
          A Southerner in South Africa
          By Gaston, Paul M.Paul M. Gaston
          Vol. 8, No. 6, 1986, pp. 9-15
          
          Few visitors return from South Africa these days with good news or
give us much reason to be hopeful. Like those who have visited the
country, most Americans fear and expect the worst from it. We are all
a little like those northern Southwatchers of the early 1960s who
shook their heads in amazement each night, transfixed by the latest
visual evidence of some new outrageous violation of human dignity,
some new strain on conscience and credulity.
          Like them, we have good reason to believe that the worst is
happening in South Africa. A few constructive-engagement emissaries
indulge Reaganesque fantasies and dress P. W. Botha in imperial reform
raiment, but few of us are deceived. Despite government censorship,
reporting on south Africa overwhelms us with awareness of police-state
brutality, victimization of the nation's black masses, and the
obstinancy of Afrikaner nationalism.
          It is easy to submit to a sense of doom. The terrors of the
apartheid regime are so pervasive and its powers so vast and
impregnable that the Armageddon we see on the horizon seems sure to
end in a tragic victory of the forces of evil over the forces of
good. Blacks will not accept the fate the ruling whites have decreed
for them and their rejection of it, given the present odds, insures
the bloodbath against which we are daily warned.

          Many of us also believe that only pressure from the outside--from
the world that is South Africa's "North"--can change the white
intransigence and avert the calamitous bloodletting. Southerners in
particular ought to understand this kind of thinking. We know that it
took northern intervention to break the logjam of our history, once to
end slavery and later to dismantle segregation.
          Thoughts like these were among those running through my head as I
prepared to take my first trip to South Africa. I had wanted to go
there for many years, partly because friends there urged me to come to
teach my Southern history course. Perhaps, we reasoned, the study of
liberation struggles in another racist society might help South
African students understand better their own situation.
          Eventually I received an invitation to come to the University of
Cape Town to teach a course on the history of the Southern civil
rights movement. My wife, meanwhile, was invited to participate in the
work of a Cape Town group that helped communities in the black and
so-called colored townships who wished to set up educational day care
centers and helped to train teachers and administrators to staff
them.
          By the time the formal invitation arrived we had both begun to feel
that the idea was one whose time had passed. The country was in
turmoil. For months we had been seeing on television the awesome
Casspirs (military tanks) roaming the city streets and crushing black
protest in the townships.
          At the same time, letters from Cape Town friends told us much we
didn't see on television or read in the newspapers, and gave us a
vivid sense of the mounting repression and anxiety:
          * "The phone rings all the time and it is lawyers, friends with
more news. The latest is that the eighty-five who were taken yesterday
are to be placed under the emergency laws, which are immensely
wide. Cape Town was declared to be in a state of emergency
yesterday. Meetings are banned, of course."
          * "I have just returned from the fruit and vegetable market
where I have a friend whose husband was arrested at 4
a.m. yesterday. She is a lovely, energetic, sensitive and immensely
warm person. Her eyes fill with tears which she quickly brushes
away."
          * "Last week-end a friend telephoned us from her home in
Guguletu (a black township on the outskirts of Cape Town) to say that
the police were lined up outside her house, were taunting the people,
who were taunting them back... A tiny incident in a myriad of horror
and death."
          * "This has been a heavy week for me. The morning of the
emergency meant the arrest of one of our staff members, the Tuesday
morning the detention of another plus the husband of another, plus the
necessity of another to become unavailable. People have been picked up
left, right and centre. One has the sense of ruthless
determination."
          * "Our history is poised on the brink; you can almost smell
it. And what will it be?"
          What might it be, indeed! And who would make it? Those questions,
and the chance to be where history was "poised on the brink," urgently
called us to press on with our plans to visit, despite the rising tide
of repression and resistance. People whose judgment we trusted
reassured us about safety, even after a crushing new state of
emergency was declared on June 12.
          My wife and I arrived in South Africa in early July, I to stay ten
weeks, she seven. Most of our visit was in Cape Town, where we worked,
but we had a long weekend in Johannesburg and a week at a mountain
retreat in the Eastern Cape.
