Johannesburg – Durban – Pietermaritzbur,
I have a huge constituency, so how could I not have confidence?
We are entering a period of resistance politics.
Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi (March 1994)
In the air over Central Africa, 1 April 1994
Until discovering the cost of a bullet-proof vest (hundreds of pounds) I had dutifully sought one in London – by way of calming friends rather than avoiding death. Foreigners are unlikely to be at risk during the election period unless they choose to enter zones of maximum violence. But perhaps some friendly fussing is forgivable; seen from afar, pre-election South Africa looks quite bloody.
A fortnight ago three of the AWB invaders of Bophuthatswana were shot dead by a black policeman in front of the world’s TV cameras – after the invaders had murdered seventy Tswanas while driving around firing at random. Then there was last Monday’s IFP-organized Zulu march through Jo’burg’s Central Business District, an area traditionally sacred to white money-makers, during which at least fifty-nine were killed. And people forget that the chances of being involved in such exceptional tumults are a million to one.
At Heathrow I talked with two distressed young Zulu couples, all law students in their final year at Wits. They come from kwaMakthutha, in the Natal Midlands, and a few hours previously had heard of the murders of three ANC activist friends by an Inkatha gunman. They too are ANC members – ‘Most urbanized Zulus, even the uneducated, follow Mandela’ – yet they admitted certain local ANC leaders must accept ‘a share of the blame for our crazy war’. All four raged against foreign journalists’ misinterpretations of this conflict as ‘Zulu versus Xhosa’.
Some see the Inkatha/white-right-wing alliance as a sinister hybrid, genetically engineered by America’s New Right and Europe’s more fanatical free marketeers, with support coming from shadowy neo-Nazi organizations. For this hypothesis there is considerable evidence. It is not in the interests of the American mainstream right wing to rock the new South Africa’s boat; they can profit more by steering its course. But throughout southern Africa New Right fundamentalists have long been at work – in collaboration with the CIA, here as elsewhere, during the Cold War. In the mid-’80s they launched a lavishly funded anti-ANC campaign, applauded by Laurens van der Post among others. In 1990 Sir Laurens asserted, ‘For the West to help the Communist ANC to gain power would be suicidal. Only Buthelezi truly cares about the blacks and understands their needs. Inkatha’s warriors and the kwaZulu police should be armed and trained to fight the terrorists …’ And so they were being, at that date, by senior officers of the SADF and SAP, in collusion with the Department of Military Intelligence – and therefore with I’m told President de Klerk’s knowledge. Since 1987 Third Force operations have caused many thousands of deaths – more than 5,300 in kwaZulu/Natal alone, during 1992. Last year’s statistics have not yet been published.
Florida, 4 April
Tomorrow Jennifer is motoring to Natal and will drop me off in Ladysmith. But my plan to buy a bicycle in Pietermaritzburg, and resume my journey where it ended last year, may be thwarted by recent developments.
During the past week 123 blacks have been murdered in kwaZulu/Natal and two days ago the Transitional Executive Council (TEC, the interim government) declared a State of Emergency throughout the province. Troops are being dispatched to the area in an attempt to create conditions allowing ‘substantially free and fair elections’, regardless of Buthelezi’s whims. (‘Substantially’? In the context a fudge word.) This TEC decision was made under pressure from Judge Kriegler, head of the Independent Electoral Commission (ICE), who insisted that otherwise no voting would be possible in kwaZulu. But here we’re into cloud-cuckoo-land, where I suspect we’re going to remain for some time to come. A State of Emergency imposed by an Inkatha-scorned TEC, and enforced by a mere 2,000 troops, will encourage no one to go to the polls in defiance of kwaZulu Police (KZP) hit squads – the IFP’S allies. Recently Buthelezi has been using phrases like ‘ethnic cleansing’, ‘obliteration of opponents’ and ‘a fight to the finish with the ANC’ – phrases not easily dismissed as bombast in a province already blood-soaked.
Meanwhile, throughout South Africa, thousands (millions?) of whites are frantically stock-piling tinned and dried foods, brandy and Coke and beer, cooldrinks, candles, kerosene, bottled gas, chlorine pills, loo paper, soap, tampons, antibiotics, dog biscuits, cat munchies and etc., etc., etc. A CP ‘List of Emergency Provisions’ includes ‘arms and ammunition, a small Bible, and a panga or small axe’. All this in preparation for some post-election cataclysm (the sabotaging of electricity and water services? blacks slaughtering whites? whites slaughtering blacks?) – some cataclysm that will confine people to their fortified homes for weeks on end. Already the hyper-jittery have fled to Zimbabwe’s tourist resorts in overloaded camper-vans and plan to remain there (the IEC will provide voting facilities) ‘until things are calmer’.
Foreigners are both amused and bemused by this panic buying. However, it seems semi-hysteria has marked the white response to political crises since 1838. And the elections have been defined, in numerous widely disseminated right-wing pamphlets, as a major crisis. The whites’ proneness to irrational fears is understandable enough; at some level they must know they deserve punishment, even if none is threatened.
