Honorary White (6 page)

The Principal told me that present building needs have forced some builders to let Blacks do skilled work, even at the risk of prosecution. Reflecting a booming economy, contractors are enjoying their busiest times and there is an acute shortage of skilled white labor. There are many Blacks on their payrolls fully capable of skilled work without supervision. To meet their pressing deadlines, the contractors put the Blacks on skilled jobs and keep legal representation readily available to deal with such prosecution and fines as are incurred. Legal fees and fines are prorated into each building estimate. The Principal hoped that, eventually, the job reservation laws would crumble under pressure from public need for housing and the industry's need to expand.

We now drove through the so-called elite section of the town. Most of the homes here were attractive bungalows surrounded by neatly trimmed lawns, with flowering shrubs and fruit trees. These were the homes of Soweto's tiny “black bourgeois” community, the local doctor, dentist, grocer, gas-station operator, etc., all of whom had struggled and saved to rise above the depressing sameness. Each of them had begun by buying the government-built four-room square structure and added rooms to it as they could. They had had to install at their own expense running water, plumbing facilities, electricity, and whatever other household devices they could afford. All this on a flimsy lease which could be rescinded at the Government's whim.

Ironically, my guide spoke of the bungalows and their owners proudly, as if those people had been specially “allowed” to achieve that much, her voice crisp and objective as if she were speaking of cold, inanimate things, not insecure human beings who were forced to live in fear that one fine day the dreams they'd earned would be snatched away from them. I thought of myself, my own pride in ownership of a home thousands of miles away, my security in the knowledge that I had the right to defend it against all comers, supported by the full weight of the law.

My guide now promised a big surprise and we drove to the Bantu Council Building. It was much more than a surprise, the sight of that modern red-brick building, graceful in its simple lines against a dramatic background of neatly trimmed lawns and darkening sky. A macadam driveway circled in front of the building before coming to rest at the base of a wide wooden stairway which led upward to carved wooden doors. A uniformed doorman led us inside and then hurried away to find the Secretary of the Council. My guide proudly showed me the large Council Chamber, paneled in wood and thickly carpeted, and the smaller offices of the President and Secretary of the Council.

We found the Secretary in his office in conversation with someone, so we waited for him in the Council Chamber. My guide told me that members of the Council are mainly drawn from the small business community of Soweto. The Council is supposed to oversee Soweto's health and educational and social welfare, and make recommendations to the white Johannesburg Council which has the final decision as to which, if any of them, are expedited.

When the Council Secretary finally joined us, he proceeded to give me a very careful review of the Council and its work. He seemed primarily concerned with impressing my guide whom he knew to be a Government official. Smiling broadly, he invited me to ask him questions.

“How much freedom can your Council exercise in the management of Soweto's affairs?” I asked.

“Well,” glancing nervously at my guide, “we have a pretty free hand. We're on the spot, we know what the township needs, and our recommendations are generally honored.” Nodding his head affirmatively all the while.

“Does the Council collect the rents on the houses?”

“Yes.”

“Would you tell me about subletting and how it works here?”

“Well, I couldn't go into that. That's the Council's business. I can't discuss that.”

“I understand you maintain supervision of the schools.”

“Yes.”

“I've just been looking at your high school. From the outside—”

“The schools are still out for the Christmas holidays,” he interrupted.

“I know. But could you—”

“The Chairman of the Schools Committee would be the best person to talk to you about the schools.” Again he interrupted me, anticipating my question, meanwhile looking at my guide as if to assure her that he would say or do nothing contrary to official policy.

Unexpectedly we were joined by a little man, hardly over five feet tall, shiningly bald, and spry. On being introduced to me, he seemed surprised.

“I thought you were a plainclothes policeman,” he said. “I was planning to ask you to help me get a new pass.” Grinning meanwhile.

“At your age, why would you need a pass?” I asked him.

“Every black man needs a pass,” he replied, the smile vanishing. “I am a member of this Council. I live and work here in Soweto. Been here nearly all my life. I'm seventy and still I need a pass.” His watery eyes staring balefully at my guide, he continued, “Blacks are not human, so they need passes to move among the humans. What about you?”

“I'm a visitor from overseas. This is my first visit to your country and this lady is guiding me around Soweto.”

“Before people try to guide others, they should try guiding themselves,” he replied, looking at me. “How can you guide when you don't know Soweto yourself? Blacks live in Soweto. Only Blacks. They're forced to live in Soweto. They know what is Soweto. The white man comes here and says to us, Come. Go. Fetch. Carry. Live. Die. Show your permit. Show your pass. That's all the white man knows about Soweto. Busloads of white tourists drive through the township with somebody in the bus showing them how the Bantu live. Somebody white, from the Information Office. They say, ‘Look at the Bantu, how happy they are in Soweto. Look at them smile. Look at the happy children playing football. Look at the happy old men drinking Bantu beer.' Guides!”

