”
Place of Weeping
Loyal Natives
“A Balanced View”
Journey to the North
Part Two
The Play Within the Play
Johannesburg Notebook
The Truth Room
Survivors
On Trek
“The Light of Civilization”
Velvet Glove, Iron Fist
Stormtroopers
Shell of the Old, Seed of the New
A Carpet-Bombing
The Mirror
Midnight
Journey’s End
Epilogue: Old Bricks, New Building
Bibliography and Acknowledgments
About the Author
Footnotes

First Mariner Books edition 2007
Copyright © 1990 by Adam Hochschild
Map copyright © 1990 by Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hochschild, Adam. The mirror at midnight: a South African journey / Adam Hochschild. —1st Mariner Books ed. p. cm. Originally published: New York : Viking, 1990. With new preface and epilogue. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN -13: 978-0-618-75825-8 ISBN -10: 0-618-75825-9 1. Blood River, Battle of, South Africa, 1838—Anniversaries, etc. 2. Afrikaners—Race identity. 3. South Africa—Race relations—His- tory—20th century. 4. Hochschild, Adam—Travel—South Africa. 5. South Africa—Description and travel. 6. South Africa—Social con- ditions—1961–1994. 7. South Africa—Politics and government— 1989–1994. I. Title. DT 2247. B 56 H 63 2007 305.800968—dc22 2006103110

eISBN 978-0-547-52522-8 v2.1017
Portions of this book first appeared, in somewhat different form, in Mother Jones , Harper’s, and the Boston Review.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following copyrighted material: Lines from the poem “The Contraction and Enclosure of theLand” by St. J. Page Yako. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Perskor,from The Making of a Servant (Johannesburg, 1972), an anthology translated by P. Kavanaugh and Z. Qangule. The poem “In Detention” by Christopher VanWyk. Reprinted by permission of the author. Lines from the poem “The Priceof Freedom” by Mathews Phosa, as translated by William Mervin Gumede. Reprinted by permission of Struik Publishers, from Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC (Cape Town, 2005).
FOR D AVID AND G ABRIEL
”Looking into South Africa is like looking into the mirror at midnight . . . A horrible face, but one’s own.”
BREYTEN BREYTENBACH
Preface to the Mariner Edition
Few countries on earth have ever undergone as dramatic and hopeful a political sea change as South Africa did at the end of the twentieth century. At the close of the 1980s, it was one of the world’s most notorious police states, for decades the object of protest marches and demonstrations around the globe. Thousands of black political dissidents were in jail, torture was routine, and only the small percentage of the population that was white could, in any meaningful way, vote. Nelson Mandela and other top African National Congress leaders had been in prison for more than a quarter of a century. And to all who cared about this beautiful and long-suffering country, it looked as if they would be serving out their life sentences.
But a mere few years later, in 1994, every adult South African could vote in the nation’s first democratic election. Mandela was elected President, and his coalition-government cabinet included people who had spent decades in prison or exile—and the former head of the government that had once kept him behind bars.
Not only was the startling turnaround a peacefully negotiated one, it was one of history’s most unexpected. In 1988, when I made the journey described in these pages, there was not a single journalist or commentator anywhere—nor, so far as we know, an intelligence agency of any government—predicting a democratic South Africa at any time soon. Every South African politician, activist, or academic I talked to believed that any real change was at least twenty or thirty years off, if then.
The changes that astonished the world, the first free election campaign—which I witnessed—and some of the bumps in the road South Africa has encountered since then, I have described in a new Epilogue. However, I have left the rest of this book entirely unchanged; its present tense refers to 1988, not to today. This, then, is a portrait of the country at the very peak of the state violence and repression that preceded one of the most remarkable transformations of our time. And, along the way, it is also a glance back at a crucial early episode of South African history.
