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Stephen Barton
Foreign welcome to another episode of the Power of Balance. I'm Stephen Barton. This is the start of a new season of the Power of Balance, focusing on speakers of truth to Power. And what I'd like to do is help tell the stories of some of those speakers. Not the famous ones like Mandela or Gandhi or Joan of Arc, but people who we know or knew personally. So at the end of this episode, I'm going to ask you to tell me of truth speakers you know, knew or know of, or were linked to your community or family, or perhaps you were or are one. And with your help, we'll be able to tell their stories, people whose stories are not normally told. So this season may last for a couple of episodes or it may go on for a long time. That depends on you, but more of that later. In the meantime, let me be a little clearer about what I mean by speaking truth to power, because that's another phrase that has been watered down to mean everything and nothing at all. And after that, I want to tell you about a friend of mine who was definitely a truth speaker. Why do I think this is relevant to the Power of Balance? Because one of the ways of balancing power is by speaking truth to it from a position of vulnerability, telling the dominant authority or the person representing that dominant authority, the state, the corporation, the institution, that what they're doing is morally, socially, perhaps even economically and politically wrong. And to advocate a different way. It's a voice raised not to assert one's ego or to gain power for oneself, but as a moral stand for the greater good. Speaking truth to power was coined in 1955 by civil rights and political activist Bayard Rustin for a pamphlet called Speak Truth to A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence. Rustin himself was a truth speaker. He was the main organizer of the March on Washington in 1963. It took him less than two months for him to organize to bring 250,000 people to the capital in the largest demonstration the US had ever seen. But because he was an openly gay man, he was credited for many years as just being one of the assistants. And for the same reason, it would seem. It was only in 2010 that it was acknowledged that he was one of the principal authors, if not the principal author of the Quaker pamphlet and certainly the man behind the phrase speak truth to power. Rustin probably adapted it from something the Prophet Muhammad had said. The most excellent jihad, which I am translating here is the personal struggle for good is when one speaks a true word in the presence of a tyrannical ruler. Michel Foucault, in his collection of lectures published under the title Fearless Speech, insists that those who speak truth to power require above all courage, often the courage to risk one's own life. He felt that the courage itself served as a kind of proof of the sincerity of the speaker. In speaking truth to power, there's danger, there is inevitably sacrifice, and there is undoubtedly courage. There are no disguises and artifices in truth telling. It's unvarnished. What you're doing is wrong. Change. Power can of course respond, as it often does, by removing the truth teller. It can also try and shut the nuisance down by demeaning, discrediting or humiliating, can even just ignore it sometimes. All too rarely, power listens and changes. However, whatever it does, there is an inevitable and irrevocable shift. The truth speaker has shown that power does not have it all its own way. It's the first crack in the wall. It isn't always a big heroic act involving threat to life and limb, but it does need to be for the greater good, perhaps just of the family, the institution, the country or the world. So your 12 year old child telling you that your shouty grumpiness every morning is upsetting the whole family and could you please stop it may well be speaking truth to power, but, and this is a true story, my shouting at a boss of mine many years ago, after he delivered an epic diatribe of very colorful insults, blame and threats at me, was not speaking truth to power. I wasn't shouting at him for the good of the organization. I was doing it for my own personal survival. And I wasn't holding a mirror to him about his behavior, only about what I was prepared to tolerate. The head of an HR department telling her CEO not to fire one person I don't think is telling truth to power. I may be wrong, but here's my logic. A it's actually her job and B she's advising on a single incident not to change behavior for the greater good. If she had told that CEO that the way they were conducting themselves, the way they were leading the organization was morally wrong and that they needed to stop for the good of the organization, that may well be speaking truth to power. And that takes a little more courage, doesn't it? So truth speakers, according to my definition, tell power that what it's doing is wrong and that for the greater good they need to change. And speaking truth to power takes courage, involves personal risk, says exactly what it means without hiding behind rhetoric, and speaks from a position of vulnerability. So today I have a story about two truth speakers actually in apartheid South Africa. One, Harold Strachan, was a friend of mine. The other, Benjamin Pogren, I met briefly and is an example of someone who was a truth speaker because he did more, much more than his job required. In 1965, Harold Strachan was released from prison after serving three years