HE HILLBROW ELECTIONS, 1987
By
Luc Iver de Vil
The Hillbrow Election, 1987
By Luc Iver de Vil
Copyright 2013 Luc Iver de Vil
Authors note: All characters in this work of fiction are 18 years of age and older
This book is dedicated to all those people that were part of our campaign. My friends, the volunteers, the homosexual community, the illegal immigrants and the escort girls.
We had fun learning about the duplicity of politicians.
A special thanks to my wife for doing the hard labour in getting my memories onto paper.
Preface: Many thesis’ by highly educated individual the world over, with many theories as to why the election, against all expectations, went the National Party’s way.
To the best of my knowledge none of these people were even in Hillbrow at the time, I was there, I was part of the election as the campaign manager for the winning candidate.
This is the story of what actually happened, as I remember it...
THE HILLBROW ELECTIONS, 1987
Politics and politicians! Now let me get this straight, I do not rate politicians very high, I actually rate them at the same depth that I rate Preachers, Traffic police, Lawyers and Professional Sportsman, all of no benefit to society whatsoever.
It is not that I never got involved in politics. I did. There are very few areas where one can have as much fun as one can in the comedy of politics. But to put some perspective on my story, I will have to explain the political landscape, as I saw it, back in the latter 1980’s.
We had a number of political parties strutting their bullshit through South Africa, from the distant right wing to the not so far left. The far lefties were banned, so they were either in jail, in exile, or running around in the bush with AK47’s and bombs to plant in bars, restaurants or at bus stops and railway stations.
There were three parties dominating the political scene at the time, the others were of no consequence. We had the National Party, the creators of Apartheid, by far the largest party, but in South Africa as things were in the eighties to be actually considered middle-of-the-road. The Nats found their support basically across the country, in rural as well as in urban constituencies, mostly middle class Afrikaners with a scattering of English speakers. Other language speakers such as German and Portuguese also tended to support the Nats.
On their right was the Conservative Party, formed by former leaders within the National Party who had broken away when the latter started relaxing some of the more oppressive Apartheid laws, which Conservatives found to be a sell-out of the white race. Their support base were mostly rural Afrikaans, and also within the poorer white communities.
From the left fought the Progressive Federal Party, a party that had gone through many name changes since being formed at some stage during the 1950’s I believe. This party was in total opposition to Apartheid and found their support mostly within the Jewish community, and the richer Afrikaans and English citizens.
The battleground between these three in which I found my entertainment was Hillbrow, the most densely populated square mile of humanity in Africa. In the high rise apartment blocks lived a very cosmopolitan society, and many Apartheid laws were largely ignored, impossible to police. Because of this “live and let live” atmosphere there was a fairly large Gay community residing in the suburb as well.
Hillbrow never slept, nightclubs, bars, take-away food outlets, actually all forms of trade, illegal as well as legal, operated 24 hours a day.
For as long as I can remember the PFP considered Hillbrow as a ‘save seat’, with their candidate going to parliament unopposed election after election.
I lived in an apartment block in Kapteijn Street, diagonally opposite a corner café, housed in a very old one story building which included a small house, presumably for the shop owner many decades ago. Next to the apartment building was the Huguenot hotel, a residential hotel used by foreign construction workers employed in building Power Stations across the country, to relax during their leave, or on weekends off. On the ground floor of the hotel was a large bar frequented by a mostly foreign cliental, and an Italian restaurant that had a good reputation for its food and pricing.
The corner café was owned by my good friend, Trevor, who was a very generous man, well known and much respected throughout the area. The small house attached to the café was used by a number of very attractive girls as an Escort Agency. Another explanation is needed here. The oldest profession in the world, prostitution, was illegal in South Africa, and the police had much fun in raiding brothels. To circumvent the law Escort Agencies came into being. A man could rent the girl of his choice for any numbers of hours; cash paid up front, and take her on a date. Where they went, and what they did, on this ‘date’ was nobody’s business, but their own.
Regularly, especially Fridays, a number of us friends will gather in Trevor’s café, in a little back room that was used as a kitchen and storeroom, to have some drinks and discuss the world as we saw it on that particular day.
When the general election was announced by the then President, I shall refer to him as Mr.P, to take place in May 1987, we paid it no heed. Hillbrow had been a PFP constituency for as long as we could remember, their candidate going to parliament unopposed every election.
Here I have to regress a bit, to give my opinion on the personalities of some of the leaders as I saw them. During the previous national election, 1982, I was on my sojourn as a newspaper reported in the Northern Free State. During a number of interviews, and attending public meetings, I met Mr. P a few times. He came across as very arrogant, self-opinioned and actually a very unpleasant person.
On the other hand I met a Mr. Marais, leader of a party so far to the right that they were actually off the map, the HNP. If one forgave Marais for his political views, you would have found him a very friendly, well educated, well-spoken and strangely enough, a very well read person.
Then there was the Penguin, leader of the Nats in Johannesburg, and also a senior Minister in Mr. P's cabinet. I had crossed swords with him on a number of occasion’s years earlier, when I earned my living as a professional hunter. Part of my business was the export, and local trade, in venison. The first time we clashed was when I had bought 16 tons of venison, cut-up and packed in 5kg boxes, from a meat processing plant in Windhoek, S.W.A. This meat I then resold to a meat distributor in Johannesburg who made biltong, a South African delicacy similar to American Jerky. I rented a 20 ton refrigerated truck to transport the meat to Johannesburg, and on offloading the driver put 6 boxes, marked with a ‘P’, to one side. When querying this the driver told me that these belonged to Penguin, who had asked him to bring it to Johannesburg. I objected, the truck was rented by me to transport my goods, and as Penguin had not obtained my permission to load his meat on the truck, I confiscated it. Some very hectic telephone calls followed with Penguin demanding his meat. In return I demanded cash to the value of half the rental of the truck. I did not get the cash; Penguin did not get his venison.
A few months after this we clashed again. I was contracted by the Nature Conservation Department of S.W.A. to cull 200 wild ostriches, taking the carcasses as payment. Those days ostrich meat had not yet attained the popularity as it has today, and thus was not worth much. As these ostriches were wild birds their feathers had no value, as they were damaged by the environment the birds lived in. Ostrich leather though had value, and I desperately searched for a Tanning Works that could handle the skins for me. As South Africa had a huge Ostrich Farming industry, this industry was protected and no other tanner could legally process ostrich skins, but the tannery owned by the Klein Karoo Co-op. They refused to assist. While vi
siting various tanners begging for a deal I came across one that had wild ostrich, leopard, cheetah and lion skins lying on the floor in a sorting room. When they refused to assist I queried these ‘illegal’ skins, some of those animals are protected, in their possession. I was told the skins were the property of Penguin, and that they were doing him a favour by processing it. I was furious, so I reported this to Nature Conservation authorities. Penguin was highly pissed off with me, not only was his skins confiscated, he was fined heavily. He also did get some bad publicity. This little indiscretion cost him dearly years later, when he stood as candidate to replace Mr. P as leader of the National Party. Some of the other candidates remembered this bit of illegality and forced him to withdraw his nomination.
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