Roots of Outrage

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.

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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 …’

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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.

Whites were slashed with pangas and riddled with bullets and burnt alive, raped and robbed and tortured. Belgium and America sent aircraft to evacuate their nationals as all over the vast land the whites abandoned their properties and fled the country in terror, crowding the airports, driving frantically for the borders into Burundi, Uganda, Rhodesia and mobbing the ferries across the Congo river into Brazzaville, gunned down, robbed, murdered as they ran.

On the seventh chaotic day after independence, Moise Tshombe, provincial premier of Katanga, raised the first sane voice when he demanded that Belgium send troops to restore order. But that very day the Congo was taking its seat at the United Nations in New York and loss of face for Africa had to be avoided. On the eighth day Moise Tshombe unilaterally requested Belgium to send troops. On the ninth day Belgium paratroopers dropped out of the sky and fierce fighting began. On the tenth day Patrice Lumumba, infuriated by this challenge to his sovereignty, asked the United States to send its army to help him. Russia loudly objected, and President Eisenhower backed down for fear of aggravating the Cold War. On the eleventh day the Congo collapsed and Moise Tshombe proclaimed the unilateral independence of his province of Katanga.

Thus the independence of the Congo began. The chaos was to last many years. The Western world looked on in horror. And when those in the corridors of international power looked at what was happening in the Congo and in the rest of the continent – in Kenya, where the Mau Mau had raged, in Ghana and Nigeria with their riots and tribal war, in Rhodesia, where their policy of equal rights for all civilized men was under attack, mission stations burnt down, dip tanks burned, cattle maimed – there were many who wondered whether the Afrikaners might not have the right idea: maybe apartheid was not such a bad thing.

Mahoney begged his editor to send him to the Congo to cover the crisis, but the idea was turned down. He took unpaid leave and went up to witness the drama, to interview the wild-eyed Belgian refugees. He filled a long article, but his editor could not publish it.

‘Great stuff, Luke, but what Drum wants is the blood, sweat and tears of apartheid.’

The blood that his editor particularly wanted was that which flowed from the hearts broken by apartheid – from domestic tragedies arising from the Group Areas Act which forced members of the same family to split up under the Population Registration Act, from marriages and relationships broken up under the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, from indignities caused by the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act – but the most dramatic blood of all was that flowing from prosecutions under the Immorality Act. That was always news: scandal and heartbreak, broken lives, broken careers, and sheer shame. Most cases were prosecutions of white men screwing black prostitutes, or knocking off their housemaids when Madam wasn’t looking; but sometimes there was a case where a girl was only slightly coloured, and she was in love with a white man. That was big news. And that is how Luke Mahoney met the beautiful Patti Gandhi again.

Patti Gandhi had made news several times since she had left Umtata: as the Indian schoolgirl who walked into the Durban whites-only library; the Indian girl who climbed onto a whites-only bus and manacled herself to a stanchion; the angelic Indian girl who walked into the Dutch Reformed church and prayed until the police were called to take her away for disturbing the peace; the impertinent Indian girl who took herself to a whites-only beach and swam until the constables had to plunge in to drag her out; the girl who had become such a problem to her father that he had finally sent her to England to finish her schooling; the beautiful Indian girl who, when she returned, had the audacity to enter the Miss South Africa contest knowing she would be barred and cause a hullabaloo. And now here in the dock of the magistrates’ court, Johannesburg, looking absolutely beautiful (so said Drum, the Star, the Rand Daily Mail, the Sowetan et al), was the notorious Patti Gandhi, aged nineteen, long-legged and with a bust and face to break your heart, the great-niece of Mahatma Gandhi, charged with contravening the Immorality Act in that upon or about the 20th day of May, 1961, and at or near the city of Johannesburg, she did, being an Indian as defined by the Population Registration Act, wrongfully and unlawfully have carnal knowledge of Peter Howardson, a person defined by the aforesaid Population Registration Act as White.

All the crime reporters were in court that day. Patti Gandhi was alone in the dock because her co-accused, Mr Howardson, had broken bail and fled the country. Miss Gandhi did not have an attorney to represent her. She listened to the prosecution evidence with a little smile. When the arresting police officer, Sergeant van Rensburg, finished his evidence-in-chief, she stood up to cross-examine.

‘Sergeant, how long have you been on the Vice Squad?’

‘Five years.’

‘My word! We assume, therefore, that you are very experienced in vice? So will you please define for us the word “vice”.’

‘Objection, Your Worship,’ the public prosecutor said.

‘Miss Gandhi,’ the magistrate said, ‘we are not concerned with the witness’s ability to define abstract nouns – it’s not relevant whether the police call it the Vice Squad or the Virtue Squad – we are only concerned with his evidence that on the night of 20th May you contravened the Immorality Act.’