I have just
visited Soweto and a small part of Africa. I explored just the southern part of
a huge and diverse landscape of thirty million square kilometres that receives
less international attention today than it deserves (although the Chinese state
is quietly working its way into local economies and property). Growing up in
the 1960s I watched ‘apartheid’ in action on the news reports. Over twenty
years I heard tell of places called Sharpeville, Robben Island and Soweto which
were solely that, just places in a foreign and distant land that I would
probably never visit. Then my sister set down to live there and I went to see
her. The events in these locations came alive to me, thirty-seven years later
in Johannesburg.
My sense of what defines the
people and the landscape of southern Africa became a little clearer following
my latest visit. It bears no comparison to other former British territories. It
does not have the noise, clamour and smells of India. Unlike Canada it has herds
of exotic animals and abundant bird life. Australia may be closest in nature
but its aboriginal people have been all but obliterated. The Xhosa, San and
Zulus of Africa still stand proud and are an essential part of the land. The
British Empire invaded all this land, took it for its own and violated the
indigenous people. When I walked in South Africa I believe these people can have
their own future, something quite apart from Britain and The Netherlands.
On 16th
June 1976 an event took place in South Africa that had far-reaching
consequences, not only for all South Africans but also for black citizens the
world over. (Yet on this day most Europeans were looking inward. Then as now Europe
was a nervous community. The British were tentatively getting accustomed to a
new prime minister and despairing of an inflation rate of more than eighteen
per cent. The Germans closed a chapter on urban violence with the death of
Ulrike Meinhof. In Oslo, Britain and Iceland agreed to end a third Cod War.) For
me in Britain the events in Soweto that day appeared briefly as another
representation of a dysfunctional country that appeared to have no apparent
positive solution. The human stories of what was really happening on those
streets never got through to us. Besides, I was too busy nurturing a young
family and running a business to be overly distracted by the politics of South
Africa. White, comfortable and middle class; yes I was. Political activist,
angry at the world’s unjustness and prepared to do something about it; no I
wasn’t. I could plead guilty to apathy.
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| Soweto in 2019 |
On this fateful
day riots started amongst the Africans living in the township of Soweto, the
largest of a wholly black complex of townships in South Africa and a suburb of
Johannesburg. Those residents of Soweto that worked did so in Johannesburg – a
city where rich, White entrepreneurs employed Black Africans (at pitifully low
wages and in appalling physical conditions) to extract diamonds and gold from
the nearby mines. The riots resulted from a policy directive put out by the
National government that only Afrikaans and English must be used for teaching
children in the Black secondary schools. The Sowetans saw Afrikaans as the
language of oppression. “It is the language of pass laws, permits and police,”
said one black social worker. On 16th June in Soweto, some parents
took their children out of school. Kids in their uniforms, representing every
school in the township, were led by their parents through the streets to a
rally in the local football stadium to protest. Some of the protestors looted
and burned schools and other civic properties. Two passing white men were
dragged from their cars by a few locals who beat them and stoned them to death.
The police arrived and shots were fired.
One of the first of
a dozen school pupils to die that day was Hector Pieterson. A picture of his
body being carried by an anti-Apartheid activist with Hector’s sister running
alongside caused an embarrassing sensation for the government and flashed
across the world’s TV screens. The mass protests did not stop, however, with Hector
dying. Further inflamed by his death the residents of Soweto continued to riot
through the night and the next day. Prime Minister John Vorster instructed the
police to restore order “at all costs”. The result was more police shooting
into the crowds without warning. Over three days “the cost” was one hundred
people dead on the streets and over one thousand injured.
Forty-three years
after Hector’s death we walked along the street where he lost his life. This area
is not a landscape in any conventional sense. It is an ugly mixture of roads,
shacks and small businesses attempting to find a place in a new world. Minibus
taxis ply their way up and down the streets, the drivers constantly sounding
their horns in a fashion that only the local customers understand. On our way
into Soweto we saw hillsides of bare baked earth covered in tin shacks crammed
together, some with a cardboard lean-to attached to the side. There is no grass;
there are few trees here. We came across an occasional larger house, surrounded
by high concrete walls with razor wire on top. These, many topped with a TV
satellite dish, belong to the newly well-off Black inhabitants. We learned,
incredibly, that there are an increasing number of millionaires living in
Soweto.
I first visited
South Africa in 1982 during the time of apartheid. I was out of work and flew
to Durban to visit my sister, her husband and two young children. I also spent
four days on my own in Cape Town. I did the things that tourists do. I went up
Table Mountain, but only on the cable car. I took a bus to Cape Point to see
the tip of Africa and sat next to a German international land yachtsman who had
competed on the sands of Namibia. On our return to the city the bus passed Cape
Flats, a shantytown squatter camp. This was a huge township of the same tin
shacks I saw this year in Soweto. In 1982, this was a dismal and hopeless
township where Black and Coloured Africans were confined and forgotten by a
ruthless national government, still determined to suppress non-white African
people.
