Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  The biggest contribution to the national income of Transkei is still the sale of men as migratory labourers. In the first elections that symbolised independence, 55 per cent of the people at the polls were women. After 300 years of white rule in South Africa the men of Transkei cannot earn a living at home. The land allotted them under the division of South Africa into white and black areas of occupation is not sufficient to support their families, and the cities and industries they have given their labour to build over generations, the gold and coal mines they have manned, are hundreds of kilometres from the poor portion they have been persuaded to accept of South Africa, which could not have realised its rich potential without them.

  Govan Mbeki is a man of the Transkei, educated, politically capable, but not honoured by any chieftainship or cabinet appointment in the new black government. He is imprisoned for life on Robben Island off Cape Town for political activities that asserted the right of South African blacks to share non-racial government over the whole of South Africa. I keep remembering how he has written of the Transkei as a ‘breeding camp’ where the men come home for three months a year to procreate, in these round huts, the next generation of cheap labour for whites.

  The white man had hardly set his spoor of boot and wheel upon this part of Africa before visions of how to rid themselves of his overlordship began to come to the indigenous people.

  A hundred and twenty years ago a black Jeanne d’Arc saw and heard the African ancestral dead. To Nongqause they foretold that if her Xhosa people gave up witchcraft, killed their cattle and razed their maize crops in sacrifice, on 18 February 1857 two blood-red suns would rise and a hurricane would sweep the whites back into the sea by which they had come. New fields of maize and new herds of cattle would appear, and Xhosa warriors dead in frontier wars would live again.

  The Xhosa were fighting a battle that could not be won. Not only was it the oxhide shield and assegai against the gun, but ultimately man’s masterful technological attitude to his environment – acquired in Europe’s nineteenth-century industrial revolutions – against the compact with his environment that is the ancient pastoral society’s solution to the problem and mystery of our place in creation. The need of a miracle was the Xhosa reality: they did as Nongqause’s vision bid.

  On 18 February 1857 the two blood-red suns did not rise, and the whites were not swept into the sea. Sixty-eight thousand Xhosas starved to death and those who survived did so by making their way to the Cape Colony to beg food and work from the white man.

  In Transkei’s capital, Umtata, among the rows of traders’ stores and under the glass and steel mirrors of fine administrative blocks built with the South African government’s money, there is a building unique in the history of all that was and is South Africa. The Cape Dutch-style colonial stateliness suggests perfectly what it was intended it should: a parliament just like the white man’s. It was here that the vision of driving the white man into the sea underwent a transformation to become the constitutional vision of getting the vote and direct representation for blacks, along with whites, in the government of South Africa.

  In the mid-nineteenth century the British of the Cape Colony controlled the Transkei through magistracies, and blacks had a qualified vote in the Cape legislature. The paring-down of the black franchise was successive until 1894, when the annexation of all chiefdoms of the Transkei to the Cape Colony was completed. Then Rhodes, the Empire-builder who wanted to see all Africa draped in the Union Jack, introduced an act that established a system of African representation outside a common society of black and white. A pyramid of councils, part elected, part white-government-nominated among chiefs, conveyed the Transkeians’ needs to the white government; the black councillors had no powers of legislation and the government had no obligation to act on their advice.

  The South Africa Act of 1909, which unified the country in the wake of the Boer War, took away from those blacks who still managed to qualify for the vote the right – never yet exercised – of electing a black to parliament. While that same act entrenched the African franchise in the Cape, the long-term process was clear. In the early thirties an unqualified franchise was given to all whites; by 1936 black voters in the Cape were removed from the common voters’ roll. The Transkeian supreme council had moved into this elegant doll’s house of power where, on a budget that ten years later did not yet amount to more than half the money spent by the South African government on printing and stationery, the council was allowed to deal only with local education, roads, agriculture, limitation of stock and tribal law.

  The quaint ‘natives’ parliament’ was called – both institution and building – the Bunga, derived from a Xhosa word meaning ‘a discussion’. Apart from placating chiefs for their loss of authority to white magistrates, the Bunga incidentally gave educated Transkeians a chance (unique for South African blacks) to learn by frustration the workings of Western government administration.

  The Bunga asked for direct representation for blacks in the South African government year after year; at the same time, it asked for greater administrative powers within the Transkei. These aims were never accepted by the Transkeians as mutually exclusive. In the 1950s apartheid made them so. The ‘self-government’ the new laws prepared for applied only to the eight ‘Bantustans’ – nascent black statelets – of which the Transkei was one. ‘Self-development’ was carried out by government-appointed and even government-created chiefs (the present Prime Minister was made a Paramount Chief) functioning as ‘Tribal Authorities’ whose decisions could be vetoed by the white government in Pretoria.

  The Bunga as an institution dissolved itself in 1955. In 1976 the Bunga doll’s house with its solemn panelling and gilded citations of democracy became Transkei’s National Assembly, in return for the surrender of any claim for Transkeians ever to sit in the parliament of South Africa, or take any part in the central government of South Africa, where more than a third of the Transkei’s people live and work.

