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...heroic activism. persons involved are actual. The author of the piece is participant observer. The specific setting is South Africa during the height of the resistance to apartheid in the 1960s.
KEYWORDS: Political psychology, heroic activist, literature, history, human rights
Introduction
This article deals in part with matters of personal experience in political environments of extreme conflict where political activism is ubiquitous. The heroic ego as an activist is often an important figure during intense social and political conflict. This essay explores the interplay between conflict, activism, and the heroic ego from an interdisciplinary perspective, touching on matters of biography, literature, history, and human rights. There is a concern, which many professionals confront, that professionalism not be an impermeable character-armor which insulates it from the practical experience of working with human beings under stress and experiencing the volatile emotions and sentiments of political conflict which impact upon personal responsibility, professional identity, and fundamental integrity. The theme of truth and reconciliation is a widely experienced political matter developed in situations of extreme conflict where the prospect of winning and losing is indeterminate. It posits the idea that leaders and activists, vigorously asserting the values of change or reaction, must confront the possibility that some change is inevitable, but not the way the way those who claim change imagine it. Similarly, those who defend reaction have to accept the fact that reaction cannot endure without some change, but precisely what that change is and how much reaction endures also remains problematic. Those leaders who are deeply active in these forms of struggle, which may be very lethal, are often seen as heroic promoters of change and progressivism or heroic defenders of reaction and the status quo. In each case the activists are power-centered personalities and represent, so to speak, the activist's possibly heroic ego.
A careful examination of many heroic leaders discloses flaws and disappointments. At times, historians have difficulty sorting out real fact from manufactured fact. Modern efforts to understand the political psychology of the heroic activist may be seen as a cynical exercise in deconstructing the myth of heroism itself. What is accepted is that the heroic activist is often identified with the power-conditioned personality. In short, some personality types are drawn to power for complex personal and psychoanalytical reasons. This suggests an innate skepticism of political heroism. Harold Lasswell's classical description of the political personality is described as implicating the private motives of the actor, which are displaced on public objects, and which the actor rationalizes as being in the public interest. (1) There can be, perhaps, no more skeptical appraisal of the activist grappling heroically in arenas of conflict to secure the values of the public interest. The clincher is that the actor is apparently fundamentally driven by private motives. The fact that private motives may in fact be using public objects for purposes which may be highly subjective is made even more problematic by the inevitable process of covering up those motives by rationalizations in the "public interest." To expose these kinds of psychoanalytical truths certainly puts a damper on situations as crass as the cult of the celebrity, but also raises the specter of skepticism with regard to ostensibly heroic action which we see as truthful and altruistic. The harder the truth, the tougher will be the capacity for reconciliation. Activist heroics are both admired and feared. This dilemma confronts us as society has tried to manage the problems of personality, power, conflict, and reconciliation. This article deals with the specific case of the fragility of an heroic ego and the problems it poses for the concept of truth and the power of reconciliation.
Notions of Truth and Disclosure
In Granta 78: Bad Company, a recent volume of an English literary journal, the British intellectual class was treated to an odd, but nonetheless interesting version of a claim from an ostensibly heroic ego, to "truth" and hopeful "reconciliation" from a major South African political activist. This interesting version of heroism, truth, and the reconciliation process is indicated in the publication of the remorseful confessions of the South African political activist, Adrian Leftwich. Leftwich was a leading organizer in the African Resistance Movement (ARM) in the early 1960's in South Africa. The ARM seemed to make its presence known at precisely the time of the arrest of the major African National Congress (ANC) leadership. The organization apparently succeeded in a number of operations of bloodless sabotage. However, one of its operations led to the death of an elderly woman (from myocardial complications). She was, in fact, far from the site of the bomb blast.
One of the ARM's operatives (John Harris, a school teacher) was subsequently arrested, convicted, sentenced to death, and executed. Leftwich, who was a significant figure in the ARM, was arrested and, with unseemly haste, disclosed information to the security police. Leftwich, the heroic activist, had a deeply fragile psychological interior. This resulted in the arrest, trial, conviction, and sentencing of a number of ARM operatives, many of whom had been recruited by Leftwich. After giving evidence against his former compatriots, Leftwich was released by the South African authorities. During the trial, the judge described him in zoological terms: genus ratus.
