Wednesday, 7 May 1986: Lenasia – Keeping Asian Indians Separated from White Folks

May 8, 2:00 PM, Home of Mavis & Bill Urmson, Lombardy East.

Yesterday, Mavis Urmson and I visited the Indian township of Lenasia with two women from the Witwatersrand Mental Health Society.  Mavis has been taking classes through the WMHS and received an invite to tour facilities of the Lenasia Mental Health Society which is affiliated with WMHS.  I learned that WMHS is a large multi-racial agency which is funded by the government as well as through private contributions.  While they are multiracial, each program is one race or another as is each facility.  The government will fund a program for one race only and since the racial groups each live in separate areas, each facility is built to serve one racially-defined area. 

We rode to Lenasia with Sue and Lindsey, two white English-speaking social workers from WMHS.  Faith and Jemimah, two black social workers who work in Soweto and Springs followed us in another car.  It was quite a drive to Lenasia – about 25 minutes from downtown Jo’burg, mostly on freeways with light early afternoon traffic.  We drove past the outskirts of Soweto, the black township which is rumored to be a larger city than Johannesburg, then along the southern edge of Eldorado Park, a coloured neighborhood.  Finally, in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere, we came to Lenasia.  This is the only township of significant size in the Johannesburg area for Indians. 

The Mental health facilities are located in a small but clean and modern community center.  In one room, about a dozen mentally handicapped Indians were weaving.  In another, blind and physically disabled Indians were assembling the little wheels used in curtain runners.  About 16 of the 21 group members were present, a relatively low attendance level for the group because they receive economic incentives for the number of units assembled.

Map showing location of non-white townships (highlighted in yellow) southwest of Johannesburg:  Soweto (black), Eldorado Park (coloured), and Lenasia (Indian)

 

A couple of observations about the Indian community:  All these disabled people live in homes with family members.  None appeared to be “total basket cases” but it was still a good indication of how Indian families take care of their kin.  Second, Sue pointed out that the Indian community is very supportive of efforts like these.  The Lenasia Mental Health Society is very successful in raising private contributions to support their programs.

We met Mrs. Sharm Singh, a very striking, sari-clad social worker who heads up the programs of the Transvaal Indian Blind Association.  Mrs. Singh told us about their programs for teaching braille and other skills to the blind.  Their space is small so they are planning new facilities.  The charming and dark-complected Mrs. Singh seemed very open to questions so I hit her with a political one:  Wouldn’t it be more practical to have the same facilities available for people of different races?  “It’s a waste to have separate services,” she acknowledged.  Until 1977, programs for the handicapped were all under one roof.  Then, the government enacted laws separating them along racial lines, she noted.  Social workers have been pushing the government to change this policy but it’s a slow process.  She admitted, however, that there are language and cultural differences that make it difficult for whites to work with Indian clients, Indians with black clients, and so forth.  Just among the Indians of South Africa, there are some 30 different languages spoken (although most speak some English as a second language).  It is even tough for her sometimes to work with some Indians given the array of religious and cultural differences among them. 

We next took a drive over to the Jiswa School, a training center for the mentally handicapped.  The staff were all in a meeting so we didn’t get to go inside.  Still, the facilities were very impressive even though we only peeked in a few windows and toured the grounds.  “This is a better facility than we have for whites,” Mavis commented with a slight tone of jealousy in her voice.  I asked Jamimah how Jiswa compared with facilities in Soweto for blacks.  “You can’t compare,” she sighed while admiring the Jiswa campus.      

Our Indian social worker guide then led us around various neighborhoods, primarily for my benefit, I believe.  She showed us the poorest area, Extension 10, where I got a picture of some dilapidated homes.  Then over to Extension 1 where I photographed what appeared to be almost a palace in a ritzy neighborhood.  However, I found that most of the homes in Leansia are relatively middle class although some of the owners are obviously earning mucho rands as evidenced by size and quality of their living quarters. 

 

Middle class housing in Lenasia.  I found that much of the community had a monotonous, sterile appearance similar to that of many American suburbs.

 

We also drove past the small commercial area of Lenasia adjoining the rail line which brings hundreds of Indians to and from work in Jo’burg daily.  While some Indians probably prefer living in this bedroom community with “their own kind”, they don’t have the option of living in, for example, a high rise flat near downtown.  Well, at least not legally.  And despite the relatively middle class appearance of Lenasia, it does have problems.  According to one of the Indian social workers, a small two bedroom home in Lenasia costs R60-70,000.  This is exploitive because it’s much more expensive than what they would pay in a comparable white area nearby.  But Indians are desperate to buy a home even though they are in short supply.  Some even pay R200-300 per month just to live in someone’s garage.  That’s about what a white person would pay for a nice one-bedroom flat in Hillbrow, a high-rise area a few minutes from downtown. 

Many of the homes in Lenasia are occupied by more than one extended family including grandparents, cousins, and other relatives.  Mavis commented last night about how nice it would have been to have had her mother or another relative around when her sons, Neil and Tony, were small and her health was bad.  Bill reminded her of how she often says she would just as soon not have a maid in their home.  He didn’t see how she would be able to cope with an extended family.  Her complaint sounded straight out of the American suburbs – the isolation of living with a husband and kids in your own box.  The Indians certainly have their community but they sacrifice their privacy.

I also noted that Lenasia has a planned, sterile appearance – sort of like a lot of those senior citizen ghettos in Florida and monotonous American suburbs.  Give me a neighborhood with character and diversity instead. 

And while we’re on the subject of diversity…on the way back to Jo’burg, I shared my impressions of Lenasia with Mavis, Sue, and Lindsey.  I told them I have nothing against ethnic neighborhoods.  Social separation is a fact of life, and it enables ethnic groups to maintain their identities.  But why did the government have to stick Lenasia way out in the middle of nowhere?  Also, the Indian women at the mental health center were very nice.  I would certainly welcome the opportunity to have them as neighbors.  After all, they might even invite me over for an Indian dinner sometime, and I LOVE Indian food.  But even if they lived in an ethnic neighborhood near downtown like many ethnic groups in America do, I might have the opportunity to socialize with them if we got to know each other through work, political volunteering, etc.   But in South Africa, it would take a monumental effort to have Indian friends.  So, I feel that South Africans of all races are being cheated.  Whites, for example, are deprived of easy exposure to a rich African and Indian cultures.  Mavis replied that South Africans are conditioned to separateness from birth so they don’t realize they are deprived.  Sue and Lindsey agreed that members of different racial groups here are so separated that they really don’t have an opportunity to know and develop an understanding of each other. 

In my opinion, the late President Hendrik Verwoerd, the so-called “architect of apartheid”, and his Afrikaner supporters are not Nazis, something they are often accused of being.  Instead, they are narrow-minded, silly fools who have carried natural social separation to extremes by erecting rigid, ridiculous laws to enforce it.  Just what was and continues to be their problem?  Are they somehow afraid that non-white cultures will wipe out their own culture?  Doesn’t the need for apartheid imply that the Afrikaner has a cultural inferiority complex?  God forbid his sister might marry one of these "dark-skinned devils" were she allowed to socialize with them!  Actually, it may have as much to do with economics – the Afrikaners being afraid of having to compete for good jobs with non-whites.