The Covenant (162 page)

February 9 was the kind of crisp summer’s day Johannesburg often provided, but this year it carried special significance, for the government had announced for the last time that the bulldozers were going to move; no further legal complaints would be tolerated. The first
batch of blacks to be evicted from Sophiatown were to obey the secretary’s letter to the last word.

Barney Patel, a clothing dealer aged forty-six, and his friend Woodrow Desai, aged fifty-nine, owner of a grocery store, had traveled from their shops in Pageview, an Indian trading and residential area in Johannesburg since the days of Paul Kruger. They were standing on a hill overlooking Sophiatown, where bulldozers were lined up, awaiting the signal. From their vantage point the two Indians were able to look down into the township which blacks had occupied for decades; fifty-seven thousand of them now lived here, some in ugly slums, many in fine houses which they owned. In a last-minute appeal that failed, an expert in housing had testified: “Only one structure in eight is a slum that warrants complete demolition.”

It had to be admitted, however, that the slum area was an amazing collection of buildings divided into five easily recognized categories: at the bottom, cardboard walls acquired by flattening grocery boxes; next, tin walls made from hammering out paraffin cans; next, corrugated iron siding; next, actual wood to protect the walls; and finally, cinderblocks to replace everything that had served before. But whatever the building material, all the houses were jammed together along narrow streets or dark alleys, and from this assembly came not only the patient black workers of the area but also the incorrigible young tsotsis, the peddlers of dagga, as marijuana was called, the prostitutes and the horde of petty criminals.

Sophiatown was a tightly knit community, and for every tsotsi who prowled the streets, there were a dozen good youngsters; for every father who staggered home drunk to a tin shack, there were a dozen others who cared for their families and supported the churches and schools and traders. But this black township had had the poor foresight to situate itself in the heart of what would become a predominantly Afrikaner white suburb. It must now be bulldozed off the face of the earth not for the sake of honest, if somewhat overzealous, urban renewal, as might have happened in many other countries, but because it stood in the path of white aspirations.

“There must be no confusion of thinking,” a cabinet minister said. “Sophiatown counts as a black spot on our land.” He then explained that a black spot was a place where Bantu had acquired land ownership under old laws. Under apartheid, such offensive spots had to be rubbed out. Thirteen percent of the land, traditional sites for kraals, had been set aside, and there blacks could own land. “At
Sophiatown, and spots like it that we need, their temporary sojourn in our midst is over.”

“I can’t believe they’re going to knock it down,” Barney Patel said as the bulldozers revved their engines.

“The paper said they start today.”

“But all the people living there?”

“Out in the country. To the new settlements.”

“You mean they’ll have to travel all those miles?”

“That’s not the government’s problem [he pronounced it gommint]. Out they go. Gommint says they shouldn’t have been here in the first place.”

A bell started ringing in a Protestant church right in the middle of the slum area, and continued for some minutes until a policeman hurried through the crowd to silence it. “They don’t want any trouble,” Patel said. “They’ve banned meetings of more than twelve people.”

“They won’t have any trouble,” Desai said. “Look at the police.”

To deal with the first one hundred and fifty families ordered to abandon the homes they owned, the government had brought in two thousand policemen armed with Sten guns and assegais, backed by troop carriers, signal units and squads of military police.

When the bulldozers were ready, two men to each machine, a Resettlement Board official gave the signal, and the powerful scrapers moved forward, their blades lowered, their snouts hungry.

“I just don’t believe this,” Patel said, his throat suddenly dry.

“Look!” the older man said, and they watched as the monstrous machines ripped a path through a group of shacks. A single bulldozer would wipe out an entire house, but this was no great accomplishment, for that one had been cardboard and planks.

“Look over there!” Desai cried, and as he pointed, a bulldozer chewed its way into a substantial home of wood and brick.

“That house must have been worth …” Patel did not finish his sentence, for the bulldozer, having attacked something it could not easily subdue, hung in the air for a moment, then slid sideways, endangering the driver but not upsetting. Angrily it backed up, sped its engine and tore back into the house, which collapsed in a cloud of dust.

“Look at the people!” Desai said softly, and the two Indians turned to the south where large groups of blacks gathered silently to watch the demolition, mindful of what was in store for them. They
stood with anguish on their dark faces, their hands clenched, powerless to obstruct either the bulldozers or the officials who directed them. This black spot could not be tolerated by whites in neighboring Mayfair; it must be cleansed of its vermin and converted to higher purposes.

“There come the trucks,” Patel said as a line of vehicles moved in to carry away the residents, and while the ’dozers knocked down the unwanted houses, the trucks carted off the unwanted people, free of charge, as the letter had promised.

There were, of course, those few blacks who refused to quit their homes; these were routed out by the police but no harm was done them. From one house near where Patel and Desai stood, a team of soldiers carried away an old man who had stubbornly refused to budge. “Come on, old grandpop, we’re in a hurry!” the soldiers said in Afrikaans (“Kom, Oubaas, ons is haastig”). Almost gently they bore him to a waiting truck and sat him down among the others, and he was scarcely seated before a bulldozer eliminated the house in which his children and grandchildren had been born.

The two Indians remained on their prominence most of the morning, gripped by the drama of this vast removal and weighing the possibility that they might be next. “Do you think they’ll really knock down our houses?” Patel asked as the bulldozers ate into Sophiatown.

“Gommint policy,” Desai said. “All Indians to get out of Johannesburg.”

“You think they’ll move us miles out in the country, like they say?”

