St Clement’s Anglican Church was situated in the coloured community next to the railway station. The Black Sash hired its hall for our weekly advice office sessions, setting out Sunday school benches and sometimes pews from the church for our clients to sit in while they waited. The hall was bitterly cold in winter and stifling in summer. Rain on the zinc roof sounded like pebbles in a tin can. Tired-looking posters proclaimed, “God is Love”.
Despite this uninspiring setting and our amateurish operations – there was no fancy equipment, not even a telephone, and our records were kept in shoeboxes - the advice office fulfilled an indispensable function in the coloured and black communities. It was known as a place where assistance could be found, not in the form of handouts but in more empowering ways. We engaged with people on a personal level, heard their stories and took practical or paralegal steps to give them even the smallest measure of control over their situations. Sometimes the helpful action was as small as a phone call to an employer or a creditor made from a callbox or our own homes, or a letter written to a state department on a client’s behalf. Few of our clients had access to telephones and many were illiterate.
Most white South Africans, if they knew about the Black Sash at all, would have associated it with anti-apartheid demonstrations and viewed it with suspicion. Very few would have been aware of this other branch of Black Sash activity, carried out behind the scenes through its network of advice offices. Established first in Cape Town in 1958 and later in major centres all over the country, the advice bureaux were the agencies through which the Sash engaged with the poor, helping them steer their way through the debilitating circumstances of poverty and proscriptive legislation. Through this work we gathered an enormous wealth of information and insight regarding the life of the oppressed and the apparatus of the oppressor. The advice offices really were the engine room of the Black Sash and it was a matter of pride to the organisation that its political demonstrations and social justice campaigns arose not out of sentiment or idealism but out of solid information and analysis, gleaned from its own hard work.
While I was by nature drawn to the principled actions and expressive dynamism of the Sash’s public activities, my training in welfare drew me equally strongly to the advice office. Apart from paid interpreters, advice office staffers were all volunteers. Most of us had other jobs during the week, so we worked on Saturday mornings on a roster system.
One cold morning in August 1976 I was on duty interviewing clients at a rickety school desk in the crowded St Clements hall, when I became aware of a keening sound at the table next to mine. The woman being interviewed was rocking to and fro in her chair and was clearly distressed. There was no privacy in the hall and the sad sound was beginning to make all other conversation impossible. So we took her into the church where we shut the door, and in between sobs she told us her story. Her daughter, a deaf teenager with speaking difficulties, had disappeared. She travelled regularly by rail to a special school in Umtata (now Mthatha) in the Transkei, a long and convoluted journey that involved changing trains. Her mother always asked the train guard to look after her, but this time her daughter had not arrived. She had reported the disappearance and was now frantic with worry. We decided to accompany her to the railway station to see if we could expedite her search.
The station had Victorian gables and lofty waiting rooms with benches marked “Whites only”. Steam engines were still pulling trains on this line and the metallic smell of railway smoke hung in the air. The booking clerk directed us to the railway policeman whose dingy office adjoined the shunting yard. The official knew of the case. Smug with his Brylcreemed hair and his comb in his sock, he proceeded to assure us that the bureaucratic process had been followed to the letter. Dockets had been made out in triplicate and sent up and down the line. I couldn’t help picturing these useless notes being dropped from engine cab windows as trains few through remote rural stations, perhaps to be picked up by a porter or more likely, the wind. We pressed him for further information. No, no attempt had been made to speak to anyone on the telephone, the civil police had not been summoned, and the railway guard who had undertaken the custody of the child had not been interviewed. Instead we were treated to a tirade on the inefficiency of railway officials in the Transkei and the unreliability of blacks in general. Then his hectoring took on a salacious tone as he lent over the desk towards my colleague and me. “I needn’t tell you what I think has happened,” he said with a wink. “She is probably … you know…” and he resorted to hand gestures to imply a buxom lass, nodding in the mother’s direction. I was appalled by his insensitivity and resented his conspiratorial tone. The mother gave no indication that she understood his innuendo but we all rose and left his office.
