Читать книгу Roots of Outrage - John Davis Gordon - Страница 18

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 …’