The brittleness of elaborate thinking

From Norman Levy’s very interesting autobiography, The Final Prize: My life in the anti-apartheid struggle (2d ed. 2012), one striking detail:

Ruth First, in her account of her confinement under the 90-day law [which authorized solitary confinement, without trial, for renewable periods of 90 days, and was a vehicle for torture of opponents of apartheid], noted that activists who sometimes seemed weak and woolly in their thinking held out the longest and did not break under solitary detention. In contrast, others (she had herself in mind) succumbed with insufficient resistance. (Pages 314-15, footnote omitted)

I don’t join First (killed long ago by an apartheid letter-bomb) in her self-criticism; torture, even torture without physical violence, is designed to overpower and usually does. But the contrast she draws is intriguing: those who had fully and precisely elaborated ideological perspectives turned out to be more brittle than those whose thinking was fuzzier. Why would that be?

Surely one likely answer is that ideological precision is always a delusion. We know that all the ideologies of the past were imperfect in one or many ways – it’s easy to see that with the benefit of hindsight. What’s a little more difficult is to realize that that must be true of our own ideologies, right now, as well.

Meanwhile the elaborate effort involved in creating a complete intellectual structure, fending off attacks on it, rationalizing its inconsistencies, all bespeaks a person distanced from the simple emotional forces that fuel our lives. And that distance, that self-alienation, is not only a tool for the torturer – for those unfortunate enough to encounter one – but also a shadow cast across all of a person’s life.

The "Camelot" years in the anti-apartheid struggle

A fascinating feature of Alan Wieder's biography, Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War against Apartheid (2013), is his reference to the 1950s as "Camelot" for white people who were part of the struggle against apartheid. As Wieder says, it was Gillian Slovo, one of the children of First and Slovo, who applied this term, and, one senses, she didn't do so entirely approvingly. The Slovo children clearly suffered from their parents' intense commitment to the struggle, as the children of other public men and women have often struggled, and Gillian Slovo's perhaps unhappy characterization of her parents' world should be understood against this background.

Nevertheless, the word may be apt. Nadine Gordimer's book Burger's Daughter -- a work of fiction, but connected to the actual life of a leading South African anti-apartheid lawyer, Bram Fischer -- vividly describes the partying of the day. It was, it seems, exciting to oppose apartheid in those years. And why shouldn't it have been? The whole world was moving away from doctrines of racial inequality, and surely South Africa would not sustain its isolation from this progressive trend indefinitely. Victory was coming. Meanwhile, though there were risks and consequences, they were much less severe than they would soon become. In the 1950s, of the many anti-apartheid leaders and activists who were accused in the Treason Trial, not one was convicted. And when police raided your house (as I think Stephen Clingman recounted in his biography of Fischer, Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary (2000)), you offered them tea -- if you were white. A measure of the romantic flavor of the time is that many people apparently didn't take the precautions their clandestine efforts really called for. And, while the political struggle went on, the opponents of apartheid were able to live a life that crossed racial lines -- lines that no other South Africans dared cross.

Things would soon grow worse. A state of emergency and a host of laws that made emergency rule part of regular life, a series of successful prosecutions (including of Bram Fischer), and the institutionalization of police torture changed the world of anti-apartheid opposition. It would take till the 1970s for a spirit of opposition to begin to flourish again. It's all the easier to understand how powerful the state oppression of those years was, when we know how much had been dreamt of and lost from the 1950s.

The ANC, the "armed struggle," and the Russians

Lately I've been reading about the ANC's armed struggle.* As everyone who has followed South African events knows, the armed struggle did not end with victorious rebel armies defeating apartheid troops in battle. But that obvious point may make it too easy to disregard the tremendous military challenges the ANC faced and the substantial campaign of undercover military action it nevertheless mounted. It was "armed propaganda" rather than conclusive military action, but it was quite effective armed propaganda. It's seems quite possible that the ANC’s military efforts were an integral part of the nationwide rising of black popular resistance to apartheid, and thus a material, rather than just symbolic, part of what brought apartheid down.

Along the way I've encountered something surprising: the positive role of Russians. By that I don't mean the supply of arms or money, though those supports likely were very important.

What I'm more surprised by, actually, is that the Russians emerge in these ANC stories, with only rare exceptions, as nice people. Why shouldn't they be nice? Well, because their role in the world always seemed to me to be to pursue their version of imperialism; if we became "ugly Americans" surely they became "ugly Russians."

Probably they did - but not in these stories. There must be other stories to be told, of course – the ones I’ve been reading are accounts by or about South Africans who were Communists and who were trained by the Russians in warcraft or spycraft. The South African Communist Party played a crucial role in the ANC’s struggle against apartheid, by the way, and many dedicated opponents of racism found their way to the Party. If people like Joe Slovo or Ronnie Kasrils or Barry Gilder didn't like the Russians, then nobody did. (And, in fact, Ruth First -- Joe Slovo's wife and a formidable, independent member of the Party herself -- was much more skeptical of the Soviet Union than her fellow Party members, some of whom tried to expel her for ideological deviation.)

Nevertheless. Slovo comes back from Russia with sardonic jokes he's apparently heard there about Russian politics. Kasrils learns just how much to drink before battle. Gilder, alone in Moscow for spy training, gains “at least twenty kilograms” (57) because of all the Russian food his housekeeper prepares for him. The Russians sound like pretty good friends to have.

And one thing the Russians don't do is this - an event Gilder recounts from his post-apartheid years in South Africa's National Intelligence Agency: 

During a meeting one warm afternoon in Cape Town with the CIA station chief in South Africa and a delegation from Langley, the station chief elbowed me during a break in the discussions around the corner of the venue and handed me a brown envelope with a few thousand dollars in it. He said it was for us to buy equipment. He said he needed a receipt and tore off the flap of the envelope and asked me to sign it. My hackles went up. There was no way I wanted a piece of paper sitting in a file in Langley with my signature on it. I carefully wrote: Received on behalf of the National Intelligence Agency, and handed the money over to the agency’s finance department. (204) 

Really, who were we kidding?

*In case you’re interested, the books I have most in mind here are: 

Barry Gilder, Songs and Secrets: South Africa from Liberation to Governance (2012)

Ronnie Kasrils, Armed and Dangerous: From Undercover Struggle to Freedom (2013 edition)

Alan Wieder, Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid (2013)