Outside, trains shunted back and forth, belching clouds of grey smoke. We were getting nowhere, so we shepherded the mother back to the advice office, where we decided that the best route was to alert the press. We assured her that the story of her daughter’s disappearance would be made a top priority and immediately got in touch with the local newspaper correspondent, who was a member of the Black Sash, and she distributed the story as widely as she could.
Returning home to my own children that afternoon, I knew just how frantic I would have felt if one of them had disappeared. I also knew that the disappearance of a white child would not have been treated with the same callous lethargy as we had witnessed that day. The case had a deep effect on me. I could not imagine what it must be like to have so little control over one’s own life.
The following Monday morning we heard that the girl had been found in safe care in a small town between Grahamstown and Umtata. Someone had read the story and alerted her rescuer. She was unharmed and able to proceed to school. Five years after this encounter, the girl and her mother visited us at the advice office again. She had finished school and trained as a dressmaker and we were able to put her in touch with a potential employer.
The Sunday morning following the incident, Malvern and I went to lunch on a farm in the district. The girl and her mother were in the forefront of my mind as we drove out of town under a vast winter sky. In the distance the blue humps of the Amatola Mountains loomed, and flame-coloured aloes, like candelabra, illuminated the rocky landscape. As we turned off the tarred road onto a bumpy track, a leguan slithered across our path. It was the first one I'd ever seen and with its scales and mighty tail I thought we were meeting a crocodile! We passed a cluster of small labourers’ houses and a trading store before reaching the farmhouse.
The large homestead smelt of polish and wood smoke from a roaring fire in the grate. Ornate dark sideboards and comfortable old sofas furnished the rooms while bearded ancestors and women in poke bonnets looked down from oil portraits on the walls. Our hosts were charming and lunch of guinea fowl and venison was splendid. The talk was of crops and the weather, children and schools. Plates and glasses were whisked away by a silent army of maids summoned by a bell that dangled from the ceiling above the dining table. Looking out from the farmhouse windows towards the distant mountains, I was struck by how dislocated we were from the shack dwellers and their problems. We toured the lands, saw exotic birds imported from faraway places and buck leaping in the veld. This farmer, like others in the neighbourhood, was beginning to turn his attention to the American tourist trade. We talked about “the staff” and, while feudal, it all seemed humane. I participated with enjoyment and ease in the pleasures of the day, and though anxiety about the lost girl nagged at my mind I behaved myself well, knowing it would be inappropriate to introduce “politics” on such a day.
So often, even in so-called liberal circles, the mere mention of words like “township” or “blacks” was considered political and therefore off limits. Many English immigrants, enjoying a lifestyle more affluent than they could have dreamt of in Britain, preferred to keep their heads in the sand, and sometimes even those who professed themselves supporters of the Progressive Party or the Black Sash made remarks that showed their liberalism to be merely skin deep. Someone would avoid a certain supermarket, for instance, because it was “too full of blacks”. Once at a very convivial dinner party, at which the wine had been freely flowing, a fellow guest greeted my “political” comments with the advice, “Go back to England where you belong!”
After our day on the farm we hurried back to town to attend a service in the coloured recreation hall to pray for the Reverend Allan Hendrickse, who had been detained. In the 1980s Hendrickse would become an MP in the tricameral parliament and be seen by many as a sell-out, but in the mid-1970s he was a symbol of the struggle. The hall was packed with people of all ages, from grandmothers to infants, and there was a feeling of anger and tension in the air. A mere scattering of whites was present, mainly nuns. We felt honoured to have been invited to attend by a man who sometimes served Malvern in Birch’s, the local drapery store.
The recreation hall was like community halls all over the world, functional and cavernous, with that slightly stale smell of past gymnastic activity. In later years it became for me a place of quite special memories as I went there to hear stirring political speeches at the height of the detention campaign in the 1980s, and it was to this hall that Nelson Mandela would come in the 1990s after his release from prison. Malvern and I were impressed with the calm manner in which the Reverend Sonny Leon conducted the service and the message of non-violence he delivered. Nevertheless, the Bible readings, prayers and hymns had clearly been chosen to express strong political feeling and the singing was emotional and rousing. For Malvern the atmosphere was familiar. It reminded him of powerful Dutch Reformed services he had attended as a child. To my ear, the guttural resonance in the Afrikaans words seemed to come straight from the heart. I missed many of the innuendoes of that service, but I remember it as the first time I'd heard the phrase “white oppressor”.