Ladysmith, Natal, 5 April
Jennifer, by now familiar with my priorities, dropped me off outside a Drankwinkel. The Afrikaner owner – tall, balding, big-bellied, red-faced, with a short curly golden beard – was not into reconciliation. ‘Here in Natal,’ said he, ‘we see those lefties who encouraged all this running away now to Granny Britain. But we’ve nowhere else to go – right? If blacks can run a bottle-store like this and buy a big house and a Merc – fine, fine! Only I’m not paying for it, no way! They want it all without the hard work. Now that monkey’s promising them heaven – and what next, when he can’t deliver? Would you believe me if I told you diamonds would grow on trees next month? Course not! But they believe it – see what I mean? Me and you, we can meet and talk and understand one another. With them it’s like talking to a dog!’
In the bank, an English-speaking farmer’s wife and a well-tailored Zulu gentleman were united in their resentment of TEC interference – the State of Emergency. A long, slow queue allowed me to be investigated and the young woman soon recalled last year’s Lear-theft publicity. ‘It must have been you – shame! For it to happen in Natal, after safely crossing Africa!’ She advised me to stay at the Breedts’ guest house and directed me to Andy Breedt’s office at the end of the street; soon he’d be driving home for lunch. Ladysmith is the sort of place where personal routines are common knowledge.
When Andy came ambling amiably towards me he at once seemed like a friend. An Afrikaner, born forty years ago in Zimbabwe, he is tall, blond, well built, slow-moving, quick-thinking – his smile kind, his eyes shrewd. Yes, he’d soon be driving home.
His young Indian receptionist, graceful and charming, admitted to feeling on edge – worried about her family in Durban. ‘There things are very bad, not like here. Ladysmith never has problems, except now we’re doing no business. The whole country is paralysed, waiting for the elections – and not knowing what next …’
Andy remains relaxed. ‘My optimism is genuine. Most South Africans – all sorts – are sensible. Give them a chance to live peaceably and they will.’ But he admitted that his eight Zulu employees are at present living in a state of terror, juggling with membership cards, claiming allegiance to both the ANC and the IFP. Secretly all long to vote for Mandela, but unless things change dramatically they won’t dare.
We drove steeply up, through the standard leafy suburbs, to a narrow ridge-top strewn with Boer War fortifications. The Breedts’ new house – large, thatched, open plan, with steep wooden stairs and low roof-beams – is poised on a cliff-edge and blessedly cool within. Andy’s wife Sheila was also born in Zimbabwe, of ‘Rhodie’ parents; she is small, slim, energetic, witty, warmhearted – another ‘instant friend’. Immediately she invited me to join this evening’s dinner party as a guest.
I am writing this in a short sloping garden under a regal fir tree that witnessed the Siege of Ladysmith. Far below lies the little town, backed by a scrubby ridge, and all along the southern horizon the distant mighty Drakensberg form a pale blue wall.
Later
At sunset we assembled in the bar – no ordinary bar, this, for Andy is a Boer War buff. His collection of souvenirs covers every inch of the little room’s walls and ceiling and overflows onto the bar shelves and counter – guns, tools, posters, newspapers, hats, uniforms, bullets, flags, medals, saddles, bridles, snuff boxes, cigarette tins, biscuit tins, mugs, plates, water bottles, billy cans, haversacks, badges and buttons. In the sitting room is a library to match.
A convivial time was had by all and the rapid drowning of inhibitions exposed some raw emotions among my fellow-guests. Hereabouts the Commie bogie thrives, among Afrikaners and English-speakers alike. Christianity also thrives. One man, a doctor, was completely thrown by my being an unbeliever. ‘But you seem like a good person!’ he protested naively, to my considerable embarrassment. This equating of goodness with Christianity depresses me. South Africans, mentally ghettoized for generations, have a lot of catching up to do. As one of their own academics, Geoff Durant, observed recently, referring to his native land – ‘It’s an intellectual dorp.’
Pietermaritzburg, 6 April
Last night, as I slept soundly, another sleeping woman was shot dead in the nearby township of Ezhakeni. As were five residents of Ekuvukeni, also nearby. That Indian lass (‘Ladysmith never has problems’) is seriously disconnected from her black fellow-citizens.
At 7 a.m. Andy drove me to the taxi station, around the corner from his office, and for an hour I sat in the back of a kombi while it filled. Unless at the centre of a taxi war, most such stations are noisy, bustling and quite jolly. This one wasn’t. The few people about looked tense and unhappy.
Pietermaritzburg’s taxi station is in a district reputedly afflicted by pickpockets, muggers, drug dealers, rapists, murderers. In other words, a district not white – and perhaps moderately dangerous though the atmosphere is friendly. A nearby beer hall – up a short alleyway, prettily overhung with bougainvillea – tempted me. Long metal tables and benches were screwed to the floor of the huge gloomy hall and iron grilles protected the bar from predators. The arrival of a white female startled everyone. For several moments I was silently eyed, with sheer incredulity, by a dozen young men, two teenage girls, three homeless old women with their worldly goods in plastic bags at their feet and four elderly men playing cards – playing very slowly, so worn and sticky was their pack. Cardboard cartons of maize-beer were being shared. Then a tall, thin, grey-haired man emerged from behind the bar, demanding to see my passport. When he had guaranteed me as a genuine foreigner the begging started. Two young men held out their polystyrene mugs, pointing to my beer bottle. One girl boldly asked for a Castle. An elderly man asked for a packet of cigarettes. Another asked for R5 ‘to buy stomach medicine’. The second girl leaned over my shoulder, helped herself to one of my mini-cigars, lit it – then coughed, laughed and threw it onto the stoep. From there it was retrieved by a young man who smoked it with relish and winked at me and grinned and said, ‘Better than dagga!’
