Roots of Outrage
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‘The Wind of Change is blowing through this continent,’ he told the South African parliament, ‘… and this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact and our national policies must take account of it …’ The third world of emergent nations, he said, were trying to choose between the models of the first, free, world of the West and the second, communist, world of the East. ‘Choosing by our example.’ Great Britain, he said, was granting independence to its African colonies in the belief that it was the only way to establish a free world, as opposed to a communist world. ‘We try to respect the rights of individuals … merit alone must be the criterion for man’s advancement … We reject racial superiority, we espouse harmony, unity and the individual’s rights … We in Great Britain have different views to you on this…’ History, he prophesied, would make apartheid a thing of the past. Isolationism, he advised them, was out of date in the modern, shrinking world. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee …
‘It was a brilliant, dignified speech,’ George Mahoney wrote to his son, ‘and you must include it verbatim in the journals, but you can imagine that it went over like a lead balloon. The applause was, at best, mutedly polite, except from me: my clapping was thunderous. I’ve been telling them the same thing for years, to no avail. And old Mac’s speech will avail nothing either. I regret to report that old Hendrik Verwoerd made a most clever – and persuasive, goddamn it – impromptu reply. He made a defence of the white man’s rights as a European in the minority on a black continent, and a presentation of apartheid as a policy “not at variance with the new direction in Africa but in the fullest accord with it” – because he’s going to grant independence to the black homelands exactly as Britain is doing in her black colonies! But his speech left out of account the mathematics – the simple fact that these black homelands are incapable of being economically self-supporting, not big enough for the ever-increasing black population – they’ll be simply reservoirs of labour for white South Africa. And, of course, it leaves out of account the economic injustice and indignity of the blacks in the white urban areas. You must put all this in the journals, Luke …’
Mahoney did, with relish. And then, six weeks after Harold Macmillan’s speech, came a new defiance campaign, and the massacre of Sharpeville.
It is questionable how much Harold Macmillan’s speech resulted in the massacre of Sharpeville, for the new defiance campaign by the ANC had been planned for months: it had been set for 31st March. But the rival PAG decided to upstage the ANC and mount their own defiance ten days earlier, to draw new supporters. The campaign was directed against the pass laws that decreed that a black man who wished to look for work in a white area had to have a pass: if he failed to find work within fourteen days, he had to return to his native area. If found without a valid pass, he was jailed. It was the law that put the lie to Prime Minister Verwoerd’s dignified and clever reply to Harold Macmillan’s speech: the police cells were packed each night with pass-offenders, the courts clogged, the prisons overflowing. A cruel system: cruel to make it difficult for a man to find work, cruel to punish him if he failed to find it. And so the ANC had spread the word that on the appointed day all the people must come together in their thousands and burn their passes on huge bonfires and then march en masse to their police stations and demand to be arrested. Thus would they swamp the system and make the law totally unenforceable.
Luke Mahoney was at Sharpeville that day. His editor could have sent him to dozens of other locations, but he chose Sharpeville for Luke, the only white reporter on Drum, because it was a ‘model location’ with a reputation for little violence. But Sharpeville was not quiet on March 21 1960. A noisy mob of five thousand had almost finished burning their passes when he arrived. He threaded his way through, holding up his camera and calling out: ‘Mr Drum, Mr Drum!’ People were chanting and dancing as they tossed their hated passes onto the leaping flames.
Mahoney was the only white man present, but the mob was not hostile, they wanted publicity. Then the last passes burned and the mob began to surge down the road to the police station. Mahoney was swept along in the crush as the people converged on the open ground outside it. He worked his way through the mob to the very front.
The big police compound was surrounded by a high, diamond-mesh fence, topped with barbed wire. In the centre, surrounded by lawn, was the charge office, a single-storey building, behind it were garages, cells and quarters for the black constables. Beyond them the joylessness of the model location stretched on and on. And all along the stout fence surged the chanting, dancing mob, offering themselves up for arrest.