What a weekend of contrasts that was. Each of the events seemed so isolated from the others, the travails and concerns of the one unknown or unheeded by the other. As polarised and baffling as it seemed to me, and as distressing as much of it was, I was at last getting involved in the kind of work I felt called to, and through it, I was no longer just observing, I was becoming a part of it all.
At the end of 1981 Gill and I closed our nursery school. The Grahamstown schools were beginning to introduce their own pre-primary classes and in time our little school would be obsolete. It was a good time to shut our doors. But I was not long without a job. I was approached to become a social worker at GADRA, the Grahamstown Area Distress Relief Association, a non-governmental welfare organisation, and since it was a mornings-only position it suited my family commitments. Our children were all well into their school careers by now but still needed a great deal of fetching and carrying in the afternoons.
I was employed in the advice section, where I stayed for 12 years until 1994. In winter I shivered in my prefab office next to the beer hall in Fingo Village and in summer it was an oven. What a far cry from my neat little centrally heated office in an Oxford hospital! Working mornings only was a mercy, as I sometimes felt overwhelmed by the demands. Our clients were almost exclusively black and engaged in endless struggles with hunger, homelessness, overcrowding, unemployment, alcoholism, drug abuse, rape and domestic violence. We did not at that stage see Aids sufferers, nor children who had been raped – though perhaps in those days we were simply not recognising the symptoms of either. It was a kind of war we were waging, not just against callous government policy but most often also against an obstructive and vindictive bureaucracy. South African welfare services and benefits were heavily biased in favour of whites, leaving us with little professional backup.
GADRA received no state subsidy, depending entirely on donations. Over the years we tried to change and modernise the old-fashioned name but to no avail. The community we served, not to mention the donors, had always used the acronym GADRA and wanted it to stay. Two other agencies to which we were linked bore the old-fashioned names of the Cripple Care Society and the Civilian Blind. These and other aid societies were run by stalwarts in the white community. One of my young colleagues once remarked, “Everyone in welfare is so old!” They were indeed a dying breed.
GADRA was founded in 1959 in response to a mayoral appeal. It could have been a food, the ongoing drought, or perhaps simply the overwhelming miasma of poverty. Prior to this there had been ad hoc charitable activity in Grahamstown, carried out by the churches and the Good Samaritan Society. Early in the century there had been an Englishwoman who, according to legend, rode a large white horse through the townships dispensing medical advice and assistance. Later the wife of a law professor started soup kitchens and a school-feeding scheme when she learnt that children were fainting at school because they were inadequately fed. In the 1970s a bursary scheme was launched, modelled on the African Scholars’ Fund in Cape Town. An ageing Jesuit priest administered the bursary fund from boxes stored under his bed. Humble beginnings, but in time GADRA became a very efficiently run outfit with a welfare number, a constitution, and a strong team effort uniting the three sections: Advice, School Feeding and Education.
Fresh to South African welfare work, I was at a distinct disadvantage when practising what is known in the jargon as cross-cultural social work. For one, I could not speak isiXhosa. Apart from the fiendishly difficult grammar, my limp English tongue could not master the clicks and glottal stops. I had to depend on interpreters who, I discovered, tended to supplement my advice to a client with sixpence worth of their own for good measure, which could muddy the waters somewhat. Fortunately my closest colleague, an experienced social worker, was fluent in isiXhosa. Adrienne Whisson also lectured at the university, was a member of the Black Sash and had a feisty, clear-sighted approach that was a great asset in our line of work.