That was an odd interlude. No one showed any hostility but to people so desperately poor I naturally seemed like fair game. My battered and dusty pannier-bags do not suggest goodies within but when one youth began to contemplate my leather binoculars case I judged it time to move on.
In a large shabby Indian hotel on the next street there was more fall-out from last year’s publicity. The owner, Tommy Naidoo, at once recognized both my face and my voice. He beckoned me into his tiny office (also Reception) and offered, ‘G and T? Or brandy and Coke?’ Were his wife not in Durban he would have invited me home; but I could have a room in the hotel as his guest.
On the floor behind my chair a life-sized photograph of Mr Mandela leaned against the wall. ‘I’ve just demoted him!’ chuckled Tommy. ‘He’s failing badly, not controlling ANC violence, not talking enough to our man [Buthelezi]. When we look back apartheid seems not so bad, then we’d no such violence and crime and uncertainty. And most people want to live with their own sort, that’s a fact of life worldwide.’
Tommy foresees my not being allowed to cycle through kwaZulu. ‘It’s wild there now, they’d think you were on about voter education and they’d kill you.’
On my remarking that voter educationalists don’t cycle Tommy shrugged. ‘Do they know that? They know nothing! You look the type – friendly old white lady with a do-gooder face. You wouldn’t be the first kaffirboetie to be carved up – remember Amy Biehl? You’d be lucky if you were shot nice and quick!’
Tommy is a shrewdly benevolent Mr Fix-it whose office is never empty. For a few hours I sat in a corner observing rich and poor, of all colours, seeking help and advice – and getting it, unless Tommy smelled exploitation. Casual disputes and comments swirled around me, confusingly.
‘In Empangeni yesterday the KZP couldn’t stop ten thousand Zulus carrying traditional weapons. [These are banned under the State of Emergency.] Police interference would have started the civil war.’
‘Didn’t the TEC know that ban couldn’t be enforced? Being televised defying it only raises Inkatha’s morale.’
‘It must’ve been the army in Empangeni, Mandela said on Thursday the police were to be confined to barracks. And our security legislation is suspended. Who does he think he is?’
‘He knows he’ll soon be President, he’s giving us a trailer of phoney ANC democracy.’
‘Mac Maharaj contradicted him then, said if the KZP co-operate they won’t be chained up.’
‘Is this how to make a democracy? Putting quarter of South Africa’s population under military rule!’
‘All the same, thousands feel safer since the army moved in.’
‘How safe? In six days of the Emergency we’ve had ninety-two murders – not counting today’s that we haven’t heard about yet …’
‘That’s less than before. And we’ve not got a civil war, only gangs.’
‘The nine Mzelemus weren’t a gang. A grandmother, mother and seven daughters – not forgetting a five-months-old baby with her head sliced in two by a machete.’
‘Seems the father was an ANC supporter, when the killers asked for his Inkatha card he couldn’t show it.’
‘And the Nats are bribing with food and money. They give a rand for every poster put up in a township.’
‘One rand? Would you put up a Nat poster in a black township for less than ten thousand? Plus all funeral expenses paid!’
‘NEON[National Elections Observer Network] is desperate for volunteers here – needs 800, can only recruit 300. And how reliable will those be? They’ll be tough down-and-outs, ready to risk their lives for free meals!’
‘They can’t be down-and-outs. They must be able to speak, read and write English.’
‘You mean we’ve a shortage of starving graduates?’
‘Kriegler said yesterday polling might be postponed here, if voting can’t be free and fair.’
‘It should be postponed everywhere, it’s a nonsense. How can it be free and fair with the ANC running it?’
‘Are they running it? The IEC’S just fined them R100,000 for intimidation in the northern Transvaal – blocking Nat rallies.’
A suspended fine – window dressing!’
The foyer outside Tommy’s office serves as an informal club for minor Indian businessmen – a close-knit community, their first language English. They invited me to a snack lunch: a sliced pan laid on the table in its wrapper, a big dish of delectable tomato, onion and chilli mush. A black lawyer joined us, self-important and evidently influential; most of those present deferred to him. Although a member of the IEC, and as such supposed to be neutral, his ANC allegiance was plain to be heard.
