Ah But Your Land Is Beautiful Read online

  – I do not want them to touch me, Father. But if you help me into the truck I shall go.

  – I will help you, mother, and as soon as I can I shall come to your new house in Meadowlands.

  – Give me a minute, Father. I must say goodbye to my house. My husband built that house many years ago when we were both young. I am glad he is not here today.

  The old woman stands for a minute at the gate of her house. She shuts her eyes, she is praying. What is she praying for? That some angel with a sword will come down to defend it? Or does she give thanks for the life that she lived there? Or does she ask forgiveness for those who have taken her house from her?

  – I am ready, Father.

  Meadowlands. The name is beautiful. The huge machines come, and day after day they raze Sophiatown to the ground, the shops, houses, lodging-rooms, brothels, shebeens, churches. For some reason the huge church of Christ the King is left, standing guard over the desolation. Other huge machines come and take away the rubble. The new streets are laid out and paved, and thousands of houses are built for the white workers of Johannesburg. The name of Sophia, loved wife of Mr. Tobiansky, which in some other dispensation might have lived for ever, goes into oblivion.

  The new town gets a new name, Triomf, meaning Triumph. One assumes it means the triumph of the Great Plan, of the philosophy and practice of separate coexistence. One must not be surprised if one day the name is changed, back to Sophiatown perhaps, or to Huddleston, or to Kwa-Lutuli.

  . . . You must not have any doubts, my dear aunt, about the demolition of Sophiatown. It was a giant slum, dirty and overcrowded, full of thieves and murderers and prostitutes. The new place Meadowlands is a place of order and spaciousness. The houses are small but well built, and when the trees grow up it will be a place to be proud of. It is another great step forward in the Great Plan. It will certainly not be a place for South Africa to be ashamed of, which Sophiatown certainly was.

  Another notorious slum that will be demolished is District Six in Cape Town. It too is full of thieves and murderers and prostitutes. The Government is determined to put an end to mixed residential areas. There is no need to feel guilty about these demolitions. Ethembeni about which I last wrote to you, Sophiatown, District Six, and all the other blackspots are not Afrikaner creations. Ethembeni was allowed to come into being by the Natal Government, Sophiatown by the British rulers of our defeated Transvaal Republic, and District Six by the Cape Government. Mixed residential areas were never permitted in our two republics.

  The man Father Huddleston is an agitator. The title ‘Father’ is Romish, and is alien to our Reformed churches. He would much rather be with black people than white, and he takes every opportunity to be photographed with laughing black children. He is laughing himself and has his hands on their heads in the act of what is known as ‘blessing’, another Romish custom.

  His attempts to stir up violence in Sophiatown ended in total failure. But he did great harm to our country by inviting foreign newspapers to come to Johannesburg and to publicise the removals. This time he took every opportunity to be photographed with old men and women, who naturally take such a resettlement much harder than the younger ones. The newspapermen get the old people to weep or, if they cannot weep, to hold handkerchiefs to their eyes and, if they can get Huddleston there too, looking full of sorrow, they feel they have done their work well. Then they send their pictures overseas so that all the world can see how cruel are the white South Africans, especially the Afrikaners.

  A friend in London sent my Minister a picture from an English newspaper showing Huddleston helping an old woman into the army truck that is to take her to Meadowlands. A couple of young policemen are shown laughing, and unfortunately it looks as if they are laughing at the old woman. I happened to be in my Minister’s office when he received the paper, with this photograph on the front page, and the caption ‘Seeing the Funny Side’. He sat and looked at it without speaking, but his face was black with anger. At last he threw it over to me. ‘Look at it, look at it, Van Onselen,’ he said. ‘What do you think of it?’ I said, ‘Minister, it’s a scandal.’ He said, ‘Of course it’s a scandal, but if I were to touch this Huddleston, there would be still more pictures.’

  He then told me to find out the names of the two young policemen, why they laughed, why they laughed when there was a photographer there, and why they allowed Huddleston to help the woman into the truck.

  In fact the removal was a great triumph for the Minister. It was carried out with a minimum of disturbance, and many of the people laughed and joked with the police. The Minister kept in touch throughout the day with the Commissioner of Police in Johannesburg, and had the messages typed out and put on his desk. Each time I went to his office he showed them to me, and he was full of pride in the police and the officials. His cup overflowed when he received congratulatory messages from the Prime Minister and from Dr. Hendrik. His happy mood lasted exactly ten days, and then he received the picture from London. My Minister has the reputation of being a hard man, but in fact he is not, and he was deeply upset by the false impression given by the photograph.

  I have taken very seriously your advice as to how I should deal with my intense dislike of my immediate superior Dr. Fischer. It is too early to say if my efforts have borne fruit. While we are in Cape Town he spends a great deal of time at the Houses of Parliament, and I do not see much of him. I will see much more of him when we all return to Pretoria.