I was also unfamiliar with many cultural nuances and had much to learn. Fortunately I was encouraged and aided by an ex-school principal who worked in the office. She was especially supportive when I found myself having to let go two of our colleagues, one after the other, the one for drunkenness and the other for theft. Mrs M, as we fondly called her, had many money-saving tips which she dished out to the clients, one of which was to use bicarbonate of soda instead of expensive deodorants. I wondered whether on a hot day one mightn’t start to fizz!
My colleagues were all helpful in interpreting the township world to me. The first time I was told that a client would not be appearing for his interview because he was “late”, my irritation proved quite inappropriate as it transpired that he was in fact deceased. I was baffled and amused by expressions like “sit-in lover” for a live-in lover and “chasing the century” for someone who was growing old. One passionate letter we received waxed biblical in its exhortations: “Yes, let us go on, my faithful learnards. Rome was not built in a day. For this God is our God forever and ever. He will be our guide even unto death. Diamonds can be picked up,” it concluded, “but faithful people are rare.” Another letter concluded with the Quaker phrase, “Let us hold this problem up to the light.”
One young graduate social worker was a South African Barbara Cartland in the making. Her flamboyant write-ups on her clients sometimes made me blush to remember my own purple prose, of which my supervisor at the Radcliffe had so disapproved. “From the client’s history it would seem,” went one report, “that she is married to a quarrelsome, impoverished man and has been shut up in this small gloomy heap. Her nights pinned down by fear of what might happen and having to be indebted to her husband’s changing moods she is now only imprisoned by the need to escape this brutal life.” Another report, describing a visit to a paraplegic, read, “A bright exotic home with the bulge of the client’s body entrapped on the couch. Fragile face and jaw line is raised in a gallant obstinate determination. His fathomless eyes seem to mourn all the inexplicable cruelties and sorrows of time and the world.” This same girl once complained about our rather meagre salaries, telling me, “It is alright for you, you have a fat cushion to lie back on.”
I never ceased to be amazed by the variety and inventiveness of the strategies people devised to survive. They collected and sold old bottles, newspapers, coal, manure, pine cones, wood. Snacks and sweets were sold at school gates, catching children on their way in and out. Knitting, sewing, leatherwork, doing someone else’s housework, looking after babies, “mudding” wattle-frame houses – the list was endless. Sadly of course it also included petty burglary and prostitution.
Many households were headed by women, who were generally acknowledged as the backbone of the township community. Lack of employment in Grahamstown, together with the migrant labour system, meant that men left home to seek opportunities in the mines and elsewhere. Some women’s organisations taught simple skills to improve the standard of living and humanize the environment. During home visits I was struck by the cleanliness of so many houses. They were often cramped and inadequate, with leaking roofs or badly fitted doors, yet people scrubbed and cleaned even though water had to be fetched from a tap down the street. One of our clients had received financial compensation for the loss of a leg in an accident, enabling the family to put a new roof on their house. “When I look at the roof,” his mother said, “I see my son’s leg.”
It was a revelation for me to learn about the broad-based system of African kinship and the density of social networks. Extended webs of interdependence meant that sometimes relatives of three generations lived in the same household, helping out with food and money and providing support in emergencies. Voluntary groups such as churches, mutual aid associations, women’s groups and rotating credit clubs formed part of the supportive networks that helped relieve people’s financial and emotional burdens. When the state casually disrupted or intervened in the lives of black people it was usually with no regard for the crucial role played by supportive social networks such as these.
A pressing concern in the Eastern Cape was the resettlement of people. The nationalists had a grandiose plan, not unlike that of King Canute, the Viking King of England, who infamously attempted to stop the tide from coming in. “Go back, you black food!" the ruling party seemed to cry as they set about removing black people from South Africa and relocating them to a series of ostensibly independent states. Here they would enjoy so-called autonomy, while in fact real power would remain entrenched in white South Africa. As early as 1917, even the great internationalist Jan Smuts had said in a speech delivered in London, “In South Africa you will have in the long run large areas cultivated by blacks and governed by blacks … while in suitable parts you will have your white communities, which will govern themselves separately.” This meant, of course, resettling people from where they had migrated to the cities and towns and dumping them far from any sources of livelihood and support. It was a cruel and deluded project that caused untold misery, witnessed, among many other things, in the appalling malnutrition figures of the next few decades.
