PART III
"NORMALISATION"

53

It bordered on being a guilty pleasure, what the Committee of 81 called "the so-called normalisation of classes." Like almost everyone else, I had grown weary of the boycott in May and June, though I had not felt entitled to say so. It would be perverse to call the sensation liberating, but getting back to schoolwork at last, in the latter half of July, did relieve a great deal of generalized frustration among the Grassy Park faculty. As one teacher put it, "Sitting on your thumb is exhausting, hey?" At the very least, it was nice to feel employed again.

And the children, mindful of the amount of work they had missed, were suddenly intent upon their studies in a way I had not seen before. Their resumption of schoolwork was only conditional, according to the Committee of 81, yet judging by the number of after-school study groups the children had organized, it was also being conducted with an eye to the year-end examinations. The Committee of 81's authority was not what it had been, in any case. At the end of July, the Committee issued a call for another week of boycotting, to protest the continued detention of some of its members. The call was ignored.

"Staff-student relationships will never be the same again," one Cape Town educator had declared during the boycott. "The established ideas of education will have been altered irrevocably."

As the third term got under way, life at Grassy Park High did not seem to bear out these predictions.

Some things were different. Dress standards remained relaxed. The students still wore uniforms, but the hand-me-down pastiche of blazers, jerseys, skirts, shirts, pinafores, and trousers they presented was decidedly more casual than before. There were also fewer children in school. Though we had lost no students in the mid-June violence, we had lost a number of kids to the local factories and textile

mills. Either their parents had become exasperated with the boycott and sent them to work, or they had succumbed themselves to the lure of the wage—despite the fact that it was less than a dollar an hour. Some Cape Flats schools had lost three hundred children. We had suffered many fewer casualties than that at Grassy Park High, and the silver lining on the dropout cloud was that we now had slightly less crowded classes. (I lost two or three students in most of my classes; six or seven in 7E2.)

But "staff-student relationships" were almost immediately, it seemed to me, much the same as they had been before the boycott. In fact, if anything, they appeared to have regressed. The matrics who had been effectively running the school for the past three months and who were now under the greatest pressure to catch up in their studies—the matriculation exams they were scheduled to take in November would be crucial to their futures—relinquished power ipso facto by plunging into their schoolwork. The more dedicated teachers were also suddenly working very hard, trying to make up for lost time, so that progressive-minded refinements in classroom techniques were soon getting more lip service than implementation. Who had time for discussion and debate when there was so much course material to cover?

Far more striking than these natural refluxes, however, was the way the school's authoritarians—Napoleon, Africa, and others—seeing their opportunity, thrust themselves into the post-boycott leadership vacuum. These teachers now stalked the school grounds with canes in hand, daring anyone to dispute their regained territory. It was the mission school all over again, I thought, minus its earlier charm. "People showed their true colors during the boycott," one young colleague muttered to me. "So there's no point pretending whose side they're on now."

The students as a group seemed dispirited. All the noise and excitement, all the euphoria of power and new ideas, were gone now. And what had the boycott got them, other than fewer classmates, more broken windows, and two months of work to make up? Only their most modest demands had been met. Many of their leaders were still in jail. Feelings of defeat were unavoidable.

It seemed essential, therefore, to try to consolidate the boycott's gains in terms of student awareness and organization. Over the objections of students who claimed they were sick of the whole subject, I designed my lessons with that end in mind. (Since none of the classes I taught "exam subjects" faced the government exams this year, there

was less panic and frantic studying among my students than among most others.)

In all my classes, we discussed the conduct of the boycott—where it had succeeded, where it had not. I urged the children to be self-critical. Had the boycott lasted too long? Few students were willing to say so, but I suggested that it had. Not because they had "made their point"—clearly, that needed to be done repeatedly until apartheid was destroyed—but because, if the boycott had been suspended while the students still possessed the unity and enthusiasm of its early weeks, then the possibility that they might resume boycotting at any time would have strengthened their bargaining position. As it was, the return to class had ultimately been more the result of boredom and parental pressure than of any dynamic decision, and the threat to resume boycotting was now seen to be empty. Both time and momentum had been lost. And what of the tactic that had separated their demands into categories of short-term and long-term—had that been well advised? Or had it just allowed the government to make some classroom repairs and provide some textbooks, and postpone addressing the larger issues, since those were framed as "long-term"? Again, few students seemed willing to second-guess their leaders. 7E2, which had scarcely survived the boycott as a class, was almost unnaturally quiet.

I asked my English classes to write letters to imaginary friends overseas describing the events of the last few months in South Africa. Some of the results were impressive, showing a solid comprehension of what the boycott had been about, and of where things stood now. "We were asking for our freedom, and the reply was in bullets," Shireen wrote. "Now we must prepare ourselves for more struggle." But many of the letters turned in were appalling. One girl was mainly concerned that people overseas not think the children here in South Africa were always so unruly. Another girl assured her reader that the students had been seeking "freedom, not communism as we find in Zimbabwe." This sort of thing, after all we had been through, was pretty discouraging.

At times it seemed impossible that these were the same children who had staged those clever, subversive little morality plays just a few weeks before, or had organized and run such an efficient, effective student government. Nowadays, the SRC, whose leadership had devolved into new hands when the matrics all left their posts to begin studying for their exams, concerned itself mainly with constabulary functions, like disciplining students caught smoking in the lavatories.

The new SRC's only memorable difference with the authorities came over the question of whether Muslim boys should be excused early on Friday afternoons so that they could go to mosque.

In my classes, I tried to counter student discouragement over the outcome of the boycott by pointing out some of its positive effects. World opinion had been strongly influenced, had it not? According to a June report from London, "Criticism of South Africa's policies in the Western European press has been increasing steadily since the start of the school boycott." More immediately and more importantly, black civic associations throughout South Africa had been galvanized into political action on a broad range of local issues.

But my efforts to maintain a positive, critical perspective in classroom discussions on the issues raised by the boycott continued to yield little. Was I particularly interested in what my students thought and felt about the mid-June uprising? Then they were particularly reluctant to talk about it. A few condemned the violence against black businesses, but most took the position that there was nothing to say. Die boere had all the guns. It was suicidal to attack them with stones. Yet people were so angry, they did so anyway. A government classroom was not the place to discuss such things, in any case.

Only the continued detention of Elliot and Jacob seemed to rouse the children's interest in the struggle these days; and even the detainees' plight seemed to be the source of more worry than anger. Prayer meetings were held, and a girl in 6A7 gave me a turn by writing in an essay that she "prayed every night to God to let the government release Elliot and the others soon." No one made any jokes about torture these days, I noticed. But neither were people lining up to denounce the cruelty and immorality of detention without charges. Perhaps the futility of such reproaches had been the boycott's most powerful lesson for our students.

While I was busy worrying about how to counter my students' discouragement, Clive came by my classroom one afternoon and said that he thought I was wasting my breath. His friend Mattie was with him, wearing the navy blue blazer of another school.

"It's not a bad thing, necessarily, if people think they've been defeated on an issue," Clive said. "When we lose a battle over bus fares or electricity rates or inferior education, the people learn something. They learn that these little issues are not the point. Power is the point."

Mattie demurred. "They aren't little issues. Bus fares are a big

thing to most people. Talking about majority rule at this stage is for intellectuals, not for the masses. The people gain confidence from small victories, on specific issues. They begin to see the power they have ."

As she spoke, Mattie was wandering around my classroom, inspecting the walls—the magazine pictures, the Careers Information poster, the tattered maps from my travels—and shooting me wry, inquiring glances as she went.

"But I don't think you need to worry about the students," Mattie continued, addressing me. "Their morale might seem low at the moment, but they've just been through a very big educational experience. They're more aware of their oppression now than ever before, more aware of the need for good political organization, and more aware of the role they will have to play. Seeing their friends and teachers detained, seeing the cops shooting down people in the streets, these are things no one will forget, don't you worry."

Clive and Mattie had come by, it turned out, to try to sell me a copy of a mimeographed pamphlet called "Inter-School Manual." On the cover was a drawing of a raised fist clutching a pencil. The price was ten cents. I took one.

The main article in "Inter-School Manual" was about the same thing we had been discussing: what was to be done in the aftermath of the boycott. Headlined by the international revolutionary slogan "The Struggle Continues" in four languages—English, Afrikaans, Xhosa, and Portuguese—the article cataloged what had been learned through both "victories" and "mistakes," and stressed the need for students to work for liberation during both "high points like the boycott" and low points, "periods of reaction," like the present.

"Inter-School Manual" also contained articles about the bus boycott, the meat strike ("Victory in Defeat"), corporal punishment in schools (including guidelines for "Group Confrontation of Reactionary Teachers"), and the need for SRCs. There was a synopsis of the Freedom Charter,^[*] and a surprisingly good short history of the liberation struggle, beginning with the founding of the ANC, including a deft summary of the contributions of the Cape Town-based Unity Movement, and concluding with the hope "that this article will serve as a starting point for discussion amongst cadres." The tone of "Inter-

* A document produced in 1955 at the "Congress of the People," a historic meeting of the ANC and other groups, the Freedom Charter is still regarded by a broad spectrum of the resistance as the blueprint for a democratic South Africa.

School Manual" was nicely balanced—both hortatory and clear, critical yet not divisive. Its fourteen pages were decorated with drawings, diagrams, quotes (Brecht, Mandela), poems, and slogans. There was even a crossword puzzle, the answers for which included "profit," "amandla," "proletariat," and "PLO." "Capitalism" was identified as black South Africa's main problem at least as often as "apartheid" was, and "Azania" was the preferred name, not "South Africa."

My favorite article in "Inter-School Manual" was one titled "Teachers—The Stillborn Radicals." It scorned the "petty bourgeois attitudes" of teachers, and declared, "Our first, our second, our final impression of teachers in general, is that they are a misfit lot condemned to the Sewage Tanks of Athlone. Their sole concerns are their cheques, their bonds on houses, their cars and a host of other interests. As a body, they cannot be trusted." The article concluded with a typology of teachers—who had, it said, been "put under the microscope" by the boycott—listing five distinct types of teachers. Four of these were reactionary, although inclined to "spew out glib phrases as regards the struggle in the country." The fifth type "supported us in word and deeds" during the boycott and had not "reverted to the old dictatorial methods."

For my relations with my colleagues, the boycott had been a watershed. It had revealed and deepened the political differences among the faculty, and as far as some teachers were concerned, I had emerged as a member of a hostile party. No longer did the principal stop me in the courtyard to share with me his war stories. Africa and Napoleon seemed to have lost interest in my views on Charles Bronson's films. On the other hand, there were teachers who were more forthcoming with me now than they had ever been before.

A group of us had started gathering for lunch in the school library, rather than in the staff room. There were eight or ten regulars in this group, including Nelson, Alex, Meryl, Conrad, Solly Marais, and a shifting complement of senior students. Conversation among the library crowd was lively, literate, and in English. In fact, this group had exactly the sort of easy, witty camaraderie I had once hoped to find after work in the Grassy Park pub.

The library lunch group was amused by my surprise at finding "normalisation" so thoroughgoing and regressive. "What did you expect, the collectivization of marking?" Nelson asked. "Man, this is still a government school."

"The pupils have been boycotting classes, demanding changes,

and returning to classes since I was in school," Solly said. "That was nearly fifteen years ago now!" That got a chuckle—it had been closer to forty years since Solly was in school. "It's true, though. There were often walkouts at the mission schools, especially in the Eastern Cape. Even before the war, and certainly all through the forties. School buildings were burnt down. The headmasters inevitably called in the cops. So-called ringleaders were expelled, and once they knew who you were, no other school would take you."

"This 'normalisation' is nothing, compared to that," Meryl said.

"Our unity is so much stronger now," a student said. "The government must be that much more careful—even while they're working to destroy us."

Yet I had heard and read stories about how, in Soweto, for at least a year after the 1976 rebellion, power had shifted dramatically from the nominal authorities to the students, so much so that nothing happened in the township that was not approved by the students. Why was this obviously not going to be the case on the Cape Flats in 1980?

"Nineteen seventy-six was far more traumatic," Nelson said. "Some people actually thought the revolution had come. Hundreds of teachers quit their jobs. The students were not well organized, but they seized the initiative to a degree nobody had ever seen before. This boycott was better controlled, but it had more limited objectives. The authorities didn't panic. They've become more resilient."

Conrad: "Resilient? Look what's happening at Crestway. That's not resilient, that's vindictive."

Crestway was a neighboring high school, where the principal was being harassed by a C.A.D. inspector whose edicts concerning student meetings he had ignored during the boycott. Before the year was out, the Crestway principal would resign.

"Resilient means to bounce back. So C.A.D. is bouncing back!"

"So watch out, they'll pak you next!"

Actually, no one seemed especially worried that they were about to be fired or disciplined for their actions during the boycott, but the fact that the forces of reaction now held sway did give conversation in the library a certain besieged air.

54

Throughout its tenure, the Committee of 81 had complained when the press described it as a body of "Coloured" students. All local African and Indian schools, it insisted, were also represented on the Committee. The preponderance of black students in Cape Town simply happened to be classified "Coloured."

But when the Committee of 81 decided to end the boycott, only "colored" and Indian children returned to classes. In the African townships of Cape Town, the boycott continued. Student spokesmen said the boycotters wanted to demonstrate their solidarity with the local meat workers who had been locked out. The boycott was also still in force in African schools in the Eastern Cape, in Kwa Mashu near Durban, and at the University of Fort Hare.

Leadership of the boycott in Cape Town was assumed by a student group known as the Regional Committee—but police harassment and the continued blanket ban on all meetings made it very difficult for this leadership to function. For the most part, schools were deserted. No awareness sessions were being conducted at those schools that did have students. The township streets were full of restless, idle youth. In the second week of August, when crowds gathered to commemorate the anniversary of the outbreak of the 1976 uprising in Cape Town, violence erupted. Vehicles were stoned near Crossroads (a huge squatter camp near Mitchell's Plain) and Nyanga, buildings were looted and burned, and five people were killed over several days.

The government showed little interest in getting the African children back in class. In Cape Town, the parents of boycotting students formed a Parents' Action Committee to meet with the authorities. This committee carried a mandate from the boycotting students, but the government insisted it would negotiate only with school committees and community councils—bodies long rejected by the students. The leaders of the Parents' Action Committee were soon detained, in any case. When student leaders attempted to meet in a Guguletu church, they were baton-charged where they sat by police. In the ensuing flare-up, one boy was killed and four people were wounded by police firing from inside a bus.

The anger of students in the African townships came to be directed increasingly at their teachers and principals. One night, the principal of Sizamile High School in Nyanga was watching television with his family in their eight-room house in Guguletu when a crowd

of young people burst in the door and began silently pouring gasoline on the furniture. The family fled. The house was gutted, as was the principal's new car. On the same night, the principal of Fezeka High School in Guguletu was attacked in his house by children with stones and petrol bombs. He, too, had his house burned down and barely escaped with his life. A number of teachers' houses were attacked. And the students did not seem to be alone in their animosity toward those whom they considered "collaborators." One teacher sought refuge from angry children in a house near his school, only to be beaten up by the equally hostile parents inside the house.

Nervous jokes about events in Guguletu and Nyanga got to be a staple of conversation in the staff room at Grassy Park High.

The same sorts of things were happening in many parts of the country where the boycott continued. In the Ciskei bantustan, conservative rural parents were trying to drive children back to class with sticks. A student constable was killed in one clash with police, several children in another. The principal of a junior secondary school in the Alice district was stoned to death by students. After this incident, the Ciskei Chief Minister, Chief Lennox Sebe, declared, "People must now realise that we are no longer dealing with students but with terrorists who have no consideration for human life. . . . I am convinced these children will kill their own parents." Like the other bantustan leaders, ChiefKaiser Matanzima, the ChiefMinister of the Transkei, blamed outside agitators for the school boycotts in his "homeland." Black education in South Africa had been destroyed by "Communists" who infiltrated among the people, according to Matanzima. His appeal to students to return to class had a certain pithy logic—"Where will you get education after you have been killed?" he asked.

The ongoing boycotts were occurring within a larger pattern of unrest. Every day the papers seemed to carry reports of police tear-gassing a crowd somewhere, baton-charging a school, shotgunning a child. In Grahamstown in July, a woman was shot dead in her yard by police while boycotting students marched nearby. At her funeral, a sixteen-year-old boy was shot dead, and a dozen people wounded by police gunfire. At his funeral, three more people were killed. In a township near Port Elizabeth, four children were killed and sixteen wounded by police during a Guy Fawkes Day celebration. In Guguletu, police killed two boys when they opened fire on a Saturday night crowd celebrating the victory of black American Mike Weaver over white South African Gerrie Coetzee in a heavyweight title fight.

On and on it went. Even from the "locations" near country towns, there seemed to be an unending stream of reports of children stoning vehicles, or stopping and looting bread vans, then distributing the loaves to the people. Finally, there was a great wave of industrial strikes—at the Volkswagen and Goodyear plants in the automobile manufacturing district near Port Elizabeth, at canneries and textile mills and factories in Natal and the Eastern Cape, at Sasol. Ten thousand black municipal workers struck in Johannesburg, as did the city's black bus drivers. Black workers continued to lose most battles with management, but some observers contended that this growing labor militancy was the most significant form of political resistance to flourish in the second half of 1980—even more significant than the boycotts of schools.

In September, the minister in charge of African education abruptly closed nearly eighty schools, including all eighteen African high schools and higher primary schools in Cape Town. Although most of the schools that were closed had been deserted for months, this act removed all hope of salvaging the year's work for nearly sixty thousand students. An indeterminate number of schools were closed in the bantustans, too, where hundreds of children were also reported detained for boycott activities. There had been little if any attempt by the government to address the demands made by the boycotting African students. Indeed, these demands were almost identical to those put forth in 1976, which never had been addressed.

As a result of the closings, dozens of African teachers were fired; many others were transferred to rural schools. In Cape Town, in September, African teachers suddenly had their pay withheld. "This is horrible," one teacher affected told the press. "We do not know what we have done." Again, this was the kind of thing that hit home among my colleagues at Grassy Park High, and the plight of these teachers was much discussed.

Why did African students continue to boycott after the "colored" children who had initiated the boycott were back in classes? The lack of any leadership capable of ending the boycott at African schools was often cited. A more basic reason was that conditions were simply that much worse at African schools, and in African townships. Certainly, the shattering impact of influx control on social, family, and economic life in many African townships contributed to a degree of systemic breakdown rarely seen in "colored" areas.

Did African boycotters feel abandoned by their "colored" comrades? Some undoubtedly did. In Cape Town, "coloreds" were accused

of a "lack of sincerity," and one Fort Hare expellee declared, "Those who give recognition to the system by attending classes are traitors to the nation." This condemnation was meant to apply to the many African children who had returned to classes in Natal, as well as to "coloreds" in the Cape. "Colored" student leaders were more careful in their remarks about those who continued boycotting. They were uniformly supportive, even once it became obvious that the uncoordinated, unfocused nature of the continuing boycott was badly dividing black opinion and putting no effective pressure on the government.

Most of the schools in Langa, Nyanga, and Guguletu would not be reopened until March 1981, well into the next academic year—by which time the "social effects" of the boycott had been "devastating," even according to pro-boycott reports.

55

Among all the manifestations of black unrest in 1980—the disruption in the lives and education of hundreds of thousands of children, the dozens of dead and hundreds of wounded in the June uprising on the Cape Flats, the Sasol bombings, growing black labor militancy—none seemed to make nearly so great an impression on white Cape Town as the deaths of two men in the August violence near Nyanga and Crossroads. Both had been drivers of vehicles that were stoned and burned. One, George Beeton, a fifty-nine-year-old contract supervisor, had immigrated to South Africa from Zimbabwe with his family only six months before. The other, Frederick Jansen, was a forty-six-year-old father of five. Both men were white, which clearly had something to do with the deafening public outcry over their deaths. Outraged editorials filled the newspapers and were read on television, a fund to aid the families of unrest victims was belatedly begun, and there was talk of armed whites preparing to take revenge on black Capetonians.

Within a week, twenty-four people had been arrested in connection with the killings. One of those arrested, Oscar Mpetha, was a seventy-one-year-old trade unionist and highly respected civic leader who had told an enquiring reporter the day before he was arrested that he believed the police were responsible for the unrest in African townships. After four months in detention, Mpetha and seventeen others would be formally charged with one count of terrorism and two counts of murder each. How exactly the authorities had settled on

these eighteen people as those responsible for the deaths of Beeton and Jansen, when the crowds at the scenes of the crimes were estimated at "several thousand," was never clear.

Undoubtedly responsible for some of the vehemence of white public reaction to the news of the deaths of Beeton and Jansen was a large, gruesome photograph published on the front page of the Cape Times. This photograph seemed to etch itself into the memory of everyone who saw it. It showed Jansen sitting on the ground waiting for an ambulance after his bakkie had been stoned and burned. Jansen was still alive when it was taken. Filthy, bloody, and burned, he was sitting in what looked like a puddle, with his briefcase beside him. One trouser leg had been torn off, and a thin, bent, pale leg filled the foreground of the photograph. Jansen's posture radiated trauma—his head hung down, his face was in dark shadow.

It was an arresting photograph by any standard, but its special fascination resided, of course, in the fact that Jansen was not simply another accident victim, but a prophetic symbol. Before one's eyes, this middle-aged Afrikaner was paying the historical debt. All the talk among whites was about the barbarity of people who could do such a thing. But I thought the subtext of this disgust was—besides simple fear that they or their loved ones might be next—an unspoken, even unconscious recognition that communal violence of this type was only retribution for the countless blacks killed and maimed by the forces of white rule over the years.

Somehow the worst part of the Jansen photograph was the way he had been left, half-immolated, like a sacrifice that would not burn properly, and was not worth any further trouble. The huge crowd standing nearby while the photograph was taken had been, according to the photographer, absolutely silent.

56

Compared to the violence and confrontation occurring a few miles away in Guguletu, these were quiet times in Grassy Park. Even so, the undeclared war between blacks and the government had a way of flaring up in one's face. One August morning, for instance, I was driving to school with Alex and Liz Channing-Brown. The commuter traffic going in the other direction was rush-hour heavy, but we were sailing along smoothly into the sun rising over the Flats. We had just crossed the line on Lansdowne Road when several white men armed

with submachine guns stepped into the road ahead of us. The men were not in uniform, but I did not consider not stopping. These hijackers looked angry and ready to use their guns. As I pulled to the curb, Liz seemed to be going into near-paroxysms of panic. Her purse, I realized, was undoubtedly full of dagga and Mandrax.

