A Song in the Night (23 page)

Over the next few days we moved to Cape Town and settled into the house that would be ours for nearly six months. Our new home came with a station wagon, two dogs, a gardener named Nelson, and a maid named Tembisa. It was surrounded by a high wall and included a swimming pool just off the kitchen entrance. By the standard of South African whites, this was not particularly affluent, and I realized within days how seductive the whole environment could be.

My goal in South Africa was ambitious. After years of archival research and interviews in the United States, I had come to South Africa to complete the other side of the equation. It was one thing to write about apartheid as an idea, but what was it like for the people, black and white, who lived it? I was trying to assemble, as diligently and fairly as possible, a thorough explanation of how and why South Africa had both started and ended its modern system of racial domination. With this goal in mind, I made an ordered spreadsheet of the 120 places I wanted to visit and people I wanted to see in the 180 days I would be in the country. I jumped on this list immediately, making arrangements through phone calls, letters, and visits. E-mail didn’t exist in South Africa, and many people were too busy to make commitments over the phone, so
I found that the most effective way to get something done was simply to show up at an organization or a person’s front door.

To maintain our daily life, we enrolled our boys in the local Catholic school, where they wore uniforms and ran around with mostly white children in a neocolonial setting. John, who was three and a half, exuberantly made friends and seemed oblivious to issues of race. I began hearing about his friendship with a little girl in the class, and one day, when I picked him up, I asked him to point her out to me. He pointed to the only African girl in the room.

“There she is,” he said, smiling. “She’s the one in the purple dress!”

Samuel, five and a half, was blond and serious. One of his favorite pastimes was explaining plate tectonics to perplexed adults. He became popular in his class because he could help other children learn to read. He was nicknamed “Home Alone” because his blond hair and American accent reminded the other children of the actor Macaulay Culkin, who had starred in that movie a couple of years before.

Soon we settled into the easy lives of a white South African family. Our house was comfortable and food was cheap. The boys swam in the pool and made friends, and we went to dinner parties. People invited us over to their cookouts, and the men drank beer around the grill and chatted while the owner waved away the smoke.

From this bubble of privilege, it was harder to learn what was happening in other parts of South Africa, even parts that were physically nearby. Our maid, Tembisa, came and went and mostly resisted my efforts to engage her in conversation
about her life. One of the few questions she asked me was whether South African blacks who traveled to the United States were forced to live in black townships during their visits. I tried to explain that although there was segregation in America, in which people of color lived together in poor neighborhoods, it was also true that a visiting black man could stay in a hotel in the center of the city if he had the money. She didn’t quite believe me. I eventually learned that her father had died in one of the government-created potato famines and that Tembisa was struggling to support three children.

Our gardener, Nelson, appeared once or twice a week but then stopped appearing completely. We got word that he had fallen ill with tuberculosis, but he was out of our reach in one of the remote and largely invisible townships that ringed the city. When I made an effort to try to find him, I was cautioned by our physicians against doing so, because tuberculosis in South Africa was highly contagious and often fatal.

To add to the illusion of comfort and to the surrealism, the weather constantly reminded us of California. The sky was almost always blue, and the sun sparkled on the bay. Dana set up a place to do her research on the main campus of the University of Cape Town, and I drove into the city to an old prison that had been renovated to become the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business. The route passed a small game reserve near the base of Table Mountain in the center of the city, so I often found myself on a smooth highway zipping past the South African antelopes known as kudu grazing in the blond grass while I listened to the Beach Boys.

In many ways, the Graduate School of Business of the
University of Cape Town also seemed familiar, having been modeled on modern business schools around the world. It had all the accoutrements of respectability: well-organized MBA and executive programs, semicircular classrooms with printed name cards, carefully drafted case studies as part of the curriculum. The place was spanking new, and it also exuded potential.

Yet as an outsider, I immediately sensed peculiar and disturbing undercurrents. I couldn’t help wondering what kinds of grim things had happened in those cells now turned into whitewashed offices with jaunty modern furniture. I found it distasteful that the school joked about its legacy. On the walls one found framed lithographs of the construction of the building by prison labor, early maps of Cape Town with “Breakwater Jail” clearly marked, and even a “wanted poster” for a black man named John Brown. The poster was so popular that the school had put it on a T-shirt that was sold in the gift shop, a move that struck me as tasteless at best, racist at worst.

