Life in South Africa: An Outsider Goes Inside

The author is a recent graduate now living and working in South Africa.

PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA--In the evenings, Pretoria looks a great deal like Washington, D.C. A few tall buildings in the center of the city house South Africa's civil service, Pretoria's major industry. The Voortrekker Monument an enormous memorial to the Afrikaaners who walked from the coast into South Africa's heartland in the 1830s, stands over Pretoria just as the Washington monument watches over Washington. Around the city, white residential areas look just like Washington's suburbs: neat houses with well-tended gardens look out over beautifully laid-out streets lined with graceful jacaranda trees.

And, like the suburbs of Washington, Pretoria is completely white at night. A few black teenagers, dressed in ragged shorts and jaunty caps, sell the afternoon newspapers to passersby--only the editions designated for whites, of course. A few black housemaids live in the servants' quarters that must by law be attached to every house in white zones; a few waiters work inside Pretoria until just before the last buses go out to the black townships. But, for the most part, nighttime Pretoria seems to have accomplished the basic aim of apartheid: complete separation of the races. At night, when workers are no longer needed, the blacks disappear, leaving the wealth of the city proper to their white employers.

From a restaurant at the top of one of Pretoria's new sky-scrapers you can see a group of lights, blinking outside the city limits. This is the black residential area--where the blacks return at night, to tiny crowded houses and coal stoves. If they are lucky enough to have the right kind of pass, they can live with their families; if they are even luckier, their house might have electricity. If they are unlucky, they live in single-sex hostels, or illegally in squatter compounds, in fear of the dawn pass raids that could send them back to rot on the bantustans, where there are few jobs and little fertile land.

A tall new apartment building stands on a ridge just outside Pretoria, overlooking the main route the blacks take into the city early each morning, before work starts. I am told it houses policemen and their families. South African whites are on the alert these days. If any trouble starts, the police will be able to move right in, with tear gas machines designed especially for South African crowds, and, if that fails to disperse "them," automatic weapons.

***

As a white American, I find it easy to slip into oblivion in South Africa. Much of the countryside, at least around Pretoria, looks much more like the U.S. than Africa. The cities look like smaller versions of our own, and small towns in the Transvaal look just like the Midwest, complete with Kentucky Fried Chicken and Burger King. It looks like home, the part of South Africa where the white population lives--so peaceful, so comfortable and modern. I find it easy to relax, to forget what this standard of living is built on.

Until I walk into a restroom and am greeted by a sign: Ladies--Whites Only.

Most of these signs--what the South Africans call "petty apartheid"--have been removed in the last few years, as white South Africa tries hard to give its drooping image a facelift. But enough remains to remind you that apartheid exists, that it is not a figment of some fevered radical's exaggeration, that beneath Pretoria's familiar exterior there is something very wrong indeed.

Apartheid doesn't seem real until you are forced to recognize it; the 18 million blacks who live in South Africa barely intrude on the white outsider's consciousness, until you hear a liberal white South African talk about the boy who tends the garden and realize the boy is 50 years old. Or a friendly Afrikaaner tells you, "We built this country," adding proudly, "If it wasn't for us, there would be nothing here but huts"--refusing to recognize that it was cheap black labor that did the building. Or a liberal white says, "Really, you can't imagine how many of them have told me they wouldn't want to be ruled by their own people." And you realize the only black she has ever talked to at length is her maid.

Or you read about Thornhill, a resettlement camp for blacks who are in the process of being removed from the townships outside white cities to the Ciskei bantustand. Last month, a typhoid epidemic of about 130 cases broke out among Thornhill's 10,000-odd residents. The camp's medical facilities were expanded to meet the emergency: Thornhill now boasts a full-time staff nurse and a six-bed hospital. From the country that brought you Dr. Barnhard and his heart transplants...

