Invictus - Carlin [30]
CHAPTER V
DIFFERENT PLANETS
The world Mandela found himself inhabiting in 1989 was far removed in time and moral space from the harshness of life in South Africa, especially black South Africa. As he dressed up for a night out at the home of that nice Willemse couple, as he messed around with his microwave oven, discussed wine with his butler, splashed in his pool, and admired the view from his garden, the most powerful men in the country—the very ones with whom he would sit and sip those genteel cups of tea—would sneak out of the back door and regress to apartheid type, venting the furies on the people Mandela had dedicated his life to setting free.
Apart from the usual riot police mayhem in the townships, the police and army death squads whose creation Botha had approved were bumping off activists they considered a particular danger to the state. And Kobie Coetsee still presided over a judicial system that was sentencing more people to death than Saudi Arabia and the United States (though fewer than China, Iraq, and Iran) and was passing one unjust judgment after another. In April 1989, two white farmers found guilty of beating a black farm employee to death had been sentenced to a fine of 1,200 rand (then about $500), plus a six-month jail sentence suspended for five years. On the very same day another court had found three policemen guilty of beating a black man to death, but jailed just one of the policemen, the one who happened to be black, for twelve years.
Nothing quite compared, though, with what Coetsee’s people were getting up to in a courtroom in downtown Upington. Of the twenty-six individuals accused of the murder of Lucas Sethwala, the black policeman who had fired into the crowd, they had contrived to find twenty-five guilty. What still remained to be decided in the middle of 1989 was whether the twenty-five, who had all been in jail since the end of 1985, would receive the mandatory death sentence.
Paballelo was consumed by every detail of the trial. But for the white population of Upington it might have been unfolding in Borneo, for all the interest it held. Save for the policemen on duty, not one white Upingtonian turned up during the whole three and a half years that the trial lasted. Drama works on the premise of a shared humanity with the protagonists. For Upington, Paballelo was a dimly lit parallel world inhabited by an alien species; best left well alone.
It would be unfair to suggest that Upington had cornered the market on white racism. The trial under way there, and the circumstances around it, could have happened in any of a hundred other towns in South Africa. Upington, sitting out there in the desert, did provide a sharply focused vision of apartheid, of the neatly drawn lines that kept the races apart. But the local white burghers were by no means alone, or substantially different from most of their pale-skinned compatriots. And while they were satirized and pilloried the world over, you would have to wonder whether the average citizen of the United States, Canada, or Australia, had he or she been born in apartheid South Africa, would have behaved much differently. They inhabited the same general orbit as the most privileged people in the Western world. Their lives centered on home and work, on leading an enjoyable and comfortable life. Politics rarely came into it. The difference lay in that they happened to live side by side with some of the poorest, most badly treated people in the world, and that their good fortune, the reason why white South Africans enjoyed quite possibly the world’s highest average standard of living, and most definitely the most comfortable quality of life, depended on the misfortune of their black neighbors.
Choose a family from among the