Are We There Yet? (6 page)

When our tour was over, we took a lift to the surface. I stepped into sunshine that reduced my irises to pinpricks and a world that many of the men who once toiled here would have thought impossible. Groups of teenagers of all races and similar awkwardness roamed the park smoking and trying to look disinterested. Afrikaner staff addressed all customers as “Sir” and “Ma'am” and Buppies (Black Urban Professionals) strolled by with one hand in their partner's and the other SMS-ing a mate about that night's activities.

There was a good chance those plans would have centred on Melville, a suburb with a long history of bohemianism and a lusty sprinkling of welcoming venues. I headed to the area that evening with a cousin who still lives in Johannesburg and encountered a striking change since my previous fleeting visit four years earlier.

It was a Thursday evening and Melville was up for a big night. In cosy cocktail bars couples flushed with one-part inebriation and one-part infatuation swapped compliments over candlelight and margaritas. Crowds of caramel-coloured coquettes in Gucci and muscled men still young enough to have faith in their charisma spilled onto the pavement from crowded pubs. The
nts-nts-nts
of African drum and bass shared the air with the lemongrass and coriander wafting from the restaurants and sidewalk cafes. But the most striking aspect of all was that people were actually out. On previous visits to Johannesburg, crime had impacted so severely on the city's inhabitants that they had socialised primarily at piazza-style shopping malls where their person and vehicles were watched over by armed men. Here the streets had been noisily and joyfully reclaimed.

The topics of dinner conversation had also moved on. A few years earlier no gathering would have been complete without tales of an acquaintance who had been beaten, hacked or blasted to death for their car or wallet. On the one hand all this talk was undoubtedly a coping mechanism, but on the other it was like listening to the morbid fascination some elderly folk develop with the maladies affecting their contemporaries. Now these tales no longer surfaced with such bloody regularity. It seemed that a collective decision had been taken to accept the reality of the situation, do what could be done to minimise its impact and get on with life.

Not that this was a new attitude in these parts. The next day I was heading to where it had practically been patented: Soweto.

Chapter 3

Struggle Town

To understand Soweto you have to understand the system that created it. To understand this beast, you head to the Apartheid Museum. I was repeatedly advised that travelling to Soweto alone and white was tantamount to waking Mike Tyson by punching his testicles. So warned, I once again enlisted the aid of Oupa, who collected me in his immaculate sedan.

On the way we stopped at a set of traffic lights which functioned as a drive-through mall. At most major intersections in South African cities, pavement entrepreneurs have set up shop selling everything from neatly packaged garbage bags, cool drinks and hangers to mobile phone rechargers and hands-free sets. Previously the men and women who worked these streets would tap on your window with a pathetic expression, point to their stomachs to indicate hunger and clinch the deal by accessorising the image with a child in rags. And don't assume that they were all black.

“You'll like this,” said Oupa as he fished some change from his pocket and waved one of the nearby men over. The merchant exchanged the shrapnel for a pamphlet printed in red ink that stained his fingers. It was entitled “Jokes 4 Change” and contained a series of satirical poems, cartoons and topical quotes from comics. What a marvellous grassroots scheme this was. It put money in the pockets of the seller while making the buyers seem wittier and better read than they actually were.

The Apartheid Museum, on the other hand, was anything but a chuckle hutch.

Appropriately located in the no-man's-land between Soweto and Johannesburg, the museum has a penal austerity about it. It is made of white concrete blocks, black metal sidings and eight-metre-high walls of yellow rubble from the goldmines encased in mesh. These materials were chosen to contrast and are separated by the harshest of angles. It is bereft of softness.

The building manages to be both a practical museum space and a metaphor for a social system that divided by colour. At the entrance stand seven concrete columns, each engraved with a cornerstone of the constitution written after the 1994 transition to majority rule: democracy, equality, reconciliation, diversity, responsibility, respect, freedom.

In their shadow is a row of faded green wooden benches with the words “whites only” stencilled on them. They face a shallow pool of reflection above which a quote from Nelson Mandela is etched onto a granite slab. “To be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” It is the first surface on which black and white appear together.

After buying our tickets, Oupa put them behind his back and said, “Choose.” I tapped his left hand and he produced a card that read “nonwhite”. Not black, Indian or coloured.

“I'm ‘white',” he beamed as he flashed his card and ushered me towards the steel gate allocated to me by race.