He made the last word sound like an insult, speaking his mind, careless of any effect it might have on the now pale white woman. The Council Secretary nervously wet his lips from time to time as if preparing to intervene, but the old one seemed beyond caring, beyond fear. Perhaps, I thought, he has finally come to terms with himself, his life and his dignity, and has decided to make his stand.

“You want to see Soweto, come to us,” he told me. “Come as a brother.”

I apologized for the impromptu visit, saying that my stay in Johannesburg was short and I'd taken advantage of the opportunity provided me to see his township. But he would not be pacified.

“If you want to know about us, make time. Don't tell me you have too little time. You're one of us, black like us. You do not need any White to tell you about us or show you how we live. We'll make time to see you, talk with you. Let us know when you can come, but come. We need to meet our brothers from far away. You've come this far, don't tell me you have no time.”

I felt humbled and promised that I'd make the time to be with them. Somehow. He was good for me. I felt elated, and at the same time, reminded of my priorities.

That was the end of my guided tour. On the way back to Johannesburg, my guide and I talked, but desultorily. She seemed to have lost much of her enthusiasm. At my hotel, there were telephone calls for me from a local newspaper, the
Johannesburg Times,
seeking an interview, and from a black poet I'd met. I returned the
Times
call and agreed to be interviewed, then called the poet and, in passing, mentioned that I'd just made a guided tour of Soweto. He laughed at the idea of the white guide and suggested that it was a deliberate ploy on the part of the Office of Information to keep me away from the inhabitants of Soweto. He himself offered to take me there or anywhere else so that I could really meet the people. I told him that I'd been warned not to go into a township without a permit, but he brushed that aside, asking who the hell would know the difference. I'd be a black man in a black township. “They say we all look alike, don't they?” he laughed. I agreed to take the risk and go with him.

O
N THE APPOINTED DAY,
we met in front of the hotel and drove to Alexandra, six miles outside of the city in the opposite direction from Soweto. We drove through lovely suburbs of wide, clean streets and charming villas surrounded by neat lawns and carefully nurtured hedges and the ubiquitous blue-tinted swimming pool. All along the route were the separate bus stops for Blacks and Whites.

My first impression of Alexandra was of a garbage dump. Everywhere the garbage was piled as if the inhabitants had long given up the struggle to remove it and just let it accumulate. Where Soweto had roads and drearily similar box-like houses, Alexandra had a jumble of narrow, garbage-clogged foot paths worn out of the naked earth by decades of footsteps, intersecting with shallow gullies which wound their way erratically here and there until they were lost in sudden overgrowths of weeds. What had once long ago been neat houses had deteriorated into dilapidated wrecks patched with tin, cardboard, or even strips of plastic, their squalor emphasized by the uglier little tin outhouses scattered around them. In the middle of all this, two buildings rose ten or twelve stories into the air, straight sided, red-bricked, and looking clinically functional, as if contemptuous of the squalor though firmly anchored in it.

These were the hostels, one for men and one for women, built to house cheap black labor necessary for the numerous manpower-hungry industrial projects which are mushrooming around Johannesburg. They were designed to accommodate the largest number of workers in the least possible space, and are a honeycomb of tiny, cell-like rooms. Cold running water and toilets are provided at one central location in each building.

Most of the black workers in Johannesburg and its environs are young men born in ghettos like Soweto and Alexandra; others are migrant workers from the Bantustans of the Transvaal, Transkei­, Zululand, and other outlying territories, or immigrants from Rhodesia, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, and even Mozambique. These migrant and immigrant workers are not permitted to travel with their wives, and see them for only a short time each year, at Christmas, when they are given leave to return home.

“Well, what do you think of all this?” my companion asked.

“It stinks,” I replied, meaning the garbage.

“What about those?” pointing to the hostels.

“At least they're an improvement on the tin shacks around them.”

“You think so? Talk to some of the fellows who live in them. Best that can be said of them, they have electricity and running water. They'd never house white men in places like that.”

“Could I take a look?”

“Doubt it. They don't encourage outsiders. We could peep in if you like. Many of the ground floor rooms have broken windows and nobody seems to be in any hurry to repair them.”

I declined, not wanting to intrude on the hostel residents, but my friend led the way through the weeds and stunted trees to the base of one of the hostels.

