The ‘homelands’ into which blacks were packed … are bursting at the seams, ecologically devastated and in economic despair. The result is that when the government relaxed its influx regulations in the mid-1980s, this dammed-up rural poverty flooded out to the cities.
Allister Sparks, The Mind of South Africa (1991)
Khayelitsha covers I don’t know how many acres of the sandy Cape Flats – enough acres to make square miles. You see its edges from the N2 motorway: a classic shanty city, pullulating with people, the frail dwellings cobbled together out of bits of this and that, litter-strewn beyond one’s worst nightmare, apparently an instant monument to desperation, destitution and despair. The population is said to be at least half a million – perhaps closer to a million? No one knows and not that many care. All the time the numbers increase. The unemployment rate is around 80 per cent, though job-seeking prompted the migration – you don’t create a shanty city for fun or to oblige the ANC. (Many Capetonians accuse the ANC of enticing their Xhosa followers to the Western Cape to counterbalance the unreliable Coloured vote.) Most white and Coloured Capetonians speak of Khayelitsha with fear and disdain, as do many blacks from the older townships. It is supposed to be, and probably is, a dangerous place for whites.
One of my new friends, a young English-speaking woman doctor, works on Mondays in Khayelitsha’s day hospital on the township’s periphery. (There is, of course, no ‘real’ hospital.) Not everyone approves of Mary’s continuing to work there post-Hani, given the palpable heightening of tension. But in a hospital staffed only by overworked nurses a doctor’s attention is, in Mary’s view, ‘a human right’. She agreed to take me with her one Monday morning and having seen the facilities (an improvement on many African countries’ state hospitals, but that’s not saying much), I wandered into Khayelitsha.
I had done some forward planning. In such places it is best not to seem a curious sightseer, gawping at local miseries, but to have a purpose. So I was carrying my jungle-trousers – after more than 5,000 miles of saddle-friction, between Nairobi and Cape Town, major repairs were needed. Ostensibly I was visiting Khayelitsha in search of a seamstress.
Where narrow sandy alleyways wriggle between shacks the vibes conveyed a guarded neutrality rather than hostility. My initial enquiries were thwarted because no one spoke English. Then Phineas approached me, a small sad youngish man with a broken camera who wondered if I could mend it. I confessed that I’m pushed to change a light bulb – someone emphatically not in the camera-mending league. He nevertheless invited me into his two-roomed tin shack, the living room furnished with a couple of camp chairs and a small table holding a Primus stove, three saucepans and a few plates.
The chipboard walls had been carefully papered, floor to ceiling, with bright magazine pictures. The other room held only two single beds: one for the four children, one the marital couch. Phineas’s wife was away in Cape Town trying to sell the shopping bags she weaves from unpicked fertilizer sacks.
Phineas admitted to being an ex-policeman. After six years in the force his nerve broke – ‘everyone wants to kill you’ – and he joined the ANC and moved to Khayelitsha as an ‘organizer’. Joining the ANC was for him, I gathered, an ‘insurance-policy’ move rather than a conversion. However, it is no protection against the PAC, who particularly dislike black policemen (or even ex-policemen) so Phineas confines himself to MK-controlled sections. He advised me to do the same. ‘The PAC keep away from this side, here is safe. Khayelitsha is a very big place – so big! But without amenities, very bad for children. Toilet dirt comes onto the roads, in summer you can smell it from the N2 and people say we live like animals. How would they live, without amenities?’
Phineas had found an expensive camera (in Khayelitsha, read ‘stolen’ for ‘found’) and hoped to be able to earn something as a photographer: ‘I am good at that and people like photographs.’ He showed me the broken camera with tears in his eyes. ‘Maybe I should have stayed with the police, there I had a little money, now we have nothing. But I was afraid. Things have got very bad. There is too much killing. Lately two constables were necklaced here. My wife liked me to leave. She was afraid, day and night. She said it is better to be alive, with no money.’
Phineas couldn’t direct me to a seamstress. ‘But you ask, people will tell you. Here are many women with Singers, liking to sew for money.’
I crossed a dusty, rubble-rough wasteland on which youths were kicking a football. They paused and stared and laughed mockingly; a few shouted something that wasn’t a greeting. The sky was cloudless, the sun brilliant, the air clear – Peninsular pollution is spasmodic, wind-controlled. A superb mountain range overlooks the Cape Flats, its jagged grandeur accentuating the immediate squalor. A few miles away, beyond bushy dunes, are the long sandy beaches of False Bay. Khayelitsha could be (maybe one day will be) a desirable residential area.
A few boys and girls, aged tennish, approached and smiled uncertainly as we passed. Then I turned and asked about a seamstress. They giggled and said nothing. Unfolding my holey trousers, I used extravagant sign-language. They shrieked with laughter, the holes being in an amusing area, then beckoned me to follow them and led me into a maze of laneways beyond the wasteland. There I was delivered to a group of young men and women, the latter queuing for water by a standpipe, one of the former laundering clothes in a plastic baby-bath. It is always surprising to find African males attending to domestic chores; but these, it emerged later, were ANC activists.
All these young people spoke English more or less fluently. I was warmly welcomed, offered a drink of water, closely questioned about my identity and reasons for visiting Khayelitsha. I told the truth: a travel writer from Ireland, frustrated by being so cut off from blacks in a mainly black country – reason enough for visiting Khayelitsha. It was at once apparent that they believed me.
One handsome young man, tall and well built with dreadlocks (unusual here) remarked, ‘You’ve come to a safe area, other parts could be dangerous for you – don’t walk far alone, one of us can go with you.’ He was holding his youngest brother by the hand, a subdued-looking 5-year-old. Later I learned that nine months ago their mother was shot dead by the SAP during a night raid (an arms search) on their shack. The little fellow, with his 9-year-old sister and 12-year-old brother, were sleeping in the adjoining bed and saw their mother die.
Mrs Mgidlana was the nearest seamstress, in M948 Site D. (All but the newest shacks are numbered.) The Mgidlanas’ compound is upmarket: three shacks of two rooms each, the façades painted in green and white stripes. And their bigger-than-average plot allows them to grow a few vegetables and a papaya tree. However, given an extended family of twenty-seven, three shacks hardly represent luxury.
Mr and Mrs Mgidlana are elderly, he half-crippled by rheumatism, she by childhood polio. Being fervent Jehovah’s Witnesses, they spent some time trying to save my soul, very gently and compassionately. Then they gave up on that and offered me lunch: pap and a stew made of something’s (a goat’s?) intestines. Evidently they are prosperous: not many Khayelitsha folk eat at lunchtime. In Umtata they had owned a textile factory employing forty women. Sanctions killed it – unlike white fruit exporters, blacks were unable to organize sanctions-busting. Then they and most of the staff, whose families had been largely dependent on their wages, moved to Khayelitsha.
‘So were sanctions wrong, a mistake?’
Emphatically and in unison they said, ‘No!’ – and Mrs Mgidlana laughed. ‘You expected us to say yes because in your world money comes first! Here we have learned this is not so. Freedom comes first. But you people have always had it so you can’t understand … It was good, the world joining us in our struggle. For us and our workers sanctions were bad – yoh-yoh, very bad! But necessary, to frighten the government. And now Madiba is free and soon we’ll have the vote!’
Mr Mgidlana was considering me thoughtfully. Then he said, ‘Writing this book, you need to live here for a little time. Looking for a few hours is no good. You need to share our days, so you can write how it feels.’
My heart bounded with joyful hope. ‘But is that possible?’
‘It can be arranged,’ said Mr Mgidlana. ‘I’ll call people.’ Stiffly he stood up, with the aid of a crutch, and limped away.
The people he called were formidable: ten MK heavies whose AK-47s, one intuited, lay not far away. Politely they all shook hands while viewing me with extreme disfavour. Once in a while I have encountered as tough a bunch of men, but nothing tougher. They crowded the small room, six of them sharing with me a sofa made for four. Suspiciously and aggressively they grilled me, scrutinizing my passport page by page, discussing in Xhosa my publisher’s ‘To Whom It May Concern’ letter, demanding to see my notebook and passing it round. Who was paying me? That seemed of major importance. The freelance writer’s way of life baffled them. Ditto the desire of a white to live, however briefly, in Khayelitsha. ‘Here’s no hotel,’ said the leader – a tall, broad, scowling character. ‘Here’s no bathrooms or restaurants or swimming-pools or tennis courts – all those things you need.’
At that I flipped. Thus far I had been ingratiating, on the defensive. Now I went into the attack, forcefully pointing out that the needs of South African whites are not the needs of all whites, that my main need at the moment was to be with blacks.
An uneasy pause followed. Then the heavies withdrew to the yard, led by Mr Mgidlana. A twenty-minute indaba ensued. Watching through the doorway, I noted that Mr Mgidlana’s status is high. Finally the heavies gave in. Four of them returned to say that we were going, now, to head office in Cape Town (the ANC head office). There was none of the usual sauntering to and fro, arguing about transport, then hanging around waiting for it. With military briskness I was escorted to the tarred road where a battered kombi-taxi was requisitioned and away we rattled – having been joined by Georgina, a remarkable 19-year-old who was soon to become an important person in my life. She speaks fluent English but on this journey didn’t use it: the MK aren’t into small talk.
