TALES OF APARTHEID
Steif, William
South Africa TALES OF APARTHEID BY WILLIAM STEIF SOUTH AFRICA'S information ministry tries hard to shield visiting reporters from the facts of life in that country, but sometimes reality...
...He has no finesse, Just old-fashioned Calvinistic doctrine* The government ships undocumented blacks found in urban squatter camps back to the homelands in locked buses...
...At ten, I left the table and rushed downstairs, where I saw only one person waiting: a small, wiry brown man who looked very uncomfortable...
...I thought about Stefans Kendra and his injured dignity...
...that my party sat down in the restaurant, an ostentatious place with yard-long menus and slow-motion waiters...
...Frequently their contracts are not renewed...
...Racism is like Nazism...
...As I returned to the restaurant, the tournedos rossini were just being served, while the parliament member was droning on about the Natal sugar cane crop...
...The Cape Colored, also known as Cape Malays, had lived in District 6 since the Eighteenth Century...
...You are a Quaker, aren't you...
...No, they are not moving," he says of the white ruling minority...
...Botha, now South Africa's executive state president, was "very arrogant and tough" in the 1960s, Van Rensburg says...
...He had a wife and two children...
...Prozesky seems intent on securing a good buy in rattan, so Shikwane sends him down the hall...
...The homelands are so overcrowded they can't carry the population now...
...Botha has threatened me personally...
...South Africa TALES OF APARTHEID BY WILLIAM STEIF SOUTH AFRICA'S information ministry tries hard to shield visiting reporters from the facts of life in that country, but sometimes reality intrudes...
...From my eleventh floor hotel room in Cape Town, I could see a red scar of lateritic earth on a hillside a couple of miles away...
...On February 11, 1966, P.W...
...It hasn't...
...One evening in Cape Town, I was scheduled to have cocktails with South African journalists—all white, of course—at 6 p.m...
...We went to my hotel room to talk...
...Look at the hostels [vast barracks for single men] in Soweto...
...I recalled the first line of the Old Testament's Book of Habakkuk: "How long, O Lord, have I cried to thee, unanswered...
...Violence," says Van Rensburg, "breeds more violence...
...The men receive $48 to $64 weekly...
...Inside, men bend and mold Indonesian wood, and women upholster the furniture...
...I served," he said angrily, "and now I can't even go into a bar and get a drink...
...Four other children are overseas, three at universities in the United States, one at school in London...
...How long, I wondered, could his deep anger, multiplied by millions of South Africa's brown and black people, be contained...
...Shikwane, fifty-seven, clean-shaven, amiable, is a man of many dollars: His factory grosses $3.2 million a year, "and one third of that is profit...
...We go to the factory—down the road from a tannery, a Taiwanese-financed shoe plant, and a tractor depot—to see Habukuk Shik-wane, the black capitalist who runs it...
...William Steif, a former correspondent for the Scripps-Howard Newspapers, reports frequently from various parts of the world for The Progressive...
...In 1978, he had volunteered for the army's Cape Corps, a unit for so-called coloreds—persons of mixed race...
...He bullies like a dockside worker...
...He grew up at a Lutheran missionary station twelve miles from the factory...
...The government now boasts that 55 per cent of the blacks are in the homelands," Motlana says...
...For 10,000 Xhosa, this meant being moved more than thirty-five miles from fertile farming and grazing lands to a dry area in Ciskei...
...It was an open-door culture," says the priest...
...BUT IT ISN'T hard to see what's going on...
...The Catholics fought the removals, and so did the Anglican church...
...Under South Africa's contract labor system, black workers must return to the homelands each year...
...Rommel Roberts...
...They haven't the foggiest idea of what's going on in South Africa...
...in lebowa, a small homeland carved out of the northern Transvaal, a rattan furniture plant has displaced some of the bush, where kudu and impala can still be found...
...Slowly, however, the government bulldozers moved in...
...the women get an average of $20 a week...
...But the cocktail chit-chat went on and on, and it wasn't until 8:30 p.m...
...the industrialist asks...
...P.W...
...I didn't know what it was until I phoned Father Basil Van Rensburg at Holy Cross Church...
...My appetite vanished...
...Motlana, a trim man of fifty-eight, has a prosperous medical practice and heads the Soweto Civic Association...
...He told me he was thirty-one and earned about $360 a month as a bus ticket collector for South African Transport...
...He employs 500 people...
...Drugs are the order of the day...
...There's no attempt at stabilization within this country," says Van Rensburg...
...Officially," Van Rensburg explains, "50,000 people lived here...
...There were shops at the corners that gave credit...
...There are thousands of little silver toilets, privies, in these camps...
...In the lingo, they are "endorsed out...
...The "homelands" policy—by which more than ten million blacks have been forced to relocate to colonies within South Africa—"has made us a nation of migrants and commuters," he says...
...As Prozesky leaves, I look at Shikwane and wink...
...I asked breathlessly, and he nodded...
...The people were artisans, bricklayers, carpenters, mechanics, fishermen, street cleaners, postmen...
...The Nationalist Party considered itself divinely appointed by Almighty God...
...He asked me where I was staying, and I told him...
...A second "influx control" method, called "homelands consolidation," eradicates "black spots" within white South Africa...
...It was a ten-minute taxi ride to the house next to his church in District 6, the 230-acre neighborhood's old British designation...
