Chapter 3
Gunfire and Jingles

I had lived in South Africa before, in 1980 and 1981, but things had changed enormously in the five years I had been away. On my first morning back, I went walking through the Johannesburg suburb where I had arranged to stay. The winter light was intensely pure and fresh, the earth richly red, the highveld sky heartbreakingly blue. It all brought back a flood of memories: the ineffable natural pleasures of southern Africa. Then I rounded a corner and saw, spray-painted in big black letters on a brick wall opposite a police station: VIVA UMKHONTO WE SIZWE! (Umkhonto we Sizwe is the military wing of the African National Congress, which has been outlawed in South Africa since 1960 and operates from underground.) For a moment, I just stared. I had never seen anything like this bold battle cry in a white suburb before. I glanced nervously toward the police station, which looked peaceful enough behind its barbed-wire fence. As I turned away, I caught the eye of a black man of about thirty who was standing in the sunshine reading, of all papers, the Citizen . He returned my nod, then said, with no visible irony, "Morning, baas ."

On the whole, though, the white suburbs, tranquil in their insularity, seemed little changed. What had really changed were

the townships. I had worked as a teacher in a "coloured" high school in Cape Town, had been through a three-month-long student boycott, and had seen the townships explode in major violence, so I thought I already knew something about resistance and conflict in black South Africa. But I was completely unprepared for the level of violence, the rage, the radicalization I found in 1986. The lives of millions of ordinary black people had been turned upside down by the fighting that began in September, 1984. Blacks in general seemed to be in an apocalyptic frame of mind. The police had always been an occupying force in the townships, but now the Army itself was heavily deployed there. In fact, the only whites one saw in the townships were the security forces: grim young soldiers in combat gear riding through the coal smoke, automatic rifles at the ready, in evillooking armored vehicles known as Casspirs, Buffels, or Hippos. It was hard to imagine a white teacher in a black school now. I had worked legally in Cape Town, but work permits for foreigners had become virtually unobtainable—particularly for journalists. This time, I was in the country on a tourist visa.

On my first afternoon back, I went to see the sister of a friend who had left South Africa years before. She lives in Alexandra, an old black township northeast of Johannesburg, but she refused to let me visit her there. Instead, we met in an industrial area on the edge of the township, and there sat talking in my car. Across the road was a cluster of new brick buildings—a police barracks—from which government jeeps and trucks came and went constantly, ferrying groups of black men, some of them in uniform. These were policemen who had been driven from their homes in Alexandra. They kept looking in our direction, which made me uneasy, but my companion dismissed them with a contemptuous gesture. "We call them green beans, because of their green uniforms," she said. "We don't worry about them anymore."

My friend's sister was fifty years old, rail-thin, with a nice smile but a permanently pained expression. Whenever the conversation strayed from news of her brother, every scrap of which she gratefully devoured, she would sigh and say, "It is very, very

bad here." Her contempt for the police did not seem to extend to the Army, which was heavily deployed in Alexandra. "It is just so dangerous now. I can't tell you. It is like a war," she said, and then, dropping her voice to a whisper, confided that she did not mind having the troops in Alexandra, because they made it easier for her to get to her job as a secretary. The Army was apparently taking a "hearts-and-minds" approach to the residents of Alexandra (as opposed to the rifles-and-rifle-butts approach they were using in KwaNdebele). My friend's sister did not blame the comrades for the fighting, though; she blamed the government. "They have pressurized us for so long, this must just happen," she said. "Someday it will be better." In the meantime, she had decided to quit her job and leave the city. She had just bought a plot of land next to her mother's in the KaNgwane bantustan.

Her brother had fled the country in 1976. When I asked if she had any news for him, perhaps about his old friends, she shook her head. "Some of those who left with him have come back," she said. "They come underground. They have been trained. But many of those boys are now serving long prison sentences. And some of them are late. Yes, several of his good friends are now late. But I wouldn't like him to hear that, all alone there in America."

When it came time to part, I offered her a lift home, but she refused it, insisting that it was too dangerous for me in the township—or, alternatively, that the fighting had played havoc with her housekeeping. "My furniture, which is quite nice, gets completely covered with dust," she said. "If you could see it, you wouldn't believe it." I later discovered that just having me drop her off could also have been dangerous for her . Someone might have seen me, a strange white man, rumors might have started and got twisted until people decided that someone from "the system" had been there, and her house could have ended up being firebombed. When we parted, she urged me repeatedly to drive quickly out of the area, stopping for no one, because hundreds of cars had been hijacked in and around Alexandra in the previous weeks.