“This is the women's unit,” he said. “All these lower rooms are empty. Peeping Toms and things like that, you know. And besides, most of the women stay in the hostel only for a short while then try to find jobs as domestics with the chance of living in their employers' houses.”

I looked through one of the broken windows. The narrow room contained a small iron cot with a thin, plastic-covered mattress. A rickety wooden table completed the furniture.

“The men's hostel is always filled to capacity, with a waiting list of others wanting to get in,” he said.

“Where do they live while they're waiting?”

“You really want to see?”

He led me back toward the shacks and we had to pick our way over piles of garbage and around a partly enclosed but uncovered hole which evidently served as the communal lavatory. There was a water spigot a few yards away. We entered one of the ramshackle houses and he knocked on an inner door, then pushed it open to let us into a pitiful room about eight foot square. Although we had come in from bright sunlight the room was in near total darkness; the only window was tightly sealed with burlap. A young man crouched by a single lighted candle, eating something with his fingers from a metal pot. My companion made the introduction, but, in the circumstances, no attempt was made to shake hands. I could not see the young man's face clearly in the prevailing gloom and I knew he could not see mine. He sat on the edge of a cot, one of three which ringed the room. He told us that six of them, five other men and himself, lived there, sleeping two to a cot. I tried to imagine what it was like.

The young man finished his meal, wiped his fingers with a piece of paper and stood up. I saw that he was neatly dressed in short, sharply creased slacks and shiny shoes. He said he was employed as a clerk with a local engineering firm, having graduated from the Orlando High School in Soweto. He suggested that we leave as he had arranged to meet some of his friends nearby. As we were leaving, I noticed that another of the cots was occupied, someone making the most of having the entire cot to himself. No electricity, no running water, no sewage facilities, no privacy, no sunlight, no air.

“Christ!” the word slipped out.

“Getting to you, eh?” my friend said. “I sometimes read about how you black Americans riot because of your living conditions. We'd trade with you any day, and think ourselves lucky. How long do you think you'd remain human in a room like that? You can hardly close your eyes before there's someone wanting to stick it up your ass. Hell, no women available, so what can you expect. The women who live here stay indoors at night. Rape around here is less a crime than a daily hazard.”

“Don't these fellows ever take any action?”

“Action? What action? In this country you work or you starve. If you have a job you hang onto it because you know that there are several others just waiting for you to slip. Action? You mean like striking? Shit, they'd throw you in jail so fast! Don't forget you're talking about Blacks.”

God, no wonder the white guide had kept far away from this place! These black men and women actually had to pay to stay in stinkholes like this. Somebody was making a fortune out of all this misery and it wasn't the Blacks. They could not own property, thus could not be landlords. So it had to be either the Government, through its Bantu Councils, or private industry, growing fat on Government contracts.

“We welcome evolution but we are opposed to revolution.” The banker had repeatedly chanted the Government's slogan. So had the MP, Englebrecht. Didn't they realize that it was in places like this that revolutions were born and bred? Maybe they'd never seen sights like these, even though they festered right under their very eyes. In other places, others had been similarly blind and uncaring until someone had rubbed their insensitive noses in the shit.

My friend led me on through the darkening township. I felt that he was slyly pleased at the way I had been affected by the hostel visit, and how carefully I was stepping around the mounds of garbage in our path. People sat on the stoops of the shacks chatting with each other, seeming unmindful of the ugly chaos around them.

“How would you like to spend a week or two here?” He was smiling. Laughing at me.

“Not for anything,” I answered. I wanted to get away from there, away from the stench, the dilapidation, the all-pervading air of decay. It was getting me down. I couldn't understand how he could be so at ease, so comfortable. Then I remembered this was what he wrote about in his poems.

“A bit different from your guided tour of Soweto, isn't it?” he grinned. “The Information Office never brings tourists down here. No smooth roads for the cars, no fancy playgrounds for happy, smiling black children. No Government show pieces. All we have is what you see. Decay and death, and we're forced to live in it. Nowhere to move to, and even if we found somewhere better, how the hell would we get permission to move? You saw what the inside of that hostel unit looked like? Some rooms in these other places are worse. Much worse. And people live here and rear their children. Right here in these miserable holes. Christ Almighty, it's inhuman!”

“I agree,” I told him.

“You agree!” He suddenly turned on me, the thin face tight with anger, a trickle of spittle escaping his mouth. “You agree! That's mighty big of you, my friend. But in a few minutes you'll walk away from it, back to your fancy hotel. I suppose you'll take a nice hot bath and wash away every memory of this stinking slum. You agree! That's nice. That's very nice. We agree too, but we still have to live in this shit. And pay for the privilege. Do you realize that? We pay rent to live in these stinking, rotten holes. Come with me, man. There's something else you should see!”