...Very few go...
...Your name is Rommel Roberts, isn't it...
...That bulldozed hillside, the red earth, is District.6...
...Shikwane smiles and becomes a bit obsequious again, playing his role...
...He bullies like a dockside worker...
...We went downstairs, and I found a message from Rommel Roberts at the front desk: He'd come and gone...
...He has no finesse, just old-fashioned Calvinistic doctrine...
...And at 10 p.m., I had arranged to meet with Rommel Roberts, a Quaker opponent of apartheid, in the hotel lobby...
...You have to rub their noses in it constantly...
...Young whites have no reason to go into black or coloied townships...
...Van Rensburg was detained by police on a few occasions...
...The Nationalists saw that District 6 was good land and they wanted it...
...There were seven schools in the area, all the mainline churches, including mosques...
...Many blacks seek work in urban areas, where the pay is also poor...
...The factory sits at the edge of Lebowakgomo, the capital, a plateau town surrounded by mountains...
...What's that...
...He was a member of the outlawed African National Congress in the 1950s...
...According to the South African National Chamber of Commerce, the average monthly wage for a black worker in 1983 was $240, compared to $964 for whites, $454 for Indians, and $323 for coloreds...
...Hence his name, taken from the Biblical prophet Habakkuk...
...Over the years, almost a million people have been picked up this way, 142,000 in 1983 alone...
...It is responsible for the breakup of family life...
...South Africa is turning the homelands into dust bowls...
...In the arid homeland of Ciskei, close to a million people are clustered in camps...
...If we want to change this regime, we must destabilize it...
...Botha, then South Africa's minister of community development, announced that District 6 was going to be blitzed...
...P.W...
...They were forced to sell their cattle to white farmers," Roberts says...
...You closed the door only if you were sick...
...I told him it had been nice to talk, but I had to go...
...On an average weekend there are 548 reported assault cases in Cape Flats...
...Holy Cross is on 'colored land' now...
...If any black could be happy in South Africa, it should be Shikwane...
...The blitz took more than sixteen years, but by late 1982, the last families of "Cape Colored" were removed from District 6. They were uprooted under the apartheid law known as the Group Areas Act, which allows the government to move people for reasons of race...
...Look out your window," he said...
...The divorce rate is up, the alcoholism rate is up, and we're beginning to see beriberi [disease] among men without wives, without families...
...He had seen action in Namibia, formerly known as Southwest Africa...
...Shikwane adds that the government "denies black people the fruits of free enterprise—even communism would be better...
...Again he unleashed his anger at the hotel bar and the apartheid system...
...The final act is to turn off the water taps in erasing a 'black spot.' " "We've launched several campaigns to get whites to go out to see what's happening in the squatter camps," adds Roberts's wife, Celeste, a former Irish Dominican nun who left the order because she felt it was not doing enough against apartheid...
...But there's no change...
...Many of the former inhabitants of District 6 are crammed into barren, new subdivisions in wind-swept Cape Flats, twenty miles from downtown Cape Town...
...But he isn't...
...Huh...
...in soweto, the black city on the outskirts of Johannesburg, Doctor Nthato Motlana is angry, too...
...Today he is a Quaker...
...Now we have a more sophisticated kind: the homelands...
...This is the package given the United States and other Western nations to show differences...
...In Qwaqwa [one of the homelands], the average factory wage runs between $10 and $ 15 a week, if there's any work, and there often isn't...
...Botha has threatened and bullied me personally...
...Prozesky, having made his purchase, returns to the office...
...THE SECOND time around, I manage to meet up with Rommel Roberts...
...A white in his mid-thirties, Roberts had prepared for the priesthood but left his seminary just before his final year of studies...
...If they were, they wouldn't be moving blacks from one area to another...
...I am a man of dollars, but I cannot forget the mass of black people, not for a moment...
...Shikwane lives in a big house near Lebowakgomo...
...An hour later, I was to dine on the top floor of the Heerengracht Hotel with a member of parliament and his wife...
...Yet the basis for moving the people was greed...
...My name is Stefans Kendra, k-e-n-d-r-a," he responded...
...His eldest son is an accountant at the plant...
...for five years, he was banned, the equivalent of being placed under house arrest...
...Instead, they are nationalizing hatred...
...They kicked me out of the bar," he said...
...For God's sake, don't make our struggle for human rights any more difficult than it is...
...I'm angry, angry as hell...
...Listening to him, I had a strange feeling...
...We must accommodate them," he says, gesturing in Prozes-ky's direction...
...There is no change...
...The old apartheid is no longer feasible," he observes...
...So you want my true feelings...
...The easiest way to bring South Africa to heel," Motlana argues, "is to demonetize gold—make it worthless...
...I hate this government with all my being for what they have done to family life," he says...
...Actually, there were about 65,000...
...We feel very dispersed...
...Apartheid is brilliant in this respect...
...Population density in these communities is over 150 families per square kilometer...
...We know a family needs four acres to subsist in that part of Africa," Roberts says...
...I am escorted there by A. P. Prozesky, a man in his early sixties from the South African Foreign Affairs Department...
...To appease us, the government allotted a sliver of land adjacent to District 6 as a 'colored' area," he says...
...They thought maybe that'd shut us up...
...The government says decision-making is in the blacks' 'own country,' so it doesn't have to share power...
Vol. 49 • February 1985 • No. 2