for conspiring to commit acts of sabotage and against the apartheid regime. When he came out, he went to the Rand Daily Mail newspaper and in a series of interviews told journalist Benjamin Pogrand of the torture, beatings and horrifying maltreatment of black prisoners that he'd witnessed. The risk was huge to both reporting on prison conditions at the time were was illegal in South Africa unless the facts were absolutely accurate. And I do mean absolutely. As you'll see later on, as Harold told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission More than 30 years later, I could blow the whistle on what happened in prisons. I knew how dangerous this could be if we were careless. We had to be careful. The other problem was that as Harald Strachan was clearly the source, if the government got wind of the plans to go to press and they then issued him with a banning order, no newspaper could publish what he said, even if all the facts were absolutely true and absolutely accurate. So Harold went into hiding and the articles were published. The regime went after Benjamin Pogrand, his newspaper, his editor and all sources with a vengeance and took them all to court. When Harold came out of hiding, he too was prosecuted and convicted of perjury. He had said inmates had been subject to constant beatings, which the court decided to interpret as meaning beatings that went on for 24 hours a day in perpetuity. So he was convicted of perjury and sentenced to a second term of two and a half years in prison. Now, his first spell wasn't exactly a honeymoon and included having 12 teeth wrenched out by a dentist who held him in a wrestler's headlock during the process. So you can imagine what it was like. For his second term, the newspaper, the Rand Daily Mail, Benjamin Pogrand and his editor Lawrence Gandar, were subjected to three years of harassment. Security police raids trumped up charges against their sources and what was later described to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as organized mass perjury by the regime. Both Gandar and Pogrand had their passports confiscated and Gandar was fired from the paper. He was, however, reinstated as editor in chief after the senior journalists threatened to walk out another form of speaking truth to power. There both men were convicted of publishing false allegations and were given suspended sentences. Now, you could argue that Lawrence Gandar and Benjamin Pogrand were just doing their jobs as journalists and were not truth speakers, but I would not. The South African press at the time, both English speaking and Afrikaans, were as tame as tame could be. As Gandar's Wikipedia page put it. The attacks against the newspaper were also taken up by the government controlled South African Broadcasting Corporation, the SABC and the Afrikaner newspapers, and silence from the English newspapers. So these newsmen knew that even if they diligently checked all the facts and verified them with inside sources, which they did, the government would come after them with every sledgehammer they could find and they would get little or no support from any other media outlet or indeed from the power bastion of white society. So yes, they were doing their jobs as journalists, but in an environment where very few others were. So today, when journalists in Gaza report on what is going on, knowing that they have a high chance of being killed by Israeli forces, as have at least 180 of their colleagues, they are speaking truth to power. When the New York Times, the Guardian or the BBC finally join the growing voices of protest about what we have all been seeing on our screens for over two years, they are not speaking truth to power. They are finally just doing their jobs. Harald Strachan definitely was speaking truth to power. He was very vulnerable, had no power whatsoever, knew that he would be singled out for vengeance, but nevertheless spoke up for the greater good because he knew that the horrors inflicted on black prisoners were wrong and needed to be changed. He also knew that he was in a unique position, having just been released to speak up for those who weren't able to, and as he knew they would, the South African regime hit back as hard as they could, both during his second prison term and after he was released back home, he was served with a banning order which barred him, amongst other things, from being in the same room with more than one other person. He was then placed under house arrest for five years, which meant that he couldn't leave his home, had to report to the local police daily, and of course had to endure regular nighttime visits from the security police, who were just checking that he was safely tucked up in bed. I got to know him about two years after his house arrest was lifted. At about the same time a gunman tried to kill him at his home in 1978, and then again when a group armed with automatic weapons opened fire on his house the year after that. I remember he then installed this massive steel door which looked as if it could deflect anything but a cannon. When I met him, he was a wiry 53 year old, bouncing with energy, brim full of history and bursting with the future. During the war, he'd trained as a bomber pilot with the South African Air Force and was pretty bloody irritated that it ended before he could go into action. So what does a man do when there's no war to fight? He studies art. First at a university in Pietermaritzburg, then in London, and finally learning art restoration in Stuttgart. At least