The Africans

by David Lamb

  “If you take a million whites,” says Shimane Kumalo, a black social worker in Soweto, “and you subject them to the same process of uninterrupted poverty, the same poor schooling facilities, the same school dropout rate, the lack of occupational skills and the unemployment rate, you will certainly have a murder rate just as high.”

  The irony of all that is sad and wrong in South Africa is that the South African black is, on the whole, the best educated, best dressed, most prosperous, most literate black on the African continent. He has access to the best medical care—the 2,700-bed Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto is the largest in Africa—and to the steadiest employment. But such superlatives are both relative and irrelevant. The South African black does not want to be compared with other blacks in Africa. He compares himself, and his opportunities, to white South Africa, and on that score he comes up miserably short. He is not a citizen of his land. He is its hostage. In Soweto and other townships adjoining white cities, he is not allowed to buy property. He cannot enter Johannesburg without a pass and cannot stay in the city after nightfall without permission. He has no vote for or say in the all-white parliament. If he is over sixteen years of age, he must carry a pass book listing his tribe, his employer and his tax payments. If he wants to use a restroom in Johannesburg, he has a choice of 161 public toilets. All the others are reserved for whites.

  His is the only country in the world where racism is institutionalized—the government operates one television channel for whites, another for blacks—and every aspect of his life is dictated by South Africa’s 300-plus discriminatory laws. They determine whom he can love, kiss, marry and have sex with, where he can live, eat, travel and go to school, what he can do for his vocation and avocation. South Africa’s “Heartbreak Laws” maintain racial separateness at all significant levels of society. A 1949 act outlaws mixed marriages. “A marriage,” it says, “between a European and a non-European may not be solemnized and any such marriage solemnized in contravention of the provisions of the section shall be void and of no effect …” A 1953 act bars interracial sex. Persons violating the sex law are arrested, tried and usually sentenced to six to nine months in prison. The sentence is frequently suspended if the couple agrees “not to carry on.”

  Although the government in recent years has made cosmetic changes to reduce petty discrimination—some public parks and sport teams, for instance, are now integrated, and about 650 blacks attend white universities—the bottom line of South African society is that a man’s color establishes his identity. And the basis of that policy is fear, the whites’ fear that without apartheid the Afrikaner culture and economic superiority would wither and die like the green grass of summer. “If the European loses his color sense, he can not remain a white man,” former South African prime minister J. G. Strijdom once said. The Afrikaner believes that if the blacks gain, the whites lose. He views minor changes such as the integration of city parks as revolutionary. The black sees them as meaningless. Both groups have entirely different concepts of what constitutes change, and the blacks, at least the more militant ones, want nothing less than the same rights other Africans have won throughout the rest of the continent. They are not eager to destroy Africa’s only technologically advanced country, but eventually they will if that is what it takes to win their political rights.

  The ultimate authority in deciding to what caste a person belongs is the little-publicized Population Registration Board, a group of white social workers who meet privately and classify all South Africans according to race. The board is the final appeal for people who think they have been wrongly classified and for people who want to “pass” from colored to white or vice versa in order to legalize a relationship. (Whites and nonwhites cannot legally stay under the same roof overnight.) Deliberations take months, sometimes years, with the board paying careful attention to skin tint, facial features and hair texture. In one typical twelve-month period, 150 coloreds were reclassified as white; ten whites became colored, six Indians became Malay; two Malay became Indians; two coloreds became Chinese; ten Indians became coloreds; one Indian became white; one white became Malay; four blacks became Indians; three whites became Chinese.

  The Chinese are officially classified as a white subgroup. The Japanese, most of whom are visiting businessmen, are given the status of “honorary whites.” Absurd? Yes, if all this were part of an anti-utopian novel. But in real life it is a chilling part of the most complex system of human control in the world (the Soviet Union notwithstanding). When Mymoena Salie became the first black woman to win a multiracial beauty contest in South Africa several years ago, she found herself unable to accept the prize—a two-week seaside vacation—because the hotel did not admit blacks. An American tourist at the hotel that offered the prize was gazing out one day at the beach and the sea beyond. “Is that the Indian Ocean?” he asked the waiter who brought him a drink. “Oh no, sir,” the waiter replied. “That’s the European ocean. The Indians use the next beach over.”

