PART II
BOYCOTT

37

One cool sunny morning in the middle of April, everything at Grassy Park Senior Secondary School was summarily turned upside down. The spectators became the actors, the authorities stepped aside. In Paulo Freire's famous formulation, the objects became subjects. When I arrived at school that morning, I felt like I'd passed through the looking glass. Homemade banners and painted slogans festooned the walls and fences: WE WANT OUR DEMOCRATIC RIGHTS; DOWN WITH GUTTER EDUCATION; RELEASE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS. The entire student body was marching in a great solid phalanx around the campus, chanting, carrying placards, singing freedom songs. "A PEOPLE . . . UNITED . . . will never be DEFEATED," they roared, over and over, as they paraded. They gave clenched-fist Black Power salutes, and thundered out this Zulu call-and-response:

"Amandla!" (Power!)

"NGAWETHU!" (To the people!)

"A-man-dla!"

"NGA-WE-THU!"

The Grassy Park faculty trailed behind the children in a knot, looking nervous. As I approached, Pieterse looked at me sheepishly, shrugged, and mouthed, "Boycott."

The word had been in the air for weeks. My younger students had pronounced it with a guilty relish. I had privately doubted that they knew what it meant. Now I saw differently. Students of mine waved excitedly from the midst of the marching column, as though they had just boarded a train bound for somewhere wonderful and I was on the platform seeing them off. There was Hester, there was Shireen, and Oscar and Mareldia. I waved back, and soon found myself murmuring along with the rollicking refrain of "Freedom Is Not Free"—You've got to pay the price, you've got to sacrifice . . . . A colleague pointed out

a white car parked across the street from the school. "The Special Branch," he hissed. One of the two men in the car was taking pictures.

After a few circuits of the school's perimeter, the procession turned into the courtyard. A small platform was set up, with a microphone. The principal was accorded the honor of speaking first, and for a few moments it was as if things had suddenly returned to normal. The principal launched into one of his gusty, bilingual sermons about his own long history of dedication to improvement in education. But the students did not behave normally. At first, they were strangely hushed and attentive. Soon, they were openly restive. The principal saw the trend of things and quickly drew his remarks to a close with heated, oblique admonitions to maintain order "lest the tragedies of 1976, when the police killed hundreds of schoolchildren, be repeated!"

A succession of senior students then mounted the platform and gave us progress reports on simultaneous boycotting at other Cape Flats schools. There was a complete stayaway at nearby Parkwood High. There was a mass meeting at the local teacher-training college, with a decision likely to shut it down. More schools were walking out every hour. The boycott had apparently taken the authorities by surprise. These bulletins were crisply delivered, and each drew passionate cheers from the twelve hundred students filling the courtyard—as well as some conspicuous applause from the teachers milling at their flanks. The student speakers displayed a striking poise and seriousness. They did not discuss the planning of the boycott, although it had clearly been extensive, and its architects were now emerging from their anonymity. Notable among these, and obviously a leader, was Clive.

Clive spoke forcefully, articulating the situation in both English and Afrikaans. The boycotting pupils' demand, said Clive, was for full equality in education. Short-term, that meant an end to the drastic disparities in funding among the various racist school systems. Long-term, it meant an end to apartheid in education. The pupils would settle for nothing less than a single, non-racial educational system. These remarks each elicited a tremendous roar from the Grassy Park student body.

Clive urged his audience not to lose perspective, however. These goals would not be achieved overnight, not without struggle and sacrifice, because the government—"the regime," he called it—was deeply committed to their frustration. The boycott of classes was simply a tactic, he said, not an end in itself. The tactic's effectiveness would have to be reappraised continually. For now, it seemed to be the

best available way to focus public attention on the problems of schools. "This is not a holiday from school," Clive insisted, driving each word home. "It is a holiday from brainwashing." Pupils, Clive said, should come to school each day, on time, but they should refuse their normal lessons. Leaving the school grounds, which would provoke confrontation with the police, would not be constructive. Did everyone agree with this plan for the boycott?

A deafening acclamation endorsed the plan.

"Amandla!"

"NGAWETHU!"

After the convocation in the courtyard broke up and the pupils had resumed their marching and singing, I stood and watched my colleagues, who now mostly loitered near the staff room, smoking and chatting. Many of the teachers, I thought, looked smaller today, as though the theft of their authority had physically shrunken them. Napoleon, particularly, seemed lost inside his baggy brown suit. Da Silva and some of the senior teachers looked profoundly disturbed and disgusted; but most of the others just looked uneasy or bored. A few, notably Nelson and Meryl, appeared quietly elated. I joined them. Nelson asked me what I thought, and I said I liked the bit about a holiday from brainwashing.

In fact, I liked a lot more than that. This jubilant, organized defiance was easily the most exciting thing I had seen since coming to South Africa. It was nothing less than life rising up against death. It was also, for me, rather redemptively déjà vu. For I found the badly aged battle cries from my own student days—for "relevance in education" and "power to the people"—rang here in Grassy Park with a fresh significance. And when, later that morning, somebody produced a guitar in a classroom where several dozen of us, students and teachers, had gathered after the principal had dismissed school for the day, I found I could even link arms with my companions and sing Pete Seeger songs without feeling even slightly absurd. It was the sweet African lift and twist that these kids put on the most self-serious liberal lyric. I didn't tell Nelson any of this, though. I asked him what he thought. He said a great deal would depend on how many schools joined the boycott.

38

As it turned out, a very large number of schools indeed joined the boycott.

But the walkout at Grassy Park High would not have been such a bolt from the blue for anyone who had been watching the forces gather for the previous couple of months. At the beginning of February, two thousand parents and pupils had gathered at Regina Mundi Cathedral in Soweto and called for a boycott of schools. That call went unheeded, but two weeks later, one hundred pupils at Mount View High School, a "colored" school on the Cape Flats, did boycott classes for a day to protest their school's poor condition and lack of stationery. Two days after that, eight hundred students at Fezeka High School, in the Cape Flats African township of Guguletu, walked out to protest a textbook shortage, an increase in school fees (and the fact that they had to pay such fees, when white pupils did not), the rules that compelled them to buy and wear "expensive and unnecessary uniforms," and the lack of student representation. The Fezeka principal rejected the pupils' demands, but the community's School Committee was more sympathetic, and after a week of talks the children returned to class.

Then, in the second half of March, pupils and parents from Mount View and Crystal High Schools—both located in an especially desolate section of the Cape Flats known as Hanover Park—held two mass meetings, protesting a number of abuses, including textbook shortages, "teachers' drunkenness, lack of qualification and unreliability," misuse of corporal punishment, and the fact that one of the principals had summoned the Security Police after he found "SWAPO" written on a blackboard. The condition of the Hanover Park schools was infamous—they had simply never been repaired after the 1976 uprising, and resembled, in their pupils' words, "bombed sites." Pleas were made for their reconstruction, along with calls for the resignations of both principals and several "inept" teachers. After attending these meetings, three white teachers at Crystal High were dismissed. On the next school day, students staged a wildcat boycott protesting the dismissals.

All the ferment in February and March in Cape Flats schools occurred around relatively local issues at individual schools. But in the first week of April, after the Hanover Park boycott had been crushed, representatives from a number of Cape Flats high schools—the press reported nineteen, but it was apparently fewer—met and

produced a list of grievances. These still focused on textbook deliveries and the reinstatement of the dismissed teachers, but by the next week, when representatives from twenty schools gathered, the grievances included such items as the disparity in teachers' salaries according to race. At this second meeting, held on April 12, a statement was issued threatening a mass boycott if the pupils' grievances were not redressed within three weeks. Neither the authorities nor the public seemed to take much notice. Two days later, a host of Cape Flats high schools, including Grassy Park High, elected to wait no longer.

39

"We want the same education the white children get," Wayne said.

"That's why we're boycotting."

"Has sir seen their schools? They've got swimming pools and tennis courts," Shaun said. "And tuck shops [school stores] like supermarkets."

"And bioscopes!" (cinemas)

"They learn the truth," Nico said. "They don't get brainwashed like we do."

On the second day of the boycott, when it became obvious that marching, singing, and speeches were not going to be enough to fill the hours, the student leaders at Grassy Park High asked the teachers to join them in establishing an "alternate curriculum." After some hemming and hawing, the faculty decided to accept the offer.

The "alternate curriculum" consisted of a great hodgepodge of subjects suggested by both pupils and teachers. Liberty and Chantal offered to lead workshops on the non-racial sporting movement. Conrad Botha would teach something about computers. Trevor Pieterse volunteered to lecture on the sestigers . Soraya would present a class on women's issues. Meryl would offer some direly needed education on sex and contraception. Nelson, Alex Tate, Georgina Swart, and a fiery little math teacher named Jacob would offer a variety of topics in history and politics, including the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, the fall of Allende's Chile, and divers aspects of South African history, from Khoisan culture to the bantustan policy and the tradition of black resistance. Tate would also teach a student-requested course on rock-'n'-roll music. I was asked to lecture on the United States Bill of Rights.

But working out a schedule for these "awareness sessions," as they were called, took much longer than necessary, I thought. The faculty was clearly glad to have some organizing to do. But just as some teachers seemed ineffably shriveled by the students' boycott of their classes, so the same people at times appeared to have contracted an instant dotage and become incapable of basic organization and decisions. In the end, I got so impatient that I jumped up and started assigning people topics and venues myself, and drew up a comprehensive schedule of lectures and workshops. This schedule was ratified immediately by all concerned, and run off on the staff room mimeograph. That it was not my place to impose my solutions in such a situation, that anything else might have been going on in those meetings besides a simple act of scheduling, seems not to have occurred to me at the time. I was just eager to get to work. Naturally, my Swiss-clock schedule was followed for less than one day, and I don't think I saw a copy of it other than my own after the second day.

As "awareness sessions" got under way, those teachers who could adjust to the newly unstructured environment—and they were by no means all of the Grassy Park faculty—found themselves flattered by classrooms full of children rapt with the much-repeated conviction that only now, finally, were they receiving something that could legitimately be called education, only now were their teachers revealing to them the important things they knew. If anyone became bored, they were free to get up and leave, and if they distracted their fellows, the teacher was free to send them away. There was always a march, a meeting, or a sing-along which they could go join. Education had been liberated on several fronts at once.

During the first days of the boycott, I taught, besides the Bill of Rights, mass vocabulary lessons. For a whole new political lexicon was filling the air, in speeches, manifestos, and pamphlets, and I had discovered, upon questioning, that few of our students could define oppression, racism, or class . It was a strange sensation, looking out across a room full of eager young faces in South Africa and saying, "What do we mean by 'liberation'? Koos?" Or, "Mieta, can you give us an example of 'indoctrination'?" Or, "Amy, use 'democratic' in a sentence, showing that you know what it means." From definitions we went on to the functions of inferior, "gutter" education. "Cheap labor!" Elroy cried, parroting the phrase on many a placard. "It is to make us stupid," a boy whom I did not know announced. Many children seemed to agree with the dubious proposition that the education provided at "white" schools was something wonderful that they were

being denied. I tried to suggest that white schoolchildren were also receiving a narrow, passive, and politically censored schooling, but ran into a wall of vaguely resentful skepticism. Our students did not want to be told what they wanted, not this week.

One problem I did not face, though it bedeviled a large number of my colleagues from the beginning of the boycott, was the reproach implicit in the constant denunciation of the normal school curriculum issued by boycott leaders and quickly picked up by the mass of students. How could their teachers have conspired to waste their time with that government propaganda? At Grassy Park High, there were few cases of direct confrontation, but the humiliation of individual teachers was reportedly common at other Cape Flats schools, and the atmosphere everywhere was thick with newfound faculty conscience. Needless to say, I heard no more about my previous deviations from the syllabus. The confrontation with the authorities that I had been dreading had been postponed indefinitely by the advent of this infinitely more serious confrontation.

A whole new version of South African history was available in the awareness sessions. Had the children been taught that blacks and whites arrived in South Africa at more or less the same time? Now they were free to learn that the Khoisan had lived in the country for thousands of years and that the Bantu-speaking groups had arrived fourteen hundred years before the first whites settled at the Cape. Had they learned that the indigenous people were in a state of ceaseless tribal warfare before their conquest by the Europeans? Now they could discover the actual contours of the various societies and their conflicts in preconquest South Africa, with the "bloodthirsty despots" and campaigns of destruction that dominated the official history now counterbalanced by the facts—facts that showed, among other things, that autocratic leadership was virtually unknown south of the Limpopo before the arrival of the Europeans, and that low population densities had actually made violent confrontations between tribes relatively rare. It seemed to interest our students especially to hear that the 200,000 Cape Khoisan had not passively suffered their extermination by the Europeans, but that the indigenes had in fact kept the Portuguese off their coasts for 150 years with their ferocity, routed a would-be English convict settlement at Table Bay, and waged a war against the Dutch East India Company's fort at the Cape which very nearly succeeded in destroying it in 1659.

There were so many myths to explode! That the Great Trek had

been the result of the Afrikaners' resentment of British colonial rule at the Cape, for example, was true, but the key element of that resentment was all but invisible in the history textbooks. The fact was that the Boers refused to accept, even in principle, legal equality between blacks and whites. They trekked, in the words of their leader Piet Retief, "to preserve proper relations between masters and servants." Of course, no black South African could be jarred by the revelation that the Boers treasured white supremacy. Still, it seemed important to be setting the historical record straight right there in a government school.

There were also many local myths that came in for debunking. In Cape Town, even black people were prone to talking about the good old days before 1948. But apartheid's roots went much deeper than mere National Party policy. The Native Lands Act, for instance, passed in 1913, before the National Party even existed, had been arguably the single most devastating piece of legislation in South African history, forcing the evictions of millions of black tenant squatters from white farms and directly causing mass starvation. And it had been tacitly approved by the British crown, which ignored deputations of black South Africans protesting this "sickening procedure of extermination." One could keep going back through South African history: to the systematic slaughter of the San in the eighteenth century, to the segregationist edicts of the Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth century. White supremacism had been born in South Africa not in 1948, but in 1652, with the arrival of the first permanent European colonists.

The story of black resistance—in tribal units until the late nineteenth century, and in modern political organizations since the early twentieth century—a history that was entirely ignored or misrepresented in the prescribed history textbooks, also became the subject of many an awareness session. The forbidden names and acronyms were spoken, loudly and often: ANC, PAC, BPC, Bambata, Dube, Gandhi, Abdurahman, Plaatje, Kadalie, Sisulu, Luthuli, Mda, Mandela, Tambo, Mbeki, Ngoyi, Sobukwe, Biko. These sessions were always led by the same few teachers and tended to draw the same few older, more sophisticated students, yet they seemed to me to be the most essential kind of education, taking place exactly where it was most needed, and I found them strangely moving. An understanding of the tradition that this boycott advanced was absolutely critical, I believed. In a situation like South Africa's, history is no lifeless palimpsest; it is the chart of possibilities.

Scrawled on a blackboard: "The classrooms of the oppressed are not for intellectual cowards." On another blackboard, a famous statement by the Cape Town "colored" leader, Dr. A. Abdurahman, in protest against the 1905 School Bill: "We are excluded not because we are disloyal, not because it has been proved we are inferiorly endowed and unfit for higher education, but because although sons of the soil, God's creatures and British subjects, we are after all black." Alongside this quotation, in blistering contrast, was scribbled one of H. F. Verwoerd's infamous dicta: "If the Native in South Africa today is being taught to expect that he will live his adult life under a policy of equal rights, he is making a big mistake." And beneath that, from a former administrator of the Transvaal: "We must strive to win the fight against the non-White in the classroom instead of losing it on the battlefield." At Grassy Park High, for the moment anyway, the white supremacists seemed to be losing this historic struggle.

"So what do you think of it so far?" Clive asked me.

"It's amazing."

Clive had been in constant motion since the boycott began. (Before that, I realized in retrospect, he had not been around school much.) We had just run into each other in the courtyard outside the staff room. In an upstairs classroom, children were singing "Solidarity Forever" and "We Shall Not Be Moved."

"Have you been getting many people at your awareness sessions?"

"Standing room only."

Clive laughed. "They all want to listen to your American accent." He grew serious. "But we're quite concerned that some of the Standard Sixes and Sevens may start bunking [playing hooky]. So we really must keep them busy. Simply explaining the issues is not always enough. You teach Sixes and Sevens. What is your impression of their level of awareness of what's going on?"

"It's hard to say. Some of them seem a bit lost. Most of them seem to grasp the basic issues. They're all looking to you and the other matrics to tell them what to think and what to do."

Clive shook his head. "It's so strange. There's all levels. From little kids who think this is a holiday, to some others, even including a few on the SRC, who think this is it , that everything will just snowball from here. You know, the workers will come out next, the country will be paralyzed, and the regime will fall. Just because we don't have the cops storming in here, they think the cops are afraid of us."

We both snorted, then both glanced reflexively at the entrance to the school, where the riot police had still not gathered.

40

The boycott spread rapidly all that week. By Friday, thirty high schools and 25,000 students in the Western Cape were refusing their lessons, and on Saturday representatives from sixty-one different Cape Town black educational institutions met to discuss strategy. This meeting resulted in a list of specific demands for equality in education, the formation of the Committee of 61 (later the Committee of 81), and a call for a national schools boycott. The following week, that call was heeded by some one hundred thousand students throughout the country. In Cape Town, the boycott was a complete success almost immediately. Every "colored" high school on the Cape Flats went out on strike, as did all the teacher-training colleges and the University of the Western Cape. And in the weeks that followed, the boycott continued to spread, even into black primary schools, until it finally involved an estimated two hundred thousand students in every corner of South Africa.

The government's first reaction was cautious. "It is not necessary for them to go into all these hysterics," said Coloured Affairs' chief inspector of schools on the first day of boycotting. "If they want student councils, they only have to ask their principals." A disinformation campaign was quickly started up, however. Within three days, anonymous pamphlets condemning the boycott began to appear at Cape Flats schools.