Mahoney’s impression was that the mob was not hostile. Ebullient, he scribbled, cocky, noisy, taunting – but not hostile in the military sense. In fact, from what I overheard, many people were expecting to hear some important announcement from the police about the suspension of the pass laws …
Suddenly out of the police station the constables came running, with rifles, and they formed a line across the lawn facing the mob. The commander strode up to the fence with a loudhailer and bellowed: ‘Please disperse! Go back to your houses! This gathering is illegal!’
The shouts came back: ‘Yes, we are illegal!’ ‘We have no passes!’ We must be arrested, please!’
The rest was confused. The people at the front were being shoved from behind, and the fence was heaving, a sea of excited, laughing, shouting, singing black faces, men, women, children, young and old pressed against it, clamouring to be arrested. Again and again the station commander bellowed over his loudhailer, and the mob yelled back. Then a black sergeant ran up to the fence in panic, shouting: ‘Disperse! They’re going to shoot! Disperse!’ From his position at the corner of the heaving fence Mahoney formed the impression that the vast majority of the people were just enjoying themselves at the expense of the nervous policemen inside the fence, gleeful grins on black faces.
Mahoney did not hear any order to open fire, and the commander subsequently denied ever giving one. All Mahoney remembered was the line of frightened young Afrikaner policemen, rifles at the ready, the massive mob yelling at the heaving fence, the commander yelling, the black sergeant pleading: then the first shocking shot, then the ragged volley, then the pandemonium.
The pandemonium as the mob turned to flee, screaming, shoving, trampling each other underfoot, bodies crashing, and the panicked firing continued cacophonously. Shots cracked out above the screaming chaos. Men, women, children and old people were running, stumbling, lurching, tripping, sprawling, and still the shocking gunfire continued, cracking open the heavens. Mahoney stared, horrified, his face creased up, screaming: ‘No! No! No! No! No!’ And still it continued, the bodies crashing and writhing; then the commander was running amongst his men, bellowing, and the gunfire spluttered out. Then wailing rose up in its place.
Luke Mahoney stared, aghast. On the ground lay sixty-nine dead, a hundred and eighty wounded. He strode furiously from his corner, his camera and notebook on high, his heart full of outrage, and he cried out to the policemen behind the fence:
‘You stupid fucking bastards!’
That evening there were furious marches at Langa, near Cape Town, protesting against the Sharpeville massacre; the police baton-charged, opened fire and killed two. That night there were riots, and municipal offices were burned down. The next day the Minister of Justice suspended pass arrests, which was interpreted as a victory for the PAC, but the next week over eighteen thousand were arrested under new emergency regulations, and the next week the ANC and PAC were banned as illegal organizations. A state of emergency was declared and the Citizen Force was called out in the Cape.
It was a bloody time, and South Africa was shaken. Then, less than three weeks after Sharpeville, came the Rand Easter Show, and South Africa got more shaken.
The Rand Easter Show in Johannesburg is a big deal, a massive agricultural fair featuring pedigree livestock, gleaming machinery, the whole range of South Africa’s industrial products. There are fashion shows, horse-racing, polo, show jumping; there are acres of enclosures, pavilions, marquees, stalls, bars, restaurants; there is all the colour and fun of the fair. And the women all dress to kill. Mahoney was at the show that opening Saturday, reporting for Drum, because as a white man he could get into all the areas. He was directly in front of the colourful raised dais when the prime minister of South Africa, Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, was shot.
Thousands of people saw it. The prime minister’s motorcade arrived at noon to roars of applause. He walked down the red-carpeted avenue of people, smiling and waving, a tall, well-built, white-haired man with pale-blue eyes and a benevolent, pasty, intelligent face. Awaiting him on the platform were rows of dignitaries. The prime minister and Mrs Verwoerd mounted the dais to applause, then sat. The Mayor went to the microphone to initiate the opening ceremony and polite silence fell.
