Monday-Wednesday, 7-9 July 1986: A Return to the Same Old Shit in South Africa

August 13, 3:45PM, Hillcrest Community, Halfway House, South Africa.

My train from Victoria Falls arrived in Bulawayo on Sunday morning.  I had made arrangements with Penny and Adrian Feather who graciously put me up Sunday night.  The last leg of my five week journey consisted of me retracing my journey from Bulawayo, through Botswana, and back to Johannesburg.  This was a much easier trip than the one coming up to Bulawayo in early June as I was able to take the once-a-week express train which got through border posts much quicker and only took 23 hours total.  Besides, I had a little compartment all to myself.

I had purchased my return ticket to Johannesburg in advance.

The train pulled out of Bulawayo an hour late at 1:00PM Monday afternoon.  When we later stopped in Shashi in northern Botswana not far south of the Zimbabwe border, a horde of locals descended on the train to change money and sell handicrafts.  A guy in a compartment near mine leaned out the window and tried to get one of the venders to change his Zimbabwe dollars for Botswana pula.  He found no takers.  I showed me once again how worthless is the Zim dollar.  Glad I had gotten rid of all of mine. 

Shashe River at sunset on July 7.  It was just about bone dry in mid-winter.  Note the shadows from the railroad bridge.  A highway bridge is in the distance. 

 

After dinner I did some writing, and was heading back to my compartment with a couple of cool Lion Lagers when the African man named Exhauviah in the next compartment struck up a conversation with me.  He was an office manager in the Zimbabwe Transportation Ministry and very articulate.  I found no problem using big words with him.  Lately, I seemed to be getting in the habit of keeping my language around Africans as simple as possible given that English is a second language for many of them.  This fellow and his daughter were travelling to Lobatse in southeastern Botswana to visit his brother who is a secondary school science teacher.  His brother’s wife works in Gaborone with a wholesale food company.  Exhauviah and I never got around to talking politics – actually a relief as I was getting rather sick of the subject.  Instead we compared prices of housing, clothing, and consumer goods in our respective countries.  He was amazed at my little Brother typewriter which often seems to be a conversation stimulator.  Exhauviah had an expression that I’ve since noticed both blacks and whites use regularly in southern Africa.  Instead of say, “No kidding?”, “Is that so?” or “Really?” they say “Is it?” pronounced “Izit?” 

While we were talking, an African man from another compartment came in.  Oh yes, I had promised earlier to help him fill out his South African customs form.  He was a friendly 67-year-old house painter from Soweto Township outside Johannesburg.  It was fun talking to these guys.  On South African trains, you don’t have a chance to interact like this with people of other races.  Recently, however, I learned that whites can ride in multi-racial 2^nd class coaches with blacks, but you have to reserve it.  They don’t tell tourists this because I assume they don’t want people like me mixing with non-whites.  Exhauviah suggested we exchange addresses as he wanted to look me up after I started my job in Gaborone (which was looking increasingly likely).  The next day, the old fellow from Soweto gave me an African handshake as we got off the train in Johannesburg.  

I got a bit pissed off at the service in the South African dining car which was stuck on to the train after we crossed the border.  Breakfast wasn’t bad, but I had to practically create a scene at lunch to get the staff to find change for my 10 rand note, the smallest bill I had.  Besides, the fish I had was yucky and they never did bring the lemon tea I ordered. 

On the way to Botswana five weeks earlier, the train had crossed the western Transvaal at night.  This time, I saw it in the morning.  We arrived in Zeerust while I was in the diner eating breakfast.  It is a cute little town nestled among tree-covered hills.  Several pointed church steeples were in evidence.  After breakfast, I noticed several South African Railways “dicks” walking up and down the passageways through the cars.  They didn’t seem to pay any attention to me, but I noticed them talking to several black passengers.  Were they looking for terrorists?  The train passed through an attractive agricultural valley west of Swartruggens.  Between there and Koster, I saw dry grazing land, bush-covered hills, and fields with dead maize stalks.  East of Koster, the landscape became typical high veld:  flat with farm fields, the trees being limited to windbreaks and the farmsteads.  Just like Kansas except for the road signs in Afrikaans.  Between Koster and Krugersdorp, the train climbed through the Magaliesberg, the range of low mountains where I had accompanied the Wits U. geography students on a field trip in April.