As the boycott continued, official statements became both ominous and placatory. Marais Steyn, Minister of Coloured Relations, told Parliament that "agitators" and "propaganda agents" were behind the boycotts, yet he also professed to understand that the students had legitimate grievances. "Agitators are using the problems that do exist for their own political purposes," he said. Steyn's own relations with the "Coloured population group" of which he was nominally minister were foredoomed by the fact that he held a second cabinet portfolio, as Minister of Community Development. That post made him the chief enforcer of Group Areas. Steyn's protestations of sensitivity to the pupils' grievances were undermined, in any case, when the pupils stayed out a second week and Steyn abruptly threatened to close the schools. This threat was widely condemned, and by

the time the Minister was prepared to offer to meet with student representatives, the Committee of 81 was refusing to talk to him because he was "not elected democratically."

Prime Minister P. W. Botha began to get in on the act after the second week of the boycott, and his threats had a distinctly heavier tone. "No self-respecting State can allow agitators to misuse schoolchildren's uniforms to challenge the authority of the State," Botha said. "If the State is challenged and it hits back, it will use all the power at its disposal."

The white opposition displayed more sympathy and comprehension. On the same day that Botha's menacing remarks were published, the Cape Times declared—quite accurately, I thought—that the school boycott was simply "the community giving notice that the rising generation will not work the machinery of their own oppression." In Parliament, an opposition spokesman warned the government that a "powder keg" was developing on the Cape Flats, a situation comparable to Soweto's in 1976.

The government, despite its leader's bellicose talk, clearly did not want that powder keg to ignite. When student marches ventured off school grounds, they were dispersed by the police with tear gas and baton charges. But the children for the most part stayed inside their schools, and the police showed an uncharacteristic restraint. Neither side wanted a repeat of the massacres of 1976.

41

Although teachers conducted, for the most part, the awareness sessions at Grassy Park High, the boycott remained the students' show. It was curious that their great activation should have come in the form of a refusal; it was wondrous to see the energies that refusal liberated. Student government—formerly a pallid bureaucratic exercise—was suddenly a vital reality. Most of the meetings were held in camera, but the extent of grass-roots participation was obvious from the number of reports being delivered to classes from delegates to various committees. It was democracy in action, and full of pleasant surprises. I was struck, for instance, by the way 6A6 chose one of their least prepossessing classmates, a sickly, cozening boy named Myron, as their envoy to the schoolwide Students' Representative Council. It was not easy for a Standard Six student to follow all that was said at an SRC meeting, and some junior delegates apparently did not under-

stand that they were expected to make a complete report back to their classmates. But Myron seemed to rise to the occasion, taking his responsibilities very seriously and doing a creditable job. This, I thought, was a fine example, too, of the great and sane socializing process that went on at Grassy Park High, in which the least agreeable kids were almost instinctively drawn into the center of the group for rehabilitation.

In the great cracks of free time provided by the boycott, and watered by the prevailing excitement, a guerrilla theater bloomed. Plays written and produced by students were performed in the classrooms, in the courtyard, and out on the playing field. Broad humor at the expense of the authorities was a favorite theme, and certain student actors were much in demand for their roaring, pantagruelian imitations of Security Police officers. These buffoons, who saw "communists" behind every bush and schoolbook and lived to torment noble, quick-witted boycott leaders, were invariably destroyed by The People—a part usually taken by the audience itself.

I learned a lot from watching these productions. One play, for example, was about what would happen in downtown offices and factories on a "rainy Monday"—the local euphemism for a general strike. The white bosses stumbled around helplessly, cursing the "hotnots." They could not even make themselves a cup of tea. One obnoxious woman's misery seemed to be a source of special glee for the audience. I asked someone about her.

"She's the Jewish lady," I was told.

I was shocked. Someone else explained that Jews owned most of the textile mills in which Grassy Park women worked. Jewish women were often put in charge of factories owned by their husbands, I was told, and they had acquired terrible reputations in the black community as ignorant, tyrannical, and unfair bosses. "They're even worse than die boere, " my informant claimed. Hence the cruel caricature. I still didn't like the sound of the taunts thrown at the "Jewish lady," especially those thrown by some Muslim students, but the play was a smash hit which ran in various forms for weeks.

Another popular play, put on by 6A6, depicted the travails of a boy from the platteland whose family had just moved to Cape Town. His new classmates refused to sit beside him, claiming they could still smell the cow dung on his shoes. He was thoroughly miserable. Then he saved one of his classmates from a burning building, and the other children came to see the error of their attitudes. Although a peroration about the need for "solidarity of the oppressed" followed this

drama, it was not the play's message per se that I found interesting, so much as the fact that it was conceived and staged by 6A6, in a spirit of cooperation and creativity that I would never have imagined my poor register class could muster. 6A6 seemed to have found, through the boycott, the solidarity it had so conspicuously lacked. "All the children are proud to be in 6A6 now," Hester told me. "The other classes ask to see our play."

Yet I noticed that Aubrey, who should by rights have been playing himself as the country kid, was not even in the play, but stood off at the edge of the laughing audience, tight-lipped and ignored. The depth of local prejudice against rural people was no fiction, and the healthy process that drew a Myron into the bosom of the group was clearly still not working for an Aubrey, despite the catalyst of a rising political consciousness.

Student discussion groups thrived. These were generally not open to teachers, although I was sometimes drawn into groups that were meeting in my classroom. One day, some pupils were debating whether to demand the abolition of school uniforms. As I had gone to schools that did not require uniforms, I was consulted. I said I thought the abolition of uniforms might backfire, in that the children from more prosperous families would be able to wear a different outfit each day, while poorer kids would have to wear the same cheap clothes all the time, which might embarrass them. This notion set off a storm of argument. The group began considering a demand that uniforms be kept compulsory but provided free to the students by the school, since the cost of uniforms was already prohibitive for poorer families. When they could not seem to reach a decision on sending this idea to the SRC, I suggested they take a vote. This suggestion—which I made often, in various situations—went, as usual, nowhere.

I seemed to be the only person in Grassy Park who regarded voting as the ideal way to weigh issues and make decisions. It was, after a certain amount of debate, my answer to nearly every tactical question. "Come on, let's vote on it." Sometimes students would try to oblige me. But if two-thirds voted one way, they would invariably raise their fists and intimidate the other one-third into voting the same way. No amount of my explaining the sacred principles of direct democracy could dissuade them from this behavior. The principle involved, I was told, was simply the protection of their "unity." At the time, I wrote off this attitude to the lifelong conditioning of an anti-democratic society like South Africa's. Later, I started to see how, under the boycott circumstances, "consensual" decision making

might actually have its advantages over the opinion poll model I had brought with me intact "all the way from California." In the face of their overwhelmingly powerful foe, a high degree of "unity" was indeed a sine qua non among the striking students.

That unity was represented throughout the Cape Peninsula by the Committee of 81. The Committee's membership was perforce anonymous, though it was well known that our school's representative was a small, quiet matric named Elliot. Elliot seemed a curious choice for the job, as he was not among the natural leaders in his class, until one realized that that was precisely his qualification. Charismatic students like Clive were already drawing enough government attention to themselves. They did not need any more. The Committee of 81's deliberations were a subject of terrific interest not only to the tens of thousands of students they directly concerned, but also to the press and to the government—particularly to the Security Police. Remarkably, the Committee managed to continue functioning effectively through the first several weeks of the boycott.

"We learned our lessons in 1976," one member of the Grassy Park High SRC told me. "That was an uncoordinated revolt. Now we take every precaution we can to avoid bloodshed and arrests, especially the arrests of our leaders. The Special Branch tries to infiltrate every group that opposes the government, and learn their plans and tactics. Well, we have studied the government's methods and learned their tactics."

I got a glimpse of the resultant countertactics one evening during the first week of the boycott, while giving Clive a lift to a meeting. He was very mysterious about our destination and kept an eye on the rearview mirror. Suddenly, he told me to pull over, jumped out of the car, yelled "Thanks," jumped in another car going in the opposite direction, and was gone.

From the beginning, the more sophisticated students among the boycott leaders tried to stress that the boycott was not directed primarily toward the government, and was not ultimately interested in "concessions." Rather, they said, it was directed toward the black community, as education and encouragement. The boycott's main goal, according to this view, was to lift the mass political awareness and morale. The students carried their message directly to the community at mass meetings.

The first such meeting in the Cape was held in Grassy Park after the first week of boycotting. Seven hundred parents and pupils filled

an old church hall on a chilly Thursday evening. I went along with Alex Tate, although we had been warned that the Security Police would surely have observers present, and that if we were identified we would lose our jobs. We saw only a handful of our colleagues at the meeting. But I would not have missed it.

The atmosphere in the hall was urgent and purposeful, though the defiance in the air was far more shadowed and nerve-racked than anything we saw during rallies at school. A stage full of students and a few community leaders ran things. After a brief, solemn welcome from the chairman of the local ratepayer's association, the meeting was opened to the floor.

A heavy, nervous, middle-aged woman in a flowered doek (head scarf) rose. She began to describe, in halting kombuis, the anguish suffered by the mothers who worked with her in a factory in town, as they worried about the safety of their children. "We don't know what might happen to them. There's nothing we can do. I tell my daughter to be careful, but she only tells me the children know what they're doing. How can they know, when they're so young? She says we must take chances to win our freedom, but I don't like to see my children take the chance of being hurt. The other mothers feel the same way. We respect what the pupils are trying to do with their boycott, but we are afraid."

For the next hour, a parade of other parents expressed similar feelings. Some blamed themselves for the situation. "If only we had fought harder ourselves," one man said, his voice shaking with emotion. "If we had not let the government get away with apartheid all these years, our kids would not be in this danger today. We let keeping our jobs become more important than winning our freedom."

The fears of parents notwithstanding, support for the boycott among those at the meeting appeared to be unanimous. Testimonials to the courage and maturity of the pupils were offered up by speaker after speaker. Some of the remarks were very moving. Slowly, discussion turned to the statement that would be issued after the meeting. Calls for everything from classroom repairs to a universal franchise in a non-racial democratic South Africa were proposed, and their merits debated.

"If we demand too much, we will be ignored."

"If the people speak with one powerful and resolute voice, they will not be able to ignore it!"

"They can accuse us of using the children's boycott for our own political ends."

"This boycott is about political rights, not new dustbins. It is a disgrace that these poor children must lead us!"

Some of the participants in this parley, none of whom I recognized, began to display an extraordinary eloquence in English. Bejeweled phrases, packed in tremendous Victorian sentences, tripped off their tongues. Who were these people, I wondered. They were obviously not humble laborers, nor was this the first time they had declaimed in public about the iniquity of apartheid. One old fellow, with an immaculate white mustache and a professorial manner, proposed the most high-flown, antique rhetoric of all, richly studded with phrases like "our inalienable rights and irreducible dignity" and "the sectionalist oppression of this illegitimate neo-colonialist regime." The bulk of his pronunciamento was ultimately adopted. While I didn't know who stood for what, it was clear even to me that these highly polished speakers represented constituencies larger than just themselves and any children they happened to have in school. The government's allegations about the boycott being the work of "agitators" were stabs in the dark, but the truth was that virtually all avenues of black political expression had been closed off by the government, that schools were one of the few places where blacks could even congregate, and that class boycotts for that reason did express the frustration and anger of not just the students, but of their parents and of the black community as a whole. The anonymous orators who rose at the mass meeting in Grassy Park were actually some of the old-style politicians of the Cape Flats—some of those, that is, who were not banned, dead, in prison, or in exile.

Yet the night belonged, as the season belonged, to the students. They explained the issues and boycott strategies to their parents. They put out the most affecting pleas of all to the community at large to join "the struggle," as they called it. Their self-confidence, their idealism, were so impressive that you could literally see it bring tears to the eyes of their elders. And before the meeting broke up, several student speakers, in an effort to reassure worried parents, took the trouble to emphasize again the point that this was not 1976. "We know what we're doing this time," a frail boy from my religious instruction class declared. "Nineteen seventy-six was reactive . That was just an explosion, a response to the government's provocations. This boycott, this uprising, is proactive . It's as well planned and well controlled as we can make it."

As if to throw a cloak of safety over this fragile-sounding proclamation, someone in the back of the hall began just then to sing, in a

high, clear voice, "Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika" ("God Bless Africa"), and seven hundred voices immediately rose into the slow, beautiful pan-African anthem of the liberation struggle.

The statement issued to the press after the Grassy Park community meeting was a strongly worded endorsement of the pupils' boycott. And an avalanche of expressions of "total support" for the striking students followed over the next two weeks, issued by black civic, religious, and teachers' organizations throughout the country.

I found this unanimity, and the militancy of many of the resolutions passed, surprising and exciting. Then I began to notice, in the remarks of various "moderate" black leaders, a recurring concern that "no one should be able to point the finger and say we did not do our part." That didn't strike me as the most inspiring motive for involvement. It made it sound like supporting the students was simply de rigueur in black South Africa at the moment.

Certainly, not everyone in Grassy Park had been at that first community meeting singing "Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika." The next day at school, while watching some kids marching around the campus perimeter chanting, I noticed a tiny old lady suddenly cross the street, wade into the crowd of students, and pull out a little girl by the hair. The old woman began slapping the girl, calling her "cheeky" and "naughty." The other students tried to intervene, hastening to explain to the woman that this disobedience was an important part of the struggle. But the woman just glared at them all with a vast disgust, turned on her heel, and set off in the direction of home, dragging her weeping granddaughter behind her.

No teacher at Grassy Park High spoke out publicly against the boycott during its first weeks, although there were a number who were obviously not pleased by developments and took little or no interest in "awareness sessions." Mario Da Silva sat in his empty classroom reading. Ivan Grobbelaar began spending his time at the racetrack in Kenilworth. A Muslim teacher of Afrikaans named Khatieb passed his days selling car insurance on the school phone. Two older ladies who taught religion and sewing ensconced themselves with their knitting on a couch in the staff room, where they could be heard muttering darkly about the way things were going.

Senior staff with somewhere to hide generally hid there. The principal retreated to his office and was not seen for days at a time. Vice-principal Africa disappeared into his tiny office under the steps

of the new building. Pasqualine buried himself in the back of the dark, narrow book room which was his responsibility and lair. (And students did cruel but hilarious imitations in their ubiquitous street-theater groups of a mad old man groping fearfully out of a cave of books, quickly bewailing his father's crucifixion, and scurrying back in his hole.) Napoleon was perhaps the most pathetic figure of all. The former lion of geography now darted from his classroom to the staff room, and seemed plagued by a host of new nervous tics. The awareness sessions he offered were suspiciously close to normal geography lessons, and were not well attended. Napoleon's extensive collection of canes was nowhere in evidence these boycott days, and no one seemed to want to hear about his medieval monarchies, either. I was later told that, during the 1976 uprising, Napoleon had been assaulted by a matric who ran amok with a panga. He had escaped that attack uninjured, while the student ended up in a mental hospital; but Napoleon's present uneasiness was certainly understandable, as he moved among hundreds of newly "empowered" students who remembered the pain of his beatings.

"No one expects anything different from some of these reactionaries," Nelson said. "But I'm very disappointed in Grobbelaar."

"You are?"

I couldn't imagine why Nelson would ever have expected anything more from the man I considered the original sleazemaster. We were interrupted by a student request for help with a poster. Nelson's classroom was a veritable factory of posters, placards, and banners these days. Jars of blue, red, green, black, and yellow paint lined one wall; children knelt on the floor over squares of cardboard, long rolls of butcher paper, and sheets of white cloth, writing the system stinks and be realistic not racialistic and skin colour isn't everything and biko lives and freedom now. In one corner, a portable phonograph played Nelson's well-worn Victor Jara album (¡Un Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido! ). In another corner, some students were planning a collection to finance the rental of a film. We had already seen The Story of Miss Jane Pittman, about an American slave and her emancipation, and If, about a student revolt in England. Which film did I think they should get for the next showing, Viva Zapata or Nicholas and Alexandra? Both had proved extremely popular at other boycotting schools. I voted for Nicholas and Alexandra . No, I didn't think I wanted to teach an awareness session on the life of Zapata. I hadn't even seen the movie.

My awareness session on the Bill of Rights had mainly drawn

older students, and had been less a lecture than a discussion. Some interesting things had come out, as we talked about the meaning of each amendment and its relevance, if any, to the South African situation—notably, one boy's comment, "I think the whites will one day wish they had made something like a Bill of Rights here, because they are going to need it themselves." I had since led awareness sessions on the disinvestment campaign in America and Western Europe, and the anti-nuclear movement. Meanwhile, my daily vocabulary lessons had evolved into newspaper-reading sessions. A group of students and I would gather in my classroom each morning and read that day's Cape Times together, taking time to analyze and criticize articles and editorials. This was a wonderful way to combine lessons in vocabulary, reading comprehension, and "current events"—especially since we ourselves constituted much of those very events these days. That is, the boycott did. I urged students to consider other ways, other perspectives from which, certain stories could be covered, and they seemed quick to grasp the concept of news selection and its ideological elements.

Nelson returned from his poster conference. I asked him, "What did you expect from Grobbelaar?"

"That he would show some solidarity with the students. After all, he's not one of these teachers who only cares about keeping his job, not with the way he behaves."

Nelson had a point.

"He's almost as temporary here as you are," Nelson said, and laughed. "Have you still heard nothing from Pretoria?"

I hadn't.

"Well, I'm sure the students will add your reinstatement to their demands after you're thrown on a plane going to Miami."

Nelson laughed. I didn't. The three white teachers whose dismissal had sparked protests at Crystal High had not been reinstated. In fact, the more I learned about their case, the more nervous it made me. The Crystal High principal had fired them at a Friday afternoon staff meeting, in front of forty-eight other teachers. According to the Cape Times, "He said that the school had been a happy one last year but this had changed when these teachers arrived." The principal alleged that the teachers had been "subverting the minds of pupils with politics and ideologies to bring about chaos and instability in South Africa." Coloured Affairs' local office told the teachers they were fired because qualified "colored" teachers had been found for their jobs, but when two of them applied for new posts, Coloured

Affairs' head office unwittingly offered them their old jobs back! After this mistake was discovered, the offer was hastily withdrawn. But no teachers had yet taken their places at Crystal High. As if all this were not enough, much was being made in the press over the fact that one of the teachers involved was "English." Although she had graduated from the University of Cape Town, had a three-year-old child who was born in South Africa, and owned a house in Cape Town, this foreign political agitator carried a British passport. A few weeks after her dismissal, the government abruptly revoked her temporary residence permit and ordered her to leave the country.

