5-6 April 1986: My First Experiences with a White South African Family

Monday, April 7, 1986, 1:00 PM

Home of the Urmson family, Lombardy East, Johannesburg   

 

So much has happened in my first day and a half here that it would take me all afternoon to describe it.  I have to leave soon to go shopping with Mavis and her mother (aka, “Granny”), but I’ll at least get started.     

After my evening arrival here on Saturday at this comfortable home, one of the first things I did was fill my sink with water and watch it drain.  And yes, the water did spin in a clockwise direction here in the Southern Hemisphere as explained, I thought, by the Coriolis Effect.  However, I later learned that the effect needs a much larger area than a sink or toilet to really produce curvature in moving fluids.  Thus, it most definitely affects large-scale wind motion but apparently what I observed was just a function of the geometry of that particular sink and drain pipe.   

After freshening up, I went to the main part of the house for some delicious homemade beef with vegetable soup.  I met Mavis’s husband, Bill, a tall, handsome Englishman in his mid-40s.  As we were finishing our soup, someone mentioned that we mustn’t miss “The Cosby Show” on TV.  I remembered that Jim Bachman, my friend back in Colorado, had informed me that “The Cosby Show” is the most popular TV program in South Africa.  “How do you know that?” I asked Jim.  “I read it in People magazine,” he replied adding some flippant comments to needle me about my know-nothing attitude toward popular culture.

At the end of this particular episode, which Jim told me had aired around the Martin Luther King holiday in the U.S. in January, the Huxtable family is watching King give his famous “I Have a Dream” speech on the tube.  The Huxtables sit there in total silence with reverent, admiring looks on their faces.  My new white South African friends and I also watch in total silence (I didn’t have the nerve to look at their faces) with no comment at the end.  But I suddenly felt very emotional watching Dr. King plead, “Let freedom ring,” to a South African audience.  And, for a rare moment I felt proud to be an American, knowing how far my country has come with civil rights.  I felt very proud of Dr. King and all the Americans who have worked so hard in my lifetime to bring about some (but certainly not enough) racial justice which really only seems to make perfect common sense.  Proud of all of us who feel that black folks are simply people like us who happen to have darker skin and some cultural differences.  Therefore, why shouldn’t they have the same shot at life as the rest of us?  Of course, it may make perfect sense to my American friends and me, but I’m now in South Africa where attitudes are very different.    Thus, I kept these feelings to myself. 

I’ve had to take a momentary break from my self-righteous musings to give some TLC to Whisky, a resident pussy cat who has just crawled up on the bench to sit with me under the maple tree where I’m typing this.  I wonder if black-and-white-coated Whisky would be classified as a “Coloured” (mixed-race) cat here in the land of Apartheid.

I had little difficulty getting to sleep in my little bed on Saturday night and had the ANC led an attack on the neighborhood, I would have known nothing of it until morning.  I didn’t wake up on Sunday morning until 9:15 and gradually made my way to the front porch in time for tea.  Mavis’s sister, Nena, brother-in-law, Wendell, and 10-year-old niece, Keri, arrived with Granny in their Kombi (VW bus).  They had picked up Granny in Middelburg, some 150km east of here.  The family was on their way back from a holiday on the Wild Coast of the Transkei.  Our conversation touched on Wendell’s experiences with slot machines in the Transkei (gambling is legal in most of the Black “homelands” and an excellent source of revenue, catering to vice-starved South Africans).  Wendell had hit the jackpot and won 100 rand (about US$40) on one of his last tries.  We also talked about my travel plans.  The most memorable comment during tea came from Granny who is quite the charming old character.  One of the boys had mentioned something about the cats often sleeping on his bed at night.  Granny, who had lived on a farm much of her life since immigrating here from England, thought that sleeping with cats was nonsense.  One summer night a cat had jumped through the open window of her bedroom in the flat where she now lives and landed right on her stomach.  It was a black cat and, for an instant, Granny thought it was a black man.  “We’re terrified of them, you know,” she said turning to me, “or at least we’re taught we should be.”

Our Sunday dinner (around noon) was delicious including roast chicken with stuffing and gravy, fried onions, chunks of fried potatoes (resembling “tater tots”), Brussel sprouts (which Keri referred to as “little lettuces”), maize (corn), and orange drink.  For dessert, we enjoyed a delicious Afrikaner custard pie called melktert, made from flower, eggs, and cinnamon.  At some point, Keri (a very pretty and precocious child with shoulder-length blond hair) commented that she couldn’t imagine living anywhere but South Africa, except maybe the Unites States because of Disneyland and Disney World.  I informed her that Disneyland was OK but I had found most of the rides rather dull.  “I’ve heard that Knott’s Berry Farm near Los Angeles has more exciting rides,” I added.  Keri was ready to hop on the next flight to find out first hand.

Nena and family took off for home leaving Granny here to help out while Mavis goes to the hospital for a couple days this week.  And, as the former owner of a VW bus, I wasn’t surprised that we had to push the Combi to get it started!

Top photo:  I’m standing at the entrance gate to the Urmson’s home northeast of Johannesburg. Bottom photo:  The Lombardy East neighborhood where the Urmsons live.  Note the stop sign and stop lane on the left side of the street.  I found that most homes in nicer residential areas in South Africa were surrounded by walls.  The same was true in Niger (West Africa) where I served as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer four years later. 

Late Sunday afternoon, Mavis and I drove 16km north to Halfway House, a dorp (small town) which is located adjacent to the expressway to Pretoria.  It was my first time out on the roads in the daylight and Mavis driving on the left-hand side of the road still felt very strange – as if I were looking into a mirror.  The landscape was green and rolling with a few trees – sort of like southeast Texas.  The temperature was in the low 20s Celsius (low 70s F) – I need to get used to the metric measurements used here.  What struck me most were the black people – EVERYWHERE.  Even though we were driving through white areas, we would encounter black pedestrians along the shoulder, alone or in small groups, every couple hundred meters.  When we returned to Lombardy East at dusk, the roadsides were still full of blacks (not along the expressway but along other roads).  As Mavis swerved to avoid hitting them, she noted that many blacks get run over by autos.  Since most of them don’t drive, they don’t realize how difficult it is for drivers to always see them, especially at night.  And especially with dark skin and dark clothing, I added. 

Seeing all these black pedestrians was beginning to give me a perspective on the enormity of the black population of South Africa which is 1/3 the area of the 48 US states.  Their black population is similar to ours (25 million) but the country has only 5 million whites.  My god, if the black South Africans were to all suddenly agree to knife all the whites in their homes, autos, and offices, all the guns in the combined U.S. and Soviet armies couldn’t stop them.  So, despite the superficial similarities of the landscape and white lifestyles compared to the U.S., the size of the black/white ratio makes South Africa vastly different from America.  While I don’t anticipate being murdered in my bed by a black mob tomorrow night, the statistics must be unsettling for South African whites, regardless of whether they are racists or not. 

The purpose of our drive to Halfway House was to visit Tom and Joan MacGregor who live with five other adults and four children on a six-acre piece of land they call Hillcrest Community.  From their home, we had a beautiful view of the setting sun over the veld.  Joan is in charge of the goats, chickens, and ducks while Tom has several beehives.  There is a large vegetable garden and numerous fruit trees on the property.  With hard work, the group is able to produce much of their own food from the iron-rich soil and mild climate.  Most of the community members (including Tom), have regular jobs in Johannesburg.  Joan and Tom invited me to come back for a longer stay and said they can put me in touch with a couple other communes in South Africa.