Koster reminded me of a typical farm town in the Midwestern US.

  

I had expected Jenny from Hillcrest Community to pick me up at the Johannesburg station, but somehow we got our meeting place mixed up and I missed her.  So, I had to lug my burden down several blocks to a bus stop to get transport back out here to Halfway House.  Along the way I was reminded that, yes, I was back in South Africa again.  The black bus driver almost missed a white lady who was flagging him down along Louis Botha Way.  When he came to a screeching halt she jumped on the bus yelling, “I thought I’d have to throw myself in front of the bus to get you to stop.”  The driver said nothing and I felt my blood heat up.  Had a black driver in say, Zambia, made the same mistake the scenario would have been much different.  First of all, he would have smiled and apologized profusely before she had a chance to yell, which she wouldn’t have done in Zambia anyway.  She would have smiled back, made some small talk, and everything would have been cool.  Not in South Africa.  It’s little incidents like this that remind one of the tenseness in the relationships between blacks and whites here.  I’m not saying it’s always like this, but there is a large measure of bad will that crops up when you’re not expecting it.  Oh yes, and when she had paid her fare and started walking to her seat, she looked at me shaking her head as if to say, “God, aren’t they incompetent!”  I said nothing and gave her no sign of agreement or disagreement.  What I wanted to say was, “Don’t look to me for sympathy, lady.  I’m an American.” 

Five weeks in black Africa had worn out my sympathies for white South Africans (other than for the minority of liberals who want meaningful change).  Black Africa is far from perfect.  Zambia and Zimbabwe, in fact have created real economic messes for themselves.  But even in Zimbabwe, where white minority rule had been overthrown only seven years ago, I saw the possibilities of what relationships between blacks and whites could be.  And having had a chance to talk with black Africans on an equal basis (as opposed to the “Yes, master” shit I heard from them in South Africa), I had begun to appreciate their humanity, their wonderful warmth, ad care-free attitudes toward life and other people.  Sure, the Africans have a lot to learn about technical efficiency, good government, and the like.  And we have a lot to learn from them about human relations.

When I got off the bus in Halfway House, I phoned the farm to see if anyone was available to pick me up.  The only people at home didn’t have cars.  There are no taxis that I know of in Halfway House, so I dejectedly picked up my bags which were beginning to feel like baby elephants and headed up the road.  It was almost two miles to the farm with a long, nasty uphill section.  I tried hitching for about 15 minutes, but none of the eight or so cars (all driven by whites) that passed gave me any notice.  I’d have to take a lot of rest stops with these three heavy bags. 

Just as I started the uphill section, an old black guy on a bicycle with a big basket in front stopped and asked if he could help.  Sure, and I could pay him, but could he manage my big duffle bag on the basket?  No problem.  I’m sure we were a funny sight – me with my backpack and big blue briefcase; him with my big blue duffle bag in his bicycle basket.  And I noticed that he seemed to know just about all the black folks we met along the way.  They would talk and laugh (probably in Sotho – I didn’t understand a word of it).  I caught a glimpse of the black social fabric of Halfway House.  These people all knew each other, but white people who lived a couple houses away from each other would drive past each other every day without so much as a nod.  I should add that whites in South Africa never walk.  Since I do, that makes me really strange, I suppose.  When we got to the farm, I gave him 4 rand ($1.60).  That’s probably as much as he makes for half a day’s labor.  All the black workers at the farm knew him, of course.