I wandered out of Nelson's room and across the courtyard. A group of children was singing "This land is your land, this land is my land" in the corner of the courtyard, transposing South African geography onto the original lyrics: "From the great Limpopo to Robben Island. . ." As I passed, Charmaine suddenly stepped from the group and into my path, singing "This land is my land," staring me straight in the eye, and pointing to herself on the "my." I pushed past her and continued on to New Room 16. There was only one person in my classroom when I got there: Wayan. He had his face buried in a science fiction paperback, and he started sharply when I entered. I motioned to him to relax and keep reading. Wayan had been mostly hiding in books since the boycott began.

42

The boycott was a time-honored tactic of black resistance in South Africa. Bus boycotts, school boycotts, consumer boycotts—some of the best-known episodes of the freedom struggle had been boycotts. When I arrived in Cape Town, people were still talking about the successful boycott the year before by black consumers of the products of two local firms—a pasta manufacturer that had fired workers for joining a union, and a potato chips maker that had sponsored "racial" sporting events. Black school boycotts had been part of the South African scene since the first slave school was established in 1658 and its students ran away and hid in a cave on Table Mountain, refusing bribes of rum and tobacco to return. In 1955, the ANC had organized a school boycott to protest the introduction of Bantu Education. Some seven thousand students were expelled during that boycott, and over one hundred teachers were dismissed. Alternative schools were established, but to avoid prosecution under laws that prohibited unregistered schools,

these had to be called "cultural clubs," and no chalk or blackboards could be on the premises. The ANC schools were harassed by the police—there were raids, beatings, arrests, and bannings—and chronically short of funds. The schools collapsed completely after Sharpeville.

"Boycotts are exercises in non-collaboration," Nelson said. "They increase the self-awareness of the oppressed as oppressed." This was no doubt true, but there were also glaring problems, I thought, with the boycott as a tactic. For one thing, its repeated use only underlined the weakness of blacks in South Africa. People could refuse their schooling, they could deny themselves potato chips or transport, but these were such passive gestures, and in themselves exerted nothing but the most localized pressure. School boycotts were especially problematic. Despite the seemingly widespread recognition among blacks that the education provided by the government was flawed, that it was designed not to teach people to think but to teach them to obey, there was a tremendous desire for education, any education, among the broad mass of black South Africans. This desire had been built up through generations of poverty and illiteracy in the midst of Western-style prosperity, and even if it was not being expressed publicly during the first weeks of the 1980 boycott, it formed a heavy undercurrent of anxiety, especially among parents, who desperately wanted their children not to waste their chance to get the education most of them had never received. Education was seen as the ladder to a higher standard of living. By many blacks, it was seen as the freedom road itself.

The boycott leaders were, I discovered, way ahead of me in their thinking about the limitations of the boycott as a tactic. Although strategy meetings were held in secret, their content could often be inferred from the dozens of broadsheets and pamphlets, anonymous and otherwise, that circulated throughout the boycott. These pamphlets—one imagined the feverish, clandestine writing and wrangling, the midnight printing on school and company mimeographs, the bundles hidden in the trunks of cars, the children with packets carried under their jackets, the thudding of hearts as police cars passed—made interesting reading. "The boycott is not an end in itself," one of them declared. "The boycott can achieve short term victories. These are important because they give students confidence in themselves, teach them through practical experience the basic lessons of organization and create the climate wherein political consciousness can flourish."

Many of the pamphlets dealt with the shortcomings of "gutter education," and advocated an alternative, "education for liberation." "We must be prepared to fight for a just and equal society. We must become actively engaged in the fight for liberation as part of our educational process."

As the boycott continued, the pamphlets seemed to emphasize increasingly an economic analysis of the South African system. Thus, one pamphlet asserted that

the struggle in South Africa is not against apartheid "pure and simple," not against white domination ALONE, but ALSO against the whole system of class exploitation which underlies it . . . TO MAINTAIN AND DEVELOP THE EXPLOITATION OF THE WORKERS IS THE BASIC PURPOSE OF THE APARTHEID SYSTEM.

The problem in South Africa was not, according to this pamphlet, "some special evil in white people," but "an economic system in which the wealth of our country, the mines, the factories and the big farms, are owned by a tiny minority. This ownership enables them to exploit the labour of the working people for their own profit."

At Grassy Park High, too, the politically correct line soon became a "class analysis." In our discussion groups, especially those with older, more sophisticated students, we no longer spoke of black people and white people when we talked about apartheid. We spoke instead of "the ruling class" and "the oppressed," even occasionally of "the proletariat." It was a peculiar twist. Rejecting the government's terminology, rejecting the whole question of race as racist, and replacing all that with tough-minded terms that implied a systematic, radical, and constructive approach to the problem of liberation, was an exhilarating exercise; it was more than semantics, it was like the intellectual annihilation of the entire apartheid worldview. But in South Africa, of course, the dichotomy was false. "Class" is not some eternal structure, but something that happens in time, a historical relationship, and in South Africa that relationship—once defined by things like Christianity, literacy, and participation in the money economy—had become defined almost entirely by "race." The two concepts were not extricable.

And yet I myself took to this new way of talking about apartheid with enthusiasm. The system was not as it was because whites were inherently wicked, I told my students, but because apartheid was profitable . That was the reality; the rest was illusion, "false consciousness," in Marxist argot. The truth, of course, was that framing the

issues in terms of something other than skin pigmentation simply made my own position more comfortable. What I did not know was that this gambit—deflecting resentment onto some vague "economic" group—was a hoary tactic of the white left in South Africa. In Grassy Park in 1980, for reasons of local ideological evolution unknown to me at the time, this "non-racial" terminology was simply back in fashion.

Marxism seemed to be making a comeback among the black resistance nationwide, a development noted with alarm by the white newspapers, whose polls showed that blacks tended to associate capitalism with greed and exploitation and communism with equality. There had been influential communists among the black intelligentsia in South Africa for sixty years, and the Communist Party itself had played an important, if ambiguous, role in the freedom struggle until it was outlawed in 1950. Many blacks were said to continue to have mixed feelings about the ANC because of its links with white, Moscow-oriented communists. But in 1980, I often heard criticism of the Black Consciousness approach to South Africa's problems as being insufficiently "socialistic." Black Consciousness had been, as Nelson said, an important influence on many young people, including some of our matrics, who now seemed intent on graduating from an analysis that emphasized "race" to one that emphasized "class."

Personally, I found I learned more from talking with groups of senior students these boycott days than I did anywhere else. Once or twice, a number of them gathered in New Room 16, and I sat in on their discussions. Their energy for debate seemed inexhaustible. Their curiosity, their independence, their eagerness to figure things out were light-years ahead of anything I had seen before among high school students. When they applied their "class analysis" to the government's current reformist talk, they defined the state's long-term outlook about as well as anyone I had heard. "The regime is preparing to drop 'race' as the only standard for membership in the ruling class," a Muslim boy named Omar said. "They've realized they can afford a few black faces among the oppressors. That's what they mean by 'total strategy.' It will still be minority rule, but the rest of the world will leave off condemning the system here just as soon as they see a few token blacks sitting in that minority."

I found this perception especially shrewd because it contained the awareness that government spokesmen were right when they complained that South Africa was judged internationally by a different set of standards with regard to human rights than were other coun-

tries, particularly Third World countries. It was true: the world would abide a hundred different kinds of tyranny, but in the late twentieth century the one thing it would not abide (at least not silently ) was legal discrimination by race.

"What we must get rid of is capitalism!"

"First apartheid, then capitalism. This whole so-called free enterprise."

"Is it free enterprise when the law forbids the oppressed to own property in the central business districts?"

"And they won't even allow us to have a shopping center where we live?"

"How can you have free enterprise with Group Areas? Private property is meant to be the basis of capitalism, but here the government can just take away your property and tell you to move. They say they hate communism, but that is communism."

"That's not communism! Under communism, the people own everything. Here, some so-called ruling class liberal can speculate in the property that's confiscated by Group Areas, and make his fortune while he's crying in public about how terrible apartheid is."

"Free enterprise is what they have in America. Do they have laws saying where people must live and where they may trade in America?"

As the resident authority on things American, I confirmed that they did not. I also confirmed that the South African government's anti-communism, and especially its self-description as a free enterprise economy, went over big in the United States. American corporations that did business in South Africa regularly echoed this claim, in the course of their argument that their operations here provided jobs and opportunities—when their spokesmen were quite aware that South Africa had probably the most strictly regulated, government-dominated economy in the non-communist world.

"Do all Americans think capitalism is best?"

I guessed that most of them did.

"Do you think so?"

"I think it works pretty well in some forms in some places."

"And here in South Africa?"

This was the kind of question that could get me into several different kinds of trouble. "I agree with people who say that apartheid and a free market economy are not compatible, that you can't have both. Because of Group Areas, and because of job reservation, but even more because of influx control. Never mind all the disadvantages

of poverty, and lack of education and training. When you can't freely sell your labor, you're missing the most basic element of a free market."

"Does a free market mean freedom?"

"Not necessarily," I said. "Capitalism certainly doesn't equal democracy. Look at all the countries that are supposedly capitalist—Taiwan, Chile, South Korea, Zaire—and are also dictatorships. In poor countries, capitalism has a tendency to make a few people rich, and leave out the rest."

"Just like here in South Africa."

"Capitalism just appeals to people's greed," one girl announced.

"And their ingenuity," I demurred.

"What about in America? Is it just a few rich there?"

"Quite a few, and a very big middle class. But capitalism and democracy go together differently there than they do in a poor country. Not so many people get shut out."

"What about the blacks?"

"Most of them are shut out."

"And the rich blacks there, the ones we always read about?"

"They're not typical. They've escaped the ghetto."

"It's just like here!"

"Not altogether," I said.

"It is . There are a few blacks with some money and some power. And they're the Buthelezis and the Thebehalis^[*] of America."

"No," said Omar. "Somebody like Andrew Young in America probably has a lot of support among black Americans. Here, the question is not really whether some guy with black skin, some Thebehali, is allowed onto the board of some corporation, or even into the government. The question is who that black man represents . Does he represent the people? Truly? Has he been democratically chosen?" A number of students laughed in derision, and Omar concluded with a flourish: "Where are our true leaders?"

Everybody knew the answer to that one, and a number of students murmured it. "On Robben Island."

"Out in Table Bay."

"On the Island."

"Murdered."

There was a heavy silence.

* Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, head of the KwaZulu bantustan; David Thebehali, then-mayor of Soweto.

"Democracy is what we want, not capitalism."

"Nor communism."

"And democracy is what the regime will try to stop us from getting, at all costs!"

And so it went, on and on. As can be seen, our senior students were well on their way to acquiring a deep skepticism toward every aspect of the society in which they lived, and particularly toward its masters. They no longer needed to have the government's rhetoric translated for them. They could do it for themselves. Separate development meant continued white domination. Total strategy meant continued white domination. I often tried to steer their discussions toward the situation of the millions in the bantustans, and the millions of migrant workers, for whom apartheid was not restrictions on downtown business ownership, but pass raids and starvation. Rural Africans and their problems were, I realized, in some ways more foreign to my students than were the whites of Muizenberg. And they were highly receptive to new information offered about "the masses"—crowding into awareness sessions on Xhosa culture, bantustan politics, worker safety (and the lack thereof) in the gold mines, and the feudal conditions that prevailed among black workers on white farms.

But note how, in the heat of discussion, the niceties of "non-racial" terminology tended to fall away, and the "ruling class" again became "whites." Of course, if one were to listen in on unguarded conversations among blacks anywhere in South Africa, one still heard, as one had always heard, and as it will continue to be for as long as apartheid exists, the authorities described as "whites."

Did the matrics and I ever find time these days to discuss what they were going to do, individually, with their lives after high school? No—nor the inclination. I tried to avoid thinking about the implications the political ideas that now filled the air held for the kind of career counseling I had been doing before the boycott began.

43

The time had come for us to move out of the big house on False Bay. Because we were still waiting for our work permits—still waking up each morning wondering if we would be expelled from the country that day—we were in no mood to house-hunt. Rachel, moreover, had received news that her mother was ill, which raised the possibility that she might have to return to America soon. Thus, it was a godsend

when Alex Tate said that two of his roommates were leaving, and we would be welcome to take over their room in the flat he rented in Rondebosch.

Rondebosch was the university district. It was a much livelier place than Muizenberg and just as pretty. The splendid brick-and-ivy campus of the University of Cape Town occupied the wooded lower slopes of the east face of Table Mountain; Rondebosch fanned out onto the fields further down, beneath a lush green canopy of oak and plane trees.

Our new address was the second floor of an old manor house beside the railway line. The grounds of the estate had been broken up and given over to four or five small apartment blocks, all handsome two-story buildings painted pale green and disposed around a courtyard full of well-tended rose bushes, asphalt walkways, and royal palm trees. Just across the railway line were the playing fields of one of the oldest private boys' schools in South Africa. One block in the other direction, between our place and the university, was an imposing new theater complex where plays like Athol Fugard's The Island (about Robben Island) played. There were cinemas, supermarkets, bookstores, and several student pubs within a couple of minutes' walk.

Alex lived with Fiona, a thin, shy, attractive woman with big sad eyes and thick blond hair. Fiona was an architect by training, but she spent her time these days designing and constructing not buildings but fantastical skirts and dresses—moody, brilliant garments, mostly of African and Asian material—a few of which she managed to sell in the more adventurous Cape Town boutiques.

Alex and Fiona had met at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, and had come to the Cape in their old Volkswagen two years before. Their flat they had turned into something of a fairy bower. Tapestries and mobiles and great Chinese paper butterflies hung from the ceilings; walls were painted burgundy, doors were painted blue with silver stars, oversized tarot cards adorned the risers on the stairs. The first time I walked into the place, it was like being transported back through time and space to apartments I had frequented in Berkeley as a teenager ten years before.

Living there produced many more of the same echoes. The household belonged to a "vegetable co-op," which membership involved long, slow meetings with other group households, early morning trips to a commercial produce market, wrangling with lazy fellow co-op members, and sundry other experiences reminiscent of our own

efforts, when we were students, to beat the supermarket out of its profit margin. Fiona was a vegetarian, so our communal suppers also tended toward the rice-based, highly spiced, quasi-Asian casseroles that I will always associate with the Northern California of another era.

The living in Rondebosch was easy. The rent we paid was preposterously low, just as it had been on the coast. Our room had a fireplace, we each had a desk—mine had a great view of the mountain. Fiona and Alex were delightful roommates, considerate and witty, and the four of us got along famously. In the evenings, we would sit in Alex's study, sip sherry by the fire, and play Scrabble. Once, Alex asked me where, in all my travels, I had found to be the most romantic place. Bali? Tonga? The highlands of Sumatra?

"Right here," I said, and it was true. The walls were lined with good books and Picasso prints, the fire burned bright and fragrant, the furniture—the rosewood desk, the Oriental rugs, the lamps for which Fiona had made beautiful beaded shades—was all so perfectly tattily elegant. A guitar stood in the corner, medieval folk tunes played on the stereo, the windows were leaded and looked out on the courtyard and a towering mountain. Nowhere in the real world, in all its dust and glare, could possibly be this romantic. Tonga, by comparison, was a bore. The others laughed when I said so—and the peculiar, sandblasting harshness of South African life seemed to me to edge closer at that moment outside the leaded windows and burgundy walls.

Moving to Rondebosch soon doubled and then redoubled the number of white South Africans I knew. Our neighbors were mostly students and pensioners, and were quite unrepresentative of white South Africa as a whole—there were very few Afrikaners around, for a start, and I never met anyone there who was willing to defend apartheid—but that did not stop me from finding the people of Rondebosch a fascinating new group to watch, and to generalize freely from.

At first, the shrill cries of the schoolboys at rugby practice on the playing fields across the railway line would fill me with unease, as I sat preparing the next day's awareness session on foreign investment in South Africa, or on the government's refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. What went on at white schools, anyway? Were the pupils, or for that matter their teachers, even aware of what was occurring among their counterparts across the line? When I put these questions to graduates of white schools whom I came to know in Rondebosch, they usually laughed in my face.

"They don't know, and they wouldn't give a stuff if they did

know," a chemical engineer with a punk haircut told me. "The boys are interested in rugby and girls, the girls are interested in clothes and boys, and they're all true believers in The South African Way of Life. Check the scene in the white school in Herbstein's book. That's exactly how it is."

Denis Herbstein's White Man, We Want to Talk to You was an account of the 1976 uprising by a former South African correspondent for the BBC. The scene in question took place in June 1976, in a white middle-class English-speaking high school classroom in Johannesburg, where a teacher was trying to discuss with his students the carnage then occurring ten miles away in Soweto. The students' suggestions for handling the uprising: "Shoot them," "Kill them all," "Teach them a lesson." Their analysis: "They are savages," "They are straight out of the jungle." The teacher's attempts to explain black grievances met a wall of incomprehension, and even self-pity. Teacher: "It can't be very nice to have no say in the running of your own life." Students: "We haven't either, no one listens to us."

"It's a conspiracy of ignorance," one UCT student said to me. The more I learned about white education, the more apt that description seemed. Contrary to what many of our students believed, white schools used virtually the same textbooks we did at Grassy Park High. They learned the same historical myths and untruths, plus a few more. "We were even told that blacks had a far better life than the English press would lead us to believe. Their rents were low. They paid no income taxes. They were really quite happy with the homelands policy. All complete bullshit, and we all believed it!" White schools used the same rote, exam-obsessed educational methods as those in our syllabuses. Their students' access to the world of ideas outside apartheid was, in short, no greater than that of black students, despite their vastly superior facilities.

