Ah But Your Land Is Beautiful

by Alan Paton

  We naturally do not sign our names. But we sign ourselves

  The Preservation of White South Africa League

  It’s a big day at Ethembeni, a kind of field day for the younger members of the Liberal Party, combining picnic and politics. These young people have come from Pietermaritzburg and Durban to learn all about the ‘blackspots’, and Ethembeni is one of the most famous of them all. A blackspot is a piece of land surrounded by white farms, and its very existence is offensive to the Government, which has announced a tremendous plan to remove all black landowners in the blackspots to their own ‘traditional black areas’. It was the British colonies of the Cape and Natal which allowed black people to purchase land in the ‘traditional white areas’. There are about seventy or eighty blackspots in Natal alone, and they have been a continual and intolerable reminder of the days when Afrikaners suffered under alien British rule.

  That is Emmanuel Nene who is speaking, the small man with the big hat and the big smile and the big moustache. It is hard to know what he is smiling about, for he is at the crossroads of his life, having recently joined the Liberal Party, and having made powerful enemies who will break him if they can. Perhaps he is smiling because the party has opened new doors to him, into the hearts of young people of all kinds. No one listens to him more intently than the young Indian members, whose parents have been afraid of the Zulu people since the riots of 1949, and have imparted their fear to their children.

  – My father lived in Natal, but he worked in Johannesburg. He was a head clerk on the Crown Mines, and he was a very respected man. He and his friends worked in the towns, in Johannesburg and Benoni and Springs and such places, and some in your home towns of Durban and Pietermaritzburg. But they wanted a place of their own. They did not want to live under a chief but under their own council. They wanted a place where they could leave their wives and children in safety, a place to which they themselves could return whenever they were able. They called this place Ethembeni. That means, the place of hope. Do you know that no person has ever been killed at Ethembeni? No woman or girl has ever been raped. We are not angels, you must not think that. Sometimes we drink too much, sometimes we fight, sometimes we look — well, this is difficult for me to say — sometimes we look at people we should not look at, but we do not kill and rape.

  – Well, I will not tell you all the details. But my father and his friends had some good luck. They were able to buy a white farm called ‘Waterval’. There were forty-eight of them, and they put all their money together. The farm was cut up and each man got a title deed for his land. I cannot show you these title deeds. They are too precious, so we keep them in the bank. This happened in 1905, and since 1905 we have believed that no one in the world could take our land from us. Some of our men served in the first World War and some in the second. That was because we felt we must defend our land.

  – This place Ethembeni has been our paradise. Look at the grass, you will not find grass like that in any of the Reserves. Look at our cattle, you will not find cattle like that, you will not even find milk for your children. You see the mountains. You call them the Drakensberg, we call them Khahlamba. Two streams from the mountains flow through Ethembeni. The water is cold and clear, we can drink it, and the children can play in it. The police do not come here. They can catch you without your pass in Newcastle, but they do not come here. There are two schools, and one day we hope to have a high school of our own.

  – Now let me tell you what has happened to us. When my father and his friends bought this farm, they bought it lawfully. But in 1913 the white Parliament passed the Natives Land Act, which meant that no black man could ever again buy any land except in the Reserves, and that he could almost never do, because the land in the Reserves is owned in community by the chief and the tribe, and cannot be sold to any private person. However, the Land Act did not affect our title deeds. We thought we were safe. But we were safe only till 1936, when the white Parliament passed the Native Trust and Land Act, which gave the Government power to take away the title deeds from what they now called the blackspots. This place Ethembeni, where they do not murder or rape, became a blackspot, and a blackspot is a blot on the white countryside.

  – Now although the Government had this power it did not use it. But in 1948 the Nationalist Party came to power, with its policy of the complete separation of the races. Blackspots became offensive. It was the British who had allowed them to happen, but now the Afrikaners would put everything right. Our title deeds would be taken away, and we would be given plots of land, one-sixth of an acre, and on each plot there would be a hut, made of aluminium, so they tell me. There would be no cattle there, no milk for your children. You could not keep a cow, you could not even have a garden on such a piece of land.

  – We could not believe it. Do you know what we called the title deed? We called it the white man’s word, and now it was to be taken away. We did not understand it. We did not understand how a big man who lives in a big house in Pretoria can take away our small houses from us. We try to understand it but we cannot. Not one of us in Ethembeni would take away a house from a man.

  – I showed you the house where Mrs. Doris Majola lives. She is more than seventy years old. She has six acres where she keeps two cows and grows mealies and beans and pumpkins. She is not rich but she lives a comfortable life such as we like our old women to live. But the Minister with the big house in Pretoria says she is living in a blackspot, and she must go to the aluminium hut where she can have no cows nor milk nor garden. We do not understand how such a man can be so cruel. It’s not only white people, you understand. Sergeant Magwaza of the Security Police went to Mrs. Majola and offered her ten pounds for her two cows, and when she said she would not sell them he said it did not matter, because he would get them for nothing on the day they took her away. He also warned her against the Liberal Party, and especially against the local chairman Mr. Emmanuel Nene, but she laughed at him and asked why she would be afraid of a child that she had brought into the world with her own hands.

