Tuesday, 29 April 1986: A Close Encounter of the Military Kind

3:45 PM, enroute from Johannesburg to Middleburg in the Eastern Transvaal with Mavis & “Granny” 

I’m off to Kruger National Park for a few days in hopes of photographing some lions and other critters.  That is not, however, the big excitement of the day.  Lots has been going on in Alexandra Township recently.  Students are boycotting classes, work “stay-aways” are being enforced by roving gangs of teenage boys, and the township’s mayor has resigned.  According to a conversation with Jonahs, a black acquaintance of mine who lives in Alex, chaos reigns.  He was stopped by a youth gang one morning on his way to work and threatened.  He got away with his skin intact by convincing them that he had to go pick up dry cleaning.  Sue, his white employer, insists that he not come to work this Thursday as it will be too dangerous.  Thursday is May Day and there are rumors of nationwide demonstrations.  Of course, I’d very much like to be around for the action, but without the proper press credentials, I could get busted by the fuzz.  Plus, the life of a honky with cameras isn’t worth 2 rand in a place like Alex.  So, unless I had the right escort, I probably couldn’t get near a disturbance in the black townships (or even into troubled townships) without considerable risk.  Still, I’ve felt rather guilty for enjoying the easy life as a guest of generous English-speaking whites and seeing nothing of the other side.

Yesterday, I took a good look at a map of the Lombardy East area and realized that the home where I’ve been staying off and on for the last three weeks isn’t but a couple of kilometers walk from Alex, through a valley and across a creek.  I decided this morning that it was time for my cameras and I to take a little promenade up to the perimeter of Alex.  I wasn’t sure what I’d find or how close I could safely get to the township but, hopefully, my small bit of street sense would get me through.

It was about 8:30 AM when I headed down Wordsworth Road wearing my camera equipment vest with lenses, filters, spare film, etc. and carrying two cameras with shoulder straps.  Rather than approaching Alex directly, I walked through a grassy park area and across the creek into Lombardy West, a white area of a few suburban blocks abutting Alex on the southeast.  As I proceeded up the quiet residential street, fear of the unknown invaded my consciousness.  Was there a war zone ahead?  Would I recognize danger when I saw it?  Was I being overly paranoid?  Was I being a fool-hardy idiot?  What if die polisie drove by and saw me carrying all this camera gear?  There was no law against me walking through Lombardy West with camera gear.  I’d tell then I was looking for a good spot to photograph the valley.  They probably wouldn’t buy it, but what could they do but tell me to turn around? 

Suddenly, a medium-sized mutt trotted out through an open gate at a residence.  Most dogs don’t follow me into the street, but he started to approach with warning barks.  I stopped and faced him saying, “Easy old fella. I’m going to keep walking down the street.”  He temporarily mellowed out in response to my relaxed manner.  I slowly walked backwards away from him.  Each time I would walk a few feet, he would start barking again and begin to approach me.  While he didn’t get closer than about six feet, I wasn’t taking any chances.  I kept stopping and giving him verbal assurances that all was cool.  Once I was past his property, he retreated and I proceeded on toward the corner making a mental note not to come back this way.  Whew!

At the corner, the residential area gave way to warehouses.  There were black people walking along the street here and there – mostly women, small children, or solo males.  A little nerve-racking perhaps but nothing dangerous.  Just past a petrol station, I saw what appeared to be the entrance to Alex off the main road.  I had since tucked my cameras under the vest but it was literally bulging with equipment.  As I continued, there were more blacks along the road and large groups of them waiting for buses.  I steered clear of them and decided to walk no closer than a block from the township entrance.  There were simply too many people around for me to chance walking up to the entrance to take a picture or two.  There wasn’t much to see there anyway. 

I turned down a side street in the warehouse area which paralleled the township boundary.  A little voice in my head told me I was completely on my own.  Both the blacks and the police were potential threats – there was no one to turn to except myself.

I was walking down into the valley again, back in the direction of Lombardy East.  Now I was taking a direct route.  Along the two-block-wide warehouse strip between Alex and Lombardy East, I carefully ambled with my eyes wandering in all directions.  The strip of warehouses on my left blocking the view into Alex finally gave way to a vacant, trash-covered lot.  Black women and a few small boys were waking close by while several goats grazed on trash and grass.  I stood on top of a small trash pile and snapped a couple pics of the slum dwellings a block away.  No one seemed to notice me. 

A section of Alexandra Township viewed from the southeast.  My impression of it from the perimeter was “crowded, poor, and monotonous”.

 

As I continued walking down the paved street, a group of about five small boys, aged perhaps four to seven, walked across the street in front of me.  I had noticed them earlier and had judged them to likely be harmless.  They waved and greeted me with big smiles.  I smiled and said “hi”, getting the impression they were hoping I might give them gifts.  It occurred to me that I could give them some coins and ask them to pose for a picture.  I quickly dismissed this as potentially dangerous, as it would take too much time and might interfere with me making a quick get-away if trouble appeared.  Perhaps older boys or men would see the interaction and resent my exploiting youthful models for a few cents.  