The Western Cape head office is a rambling old three-storey building on Victoria Street with medium-level security in the big drab entrance hall. Normally, though not when escorted by the MK, one signs a grubby visitors’ book before being handed a pin-on permit-to-enter label. Upstairs, a labyrinth of corridors connects countless cramped offices created by the partitioning of large high-ceilinged rooms. There is an aura – not misleading – of earnest endeavour and serious disorganization.
I felt slightly like a captive as the heavies ushered me into an enormous conference room, its only furniture a very long table and rows of metal chairs. Posters covered the walls, most depicting either Comrade Mandela or Comrade Hani with quotations from their speeches. Like the rest of the building, this chamber is functional to the point of asceticism. Here no money has been wasted; among a certain section of the ANC such asceticism is a point of honour, a mark of their ideological distance from the capitalist consumer society.
Three senior officials were summoned: charming gentlemen, courteous, tactful, kindly. Their grilling didn’t feel like a grilling though it was no less thorough than the MK’s. Under a regime whose Dirty Tricks Brigade is endlessly innovative and extremely ruthless, no chances can be taken. When asked about previous links with the ANC I mentioned subscribing annually to the London office and receiving their newsletter. And of course, I added as an afterthought, I’d met Kader Asmal when he lived in Dublin. (He now lives in Cape Town.)
All expressions changed and one man bounced to his feet. ‘Come, we’ll ring Kader!’ Which we did, from an adjacent office, and five minutes later the MK had been told I could spend eight days in Khayelitsha, as their protégé, starting a week hence – a delay needed to spread the word that I had been guaranteed trustworthy. Among a population lacking newspapers, telephones or a regular postal service, it takes time to circulate information.
On the way back to Khayelitsha the heavies loosened up, becoming almost chatty. Although ‘chatty’ doesn’t quite suit either their conversational style or their subject matter in this case – SAP excesses. Before leaving them I received my orders. On the following Monday at 9 a.m. I was to wait outside the hospital for my two-Comrade female bodyguard – Georgina would be one. Under no circumstances was I to go roaming alone around any part of Khayelitsha. Should misfortune befall me, they would have to take the unpleasant consequences. Being a friend of a friend of Comrade Mandela, I was now seen as a valuable commodity.
At the appointed hour I stood waiting, as instructed. When Georgina and Lucretia arrived at 10.20 they made no reference to the eighty-minute hiatus and I knew I was back in African territory, mentally as well as geographically.
During the next week I was never alone, day or night, except when on the loo and even then someone guarded the door. My main minders were Georgina and Lucretia, relieved briefly at intervals by another pair of equally vigilant, affectionate and intelligent young women.
Georgina and Lucretia have a problem in common: their MK partners, who returned from exile in 1991, are in Pollsmoor prison awaiting trial for the possession of illegal weapons. Georgina is philosophical about Albany’s misfortune. ‘He isn’t being tortured, that’s what would really upset me. And my revolutionary fervour keeps me going!’ I half-suspect her of glorying in this situation; certainly having a hero-lover enhances her status among the Comrades.
Lucretia, however, is inconsolable. She doesn’t lack would-be Tony-substitutes (uninhibited in their pursuit by my presence) but firmly tells them all she wants to go to bed only with Tony. One night she confided, ‘I love him too much to enjoy anyone else. He loves me the same way. We trust each other. How would he feel, when he comes out, if he heard I’d enjoyed someone else?’
Tony and Albany could be out on bail were R800 (R400 each) available. There seemed to be a role here for me but my hand was stayed by the young men’s lawyer. Some people are safer in than out.
From the station we walked some two miles to Blossom’s shack, my progress through the maze of alleyways causing quite a sensation. Often we stopped for me to be explained (in Xhosa) and to be introduced (in English) to various significant local personalities. After heavy rain during the night many stretches of track were completely under water – stinking water, where sewage visibly bubbled up from defective pipes through defective manholes. (‘Personholes,’ corrected Georgina – she is at that stage.) When we met three toddlers happily splashing, there was a delay. My minders shooed them back to their respective shacks and delivered punchy lectures on the hazards of playing in sewage. These ANC Youth League leaders have a well-developed sense of civic responsibility.
Some laneways are road-width, their verges patchily green now the rains have come, and occasional small trees and shrubs alleviate the grimness of the dwellings. Everywhere laundry billows in the breeze, its abundance outside minute shacks telling of the overcrowding within. The universal African devotion to personal cleanliness is unconquerable, which is why South Africa’s shanty cities never seem like slums. The word ‘slum’ implies dirt, slovenly disorder and bad smells – not features of black homes, however littered and sewage-scented their external environment may be.
Twenty-one-year-old Blossom was chosen as my hostess because most of her family had returned to the Transkei for a funeral, leaving a double bed available for my minders and me. (Nine of us slept in the two-roomed shack and eight had gone to the funeral, so normally this dwelling sleeps fourteen – somehow.)
We found Blossom in her doorway, sweeping sand out of the living room. Khayelitsha is built on fine silvery sand, the incursion of which into dwellings requires them to be swept out every few hours. This corrugated-iron shack is painted bright green and Blossom made a pretty picture in the doorway, wearing scarlet pants and a canary-yellow shirt-blouse. She welcomed me with hugs and kisses as though I were some long-lost friend. In the living-room-cum-kitchen three small beat-up sofas (beds at night) occupy most of the floor space. Behind the sofa facing the door is the kitchen area, four-feet wide with crockery neatly arranged on a miniature dresser and everything else (not that there is much else) stored in the cupboard below. The cooker is a reeking home-made oil stove – a two-gallon paint tin, which also serves as a space heater when the temperature drops at sunset. The fumes from this hazardously flaming contraption give all who huddle around it sore eyes and throats – and thus was solved my main Khayelitsha problem. The Xhosa are a proud people; it is offensive for a guest to supply food even if that means the guest must go hungry for a week. But I knew a farewell gift of a super-de-luxe oil stove would not be offensive.
It seemed my arrival had been eagerly awaited and soon Blossom’s shack was packed. Little welcoming gifts were brought: a strangely shaped stone from the Transkei – a model bicycle made of wire, perfect in every detail – a model Xhosa stool, carved from driftwood. Comrades set about teaching me essential Xhosa phrases and how to toyi-toyi. The latter lesson I found easier than the former though it does test one’s stamina. These Comrades take their toyi-toying very seriously; there must be no cheating with only one hop and that double hop is what wears out the novice. Then it was decided I should be given a Xhosa name. After some debate (in Xhosa) I became Comrade Noxolo, meaning ‘Peace’, which touched me deeply. As did the conferring of the Comrade title, marking my acceptance as a reliable friend, a person with the right attitude. But there were admonitions, too. I must be disciplined, stay close to my minders, obey them. Regrettable things happen in Khayelitsha. Only two months ago a young Englishman, a volunteer social worker, had been shot in the back and head while playing soccer in the Community Church Centre. No one knew by whom or why. ‘Except we can guess,’ said Blossom. ‘By the PAC, because he was white.’
Part of me couldn’t take these warnings too seriously; people are murdered in their beds in rural Ireland. Granted, a current of anti-white feeling is now running through the townships but traditionally, in South Africa, anti-white-ism has been strictly political – not racist. Since the ANC was founded in 1912 it has been consistently non-racist, apart from a half-hearted flirtation with Garveyism in the 1920s. This is its greatest moral (and now political) strength. Consistently, ANC leaders have stressed the crucial difference between black Africa, comparatively recently colonized, and South Africa where the White Tribe took root in 1652. Zimbabwe, for instance, was colonized a mere twenty years before the founding of the ANC.
On that first evening, sitting back in one corner of a sagging sofa, I knew an extraordinary sense of relief and release. I felt it physically as well as emotionally and mentally; my body relaxed as though after a Turkish bath and massage; I was on every level at ease. But from what had I been released? I thought about that later, lying between my sleeping minders. Released from unreality, I decided. The artificiality of white South Africa, to which the habitual pattern of living institutionalized by apartheid has been largely confining me, sets up a tension both hard to describe and hard to tolerate. Logically, in Khayelitsha, the white guest should have been feeling more tense. Instead, I felt liberated and soothed. Amidst the poverty, the suspicion, the fear – of police raids, rival black factions, hunger, disease – the blacks relate to their friends with a vitality, a spontaneity, a warmth and humour not often found among South Africa’s whites. Have those whites self-destructed, by choosing to live as they do? Their materially comfortable (though no longer emotionally comfortable) world rests on such morally rotten foundations that one often senses a corrosive shame somewhere deep down inside them. Hence those endless, compulsive, synthetic ‘justifications’ of apartheid. By now the majority must know that their affluence depends on blacks being ruthlessly exploited. ‘Exploited’ can seem a stale, weary word, so often angrily shouted in absurd contexts that its repetition irritates. Yet in South Africa it would be an affectation to look for a fresher equivalent. Here exploitation was, and remains, the central issue.
Next morning I felt integration had gone a stage too far when Happy, a local ANC Youth League leader, sprang it on me that a rally had been arranged for that afternoon – to be addressed by Comrade Noxolo, who has always been phobia-afraid of speaking in public. But somehow this occasion was different. Throughout the morning butterflies gyrated within, yet when the time came concern for the new South Africa overcame my phobia and I spoke from the heart for thirty minutes.
