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Fly the Beloved Country

The London Sunday Times - November 22, 1998

I am leaving South Africa. I have lived here for 35 years, and I shall leave with anguish. My home and my friends are here, but I am terrified. I know I shall get into trouble for saying so, because I am the widow of Alan Paton.
Fifty years ago, he wrote a book called Cry, The Beloved Country. He was an unknown South African schoolmaster and it was his first book, but it became a world bestseller overnight. It was eventually translated into more than 20 languages and became a set book in schools all over the world. It has sold more than 15m copies and still sells today at the rate of 100,000 copies a year. Two films have been made of it.

As a result of the startling success of this book, my husband became famous for his impassioned speeches and writings championing the cause of the black man in South Africa and bringing to the notice of the world their suffering under apartheid.

He campaigned for Nelson Mandela's release from prison and he worked all his life for black majority rule. He believed that at last the black man would come into his own. He was incredibly hopeful about the new South Africa that would follow the end of apartheid, but he died in 1988, aged 85. I was deeply upset that he wasn't alive for Mandela's release and the birth of this new South Africa.

I was so sorry he did not witness the euphoria and love at the time of the election in 1994. But I am glad he is not alive now. He would have been so distressed to see what has happened to his beloved country.

White wedding: Anne Paton is glad her husband did not live to see South Africa today
I LOVE this country with a passion; but I cannot live here any more. I can no longer live slung about with panic buttons, bunches of keys, special gear locks. I am tired of driving with my car windows closed and the doors locked, of being afraid of stopping at red lights, because this is where one can be attacked. I am tired of being constantly on the alert, having that sudden frisson of fear at the sight of a shadow by the gate, of a group of youths approaching - although nine times out of 10 they are innocent of harmful intent. Such is the suspicion that dogs us all.

I am tired of the endless litany of disaster that is repeated every time friends gather together. "Do you know what has happened to so-and-so?" is invariably the opening gambit.

Among my friends and the friends of my friends, I know of nine people who have been murdered in the past four years. One old friend, a very elderly lady, was raped and murdered by someone who broke into her home for no reason at all; another was shot at the garage.

We have a saying, "Don't sack the gardener", because of the belief that it is so often an inside job - the gardener who comes back and does you in. All this may sound like paranoia, but not without reason. I have been hijacked, mugged and terrorised.

A few years ago my car was taken from me at my local post office at gunpoint. I was forced across into the passenger seat as they intended to take me, too. I sat there frozen. But just as one man jumped into the back and the other fumbled with the starter I opened the passenger door and ran away. To this day I do not know how I did this. But I got away, still clutching my handbag. That was when I lost my first car.

On May 1 this year, a public holiday, I was mugged in my home at three in the afternoon. I used to live in a community of big houses, with big grounds, in beautiful rural countryside. It's still beautiful and green, but the big houses have been knocked down and people have moved into fenced and gated complexes like the one I now live in. Mine is in the suburbs of Durban, but they're springing up all over South Africa.

That afternoon I came home and omitted to close the security door. I was careless in those days. I never shut my front door. I went upstairs to lie down. After a while I thought I heard a noise, perhaps a bird or something.

Without a qualm I got up and went out onto the landing. Outside there was a man. I screamed and immediately two other men appeared. I was seized round the throat and almost throttled. I could feel myself losing consciousness.

My mouth was bound with Sellotape (my own, which they had taken from my desk) and I was threatened with my own clasp knife (Girl Guide issue from long ago) and told: "If you make a sound you die." My hands were tied tightly behind my back with string and I was thrown into the guest room and the door was shut. They took all the electronic equipment they could find except the computer. They also, of course, took the car - this is when I lost my second car.

The complex was full of people, all watching a rugby match on the television. But my house is fairly private and the thieves were able to load up my car and drive away without any problem. It was made easy for them because the keys were hanging tidily by the front door.

A few weeks later my new car (courtesy of the insurance company) was comfortably in my locked and fenced carport when I was woken by its alarm in the early hours of the morning. The thieves had removed the radio, having cut through the padlocks in order to bypass the electric control on the gates. Radio thieving is quite sophisticated here. There are organised gangs that "do" areas, taking as many as they can in one night.

A few weeks ago came the last straw, shortly before my 71st birthday. Once again I returned home in the middle of the afternoon and walked into my sitting room. Outside the window there were two men in the act of breaking in. I retreated to the hall and pressed my panic alarm.

This time I had shut my front door on entering. I had become more cautious by now. Yet one of the men ran round the house, jumped over my 6ft steel fence and proceeded to try to batter down the front door, shouting to be let in. Meanwhile, his accomplice was busy breaking my sitting room window with a hammer.