  I must finally report to you that the congresses, the African, the Indian, the white and the coloured, are planning to hold a great Congress of the People in Johannesburg in June. One good thing is that Lutuli will not be able to be there, as my Minister has confined him for two years to the area around Groutville, where you may remember he was once the chief. At times it makes me anxious to see how the work of the congresses persists. I had hoped that when the Defiance Campaign came to an end, there would be a lull in their activities, but it does not seem to be so. I can tell you in confidence that I and many others will rejoice on the day that Dr. Hendrik takes over the reins of the government of the country. I do not like to appear disloyal to the P.M., but he does not have the vision or the intellect of Dr. Hendrik, and when he speaks he does not evoke the Afrikaner pride that Dr. Hendrik can call forth and which our revered Dr. Malan could certainly evoke in me (and which I am afraid Dr. Fischer does not; his Afrikaans is generally recognised to be superb, but I find it too cold and logical).

  The Congress of the People is going to last for two days, and it is going to present a new Charter for the People of South Africa. That means of course that it will reject totally Dr. Hendrik’s Great Plan for peaceful and harmonious separate coexistence. My Minister is facing the grave decision as to whether he should ban the gathering altogether as a danger to the peace of the country.

  Father Huddleston

  Church of Christ the King

  Sophiatown

  I am getting sick and tired of seeing your photograph in the papers, patting the heads of black children. Do you ever pat the head of a white child? Have you no love for the children of your own kind?

  The latest photograph is of you with your arms round a black woman. It makes me ashamed to be a member of the Anglican Church. Why cannot we stick to our own kind? In God’s creation dogs do not mate with cats, and lions do not mate with antelopes. Why is it a crime to want to stick to your own kind? God created us different, yet according to you He will bring down judgement on the Government for moving blacks out of white Johannesburg, and sending them to live with their own kind.

  As a priest you make me sick. Why must you always paw the black women? I know all about your vows. But why are there thousands of infants’ graves in every nunnery in the world? They are monks’ children and you know it, and as soon as they are born they are put to death so that your holy name can be preserved.

  Now that Sophiatown has gone, what will the white men do who used to go there to visit the black dollies, and kiss the black
tits and the black — ugh! I cannot bring myself to write down such filth. And you, are you so holy? You know as well as I do that if you start pawing black women you won’t stop there. And you a priest! It makes me want to get out of the Anglican Church.

  I have never touched a black skin in my life and I never shall. The thought fills me with disgust. My mother would never let a black woman touch any of her children. She taught us not to hate anybody but she would not let us be touched by the black nation.

  I look in the paper every day to see if the Government has sent you back to England.

  Proud White Christian Woman

  . . . I can understand your puzzlement, my dear Max, and I do not take offence at your question. It was a pleasure to hear from you after all these years. You were nineteen and full of reforming zeal, and it was exciting to you to be taught by a man who was proud to be a Marxist and a member of the toughest party in the world. You are by no means the only one who asks how I, an aging professor of Biology, thought by many to be a world authority on certain obscure matters, and having such a fiery past, can join a political party which is made up of cranks, utopians, and impractical idealists; desperate black people who think their threatened rights can be saved by white liberals just because they are white; scheming black people who think there might be pickings in it; and other black people who for some extraordinary reason join white people to fight for things they both believe in.

  It’s a good question and, if it puzzles you, it puzzles me too. It has made me take time off from my work and turn my instruments on myself. What’s going on there in that queer, supposedly autonomous entity Edward Roos which I call my self? In my idealistic days I was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, but I left in 1936, partly because I could no longer endure the hostility of the ‘real believers’. My belief in dialectical materialism was shaky and I could never really accept the idea that the right and only way to bring about social and political change was to provoke hostility between class and class, which in South Africa meant hostility between white and black. I suppose I was in truth a socialist who wanted to be a democrat also. However, my resignation in 1936 did not prevent the Nationalist Government from ‘naming’ me in 1950. That meant that nothing I said or wrote could be published, but it did not prevent me from joining the Liberal Party.

  I had several reasons for doing this, but I shall mention only one. It was the conduct of the white members of the party during the campaign to resist the destruction of Sophiatown. Here were men and women who had not taken part in any resistance before, who were sent for at all hours by black members of the party in Sophiatown, to trace people, sometimes members and sometimes friends of members, who had been taken away by the police, for a whole host of offences that only black people can commit, such as being caught in the street without their passes, but really because they opposed the destruction of Sophiatown and of their freehold. Some were taken away for no other reason than that they objected to being questioned in the street as to what they were doing and where they were going. Some no doubt objected in stronger terms than others, and there is no easier way for black persons to get arrested than to object strongly to being interfered with when they are strolling or gossiping or shopping in the streets of the township which they regard as their home, and where they expect to be able to walk about in freedom.

  There is nothing more difficult for most white South Africans than to go to a police station and make inquiries about some black person whom they believe to have been detained unjustly. I know this well because when I was young I did it myself, and I had to force myself to go into the police station. One is conscious — and this is a terrible thing to say — that one is being disloyal to something, and that something is nothing less than the cause of white supremacy. One feels that one is poking one’s officious nose into affairs which every decent white South African should leave in the hands of the police with perfect trust in their probity and humanity.