The corridors diverged and Oupa disappeared with a wry “Have fun”. We were separated by floor-to-ceiling steel grates and he was obscured by enlarged identity documents that hung from the roof. Referred to by authorities as a reference book and known as a “dompass” (dumb pass) to blacks, every South African was issued with one of these ninety-six-page passport-style documents.

If you were white, this generally accumulated dust on a wardrobe shelf and was only hauled out at election time to prove you had the right to participate by virtue of your melanin.

If you were black, your very life could depend on it. Failure to produce this pass on demand was an offence punishable by imprisonment. Police who viewed you as “an idle or undesirable native” could cancel the pass at will, which meant you had to leave an urban area within seventy-two hours.

I clearly recall various pass dramas with our even more various maids – it's so difficult to find someone who'll clean, wash and cook for a pittance, retain a pleasant demeanour, refrain from pocketing the silverware and not drink herself into a stupor on the one day a week she has off. Having one of my parents' signatures on this document was literally a “get out of jail” card.

From the other side of the steel bars, Oupa remarked, “There were times when policemen barged into my house at three or four in the morning on the chance that I might have had visitors staying over whose passes may or may not have been in order. The pass system was one of the factors that made blacks support international sanctions against South Africa. There were some well-meaning but misguided whites who believed that blacks would be the only ones to feel the brunt, while the rich would remain unaffected. That may have been the case, but we were used to suffering and starvation, so we figured we might as well do it for a good cause.”

I scoured his tone and eyes for bitterness but could find none. Unwilling to accept his demeanour as genuine, I tried to push a button by asking if he still had his pass. “Of course,” he said with the smirk of a man who had seen through an obvious ploy. “I used it as ID when I voted for the first time.”

Although most visitors to the museum are familiar with the basic premise of apartheid, many, myself included, do not know how it was instituted, applied and enforced. This is where things took a turn for the didactic.

Aside from featuring a photograph and mandatory details such as a name and address, the dompass included a box marked “race”. The entry assigned to you under one of the primary pieces of apartheid legislation – the Population Registration Act of 1950 – would shape your life for much better or far worse.

If you were deemed to be on the dark side of the colour bar, you were legally denied access to museums, galleries, zoos, sporting facilities, pools, beaches and employment prospects beyond unskilled labour. The top of the career tree for blacks in apartheid South Africa was as a nurse, teacher or policeman and these only came about because the posts were located in areas where few whites were willing to work.

This act was also the cornerstone of a policy that mandated who you were allowed to have sex with or marry. Civic organisations were compelled to become racially exclusive to the point that the apartheid government instructed the National Ornithological Society to expel its only nonwhite member or cease to be. Needless to say, birds of a feather …

The devil was in the detail. One of the most notorious early classification procedures was the pencil test. If an HB was inserted into your hair and remained there, it signified frizzy strands, and therefore classification as black or coloured.

This legislation remained in place until well into the 1990s and since racial categorisation had such a bearing on your life prospects, it was frequently appealed. In 1985, for example, 702 coloureds became white; 19 whites became coloured; one Indian became white; 20 coloureds became black; 249 blacks became coloureds; 50 Indians became coloureds; and 11 coloureds became – of all things – Chinese. No blacks became whites. No whites became black.

Once the government had slotted the population into genetic categories, step two of apartheid involved dividing the nation between them with a piece of legislation called the Group Areas Act. Residential segregation had been part of South African life since the early nineteenth century but this principle was now extended and implemented with vicious efficiency. The idea was to split each town and city into regions where a single race would live and trade. This was accomplished by controlling the purchase of homes or rentals on racial lines.

In hundreds of suburbs this involved the violent dissolution of neighbourhoods where numerous races had lived in harmony for decades. One of the best known was Sofiatown, a jumping neck of the Joburg woods where black gangsters who modelled themselves on Capone's boys mingled with Jewish clarinet players, Indian artists and torch-song chanteuses whose racial backgrounds were exotically indistinct. The National Party government, which introduced these acts and ruled from 1948 to 1994, viewed areas like Sofiatown as “the deathbeds of the European race”.

If the one-two delivered by the Population Registration Act and Group Areas Act left the country's hopes of racial parity teetering like a punch-drunk fighter, a piece of legislation called the Bantu Authorities Act delivered the knockout strike, then got in a few cheap shots as its opponent fell to the canvas.

Designed to rid the African population of their last scraps of rights, it created a number of tribal reserves – or homelands – where these people could apparently enjoy the constitutional privileges so recently ripped from their grasp. The government spin likened this process to the decolonisation of European empires in tropical Africa. Although the South African economy flourished in the 1950s and 1960s, the nominally independent homelands were destitute. Nearly all consisted of up to nineteen fragments of land separated by white-owned farms and investing directly into these areas was a punishable offence under corporate law. With the often substandard land unable to support ever higher concentrations of people and stock, the inhabitants had no choice but to leave as migrant workers seeking employment in major industrial centres.