  Both private reception rooms at the Umtata Holiday Inn are called the Kaiser Matanzima Room. If this is caution, it isn’t lack of imagination. Prime Minister Kaiser Matanzima gives no chances to rivals who might qualify to have their names honoured. One of the new administrative blocks is named after State President Chief Botha Sigcau, rewarded with that high office for his politically strategic importance as Paramount Chief of the rebellious Pondo people; but President Sigcau’s portrait does not hang in the Cabinet Chamber with Kaiser Matanzima’s, and Matanzima has not repealed the preventive detention act that, under South African rule, kept the leaders of the opposition party in jail during elections for the country’s first independent government. (The leader of the opposition was jailed again, by Matanzima, while I was in Transkei.) George Matanzima, Minister of Justice, now, but once struck off the lawyers’ roster for professional misconduct while practising in South Africa, seems content to be the closest of siblings. The Brothers Matanzima have the same Roman senator heads. Their family name means ‘strong saliva’; the taste of power turns venomous when Kaiser Matanzima attacks those who call him a stooge of the white South African government, a man who has betrayed the black man’s right to share all South Africa. From time to time, venom flickers even at the government that set him up.

  Kaiser Matanzima’s cousin, Nelson Mandela, and his other compatriots Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki are serving life sentences. The constitutional vision has receded further and further. It is not difficult to see why Nongqause’s vision of ridding the blacks of white overlordship would be transformed, yet again, into a third avatar. To some blacks, 13 per cent of the land seems better than nothing; a beggarly black state within South Africa could be regarded as a Trojan horse from which liberation could overrun white domination.

  Matanzima is the man, as well as the opportunist, of his time. He carries within his personality the contradictions of the vision transformed. He has opted for tribal nationalism, accepted and approved apartheid; on occasion he lifts the black power fist
and declares solidarity with blacks in South Africa who reject apartheid and hold out for full rights in a unitary state. He pledged he would not take independence until the South African government fulfilled Transkei’s claims to additional land and guaranteed such citizenship rights as there are for blacks in South Africa to those Transkeians living and working there. He has got part of the white-owned land he claimed – some of it as a gift of farms to the Brothers Matanzima personally. But he has given up the right to South African citizenship of the 1.3 million Xhosa-speaking people who do not live in Transkei. Thousands of them were not born in, nor have they ever seen Transkei. The language they speak is declared by the South African government as proof of Transkei nationality; in this way apartheid ‘keeps South Africa white’ by making ‘foreign’ sojourners of the majority of South Africa’s urban black population. If they refuse to accept Bantustan citizenship, they become stateless. While I was in Transkei a vast settlement of squatters near Cape Town was bulldozed and 70 per cent of the inhabitants, Xhosa-speaking, were ordered to go ‘home’ to Matanzima, who had neither welcome, land nor work to offer them.

  No foreign dignitary attended the Transkeian ‘independence celebrations’ in 1976: the countries of the world have not officially recognised the existence of this one.

  The single gain Transkei made in the independence deal is the abolition of South Africa’s lower standard of schooling for blacks. A scholarly Transkeian of the missionary college old boy network castigates UNESCO for refusing educational aid, now: couldn’t I influence anyone – the Americans, West Germans – to give young Transkeians scholarships abroad? Even Amin’s Ugandans get them! ‘Everyone sneers at us for taking orders from Pretoria – why won’t they help us train people to make our independence real? Orders … it’s not true … Well, what can we do? D’you know that the library here in Umtata was opened to blacks only after the celebrations in ’76! We’re not stooges … we need teachers, librarians …’

  His eyes move about his government office as if to catch out a filing cabinet listening and observing. Yet he gabbles indiscreet asides. His son has ‘disappeared’; I know what that means? – yes, from South Africa where he was studying – fled abroad after detention during the riots in 1976. These young people want nothing to do with this independence … Out in the street he accompanies me courteously but I am merely a presence from which his preoccupation echoes. Pretoria, Pretoria, he murmurs – a ringing in his ears.

  In the bar at an Umtata hotel a group of attractive black men wearing young executive clothes meets heartily every evening: a lawyer, an insurance man, ‘reps’ (travelling salesmen) from South African firms, and functionaries in the para-governmental Development Corporation, financed by South Africa. The Corporation is concerned with getting blacks into business as well as attracting white foreign industrialists by the inducement of tax remissions, no minimum wage and no trade unions. A game of cards is slapped down among the beer bottles, banter flies in a mixture of Xhosa and English, a tray of fried fish goes round in place of peanuts. The insurance man has just won his company’s citation for the month’s highest average of life insurance sales; the cosmetic ‘rep’ swaggers: ‘A gold mine, I’m telling you, this country’s a gold mine.’

  To whom does one sell life insurance here?

  To the grandmothers whose worth could not be compensated by any premium? To the men who tell me they don’t know where to find the new R2.50 livestock tax payable on each head of cattle – their only capital?