Of course, the training given white students differed fundamentally from that offered to black children, in that whites were being prepared to rule the country. Undereducated, overprivileged white kids were simply not permitted to consider any other possibility. A compulsory subject in white schools was something called "Youth Preparedness," the Standard Six text for which contained the following passage:

Our forefathers believed, and we still believe today, that God himself made the diversity of peoples on earth. . . . Inter-racial residence and intermarriage are not only a disgrace, but are also forbidden by law.

It is, however, not only the skin of the white South African that differs from that of the non-white. The White stands on a much higher plane of civilization and is more developed. Whites must so live, learn and work that we shall not sink to the cultural level of the non-Whites. Only thus can the government of our country remain in the hands of the Whites.

I began to think that white schoolchildren needed our awareness sessions at least as badly as our students did.

Yet this generalization shortchanges some white schoolchildren. The teenage daughter of a UCT lecturer confided to me that many of the girls at her private high school were distressed when their teachers forbade them to hold discussions of the black schools boycott. "What can we do? " she asked me, her pale cheeks flushed with good intentions. "If one of our teachers were to let us discuss what we liked, they would be sacked."

Also, I began to notice that when the whites I got to know in Rondebosch—working people in their twenties and thirties, as well as UCT students—got together and talked about their school days, a striking pattern in the careers of their old classmates emerged. The top students from the top schools—the South African Etons and Harrows—all seemed to be banned, in prison, in political exile, gone underground, or dead. This was greatly exaggerating the case, of course—only a minority of top students had actually suffered these fates—and few white radicals had developed their politics while at school. But this impression did serve to underline the shattering seriousness, even among the elite of the white elite, of any real commitment to black liberation.

The English-medium white universities were not, in any case, party to the "conspiracy of ignorance" that prevailed at white schools. If anything, they were places where a good number of students blossomed in the relative intellectual freedom, and social conscience flourished. However one might gauge the depth of their political commitment—and nearly everyone in South Africa tended to dismiss it as fairly shallow—white English-speaking university students made a good deal of anti-apartheid noise. Thus, when the black school boycott began, the Students' Representative Council at UCT promptly sent a message of solidarity. "Although we do not share a common experience with the pupils," their resolution read, "nevertheless our commitment to a just and free society demands that we support their demands for the abolition of discriminatory education." Students at the University of Natal began to boycott their lectures in solidarity

with black students, and in the third week of the boycott, four thousand UCT students, nearly half the student body, refused to attend classes for several days. Then, after they had returned to class, the campus SRC organized, in response to a call from the Committee of 81, an "international day of solidarity" in which more than two hundred overseas student unions and universities took part.

As for the teachers in white schools—here, Herbstein's chilling transcription was apparently misleading. For the government's teacher-training program weeded out, according to the people I talked to about white schools, nearly everyone who might prove as sympathetic to the suffering of blacks as the teacher in Herbstein's classroom seemed. Liberal teachers existed, but they were besieged.

While I sat preparing awareness sessions, I would sometimes try to conceive the outlook of my counterpart, my adversary across the line who was wholeheartedly delivering the government propaganda that I was busy trying to disassemble. But the mentality remained dauntingly foreign. The year before, I read, two high school teachers in the Transvaal had helped tar and feather a Pretoria historian for having written a revisionist essay about the Great Trek—and they were still teaching. Those teachers' organizations that had protested the inclusion of a "colored" team in a school rugby tournament were now reportedly considering forming a nationwide whites-only sports body to resist integration. These people, I thought, were teachers? And it wasn't only Transvaal Afrikaner teachers who thought like this—or Free Staters struggling to set "Kill Mugabe" to "Singin' in the Rain." Right here in Cape Town, just as the boycott was starting, a high school teacher named Trevor Robertson was leading a campaign to prevent the opening of one of the city's beaches to all races. Of the open beach proponents, Robertson declared, "Their object is to erode the Group Areas Act—the cornerstone of apartheid, and the salvation of the white man in South Africa."

In the early winter evenings, trying to collect my thoughts, I sometimes liked to stroll around the old school across the railway line. It was a beautiful campus, all oak trees and graceful Cape Dutch buildings, bell towers and perfect emerald lawns. The boys on the playing fields, with their blue and white uniforms, their grass-stained knees, their ardent cries in the deepening gloom—they did not much resemble oppressors. But to make sense of anything in South Africa, to keep clear of the deadly vleis of the traveler's inchoate nostalgia, I had to be, like Nelson, cold and dry—analytic. One of the images we used at school to illustrate the functions of the different racial educa-

tional systems involved funnels. The funnel of black education was jammed at the top with far too many students, most of whom were spilling out to land on the ground outside a factory, while a very few popped out the bottom to land at lower clerical posts. The funnel of white education had the same number going in the top as came out the bottom, and those emerging landed straight in the head office of the factory. This, here, was that white funnel.

44

While many teachers participated in the awareness sessions at Grassy Park High, few were willing to draw the attention of the authorities to themselves by speaking in public. During the third week of the boycott, at a mass rally at school, three teachers—Nelson, Georgina, and Jacob—abandoned this cautiousness and consented to address the student body as a whole. The rally was held in the courtyard. Nelson gave a quiet, intense speech about the systematic violence of the apartheid state, urging the students not to be distracted by all the talk about how the boycott might become "violent," but to remember instead that relations between the state and blacks were already extremely "violent," by any reasonable definition of that word. What this boycott, what the freedom struggle itself was all about, he said, was the creation of a nonviolent society, a consensual democracy in which state violence would be unnecessary. Georgina talked about the need for solidarity between students, teachers, and parents. Then Jacob took the microphone, and proceeded to assail the government, the Security Police, C.A.D., the Prime Minister, and any other apartheid target that occurred to him, in rapid colorful bursts of phrase that had the students screaming with laughter and roaring with applause.

Afterward, Nelson was furious with Jacob. "That guy needs to learn to think before he speaks. Whose purpose does he serve by exposing himself like that? If I'd known he was going to get up there and beat his breast and dare the Security Police to come and get him, I would never have shared the same platform with him. Who is he working for, anyway?"

Whomever he was working for, Jacob was a ubiquitous figure at school during the first weeks of the boycott. A tiny, dark, quick-moving man with gold-rimmed glasses, a chipmunk laugh, and a ragged goatee, Jacob hailed from the Eastern Cape, where he had been as-

sociated with Steve Biko's since-banned Black People's Convention in the mid-1970s. Jacob had not been teaching long at Grassy Park High, but his tireless work in the "alternate curriculum" had quickly made him a solid favorite among the students, and his awareness sessions were usually standing room only.

I went to one of Jacob's lectures. It was billed as a history of the resistance in South Africa. It was that, and several other things as well. Again, Jacob lit into the authorities with manic glee. He called the Prime Minister "Pete Wapen"—"wapen" means "weapon" in Afrikaans, and this was in fact P. W. Botha's nickname in the government—and imitated mercilessly the South African leadership's angry, foolish reactions to every challenge. He scribbled the names of black resistance heroes on a blackboard, shattering stick after stick of chalk with the force of his writing (each time drawing a short burst of laughter from the eighty people crammed into the first-floor classroom—and then a long burst when he suddenly whipped an offending piece of chalk out the window, cursing C.A.D. sotto voce for always providing inferior materials). Jacob's exegeses of the various movements, ideologies, organizations, and leaders in the struggle were vivid and, in all cases, sympathetic. His own thinking clearly owed most to the current of black nationalism represented first by the Pan-Africanist Congress and later by the Black Consciousness movement, but he avoided the temptation to criticize other factions of the liberation struggle, eulogizing the martyrs of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party along with his own political mentors. It was a freewheeling bombardment of a performance, full of one-line summaries of complex historical forces, quick character sketches, bizarre asides, apocryphal anecdotes, and more than a few dubious facts—I was actually tempted several times to interrupt to set the record straight on one point or another, but the freight train of Jacob's monologue had always hurtled on to the next point before I could decide whether or not it would be worth it.

The highlight of the lecture was an extended demonstration of the techniques of torture employed by the Security Police. Jacob had personal experience of some of these practices, since he had been detained for seven months without charges or trial in 1976. There was "the airplane"—the prisoner was forced to hold his arms straight out at his sides and rotate them and was beaten when he could no longer continue. There was "the refrigerator"—a very cold room into which a prisoner was thrown naked and wet for hours and sometimes days. There were hoods, electric shocks, fists, boots, truncheons, the "wet

cap," "the helicopter," solitary confinement. There was starvation, sleep deprivation, suspension by the feet, suspension by the wrists, partial suffocation. There was the tenth-floor windowsill at police headquarters in John Vorster Square, Johannesburg, from which so many political detainees had "jumped." As he relived these nightmares, Jacob's performance reached its highest pitch of enthusiasm. He whirled and danced, acting out everything, playing all the parts in a high, theatrical voice and laughing crazily. To my horror, his audience laughed right along with him.

Jacob's lecture shook me, and not only because of the brutality he described, or the idea (not true, in retrospect) that our students somehow found torture funny (they laughed, actually, to relieve tension). It shook me because it made me wonder what I was doing. Some of Jacob's dates and figures might have been doubtful, but his effect on an audience was undeniable: he got to them. It was an old-fashioned, holy-roller kind of speaking, more exhortation than education. Yet it worked. And it suddenly showed my own lecturing style, my careful pursuit of the precise phrase, the nuance of meaning, in what I found to be a very unfavorable light. What did it matter whether these kids knew that the latest research showed that the rate of infant mortality in some areas of the bantustans was 282 per 1,000 live births, not 90 as the government claimed, and not 400 as some demagogues said? Who cared whether the number of people hanged by the state last year (133) was more or less than the number Iran had executed? The point here was mobilization, "conscientization," not fact-check hairsplitting. Was my dilatory, academic approach even remotely appropriate here?

45

Another incident that shook my self-confidence occurred a couple of days later, when we received word at school that the riot police were on their way to Grassy Park High. The students all hurried to their register classrooms, where we quickly took attendance. I had never been given instructions on what to do in case of police attack, and there seemed to be none forthcoming now, so I told 6A6 that we would simply stay put. If the police came, I would lock the door. The children would keep their backs to the windows. If a tear gas canister came through a window, we would pick it up and throw it back out. Okay? The children, some of whom looked terrified, all seemed agreeable to

this plan. While going over it again to make sure they all understood it—looking out into forty young faces, all looking worriedly back at me—I felt in my chest a distinct clunk of responsibility for their welfare. "It'll be all right," I said.

I poked my head out the classroom door. The school seemed deserted. Nobody here but us revolutionary banners, baas.

Further down the landing, I saw Ralph Pereira stick his head out of his classroom. I told 6A6 to stay seated and quiet and went to confer with him. Pereira was an affable, middle-aged science teacher whose company I usually enjoyed. Today, he looked grim and a little wild-eyed.

"Any sign of the storm troops?" I asked, half-kidding.

Pereira stared at me. "What did you tell your kids?"

"I said I'd lock the door if the cops came."

"Serious? They'll just knock it down."

It was my turn to stare. "Why? Why would they break into a classroom to get at kids who are just sitting quietly?"

"They'll throw tear gas in."

"We'll throw it back out. What did you tell your class?"

"I told them, if the cops come, they should run in every direction." Pereira gestured across the fields.

I was shocked. "But the cops will chase them. And that's when they start shooting, when people run away. They're much safer in their classrooms."

Pereira shook his head. "I don't think you understand, Bill," he said. "First of all, I cannot tell these children just to sit quietly and wait for the riot police to come in and attack them. And I'm sorry, but I don't think you understand how much these Boers hate these children ."

The kids in Pereira's classroom had started making noise. He gave me a tight nod and went in. I returned to New Room 16, still convinced my contingency plan was preferable to Pereira's. Fortunately, neither of our ideas was put to the test, for the riot squad did not turn up that morning. But Pereira's words—and the sad, vehement way he had spoken them: "how much these Boers hate these children"—stayed with me for days, and disturbed me deeply.

Did I know anything about the sort of hatred that existed in South Africa? Did I understand the risks our students were running when they defied the government? People in Grassy Park talked about 1976, about the kids who had died. They talked about secret mass burials at night near Soweto. Though nearly all the books and

articles written about the 1976 uprising were banned, the government's own commission of inquiry into the unrest had turned up Cape Peninsula police sergeants who ordered their men "to fire at the rioters because it would be easier to arrest them if they were wounded," and intrepid souls who testified that they had heard the Cape Town riot squad "boasting among themselves how many people they had shot and in what ways they had shot them." Even in liberal Rondebosch, a neighbor had told me about other neighbors who acted as vigilantes in 1976, taking high-powered rifles out to vantage points near the townships and returning with tales of having "killed plenty of kaffirs." And there were cases in which children had been attacked in their schools by police, and shot to death —in "colored" Cape Town high schools just like ours.

For me, these were only stories—and casualty figures did not convey real violence or real peril. For our students, on the other hand, official violence, white violence, was an imminent potential. It constituted the immediate horizon for their boycott. Many of them had seen it unleashed before. This realization caused me to think again about "conscientization," which I usually conceived of as a more or less rational process, having to do with knowledge and analysis. During the first week of the boycott, Jasmine of 6A8 had asked me, in all earnestness, "If sir was ever conscientized." Feeling silly at first, I had told her how, when I was about her age, I had been awakened to the immorality of the United States' role in the Vietnam War. No one in 6A8 had heard of Vietnam, so I ended up telling them a long story—about the war, about the anti-war movement, about student radicalism and the political sociology of the suburbs where I grew up. They seemed to understand quite well how my political awakening, such as it was, led to rifts with friends who were not similarly "conscientized," and how children even broke with their parents over the issue. But they were uncomprehending when I explained that, for me personally, Vietnam was always a disembodied event, that in those days I didn't even know anyone who had been there. To these children, I realized, "conscientization" did not have to do with coming to understand something they saw on TV or read in the papers. It had to do with things happening in the streets, to their families and neighbors, and to themselves. And the pivotal experiences that "conscientized" them were very likely to be violent. After all, which would make the greater impression on anybody—never mind a young teenager—a teacher's lecture on United Nations arms sanctions, a self-conscious discussion of inferior education, or the violent hatred of the white

authorities made manifest by guns, dogs, and tear gas?

In the first days of the boycott, I had argued with Georgina Swart about "conscientization." Georgina had emerged, as soon as the boycott began, as a hard-line leftist with a devoted clique of senior students. I had never taken Georgina seriously before, partly because she was in the habit of wearing toxic amounts of sweet perfume, but mostly because her conversation seemed to be made up exclusively of gossip about other people's private lives and personal defects. Georgina's conversation had changed after the boycott started, though, and now featured constant references to the year she had spent studying in Lusaka, Zambia. This sojourn had great cachet in the newly politicized climate, since virtually no one else at Grassy Park High had spent any time at all in "independent Africa." Lusaka, moreover, was the headquarters in exile of the African National Congress—a point that no one ever mentioned, but of which Georgina and her listeners were all very aware.

Our little argument had occurred after I heard Georgina talking in the staff room about the difficulties she was having getting students to remember the differences between the Third and the Fourth International. "They tell me what Marx wrote on the national and colonial question when they mean Lenin! Some of them must be drilled endlessly before we can really call them conscientized." I tried to suggest that "conscientization" was less a matter of indoctrination, of drilling children in a dogma, than it was of awakening people from passivity and unconsciousness, of rousing them to a critical, confident view of their situation. Georgina had dismissed my view as "very idealistic," and I had wondered if I were not in fact underestimating the importance of discipline, of unanimity, in political mobilization. But now it began to seem that I had not gone far enough. A "critical, confident" approach was only a start; real opposition to the government in South Africa required nothing less than old-fashioned courage.

The boycott had been nonviolent so far, and students and police were both taking care to avoid confrontation. Yet the climate was beginning to darken. A number of people—including high school students and teachers in the Cape—had been detained under the security laws since the second week of the boycott. All our students knew what "detention" meant. It meant solitary confinement in a prison cell. It meant utter helplessness, uncertainty, and terror. It probably meant many hours of interrogation by the Security Police. It probably meant torture. Jacob might be able to make the experience sound unreal and slapstick, but everyone knew it was all too real. Since the early 1960s,

at least fifty "politicals" were known to have died in detention—with official explanations like "fell out of tenth floor window" (Mathews Mabelane), "fell six floors down stairwell" (George Botha), "application of force to neck" (Joseph Mdluli), "suffocation" (Fenuel Mogatusi), "bronchopneumonia following head injuries sustained in a shower" (Nichodimus Kgoathe), and "brain injury" (Steve Biko).

As much as anything else, "conscientization" involved helping people to overcome their fear of the authorities. The "socialization of courage," someone had called it. At Grassy Park High, you could almost see it being nurtured and developed among our students, in their rallies and songfests and discussions, in their ceaseless talk about "sacrifice." I wasn't crazy about the more kamikaze side of this mentality, but the constant repetition of slogans and catch phrases had begun to make sense to me. These were the signs and symbols and passwords of a subculture that was flourishing in the boycott atmosphere. It was really more a culture than a movement, because it had no apparent connection to a formal political organization. It was a very potent formation, nonetheless. It was the subculture of revolution.

I felt sorry for parents who had to watch their children becoming members of this fervent and perilous new subculture. There was a tailor with a shop at Busy Corner, a man whose son was a Standard Nine student whom I knew slightly. I was in the tailor's shop one afternoon during the third week of the boycott, having a torn pair of pants repaired, when the tailor suddenly asked me what I thought of the boycott. I said something about how it was all very "interesting." The tailor harumphed. He was a stooped, balding man with very thick glasses. "Oh, it's all very well, but I'll tell you true, I don't know what will become of these children," he said. "They are becoming strangers to their own parents. They talk all this language we never heard before, and accuse us. They say they don't care about their education, and they're not afraid of the police. They are becoming rude and foolish. Here are your trousers, sir." I took the pants from the tailor and paid him. He stared me in the face, and in his magnified, unhappy eyes, I saw more pain than I was ready for. "My boy was doing well at school. He didn't give a hang about politics before. I wish someone would talk some sense into him. He won't listen to me."