          Those weeks of immersion in South Africa's "history on the brink"
were moving and totally absorbing. Privileged to meet many of what in
the civil rights days we would have called "movement people," we came
back enriched by their friendship and their example. And we discovered
in them, in their struggle for a new South Africa, comradeship,
character, courage, and vision that inspired hope for the future. Far
from feeling America should be a good "North" and lead South Africa to
freedom, we came back wanting Americans to listen to the voices of the
new South Africa, struggling to be born.
          To return from South Africa optimistic, let alone with what one of
my friends cynically labels my newfound South African utopianism, is
to be out of the mainstream of reportage and judgment. But I cannot
make this response credible without some report on the 

state's
repressive power and apartheid's web of cruelties. Evils are there in
great abundance. We met them, were personally touched by them,
wrestled with them in one way or another every day we were there, even
though we were white and privileged.
          The newly arrived visitor is first of all struck by the amazing
reach of segregation. Even an unreconstructed southerner would blink
at the legislation that assigns living and working space exclusively
on the basis of racial classification and confines blacks in urban
townships, rural reserves, and single-sex workers' hostels--all
hidden away from the white world. The blacks who have built and whose
labor runs the modern, urban, industrial state are shuttled away at
the end of each day, hidden from the eyes of white people in
cement-block ghettos or hovels and shanties huddled on the
sandflats.
          On the outskirts of Jollannesburg we visited Alexandra, a
one-square mile township housing 100,000 people. I wrote in my diary
of watching a shanty being built of poles that support
corrugated tin sides and roof, about 15' x 10', will house 8 to 12
people, perhaps more. One has a sense of huge numbers of people
shoe-horned into squalid hovels. Crude outdoor privies. No houses have
plumbing, few electricity. And this is said to be "one of the better
townships."
          We were told about the political crisis in Alexandra--the struggle
of young community people to overthrow the rule of co-opted black
officials--and of a "great sense of community solidarity, much support
from comrades of clinic and community-service endeavors." But this was
not the community spirit the government approved: "army pitched tents
just outside townships," I wrote in my diary that night. A police car
took some notice of us, but drove off in another direction without
asking questions.
          One must go looking for Alexandra to see it something most whites
in Johannesburg have probably never done. It was the same everywhere
we went. Outside Cape Town, where a new township had recently been
established adjacent to a main highway, the state's bulldozers had
raised high sand dunes to block the view. No motorist need look on
those homes. One wouldn't have known there were black people on the
other side of those dunes of it hadn't been for high light poles which
we were told kept the community as bright at night as in the day
time--all for good security reasons!
          Along with segregated lives comes a peculiar immunity from
reality. Most ordinary whites we met, people uninvolved in any sort of
dissent or political activity, sooner or later brought up "the
troubles," indicating the crisis and conflict were on their minds. But
their daily lives, we felt, insulated them from the harsh world
apartheid sustained. One can live in total isolation
from all this, as most do, I wrote in my diary. Newspapers say little about the 'unrest,' as it is
called. In fact, they are muzzled so they can't. Television news is
unbelievably bland & uninformative. All 'unrest' areas are
surrounded by police or cordoned off by road blocks. Few whites see
them or have a picture of what is happening there. Life in
middle-class neighborhoods like ours goes on cheerfully: folks see
only 'cheerful' blacks who smile and say 'yes, master.'
          In Parliament one afternoon I watched a fierce debate between Helen
Suzman, of the opposition Progressive Federal Party, and the leaders
of the ruling Nationalist Party. Here I thought I might learn what the
country's leaders thought about the "unrest," get some hint of how far
the world of apartheid had shielded them from what seemed obvious
realities to us. I was lucky to see a debate at all. Parliament has
almost become an anachronism, abandoned by many serious antiapartheid
leaders. Frederik Van Syl Slabbert, one of the several inspiring
Afrikaner foes of apartheid I met, had resigned his position as leader
of the opposition party earlier in the year, despairing of
parliamentary politics as a means of bringing change
          The occasion for the debate I witnessed was the August massacre of
blacks in Soweto. There were conflicting reports over what had
happened with eyewitness accounts differing sharply from the
government version. Mrs. Suzman, a tenacious woman in her fourth
decade in Parliament as an eloquent critic of the government, had
introduced a resolution calling for the appointment of a judicial
inquiry to determine the facts. No one gave the resolution any chance
of passage but the debate promised to tell something about the myths
and assumptions the Nationalists lived by. Mrs. Suzman seemed tired
when I first met her a few days earlier. But there was fire in her
this day.

