17

The turquoise house was up for sale. I estimated its market value at a million dollars. But I am from Los Angeles. The asking price for the house was less than forty thousand dollars. I asked one of our housemates, an apple-cheeked boy with a shore job in the navy, why it was being offered for so little. He said Muizenberg was no longer fashionable, that the prime Cape Town property was all over on the Atlantic coast now. But our other housemate, a teenager named Peter who worked in a bank, rejected that explanation. All real estate prices were profoundly depressed, he said, and had been since 1976. "It's this bloody revolution they're expecting."

The owner was an author who lived nearby. One evening, he came by with some prospective buyers, then stayed after they had left. He was a vivid, thick-set, hassled-looking fellow. He wore an Irish sweater and spoke with a strange, rolling burr.

"I sometimes wonder if anyone will ever buy this poor old place," he said. "I should never have put my son in charge of it."

The owner's son, a drug-addled wastrel, had rented out the house to a long line of transient foreigners, school friends, and dubious characters who had contributed greatly to its present disrepair. The owner ran through a convincing litany of paternal and landlordly

miseries, then shifted to a topic that we soon came to know as his favorite: the bloody government.

"They're mad. Simply mad. They carry on with these insane policies. They're determined to bring Armageddon down on all our heads. And the worst part is, more and more of these so-called English are throwing in with them now."

In reality, the worst part, in the eyes of our landlord, was what the government was doing to him personally. For, besides being an author, he was in the publishing business. And although he neither wrote nor published political works (his oeuvre consisted of children's books, travel books, and a popular history of the Bushmen), our landlord was convinced that the government was systematically obstructing his business ventures. This occurred, he said, because he was English-speaking and because he had refused to join the Afrikanerled National Party.

To understand our landlord's complaint, to understand anything at all about South Africa—to get anywhere in South Africa, our landlord might have added—one must know something about the Afrikaners. Today they dominate the country's government. But this hegemony is a relatively recent state of affairs. During a century and a half of Dutch colonial rule, and particularly during the ensuing century of British imperial rule, Afrikaners themselves lived as restive subjects of alien authorities. In fact, the settlement by whites of much of present-day South Africa came as the result of a mass flight, begun in 1834, into the interior by Afrikaners determined to escape British rule in the Cape. Known as the Great Trek, and largely triggered by the abolition of slavery, this migration led to the founding of the two Boer Republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. When British interest in the big gold strikes in the Transvaal led to an attempt at annexation, Afrikaner resistance culminated in the bloody Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902, which the outnumbered and outfinanced Afrikaners lost.

Independence from Britain, achieved in 1910, did little to improve the Afrikaners' position. Compared to English-speaking whites, Afrikaners remained poor, uneducated, and unskilled. Drought and depression forced hundreds of thousands of them off their farms in the 1920s and 1930s. In the towns and cities, destitute Afrikaners were sinking to the social and economic levels traditionally occupied in South Africa by blacks. The ownership and management of the South African economy were almost exclusively in the hands of English-speaking whites. How the Afrikaners managed to turn this situation

around is an ethnic success story possibly without parallel in recent world history. The watershed year was 1948, when the National Party came to power on a platform they called apartheid.

In 1948, Afrikaners finally united as a bloc to elect a government specifically dedicated to the uplifting of the volk . By remorseless gerrymander, the Nationalists consolidated their position and within a few years had become unbeatable electorally—a situation that has not changed since. Our landlord's contention that English economic ascendancy had been systematically checked under "these bloody Nats" was easily verified. Since 1948, the percentage of Afrikaner workers in white-collar jobs had more than doubled. Where the per capita income of English-speaking whites was more than twice that of Afrikaans-speaking whites in 1948, they now approached parity.

This "national" economic advance was achieved in large part by a great expansion of the public sector. Public corporations known as "parastatals" were created for everything from the manufacture of steel to oil exploration, and these organizations were staffed at virtually all senior levels by Afrikaners. While loudly resented by the English private sector, state favoritism toward Afrikaner businesses became a fact of South African life. It was here that our landlord's interests were being most clearly prejudiced. In 1977, for example, the Department of Information had awarded 98 percent of its publishing budget to the Perskor group, an Afrikaner publishing house that had several cabinet ministers, including the Minister of Information, on its board.