It is the disparity between the way the whites and blacks live that makes South Africa so jarring, I suppose. The difference between the comfortable suburbs and the shanty towns exists in many countries; there is a big difference between Chevy Chase and Washington's inner city, too. But elsewhere it is not enforced by law, and elsewhere, the affluent society would have some awareness of how the other three-quarters live. Whites need a special permit to visit black townships, for instance, just as blacks need passes to go into white areas. And elsewhere, the system is not so all-inclusive; in South Africa, even black education is designed to produce servants.

(I remember, as I crane my neck to see the black township areas from the highway as we drive past, that some Harvard official--was it Larry Stevens?--was reported to have said last year that parts of Soweto were not so dreadful, that they had paved roads and telephones. I can't figure out where they took him. Most of Soweto has no electricity, much less paved roads; in fact, the township's administrative board is currently conducting a survey to determine whether Soweto residents want electricity. Hard to believe a survey is really necessary...)

***

The blindness--the refusal by so many South African whites to realize that black South Africans have needs and desires just as the whites do--is perhaps the most disturbing element of the gap between the races. The complete failure to understand that the black woman who works as the family maid might like running water in the servants' quarters, or that the blacks' real problem in South Africa is not that they are always having babies.

I find myself wondering what happens to the minds of white South Africans, how they can build up such powerful blinders. What happened to the white doctor in the Transkei--nominally an independent black state within South Africa--who last month refused to let a black baby into the whites-only hospital? It didn't matter that there were no beds free in the black hospital, he said; the baby could share with another black. Or the white farmer who severely beat his black maid to get her to confess to stealing the madam's purse; it wasn't shocking because he beat her, only because she died of the injuries. It must be some kind of unconscious puberty rite that white South Africans go through: I cannot believe that at six, they could be so inhumane.

Even liberal whites like Helen Suzman, who received an honorary degree from Harvard in 1976, ask only for a limited franchise for blacks, based on criteria like property or education--in a country where blacks cannot own the land their houses stand on, and where the black schools are hardly worth attending. (I wonder whether Harvard would ever grant an honorary degree to Nelson Mandela, the great black South African who spoke out for freedom. It seems unlikely; Mandela could not come to receive the degree in person, anyway, because--like so many South Africans, black and white, who too strongly have denounced apartheid--he has been in prison for 15 years.) Apartheid's supporters are not good at taking criticism; if it seems likely to become serious, the critic is silenced by banning, jailing, exile or death. The ones who remain operative, like Suzman, stay within narrowly-defined limits.

Whites who can't afford to leave are doing their best to get some money out for the time when they might have to go. Those who are staying are buying guns and crossing their fingers.

White South Africans are fond of drawing parallels between their country and the U.S. The Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock only a few years before the first Dutch settlers came to the Cape of Good Hope; the westward movement in the U.S. came at the same time as the Afrikaaners moved north in covered wagons on their Voortrek. Both countries had gold rushes in the nineteenth century; both countries had to fight the British for their independence. The only reason America doesn't have South Africa's problems today, they'll tell you, is that the early Americans were better at killing off the indigenous peoples.

South Africans also look hard for more modern parallels. Stories about racism in the States appear fairly frequently in the newspapers, as if someone is saying to the U.S., "let those without sin cast the first stone." (Stories about disinvestment by institutions like the American Friends Service Committee are buried in the back pages of the white papers, though they are more prominently displayed in black papers like Percy Qoboza's Post.) But the U.S. is clearly some kind of symbol to South Africans, though it is a confused one at best. To blacks, it seems to be a place of freedom, to some extent at least, the place where a black civil rights movement could make headway without fullscale war. To whites, America is an unreliable ally, which must be drawn in on their side in the fight against the liberation movement. More and more, South African government officials describe apartheid-ruled South Africa as Africa's last hold-out against Marxism, in an effort to woo American support for their position. Always they ask, both blacks and whites, what the U.S. will do when it comes down to the wire, whether it will intervene, and on which side. Cyrus Vance is in Pretoria this weekend discussing Namibia, so the question is particularly relevant. Unfortunately, I can't answer; neither could he, probably. If South Africa is liberated, the whole western economic structure is likely to change drastically, and it isn't clear to anyone the U.S. won't end up joining South Africa's whites in the laager.

