Editorials

...Sacks, a neurologist, writes that language arises biologically in human beings from the irrepressible need of the human individual to think and communicate...

...In this decade it has empowered a whole people whose subsequent acts have produced a moral and political revolution...

...justice demands, and the realities of power will require, a redistribution of wealth and an equalizing of opportunity...

...Though he and his followers speak of "a new South Africa," what they have done so far amounts to tinkering with the system rather than replacing it, and is in any case easily reversible...

...This disparaging of Sign and exclusion of the deaf from full participation set the stage for a dramatic upheaval at Gallaudet...

...Earlier, the government had enacted the Disclosure of Foreign Funding Act, requiring nonprofit organizations to report to the government all foreign contributions they receive...

...Thus he was able to teach them to read, and in so doing, opened to them the whole world of literature and culture...

...The language is mild, the request is hardly radical...

...F. W. de Klerk, Nelson Mandela, and Walter Sisulu may never be best friends, but at this moment in history they can be indispensable allies...

...campus and caught the imagination of the world...

...A vast and tricky assignment...

...Despite the recent liberalizing gestures, this is no time for "outsiders" like ourselves to speak of relaxing sanctions...

...Still, the signals are mixed...

...Given these conflicting developments, it is impossible to know whether de Klerk accepts the necessity of peaceful change to avoid violent change and, if he does, whether he commands enough support among the ruling whites to bring it off...

...And the sanctions hurt...

...From out of the dark and formless void of a people's inarticulate yearnings, "solidarity" has fashioned a renewed sense of human possibility...

...That would be followed by a step-by-step eradication of apartheid's restrictions and taboos, a cut-off of South Africa's aid to Angolan rebels, fulfillment of Namibian independence, and creation of a draft constitution including a bill of rights, to be adopted, rejected, or amended by a democratically elected constituent assembly...

...Democracy has seldom been so graphically rendered...

...Despite their bravado and defiance, white South Africans cannot find it comfortable to live in the world under condemnation as untouchables...

...At the same time, he questioned the government's seriousness about dismantling apartheid...

...Any government in which blacks and whites share power will face the very great problem of reshaping not only the nation's political, judicial, and educational systems but also its economy...

...Sign, rather than merely sequential, is iconic, multidimensional, and nearly cinematic in form...

...On the one hand, the government is consulting Sisulu and Mandela about how to proceed toward an end of apartheid and the continuing official state of emergency...

...There, a form of gestured English (signed English) was promoted, and even though the school was founded in their behalf, the deaf were systematically prevented from attaining positions of higher authority in the institution...

...Yet everyone knows that the anti-apartheid leaders cannot settle for half-measures or long delays without losing their followers...

...No mere spoken formula...

...They struck classes, reached out to the hearing community, and brought their demands to a climax by demonstrating on the steps of the Capitol...

...World opinion can function as an honest mirror, sending back a true and ugly reflection...

...Meantime, there is also new recognition and partial acknowledgment of apartheid's long-term costs: a majority of South Africa's citizenry impoverished, unemployed, undered-ucated, malnourished, and outraged enough to persist in their efforts to gain power over their lives and their country...

...It reaches out...

...God's word or better, linguistic act effected what it announced...

...In the beginning is the Word...

...and is near at hand...

...Language as activator and guarantor...

...Theirs was a signed rebellion: silent, yet ringing...

...Though the rally itself passed without a single violent incident, Sisulu explicitly declared that the ANC will not unilaterally renounce the use of revolutionary violence, a step the government has long demanded as a precondition for negotiations...

...Mandela is still in prison...

...In late November, hours before a rally in the Transkei "homeland" where the ANC and the United Democratic Front were to be "unbanned," government police moved in with teargas...

...To the students, their own "calm strength of union" had come as a revelation...

...A person, active in history, loving beyond measure, participant in our lives...

...In November, four new areas were opened for integrated housing clearly a step forward...

...While baffled government troops stood by, Sisulu addressed some 70,000 protestors, including hundreds of whites, gathered for one of South Africa's largest political rallies in thirty years...

...They've responded in one of two ways: a move to the far right...

...concrete opposition to apartheid...

...Having served twenty-six years of a life sentence for treason, Sisulu brings unquestioned credentials and tested, patient strength to the anti-apartheid movement, still in the hands of a seasoned generation...

...and, somewhere in between, the followers of Chief Buthelezi, the Inkatha, saddled with his idiosyncratic views...

...Think of the single word "Solidarity...

...As Sacks notes, to lack language is to be prevented from fully entering the human estate...

...From speech sprang forth not only illumination ("Let there be light"), but life itself...

...There, in a sea of hands, they issued their own emancipation proclamation, the only sound being for the most part sudden waves of applause...

...And it was good...

...There has been a growth of white involvement in opposition to the system, including a rising number of young men refusing to serve in the military "people taking a very personal stand vis-a-vis their lives...

...In the first verses of Genesis, when the earth lay in silence and "darkness covered the abyss," it was speech that drew forth substance and established form...

...no mere sound byte...

...The word overcomes the darkness...

...Later, Sisulu said of de Klerk, "he must make reasonable efforts to create a climate for negotiations...

...PRETORIA'S MIXED SIGNALS Visiting Commonweal's offices last spring, Naomi Tutu, twenty-nine-year-old daughter of Cape Town's Archbishop Desmond Tutu, spoke of a growing impatience among younger members of the anti-apartheid movement and of a widening gap between religious leaders still willing to negotiate with Pretoria's white minority government and the young, who see negotiations as capitulation...

...Prosecution of anti-apartheid groups could subject these funds to seizure, a move that might well destroy the movement, or drive it wholly underground...

