Frankie and Stankie (15 page)

At school, just before the 1948 general election, there are lots more jokes than usual to show how stupid Afrikaners are. Most of the jokes are about a stock character called van de Merwe who is nearly always in the police. In one of the jokes, Sergeant van de Merwe has won a trip to America to take part in a radio quiz show, but he loses the prize because he can't answer his first question in which he has to guess what item of clothing it could possibly be that is made out of canvas and has a rubber sole, plus eight eyelet holes and a lace and a tongue. Everyone at school can tell that the answer is a sneaker. But van der Merwe doesn't get it. And then, for his next question, he can't even answer what has
two
rubber soles,
sixteen
eyelet holes,
two
laces and
two
tongues. In South Africa a sneaker is called a tackie. Often it's Enid who's telling the jokes, because she's good at jokes. Enid likes to laugh a lot, but she never makes any sound. You can only tell that she's laughing because her eyes are watering and she wobbles.

Yet in spite of Sergeant van de Merwe, the Afrikaner Nationalists are not so stupid that they lose the general election. They win by a narrow margin and all the English are stunned. It's like waking up next morning to find you are walking through an alien landscape. The UP vote looks strong in the beginning because all the city votes come in first, but all through the night, while Lisa and Dinah are asleep, the votes start dribbling in from the rural areas where each constituency has three white men along with several hundred sheep and umpteen hectares of maize. So the Nats have
won, with a narrow margin, on a third fewer votes than the UP have got. This is a big surprise for the English, especially as the way both parties have touted for votes is by proving that they are more racist than the other party, and General Smuts has so recently proved his credentials in this respect by ordering the suppression of a peaceful black miners' strike that has left twelve dead, a thousand injured and all the leaders in jail.

Once the Nats have won the general election – and after they've finished riding round the streets in beat-up Chevs blowing continuously on their horns for three days and nights – they set about fixing the electoral system to ensure that they will stay in power for ever. Plus they begin to pass a series of acts that continue throughout the rest of Dinah's childhood. While most are no more than intense, more lunatic versions of the racist legislation that the British have already put in place, their horrible, drawing-board ruthlessness is enough to make a person reel, especially if that person has the bad luck to be black. Some of the acts mean exactly the opposite of what they sound like, so that the Abolition of Passes Act means that blacks must now carry new improved passes consisting of ninety pages and more, and be ready to produce them at any time, on demand. And the Bantu Education Act means that all the independent black schools have to shut down, including the very good mission schools. The state takes over the running of all black schools – and, as one of the new cabinet ministers remarks, ‘What is the use of teaching a Bantu child mathematics?'

The Extension of University Education Act means that the Bantu can't any longer go to ‘our' universities, because, instead they'll go to various tribally segregated colleges. Bantu is the new favourite word. It's favoured above native, not only because to the untutored ear it sounds more bongo-bongo, while to the educated it sounds more ethnographic, but also because white people are waking up to the idea that native doesn't have to mean a black person; it has implications of belonging to the land which they are anxious to claim for themselves. The Registration of Separate Amenities Act means that we do not need to provide much in the way of amenities for the Bantu, because we will provide these ‘according to their standard of civilisation' and ‘according to their need' – and, as we all know, the Bantu's needs are simple. Since this
act defines everything racially, down to who's allowed to sit at every park bench and bus stop, it does, at least, necessitate a welter of new signs – and, for a while, putting up all the signs is making work for those who are in the process of being dispossessed.

Then there's the Mixed Marriages Act that says you can't marry across colour, and the Immorality Act that says you can't have cross-colour sex. This act arms policemen with field-glasses and requires them to become Peeping Toms, as they climb trees, or shin up drain-pipes and washing poles to peek through bedroom windows and sniff at post-coital bedlinen.

‘It was noted that the pillow beside the accused's head was disturbed, your honour. Exhibit number one, it has been noted, is a black hair recovered from the pillow, your honour. The hair, it has been noted, is of the Bantu type, your honour.'

