A Song in the Night

by Bob Massie

  This experience burned for decades in the living memories of the Afrikaners, who swore that one day they would regain control from the British and be free to do what they wanted with “their” land and “their” blacks. A huge wave of nationalist rallies began in the 1930s, and some of the major Afrikaner leaders, including one future prime minister, were jailed by the British for favoring the defeat of Britain by Hitler. After the war, however, the Afrikaners finally achieved what they wanted: they won a majority in the whites-only election for Parliament. Led by a charismatic and demented professor named Hendrik Verwoerd, they wiped out the remnants of British law and changed the voting structures to secure permanent power for themselves.

  To make sure they had no future opposition of any kind, they constructed a comprehensive legal and police system to control the majority black population. Africans were denied the right to vote, to own businesses, to travel without permission and identity documents, to live anywhere except in designated areas, to speak in public or to protest, to attend universities, or to resist the government in any way. They were to remain in a permanent state of “apartness,” or apartheid, excluded from every chance to participate and to prosper. And thus the Afrikaners’ desire to preserve their culture in freedom and their generational grievances against the English justified the creation and enforcement of the most modern and aggressive system of racism in the world.

  To see some of the monuments of this troubled history, we drove north on a major highway cutting through green and yellow rolling terrain dotted with industrial parks that reminded us of east Texas. We went first to the Voortrekker Monument. Built in 1938 as a neofascist shrine to Afrikaner victory, the monument is one of the most visually powerful and politically controversial structures in the country. We climbed a hundred steps to the central chamber, where Afrikaner settler mythology is laid out in a large frieze around a central crypt. The building is built so that each year on the sixteenth of December—the date in 1838 on which five hundred Afrikaners rebuffed an attack by thousands of Zulus—a shaft of sunlight streaks through the window and illuminates a stone table at the center. The table resembles a sarcophagus; carved deeply in the top are the words “Ons Vir Jou Suid Afrika”: “We (Are) for You, South Africa.”

  The place evoked many sentiments. It bothered me that the settler imagery seemed so familiar. If the bearded white men had been wearing Pilgrim hats or cowboy boots, I wondered, would I have found it as appalling?

  We climbed more steps to obtain a sweeping view of Pretoria. There my mind shifted back to college. During my senior year, in the same spring as my bout with the eating clubs, I had also become deeply involved with the student divestment movement to protest apartheid. We had spent weeks marching in front of Nassau Hall, the student administration building, shouting, “Princeton—Pretoria! Break the connection now!” During my final months at Princeton, hundreds of students had joined this daily protest. I had admired the top student leaders greatly and wondered how they had acquired so much detailed knowledge about the business connections of the university. We handed out flyers and took buses into New York City to see one of our classmates testify against apartheid at the United Nations. In April 1978 more than two hundred students, including me, had seized and occupied Nassau Hall and spent twenty-four hours singing songs, holding teach-ins, and sleeping in the corridors to provoke a response from the university trustees, which never came. That incident, as much as any, launched me on a lifetime of study and activism on corporate and investment policy.

  As the sun beat down on my little family nearly fifteen years later, I thought how far away Princeton seemed—a small town now locked in the snows of an opposite season on the other side of the world. The claim that there had been a connection between Princeton and Pretoria had at first seemed unlikely. It had required squeezing a long and complicated set of relationships into a single binary pair. “It’s not that simple,” administrators and trustees had told us in the 1970s, and in one sense they had been right. And yet they had also been wrong. Firms from around the globe—from the United States, France, Great Britain, West Germany, and Japan—had provided South Africa’s white leaders with large amounts of money and technology to build their racist state. When I was at Princeton, nearly four hundred American companies owned subsidiaries in South Africa. Even though these firms never accounted for more than a fifth of South Africa’s direct foreign investment, they dominated such key sectors as electronics, automobile manufacturing, financial services, and petroleum refining and distribution. Dividends from these companies had flowed into Princeton’s bank accounts, and some of their executives sat on the university’s board of trustees. The connection had been real.

  Over the next few days we moved to Cape Town and settled into the house that would be ours for nearly six months. Our new home came with a station wagon, two dogs, a gardener named Nelson, and a maid named Tembisa. It was surrounded by a high wall and included a swimming pool just off the kitchen entrance. By the standard of South African whites, this was not particularly affluent, and I realized within days how seductive the whole environment could be.

  My goal in South Africa was ambitious. After years of archival research and interviews in the United States, I had come to South Africa to complete the other side of the equation. It was one thing to write about apartheid as an idea, but what was it like for the people, black and white, who lived it? I was trying to assemble, as diligently and fairly as possible, a thorough explanation of how and why South Africa had both started and ended its modern system of racial domination. With this goal in mind, I made an ordered spreadsheet of the 120 places I wanted to visit and people I wanted to see in the 180 days I would be in the country. I jumped on this list immediately, making arrangements through phone calls, letters, and visits. E-mail didn’t exist in South Africa, and many people were too busy to make commitments over the phone, so I found that the most effective way to get something done was simply to show up at an organization or a person’s front door.

