Thursday, 24 July 1986: A Slow Train Trip West & Thoughts on Sanctions

Uitenhage, on the Port Elizabeth – Cape Town train, enroute to Hartenbos, a seaside resort on the “Garden Route”

Not much to report on today.  Got a haircut with shampoo in Port Elizabeth for the equivalent of US$2.50.  The prices down here are even cheaper than up north.  The rodoval I’ve reserved on the beach at Hartenbos for tomorrow night will be R16 plus tax.  From PE to Hartenbos would be a bit over four hours by car but the train will take about 24 hours.  Good that I’m not in a hurry, eh?

We only get about 50kms before the sun sets.  It’s dark as we pull into Uitenhage, the scene of some very nasty violence especially last year when a bunch of blacks were shot during a funeral march.

My train takes a circuitous route from Port Elizabeth (red box on right side of map to Hartenbos (red box near center of map):  First northwest, then west to Oudtshoorn, south to George, and west to Hartenbos.  After a day in Hartenbos and Mossel Bay, I continue on to Cape Town (red box on left side of the map).  Rugged mountains along the Indian Ocean in this area would have made construction of a coastal rail line impractical. 

 

My compartment mate is an Afrikaner soldier names Louis.  He can’t be over 18.  Hasn’t said much yet.  As the train went through a black area outside of PE, he commented that, “This is where they burn animals with rubber tires.”  I played dumb saying, “You mean dogs and cats?”  Assume he meant black folks.  As we went through Despatch, a dorp just a few kms down the track from here, Louis commented that this was the home of some guy who is the center for the Springboks (rugby team).  This kid obviously has his priorities.

I’m reading Business Day, a reasonably good newspaper and sort of a South African Wall Street Journal.  So Reagan is against sanctions, eh?  But I must admit the stuff he is calling for on a definite timetable is pretty stringent for these fuckers.  I mean releasing political prisoners and unbanning black political movements?  That is radical shit here.  And if their buddy, Ronbo, is saying it, where do South Africans have left to go for sympathy?  The clock is ticking and it’s only a couple minutes to midnight (of course people have been saying that about South Africa for years). 

The front page of Business Day, like many other papers here, carries the following message in a 1½ inch square shaded box: “This newspaper has been produced under emergency restrictions amounting to censorship.  The restrictions have the effect of suppressing information of public interest and of distorting the news in ways that may be seriously misleading.”  And it’s true – if you rely on the papers, SABC News and conversations with other whites, you’d think nothing was going on here.  I hear little, if anything about township violence and activities.  There are reports now and then about the number of people killed, but it’s all very abstract.  You don’t see photographs or hear details, so it tends to feel like it’s happening elsewhere.  And I’m sure that’s how the situation strikes most whites.

One thing I do get from the papers is that the economy here is really fucked.  Foreign loans and investments are drying up.  The rand is down, unemployment is up.  But the siege economy and recession don’t hit you when you walk the streets of a pleasant city like Port Elizabeth.  Wonder when all this really hit home?  I suspect that well-informed people in the U.S. actually hear more about what’s going on here than I do!  But I’m in South Africa as much to collect impressions as I am to collect information. 

Christ, I wonder if the soldier boys a couple compartments down can play their rock music any louder!  They’ll wake up all the animals in the countryside.

Not sure how I feel about sanctions.  On an emotional level, I’m all for them.  Figure sanctions might shake up these bloody Boers (if that’s possible).  It might let them know that the rest of the world means business.  But rationally, I know that the fuckers will probably just tighten up the laager, retrench (lay off) the blacks and dig in for as many years as they can hold out.  Yes, I should be pro-sanctions if I’m a good card-carrying progressive American Democrat with a social conscience.  But I see sanctions as a simplistic answer to a complex situation.  Americans don’t know what to do with South Africa so, what the hell, let’s impose sanctions.  Wish there were a better way. 

Actually Reagan’s proposals aren’t bad, but why weren’t American politicians making these demands years ago instead of being chummy with Pretoria and not talking with the ANC?  You watch; the US government won’t turn on Pinochet in Chile until the bastard is on his death bed someday.  They say we can’t interfere with sovereign governments; then why do they aid the Contras in Nicaragua?  Face it.  Ronbo’s policies are based on who is a commie (or a suspected one) and who isn’t.  It doesn’t matter if a government is made up of fascist murders as long as they are anti-communists and good for business.