We came to a stop and two of the gunmen approached, bent over and peering into the car. The one who came to my window was fiftyish, with a mustache and heavy sideburns and a beagle's face. He stared at the three of us, looked disgusted, then straightened.

"Go on now, get out of here," he said, motioning with his gun barrel. "Voetsek."

We proceeded. Pulling us over had been a case of mistaken identity, quickly corrected by a glance at our faces. The police—or traffic inspectors, or whatever they were—had been looking for unlicensed taxis carrying people to the townships. The bus boycott had increased the demand for such taxis a hundredfold, and Lansdowne Road was one of the major thoroughfares out to the Flats. There were roadblocks operating on the others, too, and all around the bus stations that people normally used. My old station wagon was just the sort of car blacks would use as a "pirate" taxi—that was why we had been pulled over.

Although Cape Town's bus system was privately owned, the crackdown on unlicensed taxis was just one of the ways the government was aiding the bus company in its efforts to break the boycott. Pamphlets had been issued over the imprint of a nonexistent Cape Town Taxi Drivers Association, urging an end to the boycott. Months later, the government admitted producing these pamphlets itself, just as it had produced the flyers denouncing the schools boycott signed "Concerned Cape Town Citizens." The Cape Town City Council eventually proposed a bulk-ticket scheme, through which employers could purchase at a discount a whole season's transport for their employees, and then figure this fringe benefit into wage calculations. That way, a worker would think twice about boycotting bus service, since the cost of bus tickets would be subtracted from his pay whether he took the bus or not.

Clive: "Do you see why we don't care too much for so-called free enterprise? The government joins up with private monopolies against the people and they call it free enterprise. We are not even permitted to choose our own transport from our ghettos to our menial jobs."

The 1980 bus boycott in Cape Town lasted, with slowly diminishing effect, for several months. While the boycott undoubtedly hurt the

bus company's profits, it did not succeed in rolling back fares. If anything, according to company spokesmen, the boycott only hastened the next fare hike, by creating both a shortfall in revenues, and extra expenses for repairs to buses damaged by stone throwers.

57

It had been in remission during the boycott, for obvious reasons, but in the third term my little careers counseling program revived mightily. I held special classes for matrics on how to fill out applications for scholarships and bursaries. For those students interested in medicine, we organized a field trip to the big "Non-White" hospital in town, where they were addressed by black nurses and doctors and given a tour. Jillian and another girl who said she might like to study architecture, I sent to Fiona, who took them around an architect's office and answered their questions. For Michael, interviews with the local shipping firms that ran marine engineer apprenticeship programs were arranged. Warren stunned me by announcing that he had decided to go to UWC, after all; he was vague about his reasons, saying only that the boycott had given him the time to think about things.

My goal remained the admission of the maximum possible number of Grassy Park graduates to the University of Cape Town. There were application deadlines coming up at UCT, and for black applicants some advance planning was essential. The careers information service that I had been using put me in touch with an adviser at UCT who was willing to come to black schools to advise students about the best individual strategies for acquiring the necessary ministerial permit. She came to Grassy Park High and spent a long day counseling our matrics. Immediately thereafter, "Caggle" became the buzzword around school—short for "Comparative African Government and Law," a course offered at UCT but not at UWC. This was one of the ways for a black student to qualify for a permit: by seeking to study something offered only at a "white" university. Apparently, a number of black students had been granted permits recently after listing "Caggle" among the courses they wanted to take at UCT.

Meryl Cupido met with the adviser from UCT, I noticed. This pleased me no end. I had often pestered Meryl about her plans. When she had graduated from Grassy Park High the previous December, she had done so with no plans whatsoever, she said. And she had been doing nothing whatsoever when the opportunity to teach suddenly

arose (Meryl started work the same week I did). Was she now thinking of applying to UCT, I wondered? "Perhaps, perhaps," Meryl laughed. I asked if I might consider her my first counseling triumph—a casualty of the precounseling era rescued and rehabilitated—and she invited me to jump in a vlei.

Meryl and I had become good friends. She lived with her parents just across the street from school, and we often did our marking together at the parlor table in their small, tidy house, while her mother and sisters banged around in the kitchen and brought us tea. Meryl had misled me when we first met, with a lush and subtle version of "playing the fool." Like me, she had been forced out into the open by the boycott, however, forced to reveal more of her thoughts than she would have done otherwise. And Meryl had turned out to be better informed, and more politically serious, than many of our senior teachers (whom she had always before been at pains not to threaten). Meryl was, in fact, a budding radical activist. One of the reasons she was so quiet about her politics, I realized, was the trouble they caused her at home. Not with her mother or her sisters, but with her father, who was a loading foreman on the Cape Town docks and, in Meryl's phrase, "a reactionary." I met her father only a couple of times. He was a small, sour, muscular man, who filled the front room of his house with so much copper bric-a-brac that there was nowhere to sit.

I got along well with Meryl's mother and sisters. One of her sisters was in my vocational guidance class; another, older, was in love with a Portuguese sailor and used to ask my advice, as a well-traveled man, about whether she could possibly be happy in Portugal, since they could not marry legally in South Africa, "due to a piece of boere work known as Mixed Marriages." When Meryl's father came home from work, our schmoozing would stop, and I would soon pack up and head for Rondebosch.

It was Meryl who first pointed out to me that not all of our matrics wanted to study beyond high school, and that I might be able to help some of those who wanted to go straight to work. As soon as I made an announcement to this effect, several students came forward—kids like James Booysen, who said his only ambition was to find the highest-paying job possible when he finished high school. It seemed that James had already succeeded beyond the greatest expectations of his parents, who were farm workers in the platteland who had sacrificed everything to lodge their son here in the city while he went to high school. I felt sheepish about having neglected kids in James's position,

and began contacting on their behalf some of the more progressive employers in town—banks, international corporations, department stores. But I hedged my acceptance of these job-minded students' goals by also arranging presentations at school by recruiters from the local technical colleges, known as technikons.

Meanwhile, I had hit upon another possibility for escape from the closed circle of inferior education, this one for promising Standard Eight and Nine students: the American Field Service's high school student exchange program. It was a long shot—applications outnumbered places available by fifteen to one—but ten kids from Cape Town had been selected the previous year, and the Americans would undoubtedly see to it that the draw included a few black students each year. It was not easy to picture one of our Grassy Park students plunked down for a year in a small town in Kansas, but then that was the idea of AFS: cultural exchange. I talked with dozens of students about the program and compiled a short list of kids who seemed both qualified and interested. Then I contacted, through the local AFS office, a "colored" student who had recently returned from his year in the United States. His name was Roland and he readily agreed to come to Grassy Park to talk to my group of potential candidates about his experience.

Roland gave me a fancy slap-slide-twist-clench of a handshake when we met in the principal's office on the afternoon he came to talk. "How it is, my man," he said.

Roland was a tall, round-faced kid with rubbery features and a large, sculpted Afro. He was wearing bright blue sweat pants and a tight black T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and had a pair of rose-tinted sunglasses propped in his hair. He looked just like a black American college athlete—which was the idea, of course. Roland laughed and regarded me quizzically: "How the hell you come to be teaching in a place like Grassy Park?" His accent was an unsettling mix of Cape Flats and half-mastered black American.

Whatever concern I might have had about Roland's ability to convey his experience with AFS to a group of strangers was swiftly allayed. He was a practiced public speaker. He had spent his year, he said, in Richmond, California, just across the bay from San Francisco, where he said he had addressed American crowds many times.

"They give you three rules when you go over on AFS," he told the fifteen students who had assembled in a sewing room to meet him. "No drugs, no hitchhiking, and no political speeches." Here, Roland

paused for effect, and smiled slyly. "But hey, I broke all three of those rules in one night!"

His listeners tittered nervously.

"But seriously," Roland said, "AFS is a great trip, if you can do it. It will open your mind right up. They have a rule that you have to come back here for two years after your AFS year is over, but I'm telling you, I was ready to break that rule, too. I didn't want to come back. When I had to leave all my American friends behind, I'm telling you, I cried. "

I had a class to teach that period, so I had to leave. I stuck around long enough to hear about some of Roland's athletic exploits in America—how he had led his school's soccer team to the state championships; how he had broken his school's record in the 220, "but I was really cranked on speed, I admit"—and to confirm my first impression that his visit was turning into a disaster. Several of the prim, bright Muslim girls whom I left behind in the sewing room gave me terrified looks as I slipped out the door. I made signs to them to be calm, everything would be all right, I would be back.

When I did get back, the meeting had just ended. Roland was already gone, and the others were filing out of the room. I asked them how it went and several said, "It was very interesting." I finally cornered a precocious boy named Aaron and asked him what he had thought. He laughed heartily. "That guy was weird," Aaron said. "He mostly just talked about athletics, and nightclubs, and all the white girls he took to bed. He made America sound like one big shebeen!"

"Did people ask questions?"

"Some people asked. The girls were too embarrassed, I think. They don't like to hear that kind of talk. All those drugs. And some of the rest of us, I'm sorry, but we just couldn't help laughing at him. He was so Americanized."

I tried to explain that Richmond, California, was not really a typical American town—which Aaron already understood. "But maybe you should explain that to some of these girls, who were a bit shocked."

Did he think people had been put off the idea of AFS by Roland? Had he been put off himself? "Not really. I can't speak for the others. But this guy was, you know, just what some people say you'll become if you go away to America to study. He was depoliticized. It's like he's too 'cool' now for the struggle. He can talk about it, but you can tell his heart's really in California. That's what struck me."

A number of girls, and several boys, had been put off AFS by

Roland's performance. In the end, there were only three or four serious applicants. Among them, Aaron had by far the best chance, I thought. But then he withdrew his application. His family did not like the idea of his going away for a year just now, he said. Among other things, the family business was short-handed. Aaron's family owned a garage, and Aaron himself already had a reputation as a Saturday night terror with a tow truck—filling the family compound with towed-away vehicles, which the owners then had to pay to retrieve. I kept telling Aaron that, with his capitalistic instincts, he would do marvelously in America. Which made him laugh his big, easy laugh. But being in business here was depoliticizing enough, he said. He didn't need equal opportunity to make it worse! In truth, Aaron was not in dire need of widened horizons. And none of the other applicants to AFS from Grassy Park High was accepted into the program.

Offering the starkest possible contrast to Roland's jazzed-up jock manner, in the way of a Cape Flats high school student transformed by a stint away from home, was Elliot's demeanor when he was finally released from prison. He arrived at school one Monday afternoon in the back of a bakkie. Classrooms immediately emptied as students flocked to give him a returning hero's welcome. Elliot looked awful: pale, dazed, frightened, and aged. But he stood up on the bed of the bakkie and gave a short, moving speech in a clipped, militant language that he had not known when we last saw him. Detention had not affected his commitment to the struggle, he said, except to strengthen it. He had been kept alone in a cell, but had been able to shout to other prisoners, including several resistance veterans who had helped him keep his spirits up. He had celebrated his seventeenth birthday in jail. Elliot gave a raised-fist salute, tears streaming down his face.

"Amandla," he called.

"NGAWETHU!" roared the students.

"Amandla!"

"NGAWETHU!"

A few weeks later, Elliot came to me for some counseling. He said he was interested in going into computers. I had to ask him why.

"They seem interesting," he said. "And they're going to be using them for nearly everything. There will be a need for people who understand them."

This was true enough, of course, but I wondered if Elliot realized how much of his time would be consumed by a full-time course in

computers at a university. He saw what I was getting at.

"I'll have the time," he said, looking at me steadily. "I just spent three months locked up. I was naive and inexperienced when I went in. Everybody knows I was interrogated. Some cadres come out working for the regime. It can take a long time to tell, after someone comes out, whether they still have their commitment. I understand that. The struggle must be protected."

Computers it would be, then, for Elliot, if he could possibly manage to catch up and pass his exams. "Jail is a good school," they say in the resistance. Talking to the new, post-detention Elliot, I could see what they meant.

58

It was wintertime now, the rainy season in the Cape, and the fishermen were out on the street corners in Grassy Park, selling long blue snoek from the backs of carts and trucks. In New Room 16, normalization proceeded apace. There were only so many ways to include the late great boycott in one's lesson plans, and it began to figure less and less in mine. In geography, we now addressed ourselves to neutral subjects like topography and the weather. I myself was particularly interested in learning more about how Cape Town weather worked—specifically, about when warm weather could be expected to return. There were mornings now when it was so cold that I could hardly concentrate to teach. On those mornings, my students tended to abandon their usual seating arrangements and all cram together into one corner of the room. They would laugh as I paced before them, stamping my feet, and they would laugh even harder when I finally gave up and squeezed myself into the relative warmth of their midst. Someone in 7E1 suggested that the belt of high pressure currently squatting somewhere over Angola was unjustly depriving us of heat and would apparently have to be forced to comply with the democratic wishes of the majority of the people.

I gave a series of pop-quizzes to check my geography students' retention of the material we had covered before the boycott. I was dismayed by the results, and I was further dismayed by the complaints of several students that the problem was the poor quality of their notes from earlier lessons. It seemed I had expected too much from them in the way of taking notes from lectures and discussions. Indeed, I was beginning to worry that my impatience generally—my

unwillingness to go over simple material several times, slowly—was having ill effects on some children. While I enjoyed teaching, I began to wonder if I had the right personality for doing it well at this level.

In English, to the great distress of all those children who hadn't done theirs yet, we resumed our book reports. Reading was still a chore for most of them, as was public speaking. Neither had the boycott improved my students' taste in literature. I had been hoping for something a little livelier—I was pushing Jack London and Lewis Carroll—but the children were still intent on Jock of the Bushveld and Mills and Boone romances. Hester finally got to recount for us The Book of Horse and Pony Stories. Her elocution was good, but most of the children continued to mumble, mix up their tenses, and resort to Afrikaans in a pinch. I saw that all my worrying about stigmatizing my students' native speech was needless. My impact on their habits and self-perceptions was starting to seem more and more negligible.

I resumed assigning more homework than my students thought meet, more writing than prescribed to my English classes, and resumed keeping a close record of work done. The children began to avail themselves of the opportunity to review their records and were amazed to see how far ahead of the rest were a diligent few like Josef and Malcolm of 6A8. Charmaine was outraged to discover herself quite far behind most of her classmates. Her English was among the best in her class, she knew. But she had turned in very little work. I told her she could avoid failing by completing all future assignments, but not by simply passing her final exam, and she said, "Yes, sir." But she said it so slowly it was funny, and everyone listening laughed.

I found I had less energy now for trying to make my classes exciting. Just getting through the nine periods each day and keeping something happening in every class often seemed enough. I had less energy for outrage at the deficiencies of the system, too, although a siren going off at an inopportune moment, or failing to go off on schedule, could still incense me. One day in 6A8, the siren aborted a great lesson on Rudyard Kipling's Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. While the class clambered to its feet to await dismissal, I fumed. "You want to protest gutter education? That" —and I pointed in the direction of the siren—"is gutter education!" The children regarded me with concern and wonder. I wearily dismissed them. On their way out, Amy and Shireen stopped by my desk.

"It's true, sir," Shireen said earnestly. "They must keep to the schedule!"

"We can tell the SRC, and they can tell the principal," Amy said.

I loved those girls at that moment. Their faces were so serious, their empathy with my distress so spontaneous, I could have kissed them. Instead, I burst out laughing, and so did they.

I was worried about Wayan. I had taken to giving him lists of books to look for in the public library, concentrating on the adventure and fantasy fiction he loved most. He would sometimes stay after class, and we would talk about his reading. Wayan was still skittish and shy with me, but his enthusiasm for literature had the power to carry him away, over the barriers of his gawky reticence. "He has been living alone on the island for fifteen years, with only a parrot to talk with; then he finds a footprint in the beach sand!" I worried about how Wayan would cope with Robinson Crusoe the racist and slaver in the latter half of Defoe's tale, but I did not worry about his reading ability, which seemed to increase each week. Then Wayan suddenly stopped coming around to talk. When I asked him about what he was reading, he mumbled something about not having had the time to go to the library. Something was wrong, and a couple of days later I managed to pry out of Wayan what it was. There were a couple of boys—big boys—who were hassling him about being "teacher's favorite" and a bookworm. Wayan would not say who they were.

I told Wayan a story that seemed to startle him and cheer him up. When I was in high school, I told him, I had also been an insatiable reader, and my English teacher had taken an interest in me. One day, this teacher had come to see me at the gas station where I worked in the evenings, and we had stood around talking about some books of his I had borrowed. After he left, one of my fellow workers, a boy my age who had already dropped out of school, wanted to know who my visitor was. When I told him, the boy stared in disbelief, then muttered, "I never had a teacher who knew my name." After that, the boy became sullen and hostile toward me. Later that evening, he and I had some sharp words in the heat of a rush of customers, and he cold-cocked me. I was knocked off my feet. The pump I was holding flew out of my hand, gasoline went everywhere, I saw stars. The gas station manager saw the punch and fired the other boy on the spot. I never really blamed him for hitting me, though. I understood his resentment, I thought. "But that was wicked, to hit you when you were not looking," Wayan said, his expression astonished, outraged, and delighted all at once.

Wayan's troubles with his tormentors, whoever they were, seemed to pass in the weeks that followed. Yet I continued to worry

about him, about his solitude among his peers.

Then, a great ray of sunshine. Aubrey September and I had resumed our tutoring sessions. The boycott had improved his English vocabulary somewhat, adding some new "political" words and subtracting some kombuis —notably, the word baas. He still seemed lonely, though—until the afternoon I looked out my classroom window and saw him standing talking in the field below with Wayan. They made a comical pair: tall, timid, literate, childish Wayan and sturdy little no-nonsense Aubrey. But besides their mutual isolation, there was a certain congruence to their characters. They were both quiet, sensitive kids, one delicate, the other salt-of-the-earth. Could they become friends? Could they ever. Aubrey and Wayan became absolutely inseparable. They came to class together, they sat together, and I saw them all over Grassy Park together, walking, conferring, with Wayan's hand always resting on Aubrey's shoulder. Aubrey's command of English continued to improve, for which I credited their friendship at least as much as my teaching, and before the year was out I even saw the two of them playing soccer with the other boys in 6A6 in the field below my classroom window.

Nelson and a number of his students dreamed up a singular antidote to post-boycott malaise. They called it the Grassy Park High Touring Club and embarked on an ambitious fund-raising program. Their plan was to raise enough money to rent a bus and driver for a two-week camping trip around South Africa during the Christmas holidays. Sixty children and a handful of teachers and parents would go. The Touring Club started sponsoring Saturday car washes, benefit concerts, raffles, parties, and dance marathons, and opened a bank account. Some of its fund-raising events were new ones on me, like the "stay awakes," in which students earned a certain amount of money, pledged by local businesses and well-wishers, for each hour they were able to stay awake over a long (a very long) weekend. Nelson hurled himself into the Touring Club project with astonishing energy. It was bizarre to see the man whom I thought of as a single-minded revolutionary dashing around in a sweatshirt washing cars, taking tickets at the door of the dance, and generally acting like the leader of a church youth social. When I told him so, Nelson the atheist laughed sharply. "The kids who are coming with us," he said, "are not the same ones you'll see in church."

Clive was a member of the Touring Club, as were several other matrics who had been boycott leaders. Among the teachers, whose

assistance Nelson was constantly soliciting, Georgina and Meryl were prominent supporters. Meryl, I was beginning to realize, was a protégé of Nelson's. She spent a lot of time at his house, avoiding her father and making use of Nelson's library, and the more openly Meryl talked with me, the more of Nelson's language and ideas I heard in her own.

59

My parents, whom I had not seen since leaving the United States, broke the long drought of contact by suddenly coming to Cape Town for a week in August. We had a lovely time together, catching up and seeing all the Cape sights. But the highlight of their trip, they said, was their visit to Grassy Park High. I was actually reluctant to take them there—it was unimaginable that any of my fellow teachers would bring their parents to school—but I was overruled by everybody else concerned, from my classes to the principal to my parents themselves. So we dropped by, one sunny afternoon. First we met with the principal in his office. Van loved having foreign visitors, especially Americans, and he regaled my parents with his version of the situation in black education in South Africa, and with overblown praise for my work, especially my career counseling efforts. Then he insisted we take a tour of the school.

At that point, I had an inspiration. I hastily consulted a chart to find out where my various classes were during that period, and I directed our steps to those rooms. My apologies to the teachers whom we interrupted were brushed aside. As soon as we would enter a classroom, the entire class would leap to its feet, with all eyes fixed on our little party. This chance to see some of my family was obviously a bigger thrill for my students than I had realized it would be. In the first class we visited, I introduced my parents to the children, who chorused. "Good afternoon, Mr. and Mrs. Finnegan, " and then, after a second's pause, I decided to introduce each student individually. It turned out to be great fun, rattling off their names, watching each face blush or brighten as I ticked them off—Nico, Hester, Terence, Aubrey, Wayan, Elroy, Koos, Charmaine, Shireen—so I did it in each class we visited. The principal claimed to be astounded that I could remember all two hundred-and-some names. He said he had never seen such a thing before in forty years of teaching (and the event did apparently enter his collection of oft-told anecdotes). For me, too, introducing my

classes to my parents was something special. It was a chance to show them in an unforced way both the density and charm of the world I was living in, and the depth of my involvement in it.

A group of senior girls, having heard my parents were coming, had prepared a little banquet for them. I had heard something about it, but I had not been consulted and I was stunned to see that it was really on—in my classroom, as soon as school was out. While we waited for the girls to complete their preparations, my parents chatted with a throng of students and teachers. My mother disconcerted everyone by casually sitting down on the landing outside my classroom. People scurried around, trying to convince her to take a chair, but she politely declined, and she was soon joined on the ground by several madly grinning students.

Seats at the banquet itself were limited and reserved for teachers, but we urged all the students still around to help us eat the vast pot of curry which was served as a main course. My parents were introduced to a whole range of Cape cuisine there in New Room 16—there were bredie, samoosas, sosaties, frikkadels , yellow rice with raisins and cinnamon, roast chicken, bobotie, and buriyani . My father was escorted through these strange and tasty dishes by Meryl. My mother, in conversation with Nelson, complimented him more than she knew when she said that, with his beard and beret, he reminded her of Che Guevara. Nelson later told me that he was astonished to find that an American of her generation knew who Che was.

