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MAHATMA GANDHI TODAY
Andre Brink
Gandhi Memorial Lecture in 1970
I feel very proud and very humble to have the privilege of delivering this
Memorial Lecture just one year after the centenary of The Great Soul's birthday
on 2 October 1869. It is now almost twenty-three years after that tragic
day in January 1948 when the Mahatma was killed by the bullet of a fanatic,
so soon after one of his noblest achievements through fasting: reconciling
the two great rival religious groups in India. This was, as is so well known,
one of the forms of expression by his justly famous peaceful weapon, satyagraha,
"Soul Force", which, many years before, he had also applied in
South Africa to ease the oppression suffered by his compatriots in this
country.
In recent years there have been many disturbing reports of new unrest and
new strife, of the revival of old antagonisms in India. And as far as this
country is concerned: the South African Indian Congress, founded by Gandhi
and based on the very principle of satyagraha, has long been paralysed.
What is more, those principles of love and cooperation of people of different
races on a basis of equality, are insulted and denied daily by the unmitigated
evil of the apartheid system which has got its deadly grip on our society
like a boa constrictor on its prey. Millions of people are insulted and
humiliated and oppressed and denied their simplest human dignity simply
because their skin colour is less etiolated than that of an oppressor who
has lived under a moral wheelbarrow for too long. And many thousands of
people who sympathise with Gandhi's belief in racial equality, in the common
dignity of all men, are languishing in jail, in various forms of banishment,
or in exile. In our beautiful and unhappy country a small minority is determining
absolutely the lives of all and causing the deaths of many. And so it may
seem as if the Mahatma is, in fact, dead; and as if his spirit of greatness
and compassion has really departed from us.
But appearances are deceptive; and that is the theme of my lecture today.
The Mahatma is dead. Yet the Mahatma will never be dead. And in mourning
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi today we also celebrate his undying legacy to
the world.
I realised this very acutely in the past fortnight, a propos of another
great man, in his way a disciple of Gandhi. In a letter in a Cape Town newspaper
ex-judge Blackwell made an appeal for clemency for Bram Fischer who is at
present, old and in poor health, serving a life sentence in jail. Given
the authorities we have I doubt whether this plea will be heeded, although
I most sincerely endorse it. But it was something else about the judge's
newspaper letter which struck me even more. Bram Fischer, he said, was in
danger of becoming a forgotten man. And in that, I think, he was wrong.
I, for one, and there are many like me - and several Afrikaners among them
- can never forget the impression made by Bram Fischer's profoundly moving
statement from the dock before he was sentenced. It was, fortunately, widely
reported at the time, and in the evolution of my own ethical and political
thinking his statement marked a turning point, a decisive moment. I am not
allowed to quote publicly from his speech, because even that is forbidden
in this free country which the Prime Minister constantly assures us is not
a police state. The important thing is that his ideals of racial harmony
and cooperation did not go to jail with him. Nor did the memory of his compassion
with those suffering on account of their race, his adherence to the principle
that everybody should be allowed to help determine the form of government
which shapes his life.
The government - any government - can effectively silence or incapacitate
an individual or even large numbers of individuals, but all the battalions
of fear and all the organisations of hate, all the formidable, destructive
power of armies and police, of Saracens and jails, of BOSS-laws and banishments
cannot kill an idea in which the light of truth is burning.
And it occurred to me, as I read Judge Blackwell's letter, that even when
Fischer dies those words he spoke in the dock would live by virtue of the
simple fact that I, and many others, can never forget them. And when we,
too, die one day, a new generation will be at hand to keep those ideals
alive. I am reminded of an essay by the great Afrikaans poet Van Wyk Louw,
"Heerser en Humanis" ("Tyrant and Humanist"), in which,
on the eve of his execution, a condemned writer is visited in jail by the
Head of State. The tyrant promises him a reprieve on the condition that
he recant. If not, he will die and every word he has ever written will be
destroyed. With quiet assurance the humanist elects to die, bolstered by
the conviction that he will win in the end. "How can that be?"
the tyrant asks. "I have two reasons", replies the condemned man.
"One is that your executioner will see me die. The other is that you
have found it necessary to visit me tonight."
It may be helpful to dwell a bit more on the history of Bram Fischer, for
the sake of those who have already begun to forget about him; and also for
his illumination of the spirit of Gandhi.
