Quarantine in Johannesburg

...Liberals, Christians, "sickly humanists," trades unionists-all will do, and they greatly outnumber the Marxists he has chosen to ban...

...Will the protest continue...

...As a writer I frequently used to drop in on fellow-writers...

...Those cables not blocked by the authorities and letters from friends abroad thrilled me...

...So that we could see each other, he made a 40-mile bus trip once a week and we would go from cafe to cafe, perhaps ending in a cinema...

...But the breaking-discreet, surreptitious, as it had to be if I were to avoid up to 10 years imprisonment-gave me no satisfaction...

...In one way it is an honor to be housearrested and banned: It means the South African government dare not charge one with an offense even under the fantastic network of laws at its disposal, yet so fears one, or one's power as a writer, that it arbitrarily imprisons one's talents and stunts one's life...

...Suzman M.P., and one or two newspapers...

...The government also uses banning to destroy by attrition the Liberal party, the Indian Congress, and trade unions, as it did the legal Defense and Aid Fund until it simply outlawed that desperately needed organization...

...Helen Joseph, the English-born social worker who was the first to be house-arrested three years ago, already under substantial bans, has recently been additionally restricted so that she can no longer enter the building where she worked for a Medical Aid Society because on another floor a trade union has offices...

...Yet for me, with the security of a British passport and partial roots in London, it was all comparatively simple...

...If T met someone for lunch or coffee, I did so with advice ringing in my ears: "What if you should be arrested and the friend is called as a state witness or-if refusing to be one-is confronted with a year's imprisonment...

...Meanwhile, for two months, friends repeatedly urged: "Go...

...Some of them have emerged from serving prison sentences, only to be immediately banned and house-arrested-five more years of bitter punishment, this time without charge or trial...

...I could no longer visit him, nor enter a non-white area...

...Never have I gone so assiduously to church...

...The two policemen left...

...now it was an offense for us to communicate with each other "in any manner whatsoever...

...Yet so tough has become the conscience of white South Africa, so much has banning become part of the South African way of life, or, to quote Uys Krige, Afrikaner poet, "an old South African custom," that protests are minimal...

...I requested permission to have occasional meals with my sister and her family...

...Such jobs as I was qualified to do were pretty well ruled out by the wording of the bans...

...I had intended to recuperate with friends in Cape Town...

...now I was confined to Johannesburg for five years...

...For the first time I really felt my spinsterhood...

...I asked permission for my 85 year-old father to come- it was granted, for one visit a month...

...Even the peculiarly abominable house arrest and banning of Ruth Hayman, widely respected attorney and vice-chairman of the Transvaal Liberal party, aroused only a scattering of protest-from the brave and ever alert Black Sash, the Liberals, Mrs...

...But the coming away grieved me...

...From being out to dinner several nights a week, and enjoying friends most weekends, I was now confined to the house where I rented a room, daily from 7 p.m...

...However, the Magistrate did give me permission to attend communion at a nearby church on Sunday mornings...

...No visitors could come to see me at any time except my doctor or my legal adviser...

...Julius Lewin, Professor of Law and African Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, says bans are "a penalty unique in the history of criminal law," and points to the law's grim uncertainty...

...No trial...

...I had a friend, seriously ill in a non-white hospital...

...and paranoia not only because of the imminence of the Security Police but because the ban was like having the plague...

...African factory workers are banned from factories, Colored and Indian teachers from schools...

...On some Sundays, when this petered out and when landlord and servants were away, leaving only two marmalade cats and me in a large old house, I would turn up Mozart's horn concertos, or Stan Getz to fill the emptiness...

...Now they stood over me while I tried to absorb the eight foolscap pages of bans and prohibitions and a ninth page "ordering" me to report each Monday to the nearby police station, to sign the parole book...

...I would go to town, hungry to be with friends, and literally walk the streets in the hope of bumping into one...

