Friday-Saturday, 11-12 July 1986: Witnessing Black Domestic Violence

July 13, on the train to East London. 

On Friday afternoon, July 11, Tony MacGreggor from Hillcrest drops me off at Cathy’s office near the Johannesburg financial district.  On the way, we pass an attractive woman at a bus stop.  She works with Tony who says he can fix me up.

Cathy comes down from her office with Phil, a jovial, chain-smoking coloured guy around age 30.  He’s wearing a dark suit, candy-striped shirt and matching tie.  As we walk to Cathy’s car, he talks about the way some people in his building in Hillbrow (where he lives illegally) stare at him.  Like most coloureds, his first language in Afrikaans (his English is excellent).  He says that some South Africans are surprised to hear that.  He has a heavy Afrikaner accent and says a lot of stuff in Afrikaans to Cathy who doesn’t understand it so well.  Phil is intelligent and works as an accountant for a temporary agency.

The place where Cathy is house sitting in Bergbron (a NW suburb) has been burglarized a few days earlier.  They took the VCR.  Cathy, Phil and I visit Cathy’s older sister for her birthday.  Turns out that Cathy’s niece has recently had her flat in Hillbrow burglarized also.  Cathy is uptight as she feels the guys may come back.  As a result she won’t leave the place for long at night.  She keeps it locked up like a fortress.  Phil has been staying with her in the second bedroom for security.  The three of us get carry-out Chinese food and drink wine.  Later when Cathy and I have sex, it’s not as good as previously.

Aerial view of Bergbron, a northwest suburb of Johannesburg.  Source:  https://mapcarta.com/

 

On Saturday, Cathy goes out for the day.  I set up accommodations with several Rotarians in the Eastern Cape for the coming week, but can’t get through to make train reservations.  It’s very frustrating trying to deal with a railroad that seems to keep bankers’ hours.  

There is an auction being held for this and several other condos in this development.  A pushy lady comes by and wants to see the place.  Reluctantly, I let her in, and then tell her I wouldn’t give R20,000 for this dump noting the huge cracks in the walls of a practically new unit.

I go jogging in the afternoon.  About two blocks down the street I come upon a black woman lying motionless in the grass next to the street.  There are whites sitting in a car next to her body.  Several blacks and whites are standing around including a white guy with a club.  I get the story from the Afrikaner guy with the club and his wife.  He saw a black guy kicking this woman, so he went after him with the club.  “He’s a bloody animal,” declared the Afrikaner.  “I don’t treat my family like that.”  He had called the cops, but said it would be his luck that the black guy would run off by the time they got there.  Suddenly the black assailant picks up the woman who is barely conscious.  He carries her off piggy back.  The Afrikaner knows the black assailant who works in a house close by.  The black woman is his girlfriend or wife.  I continue jogging, work out at the trim park.  Several friendly black guys say “Hi” while I’m doing sit-ups and I note the contrast with what I’ve seen down the street.      

I stop for groceries then pass the scene of the earlier beating some 45 minutes later.  I pass a big Afrikaner woman her family standing in front of her house.  I stop to find out what happened to the black woman.  They point her out on the other side of the park lying on the ground with several blacks standing around.  They think she’s dead.  So I take a jog by the black woman to see what’s happening.  Turns out she’s sitting up now.  It’s now an hour after the incident and neither the cops nor an ambulance has come by yet.  I see this incident as an illustration of the violence in black society and the callousness of the South African police.  What if the woman was dying?  I bet they would have been right over with an ambulance had it been a white woman.  Cathy later says this sort of thing happens all the time.  I feel surprised not so much by domestic violence, but by the fact that it was done right out in public.

As I turn on the Brother portable typewriter to start recording all this, it breaks down.  Oh shit.  So now I’m stuck making hand-written notes.  [I type them up in Botswana about eight months later.  In the meantime, I take the typewriter to a Brother shop in Cape Town in late July and get it fixed.]

Phil has left for the weekend.  In the evening Cathy gets a pizza for the two of us.  Graham Hart, a geography lecturer at Witts U., does the weather report on TV.  It’s good to see that geographers seem to be more professionally recognized and understood in South African than we are in the States.

Cathy says she’s tired and is going to turn in early.  I listen to a jazz tape (“Sometimes when I’m alone at night watching those reruns of Dragnet, Love pulls at me like a magnet.”)  I’m beginning to feel “alone” with Cathy.  When I get into the bedroom a candle is burning.  Hmmm.  I cuddle her but there is no response.  What’s the message?  Later, I go off to the guest room to sleep.  It’s gotten to the point that I can’t sleep with her, given all her tossing and turning.