Upon his release, Leftwich left South Africa for England, where he established himself as an academic in political studies. He continues in that position today. Since his departure, South Africa's transformation has brought political adversaries together in a common political society. To sustain this kind of society, some form of accounting for the past and some form of forgiveness seemed to be part of the new ideological and political order of the transformed South Africa. In Leftwich's narrative, I Gave the Names, he tells us that "it has taken me a long time to look at what happened and try to come to terms with it ... but now that the obscenity of apartheid has been formally buried, perhaps it is time to do so." Leftwich, the heroic activist, is then a good candidate for the testing of political truth, reconciliation, and procedence.
The ideological justifications for such concepts as "political truth," "reconciliation," and "heroism" seem to carry an assumption of moral simplicity. The moral simplicity of disclosure, it is thought, permits a society to move forward by conspicuously displaying a new spirit of cooperative understanding and political accommodation, based in part on the truth of disclosure. In practice, however, these transformational processes are problematic and like all moral experience, they are often fraught with ambiguity, paradox, and a sense that a morally absolute agenda of transformation is unattainable. What I find interesting about confession, forgiveness, and the possibility of political renewal is that each involves a complex of individual and often highly personalized moral assessments and accommodations within the larger political culture of society. Often, these assessments and accommodations are replete with the most visceral emotive symbols borne of political experience. It is out of these experiences that large-scale, collective judgments of significant moral import emerge, which must ostensibly sustain a better political future for the affected society. However, the public narratives of these experiences do tell us a great deal about the personal frailties of individuals in arenas of social conflict. These stories also give us a rare but realistic view of the inner workings of political and social relations, including their capacity to reach the raw depth of moral failure.
Mr. Leftwich's story is a disclosure. It is a complex and interesting account of personal morality implicating large-scale political and social values. Indeed, the Leftwich tale implicates latent claims of both private and collective, morality and their effects on betrayers, victims, and victimizers. Perhaps we might learn more from the Leftwich experience by drawing on some further insights into his conduct and character from people--like me--who were directly involved in anti-apartheid activities in South Africa in the 1960's. We remain interested in the broader lessons that may be drawn from the strengths and weaknesses of political activism, particularly regarding the depth, or lack of it, of political and moral convictions, and the critical moral foundations for defensible political transformation. This article then touches on matters that are personal and also matters that affect the more general, moral climate of the transformation of South Africa in particular. We also examine the comparative experience of other cultures which have worked on the problem of overcoming lethal violent conflict and the change toward political orders that are sensitive to the principles of human dignity and moral sensibility.
Literary Precedents and Leftwich
Before I discuss my personal relationship with Leftwich, it may be useful to look more generally at the concept of "truth" in issues of political transformation. Since I am a lawyer, I know that a central function of practical lawyering is the search for the truth. Lawyers confidently proclaim the truth or falsity of evidence garnered from the rituals and practices of legal drama. Unfortunately, most lawyers know that a legal truth can only approximate the real truth and indeed, a legal truth might be a social untruth. The procedures for establishing legal truths may vary with the skill of the advocates, the brainpower (or lack of it) of the judge, the frailty of jurors, and the theatrical abilities of witnesses. These factors suggest that the public policies based on legal truths may themselves be quite fragile. I am therefore uncertain whether another form of truth might be at all illuminating in understanding the nature of truths that emerge from betrayers or those actively involved as agents of torture or repression.
Important experiments with "truth" in classical literature have generated universal appeal, although precisely how literature reproduces the creative version of the truth is often a matter of literary insight and criticism at its sharpest. From the point of view of a poet, Yeats stresses the problem of knowing truth because of the difficulty of sorting out "the dancer from the dance" ("Among School Children"). This implies a recognition of the imperfections of experience (dancers) from the ideals--the ideal dance. I would suggest that understanding the relationship between the dancer and the dance is a central challenge and insight into the business of finding the durable "universal" truth, Yeats' "golden bird." Shakespearean scholars often see in MacBeth a detailed...
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