Honorary White

by E. R. Braithwaite

  He made the last word sound like an insult, speaking his mind, careless of any effect it might have on the now pale white woman. The Council Secretary nervously wet his lips from time to time as if preparing to intervene, but the old one seemed beyond caring, beyond fear. Perhaps, I thought, he has finally come to terms with himself, his life and his dignity, and has decided to make his stand.

  “You want to see Soweto, come to us,” he told me. “Come as a brother.”

  I apologized for the impromptu visit, saying that my stay in Johannesburg was short and I’d taken advantage of the opportunity provided me to see his township. But he would not be pacified.

  “If you want to know about us, make time. Don’t tell me you have too little time. You’re one of us, black like us. You do not need any White to tell you about us or show you how we live. We’ll make time to see you, talk with you. Let us know when you can come, but come. We need to meet our brothers from far away. You’ve come this far, don’t tell me you have no time.”

  I felt humbled and promised that I’d make the time to be with them. Somehow. He was good for me. I felt elated, and at the same time, reminded of my priorities.

  That was the end of my guided tour. On the way back to Johannesburg, my guide and I talked, but desultorily. She seemed to have lost much of her enthusiasm. At my hotel, there were telephone calls for me from a local newspaper, the Johannesburg Times, seeking an interview, and from a black poet I’d met. I returned the Times call and agreed to be interviewed, then called the poet and, in passing, mentioned that I’d just made a guided tour of Soweto. He laughed at the idea of the white guide and suggested that it was a deliberate ploy on the part of the Office of Information to keep me away from the inhabitants of Soweto. He himself offered to take me there or anywhere else so that I could really meet the people. I told him that I’d been warned not to go into a township without a permit, but he brushed that aside, asking who the hell would know the difference. I’d be a black man in a black township. “They say we all look alike, don’t they?” he laughed. I agreed to take the risk and go with him.

  * Cinemas.

  Chapter

  Four

  ON THE APPOINTED DAY, we met in front of the hotel and drove to Alexandra, six miles outside of the city in the opposite direction from Soweto. We drove through lovely suburbs of wide, clean streets and charming villas surrounded by neat lawns and carefully nurtured hedges and the ubiquitous blue-tinted swimming pool. All along the route were the separate bus stops for Blacks and Whites.

  My first impression of Alexandra was of a garbage dump. Everywhere the garbage was piled as if the inhabitants had long given up the struggle to remove it and just let it accumulate. Where Soweto had roads and drearily similar box-like houses, Alexandra had a jumble of narrow, garbage-clogged foot paths worn out of the naked earth by decades of footsteps, intersecting with shallow gullies which wound their way erratically here and there until they were lost in sudden overgrowths of weeds. What had once long ago been neat houses had deteriorated into dilapidated wrecks patched with tin, cardboard, or even strips of plastic, their squalor emphasized by the uglier little tin outhouses scattered around them. In the middle of all this, two buildings rose ten or twelve stories into the air, straight sided, red-bricked, and looking clinically functional, as if contemptuous of the squalor though firmly anchored in it.

  These were the hostels, one for men and one for women, built to house cheap black labor necessary for the numerous manpower-hungry industrial projects which are mushrooming around Johannesburg. They were designed to accommodate the largest number of workers in the least possible space, and are a honeycomb of tiny, cell-like rooms. Cold running water and toilets are provided at one central location in each building.

  Most of the black workers in Johannesburg and its environs are young men born in ghettos like Soweto and Alexandra; others are migrant workers from the Bantustans of the Transvaal, Transkei­, Zululand, and other outlying territories, or immigrants from Rhodesia, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, and even Mozambique. These migrant and immigrant workers are not permitted to travel with their wives, and see them for only a short time each year, at Christmas, when they are given leave to return home.

  “Well, what do you think of all this?” my companion asked.

  “It stinks,” I replied, meaning the garbage.

  “What about those?” pointing to the hostels.

  “At least they’re an improvement on the tin shacks around them.”

  “You think so? Talk to some of the fellows who live in them. Best that can be said of them, they have electricity and running water. They’d never house white men in places like that.”

  “Could I take a look?”

  “Doubt it. They don’t encourage outsiders. We could peep in if you like. Many of the ground floor rooms have broken windows and nobody seems to be in any hurry to repair them.”

  I declined, not wanting to intrude on the hostel residents, but my friend led the way through the weeds and stunted trees to the base of one of the hostels.

  “This is the women’s unit,” he said. “All these lower rooms are empty. Peeping Toms and things like that, you know. And besides, most of the women stay in the hostel only for a short while then try to find jobs as domestics with the chance of living in their employers’ houses.”

  I looked through one of the broken windows. The narrow room contained a small iron cot with a thin, plastic-covered mattress. A rickety wooden table completed the furniture.

  “The men’s hostel is always filled to capacity, with a waiting list of others wanting to get in,” he said.

  “Where do they live while they’re waiting?”

  “You really want to see?”

