PART I
CROSSING THE LINE

1

High above Cape Town, on an otherwise clear day, a snow-white cloud will form, a thin level stripe drawn across the top of the already improbable Table Mountain. Soon the cloud will begin to spill, first in modest cottony puffs, trickling gently over the edge, later in huge silent cataracts, pouring a thousand feet, two thousand feet down the cliffs, as if to inundate the city below. The downward-rushing clouds never reach the city; they burn up as they hit warmer air. But the wave keeps coming, charging off the top of the mountain, out of the strange level cloud, swirling down the great rock face.

The first time I saw this phenomenon I was walking out of a downtown bank. The sight stopped me in my tracks. I pointed, and people on the sidewalk turned and looked, but no one else seemed the least bit amazed. The moment reminded me of a photograph in a book I had owned as a child. In the foreground, people were going about their business on a sunny afternoon on an old fishing pier in California. In the background, a couple of miles offshore, a giant, solidlooking fog bank was rolling toward the pier. The fog bank looked exactly like the wall of white water from a broken wave—"The largest wave in the world?" the caption asked. I was fooled, and spent hours staring at the picture in horror, trying to imagine what happened to the people on the pier. The photograph was like those danger dreams: you're terrified but you're mesmerized, your legs won't carry you away. The cloud falling down Table Mountain had a similar quality. In Cape Town, people call it "the tablecloth," which does not do it justice, and point it out to tourists.

The Cape Town seen by tourists is a stunning place. In any weather, from any angle, the mountain will take your breath away. The city coils around its green lower slopes on three sides, and suns itself on the beaches of two oceans. I have heard visiting yachtsmen,

in town for the gala Cape-to-Rio yacht race, pronounce the city's beaches as lovely as Ipanema or Copacabana. On the eastern slopes of the mountain, three-hundred-year-old vineyards, their wineries housed in whitewashed three-hundred-year-old buildings with gracefully gabled facades, carved fanlights, and louvered teak shutters, lie surrounded by forests of oak and pine. Downtown are cathedrals, museums, and public buildings in a profusion of Dutch and British colonial styles, smart shops with signs outside that say Se Habla Castellano, and a shady cobbled square that was once a slave market. The Cape of Good Hope sits a few miles south, a weathered finger dividing the oceans, now a nature reserve where ostriches, zebras, baboons, and elands roam. Passing travelers have been lavishing superlatives on the Cape since at least the sixteenth century, when Sir Francis Drake described it as "a most stately thing, and the fairest Cape we saw in the whole circumference of the earth."

To the best of my knowledge, no favorable comment of this cosmopolitan type has ever been bestowed upon the Cape Flats. Starting where the greenswards fed by the runoff from Table Mountain end, the Cape Flats is a broad, windy expanse of sand dunes that separates the peninsula from the African mainland. It is an immensely inhospitable area. After the first European settlers had gathered its scant vegetation for firewood, the Flats became so barren that it was nearly two hundred years before a decent wagon road could be built through the dunes to connect Cape Town with the nearby farming districts. The problem was wind-driven sand, and it was only alleviated in the nineteenth century by the planting of hardy shrubs like Hottentot figs and Australian wattle. Still, the Flats remained a bleak, wild place, an almost uninhabited waste—surrounded by rich, fine country.

Today, a majority of Cape Town's population lives on the Cape Flats. Over the past few decades, "government removals" from the older districts of the city have sent hundreds of thousands of people out to live among the scrubby, windblown dunes, in unlikely places with names like Lavender Hill, Grassy Park, and Lotus River. In South Africa it would go without saying that the people who have been removed to the Cape Flats are black.^[*]

The removals were the main component of a grandiose government plan to turn Cape Town into a politically correct city, a model of orderly race relations in an apartheid South Africa. The city center

* The majority of those removed were officially classified "Coloured." For an explanation of the racial terminology used in this book, see p. 28.

would be "white." Blacks would live in satellite townships. The bulk of the removals took place in the 1960s and 1970s, but the idea behind them was as old as Cape Town itself. Jan Van Riebeeck, the first commander of the fort built on Table Bay in 1652 by the Dutch East India Company, wanted to build a canal across the Cape Flats in order to cut off the peninsula from the African mainland and from the "savages," as he called them, the "lazy stinking people" whose lands his employers had authorized him to occupy. Van Riebeeck's canal was never built, and the city that grew up on Table Bay became a polyglot entrepôt—the Tavern of the Seas, it was called—and the most racially integrated city in southern Africa. By the lights of the architects of apartheid, of course, something had to be done about that.

Life on the Cape Flats is difficult. Housing is scarce; perhaps a quarter of a million people (in a metropolitan area with an estimated population of 1.5 million) live in illegal shanties. With traditional communities destroyed and all available employment many miles away, families have a tendency to disintegrate. Poverty, hunger, displacement, rage—for a settlement its size, the Flats is said to have the highest murder rate in the world. Rape and robbery are epidemic; alcoholism is a major problem. This is not the Cape Town tourists see.

Some of the old neighborhoods declared "white" were simply "bleached." Others, including a large and densely populated area known as District Six, were bulldozed. The extirpation of District Six cut extremely deep. Among blacks, the neighborhood had associations with the emancipation from slavery. There were families that had lived there for seven generations. People say District Six was the heart of Cape Town. By the time I saw it, the area was a wasteland. Blocks of flats for white police personnel were under construction. There were plans for a whites-only technical college. But most of the district was rubble—extremely valuable rubble, with downtown a brick's throw away. It was as if the heart of the city had been torn out, still beating, and flung onto the Flats.

Beyond the economic explanations, beyond the pitiless specs of apartheid blueprints—and these dictated urban planning in all South African cities—the government's bid for sole possession of the center of Cape Town had a heavy symbolic element. Whites called Cape Town the Mother City. This was where Van Riebeeck first stepped ashore. This was where the House of Parliament stood, here before the humbling face of Table Mountain, which the longtime Prime Minister Jan Christiaan Smuts once called "our national Holy of

Holies." Cape Town was sacred space for white South Africans, and they claimed it symbolically with an army of conquerors' statues, scattered through the downtown streets and parks: Smuts, Van Riebeeck, the Portuguese explorers Vasco da Gama and Bartholomeu Dias, the British empire-builder Cecil Rhodes.

Black people still throng those streets: working, shopping, hawking flowers and newspapers. But they all live far away now, on the Flats, in another world, and merely visit here. Look closely, though, and see more. See the government truck grinding past the elegant pink-colonnaded hotel in its manicured grounds. Hear the faint sound of singing from inside the sealed enclosure on the back of the truck, and when the truck comes to a stoplight, hear the voices rise in a mournful and beautiful African hymn, and see black fists suddenly thrust through the canvas, through the wooden slats into the day-light. And see the gas station attendant in his red overalls turn, and the hotel gardener in his green overalls turn, and the milkman in his blue overalls turn, and the street sweeper in his orange overalls turn, see them all turn toward the truck and raise black fists. The light changes and the truck roars onto the freeway. This is a long-range removal. The people in the truck will be dumped in a semidesert seven hundred miles away.

At an air force base on the edge of the Cape Flats, Mirage F-1 fighter jets in a public display streak past the crowd, flying ninety feet off the ground at six hundred miles per hour. Look closely, and see that this display is related to what happens in the room deep in police headquarters on Caledon Square, the otherwise nondescript room where the torturer works, and that both of these are related to the fact that the new freeways which now penetrate to central Cape Town are never full of traffic. Some taxpayers complain that this shows the freeways weren't needed. Others say, "Look closely; the freeways were not built for commuters." They were built to give the army fast access to the city center in the event of an insurrection.

This prospective insurrection is a consuming preoccupation in South Africa. When the yachts leave Cape Town for South America, they sail past Robben Island, the prison island in Table Bay where potential leaders of the prospective insurrection are jailed. The security surrounding Robben Island is legendary. If and when the revolution comes to Cape Town, though, it will not come from Robben Island. It will come from the Cape Flats. And that is where the authorities intend to contain it, away from Cape Town proper. This is perhaps the uppermost reason for the removals: to rid the city center of the pro-

spective enemy. The streets of District Six were narrow and labyrinthine—easy to barricade, with endless places to hide in house-to-house fighting. The streets on the Cape Flats are wide and straight and the buildings are low, giving the advantage to the side with the heavy artillery.

In 1980 there occurred a sort of dress rehearsal for a mass uprising in the Cape. Two months of organized defiance, led by Cape Flats high school students, erupted in June in widespread violence. Dozens of people were killed by the police—the exact number was never disclosed. In the end, the government's containment strategy was successful in 1980. Both sides did, however, learn some lessons. I was a teacher in a Cape Flats high school in 1980, and I learned a few things, too.

2

At the end of February, when I started teaching, the southeast wind known as the Cape Doctor was still a warm wind. It whistled and sighed through the cracks in New Room 16, and a fine sand infiltrated the classroom while I met my students for the first time. I had been hired to teach, in descending order of work load, English, geography, religion, and vocational guidance to classes spanning five grade levels at Grassy Park Senior Secondary School. In the months to come, the wind would turn cold, and the hundreds of students who poured through the door each day would individuate in my mind to a degree that I would not have thought possible. But on that first day, my students were to me just anonymous waves of maroon sweaters, beige skirts, and shy, curious faces, their ebb and flow controlled by an unsettling siren.

My education began at the beginning, with salutations. Each class would arrive and stand silently in rows, facing me expectantly. I muddled through the first few greetings by introducing myself and urging everyone to sit down. Then, between classes, an embarrassed girl described to me the normal procedure. Following her script, I addressed the next group formally.

"Good morning, scholars," I intoned, feeling absurd.

"Good morning, sir," they roared back in unison.

I paused. They waited. I nodded pompously. They briskly took their seats. It was my first lesson in the local educational atavism, and a quaint first taste of power. The atmosphere reminded me of the

mission schools in colonial novels. The students all wore uniforms, the boys wearing white shirts and ties and big black regulation shoes. They called me "sir," and addressed me in the third person—as in, "How does sir like South Africa?" Someone was forever leaping to assist me in the smallest task. Though many of my pupils were fully grown—the oldest was twenty-three—they invariably referred to themselves as "the children."

In deference to our terrific curiosity about one another—and to my unpreparedness to present any of the advertised subjects—my students and I set aside schoolwork for that first day and asked each other questions. I asked them about their parents, their hobbies, their ambitions. I got more giggling than information (topics for essays for future assignment began to suggest themselves). My students' questions were more interesting.

"Has sir met John Travolta?" "Did sir meet Charlene Tilton?" The only Americans many of them had met were evangelists who had come to testify in Cape Flats churches, and I had to admit that I hadn't met Wilma Humphries or the Reverend Glenn Powers, either. My students were especially interested in the lives of black Americans. The less worldly marveled at the news that there were indeed black mayors of big cities in the United States. They were eager to know more about Michael Jackson, Arthur Ashe, "your ghettos such as Harlem," Dr. Martin Luther King, and Pele (time for a quick map of South America on the blackboard).

There were two questions that echoed most poignantly for me on that sunny first day at Grassy Park High. The first, which I heard more than once: "Do you find so-called colored people in America?"

What was meant was people of "mixed race," people with both African and European blood in their veins—people, in other words, like my students. In one sense, it should have been an easy question to answer in the affirmative, for there are millions of Americans who could be so described, of course. But what my students were really asking was about where and how racial lines are drawn in the United States, and I found that baneful process anything but easy to describe, even by way of broad historical and political generalizations; for these kids were looking for parallels to their own situation, and racial lines are drawn differently in South Africa than they are anywhere else in the world.

Certainly, the segregation guidelines that had determined the makeup of the student body at Grassy Park High seemed to have been, if nothing else, unique. Student complexions ranged from coal

black to a few shades paler than my own Irish-Scottish coloring, while features ran the gamut from East African to Northern European, Malay to Middle Eastern. Neither religion nor language had been the segregationist's criterion. There were Muslims, Catholics, Protestants, and Hindus in my classes, and 30 percent of the school spoke a different mother tongue (English) from the rest (their first language was Afrikaans^[*]). No shared "tribal" past bound Grassy Park students together. The blood of the Cape's indigenous people, the Khoikhoi and the San (called "Hottentots" and "Bushmen" by their European conquerors), ran strongly through the faces and frames of many students, yet the tribes themselves had either been exterminated (Khoikhoi) or had had their remnants driven deep into the interior deserts (San) generations before.

My students' diverse origins were evident, too, in the names on the class lists I had been given. Their surnames were Anglo-Saxon and Islamic, German and African, Indonesian and, in surprising numbers, Afrikaans.^[**] There were names that recalled the slavery their ancestors had endured (most of the people brought to the Cape in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from Angola, Mozambique, Madagascar, and Java had emerged from slavery in the nineteenth century stripped, like their counterparts in the American South, of their family names): Thursday, September, February, from the custom of naming slave babies for the month or the day of the week they were born; Hector, Adonis, Achilles, Caesar, Nero, from the custom of naming slave babies after classical figures; Patience, Gallant, and Satisfied, after virtues looked for in slaves by their owners. The number of Afrikaans names—Botha, Cloete, Le Roux, Van Niekerk—and the fact that the majority of Grassy Park High students spoke Afrikaans as a first language, indicated the largest cultural source group for this ethnic bouillabaisse, and the source, too, of most of the European genes on the Cape Flats.

Yet the government had seen fit to classify all these youngsters—to classify some 2.8 million of its citizens—in a racial group it called "Coloured." Hence the ritual local use of the term "so-called," for the

* Derived from Dutch, Afrikaans is spoken only in South Africa, where it and English are the two official languages. Students must pass both languages at every grade level to advance.

** Descended from the original Dutch, German, and French Huguenot colonists in the Cape, Afrikaners today constitute 60 percent of South African whites and dominate the country's government. Most of the other whites are of British descent and English-speaking.

classification was the government's creation, and deeply resented as such by the people so called. There were four main racial classifications in South Africa—Africans (of whom there were roughly 22 million); whites (4.5 million); Indians (870,000); and "coloreds"—and four separate educational systems, one for each of these groups. Most "coloreds" lived in Cape Province, where they were the largest of the four "population groups." (The Cape was the only one of South Africa's four provinces where Africans did not constitute the majority.^[*]) "Coloreds" shared with all of South Africa's "non-whites" the basic political deprivation—disenfranchisement—and tended to identify themselves, when a racial term was unavoidable, as "black." In some respects, however, notably the possibility of maintaining secure urban residency, "coloreds" (and Indians) enjoyed options denied to most black South Africans. Hence the plaintive queries about the racial middle ground in America.

The second resonant question came during my last class of the day. The students were seniors. We had already greeted one another and begun our shy, acquainting conversation, when a tall boy with an Afro strode in and took a front-row seat. He offered no explanation for his late arrival. He was not, I noticed, wearing the school uniform. He wore, instead, blue jeans, beige shoes, and no tie. He had a long, serious, light brown face, with a sparse mustache and the thoughtful, fearless expression of a natural-born warrior. His presence obviously made his classmates nervous. They kept giggling and glancing at him. He ignored them. He just sat and stared long and hard at me. After several minutes, he suddenly leaned forward across the battered desk, his dark eyes burning, and interrupted my biography-in-progress of Big John Tate, the heavyweight boxer.

"Why did you come here?"

It was a good question. But a good answer might have taken hours to deliver, so I cast about for something to say, while the other students mumbled apologies and quietly scolded my questioner in Afrikaans. He ignored them except to curl his lip at an English word I caught: "cheeky."

Why did you come here?

I stared into those searching, suspicious eyes for a long moment,

* The other three provinces are the Transvaal, Natal, and the Orange Free State. The administrative capital of South Africa is Pretoria, in the Transvaal. Cape Town is the country's legislative capital.

seeking some small inspiration. Finally, I said, "To see for myself what's happening here."

The boy just kept glaring. I glared back. The other students chided him and hissed his name. "Clive!" Nervous giggles. "Clive! Shame!"

Clive began to nod his head slowly. This wasn't really much like mission school at all, I thought. Then Clive sat back and said, "OK. To see what's happening." He half grinned. "Man, you'll see what's happening here."

3

The answer I gave Clive was so true that it could have been my motto. It certainly described my existence at the time, anyway. I was twenty-seven years old. I had left the United States two years before, after finishing graduate school with a singularly useless degree, and had been in transit ever since. My last address had been a little house in the jungle on the southwest coast of Sri Lanka. Before that, Thailand. Before that, Indonesia. Before that, Australia, Fiji, Samoa. I survived by odd jobs and travel writing. If I was doing anything, I was making some effort to see things for myself.

South Africa had not been on my itinerary, exactly. Rachel—Rachel Moore, my intrepid companion, who had left a job teaching college in California to join me in Singapore nine months before—had always wanted to see East Africa. So when we had had our fill of Asia, we decided to head for Kenya. But visas for Kenya had proved impossible to procure in Sri Lanka, and the same went for Tanzania. And no airline would take an American to either place without one. As we were about to get on a train to New Delhi, where there was a Kenyan embassy, Rachel came down with a mild case of hepatitis, and her enthusiasm for further travel in India, which was never very great, vanished. Then an airline clerk told us about a twice-weekly Tokyo-Johannesburg "Gold Exchange Shuttle" which refueled in Colombo. The visa process was easy, said the clerk: it could all be done by airline telex.

After a year in south Asia, such space-age efficiency was bedazzling. The idea of a relatively developed, nontropical country also suddenly had its attractions, because of the hepatitis, for which doctors were already prescribing what seemed like the drastic medicine of immediate return to the West. Perhaps, we reasoned, South Africa

might be just the right half-step, a bacterial interregnum between Asia and East Africa, which we could then reach overland, following the fabled "Cape to Cairo" route. By such reasoning, anyway, we tried to put down our misgivings about hying our white hides to the land of apartheid, and applied for visas. Stunningly soon thereafter, we found ourselves on a British Air 747 packed with Japanese businessmen bound for Johannesburg.

Taking a longer view, I see some less immediate, less circumstantial elements in my own motives for going to South Africa. One was the surf. Endless Summer , a 1963 surfing movie that profoundly warped my career goals at the age of ten, had its climax in South Africa, where its protagonists, two California surfers, in the course of circling the globe in search of "the perfect wave," found it. I had been pursuing my own endless summer, surfing throughout the Pacific, Australia, and Asia. I was still carrying my surfboard, and "the perfect wave" at Cape St. Francis still possessed a Mecca-like allure.

There was also the matter of pizza parlors. The evidence is there in the journals I kept in Asia, especially in a series of entries made in Indonesia after my second round of malaria: I wanted some pizza. Moreover, I wanted to order it in a modest but air-conditioned Italian restaurant, along with cold beer in a can. At the time I wrote out this desire—while camping in the jungle beside a great surf break on an island a hundred miles west of Sumatra—it had been probably six months since I had seen cheese, much less pizza. The idea of such basic temperate-zone foodstuffs had clearly acquired a terrible force in my mind. So the possibility exists that at some level of awareness I suspected that my little air-conditioned pizza parlor might be found in South Africa and that this hunch, too, served to lure me onto that jet for Johannesburg.

If so, the hunch was correct. Pizzerias abounded in Johannesburg. So did bookstores, supermarkets, first-run cinemas. In fact, the Western-style wealth of the city was an overwhelming first impression, after what seemed like an eternity in impoverished Third World lands. And that culture shock, the psychic dislocation caused by abrupt transit from a world of underdevelopment to one of prosperity, still lingered a month later when I started teaching in Cape Town.

Why did we travel a thousand miles to the southwest to start traveling northeast? Cape to Cairo had something to do with it. So did the surf. So did the fact that we bought a car on our first day in Johannesburg, and dreamed up a great looping route from the Cape up the west coast of Africa, across to the east through the Kalahari

Desert, about which we had read wondrous things, and then north.

We hadn't planned to buy a car. Apartheid made us do it, you might say. That is, none of the buses we tried to catch near the air terminal in Johannesburg would take us. The buses all carried signs saying Non-Whites Only, and their drivers, who were black, refused to let us board. There were taxicabs, but the fares, after Asia, seemed prohibitive. So when an Australian surfer waiting at the terminal told us that used cars were cheap and plentiful in Johannesburg, we were wide open to the suggestion. Johannesburg reminded me at first glance of my hometown, Los Angeles, where life is not possible without a private automobile—and suddenly the thought of getting a car, after a year of oft-horrific public transport, had its own momentum.

I went to buy a newspaper. The teenage girl at the newsstand informed me that the paper I was trying to purchase was "the native edition." Her mien made it clear that she was not joking. "The white edition for today is sold out," she said.

Did the not-sold-out edition, I wondered, contain classified ads?

"How should I know?"

I expressed a determination to buy it and find out.

The girl regarded me for a long, unpleasant moment. Finally, she said, "Suit yourself."

There were, it turned out, classified ads in the paper, and plenty of cars for sale, including a '65 Opel station wagon for four hundred rands (about five hundred dollars at the exchange rate then) that sounded good. We stowed our luggage, hitchhiked to the suburbs and, five minutes after we saw it, bought the car. It was a sturdy, two-tone, sweet old thing. We bought a city street map and went for an inaugural drive. I was in my own little Whitmanic heaven. New car, new continent. Allons! The road is before us.

Soweto, the great black township, was the only place in Johannesburg we knew, so we made that a first destination. Yet we could not find Soweto on the city map. The area where one would expect to find it, southwest of the city center—Soweto is an acronym for "South West Townships"—was just a large blank on the map. We found that astonishing. Soweto was, after all, the largest city in southern Africa. Did they have segregated street maps, as well as segregated newspapers? It began to seem surprising that blacks and whites were utilizing the same roads and sidewalks. But then most blacks were walking, while virtually all us white folks were riding in cars. A commuter train rumbled past, filled to bursting with people, all of them black. There were bodies halfway out the windows, even some weary-looking

men standing on the cut levers between the cars. The train looked just like many (too many) we had ridden in Asia, except that here we looked at it from across the apartheid abyss. We couldn't ride that train if we wanted to; we were cut off from all that life. We headed for my pizzeria.

So the morbid novelties of apartheid assail one from all sides upon arrival in South Africa. Every form we filled out—to purchase the car, to register at a hotel—required that one identify oneself racially. Even the highway map we bought gave the populations of towns in race breakdowns. The strangest thing of all, though, was how much Johannesburg reminded us of the United States. It was something about the vast, brash wealth of the place, the number of gun and ammunition shops (Whites Only). There was in Johannesburg a simmering, raw atmosphere, laced with invisible violence—Rachel said the city had a "pornographic" quality—that we had not felt since we left the U.S. There were also, as mentioned, the familiar amenities. Delicatessens, cheese, wine, Kentucky Fried Chicken. And other, more loaded, homecoming-like payoffs, such as a wonderful absence of the ceaseless attention the Westerner receives on the street in Asia. Here, nobody gave us a second glance. In white Johannesburg at least, in appearance at least, we fit in.

Of course, the bleak, pointed avoidance of one's gaze by blacks, the eerie atmosphere of formalized racial deference, was scarcely the sort of public anonymity that we had been missing. There was no mistaking these South African blacks for Americans, either. While most were dressed in Western clothes, they moved, spoke, laughed, were built, and carried their babies (on their backs in blankets tied around their waists) in ways that were to us thoroughly exotic. Their most striking feature, though, on first encounter, was simply their numbers. Even in the white suburbs, black people were everywhere: on foot, on bicycles, in buses and delivery vans, in the uniforms of maids and gardeners and municipal workers. The feeling was that all the city's work was being done by blacks. Even the Afrikaner housewife who sold us the car, whose husband was a plumber, had commanded a domestic force of maids and gardeners upon whom she appeared to be hopelessly dependent.

The obvious question occurred to both of us more or less immediately: If these blacks were half as oppressed as the rest of the world believed, what was preventing them from withholding their labor, from shutting down this system with a general strike, and making big changes fast? To judge from the newspapers we picked up—"white"

and "native" alike—the problem was not that no one was aware of the prevailing injustice. The papers were full of articles and editorials criticizing the government and denouncing apartheid. And the writers seemed to be indicting the South African system in virtually the same terms that we, or any observer with the least partiality to democracy, would have chosen. In Parliament, we read, there was a lively no-confidence debate in progress, with the opposition members storming out amid revelations that the government had been opening their mail and tapping their phones. We had not expected to find such freedom of speech. But what defense could the government possibly offer against these arguments? What defense, for that matter, could be offered against the decades-old, unremitting international chorus of condemnation? This miserable country had even been banned from the Olympics, where every dictator was welcome to send a team. The papers we saw gave few clues to the answers to these questions, and none to the big question about why blacks did not revolt. Everybody in Parliament, of course, was white.

We left Johannesburg for the coast, driving south through a range of weird yellow man-made hills: the slag heaps from the gold mines of the Witwatersrand.^[*] We pushed on into the eastern Orange Free State, where the countryside turned gorgeous. This was late summer and the grass on the highveld was long and a deep green. Great scarlet rimrocks towered over the old Boer^[**] homesteads, with their weeping willows and eucalyptus windbreaks. The fields were full of sunflowers and endless rows of tall, ripening corn. Merino sheep and fat red cattle grazed on the hills. Sleepy little country towns clustered around shady squares and imposing church steeples. Every white farmer seemed to drive a Mercedes-Benz.

In the countryside, though, the black townships were not hidden away as they were in the city. Instead, one or more "locations" sprawled near every white settlement—always with a cordon sanitaire of fields, or a river, or a hill between them. And the black towns looked like festering wounds on the lush land. They were treeless, roadless collections of shacks, as wretched as anything in Asia. The

* The Witwatersrand—"White Waters Reef" in Afrikaans—is the gold-bearing reef that underlies Johannesburg and neighboring towns; often called simply "the Rand."

** "Boer" is another term for Afrikaner, less widely used now than previously. In Afrikaans, boer means "farmer."

houses were built from scraps of cardboard, plywood, and corrugated tin. There was clearly no electricity, no running water. Women trudged along the highway, bent double under huge loads of firewood. Teenage girls carried plastic jugs of water on their heads. And the children, some of them dull-eyed and swollen-bellied from malnutrition, came begging wherever we stopped.

We car-camped our way to the Cape, barbecuing chicken and steaks, drinking good, cheap Cape Pinotage wine, and detouring often. It was easy, almost enchanted traveling. As the Berlitz Travel Guide says, South Africa is "Africa on a silver platter, the call of the wild at the end of a superhighway." In Natal, we drove high into the Drakensberg Mountains, then hiked still higher, past thorn trees and antelope, and ate lunch on a rocky peak near a troop of baboons. All around us were sheer purple flat-topped mountains and deep gorges bisected by cold clear rivers. This was too high for white farming. Down the valleys we could see the thatched round huts of Zulu villages, their mud walls covered with strange designs. Rachel's hepatitis had already disappeared, and would not be heard from again.

We descended from the highveld into tropical Natal, reaching the coast at Durban. Then we wandered down through the Transkei, the bantustan^[*] created for Xhosa-speaking people. I surfed. We slept on beaches and at roadside "caravan parks." We picked up hitchhikers, mostly black country people, and plied them with questions about their lives. On the whole, people were friendly, but shy. There was often a language barrier. I was surprised when not one black person I asked had heard of Alan Paton's famous novel Cry, the Beloved Country , not even around Ixopo, where the story begins. I was also surprised that no blacks, not even those who asked for our address in America, invited us to their homes. One man did show me his "pass."^[**]

* The bantustans are rural areas set aside by the government for Africans to live in. There are ten bantustans, each meant to serve as a "homeland" for a different "tribe." All but one of the bantustans are geographically discontinuous. KwaZulu, for instance, was reported in 1978 to consist of forty-eight separate "fairly large" pieces and 157 "smaller" pieces. All together, the bantustans comprise 13 percent of the land area of South Africa. Roughly 50 percent of all Africans live in the bantustans, roughly area of South Africa. Roughly 50 percent of all Africans live in the bantustans, roughly 35 percent live in the cities, and the remainder live in the "white" rural areas. The extreme poverty in the bantustans drives large numbers to migrate to the cities. The Pretoria-supported leaders of four bantustans, including the Transkei, have accepted "independence." No country in the world except South Africa recognizes the bantustans, nor does the United Nations.

** Until mid-1986, every African over the age of sixteen was required by South African law to produce on demand his or her pass, complete with employer's validation, certifying his or her right to be in that area. Hundreds of thousands of people were arrested each year for pass law violations, fined, jailed, and "endorsed out" to the bantustans. This policy was known as "influx control." The recent repeal of the pass laws was greeted with widespread suspicion that old and new laws against trespassing, vagrancy, and squatting will continue to serve the same function: state control of black movement, particularly black urbanization.

The little green booklet had all the banality of true evil, I thought. But its owner denied that he resented having to carry it. "So long as he is in order, I am right," he said.

In the Transkei, we caught glimpses of the Africa we had come to see. Women in traditional Xhosa dress, their faces made ghostly by masks of white mud, smoked long-stemmed pipes and wore hundreds of copper and beaded bracelets. Blue-black birds with five-foot tails flew up and across the road. At one place, we stumbled into a gathering outside an abandoned homestead, where fifty or sixty people—some in traditional dress, some not—were singing, dancing, and shouting with joy to an extraordinarily compelling kwela beat. The energy of the music outpowered any rock band I had ever heard. Later that day, I forced myself to drink a carton of the bitter, sorghum-based Xhosa beer in a rowdy bar where the other customers cheered me on with cries of "Masisele!" (Drink up!)

We met few whites, partly because pubs in South Africa were closed to women, and Rachel refused to sit in the strange, sterile "ladies' lounges" to which we would have been confined. We caught plenty of stomach-turning glimpses of local race relations—white children asking their mothers to buy them candy they called "niggerballs"; a fat white foreman threatening a black railway worker with a metal-tipped rhinoceros-hide whip called a sjambok —but the whites we met, who were mostly surfers or fellow campers, were uniformly pleasant. A woman in a caravan park in East London, having noticed collections of Nadine Gordimer's stories and Athol Fugard's plays among our things, said, "You won't go back to America telling people we're all like they say we are, will you?" Yet even she was friendly, and fed us our first boerewors —a heavy beef sausage beloved by many South Africans. On a hill above that caravan park, a billboard advertised "Texan" cigarettes.

The view from the little bubble of well-being we traveled inside got steadily prettier as we approached the Cape. The coast, sheltered from the dry interior by a range of rain-catching mountains, was a forested, shining series of gentle bays. The sea was warm; the climate grew Mediterranean. The only problem was that we were running out of money. Gas cost nearly three dollars a gallon, food prices were comparable to those in Europe—suddenly, our budget was ten times

what it had been in Asia. The months of solvency that we had projected for touring Africa were quickly turning into weeks.

Running low on funds in distant countries was actually nothing new to me. I had always managed before to find work and save. But the South African economy clearly was something new. Weeks later, my students would be astonished to hear that I had ever worked as a dishwasher, a gardener, a gravedigger. How could sir stoop to such menial jobs! One girl asked if it was true that there were white domestic servants in Europe and in America, and when I replied that it was, she and her classmates gasped with wonder—and, I daresay, delight. In South Africa, those sorts of jobs were held exclusively by blacks. In fact, there were no quick, dirty, manual jobs for the likes of Rachel and me. By dint of having white skins, we were considered above such work—as we were too often reminded by blacks who called me baas (boss) and "master," and Rachel "madam" and "the lady." Even the whites-only caravan parks, which were strictly for people of modest means, all had, we noticed, special areas for billeting one's "servants."

By the time we reached Cape Town, cash flow was becoming a problem. We were both eager to head north, to see the Kalahari, to get into Africa Africa, but if we had to stop and work . . . Cape Town, with its mountains and beaches, its wineries and graceful, Old World ambience, was an infinitely more appealing place than, say, Johannesburg. Apartheid was still everywhere in evidence, but the atmosphere was markedly less harsh than elsewhere in the country. The fact that the majority of Capetonians were "colored" had something to do with that, no doubt. There was no drastic break in appearance between different groups. This "phenotypic continuum" gave the city a heterogeneous look, the way I imagined Brazil. There was a greater sense of socioeconomic continuum as well. Cape Town had a reputation as a bastion of liberalism in South Africa. Its red double-decker buses were even newly integrated.

A day or two after we arrived, I wandered into a surf shop, actually considering selling my surfboard. The kid behind the counter didn't want my board, but he did tell me about a desperate shortage of teachers in the local "non-European" schools, as he called them. In fact, his father, he said, was a school inspector.

We went to see his father, who turned out to be an exuberant, avuncular Afrikaner with an armful of postgraduate degrees in psychology and education. "Ag, man," he said. "These children need help so badly. And their teachers. And their inspectors! Look at this stack of psychological tests I've got from your America, but never have time

to distribute! The government simply must give us more money! But I'm sure we can find a place for you."

Rachel decided she couldn't face teaching again so soon, but I found the inspector's enthusiasm contagious. I rushed off to the Cape Flats with a list of short-handed schools. As the school year had started several weeks before, they really were desperate. My interview at Grassy Park High lasted less than an hour. The principal took my word regarding my qualifications, and I started work three days later.

Deciding where to stay was simplified by the Group Areas Act, a piece of legislation under which every residential area in South Africa has been assigned to one or another of the four main racial classifications. With exceptions made for servants, no individual may live in an area not designated for his or her classification. Thus, we were legally forbidden to live in Grassy Park, or anywhere very nearby. So we rented a room in the nearest "white area," a suburb called Muizenberg, on the Indian Ocean coast, five miles away.

4

"Crossing the line" each morning involved a stark transition. I started off on quiet, cobbled beach-town streets, among surf shops and Victorian mansions. Heading away from the coast, I drove northeast, into a wide wasteland of sand dunes. These were the Cape Flats. For a mile or more, there was nothing but sand and scrubby fynbos , with the Port Jackson scrub glinting in the low sun. Then the road skirted a large squatters' camp: half-glimpsed tar-paper shanties back among the dunes, underfed children in shapeless old sweaters crossing the road with plastic water bottles. Then came the bleak tenements of Lavender Hill, and the transition was made: from white to black South Africa, from the First World to the Third. Crowds of people tramped alongside the road, pedaled bicycles, and crammed into share-taxis. I was an anomaly; all the other commuters were headed for the white areas. I passed Jessie's Moslem Butchery, the Dandy Cash Store. Then the road curved into Grassy Park.

While it shared the bright, flat, sprawling quality of every place on the Cape Flats, Grassy Park felt less arbitrarily located than some of its sister communities, for it was bounded on three sides by marshes known as vleis. This gave it a rough kind of neighborhood coherence, around a market square known as Busy Corner. Grassy Park looked

nothing like "your ghettos such as Harlem." Where the feeling was not suburban, it was rural: donkey carts clopping down unpaved roads, farmers and fishermen selling their produce from wagons, stock grazing in empty lots. There were a few high-density apartment blocks, barren brick structures with graffiti-covered walls, unhealthy-looking stairwells, and little cookie-cutter sections of corrugated tin slapped on over the ground-floor doors. These places were called, incongruously enough, "the estates." They had been built in the 1960s by the Cape Town City Council. The oldest section of Grassy Park was also council housing—an area called Cafda, after the Cape Flats Distress Association, a private charity that had once administered the township. Cafda was all tiny red-brick cottages with roofs so low they seemed to have been built for dwarfs. The people in Cafda were very poor, but their neighborhood had one great softening feature: fine, full-sized eucalyptus trees. The rest of Grassy Park sat out in the sun and blowing sand. There were a few "pondoks," or shanties, built from scraps of wood and tin and iron, scattered around Grassy Park. But most of the housing, at least in the blocks around Grassy Park High, consisted of small, fairly new single-family homes, with electricity and indoor plumbing. Some of these houses were privately rented, but most were owned by the people who lived in them.