As I walked to a bicycle shop recommended by Tommy the most obvious thing was normality – here in Natal, in the eye of the storm. Shoppers shopping, beggars begging, taxis loading and unloading, traffic racing, teenagers stuffing their faces with fast foods, hawkers trading, Muslim schoolchildren streaming home from their academy beside an imposing mosque, the dainty little girls wearing long stockings and tight headscarves despite the heat. Perhaps at that very moment unspeakable atrocities were being committed nearby. Yet I find myself unable to believe that South Africa now – even kwaZulu/Natal – is a country about to implode into civil war. Am I being an obtuse outsider, unaware of all the nuances? Or as an outsider am I sensing something the South Africans themselves have lost sight of under the pressure of day-by-day destabilizations? I am very conscious of a nationwide longing for peace and calm, a force that feels stronger than the destabilizers.
Buying a bicycle is a momentous event, akin to marriage: you are acquiring a partner. Now I have acquired Chris (in memory of Chris Hani) and it remains to be seen how our relationship will develop. Lear was a thoroughbred, Chris is a mongrel – bits and pieces from Singapore, Taiwan and Korea, assembled in South Africa. Riding him feels like riding a carthorse after a Derby winner. But I daresay shared experiences will eventually make that invidious comparison seem irrelevant.
Durban, 7 April
Our first shared experience took us over South Africa’s most televised road, the hilly fifty-five-mile route of the annual (31 May) Comrades’ Marathon. A confusing name, in contemporary South Africa; these Comrades are not ANC/SACP members but hundreds of men and women of all ages and types whose whole lives seem geared, both physically and psychologically, to this yearly challenge.
Looking down from Durban’s densely wooded suburbs, high above the city, I could see navigation problems ahead. Durbanites are inexplicably proud of their ‘modern infrastructure’, some of which now lay below me: six motorways, on three separate levels, turning and twisting and twining around one another like a pit of demented snakes. I had to walk the last few miles to the centre, past serried blocks of commercial high-risery. This port city is almost as uncongenial as Jo’burg, without the highveld compensation of a pleasant climate; Durban’s humid heat is hellish. The friends with whom I am staying, in the most affluent Indian ‘location’, tell me I’m seeing the place at its worst. During the Easter holidays multitudes of Vaalies descend on this ‘Fun Capital of South Africa’ to enjoy the Golden Mile – in fact three and a half miles of beach where everything in sight is the very quintessence of vulgarity – and to romp amidst the gaudy plastic and concrete delights of Funworld and Waterland: go-karts, boat rides, motor chutes, aerial cableways. The Vaalies’ unpopularity may be gauged from a remarkable advertisement in today’s Natal Mercury:
On average, 11 tourists create one job. Multiply that by a million or more and that’s a lot of jobs. But a booking from the Transvaal will become a special event if we don’t make our visitors feel really welcome. We need our tourists. For goodness sake let’s be nice to them.
The same, 8 April
Before the fun merchants and infrastructuralists took over, Durban must have been quite attractive. Remnants of dignity and calm survive: the City Hall, several lush public parks, the occasional untouched nineteenth-century street where history echoes.
This morning I had to choose between touring Durban’s ‘violence-torn townships’ (the favourite cliché) with a member of the National Peace Secretariat – who would lend me a bullet-proof vest – or visiting Professor Azikiwe in his tenth-floor flat overlooking the port. I chose Professor Azikiwe. The idea of touring any black township with a group of whites makes me uncomfortable. And the townships in question being violence-torn compounds that discomfort. To the unhappy residents, it must seem that writers, journalists and TV crews are there only to exploit their distress.
Professor Azikiwe is a Nigerian anthropologist; he and I have been communicating since he wrote to me after the publication of my Cameroon book, in which I referred to the activities of an internationally famous sangoma. In 1990 he spent three months in Namibia during its first ‘free and fair’ election campaign. There the main parties agreed to hire – at vast expense – foreign, neutral inyangas (witchcraft practitioners) whose public rituals in the polling stations freed them from malignant spells and made them safe for all voters.
‘In South Africa,’ said the professor, ‘there’s also quite a widespread fear of the opposition enspelling polling booths. Some believe spirits will see to whom their vote goes. Others are convinced a spirit will take over their minds and force them to vote for “the enemy”. But can you see Mr Justice Kriegler hiring inyangas?’
Having learned Venda and Zulu, Professor Azikiwe turned his attention to witchcraft in Venda, Northern Natal and the northern Transvaal. ‘In some areas traditional beliefs are stronger than in many other parts of Africa, but distorted now. It didn’t help when tribal courts were forbidden to try accused witches. Banishing them was more usual in the old days, instead of killing them. These days hundreds are being killed. I’ve met young men who think it’s their duty to protect the community by killing them – having first bullied people to give money to pay a sangoma to “sniff out” their victim. Over the past few years there’s been much more action. Witches are blamed for all sorts of things – political hounding, family quarrels, personal illness, lightning deaths, drought. It’s believed they can create zombies by reviving corpses which they then control. And there’s an expanding market for protective battle muti. The Boipatong killers smeared themselves with this before attacking. Most of the 10,000 Zulu marchers in Jo’burg on 28 March were smeared – and that’s a lot of muti! Since 1990, 15,000 or so have been killed in political violence – how many died because they trusted muti to deflect bullets? This delusion you find all over Africa and it’s centuries old. Here the muti murder rate is soaring – killing people for body parts. The brain makes the most potent muti, that’s why so many violence victims have their skulls cracked open. But whole skulls are needed to put into the foundations of a new business premises to bring prosperity. The genitals and breasts are obviously for fertility rites. Like with everything nowadays, it’s all over-commercialized. So you get too many traditional healers corrupted by the big profits. I’ve witnessed one sangoma paying R3,000 for a liver. Some whites here are very naive, imagining the Christian blacks – that’s most South Africans – are uninfluenced by old beliefs. As though a century of European prosletyzing could cancel out millennia! I doubt you’d find 20 per cent without a belief in some elements of their own traditions. Sure, they’ll tell whites they don’t believe in any of this mumbo-jumbo, it’s the work of the devil, they only believe in what the Bible says. But those denials are part of their being broken by their treatment in this country.’