Two of the new homelands were located on our doorstep. When the Ciskei became “independent”, a new capital was built at Bisho (now Bhisho). A series of heavy buildings, a cross between Star Wars and the Weimar Republic, rose like bunkers in the veld. Among the finishing touches were parking spaces marked for VIPs, and others for VVIPs. But like the fictional Toy Town of my childhood, with its cardboard houses and strutting, opinionated characters, this façade had no substance. For many of us it was a symbolic moment when, in the midst of the so-called Independence Day parade, the towering flagpole with the new Ciskei fag fell down like a toy.
One of my first visits to a resettlement area was in the early 1980s when I went with two other Black Sash members to Kammaskraal, beyond Peddie to the east of Grahamstown. People had been moved there from the coastal areas of Kenton and Alexandria. A general invitation had been issued to the white churches of Grahamstown to participate in a communion service with the people of the area. We travelled in a small cavalcade of cars, up and down rutted dirt roads on a beautiful spring day. The countryside was greening and the hills rolled towards the distant coast. It seemed a lovely pastoral scene, but of course it was completely undeveloped – except for the rash of government-issue lavatories that greeted us like upended tin coffins as we neared the settlement. Clearly, a further influx of people was anticipated. Such houses as had been erected were made out of packing cases and tomato boxes. Astonishingly, some had flourishing gardens helped by water from a nearby dam.
The multilingual ecumenical service took place beside the road on a hilltop. There was a preponderance of women and children. Some wore their special church uniforms of starched white hats, scarlet jackets and black skirts, some were in frilly dresses and smart hats, some in tattered clothing. When the peace was given, the entire gathering leapt up and danced. Then the communion wine came, in chalices and broken cups, and we all lined up at the side of the dusty road. As we left there were knots of people wandering off over the hills, shouting, singing, dancing, in an air of medieval festivity. It reminded me of a day early in our marriage when Malvern and I participated in a Ban the Bomb march to the nuclear power station at Aldermarston in Berkshire, England. A huge cross section of people, from Christians to anarchists, hippies to housewives, sang and danced their way down country lanes, banners held aloft. Among the high hedges it was impossible to see where the crowd began and ended. Such expressions of the human spirit, with their combination of grit and joy, have always had the power to stir me and on that day at Kammaskraal I was again amazed by the resilience the people displayed. Transplanted far from the lives they had known, in makeshift dwellings exposed to the extremes of Eastern Cape weather, yet they participated joyously in a church service with visiting strangers.
Resettled, repatriated, removed; dumped, displaced, forgotten – these words were all used to describe the many millions of South Africans who were forcibly removed in pursuit of the policy of separate development. In the Eastern Cape their need added significantly to the strain on the already heavily burdened and under-resourced region, and our advice offices and welfare organisations felt the impact too.
One of our long-term goals at GADRA was to change the mindset of those receiving aid, from passive dependency to a more proactive engagement. My predecessor had started asking recipients of food parcels, euphemistically called “rations”, to offer some small token in return. They could work in the allotment behind the offices where spinach was grown for distribution with the food parcels, or cut up stockings to fill cushions for energy-saving wonder boxes -a home-made device used to keep saucepans warm.
In a further effort to impart self-help skills we introduced a development component to our work and gave it the isiXhosa name Masakhane – let us support each other. A volunteer introduced us to the deep-trench method of gardening and encouraged people to make water tanks and erect wire netting. This style of gardening suited the Grahamstown area, where water was a scarce resource. With plenty of mulch and compost, the method required less land, labour and water, and had the further advantage of recycling biodegradable rubbish. From small beginnings our gardens expanded and in time people started seeking help with their own gardens. When Betty Davenport, another staunch Black Sash member and a very able craftswoman, joined our staff we diversified our development work to include sewing groups and other practical activities.