There were far more prosperous "colored" communities on the Cape Flats, places where the landscaping, the spacious new homes, looked much like their economic equivalents in the white areas, but private home ownership did serve to distinguish the bulk of Grassy Park from the bulk of the Cape Flats—and, for that matter, from the great majority of black South African communities. The government could uproot black property owners, as it had demonstrated countless times—indeed, it had done so to many people who were now Grassy Park residents. But it was much more likely to visit its removals on tenants and on squatters than on black homeowners. Most blacks lived in government housing of one kind or another. To have one's own home was a rare blessing, and provided a rare degree of security. Thus, people in Grassy Park were, as a rule, intensely house-proud. You could see it in the nameplates that adorned most houses: Our Haven, Valhalla, At Last. You could see it in the neat front yards and gardens, the fancy little homemade fences of wagon wheels or terra cotta, the ornate stained-glass front doors, and well-clipped bougainvillea hedges. The houses weren't precious or pretentious—most had chicken coops and serious kitchen gardens out back, growing corn, cabbage, beans, potatoes, beets, tomatoes—as much as they were

cheerful. Given the bleakness of the Flats, the harshness of the policies that had sent people out there to begin with, and the general hard lot of being black in South Africa, this air of sunny contentment struck me as remarkable.

Of course, there was more to it than met a foreigner's first glance. The wide, straight streets which I found so charmingly full of life—people always strolling to or from the shops or the bus stop at Busy Corner, children playing soccer in the quieter roads—were designed to accommodate the armored vehicles known as Hippos, to give the advantage during "times of unrest" to government forces. Some areas were extremely dangerous after dark: street gangs robbed and raped with horrifying freedom. It was many miles to work for most people, first by bus, then by train. Busy Corner had some amenities—a clinic, a pub, a small post office, a fish-and-chips shop, several of the little groceries known as cafés, even a branch of the Standard Bank—but most errands and shopping had to be done across the line. Just as black businessmen were not allowed to trade in the white areas, supermarkets and department stores were not built in black areas. Everywhere were women returning from expeditions to the big shopping malls in the white areas, toting bulging plastic bags. One thing I never saw in the entire year I worked there, though, was a white person on the street in Grassy Park.

The high school was two blocks from Busy Corner. It was one of the most substantial schools on the Cape Flats. There was a core of brick buildings around a courtyard, containing perhaps a dozen classrooms, with three or four smaller buildings out back. In a sandy field adjacent stood the scruffy, gray, two-story, pre-fab "new building," containing another ten classrooms, one of them mine. That was about it, really. There was no auditorium, no gymnasium, no cafeteria, no book lockers, no language labs, no heat. The "sports ground" was a glass- and rock-strewn horse pasture; the library owned fewer books than I do. The classrooms were full of broken windows, broken lights, decrepit desks, and yawning holes in the ceilings.

The contrast with the high schools across the line could scarcely have been more galling. Public schools for whites were vast, immaculate facilities. The new boys' high school in Wynberg, less than five miles from Grassy Park, had six tennis courts, three rugby fields, one hockey field, two squash courts, a swimming pool, a fully equipped gym, five science labs, a geography lab, and four soundproof music rooms.

5

At the end of my first day of teaching, there was a meeting of the faculty. Forty-odd teachers crowded into the "staff room," jostling and jovial. Before the meeting began, I was introduced to my department chairmen, Mr. Napoleon of geography and Mr. Pieterse of English.

Napoleon was a tiny, energetic fellow in his late forties. He had small bright eyes under high, surprised brows, and a quick, commanding air. He wore a baggy brown suit and a pencil-thin mustache. He had a lisp and admirable posture. "Mr. Finnegan, Mr. Finnegan. Have you taught geography before, sir?" I confessed I hadn't. Napoleon harumphed. "Then I must show you how we do it. We'll have a meeting. The other new geography teachers must come, too."

Pieterse was in his early thirties, tall and broad-shouldered, with a cauliflower ear (from playing lock for a local rugby club) and a manner that somehow succeeded in being both hearty and ironic. Pieterse smirked and said, "All the way from America to little Grassy Park. What part of the States?"

"California, originally."

Pieterse laughed and shook his head. "Well, you'll find life here boring, man, I can tell you, after Hollywood. And Disneyland."

Pieterse was abruptly carried off by another teacher, who led him across the room by his cauliflower ear to Napoleon, while onlookers laughed. Napoleon started pretending to scold Pieterse, flexing a long thin stick and railing in Afrikaans while Pieterse, who was twice Napoleon's size, pretended to cower.

I recalled something my predecessor in New Room 16 had told me during our only conversation. She had advised me to take disciplinary problems to Napoleon. "The students are afraid of him," she said. "Sometimes you only have to mention his name to bring them to order. I let him do all my caning. He's quite good at it, they tell me."

So that long pale stick with which Napoleon was making the air in the staff room sing was the dreaded "cane." The sight of it made me uneasy. Coercion, physical violence, suddenly struck me as a terribly crude, inappropriate, almost obscene thing to introduce into the complex, delicate world of the classroom, where I felt so tentative and well-meaning, and my students seemed to feel the same, and the great, ineffable business of education was meant to take place.

I turned away to read a bulletin board, and there found a chart of teachers' salaries. I had never been told what I would be earning,

so I began to look for my category on the chart. So many years' education, so many years' experience—then I was brought up short. There, spelled out in grubby bureaucratic black and white, were two more salary determinants: race and gender. In every category, a male teacher's salary was roughly 10 percent higher than a female's, and each category of experience, education, and gender was further broken down into four racial categories. In the race breakdown, the differences in salary for teachers of the same qualifications were far greater than in the sex breakdown. Teachers in the lowest-paid classification, "Bantu" (African), were receiving salaries barely half of what their identically qualified colleagues who were classified "white" received. As a "white" male, I saw, I would be earning nearly 40 percent more than a "Coloured" female colleague, and 30 percent more than a "Coloured" male colleague, with the same qualifications.

The principal called the meeting to order. I found myself wondering what racial classification each new colleague whom I could see suffered. Like their students, the Grassy Park faculty were of all shades and physiognomies. Certainly, all four classifications on the salary chart ("Asian" was the fourth, and the second-best paid) seemed to me to be represented. But the truth was that only "Coloureds" and "whites" were legally permitted to teach at Grassy Park High, and that, before I was hired, there were only two people classified "white" on the faculty of fifty. The joke went that the Grassy Park faculty was a so-called colorful group. And they did look eclectic, at first survey. There were debonair old guys in berets, dumpy matrons clutching purses, sleek young women in high heels, and a fellow who looked like O. J. Simpson. There was an eighteen-year-old girl who, it turned out, had graduated from the school the year before and was now back teaching science.

The principal, George Van den Heever, was a big, pale, solidly built man in his sixties who seemed to have a special affection for Americans. When I had turned up unannounced in his office, looking for a job, he had spent most of the interview sharing with me his recollections of the GIs he had met and befriended in Italy during World War II. "Wonderful fellows! They would gladly give you the shirt off their backs!" Now he opened the staff meeting by introducing me to the faculty at large with an extended, acutely embarrassing speech in an ancient oratorical style, ending by dubbing me "our very own Yankee Doodle Dandy."

There was a second teacher starting work that day, a young woman named Elizabeth Channing-Brown, who was also introduced.

I guessed her to be classified "white" (correct). Channing-Brown was an actress, we were told, and she did have the broad, fine, regular features of a leading lady. She would be teaching English, we heard. Channing-Brown looked extremely nervous and was chain-smoking.

As the meeting proper got going, business began to be conducted in Afrikaans. The principal made a long, energetic speech, which became increasingly emotional and dramatic. His voice rose. He pounded on a table. About twenty minutes into it, a bull-necked fellow in a bright green shirt leaned over and asked in a whisper whether I understood the speech.

I shook my head and his face creased in silent mirth.

When I murmured that I wouldn't mind knowing what it was about, my neighbor listened closely for a minute, then shrugged and whispered, "There are pupils hanging about who don't belong to this school."

Finally, the principal wound down, and a portly young teacher in an expensive-looking dark blue suit took the floor. He spoke in English and with great fluency, although his elaborate, grammatically impeccable sentences seemed intended only to echo the principal's main points, emphasizing the need for standards and discipline in the school and so forth. This was Mr. Da Silva.

Then a third speech, nearly as long as the principal's. It was given by Mr. Africa, the vice-principal. Africa made great use of his long, graying slab of a beard, murmuring into it with a solemnity reminiscent of the Old Testament prophets he resembled, then lifting his face and raising his voice at key points, to impressive effect. His topic was lost on me, however, as he spoke in Afrikaans. Africa was a tall, thin man, with sad, calculating eyes.

Lulled by the powerful, consonant current of these performances, my attention began to wander. I observed that my colleagues were, on the whole, far better dressed than I. Nearly all the men wore suits, many of them three-piece, while my outfit had been gleaned entirely from the racks of a local Salvation Army outlet. My clothes were clean, but they did not match and they did not fit and, what was more, I was wearing all of the passable items I owned. For my job interview, I had worn my best traveling clothes: some elderly cords, a shortsleeved cotton shirt, and a pair of plastic loafers from Sri Lanka, painted brown to look like leather. Afterward, the principal had gently mentioned the matter of dress. "We're quite casual here," he said, "as you can see from looking at Mr. Tate." But then he went on to mention his expectations regarding a coat and tie.

I looked around the staff room for Tate. He was there, surreptitiously reading a paperback behind his briefcase. Tate had been called in by the principal toward the end of my interview, along with several other teachers, who stood in a row and were told by the principal of my application and of my qualifications and asked for an opinion, while I sat right there and squirmed. They all seemed to squirm, too, until Tate finally spoke. "I think the question is not whether we will have Mr. Finnegan, but whether he will have us." I was very grateful for this Kennedyesque remark, and everyone laughed with relief, and I was hired. Tate was a young, bearded, sweet-faced Englishman (he and Da Silva were the two "whites" on the faculty before Channing-Brown and I arrived), in his second year of teaching history and English at Grassy Park. Tate dressed casually, it was true, in baggy cords and a tweed jacket. He still looked better than I did, though.

The flow of agreeing speeches in two languages which I by now thought constituted a Grassy Park High faculty meeting in its totality was rudely interrupted by a short, handsome young teacher named Nelson October. When he started to speak, the room woke up.

"I'm afraid I must disagree with nearly everything that's been said here this afternoon," October said, in fast, accented English. "The principal, the senior staff, have been talking about making new rules for the pupils as though there were no need to consult the pupils themselves in these matters. This approach has been seen to fail before, and contravenes agreements already reached with the SRC" (Students' Representative Council).

October went on in this vein. I found the tension created by his remarks almost stifling: it so ruptured the consensual mood that I had quickly come to believe prevailed at all levels at the school (pace Clive). Yet no one else seemed to share my distress; and then the meeting was suddenly adjourned, precipitating an unabashed stampede for the door.

On the way to my car, I found myself walking beside Elizabeth Channing-Brown. I asked how her first day had been.

"Oh, not so bad, really," she said. "The children were sweet. The only thing I'm afraid about, you know"—and here she laughed nervously and looked around to make sure no one else could hear—"is riots."

6

That first evening, I took home a stack of "schemes" (syllabuses) for each of the subjects I was to teach. These were highly detailed, specifying the content of virtually every lesson all year long. From the moment I opened it, I didn't like the look of the material. It seemed to consist almost entirely of very old-fashioned busywork: memorizing columns of rainfall figures for geography, memorizing columns of obscure animal-gender terms for English (duck and drake, cob and pen, fox and vixen). I especially didn't like the formula for the evaluation of work: everything would depend on a final examination; a student's performance throughout the year would have almost no bearing on whether he or she passed or failed.

Then there were the textbooks. They were old and uninspiring and, upon inspection, revealed themselves to be full of racist mischief. A typical land-use analysis in our geography text: "Because this region is inhabited by the densest White population, we find a great concentration of industry." A sample sentence in the English grammar book: "All the Bantu who had been drinking beer began to fight one another." These sorts of racial stereotypes infested the textbooks. Moreover, there were a number of ways in which the apartheid society was, I thought, being presented as the normal order of things—such that South African geography, for instance, was described as if factors like the Group Areas Act and the pass laws were as common as industrialization or glacial scraping.

It didn't take me long to decide that I would not be doing much teaching according to the schemes. I wondered how many of my colleagues did so. There was clearly a great deal that our students needed to learn about the world they would soon be entering as adults, and precious little of it was being provided by the government's idea of education. I was not really in a position to start teaching the "truth" about South Africa, since I scarcely knew any of it myself. On the other hand, simply conveying the material in the schemes and the textbooks, uncriticized, would have been unconscionable. I was developing a substantial enthusiasm for the "subject" of South Africa. What I could learn, I decided, my students could learn along with me. In geography, I noticed, one of the subjects we were expected to cover was Other African Countries, and the prospect of extracurricular research in this area also suited me fine. Our textbook's gloss on the

subject looked to be less than useless, somehow contriving to present the material as though the great wave of decolonization of the past two decades had never occurred.

My introductory announcements to my classes the next day met with blank looks. Exams weren't important? Writing assignments every week? Outside reading?

"That's right."

Lectures, from which they would be expected to take notes? To these kids, it turned out, taking notes meant copying their textbooks, word for word, cover to cover, into notebooks, and using the entire school year to do it. This had, they said, been their main occupation under my predecessor. Their more energetic teachers might put something up on the blackboard for them to copy. But writing and listening simultaneously? Asking questions when they didn't understand? And disagreeing? And leading discussions themselves?

"That's right," I said. "You'll learn. You'll see."

The children seemed dubious, to say the least. And after my policy announcement concerning corporal punishment—I said I would not be using it—they hardly tried to hide their disbelief.

"Sir! " The children gasped and snickered, pulled faces and made it clear that they thought I was out of my mind. It was, taken all together, not the most encouraging reception. After one class, a girl stayed behind, while three of her friends hovered outside the classroom door. It was the same girl who had told me how to greet my classes. Her name was Hester. She was a big kid, with long brown hair, and a careful, earnest manner. "Will this be how the children in America receive their lessons?" she wanted to know.

I said I supposed so, since that was where I had learned whatever I knew about teaching school. (I didn't mention that I had never taught school before.)

"Thank you, sir," Hester said, very formally. She left and I sat, strangely exhausted, at my squat little teacher's desk and listened to the excited laughter of her friends as Hester joined them and they hurried off down the passage. As self-appointed educational reformer, I clearly had my work cut out for me.

7

This is a digression about terminology. Its importance in South Africa is almost impossible to overstate. Racial terminology can be invidious anywhere, but the uncritical use of the South African government's categories is especially loaded. In the public prints in South Africa, the conventions vary widely, and usages tend to fix the position of a writer or a journal on the domestic political spectrum. A progovernment newspaper will routinely discuss Whites and Blacks and Coloureds and Indians, while an antiapartheid writer will usually take the trouble to hold such concepts at intellectual arm's length, even when the effort requires multiple repetitions of stupefying phrases like "the so-called 'coloured' people." These differences are not just semantic; they reflect a basic dispute about the nature of South African reality. Mere quotation marks may call into question the entire society's legitimacy. Thus, one can say that 15 percent of the population owns 87 percent of the land, or that 15 percent of the population "owns" 87 percent of the land—impugning, in the latter case, the very idea of legal ownership in South Africa, and suggesting, perhaps, that this state of affairs is not only illegitimate, but also temporary.

Government policy is a particularly slippery area. "Apartheid" became an international embarrassment decades ago and has not been used officially since the 1960s. "Separate development" was its successor, and eventually discarded for similar reasons, to be replaced by "separate freedoms," "plural democracy," "vertical differentiation," "friendly nationalism," "constellation of states," "good neighbourliness," and countless other euphemisms for the same policy. Meanwhile, the "bantustans" became "homelands" became "self-governing states" became "black national states," while the "pass laws" became "influx control" became "controlled urbanisation," and so on, ad absurdum . Official terms for the country's various "population groups" have also changed with the times. Thus, the "natives" of the 1940s became the "Bantu" of the 1950s became "Blacks" in the late 1970s, while "Whites" replaced "Europeans" after 1971.

Blacks—by which I mean everyone not classified "white"—have tended to reject each of the government's designations for them in its turn, while most opponents of the South African system have continued to call it by its best-known name, "apartheid." The government's reasons for choosing certain terms, and rejecting others, are themselves instructive. As the debate over political rights heated up

after the Second World War, "natives" became obviously deficient for its suggestion that only blacks are true South Africans ("Europeans" had the same problem). "Africans," which for many years was what the people the government called "natives" and "Bantu" called themselves, was unacceptable to the authorities primarily because in Afrikaans "African" is Afrikaner . The reasoning behind "Bantu" was never clear. The word refers to a large linguistic grouping that occupies most of southern and East Africa; in Zulu, abantu means people. "Bantu" was hated by blacks, in any case, and began to be replaced in official usage after 1977 by "Black"—which had actually become the preferred term among black people themselves over the previous decade, in much the same way that it had in the United States.

But South Africans classified "Coloured" and "Asiatic," many of whom had long resented these terms—"Asiatic" was clearly intended to suggest that people of Indian ancestry were not true South Africans, but had a homeland elsewhere—had also begun to refer to themselves as "black" in increasing numbers throughout the 1970s. This was part of a broad-based movement to build a sense of common identity among all sectors of the disenfranchised. As this was a development much dreaded by the government, the introduction of "Black" as a term for the African majority was widely seen as less a capitulation than a subterfuge, a move to prevent those classified "Coloured" and "Asiatic" from calling themselves "black," since that term would now misrepresent their status under apartheid. (Radical "coloreds" had adopted "Non-European" for a period during the 1940s and 1950s as a term to ally themselves with other blacks before the widespread acceptance of "black," but it was now used only by a few pseudo-genteel whites.) The government continued to use "Non-White" to describe all blacks—such that the signs on trains, buses, toilets, liquor stores, and so on still read non-whites only. This term was universally scorned by blacks for the obvious reason that it made "whiteness" the standard of identity. How would whites like to be called "Non-Blacks"?

In this account, I try to use the terms that are most acceptable to the people I am describing. Thus, "black" refers to everyone not classified "white" under apartheid. Where necessary, I distinguish between "colored," "African," and "Indian." Sticking quotation marks around every racial term—and sometimes around the word "racial" itself—can be awkward and tiresome, yet I usually put them around "colored" anyway, out of respect for the great number of people who reject the word. Where a racial term modifies a manifestly un-racial

noun—a "white" beach, a "white" cinema—I also sometimes add quotation marks, just to keep clear the legal and arbitrary character of the exclusion involved. Although "African" is not the most progressive term for the people whom the government now calls "Black," I do not usually put it inside quotation marks, because it does not seem to be significantly resented. Neither do I use "Black African," as some writers do, in deference to the feelings of whites (and other blacks) who also consider themselves "African," for nowhere do I credit the suggestion that whites do not belong in South Africa. There are undoubtedly non-racist whites who prefer to see "whites" inside quotation marks, but while one may agree that this is as arbitrary and inexact and insidious as any other racial term, the vast majority of South Africans so classified clearly think of themselves as "white" and believe passionately in the reality of that condition, so I retain the term unadorned. In general, I don't try to impose a didactic consistency in this business of racial designation, but trust to context. Usage changes all the time, and there seem to be no conventions which are both graceful and broadly acceptable.

8

While I struggled to land on my feet as a teacher, my first weeks at Grassy Park High were also, for me, a strange sort of idyll. I loved suddenly having a strict routine, after the unstructured life I had been leading. I also liked the work. It was absorbing and seemed, in some large sense, worth doing. More than anything, though, I enjoyed getting to know my students. Their shyness with me ebbed away steadily. Their initial anonymity began to break up into a prodigious variety of individuals: wry athletes and troubled stutterers, cautious bright kids and jolly fat ones, coquettes, earnest innocents, affable rogues, teachers' pets, and on and on. I had been given no records, no test scores, no files on any of my students, a piece of neglect that was possibly, I thought, just as well.

I saw nine different classes, and each of these, too, slowly began to reveal its own distinct personality. (A "class" at Grassy Park High took most of its subjects together, moving from room to room as a group.) I taught second-language English to three Standard Six classes—6A6, 6A7, and 6A8, they were called. Standard Six (equivalent to American eighth grade) was the entering class at Grassy Park High. Most of the children in Standard Six were thirteen or fourteen,

although some were as old as sixteen. I saw these classes more often than I did any others—six periods a week each. Then there were two Standard Seven classes to whom I taught geography—7E1 and 7E2. Their first language was English; we spent four periods a week together. I also saw two Standard Nine classes once a week for vocational guidance, and two Standard Ten classes—seniors, known as "matrics"—once a week, for what was supposed to be religious instruction. Clive Jacobus, the boy who had challenged me on my first day, was a matric. Besides the great range in age and maturity in the classes I taught—there were kids in Standard Six who looked ten years old, while most of the matrics looked like college students—there were subtle differences between, say, all of my English classes. Over time, I found they each required a different touch, which itself changed from day to day, to rouse them to learning.

Our schoolwork went ahead by fits and starts, as my students and I struggled to get used to one another. My inability to speak Afrikaans was in some ways an asset as I went about teaching second-language English—I was not tempted to conduct lessons the easy way, in my students' mother tongue, as some of my Afrikaans-speaking colleagues did—but it became a distinct liability when students would break into Afrikaans to express themselves in a way that they could not in English. Instant translations were usually available, when the Afrikaans in question was not too raunchy, yet I would lose the nuances, especially when they were humorous, which they usually were. My students had, in fact, a highly developed sense of fun, and great comic timing as a group, and before I could understand any of it, I came to admire the relish with which they used and abused the Afrikaans language. (Their dialect was different from that spoken by white Afrikaners—more guttural, musical, and rich with slang.) Their wit worked differently in English, where it had more to do with accents than with phrasemaking, yet it still worked. It's an impossible sort of thing to reproduce in print, but a typical instance occurred one day when I introduced the vocabulary word "bachelor." I asked whether anybody knew what it meant, and somebody piped up, "Like Mustapha." Mustapha was the oldest boy in that class, a sixteen-year-old among thirteen-year-olds. He was deep-voiced, heavily bearded, terribly shy, and somehow, under the circumstances, he was the absolute living embodiment of the word "bachelor." The whole class, teacher included, dissolved in mirth on the spot, and for weeks I could not look poor Mustapha in the face without thinking "bachelor" and having to bite my lip.

To my English classes, I deliberately gave out essay topics that might help remedy my ignorance about my students' lives. And slowly, like images starting to emerge from the clouds of developer in a photographer's chemical bath, their world began to take some shape, to gain some substance, in my mind. Their parents were fishermen and factory workers, stevedores and secretaries, skilled and unskilled laborers. A few were teachers; a very few were successful Muslim businessmen. Their parents were always referred to in respectful, even childish tones, usually as "my mommy" or "my daddy." Organized religion seemed to be a big part of many of their lives. And "church" was clearly more than just Sunday services—it was choral societies, picnics, film shows, fund raisers, youth groups. "Mosque," too, seemed to involve an endless round of Koran classes, special observances, and social obligations. Most of the boys, and many of the girls, were sports lovers. Soccer, cricket, rugby, tennis, swimming, Ping-Pong and "netball" (similar to basketball) were their favorite sports. Hobbies ranged from karate to chess, raising dogs to electric guitar. One boy was a member of the Faking Club, a group that went around staging bloody accidents to test the public's knowledge of first aid.

It was a sanitized version of adolescent life on the Cape Flats that appeared in my students' compositions, of course. There were no alcoholic fathers or pregnant teenagers, no drugs or identity crises. The prevailing writing style was stilted and formulaic, which also tended to reduce the visibility of the real. The pulpit provided the inspiration for a few rhetorical flourishes, as in the essays of one churchgoing girl who liked to end her sentences, "but all forsaken," or "but all in vain," for which touches of color I was grateful. But original, imaginative prose was not something my students had ever been encouraged to write.

Still, their essays were for me a lode of information and ideas about everyday life in Grassy Park. I was struck, for instance, by how often a great, vague creature called "the people" appeared in my students' writing—"the people" not as a political concept or mandate, but as a simple, circumstantial consideration. "The people" were likely to gather at any public event. They were likely to go either way in a pinch. If your house was burning, "the people" might worsen matters by looting, or they might save the day by putting out the fire, you never knew. Skollies (hoodlums) and skelms (thieves) were also a factor in any public situation. One girl described how she sometimes carried a handful of one-cent pieces with her when she walked in

certain areas. If skollies came after her, she would throw the coins at them, and while the skollies stopped to pick them up, she would make her getaway. The ever-present threat of skollies contributed to an overall sense I got of lives being led between some terribly narrow horizons. Many of my students, I discovered, had never even seen the Atlantic coast of Cape Town, though it was less than ten miles away.

Being black in the land of apartheid had something to do with that, but the one great and ongoing narrower of horizons was simple lack of funds. People were poor. Poverty was far from equally distributed among my students, however, and the differences between the situations of some and the situations of others became obvious even in their essays—once I began to understand what I was reading. If a child mentioned "the Primus," for instance—a paraffin, or kerosene, stove—it probably meant that the house he lived in lacked electricity, which in Grassy Park meant he was poorer than most.

My students rarely, if ever, mentioned to me, either in conversation or in their writing, the endless series of humiliations small and large that being black in South Africa involved—such that I could easily have imagined that they lived in a nice tight apartheid compartment where racial slights and insults were not part of their experience. It wasn't so, of course, as I slowly came to see.

My students' writing betrayed no great political awareness of their situation. The acute consciousness of oppression that one might expect to find overwhelmingly among black South African youth, especially among urban students, was simply not in evidence. In fact, their main interests seemed to be thoroughly "normal." When we decided to brighten up New Room 16, my classes brought in posters, handbills, and pictures snipped from magazines until the walls were full of rock bands (Abba, Boney M, Michael Jackson), shiny cars, sports stars, and animals. I contributed a set of maps that I had been carrying when I arrived in Cape Town, which were well worn but useful as visual aids for my chronic digressions about life in distant lands.

What struck me most about my students during my first weeks as their teacher was not the ordinariness of their concerns, though. It was the extraordinariness of their relations with each other. At least I had never known high school kids anything like them before.

Basically, it was their lack of nastiness. There didn't seem to be any outcasts among them. The least confident, least likable kids did not appear to lack for friends. Their social life in general seemed imbued with an amazing collective good sense. Not only were there

no class "stars," no in-crowd of popular kids, but there were no couples, no high school romances. Clear friendships existed between the sexes, but boys generally sat with boys, while girls hung out with girls (all in a marvelously easy physical intimacy). Heavy romances were conducted, I was told, only with non-schoolmates. Inside the school, nobody went steady. It was so sane, it was strange. Strange because I couldn't help but think back to my own high school experience, to the semihysterical atmosphere of constant, intense competition—social, sexual, athletic, academic—that had prevailed among the fabulous amenities of our upper-middle-class school. At times it almost made me envious of my students at Grassy Park High. Their school, notwithstanding its many deficiencies, somehow had all the warmth, the healthy emphasis on the group, that my own homophobic, rabid-individualist schooling had lacked.

This pastoral mood of mine reached its apotheosis at a track meet a few weeks after I started teaching. Black school sports were mostly underfinanced to the point of nonexistence, but this was a big annual event, with about a dozen Cape Flats high schools competing. It was held at the main "Non-White" stadium in the Cape, which was a few miles from Grassy Park. We traveled to the meet, the whole school, students and faculty, in a fleet of rented buses, having canceled classes for the day. There were a few tricky moments outside the stadium, where a crowd had gathered of non-students and local skollies who were being refused admission, through whom we teachers had to shepherd our excited flocks; but once inside and installed in our Grassy Park section of seats, it was as though the dreary, troubled world outside ceased to exist.

Facilities on the field were minimal. Many of the runners were barefoot, and events requiring much apparatus, such as the pole vault (my old event), could not be staged. Yet the pitch of enthusiasm in the stands and the intensity of competition on the field were such that the modest setting seemed transformed. I was thoroughly caught up in the excitement myself. There were students of mine competing, and I found myself unabashedly bellowing them on. A Grassy Park relay team of Standard Six girls won a heart-stopping race, and the pandemonium that followed would have done justice to a world record effort.

One of my colleagues, a young math teacher named Ivan Grobelaar, passed me a small bag of tangerines. "For your throat, Mr. Finnegan," he said, smirking. I was grateful; I had been shouting my throat raw. I bit into one of the tangerines and gasped. It was satu-

rated with brandy. After he had finished laughing, Grobbelaar informed me that these naartjies were standard fare at local sports events. "They don't allow alcohol at the sports grounds here in South Africa," he said. "They even search the people for bottles. So we like to inject these naartjies , you know, with our favorite drink." Whole coliseums, according to Grobbelaar, would turn into wild bacchanals, with the revelers leaving behind nothing but a sea of tangerine peels. "And today, you must admit, we do need something to pass the long, boring hours."

I wasn't bored, though, especially as the day wore on and Grassy Park remained in contention for the team title. I had not thought it possible, but the volume of the chanting and cheering rose steadily from its original level. Little red flags had been issued to Grassy Park partisans and each time we won something the flags would all be hurled into the air with a great roar, and a rousing victory song would begin. At one point, Grobbelaar wondered if I wouldn't like to take a walk and relax with some "dagga" (marijuana). But I would not have left the stands by then for anything. Didn't he realize? We had a chance to win . He strolled off with Liz Channing-Brown instead.

In the end, we didn't win. But that fact did not seem to matter on the buses back to Grassy Park, where the singing was nonstop. I remember looking out the window at one point, as we passed through some drab Cape Flats township, probably Athlone or Lotus River, where people thronged the dusky roads, and the sun was slipping behind the high purple mass of Table Mountain, and singing students rocked and swayed around me on every side—looking out the bus window and thinking, with a keenly pleasant sense of the irony involved, that it seemed I had finally become infused with something that I had, once upon a time (around the time I was pole-vaulting, to be exact), heard a great deal about, but eventually despaired of ever knowing: I actually had School Spirit.

9

My fellow teachers didn't just dress better than I did. They also drove more presentable cars. Some of them, notably the younger men, could pass hours discussing the fine points of performance in the new Ford Granada, Chevrolet Chevair, or Toyota Corolla. Often, during the lunch recess and after school, one could see platoons of student volunteers deployed in and around some teacher's Mazda, scrubbing the

dashboard, polishing the already glistening chrome, and otherwise lost in reveries of abject product worship. My Opel wagon commanded no such devotion. I even began to think that my car, all low-slung and rust-flecked, was considered something of an embarrassment by certain teachers and students. If it was mentioned at all, it always seemed to be by someone remarking the fact that it still had Transvaal license plates—in a tone that suggested that it could at least do without this final indignity. But my vehicular gaucherie was, on the whole, politely overlooked, along with my other eccentricities, by the majority of my new colleagues, who seemed to go out of their way during my first weeks at Grassy Park High to make me feel welcome.

Meryl Cupido was especially unsuspicious. She was the teenage science teacher who had graduated from Grassy Park High the year before. She was a handsome, exuberant girl with long curly black hair and a frank, pealing laugh. Everything I said and did seemed to astound Meryl. She would peer into a sandwich that I had brought from home and exclaim, "Avocado pear! Who else would think to put this in a sandwich? You have such an interesting life, Bill!" Like most of the South Africans I met, Meryl pronounced my first name "Bull," which I found unsettling. And Meryl did so with particular relish, because—as she explained to me—she could not yet bring herself to call any of the other teachers by their first names. I was different because she had not known me while she was a student. Shifting from "Mr. Pieterse" to "Trevor" or "Mr. Tate" to "Alex" would take a while. Meryl and I taught many of the same children (the Standard Sixes), and much of our conversation centered on them. For we found that we shared an unbridled enthusiasm, quite unknown among our more experienced colleagues, for the individual qualities of our individual students, and that we could easily spend hours discussing them, comparing their work, and laughing over their foibles. "And Aubrey September? How will he ever pass his exams? You must help him, Bull! He is not stupid. And that Charmaine? What a wicked girl she is! She just laughs at you. She doesn't care about anything. But she, and some of those others in 6A6 as well, what an aroma they have, isn't it, Bull? Someone must show them how to wash!"

John Liberty, the senior physical education teacher, was also friendly. A rumpled, muscular man in his forties, Liberty was an avid baseball player—which was what first got us talking. Liberty had a number of books and magazines about baseball, and drawerfuls of clippings from the sports pages of American newspapers. The club he played for even rented a videotape of the World Series each year, he

said, "and we run the thing till it's wrecked!" Although the South African baseball season was just ending as I started teaching, I managed to see Liberty and his team in action a couple of times. They were surprisingly good and serious players. They were also incredibly brave. For they played on badly kept diamonds, where ground balls were forever leaping into an infielder's face, or some outfielder was always going head over heels after hooking his spikes on a tuft of grass. The batters did not wear helmets and the catcher did not wear a cup. When I mentioned to members of Liberty's team that grown men who were not professional players in the United States usually played softball, not hardball, they were shocked. American baseballers were their heroes. "Here, only the women play softball." The league Liberty played in was avowedly "non-racial," but everyone in it was black. It reminded me, at first glance, of what I had read of the old Negro Leagues. There were hickory-tough, white-haired catchers in their fifties, who had been playing since the Second World War, trotting out to the mound to calm lanky teenage fireballers. There were leather-lunged wives and friends heckling the opposing team from weatherbeaten bleachers in a creative combination of English and Afrikaans known as kombuis . I declined a number of kind offers to join the team, partly because of the excellent chances of injury, and partly because I didn't think I was good enough, but mostly because I could not face the storm of inspired kombuis that I was sure would blow every time I stepped up to the plate.

We first met in a strained situation, but Conrad Botha, the school librarian, and I were also soon on good terms. I had gone during my first week at Grassy Park High to remonstrate with him, after having been told by my students that he had decreed that the library would no longer loan out books. Conrad was a slight, boyish fellow about my age, with glasses, a patchy beard, and the habit of calling other male teachers "sir." He apologized for any inconvenience his decree had caused. "But they've asked me to put this library in order. And the only way we can begin is by keeping all the books here, so that we can make a list." I could see his point, and I could also see that his library would not suffice for the purposes of my English classes, anyway. There were so few books, and most of them were in Afrikaans. We would have to use the public library. Conrad and I started talking, though, and I discovered that this was his first year at the school, too. For the past seven years, he said, he had been teaching at a primary school in Wynberg, where his uncle was the headmaster. I was surprised to hear that there was a black school in Wynberg. "Oh, well,"

Conrad said. "You know there's a Wynberg upper and a Wynberg lower . We live and have our schools in lower Wynberg. Quite a number of suburbs are divided that way, since Group Areas. In Wynberg, it's easy to tell the two places apart, because the railway line separates them. There's usually something like that: a highway or an industrial area or some such. But you know you'll always find the property values on our side of the line quite high, and the houses well kept. I don't know why, but people want to live as close as they can to what we call the ruling class. Although they say that if you fix up your place too well, and it's just there by the line, they may suddenly decide that your neighborhood must be a white area, and force you out. Oh yes, that has happened. But on their side, it's the opposite. The houses are run down, and they sell quite cheap. Only the so-called poor whites are willing to live so close to the so-called coloreds. You know, if you're interested in studying just how strangely people can behave, sir, you could not have come to a better place than Cape Town."