As the Mayor began, Mahoney noticed the white man approach. He was middle-aged, neat in a well-cut suit. He approached with an air of authority. Mahoney thought he was a security officer. He walked straight to the platform and mounted the steps. Several dignitaries turned but nobody looked surprised and the Mayor continued speaking. The man walked towards the prime minister, then put his hand in his pocket. He said: ‘Verwoerd,’ and the prime minister turned. The man pulled out a .22 calibre pistol, levelled it at the premier’s surprised head, and pulled the trigger. There was a shocking bang, gasps and screams went up, the prime minister slumped, a splat of blood on his head. The man pulled the trigger again, there was another splat of blood, the prime minister collapsed, and chaos broke out. The man was overwhelmed and disarmed.
The prime minister was rushed to hospital with two bullets in his head, but he survived. The gunman’s name was Pratt: he was a successful farmer. Psychiatrists judged him mentally deranged. In his statement to the police he said he shot the prime minister because he was ruining the country with apartheid.
7
Other blood that interested the editor of Drum was that flowing from Grand Apartheid, and forced removals.
After more than ten years of power the government had recently passed the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act, which sought a ‘higher morality’ for the policy of ‘Separate Development’, as apartheid was now decorously called; but it did not diminish hardship and heartbreak. Midst fanfare the prime minister had announced in Parliament that under this act the various black ‘homelands’ would be prepared for self-government and, eventually, total independence. This, he explained, was the logical progression of the ‘benevolent science’ of Separate Development and it would result in a ‘constellation of southern African states’, eight black and one white, independent of each other but harmoniously cooperating in matters of mutual interest. It would be a constellation so successful, the prime minister promised, that future generations of blacks would look at us with gratitude.
It sounded fine, a worthy goal, but in fact it was a cynical attempt to shovel eighty per cent of the population into the poorest corners of the land. It was a mirage because the homelands were overcrowded, and the mirage required increased forced removals of unwanted blacks from the white urban areas back to their homelands.
‘Where they are to be stripped of their present South African citizenship – such as it is, second class – and have the new citizenship of their homeland thrust upon them!’ Once more George Mahoney’s gravelly voice rang out in Parliament. ‘So they will be foreigners in the rest of “white” South Africa, with no right to enter and seek work unless the white South African government decides it wants their labour! And, of course, as foreigners, they will never ever expect to get the vote in “white” South Africa, even when this government collapses! Hey presto! With a stroke of its pen, this duplicitous government has got rid of tens of millions of its unwanted black citizens without firing a shot, while pretending to grant them independence, and thus creating pools of cheap labour!’
‘They’ll have the vote in their own homelands!’ a government frontbencher shouted. ‘What’s wrong with that?! That’s what Britain’s doing to her colonies!’
‘What’s wrong with that,’ George Mahoney cried, ‘is that it’s quite immoral and quite illegal! These blacks of ours are legally South African citizens now and you intend to strip them of that citizenship and thrust a new citizenship of a new country upon them! A country which ‘I guarantee no other state in the world will recognize – a little tin-pot “country” which cannot possibly support its people! Where they will be bottled up in impoverishment!’
‘They won’t be impoverished! They’ll have their cattle, and the Border Industries will provide employment!’
‘Not impoverished?!’ George Mahoney echoed incredulously. ‘Eighty per cent of the population crammed onto thirteen per cent of South Africa’s surface? How can they have a cattle-based economy on crowded homelands like that?! And where are these wondrous Border Industries that are going to provide employment? How many will there be? How long before these optimistic industrialists decide to take the plunge? Years? Meanwhile what do our poor deportees do?’ George shook his head. ‘Mr Speaker, there is nothing wrong, per se, in giving the blacks local self-government in their natural homelands, such as in the Transkei and in Zululand and in Bophuthatswana, giving them valuable experience in democracy. But such local self-government cannot by any stretch of the law or morality be a substitute for their greater South African citizenship, the right one day to vote in the land of their birth when they are ready for that responsibility!
