Living Their Lives in Cages: A South African Notebook

24 October 2008

In transit, Joburg to London. Short conversation with an Afrikaner on the plane: from Pretoria. Not a nice town any more, he says. Crime. Wonders whether he and his wife should leave for a country town. The alternative is to leave the country altogether, as his daughters have done. ‘At the back of all our minds’, he says, ‘is the question, When? And where? And what will I do when I get there?’ At one point a second man joins in—people are still finding their seats—and says that he has scattered children, whom he visits. ‘You’re on a perpetual holiday’, says he, ‘going from one to another. The funny thing is’, he comments when a third father joins the conversation, ‘they all choose different destinations.’

7 November 2008

Joburg again. The locals squaring up to Barack Obama. At a dinner for university benefactors, a distinguished graduate now living in America publicly expresses his delight about the outcome of the elections. Though living there, he declares himself to be ‘of Africa’. An assumption not gladly shared by the rest of the room: applauding his remark, I found myself clapping with only a quarter of the audience. No instinct for self-preservation, just fear. Some exuberance about the victory, but on the whole, a world-weariness. A cartoon shows the banner headline: US GETS A BLACK PRESIDENT. ‘Copy cats!’ says one passer-by to another. People recall that when Obama came to South Africa two yeas ago, Thabo Mbeki declined to see him. Now, pointing to the career of the able cabinet minister Trevor Manuel, they say Obama wouldn’t have had a hope of being elected leader in South Africa. Here he would be regarded as being Coloured [mixed-race]. Not a sufficient power base.

8 November

Yesterday, two immediate crime stories. First came Phena, Peter’s Zulu maid, distraught because the previous day her mobile phone had been stolen. She was in her house at the time. The police: you were lucky not to have been shot. Then, at the university lunch, a woman in the official party referred to a delay that morning: the gardener at the hotel where they were staying had been stabbed. Again, only a mobile phone and a little money. Traffic sign at an intersection, where people wait to enter a main road: ‘Smash and grab’, it warns. Hence the common South African goodbye, justified by car-jacking and the very high accident rate: ‘Go well!’

10 November

A journalist remarked the other day of Australians: ‘We find them appalling in their lordly self-esteem. They find us faintly contemptible in our lack of confidence and naff manners.’ There may be something in this. Australians are not used to lives fraught with negotiating difficulty on a daily basis, so their self-confidence is, to a large degree, unblunted. A resentment of this may partly be why the convict taint lives on here—has, in fact, got stronger—for it’s partly a way of getting their own back. As with New Zealand, there’s an implicit dialogue going on, but in both cases Australians are largely unaware of its existence. Returnees to South Africa say the country is surprisingly conformist (even socialist). ‘The problem with very stable societies like Australia’, wrote one, ‘is they don’t have reckless courage.’

11 November

Driving into Cape Town on Saturday, we passed the Athlone Cooling Towers. I mentioned the amakwethu, the young Xhosa initiates who, having just been circumcised, go to the bush to live in isolation for two months. They can live near each other, and often, in the shadow of this power station, one would see a few tents. And sure enough, on Saturday there was a solitary white one.

Stephen told a story. Apparently the Western Cape ANC congress had been postponed, and with it the election of office-bearers. There were other smart tricks being played, too, leading Pretoria to send someone down in the hope of sorting it out. He was from the ANC Youth League—although thirty-eight and a father of two. When he arrived, he was asked whether he had (as a Xhosa man) been circumcised. No. Before he knew it, he was whisked away to a ritual circumciser, who brandished a knife. In the ensuing struggle, the old man lost … his mobile phone! But he performed the operation, whereupon the man from Pretoria had to go into isolation for the stipulated period—during which the congress was held, one of his abductors elected chairman.