My parents' visit to Grassy Park High did have some strange little repercussions, however. For a start, I felt funny about the raving over my mother's beauty and youthfulness that some people at school kept up for a while. It seemed impossible to them that a woman could both look like that and have a son my age. On the Cape Flats, of course, it was impossible. And there were some uncomfortable moments a few weeks later, too, when a Standard Six student showed me a letter she had received from my mother. It seemed this student, who was a rather slow and silly girl, had gotten my parents' address from them and had written my mother a letter. My mother, in replying, had made, I saw, a small but crucial mistake. Unfamiliar with the format for personal letters taught in South African schools, and unfamiliar with the local habit of giving houses names, my mother had obviously thought that the name of the girl's house was her correspondent's nickname. Thus, she had begun her letter, "Dear Victory . . ." I had to struggle to keep a straight face when I saw this, although little "Victory" clearly saw nothing funny about it. She just wanted to

know why my mother had written to her house.

The more substantial fallout from my parents' visit to Cape Town was simply my own realization that I had received, in no uncertain terms, their blessing. Before their arrival, I had worried about what they would think of what I was doing with my life. Since my graduation from college, they had never been anything but supportive—never showing any undue alarm at, or offering unsolicited advice about, my long-term decisions and projects, unfathomable as I knew many of them must have been—but it had, after all, been years since I had seen them. This fretting proved unfounded, to say the least. Somehow, in all the months I had been teaching at Grassy Park High, it had never occurred to me that by working there I might be fulfilling one of my parents' fondest fantasies. This had been a willful ignorance on my part because, despite their conscientious restraint on the subject of what they thought I ought to be doing, I had long known that they did have their own ideas. These had changed with the times—the Peace Corps had given way to Nader's Raiders—but the theme was constant. It was: missionary work. Aiding the defenseless, for little or no pay. My mother, especially, had always been prone to rhapsodizing about young idealists who founded health clinics in Brazilian favelas, or lawyers who donated their services to the poor. Seeing me teaching at Grassy Park High had obviously elated both of them. In their minds, I realized, I had joined the long queue for sainthood. They were particularly pleased to hear about my career counseling work. I had become their son-who-had-dedicated-himself-to-helping-black-South-African-high-school-kids-get-into-college.

What was the problem? Did I or did I not seek my parents' approval? I did. The problem, and the painful irony, was that I was rapidly losing faith in both the specific goals of my career counseling work and in the idea that I was doing any good at all among the youth of Grassy Park.

60

A pamphlet that circulated among Cape Flats schools during the boycott declared: "Too many parents still believe that if we get certificates and 'good' results, our future will be brighter than their present condition. This is wrong. As long as there is racial division and exploitation, we can only reproduce our present system. We must convince our parents that the only way is to reject and replace this system."

While this attitude, which was widespread among "conscientized" students, seemed justified, I found it difficult to see how it could be put into practice by students. Could they found their own schools? Could they boycott existing schools indefinitely? If not, they would have to seize the government, or at least be able to compel it to "replace this system"—both very distant prospects at this stage. In the meantime, education and training had to be acquired, inadequate as the system for providing them might be. This seemed self-evident.

So I was irritated when it seemed that many of my colleagues, even some teachers whom I had come to think of as friends, were being almost pointedly slow in responding to my requests for help getting our matrics ready for life after graduation. Were people just being lazy? Certainly it could not be that they feared I was trying to make "another James Meredith here," for I had long since abandoned the idea that our students could go to any university they chose, anywhere in the country. My ambitions for our Grassy Park graduates had been scaled down and were, I thought, no longer unrealistic. And yet there was this diffidence, this unspoken reluctance to help. Was it simply timidity, like the initial reluctance of some matrics to pursue and nail down their real career opportunities? In teachers, that would seem unconscionable.

Slowly, over several months, these questions were answered and my righteous incomprehension was rectified.

"Bugger their labor shortage. It's not our problem," Nelson said. "They've been crying about so-called labor shortages ever since they got to the Cape and the Khoisan refused to be their slaves."

I was glad Nelson was willing to talk about the question of careers—too many teachers seemed determined to avoid it entirely—but I thought this objection to my figures about future demand for skilled labor irrelevant. "It's not 'their' problem if economic growth is checked," I said. "And the point is not to rescue anybody's corporation, it's to take advantage of the opportunities that arise. Blacks in this country must acquire more skills, it's as simple as that. Who's going to run things when majority rule is achieved? If blacks don't have the training—and it can't be gained overnight—things will go downhill here so fast—"

"Our liberation will not be achieved by supplying manpower to whichever sector the regime decides needs it," Nelson snapped.

This argument went around in circles.

Nelson eventually indicated a more specific reservation about my career counseling work when he casually asked me one day whether

the careers information service I had been using was associated with something called "the Urban Foundation." I didn't know and said so. He nodded grimly and let it go. I began to make inquiries.

"The Urban Foundation? That's Oppenheimer's show, and Dr. Rupert's,"^[*] Raphael told me. "They started it up in '76, to help get blacks into the system, particularly into big business. 'The adoption of free enterprise values by blacks,' that's what they say they're after. What they mean is they want to make sure a socialist revolution doesn't happen in South Africa."

The Urban Foundation was also, it seemed, vaguely government-associated in its origins. And the Urban Foundation was indeed the principal sponsor of the careers information service I had been using. This discovery shook me, even though I couldn't see how it changed my basic argument that opportunity was opportunity, whether the government was involved with providing it or not. Then I had a talk with Soraya, who had helped me to arrange various careers events, such as the hospital tour, but who was also extremely sensitive to community opinion.

"You have to be very careful whom you accept help from here," Soraya said. "There are so many front organizations that are out to use the unwary. That's why people are so suspicious and mistrustful. They don't want to be manipulated. They want to know everything about an organization before they become associated with it. If its roots are not truly in the community, they'll have nothing to do with it. Community-based initiatives, those are the only kind that have credibility here. And the Urban Foundation?" Soraya laughed at the thought. "No, it doesn't qualify. SACHED [the South African Council of Higher Education] is probably the best counseling service. At least it's seen as black."

The problem of credibility was, I had begun to see, a very real one. Why had I not thought to consult with more people in Grassy Park before I jumped in and started buffaloing my students?

Another aspect of my careers program that had been seriously underresearched was my insistence that students use the permit system. Gradually I had become aware that the permit system was not some new and exciting liberalization, that it was in fact well understood and deeply resented by blacks. The abolition of the permit sys-

* Harry Oppenheimer, the leading industrialist in South Africa and a primary backer of the Progressive Federal Party; Dr. Anton Rupert, another wealthy liberal industrialist.

tem had been one of the Committee of 81's first demands during the boycott. My attitude, in the meantime, was that students should regard its restrictions as so much red tape to be cut through. "It's your country, your university," I told them. "Your parents' taxes paid for it; so let's use it." This approach, defeating apartheid by pretending it didn't exist, had obvious attractions. What I didn't realize was that there was a long-standing, countrywide boycott of the permit system, that in the black community it was considered "collaboration" to apply for a government permit. Community censure was heavier in some areas than others, and relatively restrained when it came to permits to attend "white" universities. Still, many students felt the conflict as they considered my advice. And for months nobody told me what the problem was—by which time dozens of students had already applied for permits to go to UCT, citing reasons like their great desire to study Comparative African Government and Law.

Clive's interest in going to UCT remained limited, and one day I finally got him to elaborate on the reservations he had expressed from the beginning. "I just don't want to get involved in minority politics," he said. "That's what happens to blacks at UCT. They're powerless. They have no leverage. We're not the minority in this country. Why should we put ourselves in that position? We're not interested in 'integration.' We're not interested in 'assimilation.' But that's what blacks at UCT end up fighting for. They get sidetracked by being there."

I was not persuaded that the anemia of black student politics at UCT outweighed the great advantages of getting the best available education, but Clive's scorn for the goals of "integration" and "assimilation" did give me pause. While I had never thought of these as goals myself, I began to wonder if their assumptions did not underlie my thinking. "Eurocentrism" had become a dirty word during the boycott, and one of the Committee of 81's long-term demands had been for revision of the school curriculum to reflect black history, culture, and achievements. Was I not hopelessly "Eurocentric" myself? Was I not determined to usher as many of our students as possible out of their poor Third World backwater into the mainstream of Western culture, such as it flowed through the libraries and lecture halls of the University of Cape Town? And what about the AFS exchange student program I was pushing?

Then there was the emigration temptation. Clive, in a conversation about a classmate of his who was eager to study medicine, told me, "Half of the blacks who qualify as doctors in this country turn

about and move to Canada or Australia." Clive's figures were undoubtedly high, but the phenomenon he described was apparently real. As Clive put it, "Why would anyone stay in this hellhole who wasn't forced to?"

I didn't have an answer for that, although I did have an answer for the Standard Nine boy who blew up at me one day in the middle of an interview, accusing me of misleading him and his classmates. "We're not going to be scientists," he said. "We're going to be secretaries and clerks!" I gave him a spoonful of counselor patter: "Some of you will be secretaries and clerks, but others of you, if you aim high and work hard, both in your studies and for change in this country, may become scientists." I meant every word of this. But I was actually struggling myself now, much of the time, to maintain enthusiasm for my career counseling.

I was getting into a real bind. I understood some of the objections to my career counseling, and I was disposed to heed the revolutionary injunction that tools should be provided only to break down the system, not to reinforce it. But I did not see how to implement that injunction. By definition, I was incapable of generating "community-based initiatives." While I could see the point of rejecting the system at every turn, I could also see the great value, both to individuals and to the freedom struggle, of higher education for the largest possible number of blacks. Gaining skills meant gaining confidence. More education meant higher expectations. Finally, while I could see the psycho-political value of refusing to do the white boss's work—of refusing, in Paulo Freire's phrase, to "be for another"—I was too much the product of my own upbringing to be able to picture any good coming from a widespread renunciation of individual achievement.

For better or worse, and despite all these second thoughts, my little careers program had by this point gained its own momentum. Grassy Park High matrics were writing letters, filling out applications, and going for interviews at a great rate now, and my role was simply to give the best advice I could.

There was a larger context for my growing ambivalence about my career counseling work, and that was the government's "total strategy." This was the white survival blueprint that had in many ways superseded "grand apartheid." Total strategy was usually described in military terms—terms that emphasized increased defense budgets, the destabilization of potentially hostile neighbors, and ever-tighten-

ing internal security—but there was much more to it than military policy.

Grand apartheid had failed to address the economic and political realities of a modern industrial state. The skilled labor shortage was only one of many signs of the failure of grand apartheid. Total strategy, by contrast, faced certain facts—of black urbanization, of economic growth, of the inexorability of black advancement, even of the hopelessness of trying to channel all black political life into "homelands." The government had not abandoned the grand plan to use the bantustans as instruments for the denationalization of the majority of blacks. It had simply recognized that not all blacks could be denationalized, and that a futile effort to impose the original, fanatic-segregationist's vision would only hasten the day of a general uprising. Thus, slowly, and without any notable coordination, government policy over the past few years had been growing more realistic. Increasing numbers of blacks were being educated. Job reservation was being rolled back.

At the same time, P. W. Botha's government was working to tighten influx control. For the key to the success of total strategy would be to draw the sharpest possible line between black "insiders" and black "outsiders." In fact, the survival of white hegemony hinged, it was believed, on the development of a substantial black middle class. This was the unwitting irony of the "class analysis" our students favored—that it was shared by the Botha government, which sought nothing more earnestly than that class should become more important to urban blacks than race.

The government's political objective was co-option, of course. Give a certain number of blacks a certain amount of prosperity, enough to give them a material stake in the system. These relatively well-off blacks—"coloreds," Asians, urban Africans—could then serve internationally as evidence that apartheid was being reformed. More important, a black middle class would serve as a buffer between whites and the angry black masses. Numerically, the black middle class would always be dwarfed by the hordes still excluded from the groaning board of prosperity. Yet their presence "inside" the system, assuming they could be trusted to defend their own new privileges, would be immensely bolstering to the system. Traditionally, the tiny black middle class had provided the leadership of the resistance. Nelson Mandela himself had been a lawyer, as had Oliver Tambo; Robert Sobukwe (founder of the PAC) had been a teacher; Steve Biko had been a medical student. If this class could be enlarged and its security

assured, the absorption of its skills and sophistication into the status quo could be a killing blow to organized resistance.

The government's regular announcements that it would soon be repealing "petty apartheid"—removing all "unnecessarily hurtful discrimination"—were directed at the black middle class at least as much as they were at international opinion, for these restrictions, and not the profound oppression of influx control, were what most directly affected "coloreds," Indians, and Africans "legally" employed in the urban industrial heartland. The final lure to cooperation for black "insiders," now being dangled only in the far distance, was full South African citizenship. This might be offered, it was understood, only after the majority of blacks had been stripped of even their second-class citizenship by assignment to bantustans which had accepted "independence," and only after the black insiders had passed a succession of loyalty tests, undoubtedly including conscription.

Whether or not this scenario seemed farfetched, the government was already committed to the incorporation of large and increasing numbers of blacks into the First World economy, as the projections for future black high school graduates showed. The government was already committed, too, to a double-edged policy of slow reform and increased repression. Conditions were actually worsening in the bantustans as influx control was tightened and forced removals from "South Africa" to the bantustans continued. Opponents of the government were being banned, detained, harassed, imprisoned. At the same time, the government was working hard to entice black insiders to participate in the development of "a new dispensation." In 1980, this effort focused on an advisory commission called the President's Council, created to consider the constitutional question. A few Indians and "system coloreds," as they were called in Grassy Park, were included among its government-selected members, but no Africans. Even the white liberal opposition rejected the President's Council. More recently, the focus has been on the tri-cameral parliament.

This double-edged policy, this paradox, was and is the essential dynamic between the government and blacks. On the one hand, armed repression. On the other hand, a tireless if clumsy search for "reasonable" blacks "willing to negotiate." Many of the government's "reforms"—such as the tri-cameral parliament—had to be forced on incredulous blacks. And yet their reformist symbolism was important, both for its effect on international opinion and for the way it allowed whites to become accustomed to the idea of having a few "good" blacks inside the system with them. The government's at-

tempts to co-opt insider blacks went on at every level, from the "toy telephone" community councils to the "multiracial" (as opposed to non-racial) sports clubs that offered superior facilities to those blacks willing to play integrated games—and to have their playing publicized for international consumption.

But this search, this drive to get at least some blacks to identify their interests publicly with the government's, produced many strange and pathetic episodes. In the latter part of 1980, for instance, the government was preparing to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Republic of South Africa.^[*] In Pietermaritzburg, Natal, celebration organizers told "colored" residents that "money would be no question" if the residents would only agree to sponsor a stand at the local festival. School principals offered "colored" children "free tracksuits, sweets and cakes" in exchange for their participation. The government's offers were rejected. They hadn't decided to form a republic, community leaders said, the whites had. For blacks, Republic Day was a day of mourning. This kind of episode was becoming increasingly common in South Africa—the government entreating blacks for their "cooperation." It was obscene, somehow, for it was only the system's bottomless contempt for black people dressed up as goodwill.

What did all this have to do with my career counseling work? Simply that, as I came to understand the general outlines of total strategy, I began to see that, by encouraging our students to go on to college, by emphasizing individual achievement and individual career goals, I was helping to provide candidates for the government's envisioned buffer class.

61

In the second half of August, I made arrangements with my classes, told the principal that I would be taking my allotted absences for "personal business" all in a block the following week, and drove five hundred miles up the Indian Ocean coast to Cape St. Francis.

"The perfect wave" was the myth. The reality was a sandy, windblown, fifteen-mile-long cape the eastern shore of which contained a series of sweeping points and bays that formed the heavy winter

* South Africa left the British Commonwealth after attacks on the country's racial policies at a conference of Commonwealth prime ministers in 1961.

swells from Antarctic storms into long, clean lines of surf of variable quality. The spot made famous by Endless Summer was a rocky bit of coast near the tip of the cape where the waves could actually be surfed only a few days a year, when conditions were ideal. A far more consistent break was located at Jeffreys Bay, near the eastern base of the cape. There was a modest Afrikaans beach resort there, with a couple of small hotels and a scattering of stucco summer houses strewn across the dunes. In the winter, the town's population seemed to consist mainly of visiting surfers—Australians, Americans, Brazilians, French. I took a room at a boardinghouse on the beach, where I could see the waves from my bed.

The weather was sunny and could and the surf that week was up. Each day, I would rise before dawn, make a cup of tea in the boardinghouse kitchen, struggle into my clammy, frigid wetsuit, and be in the water before sunrise. Some days the waves were good; some days they were magnificent. The prevailing wind blew offshore, sculpting the waves into rough-grained, ruler-edged cylinders that roared down the coast for hundreds of yards without a significant flaw. The rides were long, fast, and ferociously intense. I spent many exhausting hours in the water. At night I slept profoundly. After a few days, my surfing began to regain the sharp edge it had lost since I moved to Rondebosch. I began to feel, in fact, that my life was suddenly back on the track it had been on before I came to South Africa—the old world surfing odyssey.

Grassy Park seemed to exist in another reality entirely. (I never saw a black person on the beach or in the water at Jeffreys Bay.)

That most of the people I met at Jeffreys were foreigners only added to the sense that I had somehow departed South Africa. The other guests at the boardinghouse were all surfers. None of them knew, or wanted to know, anything about the country. They were there for the waves.

Of course, South African reality was always flickering in the frame of even this otherworldly scene. Jeffreys Bay had a "location," the boardinghouse had a black staff—even visiting surfers couldn't help but notice what only a few knew was called apartheid. "It's a bloody rugged system, I reckon," one young Australian said one shining evening, while a number of us were sitting drinking beer after dinner. "But they say it works."

"Fair dinkum it works," one of his mates said. "These people have got a bloody good life, especially when you consider that this is Africa. People are starving to the north of here."

"It works if you're white," a lean, quiet Tasmanian said.

"These wogs don't have it so bad. They've got bloody good schools, and they don't even pay taxes."

"Where did you hear that?" I wondered.

"Eric. He reckons this is the most misunderstood country in the world."

Eric was the owner of the boardinghouse, a tall, curly-haired Englishman in his fifties who had come out to southern Africa twenty years before. Eric wore baggy khaki bush shorts, had a strange, bouncy, slightly fey walk, and liked to buttonhole his young boarders on his spacious, glassed-in, ocean-view stoep. From him they received an endless free supply of misinformation about southern Africa, such as the canard about blacks' paying no taxes in South Africa. (The truth was that blacks' taxable income was always a higher proportion of total earnings than whites'. Whites, moreover, received rebates for getting married and for each child, which blacks did not. This was meant to encourage white population growth, of course, while discouraging black population growth.) I avoided Eric, though I couldn't help overhearing some of his monologues. He had a deep, chain-smoker's voice, and his spiels actually held for me a certain morbid fascination.

Eric had first lived in Northern Rhodesia, where he had been an apprentice electrician "until it started going black." His life since then had been a long, slow, comfortable march southward before the tide of black liberation—over the course of which Eric had acquired an Afrikaner farmer's daughter as a wife, two daughters of his own, a hatful of opinions about World Communism and the African Mind, and a degree of wealth and leisure beyond the dreams of most working-class Lancashiremen of his generation.

"Best move I ever made was to leave England," Eric said, often. "I'd have ended my days in jail if I'd stayed."

Relaxing in his favorite chair on his luxurious stoep, pecking at an endless series of gin-and-tonics supplied by a maid in a checkered doek, Eric liked to reminisce about all the Africans he had "taken down from the tree" and turned into laborers. He himself was not a racialist, he said. That had been proved when he befriended some black American diplomats in Swaziland. But black Americans, according to Eric, were no more like Africans than the Chinese were. The African, he contended, was "only two steps removed from a bloody animal." African political aspirations were a Communist fabrication, he believed. "The African would rather be fed and in chains

than hungry and free"—this was one of Eric's favorite sayings. Moreover, the only whites an African respected were the Afrikaners. "Because with the Boer he knows exactly where he stands."

Eric's wife and her parents—who were all living at the boarding-house—were good demonstrations of the second part of this otherwise faulty piece of reasoning, I thought. They were Afrikaners, and there was a sort of dynastic placidity about them that contrasted sharply with Eric's high-volume, aggressive/defensive English racism. The three of them, plain middle-aged daughter and stout bespectacled parents, would sit in their living room in the evenings watching television beneath a framed set of portraits of Boer leaders dating back to the Great Trek, sipping coffee from pink and white cups, and clearly not feeling much compulsion to justify themselves to passing surfers. One afternoon, I heard a kid from California tell the old man that a window in his room wouldn't shut. "Tell the boy," the old man said, indicating a middle-aged black man who was working nearby. When the American hesitated, the old Boer called to the black man himself. He called him "kaffir" and ordered him to assist the "baasie " in a firm, nonchalant tone that I could not imagine his soutpiel son-in-law ever quite mastering.

The only person in Jeffreys Bay whom I told about my job back in Cape Town was a black woman named Julia who worked at the boardinghouse. She was about my age, Xhosa-speaking, with three children and a husband who worked at the Goodyear factory sixty miles away in Port Elizabeth. Julia had a bantering, flirtatious manner with the surfers at the boardinghouse, which changed abruptly with me when I told her I was a teacher at Grassy Park High. She became reserved and serious. I asked her if any of the children in the Jeffreys Bay location went to high school. A few did, she said, although the nearest "colored" high school was many miles away. Had there been boycotts there? "Only a few naughty children made trouble, and they were expelled," Julia said, and hurried off with a load of laundry.

I tried to ease Julia's new awe and mistrust of me over the days that followed by saying nothing else alarming, and by sharing little jokes with her in kombuis that the other boarders could not understand. Slowly, she seemed to decide that it was a nice change after all to have a guest who knew something about South Africa. And when it came time for me to leave, she surprised me by pressing on me a bag full of pastries, and by telling me I was "a good Christian." It was not my fault, she said with ill-suppressed mirth, that I was "born wit ."

The journey back to Cape Town went quickly. I picked up a hitchhiker, who turned out to be a lawyer from San Francisco who had come to South Africa overland from Cairo. I was very interested to hear about his trip, which had taken him almost a year, and he was eager to hear about South Africa—all he had heard since he got here from the exclusively white motorists who gave him lifts were, he said, "kaffir stories." Somehow he had managed to cross all of Africa without realizing that blacks could not see in three dimensions, judge distances, or think rationally, and without truly appreciating the import of the idea that before white conquest blacks had not employed the wheel or written language. He had labored in this intellectual darkness, that is, until white South Africans had seen fit to point out these things to him ad nauseam . (After a week at Eric's, I knew too well what he meant.) I tried to satisfy my rider's curiosity about South Africa. In fact, I was embarrassingly voluble, especially on the subject of Grassy Park High. I realized that I missed my students, and couldn't wait to get back to my classroom.