Now, to put my trip up north in perspective, I should remind the reader that I left South Africa on June 1, before the Soweto 10^th Anniversary stay-a-ways and demonstrations.  There was no state of emergency before I left.  When I came back on July 9, there was.  

That night, I had dinner with Jane and Harriet, the two lesbians who live here.  They told me that things had really gotten tense in South Africa since I’d left.  Many people had been detained (I’ve since heard as many as 10,000), but no one could find out who.  They had a black activist hiding out here for a few days.  They agreed with my pessimistic scenario for the future of South Africa, except that they felt I shouldn’t equivocate the right wing with the Afrikaners.  There are liberal Afrikaners and right-wing English speakers as well.  Jane was reading a copy of the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group Report (It’s actually available at bookstores here.)  This is the publication that led up to the British Commonwealth sanctions drive recently.  Jane said their assessment of the South African situation was simplistic, and yet she was surprised at how right-on were their conclusions about South Africa.

The next morning Jane and I talked some more about working for change in South Africa.  Liberals like her and Harriet have absolutely no say in this society.  Voting, you say?  Hell, the liberal Progressive Federal Party (PFP) doesn’t even bother to run a candidate against the Nationals in this parliamentary district.  A couple years ago, Jane worked in the office of a church activist organization.  It was very draining as they were always expecting more and more from their employees.  Jane said there is a fine line between giving everything to a cause and not getting involved.  She saw people who gave everything wind up with failed marriages and lives that were broken by arrest, detention, and imprisonment.  Jane is now studying art, a field where she hopes to make a political statement.  Actually, there is more freedom to be politically controversial in the arts than in any other area of South African life.  The government figures the arts are only for elitist intellectuals, so they don’t worry much about what goes on in theaters or art galleries.

Jane also talked about making a difference with the black workers here on the farm.  There are about a half dozen of them plus their families.  The whites at the farm are very concerned about providing a good living for them and giving them the support they need.  Jane pointed out that the social relationships among the blacks are very complicated as is their concept of the land they live on.  While two white families own the farm, the blacks consider it their land in a sense.  This is especially true for Irene who has lived on this property for at least 25 years.  Yet the solution to helping out blacks is not some sort of do-gooder paternalism.  As Dan, an American living on the farm with his South African girlfriend to me, South African whites always want to make decisions for the blacks – even as to what the blacks need with regard to legal rights and self-determination.  If the South African black seems incapable of making decisions, I wonder if it’s because South African whites have never asked him to do so!          

The next morning Jane and I talked some more about working for change in South Africa.  Liberals like her and Harriet have absolutely no say in this society.  Voting, you say?  Hell, the liberal Progressive Federal Party (PFP) doesn’t even bother to run a candidate against the Nationals in this parliamentary district.  A couple years ago, Jane worked in the office of a church activist organization.  It was very draining as they were always expecting more and more from their employees.  Jane said there is a fine line between giving everything to a cause and not getting involved.  She saw people who gave everything wind up with failed marriages and lives that were broken by arrest, detention, and imprisonment.  Jane is now studying art, a field where she hopes to make a political statement.  Actually, there is more freedom to be politically controversial in the arts than in any other area of South African life.  The government figures the arts are only for elitist intellectuals, so they don’t worry much about what goes on in theaters or art galleries.

Jane also talked about making a difference with the black workers here on the farm.  There are about a half dozen of them plus their families.  The whites at the farm are very concerned about providing a good living for them and giving them the support they need.  Jane pointed out that the social relationships among the blacks are very complicated as is their concept of the land they live on.  While two white families own the farm, the blacks consider it their land in a sense.  This is especially true for Irene who has lived on this property for at least 25 years.  Yet the solution to helping out blacks is not some sort of do-gooder paternalism.  As Dan, an American living on the farm with his South African girlfriend to me, South African whites always want to make decisions for the blacks – even as to what the blacks need with regard to legal rights and self-determination.  If the South African black seems incapable of making decisions, I wonder if it’s because South African whites have never asked him to do so!