Our students were talking more and more now about how they might link up with "the workers" in some sort of joint protest. There was even talk of calling a general strike, although it was soon realized that such a call would go unanswered, if not unheard. The only large-

scale action attempted by the students off school grounds during the first weeks of the boycott was a march that took place on Tuesday, April 25. That day, very few children showed up for school. It seemed that students from a number of schools had decided en masse to ignore the Committee of 81's order to stay on school grounds during school hours, and had assembled instead in the Cape Flats community of Athlone for a march on the city center, seven miles away. At Grassy Park High, we sat numbly, listening to the radio for news. An estimated eight thousand students had gathered in Athlone. They set off for town, singing and clapping, blocking traffic. Before they reached even the first white area, the riot police attacked, with tear gas and batons. The marchers scattered. Some were trapped in a parking lot. Others were helped to escape by sympathetic motorists. I had visions of my students running, dodging clubs and bullets, being hurt, maimed, and worse. Hester, Mieta, Nico, Mareldia, Shireen—I felt like a parent with two hundred missing children. But no shots were fired, said the news. There were no serious injuries. Still, my anxiety scarcely diminished until the next morning, when all of our pupils showed up at school and awareness sessions resumed.

The Athlone march had been seemingly patterned after another march, one that had deeply impressed itself on the South African political memory. That march occurred on March 30, 1960, nine days after the Sharpeville massacre. A large crowd had gathered in Langa, on the Cape Flats, and began marching toward the city center. The march was headed for the buildings of Parliament, but was diverted to Caledon Square, outside police headquarters. The size of the crowd has been variously estimated, from fifteen thousand to thirty thousand, and its revolutionary potential much debated. Certainly, it was an unprecedented gathering of blacks in the heart of a "white" South African city. The closest thing to a leader the crowd produced was a twenty-three-year-old UCT student named Philip Kgosana. Kgosana was persuaded by the police commander to lead the crowd back to Langa, in exchange for an interview with the Minister of Justice. Had he refused the deal, some observers believe South African history might have been different, but Kgosana accepted it, and the crowd dispersed peacefully. Kgosana was arrested when he turned up for his interview, and the African townships on the Cape Flats were sealed off by the police and military. Food supplies were halted for a week, until the popular will to resist was destroyed.

This was the kind of thing being discussed at Grassy Park High these days—should Kgosana have negotiated? how could the regime

be caught off guard again?—so that it was sometimes easy to begin to believe that "the community" was poised for insurrection. This was far from true. On another trip to Busy Corner, I was standing in a small, family-run fish and chips shop where I often went for lunch. While I waited for my food, I listened to the shopwoman gossiping with another customer.

"Have you seen Crystal lately? She dresses quite smart now she's got that job."

"I reckon they gave her a Barclaycard."

"I reckon so. And she'll be able to buy whatever she likes on very good terms."

"She was talking about a washing machine or else a tumble dryer."

"I thought perhaps a motorcar. Oh, look, the mister's waiting for his lunch while we stand here skindering. Shame. How's things at the high school, sir? They still boycotting?"

I said they were, indeed.

"Shame."

Oppression, I thought, was domesticating. And it was necessary to recall that most of "the community" still had its mind on Barclaycards and tumble dryers. Not that a major showdown was not approaching. It was on the last day of April that the Prime Minister made his ugly threat: "If the State is challenged and it hits back, it will use all the power at its disposal." I found myself studying the glowering oval of his face in the newspaper, wondering what exactly he had in mind.

46

It had become my habit each morning on my way to school to buy a Cape Times from one of the little barefoot newsboys in ripped shorts and castoff jackets who worked the intersections throughout the Peninsula. One Tuesday, during the boycott's fourth week, while driving slowly through a cold tule fog which stood that morning on the Flats, I happened to glance at the paper where it lay on the front seat, and caught sight of what looked like Mr. Van den Heever's face on the front page. I pulled over and snatched up the paper. It was Van den Heever. The photograph showed a group of business-suited men striding past the Parliament buildings downtown, with our very own Grassy Park High principal in there striding with them. This, the

caption said, was the delegation from the Union of Teachers Association of South Africa (UTASA), which had met yesterday with the Prime Minister. I was flabbergasted.

I had heard of UTASA only vaguely—it was a "colored" organization, that I knew, and definitely not a trade union, despite its name. I had not known Van belonged to it. Apparently, the UTASA leadership had been summoned to the Prime Minister's office to explain what it was the boycotting students wanted. According to the accompanying article, "The coloured teachers put to him their grievances in discussions both sides said had taken place in a spirit of goodwill."

Well, well. I drove on into Grassy Park, where I spotted Chantal Da Grass just leaving her house for work. I stopped to give her a lift. When she got in the car, I dramatically presented her with the morning paper. To my surprise, she seemed nonplussed.

"It was in yesterday's Argus , too," she said. She read the Cape Times article while I maneuvered through the ghostly ground fog at Busy Corner. I parked in a sandy field next to school and Chantal handed back the paper.

"I didn't know the principal was such a bigshot," I said.

"He's a moron," Chantal said bitterly, and climbed out of the car.

I was flabbergasted anew. Chantal, who was usually gregarious and forthcoming, declined to expand on this execration. I followed her into the staff room, where we were told that the principal had just called a staff meeting. The occasion, of course, was his report from the meeting with the Prime Minister.

The principal arrived, as ponderous and unreadable as ever, and gave us a surprisingly modest, tough-minded account of the meeting, with none of the overawedness I would have expected. In truth, I was a little awed myself at the thought of his having just been in the innermost sanctum of the power structure, eye to eye with the most powerful man in the country (the most powerful man, for that matter, in the whole of Africa)—a harsh, humorless figure with an infamous temper and a marked taste for repression—having, in P. W. Botha's own words, "frank discussions." I wanted to hear what the office looked like, what the etiquette had been, what the principal himself had said, whether Botha had become angry or been charming. But the principal stuck pretty well to the press release script. UTASA had presented a list of complaints about the state of "colored" education. The Prime Minister had agreed to look into the questions they raised, agreed there was a backlog of needed improvements, and complained himself about the financial constraints he had always to consider.

Then, before concluding, the principal personalized his report slightly by quoting the Prime Minister directly.

"He said there were two things which must not happen with this boycott. 'I don't want UCT students involved whatsoever,' he said. 'This is not their affair. Secondly, I don't want foreigners involved. If foreigners become involved in this boycott,' he said, 'Hare sal vlieg, koppe sal val, en bloed sal vloei!"

The principal employed a booming boere voice to deliver this last line, after which he and most of the teachers in the staff room laughed—and everyone in the room seemed to turn to look at me.

"What was that?" I squawked.

Now the whole room roared with laughter. "Translation, please, Mr. Africa, for our American friend," the principal said.

"'Hair will fly . . . heads will roll . . . and blood will flow,'" Africa said, with certain other teachers joining in gleefully.

"Great," I said.

The meeting ended on that note.

The controversy over the UTASA meeting with the Prime Minister was only beginning, however. There was, for a start, a great deal being written in the white press about a remark made by the Prime Minister at a press conference after the meeting: "My government and I are prepared to accept a programme whereby the goal of equal education for all population groups can be attained as soon as possible within South Africa's economic means." This, it was argued—"the goal of equal education"—signaled a major shift in government policy. UTASA appeared to buy that argument. As the Cape Times reported, "UTASA felt that the undertakings given by Mr. Botha should go a long way towards meeting the community's legitimate grievances in the field of education."

The first question was to what extent UTASA could claim to represent "the community." The Argus had its answer ready immediately after the meeting with the Prime Minister, when its editors wrote, "The delegates represent the deprived and the aggrieved . . . The coloured teachers and pupils have a strong case because it is a moral one. But besides this they have the backing of the entire coloured community." The Committee of 81 disagreed emphatically. It rejected the offices of the UTASA delegates. "We state categorically they are not the true leaders. Any decision or agreement entered into by such a delegation will be disregarded by the people they claim to represent. These persons do not represent the interests of the people but wish to project themselves as leaders of the community."

A second question concerned what the Prime Minister's pledge regarding "equal education" was actually worth, and again the boycotting students seemed to come up with a very different answer from that of UTASA or the white press. In a word, the students considered the pledge worthless. While a long way from the "Bantu Education" rhetoric of the Verwoerdian fifties, it made no mention of an end to apartheid in education, and bore a strong resemblance to a host of other unkept promises made by verligte officials in recent years. When I asked a member of the Grassy Park High SRC what the government could say that would be meaningful, he thought awhile, and finally said, "Nothing. Because they always lie."

There were teachers' organizations that were much closer than UTASA to the thinking of the boycott leaders, notably an ad hoc group called the Teachers' Action Committee (TAC), which had formed for the specific purpose of demonstrating solidarity with the students and had already held two mass meetings in Athlone. The non-racial TAC was working directly with the Committee of 81 and had denounced existing teachers' organizations as "reactionary" and "racist." TAC criticized the UTASA delegation to the Prime Minister for allowing itself to be politically manipulated by the government. This was what Chantal had meant when she called the principal a moron. Anti-UTASA sentiment was quite strong, I began to realize, on the Grassy Park faculty. Now I wished I had gone to the Athlone TAC meetings, rather than heeding the usual warnings about police surveillance and my job.

But anti-TAC feeling was also strong among the Grassy Park teachers. In fact, a large crack was beginning to reveal itself running down the middle of the spectrum of political attitudes on the faculty. To a great extent, this schism traced a generational fault line. Young teachers like Nelson, Matthew, Georgina, Alex, Soraya, and Chantal, along with a number of less assertive junior faculty like Conrad, Meryl, and Cornel, were on one side of the divide, along with one or two of the most liberal older teachers, like Liberty and a debonair, mild-mannered science teacher named Solly Marais. All the other senior teachers, and a few conservative young teachers like Da Silva and Khatieb, joined the principal on the opposite side. There was also a small faction of indeterminate allegiance, a group that included teachers in their late thirties like Pieterse, inveterate jollers like Grobbelaar and Dorian Nero, and a few people simply too timid to reveal their thoughts. The rough outlines of this split had been clear since the beginning of the boycott, but as the boycott approached the

end of its first month, a new issue began to highlight the differences between the two camps. The question was simple, and it was finally becoming permissible for teachers to ask it out loud: Should the boycott continue, or should it be called off?

The obvious answer was that this was not up to the teachers, but up to the students. And that was exactly what Nelson told the principal when the principal eventually asked him—reaching straight across the growing political abyss at a tense staff meeting—if he would not use his influence with the students to persuade them to return to class. To be fair, this had also been the response of the president of UTASA when the press asked him after the big meeting with the Prime Minister whether he thought the boycott should be called off. Other "community leaders" had been less circumspect, however. Dr. R. E. van der Ross, the "colored" rector of the University of the Western Cape, had been ordering his students back to class since the second week of the boycott, and threatening dormitory residents with eviction. (And he had been publicly humiliated for his trouble by his students, who had refused to let him address them at a rally, and then protested vehemently when he tried to join them in singing "We Shall Overcome.") The Reverend Allan Hendrickse, leader of the "colored" Labour Party, had started calling for an end to the boycott immediately after the UTASA meeting with the Prime Minister, saying, "He deserves a chance to translate words into deeds."

The scorn that these "sellouts" came in for was often withering. "They never learn," a pro-TAC teacher at Grassy Park told me one day. "It's almost like they don't realize that we've heard it all a thousand times before. How can they say, 'He deserves a chance'? He's had ten thousand chances! Do you want to know the truth? These sellouts know exactly what they're doing. They simply prefer the status quo to a conscientized and mobilized people."

Yet the principal's pleas for an end to the boycott were not unaffecting. "The issue now, and it is becoming more serious every day, is the education of these children," the principal declared at one of the staff meetings which were now becoming almost daily events. "Will it continue, or will it be left off?"

The principal tended to make his points in long, passionate speeches which emphasized his own career. "I believe in education," he told the faculty. "I've spent nearly forty years working for improvements in the education of our people. I have no illusions that this government actually cares about the education of our people. We

had to fight for everything we've got. We had to fight to make education compulsory. But we won that fight. And we shall continue to fight until our children are receiving the same quality of education white children receive. But the only way we can win is by getting all the education we can in the meantime. Without an education, these children will be lost."

I thought of the newsboys out on the trunk roads, most of whom were younger than our students, but none of whom had classes to boycott. This, of course, was just what the principal wanted me to think about. (The compulsory education he claimed had been "won" obviously did not apply to the newsboys. According to the law, compulsory education was slowly being phased in for "colored" children, but this law was not being enforced. Education was not even technically compulsory for African children. For whites, of course, education had long been compulsory for all children between the ages of seven and sixteen.) And then there was the commonplace about greater education leading inevitably to greater political awareness and ultimately to political power—and the sneaking suspicion that the most hardheaded white supremacists in South Africa quietly welcomed all shutdowns of black schools. . . .

When the principal sensed that he was not managing to enlist much new support for pressuring the students to return to class, he made his appeal to the TAC faction more direct. "I myself would not want it to be on my conscience that I did not do everything I could to see that these children received the best possible education," he said. "Do you really have no advice to offer these poor children, when they most need it? Or are some teachers simply afraid to offer it? There is nothing more to be gained by boycotting now, that is clear to all of us. The children have made their point. It's now time to return to our schoolwork, before the entire year is lost. But who will say so?"

While most of the younger teachers seemed to dismiss his arguments out of hand, I felt sympathetic to the principal's situation. He was dreadfully caught betwixt and between. There was obviously pressure being exerted on him by Coloured Affairs to curtail staff support for the boycott, and by extension the boycott itself at Grassy Park High. If he ignored this pressure, he might face censure and even firing. At the government commission of inquiry into the 1976 uprising, Van der Ross of UWC, who was now incurring the wrath of his students for his anti-boycott position—a wrath that would only increase in the weeks to come, achieving a truly daunting intensity after he called the riot police onto the UWC campus to crush a student

demonstration—Van der Ross had been accused by witnesses before the commission of not having taken sufficient disciplinary action against his students during the 1976 unrest.

Rectors and principals got it from both sides. In 1980, the government would soon begin demanding that principals expel boycotting students. Meanwhile, the Committee of 81 had already declared that principals or rectors "who carried out a threat to expel students or teachers supporting the boycott would be considered 'enemies of the people.'"

Our principal's position was made more poignant for me by his occasional bitter observations that, if he had only not been such a dedicated fighter of apartheid all his career, he would have been promoted long ago to some higher post than mere high school principal—a contention more or less confirmed even by his detractors on the Grassy Park faculty, who said it was true he had been passed over for promotions to posts for which he was qualified. The posts had gone instead, they said, to "more reliable quislings."

Teachers were also caught in the middle, of course, and having their "reliability" tested by both sides—by their employers and by their students. TAC proved to be a short-lived and rather ineffectual organization. A much publicized resolution to "down tools" was abandoned after a few days in the face of its absurdity under the circumstances of the boycott, and the organization itself soon dissolved. It had served its purpose, however, by demonstrating the support of thousands of their teachers for the striking students. It had also, I realized, served to mark its members. Did this mean that thousands of bright young Cape Town teachers had just blighted their career prospects? Or did it mean that they all expected a profound upheaval in South Africa, nothing less than a change of government in their time? Either way, I was impressed. At the same time, I was appalled at the number of teachers at Grassy Park High who turned against the boycott as soon as the principal gave the signal that it was becoming safe to do so—appalled not so much by their desire to protect their jobs and to get on with their course work, as by the alacrity with which some of them seemed to abandon all interest in the freedom struggle which had been receiving their "total support" only the week before. "Teachers are a fickle, untrustworthy caste" was Nelson's inimitable analysis.

I was also appalled by some of the tactics adopted by the principal in his effort to swing the faculty over to opposition to the boycott, once he saw that a solid bloc of the younger teachers was definitely not

buying. He began to single out individual teachers who were vulnerable in one way or another. First he went after Jacob, whose base in Grassy Park was thin, and whose volatility and hard line put off even some of the pro-TAC teachers. The principal denounced Jacob as an "adventurer" in front of the entire faculty, and gave him no chance to defend himself. Next, the principal went after Alex, accusing him of "knowing nothing of the oppression we have suffered." But Alex refused to be race-baited into silence, and eloquently defended his rights as a faculty member to express his opinion.

The other side stooped to even less savory smear tactics, I thought, when Georgina began to tell people that Da Silva was a police informer. In the boycott atmosphere, this sort of rumor was enough to get someone killed. As far as I could determine, and I made an effort to get to the bottom of the story, there was no evidence to substantiate the charge. Unfortunately, it had credibility, partly because Da Silva was a conservative, but mostly because he was "white." Georgina, too, knew a vulnerable foe when she saw one.

All this faculty infighting and polarization over whether the boycott should continue was irrelevant to the fact of the students' boycott, of course. Debating the issue in endless meetings was simply many teachers' way of coping with the strains of the boycott. These meetings were also great opportunities for pose-striking and speechmaking by those teachers who harbored their own political ambitions, particularly for those senior teachers whose sights were said to be set on posts in the Coloured Affairs bureaucracy. As opposition to the boycott grew, we were treated to interminable diatribes by the likes of Napoleon and Africa—Napoleon was beginning to move less cautiously around the campus, Africa had emerged from his office—each determined to publicize his own ideas about "equality through education."

What was my own position while my colleagues were all being flushed out of the political underbrush? I tried to lie low. I felt vulnerable, working illegally as I was, and I wanted to attract as little attention as possible. If there were indeed police informers among our students, as everyone claimed there were, and if they ever came to my awareness sessions, I was sunk. But I kept my mouth shut at staff meetings, and let myself be identified willy-nilly by the senior teachers with the fence-sitters on the faculty. Then the principal, after reviewing the list of awareness session subjects and remarking the absence of his own favorite chapter of political history from the courses offered, asked me to prepare a lecture about the civil rights

movement in the United States—and I realized that I was about to be smoked out.