 

8:35 PM  At Granny’s home in Middelburg…the story continues

The young boys walked through a vacant trash-filled lot to the right of the street.  I screwed my 200mm telephoto lens on to the Pentax body loaded with black and white film and fired off a few shots of them. 

There wasn’t much more to see from the street, so I continued to a dead end, then down through the field and across the creek.  I headed straight up a path toward the northwest tip of Lombardy East probably another 500 yards beyond the creek.  Along the way, I spotted armored military trucks patrolling the perimeter of Alexandra and was able to get a couple telephoto shots of them. 

Telephoto shot of army vehicles patrolling Alexandra Township on April 29.  I almost got arrested for this crummy photo?

 

I’d finished off the roll of Kodachrome in the other Pentax and had a couple frames left on the black and white roll.  Perfect.  I could get a couple of panoramic shots of Alex from here with the telephoto.  I was now back in safe territory (or so I thought) walking about 100 yards from Victoria Street which forms the northwest edge of Lombardy East.  There were a few blacks working in a road crew on Victoria Street, but there appeared to be no one in the large open field I was crossing.  Nothing between Alex and me but veld grass and power lines. However, the power lines and towers were blocking a good shot of the township.  All I had to do was walk back a couple hundred yards towards Alex, then a couple hundred yards northwest to where the power lines made an abrupt turn toward the township.  That was the best spot for my remaining shots. 

A week earlier, a couple of blacks had been killed by land mines which exploded north of Bethal in the eastern Transvaal.  At about the time of one of the explosions, Tony, Hugh, and I had been driving through Bethal heading east toward the Swaziland border.  We had been on a paved road (mines are usually only set on dirt roads) a few miles away but Tony’s wife, Joan, had been a little concerned when she heard about the explosions knowing that we were in the area.  Thus, I was aware of a slight risk of mines while walking along a dirt road in a no-man’s land near a black township.  No reason to be paranoid – just careful.  I was paying attention to where I was walking as well as scanning the area for any black pedestrians.  At last, I reached the power lines’ turning point.  Yes, a good spot for shooting. 

Then…OH SHIT!  A couple hundred yards down this dirt road was a large military armored truck heading right towards me.  I thought I’d been careful because the military wouldn’t have seen me out here unless they were looking away from the township with binoculars.  I certainly didn’t expect to meet up with soldiers in this deserted field.  Oh fuck, what to do?  I couldn’t out run them and, anyway, if I started running it would be an admission of guilt for sure and might give them an invitation to shoot in my direction.  Perhaps if I started walking in the opposite direction from Alex, the bastards would leave me alone.  And maybe if I crossed some rough terrain, they wouldn’t be able to follow.

I walked at a fast clip, heart pounding, but it was too late.  They pulled up about 50 feet from where I was crossing a ditch and hailed to me in English to stop and come over to the truck.  I was screwed.  As far as I knew, I technically hadn’t broken any laws.  But this was South Africa, not the good ol’ US of A, and I wasn’t all that sure about the respect for the rule of law here.  While I had little concern about getting put in jail, I envisioned some unpleasant hassles.  The worst was getting my film confiscated.  No, actually worse than that was getting hauled in for questioning and the military discovering that I was here at the invitation of SATOUR.  They could report me to the tourist board which could have me deported because I had been taking pictures of a black township under military occupation instead of beautiful South African landscapes – a worst case scenario which I could probably talk my way out of.  None the less, Mavis wanted to leave for Middelburg in a few hours, and I figured she would be royally pissed off if I got busted, inevitably drawing her family into the mess.

I wasn’t clearly thinking about these potential nasties at this point.  The problem at hand was six guys perched atop the back of a big army truck who wished to speak to me.  They must have been reservists or police detectives as they were dressed in civvies.  No weapons were showing which made the situation slightly more bearable.  A chap of about 30 did most of the talking.  They spoke good English with Afrikaner accents and spoke to each other in Afrikaans.  None looked excessively vicious, although I would have felt more comfortable were I accompanied by Gaku Homa, my Aikido teacher back in Denver, had I encountered them in a dark alley.  As for me, I managed a display of outward calmness and tried to show no emotion other than respectfulness and cooperation.  The conversation went something like this:

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m an American tourist staying in Lombardy East over there,” I replied while gesturing toward the southeast.  “I was just taking a walk out here.  Shouldn’t I be here?  I mean I’m sorry if this is some sort of restricted area, but I wasn’t aware of that.”

“I can’t tell you that you’re not allowed to be here.  But if you kept walking toward Alexandra, you’d be a dead man.  This is a dangerous area.  Do you work for a newspaper?”

Here I decided to fudge the truth a little as there was nothing on me that would prove any connection with a newspaper.  “No sir, I’m just travelling around the country as a tourist.”

“And who do you work for back in the United States?”

“I’m currently unemployed.”

“What kind of work did you do before you became unemployed?”

No way was I going to tell him I had been a magazine editor, so I skipped back a few years.  “I was an environmental scientist.”

“What are you taking pictures of?”

“Wildflowers [thankfully, there were a few still blooming] and the landscape.”

“With that?” he retorted looking at my donkey-penis-size telephoto lens.