The only satisfaction to be got from this act is when a stiff-necked Dutch Reformed clergyman is caught doing sex with his housemaid. The Population Registration Act – with the assistance of the pencil test and the half-moon fingernail theory – is there to help decide upon your racial category. Children can be ripped away from white families because they look too black. There's a case that Dinah's heard of, because it's been in all the papers. It's about a girl called Sandra Laing who gets reclassified because the teachers at her junior school report her. At first her family fights like anything to stop the reclassification, but, when they can't, they change sides and refuse to have anything more to do with her. Even after she's a grown-up and married with two little children of her own, they keep on refusing to see her – though her brothers, who never get sent away, look just the same as she does.

While both Dinah's parents think the government is raving mad, it's her dad who takes the matter more to heart. So the most direct effect of the Nationalist election victory upon Lisa and Dinah is that they wake up every morning to the sound of their dad shouting back at Foreign Minister Eric Louw on the early morning radio. Eric Louw, wartime Nazi enthusiast and our new liaison person at the UN, is doing his regular broadcast. It's his brief to enlighten the UN as to the beneficial nature of apartheid, especially for the black man, and to explain how we, in South Africa, are single-handedly carrying the torch for Western civilisation. Eric Louw's big friend at the UN is Eamon de Valera who, thanks to the Boer War, still
thinks of the Afrikaner Nationalists, not as our newest and most ghoulish racist oppressors, but as fellow republican victims of British Imperialism. Eric and Eamon sort of wear the same hat – and not only metaphorically – because it's from the Boer leader, General de Wet, that Michael Collins and the Irish rebels got their photogenic hats: those fetching leather hats with the poppers on one side. The IRA call these de Wet hats and they wear them in a spirit of brotherhood. Meanwhile, Eric and Eamon are bonded. Eric and Eamon are friends.

After their dad has woken the household ranting back at Eric Louw on the radio, he gets up and goes stamping through the house in sandals, venting his rage on all the Venetian blinds, which he wrenches up with such force that their mum's family of ebony elephants regularly bounces off the living-room pelmet and bangs him on the head. The pelmet is one of several which are of his own making and they are the only item of woodwork that Dinah has ever seen him undertake. The pelmets are like three-sided wooden window boxes made of plywood that get screwed upside-down over the curtain rail to obscure the rufflette tape and the hooks. They are so much de rigueur at the time that even Dinah's dad, who is prodigiously non-DIY, is required to succumb to necessity and take up his tool kit in the cause of their construction.

While its main business is to make the lives of blacks even more of a waking nightmare than it was before the election, the new government is at the same time dealing with smaller swathes of English-speaking whites. It starts by pitching out numbers of high-profile top honchos in the armed services, the police and the civil service, especially those who might possibly have dossiers on the pro-Nazi activities undertaken during the Second World War by certain members of the present cabinet. It also puts the screws on any Afrikaner public servants that it suspects of having the wrong leanings. It sheds any English-speaking civil servants whose Afrikaans won't quite pass muster, in order that right-thinking Afrikaners can be moved into their jobs. Very soon the civil service and the armed forces are effectively the exclusive preserve of the
Volk
.

One of the government's main undertakings is to swipe the jobs off blacks and give them to poor white Afrikaners. This is what the Job Reservation Act is for, because it redefines whole categories of
job as being for white people only. When Dinah and her mum go shopping in Stuttaford's, Dinah always likes the lift man whose name is Ephraim. He wears a smart khaki uniform with an epauletted drill-cloth shirt and matching trousers with very ironed creases and turn-ups. Ephraim has to move a shiny brass lever in a groove across a big brass disc to make the lift go up and down and to open and close the doors. All the shop assistants who get into the lift always start talking to Ephraim right away, because he's such a good listener.

One of the shop women will get in and say, ‘You better make sure this lift doesn't break down today, Ephraim, because my feet is killing me this morning, honest-to-God. I'm telling you that, so help me.'

Then Ephraim will say, ‘
Hau
, madam, too much the foot is hurting today?'