Such sharp practice is leaving a sour taste in the mouth of many ANC supporters. People are saying that they could lose control of the province in the elections early next year. The writer Bryan Rostron suggests that if there was the War of Jenkins’ Ear, then the cut foreskin might yet provide a similar rallying call. * Central Cape Town. Appalled by St George’s Street: the mall has introduced trees and fancy brickwork, and the trade-off has been a striking makeover or replacement of many of the buildings. The coffee houses have gone: so too has the attractive glimpse down Burg Street of the romantic clock tower on the Groote Kerk. Not that it’s gone, exactly, but the tower is walled in by a monstrous development. I stop to buy a paper. An old man is muttering ‘blankes’, ‘nie-blankes’, ‘kleurling’—the typology of the old regime. A man answers him in English. They’re talking about Obama. ‘He’s a Coloured man. Like us. And he’s President. The next one will be a Muslim. The Bible says so.’

I move on to Long Street. There’s been a generational shift. Not so much counter-cultural now as a haunt of backpackers. Hostels here and there. The big Edwardian pub with zany cast-iron now one of them, lit up in yellow and azure blue. Hip. A few Africans sitting in the bars. A shop selling African music. But still good secondhand bookshops: I remember Anthony Clarke years ago selling nineteenth-century books he’d somehow landed from the English Rooms on Madeira. David McLennan still there (Select Books). Mentioned that surveys have shown that black kids do not recognise the name P.W. Botha, and not even Verwoerd [apartheid era prime ministers]. A consequence of no textbooks, I suppose.

Well, said David, my father was talking of emigrating in 1948. But somehow it all keeps rolling on. Crime, though—there’s a problem. Indeed. Here I am at Stephen’s, behind a locked door; if I leave this well-appointed cottage, then I must lock the door, pull a kind of trellis door and lock that, go through a side gate (barbed wire ranged over the arch), and so to the front door of the main house. This I must double lock every time I go in and out. They live their lives in cages.

About 60 per cent of burglaries, the Hout Bay police say, occur in houses where people are careless about locking windows and doors. So Stephen is very strict about it. In fact he could scarcely be more pro-African, since he worked vigorously on the Mandela Park school committee and, with Lucy, has virtually adopted two African daughters. He simply segregates the tension, and deals with it.

12 November

Stephen took me to the nearby township of Darling to see Pieter-Dirk Uys, who puts on a Sunday midday show there over lunch. Very struck by how, as Evita Bezuidenhout (an Afrikaner Dame Edna), he plays his audience. The foreigners are singled out early in the piece by asking who doesn’t speak Afrikaans, thus creating a useful us-and-them dichotomy which gives him a margin of safety. Afrikaans is often used to provide a kind of sub-text, its piquant bluntness just right for confidentiality. The comedy is often punctured by serious statements about South Africa: Why didn’t people say to the Nats, Enough! At least as a country we’ve been given a second chance, she says. Later, in conversation (and returned to himself), Uys’s optimism extends to saying that—as a result of recent rumbles—the ANC stranglehold on power would be slackened. They will lose their two-thirds majority—perhaps even the election! (Unlikely.) How different Uys is from Barry Humphries. The committed activist, for one thing: there’s been his very own voter education program in 1999, the continuing AIDS awareness program, and the visits to Parliament (in drag). The result is that, unlike Humphries—whose backward-lookingness amounts to wisteria—Uys is forward-looking, responding to new situations, even if he feels to some degree constrained in depicting black characters. He’s now as quick and as polished as Humphries, and although there’s the same touch of megalomania about Evita, it definitely stops with her. Uys interviewed is a modest and unassuming man. None of Humphries’ extraordinary sense of entitlement, transmuted into a desire to punish those who are thought to have slighted him—however long ago. Quite the contrary: Uys cannot be activist enough. Beyond his campaigns, there’s a trust to teach the young of Darling art and music, and to assist the community with their practical needs. Humphries, of course, is a cultivated gentleman of conservative temperament. And, unlike South Africa, there is no particular need for him in England or Australia to be any kind of activist (Camberwell station notwithstanding). But this does not mean, as he would like people to imagine, that he’s non-political. How quickly he came to ridicule Rudd for being called Kevin—and for looking like a dentist. In twelve years, there was not a single word uttered against Little Johnny—even though he could easily have described him as Sandy Stone on speed.