Our school-feeding scheme was managed by an indefatigable and courageous stalwart. Margaret Barker was the wife of the Anglican Dean and also a Sash member. She delivered food to a number of township schools daily in her kombi, continuing even through the late-1980s, when school buildings were being burnt down in protest against the education system. Most of the time she had to contend with heavy army and police presences in the townships.
The feeding scheme was often given donations of food, an excess from a student function perhaps or a surplus of carrots from the market. Once Margaret and I drove out to a nearby farm to collect a donation of pineapples. We took baskets and boxes and a pair of old gloves for the prickly work of loading the fruit, but when we arrived we discovered that we were also expected to pick the pines ourselves. Margaret didn’t falter, and armed with one glove each we set to. Fortunately a group of farm workers arrived in time to lend their skilful hands and soon our kombi was loaded with a bountiful harvest.
Reconciling the public’s idea of gifts with our policy of becoming less of a hand-out agency was quite a balancing act, but over the years we managed to get our message across. Nothing, thankfully, ever rivalled an event I took part in shortly after arriving at GADRA. A service organisation wishing to donate food parcels asked us to identify our “most needy” cases, who would personally receive the gifts at a handing-over ceremony. It was difficult enough just deciding who the most needy were, but then we discovered that the venue for this proposed display of charity was to be an industrial site, which entailed a considerable walk. Some of our clients were frail and elderly and a few were disabled. The reason for selecting this out-of-the-way venue, it transpired, was that GADRA had a reputation for being political and the donors did not want to attract too much attention. That word again – I could hardly contain my frustration. “Political!” I spluttered. “What does that mean?” My more seasoned colleagues remained poker-faced and we proceeded with the bizarre scene. Names were called and people received their parcels with humble bob curtsies, after which they sang a hymn of thanks and had their photograph taken with the donors. That event bothered me for a long time – it seemed to be part of the very paternalism we were trying to eradicate.
A lot of GADRA’s work involved pensioners and one of our campaigns targeted the poorly organised pay-out system in which people waited in long queues for up to 10 hours at a time to receive their grants. Waiting in bad weather or in the fetid atmosphere of a community hall was an exhausting ordeal for the elderly and disabled, and in some instances people fell ill or even died in the queue. It was not uncommon for those in need to start standing before sunrise, not only to be certain of an early place but also to ensure being served before the money ran out. The latter happened from time to time and then pensioners had no choice but to queue again the next day. It seemed to us a simple matter to streamline the method by staggering the pay-out days: old age on one day, disability on another, and so on. We also proposed better systems of queuing. A tiresome bureaucratic tussle ensued. GADRA and the Black Sash collaborated on this campaign, attending endless meetings with officials. The changes came slowly, but at last our ideas were adopted.
Pension fraud was commonplace, often perpetrated by unscrupulous family members or neighbours posing as procurators, with the result that many who were incapable of walking insisted on collecting their money in person. On one occasion I saw a young disabled man crawling to collect his grant. Once a year all pension holders had to present themselves to verify that they were still alive. On such days we witnessed Hogarthian scenes of the halt, maimed, aged and blind shuffling along, supported by sons or daughters, transported in wheelbarrows or carried on someone’s back.
I was once asked to help the Family and Marriage Association of South Africa (FAMSA) with the case of an old man from Malawi who had spent the better part of his life as a waiter in a Grahamstown hotel. He had fallen ill and was unable to continue his duties. It was difficult to establish exactly how old he was but his face was lined, his hair grizzled and he walked with a shuffle. The hotel gave him no pension, feeling that they had fulfilled their obligation by caring for him while he was sick. With no chance of a state pension, he wanted to return to Malawi. I was reminded of the words of a Mozambican migrant worker to an advice office volunteer in the Transvaal: “You pick us like grapes, suck us dry and then throw us down.”
We were able to contact the old man’s family and arrange a passport, then sent him on his way with an air ticket provided by the Black Sash. In Port Elizabeth and Johannesburg he was met by Sash volunteers who provided overnight accommodation then steered him towards his connecting fights to Malawi.