Neither was our landlord wrong when he complained that increasing numbers of English-speakers were joining the National Party. Since 1948, Afrikaner nationalism had gradually taken heed of the geopolitical realities of its rule, and relaxed from its earlier, near-religious exclusivism, until it now actively sought to include all South African whites in its dispensation—under Afrikaner leadership, of course.

The usual view of apartheid is as a system of racial oppression, and this is obviously its definitive feature. But apartheid can also be seen as a system of ethnic patronage, representing the triumph and utopia of a long powerless and insecure group.

Certainly that was how our landlord saw it, as we sat sipping local cream sherry on late summer evenings in his crumbling investment, hearing about his woes. And our two housemates, while they lacked his experience, education, and status, shared his view, for they, too, were English-speaking whites. The sailor would come off duty railing

bitterly about his Afrikaner superiors, repeatedly distinguishing "Dutchmen" from "white men" in his remarks. His father was a government clerk in Durban, and the sailor had already come to understand that real opportunities in the military and the civil service, both unusually large and influential establishments in South Africa because of the special requirements of administering apartheid, were effectively restricted to Afrikaners. And Peter, the young bank clerk, who had vague aspirations toward a socially respectable racial liberalism, when he heard where I was working, declared himself sympathetic with the curious remark, "I'd sooner have a colored friend than an Afrikaner!"

Afrikaners repaid these sentiments with interest when it came to die Engels . The collective memory of British devastation of Afrikaner farms and homesteads during the Anglo-Boer War was very much alive; indeed, there were still people who could remember the concentration camps built by Lord Kitchener's imperial forces, inside which twenty-six thousand Afrikaner women and children perished. Afrikaners called the English rooineks ("red necks"—burned because unaccustomed to the African sun) and soutpiels ("salt penises"—with one foot in Europe and one foot in Africa, an Englishman's piel dangled in the sea) and constantly questioned their ultimate commitment to South Africa. As an Afrikaner policeman in a popular song put it, "You've got the big mouths, you've got the degrees, but when things turn sour, then you run overseas."

The determination of Afrikaners, on the other hand, to remain in South Africa was rarely questioned by anyone. There was no European homeland to which they might return. This truism, along with the sheer size and wealth of the white population, the industrial economy, and the military, was what made South Africa seemingly an exception to the postcolonial historical rule. The domino theory of decolonization, which assumed that because white settler rule had been replaced in every other country in Africa it would inevitably disappear in South Africa as well, simply did not take into account the unique strength of the Afrikaners' attachment to the land they occupied.

They were undeniably a remarkable people. They were, after all, only 9 percent of the country's population (roughly the same number as those classified "Coloured"). Inevitably, the other 91 percent spent a great deal of its time contemplating this small group that somehow ruled the South African roost. An English-speaking surfer in Muizenberg offered me what seemed to be a widespread perception of the

Afrikaner character: "You can't go through a Dutchman," he told me. "You must go around him. He is as solid as a brick shithouse. And exactly as intelligent."

Black people naturally tended to focus on Afrikaners' racial attitudes. One of my colleagues at Grassy Park High once tried to explain these to me. "You simply can't imagine how the Boer sees things," he said. "He honestly believes that blacks are not human beings like himself. They call us 'things.' All the time, they talk of 'these black things,' and that's exactly how they think of us—as 'black things' that do their work for them and cause them trouble sometimes and must be controlled. The idea that we are human beings, equal to them, that we deserve the same rights as them, that we could be bosses and leaders over them and run the country, seems absolutely absurd to them. It must be a joke, and not a very nice one, they think. To them, that would be like having baboons run their beloved country. They will never allow it. And their attitudes won't change for many generations, no matter what happens here. They won this land with the Bible and the musket, and they still think that way. They believe they are the Chosen People, and God gave them this land."