13 November Africans often seem to find whites, for all their economic and social power, driven, incomplete and vulnerable: like a blind giant that needs guidance. A woman academic, a foreigner, was in a car that broke down on a road passing through a black township. A couple of members of a gang came up to her. ‘You should not be here,’ they said. ‘We are bad people.’ And then there’s Vuyiswa, Stephen’s two-days-a-week maid. She was given a hard time by a previous employer, who fed her in a tin pannikin and wouldn’t allow her to use the same loo. But times have changed: madam lost her partner, her status, and is now reduced to living in the servant’s quarters at the back of someone’s house. Vuyiswa’s first response was: perhaps I could lend her some money?

14 November Elected President of the ANC in December 2007, and the cause of Mbeki being ‘recalled’ (dumped) as president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma appears unstoppable. He has been on trial for rape, and though acquitted, is still to face corruption charges. Meanwhile he blunders about the country shooting from the hip. One day, he say,s criminal suspects should be denied bail as well as their right to silence when interrogated; or that the abolition of the death penalty should be reconsidered. (Against the constitution.) On another he says that children who drop out of school should be sent to ‘faraway colleges’ and ‘forcibly educated’; so too should pregnant teenagers. (A bit rich, coming from a man reputed to have a scattering of twenty children.) Then he throws in some rhetoric from the Struggle: the question of having the tainted Springbok badge on the rugby jumpers of the national team should be ‘revisited’. So there is a Zuma juggernaut. It’s Palin politics, South African style. He appeals to ANC activists, as she did to hard-core Republicans; but, if anything, his appeal to the black average Joe in South Africa is even greater than hers to blue-collar America. Columnists write of the adoration at rallies; the hothead president of the ANC Youth League, Julius Malema, says he would ‘kill for Zuma’.

An aspect of all this is that the ANC has been dominated since the sixties by the Xhosas of the Eastern Cape: Zuma is a Zulu, the largest and traditionally the most powerful of the African groups in this country. So there is a real risk of more urgent ethnic dynamics operating in South African politics, both between Africans themselves and—perhaps cultivated partly by a need to off-set that—between blacks and whites.

15 November

The Obama effect now spreading, deeper. Reports of a surge in African youth registering to vote in next year’s election. And a group of Cape Town musicians have turned a traditional song about the Alabama into ‘Daar kom, Barack Obama!’ PK says that he had become involved with a debating society in an Afrikaans school in Kuils River. One day he went along to a special occasion. The speaker was an Afrikaner returned from America. ‘Let’s face it’, he said, ‘you’ve got a government which will give you most of the things you want. You have every opportunity. Stop moaning and make the most of it. And donate money and help your school.’ Out came the cheque books. This fits a pattern among remaining Afrikaners, of facing the future and implicitly taking part in a wholesale abandonment of the past. David McLennan says he now finds it difficult to sell Boer War material. PK, when at Kimberley, went to inspect some battle sites. ‘Once there were many, many school buses pulling up,’ said the Coloured man in charge. ‘Nobody comes here now.’ Returned to a bookshop yesterday. A man, rather sallow and bearded, moved about jerkily and disjointedly; he seemed to know what he was doing, and was giving the owner no cause for alarm. It turned out that he was his assistant. The fellow had a degree from Stellenbosch, but had been called up and sent to Angola. There he was involved in military action, and came back brain-damaged. He can now do only one thing at a time. If the bookseller wants him to do two things, then he places an elastic band on his finger, to remind him. But at three tasks, he falls to pieces. He would not, says the owner, be considered a victim of apartheid. But he is.

19 November

I once lived for eighteen months in Grahamstown, a university town tucked away in the Eastern Cape. Once it was the country’s second largest town, but—as with Hobart—decline was sharp, and so the place became an educational centre. Today it has a population of about 110,000 (nobody knows for sure), added to constantly by new arrivals from the countryside. It is always worth revisiting, not least because it is small enough to see the sinews of South Africa working.