***

I hadn't realized how much the Afrikaaner Nationalist Party controls white lives in South Africa. The Dutch Reform Church has a firm grip on the Afrikaans populations, at least here in the heart of the Transvaal. And it has no qualms about legislating morality: there seems to be a need to prove that whites are morally superior, to justify their legal and economic control of the country. No drinking or soccer on Sundays; no pornography (though pictures of bikini-clad women are splashed everywhere in this incredibly macho society); and, of course, no interracial sex. Nothing that would let the whites' moral fiber decline--that is, nothing that would prove too conclusively that whites and blacks are equally human. They are, of course, and the result is a kind of perverse delight in breaking the rules, rather like suburban Americans during the '50s.

But if white South Africans complain about the apartheid laws, they can live with them--which is more than the blacks can do. In some areas, black infant mortality reaches 50 per cent.

And, of course, there are the laws that enforce the blindness, that keep whites from realizing how the blacks live. Besides the laws that prevent social interaction, and laws that prevent serious dissent from the government's apartheid policies, there are laws to keep South Africans from thinking. The censor's list is long and strict, and the newspapers have to tread carefully when they cover current events. Often the censors are fairly arbitrary, as in one famous case, when they banned Black Beauty (because of its title). While in Pretoria, I realize I have a banned novel in my suitcase, Alex LaGuma's Fog at the Season's End. For a moment, I feel as if the whole South African security force is about to knock on the door; reassured, I realize I am only liable to a $650 fine, just for reading a novel. It rather makes me long for the First Amendment--and rather makes me wish more white South Africans could read works by the black South Africans who have portrayed so clearly the world in which they live, the world most white South Africans barely see.

***

In Middelburg, a small town outside Pretoria, two small boys run up to wash the windows of the car, hoping to get a few cents for their efforts. They wipe the window furiously with a cloth only slightly more ragged than their clothes; this five cents means a lot to them. Times are bad now for black South Africans. Unemployment has reached an all-time high, though no one has exact figures; and there is no minimum wage for most of the jobs blacks can do. 80 per cent of black South Africans fall below the poverty datum line, the absolute minumum standard of living. A third, smaller boy, his elbows poking through his man's-size shirt, runs up to join the other picanins (as my liberal white friend who is driving calls the boys, to distinguish them from the boys who make up the adult male population, I suppose). The first two fight the new boy off, threatening to hit him with an empty bottle over five cents. I am told not to intervene: they are blacks first, not children fighting, and I am an alien white. When we return to the car, there are only two boys polishing the window, desperately.

All the dust was on the inside, anyway.

***

It isn't easy to deal with South Africa, as an American. The similarities are clear, but so is the oppression. Even in the most racist areas of the States, there are still legal ways to fight discrimination; in South Africa, there are no such means. Apartheid is changing under outside pressure, it is true: the farmer who killed his maid with a sjambok might get a few years in jail now, instead of merely a fine. But it is not changing fast enough, and both blacks and whites are getting ready for the confrontation. As Zimbabwe and Namibia are going, so will South Africa. Those whites who can do so are leaving; doctors and computer programmers, who have easily saleable skills, are said to be leaving in droves, while whites who can't afford to leave yet are doing their best to get some money out (illegally), for the time when they might have to go. Those who are staying are buying guns and crossing their fingers. I am sympathetic: if the Native Americans took over Boston, where would we go?

But my sympathy is limited. For surely, there were points along the road to Grand Apartheid where compromise could have been reached, and confrontation would not have been so inevitable. Now, it seems too late, and the Afrikaaner Nationalists still seem unwilling to give up a single piece of privilege. If they were flexible, they wouldn't have chosen the most hawkish candidate to replace Vorster. Time is running out, and everyone in South Africa knows it; but the Nats seems to have closed ranks and turned right, marching toward full scale war.

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