Not everything I said went down well with the rank and file. Commending political tolerance, as one of democracy’s vital organs, does not bring a standing ovation from Youth Leaguers. To most of them ‘democracy’ means, quite simply, getting the SAP off your back and doing what you feel like doing. Among this segment of the population, the new government will be celebrated not because it guarantees Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Assembly and so on but because it will secure power for the ANC – albeit shared power, until 1999. Given this mindset, anyone seeking to reduce the ANC vote by normal preelection campaigning can only be seen as an enemy. I don’t envy any Nat speakers who may venture to hold election rallies in Khayelitsha.
‘Middle-class’ shacks like Blossom’s have flush lavatories some six yards away in double ‘sentry-boxes’, each serving two households. A tap on the outside wall provides clean, drinkable water, no problem there. Given the massive influx to the Cape Flats during the past decade, it could be argued the authorities haven’t done too badly. Not a PC comment, but inevitably I contrasted Khayelitsha with the so-called compounds around Lusaka where a drought-driven influx took place in 1991/92 and the authorities couldn’t begin to cope. However, my flicker of ‘let’s be fair to the whites’ was speedily quenched by Lucretia. ‘This is a rich country, Zambia is a poor country! Now you’re being silly!’ I relish the Youth Leaguers’ directness. They are awed neither by my age nor my tenuous Madiba connection; they say what they think, never arrogantly but always decisively.
Early on my first morning I committed a grievous faux pas by quietly slipping out to wash my face and hands at the tap. Those few neighbours lucky enough to have jobs were on the move and I exchanged greetings with several women filling buckets at their own taps. Later, Blossom was appalled: the neighbours would think her too mean to heat my washing water. In vain I protested that at home I always wash in cold water – that I prefer it. Obviously Blossom and my minders didn’t believe me and anyway that wasn’t the point. Blossom’s reputation as a hostess had been blemished. (Even in hot regions of black Africa, I then recalled, one’s village hostess insists on providing a basin of steaming washing water.) Moreover, I had been insubordinate, I had left the shack on my own. Meekly I apologized for both offences and promised not to repeat them.
Blossom is a qualified hairdresser; her framed certificate hangs on a wall beside a poster of some famous Afro-American rock star whose name escapes me. However, being a qualified hairdresser in Khayelitsha doesn’t get you very far; not many can afford hairdos. Five customers per week is Blossom’s average, at R4 for a three-hour session – three hours because water heats slowly on a paint-tin stove. Then a plastic tub is put on a tin chair, in that small space between the three sofas, and the process is under way. At the final stage Blossom’s younger sister, 15-year-old Beauty, assists, holding a pot of sticky stuff with which the coiffure is completed. (Only reckless parents name a baby ‘Beauty’ but in this case the gamble came off.)
To outsiders, Khayelitsha can seem an undifferentiated mass of jobless, hopeless, feckless poor – a threatening mass, with strong criminal leanings. Yet like any other human community it contains all sorts. No doubt having a writer-in-residence quickened the pace of Blossom’s social life: each evening, activist groups of both sexes and all ages gathered to meet Comrade Noxolo. It exhilarated me to hear them spiritedly arguing about the new South Africa in terms that would take the average white way out of their intellectual depth. But it distressed me to find people like Aki, Muriel, Eddie, Antonia, Pius, Sam, William, living in Khayelitsha. This is illogical, even snobbish; I should be equally distressed to find anyone living in Khayelitsha. However, those individuals – if one must be snobbish – were people on (or above) my own educational level and of my own middle-class sort. When Antonia and I were tête-à-tête in her shack, my minders having left her in charge for an hour, I discussed this illogical distress. She laughed. ‘Yes, we should be living at ease in Claremont or Obs – and we would be if we could choose! But for Khayelitsha that would be bad, I hope we help to keep up standards. Maybe not standards of honesty, in your terms – to survive we all have to be dishonest, one way or another. I mean standards to do with our social life, with human relations, what we call ubuntu. We can’t do much, Khayelitsha has to be anarchic, given its problems – especially those parts you’re not allowed to visit. But it might be even worse if we weren’t around.’
Khayelitsha’s élite are critical of the Western Cape ANC leadership for not keeping their faithful township followers in touch with the progress of the current all-party (well, almost all-party) negotiations. Of necessity these are slow, opaque and tortuous, liable to being delayed by petty disputes or bouts of sulkiness on one side or the other. ‘But also they’re heroic,’ said Pius, a retired teacher from the Ciskei. He was referring to a general determination, among all the participants, not to let the legacy of apartheid poison the future. And something truly remarkable is happening, as representatives of all colours and most ideologies debate and manoeuvre, month after month, seeking workable compromises. Said Pius, ‘Their honourable task should be explained to everyone, particularly the young. It should be held up to them as a model of conflict resolution without violence. Instead, we have lawlessness and suspicions growing in the townships because this delay is not understood.’
William, a fully qualified electrician able to find only occasional odd jobs, voiced some (widespread) doubts about the final outcome of the negotiations. Is this carefully organized transfer of power, blessed by the capitalist West, likely to lead to rich whites sharing their wealth with poor blacks? Is it not much more likely that the new multicoloured rulers will go into a mutually profitable huddle and tailor a new South Africa to fit their own ambitions? A South Africa only ostensibly ‘democratic’, paying only lip-service to the poor, yet pleasing to a West that feigns concern for ‘human rights’ – unless, of course, their protection impedes ‘commercial interests’.
‘Is the Struggle really over?’ wondered William, ‘The star of democracy has risen above the horizon – but what next? Will exploitation stop because apartheid has been outlawed? I don’t believe it! Exploitation started long before apartheid was invented and you’ll see it going on long after apartheid is smashed.’
Within forty-eight hours, because I felt so at home in one corner, Khayelitsha no longer felt like a shanty city. Even my perception of ‘shacks as wretched dwellings’ had changed – though during heavy rain on my second night multiple roof leaks forced Blossom, my minders and me to join the five in the less leaky living room. But one soon comes to appreciate the countless small but strenuous efforts made to enhance people’s homes and immediate surroundings. At sunrise a man down the laneway could be seen deftly rearranging the white pebbles with which he creates an astonishing variety of elaborate geometrical designs on the sand of his plot. Wallpapers are ingeniously devised using printers’ discards (sheets of obsolete advertisements) or factories’ discards (defective cigarette packets, soup-tin labels, soap wrappings). Bits of delicately carved driftwood hang on either side of a rotting entrance door under rusty eaves. Several poinsettia cuttings are being cherished outside the windowless shack of a widow whose six children, aged 2 to 13, are always neat and clean. Eight months ago, during one of those numerous night raids, the SAP murdered her husband. I photographed the bullet holes in the door; the police offered her R10 (£2) in compensation for the damaged door.
This is not a broken-spirited community, demoralized by poverty and brutality. Khayelitsha is no monument to despair, as it seems from the N2, but a monument to resilience, creativity and courage.
That is the positive side; inevitably Khayelitsha induces mood-swings. Moving out from ‘my’ corner, we visited areas of utter misery where the one-room shacks could be demolished with a bare fist and are so closely huddled together there is scarcely space to walk between. The interiors are unfurnished, the children puny and listless, the adult faces set in lines of hopelessness, the future – no matter what colour the government – seen only as a threat. These are the truly destitute and there are many thousands of them. In Blossom’s less deprived area, migrants arrived with a little capital and it makes a difference that many are young ANC activists who have faith in the new world that Madiba is preparing for them.
One afternoon at a crossroads we came upon a throng of young women excitedly trying on fashionable garments each bearing a city-centre dry-cleaner’s label. The kombi to which they had been transferred, after the hijacking of the dry-cleaner’s van, stood nearby. The three hijackers were content to collect a few rands for garments worth a few hundred. There were dozens of coats, jackets, skirts, slacks; by local standards these entrepreneurs are now rich and their customers are smartly dressed at prices they can afford. Viewing this enterprise from within Khayelitsha, I failed to see it as either criminal or immoral. I’ve always been a Robin Hood fan.
Those young men are, of course, exceptionally daring. More usually, people sustain their families through small-scale shoplifting. A common late-afternoon sight is a trestle-table going up outside a shack. Home is the hunter with, for example, two small bottles of shampoo, a tube of toothpaste, three bars of soap, a small packet of biscuits, a small jar of jam. Everything is small: when shoplifting, you don’t go for bulk. These goods, sold at 25 per cent of the supermarket prices, enable the ‘thief’ to buy basic foodstuffs for the family’s supper at one of Khayelitsha’s numerous spaza shops (tiny shops in people’s shacks, illegal until 1989).
However, shoplifting is not regarded as a desirable way of subsistence. One young husband, standing behind his trestle at sunset, put it like this: ‘If I could get a job in the bakery [where two of his friends work] I’d be so happy. With regular money every week and no fear. This way of work, you live all day in fear of prison. The white people call us lazy thieves. It makes me sad. I’m not lazy, I want work and to have no worry. Do these people want us to let our families starve? How do they expect us to live without money. In the past we lived without it, growing food, keeping cattle. Now we’re without land and must come here, hoping to work. When there’s no work we must still feed our families.’
Day after day – almost hour after hour – people begged me to find them a job. They pleaded with the sort of urgency that makes one feel guilty about one’s inability to help. Don’t I know someone in Cape Town who needs a maid, a gardener? Or someone who could employ an electrician, a hairdresser, a plumber, a tailor, a bricklayer, a tinsmith, a weaver, a shoemaker, a carpenter, a baker, a seamstress? In Khayelitsha live many who are skilled yet hungry; where little cash circulates, local jobs are few. A favourite white theme – ‘most blacks only pretend to look for work, they wouldn’t stick with a job if they found it’ – has been infuriating me for months past. Now it makes me gibber with rage.