Grahamstown’s commercial spine is the set-square formed by Bathurst Street and then Church Square, completed by South Africa’s only substantial Victorian cathedral, while beyond that lies shady High Street. Ten years ago the street contained one of the town’s burnt-out shells; it is more prosperous now, but its lack of signage agreeably confirms its air of belonging to another time. In fact, apart from a few key businesses, the whites have largely withdrawn. For just as in Johannesburg there has been the retreat to Sandton, or in Cape Town to the sumptuous Waterfront precinct, so well-heeled Grahamstown now goes to Pepper Grove. It’s a dinky shopping mall, where white South Africans can play out their fantasy—more or less—of living uncomplicated suburban lives. Meanwhile black businesses have steadily advanced: ten years ago up Bathurst Street almost to the turn, but now round the corner to level with the cathedral in Church Square. The furthest reach of High Street, protected by a belt of administrative buildings, is immediately below the university, and now contains the town’s restaurants and some B&Bs. Almost bohemian, until you look at the signage: ‘Kindly do not affix posters to the walls’, or a landlord seeking ‘students of sober habits’. Window-box whites—in all, less than 10 per cent of the country’s total population—have never quite chucked Edwardianism.

But the town is being jolted into contemporary South Africa. Crime is increasing, in Grahamstown East (the African area) as in Grahamstown West. A handful of interracial murders in recent years; an alarming rise in the number of break-ins while people are at home. Up go the electric fences. Much petty theft, essentially opportunistic. But then unemployment is still grotesquely high, at around 40 per cent.

Yet real progress, too. Three thousand new dwellings in the African township, virtually eliminating the old corrugated-iron ones, sometimes caked with mud. An increase in car ownership. So some satisfaction with the post-1994 situation. This is indirectly indicated by the biggest cohort of responses to a survey question about a possible name change for the town: these people were happy enough with the present one.

One in eight people here are HIV positive, often evident in TB. Dry-coughing is one of the cries of Grahamstown. The hospital provides drugs to 1400 sufferers, which has slowed down deaths considerably. But, says AIDS expert Kevin Kelly, the epidemic has had—in addition to its devastating effect—an insidious one. It has come to dominate NGO activities: here no less than sixty-seven organisations list dealing with AIDS as one of their aims. A massive diversion of resources. But the real tragedy, Kelly adds, was Mbeki’s denialism, and the refusal to supply sufferers (including pregnant women) with appropriate drugs. This has led directly to probably 350,000 deaths. A judgement delivered calmly, in a sparsely furnished Victorian room. The figure hovers.

22 November

Race and crime. The tension beneath the surface Peter spoke of erupts here. Malicious damage to property, and vandalism of remote churches—once unthinkable. More directly, there is not only less concern on the part of intruders as to whether people will be home or not, but elements of cruelty in assault and murder: the jugs of boiling water poured over an old lady; the couple who were bashed and stabbed repeatedly, for an hour or so, and then left for dead. One survived.

But there is also the appalling treatment of farm-hands by diehard Afrikaners. The papers have been much taken up with the trial of an eighteen year-old Afrikaner who, having shot an African who he claimed had attacked him (he was then thirteen), went on a shooting spree in January. On hearing of a friend’s house being burgled here in Johannesburg, he donned an old South African Defence Force uniform and proceeded to take out four Africans, wounding others. Apparently despondent about the future of the country, he pleaded guilty. Four concurrent life sentences; reports of a grim smile.

South Africans still live in a segmented world. New houses for blacks go up adjacent to old black areas; new housing for whites similarly follows the runnels of race. In Cape Town, blocks of flats repeatedly evoke the Mediterranean in their names. Commercial radio services this neverland. There may be a striking shift into Afrikaans—and back—but the commercials are little different from those in Australia, and presume a privileged lifestyle. Radio Algoa has a timespot for brief messages from people living and working abroad. One contributed from Nigeria, saying that people in South Africa didn’t know how lucky they are. ‘They ought to go to Africa,’ he said.

They ought indeed. Stephen has a story about one of his African girls. Thandi had chosen, for the Western Cape eisteddfod, to sing a Xhosa song. She sang it not only in Xhosa, but also in English and Zulu. ‘Thank you, Thandi’, said the adjudicator, ‘for singing such a charming foreign song.’

