Thursday, 24 April 1986: Apartheid Bus Frustrations

North of Halfway House on a bus bound for Pretoria

I’ve just had my first maddening brush with apartheid or so it appears.  Actually, I’m still not sure what happened but here goes.  

I’m staying in Halfway House, north of Johannesburg.  I wanted to get up to Pretoria, the South African administrative capital, 35 minutes north by car.  I phoned the bus company.  Yes, they had buses which stopped several times a day in front of the hotel and post office in the center of Halfway House.  Yes, it was a multi-racial bus.  The fare was R2.20 (about $1.10) – a bargain at twice the price.  So, after phoning for an appointment tomorrow afternoon with a guy with an immigrants’ committee in Pretoria and phoning Joan MacGreggor’s brother, John, about a place to stay up there, I packed up my shit and headed for the bus stop. 

It was about a 3km walk.  Luckily, I hadn’t walked far when a woman stopped her car and offered me a lift.  The bus was due there at roughly 12:30PM.  At 12:29, along comes a bus marked “Pretoria via Halfway House.”  I frantically waved for the bus driver to stop.  He shook his head from side to side and kept on going.  There appeared to be all black people on the bus, but I had been told that the intercity buses had recently become multi-racial.  I stood there in amazement and frustration for a few minutes.  No other bus came by.  Gathering up my stuff, I walked off to the police station a block away.  I asked the black cop in the station about the buses but he knew nothing about them.  I’ve found that it’s difficult if not impossible to communicate with blacks here, especially when it comes to getting directions.  Is it my Amerikaner accent, do they not want to communicate with whites, or is their education so poor that they can’t speak English with a damn? 

Mad as hell, I carried my load back to Hillcrest where I was staying.  Multi-racial, eh?  Bullshit!  I was going to get to the bottom of this.  I called the bus company.  Yes, the bus was multiracial.  The black guy on the phone said he would speak to the driver about it.  That wasn’t good enough.  I wanted a definite answer from a supervisor.  Some woman told me I was probably at the wrong bus stop.  “They can’t stop everywhere, you know.”  I later learned that she was blowing smoke up my butt.  Her supervisor was out on some errand and he couldn’t help me anyway.  She gave me another number to call, and the person who answered referred me back to the first number.

About this time, Joan MacGreggor came back from work.  Thinking that perhaps I had been at the wrong stop, I asked if she could drive me back down to the town center again as there was another bus at 2:30.  She was as confused about the situation as I and kindly offered to drive me to Pretoria if the 2:30 bus wouldn’t stop for me.  Finally, at almost 2:45 along comes a bus that is painted white (the other one was blue-grey).  He stopped and the half-full bus had a mixture of whites, blacks, and Indians on board.  The driver was black so I figured it was no use asking him what had happened.  That was probably just as well, because about 15 minutes later an elderly white lady got up to get off the bus, and he yelled at her for some reason.  She didn’t know why he was mad at her and neither did I.  It’s easy to see how one can become a racist when constantly dealing with situations like this.  I’ve already given up trying to ask blacks for directions, etc.  All I get in reply is total confusion.  If the government ever expects blacks to play a role in this society above the level of ditch diggers, it going to damn-well have to improve their schooling so they can better communicate in the Queen’s English.  If there were just one black language here, I suppose you could argue that whites ought to learn to speak it.  In fact, there about six. 

After the intercity bus let me off, I found a square about two blocks away with scads of local buses surrounding Paul Kruger’s statue (Kruger was president of the Transvaal Republic from 1883 until 1900).  A Sunnyside #2 took me to John’s high rise apartment building about 3km to the east.  It’s now 6:50PM and I’m sitting in John’s little flat on the 21^st (top) floor.  The view is spectacular from the east-facing window.  Stretching out in all directions are 5- to 20-story apartment buildings.  I don’t think Pretoria is all that much bigger than Colorado Springs (excluding the sprawling black townships around it) but it has the feel of a big city.  Hills surround the city which is very green.  A cool evening breeze is now coming through the window.  I suspect the temperature is around 20°C (high 60s F).  Through the window at the end of the hall, I have a great view of the Union Buildings which are floodlit at night.  It’s great being in a real city again after spending most of the past three weeks in a suburb, on a farm, or camping out.  And, instead of waiting two days to have a maid do my laundry, there is a REAL laundry room I can use down on the second floor. 

Pretoria and the South African Union Buildings viewed from a 21st floor apartment.

 

John is a journalist with a local newspaper.  Earlier, he told me some interesting stories about how the South African military appears to be getting around the arms blockade.  If the U.S. is not selling them armaments, then how are they getting Ellison diesel engines for their army trucks?  If France has cut them off, how are they still getting Mirage jets and spare parts for them?  He implied that a lot of these items come through intermediaries like Israel. 

John also talked about how ill-prepared the South African army is for controlling riot situations (brought back memories of the cluelessness of the leadership regarding riot control that I experienced as a low-life member of the Ohio National Guard back in 1970).  London Bobbies, for example, are taught how to defuse situations.  But when young South African soldiers find themselves out numbered in a riot, they panic and start shooting.  The army’s tactics tend to incite more violence rather than defuse it.

 

[Note on 9 July 2022:  A couple years later, I learned from Joan, that John had been murdered by a black man he was trying to help.]