  Cape Town is the home of South Africa’s oldest white settlement and a beautiful city it is, full of manicured gardens and sheltered bays, overlooking the Cape of Good Hope and the shipping routes for supertankers that make South Africa one of the continent’s most strategically important countries. “This cape is a most stately thing and the fairest cape we saw in the whole circumference of the earth,” Sir Francis Drake wrote after rounding the cape in 1580 on the Golden Hind.

  On a clear night, which most nights are in Cap Town, you can see the lights of Robben Island a few miles off the coast. It is a low, flat, scrub-covered islet where the U.S. ambassador, John Heard, used to hunt birds in the early 1970s. But Robben Island is no more a recreation facility than Alcatraz was, for that is where the government keeps the blacks who would be the leaders of a South Africa ruled by the majority. The currents are treacherous there and no one has ever escaped, even though the mainland is so tantalizingly close.

  The large picture windows of the seaside restaurants in Cape Town look directly out at the island, and one evening, over a dinner of fresh lobster and a bottle of local wine, the conversation turned, as almost every one eventually does in South Africa, to race. Sandy and I were with another couple we had met earlier in the day. Martha and George were both divorced and in their fifties. She worked as a secretary for a European embassy; he owned a small hotel.

  “See that blinking light out there?” George volunteered, as though the subject could not be ignored. “That’s Robben Island, where they’ve got the political prisoners. You’ve heard of Nelson Mandela? He’s out there. Walter Sisulu? Govan Mbeke? They’re there too. There are one hundred and sixteen of them.”

  “Only one hundred and sixteen?” said Martha. “If I had my way, there’d be two hundred and sixteen. I don’t like subversives, and it’s as simple as that. I’m conservative. I don’t apologize for it.”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s right myself,” George said. “I don’t think they should be locked up for not going along with the government. And I don’t think the government should tell a man where he can go. Like if I want to invite a black person into my house, I need a permit.”

  “That’s rubbish,” Martha said. “You don’t need any permit. I’ve been to lots of parties with blacks, whites, coloreds. I’ve got black and colored friends, and I never needed any permit.”

  “Have you ever had one of them in your house?”

  “Of course.”

  “When?”

  “I have, that’s all,” said Martha, an Afrikaner, and the conversation quickly shifted to how tasty the lobster was.

  The next morning as I was checking out of the hotel, I was paged for a telephone call. It was Martha. “You deserve an apology for the way George was talking,” she said. “I really don’t know him very well, and I didn’t want you to think that all South Africans feel that way. He wasn’t speaking for me, I can promise you.”

  Most impartial observers would refer to the prisoners on Robben Island as nationalists. The
South African government calls them subversives, Communists and terrorists—which, indeed, they may well be if they ever get their freedom.* To deal with these dissidents South Africa, like most police states, has a myriad of laws to legalize its mistreatment. A 1950 act outlaws the South African Communist Party and any other organization that furthers the aims of Communism. A 1962 act makes sabotage a capital crime and presumes the accused guilty unless he can prove his innocence. A 1967 act provides for indefinite detention in solitary confinement without access to a lawyer for suspected terrorists. The most bizarre tool the government uses to silence dissent is called “banning,” which in effect turns a person into a nonperson. The 150 or so banned people in South Africa are not allowed to leave the city where they live, to talk with more than two people (including relatives) at one time, to publish, teach or entertain visitors at home. The local press is not allowed to quote anything they say or anything they have ever said or written. For all practical purposes, they cease to exist.