Some old people have reluctantly moved from the Transkei or Ciskei to help support children and grandchildren with their meagre government pensions. One old man caused me a pang every time I passed him. All day he sat in the sun on a Coca-Cola crate and his gaze was fixed on the past, on the mountainous spaces of home. That is not my fancy. When I asked, ‘Why does he look so terribly sad?’ Georgina suggested, ‘Talk to him, he went to a mission school, he speaks nice English.’
He spoke very nice English, slow through disuse but carefully correct. ‘I am sad because I love my home. It is peaceful there. The land is wide. My ancestors are there. Here is a foreign land and no peace. But my family need me. I can pay some money for my grandsons’ schooling. They are clever, but without my pension they have no fees. If they get a good education they can do well in our new future. So I left the mountains behind.’
Wednesday 16 June was Soweto Day, the anniversary of the 1976 student uprising. That event may be described as the conception of the new South Africa and during the protracted parturition there has been too much haemorrhaging. But surely the negotiating obstetricians must soon safely deliver the infant, despite that vicious alliance of black and white right-wingers still hoping for – and threatening – a stillbirth.
A fleet of ANC-hired buses took us for free to the ANC Youth League rally at Guguletu’s rugby stadium. Instead of driving straight up the N2 we took a roundabout route, via Mitchells Plain and Nyanga; the buses’ collective health was poorly and they preferred to avoid traffic-cop attention. On the way we passed a district from which whites were moved under the Group Areas Act; an abandoned DRC church, derelict and vandalized, marked the spot. Comrade Noxolo was honoured by being put in the front seat and entrusted with our group’s huge SACP flag to be flown from the window. A trivial task, you might think, but considerable muscular effort is required to hold a large flag steady in a fast-moving vehicle. My companions sang loudly and the mood was euphoric on this last Soweto Day to be celebrated under white rule. A year hence, if all goes well, 16 June will be an official national holiday – not, as now, unofficial, with whites still trying to run the country normally in defiance of the fact that most blacks take the day off.
One song made me feel slightly queasy: a rollicking MK chant in praise of the AK-47, sung with gusto. While struggling to control the flag, I also struggled to understand the emotions inspiring this chant. If, for centuries, you have been forced to accept the domination of well-armed whites, then there is indeed a horrible inexorable logic about the possession of arms being glorified. And about the particular weapon you can most easily get hold of (from Mozambique: US$40 each) being seen both as a liberation symbol and a guarantee that Whitey won’t ever again have all the arms. A depressing development, to those of the ahimsa persuasion. But violence does breed violence.
In an already crowded stadium the ANC flag flew at half-mast from a goal post above a flat-bed truck equipped with a temperamental public-address system. The pitch had been turned to mud by a night’s rain but the sun shone brightly, the massed youth in their most colourful garments looked like a mobile patchwork quilt and the atmosphere was effervescent – revolutionary in a cheerful way. I saw only one other white, an exuberantly charming young American woman named Amy Biehl* with whom I talked briefly; for almost a year she has been working in Guguletu on a voter education programme. She speaks fluent Xhosa (how I envy her!) and is obviously loved by her black friends. We made an appointment to meet in the Heidelberg on my return to Cape Town.
My minders thought it fitting that I should join the geriatrics, a few score elderly men and women occupying the only available seats – the stadium’s ‘stand’, an unsteady wooden contraption singularly unsuitable for those whose bones take a long time to mend. Having deposited me between Mr and Mrs Mdolela – they live near Blossom and understood about ‘minding’ me – Georgina and Lucretia romped away onto the pitch to salute an MK detachment in camouflage battledress who were marching from the entrance, being loudly cheered. The SAP helicopter, all the time circling overhead, flew much lower when they appeared. This guard of honour was for the main speaker, the Revd Allan Boesak, a Coloured theologian trained in Holland and now one of the ANC’s most prominent Western Cape leaders.
Other speakers included a poet who had been on death row in Pretoria’s notorious Central Prison, so memorably described (including its gallows facilities) by Hugh Lewin in Bandiet. An MK senior officer claimed, wrongly, that MK and the SADF are about to be merged. A young white man, not long returned from exile in Zambia, recalled in lurid detail two MI assassination attempts on his life. An SACP praise-poet wearing tribal dress was traditionally histrionic. An ANC Youth League leader drew loud applause and many ‘Vivas!’ when he spoke of ‘rejecting gutter education and demanding free and compulsory schooling for all’. Many more ‘Vivas!’ greeted his call to the youth to ‘rededicate themselves for the final offensive’ (i.e., the elections). Then Allan Boesak spoke – in English, but using African oratorical devices. Listening to him, I remembered the comment of a white friend who lectures in UWC’s English department. In her view, black students writing in English are at a peculiar disadvantage. Often their tutors criticize them for being repetitive and beating about the bush, not realizing that, in African languages, such ‘flaws’ are cultivated as component parts of an art much admired throughout Africa.
In between speeches, music was provided by Phambili, Chorimba and the Black Sufferers – esteemed musicians, all, but the sound system did not do them justice. A Xhosa dance group drew frenzied applause though they must have been invisible to 90 per cent of the crowd. When Mr Mdolela complained about the lack of political education at such rallies I saw his point. Several Comrades have asked me, ‘What party does de Klerk lead?’ and ‘What does a government do with a cabinet?’ and (perhaps not as naive as it sounds) ‘Do the mines pay the government’s wages?’ Most township youngsters have been involved only in their local politics of protest, akin to warfare. The staid world of conventional national politics, to which they are about to gain access, is terra incognita.
As we all streamed from the stadium, my minders again by my side, a rumour went around that some of our buses had been driven off by the PAC, who were holding a rival rally in Khayelitsha – better attended than ours, we learned later. Many of our buses had indeed vanished, for whatever reason, and the consequent mêlée was soon out of the marshals’ control – a wild struggle to board each vehicle, with little consideration given to geriatrics. Yet there was no ill-temper involved, just impatience – which is odd, given the black attitude to time. Everyone shouted and sang and laughed while pulling and shoving and elbowing each other out of the way. Several slim youths climbed in through windows, grinning triumphantly, and many swarmed onto the roofs. There was no room, on the way home, to unfurl our flag. At breakfast next morning my minders seemed abstracted. (As usual, breakfast was one slice of bread and marge and a cup of herbal tea.) Then abruptly Lucretia told me that I must move to another shack, some distance away. When I registered reluctance, being so very happy chez Blossom, Georgina said, ‘They know you’re here, they say they’ll torch the place if you stay.’
My heart lurched. After a short shocked silence I asked, ‘Who are they?’
‘Pack your things,’ said Lucretia, ‘and we’ll move.’
‘But wait! If my being here is putting people at risk I’d better leave. I don’t want to be responsible for burned homes – or worse …’
‘No!’ said Georgina. ‘We never give in to intimidation. We promised to protect you and we will – don’t be afraid! There’s no problem, we’re in charge, we know how to manage it. We want you to stay. They can’t intimidate us – ever!’
I assumed ‘they’ were the PAC. Of course I may have been wrong; but I lack the courage of investigative journalists and when questions are unwelcome keep my mouth shut.
My new hostess, Ika, a middle-aged physiotherapist, is relatively rich. She worked in Umtata, the Transkei’s capital, until her husband was murdered in Durban by (it is generally believed) an Inkatha hit squad. She then moved to Khayelitsha for the sake of her three beautiful daughters, now aged 17, 19 and 21. ‘I hoped here they could get better schooling and so better jobs. And better schooling was possible, in Cape Town – but so far no jobs.’ The 19-year-old has an adorable and adored 10-month-old son. ‘They get up to mischief when they’ve no work,’ said Ika with a twinkle, cuddling the infant.
In Khayelitsha, as in every artificially constrained and desperately impoverished community, one hears of abused and neglected children. Yet I myself saw no unloved child, however dire a family’s circumstances, and the joy children bring to people’s lives seems like a comforting glow, warming and illuminating shackland. When we visited Lucretia’s home her younger sister’s infant was having his nappy changed by a 15-year-old uncle who dotes extravagantly on his nephew. That lad is very much a Young Lion; but here it seems carrying a baby around, and playing with it in public, does not mar one’s leonine image.
Ika now works in a Mitchells Plain hospital. Externally her four-roomed shack looks ‘average’, with unsteady walls constructed from various substances. Internally it is affluent, with real wallpaper, pretty floor tiles, luxurious armchairs, lace curtains. The living room is dominated by a menagerie of china figures imported from Taiwan. These lions, dogs, zebras, cats, fish and several species of bird are an inexplicable black addiction; hawkers sell them by the roadside and they don’t cost very much – nor should they. Given pride of place in the plywood china cabinet was a small TV set, souvenir of the good old days in Umtata. When/if Khayelitsha is electrified, it will again serve its purpose – and there will be fewer stimulating conversations when the sun sets and oil lamps are lit. Inevitably Ika’s poorer family members have followed her south and the shack sleeps twelve. A niece was ousted from Ika’s bed to make room for me; my minders (now augmented, during nights, by two male MKs) slept in the living room.
