Dear Friends and Colleagues,
South Africa has been such a rich, complicated, exhilarating, and poignant experience that I cannot possibly encompass it in a letter. However, here is an attempt, with thanks to my wife, Leah, for editing assistance.
The end of Apartheid was only seventeen years ago. Nelson Mandela was elected president in 1994. We can still feel the exhilaration of that revolutionary change. And yet there are many notes of despair as well. Government corruption, high unemployment, and severe economic inequality along racial lines are all too present. South Africans see their current leaders as being out for themselves, and not focused on the good of the country. One black taxi driver, who seemed to be about sixty, expressed nostalgia for the old government and a time when the streets were safe and people could get jobs. Saddest of all is the legacy of intentionally inferior education for black children, which existed under apartheid.
Many white people – including some whom Leah and I grew to love and respect – maintain that racism is a thing of the past. “All that is over now since the end of apartheid.” From our perspective as Americans, 150 years after the abolition of slavery, we believe their optimism is misplaced. In the wealthy areas, every house has a wall with a locking gate which is kept closed day and night. Many also have barbed wire, often electrified. Most have placards from alarm companies saying “armed response.” The richest, in addition to all of these precautions, have security guards posted outside. This was more noticeable in Johannesburg than in Cape Town. And yet we felt safe at all times, walking the streets mindfully and selectively in four or five different regions of the country.
We learned quite a bit about Mandela the man through his autobiography, The Long Walk to Freedom, but also through immersion in his legacy. I was very moved by some of his quotations. The most striking one was this: “For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” I was surprised to learn that Mandela came relatively early to advocate the use of strategic violence to gain freedom once he came to recognize that non-violence was not working. At the time, others in the ANC were against it. In undertaking the use of violent means, Mandela studied military strategy intensively. He divided violence into four levels: sabotage, terrorism, guerilla tactics, and all out confrontation. He initiated the first level and organized a number of acts of sabotage of infrastructure. He considered that it might be necessary to move to the second level when results were unsatisfactory. When, decades later, the government finally began to respond in a more open way, Mandela was a forceful advocate of giving up violence in favor of negotiation, at a time when many in the ANC were not yet ready to do so. Mandela is truly remarkable for his flexibility, his long-range vision, his discipline, his commitment, and his refusal to be flexible when important principles are at stake.
We visited Robben Island, the desolate prison near Cape Town, where Mandela was incarcerated for many years. The Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg captivated us for an entire day. Visits to the black townships of Langa and Soweto helped us see how much and how little has changed since liberation. The stories told in these places are devastating but also inspiring.
On an entirely separate level, we encountered stories of the Khoe San, the original peoples of South Africa. They, too, were displaced and dispossessed. In many cases, they were stripped of their language and culture. Sometimes, all they had left were their dreams. These dreams became the focus of an area of research for me.
I don’t want to suggest that our time in South Africa was all about struggle and serious work. We had so much fun in Cape Town that we could hardly bear to leave it for other parts of the country. Our visit to the wine country of Stellenbosch and Franschhoek (including a spectacular day on Mark Solms’ estate) was glorious. Hiking and boating on the Garden Coast was another highlight.
On the research side, we began with our visit to Mark Solms, which I’ve described in another letter. We also had opportunities to talk about dreams with Xhosa traditional healers, who use dreams extensively in their work. We met with anthropologists at the University of Cape Town and Stellenbosch University to talk about their views of traditional cultures under the impact of colonialism. The University of Cape Town anthropologist, Helen Macdonald, is deeply interested in the role of envy within traditional culture. Although she has studied the topic as an anthropologist, she was not aware that envy is a major theme within contemporary psychoanalysis.
A high point was our trip to Bloemfontein – a dry, dusty town in the middle of the country which happens to have a university with 30,000 students. The town reminded me of Davis, California (before the recent events on the Davis campus). When we told South Africans that we were going to Bloemfontein, they invariably asked, “Why?” The reason was to meet with Piet Erasmus, head of the Department of Anthropology at the University of the Free State. I had found Piet’s work on the internet even before leaving California. His major research relates to the Griqua and Koranna peoples, two of the surviving tribes of the Khoe San people. Almost by accident, Piet discovered that members of these tribes retain almost nothing of their ancient heritage except their dreams, which are full of vestiges of the past. His publication on this topic caught my attention and, after e-mail correspondence with Piet, led to our journey to Bloemfontein. Piet was an extraordinary host and choreographed a remarkable agenda for us. He met us at the airport, and we spent a few hours talking. Then we went to his department, where I gave a seminar on the work that Beth Kalish and I have done about Achuar dream interpretation.
The next day, Piet arranged for us to spend the day interviewing Griqua and Koranna informants about their use of dreams. We and I met with – and filmed – interviews with the two groups separately. Leah’s photo of the Griqua meeting is at the top of this letter. Although we would have wanted to meet with the two groups separately in any case, the two tribes are not on speaking terms. Part of Piet’s brilliant choreography was arranging back to back meetings with the two groups (with refreshments), without them ever having to encounter each other in the corridor. The two interviews could hardly have been more different. The Griqua were warm, relaxed and cordial. Unlike the Koranna, Griqua claims for recognition and restitution are being given serious consideration by the current government. The Griqua expressed considerable interest in our work with the Achuar. When I showed them slides from some of our meetings with the Achuar, the Griqua leaders immediately pointed out similarities: “They are another indigenous culture, a lot like us.” The meeting ended with the leader thanking us and offering heartfelt blessings. Our productive meeting has inspired me to become a bit more systematic in examining similarities and differences among Achuar dream interpretation, Griqua dream interpretation, and psychoanalytic dream interpretation. I am working on a grid of different variables.
The Koranna interview was very different. Although they use dreams in ways that are similar to the Griqua, their emotional style was cool rather than warm and their behavior was hierarchical rather than inclusive. They impressed us with the force of their belief in and the urgency of their claims for recognition. Historically, they have suffered even more than the Griqua, and their identity is even more deeply threatened. However, the government is only granting restitution to indigenous groups who were disenfranchised under the Apartheid regime. The Koranna were disenfranchised even earlier, and thus their claims are not officially acknowledged.
Altogether, these experiences in Bloemfontein opened my eyes to a theme: the links among dreaming, the “telescoping of generations” (which Haydee Faimberg writes about), and identity.
On our final evening in Bloemfontein, another anthropologist in the department took us to dinner. Over our meal, this woman poured out an experience of telling her own dreams to one of her indigenous informants and receiving the informant’s interpretations. The anthropologist was disturbed by the aftermath of this encounter, in which it became clear that the informant regarded this exchange as the start of a shamanic initiaition for the anthropologist. Listening to this woman, I couldn’t help thinking – only partly in jest – that there may be a sub-sub-specialty here for the psychoanalytic debriefing of anthropologists.
Best regards and Happy Thanksgiving to all,
Chuck