I fear a hideous human harvest in the children who have grown up with this limitless violence around them.
Shaun Johnson (1986)
Last May, my Khayelitsha friends invited me back for Christmas and at Cape Town railway station, on 20 December, I noticed two potent symbols of the new South Africa – both stern and practical. Now each platform entrance has metal barriers and turnstiles, electronically operated, to thwart those still disinclined to co-operate with the State by paying train fares. And outside the station I found Strand Street blocked by barrels of concrete. Once this street was a noisy whirlpool of passengers eddying around untidily parked rows of taxis, the questioning shouts of passengers and the answering shouts of drivers’ assistants drowning each other out. Now a splendid new taxi terminus, enormous and orderly, stands on the station deck. Here are ample queuing spaces, equipped with litter bins, for each marked destination – all sheltered under high arched roofs. The several men on those roofs at first puzzled me – they looked like sentries but wore no uniforms. In fact these are monitors appointed by the Western Cape Traffic Department and various Taxi Associations – a novel collaboration – to prevent the overloading of vehicles and to intervene should trouble arise. Much trouble arose two months ago when the terminus was opened and drivers were forbidden to use Strand Street. In a shoot-out involving AK-47s and 9mm pistols ten people – mostly innocent bystanders – were seriously injured.
Early on 23 December I walked from my friends’ house in Observatory to Mowbray. But taxis to Khayelitsha are no longer leaving from there – not since two men were killed, and four critically injured, in another recent shoot-out. Khayelitsha passengers must now start from Guguletu township, a roundabout and more expensive route.
Guguletu’s vivaciously chaotic taxi terminus – an uneven expanse of wasteland – becomes a series of lakes after rain and is plagued by dust-devils when the famous Peninsular winds blow. Savoury smells, sizzling sounds and plumes of blue smoke mark a row of improvised braai-stands offering offal hamburgers – or boerewors for the comparatively wealthy. In the Khayelitsha group (no queues here) I stood beside an elderly man wearing a homburg hat and, despite the balmy midsummer air, a tweed overcoat much too long and too wide. He looked at me with some concern. ‘Lady, are you lost? Give care to your nice bag’ – a small scruffy knapsack – ‘Here is too criminal, even more than before …’ I was often to hear that complaint during the next few days. Last year I could safely leave my camera in Blossom’s shack: not so now.
Mrs Galela joined us, her three enchanting small children wearing their Sunday best – off to visit Granny in Khayelitsha. For twenty years she has been ‘the domestic’ of a Constantia family, leaving Guguletu at 5.30 every morning and getting back at 7.30 every evening – except Thursdays, her half-day. ‘They are very rich people,’ she said, and paused for a moment before adding, ‘But poor in spirit.’ On those words her voice trembled and I turned to see her eyes glistening. Annually she had received a Christmas bonus but this year it was withheld. ‘Madam says now whites must pay extra taxes to Mandela – R700 extra a month, she says.’ Mrs Galela dabbed her eyes. ‘The money – it’s not the money upsets me though I counted on it for the kids’ gifts. It’s the unkindness I feel in my soul. Hey, it’s hard! After twenty years and never once did I let her down!’
This route severely tests one’s nerve. It is, in effect, a taxi racetrack. At one point we swerved sickeningly as a Coloured-driven SAPS van overtook us and hooted very loudly on drawing level. Our driver roared unrepeatable things relating to the police officer’s private parts.
‘He wanted us to crash,’ said Mr Homburg grimly.
My spirits rose as we approached Khayelitsha’s familiar graffitied periphery walls, with their drifts of litter piled against them. The vandalized school buildings have now acquired Coca-Cola-sponsored name-hoardings and outside the day hospital where it all began I asked to be set down.
It is untrue that nothing has changed for the poor. Electricity has come to Khayelitsha. The leaking sewage pipes have been mended and some of the main tracks roughly tarred. Near the hospital, within an old shipping container, are six public telephones guarded by two young men – who must now be described as ex-Comrades, the days of Madiba-approved militancy being over. Also (a seasonal change) the midsummer crop of maize is growing dense and green in many tiny gardens.
Five boys in their early teens were the first to notice my return. ‘Comrade Noxolo!’ they yelled, then bounded towards me giving the V-sign, their eyes bright and their smiles wide. None speaks English but they knew where I was going. While escorting me to Blossom’s new shack they loudly chanted, ‘Viva President Mandela Viva! Viva ANC Viva! Viva Comrade Noxolo Viva!’ Our progress was slowed by friends young and old dispensing hugs, kisses and invitations.
I was greeted by Blossom’s sister Beauty, now aged 17 and even more beautiful. For Blossom, the new South Africa has speedily delivered the goods; she is working in a white-owned Cape Town hairdressing salon which had rejected her for this job before the elections. As she collects a 50 per cent commission (R42.50) on each perm, and averages two perms a day during a six-day week, she is on the way to becoming a Khayelitsha woman of substance. Hence her new five-roomed shack shared with only seven others. And she hopes soon to be able to move closer to Cape Town; now she must be up at 5.30 a.m. and rarely gets home before 8 p.m.
Already several families have moved from ‘my corner’. Affirmative action allows some skilled people to get comparatively well-paid work and this gives a trickle of jobs to others not lucky enough to have found steady employment – joiners, cobblers, seamstresses. Khayelitsha is far from being transformed, economically. Yet there are changes, scattered like the first shoots of spring wheat on winter-brown ploughland. Granted, some are more apparent than real, like the forest of electricity poles. At a cost of R48 every shack can be connected and have a card-operated meter installed; but this does not mean being able to afford cards. In many shacks bulbs now hang from ceilings but at sunset oil-lamps are lit. Electric cookers may stand in corners, the ovens serving as cupboards, but most suppers are still cooked on oil-stoves or outside fires. Various electrical appliances have been ‘found’ and are displayed like trophies: kettles, irons, toasters, hair-dryers – even a few fridges, also useful as cupboards. However, the fact that such appliances can be used, whenever enough rands are available, is in itself morale-boosting. And some spaza shops (now stocking a wider range of goods) offer iced beer, cooldrinks and fresh milk from giant fridges cunningly donated by Coca-Cola. Also, space in those fridges may be rented at so many cents a day for storing a hunk of meat or a bag of vegetables.
To celebrate my return Beauty put a saucepan of water on that super-de-luxe oil stove which last year was my farewell present. Now, through abuse, it is smoking almost as eye-searingly as its paint-tin predecessor. Lucretia hurried in, beaming, to show me her month-old son. She and Tony – a free man since February, cleared of all those false charges – are now married. And Tony has found a job with a Cape Town firm who previously employed only Coloured truck drivers. ‘That’s why,’ said Lucretia gloomily, ‘most Coloureds will vote again for the Nats in our local elections.’
Beauty then suggested going into Mitchells Plain to shop; Blossom had left a list of goodies – tins and packets of rubbish foods – she would like Comrade Noxolo to provide. (Was this the same Blossom who, in June ’93, would not allow me to buy a loaf of bread when she and all her family were permanently hungry?) We braved the Christmas rush in Shoprite where Beauty developed her own cravings and loaded our trolley with fizzy drinks of hectic hue and breakfast cereals with gimmicks attached and squidgy cakes smelling of synthetic flavourings.
That was only the start: within fifteen minutes of Blossom’s getting home she was begging me to buy her a gold necklace seen in an Adderley Street jewellers – ‘I particularly fancy it.’ Several other friends were equally insistent on obtaining full value from my return, though usually rather less blatant about it. At first, this altered attitude upset me, seeming almost a betrayal of our earlier friendships. Yet it is an aspect of the new reality that must be accepted. In June ’93, my moral support was valued. Eighteen months later the political Struggle is over and emotionally the victorious blacks have no further need for a sympathetic white ally. Instead, they feel the time has come to use me in their economic struggle. They have generously contributed to the reconciliation process and now there is a balance to be redressed: reparations are due.
Apart from 25 December being a national holiday, life goes on much as usual in Khayelitsha during the Christmas season – undecorated, unmolested by Santas, with little present-giving and no recognizable festive feasts. A vague sense of occasion seeps out from Cape Town’s world of rich fun-seekers, but in many corners of the shanty city Christmas is all about visiting prisoners.
During the Struggle – especially during its last phase – the line between ‘political’ and ‘criminal’ offences became uncomfortably blurred and a grey area continues to discolour the new South Africa’s ethical map. Who, now, should be granted amnesty? Many arbitrary decisions have been made – but Thabo and Molefi have not been among the lucky ones. They remain in Blandvlei prison, serving thirteen and fourteen years respectively for killing police officers (to which they admit) and possessing bombs (which they deny).
Since the elections the ANC has given up paying for prison visits to convicts who claim to be ‘political’. This has left Nosingile (Thabo’s sister) and Kaizer (Molefi’s brother) with a problem. The high-security Blandvlei prison is near Worcester, eighty miles away, and the round trip costs R40. As both families are centless, neither prisoner has had a visit since March. Therefore it was decided that on Christmas Eve Comrade Noxolo should accompany Nosingile and Kaizer to Blandvlei.
Nosingile suffers from bad-diet obesity and is a rather grumpy young woman – but who could blame her. At 7.30 we went to rouse Kaizer who shares with two adult brothers a one-roomed driftwood shack, some six feet by eight and seven feet high. This is one of a colony of such ‘garden-sheds’, without lavatories or water, standing in deep, loose sand on the far side of the motor road from Blossom’s Site. Kaizer speaks no English; a shy, timid young man, he has the defeated expression of one who knows he has been sentenced to life at the bottom of the pile.
First we had a long wait for a taxi to Belleville, standing on the malodorously garbage-strewn verge near Kaizer’s shack. In dreary Belleville we bought ‘comforts’, then had another wearisome wait for a taxi to Worcester.
Nosingile and Kaizer had never before done this trip (previously, other relatives visited) and both were aghast to discover that from the junction where the taxi dropped us there is a nine-mile walk; in the days of ANC-subsidized visits a chartered taxi would have driven all the way. On this little-used link road my malnourished and unexercised companions could not keep pace with Comrade Noxolo – almost old enough to be their grandmother. By the time we arrived both were in real distress, close to collapse.
Blandvlei’s setting, like Pollsmoor’s, is more appropriate to a luxury hotel than a maximum-security jail. One approaches through unfenced, pleasantly landscaped grounds, neatly mown and shrub-filled. Groves of pine, willow, acacia surround the car park. The complex of one-storey brick buildings has variegated flower-beds below each barred window and its two twelve-foot-high steel-mesh fences look no more daunting than any police station’s. Prowling Alsatians guard the double corridor of open space around the cells. There are no escapees.
Less agreeable than the environment is the staff, Afrikaner and Coloured warders who treated my companions with unveiled contempt and sneeringly asked me why I’d forgotten my black sash. Here most convicts are Coloured; as the only visitors for black prisoners, we were made to wait longer than was fair.
The car-park scene fascinated me. Around a score of large expensive vehicles the atmosphere was festive; this might have been a Bank Holiday crowd gathered at some beauty-spot. Picnic baskets were opened, tapes of favourite pop groups competed disharmoniously, older children noisily played hide and seek amidst the trees, toddlers tried out their new toys, Daddies drank furtively inside their vehicles (alcohol is forbidden within the precincts), Grannies sat on camp-chairs dandling babies and Mummies rummaged in ice-boxes for cool-drinks. One can scarcely ask, ‘What’s he in for?’ but I did feel intensely curious, observing these prosperous and conventional family groups. Were they visiting political prisoners? Or drug dealers? Or fraudsters?
Thabo, sentenced last year, was allowed only a twenty-minute visit and in his wing the security arrangements duplicated those in Pollsmoor’s remand section. Molefi, entitled to ‘good-behaviour’ concessions after five years, could enjoy an ‘open’ forty-minute visit. He joined us in a long room, many-windowed with cheerful primrose walls, where coarse grey blankets had been spread on rows of hard benches for the visitors’ comfort. Here prisoners can embrace their relatives and cuddle their small children, a four-day-old baby the smallest. His father wept for joy and sadness on taking the little bundle into his arms.
Most prisoners had made gifts for their families in the workshops, some quite beautiful. Model ships (one with Union Jack sails!), churches and castles, meticulously finished sets of dolls’-house furniture, carved animals and birds, miniature guitars and drums, tins painted with intricate designs and so turned into gay flowerpots holding cuttings from the prison garden. Everyone except the warders looked relaxed – perhaps a stiff-upper-lip display? How, I wondered, did they feel?
As we returned to the motor road at 3 p.m. Nosingile announced that neither she nor Kaizer could walk another step. I then tried thumbing, while sheets of rain were driven across the nearby Blandvlei Lake by a sudden gale and the temperature dropped dramatically. This must have been shift-changing time; within twenty minutes seven men, each alone in his car, drove past us. But none would stop for blacks and a poor white. Two shouted angrily at us and there was something close to hatred on those faces.
We returned to the car park, soaked and shivering, but every vehicle had come packed with family and friends. Then I noticed one ancient Ford saloon about to drive off with only an elderly couple in front and desperately I begged for a lift to the junction. The burly fair-skinned husband had African features and crinkly brown hair. ‘Where is your car?’ he demanded. ‘How did you get here? Why are you with those people? You must ask my wife for permission.’ His wife was a small sour shrivelled woman who looked Indian and offered all sorts of excuses for not taking us. In disgust I walked away. But then a young Muslim man – we had talked earlier – intervened and after an overheated argument in Afrikaans we were taken aboard. Mr Burly asked how much we had paid the taxi and said, ‘You can come as far as Belleville for twice that price.’
Nosingile and Kaizer slept soundly during the journey, their heads resting on my shoulders.
South Africa’s prison conditions are notoriously inhumane yet both Thabo and Molefi look better dressed and fed and much fitter than many of their comrades in Khayelitsha. Observing Kaizer and Molefi together, it occurred to me that Molefi enjoys a sort of freedom denied to his brother. True, Kaizer has freedom of movement, though that is limited by Khayelitsha’s isolation. Molefi, on the other hand, is free of the relentless stress of wondering where the next meal and garment will come from – and his living quarters cannot be more cramped than his brother’s. Also, he has access to facilities way beyond Kaizer’s reach: like a bathroom and a workshop. At the very bottom of the pile, isn’t ‘freedom’ an abstraction?
We got back to find Beauty weaving false hair through a customer’s springy fuzz. False nylon hair, straight and black, is the ‘in’ thing – even among girl toddlers, many of whom wear silly-looking false top-knots. Blossom has passed on her expertise to Beauty and a huge hoarding nailed to the fence outside their shack offers a selection of twenty-five coiffures costing up to R200. This affirms faith in the future; so far no customer has gone beyond the R20 range. However, painting that board gave several hours’ work to a sign-artist.
Christmas Day is Pollsmoor Day. Would I like to accompany Nosingile, Tessie and Sarah to visit imprisoned Comrades? In Sarah’s case an imprisoned husband and their sons Tammie and Ollie, aged 8 and 6, were of the party. On our way to the motor road Tessie suggested dropping into a crowded shebeen where everyone was drinking milk-stout. After a round of Castles, Nosingile urged Comrade Noxolo to provide a six-pack for the journey. Meekly Comrade Noxolo obliged. We then took a taxi to Site B railway station and from there another to Wynberg.
That six-pack was not needed. In the second taxi a young man sitting with my companions – a total stranger to us all – opened a full litre bottle of Scotch (genuine, an airport duty-free bottle) and insisted on sharing it. Seeing Tammie and Ollie gulping the neat spirit as though it were Coke I frantically yelled, ‘Don’t! Stop! It’s not for children!’ But above the sinister beat of a heavy-metal tape people were laughing and shouting – ‘Merry Christmas to you! Merry Christmas to me! Merry Christmas to us!’ My repeated pleas went unheard or unheeded and in the packed kombi I could take no action.
Even on Christmas Day breakfast doesn’t feature in ‘my corner’ and that Scotch was hitting empty stomachs. At Wynberg the young man stumbled away, having flung his empty bottle against a shop wall, just missing the window. Sarah had to be lifted out, then fell to the ground still shouting ‘Merry Christmas to us!’ Nosingile and Tessie were swaying and giggling and trying to sing ‘Silent Night’. At that moment Ollie collapsed, unconscious – as his brother threw up. Those boys had lowered a perilous amount of whisky and Ollie is a frail scrap. I feared for his life and thought wildly of sending for an ambulance. But how? And from Wynberg, on Christmas Day, for a black child – forget it! Luckily we had stopped beside a boerewors stall. Seizing a handful of salt, I thrust it down Ollie’s throat and held him up by the ankles – half-aware as I did so that a small crowd was gathering. An uneasily muttering crowd, wondering why the hell this white woman should be so maltreating a black child … Then the lad vomited – pungently, the alcohol fumes plain to be smelled. Instantly the crowd understood and laughed and dispersed.
I sat on the edge of the pavement with Ollie across my lap; he was breathing fast and too shaken to stand. I felt quite shaken myself. Tammie sat beside me, sobbing, with his head between his knees. Their mother now lay asleep in the gutter. Nosingile and Tessie were leaning against a wall, propping each other up and hiccupping. Our taxi had moved off to its departure point, away on the far side of the railway bridge; otherwise I would have organized an immediate return to base – because how could I possibly get this lot to Pollsmoor? When another taxi arrived from Site B it almost ran over Sarah before disgorging a large party of Pollsmoor visitors – led (Praise the Lord!) by Lucretia and Tony.
Soon twenty of us were aboard a fifteen-seat kombi, Sarah still stupefied, Tessie and Nosingile laughing uproariously and begging every man to kiss them. But suddenly they switched to an angry mood and began to abuse Coloureds in general; happily none was present. Then, as suddenly, they fell asleep and had to be half-carried into the prison’s thronged waiting hall. While the boys curled up together on a bench, our three adult casualties were laid on the floor in a corner – attracting contemptuous glances from prim-looking Coloured ladies. Sarah woke for long enough to vomit, then again became comatose. Lucretia hastily mopped up with one of her baby’s nappies and said cheerfully, ‘They have time to get better, at Christmas we must wait long hours.’
She was right; we had a four-hour wait. Extra Christmas visits are not allowed but most families save up their visits for this occasion. The midday heat was stifling and the air opaque with cigarette smoke, despite an open door leading to a shadeless concrete yard. Every male – and a few of the more daring young black women – seemed to be chain-smoking. Beside me sat a 14-year-old Xhosa lad who informed me as he lit up, ‘This Rothman is what sportsmen choose all over the world.’ Now who could have told him that?
Some two-thirds of those present were Coloured, their younger offspring quaintly decked out in sailor-suits or frilly flounced frocks and be-ribboned bonnets. Beside the expensive junk-food shop the queue never shortened; on every wall conspicuous notices warned that only prison-bought food may be presented to the inmates. Even as Christmas treats, homemade foods are verboten. Around us litter was piling up fast and teams of small boys irritated their elders by kicking cooldrinks cans around the floor.
Lucretia introduced me to her friend Mpho – of the Georgina calibre, an articulate, fiery young woman who grew up in Crossroads and whose revolutionary zeal has been deflected, post-Struggle, into AIDS-prevention campaigning. Until recently she was a Khayelitsha community AIDS worker but she lost her job when an NGO, the National Progressive Primary Health Care Network (NPPHCN), was forced to sack half its staff for lack of funds. This meant the closure of most of the region’s AIDS projects – in Khayelitsha, Namaqualand, the Karoo, the Boland, all areas without any State-sponsored programmes.
Said Mpho, ‘The big frustration is we’re no way as infected yet as kwaZulu/Natal and the PWV. Here we’ve a chance to stop it – we should be working overtime, not sacked! Now what can I do? I’ve three small kids’ – she pointed to them, being entertained by Grandad. ‘And I’ve a husband in jail for five years for “possession” – how can I work without pay? I can only do a little, in spare time, at weekends.’
The three Scotch victims were by now sitting up, looking cross-eyed and silently combating dehydration with a giant bottle of Coke provided by kind Tony.
This proved to be another ‘open’ visit for well-behaved prisoners. While Sarah and her husband sat holding hands I found myself delegated to talk to Luyunda and Prosper, 19-year-olds whose relatives all live in the Transkei. Likeable lads they are, with cheerful open faces – sentenced last December to ten and twelve years, respectively, for ‘possession’. As 15-year-olds they came together from their village, joined the ANC Youth League, moved around the fringes of small-time Mandrax dealing, eventually were accepted as members of an SDU and soon after were arrested. A hope that soon some amnesty will include them underpins their stoicism. They seem to feel no resentment towards the Western Cape ANC leadership for having encouraged the keeping of weapons, then abandoned many of those charged with that offence. If released now they would show the police where other guns are hidden and co-operate with them in every way, as directed by Madiba. Or so they said … Both assured me that all they want is to find jobs and live peacefully with maybe a little mandrax-dealing on the side. They seem to see no harm in that commercial activity but admitted it could be dangerous – less because of police activity than because of Coloured gangs resenting blacks getting onto the scene. These youngsters do not strike one as ‘baddies’ but they are without a moral compass. If they fail to find steady jobs, one can easily imagine them becoming professional criminals. As easily, one can imagine them becoming like Tony, a happily married, happily employed ex-prisoner, a respectable citizen of the new South Africa.
Back at No. 7164, Blossom and Beauty had borrowed extra oil stoves and were cooking Christmas dinner: a pot of rice, stewed chicken and beef, mashed butternut and boiled potatoes, a salad of raw cabbage and grated carrot with mayonnaise. Never have I seen such a meal in Khayelitsha. It was being prepared for eleven children, aged 8 to 14 – all members of Blossom’s extended family for whom, as an earner, she now feels some responsibility. The food was tipped into one enormous tin basin and served on the coffee table in the centre of the living-room floor. Nobody sat down, the whole group crowded around the basin, jostling for position, and at once the six boys snatched all the chunks of meat leaving not so much as a chicken wing for the girls. There is an urgency about the ingestion of food when one is really hungry that has nothing to do with greed. This was a race – who could eat fastest, get most – and with twenty-two hands and eleven plastic spoons it took less than six frantic minutes to empty the basin. Then there was a fight – a real fight, not horseplay – between two of the older boys for a bone with scraps of gristle attached.
Aki had invited Georgina and me to eat Shoprite Christmas cake and drink rooibos tea; her black Church forbids not only alcohol but ordinary tea and coffee – ‘unnatural stimulants’. This year the portable TV, squatting amidst the Taiwanese china menagerie, is usable and never switched off. ‘I don’t care for all this American nonsense,’ said Aki a trifle defensively. ‘But the girls love it and it keeps them out of mischief Her three daughters now have secure jobs. ‘For the educated, affirmative action is working well,’ she acknowledged.
A freelance photographer arrived then; Aki always sends a Christmas Day family-group picture to the Transkei. It took me a few moments to recognize Phineas, my first Khayelitsha friend, who by now has found a replacement for his broken camera. An NGO which sponsors individual enterprise enabled him to take a photography course and he has recently sold three pictures to Cape Town newspapers.
Many of the poorest Khayelitsha residents have never seen the sea, close as it is. So I had invited eight adults (all, except Georgina, the mothers of small children) to spend 26 December on Muizenberg beach, setting off at 9 a.m. in a chartered taxi. But then mysterious difficulties arose, to do with which taxi …
Three argumentative hours later, a non-taxi arrived to collect us, an awesomely decrepit little van driven by a small slim young SANCO leader appropriately if improbably named Golden Sands Msiza (‘Call me Goldie’). ‘We can’t all fit in,’ was my first not unreasonable reaction. But I should have known better. Africans, when spatially challenged, defy reason. The positioning of seventeen bodies within that van took time, then jerkily we were on our way, Georgina and I squeezed beside Goldie with a pair of toddlers apiece on our laps.
‘This is illegal,’ said Goldie cheerfully. ‘But at holiday seasons the boere don’t notice.’
Georgina, true to form, snorted scornfully. ‘At every season the boere make trouble!’
I have had my share of the Peninsula’s midwinter gales, now I was to experience the midsummer variety. During our three-hour wait a strong wind had blown up – and on the coast road it reached Force 9. Slowly we drove through a blinding sandstorm. Despite all the windows being closed, fine grains quickly penetrated this antique vehicle, turning black faces fawn. The toddlers rubbed their eyes and wailed. On our left raged the sea, its beaches deserted. I realized then that my ‘treat’ was doomed.
Muizenberg is overdeveloped, the most popular beach on False Bay, aggressively dominated by a solitary skyscraper – wide as well as high, visible for miles in every direction, desecrating the mighty mountain immediately behind it. Once this was ‘white territory’. Now, as the only beach accessible by public transport, it is almost entirely taken over by blacks on national holidays when most whites (and the better-off Coloureds) go elsewhere. On such occasions Muizenberg is supposed to be an alcohol-free zone but many overcome this little local difficulty by arriving equipped with mega-bottles of Coke pre-laced with brandy. Takeaways abound, drug dealers lurk within the public lavatories and the brightly painted pavilion houses a fast-food restaurant reeking of overused cooking oil. Normally I would do a long detour to avoid Muizenberg.
Goldie decanted us in a car park, slightly sheltered from the gale by the surrounding buildings, and promised to collect us at 5.30. When we ventured beachwards, struggling against the wind, stinging sand flayed us and all the children began to sob and had to be picked up and enfolded in maternal garments. Hastily we retreated towards the pavilion, via a raised concrete walkway thronged with jolly young blacks.
We were halfway across when a piercing scream – a scream of pure terror – attracted general attention. It came from a lower walkway and looking down I saw, directly below me, a young Coloured woman who had been thrown to the ground. She was lying with her legs wide apart being kicked all over – but especially in the genitals – by three black youths. What happened next will haunt me for a long time. On our level everyone crowded to the railings and cheered on the youths. Everyone. Including my companions, with their excited little children standing on tiptoe to see what was happening. Mob hysteria – a mad relish for violence – had taken over within seconds. One could feel it charging the atmosphere, dreadfully uniting this throng.
I stood staring down, doubly paralysed – by the barbarity itself and by the mass reaction to it. I have no doubt that my companions would have enjoyed witnessing the death of the young woman. This was a stage worse than enjoying the necklacing of someone perceived as a ‘sell-out’. This was enjoying vicious brutality as sheer entertainment. The world seemed to have gone off its axis, Light-heartedly we had left Khayelitsha to have fun by the seaside and now evil had engulfed us.
Murder would almost certainly have been done but for the intervention, within moments, of two shouting Coloured police officers waving cocked guns. The attackers fled, the police pursued them and two Coloured youths picked up the young woman – by then unconscious – and carried her away. What was it all about? No one seemed to know or care. Once the visible violence ceased, the atmosphere reverted to normal. As suddenly as it had flared up, the blood-lust died down. We went on our way, everyone except me chatting and laughing – in party mood again.
Georgina took my arm and said, ‘Don’t be upset. This is how we are. You like to be with black people so you take it how it comes – right?’
Faintly I smiled and said, ‘Right!’
While my companions consumed stacks of fast foods I longed for a very stiff drink. Then I asked myself if I had been overreacting? That relish for violence – is ‘evil’ too strong a word? Is ‘degenerate’ nearer the mark? Or ‘desensitized’? Many young blacks were raised amidst extreme violence, both government-inflicted and internecine, in communities vulnerable to every sort of manipulation and intimidation. Or was I now trying to excuse the inexcusable? I asked Georgina would it have been different were the victim black. ‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘because she was Coloured there was a reason for it.’ Then my friend looked away and I could see her reprimanding herself. She is an honest person and brave enough to confront her own confusions. Looking back at me she said, ‘That’s bad – and I could be wrong, maybe we just like any sort of excitement – that kind of excitement … It’s bad, I know it’s bad. But always you get a buzz from it. I can’t explain it, it’s like an addiction, like brandy or mandrax.’
I said no more. There was no more to be said.
Goldie was late. For half an hour we sat waiting for him; luckily the gale had calmed to a strong wind. Overhead the sky was clear but sinuous clouds were hurrying along the mountains, moulding themselves to the shapes of the crests – sunset clouds, pale gold above ink-blue slopes. Then I thought I was seeing an exotic bird, floating between two high ridges in the near distance. In fact it was a large solitary piece of litter, rising and falling, doing a solo ballet in the erratic air currents. Sometimes it almost touched the ground, then again soared very high, then swooped this way and that, all the time changing shape – from rippling snake to crescent moon to straight line to triangular sail. Never before have I seen beauty in a piece of litter.
My last day in Khayelitsha was spent with the ‘Gang of Four’: Aki, Muriel, Pius and Sam, my middle-aged ANC community leader friends. They are uneasy about the future. Not only the younger generation in Khayelitsha feel alienated from – almost rejected by – their new government. This has nothing to do, emphasized Pius, with ‘unreasonable expectations’. It is much more complicated, a hurtful awareness of a gulf having opened up between the ruling élite and the millions whose courageous opposition to the old regime enabled black politicians to gain power and suddenly become conspicuously rich. The Struggle, as Sam pointed out, was unifying. From world-famous Nelson Mandela to the anonymous 12-year-old revolutionaries in every township, all were in it together. At that time the foot-soldiers never foresaw – how could they? – that Liberation would split the ranks, leaving them still hungry though equal before the law. While blacks and whites got together to form a new controlling class, apparently for their own mutual benefit …
But the bitterest humiliation/disillusion, at the end of the generation-long Struggle, has to do with being suddenly uninvolved, unimportant, without a role. This is a cruel paradox, as Aki noted. In theory the vote gets every citizen politically involved. Yet it was the Struggle, rather than the exercising of the franchise, that gave the blacks a feeling of shared responsibility for their country’s future.
On 9 May 1994, having watched the first all-inclusive South African Parliament assembling, I wrote in my journal: ‘This is indeed a Government of National Unity – heroes and villains, the honest and the dishonest, the brilliant and the dim-witted, idealists and schemers, rabid racists and fervent liberals, all on their way to vote unanimously for a black President …’ My mood was uncritical, sentimental; the momentousness of the occasion – the victory of Good over Evil, Freedom replacing Apartheid – blotted out all other considerations.
Eight months later, Pius commented that expediency had to dictate who got the top jobs. There were too many waiting to torpedo the new ship of State unless they were up on the bridge. So of course there are bad guys (black, white, Indian, Coloured) holding some of those jobs, in Cabinet and elsewhere – their misdeeds common knowledge. Aki argued that this makes the new ship of State seem leaky. If the first ‘free and fair’ elections could not produce an entirely respectworthy crew, why should people be expected to see democracy as the begetter of honest government?
To cheer everyone up (including myself) I pointed out that uhuru has brought about one hugely significant change: future wrongdoers will lead much less comfortable lives with the sword of exposure hanging over their heads. This country is healthily thirsty for freedom of information and freedom of speech, liberties abhorred and outlawed by the old regime. Nowadays bureaucratic inefficiency is exposed. Educational chaos is exposed. Racial discrimination is exposed. Diplomatic ineptitude is exposed. Political cupidity is exposed. Regularly dirty linen is washed openly on the riverside of public opinion. It is even possible for new South Africans to sniff the dirtiest linen of all, still hidden in the laundry basket awaiting the attention of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Tonight I fly home – not, this time, consoled by the thought of a fixed return date. Yet away in the future there must be a return, so numerous and well loved are my South African friends, not all of whom can be persuaded to visit me in Ireland. Moreover, I have become inexplicably attached to this crazy country – to use a favourite South African adjective.
Often my experiences here have been emotionally gruelling – some verging on the traumatic – but strong bonds are forged in high emotional temperatures. And there is an addictive quality about South Africa’s pattern of paradoxes, its patchwork quilt of mass-produced prejudices and disarming unpredictabilities. Within this liberated Republic co-exist genuine political idealism and silly political posturing, fractured ‘Struggle’ alliances and new enthusiastic black/white collaborations, pride in the ‘peaceful transition’ and panic about the soaring crime rate, comic-opera dissensions and numerous rumours of sinister conspiracies, reverence for reconciliation and lethal feuding, concessions to expediency and campaigns against those concessions, fine words contradicted by devious deeds, throbbing open wounds and ingenious healing compromises, paranoid suspicions and touching trust, wary cynicism and a determination to ‘make the new South Africa work’.
Will it work? Despite my well-founded doubts about this unique experiment, I do have hope (hope rather than faith) that eventually justice will prevail – though the mechanism whereby it could do so at present remains invisible. It would be good to return in, say, five years’ time and discover that my doubts were not, after all, well-founded. Sometimes it is exhilarating to be proved wrong.