When I left Professor Azikiwe Durban’s main thoroughfare was thronged with sun-reddened Vaalies returning from the beachfront, for once on foot.
Occasionally people ask me why, in books about Africa, I avoid ‘witchcraft’. I do so because the whole area of African spirituality is closed to outsiders. Non-Africans – however sympathetic their attitude and whatever their academic qualifications – can only peer over the fence, glimpsing fragments of a mystery beyond our comprehension. It’s easy to deride and condemn witchcraft. But there are many genuinely compassionate and wise sangomas who play constructive roles in their communities. I’ve met several, here in South Africa and elsewhere.
Today’s most exciting rumour: the IFP is splintering! One Zulu-led faction favours a climb-down, another white-led faction is urging Buthelezi to stand firm. Good news, if true.
The same, 9 April
Overnight, Durban has broken out in a colourful rash of IFP election posters. These show the party logo, a large photograph of Chief Buthelezi at his most benign (followed by an ‘X’) and the slogan: ‘Make our Country Free, Support the IFP!’ This proof of a split is doing nothing to lessen public bemusement. ‘But I thought Buthelezi was against the elections!’ said one astounded young Zulu as we stood together viewing a vertical line of posters on a lamp-standard.
Yesterday, in a remote tourist camp in the Kruger Park, Mr Mandela, President de Klerk, Chief Buthelezi and King Zwelithini met to make yet another effort to avert the disaster of an election minus the IFP. For hours the four talked, apart from their courtiers and advisers. What a novel situation for the Afrikaner State President of the Republic of South Africa, to be sitting powerless out in the veld with three black leaders whose decisions now matter more than his! Mr Mandela offered to entrench the King’s status, to make him the constitutional monarch of kwaZulu in the new South Africa. How the King may feel about that is irrelevant – Buthelezi rejected the idea, the meeting was a total failure, more troops are to be sent into the province and public despondency and anxiety is increasing. But what about those posters? Not referred to by the media yet surely immensely significant.
Durban’s Poor Whites are numerous, wandering around in rags, their placards pathetic. ‘I will work honestley for a small wage.’ ‘I can make good furnisher.’ All day a young mother sat on the pavement outside Adams bookshop with an apathetic toddler by her side, a whimpering baby on her lap and downcast eyes. Her placard said: HOMELESS AND HUNGRY. She made no other attempt to attract attention and I wondered about her feelings as prosperous blacks strode past, many pausing to toss coins into her tin.
My Indian hostess, the vivacious widow of a wealthy businessman, lives with her octogenarian mother and three graduate daughters, all swiftly climbing their respective professional ladders. These independent-minded young women wear the latest Western styles and are determined to marry whom they will. Here, too, in this community of sophisticated Indians, election jitters are perceptible. Particularly post-election jitters, though not on the panic-stricken white scale.
‘Let’s face it,’ said my hostess, ‘there’s no love lost between the Indian and the Zulu. Never was and never will be. We had our time of unity – expedient unity – when apartheid was at its worst. But once those laws were gone things soon went back to normal. I guess most of us will vote Nat. And in Natal we count, we’re nearly a million – we could make possible a Nat/IFP coalition.’
Grandma observed, ‘As a community we started from nothing, got ourselves organized, outdid the British as traders, built our own temples and mosques and schools. Why didn’t the Zulus do the same? Because they were too lazy! They wouldn’t work on the sugar plantations, so Indian labour was imported. And now they’re jealous of us.’
Stanger, 10 April
My escape from Durban took two hours. I knew an alternative to the N2 existed but every attempt to find it led back to the motorway. Finally, in despair, I dragged Chris across fields of cane towards the sea – an inspired move. But even on that old road traffic was heavy, servicing countless caravan parks and luxurious resorts with names like Westbrook Beach and Willard’s Beach. Between these excrescences the coast was very beautiful, the dazzling blue sea scarcely fifty yards away, its wavelets curling whitely onto golden sand. The dense subtropical vegetation on my left included mangroves and in the wayside grass a vivid abundance of wild flowers bravely bloomed amidst an equal abundance of tins, bottles and cartons. The strong headwind was welcome to temper the sun’s ferocity. Near here miles of road are being widened by the sadistically named Savage & Lovemore construction company. When will such funding be redirected towards the ex-‘homelands’ and townships?
