Читать книгу For The People - Anelia Schutte - Страница 19
ОглавлениеAs a white child in Knysna, I knew nothing of the Bantu Administration or its work. So it comes as news to me that one man who used to work for the Administration is someone I know.
Piet van Eeden’s family went to the same church as mine, and his daughters were just a few years ahead of me at school.
My parents tell me there’s another ex-employee of the Bantu Administration who’s still in Knysna. His identity is even more surprising than Piet’s, not because I know him – I don’t – but because he’s black.
Neither of them is hard to track down. Piet van Eeden now manages a supermarket near my parents’ house, and his black ex-colleague Jack Matjolweni is working at the Department of Labour.
I call Jack at work, introducing myself by my married name. At first he sounds guarded, but when I explain who my parents are, he’s more forthcoming.
‘Aaaah, I know your mother,’ he says. I can hear he’s smiling now. ‘And I know your father very well.’
My father often deals with Jack to sort out benefits for Johnny, our gardener.
Jack says he’ll come to my parents’ house after work.
I’ve heard of Jack. In the last week I’ve had a few conversations with people from the townships and Jack’s name came up often – and never in a favourable light. It’s not surprising. A black man who worked for the apartheid government and raided his own people’s houses to catch women’s husbands and boyfriends and send them away couldn’t have been popular.
One woman I spoke to put it down to the attitude with which Jack did his job. He was young and full of spirit, she said. He was just too keen.
Jack is all smiles when my father opens the door. He’s tall, so tall he has to bend over slightly to get through the door between the kitchen and the dining room. He looks much younger than his fifty years in a leather jacket and khaki chinos that make him resemble a black Indiana Jones.
Jack speaks Afrikaans to my father but switches to English when he speaks to me. It seems more natural that way, as we spoke English on the phone. His English is broken with a strong African accent and he throws in the odd Afrikaans word here and there.
I offer Jack a coffee, tea, maybe a beer. Just hot water, he says. With sugar. I bring him his drink with a bowl of freshly baked rusks.
Jack laughs when he remembers the past. He has a high-pitched giggle that doesn’t go with his face or his size, and I find myself warming to him. It’s not that he’s making light of history by laughing about it, rather that he can hardly believe his own stories of how things used to be.
Jack tells me he was still at school when he started working for the Bantu Administration. He was seventeen.
He was recruited by chance in 1976 while he was waiting in line in a Bantu Administration office. Born in Humansdorp in the Eastern Cape, he needed a stamp in his passbook for permission to go to school in a nearby town. While Jack’s papers were being processed, one of the white Bantu Administration officials came to him and offered him a job. ‘He came to me and said “Hey, I want someone like you,”’ says Jack.
By ‘someone like you’, the man meant a black boy who could speak Xhosa, Afrikaans and English, and was still young enough to be trained and shaped into whatever the Bantu Administration wanted him to be.
Jack says the fact that he was only seventeen and still at school didn’t seem to faze his prospective employer.
‘He said I could go to night school and finish my studies that way.’
Jack accepted the job. It was just too attractive an offer to refuse. Being a Bantu Administration employee meant he no longer needed permits in his passbook. It also made it relatively easy to transfer to Knysna.
As a Bantu Administration inspector, Jack had to check people’s passbooks and make sure they had the necessary permits to be in Knysna. Sometimes he would go from door to door in the squatter camps looking for ‘illegals’, other times he would get a call or an anonymous letter from someone blowing the whistle on a rival for a job or a girl.
‘What, black people would turn each other in?’ I ask him.
‘Ja!’ he says. Yes.
Sometimes the letters and calls were from coloured workers who’d lost out on a job. Other times they came from white employers, maybe bitter about losing a worker to a competitor who was willing to pay more. But most often the letters and calls were from black people: jealous boyfriends in Knysna who wanted to get back at the men who took their women, or concerned wives in the Transkei who hadn’t heard from their husbands for months.
Jack explains that most black workers left their wives and families behind in the homelands when they came to Knysna, promising to send money as often as they could. But a year was a long time for a man to be away from his wife, and many of the workers took girlfriends in Knysna. Jack remembers wives turning up from the Transkei and the Eastern Cape looking for their husbands. He tells me how those wives would cry when they saw their husbands with other women, often with new children.
‘If somebody came to me saying the husband has left and he’s got kids, then I was fighting for that,’ says Jack. ‘I was not worried about girlfriends and boyfriends. But I was always fighting for married people.’
Not all of the illegals in Knysna were married, however, and some of them fell in love with the local girls. Those men found themselves in a different predicament. Even if they married their Knysna girl, they wouldn’t be allowed to stay without a permit. Should they try to find work without a permit, they increased their chances of getting caught. And should they get caught, they’d be sent away, back to where there was no work to support their new family.
‘What about those women?’ I ask.
‘It made no difference,’ he says. ‘The men had to go back.’
And leave the wife and children behind?
‘The law doesn’t look on that,’ says Jack. ‘That time they would say the wife must go to Transkei.’
I am amazed at his apparent loyalty to his then employer, the apartheid government, and his almost blind acceptance of its laws. But he admits that it simply wasn’t his place to say anything.
‘I was an inspector,’ he says. ‘They wouldn’t worry about me.’