...Today, several months and thousands of miles away from that moment when the police delivered those letters from Balthazar Vorster, I still feel the scars...

...for instance, just to consider the ban on gatherings-snooker has proved legal, bridge or tennis or a barbecue on top of Table Mountain, illegal, while sentences vary from two months to 12...

...Worst of all were the bans on social gatherings, and on writing...

...As the law's absurd definition of Communism suggests, the Minister's lust to combat this enemy can be very easily satisfied...

...until 6 a.m., and throughout weekends and public holidays...

...Overall the psychological effects remained immediate and shocking: a distinct drop in selfrespect at obeying any of Vorster's dictates...

...It was the banning of the student leader due to be Senator Robert Kennedy's host this past spring that first provoked substantial protest...

...Nor means of protest, since henceforth any newspaper editor who published a quote from me would be charged with committing a serious offense...

...Once, when a friend brought a British journalist to the house, I shooed them away at the front door, feeling rude and cowardly, and resenting the friend's insensitivity...

...SATISFYING" MINISTER VORSTER Quarantine in Johannesburg By Mary Benson "Whereas I, Balthazar Johannes Vorster, Minister of Justice, am satisfied that you engage in activities which are furthering or may further the achievement of the objects of Communism, I hereby prohibit you for a period commencing on the date on which this notice is delivered or tendered to you and expiring on the 31st day of January, 1971, from It was February 15...

...Nor with such gay abandon...

...For all the others-for the more than 500 banned, the more than two score house-arrested, and the few totally imprisoned at home-what must it be like...

...The attempt of an eminent deputation, including two former Judges, to question the Minister about the banning of this moderate, scholarly man, was curtly rebuffed...

...It was almost impossible not to, so destructive were they of my livelihood and normal pattern of life...

...Half an hour later the Security Police were on the doorstep...

...And if it does, will the protestors also react when, time after time, as so often in the past 13 years, the government Gazette lists the latest men and women-most of them little-known Africans-about whom Balthazar Vorster is "satisfied...

...Many are condemned by the Minister's fiat to be jobless...

...In short, not only was I forbidden to transmit anyone else's writings (such as press clippings or articles) but a diary or letters would be safe only if confined to innocuous topics...

...Easter proved long...

...More than 500 silenced, their lives stunted-and how many more thousands intimidated by the threat of bans...

...Instead of getting several phone calls a day, I felt excited if three or four friends phoned me a week...

...Congress Mbata, research assistant, is banned from entering the Institute of Race Relations...

...I had returned home in Johannesburg that morning after seven weeks in the hospital and made two phone calls...

...Within half an hour I had broken two of the bans...

...No charge to answer...

...At times, literally looking back over my shoulder and pretending to be making notes on Bellow, Camus and Forster, I made feeble attempts to go on with the novel I had been working on for some months...

...As if prohibition on "preparing, compiling, printing, publishing, disseminating or transmitting in any manner whatsoever" any book, newspaper, magazine, pamphlet, hand-bill, or poster, were not enough, a further nine clauses set out what else I was banned from writing or transmitting...

...No effective appeal...

...Some of my friends were banned...

...This was refused...

...I even counted those strangers "indiscreet" enough to phone their sympathy when the news got around: six South Africans and two foreigners...

...Meanwhile the desire to write, the need to write freely, tugged...

...Now I could not have anything to do with any political party, nor enter any building where any political party had its office, nor go near any educational institute...

...How deeply I regretted that I, too, had once been "discreet" about phoning house-arrested friends...

...Lately "social gathering" has been narrowed down to mean the banned person and one other, unless the "gathering" could be proved fortuitous...

...Now it was an offense to enter any building which housed a newspaper or publishing firm, or any institute researching into race relations...

...The interpretation of bans is arbitrary, their enforcement capricious...

...I had given talks about the American civil rights struggle to Liberal party groups and to students at the University of the Witwatersrand (where I had also done research for a forthcoming book...