Losing the Plot. Leon de Kock
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is also the symptom of a peace he has made with himself. (The Number 138)
Explaining this, the author suggests that
[watching To Sir with Love] wasn’t his first experience of black and white. Away from the screen, in his real life, he was watching his mother give her maternal love to two white children. And the feelings this spectacle invoked had made him a virulent racist. He hated the Sampsons in particular, the entire white population in general. Even the ‘pseudo-whites’, the coloured middle class, with their domestic workers and their family cars, he hated with a vengeance. (138)
On the basis of this evaluation of what Steinberg has deduced about Wentzel’s sense of things, over the longer term and in view of the stories he typically tells himself, the author is able to identify his subject’s current storyline as a ‘retrospective memory’, a reconstruction (or fiction, of a sort), in the present, of a memory that, Steinberg concludes, must have had a different charge in the past: ‘Back in the mid-seventies, he must have watched To Sir with Love with ambivalence at best: a toxic mix of longing and envy’ (138).
Such meta-reflexive recalibrating in the face of a superfluity of oral and researched data represents the real work of Steinberg’s (and Dlamini’s) brand of nonfiction. In The Number, as elsewhere in his corpus, the importance of such work is evident in the consequences attendant upon narratives of self-understanding, or delusion. The very destiny of Steinberg’s interlocutors is intricately bound with their stories of origination and validation. This can be seen on both an individual and a collective level. Socially, the prisons become a site in which the political narrative of transition after 1994 gains a sharpened focus. The early years of Mandela’s presidency saw riotous conditions inside gaols like Pollsmoor in the Cape after unrealistic expectations of mass amnesty and ‘freedom’ on an exaggerated scale were not met (The Number 271–276). However, white bosses in the command structure gave way to people of colour fairly quickly, and the new prison directors had their own ideas about running institutions of incarceration. One new manager in particular, Johnny Jansen, decided to turn the prison around, from an authoritarian, violent and mistrustful institution to a place where the governors and inmates might forge a common language. As a man of colour himself, Jansen had experienced the humiliation of racial discrimination at the hands of his former white bosses, ‘[s]o he believed that he knew why the men in his charge had murdered and raped; their psyches had been mangled by the collective humiliation of apartheid’ (319). ‘I don’t think the solution to crime is so complicated,’ Jansen says to Steinberg in the course of The Number. ‘Human beings are supposed to be simple. They didn’t become what they are by choice, but by their circumstances. If you expose them to different ways of doing things, it is like giving a child a new toy’ (319). Steinberg continues:
It was all charmingly romantic. Human beings are naturally good: apartheid had deformed their souls. Jansen himself had almost succumbed to the cancer of racial humiliation; he had wanted to kill. But he was better now, a fully-fledged human being, and he was going to shepherd his flock back to goodness: one victim of apartheid taking the rest by the hand. (319)
Romantic it may well have been, but at this point, Jansen as a senior prison boss is engaged in something quite astonishing in any prison environment, let alone one inextricably linked with apartheid – he is structuring a management revolution in a discourse associated with redemption. It is surely not accidental that healing discourse of this kind was also being used, at the same time, by the TRC, which was in fact sitting in the period that Jansen launched his initiative (1997–1998). The redemptive version of the transition story so key to postapartheid mythography, then, is played out inside Pollsmoor, one of South Africa’s biggest prisons. And, given the confined space of prison, its urgent pressures, Pollsmoor witnesses a dramatic, larger-than-life version of the promise, and outcome, of the transition narrative. Is it fiction or reality? Can it be made to work? What is more, Steinberg’s interlocutor, Wentzel, comes to internalise this redemptive promise (for reasons that are skilfully narrated in The Number), and so his story – and The Number – gain an enhanced significance as postapartheid documents: alongside the TRC, they bear witness to momentous currents of change, and the power of narrative to reconstitute the self.
In the course of Jansen’s ambitious programme, he recruits the Centre for Conflict Resolution (CCR) to come to Pollsmoor. Jansen wants the CCR to conduct conflict resolution workshops for warders and inmates. ‘These were heady days at Pollsmoor,’ Steinberg comments. ‘Its young coloured managers wanted to reinvent the prison; they were searching hungrily for ideas’ (323). The CCR people succeeded in changing the prison ‘profoundly’, Steinberg writes, ‘at least for a while’ (323). During their first 18 months at Pollsmoor, the CCR consultants established a workshop involving inmates and warders ‘in an endeavour to unstitch the coarse and violent practices apartheid had bequeathed to the prison’ (323). The 18 inmates in the workshop consisted mostly of Number gang leaders and members of the inmate committee. The workshop was based on psychological research around ‘human dynamics’. A second course involved ‘creative and constructive approaches to conflict’, while another on trauma debriefing was conducted by clinical psychologist Stephen van Houten (326). ‘It was the first time ever for some prisoners,’ Van Houten reported, ‘that they were able to verbalise their traumatic childhoods and/or their crimes.’ Steinberg sees in this a transformative moment:
That, indeed, is much of what the workshops were about for Magadien. At the age of 39 he learned a foreign language, a language of self. It opened the door to an entirely new universe. The idea that one can make of one’s life a project, an internal and inward-gazing project, that one can retrieve the most intimate of one’s memories, work on them, shape them into a single narrative of meaning – this was radically foreign, and a revelation. (326)
There is a clear similarity between Ndebele’s ‘restoration of narrative’ and Steinberg’s ‘narrative of meaning’, both of which enable affirmative reclamation of previously distorted and mangled senses of self. In addition, the correspondences between this ‘foreign’ notion of trauma debriefing and self-shaping in Pollsmoor, on the one hand, and similar processes going on in the TRC, on the other, cannot go unremarked. During the optimistic, early phase of transition, public discourse about the project of democracy seized the language of healing and reparation, of making good, all of it involving what one might call projects of reoriented selfhood. The late justice minister Dullah Omar regarded the Commission as ‘a necessary exercise to enable South Africans to come to terms with their past on a morally accepted basis and to advance the cause of reconciliation’.43 For Omar, healing the ‘wounds of the past’ (a common phrase in public discourse at the time) and avoiding further conflict meant building ‘a human rights culture’, for which ‘disclosure of the truth and its acknowledgement are essential’. Omar went further, declaring ‘truth’ the fulcrum of the public healing process: ‘The fundamental issue for all South Africans is therefore to come to terms with our past on the only moral basis possible, namely that the truth be told, and that the truth be acknowledged.’44 This publicly enshrined, redemptive understanding of ‘truth’ struck home forcefully as the TRC hearings and their media reverberations echoed in the public imagination. This was the secular redemption45 of postapartheid at work, and it paralleled the remarkable literary event of Krog’s Country of My Skull, published in 1998. As suggested earlier, Krog’s amalgam of reporting and lyrical writing, drawing on testimony and, to a lesser extent, memoir – some of it fabricated for effect – established ‘creative nonfiction’ as an ascendant form of literary intermediation in postapartheid writing. ‘Truth’ – the real thing, wheat that had been sifted and gleaned from the chaff of lies and ‘fictions’ – became a discursive imperative in both the more general public sphere and in the delimited literary realm. It ushered in a widespread public emphasis on embracing an unadulterated brand of scrupulous, ethical communication after decades of official prevarication and private denial. Such utterance of bare truth, such painful unearthing of repressed psychic material, is clearly of a different category to the notion of a reified ‘real’ – a category that literary scholars correctly dismiss as simplistic or banal, citing the interpenetration of fictional and real elements in both fictional and nonfictional utterances. Certainly, even TRC testimony is likely to contain storytelling