The many who have come to think of Fischer as a bogeyman, as a symbol of
darkness and evil which threaten to destroy South Africa, should be reminded
that he belongs to one of the most prominent families of Orange Free State
history. His father, a respected lawyer, was a mediator between the Transvaal
and Britain before the Anglo-Boer War and later became Prime Minister of
the Orange River Colony. He played a leading role in the drafting of the
constitution of the Union of South Africa. His son became one of the most
brilliant advocates in South African legal history.Yet this remarkable man
grew up as an ordinary Afrikaans farm boy. At an early age he embraced the
doctrine of racial segregation as a solution for the problems of his country;
and at one stage, in his own admission, he found it almost impossible to
shake hands with a black man.It was only during a period of soul-searching
and mental agony that he discovered, in Hitler's terrible ascent, what the
logical outcome of a theory of racial superiority was. Still he found it
difficult to shed his convictions. One night, in a discussion with an elderly
African, he put forward the hackneyed theory that segregation diminishes
points of friction. The old man countered by pointing out that if one separates
the races into different camps, the inhabitants of either camp soon forget
that the others laugh and suffer and live in the same way and for the same
reasons; and so they soon become suspicious - until they learn to fear one
another, which is where all racism starts.
From these elementary beginnings Fischer's uncompromising intellect soon
set him on the way towards Marxism. However, it was not primarily the theory
of Marxism which attracted him, but, quite simply, the practical realities
of the land he lived in. These realities were twofold: in the first place,
there was the pattern of oppression which characterises and dominates South
African society. What would happen, he wondered, if, suddenly, all Afrikaners
were herded into the Orange Free State as their "homeland" and
forced to carry passes when they left it; if all the gold and coal mines
of the Free State were kept in black hands, and if Afrikaners working elsewhere
in the country were forced to live in locations and compounds, allowed to
do unskilled work only, and if their very presence outside the Free State
were only on sufferance of another race...? In the second place he discovered
that the only people prepared to suffer for convictions similar to his -
people who could have all the luxury they wanted if they chose, but who
identified themselves to such an extent with the deprived majority that
they were prepared to forgo all that and risk imprisonment, banishment,
or even death -were members of the Communist Party. At that time, of course,
the Party was completely legal on the South African political scene, so
that for a law-abiding legal man like Fischer it was the natural platform
for his convictions.
When the Party was outlawed in the 1950s, Fischer realised that the measure
had very little to do with anti-communism as such, but that it was essentially
a measure to silence opposition to the accelerating process of safeguarding
white interests at the cost of black liberties. And so, with much agonising
soul-searching, Fischer remained a member of the banned Party, with only
one firm intention, that of helping to create a truly democratic society
in the country, in which white and black would be able to decide together
on their communal future.
Fischer often expressed his belief in the inevitability of the historical
process: in these terms history is not an accumulation of chaotic facts
and figures, but a logical development from one form of society to another.
At an early stage he became convinced that the only true form compatible
with the demands of the present century was Socialism. But he also believed
that South Africa was not ready for it, and so he refused to impose it on
the country. He knew that we had reached a stage of breakdown in the history
of capitalism and imperialism, since these two great forces, which had dominated
the nineteenth century, were unable to fulfil the needs of twentieth-century
people. At the same time he saw that, at the very moment when imperialism
was breaking down all over Africa, leading to the emergence of new states
and systems, a small and desperate band of whites were trying to preserve
it in South Africa, leading to more and more suffering, and to more and
more oppression.
During all his free life Fischer wanted to work for the restoration of human
dignity. And he accepted that it could be done only through non-violent
measures. Time and time again he insisted that bloodshed would create intolerable
chaos. At the same time he saw that South Africa was moving constantly closer
to a state of terrorism and civil war: and, drawing on the experience of
Algeria (with today's perspective he might have added Vietnam) he realised
that in such a war there could be only one outcome. This prospect was against
his belief, which was also Nelson Mandela's, in the creation of a just and
tolerant multi-racial society with white and black working together for
the future of the country they all shared.
And it was to warn South Africa against the destructive end of its own present
course that he finally went beyond Gandhi's strategies and embarked, with
others, on a programme of controlled sabotage. Controlled, because every
target was selected so carefully that there would never be any possibility
of danger to life or limb. It was done as an act of despair, to warn the
authorities against their own folly, and to help create a climate in which
the need for togetherness would supersede the urge towards separateness
which was tearing his country apart.