  So when Martha called, I said she did not need to apologize and let the subject drop. Talking race with an Afrikaner is like discussing mathematics with a stone wall. Unlike other whites in Africa, the Afrikaner has no ties to Europe. He has no home other than Africa, no passport other than South Africa’s. He is the descendant of the stern, hard-working Dutch, French and German pioneers who came to Cape Town in the seventeenth century and who stayed on to confront first the British, then the black Africans and now the world. His perspective is introverted and fiercely nationalistic, his society rigid and so puritanical that bars and movie theaters are closed on Sunday. He speaks a unique Dutch-based language called Afrikaans, follows a fundamentalist form of Calvinism and has a sense of special mission created by his own history of suffering. But the very history that gives him strength is also the source of his isolation and imprisonment, the burial ground into which the seeds of his own self-destruction have been sown

  Afrikaner history dates back to April 1652, when, after nearly four months at sea, the Dutch ship Dommedaris brought the first whites—Captain Jan van Riebeeck and a crew of 125 men—to Cape Town, They came to establish a station for the Dutch East India Company where vessels on the route to India could stop for provisions and medical facilities, and they met no resistance from the indigenous Hottentots and Bushmen who then inhabited the cape. The company had not intended to set up anything more than a way station, but gradually, almost imperceptibly, a colony of settlement began to emerge. In 1657 the company released some of its servants as free burghers to cultivate land and raise cattle. That same year slaves from Angola and the East Indies were imported as laborers. Dutch settlers began to arrive, along with French Protestant Huguenots seeking religious freedom. Later came German immigrants. Interracial marriage was common—and legal—and the Cape colored became a new ethnic group. The way station grew and became a regular port of call for European vessels. Cape Town was no longer a mere outpost. It was the birthplace of a nation—and of a new, white tribe.

  Britain seized the cape in 1795 and soon missionaries, traders, administrators and settlers were arriving by the shipload. They considered the original white settlers inferior and obdurate and treated them with disdain. The Afrikaner was denied land rights and fined for such minor offenses as allowing his cattle to stray. He was excluded from jury duty because of his language and forced to accept English-speaking ministers for his churches. If his children spoke Afrikaans at school, they were punished by having to put a placard around their necks that read: “I am a donkey. I speak Afrikaans.”

  The British returned the cape to the Dutch in 1803, then took it back again in 1806 because of the need to protect their sea routes to India during the renewed Napoleonic Wars. The Dutch settlers, who called themselves Boers (farmers), felt threatened. And in 1835, rifle and Bible in hand, they began moving north in small groups to escape the British and to secure a land of their own. Over the next eight years more than 12,000 voortrekkers* rolled across the plains in ox wagons, headed on an uncharted course for the high veld of Natal and Transvaal provinces, firmly convinced that God had chosen them to implant a new nation in Africa. On their odyssey, which became known as the Great Trek, they carried with them much bitterness and a sense of purpose forged on the anvil of oppression.

  The trek was a perilous one, and in times of danger the Boers took up positions in the laager—a protective circle of wagons with locked wheels. In the bloodiest battle of the trek, 12,000 Zulu warriors attacked a laager in 1838 along the banks of the Ncome River. The 500 Boer defenders annihilated them, and keeping the vow they had made to God during the fight, built a church to commemorate the victory. The day of that victory, December 16, is celebrated today as a national holiday, the Day of the Covenant, and the Ncome in Natal province is now known as Blood River. (The Zulus, however, remained a formidable force in northern Natal until 1879, when the British destroyed them militarily and occupied Zululand.)

  In the early 1850s the Boers established two independent republics, one known as the South African Republic in the Transvaal, the other as the Orange Free State. They made alliances with the local chiefdoms, but the peace and isolation that they sought still eluded them. Britain was uneasy with this maverick white tribe and it annexed both the Transvaal and Natal. In 1886 one of the world’s richest gold deposits was found in the Witwatersrand (the “Ridge of White Waters”) region of the Transvaal, where Johannesburg is now located. English-speaking immigrants and British investment poured into South Africa. Again the Boers felt threatened. Only this time, instead of trekking north, they stood and fought. It was Africa’s first war of independence and the only one that pitted whites against whites.