  Mr. Emmanuel Nene laughed at that, and opened his eyes wide in wonder that a policeman could warn Mrs. Majola against a man who from his birth had been to her like a child.

  – And now you see that fine house there. That is the home of the present speaker. It was built with bricks made by Mr. Reuben Majola, son of the late Mr. Joseph Majola who made the bricks for my father. Let me close my eyes a moment. Now I can see my father coming out of the door of his own house. He is wearing a suit and a tie, because he never came out of that door without a suit and tie. He was a very proper man, and very strict, oh yes. But his Christian name was Philemon, which means one who is affectionate, and he was always affectionate to us. Now let us go to my house, where my wife is waiting to give us tea.

  The landowners of the seventy or eighty blackspots in Natal have formed the Natal African Landowners Association, NALA for short. They have approached Mr. Emmanuel Nene, messenger of the court, to become their full-time organiser, but they cannot offer him as much money as he made when he was the messenger of the court. But after he had talked to his wife he took the job. He said it was an order, and it had to be obeyed. If you asked him where the order came from he would say it came from high up, very high up, and if you looked puzzled, he would say in a bashful kind of way that it came from the Big Judge. You must not think that all the members of the party talk like that. Emmanuel is an exception. When he told a party of visitors that the order came from the Big Judge, they did not laugh at him, not even the younger ones. The Security Police have been swift to act against NALA. They have visited every blackspot in Natal and warned landowners not to join it, because the communists are behind it. They say that the Government regards it as a subversive organisation, and it may be banned any minute. The Government may even ban some of the members, who, if they were confined to places like Ethembeni, would lose their jobs. Sergeant Magwaza has been to see Mrs. Majola, and has warned her against joining NALA, and has warned her that it
is even dangerous for her if Emmanuel Nene is seen visiting her house. When he was leaving her, she asked him to take a message for her to Emmanuel, and he, thinking that his warning had been successful, said he would be pleased to do so.

  – Tell him, she said, to come soon to my house and bring me a paper for joining.

  Magwaza, they say, left her house with a face as black as thunder, and they wonder what will happen to her, for it is dangerous to taunt the Security Police. Some say it is actually safer to plot for revolution. And Magwaza grew angrier still when after his warning only two of the landowners would not join NALA. One worked in the Magistrate’s Court in Newcastle, and the other for the Department of Bantu Affairs. Neither of them was ostracised by the community, for if they had joined they would have lost their jobs, and their tolerant neighbours did not wish that to happen to them. But Sergeant Magwaza had to feel the sharp edge of the white lieutenant’s tongue for his failure to halt the spread of communism at Ethembeni.

  Emmanuel Nene never tires of pointing out that the word NALA, the acronym of the Natal African Landowners Association, is also a word in Zulu, and means an abundance of food and a good harvest. It is his hope, and the hope of all the landowners, that the seed sown by NALA will also lead to a good harvest. He points out too that nala also means a beast with red spots and white spots, but to the Government it means only a blackspot, an intolerable thing in a white man’s country.

  It has come as a relief to the leaders of the Liberal Party that Chief Lutuli has given his blessing to NALA, many of whose members are also members of the party. The fact has to be faced that neither the Chief nor Dr. Monty Naicker welcomed the launching of the Liberal Party. Nor did the white Congress or the coloured Congress. Margaret Ballinger came all the way from Cape Town for the first meeting of the party in Durban, and she and Robert Mansfield were given a rough time by two of Dr. Naicker’s lieutenants, the lawyer J. N. Ismail and the doctor K. B. Ram. Mr. Ismail said that the party was drawing away strength from the congresses and weakening the forces of liberation. The party thought its nonracial ideals were very noble, but the congresses had cherished such ideals for many years.

  It is said that Dr. Monty Naicker was very displeased when the young students Prem Bodasingh and Lutchmee Perumal joined the Liberal Party instead of the Congress. Dr. Ram referred to them both by name at the Ballinger meeting, and said that they were traitors to the cause. They had been misled by sweet words of people like Mr. Robert Mansfield, who thought he was a hero because he had given up his teaching career. But many other people had sacrificed jobs and careers long before Mr. Mansfield and his party had been heard of.

  In fact it was a bitter evening, and it was a lesson to some members of the party that to sally forth with goodwill does not necessarily get you anywhere in politics.

  . . . I understand your concern about the Bantu woman Doris Majola. Your concern is naturally made greater by the fact that you have known her since childhood. But I’m afraid it would not help to speak to my Minister. He objects strongly to trying to influence his fellow Ministers, and he would rebuke me if I spoke to him. Why don’t you go directly to the Minister of Lands? You are well known for your generous gifts to the party over the last twenty years, and you would get a good hearing.

  Yet what could the Minister do? This place Ethembeni is to be deproclaimed, and all its present inhabitants are to be housed at Odakeni. All their goods will be transported free, and they will be paid compensation for their houses and their land, and even for crops that they will not be able to reap. It is true that they cannot take their cattle with them, and I understand that you feel deeply about this. But it would be quite unrealistic to expect the Government to find sufficient land to make this possible. It would also be impossible for the Minister to leave this woman at Ethembeni. For one thing she would be quite alone there. For another the houses are going to be demolished, and the place will again become the farm ‘Waterval’. She would then be living in the middle of a white farm. I am sure you realise that such a thing could not be contemplated.