62

While it was still fairly opaque and inexpressive, my students' writing had changed. There were now odd glints of boycott jargon, the occasional tweak of a teacher's nose, and glimpses of real life under apartheid that would never have surfaced in compositions during the first part of the year. "The people" appeared as often as ever, but for some children they had become a political entity: the People of the boycott guerrilla theater. Here was Malcolm of 6A8 writing about the view from the cable car station on top of Table Mountain:

We saw Cape Town, Lion's Head, the sea and Robben Island. We could not see Grassy Park. It is only so-called White Areas by Table Mountain, because it is beautiful there. Robben Island is where they keep the leaders of the people in prison.

Terence, telling a story of hardship overcome:

A boy named Gil was living in a land named France. He was a member of the oppressed in France, not the ruling class. He liked to play sport, especially tennis, but he was forbidden to play at the same tennis courts where his daddy played when he was a boy. Gil played tennis in the roads. Then the people grew angry and marched to the places where the ruling class lived and drove them away. Some were

killed. This was called the French Revolution. When it was finished, Gil went to play tennis at the courts in Green Point [a once-integrated area in Cape Town] with his friends and nobody stopped him.

Elroy, in an essay about life at Grassy Park High:

It's a good school, but it could be better. There are some nice teachers. Miss Cupido gives us science. She is nice. So is Mr. Finnegan. He has green eyes and brown hair. Sometimes he is angry with the children, but he will never beat them. I hope he is never angry with me. He tells us many stories. He buys his clothes at the Real American Discount Man's Shop in Athlone. They must improve this school.

My students never directly criticized their other teachers in their essays. They seemed to know I would discourage their doing so. (With me, they apparently felt more free. I did not buy my clothes at the Real American Discount Man's Shop in Athlone.) But the frequent sidelong comments and backhanded compliments they handed out were indications that they were still looking critically at their education and didn't mind if their teachers knew it. I was pleased to see this, for the most part, although it led now and then to small confrontations with students who seemed to have absorbed the overall idea of defying authority more than they had its progressive intent. There was Myron, in 6A6, who insisted on taking class time to make reports back to his classmates from SRC meetings, dragging out his reports with great officiousness even when he clearly had nothing to say. There was Ralph, in 6A7, who tried to insist that I send a noisy classmate to Napoleon for caning since he, Ralph, had been caned the day before for making less noise in another class. I reminded Ralph that he had carried a placard during the boycott that read "Abolish Corporal Punishment." He admitted he had, but did not seem to see its relevance, and then was mortified when his classmates hissed to him in Afrikaans the meaning of the placard's message, and began to laugh. Other challenges to my authority in the classroom were better advised. Zainul and Jasmine, in 6A8, demanded to know why I made them sit apart when they studied just as well in one another's arms, and I realized they were right. Koos complained that my marking on essays was too complicated and subjective, and I simplified my system. In general, my students were still unwilling to argue with me, and I was not always pleased when they did. But we did seem to have moved some small distance toward a healthier balance of obedience and independence.

In other Cape Flats schools, from what I could tell, the post-

boycott atmosphere was a similar mix of nonsense and new seriousness. At one school, there was a stayaway on the day of the British royal wedding. When the surprised principal went to the head of the school's SRC, he was told that this was a protest against Afrikaner domination. "Because the Afrikaner is giving us such a rotten deal, we're going to show our loyalty to the Queen." At another Cape school, Macassar High, continued student protest focused, far more sensibly, on the racism contained in an Afrikaans school dictionary. In this dictionary, the definition given for baas was "the name of a white man." For meit (maid), it was "the name of a black or coloured woman." Derogatory racial terms were included with no suggestion that they were objectionable—thus, swartgoed (black thing) was defined as "black labourer." The Macassar students tore up, threw away, and burned copies of the dictionary, and when a C.A.D. inspector came to their school, they pelted his car with copies.

63

At the end of August, the long dormant objections of some of my fellow teachers to my deviations from the government syllabuses were revived when a dreaded event was suddenly scheduled for the following week. The inspector's annual visit! Napoleon and Pieterse each called a meeting of all the teachers in their respective departments, at which they went over what the inspector liked to see in the way of documentation of a teacher's progress on the syllabus. They each asked me what I planned to do. I admitted I had no plan—a response that seemed to cause some of our more cowed colleagues literally to shudder. Of course, my insouciance was easily come by, since my job meant almost none of the same things to me that my colleagues' jobs meant to them. And my unconcern about the approaching inspection only increased when I happened to see the name of the inspector written down somewhere. It was the same fine fellow who had helped me get my job in the first place.

On the appointed morning, he established himself in the vice-principal's office, where he started interviewing trembling teachers at a brisk rate. I was one of the first called.

"Ag , I can't believe it," the inspector said, when I walked in. "I thought I knew the name. So you've lasted all this time, right through our boycott and all our troubles. And you've been teaching guidance, too, I see. Well, you must tell me all your impressions."

My interview with the inspector lasted at least an hour, and was altogether convivial. I told him about my career counseling work. He talked about the new aptitude tests he wanted to start administering to matrics. We never did get around to discussing where exactly my English and geography classes were with the syllabus. The inspector simply said, "And how are your other classes?" And I replied, "Fine."

When I emerged at last from the vice-principal's office, there were four or five teachers waiting outside, their own interviews having been delayed by the excessive length of mine. They eyed me with alarm, sympathy and, in at least one case, hopeful gloating. I laughed and gave them the thumbs-up sign.

But Nelson did not smile when I told him about my little triumph with the inspector.

"That guy, with all his worthless so-called intelligence tests? When he came to talk to us at Harold Cressy when I was in matric, we walked out on him. We refused to listen to him."

"Why?"

"Because of what he is. Because of what he does, and what he stands for. He's a paternalistic liberal, who thinks he's helping us by enforcing the system in a friendly way."

I was shocked. I liked the inspector, and I imagined that his feelings must have been terribly hurt by the deliberate rudeness Nelson described. Nelson was probably right, the inspector probably was a paternalistic liberal. Yet snubbing him so pointedly and scornfully did not seem necessary to me.

But then Nelson and I rarely agreed about ostracism. Nelson believed in it. He would join in energetically whenever people were gossiping about someone who had broken some boycott or other. He even urged people to organize themselves "to get rid of that fascist," Da Silva. I found such group behavior thoroughly distasteful.

"But that's because you're a cowboy at heart, a true American individualist," Nelson told me one day. "You think renegades should be allowed to go their own way. You think of them as 'nonconformists.' But we have group objectives we must accomplish. And we understand reactionaries to be the enemy."

Nelson's special affection for ostracism as a political weapon stemmed partly, I decided, from his work with the movement for non-racial sport, a movement in which opprobrium seemed to be a major instrument. I saw this instrument at work on Philip, the talented cricketer in 6A7, whose predicament typified the double bind

that many young black athletes faced, between "collaboration" and community ostracism on the one hand, and virtual inactivity on the other. Philip was a fast bowler with long, lithe arms that fairly cannoned the ball down the pitch. He was also a very quiet, polite boy, whose English compositions revealed an unusual sensitivity to the several sides most problems have. This kind of awareness could not have helped him much as he struggled to decide where and whether to play cricket.

The local cricket team for boys Philip's age had been riddled with dismissals of players and managers who had violated the SACOS "double standards resolution." This resolution was intended to punish players, administrators, and even spectators who associated themselves with "racial" organizations by barring them from all SACOS-sponsored activities. All the dismissals meant that Philip's cricket team, which played in a SACOS-administered league, was effectively defunct. Philip desperately wanted to play cricket, but the only team feasible for him to join now was a local "multiracial" squad.

Multiracialism (or "multinationalism") had been the government's response to its banishment from international sports. Multiracialism involved the partial integration of certain amenable clubs and leagues. Racial distinctions still abounded in the multiracial setup. The government's objective was clearly not the abolition of apartheid in sports so much as it was the pacification of international opinion. SACOS sought to discredit multiracialism overseas as a cosmetic, and its efforts had been largely successful. SACOS was the only South African sports federation recognized by the Supreme Council of Sport in Africa—that was what gave SACOS its effective veto over the readmission of South Africa to the Olympic Games.

But this great international leverage was not always matched by the stature of SACOS inside South Africa. Relentlessly harassed by the government, SACOS had great trouble organizing in townships where the threat of banishment to a bantustan hung over anyone who dared to support SACOS—with the result that it was not particularly strong in many townships, including Soweto, and was in fact viewed by many Africans as a predominantly "colored" and Indian organization. Even in the communities where SACOS was powerful, its efforts to implement its policies were a constant struggle, undermined on one side by the inducements offered to black athletes by well-funded multiracial clubs, on another by outright government suppression, and on still another by community resentment of its methods of enforcement. In Grassy Park, people complained that SACOS was rigid and failed

to take into account all the pressures operating on black athletes, especially those applied to workers by their employers, and that most people didn't really understand SACOS policy in any case. Philip didn't understand SACOS policy, he told me one day. Still, SACOS had strong support throughout the community, and at Grassy Park High. Philip had no idea what to do.

His father was urging him to join the multiracial club. The club that wanted him, which was still all white, had magnificent facilities, Philip said—like nothing he had ever played on before. And the coaching was supposed to be top-notch. Moreover, the chances for advancement for a black player over the next few years would probably be tremendous. SACOS could certainly offer nothing comparable in the foreseeable future. This was his great chance to make something of himself, Philip's father was telling him—to compete with whites on a more or less equal footing for once, to advance on merit. Philip himself seemed mostly interested in simply playing cricket against real competition, but his father's arguments were obviously affecting him, too.

The often garbled signal from SACOS, meanwhile, was that this generation of black athletes would simply have to sacrifice their own dreams for the sake of future generations. SACOS shunned on principle all international sporting contacts, and it would continue to do so until a non-racial society had been achieved in South Africa. Indeed, this was yet another way to get banned by SACOS: having anything to do with tours into or out of the country, or even inviting overseas experts to South Africa as guest coaches. If Philip decided to play for the multiracial cricket club, he would be immediately banned from all SACOS-sponsored activities—which, in Philip's case, meant that he would be kicked off his rugby team, which was in a healthy SACOS league and commanded nearly as much of Philip's devotion during the winter as cricket did in the summer. And then there would be the ostracism, the social rejection and personal abuse he would suffer at the hands of his classmates and neighbors—and the likes of Nelson.

I thought of the shining, if narrow, avenue out of the ghetto that excellence in sports represented in the United States. How straight-forward it seemed. I wondered if Philip was actually moved very much by the great SACOS tenet: "No normal sport in an abnormal society." This was the only society Philip had known. He was fourteen years old and he loved to play cricket. From talking to him, I gathered that he did understand, almost instinctively, the terrible difficulties an organization like SACOS faced at every turn, trying to behave "non-

racially" in a country where virtually every institution, every aspect of life, had been rendered "racial." But the most powerful element in Philip's deliberations, from what I could tell, remained—I had to hand it to Nelson—the awful specter of community ostracism. When cricket season began, Philip did not play.

64

It was only after we got there that we realized Da Silva had invited only the other white teachers to his wife's birthday party. "I suppose Miss Channing-Brown couldn't make it," Da Silva fussed as he ushered Alex, Fiona, and me inside. He and his wife lived in a little row house in Observatory, an old working-class neighborhood on the railway line between Rondebosch and downtown. The streets of Observatory were narrow; the houses were one-story bungalows with big dark porches and small grubby yards. Before Group Areas, Observatory had been "mixed." It was now zoned "white," though a few "colored" families still hung on in some places. "Play whites" tended to try their luck in Observatory, and white railway workers lived there in numbers.

It was a strange scene inside the party. All the usual furniture had been removed from the living room and the walls had been lined with straight-backed chairs. About a dozen people occupied these, including several old people, some small children, and several very fat young women. They all sipped punch from paper cups, were absolutely silent, and did not look at us as we passed through the room. From the bedroom, disco music blasted. I stuck my head in there and saw another room rendered furnitureless, except for a large portable sound system, which was being manned by a flashy-looking black guy. Otherwise, the room was deserted. Otherwise, too, the party was whites-only. The bedroom was evidently the dancing room, and the black guy was evidently the evening's DJ. I headed for the kitchen, where a few more people milled and the alcohol could be found.

The birthday girl was Afrikaans, which explained some of the odd mix of extended-family-get-together and modern rock-'n'-roll party. But who were all these huge young women? I struck up a conversation with a very pretty, normal-sized, vaguely familiar young woman wearing a rugby shirt, and I was promptly enlightened. "Most of the girls here are secretaries at Coloured Affairs, who knew Alison when she worked there. I'm there as well. Aren't you one of our teachers?"

Now I knew where I knew this woman from. She worked in Loubser's office. She had always been curious about who this American was, she said. We began to talk.

Her name was Marina and, like the Da Silvas' infant son, she was half Portuguese, half Afrikaans. Her mother's family had come to the Cape from Angola when her mother was young—Marina did not know why. Her father was a detective with the Special Branch. Marina mentioned her father's occupation so matter-of-factly, I thought at first she was kidding. But she wasn't. Her boyfriend, she said studiedly, was an "appie" (apprentice) who was at present "on the border."

We talked for quite a while, Marina and I. I was amazed to hear that she had only been out of Cape Town three times in her life—twice to a nearby beach resort and once to Pretoria, for a week. When she spoke of Pretoria, Marina grew animated. The discos there! And the streets were so clean! After her boyfriend came back from the army, and had completed his apprenticeship as a boilermaker, and they were married, she hoped they might move to Pretoria. "I'd also like to see Hollywood," she said. "I thought I might like being a film actress. But I've heard that's actually quite difficult to organize."

At some point, Da Silva hurried by with his flushed, rather miserable-looking wife, to whom I heard him hiss, "Shouldn't we start the dancing, honey?"

At another point, after the old folks and small children had left and the dancing had definitely started in the back room, but there seemed to be even more vast, dour young women silently occupying the chairs around the edge of the living room, I asked Marina if these new arrivals could possibly all be secretaries at C.A.D., and she said, "No. Those twins you see there, they work at Bantu Affairs. And I think some of the others are also at Bantu Affairs."

It was a weird feeling, standing drinking in that placid crowd of apartheid bureaucrats. I found myself wondering how many of the pimply young men traveling back and forth between the refrigerator, the "disco," and the bathroom were policemen. Were these really Da Silva's friends? More likely, they were his wife's, while the half dozen Portuguese-looking people who had just arrived, including one in a heavy gold necklace talking very loudly about how much he enjoyed taking business trips to New York, were his. Still, it was now clear to me what a gamut of assumptions, all bad, people at school would instantly make about the connections and allegiances of a guy like Da Silva. They would be able to picture this whole scene, and many others, all too clearly after two minutes of conversation with him. No

wonder everybody at school was so ready to believe he was a police informer. Yet Da Silva in this crowd struck me as something of a beacon of enlightened humanism. There was a bookshelf in the passage on which I had noticed Bleak House, Faust , and Cry, the Beloved Country .

Marina and I were several beers along now, and she was beginning to get a little reckless. "Mario says you get on well with the coloreds at your school," she said, inadvertently revealing that she knew quite well who I was. "I don't mind the coloreds," Marina went on. "I might not mind mixing with them socially, even. Many of them are quite nice. But the Bantu, they are why we need apartheid here. They must just stay in their own places. I myself can't bear to have them around me. I don't like the way they smell ."

I tried distracting myself from these remarks by recalling Orwell's notion that the most profound difference between the working class and the middle class in England was olfactory, that if one group didn't like the way another group smelled, there was truly no hope for amity between them. But Marina recaptured my attention by asking me sharply, with her black eyes flashing, "So what do you think of South Africa?"

I was feeling reckless enough myself by now to reply, "I think it would be a great country if only it weren't for people like you."

Marina took this badly, and while I watched her face fall, I also tried to watch a beefy blond boy standing near her, who had been edging closer to our conversation for some time. I had decided that he was a representative of Marina's absent boyfriend, making sure nothing untoward passed between us. I thought he might wheel on me for my rudeness. But he didn't. And Marina just turned away without a word.

I wished I could take my harsh words back, but knew there was no use explaining. I went and found Alex and Fiona, who had been ready to leave the party since the moment we arrived, and we left.

65

The police released Jacob without notice one sunny Friday in late September, and for reasons we could never quite fathom, he came straight to our place in Rondebosch. When I answered the door, Jacob cackled at my reaction to seeing him standing there on the step. "Boo!" he said, and he did look a bit ghostly. After four months in jail,

Jacob's black skin had gone gray. Otherwise, however, he seemed exactly the same. Same high, crazed laugh, same high-speed chatter. "They don't mind waiting outside," he said, indicating a white sedan parked across the street, and darted past me up the stairs. Inside the sedan, two Security Police were making no effort to hide their interest in me or in the license plates of nearby parked cars.

"It was a lekker holiday," Jacob said as he munched the hamburger I made him and took small sips of beer. "The accommodations were good. The company was excellent. Nothing to do all day but relax and read the Bible. Victor Five Star, we called it." Jacob laughed at his own joke—the prison where he had been held was called Victor Verster. "But the view was rather poor. And the food was terrible! Somebody must teach those Boers how to cook!"

Alex and I had been desperately trying to think of what to offer a man who had just spent four months in a jail cell, but Jacob didn't seem interested in any ritual observances. He had turned down an offer to take him out for the best meal in the city; he seemed indifferent to the beer. All he wanted to do was tell jokes on his captors.

"Those warders, I'm telling you, they're so thick. They're so easy to confuse. We've just been driving them mad. Singing in the middle of the night, shouting back and forth. I'm telling you, that's why they let me out, I was giving them all nervous breakdowns!"

Every few minutes, Jacob would jump up, cross to the pantry window, peer out, and laugh or shout something to the policemen parked outside. "Still there! They never give up, those guys."

While Jacob told his jail stories, imitating the crude Afrikaans of the guards at Victor Verster with great gusto, and while the afternoon shadows falling through our fake-stained-glass kitchen window slowly lengthened through several rounds of tea, I found myself less fascinated by the antics and insults and petty punishments being described, than by the closeness, the Laocoön-like intimacy Jacob seemed to feel with his tormentors. He didn't say much about the interrogation he had endured while detained this time, and nothing about being tortured, if indeed he had been, and we didn't ask. Yet I felt as though I was looking upon an essential mystery as he spoke, a relationship so fierce and deep, that between black and Boer, that an outsider like me, or for that matter Alex, had no chance of ever understanding it. All the talk, all the theory, all the cases and analyses and close observations we interested parties could offer, counted for nothing really in that primal struggle between the aging baas and the rebelling slave.

Jacob asked us almost nothing about events at school in his absence. When we told him that C.A.D. had continued to pay him, that the principal had been keeping his checks for him, and that no one had been hired in his place, he just nodded and said that in that case he would see us on Monday. He left about sundown, declining a lift, or even company as far as the station platform. "Hell, I brought my own escorts," he said, and laughed.

After he left, we were left with the question of why Jacob had come to see us immediately upon his release. The best possibility was that he had simply wanted some time to collect his thoughts in a safe place—safe not only for himself but for the struggle. A more convoluted possibility was that Jacob had meant to draw a red herring across his path, to start the Security Police thinking that we were among his comrades. The Security Police were famous for insisting on believing that whites were behind every black political movement, and their operatives were forever trying to unearth the connections between the subversives (blacks) they knew and their "masters" (white), whom they wanted to know.

In our deliberations about Jacob's motives for coming to see us as he had, we never entertained the possibility that he had simply come to see us because we were friends. Certainly, we had been on friendly terms before his detention. But things just weren't that ingenuous between blacks and whites in South Africa in 1980, at least not between whites and politically active blacks. The Security Police were far behind the times in this regard. The era when sympathetic whites had been widely trusted and accepted as allies by the black liberation movement had passed at least a generation before.

There were many explanations for why this should be so. The apartheid laws themselves worked to keep blacks and whites physically and politically apart, of course. And the impact of these laws was, despite the recent gestures toward reform, still growing. This ever-deepening segregation was especially vivid in Cape Town. For example, the railway line to Mitchell's Plain had just opened that winter. Like the railway line from Johannesburg to Soweto, it had no provision for carrying white passengers. Even the Cape Town city councillor for housing had been prevented by the railway police from traveling by train to Mitchell's Plain. The urban planning assumption was that no whites would ever have legitimate reasons—social, commercial, or cultural—for wanting to travel to a black suburb. The gulf between even the few non-racist whites and the few highly educated, cosmopolitan blacks was widening constantly. Dr. Nthato Mot-

lana, the chairman of the Soweto Committee of Ten and an internationally known spokesman, had recently told an interviewer, "I spent six years at Witwatersrand University Medical School, and I still have no white friends."

The heyday of black and white political cooperation had been the 1950s, when radical (mostly communist) whites and progressive blacks had worked together in the Congress Movement, and been indicted together in the epic Treason Trial of 1956–61. By the late 1960s, though, especially once Black Consciousness had begun to flower, the commitment of anti-apartheid whites to genuine change, which had long been questioned by blacks, was being broadly rejected. There were exceptions to this rule: a handful of whites whose help might still be accepted by black revolutionaries; various moderate black organizations that still welcomed certain kinds of white participation. And the resistance was due for a rebirth of black-white alliances in the 1980s.^[*] But the issue remained a deeply divisive one: the ANC and its affiliates accepted white members; the PAC and most Black Consciousness organizations did not. And the bare fact was that a man like Jacob did not have white comrades.

It had taken me some months to figure this out for myself, and I had resisted its implications every step of the way. While I had never expected that the black militants of my acquaintance would reveal their political agendas to me, I had not yet accepted a corollary social exclusion. I still thought of Grassy Park as the center of my life in Cape Town. During a shaky period after Rachel left, I had even taken to squandering my Saturday nights in Grassy Park honky-tonks—drinking and dancing and refusing to think about the finer moral issues raised when a white crossed the line where a black could not. These Saturday nights had let me in for some merciless Monday mornings, as my students seemed to derive endless pleasure from officiously announcing, "Sir enjoyed himself at the weekend." The obvious uneasiness of some of my friends at school—Meryl, Conrad, Nelson, Soraya—when they would hear that I had been seen jolling at places like the Jolly Carp (an old roadhouse near the vlei) or Traffique Lights (the new disco at Busy Corner) also contributed to my decision to abandon this frantic merrymaking.