Even though the business school saw itself as one of the leading institutions in the “new South Africa,” and even though most of my colleagues thought of themselves as far more liberal than almost anyone in the country, there was one glaring problem: there were virtually no black students. When I asked, I was told that in the MBA program of over one hundred there was
one
African. The curriculum at the time showed no evidence that the country was undergoing significant political change or that there was an immense population of black Africans and “Coloureds” (members of a distinctive mixed-race community who spoke Afrikaans rather than
English) who would soon be released into an economy in dire need of advanced management training.

Even though the country was in the midst of rapid change, I encountered highly racist attitudes almost everywhere I went. Traveling on a boat across Table Bay, a friendly teacher from a technical university asked me where I was from. When he learned that I was from the United States, he immediately launched into the standard white South African line about how good it was I had come to see the country, because the problems were so much more complex than the international media suggested. Within five minutes he had delivered an unusually compact version of a speech I heard many times. There would never be peace, he said, because South Africa is made up of too many different nations, cultures, and “people groups” (a tip-off to his conservative religious views); blacks were uneducated and couldn’t think for themselves, so democracy was an impossibility; if there were elections, blacks would vote on the basis of who could intimidate them the most; and Coloureds were terrified of blacks. I tried to slow him down with a few polite rebuttals—“Perhaps, but don’t you think that …”—but he was undeterred. He seemed so eager to have the approval of an outsider that he didn’t seem to hear that I was not giving it.

For a few minutes he offered his own pet solution: that South Africa should be divided into three nearly autonomous areas which would cooperate only on foreign policy and defense. “What would be the racial composition of these three areas?” I asked. He looked at me blankly, as though it were the first time he had ever considered the idea. Then he launched into a bigoted description of the Zulus in Natal.

Many new friends insisted that the question,
of course
, wasn’t about race; it was about maintaining excellence. When I asked whether there might be a significant component of bias in the determination of standards—and even more in the testing to see whether those standards had been achieved—people looked at me with confusion and distress. Indeed, as I traveled through the privileged parts of South African society, particularly in business and the universities, I met scores of well-intentioned, intelligent, generous people who seemed to have little understanding of their own country. They read the paper and traveled abroad and wanted Nelson Mandela to succeed. But walking through these circles, I often felt that I had entered a beautiful restaurant where everyone was laughing and clinking glasses without being aware that the whole establishment rested on the rim of a rumbling, smoking volcano.

I did not spend all of my time in white South Africa. I also went to places where black and Coloured people lived, in many cases only a few miles away and yet a world apart. Stretching out across a long sandy plain, Cape Town had two kinds of slums. The first was the township, a slightly older and more established community, with tiny cinderblock houses, a few stores and gas stations, and the occasional church. Garbage blew aimlessly through the streets while people did their best to collect the necessities of life and walk to the bus stations that would take them to their jobs in the white sections of town. Up in Johannesburg, the white authorities had set aside a portion
to the south which they named the “South West Township,” whose name was shortened into a kind of acronym: Soweto. By the time I visited South Africa, Soweto had grown to more than a million people. The comparable townships in Cape Town were Nyanga and Langa.

The second kind of slum was the squatter camp. In these areas hundreds of thousands of people, many seeking work and housing but denied both, set up makeshift shelters in whatever form they could find: cardboard, plastic garbage bags, old crates, strips of burlap, and sheets of corrugated tin. Families jammed themselves into spaces about ten feet square, side by side, stretching mile after mile after mile. In Cape Town, one of the squatter camps, known as Crossroads, contained a million people and sprawled across the Cape Flats around the airport. The terrain looked as though a huge bomb had exploded, throwing up dirt, rocks, and concrete in every direction, and then people had moved in and built hovels on top of the rubble. In the middle of these oceans of humanity, the police and military had set up intimidating forts of concrete and lacerating barbed wire and watchtowers armed by soldiers with high-powered assault rifles. Parked behind the walls were rows of Casspirs, greenish-yellow armored personnel carriers that carried soldiers out among the black community and served as the main tactical weapon of the government during the suppression of township violence. Most of the young boys killed during the uprising in 1985 and 1986 had been shot like rabbits by soldiers inside the protective steel womb of the Casspirs.

In many ways it was easy to be moved or outraged at what I saw in South Africa, but I was self-aware enough to realize that I was seeing things that also existed, with less intensity, all over the United States. I was making the effort to explore the contradictions of a foreign country without ever having made the same attempt in my own. There are many places in America that are just as invisible to most Americans as the squatter towns are to South Africans.