  You say that this woman has spoken to you about the ‘white man’s honour’, and this also troubles you. But the white men who allowed black men to buy the farm ‘Waterval’ were not Afrikaners. They were the British, and they knew very well our strong views on racial separateness. They ignored our views because they had just taken our country from us. The officials who are supervising the resettlement should make it clear to the inhabitants that the Afrikaners never gave any word of honour in the matter.

  You must not distress yourself so much. The new South Africa cannot be built without suffering. You cannot dismantle a system which the Afrikaner finds totally alien, and build it anew, without hurting someone. Let me remind you of the words of Dr. de Villiers, who said that our critics did not understand that the manifold harshnesses, the patent injustices, were all the necessary results of a most rational, most passionate, most radical will to restructure the world according to a vision of justice, all with a view to lasting peace, progress, and prosperity. When you are in doubt, keep these words before you. You will note that Dr. de Villiers does not mince his words. What is going to happen to this woman Majola appears to be a patent injustice, but the result will be that her children, or shall we say her grandchildren, will live in a just society. She cannot really expect more than that.

  I am sorry to write to you again about Dr. Fischer. At times I am troubled about myself. My feelings of dislike have grown into something like hatred. That’s a hard thing for a Christian to put down on paper. I have to go into his office very often and I am sure that he must sense my hatred; or perhaps he does not, because he might think that my feelings for him were of no consequence. He is in that office because he is a Broederbonder, and I am not because I am not. If he laughs or smiles, it is to the Minister, not to me. I find his face grim and forbidding. You must pray for me, my dear aunt. I do not really like to be a vessel of hate.

  There is a possibility that the Government may be approached by members of the Kerk to prevent white householders from letting black people use their garages for holding services of worship on Sunday afternoons. I realise that this might result in one of the ‘manifold harshnesses’. But the singing is very loud, and so is the preaching, and after the services the people hang about the streets and laugh and talk loudly as Bantu people do. There is great trouble and heart-searching among members of our Kerk. Some are deeply distressed that black Christians have no place to worship in our white suburbs, and that white Christians can call the singing and preaching a public nuisance. Others maintain that if the doctrines of racial purity and separate coexistence are infringed in this respect, then the process of erosion has begun, and that it will continue until we reach a state of total integration in which all God-given identities are lost.

  Some members of the Kerk have launched a movement to make all white church buildings available for black services on Sunday afternoons. But others declare that the noise will be greater and the nuisance worse because the congregations will be bigger than in the garages. A special meeting was held in Pretorius Hall to discuss the whole matter, and one of the speakers was Dr. Fischer, who is held in tremendous regard in the circles of our Kerk. I went especially to hear him. He has a cold manner of speaking that I do not like. I have heard Dr. Malan and he always made me feel proud to be an Afrikaner. He stirred a kind of warmth inside me. Dr. Fischer devoted no time to consideration of the duty of Afrikaner Christians to black Christians, and especially black Christians who belonged to our black sister Kerk. He stressed law and order and the undesirability of public nuisances. He knew — and he made it clear that he was in a position to know — that some people went to these garage churches to show their defiance and that behind them were other people, the communists, who if they came to power would destroy all the churches in the land. He mentioned the many churches in the Bantu townships, and admitted that they were far away, but he as a child had ridden twelve miles in his parents’ hors
e-carriage to get to church in Ohrigstad, and twelve miles back again. But his great theme was the Divine blessing of racial identity and racial separateness, and this was something to be treasured at all cost. It was as much a gift to black people as it was to white, and white Christians should help black Christians to treasure it. Dr. Fischer’s command of Afrikaans is so magnificent, and his reputation for learning so great, that he left his audience overwhelmed.

  Indeed perhaps nothing more would have been said if a woman, who looked rather like you, my dearest aunt, had not stood up to tell us that she was one of those who had lent her garage for black services because black people were not allowed the use of the Kerk itself. What is happening to us Afrikaners, she asked, when the sound of the praise of our God has become an offence to us? What has happened to us when our black fellow Christians must worship in our garages because we will not let them worship in our churches? She had listened with great attention to Dr. Fischer, and she wanted to tell him that we denied the use of our church buildings to black people, not because of any desire to help them to cherish their racial identity, but because of the hardness and coldness of our hearts. Such speeches made her fear for the future of the Afrikaner. Then she sat down, leaving the audience silent and confused.

  I think I must stop now. I am also a bit subdued and confused. I think a great deal about those words, Let not your heart be troubled: you believe in God, believe also in me. But it is hard nevertheless. I do not have your simplicity, nor that of the woman who spoke to us. When I listen to Dr. Malan, I have no doubts at all, but he seldom speaks in public today. When I listen to Dr. Fischer, I too fear for our future. Surely we Afrikaners have not grown hard and cold of heart.