“Look, Barney. Mukerjee told me yesterday the surveyors were out there, laying out streets.”

“Who can believe Mukerjee?”

“Well, he kept warning us that one day Sophiatown would be knocked down. Then I laughed. Today I believe.”

“But blacks are different from Indians. There are so many of them. So few of us.”

“Numbers mean nothing to apartheid. It’s only interested in color. Today it hates this black spot. Tomorrow it’ll be a brown spot, and off we go.”

“But Kruger’s gommint gave us the land we have. I own my land.”

“Yes, they put us there for what they called ‘sanitary’ reasons.
Today their grandsons will kick us out for economic reasons. Believe me, Barney, the bulldozers will come down our streets, too.”

They stood in silence, watching the destruction, marking the exodus of black families, and as they knew themselves to be powerless to protest this brutal maneuver, they thought back upon their own curious history in this fertile land.

Woodrow Desai’s grandfather had been one of the three Desai brothers shipped to the sugar fields by Sir Richard Saltwood. When their contracts had been worked out, they had stayed on and were soon joined by “passenger Indians” like the Patels, who had paid their own way to serve the rapidly growing community as shopkeepers and traders.

The Indian immigrants settled mostly in Natal, near the port of Durban, and there they proliferated: Patels, Desais, Mukerjees, Bannarjees. Unlike the Dutch before them and the Chinese, the Indian men would have nothing to do with black women, or white either, for that matter. They remained strictly aloof, and in the first forty years of their work in mine and field, few Indians married persons of another race. Woodrow’s father and others moved to the Transvaal, and in the smallest towns they opened shops to which all customers were invited, but in their homes they kept to themselves, with their dishes of ghee and lamb and rice and curry. They were clean, usually law-abiding, and the other people of South Africa hated them.

“Without the little one,” Patel reflected, “Indians would have been in even worse shape.”

The little one was a skinny lawyer with a high whining voice who emigrated to Durban in 1893. His name was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, intelligent enough to have made a good life for himself in South Africa had he been free to operate there. Indeed, when he arrived at age twenty-four he intended to remain, but the disadvantages which Indians suffered so irritated him that he found himself constantly at war with the authorities.

“He was a fighter,” Desai mumbled, recalling this contentious man who had defied the entire white establishment.

“And clever too,” Patel said admiringly. “When the Boer War was at its worst, what does he do? Organizes an Indian ambulance corps. Helps the English, even though they’ve been harrying him. Very brave, you know.” He chuckled to think of little Gandhi issuing orders to the white government.

“My father knew him well,” Desai said. “But Father was much like me. Never wanted trouble. So when Gandhi started sending letters to General Smuts, like he was head of an Indian gommint, my father warned him: ‘You watch out, Mohandas. Gommint’s going to throw you in jail.’ That was when he invented Satyagraha, right here in South Africa.”

“If he were watching this disgrace now, he’d do the same for the blacks as he did for us. Peaceful resistance. Just lie down in front of the bulldozers.”

“The bulldozers in India were British. They stopped. These are Afrikaner bulldozers and I don’t think they’d stop. Not even for Gandhi.”

“I love him,” Patel said. “Not for what he did in India. For what he did here.” He paused and shook his head. “I often wonder what might have happened if he’d stayed in Durban. To help our people.”

“He’d have been shot. I don’t think Afrikaners understand Satyagraha.”

The mention of shooting saddened the two Indians, for the Desai and Patel families back in Natal had suffered grievously when the Zulu, infuriated by government laws restricting them, had taken vengeance not on the whites who had passed the laws but on the Indians with whom they traded daily. For three days the tall Zulu had chased little Indians through the streets, slashing and killing, while some whites even looked on with approval, shouting at times, “Kill ’em, Zulu!” More than fifty Indians were slain; more than seven hundred required medical attention. It was a different South Africa after that, with many whites muttering that it would have been better if the Zulu had been allowed a free hand to settle the Indian Question once and for all.

Desai, who had lost an uncle in the riots, smiled sardonically. “Well, we had a chance to get out. Remember when gommint provided boat fare and leaving funds so that every Indian could go back to India? I think three old men accepted. Wanted to be buried in their native villages. The rest …”

“My father told me,” Patel said, “that any Indian who left South Africa for India could be certified insane. This was so much better than what he had known …”

As the sun approached its zenith, and the blacks’ houses crumbled to dust, the two Indians went soberly home to Pageview, where they stood at an intersection and stared at the rows of houses and
shops occupied by their compatriots; Indians always preferred living in tight communities for mutual protection. “Do you think they’d dare knock all this down?” Patel asked nervously. “Five thousand people. Homes, businesses. Insurance told me ten million pounds, at least.”

Before he could answer, Cassem Mukerjee came running. He was a small nervous man, much like Gandhi in appearance, and he spoke with that agitated enthusiasm some men display when circulating bad news: “My cousin Morarji saw the papers at his office. They’re going to bulldoze this place, too. All our houses are to go. And they’ll take our shops too.”

Barney Patel did not like Mukerjee, and now he shook him. “You stop that rumoring! Your cousin knows nothing.”

“He knew they were going to bulldoze Sophiatown,” the little man said, almost gleefully. “Are the houses gone?”

“It’ll take years,” Patel snorted, but Desai wanted to know about the supposed papers: “Did Morarji actually see anything?”

“The orders have been drafted. All Indians to be cleaned out of Johannesburg.”

“My God!” Desai said, and he leaned against the wall of a solidly built brick house, and as he stood there, sick in the sunlight, he could see the dust of the future, and thought: