Old South Africa

...I never did get the opportunity to speak directly with Bishop Tutu...

...Although he has published ten books, many of them best sellers, it is not as a writer that Paton has spent his life...

...Hence, beginning in the late afternoon, the Styxian trains and buses reverse the directions that they ply in the mornings...

...In his study of the Afrikaners, The White Tribe of Africa, David Harrison writes: "Blood River still matters, of course, because it offers the perfect symbol for the Afrikaner Nationalist view of South Africa today-a gallant, God-fearing country surrounded by the forces of evil...

...The accompanying photographs make Soweto appear to be yet another African game park...

...He was a chaplain and close adviser to many of the Boer generals and, afterwards, at the Vereeniging Peace Conference, voted with the minority to continue the war against Britain rather than submit to its terms...

...He was restricted to an area around Johannesburg, although he pointed out that had he chosen he could have fled the country...

...His hair is white, and with age his shoulders have rounded...

...On the tests conducted to determine race, he explains: "They put a pin in you, and your expression is supposed to tell them which race you are...

...Few buildings are taller than two stories, and the blocks are a grid as you would find in Memphis or Birmingham...

...When he says that apartheid is "an evil system, a system as evil as Communism," he makes a point that occurred to me frequently while traveling in South Africa: that is, its similarities to the Soviet Union and its political system...

...grievances of miners and students, and later on the violence itself...

...While there, he learned that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace...

...When police arrived at the scene, the youths fled...

...Inside these fast-moving, six-lane city walls is a familiar downtown, evocative of Dallas or Denver...

...I drove the last fifteen miles to the Blood River battle site on dirt roads through a vast landscape whose hills were only a silhouette at dusk...

...It is also easier, once airborne, not to be reminded of the similarities between South Africa's racial history and that of our own country...

...I addressed a letter of introduction to "Alan Paton, Hillcrest, Natal, South Africa," and several weeks later a reply came from his wife, encouraging me to visit...

...One reason that the Reagan Administration advocates its policy of "constructive engagement" is to bolster a government perceived to be a bulwark against Soviet penetration in southern Africa...

...Sometimes he doesn't answer a question immediately, but instead stares off pensively, his hand cupped under his chin...

...With introductions ahead of time- from sources as discrete as South African diplomats and black dissidents living in exile-I was able to meet a number of persons whose lives are in politics-be it through the government, writing, or in the churches...

...The Nobel Prize transformed him into a media darling and placed on his doorstep a standing corps of journalists...

...Each time was a pleasure...

...Natives cross here," which he would amend to: "Drive carefully...

...Rather than being tall and brooding, he is short and ebullient, perhaps the most cheerful man ever to take on so somber a task...

...When the last train departs, however, the city of gold becomes a ghost town...

...When I say they attended it I mean they parked a little way off, and got out of the car and leaned against it, watching...

...Around seventy, although with surprisingly few gray hairs, he must have told the stories of his life and his encounters with apartheid many times before, but he remained cheerful throughout the conversation, even when the subject was his own sufferings...

...But in reading that and other books, I found South Africa difficult to visualize...

...On the journey, which lasted several months, he saw white privates in the Army saluting black officers and other irreversible signs that never again would the United States embrace policies like those Paton deplored in his own country...

...Like Aztec ruins, heaps of golden residue are piled throughout the city that was founded as a campsite during the 1885 rush...

...In 1972, for example, after a sermon in Cape Town, the church where he had spoken burned to the ground...

...1 don't know when it will come or how," he said on leaving, referring to a general upheaval, "but when it does, first the blacks will suffer...

...A familiar sight in Soweto is an armored personnel carrier, painted the light browns of desert camouflage, on patrol with a squad of white soldiers...

...In apartheid's grand design, all blacks in South Africa are guest workers...

...Signs like those in Durban, "This bathing area is reserved for the sole use of the white race group," are a constant reminder of the ideology that would post such a notice...

...By 10 p.m., like grounded teenagers, all blacks must be off the streets and presumably back in Soweto...

...From a book jacket I learned that he lived in Hillcrest, Natal, which on the rail line is between Kloof and Botha's Hill...

...Anything but South Africa...

...There is the forlorn sense, even during the day, that this is a place where people work and shop, but don't live...

...Under such a sky it is easy to make the connection between the Afrikaners and those Americans who settled the West...

...Also, for twenty years, until 1963, he was a member of the Broederbond...

...Along the driveway, beside the house, and on the terraced back lawn were trees, shrubs, and flowers that made it clear that this was the tropical tip of Africa...

...On the sidewalks a number of blacks still step aside to let a white person pass...

...Then he will turn square and face you, very much the school principal addressing a pupil...

...Then it will be the whites...

...He began by saying that for as long as he could remember visitors have come to South Africa, seen the despair of places like Soweto or Crossroads near Cape Town, and predicted that "things can't last" more than a year or two...

...I drove to Soweto in a rented car, without a pass, as things had yet to "settle down...

...In the same book, which is partly autobiographical and in many respects my choice among his novels, he asks the question: "Can white hopes and black hopes be realized together, in this southern land to which both white and black have given their devotion...

...They had enough money to build their own house, but there was no land available, nor could they get the required own countries...

...The shopping district is a postcard of an American southern city before integration...

...On the main road, at the eastern end of the township, the South African military maintains a base that, at the first hint of trouble, can rapidly deploy troops...

...When they said, 'Let us pray,' we closed our eyes...

...The education of Beyers Naude has an ending not dictated by the early curriculum...

...Soweto is the hostel for these migrants, who, in theory, will use it as a bunk room for several years before going back to places like the Ciskei, Lebowa, or Qwaqwa-tracts of land that the South African government has set aside for blacks...

...There was little small talk and, likewise, no monologues...

...Such an evening under the stars amounted to a reaffirmation of the faith...

...His streaked, gray hair looped around his ears, as you might find on a New England farmer unconcerned about his appearance, and there was sharpness to his stare that indicated he could withstand a great deal of suffering, should it be necessary...

...Like many others, I first wanted to visit South Africa after reading the books of Alan Paton, who is best known for his novel, Cry, the Beloved Country...

...Since then, however, he has continued to speak out against the white, minority government, but at great cost...

...What comes as unexpected is that, by day, Johannesburg is a black city...

...The car approached mine, and its front window was rolled down...

...In the car, it turned out, was a middle-aged Afrikaner and his wife...

...Nevertheless, he continued: "I have never said anything to the contrary, but I hold that notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...

...It seems to have conquered a number of frontiers...

...At the first Lincoln-Douglas debate in 1858, Abraham Lincoln said: "I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races...

...At had been my hope to meet Bishop Desmond Tutu while in South Africa...

...Around eight o'clock headlights appeared on the dirt road leading to the battlefield's entrance...

...The trip ended with a walk at the water's edge at the Cape of Good Hope...

...So much of what South Africa was for me is summed up in these three voices, all in the opposition, telling the experiences of an Afrikaner, a British descendant, and a black...

...His work for peace is to try to convince his countrymen that unless peaceful change comes soon, general violence will...

...the Prohibition of Political Interference Act outlaws multiracial parties...

...But to those who only see gloom in the world, he points out, somewhat elliptically, that "the miracle of my lifetime is what happened in Germany," by which he means the defeat of the Nazis and the coming of peace to the European continent...

...Nearly all such violence, including the recent shooting of funeral marchers near Port Elizabeth, takes place in the townships, far removed from the white enclaves...

...He has an Orwellian ear for the language of the system that believes in "foreign natives" and that passes laws to invent homelands...

...Tutu's genius has elements of Solzhenitsyn's...

...From his intonation it was hard for me to tell if he meant that I would have to wait until the next day or perhaps the next century...

...Instead he chooses the awkward construction that he is "not hopeless" that peaceful change will come...

...But just as I left for South Africa, he arrived in New York for a semester's residence at Union Theological Seminary...

...His eyes are what you notice first...

...The Carlton Centre, one of the better hotels, has an observation deck similar to those atop monoliths across the United States...

...For anyone arriving at Jan Smuts Airport, South Africa begins as a tale of two cities...

...I expected the driver to be a security guard and asked: "Do you speak English...

...My request for a pass was dismissed with the wave of a hand, as the presiding officer said: "We're not issuing any passes until things settle down...

...It is like Hitler's Aryan madness...

...At various functions around New York, however, I was able to hear him speak...

...From the hotel rooftop, the streets below spread out like an inner-city fortress...

...So beginning before dawn, trains and buses from Soweto start to ferry blacks into the city for their work or shopping...

...yesterday...

...Published in 1948, the book remains a current reference on the country's racial dilemma...

...Applying for a pass makes it clear why in the course of a lifetime many whites only encounter blacks as servants or in other menial jobs...

...With double bulletproof doors at the entrance, the building has the appearance of a headquarters for an army of occupation...

...His favorite weapons are humor and an observant eye...

...One child is classified as white and another 'of color' when both are of the same family...

...The media were prohibited from quoting him in their dispatches...

...Unlike the slums around New York, which visually are more menacing than Soweto, this one has a rambling, suburban quality...

...the Black Urban Areas Consolidation Act regulates the flow of labor into the cities...

...Matthew Stevenson writes for a number of national magazines...

...That was the year of the Brown v. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court...

...You know my aunts and uncle are very respectable, and they didn't like the police attending my cousin's funeral...

...The answer, in gruff self-assurance, was: "Speak any damn language you please...

...In the development of Afrikaner nationalism, no event was more pivotal, save perhaps the Great Trek, than the 1838 battle against Zulu tribesmen on the banks of a river that evokes a past like that at Antietam creek...

...It is the theme of countless politicians' speeches every 16 December: 'South Africa is on the brink of another Blood River...

...The buses for blacks look twenty years old, are covered with dirt and exhaust, and even at odd hours appear packed, as though they were transporting migrant workers through California...

...Another item read: "A woman sitting in a moving bus was shot in the neck from the street outside a Soweto shop at 5 p.m...

...Looking at his calloused hands as they gripped the steering wheel, I couldn't help but think that when the fight starts in earnest, men such as this will defend the lines...

...Our meeting was thus lost in the commotion...

...During a conversation on the possibility of change, a leader from one of the opposition groups pointed toward the colossus and said to me: "How's anyone going to overthrow that...

...I lingered at Blood River until after dark, when the only light came from the stars...

...It is not surprising that he began his most recent novel, Ah, But Your Land is Beautiful, with a description of a related vista: "At night it can draw gasps of wonder, for you can see spread out below you the lights of the city of Durban...

...The anniversary of the battle is celebrated as a national holiday-the Day of the Covenant-that is much like our Thanksgiving, although the feted imagery isn't cooperation with local Indians but the rout of a black nation...

...The Patons' house, down a quiet lane, might also be found in Larchmont or Oyster Bay-except for the gardens...

...After arriving, I was free to go where I pleased...

...The trip began with a seemingly endless flight that crossed the Atlantic to Cape Town and then continued northeast, over prairie like the American West, to Johannesburg...

...Unlike many Americans who assume that time will begin to heal most political differences, he will not say that he is hopeful about the country's future...

...The few whites who rely on public transportation ride brand-new Leyland double-decker buses in which the air conditioning works and it's easy to get a seat...

...Clearly he struggles between the desire for change to come and the reality of the strength of the ruling party...

...When we opened them again, they had the land and we had the Bible...

...It spreads out across what used to be farmland on the veld, and the clusters of tract housing resemble a misplaced Levittown...

...The driver was injured and the van damaged...

...About ten miles from downtown Johannesburg, surrounded by wire fences, Soweto is no more a threat to white South Africa than one of the camps in the Gulag is to the Kremlin...

...The city's power, and, by extension, that of white South Africa, comes from the gold on which Johannesburg literally sits...

...They had driven out to camp on the banks of Blood River-in reenactment and homage to those who did the same 147 years ago, before the fateful encounter...

...Like Beyers Naude, he is not without scars for his outspokenness...

...But only a small sign, difficult to read in the twilight, indicated the way to a small museum and the more striking, life-size replica of the laager that fought here on the night of December 16...

...But it took one of the world's deadliest wars for Lincoln to have his way...

...I expected the battlefield to be the South African equivalent of Bull Run or Yorktown with the attending visitors' centers and concession stands...

...Because of the international fame that accompanied the authorship of Cry, the Beloved Country, he said he was probably spared being banned or imprisoned...

...In the newspaper that morning, a typical dispatch began: "In White City Jabavu, Soweto, a delivery van was stoned by about 200 youths who also looted the van...

...He fondly recalls a sign he once saw in a homeland: "Drive carefully...

...But as so often happens in partitions, white South Africa got the gold, the diamonds, Cape Town, and the beaches of Durban while blacks were consigned to townships like Soweto or to grazeland that in the arid Newspeak of apartheid becomes an ancestral homeland...

...The split came when he was unable to find justification for apartheid in the Bible...

...South African blacks, in his words, are the "little people-the unsung heroes who have their noses rubbed in the dust every day...

...Nor could the residents, who are bound together in one of the many symbiotic twists of apartheid...

...We talked in his studio, whose double doors open to the view of the Indian Ocean...

...These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it...

...the Publications Act gives the government a free hand at censorship...

...But it was still hard to imagine them...

...Neither Johannesburg nor its black satellite, Soweto, could exist without the other...

...At 53, his gait remains spry-it reminds me of a sandpiper's-and even on the subject of apartheid there is a springtime melody in his speech...

...In certain situations some of the older black men doff their straw hats...

...By local standards they were by no means poor...

...In fact, the evening rush hour would appear normal if everyone leaving from the station's underbelly weren't black...

...The flyer advertising the tour shows an air-conditioned Mercedes coach...

...I wanted to fix images to the words...

...Led by Andries Pretorius, fewer than 1,000 Afrikaners killed 3,000 Zulus in about six hours of close-quarter combat...

...There," he said, "you had recourse to the law and the courts...

...When the man's interior car light came on and lit up his face, I saw in profile a portrait whose determination matched those cast in bronze inside the museum...

...When he accepted the directorship of the Christian Institute, he was defrocked by the Dutch Reformed Church...

...The city operates two bus systems, one each for whites and blacks...

...But everything the Reagan Administration deplores in Soviet politics-the denial of the rights to think, travel, and work freely-I encountered over and over again in South Africa...

...For many years after he founded the Liberal party four security policemen followed him everywhere...

...nor was explicit reason ever given for its issuance...

...In Naude's case, the minister of justice informed him by a hand-delivered letter that, henceforward, he would comply with the conditions or face charges whose penalty might be death...

...Cheerful openness was not what I expected from someone who had been described to me as being under a form of house arrest...

...A mutual friend agreed to arrange an introduction...

...He abhors the prospect, and said so sincerely more than once, but doesn't see how it can be avoided when normal political dissent-as practiced throughout the Western world-can be classified as traitorous under the broad definitions of the Internal Security Act...

...Cry, the Beloved Country begins: "There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills...

...The land was segregated before 1948, but since then, especially with the development of the homelands, the demarcation has grown sharper...

...At is easy to hear men like Naude, Paton, and Tutu and believe that there are solutions to the problems in South Africa that exclude violence, or at least might keep it to a minimum...

...IT or a white visitor, there are several ways to get to Soweto, and all have qualities of the absurd...

...Since September, more than 200 blacks and one white have died in riots, clashes with the police, or random violence...

...All the races shall be accorded a separate development to preserve languages and cultural diversity-a concept that matches the separate but equal notions of the American South...

...He noted that the pass laws, which require blacks to carry identification at all times or face arrest and a fine, date to the last century...

...One imagines the passengers, wedged together in silence, to be fleeing some catastrophe instead of making their everyday commute...

...But the shopping, like everything else in Soweto, is meager, even for food...

...Both blacks and whites in the country have the sense of living under an occupation, and the Vichy-like atmosphere has produced a political discourse as vibrant as in any state of siege...

...I departed with the sense that instead of being a world apart-some underground set aside for evil practices-South Africa's society bears similarities to our own...

...Ancient Greece had ostracism and modern Russia has retained the sentence of exile, but neither is a precise precedent for banning orders...

...After hearing him speak on several occasions, I came to the conclusion that he won the Nobel Prize because of his ability to describe apartheid in the plain, sparse language that recalls some vivid chapters of the Bible...

...The essence of the system that legally separates whites from blacks emerges in this most unlikely pair of sister cities...

...Before the visit ended, he recounted a trip he made in 1954 on commission for Collier's magazine to write about the United States on the threshold of desegregation...

...Because so many peaceful avenues of change are barricaded, Naude fears that violence will precede any structural changes in South Africa...

...No trial or hearing preceded the banning...

...Whites go downtown to file themselves away in the office buildings, but the blacks come to be on the streets: to work as laborers, to shop, to sit motionless in the parks, as if posing for the camera of Walker Evans...

...I left also firm in the belief that its cures lie in greater contact with the West, especially the United States, rather than in isolation...

...But in Paton's lifetime, which is also that of South Africa as a nation, apartheid has only grown more entrenched...

...Naude went through some of the stipulations: the Liquor Act prevents whites and blacks from drinking together...

...As the former editor of the Johannesburg Star said one afternoon: "Cut us off more and we'll become even queerer than we are now...

...But whatever Soweto may have over the South Bronx, it remains a dreary image of tract housing, dirt roads, garbage-strewn lots, and children playing in the roadside squalor...

...He remembered the man as an extreme racist and when they met at a dinner, Paton asked him how he had adjusted to integration...

...It is this modern skyline rising from the Transvaal plain that gives South Africa a sense of might and invulnerability...

...In the evening Johannesburg has a curfew...

...At a dinner in New York before I left, an angry woman said: "I can understand your wanting to go to Africa...

...Go look at wild animals...

...Those whites wanting to go to Soweto on their own need a pass, which is obtained from a municipal building in Johannesburg...

...He resigned from the Broederbond and made public his reasons, an act which infuriated the membership...

...Desk-bound officers, wearing pale-green uniforms and expressions of contempt, treat any white requesting a pass as either a traitor or a subversive, perhaps on a gun-running mission...

...Sowetour" is a government-sponsored bus company that drives tourists around the nicer sections of the township, which envelops 100 square miles and has a population greater than 1.5 million, making it one of the largest cities in Africa...

...The husband worked for an American corporation...

...In 1977, by a peculiar South African practice, he was banned...

...They have a searing quality, in the sense of Scottish righteousness, but also a twinkle of benevolence...

...Africans have their As the former editor of the Johannesburg Star said one afternoon: "Cut us off more and we'll become even queerer than we are now...

...Under the laws of apartheid, which isn't one but many acts of parliament, blacks in the Johannesburg area must live in the township that, even on a clear day, is only faintly visible from the Carlton...

...Go to Kenya...

...The following morning, almost to the minute, there was a knock on the door of my hotel room and in came the cleric who has since replaced Bishop Tutu as the General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches...

...In my time in South Africa, I did not become an expert on U.S...

...Oh, I still have my prejudices," the man said, "but thank God my children don't have them...

...Born in 1903 in Pietermaritzburg, 45 minutes north of Hillcrest, he became a school teacher after being educated at the University of Natal and a teacher's college...

...Ixopo is not far away...

...Looking right at you, Paton recites these lines as an exemplary tale, so as to leave no doubt that he hopes the same dialogue might someday be repeated in South Africa...

...In conversation, he told a similar story from his own experience with the police...

...Operating mines can still be found in the suburbs, and it is not an exaggeration to say that Johannesburg's pulse can be taken from the quotes bid and asked on the London or New York exchanges...

...Over tea, he offered some answers...

...the Reservation of Separate Amenities is the essence of petty apartheid...

...But such hopes leave aside the historical interests and fears of the Afrikaners, whose decision it will be to make war or peace...

...Over the phone, as we were arranging a time to meet, he said, "I have an appointment at nine and another at eleven, so we'll have to meet at ten...

...When I decided to go there, the decision was received among friends and acquaintances with reservation, if not hostility...

...But the purpose of the trip was not to go on safari...

...The paper that morning had numerous items on the violence that since last September has fed on the bureaucratic approval, even though the South African government is making an effort to improve housing...

...But that didn't prevent me from talking to blacks or from visiting the township so synonymous with black life in South Africa...

...The perimeter is a moat of expressways, the gates being the cloverleafs at each of the four corners...

...In the 1920s, while serving as a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church, he became an early member of the Broederbond, the Afrikaner secret society that grew notorious for serving as an underground for the extreme Nationalists who after 1948 ran the government...

...Across the tracks the department stores, judged by suburban standards, look a little shabby...

...In our conversation, he made the distinction between the current situation in South Africa and segregation as it existed in the American South...

...Other pictures of a swimming pool and a band shell give the impression that blacks have chosen to live in Soweto the way retirees might move to Hilton Head...

...investment policy or African tribal politics, but I was fortunate to meet two men, Beyers Naude and Alan Paton, whose lives have already shaped the course of the country's history...

