Monday, 14 July 1986: Touring East London with a Coloured Business Owner

 It’s nearly noon when the Amatola Express train arrives in East London.  I am met at the station by John, a tall, good-looking 40ish local Rotarian with longish curly brown hair and a moustache.  He’s the headmaster for a local teachers’ center which offers seminars and classes for school teachers.  John comes from an Afrikaner background, but he’s very fluent in English.  His family speaks English at home.

John offers to start me off with a tour of the city.  First, we drive through the unimpressive downtown, then across the Buffalo Bridge through an industrial area and lower class white neighborhood.  I tell John about the incident on the train this morning when the fat Afrikaner in the canteen car wouldn’t sell me fried fish because it was “for the black people.”  He points to a group of seedy-looking whites in front of a house we are passing and tells me that these are the kinds of people who won’t change their thinking on racial issues.  This is what my fish story shows, he says.  Then he launches into a rap complaining about how foreigners come over to South Africa and tell them their society is unfair.  Yes, they know that.  The foreigners say South African society must change.  Yes, they know that too.  He basically lays the country’s problems at the feet of the intransigent, verkrampte (inflexibly conservative) Afrikaner.

John points out a Merk (Mercedes) assembly plant.  60% of the components must be locally produced.  We drive past the port facilities on the banks of the Buffalo River.  East London is South Africa’s only river port.  Shipping is off lately due to an agricultural slump, he says.

I tell John that I’ve been disappointed in the Rotary Club meetings I’ve attended in South Africa and Zimbabwe.  Most of the members have been older white men.  John has an idea.  He wants me to meet a friend who is a member of a more diverse organization, Roundtable International, which has a younger membership.  I tell him that’s a great idea.

 

In East London, I had an opportunity to meet and spend time with members of Round Table International and their friends.  It was a younger, more racially diverse, and fun-loving group than I found at most Rotary Clubs.

 

We head over to a butcher shop in a coloured neighborhood.  John introduces me to the proprietor, Greg, who is a Round Table member.  Greg is a smiling short fellow with slightly curly black hair who looks white – maybe southern European.  No, it turns out he is classified as a coloured.  His Dad was an Indian; his mom coloured.  When he came of age, Greg had to decide into which of the two racial groups he wanted to be classed.  He jokes to me that he prefers being a South African “mongrel” rather than an Indian.  John says Greg is something of a radical and has nearly been arrested on several occasions. 

John, Greg, and I drive around his neighborhood.  Greg points out various building projects which have been carried out by the city council.  Some are nice townhomes selling for R42,000 but the yards are rather small for children, he notes.  There are a limited number of these “purchase” homes.  Most of the houses are rental units although they can be purchased after five years of occupancy.  They look like small working class American boxes.  It’s not a bad neighborhood, all in all.  There is a lack of stores or shopping centers close by.  Greg says the city council has deemed that a big shopping center (as opposed to scattered small stores) must be built there with a Pick n’ Pay, Checkers or other large chain supermarket.  “Are there any coloured people on the city council?”  I ask.  Not really.  There are advisory non-voting members elected by coloureds.  However, in the last election only 4% of the eligible coloureds voted.  So, it sounds to me like a typical South African case of white people making decisions for the coloured peoples’ neighborhood, although John and Greg acknowledge that the city council has done a fairly good job.

We drive past the remnants of a home that was torched and destroyed by fire.  It was the home of a UDF member.  A car with Transvaal plates was seen leaving the scene after the fire broke out.  No charges have been brought.  Greg speculates that maybe the police did it.  “Don’t quote me on that,” Greg warns.  “I could be arrested for making such an allegation.”

Greg’s modern, comfortable-looking home is on the edge of a cliff overlooking a black township where there have been problems lately.  There is a “stay-away” in the township today.  Greg would like to drive me through it but there is a danger that we would be stoned.  He points out that the army has blocked off an entrance road to the township.  Several casspirs (armored personal carriers) are patrolling. 

The three of us drive over to a printing company to introduce me to the white proprietor.  John phones Billy, who was originally supposed to pick me up.  Tells Billy he couldn’t find me at the station.  Saw some hippy with a beard and backpack standing around but figured it couldn’t be the right guy.  They he phones another Rotarian and says he picked me up at the station, but I’m old and can’t walk too well.  The proprietor has beer, cheese and Russian sausage brought in for us.  We yuk it up and the black humor starts flowing along with the beer.  The proprietor says Greg’s house will be the first one to be torched since he is right across the valley from the black township.  John claims that Greg’s home is the only one in the area with asbestos curtains.  He tells me that crises spawn black humor.

Now we’re off to Braelyn, an Indian neighborhood.  We stop at a small shop and Greg introduces me to the owner, a very articulate Indian chap of 30 or so.  We agree that it is tough for someone like me to come here for a short time and figure out this complex society.  At the same time it’s difficult for people who have always lived here to really understand it either.  They are too close to it: too emotionally wrapped up in it to be objective.

The landscape in this Indian neighborhood is more interesting than the flat, dusty expanse of Lenasia, the Indian area outside of Jo’burg.  And it’s much closer to downtown (maybe 3 or 4 miles as opposed to about 15 in the case of Lenasia).  But the housing pattern is similar to Lenasia on a smaller scale:  a small area of huge, expensive homes on relatively small lots and larger areas for middle and low income families.  Mosques and Hindu temples are scattered here and there.

Braelyn, a relatively-up scale Indian neighborhood in East London.