All this took place while the sirens were shrieking. This was the frightening part - that they kept coming, in broad daylight, while the alarms were going. They were not deterred. They know that there has to be a time lag of a few minutes before help arrives and there is time for a "smash and grab" type of action where they can dash off with the television and video recorder.

In fact, the front-door assailant was caught and taken off to the cells. Recently I telephoned to ask the magistrate when I would be called as a witness. She told me she had let him off for lack of evidence. She said that banging on my door was not an offence, and how could I prove that his intent was hostile?

I have been careless in the past - a fence topped with razor wire and electric gates give one a feeling of security. At least it did. But I am careless no longer.

There is nothing unusual about my housing complex, they are all equally vulnerable. No fence - be it electric or not - no wall, no razor wire, is really a deterrent to the determined intruder. Now my alarm is on all the time and my panic button hung round my neck. While some people say I have been unlucky, others say: "You are lucky not to have been raped or murdered." What kind of a society is this where one is considered "lucky" not to have been raped or murdered - yet?

I know there is a moral ambiguity here. In the past whites felt in charge, no matter what their politics were. Whether they supported apartheid or not, they were top dogs. The Africans were contained. Now we are simply a small minority no longer in charge, and there is an atavistic fear among us.

The contrast between the present and the years Alan and I spent together could not be greater.

I was born in London when Britain ruled the world and jingoism was the order of the day. When we opened our school atlases, the world was covered with red blobs denoting the Empire on which the sun never set. Right down at the bottom of the map was the small red blob of South Africa.

I married a South African who was with the RAF and we came here with our two children in 1963. I first met Alan under very unfortunate circumstances. We actually lived next door to him in a place called Kloof, though we never met socially. He was regarded as a rather dangerous agitator. I was quite unaware of his fame and just thought of him as a nuisance neighbour, whose servants were rowdy at the bottom of his garden and upset mine.

One day some birds flew across from his garden and promptly dropped dead in mine. I phoned up this bird poisoner and gave him a piece of my mind. I thought no more about it, but suddenly up my drive there walked a rather disreputable elderly gentleman, wanting to look at the corpses I had by then buried. I gave him another piece of my mind and he tottered home to his ailing wife, muttering about that harridan next door.

He was, in fact, a fanatical bird-lover and would no more poison a bird than his friends.

Within a year or so, his wife had died and my husband and I were divorced. A mutual friend, deciding that I needed a job and Alan needed a secretary, arranged for us to meet. So I brought order out of chaos, and my initial awe and terror of this great man turned to love. We were married in January 1969.

Alan had a unique attribute: you never knew from the tone of his voice whether he was talking to black, white, coloured or khaki. He treated everybody alike.

Our life together was quite rocky. He was 25 years older than me, with a brilliant mind - a genius really - while I was a simple soul with an inferiority complex engendered by the fact that I had not been to university.

Alan never talked down to me or made me feel inadequate, but some of his friends did. Most of his friends did not like me. Before I came on the scene they had free access to him at any time of the day or night, they wanted him to speak at functions, write this and that, lend his influence here and there.

They gave no consideration to his advancing years. He could not get on with his writing and his life was not on his own. Some of his friends were quite unscrupulous and would make use of his name and fame for their own ends.

I changed all this. Everybody, except for a selected few, had to make appointments to see him. All sorts of ploys were tried to get round the dragon at the door, and I made many enemies, but Alan was delighted at his newly ordered existence. He got back to his writing and literary life.

At the time Alan had no passport. It had been taken away from him at Johannesburg airport on his return from a trip abroad after he had said derogatory things about the government while he was in the United States.

At the end of 1971 he wanted to take up an offer of an honorary degree from Harvard and to do research in Spain. He was reluctant to apply for a new passport, however, because he thought that by doing so he was being disloyal to his banned and restricted friends.

The government would serve a banning order on anybody it considered dangerous. Banned persons could not attend gatherings of more than three people, were restricted to their own districts, and sometimes to home. Alan's greatest friend, Peter Brown, one of the leaders of the Liberal party, was banned for 10 years and could not even attend his son's speech days. Yet it was Peter who persuaded Alan to apply for a passport.

He was given a restricted passport for one year. This opened a new life to us. We travelled the world, usually starting off in the United States at some university, where he would work immensely hard for a few days lecturing. Then we would set off on holiday. The American universities are extremely generous and would pay our fares back and forth with a little extra as well and this would enable us to indulge our passion for journeys.

Travelling with Alan was like travelling with a child. I would pack the suitcases, load the car, drive all day, arrive at our destination, book us in, unpack the suitcases and do the washing, while he would sit down happily with his cigarette and whisky. But we loved travelling; it was the one interest that we really had in common.

Because of the difference in our ages, intellects, education and background, we had divergent views on many things, and we had very few friends in common. In fact, my friends were terrified of him.