These three ideas – racial classification, dividing of urban areas according to skin colour and creating new territories that provided cheap labour without any social obligation – were the foundations of one of the most insidious attempts at social engineering the world has seen.

In my twelve years of history studies at whites-only government schools, the mechanics of the system that delivered my classmates and I such privileged lifestyles were only hinted at. And curiosity had its consequences. For example, when a schoolmate expressed an interest in writing a paper on influx control – the government term for ensuring black labourers didn't hang around white cities any longer than necessary – she was stripped of her prefectship and talk of expulsion filled the quadrangle.

The Apartheid Museum experience is designed to provoke alienation, discomfort and shame in people like me. It succeeded on all counts.

It tells two distinct tales and I'd heard neither growing up in South Africa. Not only does it detail the system of legislated racism, it also covers the resistance it engendered.

One such event took place on 26 June 1952 and was known as the Day of Defiance. Throughout the Witwatersrand, Cape and Natal, cheering crowds watched groups of protesters deliberately break unjust laws. Entrances marked “Europeans only” were brazenly strode through, curfews were ignored with cavalier disdain and lunch menus were demanded at counters reserved for whites only.

When the government picked up its collective jaw from the parliament floor at the gumption of these uppity “Ban-tus”, legislation was rushed through parliament ensuring dire retribution against the organisers of such campaigns. Key resistance personnel were arrested daily. By October 1952, nearly 6000 protesters had been jailed. During the same period ANC membership exploded from 7000 to over 100,000. For every person jailed, seventeen volunteered to take their place.

Speeches delivered by a young lawyer named Nelson Mandela, who had worked on the mines as a security guard, rebounded off the museum's concrete ceiling. As did the words of activist Steven Biko – Malcolm X to Mandela's Martin Luther King Jr – who died naked in the back of a police van after interrogation.

These utterances jarred with those of the gimlet-eyed Afrikaans politicians who beamed from a jumble of TV sets in a barbed-wire maze and whose speeches were peppered with the smug phrase “separate but equal”.

On one monitor flicked grainy footage of ANC leaders being lead to court for treason. On another a girl no older than fifteen lay face down on the street, her heart still rhythmically pumping blood from the hole in her head made by a rubber bullet. These images were interspersed with documentary evidence of the effect of apartheid on individuals: a letter from a pining mine worker to his wife far away; a photograph of a black maid carrying a silver-service tea set to the pool while her white madam reclined on a chaise longue; court orders declaring activists of all races banned, which meant forced deportation.

The museum is not a place of subtlety and its message is bluntly reinforced. Above the exhibits, spotlights, wailing sirens and surveillance equipment stand guard. Cages on all sides prevent visitors from wandering off the designated path. There are no seats.

Taking up the bulk of a wall ten metres wide and eight high is a billboard detailing every act that was passed over fifty years to reinforce apartheid. The degree to which the policy impacted on the minutiae of daily life was brought home by something called the Bantu Beer Act. The state decreed when, how and where you could sink a frosty.

Oupa's path and mine finally converged in the next room, which was occupied by a yellow armoured carrier known as a Caspir. Riddled with bullet holes, it was like being inside a giant colander. Equipped with bullet-proof slits for gun barrels and an interior made entirely of grey steel cladding, these bright yellow vehicles were the first to respond to township violence and frequently left a smattering of corpses in their wake.

They took heroic pride of place in news bulletins where commentary praised their occupants for protecting us from what was known as the “swart gevaar” – the black danger. These brave boys faced mobs so we didn't have to.

Inside the Caspir was a monitor spooling surveillance footage of township demonstrations taken from these very vehicles. Unlike the plodding “What do we want? When do we want it?” affairs common in many other nations, these South African protests featured heaving crowds, often brandishing tribal shields and spears, which fell into a rhythmic shuffle somewhere between a dance and a canter. Shot from the side of a road at the base of a small rise, the footage showed a tumultuous black cascade cresting the hill and tumbling towards the police line. The odd white face is also apparent and draws the camera's zoom lens. There is a curious energy about the gathering – part predatory, part celebratory. Although smiles are abundant and a curious sense of liberation is palpable, I was left in no doubt that it was only a matter of time before the sky was raining Molotov cocktails and hailing rocks.