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Pieter-Dirk Uys

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2 February 2012:  Pieter-Dirk Uys Receives the FW de Klerk Goodwill Award

I always thank politicians, black and white, right and wrong, for having given me a career for the last thirty-eight years. Where would I have been without them? So I have found inspiration in the strangest places: parliaments, coup d’états,  revolutions, struggles, scandals, gossip and Wikileaks. Some of my best lines have come from the writings on various walls:

• Apartheid is a pigment of the imagination

• Love your enemy; it will ruin his reputation

• Hypocrisy is the Vaseline of political intercourse

• My mind is made up; don’t confuse me with facts

• The ANC will investigate every cul-de-sac before they find the freeway

• Evil flourishes when men of goodwill do nothing

It was politically correct to be a racist for most of my life as a white South African, till the age of forty-five. On 2 February 1990, FW de Klerk made a speech in Parliament and turned the future into the present. And on the 27 April 1994, I was allowed to queue up with millions of fellow citizens and vote together in the first democratic election in South Africa. Who says life cannot start at fifty.

While the world was celebrating perestroika, we in South Africa discovered pretoriastroika. It was now illegal to do what had so long been legal. Racism, sexism, censorship, thought control, separate development, apartness and apartheid were part of the hate of yesterday. It was now also legal to be illegal. We could love whom we loved, live where one wanted to live, allowed to dream and believe that impossible dreams could now come true. We could vote and criticise. And laugh.

Goodwill does not need politics. It does not require a moral high ground or specialized education. It is not motivated by religion or guilt. It’s just to do what is decent, what is human, what is personal. I thank the goodwill of those who have awarded me this reminder of a life spent making us laugh at the absurdities of racism.

I recently entertained a busload of 50 twelve-year-old schoolchildren who had been brought to Evita se Perron by their history teacher to be taken through our apartheid museum — or as some call it, nauseum — so that they could try and understand the past. Few books have been written about those years without the clogging emotion of guilt or accusation. So I told them about the symbols of patriotism that we believed without question, the icons of power whom we venerated without doubt, and the reality of life under the forty-six-year regime of fear.

A young learner put up his hand.

“Mr Uys, can I ask a question?”

Of course.

“This apartheid stuff you’re telling us: the Group Areas Act, that Immorality Act. A sign on a bench that says Whites Only and for 46 years blacks never sat there — did all this really happen?”

Yes, it did. Why do you ask?

“Because it sounds so stupid.”

Yes, it does. But don’t forget, stupidity kills. When it comes to politics, absurd or inspirational, never look the other way. Apartheid will never ever come back again under the same name, but do not underestimate the inventiveness of evil politics. It will be back under a bland banal name, even just an acronym, and before you realize it, you have voted for it because it sounds democratic and you will be imprisoned in the darkness for another few generations of loss.

Apartheid was ahead of its time. Today all over the world, even in what we upheld as the bastions of democracy, even on the internet, our freedoms are being curtailed, diversity restricted, prejudice and secrecy setting in. They say when history repeats itself, it takes tragedy and turns it into farce. Except that in 2012 nothing is funny any more. That is why we must laugh.

Laughing at fear can only help you conquer it. It will always be lethal, but at least you will be in charge. Give it a name. Understand why it is there and tame it. Racism is fear of the unknown, of the different, of the exotic. Laugh with each other, and often at each other. Laughter allows the discovery of how much we all share in common. Unfortunately racism, like the HI-virus, has no easy cure. But care is halfway there.

I treasure my weapons of mass distraction. That balance of 49% anger vs 51% entertainment. The need to single out the ‘mock’ in democracy and the ‘con’ in reconciliation. The quest to find that glass that is half-full and never half-empty. The belief that heroes and enemies, icons and aikonas, each only have one life. So do we. And so let us celebrate peace on earth and goodwill to all men, and women. And us.

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