he got to see Germany from the ground. Back in South Africa, he lectured, divorced his first wife and married a wonderful woman, Maggie. How's that for condensing history into one sentence? He and Maggie didn't so much speak truth to power at the time as put their bodies in the line of power's fire. In 1960, during the mass protests that followed the Sharpville massacre, they both stood in front of black protesters to stop the police opening fire on them. The hope was that the armed police were wouldn't risk killing nice white folk. The gamble paid off, not so much by all accounts, because the police were squeamish, but because they judged that a man handling them out of the way would tip an already infuriated crowd into an uncontrollable riot. What got Harold jailed, which is where we opened this story, was when he joined Umkonto Wasiswe, the fledgling armed wing of the African National Congress. The man who would be his lifelong friend, Governor Mbeki, former President Thabo Mbeki's father, decided Harold would be their explosives expert. I remember Harold telling me that however hard he tried protesting, that he knew, as he put it, bugger all about explosives. Becky decided that as he trained as a bomber pilot, he was the best they had. So Harold and his crew set about experimenting with household chemicals and and trying them out by blowing up beach toilets. Which gave birth to the response from one of his comrades to the effect that if we were going to fight the fight one shithouse at a time, they would all be dead by the time liberation finally came. I read in a couple of sources that he was caught when one of his team was captured and confessed under torture. The story I remember from Harold was that he suspected the security police picked them up as an act of mercy. They had hidden extremely unstable explosives in the roof lining of an old vw, I think he said. And the police were terrified the whole thing would blow sky high every time it hit a bump in the road. I suspect both versions were true, but Harold's version was Kinder. And that's what I most remember about him, his kindness. He was tough and people around him were damaged, but he was kind. His acts of speaking truth to power were not ideological. They came from a fierce moral and ethical foundation. And he insisted that none of the explosives he devised would be used against people, only installations. He didn't like people being discriminated against or abused. I really think it was as simple as that. So it was ironic that the people who were most hurt by the retribution to his acts of compassion were his own family. He and Maggie split up, and both his son and daughter were clearly traumatized. When I knew them, he really did believe in the power of balance. He was visceral in his dislike of anyone or anything with too much power, whoever had it. So much so that when the ANC finally took power in South Africa, he broke with them because he felt they had become too powerful, too arrogant, and were not protecting the very people that he and they had fought to liberate. He went on to write two books, Way Up, Way out, published in 1998, followed by Make a Scaifman in 2004. Both were called autobiographical novels, whatever that means, and read exactly as he spoke. His tone, his phrasing, his mischievously blunt sense of humor and the use of language. English, Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa. And amalgams of all of them splattered like Jackson Pollock colors on the page. The last time I saw him was when he and Maggie visited us in London in the late 80s, I think it was. It wasn't a good time for him. His marriage was all but gone and his spark was unsure. But only, thank God for the moment. I asked him how he was getting through it, even though I knew it was a completely useless question. He said, I run, Stephen. When I run, nothing touches me. And it was only then that I remembered that amongst his other achievements, this man had been a gold medalist in the Comrades marathon, that monstrous 88 kilometer ultramarathon run annually between Durban and Peter Maritzburg. And that was another thing that he sacrificed. When he told truth to power, when he was under house arrest, he asked that he be allowed to take part in the Comrades in 1968 and again in 1972. He was turned down both times. Harold Strachan died in 2020, when he was 94 and was cremated without any ceremony whatsoever, which is exactly as he wanted it. So now I would like to hear from you about people you know, you know of or are linked to in some way. It could be a friend, a colleague, an MP or even you speakers of truth to power. I realize you may think that it would be difficult to compete with Harold's story but that's exactly what I don't want you to do. Ordinary people telling truth to power and anyway we all see and read truth speakers every day People who stand up and tell power this is wrong change Speaking truth to power doesn't have to be big and bold. It can be anything from a child speaking truth to his parent or an employee to her manager or a reporter to their editor or indeed that head of HR risking their job to say this is wrong. This is bad for the organization. I'll be fascinated to see what kind of response I get. We all must know at least one person who has spoken truth to power and if we don't, then we're probably in a lot of trouble. I look forward very much to hearing from you. My contact details are in the notes. I'm Stephen Barton. This has been another episode of the Power of Balance. Sam.