47

If the principal and the senior teachers at Grassy Park High had come to any of the awareness sessions I had conducted on the subject of foreign investment in South Africa, they might have been better prepared than they were for what I had to say about the American civil rights movement. I hadn't undertaken to expose American collusion with apartheid with any special zeal. (Indeed, I had once vowed never to curry favor abroad by engaging in America-bashing, and had wasted many hours in foreign lands defending my native superpower.) But neither had I tried to minimize the American role in the maintenance of apartheid. At Grassy Park High, where so many of our students were both uncritically adoring of the United States and desperately uninformed about South Africa's true international situation, this subject had simply seemed important, and impossible to present in any other way without discarding one's integrity as a teacher.

All the professional integrity in town did not ease my nervousness, though, when a hundred or so people crowded into the biggest classroom at Grassy Park High one morning in May to hear me discourse about the American civil rights movement. The principal and most of the faculty were there, along with a preponderance of the senior students. I knew what the principal wanted from me: an instructive, uplifting lecture about how equality was achieved for the black people in America. I went to work fast, talking without notes, as if to escape my misgivings by sheer momentum.

I sketched black American political history, using a blackboard. Slavery. Abolitionism. Dred Scott. Civil War. Emancipation. Reconstruction. Jim Crow. Plessy Ferguson. Going north. Ku Klux Klan. Jackie Robinson. Brown v. Board of Education . Rosa Parks. Dr. Martin Luther King. Little Rock and Selma and Oxford. Newark and Detroit and Watts. The Civil Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act. The Black Panthers and the FBI. Affirmative action and school busing and big-city black mayors.

Then came the hard part: the present situation, the prospects, and the relevance to South Africa of the black American experience. I took a deep breath and dove in. The civil rights movement in the

United States, I said, seemed to have come to a dead end, far from its envisioned goal of equality between black and white. Legislatively, there was really not much more to be done. In fact, affirmative action was now under attack and in retreat. School busing, while it had worked wonderfully in many places where it had been implemented, was very unpopular and was also being cut back. Educational segregation in America was actually getting worse . Profound inequality remained, and the causes were social and economic, and they were proving intractable. Centuries of oppression, and particularly the destruction of the black family, had created a huge urban underclass, a culture of poverty. Unemployment among young blacks was over 50 percent in many cities. Average black income was actually shrinking as a percentage of white income—it was now less than 60 percent. Many black urban neighborhoods, I said, were uninhabitable hells, worse in certain ways—such as in the prevalence of hard drugs—than the worst South African townships. Black anger and despair in America were, in sum, at least as intense today as they had been before the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. (Less than two weeks later, events in Miami would illustrate this rather vague point all too clearly, as three days of ferocious violence in the Liberty City area northwest of the city left 16 killed, 370 injured, and 787 arrested. These riots had been triggered, the news reports said, by the acquittal of four white former policemen on charges of beating a black man to death.)

The principal, I could see, was not pleased with my conclusion about his beloved civil rights movement. Yet I was not finished.

As for the relevance of the black American experience to the situation of black South Africans, I said that it seemed to me to be very slight. Both groups shared a history of conquest and/or slavery followed by second-class citizenship, but beyond that their situations differed fundamentally. In America, blacks were a minority; in South Africa, they were the majority. The historical stakes here were therefore infinitely higher, and the denial of black rights was far more systematic and remorseless—it was the law. In the United States, where today the laws at least were color blind, there was in theory some democratic redress against racial discrimination. But there would never be a Brown v. Board of Education in South Africa. The courts here did not have that independent power of review. Furthermore, a program of passive resistance and civil disobedience, such as that led by Dr. King in America, was not an option in South Africa. Its limits had already been demonstrated by the failure of the great

ANC Defiance Campaign of the 1950s to achieve any of its goals, and then the security legislation of the 1960s had removed the basic freedoms necessary to organize effective nonviolent resistance. Since the achievement of full black political rights in this country would inevitably mean the end to white-minority rule, and since the white government would apparently go to any lengths to prevent that from occurring, the resolution to the South African dilemma would clearly bear little or no resemblance to the American civil rights movement.

I did not go on to describe what course I thought things would take, both because it was not part of my topic and because my conclusion would have been the same painful one that most students of contemporary South African history seem to reach—that violent conflict between black and white will probably escalate until the whites surrender power. I didn't have to go on, though. I could see from the terribly serious expressions on the faces of the older students in the room, and from the terrible frowns on the senior teachers, that everyone had understood quite well my view of South Africa's prospects. As for the principal, he had walked out in disgust shortly before I finished speaking.

48

Nico and Shaun dropped by New Room 16 one morning in early May. They asked about Rachel, which they always did since the day they had visited us in Muizenberg. They asked how I liked living in Rondebosch. Then Shaun said, "Sir, do you think they will send us all the textbooks we need, and that will be the end of the boycott?" This was apparently one of the trio's prepared questions. The week before, the government had announced that boycotting schools should immediately submit new requisition forms for all needed textbooks, and they would be supplied. The deadline for requisitions had come only two school days after the announcement, and there had been a shortage of forms to boot, so there had ensued a huge scramble to determine what textbooks we had, in what condition, and so on—a process complicated by boycott conditions, and by the widespread bitterness and mirth about such inept, knee-jerk "administration."

"I doubt we'll ever see all those textbooks," I said. "And what about your other demands?"

"That's right. We want equal education. And we don't believe the Prime Minister when he says we're going to have it."

"Anyway, he only means that we should have the same the white children have," Nico said.

"I thought that was what you wanted."

"No, sir."

"No, sir. The same standard, yes, but not the same ideas ."

I was pleased to hear it. At that point, Wayne showed up. "Our class is just sitting, sir, doing nothing," he said. "Can't sir come and teach us something?"

6A6 was off performing one of their plays and I was free, so I set off with Nico, Wayne, and Shaun for the old building, where 7E1 was in its register classroom. "But not geography!" Shaun warned, and the four of us laughed. As we passed the domestic science room, we heard students singing along with a cassette of Pink Floyd's "The Wall," which was now banned in South Africa for both sale and possession: "We don't need no education / We don't need no thought control." The song had become one of the boycott's anthems.

The children were gathering in their normal classes more and more these days, rather than free-floating in small groups between meetings, sing-alongs, and awareness sessions. Some of my classes seemed to be getting more out of the boycott than others. 6A6 continued to show a cohesion they had not known before. Myron, their representative to the SRC, had gotten a little power drunk lately. In his reports from SRC meetings, he would stride back and forth in front of the class and harangue his mates about suspected "scabs" and "traitors" who were said to be secretly doing schoolwork at home at night. If any teacher tried to give them a normal lesson, Myron barked, he or she should be reported immediately to the SRC. A teacher at a neighboring school had attempted to do so, and she had been humiliated and forced to apologize publicly to the entire student body. I kept a close eye on Myron while he railed about "scabs," because he seemed to have noticed Wayan, who was obliviously reading a book. But 6A6 actually seemed to have the collective common sense now, I thought, to handle anything that arose themselves.

6A7, after a fast start, was growing aimless. Some of the more precocious children in the class—Terence, Mieta, Natalie, Angela—had hurled themselves into the boycott's apertura with great enthusiasm. I saw them at meetings, discussions, even history lectures, where there were no other Standard Sixes in sight. I thought these children regarded me with a new alertness, even a certain defiance, as if their "conscientization" had removed an almost physical veil of deference. Terence in particular spoke to me as if we were now suddenly equals,

boasting to me about how he had begun resisting his father's demands that he go to church, and saying, "There are more important things to be doing, isn't it, Mr. Finnegan." But the class as a whole needed constant entertainment, needed to have its energy channeled, and 6A7's register teacher was Grobbelaar, who was a nonentity at school these days. 6A7 began to seem sour and frustrated as the boycott wore on. They played pop music on a radio all day long, and the girls danced together.

6A8 was as calm, as attentive, as well behaved as ever. The class participated in every available activity and occupied themselves when nothing was happening. Serious little Josef kept a group of boys spellbound with his skill at chess. Some of the girls who sang in a church group together turned boycott songs into four-part harmonies. One afternoon, when I looked in on 6A8 and asked what they were doing, Amy said, with a seriousness that made her classmates laugh, "We are waiting for the Committee of 81 to tell us what to do." Shireen added, "Perhaps sir would like to give us some vocabulary. 'Oppression means when they oppress us.'" The class laughed again. It struck me that 6A8 did have a rather passive, obedient attitude toward the boycott leadership. Dismayingly, though not surprisingly, Oscar had stopped coming to school after the first couple of weeks of the boycott.

7E2, my rowdy rebels, had virtually disintegrated as a class in the suddenly changed context of the larger rebellion that was the boycott. Being moody, self-destructive Misunderstood Youth simply had no cachet these days. Getting die vier voorste pulled out to enhance one's love life suddenly seemed more than a little beside the point. 7E2's case was not aided by the fact that their register teacher was the religion teacher who had parked herself and her sewing in the staff room for the duration of the boycott. The class seemed to have fragmented into six or seven separate entities, which attached themselves to other classes or haunted obscure corners of the school grounds in disconsolate clouds of tobacco smoke.

7E1, on the other hand, showed signs, like 6A6, of having been molded by the boycott into a more cohesive class. There were children who were obviously not comfortable in the volatile boycott atmosphere—notably, a chubby boy named Kamaloodien, who was delivered to school each morning along with his four brothers in an old blue Mercedes by their father, a Muslim who owned a number of corner shops. Kamaloodien normally had a sleepy, anteaterish look about him, but his eyes were wider now, as if he felt newly compelled

to watch his flanks as he waddled around school. 7E1 seemed to take to the boycott intellectually. There were no especially fiery students, no rising young boycott leaders in the class—Nico was probably the fieriest—but there was clearly a consensus that it was time to revise their ideas about school, God, and country. A number of kids from 7E1 had suggested to me in different ways that the boycott was a vindication of the sort of geography I had been teaching them. "South Africa is quite wicked to some of these other people, isn't it, sir," said the same boy who had once protested my criticism of the migrant labor system. When I joined 7E1 on the day that Wayne had come to fetch me, they greeted me happily, and I gave them a lecture on the bantustan policy that was perilously close to being a lesson on South African geography, yet they did not object.

Relations during the boycott between the senior students at Grassy Park High and the hundreds of children in Standards Six and Seven were nominally democratic. But really the matrics were like some revolutionary vanguard party, with the younger children filling out the role of "the masses." Ambivalence, indifference, even outright dissension among the younger children were all drowned in the general roar of support for whatever the boycott leaders decided. There were also some matrics, however, who kept their distance from the protest hubbub. These included Kamaloodien's older brother, Ishmail, who hoped to study medicine at the University of Natal. He was among those about whom it was murmured that they were continuing to study at home. Warren, who hoped to become a Dutch Reformed minister, was another matric who seemed less than enthusiastic about the boycott. Whenever he came to New Room 16 to chat, Warren carefully kept the conversation on something other than politics. One day, he indicated a group of aimless-looking students in the field below my window and said, "It's no mystery why the children are starting to call it 'the borecott.'"

The high spirits of the first weeks of the boycott were definitely dissipating. Our program of activities had begun to wear thin, and fewer teachers seemed willing to teach improvised, unstructured lessons. Part of the problem, I realized, was that many of my colleagues were actually running out of things to teach. Cornel, Conrad, Andre, Chantal, Moegamat, Cecil—these teachers' own educations and experience had involved little beyond the high school syllabus and the Grassy Park community, with the result that they really did not know all that much more about things in general than their students did. Even some of the young, pro-boycott teachers were beginning to spend

more and more time in the staff room, reading and socializing and only venturing out to attend, in giggling back-row cliques, the wildly popular sex education classes still being offered by the ever-obliging Meryl.

49

In the middle of May, the Committee of 81 decided to suspend the boycott in Cape Town for three weeks. The list of demands the Committee presented to the government—with the proviso that if they were not met within three weeks, the boycott would be resumed—was ambitious. It included an end to racial discrimination in teachers' salaries and the release of everyone detained in connection with the boycott (there were by now several dozen detainees). It seemed impossible that these demands would all be met. As it happened, on the day after the suspension of the boycott in Cape Town, the authorities closed indefinitely the University of Fort Hare, in the Eastern Cape—where the students had been boycotting classes for a fortnight—and the Committee of 81 promptly resumed the boycott in Cape Town in solidarity with the Fort Hare students.

A dynamic was developing which was paradigmatic in South Africa. While the government was trying to force the students to abandon their boycott, the only group that could make any decision about the course of the boycott, the Committee of 81, began finding it increasingly difficult to function. Security Police harassment escalated. Meetings were raided, routed, canceled. The Committee itself was being decimated by detentions. At Grassy Park High, we lost Elliot, our representative to the Committee of 81, in the first big wave of arrests. Like most of the others, Elliot was picked up by a squad of Security Police at 4 A.M. at home. He was taken to an unspecified prison and held incommunicado. The number of detainees held nationally soon soared into the hundreds.

The debate about the boycott which was dividing the faculty at Grassy Park High was now taking place throughout black South Africa. Most politically significant perhaps was the violent opposition to the boycott expressed by Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, leader of the KwaZulu bantustan. Buthelezi, though despised by many blacks for his role as a "homeland" politician, commanded a large following in the form of the militant Zulu "cultural organization," Inkatha, and Buthelezi seemed to take the boycotts personally. He denounced them

as the work of "evil political forces who thought in their stupidity that they could attack Inkatha by mobilizing children." He accused unidentified white men of sneaking through the black townships near Durban at night and paying children ten rands a day to boycott. The boycott planners, said Buthelezi, were "political witches," and, he warned, "We are a people who know how to deal with witchcraft. We will destroy this evil among us." Buthelezi dramatically underscored these threats by leaving the stage at the rally where they were made, whereupon an Inkatha impi (tribal band) of two hundred men swarmed onstage and attacked a black minister who was believed to be a boycott supporter. The minister was felled with stick blows to the head and beaten senseless. His life was saved, said the news reports, only by the intervention of Dr. Oscar Dhlomo, the Inkatha secretary-general.

The anti-boycott faction on the Grassy Park faculty continued to tread somewhat more lightly than Inkatha. The time was clearly not yet right for opposing the boycott outright. Thus, when a rumor made the rounds at school that the Grassy Park SRC was considering taking a resolution to the Committee of 81 advocating a new suspension of the boycott, and the spoor of the rumor was traced somehow to the faculty, no one was in a hurry to own up as its source. A joint meeting of the faculty and the SRC was held, at which the possibilities for the rumor's origin were narrowed down to a handful of senior teachers. This meeting was an extremely emotional affair, with a number of students stepping forward to denounce the teacher who had betrayed their trust. I wasn't at all sure what was going on until somebody nudged me and indicated Pieterse, who was one of the four suspects. Pieterse was not his natural color. He was gazing rigidly at no one. The meeting was adjourned without a malefactor being named. A consensus had apparently been reached, however, about who it had been. Pieterse left school early that day. And in the weeks that followed, no matter how heated things became, he refused to be drawn into any aspect of the boycott debate. Pieterse became one of the staff room fixtures, his face buried in correspondence course textbooks from which he seemed to surface only to ask me about the nature symbolism in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse . I never again saw Pieterse in the company of a senior student.

The students were supersensitive about attempts to divide them against one another. That was why they didn't like to vote in front of me. That was why they didn't like their deliberations leaked before they had reached a decision. As disquiet about the quality and direc-

tion of their boycott spread and as pressure from the government to call it off was increasingly augmented by pressure from more conservative black groups, the bulk of the students' attention seemed to be shifting from the issues at stake to their own rear guard. "We must keep our options open"—this tactician's motto was becoming the boycott's battle cry. Similar diversions, similar problems, and the same basic dispute had plagued all resistance campaigns in South Africa, according to Jacob. "We always have these same groups, the sellouts and the holdouts, at each other's throats, while the Boers throw them all in the shit together."

Jacob laughed. This was after school. We were driving through Grassy Park. Jacob had caught a lift with me, saying he was going to UCT. He seemed to be in his usual ebullient mood. "The Napoleons and Africas and Van den Heevers, they've been ja-baas ing the whites for three hundred years. They're the good boys. They'll always tell you they're working for change from the inside, but they're not interested in change. Their minds are colonized. They don't even realize what shit they're talking. They never even see that, without their collaboration, the system couldn't exist. They'll never admit it, but they actually believe that blacks deserve to be subjugated by whites. Because blacks are poor and uneducated, they don't deserve what the rich and educated have, that's how they see it. It's up to us to make it on the white man's terms, you know, never mind how the system makes that impossible for just about every black. And if you say, 'No, we want liberation now ,' they say you must be crazy, you're a hothead, you're an adventurer. I tell you, Bill, what you're seeing here at little Grassy Park High has been happening all over this country for a very long time. It happened in the ANC in the 1940s, when the Youth League came along and told the old guard, 'Enough of this collaboration,' and the old guard said, 'Cool down. You're hotheads.' It happened in the fifties, with the PAC, and the sixties and the seventies, with BCM. There's always this struggle, between these Uncle Toms who have a little security, and those of us who want our freedom now. And then there are the intellectuals, like October." Jacob laughed. "They want to talk about Angola, or what Leon Trotsky had to say about the national question, but they don't want to fight die boere . Except die boere are the enemy, not anybody else."

I thought Jacob's openness with me was strange. He seemed to trust me before he knew anything about me. Not that I didn't appreciate that. Jacob was hyperactive, and as such slightly opaque, but I

found his attitude refreshing. I gave him rides to UCT several times. Then, in late May, Jacob was detained. He had been warned beforehand, apparently, and was just leaving his house on a hasty trip to Johannesburg when the police vans arrived. Jacob, too, was taken to an unspecified prison and held incommunicado.