Before sleeping, I unloaded my anxiety: did Ika know about the threat to Blossom’s shack? She chuckled. ‘You don’t understand, we all know about everything – we have to. And no one is going to attack my home. We’ve organized things that couldn’t be organized on Blossom’s Site. Don’t worry your head about it. Go peacefully to sleep.’ Which I did. Mine not to reason why, or how or what or where …
Friday is a Pollsmoor prison visiting day and my minders invited me to join their ANC-funded party. I was reminded of expeditions to Northern Ireland’s Maze prison in minibuses provided for relatives by IRA or UDA ‘Prisoners’ Welfare Organizations’. The crucial difference here is the ANC’s role as government-in-waiting, sure of the votes of at least 60 per cent of the population. The ANC was never comparable to the IRA, a paramilitary group without popular support on either side of the border.
Georgina remarked, ‘Soon blacks will no longer be refused gun licences and then jailed for not having them! Hey, man – doesn’t that just sum up the whole apartheid regime!’
When our kombi stopped at a Wynberg supermarket to buy ‘comforts’ I was at last allowed to spend. The most appreciated comforts are cigarettes, Coca-Cola, tea, bread, milk, cornflakes, sticky buns, packet soups and a hideous polony that looks as if it had died of apoplexy.
That was a strange journey; humans adapt rapidly and after my brief immersion in Khayelitsha I found myself looking at the whites’ world through black eyes. Having adjusted to the shacks’ scale and drabness, the brightly painted little bungalows of Wynberg and Retreat seemed like mansions and their modest little gardens like estates. Tokai’s ostentatiously affluent Blue Route shopping mall seemed both morally offensive and a vulgar indicator of where South Africa went politically astray. Georgina, who quite often read my thoughts, said, ‘Now you’re seeing it all the way we see it?’
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Yes, that’s exactly how I’m seeing it.’
‘And it’s upsetting you, you can feel now why we need a revolution.’
‘Definitely you need a revolution, but not a violent one – what would that solve?’
‘You think? You could be right. I don’t want violence – but without justice, soon, how to avoid it? More and more of it. We’re not going to hang around waiting for things to improve slowly, slowly – we’ve been patient too long. We’ll have a revolution that looks like crime getting worse, outsiders won’t see it as a revolution. Do you read Engels? No? But you should – I like him so much! In 1844 he wrote something that fits us now. “Crime is the earliest, crudest, least fruitful form of revolt against degrading poverty and social oppression.” Our new government should hang that on their walls to remind them to hurry up with wealth redistribution. Trotting along on the capitalists’ lead, still saying “Yes baas, no baas” – that won’t work.’
The Pollsmoor barrier lifted casually to admit our familiar vehicle. We parked, then went to sit in the huge, bare, white-walled waiting room with its long rows of hard seats. At one end were lavatories, at the other a kiosk selling cigarettes, crisps, biscuits, sweets, soft drinks known as ‘cooldrinks’ in South Africa. ‘Buy nothing here,’ instructed Lucretia, ‘or you’re supporting the System!’
For forty years the South African government’s survival depended on violent state repression, both overt and covert. Yet security is strangely lax. When I went to the loo, carrying a large bag of comforts, I could have planted a bomb; thus far there had been no security check. But perhaps this isn’t as odd as it seems to an Irishwoman. In 1990 Allister Sparks wrote:
Although the ANC has been the target of several assassinations and assassination attempts, it has never sought to retaliate in this way. It has no hit squad and no hit list. No black person has ever made an attempt on the life of a white South African leader, and President de Klerk and members of his cabinet move about with less security protection than just about any other political leaders in the Western world.
An hour later our group of twelve was summoned by a brown-uniformed Coloured warder shouting Georgina’s name. We were led to the remand wing around the main building: a long high fortress, its red-brown walls blank. The acres of grounds are pleasant enough in an unimaginative municipal way: smooth green lawns, evenly spaced-out shrubs, bright orderly flower-beds. A nearby glory of mountains semi-encircles Pollsmoor – some forested, some stark and sheer, of silver-grey rock. This must be the world’s most magnificently situated prison; anywhere else it would be a five-star hotel.
From a wide flight of steps we entered a cavernous hall through a narrow doorway where the heavily armed warder ignored my extended passport. Nor did anyone check our numerous bags and boxes before we climbed three flights of concrete stairs to another waiting room, small and windowless and reeking of stale cigarette smoke. (Why is that smell not merely repellent but positively depressing?) In this cramped gloom one could empathize with the prisoners’ longing for the sunny spacious beauty beyond these walls.
I drew my minders’ attention to four excellent AIDS-education posters, something too rarely seen in South Africa. Even they – both relatively well informed, Georgina with literary ambitions – were shockingly uninformed about the virus. Yes, they had heard of it – recently the ANC Youth League magazine ran a couple of warning articles – but they tended to dismiss it as more Nat propaganda to demoralize blacks.
At 11.30 precisely we were admitted to a long hall bisected by a glass-and-steel partition, with speaking-holes at two-yard intervals, above a wooden counter – the general effect not unlike a security-conscious bank. Allegedly every conversation is bugged but this didn’t deter Tony from denouncing the remand prisoners’ ill-treatment, especially their being allowed exercise only on Mondays, for one hour. However, the cells are not too crowded, leaving room to do press-ups. He and Albany have been inside for seven months; in three weeks’ time their case will come up at Mitchells Plain magistrates’ court. Having been arrested for illegal possession of firearms, they are now being charged with arson, robbery and assault. A cooked-up charge, they insist, and I met no one in Khayelitsha who disbelieves them. The police commonly bribe false witnesses: not difficult in a destitute community where perjurers may be hired for R200 plus their bus fares to somewhere else. Meanwhile Tony’s and Albany’s families are having to borrow legal fees: R2,180 (£436) to date. Luckily Tony’s secretary mother has a regular salary and Albany’s parents are both in jobs, his father a factory nightwatchman, his mother a domestic worker with a generous madam. The nature of the charges precludes any financial assistance from the ANC which, reasonably enough, distances itself from members accused of criminal offences.
As visitor numbers are unrestricted for remand prisoners, relatives and friends thronged the hall. Everyone seemed to know everyone else and a jolly time was being had by all. Later, Georgina told me the atmosphere was quite different a few years ago. To political or even quasi-political prisoners, the new South Africa promises justice, something hitherto unknown if you happened to be black or a ‘dissident’. Listening to the confusion of voices and languages, and marking the decibel level – always high on black social occasions – I felt sceptical about the effectiveness of that bugging system. At noon a bell clanged and two warders – one white, one black, both brutal-looking – hustled us out. Lucretia’s eyes were brimming as we joined the queue at the food-parcel checkpoint.
Immediately in front of me stood a small, thin, threadbare woman with baby on back and toddler at foot. I wondered why she was queuing; she carried no comforts. The queue was long and slow. Two nasty young warders with blond mini-moustaches and thick necks squeezed every loaf of bread, opened every packet of biscuits, felt every soup sachet, stirred every pot of jam, smelled every bottle of Coca-Cola. Behind their counter rose high strong iron bars through which the prisoners could be seen eagerly crowding forward, thrusting a hand between the bars when their turn came. At last the woman in front of me stepped forward, reached into a blouse pocket and handed over one cigarette. Then she and her husband exchanged quick smiles – smiles of love and reassurance. A lump came to my throat. That was a vignette I shall never forget. Later, as we drove away, she was walking along the verge, carrying the toddler, and I suggested giving her a lift. Georgina, however, said we had no room. Which was almost – but not quite – true.
I had an invitation to Khayelitsha’s Hampstead-equivalent (Site K) where lives Maria, the twice-a-week cleaning-lady (‘house girl’) of a Cape Town friend. This opulent corner is far from my corner and none of the Comrades has ever been there. So complications arose – as they usually do, in Khayelitsha, if you need to organize something. And Georgina and Lucretia being off duty that morning didn’t help; their replacements spoke no English.
Site K homes have electricity, running water and telephones and Maria had asked me to ring, confirming time of arrival. But our nearest telephone was a long taxi-ride away, in a supermarket recently built by a Mitchells Plain tycoon to service Khayelitsha. This vast, oddly Stalinist building stands isolated on an expanse of muddy wasteland, guarded by a glowering black police officer who suspiciously followed us to the telephone – which, rather to my surprise, was unvandalized. When I remarked to Georgina that most Irish inner-city telephones don’t work she laughed and said, ‘You’re lucky, you’ve many – our kids know their families depend on this one so it’s safe!’
Maria would be home by noon, her daughter Clare said, and then told my minders how to find Site K, two long taxi-rides away. Between taxis we had a twenty-minute wait in cold rain on a stretch of main road lined with some of Khayelitsha’s newest and frailest shacks, made of woven twigs, cardboard, driftwood, plastic sacks. Nearby stood hundreds of lavatory sentry-boxes – row after row among the bushy fynbos on the sand dunes, awaiting the next influx. I found this pre-planning quite chilling in its acceptance of the fate of newcomers. Yet it is also an essential public-health precaution. And in one sense it is an advance; less than a decade ago new arrivals were being beaten up by the police, then forced back to the Transkei or the Ciskei.
As time passed and no kombi stopped my minders registered increasing unease – possibly we were in PAC territory. Then came a driver who recognized us and allowed us to overload his vehicle; uncomplainingly, three passengers made their laps available despite our being rain-sodden.
In the pre-Hani era Khayelitsha was a tourist attraction and the tour ended in Site K ‘to let foreigners see how things are improving’. It is almost beyond belief that tourists could not imagine how people must feel, living on a crust in a shack, when sightseers from luxury hotels cruise past in luxury coaches staring at ‘the influx’ as though at animals in a game park. Some white liberals argue that these tours ‘helped to stir the conscience of the world’ – which argument doesn’t go down well with any Khayelitsha resident of my acquaintance.