 

While looking at the big homes in this Indian area, I try out a pet theory on John and Greg.  Is the Afrikaner afraid to give rights to Indians because of their business savvy?  Greg says there are not enough Indians in the country for the Afrikaners to worry about.  John says that, yes, the Afrikaner tends to be a bumpkin without much business sense.  He does okay as a farmer, but even in that vocation, he hasn’t modernized as well as he could.

We drive through the North End, a former racially-mixed neighborhood at the edge of downtown.  It has now almost been totally knocked down by government bulldozers.  Greg lived there as a kid.  His family was poor but there was a great community spirit in the place.  You could always find something to eat at a neighbor’s home.  There were coloureds, Indians, and a few whites living there in harmony.  The government moved the families out just as was done in District 6 in Cape Town and Sophiatown in Jo’burg.  Why did the ruling Nationalists care if Indians and coloureds lived together, I wondered.  It didn’t affect them personally.  Ah yes, Greg pointed out, but it was all part of Hendrik Verwoerd’s Grand Apartheid scheme.  In order to justify whites living in separate areas, he had to claim the other racial groups wanted their own separate areas as well.

I see the fallacy of utopias (in South Africa’s case, a right-wing, racist utopia).  Utopias attempt to impose an artificial order on society.  But society simply “is”.  It’s a dynamic body constantly undergoing slight shifts to accommodate the changing body of public opinion.  It’s totally unnatural for a government – be it communist, fascist, segregationist – to impose any artificial structure on a society.  And all such efforts are ultimately doomed to failure unless they truly represent the will of most of the people in that society.  This also goes for attempts to try to impose democracy and nation state boundaries on African tribal societies.  No wonder this continent is such a mess.

Jonh, Greg, and I discuss the Afrikaners’ concern for maintaining the purity of the “volk”, and their tendency to see the world in absolutes.  We talk about the verkrampte versus the verligte Afrikaners.  Both are conservative, but the verligte are willing to consider change.  P.W. Botha is considered a verligte by Afrikaners but he’s afraid of breaking up the volk with too many reforms.  John mentions the joke currently going around Afrikaner circles:  “Why does P.W. have bulging eyes?”  Answer:  “So he can more easily look through your TV screen and into your lounge [living room] to see what else he can give away to the kaffirs.”  No, real change won’t happen here until the average Afrikaner can be convinced to change his attitude.  “Are Afrikaner kids changing?” I ask John.   “No, they are often the worst.” 

P.W. Botha, President of South Africa during my 1986-87 travels there.  Among Afrikaners, he was known as Die Groot Krokodil (The Big Crocodile).  Among non-whites, he was called “Piet Wapen” (“Peter Weapon”) having served as Minister of Defense in the 1970s.  Source:  https://www.herald.co.zw/dr-white-justice-i-presume/

I ask Greg what he thinks of the vote for coloureds.  He is somewhat non-committal.  I wonder if he fears reprisals if I print any of this?  He says that, in some ways, the Coloured House of Parliament is a sham because it has no real power.  “Then are Allan Hendrickse [leader of the coloured Labour Party] and his allies selling out for a few crumbs?” I ask.  Greg won’t go that far.  He says they have decided that something is better than nothing.   Hendrickse keeps saying, in effect, “Thank you very much, but now give us more.”

Despite Greg’s basic liberalism, he is opposed to sanctions on South Africa.  He thinks the West should instead pump vast sums of money into South African non-white education to help the black man lift himself up.  He says the blacks aren’t ready to govern the country at this point because they haven’t had the experience.

John and I drop Greg off at his shop and drive out to the King’s Hotel for a late lunch.  We sit at the bar which affords us a beautiful view of Eastern Beach and the Indian Ocean.  John says that this is technically a white beach, but in recent years mobs of blacks have taken it over on New Year’s Day.  It’s now becoming a black beach.  To the north of Eastern Beach are the cliffed headlands of Nahoon Point.  Just beyond is a great surfing reef and beach, according to John.  Apparently, there is a controversy over the city dumping raw sewage out there, and they are now building a new sewage plant near Nahoon Point.  I contemplate the tourist potential of the hundreds of kms of lovely coastline in South Africa – if only the country could sort out its racial problems. 

[The following was written later in the evening under the influence of a large dose of wine after dinner with John, his wife Cathy, and a few of their friends.]

Oh god, I can’t take much more of this.  Especially people like that Anita Bryant clone who talked about some house that is a real bargain.  It is in terrible shape, though.  She didn’t know how Europeans (meaning whites) could live like that.  After all, there were no gutters so water kept splashing down.  She also talked about all the splendid restaurants, etc., etc. 

On the other hand, Cathy fixed a good meal (very tender lamb) and John was fun.  He got smashed and a bit obnoxious.  He told a story about a little girl with her mother in a supermarket who got upset because Mom wouldn’t let her buy candy.  So she said in a very loud voice, “If you don’t let me have candy, I’m going to tell everyone that you suck Daddy’s wee wee.”

I don’t think the group liked it when I told them I don’t like Uncle Ronnie Reagan.  They all love him here.  After all, he’s one of the few friends they have left in the world.  Don’t know which is worse:  meaningless chit chat or South Africans trying to sell me on their politics.  Yes – patterns are emerging.  I keep hearing the same old shit at white dinner parties.  Of course, it’s easy for me to eat their free food and then be so fucking smug.  I don’t have to live in the damn-awful society.