As it happened, I went into Alexandra a few days later, es-

corted by a young activist named Sipho—a slick, vague kid wearing a three-piece suit. We went in my rental car, a canary-yellow VW CitiGolf. Sipho made me stop at the edge of the township. He wanted to drive. I was agreeable. Sipho told me to have some identification out, in my hand, ready to show to anyone who managed to stop us. I took out my driver's license. Sipho headed off into a blinding low sun, driving like a maniac through the wide, rubble-strewn streets, screeching around corners, scattering people who shouted after us. Nobody managed to stop the hurtling CitiGolf. We flew into a driveway, stashed the car behind a house, and scurried inside.

Most of Alexandra is brick hovels or bleak flats, with no electricity or indoor plumbing, but the house we entered was what is called in South Africa "black middle-class." The living room was carpeted, modern, with big brass Buddhas on the mantel. The lady of the house stared at me, as did her children—I couldn't tell what their relation to Sipho was—but they seemed to grasp immediately, and to accept, that I was a foreign journalist, there to interview residents.

It was not an easy afternoon. An assortment of people—other comrades, little kids, matrons from the neighborhood—joined us for tea, but the atmosphere, to my mind, was excruciatingly tense. Everyone in the room froze each time a vehicle passed, barely breathing until young sentries peeking through the heavy curtains hissed that the street was clear. Conversation would resume—but my concentration would be shot. The others were used to this level of fear; I was not.

There had been a great deal of fighting in Alexandra. Residents claimed that eighty people had been killed by the security forces since the beginning of the year; the police figure was thirty. The fighting was a gross mismatch: while the comrades threw stones and half-bricks, and used homemade catapults to launch crude missiles made out of nuts and bolts and old spark-plugs, the security forces fired shotguns, tear gas, and high-powered rifles from inside their armored vehicles. The residents chuckled lightly, though, about the shortage of soft-drink bottles in the township—they had all gone for Molotov cocktails, known

as "petrol bombs"—and about what they called "the clothes line." This was the name for a trap favored by the comrades: a strand of barbed wire strung across a road at the height of a soldier standing in the top of a Hippo.

I asked about the "people's courts" that were reported to be flourishing in Alexandra. The government and the white press regularly deplored them as kangaroo courts, meting out savage, arbitrary justice, but I heard nothing but praise for them from the residents of Alexandra. They were curbing public drunken-ness and petty criminality, were fair in their sentencing, and always gave those accused a chance to defend themselves. A thief might be sentenced to clean up an empty lot, or water the grass in one of the many small parks that the comrades had built around the townships. A young miscreant might be forbidden to wear the T-shirt of the local youth organization—a stinging punishment in a community where the youth organization has become the local incarnation of the freedom struggle, and its uniform is its T-shirt—or obliged, perhaps, to attend political-education classes run by the comrades to counter the "poison education" received in government schools.

Everybody talked about the green beans, and about the "balaclava men"—gangs of masked police and vigilantes who had been going on murderous rampages through the township. People often interrupted one another to ask exactly which person at which address had met some gruesome fate, then shook their heads and clucked their tongues over the answers. Several people complained about the press coverage of the fighting. "They show nothing. People who are not here have no idea what is happening here," said a young man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of the Congress of South African Students, a national organization of black high school students that was outlawed in 1985.

The most interesting person I talked with that day was a chubby, pretty, soft-spoken woman named Ruth. She was a secretary in her forties and she spoke plainly, without rhetoric. Her teen-age son had been jailed without charges for three months, she told me. For the first month, she had not known

where he was, or even whether he was alive: many mothers were simply informed by the authorities that their children were dead and already buried; others never heard. "When he was released, there was something wrong with his heart," she told me. "The police struck him too many times. The doctor told me he must not get excited. But how can you tell a seventeen-year-old boy that he must not get excited? Especially with all that is happening to us now." Ruth's son was on the run. She saw him occasionally, when he came home for a change of clothes, and friends of his who were also running sometimes slept at her house. But the police came regularly, bursting in, hoping to find her son, and seizing any other comrades they found there. "I have not slept properly for a year or more," Ruth said, and I believed her. Like my friend's sister, she wore an expression of permanent pain and was given to quietly apocalyptic remarks. Several times that afternoon, she murmured, to no one in particular, "I wish the whole world would just blow up."

Then people started talking about a woman from the neighborhood who had been necklaced. The woman had been an impimpi , a police informer. She had been warned twice to stop. Finally, a wounded comrade was thrown by the police into a Hippo and found her sitting inside. "Usually, informers may sit inside the Hippos, identifying houses, and who is an activist among those the police have captured," someone explained to me. "But they normally wear masks, and they never speak when someone from the community might hear them—they point. But this woman just sat there quite calmly, with no mask, and said, 'Hello, comrade.'" People whistled and clucked their tongues. "Soon after that, they caught her and burned her. This was in Ninth Street."