Stanger, an old colonial town near the Zululand border, was built on the site of King Shaka’s capital where he was assassinated in 1828. It has long since lost the importance gained during the Zulu Wars. This hotel is grubby, the loos malodorously out of order, the mosquito netting on my bedroom window in tatters and the light switch broken. At Third World prices such details don’t bother me but here the charge is R80, plus R12.50 for breakfast, and the black waiters are sullen and slothful.
Above the door to the Private Bar a faded notice reads: STRICTLY SMART. Within, three scruffy Afrikaners in dusty dungarees were quarrelling loudly, banging their beer bottles on the bar. My arrival prompted a slim, neatly suited Indian to try to quieten them. ‘Lower your decibels!’ he shouted. When they ignored him he hesitated, scowling – then grabbed one man by the arm and yelled, ‘Get out and fight someplace else!’ Pop-eyed with rage, the Afrikaner struck him across the face. At that the Indian barman vaulted over the counter – and I withdrew to enjoy my Long Tom in the warm dusk under a fragrant tree.
Five minutes later the Afrikaners came stumbling out – two with bleeding noses – pursued by the barman, the Indian customer and three black waiters. One of the Zulus with whom I was sitting grinned and said, ‘See? Already we have our new South Africa!’
Those three young Zulus were neither ANC nor IFP but PAC, aching to vote and angrily scornful of Buthelezi’s manoeuvrings. Sipho, an assistant teacher (i.e., unqualified), means to leave his ill-paid job after the elections and ‘go into commerce’ because ‘then we’ll have opportunities’. At the age of 32 he claims to have eleven children to support, seven of them born out of wedlock by four different mothers. He believes AIDS is ‘propaganda from Pretoria to keep our numbers down’.
Tomorrow I hope to follow the tarred road to Kranskop and from there take dirt tracks to Ulundi, kwaZulu’s capital. This plan has engendered much conflicting advice. An Afrikaner road-construction foreman says I’m suicidal, all Zulus are in murderous mood. My PAC friends say I’ll be fine, much safer than in the Transkei because Zulus like whites and are only interested in killing each other. A white farmer agrees with them; his wife drives weekly to Tugela Ferry and never has a problem. An Indian high-school principal says I should return to Durban; too many are being given battle muti, in preparation for attacks on white farms after the elections, and they might like to test, as it were, the muti’s efficacy on me. Here my survival technique (Take Local Advice) isn’t working, all such advice being politically and/or emotionally skewed.
Krankskop Police Post, 11 April
No, I haven’t been arrested, though I am being confined here. My cell (unfurnished but clean) is not locked – yet were I to try to escape I would probably be captured.
The forty-eight miles to Kranskop are all uphill, rising from the coast into the mountains of kwaZulu. A memorable ride/walk (as much walking as pedalling) with little traffic, few settlements, much beauty – lushness being exchanged for austerity and the heat decreasing as I gained altitude. But then, frustration …
At 4 p.m., soon after turning onto the dirt road, kwaZulu’s unwelcome ‘invading force’ – an SADF roadblock – confronted me. ‘Where are you going?’ demanded a stressed-looking young Afrikaner captain.
‘To Ulundi,’ said I cheerfully.
‘No!’ said he. ‘There’s an emergency here – have you been asleep? Who are you? Why are you here? We have big problems, get off this road!’
Two Indian KZP lieutenants strolled onto the scene. ‘Come,’ said one, ‘come and rest with us and tomorrow continue to Greytown. This is a bad place now, we must protect you.’
New Hanover, 12 April
Near Greytown I again turned off the main road, Ulundi still my destination – via Tugela Ferry. This time I was prepared for the army roadblock and they, it seemed, were prepared for me. Kranskop must have warned them to beware of the crazed foreign female on a bicycle. Understandably, their tolerance level was low.
‘Get lost!’ said the captain crisply. ‘Get out of kwaZulu and stay out! We’ve hassle enough without a dead tourist – right?’
‘Right,’ I meekly replied, turning away from a Paradise of mountain ranges.
Half an hour later, in Greytown – an inconsequential little place, only just in Natal – I admitted to myself that the SADF knew the score. On the main street I was momentarily touched by a fear that is hard to explain because nothing happened. But throngs of Zulu youths were eddying to and fro – not purposefully, as though about to march somewhere or do something, yet angrily. The atmosphere felt oddly ominous and I attracted many quick suspicious glances. When I stopped to buy amasi and a newspaper the Indian storekeeper said, ‘Don’t hang around, we could have trouble soon.’
‘Why? What goes on?’
He half-smiled and replied, ‘We don’t ask, it’s their problem. We only try to survive. Now move on and good luck!’
Moving on meant moving back to Pietermaritzburg via New Hanover. And then to where, kwaZulu being verboten? Cape Town, I decided, for two reasons. In the Western Cape the electoral contest has a unique flavour; nowhere else, if Buthelezi refuses to play, is an ANC victory in doubt. And last year I made many friends of all colours on the Peninsula. So Chris and I will go by overnight train to Jo’burg and there take the Transkaroo Express.