‘And there is nothing wrong, per se, in the notion of a “constellation of southern African states” so mistily envisaged by the Prime Minister, where half a dozen well-run, prosperous, contented black states collaborate at this tip of Africa with our big prosperous white one in some kind of commonwealth – but that will never come to pass, because those half-dozen little black states will not be well run, they will be misruled because this government is not bent on tutelage, on giving them local self-government to teach them the ropes of democracy gradually, they are bent on hurling total independence on them to get rid of them, so the government can then piously proclaim that the remainder of South Africa is white man’s land. The little black states will be misruled because the natives have no idea of democracy yet, and they lack the education to provide a civil service! And they will not be prosperous because their territory will be over-grazed pastoral economies riddled with soil erosion because the black man counts his wealth in cattle and daughters which he sells into marriage for more cattle. And he does not have one wife, he has several, he does not have two children, he has a dozen. The Prime Minister’s “constellation of southern African states” will become a shambles of little black banana republics, ripe for communist revolution! And big fat “white South Africa” will then be surrounded by enemies. And no other country in the world will recognize this so-called constellation, but will damn it as the political sleight-of-hand it is!’
Rumbles of agreement from the opposition benches, groans from the government benches. George Mahoney looked around, then dropped his tone to one of sweet reasonableness.
‘Mr Speaker, in the name of all South Africans, present and future, I beg this government to amend this Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act. The purpose of it should not be to get rid of our black citizens, but to teach them democracy by granting them some local self-government. I beg this government not to repeat the folly of the British government, of thrusting independence prematurely on unsophisticated tribesmen as it did in Ghana and Nigeria. And I beg this government to abandon its hard-hearted, heartless programme of forced removals, shoving unwanted black people over the newly created borders into their impoverished tinpot “states” …’
The Drum editor gave Luke Mahoney the assignment of writing a series on this ‘Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Farce’. Mahoney studied his father’s speeches in Hansard, made a study of British colonial policy, and came up with a raft of suggestions on the government’s responsibilities towards ‘Tutelage of the African in Democracy’.
‘You’re turning into a good political commentator, Luke,’ the editor said, ‘but, Christ, we can’t print stuff like this in Drum.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you say here that blacks are not yet sophisticated enough for democracy – the government must “teach” them democracy “gradually”. Our black readers will resent that.’
‘But I clearly say that I don’t support apartheid – I only say there should be “gradualism”, and equal political rights for all civilized men, as is the policy in Rhodesia.’
‘That implies that most blacks aren’t civilized enough for the vote.’
‘They’re not.’
‘Be that as it may, we can’t say it. But you may be able to sell it to a conservative-minded London newspaper like the Telegraph or Globe, provided you don’t tell ’em you’re only nineteen years old. Now I want you to write some tear-jerking pieces on forced removals.’
The government had produced a new map of the future ‘constellation of southern African states’. The present Xhosa ‘homelands’, where Mahoney was born and brought up, would soon become the Republic of Transkei and the Republic of Ciskei, separated from each other by a white-held corridor. Together they were bigger than Scotland. The Zulu homeland was a patchwork of black areas sprinkled down the face of Natal, each black pocket surrounded by white-held land, and it would become the independent Republic of KwaZulu. The Tswana homeland was a patchwork of black pockets spread across the western Transvaal, the Orange Free State and the northern Cape, and it would become the independent Republic of Bophuthatswana. The homeland of the southern Sotho would become the tiny Republic of QwaQwa, tucked away in the Maluti mountains, and the northern Sotho would become the tiny Republic of Lebowa. The Ndebele homeland in the north-east would become the tiny Republic of Gazankulu, and the Swazi homeland would become the minute Republic of KaNgwane. Each republic would have their own black president, cabinet, a legislature elected by one-man-one-vote, their own civil service and army – all mostly paid for by the taxpayer in the remnant white Republic of South Africa. It made a crazy piebald map.