  The two Anglo-Boer wars (1880–1881 and 1899–1902) were among the bloodiest Africa has ever witnessed, and they divided the British population much as the Vietnam war would divide the United States in the 1970s. Britain committed 500,000 troops to the Second War of Freedom, as the Afrikaners called it, against a force of 88,000 Boers. The campaign cost Britain 22,000 dead and 150,000 wounded. The Boers, using the same guerrilla tactics that black nationalists would rely on in liberation wars against colonial authorities nearly a century later, attacked on two fronts, into the northern Cape from the Orange Free State and into Natal from the Transvaal. Their commandos harried British supply lines and communications facilities, and for awhile the Boers held the British to a stand-off.

  But Lord Herbert Kitchener, the British commander in chief, responded with a scorched-earth policy, protecting railway installations and government facilities with barbed wire and destroying the farms of both the Afrikaners and the black Africans. The wives and children of Boer farmers were rounded up and put in concentration camps, where more than 20,000 died because of neglect and unsanitary conditions. As brutal as they were, Kitchener’s tactics paid off. In May 1902 the defeated Boers accepted the loss of their independence and signed the Peace of Vereeniging treaty. (Later, in 1910, the former Boer republics and the two British colonies, Natal and the Cape, were joined to form the Union of South Africa, a dominion of the British Empire. The union became a sovereign state within the empire in 1934. South Africa left the British Commonwealth in 1961 and became a republic.)

  The Boer wars helped fashion a new sense of Afrikaner nationalism. His language, his culture, his claim to the African land made him unique, and everyone, white or black, was seen as a potential enemy. In defeat he had become a second-class citizen in what he considered his own country. New Dutch immigrants had long since stopped coming to South Africa and, isolated and alone, he knew that Afrikanerdom could survive only as a unified entity if it were uncorrupted by outside influence. He took a refuge in his church and his secret societies such as the Broederbond (literally, association of brothers), and he waited for the political power which would enable him to build a nation, where everyone was of the same mind, the same color, the same faith.

  That opportunity came in 1948 when the Afrikaner-led National Party upset Jan Smut’s United P
arty and began the longest uninterrupted reign of any political party still in power in the Western world. Believing that integration would lead to the ultimate destruction of the whites, the Afrikaner government moved quickly to enact a web of racial laws and to strengthen its system of self-preservation known as apartheid. It is worth noting here that apartheid did not create racial discrimination; it only institutionalized it. Back in 1909, for instance, the British withdrew the rights of nonwhites to sit in the South African parliament. The next year coloreds staged a nonviolent protest demonstration in Cape Town led by Mohandas Gandhi.

  In Afrikaans, apartheid means “apartness” or “separateness,” although the word has become so stigmatized internationally that South Africans no longer use it officially, preferring instead euphemisms such as “plural democracy” or “separate development.” According to the doctrine, every race has a unique destiny and a unique cultural contribution to make; therefore the races must be kept separate to develop along their own lines. But however one rationalizes it, the real intent of the system is the retention of baaskap (white supremacy). Apartheid still means racial purity, the subjugation of the nonwhite majority for the benefit of the all-white minority. It is the instrument that officially transformed the oppressed into the oppressor.

  Although there are some black lawyers and doctors and millionaire businessmen in South Africa (and, unlike anywhere else in Africa, even a few poor whites), it goes without saying that the whiter a person’s skin, the better his fortunes. The government spends $677 a year to educate each white child, $277 for a colored, and $66 for a black. White miners earn $16,630 a year and get a house virtually rent-free; black miners average $2,546 and sleep in crowded dormitories. In the construction industry, a white makes twice the salary of an Asian, three times that of a colored, and five times that of a black. Ignoring the almost insurmountable barriers that these educational and monetary inequities create, the Afrikaner then dismisses the black as being incompetent, unmotivated and inarticulate. “It’s the K factor,” he will say with a shrug, meaning that blacks are inherently inferior. The K stands for “kaffir” (the Kaffirs being one of the South African aboriginals), a pejorative whose meaning and use is similar to the word “nigger.”