One of the most curious features of this election is that all the tension associated with it is divorced from the result. The result – with or without intimidation, with or without IFP participation – is already known. Nelson Mandela will be the next President of South Africa and the ANC will have an overwhelming majority of MPS in the new national parliament (the Constituent Assembly).
On a high, commercially forested ridge, facing the distant Drakensberg across the Valley of a Thousand Hills, I ate repellent sandwiches: shocking pink slimy polony between slices of gluey white bread, thoughtfully provided by the KZP. Although that force has an even viler reputation than the SAP, my Kranskop hosts seemed decent young men – too decent to be happy with their present leadership.
From nearby foresters’ shacks a dozen children, ragged and vitamin-deficient, came racing to inspect me. Their grandfather followed slowly and, unlike them, spoke English. He earnestly begged me to pray to God every hour that de Klerk and Buthelezi would be made the new leaders because Mandela as President would certainly cause civil war. He himself won’t vote, he doesn’t believe the ballot will be secret, he plans to remain indoors between 25 and 29 April. Having no comprehension of the political processes through which the new South Africa is being born, he is fazed by kwaZulu’s electoral crisis. It’s easy to forget that in a country with a huge illiteracy rate, and many homes too poor to own radios, millions don’t know what the hell is going on.
Near New Hanover the SADF came rumbling towards me: three tanks with horrible protruding weapons. More than once in the mid-nineteenth century, up these same steep hills, struggled columns of redcoats accompanied by cavalry and countless ox-wagons, their mission to subdue the Zulus. Since this region first became the border area between Zululand and the Colony of Natal, its history has been grimly consistent. Hereabouts the Bambatha uprising of 1906 was put down by Natal’s settlers with a savagery that shocked not only the Colonial Office in London but whites elsewhere in South Africa. Here, too, there was extreme unrest among farmworkers during the late 1920s and at intervals thereafter – unrest that is being replicated as I write.
New Hanover is a prosperous little town occupying a well-wooded slope above the main road and surrounded by large fertile farms. In the small hotel’s ladies bar I was shown a smudgy, much-photocopied leaflet which I had already seen in Durban.
A terrible conflict is inevitable. Our crisis is only a microcosm for the macrocosmic racial assault taking place worldwide on everything the white man has built. The assault is driven by a no-name communism that is far from dead and involves Western collusion on a scale largely unsuspected. The forces behind it are such that black rioters and terrorists can break thousands of windows and kill thousands of innocent whites, but the international media will blast the world over the breaking of a single window by the AWB, who have killed no one. The AWB is preparing for a war involving firepower and firearm training must be given.
Signed Dr van Rensburg, Vereeniging
Said an English-speaker, ‘Now they’re trying to call up the commandos for security duties around the election. Do they think we’re going to leave our places unguarded, for the kaffirs to grab? Bloody fools!’
Said an Afrikaner, ‘Any kaffir coming near my land, I shoot him dead on the spot!’
This is not bombast; recently an Afrikaner shot dead five unarmed youths trying to raid his henhouse.
Pietermaritzburg, 13 April
The State of Emergency is coinciding with the closing down of Pietermaritzburg’s 2,000-bed Edenvale Hospital because of an indefinite nurses’ strike. More than 700 patients have been moved to other hospitals, already overstretched, and the sixty-three abandoned babies in the children’s ward have been temporarily adopted by the non-striking white staff: doctors, social workers, administrators. (The number of abandoned babies is one more symptom of black demoralization.) Eight months ago strike action was brewing and perhaps it’s no coincidence that it has happened now, during this time of general turmoil. In turn, it is aggravating white jitteriness. A strike-closed hospital rings alarm bells; in stable societies this sort of thing is not allowed to happen. And today the kwaZulu/Natal ambulance and emergency services have also gone on strike because they are paid only half the wages of their colleagues in other provinces.
Since last weekend twenty-three people have been murdered in nearby townships. When a joint SAP/SADF patrol intervened in a kwaMancinza battle the factions stopped fighting for just long enough to fire more than 300 shots at the security forces.
These days, few whites are seen in town centres. My English-speaking friends admit, ‘We are in retreat’ – shopping hurriedly, not strolling around the pleasant parks or meeting friends for leisurely sessions in Pietermaritzburg’s cosy little coffee shops. However, many more blacks are visible; hawkers trade everywhere, including on the wide steps of the municipal offices and court house, where they assert ‘equality’ by spreading woven blankets and crocheted tablecloths on the ornamental shrubs.
Early this morning, as I pushed Chris along one-way Church Street, an oldish thin woman, coughing painfully, was spreading her wares on the pavement: red and green apples, oranges, pears and small bottles labelled ‘whisky’ or ‘gin’ or ‘vodka’ and containing God-knows-what home-distilled hooch. Young women were settling their babies into cardboard cartons for the day; many speak good English (hawkers tend to be among the better educated) but none is at present disposed to discuss politics. When I overtook a well-dressed woman, carrying an expensive leather handbag over one arm and a huge wooden box on her head, she called after me – ‘Are you the Irish lady?’ Six filthy little street boys were tying ANC posters to every other lamp-standard. They looked depraved, with old cruel faces, and their leader wielded a sharpened bicycle spoke; only these juvenile desperadoes are unafraid to perform this task in kwaZulu/Natal. What does the new South Africa hold for them?