Yet I continued to go to Grassy Park whenever I had the slightest

* Notably in the United Democratic Front, a broad-based coalition founded in 1983. See Epilogue.

excuse to do so, and there were several late-winter Sunday afternoons there that were near-epiphanic for me. I might find myself walking down the road, somewhere near school. The sun, riding low over the dark wall of the Constantiaberg, would be soaking everything in a rich, buttery light. Kids from my classes would be passing on bicycles, or walking along with linked arms, or playing soccer in a sandy side street. Shouted greetings, jokes, laughter. People puttering about in their yards, old people smoking on their stoeps, a quiet group picnicking on the field behind the school. I might be on my way from seeing a student who had been ill. I might be on my way to Meryl's house for tea and some of her mother's delicious coconut tarts. A feeling would come over me, both calming and poignant: I was home. I knew so many people here, so many knew me. I had such warm feelings about the place. I knew, of course, that it was really everyone else's home, not mine—that was where the poignancy arose. But it had been so long since I had stayed anywhere long enough to become widely known, and to get to know a lot of people well, that I would just let the sense of being home flood me. It was exquisite. And I was in no rush to repudiate this connection I felt in Grassy Park merely because such connections had been "discredited" for people who were classified "white."

Alex and Fiona slowly became for me the representatives of a more resigned attitude toward the color line. At a staff braai near the beginning of the year, Fiona had been verbally abused by a drunken ex-teacher, and she had since declined to attend any more staff functions. When some teachers started talking about going camping up the coast somewhere for a weekend, Alex quickly begged off. He told me that he and Fiona had gone on a similar outing the year before. Everyone had been drunk the entire time, he said, and someone had squirted toothpaste in Fiona's hair while she slept—"not exactly our idea of fun." As it turned out, the camping weekend did not happen in 1980, but Alex's suggestion about "our" versus "their" ideas of fun stuck in my mind.

Alex and Fiona had been in Cape Town only two years and did not know many people. But their social world was solidly centered in Rondebosch and oriented almost exclusively toward other whites. They had more experience and fewer illusions than I, and their stoic acceptance of their appointed place in the South African scheme of things often made me feel foolish as I rushed off to some gathering or other in Grassy Park.

66

Social life in the student ghetto of Rondebosch did have its interracial facets. A few blacks would appear at parties. There were some well-known black drug dealers. A couple of miles up the road toward the city center, in Woodstock—a crumbling old district between Observatory and what was left of District Six—there were several nightclubs with "mixed" clienteles. These clubs led a tenuous existence on the far side of the race stipulations in the liquor laws, but were quite popular in the meantime among white students eager to dance and romance with the blacks who came there for the same purpose. There were also said to be a number of brothels in Woodstock where the Immorality Act was ignored in deference to the democratic lusts of white students. One of our neighbors in Rondebosch, a music student named Roger, was in the habit of patrolling the main road through Woodstock in his car in search of black girls adrift on the night, and these beneficiaries of his hospitality could often be seen straggling off to the railway station in the mornings as we left for school. Then Roger discovered one day that a number of his possessions had departed along with his most recent guest, which put him in a quandary over how to report the loss to the police so as to collect on his insurance without having his life destroyed by charges brought under the Immorality Act.

UCT students were denied a sense of full membership in the international youth culture by apartheid. For example, there was a rock festival held on a farm about fifty miles from Cape Town. All the top local bands were scheduled to appear. People planned to sleep out under the stars. The music would play night and day. It would be just like the Woodstock, or the Isle of Wight, in miniature. Except that the laws forbidding "mixed" camping prohibited black people from attending. It was unlikely that many blacks were dying to go to a sixties-style rock festival, yet the feeling of absurdity that overhung that meadow full of ostentatiously "free" white youth in the middle of an overwhelmingly black country pretty well spoiled the festival's charm for many participants, I was told. The same problem seemed to me to obtain around the local punk rock scene. There were a couple of punk clubs in Cape Town, and a number of bands with names like the Rude Dementals. I sometimes went to these clubs and thought it was great stuff—the ragged, aggressive, no-stage wildness. And yet I would find myself falling out of the whole jol every time I remem-

bered that this was all happening in South Africa. It was as if these high-style punkers were cavorting on a platform magically suspended in midair, prevented from crashing to earth only by their collective fantasy that they were in Soho or Chelsea or West Hollywood. The fantasy involved forgetting not only that the earth below was African, but that the opportunity for this scene to exist was being provided by a police-state machinery of massive exploitation, repression, and what much of the world was calling genocide.

A very stoned student once enunciated for me some of the hapless bewilderment he and his friends felt. "It's like science fiction," he said. "The Earth has been captured by this race of evil aliens. The Rock Spiders. They're completely crazy, and they're very stupid, but they're tough, hey, and they can be quite cunning. They've enslaved all the black-skinned earthlings, and they've given the white-skinned earthlings a choice. That's their real cunning: The Choice. You can be with them, and enjoy the fruits of rulership, or you can resist, and die . You can't possibly understand this situation here. In America, almost everyone's an earthling. Not so here in South Africa. We've been invaded and conquered by the Rock Spiders From Outer Space."

Talk about "rocks" and "rock spiders" and "hairybacks" was actually much less common in Rondebosch than it was among, say, the English-speaking surfers I had met in Muizenberg. Blaming Afrikaners for apartheid seemed to be widely understood among students as an obvious and even racist cop-out. Many male students had already been confronted with the Choice in its most concrete form: conscription. Some of those who had "done their service" spoke bitterly of the abuse they had received from Afrikaner officers and fellow soldiers, but others talked about their time in the army as having been an opportunity to get over some of their anti-Afrikaans prejudices. A few even raved about the class-leveling aspect of military service. "I would never have associated with guys like that otherwise, poor whites and real platteland boere; I was raised to believe they were inferior."

For nearly every student who had been in the army—and many of them had already seen combat—the experience had clearly been, if nothing else, sobering. There was far less undergraduate silliness among these boys than among their not-yet-drafted classmates. Their youthful romanticism seemed to have been taken out and shot somewhere in the deserts of northern Namibia or southern Angola. They had few illusions about either their true position in southern Africa or the ultimate differences between themselves and Afrikaners.

Along with the student radicals—whose ranks were periodically

thinned by detentions without trial—the ex-soldiers among the students in Rondebosch gave the political atmosphere a certain seriousness, a heaviness that belied the lighter-than-air impression one might otherwise gather from the downtown punk clubs or the country rock festivals. The two things went together somehow: the palpable irrelevance of English-speaking whites to the real national struggle for power, and a suffocating sense of moral and historical urgency. White South Africans—at least those afflicted with a form of social conscience that I recognized—lived with a generalized psychological pressure of crushing intensity. They were forced to justify themselves every day at a level that few people—certainly very few Americans or Europeans—ever had to acknowledge. Their vast privileges, their endless opportunities, the terrible crimes being committed every moment in their names and for their benefit . . .

Where most South Africans, black and white, seemed to dismiss with contempt white student radicalism, I acquired while living in Rondebosch a substantial respect for the student radicals I came to know there. Some were silly; many were infatuated with the revolutionary clichés. There were always gross contradictions in their situations. Once I phoned a young woman whose politics resembled those of the Red Brigades, and ended up speaking with the family maid, who was happy to take a message for "Miss Janice." There was a poster I saw up in several student households that declared, beneath a woodcut showing insurgent blacks armed with rifles and hammers, "Their Struggle Is Ours"—one hesitated even to ask who was trying to convince whom here. Still, the seriousness of most white student activists, the thoughtfulness of their positions, their knowledge of radical political and economic theory, were in general far greater than anything I had ever seen among, say, leftist American students. Their situation was simply so much more serious. The repression in South Africa was world-class. The inequity to be remedied was absolutely immense. And the liberation that these students so fervently envisioned would involve profound and unspecified sacrifices by all whites—the end of their way of life, as it were—a prospect that other whites never tired of throwing in the faces of these few renegades. Many white student radicals would no doubt dilute and slowly lose their "commitment" with time. But their efforts to reconcile their situations with their consciences while still in the cocoon of white university life seemed to me admirable, even if doomed.

There were black people living in Rondebosch—mainly caretakers, gardeners, maids, and "meths drinkers." The latter were an especially miserable species of alcoholic, addicted to methylated spirits (wood alcohol). There were untold thousands of meths drinkers living in Cape Town, most of them homeless—one saw them sleeping in parks, fields, ditches, alleys, and doorways. Some of them lived in caves on Table Mountain.

A more or less stable company of meths drinkers lived in the ditch beside the railway across from our flat in Rondebosch. One of them, an ageless little man named Wendl, had attached himself to Alex, whom he called "my master" and whose car he often washed—Wendl called the car "my beauty." I got to know several of our meths-drinking neighbors. All of them claimed to be casualties of Group Areas. They had grown up in Mowbray or Newlands or District Six, they said, but now their families were scattered all over the Flats, in Bonteheuwel and Vrygrond and Elsies River and they didn't know where. The police were forever arresting them, beating them up, and telling them to stay out of white areas. But, they said, they had nowhere else to go. Their physical stamina was amazing—they slept on the cold ground, they seemed to eat almost nothing, they destroyed themselves daily with meths, and yet they kept on going. In fact, getting hit by cars seemed to be the main cause of death among them. Staggering meths drinkers were a major motoring hazard all over the Cape. I had several near accidents while swerving to avoid some wretch who had lurched into the road.

These battered specters filled the edges of one's existence, and it was never easy to know how to react to them. One day, I was panhandled by a local meths drinker outside our flat while I stood talking with Nelson, who surprised me by glaring at the beggar and then stonily ignoring his pleas. After I had given the fellow something and he had staggered off, Nelson said, "I can't bear those people. They have no pride, no purpose. They don't even have any brains left." Then he added pointedly, "They live off do-gooders."

But that was how it was, I thought, living in a place like Rondebosch. A person was driven to do-gooderism. There were always black people with terrible problems around—women at the door asking if we needed any housecleaning done; teenage mothers asking for food for their babies. All our black neighbors seemed to live in perpetual insecurity, and to know them was to get involved. When the caretaker of our block of flats was fired, he came to me. We had become friendly when I borrowed some of his tools to work on my car.

After that, I had occasionally sat with him and his wife in their windowless garage apartment sharing tea and biscuits and small talk. Couldn't I help him now? He and his family would be sent to the Transkei if he lost his job.

Fiona and I went down to the offices of the company that owned our block of flats. We talked to a series of managers, who basically told us to mind our own business. The next day I got a call from the owner of the company, who called me a "terrorist" and said he would have me arrested for trespassing if I hadn't moved out by the following morning—my name wasn't even on the lease! I didn't leave, and I was never thrown out, but the caretaker did lose his job. The reason he was given for his dismissal was that the place did not look spruce enough—which was absurd. The place looked great; the caretaker had worked on it seven days a week, from morning to night. The real reason he was being fired, the caretaker told me, was that a man who coveted his job had accused him to the owner of having run his old bakkie as an illegal taxi during the bus boycott. He hadn't done it, the caretaker said, but his accuser had been hired in his place.

Fiona and Alex were far more used to this sort of thing than I. At one point, Fiona suggested that we hire a maid. She had recently taken a job and was too tired in the evenings to do her share of the housecleaning, she said. Besides, there were so many women who needed the work. I demurred. I had always cooked and cleaned for myself, and I had no desire to start acting like a white South African now.

"This isn't America, you know," Fiona said. "Acting like a middle-class American here won't help anyone or solve anything. If white people all stopped employing servants, all it would do is throw a few million more black people out of work."

She was right, but I wouldn't budge. What would we do, pay the standard starvation wage? Fiona, upset, said she believed a maid deserved more pay than an architect did, since the work was dirtier, but she didn't know how to put that principle into practice. Alex, for his part, stayed neutral. Fiona wasn't thinking of a live-in maid—just someone to do some cleaning. And this was far from an extraordinary idea. Most of the white students who lived near us had black domestic help and I knew of at least one "commune" that had a live-in maid and cook. But, in the end, we hired no one.

The job Fiona had taken was her first "in her field." She was now working as an architect for the Cape Town City Council. Her first assignment: helping to design the houses for the next phase of Mitch-

ell's Plain. Fiona hated the work with a fine passion. It was easily the highest salary she had ever earned, but she meant it when she said she didn't deserve it. For Fiona, spending her days planning the details of the drab little boxes that black people were forced to live in, trying to ameliorate their cheapness and sterility on a limited government budget, was like a worst nightmare come to life. It was everything that was most horrid about being a white South African. She kept at it for a number of months, steeling herself with the usual rationalizations about doing as humanely and creatively as possible the nasty work that would be done anyway. But she suffered, despising herself, and eventually she began calling in sick more and more often, and spending her days at home huddled under the huge Chinese umbrella that covered the ceiling in her and Alex's room, making airy drawings of imaginary cities, or losing herself in the book Alex had given her for her birthday: Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.

Fiona reminded me of a Nadine Gordimer character. Raised in Johannesburg by apolitical, English-speaking parents—her father was a mining engineer—Fiona was a victim of too much consciousness. She had been an anti-apartheid activist at Wits. In 1976, she and Alex had both been been beaten up by white vigilantes in a march to demonstrate solidarity with the students of Soweto. Her politics were still about as radical as nonviolent politics came. Fiona seemed to me to look forward genuinely to the day when a black government would rule South Africa, not because the country would necessarily become a haven of justice and freedom then, but because she would finally be able to breathe freely, to stop feeling that she was living at someone else's expense.

In the meantime, however, Fiona was paralyzed. She did not have the nerves for underground activity or the stomach for the endless compromises of "legitimate" liberal politics. All the existing career options were either pathetic or objectionable. She was too bright and self-critical ever to let herself forget who she was and where she was. Or the killer: what she must look like to black people. At some level, I came to believe, Fiona respected that black perspective on her life above all others. It had, after all, a truly massive moral authority, accumulated over the centuries of oppression. And Fiona refused to pretend that it was any less hostile, any less rightfully scornful of her every little white gesture, than it was. Fiona was too sensitive to survive in South Africa. Yet I found that I choked on my attempts to suggest that she might be happier anywhere else.

67

I was going through my own fits of self-loathing these days—mainly having to do with my job. The basic problem was that I was a foreigner, and thus unappraised of much local lore. But this didn't just mean that I didn't know SACHED from the Urban Foundation, or the history of the permit system, or even that I brought "Eurocentric" assumptions to an African situation, and had to learn to see "total strategy" as a context within which we all worked. It also meant failures and bumbling that could not be so simply remedied. It meant, I had decided, a terrible lack of communication with my students.

There were all those jokes I didn't get—and jokes were so much of my students' self-expression. A group of matrics and I are talking about what courses the University of the Western Cape will offer next year. A boy in the back starts singing, "Daar kom die Plato," and breaks up his classmates. I request an explanation. Through her laughter, Shahieda tells me that PLATO is the hobbyhorse of Richard van der Ross, rector of UWC. It's some sort of computer education system that Van der Ross is installing at "Bush" and touting at every opportunity as the wave of the future. "Daar Kom die Alibama" is a famous folk song. It was composed, Shahieda thinks, when a Confederate raider called the Alabama put into Cape Town during the American Civil War—on this point, there is some discussion. Yes, that's it. Probably. Anyway, that song has become a kind of "Cape colored" anthem and is sung on all sorts of occasions. I am about to ask what sorts of occasions when it occurs to me that all the laughing has long stopped, and the mood among the group has quite changed, as we labor through this explanation. This kind of thing, I think, happens far too often.

It happens in another form when I counsel students. I just don't know which buttons to push. A Standard Nine boy has decided to drop out of school to start working full-time as a box boy at a supermarket. He claims he lost too much ground during the boycott ever to be ready for his final exams. I go to the supermarket where he works to remonstrate with him. I try every argument I can think of, including reciting the latest statistics on the relative incomes of high school graduates and high school dropouts. He seems more embarrassed than anything else. I realize that I have to reach him on some more emotional level. I have an almost physical sense of the images—the names, jobs, ideas, symbols—I should be invoking to get his attention

and to have any real chance of persuading him. But I simply don't know them. A local teacher would, but I don't, and we part after the boy tries to cheer me up by saying that maybe he'll try Standard Nine again next year.

It happens in still another form when my ignorance of local conditions causes me to steer students wrong. Two girls want to get jobs as bank tellers. Until recently, I am told, there were no black bank tellers. I've seen them all over town, though. I call around and set up interviews for the girls with the personnel department of a leading bank. On the day of the interviews, I get a call from the bank. It seems that neither of the girls has turned up for her appointment. I seek out the girls, who are sullen and ashamed, and I demand an explanation. Eventually, one of them blurts out that the bank I set them up with is Afrikaans and does not employ black tellers. They were hoping for jobs with one of the big English banks—Barclays or Standard. Those are the only ones that have black tellers. These boere banks obviously didn't realize they were black when I made the interview appointments. When I hear all this, I apologize. I didn't realize; I didn't mean to embarrass them. We can set up interviews with Barclays and Standard. The girls are now wary. Finally, I talk them into trying again. As with my initial misconceptions about certain "white" universities, this is the sort of ignorance that can be remedied, piecemeal. But the damage to my credibility done by each of my little counseling mistakes, the diminution of my ability to get students to trust me, is lasting, at least with this year's matrics. And how many more years' matrics do I really plan to counsel?

My inability to communicate flowingly with my students undermines, finally, the quality of our classroom repartee, the workaday back-and-forth that does so much to establish the liveliness of a class or a lesson. Part of the problem is just language, my not speaking Afrikaans. It's also culture, the fact that I don't know in any detail what happens at home to these children, don't know their parents, couldn't be their parent the way most of my colleagues could—and in that sense it's also "race."

The worst part of all was the effect that I continued to worry I was having on some of my students—not on those who avoided or mistrusted me, but on those who listened and looked up to me. What kind of role model for these kids was I, anyway, skating through their world, cut loose from family and place of origin, completely free of the crushing responsibility to their people that bore down upon the best of them?

Clive was the student who crystallized these anxieties for me. He came by our place fairly often now. The slow death of the high hopes of the early days of the boycott had disappointed Clive more than most, and he seemed to be growing cynical. "This country, the whole thing, is so befok, " he would say, shaking his head. He and I would argue about his future. Clive now claimed not to be interested in going to either of the two universities in Cape Town. "A club for the rich or a bush college, both a waste of time." He didn't even want to talk about it. Instead, Clive liked to ply me with questions about my life and travels. He often mentioned his brother in Europe and wondered what he might be doing now. Then one day Clive announced that he had made up his mind. After graduation, he would just go to work, save some money, and then take off overseas. All he wanted to do was travel and write. It seemed Clive's dreams about the world beyond Grassy Park had become an individualist's, like mine.

68

There was a short break between the third and fourth terms. Alex and I decided to take a camping trip into a mountain range called the Cedarberg, about a hundred miles north of Cape Town. We invited Nelson to join us and he said he would.

But on the morning we were scheduled to leave, Nelson suddenly said he wouldn't be able to go. "I knew he would do this," Alex said. "It's always something. They always do this."

I didn't need to ask who "they" were.

We decided to force the issue and went to Nelson's house. He answered the door looking sleepy and suspicious and surprised to see us. He did not invite us in. We offered to help him with whatever he had to do. Nelson just studied us, standing there on his porch. Finally, he laughed. He said he had to go by his brother's place and drop off some things, but if we didn't mind waiting awhile . . .

Within an hour, we were on the road north. By way of explanation of his near absence, Nelson simply said, "Most of my friends refuse to have anything to do with whites. They'll probably criticize me for going on this trip."

We drove through the rolling hills and wide plains of the western Boland, past the farm towns of Malmesbury and Moorreesburg. Then we turned northeast, climbed up a steep pass through rocky hills, and crossed into the valley of the Olifants River. Suddenly, the high, dark,

wild-looking wall of the Cedarberg stood up against the sky to the east. The highway angled down to the valley floor, which was patchworked with orange groves. We stopped at a fruit stand, where the boy selling sacks of oranges might have been one of our students except that he kept shuffling and scraping and baas ing us to a degree that shocked me. "We're in the platteland now," Nelson said. "I bet that klonkie has never seen the inside of a classroom." And if this boy's parents were offered a chance, I thought, to send him to town to get an education in exchange for some housework? This was the region where some Capetonians were said to recruit their "slaves."

That we had left cosmopolitan Cape Town became even more apparent when we stopped for gas outside the town of Citrusdal. Several had advertisements for country living were lounging around the lube bay at the gas station, and our arrival became the occasion for much heavy staring and comment passing. It seemed Citrusdal whites had some strong convictions about seating arrangements in automobiles, and to their way of thinking, we had it all wrong. Nelson should not have been in the front seat, much less looking at them and smirking in that way. "Gaan kak in die mielies," Nelson muttered, just slightly too quietly for our glaring audience to hear. ("Go shit in the corn.")

We took the old road north from Citrusdal, following the east bank of the Olifants. Physically, the valley began to remind me of Morocco—the dark green fruit trees, the bone-dry mountains. At the same time, the fishermen we saw, waist-deep in rubber waders in the rushing river, kept reminding me of the western United States. Halfway between Citrusdal and Clanwilliam, we turned onto a dirt road and headed up into the Cedarberg. The mountains soon surrounded us, steep walls of rock rising endlessly, while we followed a clear, twisting stream a few miles up to a campground.

We parked, and I began to get nervous. The campground was a peaceful, sprawling place, shaded by eucalyptus and ironwood, with stables, barbecue pits, a small sloping meadow, a big ablutions block, and a ranger's office. It was very quiet in the midday heat. The problem was that I had been in South Africa long enough by now to know at a glance that this was whites-only territory. This, I realized, as much as any political convictions about non-association, was what had given Nelson second thoughts about coming along with us. Without a word, we piled out of the car and shouldered our backpacks. We had a map already. We hit the trail, marching double time.

In the first half mile we tramped, we saw many small parties—

picnickers, fishermen, families, couples—all white. We didn't stop to chat with any of them, nor did we speak to each other. I was mortified by the amount of dread I felt about the prospect of trouble. The trail zigzagged steeply up the mountainside, and the people soon thinned out, but we kept up a brutal pace for a good two hours, and it was only exhaustion that finally crowded the dread from my thoughts.