Soraya Jacobs was another teacher who was friendly to me from the start. She was a talkative, chic, Semitic-looking beauty in her mid-twenties, who drove a new silver Audi and taught sewing. Soraya was engaged to a tall, dashing fellow named Raphael, who had formerly taught at Grassy Park High, and now sold insurance for a living. Soraya and Raphael were Muslims, but not at all devout, and she frequently gave voice to her misgivings about her approaching wedding. She would just as soon not be legally married at all, Soraya claimed. "The things they do to you when you are married in this country, you can't believe," she told me. "For a start, I must give up my permanent teaching post, and become a temporary. Which means they can sack me with just twenty-four hours' notice. Why? Because they believe that a married woman is unreliable. I also must give up my bank account. A married woman is not even allowed to keep her own bank account." It occurred to me that the latter restriction (there was legislation being introduced in Parliament to change it) would really hit Soraya where she lived. For she had the coppery air, and this was very rare in Grassy Park, of someone accustomed to a substantial spending allowance. Her father was a successful businessman who had never let his children want for much. Soraya had taken vacations to Europe; perhaps she and Raphael would spend their honeymoon there, she thought. Soraya's worldliness made her easy for me to talk with.

Ivan Grobbelaar and I also shared a number of students, but his

and my conversations about them could not have been more different from Meryl's and mine. Grobbelaar taught Standard Six math, but he never showed any interest in the academic progress of his classes. He liked to regale me with long, smutty monologues on the landing between our classrooms, gesturing toward the students passing below and saying, "These people, I'm telling you, they like that thing." Grobbelaar, who was in his late twenties, had a terrible complexion and a disturbing lisp—possibly because he was missing several of his front teeth. He was a flamboyant dresser, given to three-piece lemon-yellow suits, with yellow platform boots and extremely tight trousers. One afternoon, with both liquor and dagga strong on his breath, he boasted to me that he had taken the virginity of a number of girls whom we both taught, none of whom were over the age of fifteen. I was never sure whether to believe him. Although he was hideous, the girls in that class did talk incessantly about how "well dressed" he was.

I was interested in socializing with my colleagues outside school, but I was not sure how to go about it. One Friday afternoon early on, I tried indulging my nostalgia for the afterwork rituals of other jobs I had held by whisking a few people off to a bar I had noticed behind the post office at Busy Corner. My companions were John Liberty, Trevor Pieterse, and another young English teacher, Cecil Abrahams. It wasn't a bad bar—dim, comfortable, with good draft beer and a jukebox full of Motown—but it was a bad idea. I was aware that it was illegal for me to be in there, but I had decided that I would just ignore that fact until someone else brought it up. What I was also ignoring, of course, was the arrogance of my blithely entering a place that was set aside for the exclusive use of my companions, when the equivalent place, set aside for my use—a "white" bar—would have greeted my companions with immediate ejection, if not arrest. With my American chutzpah, I managed to get served in the Grassy Park pub, but somehow the atmosphere never achieved the seamless jollity I remembered from Montana, Australia, and Guam. We all kept glancing at our watches. And when somebody declined to accompany me for a drink the next week by pointing out that it was unwise for a schoolteacher to be seen making a beeline for the bar after work in a community like Grassy Park, I abandoned the idea of unwinding ensemble at our "local."

Just a few days later, though, I went to my first staff "braai" (barbecue), which was held at one of the local vleis, and that was a lot

more like it. It was a warm, late-summer evening and the braai, when it reached full swing, was as merry as any pub crawl one could have wished for. The boerewors was basted with a sweet sharp Cape Malay sauce, and cooked on a makeshift grill in a sandy pit. Disco music blared from a tape deck: Shalamar, Prince, the Spinners, the Commodores, and, most memorably, "Street Life," by the Crusaders. The beer was cold; there was brandy and wine. People danced and, when the moon rose, the waters of the vlei glittered, and a few headlong souls went swimming.

I stood on a little knoll watching the swimmers with Meryl. "You probably never dreamed these teachers got up to such things," she said, laughing. "Well, I tell you, neither did I! Look at Napoleon!"

Napoleon was wearing a tiny, ridiculous straw hat and playing bartender with a manic intensity. As he ran from group to group, ordering people to drink, it was hard to tell whether the self-pardy was deliberate. Either way, I was pleased to see teachers who were stern and imposing at school letting down their hair, and especially pleased that, by joining in the general abandonment, I seemed to dissolve some of my colleagues' reservations about me. "Everyone wondered why you came to Grassy Park, you know," Meryl told me. "They thought you might turn up your nose at them."

Around the fire, later in the evening, Trevor Pieterse was telling a joke. "This boy grows up on a farm someplace in the platteland . His parents are just laborers, but they manage to send him to school. And he does well in his studies, and gets a bursary, and goes away to boarding school in town, and grows up and becomes a teacher. Ja , a teacher. Like Malooi." Malooi was a history teacher, who at that point was passed out in the sand not far from the fire. People laughed. Pieterse went on.

"So the boy comes back one day to the farm to visit his parents. And they're very proud of him, you know. But the Boer who owns the farm is having problems with a troop of baboons who are raiding his mealies [corn] at night, stealing the knobs off the radio in his bakkie [pickup truck], and so on. So the Boer goes to the teacher and he says, 'Trevor, can you help me, man?' (Yes, Trevor was his name.) He says, 'You're an educated man now. Perhaps you can convince these bloody baboons to voetsek [scram] somehow. I've tried everything.' But Trevor says, 'What can I do?' But the farmer pleads with him. So finally, Trevor says, 'All right.' He'll try. So he climbs up the kloof [ravine] where the baboons live. And the farmer watches him from down below. And he sees Trevor way up there, at the top of the kloof ,

talking to the baboons. The whole troop has come out to hear him, you know. And he sees Trevor saying something, and then the baboons start laughing and laughing. Then Trevor starts talking again. And again the baboons laugh. They're pissing themselves, they're laughing so hard now. Then Trevor starts talking again, and suddenly the whole troop leaps up, and runs off over the mountains like they've just seen a ghost.

"The Boer can't believe it, of course. When Trevor comes back down the mountain, he asks him, 'Man, how did you do it?' And Trevor says, 'Well, first I explained to them that I was a colored teacher. They had a good laugh about that. Then I told them what my salary was. That really made them laugh. Then I told them that C.A.D.^[*] was looking for more teachers from this area.'"

Pieterse smirked and poured himself another brandy and Coke while people tried to rouse Malooi by pitching him into the vlei. I drifted over to a group that was arguing about stereophonic sound systems, the sonorous names of Blaupunkt, Magnavox, and Sony filling the air in a rising scherzo of comparison shopping. I wandered on, and came to Georgina Swart, a tall, angular woman in her thirties who taught history, and Chantal Da Grass, a young physical education teacher. Georgina interrupted a story she was telling to ask me, "I don't suppose they have this sort of thing where you come from, Mr. Finnegan—a race-classification investigation?"

Not that I knew of, I said.

"Well, they're quite common here, unfortunately. Especially in Cape Town. We have these people called 'race inspectors,' you see, who are always white, and often very young, and always completely unqualified for this or any other job, who go around at hospitals inspecting babies. They look at fingernails, at hair, at the shapes of noses, and they decide if a baby is white or black. But people sometimes get misclassified. A lot of old scores get settled this way, you see. Someone will inform anonymously on someone else to the Race Classification Board, saying that they have black ancestors perhaps, if they have been classified 'white.' And then there is an investigation. All the relatives are called in and scrutinized, and photographed, and interrogated. Friends are questioned, neighbors are questioned. Family secrets often come out, such as if someone had an illegitimate child at some point. Families are often destroyed, in fact, by these investiga-

* The Coloured Affairs Department (C.A.D.), since renamed the Department of Coloured Relations—the administrative body in charge of "colored" education.

tions. What do you think of a system that operates this way, Mr. Finnegan?"

Not much, I said. What could I say?

"Well, perhaps you should think about it," Georgina said. Her arch—and stone cold sober—tone bothered me. But before I could reply, Georgina suddenly started screeching. "Oh! Look at Malooi! On my car!" And she rushed away to shoo Malooi off the roof of her car, where he was quietly dancing in the moonlight. "Leave him," someone called. "He's minding his own business. Anyway, he's kaalvoet " (barefoot).

"Kaalvoet and carefree!"

At some point, later that night, I was buttonholed by Pieterse, who was feeling anything but carefree. "Do you realize , man," he kept asking, "what it means to be black in this bloody country? Do you realize what it is like to work for a government you despise? You can't give up the job, because you have a family, and a house they helped you to buy. But there's no future. There's no opportunity for a black man in this country. You can't possibly understand, man. You're 'white.' You don't know how lucky you are."

Perhaps I didn't. But I did know how embarrassed I was. I offered Pieterse a ride home, but he refused, and drove off into the night, bound for, he said, "the best shebeen in South Africa." (A shebeen is an illegal tavern found in black townships.)

I stayed a while longer there at the vlei, working on some terrible brandy with some other young teachers, who then tried to teach me the rudiments of rugby, using someone's shoe for a ball.

10

My weekly classes with Standards Nine and Ten were an entirely different story from my Standards Six and Seven English and geography classes. The subjects were mandatory, but they were not academic, and no final examination would be administered. The sole textbook in religious instruction was the Bible. For vocational guidance, I had been given a syllabus that included lessons on deportment, hygiene, study habits, the importance of family life, and developing a sense of personal responsibility. About as practical as the lessons got were some instructions on how to use the "hire purchase" system to buy a refrigerator on time. In these subjects, my students themselves suggested that we scrap the syllabus. The class time was normally

used, they said, for study and discussion. The Bible was duly set aside. Discussion topics were solicited—the most frequent suggestions were careers, computers, and the pros and cons of premarital sex.

The senior students I saw were a small, serious group, quite unlike the great laughing crowds of the junior classes. In fact, matrics were a truly elite corps at Grassy Park High, for they had survived a ruthless thinning of the ranks. You only had to look at the roster of students: the school's entering class was six times the size of its exiting class. And admission to the school in the first place was a privilege, available only to those who had successfully finished primary school—something that fewer than half of all black South African students do. The matrics were, in short, a very bright, ambitious group, in most cases already far better educated than their parents.

I was therefore stunned to discover that almost none of them had any realistic notions about what they would do after graduation. "Architecture," "medicine," "engineering," "law," they wrote on a questionnaire in the space where I asked them to indicate their career plans. But in the space where I asked what they were doing to further these plans, most of them wrote nothing.

"Where would you like to go to study architecture?" I asked one girl.

She had no idea which universities offered the subject.

"What branch of engineering?" I asked a short, hatchet-faced boy named Hector.

"What branch, sir?"

None of them seemed to know where one actually went for training for these professions, or how one applied and paid for it. None of them seemed to know any doctors, lawyers, architects, or engineers. Grassy Park High had no real career-counseling program. The only career advice most students got from professionals came from their teachers. As a result, the arc of their most concrete ambitions tended to end at the local teacher-training college—where most of my colleagues had finished their educations—and where the curriculum, I discovered, was merely the high school curriculum done over again, double-time. A few students expressed a desire to go on to "Bush," their name for the University of the Western Cape, the local college for "coloreds."

This all struck me as a great waste in the making. So I undertook to find out what the real possibilities were. Obviously, black advancement was an uphill fight in white-ruled South Africa. "Job reservation" had long been a cornerstone of the apartheid system, protecting

the employment and wages of whites against black competition. In recent years, statutory job reservation by race had been largely rolled back in favor of the "floating color bar," which allowed blacks into jobs when their labor was required, and excluded them when it wasn't. But there were very, very few blacks in managerial or supervisory positions in South Africa, or in the professions. Less than 3 percent of the country's university graduates were black. In fact, the percentage of the white population enrolled in universities was the second highest in the world (behind the United States), while for blacks the percentage was lower than that in Ghana.

A great deal of job reservation was not statutory, but simply customary. I noticed that many of the advertisements in the Employment Offered columns in the Cape Town daily newspapers mentioned race classification as a job requirement: "Bantu Chef"; "Coloured Char"; "Junior Salesman (White)"; "African Maid"; "Coloured Office Girl"; "personality Girls—Europeans Only." Other ads did not need to mention race. Vacancies for cleaners, laborers, and domestic help were simply understood to be open only to blacks, just as advertisers seeking a hotel manager or a production manager for an engineering firm did not have to mention that applicants had to be white. (My first reaction to seeing the race-specific ads was disgust; then a black friend told me that she thought blacks preferred this candor to wasting their time phoning after jobs that turned out to be closed to them.) These were, of course, the same unwritten laws Rachel and I had encountered when we first asked around about jobs.

Government policy still pursued the same objectives that formal job reservation had accomplished in the past. Shortly after I started teaching, Fanie Botha, the Minister of Manpower, had sought to reassure nervous whites by announcing: "There should be no fears in the hearts of our people that they will be squeezed out of their traditional work situation. . . . Still better instruments will be established for protection against unreasonable threats in the work situation."

All in all, the differences between the choices and prospects facing a matric at, say, Wynberg Boys' High and those facing our matrics at Grassy Park High were fundamental. The best universities in the country, every profession—they were all wide open to white children. White South Africans enjoyed full employment, such that even the least capable were guaranteed a job of some kind, at a living wage. Among blacks, on the other hand, unemployment was epidemic, and the vast majority of jobs available did not pay a living wage. What the newspapers did not much advertise, I noticed, were the real career

options for most black kids in Cape Town—the docks, road crews, fishing boats, textile mills, and canning factories—employers that loomed large for any Grassy Park students who fell behind in their studies, or whose families needed them to go to work. There was, finally, the terrific educational disadvantage that even our few matrics would carry into any competition for jobs or university spaces with white matrics. In 1980, the government was spending five times the amount on the education of each white child that it was spending on each "colored" child (and twelve times what it was spending on each African child),^[*] a disparity that was plain enough in the facilities provided each group, but was also reflected in teacher-to-pupil ratios, the qualifications of teachers, and, inevitably, in student academic development.

Despite all this, I was encouraged by what I discovered in the course of researching the career opportunities available to our matrics. For South Africa was, it seemed, suffering from a serious shortage of skilled manpower. And this was a situation that promised to get only worse in the years ahead. The white population (and government-assisted "white" immigration from Europe and elsewhere) had no hope of supplying the booming South African economy with all the technical, professional, and managerial personnel it required. There was already a call out for five times the number of industrial engineers presently working in the country. Within ten years, the projected manpower shortages in all areas were awesome. Even the government had conceded that its only option was the rapidly increased training of great numbers of blacks. If nothing else, the color bar was going to be floating upward fast, and staying up. If our matrics could just get the education—a university degree or a technical college diploma would certainly be entrance requirements for the technical/managerial sector where the projected shortages would be most severe—the demand for their skills in the years ahead would be enormous.

I also discovered, in the course of this research, a non-racial careers information service, funded by a private foundation. One Saturday morning, I visited their offices. It was my first encounter with a white liberal organization in South Africa, and I must say I found it delightful. The offices were located in an oak-lined alley in a lovely old

* The figures for per capita expenditure on education for the various racial groups during 1979–80: Whites—R1,169; Indians—R389; "coloreds"—R234; Africans in "white areas"—R91.

suburb near the University of Cape Town. They had the ramshackle Victorian-with-xeroxes flavor that one associates with enlightened humanism.

"You're a guidance teacher at Grassy Park High? Oh, that's wonderful ."

The staff was friendly, competent, and integrated. After an interview, a nominal payment, and having signed up Grassy Park High for every program in sight, I carried off a heavy stack of notebooks, flyers, new information, and new hope about the "life chances" of my students. The next week, I set my senior students to writing to every university in the country, and to dozens of professional organizations, scholarship funds, and technical colleges.

Most of them, to my surprise, were less than enthusiastic about the assignment.

"Where did you get all these addresses?" Clive wanted to know. (He hadn't even bothered to fill out my careers questionnaire.)

My answer didn't seem to mean anything to him.

I provided sample letters of inquiry, but the students still seemed intimidated. Their real objection, someone finally blurted out, was that most of these institutions "are not for so-called coloreds."

That was true. Still I insisted, arguing that we could work all that out later, that first we simply needed information.

In fact, I had been told at the careers information office that special "permits" were becoming increasingly available to qualified blacks to attend "white" colleges and universities. This was the sort of liberalization, they said, that the government was busy publicizing overseas these days, in order to buttress its claim that apartheid was being dismantled, but which they did not much advertise here at home, where a backlash among the white electorate was always feared. Actually, I was told, the main English-language universities now enrolled four times as many blacks as they had in the 1950s, before higher education was officially segregated. Permits were granted only on a case-by-case basis, but the success rate for applications by "coloreds" had been running very high lately.

So we sent off our letters. And my dubious students, to say nothing of the school secretary, were astonished at the response we got. Brochures and catalogs came flooding back within days. Nobody had known so much free literature existed. We started a file that soon grew into a shelf. We charted application deadlines and began collating requirements. I started holding private interviews to match ambitions with applications for programs and funding. Even Clive seemed to get excited about the possibilities.

11

"Will this be how the children in America receive their lessons?"

My ideas about what might go on in a classroom were quite alien to my students. For kids long trained to a passive, "parrot" role in their schooling, it was no easy matter to grasp what I was doing when I would lecture—stage-whispering to them: "Take notes "—but: "Don't copy "—because: "These are for YOU "—then collect their notes to see how well they were grasping the topic "for themselves." Organized discussions and debate also seemed to cut across the grain of my students' training, making for balky, self-conscious sessions that I was too often compelled to direct myself.

My notions about education were foreign to my students at many different levels. I might, for example, deliberate out loud the merits of two grammatical constructions, and conclude that both were fine, that it was simply a matter of taste. This sort of latitudinarianism has never been in vogue among authority figures in South Africa, and I fear it only confused my students. They wanted to be told what was right and what was wrong, not treated to arcane deliberations. Other strange habits and exactions of mine, like the public library card which I insisted every student procure, or the unheard-of amounts of homework I assigned, at least had the virtue of being straightforward.

In geography, some students seemed to welcome my departures from the syllabus and my criticism of the textbook, while others were clearly disturbed by them. I thought I sensed stirrings of revolt at my presentation on the subject of South Africa's relations with its immediate neighbors. My lessons emphasized the migrant labor system and what I called "economic colonialism," and tended to depict South Africa as a powerful exploiter of the less powerful. These lessons seemed to strike a patriotic nerve in some students, or at least to clash painfully with everything they had heard before on these subjects. "What must we do, sir? The minerals belong to South Africa. There are no jobs in these other places." Other students seemed to understand that I was not criticizing them when I criticized "South Africa." This was risky business, I realized—coming to a country, taking a job teaching in its schools, and telling its young people in so many words that the country's leaders were a lot of racist thugs. But what worried me more were the many students who readily adapted their old rote-learning methods to my alternative syllabus, dutifully inserting FRELIMO into their Mozambique lessons with little apparent comprehension of the material.

Some lessons went wonderfully, others went over like the proverbial lead balloons. With my English classes, I often misjudged at first my students' proficiency in English. For example, there was a poetry lesson, one that fell squarely in the lead balloon category, during which I read an Ogden Nash poem that I had chosen not only for its nice, relativist message—so appropriate, I thought, to a prejudice-riddled society like South Africa's—but because its subject was one close to many of my students' hearts: African animals. Titled "The Hippopotamus," it went:

Behold the hippopotamus!
We laugh at how he looks to us,
And yet in moments dank and grim
I wonder how we look to him.
Peace, peace, thou hippopotamus!
We really look all right to us,
As you no doubt delight the eye
Of other hippopotami.

The silence that followed my reading of this poem's last line might have been deeply gratifying at some other time. As it was, it was merely a function of the fact that nobody got it.

Except Wayan, who was so shy that he nearly choked, trying to hide his snickers in the sleeve of his blazer. Wayan was a dark, delicate, deerlike boy, with huge brown eyes and a heartbreaking bow mouth. He was the youngest student I taught, and one of the few real readers. When things got boring, Wayan would try to read science fiction paperbacks under his desk, and when I stunned the bulk of my students by requiring written and oral book reports, Wayan was at a different sort of a loss. He had so many favorite books, how would he choose?

My worst student in English was sturdy, silent little Aubrey September. It seemed impossible that he could have passed seven years of English and still have such a poor grasp of the language. But when I met with him privately, I discovered why: Aubrey was a country boy. His family had come to Cape Town only at the beginning of that year. He had previously attended one of South Africa's infamous "farm schools," where his English teachers, he finally told me, blushing deeply, had themselves not spoken English. I started tutoring Aubrey after school.

In between Wayan and Aubrey was a wide range of reading abilities and tastes. Most of the girls proposed to read and report on "Mills

and Boone books"—the local equivalent of Harlequin romances. Desmond, who raised dogs, chose Jock of the Bushveld , by Sir Percy Fitzpatrick. Hester brought in The Book of Horse and Pony Stories. Terence wanted to read the new Wilbur Smith thriller—which looked a bit racy for our purposes. I racked my brain and scoured secondhand bookstores for less regressive literature that would not be beyond my students' ability, and brought in whatever I could find—Charlotte's Web, The Wind in the Willows , Eugene Marais's My Friends the Baboons. On the whole, the children seemed to regard reading as a chore, an attitude I dearly hoped to revise. But it was difficult to find books that could appeal to them all, for reading in class, and impossible to come up with sets of them.

Class sessions were far too short, I found—less than forty minutes each, on average—to allow me to observe the responses of my students to my lessons properly. For I was experimenting furiously, just winging it really, trying to come up with things that would do more than merely pass the hours, things that would actually excite the children. Because that, I believed, was the only way real education ever took place. Of course, there was excitement and there was excitement. I thought that letting my English students teach me Afrikaans might be a fruitful exercise. But these lessons proved almost impossible to control—forty eager teachers trying to outshout each other, with one beleaguered student, whose every utterance absolutely fractured his instructors—and I soon abandoned them.

In geography, too, my attempts to make class time more vivid sometimes went too far. There was one memorable lesson on the solar system, for example, when no amount of description seemed to get the various ideas across. Finally, we just pushed aside the desks and created a working human orrery. That is to say, I stationed students around the room, each representing some celestial body, and set them all to orbiting and rotating at the appropriate rates, while I began dashing back and forth between Earth, Moon, Sun, and Pluto pointing out salient relations, adjusting perturbations, and being fried by an overacting Sun when I flew too close—all for the edification of a class whose screams and sobs of laughter were soon drowning out my narration. The most memorable moment of that lesson, at least for me, was when Napoleon and Africa burst in the door with canes raised and a great crowd of peering faces behind them. They had come to quell the uprising that they had assumed was occurring in my room.

No uprisings did occur in my room. In fact, the feeling in my classes was the furthest thing from the violent, jailbreak atmosphere

of the stereotypical American ghetto high school. Some of the tougher boys might have a pack of cigarettes on them and be reputed to use dagga, but hard drugs, weapons, vandalism, open contempt for teachers, and the other symptoms of systemic breakdown that plague so many American schools were nowhere in evidence at Grassy Park High. Neither were there any functional illiterates somehow cruising through school undetected. Which is not to say that the world outside Grassy Park High was not rife with the usual ghetto ills: unemployment, poverty, illiteracy, crime. These woes and their effects were just kept, to a remarkable degree, out of the school itself.

But my aura as "the American" was fading, and with it the overawed, mission-school atmosphere in my classes. For the most part, I was grateful for that. It opened up the possibilities for learning, for real intellectual activity and exchange, and it allowed me to begin to know my students, not as exotic figures in a tourist's pastorale, but as people—people who were just as cruel and just as kind, just as curious and just as opaque, as teenagers anywhere else.

The tide that ran against the sort of thing I was trying to do in the classroom was never really that strong among my students. Among my colleagues, it was more profound. I first felt it clearly when Napoleon held his meeting of the new geography teachers. Napoleon's classroom was the best appointed in the school. There were counters, cupboards, a sink. Old student projects—particolored weather maps and papier-mâché volcanoes—lined the walls. It was an affecting setting in which to hear Napoleon make his pitch for the necessity of hewing closely to the syllabus.

"We must coordinate. If we don't coordinate, we will be lost. What if one of you gets sick, or must leave his post for some other reason, and we can't tell where you are with your syllabus? What if the inspector comes and finds each teacher doing some different thing? What is going to become of these poor children when they must sit their exams? All pupils must be equally prepared. It's only fair."

Everyone else seemed to agree: it was essential that we all be teaching the same material at the same time all year long. It was not an auspicious time for me to raise objections to the material itself. So I didn't.

Over lunch in the staff room, I did, however, enter into a discussion of the inadequacies of our textbooks with Alex Tate. And I discovered that my problems were nothing compared to those confronting a history teacher. "One is obliged to teach the government's version

of South African history," Tate said. "Which can be quite a problem. Because, in some areas, the textbooks are simply false. Such as on the question of who settled South Africa first. The government likes to put forward the 'open land' and 'simultaneous arrival' theories. This is the idea that the white settlers found an essentially uninhabited South Africa and that the frontier wars were fought against black tribes which had actually just arrived themselves, from the north. These theories are meant to justify white occupation of the land, of course. The problem is that they have been completely discredited by historians and archaeologists for a long time now. Blacks were living throughout South Africa for many centuries before the first whites arrived. In other areas, the texts simply offer the government's rationale for conditions in the country—for very controversial policies like the pass laws, the homelands policy—without mentioning the rest of the world's, much less the black majority's, views on the matter. It's quite bad, really."

So I was far from the front lines, with my junior geography classes, in this battle over the material in our syllabuses. Also, Napoleon's admonitions notwithstanding, I would be administering the year-end examinations to my students myself, whereas Tate taught matrics, and if he wanted them to have any chance of passing their government-administered exams, he had to prepare them to applaud the "civilizing mission" of the European settlers in South Africa, and to use hated terms like "Bantu" and "homeland," and not inside quotation marks either.

12

The principal was determined to transform Grassy Park High into, as he put it, "something more than just a colored school"—he pronounced the hated word with violent disdain. His plan: to build a wall around the school. A cheap, plain, cement block wall. It would keep skollies and other "elements" from wandering onto the school ground. At the staff meeting where the wall idea was tabled, I was tempted to speak out—in opposition to the wall. I liked the fact that donkeys grazed on the sports field, that lovers and street gangs and matrons used the school as a thoroughfare, meeting place, and refuge. I didn't want to see the campus sealed off from the neighborhood, to see it sterilized, as it were. But mine were alien, romantic reasons, I knew, so I kept quiet.

Other teachers were less reticent. Somebody pointed out that our students' favorite record album at the moment was Pink Floyd's "The Wall." Laughter. (It was true.) Someone else pointed out that the record had been banned by the government. (Not true—it was banned two months later.) More laughter. When the topic became fund raising, more substantial objections were offered. The principal thought he could procure the donation of a new car as a raffle prize by a certain charity-minded corporation president. Muslim staff and parents had already consulted their imam. Now they rejected the raffle idea—too much like gambling. Other staff members supported the fund raising, but did not support the wall—the money, they said, would be better used to buy books. The principal kept his dream alive by appointing a committee to devise acceptable fund-raising events.

I found the wall business symbolic in several ways, for I had already come to assume that such supremely local issues represented at Grassy Park High the extent of most people's interest in world affairs.

That assumption was summarily overturned on the afternoon of March 4. I was looking for books in a supply room, and finding nothing but ancient copies of Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines , when I heard a commotion start outside. I went to the door and saw students beginning to dash back and forth between the buildings. I could hear classes chanting, "Fifty-seven! Fifty-seven! Fifty-seven!" Then kids were suddenly writing "57" on the walls with chalk. Pieterse hurried past, looking flushed and breathless. I asked him what the hell was happening. "Fifty-seven!" he shouted, not stopping. "Mugabe has won fifty-seven seats! ZANU-PF is going to rule Zimbabwe!"

In retrospect, it seems outlandish, but at the time I was stunned. And not by the election result so much as by the powerful reaction it provoked at Grassy Park High. The South African newspapers had been covering the Zimbabwe independence election campaign extensively (if poorly: some had actually predicted victory for the black moderate, Bishop Abel Muzorewa, who was hopelessly compromised by, among other things, his South African support, and was crushed at the polls by the man whom whites in South Africa and Zimbabwe had long insisted was a bloodthirsty Marxist maniac, Robert Mugabe), and I had been talking to my classes about its importance, yet I had gained little sense that anyone else at Grassy Park was really very interested. Now I saw how wrong I was. I also saw how trusted I wasn't: the whole school had been on pins and needles waiting to hear the election results, and no one had said a word to me. The opposition

press in Cape Town described Mugabe's resounding victory as evidence "that the government and most white South Africans had no perception of black political thinking," and the accusation could apparently be made, at a local level, against me, too.

My dismay on that score was dwarfed, however, by the excitement of the event itself, and by the realization that seemingly everyone at Grassy Park High understood quite well, thank you, their basic situation, and even felt as one about its ultimate redress. (The government press continued to try to reassure itself. "Rhodesia's situation is not at all analogous with that of South Africa," insisted Cape Town's Die Burger . Yet over 90 percent of Zimbabwe's voters had gone to the polls, and that in itself seemed to be analogy enough for the 25 million disenfranchised in South Africa. Those black leaders who were not in jail all publicly hailed the election and its result.)

Politics saturates life in South Africa, that I had already figured out; the idea that Grassy Park was an anomalous backwater had been pure delusion. School let out early that afternoon, and it never looked quite the same again to me.

13

I was groping toward some understanding of South African politics and society. While touring the country and first teaching in Cape Town, I had come up with several tentative answers to the great and obvious question that presented itself when we arrived in the country—about what prevented black South Africans from simply rising up against their outnumbered white overlords. The first was the manifest docility of most blacks. This perception had been shaken by the unexpected response at Grassy Park High to the big news from Zimbabwe, and was further shaken by almost everything I managed to read about the history of black resistance in South Africa. Much of the relevant writing had been banned, but the long, bloody story of strikes, marches, boycotts, revolts, and massacres could be found even in mainstream academic histories. Clearly, not all blacks had been taking their subjection passively. Still, I could not avoid the impression that many black South Africans were shackled by a slavelike mentality, in which self-confidence, self-respect, and conscious, constructive resentment of their oppression were conspicuously lacking.

A second inescapable observation and provisional answer seemed

to be black disunity. From a distance, it might be easy to think of South Africa's 25 million blacks as a whole and wonder why they did not act in concert. Inside the country, it was not so easy. People lived in widely scattered communities, separated by great barriers of ignorance, poverty, language, and culture. There was no national black political organization; there were no national black political leaders (other than those in jail or in exile). There was a great range of black political attitudes. The power of black numbers, as perceived from overseas, was largely an illusion.

The most ambitious attempts to organize the country's blacks for mass political action had each been crushed in its turn: the Industrial and Commercial Union in the 1920s; the African National Congress (ANC), founded in 1912, and a potent force in the 1950s, but outlawed in 1960; the breakaway Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), also outlawed in 1960; and the Black Consciousness movement, banned in 1977. The sort of wholesale revolt that I first imagined might work in South Africa had actually been attempted by an underground movement known as Poqo (the armed wing of the PAC) in the early 1960s. Poqo had frightened whites, but inspired few blacks with its violent, ill-organized program, and it had been easily smashed by the government in 1963. The ANC's first attempts at guerrilla warfare after it was driven underground were also smashed around the same time, when a number of its top leaders, including Nelson Mandela, were captured and received life sentences. An essentially spontaneous national uprising had occurred in 1976, when Soweto high school students protesting educational conditions were attacked by police and the township exploded. The violence eventually spread to black townships all over the country, continuing for over a year and claiming at least six hundred lives. "Soweto," as the revolt was known, had been by far the most serious and prolonged confrontation between blacks and the authorities in modern times. But it, too, had been handled with relative ease by the police, who lost not a single man. (The army was never even called out.) On the black side, there had been no coherent leadership, no coherent overall strategy.

Of the various ideologies advanced by the succession of black resistance movements, the Black Consciousness philosophy struck me as the one most likely to galvanize the greatest number of people into decisive political action. Its main texts were all banned, but it was still possible to gather the general theme: aggressive black pride, black self-reliance, and psychological preparation for majority rule. In

many ways, Black Consciousness had remained a "pre-political" movement, its growth increasingly hampered throughout the 1970s by police harassment, culminating in the 1977 death in detention of Steve Biko, its preeminent leader and theorist, and the subsequent banning of all Black Consciousness organizations and publications. The movement had spread its message widely only among students, and it seemed to have spent more energy rejecting the help of white liberals than it had spent actually fighting the government, but its defiant creed had clearly inspired many participants in the 1976 uprising. Nondogmatic but uncompromising, Black Consciousness had drawn on a wide variety of sources for its ideas, from traditional African nationalism to Marxism to the Black Power movement in the United States.

It was partly the firm line taken against white liberals that appealed to me about Black Consciousness, I think, because the more I read in recent South African history the clearer it seemed that the would-be white allies of black resistance had usually served only to temper black resentment, divert black initiative, and otherwise slow the pace of black emancipation. As Steve Biko wrote, "The biggest mistake the black world ever made was to assume that whoever opposed apartheid was an ally."

My growing disenchantment with white liberalism extended to the white opposition press which had so impressed me in Johannesburg and included both of the English-language daily newspapers in Cape Town, the Cape Times and the Argus . These papers' critical coverage of the government's behavior remained ferocious, and their editors' conception of the ruling National Party was, in my view, accurate. A typical Cape Times cartoon showed a big, brontosaural skeleton, labeled "Nat-Osaurus" and wearing the battered top hat which always adorned caricatures of National Party politicians, with a scientist explaining to a group of museumgoers: "Some time in the late twentieth century it became bogged down in an ideological quagmire and trapped by a political eruption." But just as the major Afrikaans-language papers were all openly linked with the National Party and uniformly supportive of government policy, the opposition papers were all closely identified, I soon realized, with the Progressive Federal Party, the largest white opposition party. Both the papers and the party were controlled by the same South African English business interests. Along with making a profit, getting the Nats' goat was the opposition papers' raison d'être .

This lack of "objectivity" did not bother me, once I understood its particular bias. What did bother me was the bias itself. The opposition press subscribed to the PFP's platform, which boiled down to a call for "power sharing." This call was entirely ignored by the government, but it was actually less sweeping than it sounded. The envisioned power sharing was limited; it was decidedly not one-person one-vote. As a January 1980 editorial put it, "No sensible person these days is dogmatic about constitutional forms or puts forward extreme solutions such as separate development or universal franchise in a unitary, Westminster-style constitution." (The "sensible person" in question here was clearly white, since even opinion polls carried out by government commissions showed that an overwhelming majority of black South Africans favored exactly that "extreme solution": one-person one-vote in a unitary state.)

The editors of the opposition press avoided this definitive, "constitutional" question when they could. They preferred to concentrate in their editorials on the government's responsibility for the countless "unsavoury incidents" caused by apartheid—deploring the eviction of a "colored" athlete from a "white" steak house, or the enforcement of beach apartheid. They were not above squeezing political capital out of these stories—sending, for instance, a Cape Times reporter to the beach with three PFP politicians to record their high-minded horror at police harassment of black beachgoers. The real concern of the white opposition over such incidents was pragmatic, however. The constant insults and humiliations being dealt out to blacks could all too easily become, as one of the beachgoing politicians put it, "the cause of violence to come in this country." More substantive oppression was viewed from the same perspective. The essence of the white opposition's view of the need for amelioration of black misery seemed to me contained in the well-worn observation, made in a Cape Times editorial about hunger on the Cape Flats: "If they do not eat, we do not sleep."