‘You can say that again,' the shop lady says. ‘I went dancing last night, you know, Ephraim, and as true's God's my witness, my shoes was killing me all night long. Now I swear to God I've got bunions like I don't know what. Like nobody's business and that's for sure, I'm telling you.'

‘
Hau
, madam,' Ephraim says again, after several sympathetic clicks. ‘Too much the foot is hurting. Too much.'

Then, when that shop assistant gets out, another one will get in and she'll start right away as well.

‘Well, I hope you aren't going to take so long to come when it's five o'clock, Ephraim. Because you might as well know that I'll have to be out of here like a bat out of hell tonight, as true's God's my witness,' she says.

‘
Hau
, madam, too much busy tonight?' Ephraim will say.

‘You not far wrong there, Ephraim, I swear to God,' the shop lady will say. ‘Because I've
only
got my Ma and my fiancé's Ma and my Gran and my Auntie Hettie coming over – well, she's not
really
my auntie, but I call her my auntie – and anyway I've still got all my cooking to do and my greens to prepare and everything. And God only knows what there's going to be for dessert, so help me, plus I don't exactly want to look like I've been pulled through a bush backwards when they come, now do I, Ephraim?'

‘
Hau
, madam,' Ephraim says. ‘Too much busy tonight. Too much.'

‘Well, I reckon it's lucky for you people that you just eat
mieliepap
and that's it, hey, Ephraim? I swear to God I'd eat it myself, so help me.'

All the shop ladies love talking to Ephraim, except for once when Dinah hears one of them say to another one, ‘It really jives on my G-string the way that boy talks back all the time like that, you know? So help me, they not so cheeky where I come from on the farm. I'm not used to it.'

Then one day when Dinah and her mum get into the lift, Ephraim isn't there and a pinched-looking white girl with so-what body language is working Ephraim's brass lever. She's chewing gum while she's gabbling off her newly rote-learned lift patter and she's sniffing loudly in the pauses.

hardware-kitchenware-linenware-crockery
Go-wing-UP

lingerie-hoserie-ladies'fashions-tearoom-powder-room-
   accessories
Go-wing-UP

Dinah never sees Ephraim again, but when blacks disappear like that it's called going back to the farm. It means that the person has been sent back to the native reserve which is where the golf-ball oranges grow.

As an experiment in social engineering, it's amazing to see how successfully apartheid is working. Week by week, year by year, the white poor are getting richer and more skilled; the blacks are getting more invisible. Sanlam, the ever-expanding Afrikaner insurance company, has now taken over the building in the city square that housed the Maypole Tearoom and, at some point in the future, as repression creates defiance and its suppression creates an underground, the Special Branch ensconces itself there in brightly lit offices across the whole top floor. The offices are brightly lit because the Special Branch likes its enemies to see that their guys are keeping busy.

The university people on the Butcher Estate respond in different ways to the Nationalist election victory. There are those who shudder and leave at once, taking jobs in Toronto, Los Angeles,
Glasgow, Salisbury and New South Wales. Harry Stent goes, the Pecks go, the Frankels and their three children go, Dr Lieberman goes, but of all those who go it's Peter Bullen whose departure is the hardest to accept – though he's left the girls with all his hardback children's books, including his Cautionary Tales and his childhood A.A. Milne collection. And over the next few years, Lisa and Dinah fight a war of possession over these precious relics until the flyleaves are covered with their alternately written and scratched out names:

 

Lisa Sophia de Bondt
Dinah Louisa de Bondt

The handwriting gets gradually more and more mature and it goes on until there's no more space on which to write.

There are those among the Butcher residents who assert that the Nats can't possibly stay in power for more than one term. They say that we're in it for five years and that's it.
Finito
. The whole show will be over and all we need do is to fix our minds on damage limitation. These are the people who drain away later, because, come 1953, when Dinah and her sister are twelve and thirteen, the Nats romp home with a massively increased majority, not only because gerrymandering is paying handsome dividends, not only because most wavering Afrikaners have by now been brought into the fold. It's also because lots of the English business people have discovered that they like the government's new laws, which make it even easier for them to regulate and control their black workers.