The atmosphere at school was really darkening now. There were angry rallies, at which the children railed impotently about freeing Elliot and Jacob. There were no more awareness sessions about rock-'n'-roll music. Attendance remained high, but few of the boycott leaders were to be seen around school. Clive dropped by my classroom one afternoon, looking haggard, and asked if I would mind if he turned up unannounced at our place some night needing somewhere to sleep. I said I wouldn't mind.

Clive did turn up unannounced at our flat in Rondebosch a few days later, though he did not mention needing a place to stay. It was a fine winter afternoon and he had with him a fresh-faced, stocky girl in a white sweater. Her name, he said, was Mattie. I wasn't quite sure why Clive had stopped by, unless it was to show off Mattie. That would have been understandable. She was black-eyed, olive-skinned, and very pretty, with a mop of short black curls and the sort of quick-but-calm quality that gifted athletes often have. Mattie was a matric at a school near Grassy Park High and very far from shy.

"Mr. Finnegan, can I call you Bill?" she asked when we were introduced. "Clive says you're the most informal teacher in the history of C.A.D."

Clive and Mattie joined a group of us in Alex's study, where another visitor—a rather hapless UCT student who had come by to sell us tickets to a Jimmy Cliff concert, or some dagga, or both, or, hey bra, just to have a cup of tea—was just finishing telling a long, shaggy-dog story about getting high with the workers in his father's brick factory. Mattie let him finish, then lit into him. "Why do you call women 'chicks'?" she wanted to know.

"Why not?"

"Because it's sexist."

And away they went, the black high school kid and the white university student, with the student getting the worst of it on every subject from female cardiopulmonary capacity to the political sociology of drug use in South Africa, until another round of tea, with its attendant fuss, interrupted them. The most nearly equal exchange

between Mattie and the student took place on the subject of the upcoming Jimmy Cliff concert. "What's he doing here, anyway?" Mattie asked.

"He's a musician, he's come to play. In fact, the guy's a prophet. Have you heard what he's been saying about apartheid up in Joburg?"

"I've seen the pictures of him waving a Bible around, talking a lot of shit about how he's come here to save us. He makes me sick, frankly. Who needs his kind of prophet? He travels out here wearing fatigues and a beret trying to look like a revolutionary, when everybody knows that he's breaking the cultural boycott by coming to South Africa at all. He's here for the money, finish and klaar . And the government's cock-a-hoop he came."

The student shrugged, unpersuaded. "Well, I wouldn't miss this concert for anything. It's a once-in-a-lifetime thing in this country. They're holding it in Hartleyvale, anyway—the place will be packed out with blacks."

"So what?"

"So what do you want to do, tell people they can't go hear the best music going, just because they were born in South Africa? Isn't life hard enough, that they don't also have to just sit in the townships and never see the performers that the rest of the world gets to see?"

"That's their excuse for going to Hartleyvale. What's yours?"

"Pleasure," said the student, and gave a slow, stoned laugh. "Pure pleasure."

Mattie rolled her eyes, and grimaced at Clive, as if to say, "White students. Why do we waste our time?"

After tea arrived, Mattie began leafing through a stack of Alex's record albums. She grunted with approval, I noticed, over a Joni Mitchell album, and laughed quietly when she came to an extensive selection of reggae. Our student scalper departed without having made a sale—"Be very careful at Hartleyvale" was Mattie's parting advice to him—and conversation turned to the boycott. It was in a parlous condition now, it seemed to me—even the Committee of 81's lawyer had been jailed—but Clive and Mattie each contended that there was some leadership still intact. What seemed to concern Mattie was less the state of the protest in Cape Town than its health elsewhere around the country. Action was coordinated and militant in the Eastern Cape at the moment, and Natal seemed strong, despite Inkatha, but Soweto was disturbingly quiet. What was going on there? Mattie very deliberately solicited the opinions of the several people present, and listened closely to whatever anyone had to say.

After tea, some of us repaired to a north-facing porch to catch the last of the day's sun. There, Mattie asked me about how Americans saw South Africa.

"Most of the Americans who realize that South Africa exists see it pretty simply," I said. "And I think most of them just tend to wonder why the blacks here haven't gotten it together yet."

"And what will you tell them, when you go back?"

"I don't know. Maybe that there are a lot of forces at work here. Like black conservatism."

"What do you mean, 'black conservatism'?

"You know what I mean. All the people you call 'sellouts.' All the old folks who think the boycott's wicked. All the black cops and homeland leaders. All the blacks who've got cars and houses and prefer the devil they know."

"Like your fellow teachers?"

"No comment."

Mattie gave a short laugh. "Spoken like a true teacher." She raised a fist. "Staff room solidarity!"

I expected Mattie to reject my emphasis on black collaboration, as Nelson and others had—the feeling seemed to be widespread that a white had no right to blame a black for any position taken under the devastating economic and psychological pressure of apartheid, even if that position provoked vehement rejection by his own people—but Mattie's response exceeded my expectations. As conversation swirled around us and the low sun gave everything on the porch a fine, golden glow, she began to speak, quickly but softly and carefully. "You know, you shouldn't mistake whatever it is you think you're seeing in Grassy Park for the whole picture. Black teachers have been a progressive force in this country for a long time. They've gone down quite a bit in the Cape under C.A.D., and since a few other professions have finally started to open up for the privileged few that can get the training—teaching and nursing used to be practically the only things an educated black could do. But look at what this so-called commission of inquiry said about Cape Town teachers in '76. And look at all the teachers who resigned in protest over conditions in '76, especially in Soweto.

"Also, you must remember, there is a political spectrum in any community. Here, those people who are most involved with the system, the cops and the C.A.D. stooges and so on, naturally have the most interest in keeping it going. They're going to provide the most drag on the politicization process. But that doesn't mean even they

accept apartheid. Most black people are too busy just surviving to be politically active. A lot of others feel too vulnerable to get involved. If foreigners expect all black South Africans to have exactly the same political outlook, they're just being silly. And racist—they're not allowing us the diversity, the humanity , that I'm sure they allow for in their own countries. But if they think that because not all blacks are actively working for the revolution here, then all those blacks who aren't must accept South Africa as it is, they're also getting it completely wrong. Conscientization is the problem here, not conservatism."

Rachel, who had turned and started listening to Mattie, caught my eye and raised her brows in astonishment at such eloquence from a schoolgirl. I made a face back that seconded her surprise. I found myself wondering if Clive and Mattie were boyfriend and girlfriend. They were obviously cohorts, and they made a stunning pair—she even met the condition of going to a different school—yet Mattie was hard to picture as anybody's high school sweetheart. She was so fierce, so . . . "unfeminine." As the sun sank behind the mountain, Fiona suggested they stay for dinner, and Clive was clearly about to accept until Mattie deterred him with a few oblique words about an appointment she said they had in Wynberg.

"But it's been a pleasure, a pure pleasure," Mattie said, doing a good imitation of the poor departed UCT student, and grinning mischievously. "It's always nice to see how the other half lives. Thanks for the tea."

They set off, and we watched them from the porch, walking together along the railway line toward the Rondebosch station, Clive looking tall and frail, Mattie punctuating some point in their conversation with a gentle roundhouse right to the chest. Alex pointed to a white car parked up the street, with an oversized aerial and two men inside it. "What's the American expression?" he wondered. " 'The Shadow knows'?"

50

The second month of the schools boycott had a decidedly different cast from the first. In Cape Town, tens of thousands of students were still on strike, and many of the children were clearly getting tired of talking. I thought I saw a broad shift of mood signaled at the Jimmy Cliff concert. I didn't go, but the several UCT students I knew who did

all got roughed up and robbed and returned to Rondebosch in shock, with tales of knives, lead pipes, and bottle necks freely employed on the few whites in the crowd. This was not the sort of thing that normally occurred in South Africa. After the concert, some revved-up fans on their way home even entered a whites-only car on a train, grabbed two young men from Pretoria, and threw them off between stations, seriously injuring one, a student at the University of Pretoria. These attacks bore no direct relation to the schools boycott, yet they seemed to me to reveal a critical new element of reckless confidence in the general, constant mass of black anger.

Then the boycotting students made a sudden move into the white areas in a dramatic, Peninsula-wide demonstration staged at half a dozen shopping centers on May 24, at the height of Saturday morning shopping. They invaded the supermarkets, disrupting business—pulling goods off the shelves, loading carts with groceries and refusing to pay once they had been rung up. They brought banking to a standstill by flocking to branches throughout the city to open savings accounts with minuscule deposits. The authorities were caught completely off guard by this mass action, although the planning for it had not been especially secret. Pamphlets had been circulated, and the day before at school, Shaun had boasted to me, "See how we get their attention when the whites get behind us in a queue tomorrow." And the shopping center protests did get the attention of the white public more effectively than all the weeks of boycotting had. The demonstrations got banner headlines in the white papers and provoked a deluge of editorial disapproval from every quarter.

Many of our students took part in the disruptions at the suburban shopping centers closest to Grassy Park, but the biggest demonstration occurred at the Golden Acre complex in downtown Cape Town. There, some three thousand pupils, after having brought shopping at the complex to a standstill, gathered in the central mall to sing freedom songs and refused a police order to disperse. In front of thousands of shoppers, they were attacked by riot police in camouflage, with truncheons and dogs. An unknown number were injured, seventy-six were arrested, and the broken glass and spilled blood were not, for a change, all on the Cape Flats.

The mood at school on the following Monday was furtively triumphant, but the slow degeneration of constructive boycott activities was not reversed. Those of us still offering awareness sessions were having more and more difficulty generating interest in lectures and discussions. Student-led activities were also retrogressing—marches

turned into cricket tournaments, study groups became poker games. "This boycott is getting boring, sir," Elroy confided to me. "What can we do?" Inside this question, I heard echoing the principal's imprecation—"Do you really have no advice to offer these children?"—and I did have ideas, naturally, about how the students could most profitably spend their time at school. Yet the collective mood had not about-faced; teachers were still auxiliary to this children's crusade, even as it marked time.

Which is not to say that it was always easy to keep faith in the students' greater wisdom. One morning, I sat watching some Stan. dard Six boys play cards in a corner of my classroom. Mock betting and snarling at each other in skollie taal , they were doing an uncanny imitation of middle-aged layabouts gambling on a stoep or in a she-been somewhere, such that I could almost smell the cheap brandy and township cigars. I finally broke up their game, but not without awakening a type of sullen grumbling that I had not encountered before at Grassy Park High. None of the boys, I noticed, called me "sir," and they headed straight for another classroom where there was no teacher in attendance.

More teachers were emerging from their politic silences of April. The two women on the staff room couch now rose from their endless knitting to declare that they had known this boycott business to be wrongheaded all along, that in their considered opinion "the devil was afoot!" Yet the faculty as a whole continued to have little or no influence over the children, and many teachers now openly treated the boycott as a holiday. Faculty dress standards collapsed, as younger female teachers started wearing trousers to school and male teachers began turning up in pullovers and safari suits. (To the amusement of both students and colleagues, I stuck to coat and tie. Something about a bridgehead against cynicism.) Many teachers seemed to avoid the company of students. "Education for liberation" was coming to be regarded as something of a joke.

More significant than the erosion of teachers' support for the boycott was the erosion of parents' support. The shopping center protests, which had struck me as a risky but effective piece of civil disobedience theater, had apparently not struck the black community that way. There was widespread criticism by black parents of the students, whose seriousness and self-control, said the parents, had been called into question by the May 24 demonstrations. There were a number of parents' meetings in early June which produced resolutions calling on the students to return to classes. A sudden rise in student pregnancies was cited. Parents had a double influence over

the students, since most of them retained not only their traditional authority at home, but also represented "the workers" whom students were increasingly convinced they had to follow, rather than lead, in the larger liberation struggle.

There was evidence that many students were heeding the calls of their parents to end the boycott. Pamphlets that were definitely not government-originated began to appear, pointing out, "The boycott is not the struggle . It is a weapon of struggle, one amongst many others. Since the continuation of the boycott threatens to split the students and the parents into those for continuation and those against, it must be altered." But the signals coming from the Committee of 81 were, by this stage, extremely confused. It was often suggested that the Committee had been commandeered by a clique of radical idealists who were out of touch with the wishes of students or the community and favored an indefinite boycott. In any case, events seemed to be gaining a terrible momentum of their own.

The government's reaction to the shopping center protests was one of spluttering fury. Louis Le Grange, Minister of Police, promised "very strong action" against any future demonstrations. "We are not going to play around with these people anymore."

What Le Grange meant was made brutally clear a few days later in Elsies River, a squalid "colored" township on the Cape Flats. The police first baton-charged a peaceful shopping-day crowd. Two hours later, at the same spot, an unmarked van, registered to the police, was stoned. From inside the van, men wearing T-shirts opened fire on the crowd with shotguns. Two youths were killed, six were wounded. One of the dead boys was fifteen years old. Witnesses said he had been simply walking past the scene.

The popular feeling about these killings found expression a few days later when the two youths were accorded a heroes' funeral. Twelve thousand mourners followed the funeral cortege in a procession two kilometers long. Student marshals from UWC helped to keep the demonstration peaceful. At the cemetery, the crowd was addressed by black religious and political leaders, all of whom blamed the government for the tragedy. I wasn't there. When I had asked people in Grassy Park whether they thought it would be all right if I went along, no one would give me a straight answer. Finally, somebody had mumbled something about "the community," and I had taken the hint.

On the first of June, a demonstration of an entirely different order took place in the Orange Free State. A series of spectacular explosions ripped through the huge government oil-from-coal plant known as

Sasol One, destroying a number of storage tanks and causing over seventy-five million dollars' worth of damage. A simultaneous but unsuccessful attempt was made on a second plant, Sasol Two, in the Transvaal, and the next day three more bombs were found at the offices of the Fluor Corporation, the American consortium that was building Sasols Two and Three. The ANC claimed responsibility for the Sasol attacks, which were, in economic terms, the most successful guerrilla strike in South African history. The fierce, unspoken joy over the news was a palpable reality all that week at school.

Meanwhile, two more boycotts had been called in Cape Town. One was against local meat producers, in support of eight hundred workers who had been locked out in a dispute over recognition of workers' committees. Butchers all over the Cape Flats were refusing to sell red meat, and consumers elsewhere were being urged not to buy it. The second boycott was against the privately operated municipal bus service, after it announced fare hikes ranging from 30 to 100 percent. The boycotting students had been talking about the need to forge links between their action and the community at large—well, the bus boycott turned out to be ideally suited to the purpose. Students helped form street committees to arrange alternate transport for commuters. They convinced local taxis to lower their fares. And throughout the Cape Flats, the buses ran empty. Those buses that ran at all were stoned—over one hundred buses were damaged in the first three days of the boycott.

By this stage, stones flung by black youths were beginning to loom large in the fears of white Capetonians. White motorists driving to the northern suburbs via Elsies River were being stoned so frequently that traffic was rerouted. One day in Sea Point, I was stunned to see a city bus still plying its rounds past the nightclubs and delicatessens with all its windows broken out. The bus was full of elderly white women sitting grimly in the wind. That faraway nightmare, the Cape Flats, was starting to make itself felt even here on the antipodal Côte d'Azur. For some reason, our students called buses with broken windows "TVs."

Although some whites I spoke to couldn't believe it, I felt safe driving to and from school each day. My car and I were well-known along our route and in Grassy Park, where the main driving danger remained the distractions presented by the friends and pupils I was forever seeing along the road and turning to greet. A white stranger driving through Grassy Park might have had trouble, though I doubted even that.

Then, one overcast afternoon, Rachel and I took a drive out to Mitchell's Plain. Rachel had become interested in the place, and had already made a number of trips there, interviewing community leaders—including one who had been detained by the Security Police hours after she spoke with him. On that afternnon, we went out in search of photographs for an article she was writing for an American magazine. It was while driving from one vantage point to another, along one of the wide empty thoroughfares that characterize the place, with no one in sight, that we were stoned. There was a loud bang on the driver's door. A foot higher and it would have hit me in the side of the face.

My reaction was interesting. I pulled over and jumped out of the car, absolutely furious. This was not the recommended procedure, which was to roll up the windows, put one's head between one's shoulders, and step on it. But there was no angry crowd here. In fact, there was still no one in sight. I shouted for the cowardly stone thrower to come out of hiding. I wasn't sure what I would do if he or she obliged. Not upbraid them so much, I think, as justify myself. Demonstrate that I was not one of the oppressors and did not deserve to be stoned. It was silly, whatever I had in mind, and Rachel insisted I get back in the car and that we get out of there immediately. She would get her photos another day—with a black escort, if necessary.

Now, as the unrest spread, and the schools boycott neared the end of its second month, the government began to crack down in earnest. More and more activists were being jailed, and all gatherings of more than ten people were banned in terms of the Riotous Assemblies Act. The provisions of this law, which prohibited all outdoor gatherings except church services and sports events, had been renewed continually since 1976. Now, all indoor meetings were also prohibited. In its own words, the new law prohibited "any gatherings of a political nature at which any form of state or any principle or policy or action of a government of a state or of a political party or political group is propagated, defended, attacked, criticized or discussed, or at which any protest or boycott or strike is encouraged or discussed or which is held in protest against or in support of or in commemoration of anything." Professor John Dugard, a distinguished South African legal scholar, called this "definitely the widest proclamation of its kind in South Africa so far."

I didn't realize at first the exact import of the phrase "in commemoration of anything." But we were coming up now on June 16, which had become a sort of outlaw national holiday for black South Africans. Known as Soweto Day, it was the date on which the 1976 upris-

ing started in Soweto, the day on which people honored the hundreds of children killed. This year, there was a call out for a two-day, nationwide stayaway from schools and jobs. The authorities were trying to head it off. From where we were, in Grassy Park, it was clear that they did not stand much of a chance. The planned stayaway obviously had massive support. I never met a black who did not plan to observe it. Soweto Day also happened to coincide with the end of the second term of the school year; so a festive, school's-out atmosphere began to obtain at Grassy Park High as it approached. Our students, many of them bored and tired of boycotting, began to liven up. Increasingly, I noticed, they were talking about "action" with the same guilty relish that they had once said "boycott." When the sixteenth of June arrived, I found out what "action" meant. It meant war.