  In two years Umtata’s population has risen from 25,000 to 31,400. Apart from imported skilled workers and administrators employed on the R20-million university, the hydroelectric scheme, the industrial and housing developments, the new affluent class is a bureaucracy and its hangers-on. R37.5 million invested in the country by South African and foreign industrialists, and R59.5 million from the South African-financed Development Corporation have provided only 12,500 jobs for Transkeians. Unless he works for the government or has the minimal education and maximum good luck to be able to take over a white store on finance borrowed from the Corporation, the Transkeian has little choice but to labour for low pay at home or hire himself out to the mines across the border.

  The Umtata Town Hall clock has stopped and not even independence sets it measuring a new era. At noon by my watch old women in their tribal petticoats and turbans settled like huge black snails on their heads are watering the public gardens from cans; cheaper for the municipality than the outlay for a hose, I suppose. Life down the road at the end of York Street remains the reality of the capital for most people. Taxi drivers tout custom along the bus queues; some vodka ‘rep’ has been zealous: all buses bear the huge legend – SMIRNOFF, THE SPIRIT OF FREEDOM. In the market a medicine man dressed like a respectable farmer sells potions from bead-covered gourds which are his apothecary’s jars, and among business women sewing braided print skirts there is one who sells teaspoons of snuff from a tin which she also uses to mark out the circumference of the women’s anklets she cuts from the tubes of old tyres. And all along one side of the street are the recruiting offices, with their neat and cheerful, fresh-painted façades like white suburban houses, and their cajoling signs. The older ones tell a picture-story: assegais and shields invoking manliness, the homecoming of the beaming miner stepping off the train into a company of admiring women and children. The latest recognises that tribal black men have entered the kind of contemporary world offered them, abandoning hope of anything but money: no human beings, no smiles – a miner’s helmet, shown as a cornucopia filled with notes.

  In the yards of the offices are small buses and Land-Rovers that pick up recruits from their villages. Men are waiting about with their cardboard suitcases and blankets. Some look very young; there is an atmosphere of detachment and silence in the stoicism of an unavoidable destination, very different from the strutting confidence of government officials running up the broad steps of new ministries, and the free-riding pleasure of the Rotary Club candidates on their nightly spree in a hotel bar their colour would have excluded them from in South Africa.

  ‘If I were to get a telex from Johannesburg asking me to send a thousand men this week, I’d have no difficulty.’ The white recruiting officer for South Africa’s biggest gold-mining company, a group of coal mines, a construction company and a sugar-cane growers’ association, says that more men than ever are prepared to go off for a nine-month stint as a contract labourer. Black miners’ wages have been raised considerably lately; but the wage gap between white and black average monthly earnings on the mines continues to grow – at present it is a staggering R700 in favour of whites. Blacks are housed in barracks and nutritiously fed, free, as units of labour, in the interests of efficiency that take no account of further, human needs.

  In most old trading villages there are no whites now except those left behind under marble angels in the abandoned European cemeteries (the Xhosas mourn elaborately but plough and plant over their last season’s dead). The trading stores, the butchery and the single hotel have all been taken over by blacks, and so have the recruiting concessions that used to be as much part of the white trader’s turnover as the sale of sugar and blankets. In one of these villages I watched young black men in earrings, sniffing and hawking against the early morning cold, led into the magistrate’s office by the local recruiting agent – a brisk black girl loud on platform shoes. The magistrate read to forlorn closed faces the terms of the agreement whereby they would go to the mines; the men touched a clerk’s ballpoint in symbol of the illiterate’s signature to the document. The girl wrote bus and rail passes for the journey. They were led out, launched on their career in a place where they are not permitted to stay longer than nine months at a stretch, and are forbidden to have wife, child or family come to live and make a home with them.

  The Transkeians are people of twelve tribal clusters, each with its strong sense of identity and named terrain, although they all speak Xhosa dialects.

  In the 1880s Pondola
nd was still an independent country governed by its own chiefs when a colonising party of Germans from South West Africa (Namibia) – then already annexed by Kaiser Wilhelm I – landed on its wild coast and obtained grandiose concessions for mineral and commercial exploitation from an ancestor of the present President of the Republic of Transkei, Chief Botha Sigcau. In return, two sons of the tribe were taken to Germany to be educated. It would have been a good bargain for the Germans if the British had not ridden in to remind the Pondos, with a military escort, that Pondoland had already been given away – to the British, by Sigcau’s father. The Germans left; no one can tell me if the two young Pondos achieved their Abitur.

  Pondoland was the last Transkeian territory to come under white rule and it seems it will be the last to accept the apartheid dispensation of independence. In the fifties at a meeting called to persuade Pondos to accept ‘Tribal Authorities’ as a form of self-government, a man literally turned his backside to Botha Sigcau, its protagonist-in-office, and was cheered: Umasiziphathe uya Kusubenza sifile – Bantu (tribal) authorities will operate over our dead bodies!

  They did. A vast popular movement of resistance arose in Pondoland in 1960, concurrent with the general uprisings in South Africa that culminated in the police massacre of blacks at Sharpeville. Thousands of Pondos came down from their mountains on foot and horseback to demand, among other things, the removal of Paramount Chief Botha Sigcau. Tanks and guns from South Africa met them. Thirty Pondos died for their part in the revolt, 4,769 were held in preventive detention.