  It almost made me weep to see little Laura de Kock in the Newlands police station. She is only a slip of a girl, very shy, very conventional, and absolutely terrified of the police. She went to inquire what had happened to Elizabeth Mofokeng, who went out to the shop and didn’t come back again, but people reported to her husband that the police had taken her away. ‘Yes,’ said the young policeman, ‘there is a Bantu female Elizabeth Mofokeng in the cells.’ Laura asked if she could see her and the young policeman referred the question to his sergeant, who said no. He wanted to know what authority Laura had to inquire on behalf of Bantu female Mofokeng and she replied that she was a friend of the family, and had been asked to make inquiries by Mr. Mofokeng. It was easy for Laura to see that the sergeant disapproved of white people who had black friends, and of white people who called black men ‘Mister’. He wanted to know why Bantu male Mofokeng had not come to inquire about his wife, and Laura explained that he had had to stay with his distraught children, who had heard a neighbour say that the police had taken their mother away. The sergeant informed her that she had no status in the matter, but that he would supply information to Bantu male Mofokeng.

  Laura de Kock left the police station with a sense of her complete powerlessness in the face of the State. Some value that she regarded as fundamental, call it what you like, the sanctity of the Mofokeng family, the security of the Mofokeng children, the security of Elizabeth Mofokeng who could not even go in safety to the shop, seemed to count for nothing in the Newlands police station. A decent woman had been arrested on her way to or from a shop, for some offence unknown, yet no friend of hers had any right to know what offence she had committed. On the one side of the counter complete powerlessness, on the other side a power terrifying in its omnipotence, totally indifferent to the anxiety or distress of the husband and children, and, what was more, a power totally unaware that it was destroying the future of its own society.

  Laura went to look for a telephone, and public telephones in Newlands are notorious. At last she found one that worked, and she rang Ruth, the doyenne of us all, Ruth with the eager face, not beautiful, but burning with an inner fire and a consuming passion for justice, and as far as I know without fear of any policeman or magistrate or judge. She is a lawyer, and of course that made it easier for her than for Laura.

  It was now getting near midnight, and Ruth had gone to bed, but she told Laura she would be there in thirty minutes. She came to the house and got me out of bed too so that I could keep her company. She swept into the police station and asked to see the sergeant. She told him she was an attorney, and she had been asked by Mr. Mofokeng to represent his wife. She wanted to know why Elizabeth Mofokeng had been arrested.

  It was easy to observe a change in the attitude of sergeant and constable. They could ride roughshod over liberal housewives but they had to be careful of attorneys. When the sergeant was preparing to hum and ha, Ruth said to him forthrightly, in that eager way that was uncompromising but not offensive, ‘Sergeant, I am Mrs. Mofokeng’s legal representative, and I demand to know why she has been arrested.’

  ‘Lady, she was arrested for loitering.’

  ‘Loitering!’

  ‘Yes, lady.’

  ‘Let me tell you, sergeant, I know this lady well, and she does not go in for loitering.’

  ‘The court will decide that, madam.’

  ‘And I’ll be there, sergeant, and I am warning you that the police evidence will have to be good. Now I would like to put up bail for Mrs. Mofokeng.’

  ‘Madam it is not in my jurisdiction to set and receive bail.’

  ‘Then I shall ask you to release her into my custody, on the understanding that I shall deliver her to the court at the time set down for trial. Here is my card. You will see that I am an attorney-at-law, 1605 New Court Chambers, in Ferreirastown.’

  ‘Madam, I would have to release her on her own recognisances, but I would do it on the understanding that you will deliver her to the court at nine a.m. tomorrow. Court number 24.’

  ‘Well, than
k you, sergeant, that will be an arrangement satisfactory to all parties.’

  We delivered Elizabeth Mofokeng to her overjoyed husband and children, and drove behind Laura’s car to her home in Parkwood. As soon as we approached the house, her architect husband Hendrik came out to meet her, and enfolded her in a long and silent embrace. It was two o’clock in the morning, but there were no reproaches. I must say that the sight affected me. I said to Ruth, ‘All right, I’ll join your damned party.’

  – I didn’t phone you, Mr. Mansfield, because I didn’t want anyone listening in to have the satisfaction of knowing what had happened to your engine. Mind you, they’ll probably find out anyway.

  – And the engine is ruined?

  – I’m almost certain it is, but I won’t know for sure until I’ve stripped it down.

  – How did they do it, Jeff?

  – It’s easy. You park your car outside a hall or a cinema or whatever, at night preferably. The chap lifts the bonnet, takes the cap off the oil filler pipe, pours one tin of grinding-paste into the sump, puts the cap back, and closes the bonnet. I should say he would take less than a minute. The filthy oil gets into the oil pump, but before the pump packs up it pumps the oil into the engine, where it begins to erode the bearings and to eat away the cylinders. If you go on using the car, then finally the whole thing seizes up. The red light gave you three warnings, and if you had left the car and got us to fetch it the damage would have been less. But you did what most people would have done, you decided to get to your service station as soon as possible. You had to travel twenty miles to get there, and the damage done in those twenty miles would have been considerable.

  – If you can repair it, Jeff, what will it cost?

  – I’d say four to five hundred pounds.

  – And a new engine?

  – Double that. I’m sorry, Mr. Mansfield.

  – I’m sorry too.