South Africa's "international image" seemed to be of special concern to the English-language papers. Each instance of the continued virulence of apartheid, they complained, only "confirms this country's critics in their belief that South Africans are a weird breed of raceobsessed bigots." (Again, it was only white South Africans whose reputation was thus imperiled; but this confusion, of South Africa in toto with its white minority, was extremely common among whites, even among liberals.) They would often fret in print about South Africa's image as a "police state," and point out that it looked very

bad to people overseas for the government to be continually "banning" persons,^[*] jailing its opponents, withdrawing passports, outlawing political parties, and so on.

None of this is to say that the protests of the opposition press against such practices were not sincere, and even sometimes useful to their victims. Neither is it to say that the opposition press did not itself suffer any government strictures. There were over one hundred laws containing press curbs on the books in 1980, proscribing coverage of everything from national defense to prison conditions, energy policy to police operations. There were also some extremely broadly worded laws in among the stacks of "security legislation," laws that, for example, defined "terrorism" as anything that served "to embarrass the administration of the affairs of the State." Such laws naturally resulted in a high degree of "self-censorship" among journalists; but there was also direct censorship. In 1980, the Rand Daily Mail of Johannesburg began to indicate just how restricted was its reporting by inserting a picture of a pair of scissors alongside portions of stories which had been censored. I thought Louis Le Grange, the Minister of Police and Prisons, captured the government's attitude toward the press perfectly when he said, "The State and the press must have a pleasant relationship, but, when it is necessary, we talk to them with a sword in our hand in great friendship."

On some key issues, the position of the white opposition was even in agreement with the preponderance of black opinion (insofar as that could be canvassed). The PFP and its newspapers advocated, for instance, the repeal of several of the legislative mainstays of apartheid, including the Group Areas Act.

Still, the white opposition's endless talk of "change" and "intergroup reconciliation" came to seem hollow to me, and I began to mistrust its newspapers. My problem, I realized, was that I was beginning to view the white opposition, and by extension its mouthpieces,

* "Banning orders," which usually run for five years, are served on opponents of the government without warning or explanation. Banned persons are usually placed under some form of house arrest. They may not write for publication, be quoted in print, have their photograph published, meet with another banned person, or even be in the same room with more than one other person. They are usually forbidden to enter any educational institution, library, printing establishment, factory, or hospital. Sometimes they are banished to remote parts of the country. Banned persons are effectively erased from society, and are often served with new banning orders when their original orders expire. Between 1950 and 1974, the South African Institute of Race Relations estimates that 1,240 persons were banned. In May 1980, there were 146 banned men and women.

from the perspective of those South Africans with whom I was spending most of my time—from, that is, the Cape Flats. And my awareness of their irreducible "whiteness" was becoming obtrusive as a result. I still read the daily papers, but more and more I read them with an eye for their unwitting irony, for their self-serving piety and their peculiar self-absorption. Seen from that angle, they could be terribly obtuse. There was a Cape Times editorial reviewing the findings of an official inquiry into the 1976 uprising, an editorial that ended: "The lesson to be absorbed, then, is that a gap in understanding between black and white existed in Soweto and elsewhere around the country before the upheaval. We may draw our own conclusion that this gap is still in existence." I remember laughing over this "conclusion" with a colleague in the staff room at Grassy Park High. Said my companion: "That means the nanny just won't open up to madam the way she used to!"

Such are the fissures in South African life that I was coming around to seeing the value of what had seemed beyond comprehension on my first day in the country: separate newspapers for blacks and whites. The only black paper in Cape Town was a weekly, the Cape Herald, which was widely read on the Cape Flats. If black people wanted to see a daily paper, though, their only options were the white papers—which were "white" not only in the relatively subtle political-editorial sense I have been describing, but in every department, in every detail. I've mentioned some glancing instances of this, but I first ran into it squarely when I heard that the Cape Times had published a list of all the high school graduates in the Cape the previous year, and I looked it up to see what the results had been at Grassy Park High and neighboring schools. I found the Senior Certificate Pass List—but Grassy Park was not among the dozens of schools listed. I was baffled until, in the Cape Times of three days later, I ran across the Coloured Senior Certificate Pass List. In the world of the white papers, there were high school graduates, and there were Coloured high school graduates.

The argument for separate newspapers for blacks was partly practical. What use were the entertainment pages of the Cape Times when the cinemas listed were all whites-only? What use were the ads for housing, when the flats and houses were all, or nearly all, in the white areas? Here was an ad for dancing lessons—it was against the law for blacks and whites to dance together, so the lessons were presumably being offered to whites only, although the ad never said so. Blacks and whites did live in such rigorously separate worlds—did it not make

sense that, would it not be easier all around if, they should have separate daily journals?

There was a psychological argument for black papers, too. Seen from the perspective of the Cape Flats, the outstanding quality of the white papers was that of exclusion . They were produced by the white minority for the white minority. Black life was at best a shadow in the background of the "real life" being led in the white areas. The Cape Flats was covered like a police beat. Every Monday, there was a body count—so many assaults, so many rapes, so many murders—and that was the week's news from the nether regions. Blacks remained spectators, strangers in their own land.

Black papers tended to adopt editorial positions that were far more hostile to the government than those of the white opposition press—such that, in 1977, the government simply banned the nation's largest black paper, The World, and jailed its editor. Any black paper that was not openly defying the government would have been in an impossible position in the black community. This I eventually understood—some time after I began to see the extremely limited relevance of even the white opposition press to the lives of black South Africans.

But before I grew too sensitive to the hypocrisy of it all, I found the back and forth of white politics which dominated the white papers fascinating. The PFP could be terribly eloquent in its denunciations of the government. It had, after all, little else to do except polish its technique. The Nationalists, meanwhile, regularly skewered the PFP on the contradictions of its position as well-heeled protester. For the most part, the government employed a surprisingly cool, social-scientific rhetoric on even the most inflammatory issues of race and subjugation. Its spokesmen were constantly reaching out fraternally to "other groups." "The more we are prepared to sweat together in peace, the less likely we are to bleed in war," as the Minister of Cooperation and Development (formerly "Bantu Affairs") put it. Gone was the rhetoric of naked white supremacy; the government now worked hard to convey a neutral, managerial attitude toward the problems of the country. The PFP made the most of the ruling party's occasional slips, such as when the Minister of Posts and Telecommunications informed Parliament that blacks had "slower thought processes" than whites did. The opposition press had a field day with this remark—although the minister said he saw no reason to retract it. But this was all a far cry from the days when a Nationalist MP had felt free to say in public that he wished more blacks had died at Sharpeville—"Sharpeville" being a famous massacre in 1960, when

police opened fire on a peaceful demonstration, killing sixty-nine blacks and wounding hundreds, most of them shot in the back while attempting to flee.

The torch of unadulterated white supremacism had not been extinguished in South African political debate; it had just been passed to the various white parties to the right of the government, notably in 1980 the Herstigte Nasionale Party. These parties were the refuge of whites who, alarmed by the government's recent reformist gestures, had begun defecting from the National Party. The HNP advocated the restoration of job reservation; it rejected the principle of equal pay for equal work. At its convention in 1980, the party called for all-out war against Angola, which was providing bases for black South African guerrillas. It was essential to show blacks "who is boss in this white man's country," the party leaders declared. In a way, I found I actually preferred the outrageous policy statements of the HNP to the more measured positions taken by the Nationalists and the PFP. At least the leaders of the HNP stated in public exactly what they stood for. The problem was that many members of the National Party apparently saw things the same way—the far right was growing stronger with every by-election.

What exactly were these alleged reforms that the government was introducing that were alienating so many apartheid-loving whites? I had a hell of a time trying to answer this question during my first months in South Africa. Certainly, it was all still a matter of far more talk than action. Prime Minister P. W. Botha had told the country's whites the year before that they would have to "adapt or die." This was the kind of statement that appalled the verkrampte , or unenlightened, wing of his own party. At the same time, the government remained committed to the basic apartheid program, including the ultimate "denationalization" of most of the country's blacks. A seemingly endless series of consultative bodies were forever being appointed in the government's effort to formulate some broadly acceptable plan for the country's future. But these councils and commissions, most of them launched with a great deal of fanfare, all seemed then to drift slowly out of view, their charter incomplete or overly restrictive, their purpose forgotten, their recommendations ignored. In time, I learned to look upon this level of official activity with some of the skepticism that most black South Africans did.

The bottom line was not hard to discern. The white minority imposed its will on the black majority by force. The South African police and military were massive, highly motivated, and extremely

well-armed organizations. Blacks were unarmed and unorganized. The eyes and ears of the Security Police^[*] were everywhere, and there were few constraints upon the state when it moved against its opponents. This was perhaps the simplest and most complete answer to the question about the failure to date of blacks to throw off the yoke: the whites, though few, were just too strong. The African National Congress, operating from exile, fielded a small guerrilla force, known as Umkhonto We Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), estimated to contain between two thousand and seven thousand fighters, most of them based in training camps in rural Angola. Returning clandestinely to South Africa in tiny bands, ANC guerrillas attacked power stations, railway lines, government offices, township police stations, and other economic and symbolic targets on a regular basis—averaging six or seven incidents a month in 1979. The ranks of the ANC had been bolstered by the exodus of thousands of young blacks from South Africa after the 1976 uprising. Still, the military threat it presented to the government was negligible.

But the press coverage of these "terrorist" attacks, and of the numerous "terrorist" trials being held (usually in camera ) continually around the country, did serve to highlight the true location of the battle lines in the ongoing South African crisis. For when it came to the prospect of violent black resistance, the sentiments of whites, proand anti-apartheid, converged, and the white opposition took a position indistinguishable from that of the government. The sentiments of blacks on the same issue were rarely revealed in the press, but when they were, the effect was stunning. In January 1980, for instance, four young men from Soweto seized a bank in a white suburb of Pretoria, took twenty-five hostages, made demands including the release of Nelson Mandela, and were killed in a police assault. Four days later in Soweto, twenty thousand people gathered to give one of them a hero's funeral.

Other issues that provoked a similar convergence in white opposition and government positions were South Africa's banishment from the international sporting community, and the disinvestment movement in the Western democracies. The whole spectrum of white politicians opposed this sort of "foreign meddling." Again, it was difficult to know exactly what most black South Africans thought about these

* Often known as the Special Branch, or the Security Branch, this plainclothes wing of the South African Police deals exclusively with "political" crime. Its exact size is a state secret, but its power and influence have grown immensely in recent years.

issues—in the case of disinvestment, it was a treasonable offense to advocate it. But there were many signs that blacks appreciated any form of international pressure that made whites squirm.

I've said that the overwhelming power of sheer black numbers in South Africa was largely an illusion, which dissolved upon closer inspection. Nonetheless, there were statistics, particularly population projections, which unavoidably revived the idea that simple arithmetic doomed white rule. Blacks were multiplying at a far faster rate than whites. Within twenty years, it was estimated, there would be over 40 million black South Africans, with only 5 million whites. Blacks were also moving to the cities. The fraction of the black population living in urban areas, which in 1946 stood at less than 30 percent, representing 2.5 million people, was in 1980 over 40 percent, or 10 million people, and was expected to reach 75 percent, or 28 million people, in the next twenty years. Blacks, finally, were going to school. While there were fewer than four black high school students for each white high school student in 1980, it was estimated that within three decades that ratio would exceed nineteen to one .

The government was furiously trying to juggle these numbers by declaring bantustans "independent." Thus, 2.4 million blacks assigned to the Transkei had vanished overnight on October 16, 1976, and another million or so disappeared the next year as a scatter of impoverished settlements called Bophuthatswana became a "black national state." Yet such manipulations seemed to me to do little to change the real balance of forces—whatever that actually was—in South Africa.

14

6A6 was my "register class"—like American homeroom. I spent more time with them than with any other class. In some ways, 6A6 was the most difficult group I taught. It was a big class—forty-one children—with a limited attention span. If the pace of a lesson flagged even for a moment, they could be lost in space for the rest of the period. They were a disparate, only modestly talented group, almost visibly suffering from a lack of solidarity. While my other Standard Six classes were already forging coherent class identities, 6A6 remained an unsynced welter of individual wills. This, I became convinced, affected their concentration. At any given time, most of their attention was being consumed by the search for a group identity. They were impa-

tient with each other, and could not sit still when I slowed things down to attend to the problems of one of their classmates.

Hester was in 6A6. She asked me if she could be the class monitor, taking attendance and so forth, and was immediately pushed aside by three or four other children who wanted the job themselves. Hester was obviously the best choice for monitor, the calmest, neatest, most organized of the candidates. But 6A6 did not exert the kind of joking, generalized pressure on the others to withdraw the way I believed my other classes would have done, and in the end I had to make the appointment myself. Hester turned out to be not only a reliable taker of attendance, but a valuable source of information about the moods and problems of her classmates.

6A6 was "immature," Meryl said. I thought of them as lost and unfocused. They responded best, I found, when I broke them up into small groups, gave each group a specific assignment, and circulated among them, observing and advising. But even then, some children fussed endlessly about which group they wanted to be in and had trouble getting anything done.

6A7 revolved around a core of stylish, outgoing girls: Natalie, Angela, Mieta, Desiree. Their raciness set the tone for the class. Natalie and Angela were gum-chewing, brisk, flirtatious, given to carrying perfume and makeup in their schoolbags. Desiree was a horsey, appealing girl with silky eyelashes and great aplomb. Mieta was short, soft-spoken, bright, and probably quite spoiled—her family's house, I noticed, was named after her. 6A7 was with it. If a classmate failed to answer a question correctly, some wag would be heard tapping out the drumbeat to Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust," a then-current pop hit. There were a number of boys in 6A7 who, perhaps inspired by the flashy girls in the class, also cut striking figures. Philip, a long-limbed, velvet-voiced boy with jet-black skin, was said to be a gifted cricketer. Terence was a handsome, fast-moving kid whose character seemed to alternate daily between supercilious mischiefmaker and vulnerable young sensitive. 6A7 had none of the identity problems 6A6 had; but class discussions were difficult. There were just too many kids with too much to say. (6A7 reminded me of another Top Forty song then popular on the Cape Flats: the Sugar Hill Gang's "Rapper's Delight.") On the other hand, having students write on the blackboard worked well in such a voluble, appearance-conscious group.

6A8 was the smallest of my English classes, and the easiest to teach. Meryl called them "mature." They were a brainy, cheerful,

well-behaved group who seemed as if they had been together for years rather than weeks, they were so close. When one of their classmates landed in the hospital with an infected leg, I ferried the whole class over to see him in my car, ten or twelve at a time, on different afternoons, and each time I was amazed anew at the way they collected around his bed, chattering and laughing, showering the boy with sweets and fruit and visibly raising his spirits. 6A8 had its share of cutups and screw-ups, but it had a rock-solid center. There were several quiet, precocious girls, who at fourteen seemed to have the poise and judgment of grown women. These included Amy, a broad-faced, light-skinned, top student with a lovely, gentle sense of humor, and Shireen, a stocky, beautiful girl who always wore an ancient black school blazer. There were also a couple of brilliant boys—Malcolm, who got by far the highest marks in all my English classes, and Josef, who had just turned thirteen and consistently beat matrics at chess.

But it was a stolid, drawling boy named Oscar who really emblemized 6A8 for me. Oscar's father was a fruit seller who was causing his son to miss whole weeks of school by taking him off to Pretoria to help him peddle Cape produce. Oscar was struggling to stay in school, and I tried to help him by giving him his assignments ahead of time. Oscar's composition book was battered and stained from life on the road; his exercise papers were often smeared with dried citrus slime; but he kept up with the rest of his class, at least through the first term.

7E1 was a big, noisy group that was also self-conscious and easily intimidated. Perhaps it was only because their first language was English, but both my geography classes reminded me more of American schoolchildren than any of the others I taught did. 7E1 contained a number of goody-goodies, most but not all of them girls, whose dedication to behaving properly often lured them to the edge of what was considered ludicrous at Grassy Park High—mincing to the front of the classroom to pick up a praised assignment, standing too primly to answer a question. The class as a whole seemed somehow more "middle-class" than the others I taught. The children in 7E1 loved an uproar—they had created the human orrery that was quelled by Napoleon and Africa—but they always seemed aware of themselves as being uproarious, and they could be brought to order in an instant. 7E1 had been together for a year, but they lacked the kind of "class" (in the Marxian sense) cohesion that helped to mute overt competitiveness among my other classes. They responded more readily to both the carrot of teacher's approval and the stick of teacher's irritation.

7E2 was exactly the opposite. They were rowdy and reprobate. They were clearly the bottom half of the English-medium Standard Sevens. Nearly all of them had failed at least one year; some had failed several. The boys were tough guys, the girls were permanently auditioning for roles as gangster molls, and they all seemed to take a sort of battered pride in being a notorious troop whom teachers were never pleased to see. The size of 7E2 shrank steadily, because of fresh dropouts, but the improving teacher-student ratio did not seem to improve the remaining students' ability to concentrate. They exhausted me, especially on the days when I saw them in the late afternoon. And yet I got a kick out of 7E2. Their jaunty, stylized roguery reminded me of home even more than 7E1's individualism did. And 7E2's dead-end teen-rebel attitude provided a strange sort of relief from the smothering sense of responsibility that many of my other students caused me to feel.

I tried to uncover some of my students' sense of their larger situation—to clean off the connection, as it were, between the Cape Flats quotidian and its national context—by assigning essays to my English classes about their family histories. To one group, I even suggested that they use factors like the Group Areas Act and the Population Registration Act^[*] as specific points of reference.

This assignment got abysmal results. I had guessed that there might be some strong traditions of oral history within my students' families, explaining how they came to be where they were, and I was not wrong. An English composition for school, however, was just about the last place in which these personal, usually very bitter histories would ever normally—or prudently, or indeed decently—be shared. Neither was I the most reassuring solicitor of such volatile material. Because who was I really, and what were my motives for gathering information about my students' families, their experiences with government policy, and, by implication, their thoughts and feelings about such things? Had I not discovered already how trusted I wasn't? Did I not realize that we were in a country where a teenage boy had recently been convicted of "terrorism" for writing an anti-white poem?

In Grassy Park, moreover, the question of ancestry was a vexed one. In the handful of essays that arrived on the date they were due,

* The Population Registration Act (1950) requires that every South African be classified racially.

I found several that seemed to struggle to underline the "European" relatives in the writer's family tree. There were others, from Muslim children, that emphasized the exclusively "Malay" character of the students' backgrounds. I was struck by the high percentage of those compositions I got that mentioned families' having moved to Grassy Park from District Six—this was the sort of information I was actually looking for—but the unwisdom of the whole assignment was already so obvious that I abandoned it then and there, without ever seeing anything on the subject from most of my students.

Informal discussions, especially some that took place during the lunch period and after school, were far more successful. There were a number of students who had taken to hanging around New Room 16 after class on occasion. Among these were an inseparable three-some from 7E1—Wayne, Nico, and Shaun. Nico was short and slim, with long straight hair and huge, dark, serious eyes. Wayne was tall, light-skinned, and goofy, with wavy reddish hair. Shaun, the leader of the group, was small, dark, thin, and officious, with watchful yellow eyes and terribly stiff posture. These three all owned skateboards and said they were interested in surfing. Shaun seemed to have an inexhaustible fund of questions; I soon figured out that most of these were prepared beforehand and represented the trio's pooled curiosity. I had a lot of questions myself, and as we grew more comfortable with one another, the boys from 7E1, as well as other students, slowly opened up and told me some of what they thought and felt and knew.

"Some people call this 'the wilderness,'" Shaun said once, when I had asked how he and his friends liked living in Grassy Park. "They would prefer that they still lived in town. But we're used to this here. We don't mind it."

"My mommy calls it 'the desert,'" Wayne said. "She says she can't hang out the washing because of the blowing sand."

"'Siberia,' that's what my father calls it," Nico said. "He hates it out here. He's always telling about how life was better when we lived in town."

"Lots of old people say that," Shaun said. "They say they miss their friends, and the neighborhoods they lived in. Most of the houses in Mowbray^[*] had stoeps [front porches] where people used to sit. In District Six, they had balconies. So the roads were much livelier."

"Some people committed suicide after they got their so-called 'love letters,'" Nico said, suddenly speaking with vehemence. "And

* A Cape Town neighborhood that was decimated by Group Areas removals.

some old people they just climbed in their beds, and they wouldn't get up, and they just died there. They didn't want to live anymore."

Shaun: "The old people, when they first came out here, they used to get lost. They couldn't find their own houses."

Wayne laughed. "You might find some old toppie just sitting there in the road crying. He had taken some drinks, you know, and now he couldn't find his house!"

"They're still removing people, to this very day," Nico said darkly. "Sometimes one part of a family must go one place, and the other part some other place, and they lose contact with one another."

"The same thing happened when they brought us 'population registration,'" Shaun said. "Some family members might have straight hair and fair skin and be classified so-called white, while others may be darker, and classified so-called colored. These are brothers and sisters I'm talking about! They must live apart. It's the law."

"They put a pencil in your hair," Wayne said. "If it falls out you're white, if it stays there you're colored."

Nico: "In Mowbray, die boere was staying out of the sun, and the whole family getting crew cuts, just to be safe!"

My students sometimes distinguished between Afrikaners and English-speaking whites. They called Afrikaners die boere , and used the term to mean both the Afrikaner people and the authorities in general, particularly the police and the government. When I asked who it was that stuck pencils in one's hair to determine one's race, they answered, "Die boere." "The English" were a more distant group—they lived in big houses and owned businesses.

Most of the time, though, my students simply spoke of "the whites," as in "The whites drive some lekker [literally, "tasty"] cars" or "The whites don't like to see black faces on TV." At first, they were tentative around me when mentioning "whites" at all, and I was quite sure that they never showed me anything like the real extent of their resentments. Yet they slowly relaxed, and I was eventually able to make a few observations—notably, that my students seemed to know few if any white people personally. Collectively, of course, in some deep sense, they knew whites intimately, in the way that servants always know their masters, employees their bosses, the exploited their exploiters: from long and careful observation. But in my students that knowledge all seemed to be secondhand, as if gleaned entirely from friends and relatives who worked with whites, from popular mythology, and from ideas gathered at a great distance.

"Apartheid" means "apartness," and I became convinced that grand apartheid, particularly the Group Areas Act, had succeeded, at least in Cape Town, in digging great new abysses of ignorance between the various "population groups."

The range of attitudes held by Shaun, Wayne, and Nico toward apartheid and removals seemed to have its origins in their families' different experiences. Wayne was by far the mildest when the subject was the government and the destruction of District Six, and the least sympathetic toward the suffering of the poor and uprooted. "Have you seen Cafda, sir?" he once asked me, snickering. "It's a terrible place. We never go in there. Cafda is worse than the estates. We don't like those subeconomic people. They don't even have proper toilets!" Another time, while we were talking again about forced removals, Wayne said, "People complain, but most people like it better here than in town. Out here, they own a house, and the houses are new, a lot of them, not all falling down and old like you had in town."

"How should you know?" Shaun asked suddenly. "You don't remember any place in town. And has sir seen the pondok this boy lives in? His mommy don't own it, she rents it. And they better watch out it don't get bulldozed! That's how new it is."

"We're not council renters, we're private renters," Wayne said in a crushed voice. I later saw his house, where he lived with his mother and several sisters—it was a two-room tin-walled shack—and thereafter understood some of Wayne's compulsion to distinguish himself from "subeconomic people." At the time, noting his misery, I lamely tried to change the subject.

"They don't bulldoze in Grassy Park, do they?"

"Yes, sir, they do," Shaun said. "In Klip Road a couple of years ago, they knocked down a lot of pondoks. And the people put them up again, but die boere just knocked them down again."

"When did that happen, exactly?"

"We was in Standard Four. Remember, we went to watch?" Shaun said to Wayne. Wayne nodded, but he did not, I noticed, laugh in his usual brainless way about how funny the people looked, standing around crying while the government bulldozers turned their homes into rubble. Fourteen-year-olds are not known for their compassion—at least my schoolmates at that age found nothing more amusing than the plight of the rejected and degraded—but one's own shame can be sobering, at least temporarily.

Nico displayed more political awareness than his friends, and he obviously got much of that from his father. Nico's father was a bricklayer who made sure his children understood the bitterness of his own

experience. "When my father answers an advert for a bricklayer, there might be ten okes [guys] show up for one job, but if one of the guys is white, he gets it. They don't ask him his qualifications. He is hired for the color of his skin, not for his skills, that's what my father says. Once, he had a job as a messenger in an office, when he couldn't find building work. That was the worst, he says. He was the only so-called non-white in that office. They wouldn't let him use the same teacups as everyone else. He had to take his own teacup to work. My father says we mustn't hate the whites, but we must turn our backs on them. He calls himself a black man, and he says our future is with the Africans, not the whites."

Although he had been too young himself at the time to remember it, Nico knew by heart the story of his family's forced removal from Mowbray. "This Boer came in our house, one of the department inspectors, and he started looking around the place, taking note of everything, you know, all the improvements my father had made, and he was very rude to my mother. Then he went outside and we heard him talking with one of his boets [mates], another inspector, and saying how he liked our place, and thought he might just buy it for himself. Because they could get our places very, very cheap, you see, because we were forced to sell. And he didn't actually buy our place, but some other people on our road did sell their places to the very same inspectors who threw them out. It was an architect that bought our house. And he turned it into one of these so-called Chelsea cottages, with the dingus [whatchamacallit], the carriage lamp, beside the front door. My father says they built a swimming pool as well, but we only saw what they did to the front. We used to go there sometimes on our way into town, just to look."

Many Grassy Park families apparently went back on occasion to their old neighborhoods in the city center, even when those neighborhoods no longer existed. A Standard Nine girl named Annette told me, "On Sundays, we go to the cemetery where our granny is, there by our old place. All the shops and houses in that area have been knocked down. It's mostly all rubbish, and what a lot of rats . Just a few churches and mosques are still there. But now they say they want to move the cemetery. It's been declared 'white' as well. They want to dig up the people and move them, and if we won't agree, we just won't be allowed to visit our granny no more. My mommy is very upset about that. Already her losie [funeral society] is in trouble because of the removals, with the members scattered all over now, in Bonteheuwel and Athlone and everywhere. Now she doesn't know where she will be buried."

The Group Areas Act had virtually created Grassy Park. Whether people wanted to talk to me about it or not, it did not take me long to understand what a bitter, bitter foundation that was. Sometimes the easygoing, laugh-a-minute atmosphere at Grassy Park High would seem to dissolve before my eyes and reveal a sea of pain and anger so terrible that I simply had to look away. At such times, the fine gradations of "political awareness" suddenly seemed unimportant. Even the most unconscious children could not help but understand their basic situation. The school itself sent an unambiguous message: this government considers these children to be of inferior material. That message was so clear and harsh that I thought it rang in the air like a broken alarm all day every day at Grassy Park High. The fact of exclusion from the city's best facilities—schools, cinemas, restaurants, neighborhoods—was certainly not something that anyone needed to have pointed out. Even Wayne, when we talked about surfing, told me, "The whites keep all the best beaches for themselves. We are only allowed to go where the waves are dangerous and the sand is not nice and the sharks come. There are no facilities for us. We must kak in die bundu [shit in the bushes] like animals."

Aubrey September saw Cape Town differently from most of his classmates. To Aubrey, newly arrived from the Boland—the farmlands of the Western Cape—the city was one vast, if intimidating, field of opportunity. He rode the train into town on a Saturday not to see what the whites were doing to the old neighborhood, but to walk through the open-air market on the Grand Parade, or to gawk at the great modern shopping mall known as the Golden Acre. I asked Aubrey to tell me about going shopping where he had lived before—simply getting him to speak in English had already become the main part of our after-school tutoring sessions.

"There was just the one shop, sir," he said. "On the farm itself. It gave not much things. Only bread, paraffin, sugar, soap. But there was no bus to some other shop. Prices was high, sir, but we must buy there. The baas gives credit, so the people borrow. But they must not leave the farm when they are borrowed. People, they want to leave. But they must not. The baas , he will send the police after them."

I enjoyed our tutoring sessions far more than Aubrey did, I think. I was fascinated by his descriptions of life on a farm. When I asked about the primary school he had attended, he said, "The school is small, with only few teachers, and few books. All the standards go together, up to Standard Five only. For high school, we must go to

boarding school. But only few children finish Standard Five. Most, their parents tell them they must stop, and go to work on the farm, to earn them money. They cannot afford them still in school. They say, 'Why must a big child who can read and write still be at school?' The old people, they can't read and write."

Aubrey's own parents were literate, he said. His father had been a foreman on the farm, and his mother came from the country town of Oudtshoorn. They had moved to the city mainly so that he and his brothers and sisters could get a better education. "But everything is better here," Aubrey said. "The food, the houses, the clinic. Over there, when a person gets sick, they must just lie in their house. Maybe the baas comes, or his wife. But they only go to doctor when they is very, very sick. Over there, in winter, so many children is sick in the lungs, sometimes there is not one in the school. Also the people got rickets, and tuberculosis. Here you can just go to clinic every time."

I asked Aubrey what farm workers ate. "Bread," he said. "And soup for supper, in the wintertime. The people cannot afford meat and vegetables and fruit, like we have here in Cape Town."

I asked about drinking, and Aubrey looked uncomfortable. "On Saturdays, some people are drinking. Even on Sundays. The wine is very cheap on the farm. The young wine. The men who are working in the fields are drinking wine all day while they work as well. They must have a dop in the morning, first thing, before they will start. And another one at supper, and another at teatime. That is how they work on a farm. My daddy says it is bad, but even the children who start working must have their wine, or they won't work." This was the infamous dop system, by which Cape farmworkers were partly paid in drink, and as a result kept hopelessly alcoholic, unhealthy, and docile.

Although he claimed to be pleased in every way to be living in Cape Town, the only times I saw Aubrey really animated were when he spoke about his playmates in the Boland, about hunting birds with slingshots, trapping hares, and diving from a high rock into a pond. Once, he told me about how his father had used to catch baboons that were raiding the farmer's crop, and Aubrey's eyes grew wide and his words tumbled over one another in his eagerness to tell the story.

There was something I began to notice about Aubrey: he was always alone outside class. The idyll of my first weeks at Grassy Park High was passing, and exceptions to the rule of mass fellowship had begun to appear as the multitude of my students continued to in-

dividuate. Aubrey, the impassive little country boy, was clearly one of them. Wayan, whose long thin limbs seemed to grow at least an inch a week and who seemed to be in a permanent state of mild shock as a result, was another. After our tutoring sessions, I would watch Aubrey walking across the field beyond the new building from my classroom window, with his green canvas book bag slung over the shoulder of his ill-fitting blazer, and I would find myself aching at the thought of the universal hardship of a lonely adolescence.

15

I may have been starting to look at South Africa from the vantage of the Cape Flats, but that was not where I lived. I lived in "white" Cape Town and, for months after our arrival, I continued to take a prodigal's delight in its amenities. I loved shopping in the vast, immaculate, abundantly stocked supermarket. I gloried in the beautifully landscaped highway that carried us around the mountain into the city center. The downtown park known as the Gardens, surrounded by museums and a cathedral and affording a front-row seat at the epic movie screen of Table Mountain, was a near-perfect place to read away a Saturday afternoon. And the oceanfront promenade at Sea Point, on the Atlantic coast, with its shining high rises, its scalloped little beaches, its Porsches and pensioners taking the sun and stylish women walking afghans, had a crisp, sea-washed density of wealth that, in some strange way, did my soul good. It actually reminded the well-traveled less of Rio than of Nice; it reminded me of every rich cold dessert that did not exist in the malarial jungles of Asia.

Of course, the sense of disporting oneself in a roped-off preserve rarely left me. My consciousness of the line as a geographical barrier was acute, thanks to my job. When I saw my students in the supermarket—as I often did, for the market was equidistant from Muizenberg and Grassy Park—when I saw them with their mothers piling shopping carts high with all the items that cost twice as much in the cafés at Busy Corner, I was always aware that they had had to cross the main north-south railway to get there, and that the line there consisted of electrified double tracks with chain-link and barbed-wire fences, and that the bridges and tunnels across it were few and, if necessary, easily blocked off.

The line also had a million smaller segments, scattered throughout the white areas, dividing lavatories, liquor stores, trains, sealing off pubs, restaurants, cinemas. While inside places flagged by WHITES

ONLY signs, I often wondered what the other people were thinking. No one seemed uneasy. They were eating, drinking, watching a movie; few of them had ever known another arrangement. The tension, the sense of historical siege, that often fills descriptions by foreigners of white South Africa seemed vague and farfetched there in Cape Town. If white housewives did practice weekly at the pistol range, their laughter in Sea Point supper clubs did not seem less vigorous and blithe for the exercise. If the air in white Cape Town was suffocating, it was due more to complacency than to fear. My own sense of the substructure of this racial beau monde was clearly not shared by its denizens. Once, standing at a hotel counter, trying to get the attention of a rude and incompetent white clerk, I acknowledged the friendly grumbling of some other frustrated patrons about the service by saying, "That's job reservation for you." Their jocularity turned at once to incomprehension and cold hostility.

Blacks glided around the fringes of these all-white venues in uniforms. Most of them seemed to be in Invisible Man mode, when they were not actively self-abasing. At a student bar, I ordered a certain brand of beer from a black waiter. He took the trouble to inform me, "We call that beer 'Soweto,' sir."

"Why is that?"

"Because the kaffirs^[*] all drink it," he cackled.

My unamused stare seemed to bring him up short and, once I had discarded the possibility that he had picked me out as a liberal and was giving me a shrewd twist of the racial tail, I decided that his remark was as good a clue as any to what was going on in the minds of my fellow drinkers. We did not become regulars at that or, alas, any other bar in Cape Town.

Apart from my job, Rachel and I were leading a rather reclusive life. Muizenberg was a terribly quiet, genteel place. There was a lawn-bowling club near the small shopping district, and the discreet cries of the elderly players in their brilliant whites were often the only human sounds to be heard on the entire main street. The room we rented was in a crumbling turquoise mansion, clinging to a hillside overlooking False Bay. There were two other people living in the house, both young men whom we rarely saw. The house had a neglected air. There was no furniture in the long, high-ceilinged living room, and nothing on the walls.

The house commanded a fantastic view, including everything

* "Kaffir" is the South African equivalent of the American "nigger."

from the Hottentots Holland Mountains to the Cape of Good Hope itself. Cecil Rhodes—Rhodes of Rhodes scholarships, Rhodes of Rhodesia—had built a huge, thatch-roofed "cottage" immediately below, and more big houses blanketed the hillside in each direction. At the foot of the hill, commuter trains snaked along the coast between red-brick Victorian stations. Rachel and I got to know this view well, because we each set up desks on the spacious, picture-windowed balcony that overlooked it. She had begun quarrying articles from the lode of her doctoral dissertation. I spent most of my time on the balcony planning lessons and reading in my students' blue-covered composition books. We ate our meals in an alcove between our desks.

In the early evenings, when the beach was deserted and the sky still bright above the mountain, Rachel and I liked to take walks along the water's edge, starting below our place and heading east. The first half-mile or so was the Muizenberg waterfront. This was a "white" beach. Brightly painted cabanas, a miniature golf course, an arcade of shops (all closed for the season), stood alongside small, orderly parking lots and the sugary expanse of sand. Then there was a river mouth, after which the beach became a wide, scruffy, undeveloped shore known as Strandfontein. This beach was, according to several signs, reserved for the exclusive use of the Coloured Population Group.

