I’m pained when people want to forget the past – Denis Goldberg

This is your first time in Nigeria. How did you feel when you got the invitation to come over?I was really very excited because when I was released from prison in 1985 and while travelling, I met a lot of people from all over the world, including Nigerians who said I had to come here. […]

This is your first time in Nigeria. How did you feel when you got the invitation to come over?
I was really very excited because when I was released from prison in 1985 and while travelling, I met a lot of people from all over the world, including Nigerians who said I had to come here. So here I am, 28 years later, I am in Lagos.
It’s such a mixture of slums and wealth. On the way from the airport, I thought I was back in Cape Town. A nice highway, then bare ground, shanties, big buildings… it is just like home. I’d long hoped to see Lagos, this huge city of about 11 million people.
It is a long way to go between your country and mine. Nigeria has three times our population, but the economy is a bit smaller than ours. But it will grow bigger and quicker than ours, provided petroleum continues to be available in the country and depending on how the leaders deal with it.
I like the style here, I like the fashion, I like the openness of the people. I’ve been welcomed very warmly. People know about South Africa, apartheid and Nelson Mandela, but not what apartheid was practically like. I was moved that people are hungry to know more.
But they should understand that Nelson Mandela, yes, a great leader, but he couldn’t have done it on his own. If everybody is mentioning Nelson Mandela alone now, then we shouldn’t have needed to have a freedom movement or a democracy. Politics doesn’t work that way. It’s team work.

You had shared virtually everything, including an excruciating prison term with a friend, but suddenly he was gone. How emotionally affected are you by Mandela’s death?
I arrived in Lagos on Thursday and was sitting to late dinner when I heard the news of his death. I’d been expecting it because I’d seen him in hospital in July. He was clearly very, very ill. I hoped he would make it. Expected though his death was, it still leaves some emptiness in my life, as it certainly will in our country’s life and even in Africa.
I’m sad he’s gone but pleased that the long lying in hospital, unable to do anything and simply hanging on to life, is over. I feel relief for him and his family.
I feel tremendous sympathy with his family. I do wish I could reach out to them but I can only do it through the media. I don’t wish to intrude on them. They’ve got to have time to themselves. I feel a sense of loss for an older man, a great leader, a comrade who called me ‘boy’ because I was 15 years younger.
Before his release, we saw each other last in 1964. But in 1990, he came to Sweden and I was in a reception line to see him and he stood in front of me, looked at me and said, ‘hello boy, it’s been a long time’. In mutual affection and my regard for him, I quickly wrapped my ANC scarf around his neck as a gift to him. When my wife arrived the next day, he greeted her formally. When I told him she’s my wife, he exchanged greetings and whispered something to her. She then turned to me and said, “he said the boy (referring to me) is looking good. You must be looking after him well.” Those are touching moments.

Do you have concerns for post-Mandela South Africa?
No. We’ll just go on as before. People keep saying modern leadership in South Africa is not like Mandela’s, or like our generation of leaders. But then, we had nothing to aspire to because we lived from hand to mouth and had to survive. For us the price we had to pay was for freedom, and our ultimate prize was freedom.
But now that the country and people are free, people want the fruits of freedom. The sadness for me is that in wanting the fruits of freedom, people in South Africa are like people all over the world in modern economy – it’s all about connections to contracts for personal wealth. For many, that has become the overriding driving force.
The danger is not because Mr. Mandela is gone but because of the reality of the situation worldwide. The tendency in our South African media and all over the world is to go on and on about corruption in the modern South African government as though apartheid was free of corruption. Apartheid, too, was very corrupt and the big old corporations made billions. Some escaped away with their money. They said they were so relieved that Nelson Mandela brought peace and their assets were secure and they were grateful to him.
Now, they don’t pay the mine workers any better. Remember the massacre from the protests last October about mine workers’ pay and terribly bad working conditions. The attitude of the mine owners and the economic specialists is that we can’t change the system because everything will collapse. So we’ve got to go on having apartheid labour relations, which is entirely a form of racism, because majority of our workers are blacks. Two thirds of our population are Africans.
 Whites, in general, can’t see that with the deal which left them in peace with all their privileges – of education, assets, resources, etc – they should have helped with the transformation. That makes me very sad because my comrades in the ANC led the liberation movement. We put our lives on the line for a peaceful South Africa.
We said in our Freedom Charter of 1955: “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white”. Mandela in his speech at the famous Rivonia trial said, “This is an ideal for which I’m prepared to die, if necessary.”  Thirty years later, despite all the deaths, the people murdered by security police, the hangings, the tens of thousands of years in prison for activists, the murders, now they just  say, “Thank you  I’m holding out my hand in friendship. Why are you bringing up the past?” Well, I’m pained by people who want to forget the past.
We need to remember that we have a moral debt to pay if we want to live in peace. I don’t want to see an Arab Spring in South Africa. We negotiated the political settlement so we won’t have to have violence any more.  But the situation driving our people is frustration. Some people think that in 20 years, you can overcome the evil effects of 300 years.
Yes, truly, we’ve made tremendous progress, though our own media deny it every day. I go to universities to lecture. It used to be seas of white faces only. Now, there are many brilliant black kids. Majority of the students are black. Slowly, faculty members and professors are black. We watch discussion programmes on TV and the experts are of all races, all colours. This means dignity for people and respect for their humanity, expertise and understanding. This alone is a huge turn.
We need to have a policy of black economic empowerment. We need to break the cycle where young blacks can’t get jobs. First, they couldn’t get jobs because they weren’t educated. Now they are educated but are being told they don’t have experience. How do you get experience if you can’t get a job?
There’s got to be ethnic representation across board. It’s just upside down racism now. It’s only six per cent of young whites from 18 to 29 who are unemployed, but over 40 per cent of blacks of that age range are unemployed, even though they are qualified. I’m sure they go to interviews, equally qualified. It’s a huge task to overcome these differences.
How do you suddenly turn around a public administration that essentially looked after the needs of the whites who were controlling and dominating a few million workers of other colours with authoritarian measures? How do you suddenly create an effective civil service to serve the needs of 50 million people? Where do you get the trained civil servants?  