“I wanted to get a picture of this valley,” I answered, gesturing to the south at a 90° angle to Alex.  “I wouldn’t be interested in this area [pointing toward Alex] as it’s mostly trash dumps.”

“That’s an interesting story, but I don’t believe you.  I think you’re working for an American newspaper.”

At this point, I figured he had my ass.  As a kid confronted by an authority figure or my mother, I would have come clean hoping for mercy and understanding.  Now, I decided to stick with my story.  “I’m not employed by a newspaper.  I have no press credentials.  I’m just traveling around South Africa trying to learn about the country.”

“Are you prepared to come with us and tell your story to the police?”

[Oh fuck, keep cool!]  “I suppose but I really don’t think that’s necessary.  I apparently have made a mistake, and I appreciate your telling me that it’s not safe to be in this area.  I’m staying with a family right over there in Lombardy East.  They’re leaving in a couple hours to take me to Kruger Park.” [What better thing for a GOOD tourist to do, right?]

“Is anyone there now?”

[Oh Christ, I don’t want them going over there to question the Urmsons!]  “I don’t think so.  They’re running errands before we leave.”

“What is your name?”

“Will Mahoney.”

“Let me see your passport.”

I passed it up to them wondering what the response would be if they saw, “Guest of SATOUR” written under the visa.  Fortunately, the visa says nothing about “press”. 

“What is the address where you are staying?”  He was writing in a small notebook as we talked.

Damn!  Should I lie and take the chance that they will take me there only to discover the truth.  I could say 78 Wordsworth, then claim I’d gotten the numbers mixed up, but after all the other bullshit I’d been feeding them, it might look fishy, so I told them 87 Wordsworth.  There was a dumb question about whether I still lived in Pennsylvania (place of birth) – then the situation took a humorous turn.  Or it would have be humorous, had I not still been concerned they’d haul me in after this little interrogation was over.  They waved toward another truck across the valley to get their attention but to no avail – maybe it was just a just a show for my benefit.

“What do you think of Ronald Reagan?” queried my interrogator.

“Oh sometimes I agree with him and sometimes I don’t.”  [I thought it best not to say I usually do not agree with him as Reagan is respected by conservative white South Africans.]

“What do you think of Khadafy?” [Keep in mind that he was still asking these questions in a deadly serious tone of voice.]

“I think it would be great if someone shot him.”

“Would you say he’s a mad dog?”

I paused a moment to carefully craft my answer.  “Yes, that’s a good description.”

Then I launched into my best moderately pro-South African rap as long as they were in the mood to talk politics.  “Look, I’ve been spending a good deal of time here talking to white South Africans.  I realize that this is a very complicated situation with no easy solutions.  I’m here as a guest of the government [I threw that in just in case they had questions about the SATOUR endorsement in my passport.] and I want to learn all I can about South Africa because I feel that most Americans get a very narrow view of the situation here.”

“When are you planning to go to Zambia?”  [He had spotted the Zambian visa in my passport.  Of course, Lusaka, Zambia is now the headquarters for the African National Congress in exile.]

“Sometime this winter.  I also plan to visit Botswana, Zimbabwe, and so forth, but I don’t need visas for them.”

“And what sort of work to you plan to do when you return to America?”

“I’m not sure.  I might try to get a university job lecturing about southern Africa.  I am trained as a geographer.”

They were passing around my passport and talking among themselves while the Q&A continued.  Finally after about 15 minutes of this elephant shit, the head “hairyback” (a derogatory term for an Afrikaner male) said, “You may go now.  Be sure to walk that way.” he added, gesturing toward Lombardy East.

As they drove off and I was walking in the prescribed direction, I felt a wave of relief like Mel Gibson’s character, Guy Hamilton, and his Indonesian assistant, Kumar (played by Bembol Roco) experienced after they talked their way through a government roadblock on the way to the Jakarta airport in the film, “The Year of Living Dangerously”.  After I was further up the hillside and the truck was out of sight, I finished off the last two shots on the roll – photos of Alexandra, of course, not the bloody wildflowers. 

At one point in the interrogation, I’d noticed that my throat was quite dry.  Although I now felt relieved, I was still unnerved ty the incident.  And I had to face the music and tell Mavis what happened just in case these “rock-spiders” (another derogatory term for Afrikaner males) or one of their investigative cronies came by 87 Wordsworth for a chat. 

After unloading my cameras, hiding the film in my room, and replacing it with fresh rolls, I went up to the main part of the house for confession time (something I was good at having been raised Roman Catholic!).  I didn’t tell Mavis the first part of the story, letting her assume that I had been nabbed in the field on the way down from the house to get a couple of panoramic shots.  She was worried that her husband, Bill, might get angry if the cops showed up at the door.  She claimed that he is very straight and worries about his reputation as a partner in a big international accounting firm.  But actually, she got a good laugh out of my misfortune, blaming it on Uranus or some such thing – she’s heavily into astrology and metaphysics.  When the cops didn’t show up at the house, she figured my interrogators were bored and needed somebody to mess with. 

Hopefully, I learned a few important lessons from the experience.  I don’t regret what I did.  I don’t think it was stupid.  I have to take some risks or what good is all this time and effort?