Site K consists of some 16,000 identical houses, each in a minute fenced garden, lining narrow tarred roads. The verges are piled high with reeking garbage and no attempt has been made to remove the builders’ rubble. This lies about in heaps, disfiguring sand dunes that might otherwise have been pleasantly landscaped. Yet at least the houses are well spaced out; there is no sense of overcrowding.
I despaired of ever finding No. 2983A; the illogic of the numbering induced a Rubic-cube-type frustration. As in a white suburb, few people were visible; if you can afford to live here you have a job, or several jobs. But my minders remained undaunted. Diligently they sought guidance, time and again, and within an hour we had arrived.
Alas! Clare had got in a muddle: her mother wouldn’t be home until the late afternoon. Well, that was just another of those African things – possibly my minders had mistranslated? Clare, newly arrived from the Transkei, speaks no recognizable English. But she made us very welcome, suggested we await Maria’s return and looked disappointed about my having an important meeting fixed for 3.30. Again I marked the difference between black and white social interactions. Clare and my minders were at once relaxed together, chatting and laughing like old friends, then trying on each other’s scarves and shoes. Meanwhile I sat back on the smart-but-shoddy two-person sofa, relishing the Castle which teetotal Maria, with typical black generosity and tolerance, had laid on for the decadent visitor. She and her husband are paying R20,000 (approximately £4,000) in monthly instalments and will own their home before reaching retirement age. Peter is a ‘garden boy’; he and Maria are among the fortunate minority, both having a variety of steady jobs.
The outer door opens directly into this eight-foot-square parlour with whitewashed breeze-block walls – very cold in winter, complained Clare, lighting an oil heater under the neatly curtained window. A black-and-white portable TV set, long since discarded by a ‘madam’, occupied a shelf on my right amidst a profusion of thriving potted plants, some ceiling-high. It was showing a fuzzy documentary about Alaska. Between the sofa and two easy chairs, covered in the ANC colours, stood a coffee table draped in a skilfully woven red-and-gold Transkei cloth.
Proudly, Clare showed me around her home. From the parlour one enters a tiny hallway leading to two bedrooms smaller than the parlour, a bathroom and a kitchen dominated by a giant antique refrigerator – shades of Mafefe! A dwarf electric cooker, a folded card-table and two stools furnish the dining corner where an electric kettle had been plugged in to make coffee. Apart from the tiled bathroom and kitchen, the floors were wall-to-wall red-carpeted with some soft but sturdy synthetic material. Everywhere was neat and Swiss-clean. Later my minders told Lucretia that Comrade Noxolo’s friend lived in a house ‘like you’d died and gone to Heaven!’ Well, yes – but suppose a couple had six children and four dependants? These houses are barely adequate for a family of five. And the average black family is rather larger.
Were I to become a permanent resident of Khayelitsha – and I can think of worse fates, like becoming a permanent resident of London or Dublin – I would choose to live in ‘my corner’ rather than Site K. The juxtaposition of all those thousands of identical houses with the reeking piles of garbage beside the tarred roads adds up to a dismal sort of squalor with which I could not live. In shackland every DIY shack is different, you know you are among a community of individuals. Also, my corner is not litter-strewn. No one can afford to generate much litter and they dump what there is on the motor-road verges, beyond those prefab concrete walls erected to deter lawless youths from stoning passing vehicles. (That was a naive plan; at convenient intervals the youths knocked holes in the walls, then decorated them with bright graffiti – the texts in Xhosa and, I believe, bloodthirsty.) This method of garbage disposal gives passing motorists the impression that shackland dwellers are filthy savages. In fact it proves the reverse. For all its vastness and against all the odds, Khayelitsha proper upholds rural Africa’s traditional standards of cleanliness and tidiness. Yet in Site K that sense of communal pride seems to be lacking, as though comparative affluence – lessening dependence upon neighbours – had cut it off at the roots.
Some South African whites assume that blacks can afford to migrate from the homelands so impulsively and fecklessly, by the hundred thousand, because shacks come free. But in fact they come dear, appearances notwithstanding, because of black-on-black exploitation.
‘But what else would you expect?’ said Ika. ‘You complain about cut-throat profiteering in your world and this is our version of it. It’s human nature’s the problem.’
We were standing outside the depot of Messrs Matolengwe and Ndou, viewing their wares spread on the sand. They beamingly posed for my camera under a skewed little notice, balanced on the roof of their storage shed: ‘WE SELL Second Hand Doors, Poles, Windows, Zincs, Nails, WE ALSO CUT GLASS.’ These entrepreneurs drive around in their third-hand kombi scavenging from dumps and derelict buildings. ‘It’s hard work,’ said Mr Matolengwe. ‘They grumble we charge too much but we earn it! And petrol is a big cost.’ Typically, he spoke good English and Mr Ndou, some twenty-five years younger, spoke none.
I noted down a few prices. Short sheets of corrugated iron with few holes: R18 each. Others, longer but very rusted and holey: R23 to R28, depending on the number of holes. New (doubtless ‘found’) long roof beams: R20, shorter ditto, R14.50. Metal window frames four feet by six, R65 to R120 depending on condition. Flimsy inside doors, R48 to R70. More solid hall doors, R290. Sections of wooden crates, for inside walls, R10. Cardboard ‘panels’, four feet by three, also for inside walls, R4.
Ika remarked, ‘They do overcharge but I like them, they work hard. And they spend their profits sensibly. Young Jack is saving for a kombi, then he’ll be independent. Mr Matolengwe is sending his children to Cape Town schools and we need a well-educated new generation.’
On the way home we received our daily dose of provocation. An SAP chopper circled low overhead while two menacing Hippos, bristling with weapons, slowly toured the wider laneways, accompanying a ten-man foot-patrol. On either side of the track five troopies moved like automatons, rifles at the ready, eyes fixed ahead avoiding hostile stares. I remembered superficially similar scenes in Northern Ireland. But there the soldiers’ eyes are darting, afraid; and the IRA’s campaign is some justification for patrolling residential areas. Here is no such justification. When I asked friends ‘Why?’ they replied, ‘Intimidation and provocation!’
‘They want to be stoned or petrol-bombed,’ observed Georgina. ‘Then they’ve an excuse to fire at us. In Angola too many of them got a taste for killing kaffirs. But this isn’t the East Rand, here we won’t play their game.’
‘All the same,’ said Ika, ‘they tighten the tension. This sort of needling, day after day, keeps the kids’ anger boiling. One young fool could start something – it’s all waiting to happen again, like in the ’80s. I pray to God to help me to forgive these patrols! They’re planned to undermine law and order. Khayelitsha is our home place where most of us try to live decent lives. Why should we have to put up with this insult? We’re not traitors or subversives, why should our place be invaded every day? Did these people not notice what happened in February 1990?’
‘Worst is the night raiding,’ said Lucretia – and involuntarily she shuddered. ‘When you hear the Mello-Yellos coming in the darkness. And you don’t know who are they after, who’ll be shot up next. When they came for Tony they half-killed him to make him say where [his AK-47] was. But he wouldn’t say, not even when they had him on the floor twisting his private parts. They never found it, that’s why there’s this terrible charge against him. They hate people stronger than them.’
Georgina recalled a statement made in May 1991 by Adriaan Vlok, Minister of Law and Order (!). He said, ‘Just as the SAP in the past successfully hunted down terrorists, so now the SAP will hunt AK-47s and those who smuggle them into the country.’†
We were sitting around Ika’s table, tea-drinking. Lucretia banged her fists on her thighs and said, ‘The boere can’t face it, that we’re not terrorists! They can’t accept us as “the armed wing of the ANC”, entitled to become part of the SADF.’
Georgina smiled sourly and said, ‘I suppose Vlok felt sorry for the SAP, deprived of their natural prey, so he was offering AK-47s as substitute.’
Six weeks ago the last white Parliament debated a new Bill setting a minimum five-year sentence for the possession of an AK-47 – maximum: twenty-five years. Again the ANC insisted on the MK’s right to retain its firearms, arguing that whites own more than 3.5 million licensed weapons – truly a frightening figure, in a population of just over 5 million. ‘We’re in a time of confusion all round,’ observed Ika. ‘Have you heard about the latest poll, all-race? Eighty-six per cent of South Africans don’t know the apartheid laws have been repealed!’
Apart from the overt tension caused by day patrols, and the terror caused by night raids, another, more insidious, covert tension is associated with informers and collaborators. Without anything being said in English, I could sense a deep distrust of certain casual callers; although welcomed politely, their presence impeded the free flow of conversation. Incidentally, I noticed that adults never knock before entering a shack but children always do, even if closely related.
Saturday morning brought high drama. Someone had paid those R800 and Tony and Albany were being released on bail and would at any moment appear among us. My minders and their contemporaries went wild with joy. Lucretia wept on her mother’s shoulder, then apologized: ‘Those are all the tears I’ve not been crying.’
Ika and others of her generation, including the young men’s parents, were less joyful. They don’t trust the unknown benefactor’s motive. Is it just a coincidence that these releases follow on the rumour that a well-known anti-SAP English-speaking magistrate will be hearing the case three weeks hence?