If we walked far enough, it was possible to pretend that we were in no Group Area at all. Focus closely enough on the autumn twilight, the changing weather—the evenings were getting shorter and chillier now—the sea, the dunes, the various shore birds—sandplovers pitter-pattering in the shorebreak, gulls and terns and Cape cormorants wheeling and screaming overhead—and you could almost imagine the strandloper Khoikhoi padding along this littoral, wiry and dark in these deep blue shadows, wearing skins, carrying spears, perhaps pausing for a pipeload of dagga. The Khoikhoi cultivated dagga and bartered it throughout the Cape. Those were the ancestors of my students. They were nomadic pastoralists, keeping sheep and long-horned cattle, and their land tenure was communal. The Dutch arrived in 1652, and within a few years' time territorial segregation between the races was officially established. The line was first a stream. A year later, when the Europeans took some more Khoikhoi land, it was "a bitter almond hedge" planted by the Dutch fort commander.

16

In my classes, formal debates were generally flops. My students did not seem to take to the idea of argument for its own sake. I discovered that I could sometimes rouse certain classes to spirited discussion, though, by playing devil's advocate. One day, with 6A8, I began class by saying what a great thing it was that the South African national rugby team was about to include its first black player. I asked Marius Le Roux, who was a rugby player himself, whether the new Springbok, who was a Boland "colored" named Errol Tobias, would be likely to acquit himself well.

Marius stood and shifted from foot to foot. He had a slight stutter. "He's a good player, yes, sir. But—but some people are saying they selected him only because he's black."

I asked Marius if he thought that was true. Marius shrugged and looked miserable. Another hand shot up. "Elroy?"

Elroy, a chubby exuberant boy, stood. "It is true, sir!"

There were murmured objections. Shireen spoke. "It is true they were looking for a black player. But Tobias still must prove himself."

Why were they looking for a black player?

Koos, a small, hoarse-voiced boy with a fighter's flattened nose: "Because they want the Lions to come!"

The British Lions were scheduled to tour South Africa in June, playing provincial rugby clubs as well as the Springboks. Anti-apart-heid groups in England and elsewhere were already protesting the planned visit.

"Will the Lions come?"

Nobody seemed sure.

"If they do come, will any of you go to see them?"

Murmurs, laughter. Neville, a hulking, curly-haired boy, stood. "When the Lions came to South Africa before, sir, some people went to watch, but they shouted against the Springboks. Black people did this. They wanted South Africa to lose."

"Shame," a girl named Zainul said, and the class laughed.

Neville: "This makes the whites very angry, sir."

Elroy jumped up. "Also Amy, sir, because she loves Rob Louw!"

Amy began to protest, amid general laughter. Rob Louw was a dashing young Springbok. Koos called out, "She keeps a big photo of him by her bed!"

What about Tobias? Would people still boo the Springboks with

Tobias on the team? Opinions were divided on this question.

"Nothing is different. Tobias is only window dressing."

"Tobias is the first. There will be others."

Were sports being integrated in South Africa?

"In a few places, they are. In some codes, such as cricket."

"They are not, sir. The whites only say so because they want other countries to play sport with South Africa again."

Had the international sports boycott of South Africa had much effect?

"Oh yes."

"Window dressing!"

Shireen: "If die boere allow a few so-called non-whites to play sport with whites, it is only for one reason. They want to get back in the Olympics. They want to play international cricket and rugby again. They don't plan to change anything else. You must understand this, sir."

What would South Africa have to do to be readmitted to the Olympics?

"We must have no more apartheid in sport."

"We must have no more apartheid full stop."

"SACOS must approve it."

"SACOS will never approve it. All SACOS knows to do is boycott."

SACOS was the South African Council on Sport, the leading organization of the non-racial sporting movement. It enjoyed extensive international recognition, and did have effective veto power over the readmission of South Africa to the Olympic Games. SACOS was powerful on the Cape Flats—it sponsored the baseball league John Liberty played in, and most of the sports leagues the children played in —and everyone in 6A8 seemed to have something to tell me about it. Criticism and support were expressed in roughly equal measure. I was struck by the deep ambivalence many children seemed to feel about South African sports in general, and the Springboks in particular—spontaneous pride in the home team, coupled uncomfortably with resentment. It was much like the mixed feelings of patriotism and black solidarity that seemed to surface when we talked in geography about southern Africa. Clearly, an Errol Tobias was never going to provide the deep rush of pride and hope to black South Africans that Jesse Owens and Joe Louis had once done for black Americans. The British Lions did tour South Africa in 1980, but the black stands in the stadiums where they played were empty.

Good discussions also sometimes sprang from unlikely beginnings. One day with 6A7, I was letting the children tell me more about one of their favorite subjects: skollies .

"They like a chalunga, sir!"

A chalunga was a broken bottle neck full of dagga.

"Or a white pipe!"

A white pipe was a mixture of a barbiturate called Mandrax and dagga.

"And they also drink some alcohol, and then they go out attacking the people and robbing them."

Did skollies carry guns, I wondered?

"Some of them, yes, sir. But mostly they use pangas" (machetes).

"And I and J knives. Those are fish knives, sir! Very sharp!"

Were skollies not afraid of the police?

"No! They call them mapuza . They are not afraid."

"The police are afraid. They hide from the gangs if they see them."

Did the gangs ever attack the police?

"No. They just keep away from them. They're only interested in what watches and radios and CB sets they can steal."

Why did young men join gangs?

"Because they are . . . deurmekaar " (confused).

"Because they leave school and have no job."

"Because they like to be in a big group. Then they feel strong. They get the tattoos that says they're in the gang, on their arms, sometimes even on their necks. They wear the hats."

What could be done about the skollies?

"There must be more police."

"Except nobody likes to join the police."

"The Peacemakers was putting a stop to them."

Who were the Peacemakers?

"Vigilantes, sir. The people just stopped waiting for the police to help them, and they organized themselves."

"The Peacemakers wore orange coats. They carried sticks and whistles. They were very well liked. They walked about at night, and if they saw something, they whistled, and the others all came."

"The skollies were frightened. They was just disappearing after a while."

"But then the police tried to make the Peacemakers into reservists. And they wouldn't do it."

"If they went with the police, the people would stop respecting them."

"Nobody here respects the police, sir. That is why they can never get enough men for their training. Because the police here are not just for stopping crimes."

"That's why you will never see a television program here like 'Chips.' Because the people here hates the S.A.P. Nobody would watch."

What else were the South African police used for?

"For politics, sir. They watch people."

Nobody seemed inclined to elaborate on this point. So what happened to the Peacemakers, I asked.

"They broke up."

"The cops broke them up."

"And the skollies came back worse than before."

Somebody began drumming out the beat to "Another One Bites the Dust." But nobody laughed.

Few of my students read the daily papers. I tried to encourage them to start doing so, by bringing in articles they might find interesting, and urging them to do the same. Marius Le Roux surprised me by bringing in a clipping about a furor in the Transvaal over the inclusion of a rugby team from a "colored" school in a tournament that had always been whites-only. National Party leaders were condemning this modest bit of integration in Parliament, a fifteen-thousand-member Afrikaans teachers' organization had denounced the idea, and white schools were withdrawing from the tournament in droves. "Now you can see, sir," Shireen said. "This is how things really are. And all over a bit of schoolboy rugby."

Late in March, I brought in an article from the Cape Times about Zenani Mandela, daughter of Nelson Mandela, who had addressed a thousand students at the University of Cape Town and called for her father's release from prison. I asked 6A6 if they knew who Nelson Mandela was. The children all avoided my gaze; no one answered. I asked Hester. She stood and said, very quietly, "Yes, sir. They know."

In geography, I tried to use the newspapers to flesh out our classwork. While we were studying Namibia (also known as South West Africa), I brought in news items about the bush war that South Africa was fighting there with the guerrillas of the South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO). I was amazed to find that many children seemed to know absolutely nothing about it. News coverage of the war

was heavily censored, certainly, but "the boys on the border" were a constant refrain in South African public life—on television and the radio, as well as in the papers. "We hear about 'the border,'" Shaun said. "But you never hear where it is ." Some of my geography students, however, clearly grasped the basics of the Namibian conflict. Nico put me on the spot in front of 7E1 one day when he said, indicating the Cape Times, "They call SWAPO 'terrorists,' sir. But some people call them 'freedom fighters.' Which is right?"

"Would anybody else like to try to answer that?"

Nobody volunteered. The class watched me closely.

"Well," I finally said, "that's the big question. The big question. The government here in South Africa calls them 'terrorists.' But what do the people of Namibia call them? Why is the government unwilling to allow elections in Namibia in which SWAPO may participate?"

7E1 seemed disappointed that I would not declare myself more clearly; but that was as far as I thought I should go.

I was determined to involve my students more actively in their own education than they seemed accustomed to being. This meant, in my English classes, a writing assignment every week, and in all my classes a diminished emphasis on examinations, an increased emphasis on student projects. To convince the children that I was serious about my many small assignments, to convince them that they would not be able to pass my class simply by cramming for the year-end examination, as many of them seemed in the habit of doing, I kept careful records of their work, which they were welcome to review, and penalized them for late papers.

I tried to encourage more original writing by having the children write "tall tales"—and got back some surprisingly long and vivid compositions, full of monsters and witches and angels, doekoms (witch doctors) and djinns (Muslim spirits) and student derring-do. I brought in all the dictionaries I could find and broke classes up into groups and taught them dictionary games. The dictionaries were also useful for etymology lessons. Etymology seemed to fascinate many of my students. Being bilingual, they grasped it quickly, though they had apparently never been shown how to unearth the roots of words before.

Teaching the children to speak clearly and confidently in English in public, and not to mumble or blurt or break into kombuis, became a special project of mine. The dreaded oral book reports were this project's main event. I would stand at the back of the room and instruct the reporter, if he or she seemed very nervous, simply to

speak to me. Then I would nod encouragingly, signaling like a stage director for more voice, better posture, less crazed twisting of hair around finger. Some natural actors took to speaking before their classmates wonderfully well, and even hammed it up. Others suffered pure agonies of stage fright and stuttering.

Wayan's report on The House at Pooh Corner was a particular ordeal. He was terrified and spoke only to me, in a tiny, lisping, not-yet-deepened voice. Wayan tried to tell me the entire story, and got hopelessly lost in the adventures of Pooh, Tigger, Eeyore, and Christopher Robin. He obviously knew the book so well, and loved it so much, that he didn't want to leave out a single detail. It was impossible that the rest of the class was following his narrative, it became so jumbled, but I didn't have the heart to stop him, with his huge, liquid eyes fastened on mine, and his high, soft voice droning on. Fortunately, the class full of teenagers between us stayed quiet, perhaps hypnotized by their classmate's voice, which they had rarely if ever heard before, until we were all rescued by the siren.

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."

18

"Playing the fool," as my students called it, was an age-old local game, favored by blacks when dealing with whites: the fawning, false sincerity, the elaborately silly English, the knowing winks. I was never faced with real, angry defiance in my classroom, nor even with the rank, malicious misbehavior that had been visited upon teachers in my high school. But I did have children start playing the fool with me. And it was difficult to know what to think when it happened, much less what to do.

My students did not share my uncertainty. They would urge me to beat any of their fellows who seemed to be playing the fool. "Here,

sir, you may use this ruler! He is a wicked boy!" "Sir, let me go find a cane!" The children would invoke the example set by my colleagues. Mr. Erasmus, the phlegmatic, pipe-smoking young fellow who taught in the classroom next to mine? When his female students misbehaved or did not do their work, he was given to pinching them on the fatty part of the upper arm—so hard sometimes that it bled, they claimed. And the children clearly respected him for this ferocity. "You must be streng [strict], sir," they would tell me.

Yet I wasn't really tempted to such measures, nor to invoking Napoleon's dread name. I was wary of the cycle of intimidation and defiance that seemed to consume much of my colleagues' time with their students. There were teachers who spent whole class periods nearly every week administering mass canings, and seemed to feel obliged to put on unfortunate, quasi-military airs betweentimes. No, I was determined to treat my students as if they were capable of studying without physical threats, as most of them certainly were.

Charmaine might have been an exception. She was a sleepy, hapless, overweight girl, bright but sloppy and strange. Her classmates in 6A6 called her pampoenkop —"pumpkin head"—and her head did sometimes seem too heavy for her body to support. Charmaine had a distracted, anarchic manner that was unusual at Grassy Park High. She was also a past master at playing the fool. Once, when I called her up to the front of the room to hand in an assignment, Charmaine danced up the aisle rather than walked—not a quick, jivey, teenage dance, but a slow, subtle, profoundly African dance, shuffling two steps forward, one step back, twisting her heavy hips rhythmically. In some way that is difficult to explain, it was the most subversive thing I had ever seen in a classroom. It absolutely electrified her classmates, and left me, the "European" object of her insolence, completely flabbergasted. Charmaine deposited her assignment on my desk, and plodded back to her seat in triumph, making it clear that she was now restraining herself from dancing while "master" watched.

On another occasion, I insisted upon seeing whether Charmaine had a missing textbook in her schoolbag, and she opened the bag to reveal not books, but a reeking mess of garbage that turned my stomach and caused students nearby to change their seats. Charmaine drove me crazy, she was so inscrutable and immovable, so clever-butlazy. Maybe a few lashes with a cane or a ruler might have motivated her more than all my speeches and antics and good intentions. I didn't know. But I wasn't about to send her to Napoleon to find out.

Both of the times I did take my discipline problems to someone else backfired. The first instance occurred when a boy punched a girl in 6A7 just before class started and just as I spotted Grobbelaar, who was their register class teacher, passing by outside. I didn't want to take the time to deal with them, so I quickly delivered the wrangling students over to Grobbelaar, explaining what had happened. Before I returned to my class, I paused, however, to hear Grobbelaar's first words to the children—which I found horrifying. He ignored the girl, who was crying, except to tell her to be quiet, and addressed himself instead to the frightened, shamefaced boy. "Now you must know better than this," he said. His tone was kindly and paternal. "In this country, the laws are on the female's side. Even after you marry them, they may still go to the police and lay a charge against you if you beat them. A man has very few rights in this country. So he must be careful." When the two children returned to class a few minutes later, I noticed that the boy was smiling and that the girl's tear-streaked jaw was set.

The second instance came when I tried to put a stop to a rash of unexcused absences in 7E2. I sent a girl named Mareldia, who I knew had been cutting class, down to the principal's office to explain herself. The principal showed his appreciation for my involving him in such a matter by insisting that I meet with Mareldia's parents before she be readmitted to class. With waning enthusiasm, I asked Mareldia when her parents could come in.

"They can't, sir," she said, pouting. "My daddy is blind and my mommy is crippled. You must go to them."

This seemed too awful to be true. But it was. So off we went, Mareldia and I, after school, to see her parents. They turned out to live in a tiny, trim house set back from a sandy road near the Princess Vlei. Mareldia's parents were an older couple, who both looked hard-used by life. Her father had a crestfallen face and sightless eyes, and wore a straw hat with a green band. Her mother wore a tentlike blue housedress and limped painfully. They were both visibly distressed and excruciatingly polite. I felt like a perfect twit marching in to announce their daughter's misbehavior.

Mareldia's parents gave me tea, and we sat and talked about Mareldia, who sat apart and looked nearly as miserable as her parents. It was the first student's house I had been inside. The living room we sat in was small and dim and overfurnished. There were photographs—family photographs, wedding photographs, graduation photographs—on the walls, and photo albums on a coffee table. On the

mantel were commemorative plates, two porcelain dogs, and a bouquet of plastic roses under glass. A framed print of The Last Supper stood on a bookshelf near a brightly colored picture of a green-eyed Jesus gazing passionately toward a throne on a cloud.

"She's our only daughter," Mareldia's mother lamented. "And she's normally a very good girl."

I assured her parents that Mareldia was a good student, too—which she was. She had just fallen in with a wayward crowd in 7E2.

"I'll whip her," Mareldia's father promised.

I swallowed hard and gazed bleakly out the louvered window at the bamboo and kikuyu grass leading down toward the vlei. As soon as it seemed decent to do so, I took my leave. And I never sent another student of mine to the principal. Absenteeism was not a real problem in my classes, anyway.

Among my senior classes, discipline itself was not a problem. The matrics had not reached their exalted status by waiting for someone else to motivate them, and now that we had tapped into a vein of information about opportunities that few of them had believed really existed, their energy for planning their futures suddenly became boundless. Hector wanted to be an industrial engineer. Michael wanted to be a marine engineer. Jillian decided to study architecture at the University of Cape Town. Ishmail would study medicine at the University of Natal. A number of matrics simply wanted to go to the University of Cape Town, with no particular professional goal in mind, the same way so many white students did—I did not discourage this approach. A few thought they might apply to Stellenbosch University, the leading Afrikaans university in the country, located in a small town within commuting distance of Cape Town, or perhaps to one of the other Afrikaans universities upcountry. After all, they were Afrikaans-speaking themselves. Again, I encouraged this can-do attitude.

But some of my colleagues looked askance at me when they saw all the applications that the matrics and I were amassing. One day in the staff room, Georgina Swart said, "I understand that you've started a letter-writing campaign, Mr. Finnegan. Who was the young fellow in America? James Meredith? Do you plan to make another James Meredith here, Mr. Finnegan?"

19

The first time Clive Jacobus turned up after school in my classroom gave me a start. Clive and I had become reasonably friendly in the weekly classs sessions we had together—when he bothered to show up, which was not always—but I had had no sign that he wanted to know me. Then, one windy Thursday afternoon, he strolled into New Room 16 and made himself comfortable sprawled across the top of a desk.

"So tell me," he said. "What do you think of this country, now you've been here a few weeks? Are you convinced Biko killed himself, just to make the Special Branch look bad?"

Steve Biko's death had been in the news that week. After a lengthy inquest, the three doctors who had treated Biko in jail had just been absolved of blame by the South African Medical and Dental Council.

"I think it's a crazy place," I said.

"Why? Haven't you been anyplace else in your travels where the black cinema usherettes are forbidden to look at the screen while films for whites are shown?"

I laughed. I hadn't heard that one before.

"Separate development, we call it here," Clive said.

With Clive, there was no question about his political awareness. Indeed, there was not much to talk about with him other than politics. The government had just released the report of its commission of inquiry into the 1976 uprising, so we talked about that. "According to them, it was all just 'outside agitators,'" Clive said with a snort. "What do you think of that?"

"I wasn't here. But it sounds like they're dreaming out loud."

"That's exactly what they're doing. And do you know what they say about the teachers in the Peninsula here?"

I did know. The report claimed that Cape Town teachers "played an important role in creating an atmosphere of dissatisfaction and unrest among youngsters."

"Do you think that's true?" I asked Clive.

He shrugged. "In some cases. At some schools." Then, watching me closely, Clive said, "Actually, some people say that's what you're trying to do."

Now I knew why Clive had come to see me. He had heard something about my deviations from the syllabus and wanted to see if he could sound out my political views. "Not me," I said. "I'm just trying to find out what's going on."

Clive snorted. He had heard that one before.

But Clive took to coming around regularly to talk. He was interested in my background, it seemed, especially my family and my experience in the American student anti-war movement. One day, I asked him about his family, and Clive surprised me with a long reminiscence about his childhood. His father, he said, was a school principal in the northern Cape town of Upington. "That's on the Orange River, quite near Namibia. It's a strange place. Completely different to here. We only came down here when I was starting high school. Before then, I was a real plattelander . I had never seen really big buildings, or great masses of people. . . . Up there, I would say people are a lot closer to the earth. Everybody keeps goats. In fact, if you have a lot of goats, people reckon you're rich." Clive laughed. His face had a faraway look.

"Actually, the location in Upington, the so-called location, used to be quite a wild place. There's so many types of people up there. Xhosas, Damaras, Sothos. There's people from Zimbabwe, and quite a few Bushmen. And these people they call Basters, who wear their hair long, and look like so-called whites, some of them. Just about everybody speaks Afrikaans. You don't really hear anybody call themselves 'colored,' even though that's how a lot of people are classified. There used to be a lot of mixing, a lot of intermarriage, but the Boers have fairly well stopped that now. Wrywing tussen bevolkings-groepe, the government calls it—'friction between the races.' They say apartheid is meant to prevent it, but it's really meant to make it worse. Divide and Rule, we call it. . . .

"People are so poor up there. They'll go along the railway line for hours, just hunting for little bits of coal that fall off the trains. Otherwise, they must go out in the veld, looking for firewood, and that's even harder to find. If they find a cow that's been killed by a train, that's like Christmas. They just butcher it right there, and carry the meat home. I used to go out in the veld with my friends, and hunt hares with these little weapons we made. Like catapults. But my family was well off, compared to most other people. Especially after my father was made principal. He's still up there. We only see him during holidays.

"I remember the first time we heard the Beatles. It was in a cafe, along there by the river, on a wireless. I don't remember what song it was, but my brother, he was there, and he said he would go to England himself when he got older, and play his guitar, and all that. And he did. He went about six or seven years ago now, and he's still overseas. Now he lives in France, but he's traveled all over Europe.

He sends us letters, and snapshots sometimes. He had really long hair for a while. He's had quite a few different jobs. He reckons he'll come back here to visit one day, but he says he could never live under apartheid again. I always looked up to him quite a bit, but it's been so long now, I haven't seen him since I was in primary school.

"You probably think this is all really boring." Clive, who had been speaking slowly, and clearly savoring his memories, had suddenly become self-conscious and gave a nervous laugh. I assured him that I was not bored, and he seemed to believe me.

The wind was piling sand up on the landing outside my classroom door as we locked up and left. "The weather's going to change," Clive said, and pointed to the mountain. From Grassy Park, one looked upon the east face of Table Mountain, where the great butte ran back into rocky heights known as the Constantiaberg. Black clouds were gathering along the summit that afternoon. "Everybody here just looks at the mountain to know the weather," Clive said. "They say the best place to see what's going to happen is out here, on the Flats." Clive laughed and I offered him a lift home in my car.

Late that night, while I was marking papers at my desk on the balcony, it began to storm. Soon there was thunder and lightning and rain so fierce that the windowsills sprang improbable leaks: little jets of water shooting horizontally into the house.

20

Nothing highlights the peculiar contradictions within apartheid quite like the plight of those people classified "Coloured." The concept is a grab bag; there are no fewer than seven official subclassifications under the heading "Coloured." These include "Cape coloured," "Cape Malay," "Griqua," and "Other coloured" (a number of my colleagues and students at Grassy Park High were, I eventually discovered, "Other coloureds"). Even more than with the other race classifications, it can be argued that "Coloured" is a bureaucratic fiction, an administrative convenience, that there is no such "race." On the other hand, a certain amount of group identity is created simply by the fact of classification, particularly when the law mandates forced segregation, and in other ways treats one group differently from others. Furthermore, it must be said that "coloreds" did not simply spring into existence ex nihilo with the passage of the Population Registration Act. Though its edges might have been blurred, there

was clearly a large, Cape-based group of people with a cultural tradition distinct from those of their Xhosa, English, Afrikaner, and other neighbors. And while avoiding apartheid-serving notions of "ethnicity," this tradition merits some description here, for it was the heritage of the people of Grassy Park.

"Coloreds" are sometimes called "brown Afrikaners," and they do share some common ancestry and many traits with the people who enslaved their forebears. Nearly 90 percent of them speak Afrikaans as a first language; they are the only group in the world besides the Afrikaners themselves who do so. Many belong to the Dutch Reformed "daughter" church for "coloreds." At the same time, many "coloreds" repudiate all cultural connections with die boere . Once, when I said something about how expressive the Afrikaans language seemed to me, an Afrikaans-speaking student of mine denied it bitterly, saying, "Nee, meneer, dis 'n bobbejaan se taal" ("No, sir, it's a baboon's language"). I even met a few royalists on the Cape Flats, all of them older people, who expressed their rejection of Afrikanerdom by embracing its traditional enemy, hanging the Union Jack and photographs of the Queen on the walls of their homes. Though "colored" farm workers were often said to prefer Afrikaner employers, whose rough-and-tumble ways they understood, to the chillier English "gentleman farmers" of the Cape, few if any "coloreds" had ever shared the political views of most Afrikaners.

"Coloreds" are often compared to American blacks. It has been pointed out that, under the South African race classification laws, the majority of American blacks would be considered "colored." The two groups share a history of slavery, and the absolute deracination that slavery entails—a historical experience unlike that of most black South Africans, who were conquered and largely dispossessed of their lands, but were never actually bought and sold, with their languages lost, their societies atomized. I was frequently struck by similarities between the mannerisms of "coloreds" and those of American blacks, such as the way certain scapegrace "coloreds" called each other Gam, Afrikaans for "Ham," the biblical figure whose descendants were made "hewers of wood and drawers of water," and short for Gammat, a pejorative for "colored"—which reminded me of black Americans calling each other "nigger": neutralizing the hated epithet by expropriating it. Certainly, black Americans had long been a source of inspiration for "coloreds" in Cape Town. In the nineteenth century, a group of black American sailors off a visiting ship so impressed the locals with their singing, dancing, and banjo playing that attempts to

emulate them during the traditional two days of liberty at New Year's (a tradition that dated from slave days) soon turned into a vast annual parade and festival known as the Coon Carnival, in which the entire center of Cape Town was turned over to "coloreds" in top hats and satin minstrel outfits, playing guitars and saxophones, banjos and cellos, snare drums and tambourines in troupes calling themselves the Hollywood Palm Beach Serenaders, the Dahomey Minstrels, the Famous Richmond Gentlemen Coons, and the Spes Bona Nigger Minstrels.

But the Coon Carnival illustrates well the difficulty of describing "colored culture," for by 1980 the "coon" idea had been widely rejected by "coloreds" as an insulting stereotype, so that, although it was probably still the first thing many South Africans would think of if asked to come up with an example of "Cape colored culture," the Coon Carnival was actually in sharp decline, and would probably cease to exist altogether soon.

Do the leading writers, artists, and musicians classified "colored" represent "colored culture"? The most successful of them—Dollar Brand, Dennis Brutus, Alex La Guma—all seem to leave South Africa (as do their African counterparts—Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masakela, Nat Nakasa), and undoubtedly never refer to themselves as "colored," although their lives were largely determined by the "colored" experience. Do the "cultural organizations" found among "coloreds," such as the Eoan Group, a well-known Cape Town ballet, opera, and theater company, represent "colored culture," or merely a "white aspirant" aspect of black South Africa? The choral societies, the sports clubs, the "benefit societies" (private cooperatives intended to help members build homes, buy property, and so forth; these societies, like the funeral societies known as losies, were affected especially badly by Group Areas removals), the many and prominent churches, were all these not the warp and woof of a "culture"?

Perhaps this is simply to indicate the obvious, that despite the political protestations that no such thing as a "colored" people existed, there did exist a full-blown network of organizations and relations among the people so classified.

"Coloreds" are often said to be "Westernized," compared to their African countrymen. And it is true that "coloreds" observe few if any of the traditions of preconquest South Africa, some of which survive more or less intact among Africans. "Coloreds" have no traditional headmen or hereditary chiefs, no traditional land tenure practices or marriage practices, such as bride price, and no strong traditions of witchcraft or animism. Many South African whites believe that be-

cause "coloreds" lead lives they consider "civilized," they deserve better treatment than Africans, who remain comparatively foreign. Other whites believe that "pure-blooded" Africans possess stronger personalities and more innate "dignity" than people of "mixed race"—a form of racism not unknown among Africans themselves.

The white South African obsession with "racial purity" has surely had its most devastating effect on "coloreds." Interracial unions were common in the early days of the Cape Colony. A popular saying has it that the Europeans arrived at the Cape on April 6, 1652, and "the color problem" was born nine months later. The first official interracial marriage was celebrated in 1658. In 1672, five hundred of the six hundred European colonists resident in the Cape were adult males; the genealogical results of such a population structure should be self-evident. Two distinguished early governors of the colony, Simon and Willem van der Stel (after whom Stellenbosch, the second town founded by Europeans and a major cultural center of Afrikanerdom, was named), would have been classified "colored" in modern-day South Africa. Before very long, however, the good Cape burghers, progenitors of the Afrikaners, developed an intense racial self-consciousness, and a phobia about the mixing of the races. This obsession became a first principle of modern Afrikanerdom. As Dr. Niklaas Diedrichs, the State President of South Africa in the 1970s, wrote, "One of the outstanding achievements of this volk is that in the midst of an overwhelming barbarism, it succeeded in remaining white." Genealogists whose research has indicated that the Afrikaner gene pool is composed of significant amounts of African blood have found their results attacked hysterically by defenders of the volk —while being greeted with mirth and appreciation by other South Africans.

Some of the National Party's most offensive post-1948 legislation was included under the 1950 amendment to the Immorality Act (scheduled for repeal at the time of writing), which forbade sexual relations across the color line. The purpose of this law was, as a Cape Town magistrate recently explained, "to prevent the mongrelization of the races." A member of the Johannesburg Coloured Management Committee gave this view of the law and its reasoning: "The so-called Coloured is the product of racial mixing as affirmed in the law that declares us Coloured. This self-same law, the White man's law, also declares that this sort of mixing is illegal and therefore abhorrent . . . the specific law outlawing the activity that created us is called the Immorality Act. This repugnant law makes us feel that we as Coloureds are immoral creations."

Many whites clearly shared this feeling. The existence of "col-

oreds" was often still attributed to "passing sailors" mixing with black women, rather than to local residents. Along with the belief that "coloreds" were "immoral creations" went a conviction widespread among whites that most "coloreds" were alcoholic, promiscuous, dependent, and violent. In the time I was in Cape Town, I lost count of the number of whites who, hearing where I worked, made sad or leering or contemptuous reference to one feature or another of this stereotype. A favorite pronouncement among white males: "There's not a girl over the age of thirteen in those colored townships who's still a virgin." The fact that a strikingly high proportion of the "colored" population is in South African prisons seemed to have escaped no white's notice. The historical burden of white attitudes was embedded in people's very names. Getting out from under images and ideas like these, fighting their internalization, was a dilemma faced in some ways by "coloreds" alone.

Which is not to say that "coloreds" had a more difficult time of it than other black South Africans. On the contrary, "coloreds" were not subject to influx control, as all Africans were; which meant that "coloreds" were not being constantly arrested under the pass laws and "endorsed out" to a bantustan. They could legally own property in "colored" areas of "white" South Africa. These, and numerous other incremental advantages, such as statutory preference over other blacks in certain areas of employment and the higher per capita allotment for education than Africans received, amounted to greater opportunities for advancement and a significantly more secure existence for many "coloreds" than was available to their African compatriots. The distance between Grassy Park and one of the barren, overcrowded, absolutely impoverished bantustans like Qwa Qwa simply could not be measured in kilometers.

Of course, the distance between Qwa Qwa and the more established sections of Soweto was not much more vast. And for sheer deprivation the living conditions of many "coloreds" rivaled those of any other sector of black South Africa. There were an estimated 150,000 "colored" squatters on the Cape Flats in 1980, most of them living in tin and cardboard shanties among the dunes, without roads or laws or sanitation. On Cape farms, "colored" workers were notoriously underpaid and underfed. Kwashiorkor (malnutrition), rickets, tuberculosis, and severe gastroenteritis were all widespread, and the "colored" infant mortality rate nationally was nine times that of white infants. (Life expectancy was actually lower for "coloreds" than for Africans.) Again, this sort of stark misery seemed far away from

Grassy Park. Even within Grassy Park, however, a great range of socioeconomic status was obvious at a glance. Between someone like Soraya, contemplating a honeymoon in Europe, and the toothless illiterate janitor who cleaned my classroom after school, there yawned a gulf of privilege almost as deep and wide as that which separated most whites from most blacks.

The legal and political status of "coloreds" was in as much doubt and flux as everything else. It was an irony of history that much of the most notorious apartheid legislation introduced after 1948 was actually directed at "coloreds." The 1949 Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act and the 1950 amendment to the Immorality Act were certainly so, for sex and marriage had long been forbidden between whites and Africans. The Group Areas Act also hit "coloreds" hardest (along with Indians). Many Africans suffered from Group Areas, of course, but most Africans had always been forced to live outside the "white" towns. The Population Registration Act had its most destructive impact on mixed-race families and communities. And it was the limited "colored" franchise in the Cape that the Nationalists attacked and sought to abolish in the 1950s—finally succeeding in 1956, after a battle which was still recalled with an abiding bitterness in Grassy Park in 1980. The international disapprobation of apartheid has often seemed to focus on these "grand apartheid" laws as if they were the main body of institutionalized racism in South Africa, but the truth is that they merely consolidated and extended a great deal of existing legislation. The limited "Native" franchise in the Cape had been abolished, for instance, in 1936. But if the targeting of a minority group like the "coloreds" for a whole new barrage of legal discrimination was really intended, as one Nationalist member put it in Parliament, "to make our colour sense clear before the world," it seemed to succeed.

The provision for "coloreds" in the apartheid master plan was never clear. The centerpiece of apartheid planning was always the bantustan scheme, the ultimate denationalization of all Africans by assignment to one of the ten "homelands." As Dr. C. P. Mulder, then Minister of Cooperation and Development, put it in a 1978 address to the House of Assembly: "If our policy is taken to its logical conclusion as far as the Black people are concerned, there will be not one Black man with South African citizenship." But government policy toward "coloreds" and Indians has had nothing like this ruthless logic. In the early 1970s, the government unveiled a plan to build an entire "colored" city, to be called Atlantis, thirty miles north of Cape Town. This

instant metropolis would have its own industrial base and a population of between 800,000 and one million by the turn of the century. It was a preposterous scheme, and by 1980, with construction grinding to a halt, Atlantis was clearly going to thrive only as an example of Nationalist pipe-dreaming about the great unsolved "problem" of the "coloreds." A number of elected "colored" councils were established to represent "colored" opinion to the government, but all of these had been rejected, discredited, and forced to resign by their constituencies. In March 1980, the government announced the formation of an appointed body of representatives, to be called the Coloured People's Council, but popular "colored" reaction was so disdainful—the body was immediately dubbed the Coloured Puppets Council—that the names of the appointees were never made public, and this idea was also quietly abandoned.

There was a long-standing debate within the ranks of the government about whether to devise "homelands" for "coloreds" and Indians or to grant these groups some form of limited parliamentary representation. I often heard bitter jokes made about the idea of a "colored homeland." "What did they imagine District Six was?" "Who they going to dream up for our tribal chiefs?" The Atlantis project was widely regarded as a failed attempt by Pretoria to create the nucleus of such a "state," and a vast new "colored" housing development called Mitchell's Plain, located far out on the Cape Flats, was sometimes referred to around Grassy Park as "the homeland," even though most of it was still under construction. "We will be forced to move to our very own bantustan soon," a fellow teacher once said to me about his family's pending move to Mitchell's Plain. (The government's blueprint called for 250,000 "coloreds" to be living out at Mitchell's Plain by 1982.) The intensity of this debate within the government grew throughout the 1970s, and was a key factor in a major faction split in 1982. The aforementioned Dr. Mulder, who today leads the breakaway Conservative Party, continues to advocate the creation of "colored" and Indian "homelands." But the verligte, or "enlightened," wing of the Nationalists led by P. W. Botha has prevailed.

A tri-parliamentary constitutional plan was first announced by the government in 1977. Then still ill-defined, it was rejected by even conservative "colored" and Indian groups, for it completely excluded the African majority. P. W. Botha's response was unintentionally eloquent. He said that "even if the Coloureds and Indians do not accept the new constitution, the government will go ahead and imple-

ment it until they do accept it." In 1983, a referendum on the plan was finally held among white voters, who approved it, and elections for segregated "colored" and Indian chambers of Parliament were held in August 1984. These elections were widely boycotted, but just as Botha, who is now State President, promised it would be, the new plan was instituted anyway. The "junior chambers" of the new parliament have jurisdiction over only what the government determines are their "own affairs," which do not include national policy, foreign policy, or any other area that could conceivably also concern white South Africans, who effectively retain all power. Africans continue to have no representation, although there is talk of yet another chamber of Parliament being created to represent those "urban blacks" for whom no "homeland" can be found.