Towards noon, at the junction of Boshoff and Bulwer streets, roads were being blocked off by yellow SAP armoured vehicles while eight well-armed soldiers on motorbikes cruised up and down. A pair of girl hawkers on a corner fumbled nervously as they packed up their few boxes of fruit and the packets from which cigarettes are sold singly. They hastened away as I heard cheerful chanting and saw an ANC Women’s League march approaching, led by three youngish women bearing an enormous white banner with the legend: ONE CHICKEN IN EVERY POT, ONE HOUSE FOR EVERY FAMILY, ONE CAR IN EVERY DRIVEWAY. (Is a car really more important than education and medical care? Or was this a deliberate tease, playing on current white fears?) The 150 or so women and a dozen men were escorted by almost as many troops and police. Joining the march, I noticed that a remarkable number of low-ranking, poorly paid KZP officers wear costly gold watches.
The women welcomed me jovially and we walked in hot sun for an hour, past the railway station, up a long hill to the rallying point on an open grassy space in a not very affluent ‘white’ area. From their neat gardens, residents with blank expressions watched our passing. Their more nervous neighbours peered through windows protected by newly installed security grilles.
What my companions told me came as no surprise. That shorthand phrase ‘political violence’ veils the terrible complexity of the townships’ present bloodiness. Those communities live all the time on the edge of anarchy, tormented by faction feuds, taxi wars, drug wars, land wars. A political crisis merely takes off all the brakes; then conflicts with multiple roots are labelled ‘political violence’. An overweight woman on my right, gallantly panting her way uphill, said, ‘It’s not the elections have brought us to this. It’s forty-five years of overcrowding and poverty. But now things will be better. Buthelezi can’t stop destiny.’
Other marchers had come by other routes and this was quite a large rally; unfortunately all the long, impassioned speeches were in Zulu.
Today a team of seven international mediators, led by Lord Carrington and Mr Henry Kissinger, arrived in Jo’burg to tackle the ANC/IFP impasse. Their appearance on the scene has occasioned much hilarity. A planeload of foreigners imagining they can solve this peculiarly South African problem – hey man, that’s crazy!
The same, 14 April
This afternoon the international mediators departed, having had not a single meeting with anyone. (I’d like to be a fly on the wall of their aeroplane.) Neither the ANC nor the Nats were prepared even to consider postponing the elections and without postponement high on the agenda the IFP refused to negotiate. End of silly story.
Last Monday seven young black men, distributing voter-education pamphlets from a minibus in rural kwaZulu, were murdered. None had any link with a political party; Natal Pamphlet Distributors had hired them for that reason. A local Inkatha chief told them no voting would be allowed in kwaZulu and ordered their deaths – after some two hours of torture. One 19-year-old, aptly named Lucky Mkhwanazi, escaped by feigning death after his head had been hacked with a panga and two of his fingers shot off. It took him forty-eight hours to walk the fifty miles back to Durban; no one would stop to give him a lift. When Natal Pamphlet Distributors reported the team’s disappearance on Monday evening the KZP refused to investigate. The bodies were found only at noon on Tuesday, by a special Pretoria-based SAP unit. Thanks to Lucky’s evidence, the chief and five other men are now in jail. Had he not survived, no one would have been arrested. It’s easy to get away with murder in kwaZulu/Natal.
It was odd to read in the Natal Witness, amidst various accounts of undetected or unpunished murders, a paragraph headed ‘Man Fined for Hitting Lamb at Auction’ – in Arkansas, USA.
This evening, in the large crowded bar of Tommy’s hotel, at least half the customers didn’t bother to watch the vigorously hyped TV debate between President de Klerk and Mr Mandela. This imported stunt seemed meaningless – a Government of National Unity (GNU) has already been accepted as the way forward. It put both men in a false position, performing live in a TV duel that flatly contradicted GNU’S reconciliatory objective. President de Klerk, an experienced professional politician, was of course the more polished performer though his English is less fluent than Mr Mandela’s. (Both were using their second language.) The latter, aware that his hardline followers rage against this demeaning debate with a man they despise, too often attacked the President personally in an un-Mandela-like way. Much dirty linen was dragged out of both laundry baskets, a tactic not calculated to lower tension. But this is all part of the present muddle – seeing a TV confrontation as mandatory during a ‘democratic’ election campaign, however inappropriate it may be.
I’m aware of a growing sense of unreality; we seem to be living in a world of sheer make-believe. One day the IEC announces that elections cannot be held in kwaZulu/Natal, the next day that they can. Meanwhile it has become clear that the elections, nationwide, cannot possibly be ‘free and fair’. Yet the IEC, the main parties and the thousands of international monitors and observers will not dare to declare them unfree and unfair; the repercussions would be, literally, unimaginable. So everyone must pretend that the new South Africa will be a stable, investor-friendly ‘democracy’. And the world’s media, well trained to walk to heel, will not question what really goes on here.
Sadly, Gilbert Hani died yesterday in a Durban hospital at the age of 83. If only he could have lived one more fortnight!