Ruth turned to me and said, very slowly, emphasizing every word, "I think the necklace is a good thing." Her eyes were full of strange, sad anger. She went on, "It makes the people think twice before they will collaborate, even if they have no job and the system offers them money to inform. We are unarmed. They are armed. We must take and use the little weapons we have.

Informers have been the system's greatest weapon for a very long time. Finally, now, we are stopping them."

For very different reasons in vastly different places, the necklace was an inescapable—and incendiary—topic wherever one went in South Africa. A few nights after my visit to Alexandra, I was having dinner with a group of white academics. One of my companions, a courtly old geophysicist with a piercing voice, had been amusing the table with stories featuring himself as a young, lumbering, cowardly Afrikaner forever being threatened by ruffians: mistaken for Richard Widmark by a knife-wielding drunk at a carnival; hiding under the bed in a Boston rooming house while a pretty neighbor's gangster boyfriend pounded on the door; apologizing to derelicts whom he had somehow insulted on a beach in Sydney.

Conversation turned, inexorably, to the necklace. The geophysicist offered the opinion that whites who thought that necklacing proved that blacks were savages were making unwarranted racial generalizations. The act itself was savage, barbaric, bestial, certainly, but blacks other than the perpetrators should not be blamed for it. His remarks did not meet with much approbation—it was a more liberal, sophisticated group than that. Someone pointed out that the French Resistance during the Second World War routinely executed those suspected of collaborating with the Germans, often with less evidence, it seemed, than blacks had against their neighbors who were informers, and without the multiple warnings that were apparently common in the townships. Someone else suggested that the South African media made much more of the cruelty and horror of necklacing than it did of the cruelty and horror of soldiers shooting children in the back, when the latter was really a more horrifying sort of murder, if one wanted to rank murder by degrees, as the law did. The press coverage seemed to play to white fears of the black mob, while ignoring black fears of the police and Army.

The geophysicist listened in silence to these demurrals.

But then I described Ruth, and repeated her remarks, and he

blew up. He accused me of excusing Ruth's "barbarism, her savagery," because of a political program that I wanted to impose on South Africa. He compared Ruth to Adolf Hitler. He angrily brought up the fact that his mother had twice been "criminally assaulted by blacks," and when I did not respond, he thundered, "You don't care about my mother?!"

After dinner, I went for a drive to soothe my nerves. As I wandered through the wide, wet, well-lit streets, hearing on the radio that "Bushmanland and the Northern Cape will be cloudy and cold, with showers," I thought about how, as little as things might seem to have changed in white South Africa, there was in fact a constantly rising anxiety level that, in recent days, often focused on foreigners. White South Africans were afraid of black rebellion, but that fear was vague; they were much more clearly disturbed by their increasing international isolation.

The government press expressed the mood, which was a sort of paranoid mixture of entreaty and truculence, precisely with its ritual admissions that apartheid had all been a great mistake, followed by equally ritual rejections of any and all criticism coming from the morally bankrupt West, or from anywhere else in what Beeld , the Johannesburg morning daily, called "a venomous world." White South Africa could not hope to be understood: "The prejudice and hate are much too great." White attitudes toward the disinvestment issue—among both the government's supporters and its liberal, anti-apartheid opponents—verged on the hysterical. The same was true for the international cultural boycott: a recent article in the Sunday Times , a national opposition weekly, had presented a lengthy list of foreign artists who earned places on the "U.N.'s silly blacklist" by coming to South Africa and then saw their careers take off —as if visiting South Africa had somehow catapulted them to success.

The most poignant symptom I had seen was a campaign being mounted by the South African Tourism Board to try to combat all this rejection misery. The full-color double-page advertisements in the Star were almost painful to look at. The ads began, "QUICK. NAME SOMEONE YOU'D LIKE TO VISIT SOUTH AFRICA, FREE." It seemed the Tourism Board was giving away 150 round-

trip air tickets to South Africa, and inviting Star readers to submit the names of overseas friends and family for a drawing. The winners would get the tickets, and their local sponsors would get the chance to "let them know South Africa is still a great place to visit." Under a long row of photographs in warm-toned, bureau-top frames, the ad made suggestions about the kind of people one might want to nominate: "The charming Joneses who were out from Birmingham four years ago"; "Your daughter's penfriend"; "The girl you met on the plane to Mauritius." Everyone in the photos was white; everyone being asked to respond to the ad was clearly white, too.