The government's primary motive for granting "coloreds" and Indians limited parliamentary status, over the objections of the vast majorities of those very groups, was, according to one view, military. The South African armed forces were suffering from a manpower shortage. Industry was being hurt by the ever-increasing amounts of time white draftees were being required to serve in the military, and the shortage was expected to worsen. Military leaders, who were often said to be ahead of the country's politicians in their strategic thinking, and who were believed to have a great influence over P. W. Botha (who served for many years as Minister of Defense before becoming Prime Minister), had reportedly concluded that the only solution to the manpower problem was the introduction of conscription of "coloreds" and Indians. This could hardly be done while these groups enjoyed no political rights; hence the tri-cameral parliament. P. W. Botha and his military advisers often talked about the mobilization of a "total strategy" to counter what they called "the total onslaught" being mounted against the South African system. Clearly, that long-range strategy involved winning "coloreds" and Indians over to the side of the white minority, as it strove to defend its hegemony against the African majority. (At the time of writing, conscription of "coloreds" and Indians has not been introduced.)

It was this situation, as much as their racial and cultural background, that caused "coloreds" to be seen as "the people in-between." For many years, there had been speculation about whether "coloreds" would ultimately throw in their lot with the Africans or with the whites. By 1980 that speculation had abated, for most "coloreds" had been profoundly alienated by their treatment under apartheid, and the time had clearly passed for political alliances with whites. The

Black Consciousness movement, with its emphasis on the unity of Africans, "coloreds," and Indians, had been instrumental in the development of a "black" self-image among an entire generation of "coloreds." The turning point in that process was the 1976 uprising, when thousands of "colored" students took to the streets in solidarity with the students of Soweto, and many lost their lives.

But "colored" political protest had a lengthy tradition, dating back to the founding of the predominantly "colored" African People's Organization in Cape Town in 1902. Early protests focused on discrimination in education. The creation of the Coloured Affairs Department spawned the Anti-C.A.D. movement, which merged with the predominantly African All-African Convention in 1943 to form the Non-European Unity Movement. The Unity Movement was a Marxist, but anti-Soviet, organization that stressed the need for unity among Africans, "coloreds," and Indians, rejected white leadership, and in other ways presaged later movements like the Pan-Africanist Congress and Black Consciousness. The Unity Movement commanded the attention of many "colored" intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s, while the South African Communist Party exercised a strong, if indirect influence over "colored" workers through certain trade unions before its suppression in 1950. "Coloreds" were active in the Congress Movement through the Coloured People's Organization and the South African Congress of Trade Unions, and there are today many "colored" members of the exiled liberation movements. I often heard reverential mention on the Cape Flats of local "coloreds" who had left the country for military training, men like Reginald September, a major figure in the ANC, or James April, a captured ANC guerrilla sentenced to fifteen years, or Basil February, who was killed in a ferocious battle with the Rhodesian Army while attempting to reenter South Africa.

Of course, support for black liberation was not unanimous among "coloreds." There were those who professed indifference, either convinced that the government was too strong to be swayed, or believing "coloreds" to be in a no-win situation, as well as a few who believed that a black government might not necessarily prove better for them than the white government. Yet these were nearly all older people. Younger "coloreds" called themselves "black," and even the most conservative "colored" opinion to be heard in public was vehemently anti-government.

21

In a pharmacy near Busy Corner, I saw a bottle on a shelf: "Hi-Lite Special Complexion Cream—Lightens, Brightens, Smooths." Near it was another: "Karoo Freckle Cream—with special bleaching ingredient." I had read somewhere that twenty million units of skin lightener had been sold in South Africa in the past ten years—this during the heyday of Black Consciousness with its slogan Black is Beautiful. Black physicians were calling for the outlawing of skin lighteners, which had caused permanent damage to millions of people. How acute, I wondered, was this neurotic consciousness of tint among my students? In a composition titled "Falling in Love," I noticed that they invariably fell in love with someone with "light skin, fair hair and sexy blue eyes." A friend who taught art to Cape Flats primary-school children told me that, when they drew self-portraits, the children usually drew blue-eyed blonds and got furious if the inaccuracy was pointed out to them. I guessed that Kenneth and Mamie Clark's famous 1940 doll experiment—in which five-year-old black American children, given the choice between black and white dolls, consistently chose the white dolls, showing that they already understood the inferior status of black skin in American society: the finding helped to win the landmark desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education —would reveal the same attitudes if conducted among the children of Grassy Park.

But the truth was, I couldn't see it. I often heard from whites that skin tones were everything in "colored" society, that lighter-skinned "coloreds" looked down upon their darker neighbors; but I never heard the same thing from "coloreds," and never got any sense of its being so in Grassy Park. Among whites, on the other hand, such attitudes were obviously rampant. A surfer I knew slightly, who had kinky light brown hair, once confided to me in a husky voice that the other kids at his junior high school had called him kaffirkop ("nigger head"). "You simply cannot imagine how heavy that is here in South Africa, how painful it was for me," he said. There were always stories in the newspapers about dark-skinned whites. One man claimed to be unable to get work because of his complexion. Employers lied to him, he said. One security firm told him he was too small, then turned around and hired his friend who was smaller, but whiter. His life was an "unbearable hell," he said. "My wife is fair, my child is fair, yet I am treated like dirt." Blacks I knew were often perversely amused

by such stories, particularly by the suggestion that whites were outraged at being "treated like dirt" when they did not deserve to be. "He means 'treated like a black,'" a fellow teacher said to me.

That whites should be hysterical about the possibility of falling out of the privileged caste that their racial classification gained them was understandable. That blacks should be persuaded by life under apartheid to believe that whiter was in a myriad of ways—aesthetic, social, financial—more desirable would have been just as understandable. But beyond the skin lighteners and the children seeming to wish themselves or their lovers blond, I never, as I say, saw anything to indicate this. Perhaps I was just a poor social scientist and missing all the clues, but the blacks I knew seemed infinitely more sane about "race" than did South African whites. A light-skinned, freckle-faced boy in one of my Standard Nine classes was nicknamed "Boer" by his friends—loaded as the term was, the children seemed to disarm it with the easy, joking way they used it. I winced when I read that Charlene Tilton, the honey-blond star of "Dallas" and one of my students' favorite actresses, was coming to Cape Town, and that a Charlene Tilton look-alike contest would be held to welcome her. Then a girl in 6A7 told me, "They must have a Donna Summer look-alike contest, because we think Natalie can win." People in Grassy Park often talked about "play whites"—"coloreds" who tried to "pass" as whites—and there was even a teacher at Grassy Park High who was said to be one. But such people seemed to be more pitied than envied. I remember a light-skinned colleague telling me of his joy the first time he saw a photograph of Malcolm X. "I said to myself, 'Man, if this paleface can be a great black leader, then there's hope for me yet.'"

22

I was wary of Nelson October initially. His performance at the first faculty meeting I attended had been a rude surprise, and then he had pointedly boycotted the intermural track meet at which I had had my late-blooming epiphany of school spirit. Somebody said it was something about the stadium management's having broken the rules of a sports federation he belonged to. Whatever it was, October had stayed behind alone when the rest of us boarded the buses for Athlone. Yet his personal manner was not prickly and off-putting, the way this sounds. On the contrary, October seemed to be a singularly good-

natured fellow. He had bright, dark eyes of great intensity, a ready laugh, seemingly boundless energy, and an athletic grace that left me unsurprised when someone said he had been a top local soccer player before a leg injury ended his career. He was twenty-four, but seemed older. Heavy-bearded and thoughtful, he had been teaching at Grassy Park High for five years and his presence, his influence, seemed as broad and deep as any senior teacher's.

As I tried to make his acquaintance, though, I began to see that October was also wary of me. He was perfectly pleasant, but my attempts to strike up conversations with him all went nowhere. Unlike some other teachers, October was in no hurry to know the Yankee Doodle Dandy. I finally managed to break the ice one day when I noticed October in the staff room reading a collection of Pablo Neruda's poems. I asked how he liked them, and he said they were marvelous; he only wished he could read them in the original Spanish. I speak Spanish, and I had soon agreed to translate the lyrics from a record October owned and cherished, but could not understand, containing the murdered Chilean revolutionary Victor Jara's songs and poetry.

Nelson and I began to talk a lot. He was amazingly well read and well informed, not only about South African issues but about international affairs. I was chagrined to find that, although he had never been overseas, he frequently knew more than I did about countries I had visited. We agreed about most things, including, to Nelson's obvious pleasure, the American role in the Vietnam War and the behavior of the United States in Latin America. I thought Nelson was painfully romantic on some subjects, though, notably the course of the Cuban Revolution, and we argued away a number of free periods on the subject. Finally, Nelson slipped me a United Nations pamphlet containing a six-hour speech by Fidel Castro, entitled "We represent the immense majority of humanity . . ." I skimmed the pamphlet and decided that it was no use disputing a fundamental tenet of what was obviously a well-developed belief system.

Our conversations always came back to South Africa. Nelson was interested in my impressions of the country. I mentioned that I found the ubiquity of the color line in Cape Town daily life oppressive, and he laughed heartily.

"You're just not used to it! The funny thing is, petty apartheid is basically there as psychological reassurance to whites, who are insecure because they know they are so heavily outnumbered. White liberals want to scrap petty apartheid, because it's unfashionable, and

it makes them feel guilty. But nearly all of them are wealthy. They know they can simply buy whatever distance they want to keep from the masses. They just want to redecorate the place. Would you be more comfortable if it were redecorated?"

"Probably."

"Well, the oppressed are not interested in redecoration."

One day, I put to Nelson the rudimentary question I had been asking myself since arriving in South Africa, about what prevented blacks from simply rising up. Nelson's reply confirmed my own impression—that deep disunity was the main obstacle—as he described the success of what he called "the regime's long-range strategy: Divide and Rule." Nelson talked about "the apartheid theory of nations" (which tried to cast "coloreds" as a "nation-in-the-making") and the "retribalization" that was the goal of all the "tribal" segregation foisted on blacks by the government. He also mentioned "the sheer savagery of the state's repression." I suggested that the passivity of so many blacks and the obvious willingness of others to collaborate in their own oppression were also major factors, but Nelson dismissed the point, saying, "In every system of colonial occupation, there are collaborators." He mentioned the South Vietnamese government under the Americans, the Indian troops and administration under British imperial rule, and the thousands of blacks who fought for the whites in the Zimbabwe independence war. "Consciousness has to be raised, of course. But the contradictions within the system will eventually destroy it for purely objective reasons."

"But surely people have to first shake off this huge inferiority complex they seem to carry around," I said.

"That's the BC line," Nelson said, and I blushed. He meant "Black Consciousness" and he was right; that was exactly where I had found my few ideas about the black liberation struggle. "BC made an important contribution at a certain point," Nelson said. "But it was a response to a special set of circumstances. You see, the 1960s were a very quiet time in South Africa. The repression was intense, after the banning of the liberation movements. A lot of white liberals came forward, and more or less filled the political vacuum. They were the only ones who dared to talk about black liberation just then. BC arose partly in reaction to that situation, which was obviously unacceptable. BC got things moving again, and its message had a big effect among students. But most of them were unaware of what had occurred in the 1950s."

"Which was?"

"Which was some very progressive mass action. It was a different atmosphere then. It was still possible to hold big outdoor rallies. Here in Cape Town, you would find open meetings taking place on the Grand Parade during lunchtime, with many of the workers in the city attending. They might be addressed by people from the ANC, the PAC, the Non-European Unity Movement. The Unity Movement was especially strong here, and had quite a progressive analysis. All this was before the crackdown, of course, which came in 1960, after Sharpeville. Many of the strategies used at that time now seem naive. People underestimated the ruthlessness of the state. But just because the struggle was forced underground in the sixties didn't mean that people were less aware of their oppression. Just as it doesn't mean that now. Because the struggle is largely underground right now, too.

"People are capable of rising up together spontaneously. We have seen that they are, here in Cape Town in 1960, and again in 1976. But the state is ready, now more than ever, for spontaneous mass uprisings. They can contain them militarily. They can cut off the townships very easily, and starve people out in the event of a general strike, as they have done. No, man, the only strategy open to the liberatory movement has been what we call hamba khale —go carefully."

For the first few months we knew each other, Nelson went carefully with me. I learned almost nothing from him about his personal life, his family, his past, his activities outside school. I did discover that he had studied civil engineering for a year and a half at the University of Cape town before dropping out to become an unqualified teacher. I found this news exciting, which seemed to amuse Nelson. When I wondered why he dropped out, he shrugged. "It seemed irrelevant," he said. Another teacher told me that Nelson was active in the non-racial sporting movement and that his father was a major figure in that movement. Nelson's father was a foreman on a poultry farm, who—according to Mr. Pasqualine, the oldest member of the Grassy Park faculty—had suffered for his political activism during the crackdown on dissent in the 1960s. "He was a highly skilled craftsman in the furniture trade," Pasqualine told me. "But he was blacklisted and could get no work at all for years. He and his family had to live on charity. That's how he comes to be out on that farm today!"

Pasqualine was a strange, hook-nosed, bottom-heavy old fellow who actually talked constantly about people who had suffered at the hands of the government in years past. His main theme was the persecution of his own father, who had been deported many years

before to Goa. "They crucified him!"—this ejaculation was Pasqualine's repetend. One often heard it mimicked around Grassy Park High. Everyone had heard the story too many times.

Another favorite tale of Pasqualine's concerned a former teacher at Grassy Park High. He had been a leader in the Unity Movement. "One morning, with no warning, into the staff room they came, the Special Branch! They grabbed him and dragged him off to Caledon Square, just like that! Eventually, they sent him to Robben Island for ten long years." I later met the main character of this story, who didn't recall the staff room drama that Pasqualine did, but confirmed the rest—Grassy Park High, the Unity Movement, his ten years on Robben Island. What crime had he committed, exactly? "We were foolish, that's all," the man said, and changed the subject. I was later told that Pasqualine himself had been politically active in his younger days, but that he had been picked up for "interrogation" in the early 1960s. He had talked rather freely to his interrogators, it was said, and had never been the same since.

I had been reading South African history and whatever I could find about the black resistance to white rule, with a notion about passing on what I could learn to my students. Slowly, the sheer presumption of this plan was becoming apparent. People in Grassy Park knew exactly what had happened between blacks and the government over the years. In fact, the Cape Flats had seen some terrible violence in the 1976 uprising. Over one hundred people had been killed in a long series of bloody clashes with the police, and there were few people in Grassy Park who had not known somebody who was killed or injured. To this day, one local boy, who attended the next high school over, came to class with a colostomy bag, having lost his lower intestine to a police shotgun blast. My coming to see the ludicrousness of a white foreigner's trying to instruct black people in the history of their own resistance did not dim my interest in the subject, however. I continued to study and to soak in all I could, if only to be less in the dark myself. And my conversations with Nelson were a source of constant insight and come-uppance.

On one occasion, Nelson and I stood looking at a pale blue police bakkie—a pickup truck with a big steel cage built on the bed—which was parked across the street from school. The cops often parked there. They liked to watch the schoolgirls. Inside the cages on the bakkies there were usually prisoners: Africans found on the streets with their passes not in order. They would be jailed and then shipped to the

Ciskei, or the Transkei, or some other distant bantustan. The bakkies sometimes sat there for hours, with the prisoners baking silently in the cages, while the policemen smoked and called to the schoolgirls. From my classroom window, I could see them, and I often had to force myself to ignore them to be able to concentrate on my lessons. Now I pointed to the bakkie—Africans called it a kwela-kwela, or a "nylon"—and asked Nelson what he thought the cops would do if I went over and told them I would report them if they didn't immediately deliver their prisoners to wherever they were taking them.

Nelson shrugged and began to talk quietly about "structural violence." Those cops in their bakkies weren't simply enforcing some unjust laws, he said. They were engaged in "counterrevolution." "There's a war being fought in this country, you see, a war between the government and the oppressed. Whites never see it. The outside world never sees it. But it's being fought, in the alleys of the townships, inside the jails. This "—Nelson nodded at the bakkie—"is just one more scene, one more skirmish, in that war."

I thought that was pretty dramatic, although I realized that Nelson was really suggesting that I be less dramatic myself, in the personal sense, that I try to see local events in a broader context. This was a basic difference between us. I saw things in particulars. I was interested in why the police trucks were called "nylons"—it apparently had something to do with the mesh that covered the cages. I was riveted by the suffering of the people inside the cages. Nelson, on the other hand, seemed to try to see everything analytically, "structurally," strategically. This was, in fact, only one instance of a more general tension that I felt between my way of looking at the world and the way things were in South Africa. Everything here seemed to force one away from the specific, toward the general, away from the local, toward the national (even the international), away from the personal, toward the political. The pressure was relentless, and I was aware that I was not holding my ground especially well.

23

South African life, the spectacle of racial repression, was upsetting in a more or less straightforward way. This other, almost ontological discomfort was not so obvious, though it became more marked every week I was in Cape Town. The problem of racial terminology, which rendered the simplest remarks self-conscious and clumsy, typified the

larger dilemma. It bedeviled me especially when I wrote letters, because it went against my notions about how to move and live in other people's countries. I realized I had developed, in the course of my travels, a certain passivity—or perhaps impassiveness is a better word. I tried to take the world on its own terms. I had become loath to pass judgment on, to project my values onto, almost any aspect of other cultures. This was partly an achieved humility, partly intellectual exhaustion and retreat, and partly simple expedience. How much pleasanter it is, after all, to roll with, rather than disapprove, all the odd customs and anachronisms one falls upon in faraway places. But living in South Africa undermined this easy exoticism. It might be colorful and "local" to toss off remarks about having spent the afternoon in a Coloured cinema or a Bantu township for the folks back home; it might seem unduly formal to be slapping quotation marks around every third phrase. But there was no way around it. No matter how awkward, obvious, and adolescent-sounding it made one's prose—the sense of using so many words only "under protest"—the alternative, using them without protest, was worse. Ungainliness seemed to come with the territory, along with that coarsening of perception that often surrounds highly politicized times and places. Nothing is simply what it is; everything stands for something else, some social or political or economic force or objective, some ideology. There was a corresponding vulgarization of social life, in which the consciousness of race, of people's assigned slots under apartheid dwarfed individuals—whites were Whites, blacks were Blacks, and all attempts just to forget about race for a while were foredoomed.

With language, everything had to be decoded. "Self-determination" was apartheidspeak for white domination. "Total strategy" was apartheidspeak for the maintenance of white domination. Language was often debased to the point of meaninglessness. Thus, the legislation that had closed previously "open" universities to black students was called the Extension of University Education Act. And the pass laws were contained in the Abolition of Passes Act. "War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery." Language was being used in South Africa as a type of totalitarian weapon. Resistance, vigilance, no matter how tedious, was obligatory.

Of course, all the vigilance in the world could not keep daily life from beginning to seem "normal." Nelson had said I was just not used to petty apartheid, and he was right. The longer I stayed in Cape Town, the less I noticed the whites only signs. This was partly desensitization, and partly my growing understanding that the elimination

of every WHITES ONLY sign in South Africa would not necessarily change anything. The issue was power, not park benches. I even started to think of petty apartheid as a tourist attraction. It appeared to titillate light-skinned foreign tourists, anyway, whom I often saw photographing a big whites only sign on the beach at Muizenberg. The thrill was similar, I figured, to that provided by the torture chambers that are the perennial favorites on tours of old castles and prisons. Apartheid was good, old-fashioned, unapologetic evil. It was a form of social organization that tapped a certain nostalgia in many Americans and Europeans, conservatives and liberals alike.

But South Africa was not the stable, repressive place that tourists saw—that Rachel and I had seen on our car-camping tour. It was not "totalitarian" in the way that a country like the Soviet Union was. Besides the parliamentary opposition and the opposition press, there was the true opposition, the forces of black resistance, which were largely invisible to the untrained eye in March 1980, but were always there, regathering themselves. Despite the oft-noted similarities in their techniques of repression and official doublespeak, South Africa was less like the contemporary Soviet Union than it was like prerevolutionary Russia. The Soviet Union today was a relatively static society. Power was centralized and not up for grabs. South Africa was a different story. Everything here was politics, the evanescent vagaries of factions and programs, movements and alliances, and the great search among the powerless for a unifying ideology. Oppression was palpable. No detail was neutral. Local geology and ostrich farms and puberty rites among the Xhosa might be fascinating topics, but to write about them was a political act—an act of omission, a tacit acceptance of the apartheid status quo. Conventional travel writing about South Africa was out of the question. My way of traveling, of venturing through "the world," was itself insufficient.

24

As with other aspects of my initial idyll at Grassy Park High, my sentimental envy of my students' school experience soon faded. Inferior education was, after all, inferior education. Its effects could be amusing, as in the answers that came back on a geography quiz. The religion of most Swazis? "Swastika." The religion of most Botswanans? "Optimist." An African colony for freed American slaves? "Pretoria." The states that border Zimbabwe? "Paris," "France,"

"Rhodesia," "New Zealand," "Sweden." Eventually, though, the not-so-funny side of such ignorance had to be faced, and the frustrations of working inside the system that allowed it had to be felt.

The problem began everywhere. I found myself focusing on little things that no one else seemed to notice. Such as the unpredictable class schedule. There were no clocks in the classrooms, which meant that the siren kept catching me unawares—in the middle of a lesson, in the middle of a sentence. I bought a watch and learned the normal schedule, down to the minute, so as to be prepared. Yet I still kept getting blindsided by the siren, which seemed to go off at odd times more often than it did on schedule. It sounds minor, but the damage done was major, to my way of thinking. The great lesson aborted, the terrible dead time when a lesson was finished but the siren failed to wail—the cumulative effect was time and effort wasted, and a sloppy, apathetic attitude toward what went on in a classroom.

The traditions of apathy, of inferior work, ran deep. When I assigned essays to my English classes from the list of innocuous topics provided by the syllabus, I was invariably struck by the sameness of all the compositions produced. It was as if the writers, while not exactly copying each other's papers, were all working from the same Ur-essay. This occurred even when I gave them a free choice of topics. Dozens of papers would come in with the same title—"Falling in Love" or "A Night on the Mountain"—and the same basic story. These essays were all, I eventually realized, traditions in themselves. They were heirlooms—updated versions, very often, of essays once turned in by older brothers and sisters. There were Ur-essays. The only way to get more original writing, more "real work," was to assign quite specific, unlikely topics, and when I did so the fluency of my students' writing suffered noticeably.

It did not help that a number of my fellow teachers seemed to share the government's view of their pupils: as expendable, as predestined low achievers in the larger society. I saw this attitude in the way some teachers boasted that they never took work home with them. "For what I'm being paid here, do you think I'm going to give them more of my time? Not bloody likely," one told me. "You must give them something to keep them quiet during class, and get your marking finished then." I thought I saw it, too, in the way some teachers treated the students like servants, sending them off to the shops on errands, over to domestic science for a cup of tea, out to their car to fetch some item, without ever saying "please" or "thank you." Some teachers were said to carry their exploitation further, such as one

fellow who was often accused behind his back of extorting sexual favors from his female students in return for passing marks. The school administration knew what he was up to, it was said, but the teacher in question had gathered enough damaging information about each of his superiors to destroy all of their careers, and thus kept his job through blackmail. I was never sure what to make of these stories, but I was certainly unimpressed with this teacher's commitment to his work. He planned to move to the United States as soon as possible, he told me, "to get away from this damn apartheid."

Such individuals were exceptions, to be sure, on the Grassy Park faculty, which had its share of dedicated professionals and, from what I could tell, truly gifted teachers. But the shortage of higher educational experience among my colleagues was serious. Only a handful had university degrees, and nearly all of those were from "Bush." While Meryl Cupido was the youngest, she was far from the least qualified teacher on the staff. There were others who had never finished high school. Pasqualine was said never to have gone to high school. And he was teaching vocational guidance to matrics. Many people, both students and faculty, openly complained that Pasqualine was "senile." Yet the shortage of teachers was so severe that he was never asked to retire. (Indeed, it was so severe that they had hired the likes of me off the street.)

A number of teachers were going to night school, or correspondence school, working slowly toward degrees that would increase their job qualifications—and, not incidentally, their salaries. At first, I was impressed to see them all studying their university textbooks during their free periods and lunch breaks. When I sat in on their discussions, though, I was quickly disenchanted. The courses sounded at least as exam-oriented as our syllabuses. There was virtually nothing else to them, and no material was ever discussed in my presence in terms of anything except how it might appear on an exam. Napoleon, as a veteran of the medieval history course that a couple of younger teachers were assaying, would hold forth enthusiastically about "my feudal monarchies" with no greater apparent interest in the meaning of the words he spoke than my students had when they pronounced most Swazis to be Swastikas. I found this depressing—that the same profound irrelevance seemed to cling to higher education as that which threatened to render everything we taught here in high school absurd. What was more, all the time and energy that went into this extracurricular study by teachers was probably being sub-

tracted more or less directly from the time and energy they gave to their students at Grassy Park High.

To an outsider, especially one educated in well-funded institutions by well-trained, more or less conscientious professionals, these various chains of apathy, incompetence, and pernicious tradition were all painfully clear. Perhaps that was one of the only advantages to being an outsider. But none of this was unique to black South Africa, of course. The vicious circle of inferior education, academic retardation, and low expectations was also, I knew, a perfectly virulent reality among the poor in many, many schools in the United States. But that awareness changed nothing at Grassy Park High, and the clear view I had of the system's action upon my students was unnerving. We teachers were hired to prepare these children for lives of subservience, pure and simple. If we produced a few exceptions, that was wonderful. But the permanent psychological damage being inflicted every day by apartheid, the sheer waste and destruction of human potential in a society rich enough to do far better, would not be notably lessened.

25

To be a white teacher in a black school in South Africa, no degrees or certificates were required. It was essential, however, to own a quantity of native diplomacy. Alex Tate was obviously blessed in this regard. He was the best-educated member of the Grassy Park faculty, and was always being consulted on points of history, procedure, and administrative judgment (such as my hiring), and yet he wore his erudition lightly and kept a judiciously low profile in most school affairs. His classroom was decorated with pictures of his own favorite writers—D. H. Lawrence, Bessie Head, Wole Soyinka, and others whose books were certainly unknown to nearly everyone who ever entered the room—yet Tate somehow managed to avoid creating the stuffy, "aspirant" atmosphere that might easily have collected around him. He was very popular with his students, and when an intramural soccer tournament was held, one of his senior classes honored him by naming themselves "Tate United."

Mario Da Silva was not so blessed. For a start, he made no secret of his desire to move as soon as possible to a position at a white school. Da Silva had perfectly good reasons for wanting to make the change. There was the distance he had to drive each day to cross the line.

There was the fact that he could never fill more than a "temporary" post at a black school—this restriction was government policy, declaredly to hasten the apartheid goal of totally single-race schools, though also used to eliminate white teachers whose motives for teaching in black schools became politically suspicious: temporary staff could be dismissed on twenty-four hours' notice, with no explanation required. For a family man like Da Silva, this lack of job security was understandably irksome. Finally, to be a white teacher in a white school did require both a degree and a certificate, and Da Silva had earned both. The certificate, a B.A. (Ed.), was awarded only after the successful completion of a one-year postgraduate course. Da Silva took obvious pride in his education, and regularly opined that the dearth of jobs at Cape Town white schools would not last forever.

In Grassy Park, however, having passed the government's white teacher training course was not perceived as a badge of distinction. In fact, people said it only meant that a person had been successfully brainwashed by the government. The rigor of the program was not academic, it was believed, but ideological. The tenets of something called Christian National Education were drummed into candidates, whose enthusiasm for these ideas was then closely monitored by government officials. Only candidates whose enthusiasm was convincing, it was said, passed. I heard this précis of white teacher training from a number of different teachers at Grassy Park High. It provided, indeed, the first occasion for me to hear words like "racist" and "fascist" used by my colleagues.

Neither was Da Silva's cause in Grassy Park aided by the fact that he had served in the South African Army, and continued to serve several weeks a year as a reservist. Such duty was far from voluntary; yet it had a potent symbolic significance in black South Africa. (Soldiers on active duty were sometimes used as teachers in black schools, and soldier-teachers were required to file a form each week with the local authorities giving the names of any students who seemed to harbor politically subversive ideas. I heard about one soldier in Natal who was court-martialed for refusing to fill out the forms and served a year in military prison.)

These institutional associations constituted two strikes against Da Silva at Grassy Park High. His personal manner—which was an odd combination of nervous scurrying and an almost magnificent arrogance—and his tactlessness in advertising his desire to teach racially privileged children rather than those in his classes at Grassy Park earned him his third strike. He was widely hated and had con-

stant problems with his classes. Though less violent than many of our colleagues, he was very strict, and given to pouting when his pupils misbehaved. These classroom conflicts would occasionally escalate, until Da Silva would find his car's windows smashed or his briefcase stolen, and the principal would be compelled to intervene. These troubles only contributed to Da Silva's desire to get a job elsewhere as soon as possible.

My fellow newcomer, Elizabeth Channing-Brown, began having her troubles, too, within a few weeks after we started teaching. While she apparently had little success in controlling or inspiring her classes, neither did she seem to antagonize her students, so it was not that the "riots" she feared came to pass. It was the other teachers who gave her a hard time. Channing-Brown was given to tardiness, absence, ill health, and chronic disorganization, and those of our colleagues who disapproved of her job performance did not long hide their feelings on the matter. She was lectured and snubbed, and even had parts of her paychecks docked.

I felt sorry for her. From our few getting-acquainted conversations, I had learned that she had some terrible problems outside school. Her boyfriend had been paralyzed by a motorcycle accident. Her home life seemed to be an unending series of rip-offs, disasters, and evictions. One night while hitchhiking she was raped, and a number of her absences from school were occasioned by the necessary court appearances. True to her luck, the trial of the alleged attacker, whom Channing-Brown swore was the guilty man, ended in acquittal. Finally, a heavy drug habit seemed to be taking its toll on her health. I was shocked to learn that Liz was only twenty-one years old, because the lines around her mouth, the expression in her big sunken eyes, made her look at least ten years older.

One thing that could be said in Channing-Brown's favor was that she was not a racist. She took an almost ostentatious pride in the fact that many of her friends were black. Unfortunately, a number of those friends were also hoods. She seemed to be always recounting adventures in which her "friends" were featured stealing her roommate's stereo or burglarizing a neighbor's flat. Channing-Brown's speech itself reflected her familiarity with certain "elements," as the principal would have called them, on the Cape Flats. She was a graduate of an exclusive private girls' school in Pietermaritzburg, Natal, but her upper-class English was weirdly seasoned with crude drug slang and skollie taal Afrikaans. Her dramatic training (at the University of Cape Town) only heightened the incongruities when she opened her mouth.

Still, the vehemence of people's dislike for Liz Channing-Brown puzzled me, until one of our colleagues explained it. "You see, Bill, we've seen her sort before. Not so much just lately, but quite a lot through the years. These white varsity dropouts, they don't know what to do with themselves, so they go teach in a 'colored' school. They're not trained. They're not professional. They quit in the middle of term. They don't care about the children. They only come here for the hardship pay."

This "hardship pay," or "inconvenience pay," was something the government had awarded to whites teaching in black schools in previous years, ostensibly to compensate for the "hardship" of having to use the same toilets as everyone else. It had been discontinued in the drive toward single-race schools, but not everyone knew that, and it remained a focus of the local mistrust of the motives of whites who crossed the line to teach.

I was exempt from a good proportion of that mistrust because I was American. Tate was, too, because he was British (Kenya born, actually, and educated in South Africa, but a British subject and thus exempt from the South African military draft). But the more time I spent in Grassy Park, the harder it became to imagine how a typical, government-supporting Afrikaner could have functioned there as a teacher. Channing-Brown was seen as a joller, a disreputable dropout, privileged but not representative. Even Da Silva was spared the full onus of ethnic oppressorship, for he was seen as Portuguese, a much-resented group itself, but nothing compared to die boere . None of us could really serve as an example of the true Afrikaner apartheid mentality. Anyone who could have done so, it eventually seemed to me, would have been in an impossible position. We were "whites," yet we were given the benefit of the doubt in Grassy Park, given the opportunity to prove that we were not the enemy—which, considering the suspicions built into the situation, was rather amazing. The diplomacy, clearly, cut both ways.

26

Clive and I had the catalogs, brochures, and prospectuses from nearly every university in South Africa spread out on the round table on the balcony at our place in Muizenberg. It was a solemnly beautiful afternoon outside, with a light north wind brushing dark blue strokes across the pale surface of False Bay. We were drinking beer and finding the catalogs amusing, in a strange sort of way. Those for the

Afrikaans universities were full of pictures that looked as if they were taken somewhere in northern Europe in the late 1950s—groups of strapping, clean-cut white students strolling in the mountains or laughing it up at a "coffee and rusks party" in a dormitory room. There wasn't a black face anywhere.

"Look at this, " Clive said. It was the prospectus for the University of Pretoria. He was pointing to a photograph showing a group of students dragging a covered wagon across a sports ground—"the symbolic transfer of student authority, the Voortrekker Oxwagon," read the caption. "You know it's a true Boer religious ritual when they drag in the Great Trek," Clive said.

I laughed, but not hard. This was strange amusement because what we were really doing here was pronouncing some fond hopes, at least of mine, dead.

Clive tossed aside the catalog for the Rand Afrikaans University. "Ag, none of these 'white' unis have these facilities for black students. Why don't they just say so? There isn't one integrated university residence in South Africa, you know."

I did know. I had been looking further into the possibilities for Grassy Park High students to gain admission to various universities around the country, and my initial optimism, based on the increasing availability of "permits," had been hosed down thoroughly by what I had found. The University of Pretoria, for example, had turned out to have 16,584 students. Every last one of them was white. And the enrollment figures for the other Afrikaans universities were not much more edifying. The complete absence of black faces in their catalogs was not simply insensitivity, as I had assumed at first; it was reality. Permits were available everywhere, theoretically, but they were obviously not being issued everywhere. Georgina Swart's crack about my trying to create a South African James Meredith by encouraging our matrics to apply to any university in the country had obviously been on the money. And the more I thought about what it would be like for any of our students if they were actually to gain admission, a permit and, from somewhere, the necessary funds to attend one of these Afrikaans universities—the loneliness, the hostility, the housing and transport problems, the danger —the less inclined I felt to encourage them to apply. In fact, I was sorry that I had ever persuaded my students to send away to some of these schools in the first place—only so that they could feel the sting of exclusion.

Clive seemed to sense my distress. "But it's interesting," he said, and shrugged. "It's funny to see what die boere do at varsity. Nobody

at Grassy Park would ever go to Potchefstroom, anyway. Nor to one of these bush colleges."

That had been another unpleasant surprise. I hadn't even realized, when we sent away for their literature, that some of these schools—the University of the North, the University of Zululand, Fort Hare University—were "ethnic" colleges. But it seemed they were all located far out in the bantustans (hence the origin of the term "bush") and that each one was designated for the exclusive use of Zulus, or Vendas, or Ciskeians.

"These places are the weirdest-looking of all," I said.

"They're like detention camps," Clive said. "The students have to get permission to invite anybody into one of them. They don't have SRCs. They're not allowed to discuss anything in their classes."

The students in the pictures all looked like they had been cast by the government for roles as grateful, God-fearing natives.

"The professors are all Boers who couldn't get jobs in the 'white' unis," Clive said. "They're meant to be real verkramptes ."

I sighed. "I suppose we should just forget all these schools."

