She never knew how to answer him when he was in this condition of the vernacular. So she dressed herself and prepared to go a little ignominiously home to Wragby. Or so she felt it: a little ignominiously home.
He would accompany her to the broad riding. His young pheasants were all right under the shelter.
When he and she came out on to the riding, there was Mrs Bolton faltering palely towards them.
‘Oh, my Lady, we wondered if anything had happened!’
‘No! Nothing has happened.’
Mrs Bolton looked into the man’s face, that was smooth and new-looking with love. She met his half-laughing, half-mocking eyes. He always laughed at mischance. But he looked at her kindly.
‘Evening, Mrs Bolton! – Your Ladyship will be all right now, so I can leave you. Good-night to your Ladyship! Good-night Mrs Bolton!’
He saluted, and turned away.
Introduction
The air is unsteady, fearsome and uncontrollable. It is the realm of mind, the idea of the spirit and the world of change. The winds, the clouds, the mist, all atmospheric phenomena, belong to the air. But when we breathe we know that the world is real and that we belong to it. When we take in air, and when we breathe it out, we can feel the very pace of creation. Untouchable, the air can only be felt, or lived. Infinite and invisible, it shapes mountains and creates the waves. It takes up sand and creates the landscapes of reason and madness. When you hear the wind passing through the branches of a tree, you can hear God’s voice whispering or roaring his words to you and to the universe. But anger can be found in those winds. St John said, ‘The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth’ (John, 3:8). The air is the great sign of the spirit, but it can also be the uncontrolled life of emotions and beliefs abandoned to their own devices. The torment, the tempest or the hurricane are the wages of unconsciousness and passion. Air is linked to blood. Blood, a strange and mysterious fluid, hot and vital… Finally, the air allows communication and action, but if it is not tamed it leads to instability and agitation. This ambiguity finds its own path in the texts of this section.
Mandela’s letter opens a breach in one of the most unfair political systems of all times, namely apartheid. This letter remains a very clear declaration, a call for freedom and justice. Of course,those two words are in some contexts now out of fashion, but for the people who endured such an unbearable situation those two words were everything. Political action can sometimes touch a kind of universal nerve, and its seeds can give beautiful plants. Far away from politics, the life and fate of Remedios the Beauty in One Hundred Years of Solitude transport us to a supernatural America, where the dead smell of strong perfumes and women can fly wrapped in white sheets… The parable of Remedios the Beauty reveals the strength of the miraculous and its compelling power of attraction. Stranger yet is The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson’s masterpiece, which tells of the transformation of a scientist into something quite different. The distortion of shape and morals invented by Jekyll bears witness to the unconscious and will given free rein. Like an echo of Wilde’s experience, Dr Jekyll imagines a new behaviour, symbolically expressed by a potion. But this one is not the ‘potable gold’ of the alchemist; it is, rather, a great dissolution of the self and the summoning of unreached parts of the personality. The most impressive illustration of this ‘imagination’ can be found in the Two Minutes Hate in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where people give vent to their innermost fears in a public blast of hate. The reforming revolution turned into something disastrous and people are manipulated and slowly destroyed by Big Brother and his agents. Borges’ Library of Babel presents itself as a remarkable mirror, despite Borges’ own horror of that object. The spectacular structure of the unlikely library throws us into the labyrinth, another favourite theme in the author’s work. But the description of the library reveals an obsession with the discovery of the Book, the Book of all books… or, better, God’s Book. This ultimate journey can be viewed through the insane ‘memory’ of a great author, recalled in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, with ‘Jorge de Burgos’. And if air allows travel, it allows, too, losing oneself. And this can be a form of madness.
NELSON MANDELA
from No Easy Walk to Freedom
Black Man in a White Man’s Court
Mandela was arrested in August of 1962 and put on trial, charged on two counts: inciting African workers to strike; and leaving South Africa without a valid travel document. He turned the trial into a scathing indictment of White domination.
This chapter is an almost complete account of the trial held in Pretoria in the Old Synagogue (converted into a courtroom) where less than two years earlier Mandela and twenty-eight others had been acquitted in the Treason Trial. The trial opened in October 1962. Mandela was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for incitement to strike, and two years’ imprisonment on the second charge of leaving South Africa without a valid permit or passport.
Your Worship, I have elected to conduct my own defence. Some time during the progress of these proceedings, I hope to be able to indicate that this case is a trial of the aspirations of the African people, and because of that I thought it proper to conduct my own defence.
I have an application to address to Your Worship. At the outset, I want to make it perfectly clear that the remarks I am going to make are not addressed to Your Worship in his personal capacity, nor are they intended to reflect upon the integrity of the Court.
The point I wish to raise in my argument is based not on personal considerations, but on important questions that go beyond the scope of this present trial. I might also mention that in the course of this application I am frequently going to refer to the White man and the White people. I want at once to make it clear that I am no racialist, and I detest racialism, because I regard it as a barbaric thing, whether it comes from a Black man or from a White man. The terminology that I am going to employ will be compelled on me by the nature of the application I am making.
I want to apply for Your Worship’s recusal from this case. I challenge the right of this Court to hear my case on two grounds.
Firstly, I challenge it because I fear that I will not be given a fair and proper trial. Secondly, I consider myself neither legally nor morally bound to obey laws made by a Parliament in which I have no representation.
In a political trial such as this one, which involves a clash of the aspirations of the African people and those of Whites, the country’s courts, as presently constituted, cannot be impartial and fair.
In such cases, Whites are interested parties. To have a White judicial officer presiding, however high his esteem, and however strong his sense of fairness and justice, is to make Whites judges in their own case.
It is improper and against the elementary principles of justice to entrust Whites with cases involving the denial by them of basic human rights to the African people.
What sort of justice is this that enables the aggrieved to sit in judgement over those against whom they have laid a charge?
A judiciary controlled entirely by Whites and enforcing laws enacted by a White Parliament in which Africans have no representation – laws which in most cases are passed in the face of unanimous opposition from Africans—
Here the Magistrate interrupted.
*
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides that all men are equal before the law and are entitled, without any discrimination, to equal protection of the law.
In May 1951, Dr D. F. Malan, then Prime Minister, told the Union Parliament that this provision of the Declaration applied in this country. Similar statements have been made on numerous occasions in the past by prominent Whites in this country, including judges and magistrates.