To what extent did apartheid split South Africa?
Black and white mixed together every day. But for a black person, legally, to be in the city, he needed to have special legal permission or residents’ right. Technically, they were not allowed to take their wives with them. So there were laws that split families and yet they (whites) claimed to be moral. But, of course, cities grew up and the laws broke down in times of crisis.
The people in the countryside never had any interaction with whites, except with officials, and that interaction was one of “do this, do that”, with a lot of command and no help. There’s still a lot of resentment among many people, though they’ve accepted the idea that we have to build what we now call social cohesion.
Mandela famously said, “We’re a country of 11 official languages and many, many cultures. We have to become one nation.” But now that the pressure of the fight against racist domination is over, people accept their own cultural rights..
Apartheid separated black people by tribe. But in a city like Soweto, people spoke one another’s language. They inter-married. I can’t tell you we were thoroughly divided. As freedom beckoned, there was an attempt to maintain the separation and domination. The most vulnerable whites were only blue-collar workers. They were the most rankled of all. The threat of change meant their jobs could be on the line, so they resisted.
The struggle became very bitter and the security forces of apartheid wouldn’t give up. It became so bad that in the four years between Mandela’s release and his election as president, at least 10 thousand people were murdered.
Why did Mandela call for peace when he was the same man who, 30 years earlier, had called for the armed struggle? The apartheid state was bankrupt, politically, financially, morally. The whole world turned against it. They wanted them out. The West wanted change but also wanted to protect their investment.
And so Mandela said, “We need peace. People are being killed every day. Our people are dying.” But some of our youngsters now say he gave away too much. What did he give away? Murders were happening every day. Murder squads were daily killing anti-apartheid people, with the assistance of allies of apartheid. Six thousand people were killed as they battled to stop the ANC from coming into power. It even became a tribal fight.
Apartheid administrators used every division they could to control our people. They created differences between Africans and Africans, and Africans, coloured and Indians and those differences remain till today.
I live in the Western Cape Province. Majority of the population there are white, and there are also coloured. Africans were prohibited from living there, although they did. Now, Africans are streaming in and coloured people are saying, “Why are they coming to our part of the country? This is our country.”
There isn’t a sense of solidarity in overcoming the disproportionate distribution of resources of the past.  Even in Nigeria, when you had a change; you had a civil war over it. That was the excuse for the war. Having read quite wide since then, I think the real reason was that politicians were unable to accept that they had to share power and to allocate resources in a way that equalised the disabilities. I might be wrong, but that’s my take on it.

Do you see a struggle among today’s South African leaders to take on Mandela’s kind of leadership role?
I think that Mandela is a very rare person. Of course, we had a number of very rare persons. There was Oliver Tambo who led us to freedom. There was no rivalry between him and Mandela. When Tambo had a series of strokes, he laid low.
Mandela came out of prison just in time to attend a Mandela competition and when he came on stage to a rapturous applause, he made a speech in praise of Tambo. “We’re brothers. We fought together. He’s led us to freedom. No rivalry between us”.
I wept when I heard it because I thought, here are two such rare people that it’s not about them, but freedom. There was also Walter Sisulu who was in prison with Mandela and was Mandela’s mentor.
When Archbishop Tutu took over leadership of the civic campaigns and people said he was going to be a rival for power, he said no, he was only a political leader because the real leaders were in prison and in exile. He promised to hand power over to them when they returned. And that was what he did. That’s a rare characteristic.
We also have people who are flawed like most people are, and my philosophical view is that we want to build a beautiful place on earth when all of us are damaged goods emotionally.  None of us are angels, yet we have to make our country and ourselves better.  
People praise Mandela now for his gentleness, his compassion. But he was a tough guy. Look at the way he used to carry himself: proud, upright, determined, committed. Ready to risk his life and ours and we were happy to go along with it. That was what the situation needed. I was inspired and shared some of it with a number of people.
There can’t be any struggle, no rivalry.