"And Durban-Westville as well," Clive said. The University of Durban-Westville was for Indians. Its catalog made it look like it was in India: young men in Nehru caps, young women in saris, Hindu shrines in the background. Clive said, "They couldn't get them on the boats back to the old country, so they sent them to Durban-Westville." He pushed another prospectus toward me.

"Let's face it," he said. "UNISA is the answer." The University of South Africa was a correspondence college, based in Pretoria. Clive tapped their brochure. "This is the only way the whites can handle non-racial education—through the post. It's the perfect university for South Africa. Nobody has to see anybody else."

Actually, all that was left, in the way of universities, were the four English-language "white" universities. These were obviously the only places for which black students were receiving all the permits that the careers information service had told me about.

"These are clearly the only real universities in the country," I said to Clive. "At least the students in the pictures look like students."

Clive said sourly, "They've even got a few token blacks in the photos."

"And it's time they had a lot more on their rolls!"

I had already admitted it to myself—that I would have to narrow the focus of my enthusiasm down to the possibilities for getting Grassy Park graduates into the "English" universities, particularly

the University of Cape Town, to which they could commute. It was true that none of these schools had a student population even 10 percent black, but their administrations had at least declared themselves in favor of "open" admissions, and some, such as Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, were offering "bridging programmes" for "students who, while qualified to gain admission to the University, find themselves at a disadvantage due to shortcomings in their educational preparation."

"That means the victims of Bantu Education," Clive said. "The victims who survived."

"That's right."

"But these English unis, they're no good, either, you know."

"Why not?"

"Because they're completely . . . 'white,' really. They're part of the system."

"Sure they are. But they offer a better education than UWC does."

Clive sighed and shook his head. "Whatever that means," he said.

I walked Clive down to the train station. We arrived on the station platform and sat on a bench in silence for a while. The sun had dropped behind the berg, leaving the station and the shoreline in warm, blue shadow. A train entered the station, headed in the wrong direction for Clive. When it came to a stop, its engineer sat immediately opposite the bench we occupied.

"I used to work on the railroad in the States," I said.

"You're joking."

"I was a brakeman. I loved it."

"I can't believe it."

"Why not? It was great work. All up and down the country. Good pay. That was how I paid for graduate school."

"What about the people you had to work with?"

"They were fine, most of them. In fact, some of them were wonderful."

"Then they must be very different from the railway workers in this country. Here, they're the thickest people around. You can't even talk to them. They're the so-called poor whites. They wouldn't have jobs at all if it weren't for job reservation."

The engineer opposite us glanced our way. I gave him a wave. He did not respond. Clive laughed.

"See what I mean? He's just staring at you because you're sitting with me."

The engineer looked away, and he pulled the train out of the station without looking in our direction again. Clive's laughter was raucous. "Did you see what a rock that guy was? Do you see what I mean? Railway workers are the worst. They and the white miners. And their fucking trade unions."

"Don't tell me you're down on unions ."

"The white trade unions in this country? They're the most reactionary racist group there is. Haven't you heard of Arrie Paulus?"

"Who?"

Clive stood up. His train was coming. He shook his head. "He's the head of the Mine Workers Union. He says all blacks are baboons. You should start reading up on these things."

Clive started hurrying down the platform toward a knot of black people. That was where the "Non-White" cars tended to stop. I followed him. We shook hands at the door of a crowded, third-class carriage. Clive gave me a funny grin, then pushed his way into the car. As the door shut and the train started, he called out something to me in Afrikaans, which I couldn't understand but which made the people around him, all of whom were staring at me, laugh slyly.

27

My research into university admissions had revealed much about the educational system that employed me, the system Clive called "Bantu Education." The great disparity between the funding of black schools and white schools, the tremendous dropout rate in black schools, the chronic shortages of textbooks, classrooms, and qualified teachers—the numbers alone told the story. But apartheid in education was both grand, in the sense of broadly devastating, and petty: white schools even got free wastebaskets and an unlimited supply of toilet paper, while financially strapped "colored" schools were obliged to pay five rands for every wastebasket and were allotted only one roll of toilet paper per student per year (creating hardships of which I had personal experience).

The numbers reflected present conditions; black education also had a history that bears mentioning. Black schools and white schools in South Africa have always been separate and unequal. The white attitude toward black education was once described as "too humane to prohibit it, too human to encourage it." The early Cape colonists recognized the danger that allowing slaves access to education might

inspire inconvenient aspirations, and accordingly restricted such access. The 1905 School Board Act made racial segregation in education de jure, and in 1910 the ratio of government expenditures on white to African schools, per capita of population, was reported to be 333 to 1. "Mission schools," funded by overseas churches, were responsible for virtually all black education. That changed, along with so much else, after the National Party came to power in 1948.

The Afrikaner Nationalists knew well the political importance of educational administration. In the nineteenth century, the British colonial authorities had made English the sole medium of instruction in South African schools, forcing Afrikaners who were determined to resist the empire's campaign of anglicization to start up schools of their own. These schools were seriously inferior to those the English could afford to support. The large-scale immigration of British teachers, especially after the Anglo-Boer War, increased the pressure toward extinction of the Afrikaners' language and culture. Thus, when the Afrikaners gained power, they immediately instituted a new educational system, one that emphasized their language and their culture—this was the program known as Christian National Education. Besides rewriting the history textbooks to emphasize the achievements of the Boers and revising the syllabus to include instruction in apartheid, the new system segregated English and Afrikaans "white" schools. The traditionally English schools bitterly protested Christian National Education, but the Nationalist government in Pretoria eventually swept all before it.

On black education, the Institute for Christian National Education had made the National Party's position terribly clear in a manifesto issued only months before its accession to power.

Native education should be based on the principles of trusteeship, non-equality and segregation; its aim should be to inculcate the white man's view of life, especially that of the Boer nation, which is the senior trustee.

The Bantu Education Act, passed in 1953, took away responsibility for African education from the churches and the provincial governments, and relocated it where "the senior trustee" could better control matters—under the national government. Three separate education departments were eventually established: one each for "coloreds," Indians, and Africans. The previous education system had done the black man a disservice, according to then Minister of Native

Affairs (later Prime Minister) Hendrik F. Verwoerd, when it "misled him by showing him the green pastures of European society in which he was not allowed to graze." While he often invoked this preposterous idea—that the Nationalist shepherds were merely concerned that their black flocks not be led astray—Verwoerd did not dissemble about the new program itself. As he explained it to Parliament in 1953, "The natives will be taught from childhood to realize that equality is not for them . . . The Bantu must be guided to serve his own community. There is no place for him in the European community above certain forms of labour."

Under this sort of "trusteeship," the quality of black education plummeted. While the black population grew rapidly, African high schools and vocational colleges in the cities were actually closed down, as the government sought to use the lure of education to implement its bantustan scheme. By 1980, 75 percent of all high schools for Africans were located in the bantustans. Another feature of the drive to "retribalize" Africans was the introduction of compulsory "mother tongue instruction" for the first eight years of schooling, a policy that deeply damaged black education. Not only were the African languages used unsuitable for teaching certain subjects, but eight years of instruction in Xhosa could in no way prepare pupils for high schools in which they would suddenly have to begin studying in English or Afrikaans, any more than it could prepare them for life in South Africa in any but the most menial capacities. (Mother tongue instruction was not an issue in Grassy Park, nor was education used there to steer people toward a "homeland." People did say, though, that the quality of "colored" schooling had also deteriorated since the takeover of education from the churches by the government.)

Bantu Education was applied to universities in 1959 with the misnamed Extension of University Education Act, which closed the English-speaking "open universities" to blacks, while establishing "tribal colleges" for Zulus, Xhosas, Sothos, "coloreds," and Indians. The black, church-run University of Fort Hare at Alice, which had produced a generation of southern African leaders, including Nelson Mandela, Robert Mugabe, and ANC President Oliver Tambo, was taken over by the central government, and went into a rapid decline. According to Professor Ezekiel Mphahlele of Witwatersrand University, Bantu Education has achieved many of its anti-educational objectives. As Mphahlele told an interviewer, "We've lost a whole generation since about 1960, when it really began to take effect. All that

generation of people can hardly articulate themselves. They can't hold conversations for long. They can't initiate things. Their dependence on white people is remarkably high."

At the same time, Bantu Education generated so much resentment that it became a mobilizing issue in itself. The 1976 uprising was sparked by student protests against a government attempt to impose Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in Soweto high schools. In its wake, government policy made some adjustments. The Afrikaans requirement was quietly dropped, and the Department of Bantu Education was renamed the Department of Manpower and Training. The economic pressure created by the shortage of skilled manpower—and by violent protest, which both hampered production and frightened off foreign investment—made some liberalization of the black educational system begin to seem desirable to some government policymakers and, in certain forums, the rhetoric of reform began to replace the Verwoerdian rhetoric of "trusteeship." In other forums—notably, before the white electorate—the old rhetoric was retained, as voters were assured that none of the funds traditionally used for white education would be diverted to black education. In fact, nothing substantial was changed. In 1980, the disparity between government spending on black and white education was actually greater, both proportionally and absolutely, than it had been twenty-five years before.

Two weeks after I started teaching at Grassy Park High, I read in the paper a typical example of the ambivalent rhetoric then in use on the subject by government officials, when Punt Janson, the Minister of National Education, told the Parliament: "We want to give White education the very best, and then we want to give the other peoples the best possible in the shortest possible time." Janson went on to elaborate this Panglossian position. According to the newspaper's summary of his remarks, "It was the task of the white man to speed up the closing of the gap in the level of civilization between white and black in South Africa. . . . Whites had to ensure that they maintained their advantage in education in the interim period as the task of educating and training the other groups would be their responsibility . . . it was wishful thinking to expect this gap to be closed within ten or fifteen years."

28

Rachel and I went on a moviegoing binge. We took what black friends later called "your cowboy approach" to movie house apartheid and went to whichever films we wanted to see. Though we never saw anyone else try to cross this aspect of the line, in either direction, no theater refused to sell us a ticket. It wasn't a bad way to get to know the city. We saw films in wretched Cape Flats townships, in snooty English suburbs, in spooky working-class Afrikaner neighborhoods (row after row of little white houses with plaster gnomes in the little yards; stolid, ill-dressed audiences with seemingly massive appetites for cinematic schmaltz), and in a couple of great gaudy old-time picture palaces in the once-"mixed" districts. Nearly all the movies were Hollywood product—some had been made for American television, but most were the usual studio features—and the distribution pattern gave us a chance to catch up on films we had missed while living in Asia. The "white" cinemas showed films that had seen their first U.S. release a few months before, while black cinemas, which got the same films a few weeks later, if they got them at all, also played a hodgepodge of odd and older films that had somehow stayed in circulation. We saw Tom Horn, Cleopatra Jones, Blind Fist of Bruce, Apocalypse Now .

Sometimes we saw my students—one warm, dusty Saturday afternoon at the Princess Cinema, for instance. The Princess Cinema was a hulking old brown barn of a place in the heart of black Retreat. (Retreat was one of those schizoid suburbs that straddled the line. White Retreat was little more than a vast shopping mall, but black Retreat, on the other side of the railway and across some empty fields, was a big sprawling township, with a ramshackle, old-style main road full of greengrocers, fish peddlers, bottle shops, and barbershops.) Saturday matinee tickets at the Princess were thirty-five cents. That particular day, we got there late, when the steeply rising tiers and balconies were already jammed with kids. We sat down in front, where the floors were sticky, the seats were broken, and the stench of urine, dagga, and spilled beer was intense. It was a rowdy crowd. After a boy had crashed into me twice, I escorted him by the collar out of our row and announced to our immediate neighbors that nobody else would be permitted past our knees. (That was not, I reflected, the sort of thing I would have tried in a black ghetto back home, but it went down all right at the Princess.) The film that after-

noon was National Lampoon's Animal House, which vaulted us into a faraway world—early-sixties college fraternity life, a revised version of—from which we were untimely yanked when the picture ended some minutes before it should have, and the house lights went up.

Nobody else seemed to notice or care that we had not seen the whole movie. But Rachel and I bounded straight up to the projectionist's booth, barged in, and demanded of the startled little man working there that he show the rest of the film.

"That's it!" he told us. "There's no more. Look!" He showed us the film on the reel. "That's how they send it to me, hey. They don't care."

The projectionist offered us cups of tea in consolation, and we sat and chatted with him while he prepared the next session's reels. He was a middle-aged man in a knitted Muslim skullcap, and we soon discovered that I taught one of his daughters at Grassy Park High.

"Just tell me one thing, man! Will she pass?"

I predicted she would, from what I had seen of her work. We wondered if his children got free admission to the movies.

"You must be joking," said the projectionist. "I wouldn't let my kids come into this place. Don't you see the things these skollies get up to down there? They smoke dagga right in the cinema! You people must have courage to go in there, especially for the Saturday matinee!"

The windows in the projectionist's booth looked out on the Retreat main road. As we sipped our tea, I watched the people down on the street. In the crowd of kids outside the cinema, laughing, stretching, blinking in the sun, I recognized several of my students. There was Amy, from 6A8, and Terence, the quick, handsome Young Werther from 6A7, wearing a leather jacket. The children looked different from the way they did in their school uniforms, especially the girls, who now wore skintight pants, platform shoes, and heavy makeup. The projectionist's views notwithstanding, we hadn't found the atmosphere inside the theater the least bit threatening. Still, it was worthwhile to be reminded that my students, when out of school, often mixed with kids whose lives and futures were nowhere near as promising as their own. At the sprawling pub and disco next door, I saw there was a sign announcing, in alarmist lettering, that two local bands, Bloodshed and Revolution, would be providing the evening's entertainment.

The "cowboy approach" to petty apartheid had obvious limitations. As I had realized in the Grassy Park pub, it could work only one

way, and for that reason could easily be taken as an insult by blacks whose separate, unequal facilities were lightly being entered by scofflaw whites like us. But it was a constant conundrum. You didn't have to seek it out. Say you're a light-skinned person standing on a suburban train platform in South Africa. A train pulls up. The car that stops in front of you has plenty of seats, but a sign on it says nonwhites only. Do you run down the platform like a good apartheid citizen and jump into a WHITES ONLY car? Or do you reject this vicious nonsense and show your rejection by boarding the car that's in front of you, thereby flaunting your privilege before all the black people on the train, and risking being thrown off up the line by the conductor as well? Furthermore, once you get to know your local train station, do you go wait in that part of the platform where you know from experience the whites only cars customarily stop, thus softening the car-that's-in-front-of-you quandary, or not? All South Africans face choices like these every day, and for them the options virtually always come in the more "experienced" form: they all know the layout of the station platform, as it were, all too well. But "face" is probably the wrong word—"avoid" is more like it—and for the foreigner, such evasions come less naturally. So you squirm, and twist, and try to act as if apartheid does not apply to you; you try to make your separate peace by going to any movie you please.

But it all got much trickier when it involved other people.

Shaun, Nico, and Wayne had professed themselves interested in surfing. So I invited them over to our place one Saturday morning, and we went down to the beach. They wanted to proceed to Strandfontein, the "colored" beach beyond the river mouth. But the best waves were breaking at the "white" beach. I told them not to worry about it, that I thought it would be all right.

They conceded that at Muizenberg beach apartheid was normally enforced nowadays only during the holidays—"when die Transvalers come down to die Kaap, and they want their beaches all lily-white," Shaun said, putting on a heavy Afrikaans accent and getting a nervous laugh. Like many Capetonians, Shaun, Nico, and Wayne were terrific chauvinists about their city, convinced that it was the only civilized place in a barbaric land, that if Cape Town were only left alone by Pretoria, it could turn itself into a non-racial utopia in short order. "Ja, " Wayne said. "Die boere wants to be able to get a good tan without being reclassified."

It was overcast and windy, not beachgoing weather. We went to the "white" beach. We hurried across the sand and into the water and,

as I had predicted, we had no problem. We splashed around in the surf for an hour or so. The boys were nimble and fearless and were soon tottering toward shore, arms windmilling. They screamed with laughter at one another's efforts. There were few other surfers in the water. One boy about the same age as my students shouted a few obscenities at us from a distance. But it began to rain, and by the time we came in the beach was deserted.

29

Replacing the apartheid propaganda in the syllabus with material presumably more useful was only one part of my deviation from the pedagogical norm at Grassy Park High. I was also trying to change my pupils' study habits, their approach to information and authority, even their ideas about themselves and their own potential. These ambitions, too, began to draw fire from some of my colleagues, who made pointed remarks within my hearing about "American-style education." Trevor Pieterse surprised me with a comment passed lightly, but clearly in his capacity as chairman of the English Department. He said, "You know, I can see from the number of composition books you take home each night that you're a hard worker, Bill, but I hope you won't start giving great heaps of homework to your pupils, because you should realize that many of them live in places, terrible little pondoks, with ten or twelve people in them, where they can't possibly do it."

I did realize this. At least some of my students had already told me the same thing: that they lived in crowded, ill-lit places, which was why they hadn't done their homework. But the real question for me was less the conduciveness to schoolwork of each student's home situation than how much I should allow that consideration to determine my academic expectations. The assumption that poor children (black children) could not be expected to work as hard in school as better-off children (white children) was an extremely insidious one, I thought, and one that too many teachers used simply to save themselves work.

I made no special effort to find out where or how my students lived, but over time various errands took me to many of their homes. Koos, I discovered, lived with at least eight other people in a tiny, tin-walled shack in the back blocks near Rondevlei. Terence lived in a low-roofed old row cottage half smothered by bougainvillea, with a

front room the size of a closet. Hester lived in a cinder-block house surrounded by a forest of rusting cars and trucks—her father was a mechanic who worked from a pit dug in their backyard. Elroy lived with two older sisters and an ancient grandmother in a cavelike house near Busy Corner. The walls inside Elroy's house were painted a shiny blue and yellow and were so heavily spackled that they seemed to bulge and recess like the walls of the catacombs. Mieta lived in a brand-new Spanish-style house ("Mieta") and had her own room. Shireen lived in "the estates" in Lotus River. Marius Le Roux lived in Cafda.

I went to see Marius after he missed a week of school with the flu. It was the first time I had been to Cafda. There were barefoot children shooting each other with imaginary six-guns in the dirt road outside the tiny brick cottage. When I climbed from my car, the children stopped playing and stared. A group of men in undershirts played checkers on a nearby tree stump, and a tape deck near the checkers game played Sister Sledge's "We Are Family." Riding past on the back gate of a coal truck were two men wearing burlap sacks like headdresses and shouting their prices to the housewives who stood in doorways or backyard gardens. Cafda had a sleepy, earthy feeling that reminded me of villages in Asia and the South Pacific. Everywhere one looked, there were people: weeding, cooking, visiting, sponge-bathing at a tap, emerging from a privy, smoking in the sun.

I knocked on the Le Rouxs' door. A tiny face appeared in a window. I smiled, but the face darted away and a hubbub of shouts, bangs, and scurrying started up behind the door. Finally, the door opened. An older woman with thick glasses, wearing a heavy housecoat, confronted me. She had a mustache and a suspicious expression, and her gray-black hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail.

"Ja, meneer?"

I explained who I was and why I had come. The woman seemed to relax. Behind her, the cottage was dark, but I could make out Marius's bicycle, which he rode to school, hanging from the ceiling above an iron bedstead. The odor of years of kerosene cooking wafted out through the doorway. At my first mention of Marius's name, several children had run hissing into the cottage's second room. Now Marius appeared, looking waxen and frightened, wearing a coat over pajamas.

I asked how he was, and Marius stammered that he would be back in class the next week. I gave him some homework I had brought. Behind Marius, the woman who had answered the door was shooing

children away. One ran out the back door. The woman began dusting off the bedstead. Clutching the folder I had given him, Marius came outside and shut the door behind him. "Sir," Marius said, "my auntie wants to give you tea, but her cooker is not working. Can sir wait a bit? She has sent to the neighbors."

I made Marius call his aunt and I thanked her. But, I said, I had to be going. She studied me closely for a second, then nodded. We sent Marius back to bed. Before I left, his aunt asked me how Marius was doing in school and I told her he was doing fine. "He must pass," she said. "All he cares for now is the rugby, but he must pass his Standard Eight. Then he can live better than this." But her gesture, indicating the neighborhood around us, conveyed no shame or disgust. Marius's aunt was a woman of formidable dignity, and I now wished I had accepted her offer of tea. But after I'd glimpsed the lack of furniture inside her house, the cramped and lightless space, the newsprint wallpaper, I had not wanted to embarrass her by going in. We shook hands and I left.

Marius always did his homework. So did Shireen, although she complained. The building Shireen lived in was a hideous six-story, pink-and-gray cement block of flats standing in an open field. I went by there one Friday afternoon after finding in my classroom something I guessed belonged to Shireen: a booklet of vouchers for a "fun fair" being held that weekend in Athlone. My Standard Six students had been so excited about this fun fair it seemed worth it to try to deliver the vouchers. Graffiti proclaimed Shireen's building to be in the territory of the Born Free Kids. The stairwell stank of urine. I found Shireen's door on the fourth floor. She answered it herself, and her eyes opened wide when she saw me. "Sir! How could you find me here?" Yes, the vouchers were hers. She was very glad to see them—and glad to see me, too, it seemed, once she got over her shock.

Shireen invited me in and introduced me to her family: brothers and sisters, her mother, a brother-in-law who drove trucks cross-country for a living. It was a tidy, crowded little apartment, made dim by heavy drapes. On the walls were Pre-Raphaelite prints, a sampler stitched with "Home Sweet Home," and some old family photographs tinted so that even the men seemed to be wearing lipstick. There were elaborate brass candlesticks on the table, and brass fire irons, although there was no fireplace. In the next room, a radio announced what had been said that day in Parliament. I drank a beer with Shireen's brother-in-law. Shireen showed me her pet rabbit which she kept in a cage by her bed. Shireen seemed to share her bedroom with

at least three other people. I asked her where she did her homework, and she indicated the table in the front room, the only table in the apartment. "I am sometimes there all night," she mugged. "While everyone in here is sleeping, I must listen to the people fighting outside when the men come home from drinking. I have so much homework for English, I may have to stay home from the fun fair!"

In general, I thought my students could do their homework. Few if any of them were reduced to studying under streetlights, as the children in the poorest townships were. In some cases—Oscar's, for instance—I tried to be flexible. Yet I continued to expect more work, particularly more writing, from most of them than they had been used to doing.

Still, Pieterse's caveat worried me.

Other aspects of my little reform program were also starting to give me pause. I found myself, for instance, in the interests of improving my students' English, having to reject at every turn the pithy, charming pidgin that they were used to having accepted as English (colored English). I also found myself, while trying to encourage academic ambitions, seeming to reject the life of manual labor that the government so clearly expected most of them to accept, and which most of their parents and older relatives led. Stigmatizing these things was hardly my intention, but the possibility of such unwanted results flowing from my efforts to raise the sights of my students helped raise, in turn, the larger question: What kind of people was I trying to turn these kids into, anyway?

In moments of faith, my answer to this question leaned heavily on adjectives like "critical," "articulate," "informed." At other times, I knew "middle-class achievers" to be equally true. In pursuit of that teacher's grail, student motivation, I found myself falling back increasingly on my own schooling for models. I tried to foster academic competition, both explicitly, with class rankings, and implicitly, with regular praise for the neat, bright, bookish kids like Mieta and Wayan and obvious disapproval of the devil-may-care like Charmaine. These are the age-old strategies and preferences of teachers everywhere, of course, but I worried that my "whiteness" gave them an edge, an undertone, they would not have in the classes of a local teacher—as if I were rewarding the children who could act "whitest." And I underlined the alienness of my expectations with my careful record-keeping and inflexible penalties for late papers. This helped to "spread out" and identify my students by performance, making it very clear who

was doing well and who was not—as opposed to the prescribed system, which let everyone go through the year relatively unevaluated and then be decisively passed or failed by the final examination, long after classes were over.

It was ironic that what my colleagues considered overly permissive, personalized, "American-style" teaching would have seemed anything but progressive in the United States. I did allow a level of free-form activity in the classroom that, by Grassy Park High standards, bordered on anarchy. I was willing to experiment with assignments and teaching arrangements. I was even willing to solicit alternative suggestions from my students. But the emphasis I placed on performance, on production, on turning in all work on time, was nothing less than reactionary. I knew that; it was my reaction to the system as I found it. What I didn't know was whether this was the right reaction, or whether it was actually no better than clinging to the syllabus, for the way it avoided any real surrender to the children's instincts. I was intent upon developing a conventional type of academic discipline and "maturity"—but toward what end?

There was, I decided, an essential contradiction in my goals. I, like any teacher, wanted hardworking, attentive, disciplined students. On the other hand, I wanted to encourage a critical, independent habit of mind among my students toward all received ideas. This contradiction is probably inherent in the concept of a liberal education, but in New Room 16 it began to seem preternaturally sharp. What my students really needed, I was eventually convinced, in the way of preparation for life in South Africa, was nothing less than a radical skepticism, a rigorous, across-the-board, combative approach to all forms of vested authority, particularly "white" authority. And here I was, a white authority figure. Yet I could hardly give them high marks for defying me. At one level, I believed in my lessons and assignments. At another, I could see the value of my students' rejecting them—and me. I was not enamored of the harsh, dictatorial "authority" that many of my colleagues seemed preoccupied with maintaining in their classrooms. It lent itself to a stagnant, unhealthy kind of education, where the students were expected to serve as passive receptacles, being filled with undifferentiated, largely irrelevant knowledge. This passivity, I believed, could only encourage a more general disposition to accept the world as it was—surely a disastrous attitude in the circumstances of black South Africa. At the same time, a quiet, orderly classroom was a serious form of bliss.

My confusion often led me onto doubtful ground with my stu-

dents. I would find myself trying to untangle two deskmates too absorbed in each other to pay attention to a lesson. "Jasmine! Zainul! What is this, parts of speech or parts of the body?" What, I might well have asked myself, was I doing? I still admired my students' capacity for a kind of lovers' delight in one another, complete with doting silliness while without romantic or sexual focus; yet I began to consider banishing all cuddling from the classroom, as inappropriate to an academic atmosphere. It wasn't that I was getting stiff-necked or discipline fixated à la Da Silva. A few of the implications of my ambitions for my students were simply starting to make themselves felt. The paradox was that I should be trying to transform my students into exotic versions of my old college-bound schoolmates, when I liked them so much the way they were.

Of course, there were always little incidents to remind me that there was really no danger of my effecting such a transformation of the great majority of my students. One Monday, for instance, three girls in 7E2 showed up for class missing all their upper front teeth. It seemed that one of them had gone to the dentist to have a tooth extracted, and had then and there decided to have die vier voorste —the front four—all removed. Her friends had simply decided to keep her company. It was fashionable, they said, to have die vier voorste out. "It makes kissing sexier," one girl giggled. I was horrified. Yet I was the only one in the classroom who was shocked. Everyone else was amused, even admiring. "The whites think it looks skollie, sir," somebody explained, laughing. "But we think it looks lekker ."

This collision of middle-class attitudes with ghetto values and style could have been happening just as easily in an American inner-city school. Likewise the problems associated with teaching standard English to ghetto children, and the contradictions contained in "upward mobility" generally. Cape Flats reality sometimes intruded upon the grounds of Grassy Park High in forms that were familiar to an American, too. There was, for instance, the time I ran afoul of the Vlei Monsters. They were a young Grassy Park street gang, given to shaved heads ("eggshells") and earrings. The Vlei Monsters were said to be pushovers compared to the big, well-organized gangs: the Weekend Spoilers, the Hardlivings, the Genuine Schoolboys, the Panorama Kids. Still, it was generally agreed that I had made a very foolish move when, in my second month of teaching, I chased a bunch of Vlei Monsters off the landing outside my classroom. Afterward, I was told that, as a result of this rash act, my life was no longer worth "a tin continental." But I actually

found it more agreeable to be fretting about the Vlei Monsters than about what deleterious effect my teaching might be having on my students.

30

There were shantytowns everywhere on the Cape Flats. Most of them were hidden away in the dunes—illegal, lawless, shadowy places. I picked up a hitchhiker one afternoon while heading south out of Grassy Park. He was a middle-aged man wearing old denim overalls, and he said he was going to Vrygrond. Vrygrond was one of the shantytowns between Grassy Park and Muizenberg. I asked my rider how long he had lived at Vrygrond. He looked unhappy about having to speak to me, but he replied, "Couple of years now, meneer ."

I asked how long he had been in Cape Town.

"All my life, meneer, " he said.

I was surprised. I had assumed that the squatters were all recent arrivals from the rural areas. I asked where he had lived before Vrygrond.

"Manenberg."

Manenberg was one of the older townships on the Flats. Why had he left there?

My rider looked more reluctant than ever to answer. Finally, he spoke. "We was in a council flat there. They got rules about who may stay in the flat, you know. My wife's parents came to stay, because they had no other place. But when the inspector finds out they was there, he put us out. We couldn't find no other place, so now we's at this Vrygrond."

"How is it, living there?"

"If you must know, meneer, it's no good. Especially in the wintertime, when it rains, and the wind tears the roofs off the houses. We got no running water, no electricity, no protection from the skollies . It's an unhealthy place, so we sent our children to live with my sister. But we got no other place for ourselves. I must travel to Bellville each day for my job, and it's bloody far. Excuse me, meneer ."

I wondered if many people at Vrygrond had jobs.

"Most have jobs, yes. Most people there is like us. They're Capeys themselves. They just can't find a place to live. There's some squatter camps where the people is all from Transkei and so, and they come

here looking for work. But most of us, we just lost our places to live. In town, or out here somewhere."

The man gestured vaguely toward the Flats. He had a dirty, exhausted, after-work look that deserved, I thought, a shower, a beer, and his feet up in front of the television—and he seemed to know it. I asked if the children at Vrygrond went to school.

"A few of them, they go to primary school. The older children, they don't go. That's why we sent our kids to my sister. They's all in school there at Bonteheuwel. You can let me down here, meneer ."

I wanted to ask the man if I could go with him to Vrygrond. But leaving my car at that spot would have been unwise. Besides, the man would probably have refused. I watched him trudge across the sand and into the bush.

Later, I read what I could and discovered that there were some 200,000 people living in squatter camps on the Cape Flats. Most of the adults were, in fact, employed, had been so for years, and came from Cape Town. The shantytowns were the product of a massive shortage of black housing in the Cape, a shortage that every black I asked believed the government had created deliberately. In the case of the African townships, this had a straightforward purpose: to discourage immigration. In "colored" areas, it seemed to stem from a combination of removals, inadequate housing budgets, bad planning, sheer indifference, and the authorities' awareness that an insecure group was an easily controlled group. There was a great deal of talk about the housing shortage, but little action other than the construction out at Mitchell's Plain, where the rents would be far higher than most "coloreds" could afford. The rents in Grassy Park, for that matter, were extraordinarily high, because of the housing shortage. Clive once asked me what we paid for our place in Muizenberg, and when I told him twenty-five rands each, he exploded. "You couldn't rent a shack in Grassy Park for that amount! People pay a hundred and fifty rands for rooms!"

I never did find anyone to take me into Vrygrond. People in Grassy Park looked at me like I was crazy when I mentioned it. "You don't want to go traipsing out to such a place, Bull, I can assure you." Finally, I just went there myself one day, parking some distance away and hiking across the dunes. When I reached the edge of the settlement, I stopped on a high dune and stood looking down. Shanties were scattered through the hillocks and troughs of sand and brush. The community looked formless. Was this the result of decimating raids?

Or was the random, scattered layout a defensive tactic against raids? The shanties had been built with scraps of wood, iron, plastic, cardboard, and sheets of corrugated tin. The nearby dunes were strewn with garbage. The stench of open sewage rose on the afternoon air. Some little children were playing in a stack of old tires beside one pondok. An old woman labored along a twisting trail with a load of firewood. A man wearing what looked to be half a volleyball as a hat pounded a sheet of tin flat with a post. With the afternoon sun at my back, nobody noticed me. After a while, I decided against going into the camp. If this was the alternative, it no longer surprised me that people in Grassy Park were willing to pay criminally high rents, or let themselves be forced out to Mitchell's Plain and struggle to pay them there.

Mitchell's Plain was the reverse image of Vrygrond. It was an eerie place, located far out on the Flats, some twenty miles from the city center, at the end of a brand-new railway line. Monotonous rows of small, neat houses stretched for miles between awesomely wide thoroughfares. The houses were dreary but, by black standards, "middle-class"—the government liked to show off Mitchell's Plain to overseas visitors. Like apartheid itself, the huge, half-finished project had the slightly dazed, unlikely quality of cheapskate futurism.

Patrick Abrahams lived in Mitchell's Plain. Patrick was a young assistant manager in the supermarket where we shopped. He and I had started talking one Saturday morning. Patrick was a dark, slight, eager, good-looking man, who did not try to hide his glee at discovering I was American. He declared his devotion to American entertainers ranging from Earl Klugh to Steve McQueen, and asked me for my phone number. We later made a date to play squash at a multiracial sports complex in town. When we met there, Patrick exclaimed over my "casual" outfit—old shorts, old T-shirt, old running shoes. He was in spotless whites himself. But we had some good games, and we began to play together regularly. Eventually, Patrick invited me out to his house.

"It's not much, but it's my very own," Patrick said when I arrived one evening. His house was small, immaculate, and rather blandly modern, much like its owner. There were travel posters on the walls, jazz rock on the stereo, and photos of Patrick's two little daughters tucked under the glass of the coffee table. We drank brandy and Coke while Patrick's wife, Irene, a soft-spoken secretary for a big corporation, ironed clothes in the kitchen.

"It's not so bad out here," Patrick said. "The commute is hell of a long, but what can you do? We were all crammed in with Irene's parents before this. They keep the roads quite clean out here, and it's very safe, compared to other places."

Patrick had been working for the same supermarket chain since graduating from high school. "They've been good to me," he said. "We're a company that's growing very fast, you know, so there's lots of opportunity. I've had a pay rise every year I've been there. Advancement is on merit, which is not exactly the case everywhere in this country, as you might have noticed. We're even thinking of expanding into some overseas markets now. Perhaps I'll be sent to help open a new hypermarket in California, and you can show me some of the sights over there, Bill!"

Patrick kept jumping up to change the music while we talked. His tastes were an odd combination—George Benson would be followed by Jessie Colter. He asked me what sort of music I collected, and was amazed to hear that I did not collect any. "Not even a music system at home! That must be the traveling life, is it? I don't think I could enjoy that myself. I enjoy collecting things."

Patrick did enjoy collecting things. He was a long-distance runner, so he collected the badges and ties of running clubs from all over the world, a box of which he got out to show me. He had several "pen pals" overseas, who helped him collect stamps. He had a collection of pipes, although he did not smoke. All these things we looked through over the course of the evening.

When it came time for me to leave, Patrick said, "You know, Bill, I'm very happy you came to see me. This government is so stupid, the way it tries to keep people apart."

This remark caught me off guard. I enjoyed Patrick's company partly because being with him was like taking a vacation from South Africa. He was a sort of person you might find anywhere, a hardworking family man, a jock, a bit fastidious, but decent and sweet. "I'm not interested in politics," he liked to say—in fact, he said it constantly. Patrick struggled to avoid the obsessions and distortions that seemed to attach themselves ineluctably to the personalities of oppressor and oppressed in South Africa. Every conversation with him did not slide inexorably into the maelstrom-topic, "apartheid." But as we stood in his front yard there in Mitchell's Plain, I could not resist asking, "Well, what are you going to do about it?"

Patrick gave a short bark. "Do about it? What can be done? The bastards are far too strong." He sighed, and ran a hand along the

fender of his car. "Things are getting better. South Africa is joining the modern world slowly. Some of your American firms here are leading the way. You come from a great country, Bill. You are very lucky. May I come visit you there someday?"