Whether or not these generalizations amounted to a fair description of modern Afrikaner racial attitudes, they certainly represented the view of most black South Africans, a view based on long and hard experience. And the religious convictions of Afrikaners clearly were crucial to their outlook. The great majority of Afrikaners belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church, which preached a puritanical Calvinism that stressed the ideas of predestination, obedience to authority, and an elect chosen by God for salvation. In South Africa, Dutch Reformed theology had long become entangled with Afrikaner ethnic nationalism. Thus, the Great Trek was extravagantly identified by Afrikaners with the biblical flight of the Israelites from Egypt, the defeat of the Zulus in battle was attributed to the divine plan for Afrikaner hegemony in southern Africa, and God's elect were believed to be the Afrikaner "nation." Dutch Reformed theology was racist; it had long occupied itself with providing scriptural authority for apartheid. Membership in the main Dutch Reformed sect, which was virtually a state religion, was restricted to whites. (There were "daughter churches" for blacks.) It has often been remarked that Afrikaner political and religious thought developed without benefit of the Enlightenment in Europe. Certainly, a deep hostility to liberal democratic ideas emanated from every corner of the Afrikaner establishment, and not least from the synods of the Dutch Reformed Church.

Afrikaans literature was another matter, I discovered. A dissident literary movement known as the sestigers (sixties-ers) had produced a number of independent-minded writers, including the novelists André Brink and Etienne Leroux and the poet Breyten Breytenbach. The cosmopolitan vitality of these writers' work and their determination to confront Afrikanerdom's true legacy and significance were departures from the norm as radical, in many ways, as those of the handful of courageous Afrikaners who had identified themselves with the cause of non-racial democracy. Indeed, the literary and the political—like the religious and the political—tended to converge rapidly in South Africa. In 1980, Breyten Breytenbach was in Pollsmoor Prison, which was a stone's throw from our local supermarket near Muizenberg, serving the fifth year of a nine-year sentence for "terrorism."

It was easy to see the truth of much of what other South Africans said about Afrikaners. Their ethnic nationalism was plainly advanced at the expense of their countrymen. Their spokesmen seemed obsessed with Afrikaner "identity." Their leaders' idea of serious debate was pathetically limited. Afrikaner "cultural" groups like the powerful secret society known as the Broederbond (the Brotherhood), from which virtually all the leaders of the government were drawn (including every prime minister since 1948), expounded the most dubious ideas about "racial purity." The government tried to force Afrikaner cultural holidays on the nation as a whole. (How could blacks be expected to celebrate occasions like the Boer pioneer Paul Kruger's birthday? Or Van Riebeeck Day, or Settlers Day, or the Day of the Covenant? The latter marked the date when trekking Boers massacred three thousand Zulus. These were all national holidays.) The great public monuments in the country all seemed to be dedicated to Afrikaans culture and heroes, from the tremendous, glowering Voortrekker Monument outside Pretoria to the unsightly modernist spire of the Afrikaans Language Monument outside Cape Town, which Breyten Breytenbach once called "a finger in the eye" of every non-Afrikaner in South Africa. The utterly dour, unanimously male, and almost totally Afrikaans character of the government's upper echelons provided the final brick in the impression of brute ethnic domination.

And yet I soon became skeptical of the complaints of English-speaking whites, partly because the ethnic distinctions they sought to draw were blurring all the time. There were many English-speakers in the National Party. Conversely, the new leader of the PFP, Freder-

ick van Zyl Slabbert, was an Afrikaner. The clear differences between English and Afrikaner business enterprises were also disappearing as the economy became more complex. I found it got difficult, moreover, to credit the wailings of people who were benefiting from the system as it was being run, and making no effort to change it. The idea, which seemed to be extremely popular among English-speaking whites, that things in South Africa had only become objectionable since 1948 seemed to me entirely fraudulent. Although the National Party's program of dispossession and repression was more systematic, blacks had been dominated and exploited by whites no less energetically under earlier governments. The foundations of the bantustan policy had been laid long before by the system of "native reserves" established by the British colonial authorities. English-speaking whites had not been slow to profit from the opportunities afforded by post-1948 policy, either. The Durban City Council, which was exclusively "English," implemented Group Areas with unparalleled ferocity throughout the 1950s, uprooting thousands of Indian traders and property owners from the newly "white" central business district, where English businessmen who had long coveted Indian holdings were suddenly able to acquire them at distress prices, thanks to National Party policy.