...Sisulu announced that he intends to discuss "the normalization of the situation in South Africa" with de Klerk...

...Their cohesion and victory seemed to emerge all at once, like the crystallization of a supersaturated solution...

...reluctance can be understood...

...It is through language that we first realize and then develop our intellectual and emotional capacities...

...Despite the strength of the uncompromising pro-apartheid right, the National party and the liberal Democratic party together received 70 percent of the white vote in September's elections...

...Two weeks after his discharge, Sisulu galvanized all three principal factions in the opposition: antiwhite nationalists...

...In the beginning was the Word and the Word became flesh...

...two people were killed...

...To be languageless, then, for human beings, is the most desperate of calamities...

...The One who opens ears and minds, who hears the cry of the poor, who makes us one and fully human...

...It is through language that the human brain actually develops the ability to think: that capacity to acquire, store, process, relate, and ultimately share the perception of reality...

...De Klerk made an important gesture in October when his government released Walter Sisulu, former general secretary of the banned African National Congress (ANC) and a handful of other long-term political prisoners...

...For most white South Africans, all this makes up a very large pill, hard to swallow but nothing nearly so bitter as the medicine that most black South Africans have been forced to ingest every day of their lives...

...He could begin by rescinding the broad executive powers Botha conferred upon his government by enacting the state of emergency...

...What is at issue in South Africa is more far-reaching than access to political participation...

...Thus the psalmist described God as the One "who spoke and the world was created...

...But it must not be accepted...

...That is why the demonstrations led by prominent black church leaders last summer, aimed at integrating Cape Town's two remaining segregated beaches, were significant...

...The same phenomenon that swept Gallaudet is at play elsewhere over the wide earth...

...In October, the New Nation, a weekly paper edited by Sisulu's thirty-seven-year-old son, Swelakhe (a former Neiman Fellow at Harvard, now under a banning order), was placed under investigation for violating emergency regulations...

...But it was really the fruit of a long-latent sense of communal mind in a word, solidarity made manifest in the fullness of time by their nonviolent demonstrations...

...Like other indigenous languages, it has known suppression under various colonizers...

...bearer and enactor of the Good News...

...The university capitulated...

...Gestures such as the release of Sisulu may well be intended not to presage deeper changes but only to ease the pressure of economic sanctions imposed by other nations and to rescue the Republic from its pariah status in the world...

...Language liberates...

...The rally was technically illegal but was covered by government television...

...democratic moderates seeking constitutional change by nonviolent means...

...Economic pressures," said Naomi Tutu, "have led a fair number of white South Africans to start questioning what apartheid holds for them...

...A report by the human rights group Africa Watch confirms that young militants some of whom as children experienced harassment, detention, displacement, violence, and even torture at the hands of government are more inclined than their elders to reject talks and turn to violence...

...In September, a women's march against apartheid was banned, and those who defied the ban were beaten...

...The Word became flesh and dwells among us...

...In 1755 he founded a school for the deaf, and by listening to them that is, by paying attention to his pupils' unique plastic and visual form of communication he was led to associate signs with pictures and then written words...

...It was first discerned as such and then deciphered by the Abbe Charles de 1 'Epee, a French priest driven by the desire to share the word of God with the deaf-mute...

...Elsewhere, in El Salvador for example, the adherents of human solidarity continue to suffer and to be killed...

...Solidarity...

...For many years American Sign Language was held in disrepute even at Gallaudet University, the nation's only university for the deaf...

...We need but listen and respond...

...Both they and some of their counterparts in government appear to sense the ripeness of the moment: steps toward constitutional change must begin now, while veteran black leaders can mediate the transition to majority rule...

...communicate them to one another, and thus become fully developed persons...

...reflect on them and use them to create (yes...

...That can be considered only when de Klerk and his government begin to speak (like Mikhail Gorbachev) of the universality of human rights and individual freedom, and back up such talk with concrete action...

...Those born without the ability to hear, though not lacking inherent intellectual capabilities, sometimes appear and may eventually become mentally defective, unless they develop an adequate means of self-expression...

...There is scarcely a more compelling commentary on those lines from John's Gospel than Oliver Sacks's recent study of the deaf and their language: Seeing Voices (University of California Press...

...Sacks's study opens another vista an alien world for most of us "native speakers in the world of speech" the world of Sign, the speech of the deaf...

...sounds where it will...

...One can begin to speak of a change of heart among some white South Africans a critical change but one impossible to quantify...

...But other events and nonevents send a different message...

...Sign is a living language: still developing, and yet lexically, grammatically, and syntactically complete...

...The Group Areas Act, embodying a basic principle of apartheid, remains in force...

...The chances of peaceful change were further bolstered by the inauguration, September 20, of President F. W. de Klerk, already more conciliatory than his predecessor, P. W. Botha...

...Poland's Solidarity movement, nonviolent and self-disciplined, once outlawed and suppressed, has sown a remarkable harvest in all of Eastern Europe...

...no mere abstract ideological or moral message...

...But they will not be silenced...

...There are indications that elements of the Nationalist party realize, first, that basic change is coming, and second, that it is far more likely to come about peacefully under the leadership of near-mythic figures like Sisulu and Nelson Mandela, whose stature in black Africa and the world remains unchallengeable, than would be the case if they were succeeded by younger, angrier, less experienced leaders...

...our thoughts...

...In a week's time in early March 1988, the university's students galvanized the Washington, D.C...

...For such is the nature of the Word itself...

...It opens us to one another and to the cultural intercourse which is our birthright, to that which is essential for fully developed human personality...

...To others, it was an epiphany...