I drove on into Hillbrow, a seedy night-life district, where, on the main drag, black men bullfight the passing cars from both sides of the road, whipping white towels at drivers in frantic attempts to signal them into parking spaces over which, for a small fee, they will stand sentry. Hillbrow's high-rise apartments are being rapidly, illegally integrated—there are reportedly ten thousand black people already living in the area, a situation much-cited as evidence of how South African society is changing, even if certain laws (such as the Group Areas Act, which regulates racial segregation in housing) are not. This isn't the sort of change that necessarily thrills blacks, of course. Driving through Hillbrow on another night with a black reporter, I noticed him curling his lip at the crowds and bright lights and asked him why. "Capitalism," he said, with intense disgust. "Decadence."

A friend of mine says that, if one were to write a symphony about present-day South Africa, it would have to include both gunfire and commercial jingles, African war chants and Bruce Springsteen. And each of the movements would have to be composed, I think, in its own obtuse notation. When I arrived in Johannesburg, I was startled to find the same bumper sticker—"I © Soweto"—on nearly every vehicle being driven by a black person. The distribution of the thing outdid that of any other fad item I had ever heard of. What was more, the sentiment it expressed seemed incomprehensible. Were people really ready to

embrace—and in this utterly ersatz way—the ghetto where they were forced to live under apartheid? Everyone I asked about it agreed that it was quite a craze, but none of them could tell me what was behind it. Then, on my first visit to Soweto, I saw young boys hawking the stickers at every major intersection: thrusting them in the windows of taxis and vans, slapping at the sides of passing cars with thick stacks of them. Since every vehicle in sight already sported at least one "I © Soweto" on its bumper, this made no sense whatsoever. I asked my companions, Soweto residents both, what gave. They squirmed, they grumbled. Finally, one of them said, "Somebody's really exploiting the situation. They're making a mint out of the people's fear."

I asked what that meant.

"It means people try to use those things to show that their car or truck is not a company car, not a white man's vehicle—that it belongs to a black person. They hope to avoid being attacked, or having their vehicle burned, that way."

This rude mix of hucksterism and terror, I realized, was a perfect metaphor for life in the townships in 1986. (I continued to ask white South Africans about the "I © Soweto" stickers, just to see what they would say, but I never met one who knew why they were so popular.) Far-sighted black entrepreneurs actively embraced the revolution. A few days after my eye-opening on the bumper-sticker question, a Soweto liquor distributor took out a newspaper advertisement to salute "our fallen heroes"—those killed in protests—"who have sacrificed supremely to give birth to a people's education for a better and brighter future for all." And a Soweto car dealer donated a Ford Escort XR3 for the grand prize in a "People's Giant Raffle" being staged in Fun Valley, Soweto, by the Release Mandela Campaign.

Soweto itself, while undoubtedly © ed by many people—Jon Qwelane claims that he, for one, would live nowhere else, even if he were permitted to—has the same higgledy-piggledy, fear-edged, endlessly incongruous quality that the situation as a whole in South Africa has. It is the largest city in southern Africa, but it is also not a city at all. Amenities are few and furtive:

practically all the bars are illegal, located in private homes; there are three cinemas to serve the estimated two million residents; whenever possible, people do their shopping in Johannesburg, twenty miles away. Most of those who live in Soweto are poor, of course, but some are far poorer than others. There are vast "hostels" where migrant workers live in gulag conditions, strictly segregated from more permanent residents. There are crowded, filthy shantytowns stalked by disease, hunger, and evil-looking dogs. Only a stone's throw away (the measure of distance in the townships these days) from these hells-on-earth are modern ranch-style houses with sliding glass doors, indoor plumbing, and sports cars in the driveways—the houseproud, upmarket neighborhoods, known locally by mordant nicknames like Beverly Hills and Prestige Park, where the Tutus and the Mandelas live. Schools are numerous but pokey and rundown and, while I was around, they were usually vacant. The fields around them, like fields throughout the township, tended to be blackened, for grass fires were believed to help disperse tear gas.

The atmosphere in the Soweto streets could be deceptively peaceful, even somnolent, with donkey carts clopping down the long, monotonous rows of matchbox houses, small children pushing steel chair frames around in the dirt, women hanging laundry on backyard lines. . . . And then suddenly the air would electrify around a group of youths gathering stones to greet a delivery van or a Hippo or a "mellow yellow"—the absurd name blacks have given to the yellow police vans that, completely encased in shells of heavy steel mesh, patrol the townships. Like so many other South African townships, Soweto is both a bedroom community and a war zone. At night, the violence escalates wildly, with rape, robbery, and nonpolitical murder keeping pace easily with the more era-specific mayhem of firebombings, assassinations, police shootings, and raids on the homes of activists.

