17 April 1986: Two Disturbing Incidents and South African TV & Radio News.

18 April 1986, Home of Mavis and Bill Urmson, Lombardy East, Johannesburg 

I just returned from 3½ days with a group of university geography students from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.  “Wits” is one of the two or three most liberal “U’s” in South Africa.  There are black students who attend there although none were on this trip.  We went to a camp about 75 km northwest of Jo’burg to do various field studies and exercises.  And I was able to gain some insight into the attitudes and lifestyles of white English-speaking middle class university students.  This was a group of 21 to 25-year-olds who were about to finish their degrees and start teaching in secondary schools next year.  Although I’ve talked about these students in other recent letters, there is one conversation I’d like to relate.

Map shows location of the Magliesburg Range, the destination of our geography student field trip.  The Magliesburg is a relatively low, dog-legged-shaped escarpment northwest of Johannesburg and west of Pretoria.  The high point on the escarpment is 1,852 metres (6,076 ft) above sea level.

Early Wednesday morning before dawn, Frank, Andy, and I hiked up to a hilltop carrying some meteorological gear.  Every 15 minutes between 6:00 and 7:30 AM, we collected temperature, humidity, wind speed, and barometric pressure measurements and recorded them in a notebook.  Three people sharing these duties can do the whole shot in about three minutes leaving plenty of time for swapping stories in between.  Neither of these guys were what you would call left-wing radicals.  Both had completed their compulsory (for males) two years of national service.

Andy told a story about riding on a train to Port Elizabeth.  He struck up a conversation with a young chap who was in the South African Army.  The guy was on his way to some sort of inquest or trial.  Seems he had been on duty in a state of emergency area when he and his chums came across an old black man lying by the side of the road.  Their superior told them to get information out of the old man.  When he wouldn’t tell them anything, they commenced to beat him up.  Still he didn’t yield the demanded information so the proceeded to kick the side of his head in.  The young soldier calmly described how the old man’s brains looked while oozing out of his skull.  Hi main concern was that the trial was going to be a big hassle.  He wasn’t worried about going to jail because there were no witnesses except other soldiers. 

Frank has a brother who does some free-lance camera work for various TV networks.  His brother was covering a funeral last year in an area that had been declared off-limits to cameramen.  As some point, there was a scuffle between black funeral marchers and the police so Frank’s brother started filming the action.  A cop ordered him to stop filming but Frank’s brother pointed out that this was not a state of emergency area so the camera ban didn’t apply.  He went on filming so the cop tried to arrest him.  A couple of ABC cameramen saw what was happening and came over to grab his camera so the cops wouldn’t get it.  As the struggle continued, another cop shot Frank’s brother in the leg.  The incident was never reported in the South African press and there was no investigation of the shooting.  Frank wondered if such an incident would go unnoticed in the American press if a similar incident happened in my country.  I pointed out that our press would probably turn it into a national issue.

Of course both these stories are second hand and my memory is clouded on some of the details.  We’ve read about similar incidents in South Africa before so they should be no surprise to us.  Yet, when you are sitting on a hilltop in the western Transvaal looking over a peaceful agricultural valley, it’s hard to believe that such things are really happening here.  This could be California except that people drive on the wrong side of the road and speak English with funny accents.  As a matter of fact, I could probably travel around this country for an entire year and never see any evidence of problems.  The world of the black townships is so isolated not only from me, but from white people who have lived here all their lives.  They read about the violence in the papers but never hear first-hand accounts from people they know.  They don’t see the violence on TV because TV news is very tightly controlled by the government-owned South African Broadcasting Company (SABC). 

By the way, SABC radio news is a real joke.  I was listening to it last night, and coverage was limited to “President Botha said such-and-such today” and “Government Minister so-and-so said bla bla today.”  There was no real NEWS.  For that you have to tune into Voice of America on you short-wave radio or, better yet, BBC.  Last night VOA and BBC reported a bombing incident in Umtata, the capital of quasi-independent Transkei.  SABC made no mention of it.  

Getting back to the South African public’s perception of violence here, I think it’s very easy for whites to ignore it.  It just doesn’t intrude on your consciousness when you are driving through a white suburb, downtown Johannesburg, or a scenic country road.  So it just isn’t real.  At the same time, however, I can hear loud African music coming through my open window here in Lombardy East.  It’s coming from Alexandra, an old black township no more than five km from here.