23 November

A walk in the park yesterday, with Bruce. A distant man first befriends the dog, then us. Roger, a neighbour, who works for an NGO in the country: land reform. A disaster, he says. First, the wrong model was chosen. Here, as in Zimbabwe and Kenya, it was conceived within the parameters of an existing market economy. Effectively that meant a continuation of colonial patterns—and a lost twenty years. To work, land reform needs to be conceived not simply as redistribution, but as a project involving skills and the local economy: a matter of people and place, as well as land. Only when local farmers have been involved, and have taught land management techniques, has there been black empowerment.

A more serious problem is that, given the accelerated movement to the cities, land reform is now more pressingly an urban challenge rather than a rural one. The landless are also urban, and there are 17 million of them.

A flashpoint will be reached in the next few years: 2013 is the centenary of the infamous Land Act, which resulted in whites owning 87 per cent of the land in South Africa. (It’s now 82 per cent.)

But before that, there’s the 2010 World Cup. Wherever this has been held in recent years, there has been a spotlight on the homeless. TV cameras have sought them out, and—since many Latino players originated in the favelas of South American cities, there has emerged a Homeless World Cup. Already, says Roger, there are people organising massive protests to coincide with FIFA. One morning you might wake up to find 150 people occupying this park.

27 November

The ANC split turns nastier. More defections to the new party, COPE (Congress of the People—a name the ANC is challenging in the courts). And an extraordinary story in yesterday’s paper about another ANC Youth League firebrand, appearing on Al-Jazeera saying that all those who want to tear down the organisation ‘behave like cockroaches, and they must be destroyed’. It’s a real pointer to what has happened to the ANC. Mandela at the treason trial movingly said that he was prepared to die for his cause. These guys say they are prepared to kill for Zuma, as though it were the same thing.

Coming to maturity at the end of the Struggle, they are post-1994 politicians. The wave of the future.

The emergence of COPE has diverted some into thinking that South Africa is at last seeing the birth of a party-political system. But there is no real prospect of the opposition parties gaining power, nationally, even in coalition. More alarmingly, the end of liberation-movement politics is likely to see the end of the current inclusiveness—which extends to whites. Polls show that Zuma’s popularity with the masses has, if anything, increased. Sooner or later he will draw a single line through his contradictory statements, and rise on that vector—with a populist program. His links with the left are strong.

As ANC president, Zuma is already positioned to take over. And—should he choose—he has just to link up the dots to impose an authoritarian regime. It has happened before—particularly in Africa. True, the ANC is likely to lose its two-thirds majority in Parliament, which would prevent its being used as a rubber stamp. But already there has been the removal of premiers, and purges in the trade unions. Parliament has just clipped the wings of the SABC, and can now remove any board member at any time by a simple majority: a list of names for a new board is already being circulated. The Scorpions, the effective anti-corruption police, are being abolished: too close to home. (South Africa, says one academic, is a ‘kleptocracy’.) Meanwhile other police are being strengthened: water cannons are being imported from Israel, and 74,000 officers have undergone training courses. The immediate purpose is to contain soccer hooligans among the 450,000 visitors expected for the 2010 World Cup, and to counter terrorism. A police commissioner stated that there’s also ‘a broader target’—that of reducing crime in the country. But ten water cannons, capable of taking videos of offenders?

28 November

Under a dome adjacent to the plush hotel where we are installed for the conference, a mock Italian village. A couple of streets of it, complete with stone pigeons, an inert dog sitting on a balcony, clothes draped over another one, an adjacent car marked POLIZIA, shops, taverns and restaurants to the right, left and centre, more shops, and (in addition to a casino) an expanse of poker machines. This is lined by trees frozen in perpetual autumn. Most of the place under a false sky, stilled at early evening.

I make my way to the local Exclusive Books—here much less so. A cool black guy is holding an audience enthralled with his tales of mountaineering—considerable, since beyond the Himalayas, he’s also climbed Aconcagua. Mixed crowd throughout the precinct—whites very much predominant, but also members of the black middle class, the women invariably smartly dressed and sporting sophisticated hairstyles. I come to a large piazza. Suddenly the bell tower, just noticed, sounds the chimes for eight o’clock. Quite convincing, until one sees that it’s covered with fairy lights and giant stars. Kitschmas. Monte Casino, as the complex is called, is an elaboration of an appalling pun. Everything here from gaming tables to fake peeling stucco: an enormous palace of consumerism. Disconcertingly seductive.