When we were at home I managed his life 24 hours a day as secretary, housekeeper, cook, handyman, hostess, protector, accountant. The telephone shrilled constantly for him. Newspapers wanting comments on items of news or for him to write articles.

Holidays were a blissful relaxation away from the telephone and the mail. This was prodigious. Alan had a huge amount of fan mail, mainly from America, and much of it from students who were "doing" Cry, The Beloved Country and wanted answers to the most complicated questions. Every letter he answered.

People used to ask us what we talked about. Well, two of the things we did not talk about were religion and politics. Alan was a deeply religious man and insisted on going to church every Sunday. I was not a faithful worshipper like him and found it difficult to accept this routine, and it was rather a bone of contention between us.

As far as politics were concerned I was not quite on the same wavelength as Alan, and so by tacit agreement we never really discussed it. But we talked about everything else under the sun, and played endless word games, and quoted poetry, and made up silly stories about our friends.

A character in Cry, The Beloved Country said: "I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving they will find we are turned to hating." And so it has come to pass. There is now more racial tension in this country than I have ever known. But it is not just about black-on-white crime. It is about general lawlessness.

The black people are suffering more than the whites. They do not have access to powerful private security firms, and there are no police stations near them in the townships and rural areas. The majority of hijackings, rapes and murders are perpetrated on them. They cannot run away like the whites, who are streaming out of this country in their thousands.

President Mandela has referred to us who leave as "cowards" and says the country can do without us. So be it. But it takes a great deal of courage to uproot and start again.

We are leaving because crime is rampaging through the land. There are no jobs for these gangs of marauding youths, and doubtless they have minimum education. The evils that beset this country now are blamed on the legacy of apartheid. One of the worst legacies of that time is the result of the Bantu Education Act, which deliberately created an inferior quality of education for black people. Illiteracy and joblessness make for crime. This apartheid education act denied blacks the chance to build a middle class, which would have helped the post-apartheid state to prosper and stop crime.

The situation is exacerbated by the fact that there is virtually no deterrent. The criminals know that the chances of being caught are negligible, and if they do get caught they will be free again almost at once.

So what is the answer? The government needs to get its priorities right. We need a powerful, well-trained and well-equipped police force. And this means good pay and assurances of compensation for families. This means money. The right kind of person has to be attracted to life in the police, where he can do a job he can be proud of.

The police force today is hopelessly undermanned, undertrained and undermotivated. We need hundreds and thousands more policemen. We need a visible police presence, with men walking around on the beat. Now the only visible form of protection is provided by private security guards, employed at great expense by shops, banks and, of course, private citizens.

We have had a recent incident where a shopping centre was broken into in the afternoon. A call to the police station elicited the reply: "We have no transport."

"Just walk then," said the caller, as the police station is about a two-minute sprint from the shop in question.

"We have no transport," came the reply again. Nobody went. In these circumstances how can crime not be a resounding success?

Of course, there was a lot of crime in the wicked old days but nothing like this. It was a police state. If people were wandering around, the police would drive up and say, "Where is your pass?" and lock them up. Now you can do anything and go anywhere.

Here is another quote from my husband's book: "Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much."

What has changed in half a century? This quote is as apt now as it was then. A lot of people who were convinced that everything would be all right are disillusioned, although they don't want to admit it.

The government has many excellent schemes for improving the lot of the black man, who has been disadvantaged for so long. A great deal of money is spent in this direction. However, nothing can succeed while people live in such fear. Every available rand (and there is much money available) must be diverted and poured into the creation of a viable police force.

We are reduced to spending more and more money on doing our own policing and protecting ourselves. Those of us who lose their nerve, or have too many fears for the future, emigrate if we can.

I do not want to be a target for the rest of my life. I want to live in peace, where I do not constantly have to be minding my back, where I can sleep at night.

In the middle of last week, six or seven miles from my home, an old couple were taken out and murdered in the garden. The wife had only one leg and was in a wheelchair. Yet they were stabbed and strangled - for very little money. They were the second old couple to be killed last week. The next day a chap was shot nearby in his car, the father of three children. It just goes on and on, all the time. We have become a killing society.

As I prepare to return to England, a young man asked me the other day in all innocence if things were more peaceful there. "You see," he said, "I know of no other way of life than this. I cannot imagine anything different." What a tragic statement on the beloved country today.

Black & white
"Because the white man has power, we too want power," said Msimangu. "But when a black man gets power, when he gets money, he is a great man if he is not corrupted. I have seen it often. He seeks power and money to put right what is wrong, and when he gets them, why, he enjoys the power and the money. Now he can gratify his lusts, now he can arrange ways to get white man's liquor ... I see only one hope for our country, and that is when white men and black men, desiring neither power nor money, but desiring only the good of their country, come together to work for it ... I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find we are turned to hating."

Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton (Penguin Books)

With Courtesy of ©The London Sunday Times