‘ … which,’ Luke Mahoney wrote, ‘is bound to collapse one day under the weight of eight inefficient, expensive governments.’
The rest would become the white Republic of South Africa, and blacks working there would be foreigners with work permits.
‘Sounds okay, in principle,’ Luke Mahoney wrote. ‘After all, a Spaniard cannot work in England without a permit, a Frenchman cannot live in Germany without a residence visa. But the fact is that South Africa is one country and blacks are our citizens by international law, but they’re being made foreigners in their own land, and cannot seek work in their own country without permits. And the mind-blowing injustice is that the black man cannot get a residence permit – permission to live in a slum – unless he has found a job with his work permit, which is only valid for two weeks. After that he is arrested, jailed, and deported back to his soon-to-be-independent “republic”.’
There were two kinds of forced removals: the ‘old’ kind, under the Group Areas Act, abolishing blackspots in newly decreed white zones, as in the case of Sophiatown; and the ‘new’ kind, removing unwanted blacks, surplus to the labour requirements of the new map of the Republic of South Africa. While removals such as the one in Sophiatown were heartbreaking, removals under the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act were horrendous. Millions of unwanted black people were rounded up by the police sweeps, road checkpoints and door-to-door examinations of permits; millions of people – mostly the old and children – were ‘repatriated’ to their future republics. Luke Mahoney followed many of the removals in his Drum car, driving through the highveld to the dry lands of the western Transvaal to the future Republic of Bophuthatswana, driving down into the lowveld to the future republics of Lebowa and Gazankulu, driving down into the lush hills of the future putative independent state of KwaZulu, and what he saw broke his heart.
‘Economic murder,’ he wrote. ‘At least, in the Sophiatown-removal, most people still had their old jobs to go to on Monday, even if they now had to travel miles to get there. Here they have nothing. They are taken to pre-designated vacant areas and dumped. Sometimes there are rows of tin huts pre-built by the government, sometimes they have not been built yet, sometimes they are never built. There is no work, no hope. These people have no cattle, no goats, no chickens. And no young men and women to help. Vast new communities of the aged and children are being created and sternly told to get on with the business of survival. On this sick and hopeless economic base the government is building its model dream-state, its “constellation of southern African states”.
‘All one can say is, Christ help us all …’
8
That year the infamous Treason Trial finally ended after five years; all the accused were acquitted, most fled abroad, but young Nelson Mandela went underground and formed Umkhonto we Sizwe, Spear of the Nation. That year the Congo received its independence from Belgium, and the shit hit the fan. The world stared, aghast, and South Africa gained some credibility, almost some respectability: maybe apartheid wasn’t such a bad idea if this is how black democracy was.
The Congo. A vast territory, twice the size of western Europe. Fourteen million blacks from two hundred warring tribes held in check for ninety years by tiny Belgium. Vast mineral and agricultural resources. A huge network of roads and navigable rivers to extract the wealth. Being in the heart of darkest Africa, it was of great strategic importance: to Russia in her quest for African influence, and consequently to the United Nations because of the grim threat of nuclear war. The successful transition of the Congo to independence was vital to the West. Independence Day was 30 June 1960. Within twenty-four hours the Congo had burst wide open.
The electioneering was loud and furious, candidates outdoing each other in promising voters they would each get a white man’s salary and house, a white wife, a white man’s car, that stones buried in the ground would turn to gold, that their ancestors would be resurrected. The day following independence the banks were besieged by howling mobs demanding money – ‘Print money for all’ was the cry. The Force Publique was furious that they still had white officers, demanded massive wage increases, and mutinied. Thousands of mutineers ransacked Léopoldville in a drunken rage. The new prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, fired all the white officers, replaced them with sergeant-majors and promoted every soldier one rank; the Force Publique became the only army in the world without any privates. The army mutiny swept across the vast Congo. And then the black police arrested all their white officers, and massive tribal warfare broke out.