Gatherings of exiles and émigrés and refugees; gathering on the edge of ‘foreign’
cultures; gathering at the frontiers; gatherings in the ghettos or cafes of city centres;
gathering in the half-life, half-light of foreign tongues, or in the uncanny fluency of
another’s language; gathering the signs of approval and acceptance, degrees, discourses,
disciplines; gathering the memories of underdevelopment, of other worlds lived
retroactively; gathering the past in a ritual of revival; gathering the present.The actual reality of exile in the configuration of South Africa’s past, especially in the era
of minority apartheid rule, transcends the simple, unidirectional understanding of the
concept. Its ramifications in the present era account for this observation. This is why it is
crucial to remark that in actuality, exile emanated from both ends of the national
spectrum. That is, the half-measure existence to which those physically forced out were
subjected was not in any radical departure from what those repressed others left behind
suffered. From the imprisonment and detention of political agitators of various cadres and
persuasions for de-racialized democracy, to the fate of writers and critics’ intimate
experience of incarceration and banning of their works, not to talk about the plethora of
restrictions to specific regions for the purpose of keeping the opposition’s political
activism in leash, exile ruled the air right from the psychological realm to the physical.
Yet, from the other end of the battle line, that is, the location of the establishment, exile
also had its impact. Looking back at the moment in history, Serote reminisces that “In
one sense all South Africans were in a kind of exile. If you look at South Africa as a
country, you will find that the whites pretended to be Europeans, and just by having
committed such grievous crimes against humanity, they were in exile from humanity”
(Rolf Solberg 1998:186). The pertinence of such observation is reinforced by the level of
international opposition that the apartheid government received despite the tacit politics
of support that it enjoyed from some world powers during this period. Tellingly, it was
the strength of the moral valence of the opposition that placed the white minority in the
circle of exile in terms of the disapproval of its human relations on a global scale. It was
also this that contributed to the system’s eventual surrender to the moral will of the
majority. So, while the state, with its minority supporters of racial segregation, rode
roughshod over their perceived opposition, black or white in pigmentation, forcing them
into various exilic states, it was not, ironically, elevated beyond the exilic immiseration it
unleashed on the opposition.