Tuesday, 13 May 1986: A Role Model for Treatment of Black Workers
11:00 AM, Home of Woolfie & Irene Joffa, Bloemfontein, Orange Free State
I’m sitting on the stoep (patio) at the back of Woolfie and Irene’s spacious condo a few blocks from downtown Bloemfontein. The sky is clear, temperature in the high 60s F, sunshine trickling through the vine-covered beams overhead. Ferns, flowers, trees, and plants with 1-foot diameter leaves are flapping in the breeze. A black groundskeeper in royal blue work clothes is pulling weeds and raking leaves (remember, it’s autumn here) about 75 feet away in the communal area for the 2-story condos. Behind him are tall, skinny trees and an attractive 8-story block of brick flats (an apartment building). There’s some light traffic noise, a tingling wind chime, and a bird intermittently chirping. Very pleasant surroundings for writing.
The Orange Free State's Provincial Legislature meets in the Vierde (fourth) Raadsaal building in Bloemfontein. On the left is a statue of a Boer War General, Christiaan Rudolph de Wet.
Earlier this morning, Woolfie and I dropped off my dirty clothes at a laundromat where a black woman will wash, iron, and dry them for me and have them ready by 1:00. Woolfie and Irene employ a Sotho woman, Lisa, who is usually here in the morning to wash and clean, but today she had to go to the doctor.
Woolfie is president of the local Rotary Club. When I phoned him last week, he invited me to stay here. He and Irene are probably early 60s and recently sold their women’s clothing business. “We’re now busy spending our children’s inheritance,” Woolfie quipped when I asked him about his work.
Woolfie seems to have a more empathetic attitude toward black people than
does Mavis with whom I stayed in the Johannesburg area. I could detect this from a short exchange he
had with Lisa yesterday as well the way he talks about blacks. It wasn’t so much WHAT he said to Lisa – they
were speaking in Afrikaans – but his tone of voice. Unlike Mavis, he doesn’t seem to feel a need
to speak to blacks as if they are children.
You’ll get a lot of argument over this issue from South African whites. But Woolfie seems to speak to black workers –
Lisa, the woman at the laundromat, the groundskeeper just a couple minutes ago
– much as a kind American employer would.
You know, tell them what you need them to do in a polite and friendly
but assertive voice. That’s the way I
talked to Mavis’s maid, Cecilia, and it seemed to work just fine (when she
could understand me, that is).
May 14, 7:30 AM
I spent part of yesterday afternoon jogging around the rail yards about two kilometers from here. It was amazing for me to see old steam locomotives working for the first time in more than 30 years. They are still used to a limited extent in parts of South Africa as the country has abundant coal reserves but no oil except what they import or produce synthetically from coal.
Last night we went out to an Italian restaurant where I had a seafood and black olive pizza. Woolfie is a great host and won’t let me pay for anything. I did manage to pay for our movie tickets, as I sprinted over to the box office ahead of them. We saw “Down and Out in Beverly Hills” which I had seen previously, but I laughed just as hard the second time. It was helpful for Irene and Woolfie to have an American “interpreter” to explain things like 911 calls and who Little Richard and Jack Kerouac are/were. They laughed and laughed – South Africans seem to appreciate American humor and even idolize us.
Interestingly, it appeared that none of the sex scenes in the movie had been cut. They didn’t even bleep out “fuck”. Irene said that the censors stopped bleeping
out four-letter words within the past couple years. So, things are changing here. More importantly, the Johannesburg Star ran a
story yesterday announcing that blacks will now be allowed to own property (in
South Africa itself, not just in black “homelands”).
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