One may quarrel with his means, but not with his aims. Today, after the
crisis in Mozambique, more and more white South Africans are beginning to
see the wisdom of moving towards a realisation of Fischer's ideals. Only,
he saw it much sooner, and much more clearly and without self-interest or
personal ambition.
Knowing that he was risking his life, he came back to South Africa in 1964
after being allowed to go to England to plead a case before the Privy Council.
He could have stayed out, a free man. Yet he came back to certain imprisonment
and a possible death sentence. When he estreated bail after being arrested,
it was not to save his skin, but for the sake of continuing to work for
the cause he believed in - the cause for which so many of his friends were
by then languishing in jail. He knew that many of those victims had placed
all responsibility for their condition on the shoulders of the Afrikaner
rulers. And so he wanted to prove that an Afrikaner could also be different.
His free life was devoted to a broadening of the image of the Afrikaner;
and if Afrikaans is eventually to survive as a language, much of it will
be due to the fact that men like Bram Fischer have been prepared to prove,
risking their all for it, that it is more than the language of one oppressive
minority and of one frightening ideology - that it is indeed what many exiles
call it today: menstaal, "the language of human beings".That is
why I feel so confident that Fischer can never be forgotten in this country.
And I referred to him at some length because in his awareness of and concern
for others, in his compassion, in his crusade against social and political
evil, he revealed himself as a man true to the spirit of the Great Soul
we mourn and celebrate today: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
A mere three weeks before his death, as he commenced his final fast, Gandhi
proclaimed his willingness to die in the process: "No man, if he is
pure, has anything more precious to give than his life. I hope and pray
that I have that purity in me to justify the step" - this was an act,
above all a readiness, an inner preparedness, comparable to the immolation
of Buddhist monks protesting against the senseless violence of American
aggression in Vietnam or the self-sacrifice of a young Czech student to
protest against the Russian occupation of his country in 1968. More than
anything else the Mahatma reminds me of the words of Christ: "There
is no greater love than this, that a man should lay down his life for his
friends." And I make this link deliberately, because Gandhi himself
often acknowledged that the first great influence on the evolution of his
own credo was the Sermon on the Mount: that immortal expression of the power
of meekness, the force of humility, the inevitable victory of compassion.
Gandhi knew that meekness was not weakness. And by making the supreme sacrifice,
he also proved that he knew what protest really meant.
It was Jean-Paul Sartre who drew the most relevant distinction I knew between
a gesture and an act. A gesture, he said, is something performed by an actor,
intended for an audience: we can evaluate the gesture as good or bad, as
successful or unsuccessful, but it really exists in a void: it has no practical
or even moral significance. A gesture takes place without reference to cause
and effect, without consequence. An act, on the other hand, in Sartre's
definition, implies involvement in the whole chain of cause and effect:
it leads to something, it has a direct moral or practical bearing on the
situation in which it is performed; and thereby it commits the man who performs
it. It is in this commitment that the basic difference between a Sartrean
gesture and an act is to be found. We are living in a world where various
forms of protest, violent and non-violent, have become almost a way of living.
But so much of it - in this country too - is mere gesture, without full
commitment. Gandhi knew the deepest implications of commitment; because
it is only in the willingness to sacrifice that commitment is tested. That
is the difference between the demo and the true rebel - in the sense in
which Buddha and Christ and Mohammed and Gandhi and Paul Kruger and Bram
Fischer were rebels.
I believe in rebellion as a dimension of existence; in fact, as a prerequisite
for life. Not blind rebellion. But rebellion in the sense of breaking constantly
more fetters limiting true human liberty. The slave who rebels against his
master, said Camus, does not do so merely to be free: he does it in order
to affirm the necessity of freedom as the human condition.
In other words, it is a rebellion not simply directed against something,
but aimed towards something. It is not negative, but positive. When Antigone
- the first rebel of Western tradition - revolted against the State, it
was not because she wanted to destroy order, but because she wanted to affirm
a higher Order than that maintained by the State. Antigone's key word is:
No! But it is a paradoxical thing, for she really means: Yes. No to all
the forces which try to deny the human; yes to all the attributes of dignified
human life. Gandhi added a specific religious dimension when he said: "I
know that I shall never know
God if I do not wrestle with and against evil, even at the cost of life
itself."