We rested when we reached the ridge. The air was cooler and the land was greener on the summit, and the view was magnificent. Great piles of boulders, gray-white and sculpted into weird shapes by the wind, rose everywhere to the east, while the vista to the west seemed to stretch all the way to the Atlantic, some forty miles away. Long dune grass grew between the rocks on the ridge, and here and there we could see lone survivors of the cedar forests from which these mountains drew their name. They were huge, heavily gnarled, beautiful trees. It was hard to conceive how nineteenth-century loggers had managed to haul countless thousands of them down to the coast from here. ("With oxen and slaves, that's how," Nelson said.) It was now late afternoon. We set off again, across the plateau, and presently came to an old stone hut in a meadow, where we decided to make our first night's camp. There was no one around. The silence and grandeur up here were primeval.

The trail we followed the next day wound all through the high country of the Cedarberg, skirting deep gorges, traversing broad plateaus where hares darted through the protea. The landscape was fantastic—an ocean of boulders heaped up like thunderheads—and we didn't see anyone else all day. In a sheltered spot near a spring, we found the ruins of an old sheepherder's house. Built of whitewashed adobe, with a cedar hitching post still standing out front, it looked to me like somewhere Butch Cassidy and his men might have holed up. But then we were confronted, in the next valley, by a large troop of baboons, who disputed with hysterical barking our right to proceed. We slowly made our way past the apes, who noisily retreated. African wilderness, I decided, had an antic, otherworldly quality that was inimical to the suave saddlebag outlawry of the frontier myths I had been raised on.

In the late afternoon we emerged onto the eastern ramparts of the Cedarberg. Here the expanse in the distance was the Great Karroo—a vast semidesert—rather than the sea. Far below us, among the rolling brown hills in the nearer distance, a dirt road ribboned its way down the valleys to a hamlet of whitewashed buildings, rendered discrete and toylike by our altitude. That, Nelson said, was Wupper-

tal. While we rested, chewing on biltong, the jerked meat the Boer pioneers ate, Nelson waxed lyrical about Wuppertal.

"Life down there is so peaceful and healthy. There's no apartheid. No inequality. Look at how isolated it is. Pretoria just leaves it alone. Why? Because there are no whites there, of course! Maybe a German missionary or two, now and again. You see that big building there? That's the mission. And that big shed on the hillside? That's the factory. They make veldskoens [traditional shoes]. Wuppertal is the last place that makes them properly." Nelson paused, then shook his head. "People from Wuppertal can't believe it when they must travel in to town somewhere, and they see what a balls-up this country is." We were all quiet for a while. Finally, Nelson said, "Wuppertal's a test case for non-racial socialism in South Africa. One day, it will be a national monument. The plaque will say, 'People lived sanely here even under apartheid."'

Nelson chuckled, but his tone was so brooding and earnest that I thought better of pointing out that Wuppertal was really more a relic of the past than a portent of the future, that as an intact Moravian mission station it might more easily symbolize that stage of colonial penetration when the missionaries first organized the indigenes into Christianized communities, ready for exploitation by the traders, settlers, and capitalists to follow.

The wind was blowing northwest now, weatherwise a bad sign. Alex had his map out. He indicated it and said, "If we don't find this hut fairly soon, we might do well to start for Wuppertal ourselves. It is not going to be a nice night."

We set off in search of the hut, and found it high on an open, west-facing mountainside. It was empty. There was another hour of sunlight left, so Alex went off with his camera to photograph cedar trees while Nelson and I cooked supper.

Since leaving Cape Town, the three of us had observed an unspoken moratorium on talking about school. Getting away from the workaday grind was, after all, one of the best things about going camping. The long day of trudging through the mountains had cleared my head in unexpected ways, though, such that I found myself taking a longer, calmer view than usual of many things. In particular, my worries about teaching, about the effect I was having on my students, had organized themselves for the first time into a concise form in my mind. While we simmered rice and watched the sun sink into the cloud bank that was building in the west, I quietly, almost confessionally, described my misgivings to Nelson.

When I had finished, he shrugged. "That's inevitable," he said. "If you come into a situation like ours from a background like yours, it takes time for you to understand things. As for your influence on the students—I don't think you're seen as somebody who's pushing a particular political line. A liberal, collaborationist line, for instance. So it's not a matter of students being led astray like that. You might represent some things that certain students find . . . glamorous." Nelson laughed. "But everyone realizes you come from a different world. If I were you, I wouldn't worry. I don't see that you've done any damage to any student's development. Maybe you've even taught something to one or two!"

This was a reassuring perspective, to say the least. But there was something else I suddenly wanted to know. I asked Nelson: "If you had grown up somewhere else, in the West, do you think you would have become a Marxist?"

Nelson took a long time to answer. Then he simply said, "No."

It was what I had wanted to hear.

Alex returned with a story about a leopard spoor he had seen, and antelope grazing higher up the mountain.

We sat and ate with our backs against the hut while the western sky turned into a conflagration streaked with long purple clouds. With the silence on the subject of school broken, conversation turned to our students. I told a story about a girl in 6A8 who had asked me during a class discussion whether I believed in God. I had declined to answer. She had persisted. I finally said that it wasn't fair for a teacher to have to declare himself on such a personal matter to his students, to which she replied, "Mr. October tells us!"

Nelson roared with laughter. "I don't even teach that class! I only spoke with them once or twice during the boycott."

"Well, I was curious to know what you had told them, so I asked. And she said, 'Mr. October doesn't believe in God. Shame!'"

"Of course that's what I told them."

Alex turned to Nelson. "But where do you draw the line in class when it comes to politics?"

"Politics doesn't come up so often in physics," Nelson said.

"Then how is it that at least half the matrics seem to get at least half their political ideas from you?" Alex asked.

"Not in class," Nelson said. He paused for a minute, then went on. "Most of the matrics I see, I've taught for three years. When I first get a class, in Standard Eight, I try to categorize all the students in terms of their potential for political development. There are a few you have

to write off—the totally untrustworthy characters, the children of policemen, and so on. But most of them I try to work with in one way or another.

"Those with a limited amount of potential, I steer toward certain organizations—sports clubs, community groups, and so on. I also try to see that they get certain books to read in Standard Eight, certain others in Standard Nine, and certain others in matric, according to what I think they're ready for. Those students with somewhat more potential, I steer toward different groups, and give more difficult reading. Those with a great deal of potential, I treat differently still. We have study groups, we work on certain projects, and we stay in close touch after they leave school.

"I've had three classes now that I taught for the full three years. Many of my ex-students are very active, in various organizations. So it's possible to have a sort of spreading impact as a teacher. That girl who asked you whether you believed in God, she's the youngest sister of a girl I taught who's quite active at Bush now. In fact, she's a member of a study group that might interest you, Bill. I'd be interested to hear what you think of our reading program, anyway. I've already picked Alex's brain for suggestions. Everything that interests us is banned, of course. But we've managed to develop a very strong analysis, I think."

Dusk was deepening. We sat quietly sipping coffee spiked with brandy. I found Nelson's description of his systematic cultivation of Grassy Park students astonishing, and I was very surprised he had told us about it. At the same time, I felt honored by his confidence.

"Someone's coming."

Alex pointed to the north, where a flashlight bobbed in the dusk. We watched it approach. The outline of a hiker slowly took shape behind the light, moving across the mountainside. When it was fifty yards away, a jaunty "Hello!" was thrown in our direction.

It was a tall, tanned young Englishman with short dark hair and a huge blue rucksack. He wore Swiss-style knickerbockers and heavy climbing boots, and said his name was Louis. We invited him to share the hut with us that night; he accepted. We watched him prepare his supper, all silently marveling at the abundance of high-tech mountaineer's gear he kept pulling out of his rucksack. Louis told us that he was an art student in London. He occasionally came to South Africa on family business, he said, and he always tried to get away for a few days' "climbing" while he was here. The Cedarberg was one of his favorite ranges in Africa, he said, although he did most of his

climbing in the Alps and the Himalayas. I was watching Nelson for his reaction to Louis, but it was hard to gauge the exact meaning of his occasional chuckles in the darkness that soon enveloped us.

The weather did change overnight, and the sky in the morning was threatening. We had planned to climb one of the peaks in the southern part of the range that day, but all the higher country was shrouded in clouds. We hiked in that direction, anyway, accompanied by Louis. After a couple of hours, it began to rain. We found a shallow, low-ceilinged cave in a cliff face and made ourselves comfortable there. Louis began producing more marvels from his luggage, and we were soon feasting on arcane energy bars from his brother's mountain-outfitting shop in Oxford. We contributed the last of our brandy. Though very solemn and an art student, Louis was all right, we decided. He wanted to hear all about Grassy Park High, and we three tried to oblige. What amused me most in the course of this impromptu party was when Nelson, drinking spiked tea from a tin cup, began to muse out loud about how this cave, these mountains, put him in mind of the Sierra Maestra in Cuba, the mountain fastness from which Fidel and Che had launched their revolution. Nelson's eyes shone as he spoke, and lying there in his dirty coat and battered hat and week-old beard, he did look rather like a South African guerrillero , I thought. More so than he did a schoolteacher, anyway.

Perhaps it was the talk of the tropical wilds. More likely it was having gotten wet and cold on the trail. In any case, I began to shiver uncontrollably as we huddled there in the cave, and then I began to sweat. I knew the symptoms; it was a relapse of the malaria I had contracted in Indonesia a year and a half before. I climbed in my sleeping bag, and began to get a bit delirious. I said that, as soon as the rain stopped, we should make our attempt on the peak we wanted to climb. But the others knew better. When the rain did stop, we set off downhill, making straight for the nearest road. It was only a few miles, but I was so weak that it took several hours, and when we finally got to the road I immediately got in my sleeping bag again. Alex stayed with me. The last thing I saw before I fell asleep, and it made me laugh, was Louis and Nelson striding off—or, rather, Louis striding, and Nelson having to trot alongside to keep up with Louis's giant, solemn steps. They were headed for the campground, which was ten miles up the road.

They returned with the car just after dark. By then, my fever and chills had passed, leaving me rather blissfully exhausted. I insisted that we not try to drive all the way to Cape Town that night, but sleep

at the Cedarberg campground instead. We did so, and it was only when we were all stretched out in sleeping bags in the meadow there, having cooked our dinner in one of the barbecue pits and washed off some of the trail dust at the ablutions block, that I recalled how nervous I had been when we first passed through this campground. Our chances of being hassled were far greater now that we were actually staying here, I realized. But the whole business simply didn't interest me now. The idea of being a "mixed" party seemed too absurd even to think about. The stars looked like tiny diamonds sprinkled on a black velvet cushion, and apartheid was another country.

The day after we got back to Cape Town, Louis phoned. He wanted to take us out to dinner at his hotel. Alex and I accepted, and Fiona came along, but Nelson sent his regrets. He had a meeting, he said. This time, I noticed, we didn't even discuss forcing the issue. The dinner was lovely, and Alex and Louis made arrangements to meet in London in a few months' time, when Alex planned to be traveling in Europe. Louis's hotel was one of Cape Town's best, and thus probably had "international status," although looking around the big, candlelit restaurant, I could see nothing but white faces, so it was hard to be sure.

69

Back at school for the final term, I found myself looking at my classes through the lens of Nelson's revelations about his system for the political cultivation of students. I tried to imagine this farm system for the revolution, recruiting and promoting players not for their strong right arms but for certain qualities of mind and character. What qualities? Intelligence, obviously. But the movement could hardly restrict itself to recruiting only the brightest children. Mass mobilization was the ultimate object, after all, and much of the work to be done—the pamphleteering, the legwork—required no great intellectual ability. The brightest children were also most subject to the lure of the few opportunities for self-advancement, to the great temptation to make for oneself a separate peace. Integrity, then—idealism, discretion—and courage. Yet integrity was hard to measure. As with courage, it was most likely to emerge or fail under pressure, when a "cadre" was already in a position to damage the cause.

I had often contemplated the Grassy Park High faculty with these questions in mind, trying to see what factors determined which few

teachers were openly "political," while the rest hung back in their various sloughs of apathy, cynicism, preoccupation, cowardice, ambition, or outright conservatism. Age was a factor, but scarcely definitive. Neither was personal integrity the sole determinant. There were mean-spirited sneaks like Georgina associated with the struggle, while stolid straight shooters like Cecil Abrahams and Moegamat seemed to avoid as if by instinct the endless ambiguities of politics.

With my students, things seemed even less clear. My classes were young; that was part of it. Nelson said he began culling children in Standard Eight. Half of my students would never reach Standard Eight. But what would Nelson make of some of my students? What kind of "potential" would he see in a Wayan, a Hester, a Terence, a Shireen? And Shaun, Nico, and Wayne? What would Nelson make of a class like 7E2? I guessed that there wasn't a single student in 7E2 whom he would try to recruit. Their silliness seemed, at least to me, unanimous and irremediable. Then again, I could be missing something. All kinds of factors hidden to me, having to do with the political complexion of families, churches, out-of-school lives, and organizational discipline, would undoubtedly be taken into account.

The boycott had been a mass action, at least as far as students were concerned. Nelson's farm system—particularly his postgraduate "study group"—sought to produce leaders for the coordination of mass action. The young people whom Nelson "conscientized" became activists in a great range of organizations—trade unions, community associations, sports federations, student councils, ad hoc committees, professional bodies. This I gathered as I began to meet some of the others in his study group. They were teachers, clerks, nurses, university students. They met irregularly, in each other's houses and rented rooms, yet they seemed to keep up a great flow of books, pamphlets, and ideas among them. Nelson ran down some of their main texts for me. The list was heavy with the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Fanon, Cabral, Genovese, Debray, Castro, Guevara, Giap, Cesaire. When he asked for suggestions, I tried to leaven the list a bit with Orwell, Antonio Gramsci, Rosa Luxemburg, John Reed, Paul Goodman, James Baldwin, and E. P. Thompson, and to counterweight it with Solzhenitsyn and Koestler—the latter suggestions were coolly received. What I could really offer to Nelson's study group, I discovered, was a connection to some American documentary film distributors. There were several recent films about the struggle in South Africa, which had been banned in South Africa, that we now undertook to import through a well-placed employee in the Cape Provincial

library—right under the government's nose, as it were.

How strong or weak was "the analysis" developed by Nelson's group I really couldn't say. It placed a lot of emphasis on the revolutionary models provided by Cuba, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Angola. The world anti-apartheid movement was seen as an ally, but apartheid per se was not seen as the ultimate problem in South Africa. The disinvestment movement in the West was welcomed, but not only because withdrawal would isolate and weaken the Botha government. Nelson's group rejected international capitalism itself, regardless of who ruled South Africa. They seemed to value some of the insights of the Black Consciousness movement, but generally regarded the movement as naive. "BC was too easily hijacked by reformists in many communities," Nelson said. He and his associates advocated total noncollaboration with the authorities, wherever possible, and in that regard were in the old Unity Movement tradition. They were completely uninterested in compromise, in politics as the art of the possible. They anticipated total victory over the enemy in the end.

I had my doubts about much of this. Not because I still thought Black Consciousness was the most promising liberation ideology available to black South Africans. On that score, I now shared Nelson and company's reservations, and realized, too, that some of the movement's original appeal to me had had to do with my being American. That is, a doctrine of black pride and black self-reliance had struck me as essential partly because I came from a country where blacks were an oppressed minority group, suffering all the onslaughts on their self-image which that status can bring. In South Africa, though, blacks were not a beleaguered minority, and whites were not the dominant culture in the same way they were in the United States. The problem here was not how to survive as blacks in a white society, but how to create majority rule. My doubts about Nelson's group's analysis mostly concerned its practical implications.

To begin with, I had to wonder just how much contact these urban intellectuals had with "the masses." Several of them, including Nelson, were learning to speak Xhosa, but all of them were "colored" and none of them seemed to have any extensive connections with Africans. I also had to wonder what their organizational affiliations were. Did they work with the outlawed liberation movements? If so, I did not want to know about it—here, the underground ethic of need-to-know definitely applied—but if not, how were they connected to any broad-based movement? All their reading seemed intended to en-

hance their ability to judge the ripeness or unripeness of the revolutionary situation in South Africa, but it wasn't at all clear to me how they intended to create or control that situation. Black anger was the molten material with which these would-be popular leaders had to work, yet I somehow doubted that their endless discussions of class warfare and dialectical materialism were really in tune with that anger. I wondered, finally, about their air of purism, of absolutism. They scorned "bridge building"—alliances with more moderate groups—yet it was very hard to picture how apartheid would ever be brought down other than by a broad coalition of its opponents. Patience was esteemed an overriding revolutionary virtue by Nelson and friends. "The long march" was the metaphor of choice for the revolution's historical schedule. But could sectarianism not postpone liberation indefinitely? And then there was the melodramatic but fundamental question: Just how many of these bright, serious young students and clerks were actually prepared to risk their lives for their beliefs? Because without that final commitment by many, many black South Africans, the continued failure of their struggle, given white might and determination, seemed inevitable.

I mention these reservations about Nelson's group, but the fact was that I admired the few members I met immensely, and never doubted the ultimate importance of consciousness-raising groups like theirs to the freedom struggle as a whole. Some of these questions only occurred to me later, while looking back, when I could no longer ask them of Nelson or his friends. At the time, I mostly felt honored to be trusted as much as I was, given the suspicion-fraught atmosphere in the South African resistance.

70

The end of the year was approaching, and my classes were no longer what they had been. 6A6 now took responsibility for itself. Disputes between classmates were settled by subtle, even subconscious, group action. It was no longer necessary to break up 6A6 into small bunches to get anything done. With the emergence of a solid whole-class identity, 6A6's attention span had lengthened markedly. They were still a big, less than brilliant group, but they could now cope with digressions and distractions in a way they could never have done at the beginning of the year. All in all, 6A6 was something of a collective success story.

6A7 had also changed. They remained a hip, aggressive group, but their sense of style as a class had shifted—from that adapted black American jive routine, "rappin'," to a more international mystique: reggae, the Third World, and generic liberation struggles. Among the rock bands, soccer stars, and elephant families on the walls of New Room 16, a new image had been tacked up: a dashing young Zimbabwean guerrilla, complete with cold battlefield stare and AK-47 Soviet assault rifle. I figured someone in 6A7 had brought in the picture; certainly, they seemed more excited about it than my other classes did. And they were nearly beside themselves when their classmate Terence came to school one day with a camouflage-patterned beret. He wasn't actually wearing it, but the other children kept urging me to ask him what he had in his bag, and when I finally obliged them, he pulled it out with a great grin and clapped it on his head at precisely the right revolutionary angle. "A luta continua," Terence said, and the class sighed wildly. The subculture of revolution, that which had been all the rage during the boycott, seemed to have caught on in 6A7. 6A7 liked its flair.

There was less style but perhaps more substance to whatever "conscientization" 6A8 had undergone over the course of the year. We continued to have the best open-format discussions I had with any of my classes, partly because a number of children in 6A8 had begun reading the daily papers. I considered this a breakthrough, and it had a clear multiplier effect, inciting more kids to start reading the news every time some of their classmates showed they were conversant with the big world of current events. 6A8 retained their great feeling for each other's welfare, even after a classmate had dropped out—Koos often brought me greetings from Oscar, along with reports on Oscar's campaign to get his father to let him try Standard Six again next year.

Although 7E2 remained unbowed, the class had become noticeably more subdued over the course of the year, especially since the boycott. They were also somewhat divided now. Some of the boys continued to clown compulsively, but the idea of losers-as-heroes had been so discredited during the boycott that a number of children, including Mareldia, had managed to break with their class's regnant ethos and establish a beachhead of quiet industry and good marks. Since most of the rowdies would no doubt fail, this development gave one hope that those kids who managed to pass might find themselves next year in a more inspiring group.

7E1 was riven by a series of lurid episodes near the end of the

year. A clean-cut, green-eyed class leader named Brian, who had been the individual standout for Grassy Park High at the intermural track meet back in March, allegedly punched Mario Da Silva in class. This led to his suspension from school, and then to some more alleged fisticuffs between Brian's mother and Da Silva. A top student named Janet abruptly dropped out amid a hail of rumors that she was pregnant. Another boy got into trouble with the police for stealing. All this was surprising in a class I still considered to be composed mostly of goody-goodies. But the most upsetting twist of events for me in 7E1 was the sudden, unexplained coldness of Shaun. I had obviously done something to offend him; I did not know what. Shaun would not look me in the eye; he would barely answer when I called on him in class. Wayne and Nico were still friendly to me, but they, too, stopped hanging around after class to chat, and when I asked them what was wrong with Shaun, they looked miserable and said they didn't know. I decided I would let Shaun come to me about it when he was ready. With over two hundred students, I felt spread too thin to be chasing after one who was pouting, especially one about whom, if the truth were told, I had always had mixed feelings.

71

As many of our Grassy Park High matrics would soon be doing themselves, I was starting to run into some hard home truths about their futures. I had by now more or less resolved my consternation about my careers counseling work. Recognizing my own irrelevance to the political development of our students had helped a lot. Nelson had convinced me that our kids were being recruited and prepared for roles in the freedom struggle by friends, teachers, neighbors, and relatives in ways I couldn't perceive, much less participate in. This knowledge let me off the hook. If people thought I was leading some student down the primrose path to stoogedom by helping him or her apply for a ministerial permit or financial aid to go to college, they could speak to the student themselves—and, I now realized, they would .

I also felt stronger in the face of the simplistic revolutionary view that individual achievement by blacks constituted "reform" and was thus at base counterrevolutionary. This was the idea Nelson suggested when he scorned the "so-called opportunities" provided by the skilled labor shortage, and that the great black psychiatrist Frantz

Fanon expressed in its fundamental form when he wrote, "The native's laziness is the conscious sabotage of the colonial machine . . . Under the colonial regime, what is true for the Arab and the Negro is that they should not lift their little fingers nor in the slightest degree help the oppressor to sink his claws deeper into his prey." This view made the most sense, I decided, when the task at hand was that of forcing colonists to return to their homeland. But this was not the task at hand in South Africa—not unless "Drive the whites into the sea!" was one's rallying cry and program. I liked Elliot's attitude, his self-discipline and high seriousness about gaining a technical education.

But the "laziness" issue was important. I never brought it up, but it was so much a part of the white racist stereotype of blacks that it redoubled the challenge to our matrics to do more than was expected of them. Political reservations about individual achievement, combined with fear of the community censure of "sellouts," could too easily feed the universal predilection for indolence, I thought. Certainly, I believed, "success" as such should not be shunned. There had never been enough of it to go around in black South Africa; there had definitely never been enough of it in the freedom struggle.