  To maintain our daily life, we enrolled our boys in the local Catholic school, where they wore uniforms and ran around with mostly white children in a neocolonial setting. John, who was three and a half, exuberantly made friends and seemed oblivious to issues of race. I began hearing about his friendship with a little girl in the class, and one day, when I picked him up, I asked him to point her out to me. He pointed to the only African girl in the room.

  “There she is,” he said, smiling. “She’s the one in the purple dress!”

  Samuel, five and a half, was blond and serious. One of his favorite pastimes was explaining plate tectonics to perplexed adults. He became popular in his class because he could help other children learn to read. He was nicknamed “Home Alone” because his blond hair and American accent reminded the other children of the actor Macaulay Culkin, who had starred in that movie a couple of years before.

  Soon we settled into the easy lives of a white South African family. Our house was comfortable and food was cheap. The boys swam in the pool and made friends, and we went to dinner parties. People invited us over to their cookouts, and the men drank beer around the grill and chatted while the owner waved away the smoke.

  From this bubble of privilege, it was harder to learn what was happening in other parts of South Africa, even parts that were physically nearby. Our maid, Tembisa, came and went and mostly resisted my efforts to engage her in conversation about her life. One of the few questions she asked me was whether South African blacks who traveled to the United States were forced to live in black townships during their visits. I tried to explain that although there was segregation in America, in which people of color lived together in poor neighborhoods, it was also true that a visiting black man could stay in a hotel in the center of the city if he had the money. She didn’t quite believe me. I eventually learned that her father had died in one of the government-created potato famines and that Tembisa was struggling to support three children.

  Our gardener, Nelson, a
ppeared once or twice a week but then stopped appearing completely. We got word that he had fallen ill with tuberculosis, but he was out of our reach in one of the remote and largely invisible townships that ringed the city. When I made an effort to try to find him, I was cautioned by our physicians against doing so, because tuberculosis in South Africa was highly contagious and often fatal.

  To add to the illusion of comfort and to the surrealism, the weather constantly reminded us of California. The sky was almost always blue, and the sun sparkled on the bay. Dana set up a place to do her research on the main campus of the University of Cape Town, and I drove into the city to an old prison that had been renovated to become the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business. The route passed a small game reserve near the base of Table Mountain in the center of the city, so I often found myself on a smooth highway zipping past the South African antelopes known as kudu grazing in the blond grass while I listened to the Beach Boys.

  In many ways, the Graduate School of Business of the University of Cape Town also seemed familiar, having been modeled on modern business schools around the world. It had all the accoutrements of respectability: well-organized MBA and executive programs, semicircular classrooms with printed name cards, carefully drafted case studies as part of the curriculum. The place was spanking new, and it also exuded potential.

  Yet as an outsider, I immediately sensed peculiar and disturbing undercurrents. I couldn’t help wondering what kinds of grim things had happened in those cells now turned into whitewashed offices with jaunty modern furniture. I found it distasteful that the school joked about its legacy. On the walls one found framed lithographs of the construction of the building by prison labor, early maps of Cape Town with “Breakwater Jail” clearly marked, and even a “wanted poster” for a black man named John Brown. The poster was so popular that the school had put it on a T-shirt that was sold in the gift shop, a move that struck me as tasteless at best, racist at worst.

  Even though the business school saw itself as one of the leading institutions in the “new South Africa,” and even though most of my colleagues thought of themselves as far more liberal than almost anyone in the country, there was one glaring problem: there were virtually no black students. When I asked, I was told that in the MBA program of over one hundred there was one African. The curriculum at the time showed no evidence that the country was undergoing significant political change or that there was an immense population of black Africans and “Coloureds” (members of a distinctive mixed-race community who spoke Afrikaans rather than English) who would soon be released into an economy in dire need of advanced management training.

  Even though the country was in the midst of rapid change, I encountered highly racist attitudes almost everywhere I went. Traveling on a boat across Table Bay, a friendly teacher from a technical university asked me where I was from. When he learned that I was from the United States, he immediately launched into the standard white South African line about how good it was I had come to see the country, because the problems were so much more complex than the international media suggested. Within five minutes he had delivered an unusually compact version of a speech I heard many times. There would never be peace, he said, because South Africa is made up of too many different nations, cultures, and “people groups” (a tip-off to his conservative religious views); blacks were uneducated and couldn’t think for themselves, so democracy was an impossibility; if there were elections, blacks would vote on the basis of who could intimidate them the most; and Coloureds were terrified of blacks. I tried to slow him down with a few polite rebuttals—“Perhaps, but don’t you think that …”—but he was undeterred. He seemed so eager to have the approval of an outsider that he didn’t seem to hear that I was not giving it.

  For a few minutes he offered his own pet solution: that South Africa should be divided into three nearly autonomous areas which would cooperate only on foreign policy and defense. “What would be the racial composition of these three areas?” I asked. He looked at me blankly, as though it were the first time he had ever considered the idea. Then he launched into a bigoted description of the Zulus in Natal.