This essentially human, metaphysical revolt - which works through on all
levels of one's existence - takes place in a world where there is, of necessity,
a conflict between freedom and justice. Gandhi realised this implicitly
as Camus did explicitly. In absolute form, justice and freedom are mutually
exclusive: absolute freedom gives me the freedom also to limit another man's
freedom, even to deny him life, to kill him; absolute justice denies the
merits of the individual situation and works only with common denominators.
Absolute freedom makes the individual all-powerful; absolute justice makes
society an absolute power. So we can always have more justice. In the balance
between these two forces the individual and society meet each other. And
this is precisely the territory on which Gandhi conducted his campaign of
love, his war of peace.
It is this campaign which we can reassess today in the light of the conditions
and needs prevalent in present-day South Africa. It is a campaign based
on a series of clearly formulated precepts, all of them pervaded by the
intense religiousness of Gandhi's philosophy and the humility and basic
humanity of his personality.
Gandhi's vow of swadeshi seems strange to many people, particularly to Westerners.
He himself defined it as "that spirit within us which restricts us
to the use and service of our immediate surroundings to the exclusion of
the more remote." To him it had a definite religious, political and
economic significance, related to the very old concept of patriotism, of
loyalty to one's own. In this respect one is reminded, again, of Van Wyk
Louw's concept of "loyal resistance".
In the hands and minds of lesser men this notion of loyalty can very easily
become a mere instrument of chauvinism; in the hands of the political leaders
of this country today it is used as a slogan to keep people together in
a small and stifling laager dominated by worn-out traditions; it is a negative
approach, using fear to prevent people from dissenting, even from questioning,
and it uses censorship and indoctrination to condition the writing, the
reading and eventually the thinking of an entire generation.
To act against this, I should suggest a wider interpretation of swadeshi
for this country at this time. I should suggest that we see it as loyalty,
not to a party, or a church, or an economic system, or a language group,
or a race, but loyalty to South Africa, to this country which is much more
than the sum of her people, and much more permanent than any regime. I should
like to see it as an unflinching and uncompromising demand for only the
best and highest of human values for this country: which means an equally
uncompromising resistance to everything which degrades humanity and denies
dignity, everything which favours small in-groups, everything which is secondhand
and inferior, and shopsoiled by irreverent politicians. Above all, let our
form of swadeshi be a demand for truth and justice in this country. There
is very little truth and very little justice in the world. But lies and
injustice in any corner of this world should never allow us to condone it
here. In this way swadeshi becomes a force to destroy evil and hypocrisy
and inhumanity and to preserve the most sacred values of a multi-racial
society intact. It implies Gandhi's direct statement that "politics,
divorced from religion, has absolutely no meaning." And it denies the
form of politics perpetrated in this country today, where religion is used
as a serf of politics and a pretext for the most blatant exploitation of
the majority of South Africans by a minority. "Indian nationalism,"
said Gandhi, "is not exclusive, nor aggressive, nor destructive."
What we have in South Africa today, is a Nationalism which is exclusive,
aggressive and destructive, and which inevitably evokes forms of resistance
that may become equally exclusive, aggressive and destructive. It should
be part of our interpretation of swadeshi to substitute the original for
the vicious fake, and not to rest
before the fake has been eliminated - in the name of the real South Africa.
Gandhi's ethics of khaddar (Homespun cloth, i.e., work in the widest sense
of the word) is closely linked with swadeshi. To him it meant a specific
form of home-industry to counter the exploitation inherent in the more imperialistic
forms of capitalism. Today industrialisation is an irreversible fact. But
in our context khaddar may certainly be interpreted to mean the intimate
relation between a man and his work: the demand that a man should bear responsibility
for his work in order to lend it dignity; and that he should share in the
fruits of his labour. In other words: no man should be exploited in his
work or alienated through his work. The whole of the South African economy
is based on the exploitation of men, women and children with a black skin,
and the policy of "homelands" is an impossible and inhuman dream.
It accepts that people can be used for the labour they can provide, without
acknowledging even in the most basic sense of the word, that they are people.
Insisting on the essential dignity of work means revolting against the entire
system which promotes economic and spiritual exploitation of one man by
another. The supreme consideration, says Gandhi, is man.
This concept is intimately associated with Gandhi's religious background
as a conservative Hindu, living within the framework of a Hindu caste society.