A. H.
Beginnings
From a distance, Johannesburg’s Alexandra township looks as if wisps of fog had collected above it, despite the sun-scorched day. Coming closer, I see that it is not fog but dust, for most streets here, unlike those in the white suburbs that surround Alexandra, are unpaved. This morning some fifty thousand pairs of feet are kicking the dust aloft as they make a pilgrimage over the hills, in long streams that converge on one spot. Seventeen Alexandra youths, from age twelve up, will be buried here today. They are victims of police bullets during six days of recent fighting in this township, one of the bloodier battles in South Africa’s long civil war.
It is March 5, 1986. I am heading toward the funeral with some white friends. They assure me we will be safe, but it is hard not to worry: our skin is the same color as those whose government shot the young men who are to be buried today. As white people on this emotion-laden day, won’t we be targets for community rage? Adding to my uneasiness is the fact that South Africa’s division is one of class as well as race: the people I’m with are in a larger convoy of white supporters of the resistance movement, all of whom are in cars, some of them new Audis and Peugeots. This line of cars is entering an overcrowded township whose black citizens mostly must travel by foot, van, or bus. As we drive into Alexandra, we pass its ramshackle bus station: cracked and battered open-air concrete platforms with destination signs whose very names—Rosebank, Ferndale, Parktown—speak of the leisured white suburbs of swimming pools, tree-shaded streets, and well-sprinkled lawns. These are the places Alexandra residents commute to each day, to work as cooks, maids, and gardeners.
Through the open window of the car, I can smell the sewage ditches at the side of the road and hear the sound of dozens of small gasoline generators: in most of “Alex,” if you want electricity, you have to make your own. Goats, chickens, and an occasional cow wander the streets. Small, tin-roofed homes are cramped together. Desperate for housing, some families have even moved into a row of abandoned buses. Their wheels, stripped of tires, have sunk into the soil. Scattered about are reminders of recent street fighting: smashed windows, a few burnt-out cars.
Astoundingly, as our white caravan jounces slowly over the rutted road toward the funeral, we are cheered. Older people clap from the roadside. Children smile and wave from doorways. Young men give the clenched-fist salute—right arm extended, thumb outside fist. I see the same spirit a few moments later, when we walk into the overflowing soccer stadium where the funeral is to take place. Just outside the stadium is a large warehouse under construction, a skeleton of bright yellow steel girders. Several dozen young black men have climbed high up and are sitting precariously astride this framework. Despite a police order forbidding them, they hold banners with slogans like FORWARD TO PEOPLE’S POWER! Two white university students approach the structure, carrying their own banner of support. It takes them ten minutes to clamber up the steel beams while holding their sign; at every level, black hands reach down to help them up. Finally two Alexandra youths reach down from the topmost girder, take the students’ banner, and hold it aloft.
The ceremony begins. Mourners have filled every seat in the stadium and the entire dirt soccer field. The crowd rises and begins to sing, in spontaneous harmony, the stirring hymn that for three quarters of a century has been the freedom anthem of southern Africa:
Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika Maliphakamis’we ‘pondolwayo . . . (God bless Africa, Let our nation rise . . .)
I feel humbled at the majesty of the singing and the solemnity of the crowd, many of whom are weeping. Near a speaker’s platform at one end of the field, the seventeen coffins lie in a row; each is covered with banners in the black, green, and gold colors of the African National Congress. Mothers and other relatives sit next to each coffin. An honor guard of teenage boys in brown berets and red armbands stands at attention next to them. For four hours under a broiling sun, speaker after speaker comes to the rostrum.
One is Albertina Sisulu, sixty-eight, whose husband, ANC leader Walter Sisulu, spent more than twenty-five years in prison. She and her children have been in and out of jail too many times to count. In 1956 she was one of the leaders of twenty thousand women who made a famous protest march to government buildings in Pretoria. She is introduced, to much cheering, as “our mother, Comrade Mrs. Sisulu.”
“This country is governed by frightened cockroaches!” she shouts.
The crow