It’s an attitude I’ve heard from other black people and white people too, my parents included. That, back then, you didn’t disagree with the government; you just accepted that things were the way they were, you did your job and you kept quiet. Those who didn’t were marked out either as activists or sympathisers, both of which could land you in trouble.
Throughout our conversation, Jack insists that he was helping people – and that the people were grateful for what he was doing. The outsiders were coming and taking the locals’ jobs and women, he says. The locals wanted them out.
I ask him how the people reacted when he caught them.
‘They would fight,’ he says. ‘It was dangerous.’
That’s why he carried a gun.
‘Because it’s dangerous,’ he says again. ‘They can kill you.’
Sometimes, Jack says, he had to run. Other times he would get the police to go back with him. But he never had to use the gun, and no one ever as much as pointed a gun at him. Knives, yes, ‘to try to open the road and run,’ he says. ‘But if they see you’ve got a gun, nobody will bother you.’
He pauses for a long time. He’s not laughing now.
‘It was…’ he stops again.
‘Yoh, it was very hard. Because it’s my job. If I couldn’t do that, then I would be fired.’
He says people threatened to kill him sometimes, saying it wasn’t right, the job he was doing.
‘And I would say to them, “Give me a better job, and I will do that.”’
I’ve heard that Jack’s house was burned down twice but he insists it only happened once, much later, in 1993 when there was widespread unrest following the assassination of the ANC’s Chris Hani. It was the year before South Africa’s first democratic election.
At that time, he says, anyone who lived in the township and worked for the government was a target.
Jack was already working for the Department of Labour then, but admits that there might have been people who’d held a grudge about his work for the Bantu Administration in the past.
After his house was burned down, Jack moved to Hornlee, where he still lives today.
When I ask him what the most difficult part of his old job was, he says it was sending the people back to where they came from.
‘Why was that difficult?’ I ask.
‘Because you’ve got a heart, don’t you?’ says Jack. ‘You’re still a human being.’
I know the shop that Piet van Eeden manages; it’s where my father buys his newspaper. I offer to go and buy it for him so I have an excuse to speak to Oom Piet.
In the same way that Vivien Paremoer has always been Tannie to me, Piet has always been Oom.
I find Oom Piet at his manager’s station near the tills and he recognises me right away. There’s the usual chit-chat of what I’m doing now, where his daughters are in the world, how my brothers are doing and who in the family has had babies. But when I mention the book, his attitude changes. He doesn’t seem happy talking about the past.
‘I’ve talked to a lot of people for a lot of books and articles,’ he says. ‘The last time I did that, I said “never again.”’
I ask him what kinds of books and articles those were.
‘I can’t talk about it now,’ he says, looking pointedly at the cashiers behind the tills. They’re all black.
He seems wary of talking about it at all.
‘It’s behind me,’ he says. ‘That whole system. I’ve left it behind.’
Just when I think he’s blown me off, he carries on: ‘But only because it’s you, and because I know you,’ he says, ‘I’ll talk to you a little.’
He says he’ll come over to my parents’ house the next day.
After his initial apprehension, Oom Piet seems relaxed and happy to talk to me in my parents’ house.
Oom Piet’s take on the role of the Bantu Administration is very different from Jack’s. Whereas Jack focused very much on the social aspect of reuniting wives in the Transkei homeland with their straying husbands, Oom Piet saw the role as a more practical one.
‘We had to make sure the economy kept going by supplying workers, and seeing that it was done on a proper, coordinated basis,’ he says. ‘Otherwise, if you had to just throw open the doors, you can imagine what kind of influx it would have caused.’
And, he says, you couldn’t allow those people to come in without providing the necessary services for them. But, in a catch-22 situation, you couldn’t budget properly for those services when the censuses weren’t giving a true reflection of the size of the population. And the people who were in Knysna illegally avoided getting polled in an effort not to get caught.
‘You do a census,’ he says, ‘and the census says there are a thousand people. But in reality there are two thousand. Now you work according to the numbers and build a school. Then they say the school is too small. It’s always too small.’
He tells me it was impossible to keep everyone happy.
‘Say I let people come in,’ says Oom Piet. ‘Then they’ll probably come to me later and say we now need church premises. Then I say OK, fine, we’ll make a plan. Now you give them premises for a church. And tomorrow they come and say but that’s an Anglican Church. Now we need this church and another church and another church. If you make one concession, you really need to do your homework. And that’s where things got messy.’
There was never enough money, he says. Funds from the provincial government were extremely limited, and because of Knysna’s hilly terrain, any building work and infrastructure cost considerably more than in most other places in the region.
On the positive side, he says he feels like he meant something to the people.
‘You were at once a teacher, a social worker, a magistrate. You solved problems, you served people with knowledge.’
But he realises those people might not have liked everything he did. As well as controlling the influx of black people into the area, the Bantu Administration was responsible for removing squatters from white-owned land – two jobs that couldn’t have made him popular with the black community.
‘It’s like traffic police,’ he says. ‘We all agree there have to be traffic police on the roads. But they have to catch other people, not you. And that’s how it is. As long as the traffic cop catches other people, it’s hunky-dory. And who likes the traffic cop? We’re all friendly when we see him. But when he walks away, we say, “That’s the last job I’d want.”’