Beyond the basic outlines of the fighting—the black resistance against the apartheid state—the war raging in the townships could seem, especially to an outsider, quite chaotic. The security forces employed black vigilantes—the balaclava gangs—to attack their opponents; the resistance groups frequently fought among

themselves. And the carnage had been terrible. As of June, 1986, at least two thousand people had died and untold thousands had been maimed or wounded in political violence since the beginning of the uprising in September, 1984.

If there was a coordinated resistance strategy, it was concentrated on the destruction of the community council system, created by the state to place local township administration in politically reliable black hands, and on the establishment of alternative bodies—civic associations, street committees, "people's courts." How much of all this resistance activity was in response to the calls by African National Congress leaders for "people's war," and how much, if any, was being directly coordinated by ANC operatives, was a point of unending debate. The leading aboveground resistance organization, the United Democratic Front—a multiracial alliance, founded in 1983, of approximately seven hundred organizations with nearly two million members—is clearly aligned with the ANC's goals, and the state had charged a number of UDF leaders with treason for "furthering the aims" of the ANC. (A common, and fiercely ironic, accusation in the "people's courts" in the townships was "furthering the aims" of the police.) Whatever its exact size and role may be, the underground is a powerful presence, and the periodic bombings and other "armed propaganda" it produces are definitely not the full extent of its involvement in resistance. It is, above all, this unknown quantity that makes the true state of the South African revolution so difficult to describe. Even the few journalists who may know anything about the underground cannot write what they know.

What one can say with certainty is that apartheid, for all the rumors of its death, lives on most rudely. The African majority is still denied, on the basis of race, the vote. People classified "coloured" or Indian have a token franchise, but the government is really accountable only to the white minority. Not only does racial segregation in housing and education and politics remain the law—the Minister of Home Affairs recently assured the whites-only Parliament that the system of racial classification is "behind lock and key," and will never be abandoned—but the

profound inequities that flow inevitably from such a system remain as grotesque as ever. Thus, while whites enjoy a surplus of housing in the areas set aside for their exclusive use, blacks, forced to live in the townships, suffer from a profound shortage. A recent study found that seven and a half million urban Africans compete for less than half a million "relatively small housing units"; in the townships near Uitenhage, in the eastern Cape, the study found up to forty-two people living in a two-bedroom house. Health care, education, and the other social services are similarly maldistributed. Even in the courts, which are considered a bastion of independence from the government, virtually all of the magistrates and judges are white, and the racial disparities in sentencing are staggering. A white policeman is fined the equivalent of twelve dollars for the unprovoked murder of a "coloured" man in Johannesburg, and two white soldiers are fined the equivalent of twenty dollars for roasting an African man over a fire and raping his wife. Meanwhile, a black woman found in possession of a book, published by Penguin, that is alleged to further the aims of the ANC is sentenced to eighteen months in jail.

One more thing that can be said with certainty about this chaotic time in South Africa is that it is continually producing the most bizarre contrasts and anomalies. In the suburb where I was staying, a free neighborhood newspaper appeared on the porch each week. Called the Northeastern Tribune , it consisted mostly of advertising, with front-page stories carrying headlines like "DOG LICENCE CRACKDOWN." A typical front-page photograph showed a top Boy Scout saluting. The paper was what is known as a "knock-and-drop." The number of knock-and-drops in South Africa has grown wildly in the last few years, as advertisers have found them to be effective marketing vehicles. In 1985, Ameen Akhalwaya, a South African journalist of Indian descent, and a former Nieman fellow at Harvard, started up a knock-and-drop called The Indicator in the Indian township of Lenasia, near Soweto. The Indicator looks much like the Northeastern Tribune : same tabloid format, lots of local advertising. But Akhalwaya's idea in founding a knock-and-drop was less to

provide a vehicle for advertisers than it was to see if he could, by publishing in a medium that is as yet exempt from normal newspaper censorship, avoid the official assaults that have closed all previous black-owned newspapers in South Africa. A typical lead story in The Indicator might be the exposure of a police dirty-tricks campaign—the distribution of phony pamphlets under a UDF letterhead, say—or the defiant statements of political detainees upon their release from jail. A photograph in the first issue I saw showed, very graphically, the multiple wounds of a police torture victim. So far, The Indicator has been able to publish unhindered, the calls to revolution by Winnie Mandela alongside the ads for Sleeky Boutique. Such are the tactics that the resistance and journalists—and the two are not always distinguishable—have been compelled to employ.