But this tentative renewal of my enthusiasm for helping our matrics prepare for life after graduation was always running into new waves of discouragement. Looking around Rondebosch, I would find myself overwhelmed with awareness of what a white place it was. How could I encourage our students to go to UCT? The hub of student social life in Rondebosch was a sprawling pub called the Pig and Whistle. I never saw a black inside the Pig who was not in a wine steward's uniform. Nor inside any of the other bars, cafés, restaurants, and pizzerias of liberal little Rondebosch. Soaring above the Rondebosch main road, casting a long psychological shadow, were two eighteen-story student dormitories. There were no blacks living in them, of course, just as there were no blacks living in any of the countless student flats and "communes" in Rondebosch and nearby suburbs. Black UCT students were commuters, outsiders, invisible. They were not, it was safe to say, having a well-rounded university experience.

A more specific discouragement involved my slow realization that Grassy Park High was not in the first rank of "colored" schools in Cape Town. Many of my colleagues had gone to more highly regarded schools—Nelson and Soraya, for instance, had both graduated from Harold Cressy High, which was considered the best—and some of

them made obvious their disdain for the comparatively poor schooling at Grassy Park High. Grassy Park was probably in the upper one-fourth of "colored" high schools in the Cape academically, but I began to see that, for my purposes, that was not good enough—a preponderance of the black students at UCT had graduated from the handful of top "colored" schools at which English was the predominant first language, a handful that did not include Grassy Park High. Solly Marais had three daughters in medical school. When I asked him how he had contributed to this incredible achievement, he mentioned the second job he had held for years, as a liquor store clerk, and his penchant for living with "women who think they can do anything, no matter what I say," but he also cited, in all seriousness, having managed to get each of his daughters into Harold Cressy.

What really set me back on my heels, though, was when I finally looked up the results of the previous year's matriculation examinations at Grassy Park High. Barely half of last year's matrics had passed, it seemed, and less than half of those had achieved the minimum scores for what was called "exemption." Exemption was an entrance requirement at UCT. I went to see Meryl, who was one of those who had earned exemption in her class, according to the list. Could this pass rate possibly be correct? Meryl said it was. Had her class done unusually badly? They had not. Could this year's matrics expect to fare better? On the contrary, Meryl said. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. So only a small minority would earn exemption, probably? "I'm afraid that's true, Bull. It's very unfair."

I had to struggle to accept what this news meant. It meant that of the dozens of matrics whom I had encouraged and helped to apply to UCT, the majority would be academically ineligible to go there, permit or no permit. Did our students not realize this? "Of course they realize it," Meryl said. So they were all just hoping against hope. But what else could they do? They didn't know who among them would pass, who among them might earn exemption. Except they did, to a great extent, according to Meryl. "I think I could tell you right now who's going to pass from these matrics, and which ones are likely to get exemption," Meryl said. "There are usually very few surprises."

I was almost afraid to ask Meryl for her predictions. I mentioned a couple of names—Hector, Glynnis. Meryl said, "I will be very surprised if those two even pass. They both had trouble passing Standard Nine." I was devastated. These were kids with whom I had been trying for months to decide exactly what courses they should take at UCT, which professors they might like, and so on. I asked Meryl who she

thought might earn exemption. She mentioned two students whom I had never counseled. Both had seemed to avoid me all yéar long. Did Meryl know anything about their plans? "I understand they've both applied to UCT," Meryl said. "So perhaps they'll go there." The awful pattern was now becoming clear. Seeing my dismay, Meryl said, "I suppose it's not very nice to feel that some of these matrics have been wasting your time with their applications for bursaries and such, when they're not even likely to pass."

I assured Meryl it wasn't that.

"Well, I think you've done something quite nice myself, by giving certain matrics hope that they might succeed, after all."

That was exactly it. That was the pattern. The students who had been relying on my help all year, many of them, were the very students who had little or no chance of even passing their exams, much less of getting into UCT. I was a vehicle for their fantasies, a source of hope to keep them going. Meanwhile, those few students who really did have a chance of getting into UCT had not needed me. They already had, from somewhere, whatever information they needed. A system, however informal, for channeling the top students toward the few available opportunities did exist. I just hadn't been able to see it.

"And then there's myself," Meryl said. "I've also applied."

This was great news, and I was very happy to hear it. But I was no longer inclined to consider Meryl's interest in UCT a counseling triumph of mine. She would undoubtedly have done exactly what she had done, I now thought, whether or not I had ever come to Grassy Park High—just as it seemed every other Grassy Park graduate or would-be graduate would also do.

Sitting in the library, contemplating the shambles that my career counseling project had become (at least in my head), I found myself staring bleakly at the shelf for careers information that we had created with the armloads of brochures and prospectuses that had come in the mail. For months, I had struggled to keep all the literature intact and in order. The collection was hugely popular, even with the younger children, so there were always bits and pieces scattered around the library, and around the school. Lately, I had given up trying to keep track of it all, and the careers shelf was rapidly disintegrating as a result. It was not easy to watch it happen, but I kept asking myself: What about next year? Who besides the instigator of this project cares enough about it to try to keep it together? That was the point—not that "these people" didn't take good care of things, or that my efforts would all go for naught, but that the project repre-

sented by the careers shelf was mine. It wasn't a goddamned community-based initiative. It was missionary work.

The matrics rented a disco in Athlone for their annual dance. There were some notable no-shows—Clive and Nelson among them—but the great majority of matrics and teachers attended. I went, and was glad I did. The dance had a flowing, joyful quality that took me back to my first, infatuated feelings about Grassy Park High. Everyone was in fancy dress, the boys in dinner jackets and ruffled shirt fronts, the girls in long ball gowns and elaborate hairdos. The disco, known as Galaxy, was a soft-edged universe of colored lights, driving music, and happy laughter. Even the principal could not spoil the party; the speech he made was short and surprisingly sweet. What was different from eight months earlier, of course, was that I now knew all the players in the pageant, knew their faults and foibles as well as their warmth and charm. But the matrics' dance was a holiday from real life. I even let Napoleon spirit me out to the parking lot for a nip at the bar he was running from the trunk of a car.

Over the course of the evening, I must have danced with every girl in matric. The girls were taking the initiative and asking teachers to dance, which, considering how stunning they looked, made the night seem altogether too good to be true. I danced with girls I knew well. I also danced with some I barely knew—including Jean, one of the students who Meryl thought might get in to UCT. As we left the dance floor, Jean pleased me more than she knew by asking, very tentatively, if I would ever have the time to talk to her about university bursaries. Glynnis who wanted to be a veterinarian, Desiree who wanted to be a doctor, Miriam who planned to major in accounting at UCT—with each of whom I had spent hours helping them plan their futures, none of whom I now expected even to graduate—all asked me to dance. And I realized that I wasn't even vaguely irritated with any of them.

The evening passed in a long, slow swirl of illegal ("mixed" dancing) fun. And on Monday my nasty-minded little Standard Sixes had their fun, cackling about how "sir enjoyed himself" at the matrics' dance.

72

A sort of mass hysteria about the approaching final examinations began to prevail at school, and it seemed to intensify with each passing week. Absenteeism among matrics and Standard Eight students—the grade levels that faced government examinations—became chronic. The students in those classes who did come to school were pasty-faced, hollow-eyed wrecks. With the self-conscious swagger of prizefighters chatting to an awestruck public between rounds, they turned up with tales of all-night study marathons, of classmates who were cracking under the strain.

In my classes, it was business as usual, though. This seemed to make some of my students slightly panicky, especially those who had not been doing their work all year. They had gambled that I was bluffing, that in the end I would weight their final exam scores as 80 or 90 percent of their grades. As I continued to insist that my exams would not be a great grueling ordeal and would only count for 10 percent of their final grades, their uneasiness mounted. What were we doing still reading topographic maps? What were we doing still writing compositions? Why weren't we memorizing animal gender terms and collective nouns—a pod of whales, a leap of leopards, a warren of rabbits—the way other English classes were doing? I was sympathetic. But I had no choice. I pushed on with my program, only lessening the load of homework because of the sudden upsurge in studying the children were having to do for their other classes.

On the subject of final exams, Napoleon gave me a scare. He called a meeting of the Standard Seven geography teachers and announced that the senior teacher among us, a gentle, chalky, rather slow-witted man named Fourie, would be preparing the final exam that we all would use. This was unthinkable, as far as I was concerned, and I told Napoleon so in private. His eyes glittered.

"Why? You've been teaching from the same syllabus. I don't see what the problem could be."

"The boycott disrupted everyone's lesson plans," I said, playing lamely to Napoleon's feelings about the boycott. "I know what I was able to cover with my classes, and what I wasn't. You can check over my exam, if you like. But I really think I should set the exams for my classes."

If I was not mistaken, Napoleon was enjoying this. He said we could just wait and see what sort of exam Fourie prepared, and if

there was any problem, we could do some editing.

Now I knew very well that Fourie, left to his own devices, would not have his exam ready until the morning it had to be administered. So I started hounding Fourie to prepare his exam as soon as possible, even offering to take his classes during my free periods so as to give him more time to work. Fortunately, Fourie, though clearly astonished by my browbeating, responded and got his exam ready well in advance of its due date. Equally fortunately, it was awful. There were unanswerable questions, unsolvable problems, and much misleading and even wrong information. I immediately pointed all this out to Napoleon, and he did seem shocked—whether by Fourie's incompetence, or by my unwillingness to let it pass, I wasn't sure. He had to consent, in any case, to my preparing another exam for my own classes.

I was much relieved and decided I wouldn't show my exam to Napoleon until the last possible minute. Even if I did not plan to weight the final exam heavily in my students' year-end marks, I wanted it to reflect the work we had covered, including the politically sensitive material that would probably horrify Napoleon.

But I found all this fuss and fever about exams to be a terrible bore. And it was making me panicky, too. It was coming too soon. I was not ready for this reckoning that seemed to be suddenly upon us. (What had been learned, what had been accomplished, over the last nine months?) The school year wasn't over; I had more work planned. But my classes were being distracted from their lessons. And the anxiety of those students who were beginning to realize that they were very likely going to fail was a further distraction for the rest. My classes were slipping away from me before I was ready to let them go.

73

The best-funded department at Grassy Park High was the woodworking department. Some said it was nearly as well equipped as its counterparts in white schools. This was due to an old Cape tradition of "colored" artisanry, I was told, one that dated back to slave days. "Hewers of wood, drawers of water," Solly Marais said. "Next they'll be giving us a water drawing department."

The head of the woodworking department was a strange young guy named Steenkamp. He wore pin-striped suits and very shiny needle-nosed shoes, and drove a souped-up Toyota bakkie. Short and

slight, with a high, lacquered pompadour, Steenkamp gave off an impression of almost cartoonish narrowness . He had narrow eyes, a narrow mustache, a narrow mouth, and an incredibly narrow head. And Steenkamp's narrowness was not just physical. His main interest in life seemed to be his Toyota. His English was poor, so he and I had never talked much. But he had once asked me, while we were driving somewhere in his bakkie, what other parts of South Africa I had seen. I described the tour that Rachel and I had taken when we first arrived in the country. He was shocked to hear that we had slept in our car. That was unwise, he said. "The people here is dangelous ." Then he recalled hearing that the people in America were actually even worse. "They don't care about each other. They just do whatever they want. They're not all together like here."

During the boycott Steenkamp had kept a singularly low profile. Never eager to leave his woodworking domain in the first place, he had become the Grassy Park faculty's invisible man. When his presence at a staff meeting had been absolutely, unavoidably required, Steenkamp had hovered grudgingly in the background, chain-smoking and not saying a word. (He had a distinctive way of holding cigarettes in his tiny hands—like drooping, faintly obscene white darts.) As a first line of defense against having to commit himself, Steenkamp wore a perpetual smirk on his nonexistent lips.

Thus I had, over the course of the year, come to believe that Steenkamp's obsequious anonymity outside his woodwork shop was a permanent arrangement.

But that was before the Woodwork Exhibition.

The Woodwork Exhibition was an annual event, a sort of final examination cum crafts fair. For several evenings before the start of finals, the doors of the woodwork shop were thrown open to the public. On display was the best student woodwork of that year. I had noticed flyers tacked up around school and at Busy Corner announcing the exhibition, but it only really caught my attention after it had opened, when Steenkamp suddenly underwent some startling changes. Overnight, the impeccable carpenter began showing up in the staff room in what was for him complete disarray—tie undone, hair all windblown and flopping down his forehead, stiletto shoes exchanged for sensible brogans. Weirder still, the new Steenkamp was almost gregarious—making jokes in Afrikaans, favoring people with shy little smiles. I asked Meryl what could have gotten into him. She said he was just unwinding now that the Woodwork Exhibition was set up and successful. "The exhibition is the big event of his whole year, you

know," she said, laughing. "So he's very relieved that it's going well. And he comes out of his shell a bit, to enjoy the spotlight. He does it every year."

This, I decided, I wanted to see. That same evening, I returned to Grassy Park to tour the exhibit.

It was a far more elaborate affair than I had imagined. In fact, the Woodwork Exhibition turned out to be a full-blown community happening. Although it had been going on for several nights already, there were scores of people outside the woodwork shop and dozens of cars parked in the courtyard. Most of the crowd seemed to be young adults, though I also saw a number of our students and their families. I was struck by how well dressed everyone was. Pop music spilled from the door to the woodwork shop as I made my way through the chatting, perfumed throng.

The Woodwork Exhibition was organized like a model home. One wandered from "room" to "room." The furniture was all student woodwork—a fact not obvious from its quality, though, which looked to me quite professional. Imbuia wardrobes, mahogany headboards, stinkwood coffee tables, all gleamed impressively in their respective settings. The dominant style was slightly glossy and showy for my taste. On the other hand, I preferred all this polished, inlaid wood to most of the newer furniture I had seen in real Grassy Park homes—the five-piece "Cologne" and "Pasadena" lounge suites bought on hire-purchase from downtown department stores. Some of the work—the accessories, the knickknacks—I recognized from the projects that my Standard Six and Seven boys had been carrying around with them all year: the shoeshine kits and plant racks and cutting boards. Indeed, it was the details that struck me most as I strolled through the exhibition.

For it was clearly in the details that the great drawing power of this little show resided. Or rather, it was in the "total environment" that Steenkamp and company had worked to create, and which the details worked to complete. There were ashtrays and packs of cigarettes on the night table next to the (fully made-up) bed. There were plants in the plant racks, magazines in the magazine racks, a telephone and telephone book and even an address book on the teak telephone table. Clothes (all new and natty) hung in the wardrobe, lamps and lampshades hung on the lampstands, there were flowers, there were ferns. The study looked eminently ready for its master to enter at any moment and address himself to his oak desk, right down to a brace of sharpened pencils. The dining room table was set with

somebody's silver and somebody's china and somebody's best wine glasses. The kitchen was arranged to suggest an elaborate meal just about to be cooked.

That this whole idyll was being evoked inside a high school woodwork shop had been ingeniously disguised. A pleated yellow stage curtain hid one brick wall; the kitchen had been improvised around the shop sink, with a frilly little orange curtain covering the adjacent window, which was otherwise covered with industrial-strength steel mesh. Dim and meticulous lighting aided in the creation of the illusion, and also served to emphasize the separate character of each "room"—the living room was bathed in hot red light, green and yellow were the study and bedroom, and the dining room was illuminated by a soft blue that gave the silver on the table a dull, magic glow. The music complemented the "environment"—it was Little Anthony and the Imperials during my tour. The DJ, I noticed, grooving in the shadows next to the stereo, was Moegamat, the dapper junior woodwork teacher who had also played DJ at our party in Muizenberg.

And the feeling of the Woodwork Exhibition was almost that of a party—a long, slow, mellow Grassy Park party. Some of the people touring along with me were half dancing through the rooms. But this was far more than a party, just as it was far more than a high school Open House. This exhibition was really more on the order of a shrine. It was a "model home" in the fullest sense of the term. These "rooms" represented a community fantasy, a local Platonic ideal of domestic luxury and serenity which its visitors could both enjoy and aspire to own The student artisanry on display was being admired, no doubt, but the real significance of the exhibition was in its totality, as a concrete apotheosis of a collective dream. This modest, conservative, even kitschy dream was the other face, I thought, of the same community that staged angry general strikes and battled the regime's police in the streets to protest its oppression.

I found Steenkamp in the shadows of the unused portion of the shop as I completed my tour. He left the group he had been standing with to receive my congratulations on the exhibition. For some reason, Steenkamp was wearing a red velvet smoking jacket—as if he were about to take possession of the study. At first glance, the jacket looked ridiculous, especially as it seemed to be several sizes too large for him. On second glance, though, I decided that the jacket did a great deal to soften Steenkamp's usual narrowness—as did the Woodwork Exhibition, in some larger sense. Steenkamp was still a strange little

guy to me, yet I could now see that he had a role in Grassy Park that went beyond simply making a living teaching wood shop. Steenkamp was also custodian of a specific and passionate popular fantasy. No wonder he thought people here were "all together."

Back outside, I started talking to a Standard Nine boy I knew. I asked how his studying was going, and he said that he was taking the evening off. "It's my turn to sleep here tonight," he said, and nodded at the woodwork shop. It seemed that, each night it was up, Steenkamp and some of his students slept inside the Woodwork Exhibition, guarding its fragile grandeur against the depredations of those who didn't share in the fantasy.

74

A strange thing happened to Liz Channing-Brown just before finals started. She showed up at school one day and was told that she had been given a medical leave of absence for the rest of the year for "nerves." It was strange because Liz's nerves had been ragged and visibly drug-stitched all year long, but just lately had been much improved. Also, there was virtually no work left to do this year except "invigilation" (exam monitoring) and exam marking. But her replacement had already been hired; Liz was presented with a fait accompli by the principal. She didn't even get a chance to say goodbye to her classes. I thought I detected a certain amount of grim satisfaction in the staff room as Liz packed her things and left. I watched her straggle off down the road, wanly hitchhiking, with her arms full of composition books that she had defiantly announced she still planned to mark.

I asked Soraya why the principal had forced Liz out now . Soraya shrugged. "The girl who is taking her classes is the daughter of a friend of the principal's," she said. "She needs two months' experience to qualify for a full-time position."

The principal apparently had no trouble pulling such strings, just as he had had no trouble protecting me from Coloured Affairs in the days before I had a work permit. I sometimes wondered why he had continued to protect me after I had let him down during the boycott. Soraya said, "You were probably just a pawn in a power game he was playing with the Boers. You were his American. They wanted to get rid of you. Van was probably just showing off his strength by keeping you around."

When finals started at last, and our schedule of classes turned into

absolute chaos, the principal provided us all with some entertainment by going on a rampage. Students were wandering all over school, confused and taking advantage of the general confusion by not being where they were supposed to be. Suddenly, the principal came barreling out of his office, scattering students like bowling pins, roaring and waving a piece of yellow chalk. He charged into classrooms, where he started turning over all the unoccupied desks. This was hard work for a man in his sixties, even a big man like the principal, since the desks were heavy and unwieldy. But the principal was possessed. On the bottom of each overturned desk, he slashed a large "X" with his yellow chalk, and commanded the teacher in attendance that the desk not be turned back over this year. The student who should have been in it would not be examined; he or she would automatically fail! By the time he reached New Room 16, the principal appeared to be flagging. But he still managed to overturn a dozen desks.

"He's mad," chortled the few students who had been in their places in my room at the time of the principal's passage. But his performance, I noticed, did seem to shake up the school as a whole just enough to make people finally settle down to the great five-week business of final exams.

Invigilation gave me a lot of time to think. Sitting there with my silent classes, watching them scratch away on their various exams, I felt vaguely obliged to try to sum things up, to try to evaluate what had happened over the course of the year in New Room 16. Less than I had hoped, I felt sure. We had largely succeeded in avoiding the government "schemes" for English and geography, but had we managed to replace "gutter education" with anything more worthwhile? Were my students more "critical, articulate, informed" now than when I had met them? Were they better writers? My big plans of March now returned to mock me in November. It was so difficult to know what, if anything, had been achieved. The boycott had disrupted the year's schoolwork so thoroughly. Of course, the boycott itself had been the year's signal event, dwarfing anything that had happened inside my classroom. But had it really been the "very big educational experience" for our students that Mattie claimed? Watching them struggle with their exams, and imagining that at least some of those exams were as careless and irrelevant as Fourie's geography exam, yet not hearing a word of protest through all the weeks of finals about any aspect of the whole examination ritual, one had to wonder.

I had changed, anyway. Now, when I glanced out through my

classroom window and saw a police bakkie parked across the field with its load of pass-law prisoners and the cops calling out to the schoolgirls, my pulse did not quicken with outrage, nor did my throat constrict with sympathy for the people locked inside the steel cage. No, my responses had been dulled by too many months in this country. The bakkie was part of the landscape; I noted it ruefully and forgot it.

75

A telegram came from home. Rachel's mother had died. I had spoken to her on the phone a few weeks before and felt we had said goodbye, but the news of her death still shook me.

For the second or third time since Rachel's departure, I thought about getting on a plane to California. I could afford to buy a ticket now. And there was little left to do at school—just exams, and holding firm on my exams and my marks. But Rachel herself wrote that I should stay. She had been offered a visiting lectureship at the University of Zimbabwe starting in February. I could meet her there. We might make it Cape to Cairo yet. With mixed emotions, I applied for an extension of my visitor's visa, so as to be able to stay in South Africa beyond the end of the year.

This mix of emotions was becoming complex. I was homesick, I was lonely, and South Africa was driving me crazy. What bugged me the most, I decided, what really disoriented me, was simply the government's lack of accountability. The millions of people being brutalized daily by apartheid had absolutely no legal, peaceful recourse. This self-evident fact ate its way into one's soul in South Africa.