The only National Party member I knew during my first months in Cape Town was, in fact, a British immigrant. He was an older man named Harold, who ran a secondhand goods shop in Muizenberg. Harold's shop was a big, dark, dusty place, full of useless gewgaws and overpriced Victorian furniture. Hanging in the front doorway was a motheaten old scuba-diving outfit, complete with a bulbous helmet with a wire-grilled face window. On the wall inside hung a South African flag and a framed photograph of P. W. Botha. I went into Harold's now and again in search of household odds and ends. Harold, who was a swarthy, heavyset fellow, lived above his shop with his wife and her mother. One afternoon, when he heard my accent, Harold said, "You Americans could learn something from us."

I asked him what he meant.

"I mean about how to keep these baboons in their places. Over there, you've got your Muhammad Alis and your Martin Luther Kings, but over here, we never let them get that far. We give them their own places, and make sure they mix among themselves only, and we have far fewer problems. You must admit this is a much safer country for a white man than America is."

I asked Harold if he wasn't worried about the "changes" P. W.

Botha was always announcing were imminent.

"Not a bit of it. I have complete faith in the man. He's not going to give away the country. Everybody knows what has happened to all the other countries in Africa after the blacks got hold of them. They've went bankrupt. The whole system in those places has broken down. There's no public order. And there's no democracy neither. The Prime Minister knows all this. He knows what he's doing."

Harold was not a typical government supporter, in that he came to the National Party not through long-standing ties of culture and community, the way most Afrikaners did. Neither was Harold the most polished spokesman for the Nationalists, with his continual surly references to "baboons" and "kaffirs." The well-educated Nationalists I eventually met spoke very differently, emphasizing "group identities" and their belief that most of what was worth owning in South Africa rightfully belonged to whites because, in their view, whites had created the wealth. Yet the same themes ran through every defense of apartheid, I found: racism and "public order" and a deep determination not to "give away the country," lest it go the way of the rest of Africa.

It was largely from the newspapers, I gathered, that "everybody" knew how bad life was in the rest of Africa, for horror stories about "Black Africa" were standard fare in all South African newspapers. If it wasn't forty-seven people suffocating in a Lagos police van, it was a witchcraft trial in Tanzania, or Joy Adamson, author of Born Free, being murdered by one of her assistants in Kenya. Cape Town's Die Burger was especially ardent on this theme in its editorials: "Africa north of the Limpopo is a ghastly scene which is getting worse almost daily. Economies, and with them civilized norms, are collapsing." Even Zimbabwe, Die Burger reported, was "reverting to jungle."

I relied on the local papers no less for my ideas about strange lands—particularly during those first months in Cape Town, when I probably knew ten times as many blacks as whites, and the strange land that interested me most was white South Africa. I could follow white politics on the front page; I could study white weddings and cocktail receptions on the society page. It was through the daily papers that I became aware of the seemingly boundless concern among whites for the welfare of lost puppies and kittens—small animals rescued from the sides of roads seemed to make the front page nearly as often as the Prime Minister did. Another white obsession involved breaking obscure world records. Somebody was forever "disco danc-

ing" for four hundred hours, or "snake sitting" for eight weeks. This all struck me as a rather miserable ploy to evade the international boycott of sporting contacts with South Africa, a boycott that did not yet extend, apparently, to the Guiness Book of World Records . (What is "snake sitting"? It's spending twenty-three and a half hours a day in a glass cage with dozens of poisonous snakes. My favorite snake sitter was given to dramatic comments to the press during his breaks. After a tense weekend: "Saturday and Sunday were dreadful nightmares of hell!")

The real nightmares of hell occurring around the country sometimes surfaced in the papers, too. There were always farmers being hauled into court for torturing their workers, sometimes to death—these cases were so common that it became clear that some white farmers went about such business routinely, without much fear of being criminally charged.

One news item that illustrated for me exactly the distance between the South Africa I saw from New Room 16 and its counterpart across the line which I was not seeing was a report that schoolchildren in Bloemfontein, the capital of the Orange Free State, were being taught "hate songs" about Zimbabwean Prime Minister-elect Robert Mugabe. They were being encouraged, apparently, to sing "Kill Mugabe" to the tune of "Singin' in the Rain." While that melodic transposition sounded rather twisted, I thought it was nothing compared to the thinking of the director of education for the Orange Free State who explained to newsmen that "positive indoctrination was necessary to prepare youth to withstand the onslaught of communism and the total onslaught against South Africa."