My Jo’burg research into SAP malpractices yielded abundant evidence from a reliable source (Peace Action, which thoroughly investigates each case it reports) that the police really do go, extra-viciously, for MK returnees and their families. Tony and Albany returned in August 1991 and, until their arrest fifteen months later, suffered constant low-key police harassment. Yet apart from having kept their AK-47s, as advised by the ANC leadership, they were blameless citizens, both studying for matric. Whites in this country see the possession of firearms as a human right; Tony and Albany share that view. (I have another view but that is beside the present point.) False charges against MK returnees are two-a-penny and these cases look very like more of the same.
Both sets of parents fear that rumours of an anti-SAP magistrate may inspire the elimination of their sons to avoid the SAP being exposed yet again as a force too incompetent to get away with corruption when seriously challenged. Does this sound neurotic? But a third young man, charged with the same offences, was murdered a fortnight ago within twenty-four hours of his parents bailing him out.
‘Robot murderers’ are easily hired: average fee, R800. South Africa’s traffic lights are quaintly known as ‘robots’ and the jobless stand by them at certain crossroads – informal employment bureaux – hoping for a few hours’ casual labour which might earn them R10. If offered R800 for an assassination, you think not of your victim but of your family – or so I was told in Langa, by a middle-aged man with a tubercular wife and nine children. He was chillingly uninhibited about this way of earning money, the main theme of our conversation. He knew nothing about his victim. The SAP fingered the man and lent him a weapon; he used it, returned it and collected his R800. As he was working for the police he couldn’t be breaking the law.
My minders swept me off to greet Tony and Albany. Hundreds of Comrades were awaiting them and both looked dazed with happiness as they scrambled out of the taxi. Lucretia and Georgina hung back at that point; their hour would come. This was the moment for male solidarity: hugs and kisses, the MK warriors not being afraid to express affection physically. In a jubilant noisy procession we all moved off to Tony’s home where a feast was being prepared. But that was not to be. Orders soon came from On High: neither young man is to spend any time in his home and for the next three weeks they must sleep each night in different – and separate – shacks. (Georgina and Lucretia were badly shaken, their rejoicing turned to apprehension.) The welcoming crowd was ordered to disperse; Tony and Albany must become inconspicuous. They then went to a specified – from On High – shack, where my minders and I joined them fifteen minutes later. In due course the ‘welcome home’ feast followed us, as did half a dozen Comrades, close friends of the released heroes.
It astounded me that these young men could so quickly adjust to being free (if their peculiar situation may be so described) after seven months in Pollsmoor. Observing the scene over the heads of the two toddlers who had settled in my lap (small children abounded in this shack) I felt again the power with which Africans reinforce each other. Our individualism, our self-consciousness, cuts us off from that sort of reinforcement. We have developed other resources, other coping mechanisms – but have we become too isolated, one from another, too proudly self-reliant? Why do we need professional help – counsellors and ‘support groups’ – to see us through divorce, bereavement, rape, bankruptcy, car-accident trauma, life after prison? Tony and Albany were getting all the help they needed from their friends.
The liking I took to these young men, in Pollsmoor, grew by the hour during my time in their company. Both are hearteningly clear-thinking about the new South Africa but otherwise unalike: Tony the more sensitive, now seriously upset by his parents’ anxiety, Albany the more extrovert and resilient. Although equally enraged, they seem extraordinarily (to me mysteriously) unembittered by their imprisonment. They are, however, very, very frightened. I had to repress my own anger (negative energies unhelpful) when I considered the outrageousness of their situation in a supposedly ‘liberated’ South Africa. If I qualified for the role – obviously I don’t – I would willingly be their compurgator.
My substitute minders came on duty at sunset.
Even when all allowances have been made for poor communications, the Comrades are not very good organizers. On Sunday 20 June an ANC Youth League rally was planned for Nyanga – a long-established township some eight miles away – to be addressed by the Young Lions’ favourite idols, Comrades Winnie Mandela and Peter Mokaba. On Saturday afternoon word went around that 10 a.m. was the hour. Next morning – CORRECTION! Noon was the hour and by 11 o’clock hundreds were wandering around, seeking the usual ANC-hired buses. But they didn’t come – and didn’t come – and didn’t come … Someone said 3 p.m. was the hour; someone else said the rally had been postponed for a week because of the weather forecast; finally, word came that the venue had been changed from the soccer stadium to the community hall. My minders then decided to put me in a ‘taxi for the privileged’ (a limousine taxi, not a kombi) with Tony and Albany, who at present dare not travel in ANC vehicles. We drove to Nyanga by a circuitous route – part of the ‘special protection strategy’ – and I wondered why riding in a taxi that might at any moment be shot up, by a person or persons unknown, was supposed to be a privilege.
At 2.30 we found Nyanga’s huge community hall jam-packed and the first speaker in full flow. The door marshals didn’t want to admit us; there was no room for even five more, they argued. I tended to agree as Georgina and Lucretia, clutching my hands, bulldozed a few yards through the compact mass of sweating bodies to secure me a view of the platform. Outside, thousands of Winnie/Peter fans were milling about, vociferously disappointed. Although enormous, this hall was an unwise substitute for a soccer stadium. Soon the excluded began to shout angrily and try to force their way in. The few marshals on duty had no hope of restraining them and as we were pushed forward I resigned myself to broken ribs yet again (for the ninth time). The speaker faltered and stopped, the dozen ANC officials on the platform went into an emergency huddle. Five alarming minutes followed. There is something unsoothing about being trapped in an already overcrowded space which enraged thousands are trying to invade – especially when those thousands are young, mostly male and very frustrated. At last the MC announced that the ‘event’ would be transferred to a vast car park immediately outside. Everyone was to leave at once, in an orderly way, the seated élite taking their chairs with them.
The car park was, naturally enough, full of cars and the scene took on a surreal quality as more and more people – scores carrying chairs above their heads – streamed into an area through which frantic drivers were trying to nose their vehicles while Young Lions banged impatiently on the roofs and went toyi-toying between the cars to celebrate their victory over the elderly Lionesses. (The ANC Women’s League were responsible for the crazy decision to move the rally indoors.) Then came a reinforcement of marshals, not before time. One mountainous man, tall and grossly fat, wielded a long iron-tipped stick with which he drove the youths out of the way of cars; his uncontrolled ferocity drew loud protests from the Women’s Leaguers in whose care I had been left. The SAP would be proud of him; his expression may fairly be described as ‘depraved’ and one could imagine him committing any sort of atrocity. Eventually he was checked by an elderly distinguished-looking man who had the authority to order moderation. Then things settled down, the élite arranged their chairs close to the improvised speakers’ platform – and I found myself upgraded and seated.
Banners are important on these occasions. So important that there followed a ninety-minute delay while three (ANC, ANC Women’s League, ANC Youth League) were removed, with difficulty, from above the platform in the hall and rehung, with even more difficulty, high on the outside wall. This enterprise required builders’ ladders which looked capable of treachery, and daring feats of balance, agility and co-ordination. All three banners were large and unwieldy. Why are they considered so important that, for their sake, everyone accepts a long delay and the risking of lives and limbs? Is it because for so long such statements of allegiance were illegal?
The Winnie/Peter double-act always attracts media attention: in this case an SABC TV team, several black journalists, a few whites. Peter Mokaba, President of the ANC Youth League, has been keeping himself in the limelight for months past through his defiant repetition of the MK chant ‘Kill the farmer, kill the Boer!’: ‘Bulala Amabhunu.’ In fact those Xhosa words, when accurately translated, are a degree more sinister. Amabhunu means Afrikaners in general, rather than farmers. And Bulala means ‘execute’ as a punishment for crime. Ever since the ANC’s unbanning, at rallies all over the country, crowds have been singing a Xhosa war-chant that includes this phrase. But only post-Hani has it been used in English, thus sparking controversy. In mid-April the SAP announced an investigation into inflammatory statements by both Mokaba and Terre’ Blanche, who has often roared in public: ‘I myself would like to have killed Chris Hani!’ In response to the SAP, Mokaba told a Northern Transvaal Technikon rally,
Whether they like it or not, this is our chant. This is our song. This is our tradition. This is our culture, whether they like it or not. We will chant. And I want to tell them today, whether or not they are going to charge us, myself and Comrade Winnie, we are telling them today they can go to hell. Let them tell de Klerk he can go and jump in the river. We don’t care about him. We will sing our song. We will fight on. I repeat: Kill the Farmer! Kill the Boer! Shoot to kill the prey!’
Since then Mokaba has been all over the place, usually with Comrade Winnie, leading tens of thousands of youngsters in this chant – often before TV cameras, to his evident delight. Neither the SAP nor the distressed Mr Mandela dare muzzle him, not with all those Young Lions longing for an excuse to spring. But the ANC leadership recently persuaded him to mumble a half-hearted retraction, something about killing Boers being his ‘personal view, not policy, not to be taken seriously’. It is, however, taken very seriously. Many South Africans, black as well as white, feel it proves their country is, in practice, leaderless – speeding towards anarchy. And the SABC is co-operating in the use of this chant as a form of psychological terrorism. Whites can’t dismiss it as demagoguery; farmers are being killed, quite regularly, and a considerable number have moved to dorps or cities. In fact few such murders have any political flavour; most are the results of armed robberies. Yet the failure to restrain Mokaba means that a minority of militant young blacks have the sort of power they could not have in a stable society, hence the whiff of anarchy in the air. For me, it’s easy to appreciate the dilemma of Madiba and his Comrades when confronted by Mokaba and his Comrades. But, to many whites, the Mokaba chant expresses the ANC’s true feelings which the leadership is cleverly concealing while manoeuvring itself into government.