Your original background was civil engineering. How did you make the switch to activism?
I’ve thought about it a lot. I was born in 1933 after my parents settled in South Africa just before the Great Depression. We did a decent living because my father was white. I read everything I could read. I was 13 when I decided I wanted to be an engineer.
I wanted to bring water to people, do railways and work super trains. Then I discovered that in South Africa, that would be for whites and not for the people in general. But first we must build a new country, then I can happily be an engineer. Because I was white, I decided I could have technical training and start an underground of technical people. I am white, but I abhor injustice. So I decided to join the freedom fighters to right the wrongs in our country.
I became a member of the regional command of the Umkhonto we Sizwe, Spear of the Nation, militant arm of the ANC. I was supposed to be the weapons maker of the the. But I got arrested too early to actually start production (laughter), which was why I got four life sentences. I don’t regret it. I mean, there was an awful lot I could have done.  
I played a role contrary to the wishes of many people and I knew it was painful to them, but I did this willingly. I knew the cost to my family. My mother had to help. My daughter, I was always her hero until I became politically active and went to prison. When I first came out, she rejected me. She wanted me to be daddy to them as she was big sister to her little brother. I wasn’t quick enough to understand her. It took her a long time to learn to accept me.
My son on the other hand managed the situation very well; he is a different personality. But he asked me, “Dad, why did you do what you did that took you away for so long?” He could have said, “Why did you desert us?”  But he wasn’t prejudging me.  I told him I did something I thought was important.  
Millions of black kids, because of our migrant labour laws, didn’t see their daddies. They grew up without them. So I asked him, “Why are you more important than them? I can’t let it be like that because what makes us human is that when things are wrong you put them right.
I knew you would all get hurt but it was important for me to do this.” I was crying like a six-year-old who’s lost his daddy. So we embraced. It was a very sweet, emotional moment. My wife walked in and we sat down.
That evening, my son took me aside and asked what I was going to do. I replied I’ve to be politically active. My comrades are still in prison. And he said, “You have to because if you don’t, you might as well have stayed in prison.” I thought of the depth of understanding of this boy man who is thinking of me, not himself. He was working in the finance district of London. So that evening he began giving me financial advice, saying he would look after his sister and mother and that I must do whatever I have to.
I owed gratitude to my wife and mother, for bringing them up with these values.  

How traumatic was your prison experience?
The day we were sentenced to life imprisonment, the white South African media actually wanted us hanged. But the judge decided since we had not been charged with high treason, he could not impose on us the death sentence. He said the mildest relief would be to sentence us to life on each count for which we were found guilty. I want to assure you, I only served one and got a 75 per cent discount. (laughter)
When the judge announced it, first we smiled, and then we laughed. My mother called out and asked what the sentence was. I said life and life’s wonderful. And it is. I’ve had a wonderful life. I was 31 at the time and handsome. I’m proud of what I’ve achieved, together with the others and the support of my family.
We arrived at the prison following our sentence and I said to the head of prisons security, “you’re looking happy, fellow.” And he said, “they should have hanged you.” With so much anger, he said, “you will never get out of here on your two feet. We’ll carry you out of here in a coffin, feet first.”
He’d died by the time I was released in 1985. When Mandela too was released in the following years, he stepped out of the prison holding his wife’s hand and walked into freedom on his own two feet. What a moment that was. What a moment!
They wanted us forgotten and dead there.
In prison I’d a visitor for 14 years who was my connection to the outside world. She helped me break down my emotions and the walls around them and helped me to come through it all.
She felt that I was getting worn out and it was time for me to be released. She wrote a memorandum to the Minister of Justice, Kobie Coetzee, in which she put forward reasons why I should be released.
The minister invited her to a meeting. When she got there, full of trepidation, he treated her respectfully. Later I heard from one of the ambassadors that he was so impressed by the memorandum that he realised he was not just the highest lawyer in the land but a cabinet minister responsible for policy decisions. How would they deal with it if Denis at his young age and after 20 years in prison, died in prison? What would it be like if the great leader Mandela died in prison? He started the negotiations with Mandela personally.
When Mandela was in hospital with tuberculosis, he went to visit him. Mandela later on met Pieter Botha, then South Africa’s president and a hardliner. I can imagine this apartheid president sitting down to talk with a prisoner who had no power except that of our people and their love for him.

To be continued next week