"By all means," I said, and we said good night.

I set off and promptly got lost in the huge labyrinth of Mitchell's Plain. All the streets looked the same, and only one of them left the township, connecting it to the outside world—this was a security measure, rendering the whole area easy to seal off in the event of unrest. I wandered the maze of identical houses for what seemed like hours. And though we continued to see each other occasionally for squash, I never did visit Patrick again.

Ephraim was a small, tousled-looking African handyman in his thirties. Our landlord had begun fixing up his house as part of the effort to sell it, and Ephraim had come to do the work. He took up residence in a tiny room outside the back door, in a place that we had thought of as a shed, but now realized was the servants' quarters without which no house in white South Africa was complete. Ephraim painted and varnished and patched floors and walls. At night, he listened to an old plastic radio in his room and received visitors. I could hear their laughter and ringing Xhosa speech from my desk on the balcony.

I was interested in Ephraim, if only because he was the only African I came into contact with each day. But he was not an easy person for me to talk to. His English was poor, and his manner with me was distant, especially after I asked him to stop calling me baas . There seemed, moreover, to be nowhere for us to talk. Ephraim was obviously uncomfortable sitting down anywhere inside the house, and he never invited me into his room. Finally, on a series of warm evenings, I supplied the beer and we met on neutral territory, out behind the house, where we would sit around on upturned buckets, or stand around while I barbecued steaks, and talk.

"My wife and children are in Transkei," Ephraim told me, after I had asked. He spoke very softly. "I send them money, but I didn't see them for two years now. They want to come to Cape Town, but I tell them no, there is no place for them to stay here."

Though he never told me so, I soon guessed that Ephraim was in the Cape illegally. Ephraim never told me much, really. His wariness of me remained profound, and he preferred to listen to me talk, or

better yet to Radio Bantu, than to speak himself. He would translate the songs and messages on the radio when I asked, and he taught me to count to ten in Xhosa—and struggled to hide his amusement at my attempts to make the explosive "click" sounds that characterize the language. But his English was easily exhausted. What I mainly got from Ephraim was just a glimpse, no more, of Grassy Park from the other side, from the perspective of one of the millions of less privileged black South Africans.

"Grassy Park has many Muslims," he said, when I told him where I worked. "Malays. They are very rich. They own all the cafes and shops."

While this was a great exaggeration, it was true that the people of Grassy Park enjoyed advantages that Ephraim had never known. Being classified "Coloured" rather than "Bantu" was part of it. The 200,000 Africans in Cape Town were considered, moreover, to be the worst-off urban blacks in South Africa. Since the Western Cape was officially designated a "coloured labour preference area," it was especially difficult for Africans to gain permission to live there legally. In other major cities, Africans could, at least in theory, acquire ninety-nine-year leases on certain properties in the African townships, but Cape Town continued to practice "old style" influx control (this was finally changed in 1984). There were three long-established African townships on the Cape Flats—Langa, Nyanga, and Guguletu—but there had been no new housing for Africans built for many years. At least half the Africans in the Cape were there illegally, most of them living in shantytowns. The radical insecurity of African existence in the Cape militated against normal family life, making for a viciously high proportion of single men, like Ephraim.

One evening, Ephraim informed me, "The Muslims here in Cape Town keep slaves. Colored children from upcountry, they buy from their parents." I had heard other versions of the same story. Well-to-do Capetonians supposedly offered to take the children of penniless farm workers from the Cape hinterland to town, where they promised to care for them and send them to school, in exchange for housework or work in the family store. Such an arrangement would give the children the chance in life they could never get on the farm. But the unscrupulous city folk supposedly gave those desperate parents who agreed a false Cape Town address, took the children away, and put them to work, keeping them under lock and key and never sending them to school. This was probably not the common practice people

claimed it was, yet the story seemed to illustrate well the world of difference that existed between the situations of city and country blacks.

Ephraim refused to talk politics with me. When I asked whether he thought the Transkei was an independent country, he looked at me as if I had threatened his life. He would say nothing about white people. After a few beers, he would, however, offer opinions about the failings of various blacks: the gangs in the townships, the non-Xhosa Sowetans who thought themselves better than migrant workers (Ephraim had done two "joins," one-year stints as a contract laborer in the gold mines near Johannesburg, living apart from the local residents in the migrant workers' compounds known as hostels), and the "rich Muslims" of Cape Town. I couldn't tell if the remarks about other blacks were for my benefit, or if they were sincere. Perhaps Ephraim thought I, like most whites in South Africa, simply liked to be reassured that there really were still serious interethnic rivalries among blacks, that the destruction of the various traditional societies had not in fact created a single vast laboring class in the country.

It was clear, in any case, that if I was ever going to have a halfway candid conversation with Ephraim, I would have to do something different. It was no good trying to hang around the barbecue with him as if we just happened to be neighbors. At school, I got to know people by working with them. Here, I was firmly stuck on one side of the great South African sociocultural divide: oceans of mistrust seemed to separate me from Ephraim. In a half-dozen conversations, he never once looked me in the eye. I tried to imagine his experience, in which it seemed likely that no "white" had ever tried to talk to him as a human being. It was a daunting thought. And before I had come up with any bright idea about how to bridge the gap, Ephraim disappeared.

He was picked up by the police for not having his pass in order. His sister came by and collected his radio, blankets, and paraffin heater while I was at school. Rachel said the sister hadn't seemed particularly upset. I was stunned myself, though I shouldn't have been. Hundreds of thousands of people were arrested each year for pass law violations. Kwela-kwelas full of African prisoners were common sights. Ephraim would pay a fine, and/or spend a few weeks or months in jail, and/or be sold to a farmer for convict labor, and then be transported in shackles back to the Transkei. As starvation is a powerful goad to travel, Ephraim would almost

certainly be compelled to pick up and leave his family again before too long.

Some months later, I had occasion to visit the "bachelors'" living quarters in Langa, and I thought again of Ephraim. A middle-aged African woman named Lillian, whom I knew only slightly, had asked me for help in finding her brother. He had a friend who lived in a Langa workers' compound. We went out there on a cold, gray Saturday afternoon. At the entrance to the township there was a big sign warning all "Non-Bantus" that they needed a permit to enter. I decided against going to the police station for a permit. If I was stopped, I would just act the ignorant foreigner.

Conditions in the residential sections of the African townships on the Cape Flats were not as appalling as one might expect. Parts of them resembled Cafda: neat rows of tiny brick houses with gardens and detached privies. But the workers' dormitories in Langa were another story. There were dozens of them, and they looked less like living quarters than like temporary warehouses. They had tin walls and tar-paper roofs, concrete floors and no interior ceilings. Thirty to fifty men lived inside each one, and as we began our rounds, poking our heads inside one barracks after another to ask the residents whether they knew the man we sought, I could see that there was no privacy to be had in any of the buildings. The dormitories were all exceedingly dark and airless, and filled with an overpowering stench of old cooking and unwashed bodies and clothes. The men who lay on the bunks staring suspiciously at Lillian and me ranged in age from their twenties to their sixties. I asked Lillian how long she thought some of them might have lived in these places.

"Many, many years, the old ones. For as long as they have been working for their firms."

"Their firms? The government didn't build these compounds?"

"No, the companies build them, for their workers. That's why the people call this 'slave housing.'"

I asked if any of the men living there might actually be married.

"Oh, yes," she said. "Most of these men, they have wives and children in Transkei or Ciskei or somewhere. They just call them the bachelors because they cannot bring their families here."

In one building, there was a group of men playing cards near the doorway. An older fellow, who looked to be drunk, saw me and said, "What is it, my baas? What brings you to the pig sty?"

The others chuckled and shushed him. In the courtyard outside there was a large lavatory that obviously served several nearby dormitories. Inside the lavatory, I could see two men squatting over an open gutter.

I left Lillian to her search and returned to my car. It was parked near a small, dilapidated shopping center. Outside the shops there were tables set up with hawkers selling everything from sofas to summer squash. One table was covered with sheep's heads, bundles of tripe, and pink piles of liver. Stout women brewed traditional sorghum beer in big oil drums. Skinny chickens darted about in the mud. A blind man played an accordion, and people nearby swayed to the music. I sat in my car and tried to make myself invisible. It was a dreary day, and an extremely dreary setting, yet the people of Langa seemed, on the whole, lively and gay. I wondered how many of them had their passes in order. I wished Lillian would return.

31

Qualified, married, "permanent" male teachers at Grassy Park High were eligible for low-interest housing loans from the government. Most of them took out the loans and bought new houses in and around Grassy Park. Liberty's place had a garage, a study, and wall-to-wall carpet; Pieterse's had a tile roof, Italian tile in the kitchen, and stoeps both front and back.

The unmarried teachers nearly all lived with their parents. Nelson October was an exception. He lived alone in a tiny old row house in lower Wynberg. It was a crumbling neighborhood of cracked sidewalks, kerchief-sized yards, and concrete bungalows with small verandas and corrugated metal roofs—remnants of the Indian colonial architecture brought to the Cape by the English.

Inside, Nelson's place was dusty and bare. There was little furniture and nothing on the walls but a few team photos of soccer clubs. Books took up most of the space. One day I wondered aloud how many of the books on his shelves were banned.

"None," Nelson said.

He pulled down a large loose-leaf volume: Jacobsen's Objectionable Literature . He was a subscriber to this index, he said. Every month they sent him a few more pages, and every month he went through the list of newly banned books and pamphlets, combed his shelves for newly illegal works, and threw out any he found. "The

police like to raid certain people's houses and go through their bookshelves," he said. "That would be a pointless reason to go to prison."

I leafed through Jacobsen's . It was a very funny book, in a horrifying sort of a way. Thousands of items were listed as proscribed—the Publications Control Board outlawed some 1,200 publications a year. In the most recent supplements, novels by John Irving, Jerzy Kosinski, Carlos Fuentes, and Alex La Guma had been banned. The enemies of the South African state seemed to lurk anywhere and everywhere. Here was a history of the Palestinian struggle, something by Tanzanian President Julius K. Nyerere, a compilation of the World Council of Churches' "statements and actions on racism." Many, many academic works were listed, although it was hard to tell from the title what could have been objectionable in Problems of the History of Philosophy . The whole spectrum of erotica was covered, from how-to manuals like The Joy of Sex to a myriad of calendars for a myriad of Clutch and Brake Specialists. (Postcards showing bare-breasted black women were available in every corner shop, but images of barebreasted white women were forbidden in any form. Playboy and Penthouse were not allowed into the country.) All old-fashioned spicy fiction was also out. Alas, and adieu, Wicked Is My Flesh, by Stephanie Blake. The output of entire publishing houses, both leftist and pornographic, in Scandinavia, the United States, Eastern and Western Europe, had been barred.

By far the most voluminous Objectionable Literature, however, consisted of works about South African politics. It seemed that every book, pamphlet, and magazine ever put out on the subject must have been banned. Inflammatory tracts and landmark works of scholarship, trial transcripts and campus weeklies, the possession of all alike was prohibited. Rare was the month that the National Union of South African Students or the International Defence and Aid Fund in London had not had something outlawed. Reading down the endless lists was very unsettling. It was as if, before your eyes, a whole country was being deprived of the information and intellectual tools with which to understand its own situation. Titles like Basic Facts on the Republic of South Africa and the Policy of Apartheid were consigned to nonexistence. Works about the banning process itself were banned.

Besides all the books and pamphlets, there were innumerable posters, T-shirts, buttons, films, and "objects" listed. All this censorship at least had the dubious virtue, I thought, of being non-racial. But Nelson corrected that notion. Some films, he said, were approved for viewing by some population groups, but not for others. The main

concern there, he said, was that only whites should see foreign films that featured blacks and whites in roles that were not clearly hierarchical—that is, with blacks subservient. Whites were believed to have the sophistication necessary to understand that these were other cultures being displayed on the screen; black audiences might be confused by seeing black people in positions of power. I thought of Animal House . The only blacks in the film had been stereotypes—in a bar, in a rhythm and blues band, and, in a scene that had made me squirm, in a small group of African exchange students who were shunted off to a dismal corner of a frat party: the nerds whom nobody could be bothered with. The South African censors had chopped up the movie pretty badly, but they had obviously had no problem with its racial attitudes.

I later realized that this two-tiered censorship applied in other areas as well. From the news, one could easily gain the impression that the thought control in South Africa was as pervasive as in the most absolutely repressive countries. An apprentice mechanic in the Transvaal was sent to prison for eighteen months for drinking tea from a stainless steel mug with faint, crude scratchings on it saying things like "Release Nelson Mandela" and "P.W., we want our land back." Two men were sentenced to four years for singing freedom songs at a music festival in Johannesburg. But these people were black, and a vastly different set of standards applied to, say, white intellectuals than to black industrial workers. Where the slightest murmur of political awareness could get a black worker fired and shipped off to a bantustan, I found that left-wing sociologists at the University of Cape Town were not afraid to suggest that "armed struggle" might be the only path to democracy in South Africa. Of course, such suggestions were made only in obscure scholarly journals. I assumed it was the unwillingness of the government's censors to brave those frozen wastes of prose that allowed these academic journals to print what they did. But again, Nelson offered some amplification.

"Naturally, the government hates these academics who attack the system. But they're very dependent on the English universities for white manpower. And there's a brain drain of English-speaking academics going overseas already. They don't want to increase that. So they try not to force confrontations with the 'white' universities. In any case, they know that whatever these lecturers say is purely symbolic protest, with no popular movement behind it. And individuals can always be banned, if necessary. In the last analysis, the universi-

ties are all dependent on government financing."

I wondered if Nelson had ever been in jail. I asked him.

"No," he said, looking thoughtfully at his bookshelves. After a minute, he said, "Some people seem to believe that if you haven't been inside, then you can't possibly be serious about struggle. But I reject that. The point is to stay out of jail. If you go in, you've probably blundered somehow. And what can you contribute from inside?"

Nelson changed the subject.

In many ways, it occurred to me, Nelson, although unjailed, had already forsworn the ordinary pleasures of society. He lived like a monk. There was rarely anything more than peanut butter, biscuits, and tea in his kitchen. He didn't drink. He didn't have a girl friend—although there were female teachers at school who clearly yearned for his attentions. He seemed to spend all his spare time reading. Once, when I invited him to accompany Rachel and me to a multiracial theater in town to see a show featuring "the Nkoma Zulu and 'Gum Boot' Dancers," Nelson starred at me in embarrassed astonishment. "There is a total boycott of that venue, in the first place," he said. "In the second place, I wouldn't go to see that group of retribalized puppets dance to the regime's tune if they were the only entertainment in South Africa."

We decided to skip the Gum Boot Dancers ourselves. I was less easily persuaded, though, when it came to faculty braais, which Nelson also shunned. When I pressed him, he said, "Drinking, dancing, acting the fool—why should I? I would rather read a book."

I thought that was pretty elitist and said so.

Nelson laughed. "There is simply no time for that nonsense," he said.

Although he struck me as being religious by nature—his political commitment was clearly his religion—Nelson had no more patience with conventional religion than he did with conventional merriment. We sometimes argued about the potential role of organized religion in a political struggle. Nelson scorned religion as the popular opiate and that was that. I argued that black churches had made a great contribution to the civil rights struggles in the United States, that the Christian base communities in Nicaragua had been crucial to the success of the revolution there, and that some churches in South Africa seemed to be doing important anti-apartheid work and helping to politicize their congregations.

Nelson would have none of it. "These so-called activist churches are run by diversionary liberals," he said. "Most black churchgoers

belong to reactionary sects, anyway, where the priests and dominies tell people just to accept their lot in life. That's their message. God will take care of everything. You'll be happy in heaven, not here on earth. For most of the oppressed in this country, particularly the youth, the first step to politicization is the rejection of their parents' religion. There is no place in the struggle for these so-called holy men."

I thought Nelson's attitude was rigid and unrealistic, although, when he directed his criticism at the government's "Christianity," it got hard to argue.

32

Clive had said that no Grassy Park High matric would really think of going to an Afrikaans university, and in a way I hoped he was right, since I now realized that it was probably not possible for any of them to do so. There were the few who had expressed interest, though, and I had encouraged them. Now it was backtracking time. I met with Warren, a pockmarked, serious-minded matric who had taken home applications for Stellenbosch and for the University of the Orange Free State. Warren planned to become a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church.

"My father says I'm mad to think about going off to the Free State. He says it's too expensive, and the people there isn't nice. But he's never been there himself, and he doesn't know about bursaries."

"What does he say about Stellenbosch?"

"He thinks I should rather go to Bush."

"What do you think?"

"I don't know, sir. I'm not interested in Bush. I already know what is there. These Afrikaans universities, it might be a bit difficult, in terms of the social life, but they have more to offer, academically, and I might be accomplishing something else as well, going to one of them. It would be getting out of this little world we're put in here, and perhaps helping some of these Afrikaners see that we're not all drunken 'hotnots,' as they think."

How could I backtrack with Warren? I didn't even try, beyond making it clear that I would not endorse defying his parents, which he would not have dreamed of doing, anyway. I said I would help him with the applications.

Other matrics who had mentioned applying to Afrikaans univer-

sities were more easily nudged toward the University of Cape Town, which in nearly every case could also provide the courses they wanted. But I had made some further disconcerting discoveries about my students' career prospects. A boy named Adam had said he wanted to be a commercial airline pilot. But there were no black airline pilots in South Africa, it seemed, and no plans to train any. A girl named Glynnis had expressed a desire to become a veterinarian. There were no black veterinarians in South Africa. There weren't even any black airline stewardesses, I was told, after a girl named Shahieda wrote "air hostess" on my careers questionnaire. I wondered if these students were aware of these facts. And if they knew that there were no black pilots or vets, how much had my cocksure encouragement influenced them to want to be the first to break the color bar? Or were they perhaps deliberately challenging me, throwing my great confidence about their great futures back in my American face? Fortunately, none of these cases was urgent—would-be vets and pilots first had to go to college.

That apartheid was riddled with irrational features, I had never questioned. But running up against these continuing institutional obstacles to training for blacks at a time when South Africa was suffering from a dire and worsening shortage of skilled manpower was enough to make me start to doubt my assumption that the authorities operated with even a basic ration of enlightened self-interest.

"Verwoerd was an economic illiterate": this was the conventional wisdom by 1980—meaning that the original apartheid blueprint had contained no understanding of the requirements of a growing industrial economy. Liberal businessmen were constantly pointing out that apartheid and free enterprise were incompatible philosophies, and predicting that economic growth would destroy apartheid. Even before I saw it spelled out, the second part of this argument made sense to me. For someone coming from southern Asia, the vitality of the South African economy was unmistakable. In southern Asia, as in most of the Third World, the Malthusian specter still haunted the villages. Populations grew faster than economies and there was simply no prosperity to share. The South African dynamic was clearly the opposite. Despite gross inequalities and widespread poverty, a modern, high mass consumption economy was coming into being. The country was industrializing; proletarianization was already far advanced.

That industrialization meant increased economic opportunity for blacks was the assumption that underlay my counseling our Grassy

Park High matrics to seize the initiative, to get aggressive about their careers. But the further assumption, that industrialization meant democratization, that each black kid who managed to grasp the brass ring and become a fully credentialed member of the modern society hastened the ultimate collapse of apartheid—everything I was seeing in South Africa belied this idea. While black wages were definitely rising, black political freedom had been just as steadily shrinking for thirty years. With the ongoing implementation of the bantustan scheme and the creation of the police state with its permanent emergency powers, the regime's population control had only become more thorough. South Africa was not England. Because industrialization had forced the rulers of nineteenth-century Britain to introduce universal education and extend the franchise to avoid a revolution did not mean industrialization would force the same changes in South Africa. The system here had a historical logic all its own.

33

George Van den Heever, principal of Grassy Park High, often seemed a bit of a buffoon. He wore a gray fedora and drove an old green Chevrolet very badly. He had a strange, distracted, saurian air about him, such that in a conversation one was never sure whether he was listening. "He's mad" was the pronouncement one heard about him from teachers and students alike. I once watched him crossing the school courtyard, headed for the faculty rest room. Obviously unaware that he was still thirty yards from his destination, he was blithely unzipping his fly as he walked. When I disloyally mentioned this bizarre sight to a colleague, she shrieked with laughter. "That is exactly how Van should be remembered," she said.

The principal was sometimes not seen around school for days at a stretch. At other times, he seemed to be everywhere, popping into classrooms to observe lessons, surprising unwary students smoking cigarettes behind a building. One day after school I was sitting in the staff room with half a dozen other teachers while Ivan Grobbelaar entertained us on the guitar. Grobbelaar being Grobbelaar, he began to improvise the dirtiest lyrics he could around the already smutty Chuck Berry ditty "My Ding-a-ling." Our catcalls and laughter were abruptly cut off when the principal stormed into the staff room. He had been standing outside near an open window, listening, and he was in a rage. He ordered Grobbelaar to his office and began berating the

rest of us violently. What kind of teachers were we? Did we have no respect for ourselves, for the school, for the pupils? How could we sit enjoying such filth in mixed company? People were edging toward the door, but Meryl Cupido and I were trapped, cornered together on a small couch. When the principal's tirade was finally over, we were in shock. Grobbelaar would be sacked, that was certain. Perhaps we would be, too. We had definitely lost face forever with the principal.

But Grobbelaar was not fired, and colleagues laughed at Meryl's and my concern. "In a week's time, he won't even remember who was involved," one teacher said. Another told me, "Van remembers what he must remember, and that is all. He has a long history himself, you know. He used to be quite a drinker in his younger days, and he caused plenty of trouble for himself. He used to get drunk at parties, all that sort of thing. Once, some other teachers got him very drunk and took him and dumped him on the lawn of the inspector's house. That was almost the end of his career. But he managed to keep his post. And he remembered who did that to him. And over the years, he has revenged himself on each and every one of them. When it comes to that sort of thing, Van does not forget."

In fact, the principal's manner toward me did not seem to change. He continued to assail me with tales of the wonderful GIs he had known at Monte Cassino. "They had Lucky Strike cigarettes. They had Hershey's chocolate. They had everything except racial prejudice!" Van also liked to talk with me about the American civil rights movement. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was his greatest hero, he said. He surprised me with all the black American political leaders he seemed to know—he mentioned Ralph Abernathy, Joseph Lowery, Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young. When I said that I had worked in Tom Bradley's first unsuccessful mayoralty campaign as a boy in Los Angeles, the principal was delighted.

Now and then Van even brought Americans around to New Room 16: vice-consuls who eyed me strangely and suggested I come around to their offices and "register," black bureaucrats who told me pointedly that they had administered aid programs in Black Africa, touring educators who gushed over the good work I was doing among the world's needy. The principal was obviously showing off the extent of his connections in the great world to me, and I was impressed. They did seem considerable. He also seemed to be showing me off to his visitors, like some sort of prize pet, which I wished he would not do. It was not Van's attitude that I minded. I just didn't want my cover

blown. This was partly because I simply enjoyed anonymity; it was my mode de voyage . But it was also because I was working illegally. I had applied for a "work permit" from the Department of the Interior, but had not yet received a reply, and to work in the meantime was against the law.

34

Rachel and I decided to throw a party. Our turquoise mansion had seemed from the start like a great party venue. One of the reasons staff parties were held at the vleis was because the houses in Grassy Park were so small, while here we were, living in twelve cavernous rooms all by ourselves (by this time, Peter had been drafted and left for the army, and the sailor had left for the sea). When our landlord came by one night and announced in triumph that the house had been sold, and that we would have to vacate in a month's time, our thoughts about a party were perforce kicked into gear. We settled on a date and I invited all of my colleagues. Most of them said they would come. Except Nelson. He had better things to do that night, of course.

But as the date of our party drew near, other teachers also began to make their excuses. This one had a rugby club meeting. That one had "pickanin trouble." It was apparently an intimidating prospect, being on the wrong side of the line after dark. But I chided and lobbied shamelessly to get people to come anyway. It was touch and go until the afternoon of the party itself. Then I smelled the great pots of curry being cooked up by the girls over in domestic science, and saw the traditional staff room liquor kitty finally starting to grow, and I knew we were over the top.

People started arriving as it got dark. Nobody could believe the size of the house. The vast, bare living room with its fifteen-foot ceiling, the hundred-windowed balcony with the million-dollar view, all the rooms upstairs—it was all fairly galling, while showing the first people to arrive around the house. But soon enough the house was full of people, and music too loud to permit any of the more delicate forms of chagrin. The senior teachers like Napoleon, I noticed, did not turn up, but nearly everyone else did, and they all seemed to bring friends and family, music and food. The night turned into a lekker jol, as everyone said. In my language, the joint rocked.

Moments stand out:

The arrival of Dorian Nero, a lanky, fey teacher of Afrikaans,

with five women in tow who looked like they had all just come from the Hookers' Ball—great, strapping, extravagant creatures in fake furs and jewels, high heels, heavy makeup, streaming flamboyance through our kitchen. To my surprise, everybody seemed to know them. "Dorian's females," someone called them. They were fabulous dancers. One of them turned out to be the older sister of a girl whom I taught.

Cecil Abrahams, inspired perhaps by our view of False Bay, holding a small crowd on the balcony in thrall with tales of his exploits as a scuba diver in the cold dark Cape deeps, including a reenactment which allowed the talents of a biology teacher and aspiring actor named Cornel to shine in the role of a big fish—stalked under tables, behind desks, and between startled dancers before being speared by a mop handle.

Rachel teaching a group of hardened disco dancers some of the moves in her own neo-flamenco style of Southern California rock-'n'-roll dancing.

A young English teacher named Andre angrily explaining to me that the personnel for the Cape Coloured Corps in the South African Army was drawn entirely from the platteland . "It's because they're so poor and so ignorant, they don't know any better. They just want the uniform. They think it looks nice. And the pay—to them, that's a fortune. You won't find a single ou [guy] from Cape Town who would ever join the army!" (I found this speech highly embarrassing, because Meryl was standing nearby with her boyfriend, who was in the navy.)

By popular demand, an a cappella performance by the evening's disc jockey, a dapper young Muslim woodworking teacher named Moegamat, of "Unchained Melody." Moegamat hunched his shoulders, closed his eyes, and filled the house with the deep, corny ultraromantic tune, drawing long sighs and even sniffles from the temporarily hushed assembly.

The landlord's son showed up, along with a number of his friends, including the school inspector's son who worked in the surf shop. Though I had mentioned the party to the surf shop clerk, I was surprised to see these louts, and thought they would be ill at ease in this company. I was wrong. One of them informed me that they had specifically come "for the Coloured chicks," and mirabile dictu I soon saw them ensconced in an upstairs room smoking dagga with several of "Dorian's females."

But the most surprising arrival was that of Mario Da Silva and his wife, Alison. I had invited them but, again, I had not really ex-

pected them to come. Then suddenly there they were, overdressed, nervous, gulping wine and thanking me repeatedly for inviting them, while dark looks were shot their way and some people openly grumbled. Leading the grumblers was Georgina Swart. I had heard her in the staff room at school describe Da Silva as "a fascist," and express her wish that he had "stayed in Mozambique" and got what the Portuguese there had coming to them; Georgina began to flutter with malice when he walked into the party.

But I had talked with Da Silva myself, and didn't believe that he was really all the terrible things people said he was. I didn't even believe he was a refugee from Mozambique. He was, however, undeniably part of the Cape Town Portuguese community, which had, along with other recent immigrants from southern Europe, such as Greeks and Italians, a terrible reputation on the Cape Flats for racism—for "overconforming," as it is said, to the white South African norm. Thus, Da Silva's personal curriculum vitae tended to be obscured, I thought, by communal passions. It didn't help matters that his young wife was Afrikaans, or that they had met while she was working, as Georgina informed me, "as a secretary at C.A.D.!"

Somehow, Mario and Alison got through the evening unscathed. They seemed to be unaware of the general hostility toward them, a blissful ignorance I found fascinating. In retrospect, it seems no greater than my own naiveté, my own earnest belief that a nice big non-racial party was by definition a gesture in the right direction in South Africa. It was a great party, though, one that I was even led to believe went down in Grassy Park High social history. What was more, everyone managed to get home without being arrested, even the handful who did not leave before dawn. The house sustained some minor damage, and some major clutter, but was still salable.

While slowly cleaning the premises the next day, however, I ran across one memory from the night before that clanked unpleasantly: Meryl saying that some of our mutual students had mentioned to her my syllabus innovations. They sounded wonderful to her, she said, but she had heard that they did not sound so wonderful to some of our senior colleagues. If Meryl was hearing that, my status at school was shakier than I had supposed.

35

Meryl was right. The tide of objection to my little classroom reforms was definitely rising. One teacher took it upon herself to tell me that there were "paid police informers" among the children in every class at Grassy Park High. I found that hard to believe. Yet I did seem to be on a collision course with the school administration over my neglect of the government syllabus, and I was not at all sure how I should handle that confrontation.

One thing I could not do, I decided, was quit. Apparently, some terrific percentage of the white teachers at black schools did so in the course of the year—and a good number of black teachers did as well. For the children, the short-term result of all these departures was, of course, a major disruption in the presentation of a subject, even when a replacement could be quickly found, which they normally could not. All the projects and assignments undertaken by a class, all the monitoring of individual problems and progress, were tossed into the air—and generally out the window. This was why Napoleon said he was so intent on the standardizing of teaching, to minimize this problem. The more widespread effect of these random interruptions was more diffidence, more alienation, on the part of the students. Why work very hard for, or get very involved with, a particular teacher, when he or she might disappear tomorrow? The message received by the students was: Nobody, not even our teachers, takes our education seriously.

It was a particularly insidious syndrome, I thought, and it forced me to decide, quite soon after being hired at Grassy Park High, that, no matter what, I had to teach the year out. My resolve on this point was redoubled when the teacher in the classroom next to mine quit, and his classes spent the next two months doing nothing, because no new teacher could be found. In time, too, I had another incentive to finish the year. Because they were not learning the prescribed syllabus, my students would be in serious trouble if I were not around to prepare, administer, and mark their final examinations.

36

Rachel, having met by now many of my colleagues and students, marked my enthusiasm for my work, and discovered no more interest-

ing employment in Cape Town, found her aversion to teaching much eroded. She paid another visit to our kindly school inspector and the next day went to work in a high school near where Nelson lived. She seemed to hit it off well with her students. Yet she did not last a week. The principal of the school where she was teaching suspended her with the explanation that her papers were not in order. Though she had applied for a work permit, she had not yet received one. The principal would try to keep the job open for her while she waited, he said.

Mr. Van den Heever had been less sticky, and less self-protective—he knew I didn't have a work permit either. But as the weeks passed and no response came from the government to my application, I had begun to worry. Rachel's suspension only increased my nervousness. Then, one day in April, I received a summons from the Coloured Affairs Department, relayed by a glum-faced Van den Heever, to an immediate appearance at their offices in town. Yes, said the principal, I should simply leave my classes without a teacher. I drove into the city with an unquiet heart.

C.A.D.'s offices were out on the reclaimed land known as the Foreshore, a bleak place of empty freeways and gigantic new government buildings of a blockish, minatory architecture. I rode the elevator to the tenth floor of one of them, and proceeded, as instructed, to the office of a Mr. Loubser.

Loubser was a bureaucrat, middle-aged, not unfriendly, with the pencil-thin mustache still favored by many Afrikaners and a thick Afrikaans accent. I sipped instant coffee from a Styrofoam cup and he asked questions. His questions were wide-ranging. He wanted to know not only why I had come to South Africa, what I thought of the country, how I liked teaching at Grassy Park High, and so on, but all about my family, my previous jobs, my education, my taste in films and music. I began to think I was really in trouble. Then, without warning, Loubser lowered the boom: "Mr. Finnegan, do you have a work permit?"

I looked him in the eye and said, "Yes."

He paused for a second, then went on with his questions. I couldn't believe he believed me. I hadn't found my desperate little lie the least bit convincing. Now I expected a deputation from the Security Police to come through the door any moment to take me off for some real questioning. But it turned out that the purpose of this interview, apart from Loubser's desire "to meet this American ou who wants to teach in our colored schools," was simply to help C.A.D. evaluate my

professional qualifications so that they could determine my salary.

Loubser had received my transcripts from the American colleges I had attended, and needed some of the information translated into South African terms. Dazed with relief, I was happy to oblige.

But convincing Loubser that "Studies in the Romantic Imagination" was equivalent to the local English I, or that the courses I had taken in oceanography, astronomy, geology, and so on amounted to something like Geography I, proved hopeless. He was completely nonplussed by the colorful farrago of American higher education. I left the C.A.D. offices resigned to a lousy salary.

A week or two later, I finally heard from the Department of the Interior. I went back to the Foreshore, to the Immigration Office, and presented my passport. The obese young woman behind the window perused some papers, then stamped them all violently and handed back my passport.

"Your request for work visa is denied," she said. "You must leave the Republic within six days from today."

Remonstration was useless. When I asked to speak to her superior, the woman behind the window offered to call a guard to throw me out. I left, feeling stricken. I did not want to leave my job, leave my classes, just like that, not at all. I spent the evening drinking heavily. At some point, I made a resolution not to take this thing lying down. The next morning, while feeling slightly less indomitable, I started phoning Pretoria.

Again and again, I got lost in endless telephone labyrinths, shunted from clerk to clerk to dial tone. Nobody had ever heard of me, and they never told work permit applicants the reasons their applications were denied, anyway. Then, just when all had begun to seem lost, I was connected with someone who described a little-used appeals process in these cases. If I could get certain forms completed and letters written by my prospective employer (former employer was more like it, I thought—my classes were at that very moment no doubt shrugging their collective shoulders and figuring I was history, one more jive-ass vanishing teacher), testifying to my absolute indispensability and their extensive unsuccessful efforts to find a qualified South African for the post, then I just might be allowed to appeal the department's decision. This was my straw, clearly. I clutched at it and sped to the Foreshore for the forms.

To my great surprise and everlasting gratitude, Mr. Van den Heever went along with the appeal. He signed a letter, which he had me write, all about how wonderful I was and how desperately these

poor children needed me. He also said, with an air of weary, Machiavellian authority, that he would see that C.A.D. did not interfere with me.

My luck held as I returned to the Immigration Office and found on duty behind the window a different young woman, who accepted the appeal forms without a snarl and said they would let me know. Did I still need to be out of the country by Tuesday, I wondered? No, she said, that would not be necessary. I left before she could change her mind and managed to teach my last class of the day.

But now everything felt different. Surely C.A.D. would discover any day that I didn't have a work permit and sack me. Or Immigration would find out I was already working and chuck me out of the country. Or my appeal would simply be denied, and I would be sent packing that way. It made for a type of insecurity that undermines one's life at every level. You're reluctant to turn in a roll of film for processing because you may not be around to pick it up. You don't buy the big jar of mayonnaise because you may not be around long enough to eat it. I had sent for a box of clothes from home, and now I worried that it would arrive too late. Most important, it was difficult to plan weeks and months of coordinated lessons for my classes when my tenure suddenly felt best measured in days.

As it turned out, I was still around when the box of clothes arrived. They weren't brand-new, and they didn't all fit, but they instantly quadrupled the size of my professional wardrobe and were a big hit with my students, who loudly noted every new article, right down to sir's sleek new socks. I was still around, too, to receive my second month's paycheck. When the principal was handing out the checks in the staff room, John Liberty turned to me, looking up from his check, and said archly, "Taxation without representation! You Americans wouldn't stand for this, would you?" I grimaced in sympathy, and thought about how nasty it truly was to feel at the mercy of a faceless, unfriendly government, slight and self-inflicted as my own predicament was.