  He led me back toward the shacks and we had to pick our way over piles of garbage and around a partly enclosed but uncovered hole which evidently served as the communal lavatory. There was a water spigot a few yards away. We entered one of the ramshackle houses and he knocked on an inner door, then pushed it open to let us into a pitiful room about eight foot square. Although we had come in from bright sunlight the room was in near total darkness; the only window was tightly sealed with burlap. A young man crouched by a single lighted candle, eating something with his fingers from a metal pot. My companion made the introduction, but, in the circumstances, no attempt was made to shake hands. I could not see the young man’s face clearly in the prevailing gloom and I knew he could not see mine. He sat on the edge of a cot, one of three which ringed the room. He told us that six of them, five other men and himself, lived there, sleeping two to a cot. I tried to imagine what it was like.

  The young man finished his meal, wiped his fingers with a piece of paper and stood up. I saw that he was neatly dressed in short, sharply creased slacks and shiny shoes. He said he was employed as a clerk with a local engineering firm, having graduated from the Orlando High School in Soweto. He suggested that we leave as he had arranged to meet some of his friends nearby. As we were leaving, I noticed that another of the cots was occupied, someone making the most of having the entire cot to himself. No electricity, no running water, no sewage facilities, no privacy, no sunlight, no air.

  “Christ!” the word slipped out.

  “Getting to you, eh?” my friend said. “I sometimes read about how you black Americans riot because of your living conditions. We’d trade with you any day, and think ourselves lucky. How long do you think you’d remain human in a room like that? You can hardly close your eyes before there’s someone wanting to stick it up your ass. Hell, no women available, so what can you expect. The women who live here stay indoors at night. Rape around here is less a crime than a daily hazard.”

  “Don’t these fellows ever take any action?”

  “Action? What action? In this country you work or you starve. If you have a job you hang onto it because you know that there are several others just waiting for you to
slip. Action? You mean like striking? Shit, they’d throw you in jail so fast! Don’t forget you’re talking about Blacks.”

  God, no wonder the white guide had kept far away from this place! These black men and women actually had to pay to stay in stinkholes like this. Somebody was making a fortune out of all this misery and it wasn’t the Blacks. They could not own property, thus could not be landlords. So it had to be either the Government, through its Bantu Councils, or private industry, growing fat on Government contracts.

  “We welcome evolution but we are opposed to revolution.” The banker had repeatedly chanted the Government’s slogan. So had the MP, Englebrecht. Didn’t they realize that it was in places like this that revolutions were born and bred? Maybe they’d never seen sights like these, even though they festered right under their very eyes. In other places, others had been similarly blind and uncaring until someone had rubbed their insensitive noses in the shit.

  My friend led me on through the darkening township. I felt that he was slyly pleased at the way I had been affected by the hostel visit, and how carefully I was stepping around the mounds of garbage in our path. People sat on the stoops of the shacks chatting with each other, seeming unmindful of the ugly chaos around them.

  “How would you like to spend a week or two here?” He was smiling. Laughing at me.

  “Not for anything,” I answered. I wanted to get away from there, away from the stench, the dilapidation, the all-pervading air of decay. It was getting me down. I couldn’t understand how he could be so at ease, so comfortable. Then I remembered this was what he wrote about in his poems.

  “A bit different from your guided tour of Soweto, isn’t it?” he grinned. “The Information Office never brings tourists down here. No smooth roads for the cars, no fancy playgrounds for happy, smiling black children. No Government show pieces. All we have is what you see. Decay and death, and we’re forced to live in it. Nowhere to move to, and even if we found somewhere better, how the hell would we get permission to move? You saw what the inside of that hostel unit looked like? Some rooms in these other places are worse. Much worse. And people live here and rear their children. Right here in these miserable holes. Christ Almighty, it’s inhuman!”

  “I agree,” I told him.

  “You agree!” He suddenly turned on me, the thin face tight with anger, a trickle of spittle escaping his mouth. “You agree! That’s mighty big of you, my friend. But in a few minutes you’ll walk away from it, back to your fancy hotel. I suppose you’ll take a nice hot bath and wash away every memory of this stinking slum. You agree! That’s nice. That’s very nice. We agree too, but we still have to live in this shit. And pay for the privilege. Do you realize that? We pay rent to live in these stinking, rotten holes. Come with me, man. There’s something else you should see!”

  With that he started off down a narrow alleyway between some shacks, not even waiting or looking back to see if I was following him. I hurried after, not daring to risk losing him. He led me beyond the shacks, across an open piece of uneven ground where some kind of dwelling had been bulldozed away, and on to another group of run-down houses, rotting and ready to cave in on themselves. Outside one of these, a very old woman sat in the middle of some cardboard cartons and paper bags filled to bursting with rags. Here my friend stopped and pointed a thin arm.

  “Look at her, my friend. She’s too old to clean the white man’s house or mind his children, so she’s discarded, useless as the stinking stuff around her. She can’t pay the miserable rent for that shack, so they’ve thrown her out of it. Look there.”

  He pointed to the heavy padlock on the rickety door. Unimpressed, uncaring, the aged one sat, staring at nothing in particular, her eyes red and rheumy, her lined face set in final resignation, showing neither pain nor anxiety nor interest in whatever the next unhappy step might be.

  “What will happen to her?” I asked.