While all these arrangements were being made there was the matter of the old man’s luggage. He carried all his worldly belongings in two beaten up hospital sterilising boxes that we knew would never survive a trip to Malawi. But he was adamant that they must go with him and even when FAMSA produced a suitcase, he would not reconsider. So off he set from Grahamstown with the boxes held together by string, but in Port Elizabeth they were prised off him with promises that they would be sent on. In due course there was a letter of gratitude from his daughter. “My father was lost and destroyed,” she wrote, “but now because you forewarned he is safe and sound. When he left Nyasaland it was a dense forest with a village here and there, now it’s a new city.” We could just imagine the old man’s bewilderment. The letter ended with a request for the boxes. “I would like to make my Dad happy in his old age if it is the last thing I do before he moves to the next world.” Alas the boxes never reached Malawi, but at least his worldly goods in sturdier packages, did.
Once a man who had spent a lifetime in a psychiatric hospital appeared on the GADRA doorstep. He had no family or friends and we had to organise a life for him, which involved getting an identity book, clothes and somewhere to live. When his story appeared in the newspaper we received offers of clothing and food from white Grahamstonians, but some were not prepared to bring these donations to our office. The township was an unknown world to them, an alien place where conditions were too frightening to contemplate. For many white South Africans the real fright they were avoiding was the unspeakable poverty that would meet their eyes. Local poet Lungile Lose, standing among the densely packed shacks of the township and looking over towards the whitewashed town, captures the chasm between the two worlds in his poem Tantyi and Town (distant view).
A racked house
Faces me boldly,
Ponds of water here and there
Make one screw one’s nose.
Brown, rusty – most houses,
Paint here and there.
White smoke tries unsuccessfully
To conceal the houses from heaven.
Dark heavy clouds hover above Tantyi;
Foamy white clouds dance above town.
All the houses are white.
Did it snow over there?
I wish it would snow here too.
At GADRA and in the Black Sash advice office we sometimes despaired that the weight of poverty would ever be lifted from people’s backs. This was especially so when our work tended to be merely palliative. In the Black Sash, at least, our activities were always aimed at bringing about social change and our efforts were buoyed by positive activism. At the end of a day’s work at GADRA, if there were no meetings to attend, I would sometimes take Garp, our black Labrador, into the hills behind our house. There amongst the Australian gum trees and the white arum lilies beside the dam I would take deep breaths and clear my mind, burdened by the hardships I was witnessing at work but at least feeling less paralysed by confusion and guilt.
At home I had the help and support of Hilda Faltein, who started work with us as a young woman in the late 1960s. She worked full time for many years and then continued to come in as a part-time char. Our children loved her and related to her as a second mother, especially when their own was rushing off to endless meetings. I always tried to keep mindful of Hilda’s circumstances and conditions of employment, especially as the plight of domestic workers was a recurring theme in the advice office.
With no legislation to regulate the employer/employee relationship in this sector at that time, workers were universally – and sometimes grossly – exploited. Long hours, poor wages and unreasonable expectations were commonplace. I dealt with a case where a worker was left in charge of a small child who caught the flu. She was dismissed on the grounds of neglect, and the employer was intent on deducting from her final wages the price of the cough medicine and the cost of the visit to the doctor. I managed to persuade her not to take such gratuitous action, but this small victory made little difference to the dismissed worker’s plight. One employer, giving me a catalogue of her worker’s misdemeanours, grumbled, “She’s becoming too white!” A similar attitude was revealed in an advertisement in the Situations Vacant column of the Grocott’s Mail, placed by a well-meaning employer: “Domestic worker looking for full-time employment. Owner leaving town.”
One worker complained that she had too little time off to go to church on Sundays. “They won’t bury you if you don’t attend church!” she worried. She told of how the maids (there were three of them in the house) were kept waiting for what seemed like hours while dinners were in progress. Her employers were well-known members of the Grahamstown community with a high profile in the Progressive Party, so it was a tricky interview the advice office worker had with them, but more free Sundays were negotiated. Years later, when this employer was old, widowed and quite disabled, he told me during a bedside visit of his gratitude to this same domestic worker, not only for her years of service but also for the many intimate things he now needed her to do for him.