In every way, Mokaba is the wrong sort of role model for the township youth. In a Horizon interview (the ANC Youth League magazine) he recently described as his ‘greatest extravagance, designer clothes and a good time socially’, and referred to his need for two cars, a BMW and a Jetta. He reminds me of those odious Young Conservatives one hears being interviewed around Tory Party Conference time. They come in all colours.
Mrs Sosikela, sitting tight-lipped on my right, announced, ‘This is make or break day. To chant or not to chant, that is the question!’
When Mokaba’s famous BMW was spotted nearby excitement tingled in the air and a pack of Young Lions climbed recklessly onto the unstable roof of a community hall annexe. In response to the marshals’ ordering them down they shouted abuse and another pack swarmed up to join them.
‘Like animals!’ exclaimed Mrs Sosikela. ‘So many of our young behave like they’ve lost their souls.’ She gestured towards the roof. ‘Look at them! All ignorant, violent, thinking they won the Liberation Struggle single-handed, wanting to dictate to the rest of us! Madiba’s too civilized for them, they can’t understand him. Mrs Tambo says it’s wrong to call them the Lost Generation – but they are! She can try teaching in Nyanga, then she’ll see for herself.’
Grey-haired Mr Msilana, sitting on my left, demurred. ‘Through jobs they can be rescued. Any kind of job. Uneducated they can only get small jobs, but a job’s the answer. With work and wages they’re back into ordinary life – not outside it like now, angry and fighting.’
Mrs Sosikela smiled sardonically, ‘Those up on the roof, they’ve never lived an ordinary life. And they’re not interested in small jobs, they expect big jobs in offices with fine cars like Comrade Mokaba’s.’
I thought back to 1987 when Oliver Tambo, then exiled President of the ANC, named the rioting students ‘Young Lions’. ‘Hail to the Young Lions!’ he proclaimed. ‘They have united in combat groups and confronted the enemy.’ Soon after, the ANC realized that international sanctions, boycotts and COSATU-organized strikes could achieve more than combat groups of schoolchildren and ill-trained MK guerrillas. That was hard on the Young Lions; until 1989, power achieved through negotiations was never on any agenda they could read. This sudden switching of the Struggle onto new tracks left them without a role, or with only a negative role as an embarrassment to the ANC negotiators. Can one blame them for having readjustment problems now?
Mr Msilana introduced himself, with a twinkle, as ‘a retired collaborator’. He had been a minor civil servant – very minor, of course. Demographic pressures, he explained, had compelled Pretoria to employ thousands of blacks; without them the Republic’s gigantic, unwieldy bureaucracy could not possibly have functioned. The notion of blacks helping to run the apartheid state – in effect, making it possible – always discomfited anti-apartheid campaigners far away in the West. They didn’t want to hear about all the Mr Msilanas who felt they had no choice but to do the best they could for themselves and their families within the apartheid structure. Most of the millions who consistently defied it, deviously and in desperation, were bottom-of-the-pilers who had to be defiant to survive. Now, among the Young Lions, it is cool to despise the docile oldies. The post-Soweto generation has grown up in an atmosphere of revolution, change, hope. They were ready to risk – and thousands endured – detention, torture and death. They cannot remember how it was under Verwoerd and Vorster, when the apparently immutable status quo made Mr Msilana and his educated ilk grateful for even the most minor post.
On Mokaba’s appearance the marshals had trouble protecting our ‘elders’ space’ from being overrun. All around us clenched fists punched the sky and the ‘Vivas!’ sounded semi-hysterical as Comrade Mokaba ascended the platform – designer clothed, slightly swaggering, pausing to make sure the TV team was being given every assistance. Interestingly, there was no visible SAP presence.
As the English section of Mokaba’s speech made clear, the Youth League leadership is seeking to reinforce its own position, and stem leakage to the PAC, by publicly defying those ANC leaders who are now living it up in Jo’burg and – it was insinuated – in the process of selling out to the Nats. Forbidden chanting affords Youth Leaguers a marvellous opportunity to show their mettle. Yet when ‘Kill the Boer!’ time came Mokaba repeated the slogan only twice – hurriedly and almost uneasily. The TV crew looked cheated.
Disapproval was coming off my companions in waves. Loudly Mrs Sosikela declared, ‘Shame! He has no respect or consideration for Comrade Mandela!’
Then – consternation! We were told Comrade Winnie had been ‘unavoidably detained’, would not be speaking. Rumours spread fast. There had been a car crash … An assassination attempt … She had been poisoned – or arrested again – or kidnapped … Her house was burning down – her daughter had been shot …
The disappointment was acute; Mrs Mandela is worshipped by most of the township youth and many of their elders. They have their own perception of the Mother of the Nation and are indifferent to (more likely, unaware of) other estimates of Comrade Winnie. Her long years of house arrest in a remote Free State township are remembered, her subsequent sordid career is disregarded. I heard several implied criticisms of Mr Mandela, in Khayelitsha and elsewhere, for his insistence on a legal separation. He didn’t have much choice, I suggested, as his wife plunged from one scandalous morass to the next. But my point was not taken. Comrade Winnie continues to be admired for her persistent challenging of the authorities on practical matters immediately affecting the lives of the poorest, like housing and sewage and clinics. Such matters cannot receive the attention of her husband and his lieutenants while they are engaged in arcane negotiations about constitutional issues. Few in Khayelitsha could tell you what ‘constitution’ means – a limitation they doubtless share with many European citizens.
The limousine taxi had already slid away with Tony and Albany. As we struggled through the crowd (everyone seemed to be trying to go in a different direction) a young black woman rushed up to me, embraced me, burst into tears and said, ‘I’m sorry, sorry! It’s not right, it’s not how we feel about white people! Don’t be afraid, we don’t want to kill you – this is a bad man.’ My minders reassured her. ‘This is a Comrade from Ireland, she is not afraid of black people.’
Our haggard bus was spectacularly overloaded with two passengers to each seat – the lighter sitting on the heavier – and the gangway crammed. The driver seemed either drunk or high on ANC Youth League rhetoric – maybe both. At each corner we keeled over and our not crashing seemed impossible: yet the impossible repeatedly happened. Meanwhile the inflamed cargo was chanting non-stop, ‘Kill the farmer, kill the Boer! Kill, kill kill!’ The standing passengers were simultaneously stamping on the already decrepit floor and thumping the roof with their fists. Many more Comrades rode on the roof, also stamping and thumping. When we passed another bus, overturned on the verge with a huge angry crowd seething around prone bodies, I felt glad that I had left my affairs in order.
I was sitting at the back with a young man on my lap – a kindly young man who often stopped chanting and twisted round to beam down at me and shout above the din, ‘But we don’t mean you!’ I assured him that I felt threatened only by the driver’s dementia. Predictably, Mokaba’s slogan has quite a different flavour when tasted on the Cape Flats. Sitting on that bus, I could only regard it as a joke in very poor taste – a black joke, if I may be forgiven the irresistible – a macabre teasing, a taking the Mickey out of Whitey. I doubt if any of those present, all chanting and stamping and punching the roof, with big grins and twinkles in their eyes, would ever have gone out to kill a Boer – other than in their capacity as MK guerrillas ordered to do so.
I felt sad, going from shack to shack, saying goodbye. As usual Sisi was busy outside her door, having that morning loaded a supermarket trolley (the commonest township vehicle) with sheeps’ hoofs and shanks discarded by a Mitchells Plain butcher. These she grills slowly over a tin of charcoal until they themselves become like charcoal – crunchy and (Georgina affirms) nutritious. Sisi scrapes off the outer layer of burned skin and hair before selling them for ten cents each. Ndima was shoe-mending outside his one-roomed shack, a handmade shoe hanging over the door to advertise his craft. Blossom was boiling water for a client on her new oil stove; she expects to have an exceptionally busy week because of an approaching wedding. Mrs Mgidlana and her fellow-seamstresses were busy making attractive children’s garments from offcuts. Mrs Sekgonyane was washing bullocks’ guts in a baby bath and hanging them out to dry on the clothes line; they brightened the scene, glistening pink and ivory and purple. When dry these too are grilled, in strips, and bought for a few cents each as a special treat. In the ANC Women’s League-run crèche, donated food was being cooked for twenty-six toddlers whose parents are too ill to cope with them. The crèche is an unfurnished and seriously leaky shack, its floor always damp. Outside, Women’s Leaguers sat in the sun teaching a few small girls how to weave village-style. Spaza shops were selling minute quantities of essentials. A carpenter was converting three broken tables, retrieved from a dump, into one sound table. A tinsmith was converting dog-food tins, also retrieved from a dump, into trays for domestic use – price: fifty cents. When you look closely at a corner of Khayelitsha, many people are hard at work. Unemployment statistics belie the industry and inventiveness of the ‘informal sector’.
At 5 p.m. Georgina and Lucretia delivered me to the hospital to be transported back to Unreality Land. ‘Don’t forget us!’ they urged. I won’t.
* Two months later, the day before her flight home, Amy Biehl was hacked to death in Guguletu by a gang of PAC youths inanely described by the media as ‘radicals’. I can think of other, less bland descriptions. They killed her because she was white. When they noticed her car they were returning from a rabble-rousing APLA rally.
† In 1996, Adriaan Vlok applied to the Truth Commission for amnesty.