  Many new friends insisted that the question, of course, wasn’t about race; it was about maintaining excellence. When I asked whether there might be a significant component of bias in the determination of standards—and even more in the testing to see whether those standards had been achieved—people looked at me with confusion and distress. Indeed, as I traveled through the privileged parts of South African society, particularly in business and the universities, I met scores of well-intentioned, intelligent, generous people who seemed to have little understanding of their own country. They read the paper and traveled abroad and wanted Nelson Mandela to succeed. But walking through these circles, I often felt that I had entered a beautiful restaurant where everyone was laughing and clinking glasses without being aware that the whole establishment rested on the rim of a rumbling, smoking volcano.

  I did not spend all of my time in white South Africa. I also went to places where black and Coloured people lived, in many cases only a few miles away and yet a world apart. Stretching out across a long sandy plain, Cape Town had two kinds of slums. The first was the township, a slightly older and more established community, with tiny cinderblock houses, a few stores and gas stations, and the occasional church. Garbage blew aimlessly through the streets while people did their best to collect the necessities of life and walk to the bus stations that would take them to their jobs in the white sections of town. Up in Johannesburg, the white authorities had set aside a portion to the south which they named the “South West Township,” whose name was shortened into a kind of acronym: Soweto. By the time I visited South Africa, Soweto had grown to more than a million people. The comparable townships in Cape Town were Nyanga and Langa.

  The second kind of slum was the squatter camp. In these areas hundreds of thousands of people, many seeking work and housing but denied both, set up makeshift shelters in whatever form they could find: cardboard, plastic garbage bags, old crates, strips of burlap, and sheets of corrugated tin. Families jammed themselves into spaces about ten feet square, side by side, stretching mile after mile after mile. In Cape Town, one of the squatter camps, known as Crossroads, contained a million people and sprawled across the Cape Flats around the airport. The terrain looked as though a huge bomb had exploded, throwing up dirt, rocks, and concrete in every direction, and then people had moved in and built hovels on top of the rubble. In the middle of these oceans of humanity, the police and military had set up intimidating forts of concrete and lacerating barbed wire and watchtowers armed by soldiers with high-powered assault rifles. Parked behind the walls were rows of Casspirs, greenish-yellow armored personnel carriers that carried soldiers out among the black community and served as the main tactical weapon of the government during the suppression of township violence. Most of the young boys killed during the uprising in 1985 and 1986 had been shot like rabbits by soldiers inside the protective steel womb of the Casspirs.

  In many ways it was easy to be moved or outraged at what I saw in South Africa, but I was self-aware enough to realize that I was seeing things that also existed, with less intensity, all over the United States. I was making the effort to explore the contradictions of a foreign country without ever having made the same attempt in my own. There are many places in America that are just as invisible to most Americans as the squatter towns are to South Africans.

  Still, while I was there, I wanted to see things with my own eyes, and that desire took me all over the country. I took a special tour of a South African gold mine which plunged me two and a half kilometers below the surface into a dark and sweltering world where I was invited to try my hand at the hydraulic drills, march through miles of subterranean tunnels, watch the building-sized machinery crush and filter the rocks into powder, and witness the final pouring of molten gold into ingots. Thousands of men labored around me in tunnels stretching for miles in every directio
n, and yet even when I was down in their midst, I could get only the tiniest glimpse of the harsh conditions that humanity imposed on them in search of the ultimate symbol of human greed. Later the Chamber of Mines treated all the foreign visitors to a fancy lunch, to which they invited some of the white mine supervisors. The supervisors were delighted to be out of the mine for an afternoon, and after they had each downed three or four beers, they happily shared their wisdom with me, particularly with regard to the differing characters of the thousands of African men still working miles below us as we ate.

  “The Shangaans, the Zulus from Mozambique, they’re the best,” said one man, grabbing me by the shoulder to get my attention and waving a big finger in my face to make his point. “The Xhosas, they are big, strong, and stupid. The Zulus are hard workers, but you have to watch your back. The Tswanas and the Sothos, they’re shit. They are all political, all ANC—they always want something, and they cause trouble.” Then he laughed congenially and slapped me on the back, as though I, as a white person, certainly knew what he meant.

  Given the rage and fear that gripped people of all races in every corner of the country, I wondered how anyone could rise above this cauldron of misery and hate in order to create a genuinely new nation. While Africans yearned desperately for rapid progress, whites worried about everything they might lose, and the members of other ethnic groups—the Coloureds and Indians and other peoples of South Africa—felt that they were inevitably going to be caught in the crossfire. Yet through all of this, leaders like Nelson Mandela, only recently released from prison, and even his counterpart, F. W. de Klerk, the head of the apartheid National Party, had decided to guide their nation into a new future, to move forward with a measured, careful, and inspired commitment to creating a democracy. They were joined in this effort by thousands of people trying to contribute to peaceful change. I traveled the country seeking out the exceptional men and women who seemed able both to sense the terrible longings and fears around them and to patiently chart a new course.