The house I’d grown up in had a small maid’s room upstairs and electric bells, even by the bath, wired to numbered hammers in a glass-fronted box in the kitchen, but these belonged to a bygone age. There was no maid and no ringing of bells when we lived there. My mother employed a series of chars with whom she often sat down and had a cup of tea. There was Mrs Shaw, whose husband was a lorry driver and whose passion was ballroom dancing. And Agnes who had spent her early life “in service” in a large country house. I think I grew up respecting them as I would anyone else who came to tea. And yet – I have an embarrassing memory. When Agnes was new in our employ I once unpacked our silver and glassware from the dining room cupboard and proudly displayed it for her benefit. It seems a strange thing to have done.
Still, when I arrived in South Africa I had very idealistic intentions as an employer of domestic help. I vowed never to use the word “servant” or to demean older women and men by calling them “girl” or “boy”. I was determined that my employees would be treated as equals and regarded with dignity. I fear that my practice did not always match my principles.
Once when English friends came to visit, they confided in us about a conversation they’d had with Hilda. When they had remarked to her that she must be very glad to have such good employers, her response had been rather lukewarm. I was taken aback. Was it just a bad day, or did I have cause to be ashamed? I reflected on how hard it must be to care full time for someone else’s home and children. On top of these demanding duties, domestic workers still had their own homes and families to care for and their own worries to contend with. Considering the indispensable contribution they made to the middle-class lives of others, one had to concede that the wages they earned and acknowledgement they received were nowhere near an adequate recompense. Small wonder that Hilda sometimes arrived at work in a dark mood, which our children called a “munch” and I confess I found irritating. Other friends from England once pointed out that I often had conversations in front of Hilda without including her. No doubt Hilda’s dignity sometimes hindered her from speaking up, but at other times she was not, as my mother would have said, “backward at coming forward,” and she told me in no uncertain terms when she felt something was not right. This could lead to a robust debate, or it could make me feel annoyed and guilty.
In 1980, Black Sash member Jacklyn Cock produced a book about domestic workers called Maids and Madams. Her research was done mostly in the Eastern Cape, which she called “the Deep South”. The book contained some revealing interviews. “They call me one of the family,” said one worker. “How can they say that?” “Holidays?” said another worker sardonically; “I go with the family to the seaside and work harder there than I do when they’re at home!” “I live on the smell of their meat,” said yet another. Discussion of Jackie’s book at a Grahamstown Black Sash meeting caused quite a furore, as some members became defensive about their own treatment of the women who worked for them. A slide and tape show of the book was aired around the country, and abroad by organisations such as Christian Aid. My voice, with its English accent, was used to represent the madam!
The subject of domestic work was very controversial and legal measures to regulate the practice were long overdue. It was no surprise in the early 1990s, during pre-democracy discussions, to find black caucuses citing domestic work as a matter of deep grievance and hear the wish expressed that there should be no more domestic labour once liberation had come. In the meantime, however, it was the conservative camp who reacted to Jacklyn’s book as though it were a threat. After its publication she began to be pestered by anonymous letters and phone calls. At times she received up to five calls a day. She’d hear an alarm bell ringing, or the ticking of a clock, or what sounded like an electronic scream. Once after a very nasty attack of encephalitis a voice said, “You have been sick; we are going to make you sicker.” Then one night the lights in her house went out and there was a crash through the window. A 20cm stick of dynamite had been hurled through the window, landing on the dining room table. Police and explosives experts arrived and neighbouring houses were evacuated. Fortunately, although the dynamite smouldered for about half an hour, it failed to explode.
At GADRA and in the advice office we increasingly sensed that dynamite was smouldering all around us. The relentless poverty and deepening discontent, together with the escalating conflict between the forces of oppression and resistance, would surely soon explode. The Black Sash steadfastly stood against any form of violence but we grew fearful that the worst might be inevitable. The kind of treatment to which Jacklyn Cock was subjected became only too common in the years that followed, as the security forces tried to intimidate and clamp down on all elements of the liberation struggle.