  “If she’s lucky she’ll die soon,” he replied, bitterly. “Maybe someone will take her in for the night. There are lots like her, the white man’s garbage. I can show you some more, if you like.”

  “No, thank you.” I was becoming thoroughly irritated with his sneering and his jibes. I’d not created these ugly situations. He’d invited me to come and see, and now he was treating me as if all this was my responsibility.

  “Why don’t you take her in?” I asked him, striking back.

  “Me? Take her where? All I have right now is bed space, and I was damned lucky to find that.”

  “So we’ll both walk away from her, won’t we?”

  “Yes, my friend, we’ll both walk away. But I won’t walk far. I can’t walk far. I’ll always be near enough to see it and hear it and smell it. Every minute of the day it is with me. So I write about it. Me and others like me. We write about the things that hurt us and degrade us, but unlike you, we have no outlets for the things we write. Shit, man, even there we need the white man, and how he exploits our need! But, let’s get the hell out of here, if you’ve had enough.” Again he was smiling.

  “I’ve had enough.” In silence we returned to Johannesburg.

  The next afternoon I went to Dorkay House, a center for the arts in downtown Johannesburg, where I had been invited to hear some black musicians give a private performance for a visiting white American impresario. I was there early and wearily walked up six flights of stairs to a narrow room, with a raised platform at one end, in front of which were rows of metal chairs. The small audience, most of whom were already seated when I arrived, was mostly African with a sprinkling of Whites and Indians who all seemed to know one another. Before the performance began they called to each other in familiar terms, the way artists do everywhere asking about mutual friends, their whereabouts, and whether or not they were working.

  The first group to perform, the Batsumi or Hunters, consisted of a flautist, a saxophonist, a pianist, a guitarist, a vocalist who doubled on a huge bongo drum, and two drummers, one who sat enthroned among a glittering assortment of drums and another who beat dexterously on twin, supported kettle drums with padded drumsticks. Two of this group, the kettle drummer and the guitarist, were blind.

  From the moment the performance began, it became evident that this was no ordinary group of men. They seemed to enter an immediate dialogue with each other, the pianist provoking the conversational pattern which the others took up, shaped and shaded as their impulses and instruments dictated. With any group, conversational patterns form and re-form. So it was here. They played, or rather they spoke and sang with and through their instruments, many instruments and sounds completely integrated, blending with each other. At times, the flute and saxophone were in private communion, whispering to each other yet providing a variable obbligato to the insistent piano and plaintive guitar. From time to time a musician would break into song, his wordless sounds giving the music an additional, strange dimension.

  The flute seemed to be made in two sections, that which contained the mouthpiece being several inches shorter than the shank which held the spaced apertures. Caught in an occasional frenzy of expression, the flautist would pull one part from the other, and, using the palm of one hand as a mute, produce from the truncated instrument extraordinary sounds. At other times, he would blow through the lower part as if it were a trumpet, muttering into it at the same time, this creating a hoarse sound, simultaneously strange and familiar.

  From a young woman sitting near me, I learned that they were all from Soweto and were only spare-time musicians; they earned their living as messengers, garage helpers, gardeners, and watchmen. Occasionally they made a recording, but they never received enough from such a venture to make any real difference to their impoverished state.

  The second group, the Alan Kinela Quartet, used the same drummers to provide background for a tenor saxophonist and an electric guitarist. Their music was less introspective, more in the familiar, traditional jazz idiom. After a few numbers, this group
joined with the first and played Stumeleng (“Be Happy”), a lively, exuberant piece from their common tribal heritage.

  At the end of the concert, I stayed to meet the musicians. I expressed my delight at the power and joy of their music, all the more impressive in the face of the white South Africans’ determined attempts to humiliate and degrade the black man. The vocalist-bongo drummer spoke for the others.

  “How is it where you come from?” he asked me. “Where is this place Guyana? In Africa? Where?” His face dripped perspiration which he occasionally scooped away with a forefinger. A handsome young man of medium height, filled with energy which seemed ready to erupt out of him. I told him where Guyana is, pinpointing it on that other continent.

  “Tell me about the people,” he said. “Are they all black, like you? Tell me about them.” Looking me up and down as if to discover any difference between him and me, them and me.

  I told him briefly something of my people. He then asked how long I’d been in Johannesburg, how much I’d seen of the city and the black people and what was my general impression of their condition. Before I could reply, he held up a broad, thick-fingered hand and warned me:

  “When you talk about my country, don’t pity me. Look at us.” Here he moved closer to me as if to emphasize that we were of approximately the same height.

  “Talk to us as one of us. I will tell you how I live here and you will tell me about life in your country. I will tell you that I am deeply dissatisfied with the conditions of my life here and perhaps you will tell me that you are dissatisfied with conditions in your own country. We black men have been here for thousands of years. We have learned how to survive the heat and the floods and the drought, the hunger and the times of plenty. Now we must learn to live through slavery, right here in our homeland. We will live through this present experience. Our music is an expression of the spirit, just as survival springs from the spirit, just as hope, love, and strength are things of the spirit. Come, my brothers,” he beckoned to the others to come nearer around us. “Come and tell our friend here how we can live in shit and still make music.”