The sighting of
Cape Flats from our bus was my first real confrontation with the tyranny and
oppression of apartheid. The view did make me think of the inhumanity of
this government. This was accentuated further when our bus climbed away from
the flats into wooded and green Kenilworth, a southern suburb of the city. We
were shown the rich people’s (White Africans) houses; magnificent brick and
mock-Tudor mansions set in gloriously colourful gardens – all, of course,
surrounded by high concrete walls and electric fences. Our driver pointed out
the staggeringly large house of Wilbur Smith, a successful writer of adventure
novels. (I met Wilbur on several occasions in England in later years. Once, at
the theatre in London when he introduced me to his stunningly beautiful wife,
and later at book trade events in Nottingham. He told me he could not
understand why my bookshops sold so few of his books. I told him I couldn’t
either.)
What I did not
appreciate, and nobody on the bus reminded me of the fact, that our journey
took us past Tokai where Pollsmoor Prison held a very important inmate whose
eventual release in 1990 was the catalyst for momentous upheavals in modern South
African history. I doubt that any on that bus that day spared a thought for Nelson
Rolihlahla Mandela, incarcerated a few kilometres from our ride.
After my stay in
Cape Town I returned to Durban and enjoyed some family time. I was bemused to see
the first beach in South Africa where white, black and coloured people could
mix in the same place and swim together. The visible dismantling of apartheid
started in Durban. Walking those same beach promenades thirty-seven years later
I see almost total integration of the peoples of South Africa. Almost, but not
quite. In Durban city centre today, as in Soweto, Blacks and Whites are still
separate peoples.
In 2019, before
our visit, we reminded ourselves about Mandela, apartheid and the hope placed
in the current president, Cyril Ramaphosa. We did some homework so we could
demonstrate some knowledge of this wondrous country. Nonetheless, our visit in
Soweto reminded me that, in reality, we know little about the struggle the
black people of southern Africa had to endure to just get the vote! Our main
purpose in Soweto was not to sightsee with a tour operator. (To go alone and unaccompanied
is considered, for Whites, foolhardy and dangerous. This place has one of the
highest rates for murder and rape in the world). I felt to drive around and
gawp at the locals was disrespectful. (I know, I once climbed Uluru in
Australia, against the wishes of both the aboriginal people and my wife, but,
hey, we should all be allowed the occasional inconsistency in our lives). Our
purpose was to visit the Mandela House at 8115 Orlando West.
It was the
opposite of grand, but it was my first true home of my own and I was mightily
proud. A man is not a man until he has a house of his own.
These are the
words of Nelson Mandela who moved in to this tiny redbrick, single storey house
in 1946. We had come, after a morning spent at the symbolic Apartheid Museum in
Johannesburg, to learn a little bit more about this incredible man. Now at this
point I must state that millions of words have been written, hundreds of books
published and Nobel Prizes awarded that attest to the life and work of Mandela.
I am not going to attempt to add much more. But we had come, nevertheless, to
see for ourselves how one figure bestrode an unfortunate landscape. I also said
a small prayer of thanks that this man ever lived, for without him South
Africa, prior to 2009, could never have reached so far.
8115 Orlando
West, despite being Mandela’s first house, saw little of him as he was mostly
away around the country, campaigning against the apartheid regime. After his
divorce from his first wife in 1957 he lived here with his second wife, Winnie,
until his imprisonment. For twenty years Winnie lived in the house, when not
herself in detention, yet she was persecuted continually by the police. Often
she was under house arrest, banned from moving outside the property. In 1972
security police smashed through the front door, hurled rocks through the
windows and fired shots at the house with Winnie, her family and friends inside.
The bullet holes in the bricks are visible today.
I came to Soweto expecting
to be emotionally tormented at what we saw, yet left with something missing
from my search. Our Uber taxi driver largely drove in silence. He is a new
South African. He prefers the music of Phil Collins and Dolly Parton to Johnny
Clegg, Ladysmith Black Mambaso, Lemmy Special or Mohatella Queens. I did not
push him too much to learn about how far life and prospects have advanced for
Sowetans in forty-seven years. They have the vote, but there are few jobs.
There are plenty of schools, literacy rates are improving but there remains little
incentive to attend university. A corrupt government of nine years halted an
expanding economy, and above all, removed hope and aspiration in this meagre urban
landscape. Hassling the tourists – Sam outside the Pieterson memorial did it
with an engaging smile and a style that will turn him eventually into an
excellent guide - is about as good as it gets.
Three landscapes
that engulfed me with a sense of horror are Thiepval,
Kinglake and Auschwitz.
Whether Soweto deserves to be bracketed with those others is questionable, but
as with Auschwitz, it has become a shrine for a government that used violence
against its people to maintain it’s ends. But it is inescapable that these four
landscapes in which I have stood share a common thread of a violent past. Man was
responsible at all four. The place-names resonate with terror. Today, in each
of the four locations, resides a memorial to the people who came to this
landscape and perpetrated their violence on others. I have stood and
contemplated these histories and, despite the stories involved, remain
confident that some of us do learn from events and most of us make the
landscape a better place for our kids.
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