He accepts the inevitability, in many ways even the necessity of caste,
but -in his own words - "not to restrict or regulate social intercourse".
For his views on caste are based on his fundamental assumption that, even
as a devout Hindu, he cannot accept Hinduism as an exclusive religion. In
other words: accepting, as premise, the existence of different religions
and different castes, he nevertheless accepted them in a completely "open"
sense: "Let us not deny God," he writes in one essay, "by
denying to a fifth of our race the right of association on an equal footing."
Transposed into South African terms it would read: "Let us not deny
to 80 per cent of our people the right of association on an equal footing."
Given the existence of different groups, Gandhi insists that all men and
women are essentially brothers and sisters. Some pious advocates of apartheid
proclaim - and some of them actually believe - thatthis system eliminates
the possibility of friction and creates an atmosphere for happier and more
complete self-realisation. But this denies the essential fact that separation
and the barriers it constructs between people can only lead to suspicion
and fear and hate. In a world already overpopulated, in which mass media
and international communication systems are rapidly eliminating all artificial
barriers and increasing contact, South Africa alone tries to reverse the
process by erecting more and more barriers between people - aimed at the
final utopia of apartheid, with separate heavens, separate hells, and separate
lavatories for all.
Without denying one iota of the inherent differences distinguishing individuals
and groups, we have a need today, more urgent than ever before, of Gandhi's
vision of the common dignity of all men. "The only thing that is really
worth while", said one writer, "is being together." He said
it of man and woman, of lovers. We should say it, as Gandhi did, of people
- of all the people in this country. All it requires is the acknowledgement
of the fact that we are all here together, sharing this country, and that
we are all equal in our love of it.
And now we come to what, for a Westerner, is an extremely difficult aspect
of Gandhi's credo as a Hindu: that is, his tenacious belief in the Hindu
custom of Cow Protection as a religious obligation. To many this may seem
parochial or outdated. To the Mahatma it was an essential part of his philosophy.
But the important thing is that he also said: "I believe in Cow Protection
in a much larger sense than the popular belief." As I interpret it,
it is not so much the cow as cow that matters to him - for then cow-worship
can easily degenerate into a fossilised symbol which can prevent the true
and full development of a community. It is rather that he saw the cow as
- in his own magnificent phrase - "a poem of pity". The cow, cherished
beyond all treasures in early Hindu society, is gentleness and plenty incarnate.
The life of the community depends on her milk: she should be protected and
loved. And she is never aggressive: she bears patiently whatever misfortunes
befall her - and that is why she eventually survives. In this I find, for
our situation, the humble but necessary demand for a reverence for life.
We live in what is essentially a violent society. Alcohol - suicide -murder
- assault - insanity - road accidents - all of these are symptoms of our
violent society. Even South Africa's national sport, rugby, is popular because
of its violence. I should not like to sound pedantic; but could not one
reason for the incredible proliferation of violence in South Africa be a
basic disrespect for life, a disrespect for others? And why? Once again
I find the roots in apartheid. A system which uproots whole communities,
which callously shrugs at deaths in prisons and prison vans, which forbids
families to live together, and which is based on discriminating laws and
humiliating measures like reference books, "immorality", which
restricts a man's advancement in his work and limits his income, which forces
the majority of citizens to use third and fourth rate beaches and places
of entertainment and which prohibits their attending theatre performances
or symphony concerts... Such a system has as its premise the conviction
that man's life is not worth two sparrows. It turns man into an object,
and once he is dehumanised, anything can be done to him without any qualms.
Gandhi revered cows. We do not even revere people. It is time for such a
system to be eradicated in order to create a new scope of life for people;
in order to create a society in which human beings can be acknowledged simply
for what they are: human beings.
And with this we have reached the two final, and basic, forces in Gandhi's
life and work: the vow of truth and the vow of non-violence.Gandhi's injunction
to be faithful to truth contains the intrinsic and explicit demand that
one shall never be afraid of speaking the truth or of bringing it to light.
"I found through my wanderings in India", he said, "that
my country is seized with a paralysing fear. We may not open our lips in
public: we may only talk about our opinions secretly.... I suggest to you
that there is only one whom we have to fear, that is God. When we fear God,
then we shall fear no man, however high placed he may be; and if you want
to follow the vow of truth, then fearlessness is absolutely necessary."