With that he started off down a narrow alleyway between some shacks, not even waiting or looking back to see if I was following him. I hurried after, not daring to risk losing him. He led me beyond the shacks, across an open piece of uneven ground where some kind of dwelling had been bulldozed away, and on to another group of run-down houses, rotting and ready to cave in on themselves. Outside one of these, a very old woman sat in the middle of some cardboard cartons and paper bags filled to bursting with rags. Here my friend stopped and pointed a thin arm.

“Look at her, my friend. She's too old to clean the white man's house or mind his children, so she's discarded, useless as the stinking stuff around her. She can't pay the miserable rent for that shack, so they've thrown her out of it. Look there.”

He pointed to the heavy padlock on the rickety door. Unimpressed, uncaring, the aged one sat, staring at nothing in particular, her eyes red and rheumy, her lined face set in final resignation, showing neither pain nor anxiety nor interest in whatever the next unhappy step might be.

“What will happen to her?” I asked.

“If she's lucky she'll die soon,” he replied, bitterly. “Maybe someone will take her in for the night. There are lots like her, the white man's garbage. I can show you some more, if you like.”

“No, thank you.” I was becoming thoroughly irritated with his sneering and his jibes. I'd not created these ugly situations. He'd invited me to come and see, and now he was treating me as if all this was my responsibility.

“Why don't you take her in?” I asked him, striking back.

“Me? Take her where? All I have right now is bed space, and I was damned lucky to find that.”

“So we'll both walk away from her, won't we?”

“Yes, my friend, we'll both walk away. But I won't walk far. I can't walk far. I'll always be near enough to see it and hear it and smell it. Every minute of the day it is with me. So I write about it. Me and others like me. We write about the things that hurt us and degrade us, but unlike you, we have no outlets for the things we write. Shit, man, even there we need the white man, and how he exploits our need! But, let's get the hell out of here, if you've had enough.” Again he was smiling.

“I've had enough.” In silence we returned to Johannesburg.

The next afternoon I went to Dorkay House, a center for the arts in downtown Johannesburg, where I had been invited to hear some black musicians give a private performance for a visiting white American impresario. I was there early and wearily walked up six flights of stairs to a narrow room, with a raised platform at one end, in front of which were rows of metal chairs. The small audience, most of whom were already seated when I arrived, was mostly African with a sprinkling of Whites and Indians who all seemed to know one another. Before the performance began they called to each other in familiar terms, the way artists do everywhere asking about mutual friends, their whereabouts, and whether or not they were working.

The first group to perform, the Batsumi or Hunters, consisted of a flautist, a saxophonist, a pianist, a guitarist, a vocalist who doubled on a huge bongo drum, and two drummers, one who sat enthroned among a glittering assortment of drums and another who beat dexterously on twin, supported kettle drums with padded drumsticks. Two of this group, the kettle drummer and the guitarist, were blind.

From the moment the performance began, it became evident that this was no ordinary group of men. They seemed to enter an immediate dialogue with each other, the pianist provoking the conversational pattern which the others took up, shaped and shaded as their impulses and instruments dictated. With any group, conversational patterns form and re-form. So it was here. They played, or rather they spoke and sang with and through their instruments, many instruments and sounds completely integrated, blending with each other. At times, the flute and saxophone were in private communion, whispering to each other yet providing a variable obbligato to the insistent piano and plaintive guitar. From time to time a musician would break into song, his wordless sounds giving the music an additional, strange dimension.

The flute seemed to be made in two sections, that which contained the mouthpiece being several inches shorter than the shank which held the spaced apertures. Caught in an occasional frenzy of expression, the flautist would pull one part from the other, and, using the palm of one hand as a mute, produce from the truncated instrument extraordinary sounds. At other times, he would blow through the lower part as if it were a trumpet, muttering into it at the same time, this creating a hoarse sound, simultaneously strange and familiar.

From a young woman sitting near me, I learned that they were all from Soweto and were only spare-time musicians; they earned their living as messengers, garage helpers, gardeners, and watchmen. Occasionally they made a recording, but they never received enough from such a venture to make any real difference to their impoverished state.

The second group, the Alan Kinela Quartet, used the same drummers to provide background for a tenor saxophonist and an electric guitarist. Their music was less introspective, more in the familiar, traditional jazz idiom. After a few numbers, this group joined with the first and played
Stumeleng
(“Be Happy”), a lively, exuberant piece from their common tribal heritage.