The conference at Monash South Africa—on Australia and South Africa, Connections and Comparisons—is a notable success. Two Aboriginal participants: their Stolen Generation stories here acquire extra poignancy, and are more graphic than anything the South Africans present can come up with. But then the situations are now very different.

A South African Indian, and former High Commissioner to Canberra, refers to the self-inflicted Cattle Killing among the Xhosa in 1857—a kind of cargo cult. ‘If you read that story in today’s South Africa’, he says, ‘what do you think it says about blacks? That they’re dumb! The story should not be told!’ By comparison, Aboriginal stories have only recently been able to be told. The conference draws out the similarity in past racial policies. I recall the old charge made here, that Australians would behave just as (white) South Africans did, if placed in the same situation. It soon becomes plain that, around a century ago, some of the most strident South Africans were Australians.

29 November

Snapshots from Soweto. Some trees in it now; no longer the barracks, the rows of matchbox houses. First stop is an informal settlement: squatters. Eric appears, a community worker and local guide, to point to the new outside toilets, and to mention that water is now relatively accessible. But no power. We are taken to a child care centre, situated in a shack. ‘Gun-free zone’, says the sign on the gate, with symbol and red bar. Possibly twenty infants, two year-olds, remarkably quiet at the arrival of the dozen white adults. But they hesitate to continue with their first meal of salted porridge.

Employment here is so low that it becomes counted, rather than its reverse, and is reckoned at around ten10 per cent. Yet Eric’s exuberance carries all before it. He speaks of poverty, and how they keep clean: the fractured, deliberate accent exudes an optimism, making all seem possible. The 1976 uprising is long past. We mustn’t look back, but look forward! A returning Afrikaner, struck by Eric’s ability to turn a phrase, jokes about his becoming president. But later, having emerged from the day-care centre, he is touched by the scale of the challenges, and by the warmth of feeling often close to the surface with Africans. Then there is Eric’s impossible cheerfulness—‘One day, all this will change!’—and the acute contradiction that for the white man, too, this is his land, and yet, since 1963, no longer his land. It is overwhelming. The visiting Afrikaner breaks into uncontrollable sobbing.

The awkwardness. Do you wave, or do you let them wave first? A hand movement from a bus is a bit regally irresponsible: goodwill plucked as you move on. Once when the bus stopped, I caught the eye of an old woman, her face a study in determination. I nodded, as one near-contemporary to another. It must have been the right thing to do, for she nodded back, then gave a wave to the whole bus. Benedictory.

At the informal settlement: intelligent interest and sympathy inevitably threatened by the cash nexus, as people buy souvenirs. We are told to bargain—not traditional in South Africa, but the best way of keeping a social element alive in an economic transaction. It empowers the seller. Bargaining in Turkey is always a game, a test of mettle. Otherwise the contrast in socio-economic status is too sharp, and the privileged departure of the visitor—friendly, only a moment ago—potentially embittering.

Salve Regina Church. We enter a vast space, unusually peaceful. Eighteen ten-year-olds ranged on stage, girls in blue, boys wearing yellow shirts, black trousers. Suddenly they produce recorders, then ‘My Bonnie Lies Under the Ocean’. The schoolmistress conducts with clapping movements. She stops, then repeatedly takes them through the same section.

We are shown around by a wry guide: humour as cauterised pain. Scully’s our Lady of Soweto, serene and black. Bullet holes pointed out. The corner of the altar table now missing, the jagged edge a witness to the force of the rifle butt brought down as people were told to disperse.

Upstairs, a photographic display of the Soweto riots. Inscriptions on nearby walls. A visitor, possibly European, moved to write: ‘Whatever lies behind us and whatever lies before us, nothing matters compared to what lies within us.’ Some local comments more pointed: ‘My brother, killed by the SA government agents, Pietermaritzburg, 1984.’ ‘SA unfinished revolution’, reads another, ‘God love black nigga’s only’. And, more sadly, ‘No matter what we do/ Racism will always remain.’

‘Bonnie’, chirpy and episodic, floats upwards. The counterpoint of optimism.