His description of India as a State of Fear strikes one as singularly familiar.
Ours is indeed a Society of Fear. The authorities use fear to strengthen
their hold on the people. Individuals fear lest by speaking the truth they
will be prosecuted. Let us shake off the bond of fear and proclaim the truth
wherever we find it, and however dangerous it appears. Truth is always dangerous:
that is why authorities prefer to keep it hidden from view. And one basic
truth hidden very securely in South Africa is the fact that society is not
a fate which must be endured as if it had been handed down by God: it is
a practical organisation of men, by men, for men - and it can and must be
changed when it no longer expressesadequately the wishes and needs of the
individuals within it.
After twenty-two years of Nationalist domination a whole generation of people
in South Africa know no other rule and seem to resign themselves to its
inevitability. But it need not be suffered as a fate. It can be changed.
It must be changed, for it has long ceased to be - it never was - the expression
of the needs and wishes of the majority of people in the country. There
is one force that can kill the fear which often threatens to paralyse us
when we wish to bring the truth to light. "That force is the love which
drives out fear".
For love is in the centre of Gandhi's teaching of ahimsa which is, in Milton's
words, "the irresistible might of meekness". Literally ahimsa
means "non-killing". Hence its usual translation as "non-violence"
or "passive resistance", both of which terms were severely disliked
by Gandhi. For it is not a negative but a positive force. And the power
within it is love: "To one who follows this doctrine there is no room
for an enemy.... But I go further. If we resent a friend's action, or a
so-called enemy's action, we still fall short of this doctrine."
Then follows the very important qualification. "When I say, we should
not resent, I do not say that we should acquiesce." In fact, Gandhi
states that it means the opposite of acquiescence: he illustrates how a
surgeon can wield his knife on the patient's body for the latter's benefit,
cutting out disease in order to heal, practising, in the process, "the
purest ahimsa". Likewise, ahimsa demands of us to rebel actively against
all evil and not to rest before it has been destroyed: "Ahimsa is a
positive state of love, of doing good even to the evil-doer. It does not
mean helping the evil-doer to continue the wrong or tolerating it by passive
acquiescence. On the contrary, love requires you to resist the wrong-doer
by dissociating yourself from him even though it may offend him or injure
him physically."
This is the supreme message of Gandhi, as exemplified by his whole life
and very specifically by his satyagraha in South Africa: there was nothing
"passive" about his resistance - and certainly no consideration
for personal comfort or safety. His imprisonment and constant persecution
prove this form of resistance, insisting that "Soul-Force is infinitely
superior to body-force. If people, in order to secure redress of wrongs,
resorted to Soul-Force, much of the present suffering would be avoided.
There is no such thing as failure in the use of this kind of force. `Resist
not evil' means that evil is not to be repelled by evil but by good."
Something achieved through violence, Gandhi rightly maintains, can be held
only through violence. Something achieved through the highest activity of
a mind bent on love and on doing good, on opposing evil by good, can be
retained simply by remaining worthy of it.
It can be argued that Gandhi's adversaries, the British, with at least a
token tradition of "doing the gentlemanly thing" might have been
more susceptible to moral persuasion than the South African Government would
be in similar circumstances; that Gandhi's satyagraha would have availed
nothing against Hitler. It may also be argued that some situations become
so inextricably bound up with violence that only violence can break the
deadlock. What Gandhi indicated was that violence, in its gross oversimplifications,
is always an insult to humanity - to the man who has recourse to it as much
as to the victim. And what he does make eminently clear is that, whatever
road South Africa may choose in the future, whether that of violent revolution
or of relatively peaceful change, there can be no victory over evil unless
there is Soul-Force in the struggle, unless those of us committed to the
fight against oppression and injustice are also morally superior to our
adversaries.
If we evaluate, in the light of everything Gandhi represented, the situation
in South Africa today and agree on the need for urgent and radical change,
we should be reminded by his example that change involves more than the
destruction of what exists, more than the replacement of one system by another;
it is a process directed inward as much as outward, to the self as much
as to the other. It involves, in the words of a poem dear to the Mahatma,
a movement from the unreal to the Real, from darkness to Light, from death
to Deathlessness. What we need is to change the country into a better place
to live in, and ourselves into people more worthy of living in it.
From: Andre Brink, Writing in a State of Siege,
New York,
Summit Books, 1983. |
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