But the real conflict in my feelings about staying on in South Africa came to the fore when I thought about going back to the United States, because I was both homesick—and slightly sick at the thought of home. Running into other Americans in South Africa was part of it. My name and number had evidently landed on some informal but well-circulated list of "contacts" for certain kinds of visitors to Cape Town—journalists, academics, friends of friends—and a number of them had looked me up. Their voices, their clothes, everything about them conjured up for me a world: the America I missed. And yet I felt out of phase with it all, felt it receding even as I savored it. I had been repeatedly put off by the callowness of the individuals who brought with them this symphony of home-and-hearth associations. The film-

set designer from Los Angeles interested only in buying the maximum allowable amount of Africana; the junior congressional aide impressed by Mitchell's Plain; the college literature teacher bound for a job at the University of the Transkei, unaware even that blacks resented the sham independence of the bantustans; the free-lance journalist seeking an introduction to a "student spokesman" (I knew the type he wanted: the angry young township radical breathing fire about "the oppressor." I had long wondered if these "student spokesmen," who appeared regularly in articles about South Africa in foreign newspapers and magazines, were real people. My doubts on that score deepened when I tried to picture putting this American together with kids like Mattie, Elliot, or Clive, because I knew very well that none of the politically committed kids I knew would talk to him. They would consider it a security risk with no possible gain, an ego trip, "adventurism." But no sooner had I thought the words ego trip than I knew I had the student spokesman for the job. Roland! He of Richmond, California, track and soccer and bedroom fame. I phoned Roland—hey, he was agreeable. He and the journalist made a date, and the thank-you note the American later sent me claimed that their interview had been "very moving"); the California surfers at Jeffreys Bay—they all seemed so naive, so ill-informed, as if understanding a place like South Africa on its own terms involved an intellectual effort that either was beyond them or they simply didn't consider worth the trouble. They seemed, I suppose, only like what they were: citizens of a superpower, visiting a distant colony. But my irritation with their insularity distressed me doubly. Would I be able to fit in back home at all?

Tina Turner didn't help matters. Along with Ray Charles, Jimmy Cliff, Betty Wright, and Blood, Sweat and Tears, she broke the United Nations cultural boycott by touring South Africa in 1980. Turner compounded her sins, however, by being a singer I liked, and by going far beyond the limp excuses offered by most performers when questioned about their reasons for coming to South Africa. She had arrived, she told local reporters, "under the impression that South Africa was one big safari scene—people running around in the trees, etcetera," and she had been pleasantly surprised. Turner was not much impressed by apartheid. "Look at the buses; both blacks and whites are permitted to ride together," she said in Cape Town (the only place in the country where the buses were integrated). "This would have been unheard of years ago. Significant changes are coming around." In any event, Turner announced, she herself was a Bud-

dhist, and so took the long view. "I am not angered by the plight of blacks here: it is through such suffering that they will become enlightened." Turner did not, thank Buddha, go as far as Cashears, a black American nightclub entertainer and Turner's opening act, did, when he announced to the Cape Town press that he thought P. W. Botha deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in office. But I still had a hell of a time trying to explain to my classes, after Turner's remarks appeared in the local papers, how black Americans could think this way. The truth was, I didn't know.

And then there were Rachel's letters, which, along with letters from other old friends, were painting a picture of American life that sounded less than inviting. It was the year of the hostages in Iran, which was not doing much for the national mood. A "period of reaction," my students might have called it. Rachel was teaching two courses at the University of California, and was appalled by her students. "They're like Martians to me," she wrote. "So cynical. So conservative. So materialistic." For people who had gone to college a few years before, the sharp rightward shift in student politics felt a bit like instant middle age; yet it extended to many of our peers as well. Half of the people I knew seemed to be going to law school; half of the rest seemed to be going to business school.

My closest friend, with whom I had traveled and surfed in the Pacific and Asia, had preceded Rachel back to the U.S. by a year, and had written us long, ecstatic letters about how wonderful it was to be there. But his feelings had changed. Now he wrote, "Returning was like walking through the biggest amusement park in the world—now, well, it's still the same amusement park, but it is dark, and I've ridden every ride, and I have no money and I've lost my car keys. Adjustment—jesus, have I traded my sanity for three years in the South Seas? . . . I just hope things are easier when you return." This friend was now struggling to make a living writing for magazines that he said all seemed filled with "the same cool snippets of modern-life nonsense." Both he and Rachel described feeling overwhelmed by the sheer size of the country. Rachel hoped life in Zimbabwe would be on a more manageable scale.

Even from the letters of friends who seemed happy, I got a sense of cheerful farce that unnerved me. Perhaps I had lost that taste for the stylishly absurd that sustained one in late-twentieth-century America. Perhaps I had lost my edge that way from living too long in less absolutely commercialized cultures. What I found myself wondering now was whether I really wanted to return to a society so shape-

less and vast. Because life in South Africa, for all its horrors, at least didn't lack for issues you could sink your teeth into.

Despite all the restrictions on public discourse in South Africa, a nonstop debate raged here that was as serious, as profound, as they came. The question was: how to create a political framework that would be regarded as legitimate by a majority of South Africans. It was argued constantly, in every corner of the country—even, despite appearances, among the government and its supporters, who spent their time concocting reasons why the debate was unnecessary. It made history and ideas important in a way that they could never be in a more settled society. I had heard the meaning of events a hundred and fifty years old hotly contested among functional illiterates in a shebeen—it mattered whether blacks had gone along willingly on the Great Trek or not. And words like "freedom" and "justice" and "democracy" rang out in South Africa with a resonance, a power, that one simply did not expect them to contain any longer in the great, dyspeptic, democratic West.

My absentee ballot for the 1980 presidential election only found me on the American election day, far too late to send it back. So I took it in to school that day, thinking someone might want to look at it. As it turned out, everyone wanted to look at it. Teachers and students pored over the packet of pamphlets and forms, marveling. Look at all these "propositions," and all these pages and pages of arguments! What's this, Spanish? And Chinese? Here's Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, John Anderson—but who are all these other names?

Actually, my more militant friends at school—Clive, Jacob, Meryl, Aaron, Nelson—refused to get excited about my ballot, and I didn't blame them. They were not admirers of a political system they considered to be a creature of corporate capitalism. Were American elections not invariably an occasion for the local white opposition press to lament that no similar national whoop-de-do was taking place here in South Africa? And I was, in fact, ashamed, watching people paw over my absentee ballot. Not ashamed of the American political system, but of my own blasé attitude toward it. Reagan was a menace, I believed, and I hoped Carter would win. But the idea of voting failed to move me, while it clearly moved many of my students and colleagues deeply. This, I thought, was the difference between life in America and life in South Africa.

76

The yellow X's were fading on the rerighted desks as exams wore on.

I finally gave Napoleon my geography exam on the afternoon before it was scheduled to be administered. The next morning, he and I met in the staff room. There were some problems with my exam, Napoleon said stonily. Some questions were poorly organized. And there were a large number of questions that did not pertain to syllabus material. Why were they on the exam?

"We spent class time discussing them."

"You spent class time discussing why Cape Town was twinned with this, this—city in Taiwan?"

I admitted we had, and tried to explain that the subject had been a takeoff point for lessons on Taiwan, China, South Africa's foreign relations, and relations between Pretoria and Cape Town (where the "twinning" had been unsuccessfully opposed on the City Council). "China is not part of the Standard Seven syllabus," Napoleon said. "And geography is not civics. I suggest you delete this question."

There was more, much more, that Napoleon objected to in my exam. He had never heard the term "economic colonialism" before, and he did not consider it a concept that Standard Seven students were ready for in any case. He was shocked to find a whole section of my exam devoted to the geographic implications of the Group Areas Act. "And nothing here about urban geography, which you should have covered before the boycott." The Group Areas material actually was our urban geography work. But rather than argue, I tried to direct attention to the noncontroversial parts of my exam that Napoleon claimed were poorly organized. Here, I had to endure disparaging comparisons of my work with Fourie's, which stung, but at least I could concede point after point without feeling like I was selling my students down the river.

In the end, I managed to beg off from any more "editing" with the excuse that it was time to draw up a final draft and mimeograph it. Napoleon scanned my exam, his eyes narrowing at all the SWAPO, FRELIMO, and apartheid that remained among the questions. Finally, he handed it back to me, shaking his head. "I just hope no inspector ever sees this, " he said.

I gave the exam, which I was still quite pleased with, to my students. And many of them responded with surprisingly high marks. Had they simply memorized the material, or had they actually ab-

sorbed some of the ideas in it? I invigilated while 7E1 took their exam, and I had a strange moment when Nico glanced up, caught my eye, and gave me a quick, inscrutable, Black Power raised fist. On his exam, Nico described FRELIMO as "the FREEDOM FIGHTERS that liberated Mozambique and changed the name to Maputo." Had I given my students the idea that they could get good marks by producing revolutionary rhetoric? It was a disturbing thought. Certainly, those who got high marks on their final exams got them for having their facts straight, not for agreeing with me. But had that been true all year long?

When it came to final grades, I stuck to my announced policies regarding the relative weights of assignments and exams. In 7E1, the pattern of late-season catastrophe continued, as several good students, including Shaun, did badly on the final. They all passed the course, though, on their accumulated records. In 7E2, nearly half the class failed geography, which was actually not as bad as I had expected them to do. The insurgency of newly diligent students—Mareldia and company—blitzed their final exams with what I took to be angry excellence. Some of their most reprobate classmates made desperate efforts, the first real work I had seen them do all year, and then laughed hollowly about the prospects of a third or fourth try at Standard Seven.

In English, 6A8 finished stronger than ever. Not a student who was still coming to school failed—Marius Le Roux's aunt could rest easy—and Malcolm and Josef piled up truly prodigious final marks. 6A7's colors were less flying, and several students came up short. I had to fail them, although I expected to hear from at least one of them: Terence, he of the camouflage-patterned beret and the winning smile, who had passed his final easily, but had simply turned in too few compositions over the course of the year. In 6A6, where the general level of performance had risen steadily since the boycott, there was the same problem, however: three kids who had passed their final exam but failed the class. Myron was among them. So was Charmaine, who had earned one of the highest marks on the final. The good news was all the children who had managed to pass—including Aubrey! I was elated to find Aubrey's aggregate mark working out to exactly the official pass percentage. His faithful completion of all his assignments had just carried him over the top.

I braced myself for blasts from Charmaine, Myron, and the others as I handed in my marks to my department chairmen. But there were other blasts awaiting me first.

"You must be joking, Bill," Pieterse said. "A pass rate of ninety percent? Where do you expect us to put all these children next year?"

Somehow, no one had ever told me that there existed, besides the official passing percentage, an unofficial passing curve. Only so many students could be promoted each year—and that figure was closer to 50 percent than to 90. It had been sheer blindness, willful ignorance, on my part not to have seen it all along. Each grade level at Grassy Park High had close to twice the number of students that the next higher grade level had. There were no teachers, no facilities, no funds available to handle any more. What had I been thinking? This was the funnel of black education at work, spilling most of its contents onto the ground.

My students, I realized, knew the score. They knew how many of them would not pass. Nevertheless, I found it heartbreaking to go back through my class lists, looking for students to fail. Elroy? But he had missed three weeks with pneumonia! Joanna? But she had painstakingly rewritten every composition, correcting all her mistakes, for no extra credit. Aubrey? But he had worked so hard! I wanted to protest, I wanted to shout at Napoleon and Pieterse—this just wasn't fair . But they knew it, and what could they do? Did my students deserve to pass any more than the students of other teachers did? There were only so many spaces in each standard. That was the system.

So the blasts I had expected from the students I was failing never came. In fact, the year was ending and my students were drifting away with a most unsatisfactory whimper. As the examination schedule staggered slowly toward completion, children wandered into New Room 16 when I was not invigilating to chat or to say goodbye. Would sir be back next year, a few asked idly, plainly aware that I would not. A group of girls—Hester, Amy, Shireen, Mieta—offered to help me take down the pictures, posters, and miscellany on my classroom walls "before the skollies steal everything." They took the things they liked; I kept my maps. I gave Wayan a copy of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings , and Hester a copy of Black Beauty . Shaun never came to see me. Nico and Wayne did—we made vague plans to go surfing over the summer. A number of matrics took my phone number—Hector, Michael, Ishmail, Shahieda, Warren—so they could let me know how they had fared with their exams and various applications. There was no graduation ceremony, it seemed, no end-of-year ritual. There were no yearbooks to inscribe, no class photographs. Summer vacation simply crept over the school, as some kids finished their exams a week

or more before others. Laughing groups in shorts and T-shirts now waited outside examination room doors for their friends to emerge. Tennis racquets were waggled in windows—when I hissed "Voetsek! " at one, a roomful of Standard Nine students taking an Afrikaans exam laughed.

The faculty was unwinding, too, as invigilation duties lightened and exam marking was completed. In one case, this relaxation seemed to involve a wholesale personality transformation. It was the next-to-last day of school. I was walking past Da Silva's classroom when I heard a guitar and someone singing. I stopped and looked in the window, and there beheld Da Silva himself, performing for forty rapt students. He was singing Peter Sarstedt's nasal folk ballad "Where do you go to, my lovely?" in a rich, booming voice. And I was spellbound, too, standing there listening to DaSilva sing about a woman who talked like Marlene Dietrich, danced like Zigi Jeanmaire, and wore clothes made by Balmain, with diamonds and pearls in her hair. "Extraordinary," Solly Marais murmured in my ear. He had joined me at the window. We tiptoed away together.

The last lunch of the year in the library with the good group that gathered there was the usual jollity under a lowering cloud. Nelson's Touring Club was in desperate straits—there were only three days left until they had to come up with the final payment for the bus they wanted to rent, and they didn't have the money. If they didn't make the payment, they would lose their deposit and the tour would have to be canceled. Each of the people on hand seemed to have a funnier and less practical suggestion for an emergency fund raiser than the last. The principal featured in several ideas that were surefire moneymakers if only he would consent to being bombed by cream pies or water balloons or spending a few hours in a ducking chair. Africa and Napoleon also had potential in this area. Meryl thought Grobbelaar might draw a paying crowd with some of his dirty folk songs, until she was reminded that young Ivan had recently become a devout Muslim and forsaken all forms of vice. I had a small speech of gratitude and farewell in my throat during much of this session, but it never seemed quite appropriate, and I figured I would be seeing everyone there again, anyway.

77

On the last day of school, we had the first staff braai since before the boycott. While the end of the year for our students might have been a vague, uncommemorated, anticlimactic affair, we teachers received a double paycheck on that last day, and we knew how to mark the occasion. The braai started early and drew dozens of teachers—nearly the entire faculty. It was held not at one of the vleis near Grassy Park, but at a picnic ground in a pine forest in Tokai, on the lower slopes of the Constantiaberg.

It was a gorgeous day—cloudless and warm, with the dizzy pure freshness of early summer. New grass, extravagantly green after the spring rains, carpeted the clearing in the forest where we gathered. The very blue skies, the light south breeze, the pine scent mixed with the smell of boerewors on the braai, all carried me back to my first days in the Cape, when the wind called the Cape Doctor was blowing and I decided to stay. That time now seemed like it had happened in some other life. But this was a day for glimpsing larger designs—a sad, heady day.

Stevie Wonder was blasting—Everyone's feeling pretty / It's hotter than July / Though the world's full of problems / They couldn't touch us even if they tried —from the stereo in Dorian Nero's car, which was parked in the middle of everything with the doors thrown open. I was sitting on a fallen tree with half a dozen other teachers, eating and drinking, when Meryl turned to me. Gnawing on a rib and watching me closely, she said, "I got my letter from UCT yesterday."

I held my breath. "Go on."

"I've been admitted."

Meryl could not control a huge, messy smile. Neither could I. We clinked my plastic cup of beer against her can of Coke. "I'll kiss you after you find a tissue."

"You will not. This is still South Africa."

We sat there grinning like fools. Happily, nobody asked us why. Anywhere else, I thought, news like this would merit general congratulations and celebration. But achievement inside the system was such an ambiguous business in black South Africa—especially when a government permit was involved—that any public display on this little occasion would have been inappropriate. Recently, while reading letters from friends overseas, each describing their own latest triumphs and disappointments, I had realized that I had even come

to regard less schizoid societies—where people clambered up the ladder of success as best they could without overwhelming qualms—as strange. Severe alienation, the perpetual tension of life in a moral minefield, now seemed like normal existence to me. Anything else sounded catatonic, vicious, or both. Still and all, I was deeply glad for Meryl.

People had started dancing. Meryl and I joined them. The music now was Donna Summer. Arms were waved, hips were shaken, dust was raised. The forest boomed with libidinal bass. I danced with Soraya. I danced with Chantal. Then I pleaded thirst and retreated to a group of male colleagues who were standing around the braai pit working on a bottle of Mainstay Pure Cane Spirit.

"To Oscar Mpetha," I said, taking a swig.

There were grunts, both noncommittal and seconding, a couple of nervous laughs, and some blank looks. "Amandla ngawethu," Pieterse said sarcastically.

Conversation paused, then resumed.

"So what will you be doing for Christmas, Bill?" Ralph Pereira wanted to know.

I hadn't really thought about it.

"We'll be seeing you on the beaches, I hope," Solly Marais said, and everybody laughed. Beach segregation was a burning issue in the Cape at the moment—as it had been every holiday season for the past few years, according to the newspapers. Controversy was already raging over which beaches, if any, would be "open" during the upcoming season.

"That's another good thing about scuba," Cecil Abrahams said, and people laughed again. "The Boers haven't got around to marking the reefs!"

"Not yet!"

"Can't you just see one of them popping up from behind a rock?" Malooi imitated a policeman trying to talk through a respirator. "Waar's jou pass? [Where's your pass?] These fishes here is for Europeans Only!"

Trevor Pieterse, who was drinking steadily, turned to me. "We'll be seeing you at the Coon Carnival, too, I trust," he said.

It was a strange, surly remark. A couple of people laughed derisively. "No," I said. "I don't go to Riotous Assemblies." More people laughed. This year's Coon Carnival, which was scheduled to take place shortly after New Year's, promised to be the most pathetic "Cape Mardi Gras" yet, for it had been restricted to two remote

venues so as not to conflict with those provisions of the Riotous Assemblies Act that were still in effect. "Will you be there?" I asked Pieterse.

"Of course," he said officiously, then threw back his head and began singing "Daar Kom die Alibama." Everybody laughed, and I slipped away.

The braai was turning into a rowdy party. It was, after all, the office Christmas party and the first day of summer vacation rolled into one. With their big holiday-bonus paychecks in their pockets, most of the faculty seemed to be feeling almost frantically happy. The long hard school year was over, all its conflicts and pressures survived. Colleagues to whom I had hardly spoken in months were suddenly eager to talk—young Erasmus, eyeing me glassily and wanting to know what I really thought of "our South African women"; old Fourie politely inquiring about my geography students' final marks. Unfortunately, I was feeling estranged from the prevailing festive spirit. I, too, was relieved that school was over, and probably as pleased as anyone to have made it through to the end. Yet I didn't feel much like celebrating. And I really didn't feel like drinking. I found myself wandering off, away from the braai.

Entering the forest, I hiked vaguely uphill across a springy floor of fallen pine needles. The disco noise from the clearing soon faded. Toasting Oscar Mpetha—that had been a strange thing to do. Earlier that same day, at Pollsmoor Prison—which was only a couple of miles from these piny woods—eighteen men and youths had been charged under the Terrorism Act with one count of terrorism and two counts of murder each in the deaths of George Beeton and Frederick Jansen, the white motorists killed on the Cape Flats in August. All of the accused lived in Guguletu, Nyanga, or Crossroads. Mpetha was the seventy-one-year-old community leader who had been arrested after suggesting to a reporter that the police bore some responsibility for the violence. He and the seventeen others had spent the last four months in prison. Mpetha's wife had been too ill to visit him and his daughter had been refused permission to do so. That morning as he and the others were being led into the prison courtroom, each had raised a clenched fist to the crowd of supporters gathered there, and when the brief charging procedure was over, the courtroom audience had risen and started singing "Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika" while guards hustled the accused from the courtroom.

There were other local detainees I might have toasted, including two still being held without charges in connection with the school boycott. One of them was a teacher in Mitchell's Plain; they had both

been in for eight months now. There were also six schoolgirls—two of them fourteen years old, three of them fifteen, one of them seventeen—who had been jailed without charges for the past four months. Their families had also been refused permission to visit them. But Oscar Mpetha was the best-known Cape Town detainee at the moment, and everybody present knew I meant every political prisoner in South Africa, anyway.

My bringing up such a subject in the middle of a party had not been appreciated, I knew. But I was feeling perverse. Taking this walk in the woods had been partly to avoid doing anything more offensive. How could I, a white foreigner, take it upon myself to remind black South Africans of their failure to effect their own liberation from an oppression that I not only did not suffer, but that I had been directly benefiting from in many different ways since the day I arrived in their country? I couldn't justify it. Perhaps I had, over the course of the year, simply come to share Nelson's scorn for certain kinds of "socializing." Perhaps, if I were to continue teaching at Grassy Park High, I might not attend another staff braai. Would I then be off with Nelson or Jacob, doing whatever it was they were doing today instead? Probably not, and not only because I was not black. For I also felt mired in an increasing hopelessness about things in South Africa, a sort of low-grade despair that was no doubt what made me want to be perverse.

Everything just seemed so deadlocked. For all the confrontation and bloodshed this year, had the cause of black emancipation been significantly advanced? I couldn't see that it had. But perhaps I had no perspective, no imagination. Nadine Gordimer's then forthcoming novel, July's People, would be set in the future, during the final throes of the South African revolution, and she would trace the genesis of the climactic uprising to this year's events. "It began prosaically weirdly. The strikes of 1980 had dragged on, one inspired or brought about by solidarity with another, until the walkout and the shut-down were lived with as contiguous and continuous phenomena. . . ." The inscription for July's People would be taken from Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks: "The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms." I could certainly see the interregnum, and a goodly diversity of morbid symptoms. But I could not see around me any of the signs of mobilization for black victory. Not now, not in Cape Town.

It hit me, suddenly, what I would do for Christmas. I would get the hell out of town. Alex had invited me to spend the holidays with

his family in Johannesburg. I could make that a destination. I would hitchhike there, across the Great Karroo. Sleep outdoors. Wake up in strange surrounds. Throw open the soul's windows, let the wind blow through! The past ten months had been the longest period for which I had ever held a normal Monday-to-Friday job. I had not realized until now how restless with the workaday routine I had become. I was not feeling exhausted, or vacation-lazy—on the contrary, the very thought of my time being my own again filled me with energy.

I was walking along a level, wooded ridge now. As I came to a break in the trees, the sound of taped music reached me on the light south breeze. Half a mile below, I could see the staff braai in the clearing. Dorian Nero's baby blue car looked like some ugly modern sylvan shrine. Its worshipers milled around it in the sinking sun. If I squinted, I could identify individuals, but the scene was already so far away that the dancers did not seem to be moving.