51

In the Western Cape, the first day of the stayaway was a huge success. Seventy percent of black employees did not turn up for work, and all major industry ground to a halt. The newspapers called it "the most powerful peaceful demonstration in the region since Sharpeville in 1960." The emphasis in that description was on "peaceful"—137 people had died in the Cape in the 1976 uprising, which had been nothing if not powerful—but the precedent was also ominous. "Sharpeville" referred, after all, to a massacre.

And June 16, 1980, was only relatively peaceful. Where people tried to hold commemoration services, the police, citing the ban on all gatherings, attacked with batons, tear gas, buckshot, and plastic bullets. In Soweto, many were injured and one person was killed outside the Regina Mundi Cathedral. In the nearby "colored" township of Noordgesig, seventeen youths were shot. Five more people were shot in Bloemfontein. On the Cape Flats, roads were barricaded, stones were thrown, and the police dispersed crowds with a "sneeze machine," which sprayed tear gas through a huge funnel mounted on the back of a truck. The main road into Grassy Park was closed by the police.

The second day of the stayaway was also a success, as over half the black workers in the Cape continued to stay home. But the random, hit-and-run skirmishes between black youths and the police escalated drastically on June 17, and the Cape Flats was turned into a giant battlefield. Barricades of burning car tires, bricks, oil drums,

tree branches, ripped-out plumbing, mattresses, and even telephone poles blocked the major roads. Schools, shops, supermarkets, and rows of houses were set alight. Businesses were looted. Cars were torched and their burned-out shells began to litter the streets. In the midst of all this, the critical strategic weakness of Cape Town, from the government's point of view, was revealed, as every route to the city's international airport was cut. The airport itself became a hysterical scene, as cars, unable to reach the city, began returning with shattered windows and injured passengers. Eventually, the police had to start ferrying passengers to and from town in vans covered with protective wire mesh. The city's military airfield at Ysterplaat, located securely (and not accidentally) in a white area, with no black townships between it and the city center, was not imperiled—so that was where two planeloads of anti-insurgency riot police were flown in from Johannesburg.

As the police mobilized, rumbling into the townships in the armored trucks called Hippos, the tactical thinking behind the wide, straight streets on the Cape Flats came into play. In pitched battle, the open terrain greatly favored the police. It was sticks and stones against bullets, and there was no place for people on foot to hide. The police used shotguns, Uzi submachine guns, and high-powered rifles, and the rapidly mounting casualties were all on one side. Skollie gangs were being blamed by police spokesmen for the burning and looting, but no gang members were turning up at the hospitals and mortuaries. In fact, the number of women and children among the casualties seemed incommensurate with the kind of police action being described in official reports. The few reports coming from township residents charged that police were avoiding confrontations with gangs and simply shooting people indiscriminately—and the lengthening list of victims seemed to bear them out. A twenty-two-year-old mother of three shot to death. A forty-five-year-old woman shot to death, and her husband and son both shot when they went to look for her. A seventeen-month-old baby shot in the head in her crib, the police refusing to help transport the baby to the hospital, and the baby bleeding to death. A boy shot to death, and his mother prevented from going to his body by a policeman who shouted at her, "Laat die donder urek!" ("Let the beast die!")

The worst carnage seemed to be occurring in and around Elsies River, but the news from Grassy Park and vicinity was also all bad. A fifteen-year-old Grassy Park boy shot to death—not, apparently, a student of ours. A fifteen-year-old Retreat boy, William Lewis, shot to

death—he had been a Standard Six pupil at Lavender Hill High School. At the mortuary, they told his mother that he had been throwing stones. But, she said, he had been walking on a hill over two hundred yards from the road, on the way to the shops to buy milk for his puppy, when he was shot. In Lavender Hill, a fourteen-year-old girl shot to death. A policeman riding in an ambulance on the road into Grassy Park—at the place where it passed Jessie's Moslem Butchery and the Dandy Cash Store—had ordered the driver to stop when a stone or stones were thrown at the back of the ambulance. He got out and shot the girl, Shirley September, who witnesses said was far from the road and far from where the stone had been thrown. The bullet entered above her left eye and went out the back of her head. The policeman got back in the ambulance, which proceeded. A wounded boy in the back of the ambulance said he heard the policeman bragging about the shooting, and that they stopped several more times to allow the policeman to shoot into crowds. Shirley September, who had been a primary school pupil, lay dead for two hours before another ambulance arrived.

On and on it went. General Mike Geldenhuys, the Commissioner of Police, announced that the police would "shoot to kill" anyone seen burning or looting in the black townships. Minister of Police Le Grange vowed to have "no mercy" on rioters. "We will act relentlessly against them," he said. "They deserve what they will get." By now, however, the attention of the world media had been turned on the Cape Flats, and the "shoot to kill" announcement raised a storm of international protest—from, among other bodies, the United States government and the United Nations. The announcement was amended to read that the police "would maintain law and order at all costs." The subtle differences therein were undoubtedly lost on many of the victims of police gunfire—such as the twenty-seven-year-old man shot dead when police claimed they saw him trying to break into a petrol pump at Tudor Motors, Retreat.

It was impossible to get accurate casualty figures. The police had forbidden reporters to enter the townships, accusing "pressmen, especially those attached to foreign news media and television networks," of "openly inciting black youths . . . to stone-throwing and riotous behavior." The police had learned of this incitement, they said, from "certain members of the South African press." The Cape Town newspapers canvassed local hospitals and mortuaries and came up with a figure of at least forty-two dead and several hundred maimed and wounded. But the police would release no figures. And then Cape

hospitals received "special instructions from Pretoria" not to release any information to the press.

All this time, I was in Rondebosch—listening to the radio, reading the papers, phoning friends in Grassy Park. "You probably know more than we do," Meryl Cupido said when I called her. "The cafes are all closed. We can't get a paper!" The paper boys, I noticed, were on the streets in the white areas in their usual ragged numbers. Did they even know about the stayaway? They all slept, someone had told me, in the sheds and vans and sidewalk stands of the newspaper distribution network—violating Group Areas and cut off from the township grapevine. Other than theirs, there were few black faces in sight in the shops and offices and restaurants. Although the "NonWhite" side of the corner liquor store was open, it seemed to have no business. Yet the atmosphere in Rondebosch was really not far off normal. Some clucking and head shaking about "hooligans" and "unrest" in the bookstore. The maître d' helping out with the cooking at the Hard Rock Cafe, and the white waiters smirking. Maybe the executives in their office towers were having a hard time without their tea ladies—I couldn't tell. At the student bar up the road, I noticed the black wine steward who had once warned me about the beer they called Soweto working at twice his usual pace.

The next day—Wednesday, June 18—sporadic fighting continued on the Flats, if fighting is the word. But the factories in town were running, people were back to work. Alex and I, officially on vacation now, decided to climb the east face of Table Mountain. We ascended from Kirstenbosch, through the deep forests of stinkwood and yellowwood, ferns and assegai. In the woods, we saw other hikers, a few spectral joggers, and a sturdy-legged girl with a tiny monkey on her shoulder. Eventually, we emerged onto the rocky heights, where there was no one else, and began working our way north along the ramparts.

Three thousand feet above the city, there was a cold wind flowing over the top of the mountain. We found a sunny, protected niche and split the beer and oranges we had brought. From there, we could see the entire Cape Flats—and, beyond them, the low green hills near Stellenbosch, the etched purple peaks of the Hottentots Holland, now dusted with snow, and the whole magnificent sweep of the False Bay coast. We could also see the townships burning. There wasn't much wind at sea level, and the smoke hung brown and ugly over much of the Flats. The few thick columns that rose straight up caught the jet stream blowing from the southeast at a certain height, where the

smoke turned abruptly and bore northwest. The whole of Table Mountain, Alex said, apropos of nothing, was a White Group Area. On the mountainside below us, on more or less the route we planned to take down, we could hear baboons barking.

52

After all the bloodshed and destruction, a malaise seemed to settle over black Cape Town. The mood of popular rebellion, which had been gaining strength for two months as the schools boycott radiated its message of resistance into the community as a whole, seemed spent now. And the students were no longer discernibly in the forefront of anything. During the uprising itself, they had been overtaken by the tidal wave of general township rage. The fighting had yielded few clear images. Unlike Soweto in 1976, the Cape Flats in June 1980 could not be symbolized by a column of children marching under banners, with fists raised. The confrontation with the regime's guns, when it finally came, had been less focused than that. Like the Flats themselves, the battle had seemed scattered, brutal, chaotic. It was black South African tradition to give people killed by the police big public funerals. Indeed, these funerals often became battlegrounds themselves when the police tried to disperse them, sometimes resulting in yet more deaths, and another round of resistance funerals. Yet most of the dozens of dead in Cape Town were buried quietly, as if people at this stage lacked the heart for any more confrontation. Shirley September's funeral was attended by perhaps five hundred mourners. Her mother later told a reporter, "We thought we would never see a 1976 again but this time was worse for us here." The passivity in that remark spoke volumes. The communal pressure on Mrs. September to understand her daughter's death in political terms, as a casualty of the Struggle, seemed to be effectively nil.

I contrived a reason to go into Grassy Park as soon as the roads were open. At the point where I crossed the line, the scene was one of devastation. The road was charred and broken from the tire fires used to block it. Burnt logs and the remnants of barricades lay everywhere along the verge. The particolored glint of broken glass blanketed the streets and fields. Stop signs and stoplights had all been destroyed—lending new meaning to the idea of defensive driving. Smashed, blackened automobile carcasses were being loaded onto trucks.

But all this was on the outskirts of the community—in Lavender Hill, and in the open spaces between Grassy Park and the nearest white area. Grassy Park itself, as I drove around it, looked unscathed. And so, thank God, did Grassy Park High—except for some new graffiti. On the road beside the school, I saw three girls from 6A7, and we stopped to talk. They said they had all observed the stay-at-home literally, and had not set foot outside their houses from Monday night until Thursday. "It was dangerous here, sir!" No, they knew of none of our students who had been hurt. Someone had tried to set a fire at the school Tuesday night—people were saying it was the Vlei Monsters—but the fire had not caught. It was a miracle that none of the shops at Busy Corner had been torched. Had I been to Elsies River or Ravensmead? There, they had heard, all the schools and shops had been burnt to the ground. "It must be very terrible there, sir."

Talking with these girls—tut-tutting about the damage done to buildings, murmuring "Shame!" together about the people who had been shot, speculating whether the boycott would continue after the term break or not—I again had the eerie, dispiriting feeling that the essential connection between these past days and nights of fighting and the Struggle was somehow not being made, not even by these students. I returned to Rondebosch with a suffocating sense of wasted life and pointless suffering.

Militarily, the revolt on the Cape Flats had presented the government with some problems—notably, the inadvertent siege of the city's airport—yet it had never been more than the police could handle. As in 1976, no troops had been called out. The black townships had been easily sealed off, so that the unrest never reached any white areas. This was the first strategic priority of all urban planning in South Africa, the containment of township uprisings, and the Cape Town system had handily passed a serious test. Moreover, when it came to firepower, there had been no contest whatsoever. Dozens of blacks were dead, hundreds had been shot, while not a single policeman had been injured on the Cape Flats.

Exactly how many people had died became a matter of dispute. The police at first said nine. Then eleven. Then twenty-nine. Eventually, they said thirty-four. The opposition press stuck to its figure of at least forty-two. For some reason, the police refused to release the names of those who had been killed. It seemed the friends and families of those still missing were to be left in an agony of ignorance indefinitely. The police, in any case, had been indemnified en bloc by Parlia-

ment against any civil action being taken against them by their victims or, if they were dead, by their families.

The white press had deplored in unison the Cape Flats violence, but beyond that the opposition papers and the government papers differed sharply in their interpretations of events. The Cape Times offered this trenchant, double-edged defense of the police: "The necessity from time to time to shoot people dead by the score is a consequence of the system, not of defects of character or training on the part of the men charged with maintaining law and order." The Cape Times editors also took to task the many whites afflicted with "the convenient thought that this is a mere law-and-order problem": "To say, as the commissioner of police is reported, that the death and violence in Cape Town last week was 'non-political' is another milestone in the South African capacity for self-deception." (The white South African capacity, they meant, of course.) Die Burger, meanwhile, also praised the police, yet discerned no indictment of apartheid in the uprising. The government paper issued pious calls for "forgiveness, courage and faith from all communities," sternly told the supporters of the schools boycott that they had been "warned from the beginning that things could easily get out of hand," called the work stayaway "abortive," and commended in classic witbaas fashion those blacks who had not observed it: "The courageous workers who did not take any notice of the agitators' call for 'solidarity' or their threats deserve a pat on the back and the gratitude of their employers." In the capacity for self-deception department, I was perhaps impressed most of all by Die Burger 's plea after the uprising had been crushed: "Will brown leaders not come to the fore to lead their people away from confrontation?" Did the government really not know that it had already thrown virtually all the legitimate "brown" leaders in jail?

At least 394 people had been detained since the boycotts began, and at least 330 of them were still in jail, according to figures compiled by the South African Institute of Race Relations. It was not even known under which of the various security laws 90 percent of the prisoners were being held. The Argus published a complete list of the detainees, which I tore out and taped up on the kitchen wall of our flat, among the Italian postcards, co-op notices, and opera schedules. (No one mentioned this obtrusive addition to the decor, but I began to wonder if it was not in fact a bit melodramatic, and after a couple of weeks I took it down.) Once we knew where he was being held (in a prison thirty miles from Cape Town), Alex and I discussed the

possibility of visiting our colleague, Jacob. But such a visit was always inappropriate, it seemed, for one reason or another, and eventually Jacob, Elliot, and fifty-five other detainees were reported to be on a hunger strike and refusing all "privileges," including visits, reading matter, and exercise, in protest against their detention.

You would never have known it was such a dull, depressed time from the letters I began getting from home. The mid-June violence had made headlines around the world, and it seemed everyone who knew I was in Cape Town suddenly wanted to know what was going on, and whether I was all right. It was at least good to hear that the world at large had heard about the uprising. According to the Times of London, events in Cape Town had "destroyed South Africa's carefully polished new image and exposed the reality behind the promises of reform." The Observer was more dramatic. "The drift to war has begun," that paper wrote. "When a normally peaceful community like the coloureds go on a violent rampage, as in Cape Town last week, it is time the world community woke up to the danger." Despite the restrictions on access to the townships, some film of the fighting had reached Europe, and its impact on public awareness had apparently been powerful.

In truth, the noises we were hearing from overseas seemed more than a little unreal. The drift to war? Bishop Desmond Tutu, then chairman of the South African Council of Churches, not yet the Nobel laureate, predicted in a speech in London that Nelson Mandela would be Prime Minister of South Africa before the 1980s were out. Britain, we read, had just joined forty-two other Commonwealth countries in a massive Release Mandela campaign. . . . It was as if everyone assumed that the government in South Africa was bloodied and reeling now. Which was not at all how it looked from inside the country. The Prime Minister went on television a few days after the Cape Flats uprising and calmly pointed out that the state had not yet used anything like its full might against rebellious blacks. However, he said, "if we are forced to do so, people will be hurt very much more."

The newspapers were full of ads for new, shatter-resistant window-laminates—"With the incidence of urban violence increasing daily, the average working and living environment is no longer safe." Home insurance policies were being rewritten to cover "political riot." And the property market in the Cape was reportedly slumping dramatically (our landlord in Muizenberg had sold just in time), as it had done after Sharpeville, and as it had done for a long while after Soweto. But even in Cape Town, the whites did not seem to me gripped

by any noticeable new apprehension during the weeks after the uprising on the Flats. The Minister of Finance reasserted his government's commitment to "free enterprise," the date was set for the next yacht race to South America, young couples got married at the usual rate, and apartheid was enforced with the usual rigor. I heard what seemed a common white view of "the unrest" one morning at the breakfast table in a surfing companion's house. When his mother heard where I worked, she delivered herself of a variety of opinions over porridge, including, "Our girl tells us that nobody actually wanted to stay away. It was just those schoolchildren, who are being led by communists, forcing them. We let her stay the night here, never mind we don't have a permit, just so she wouldn't have to stay away."

I was thinking of leaving South Africa. Not only did the country's situation seem just overwhelmingly tragic and hopeless, but Rachel had received the long-awaited news from home: her mother was very ill; she would have to go to her. It was unclear if or when Rachel would be able to return. We still had little money. It seemed our plans to travel Cape-to-Cairo might be shelved indefinitely. I was deeply torn. I felt an obligation to go with Rachel. I felt an obligation to stay with my students. But would classes ever resume? Would I ever receive a work permit? I did not look forward to the loneliness of Cape Town without Rachel. Neither did I feel ready to return to the United States. I still wanted to cross Africa overland.

In the end, Rachel flew home by herself. We didn't know if I would be following her on the next plane, my application for a work permit denied, or if I would be staying on for the five months of school that remained, or what. Rachel and I had been together for nearly seven years, and we had endured lengthy separations before. But this one loomed unpleasantly ill-defined.

School inspectors, principals, spokesmen of every stripe had been declaring the school year "a write-off" since the end of May. The children's failure to write the normal mid-year examinations in June had been the final blow, according to these experts. On July 9, when the African schools in Cape Town were scheduled to resume classes and the high schools remained completely deserted, it seemed the academic year truly would be a washout. But then the Committee of 81 put out a call for students to continue to show up at school on school days, as they had been doing throughout the boycott. And the next week, when "colored" schools were reopened, attendance was nearly as high as ever.

The first day back at school was chaotic, as no one seemed to know whether the boycott was still on. A Peninsula-wide referendum was held by the Committee of 81, although we teachers were barred from seeing the voting. Then, on the second day of the new term, the Committee of 81 made it official: the boycott was suspended. On the same day, Ronald Reagan was nominated as the Republican candidate for President of the United States. The day before, the fifty-seven local detainees who had been on a hunger strike had agreed to start eating again. And two days later I received my work permit.