...He wore a light-blue leisure suit and hush-puppy shoes, not exactly revolutionary garb, and we talked for fifty minutes over coffee ordered from room service...

...In 1953, he founded the Liberal party, the country's first multiracial party that attempted to wrest the parliamentary majority from the Afrikaner Nationalists...

...Technically, the black township of Soweto was off-limits to visitors, especially foreigners, whose safety was questioned because of the continuing violence...

...Here parliament runs everything and, as it chooses, can pass an act to stifle any change...

...Ah, But Your Land is Beautiful has this passage...

...His manner of speaking was direct, clear, forceful, and engaging...

...On returning, I came in contact with Desmond Tutu...

...I also wanted to meet Alan Paton...

...One leaves South Africa with a sense of relief...

...No police with nightsticks are needed to enforce this lockup...

...Defense of strategic minerals and vulnerable passages off the Cape of Good Hope is another reason why Americans are often ambivalent toward taking a strong position against the South African government...

...The wire around townships like Soweto looks like what you pass through on the way from Vienna to Prague...

...Would the precedent be Brown v. Board of Education or Sherman's march to the sea...

...His father, Joshua Naude, served with distinction on the Afrikaner side in the Boer War...

...Despite his accomplishments as the General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches, I knew little of his day-to-day work...

...He frequently ends by saying that "we will remember later those who helped us now," but his tone is never threatening, except to pretense...

...Only since the party was outlawed in 1968 has he had uninterrupted time to write...

...In recent months, however, the specter of rebellion has hovered over South Africa...

...On the leaflet are phrases like "Book Now" and "Don't Miss This Opportunity...

...But the view from the hilltops isn't hedgerows but the sweep of the Indian Ocean...

...The victory secured the Afrikaners land for farming and settlement that was up-country from British rule...

...You know how they are taught to look at people with that merciless stare that frightens the wits out of the more timid ones...

...Natives very cross here...

...In many of these conversations, the common ground was speculation over whether apartheid would end with a whimper or a bang...

...What is remarkable-to an American visitor-is how compliant most blacks are with the conditions of apartheid...

...An unforgettable scene, worthy of the pen of Dickens or the eye of Daumier, is that of railway carriages jammed with blacks as they pull into the platforms at Johannesburg station...

...The Natalian hills above Durban are reminiscent of a plush London suburb: Parts of Surrey and Sussex came to mind...

...On a trip to New Orleans in 1981, Paton saw again a man that he had interviewed on that earlier assignment...

...For thirteen years he was the principal of a reformatory for black boys at Diepkloof outside Johannesburg, which is now part of Soweto...

...the Group Areas Act keeps blacks from living in white neighborhoods...

...I wanted to judge for myself a country I knew second-hand from books, headlines, and the silhouettes that are often shown on television...

...In fact, he could meet only with one person at a time, meaning his wife would have to leave the room when a friend dropped by to see him...

...But, then, in what I would describe as his stump sermon, his eyes will twinkle as he tells of an early encounter between whites and blacks: "We had the land and they had the Bible...

...The justifications for the homelands reminded me of the agitprop I heard repeatedly on a trip to the Soviet-occupied Baltic states...

...But not South Africa...

...What struck me first about Beyers Naude, an Afrikaner and a leading critic of the Pretoria government, was his precision...

...In the pronouncements of apartheid, South Africa is for whites...

...In South Africa's case, parliament has enacted a series of laws that, were they not the cornerstones of apartheid, might be thought to have been plagiarized from George Orwell's 1984...

...Beyers followed his father into the Dutch Reformed Church...

...his wife was a nurse...

...Pictures of houses on the tour show a split-level in a neighborhood called "Beverley Hills...

...And then the Security Police...

...The glass exteriors of the office buildings shimmer in the prairie sun...

...As the Pan American jet lifted into the night sky over Johannesburg, I was finally freed from the tension of a society divided along racial lines...

...The family I got to know lived in the garage of a four-room house...

...Before leaving South Africa, I visited Blood River, which is as indicative of the country, in one sense, as is Soweto...

...Nobody will ever describe Desmond Tutu as Lincolnesque, even if his effect is to transform South African society as Lincoln did ours...

...Nevertheless, from that point, Naude wasn't allowed to address any public meetings...