          Armed with published eyewitness accounts and her own
inspection-tour findings, she accused the government of covering up
its complicity in provoking the violence. It was not the first time,
she said, recalling earlier massacres followed by predictable
government distortions and denials of the truth. With rising emotion
she looked directly across the narrow aisle at Minister of Law and
Order Louis le Grange: "There has been a terrible spiral of death, and
I lay it at the feet, the very large feet, I must say, of the
minister."
          Government replies, and a level of abuse and heckling I found
astonishing even in this astonishing country, came from top-level
cabinet ministers. Led by the state president, some studiedly insulted
her by chatting while she spoke. Others shouted insults. The minister
of Constitutional Development said the trouble was caused by
communists and comrades, another thought Mrs. Suzman's remarks were
"scandalous," and the minister of information spoke for the rest when
he denounced her "1ack of patriotism."
          Mrs. Suzman's words were strong ones. "Shooting people in the
townships will not bring the new South Africa," she said, lamenting
what seemed to her the obvious truth that "the entire world has become
our enemy."
          No decent respect for the opinions of mankind, certainly not for
Helen Suzman, was evident in Parliament that afternoon and I returned
to the home where I was staying full of an innocent's outrage. Former
opposition party leader Slabbert was there, amused by my innocence. My
host marched me into the house, stood me in front of a floor-length
mirror and asked me what I saw. At a loss for the right answer, I was
given it: "You are looking at a man who has seen the South African
Parliament for the first time!"
          The segregated lives, the insulation from reality, and the siege
mentality of the Afrikaner ruling class were all vital parts of the
South African social order we were struggling to understand. So also
was detention, the South African term for political arrest. The new
state of emergency, declared on June 12, was nationwide and all
encompassing. The greenest new police recruit had authority to arrest
any person he suspected of being a threat to the state. Once detained,
the victim had no recourse to anyone on the outside and might be kept
hidden away in prison indefinitely. No one yet knows how many persons
have been locked up since June 12, but reliable estimates are in
excess of twenty thousand, a very large portion of them children.
          Political arrests were nothing new to South Africa in 1986. The
state had depended on them, along with the banning of dissident groups
and individuals, for its very existence almost since the moment the
Nationalists came to power in 1948. Systematically it had been cutting
off new opposition leadership at the knees every time it appeared. The
new emergency decree, wider than any previous one, was therefore only
an extension of the fundamental state policy of maintaining rule by
intimidating and terrorizing its opponents.
          Our introduction to the world of intimidation and arrest was
immediate. On our first day we learned from one woman of a family
member's idealism, brave resistance, imprisonment, and death from
cancer in jail. The second day a warm and gentle academic told me of
his arrest, of interrogation without being allowed to sleep for
twenty-four hours at a stretch, of solitary confinement, and, as I
wrote in my diary, "of his struggle to find ways to maintain his
dignity, to carve out areas in which he would not cooperate, areas of
some privacy, some way of distancing himself from the police."
          By the time we got to Cape Town our best friends had been jailed
briefly and arrests were constantly on our minds. We found the woman
who directed the program my wife was to work with in distress because
her daughter, a university student, was in Pollsmoor prison. She would
remain there for two months. Other friends were concerned about a high
school classmate of their daughter, also at Pollsmoor.
          At the University of Cape Town, where I was to teach my course on
the civil rights movement, I began making mental notes about the many
similarities between it and my own university. But the differences
were more striking. In the familiar looking student lounge a bulletin
board carried notices of students in detention and announced meetings
to protest the state of emergency. Every Wednesday a vigil for the
detained students was held. The student newspaper, vigorously
anti-apartheid, carried a communication in one issue from the
student-body president under the headline "President speaks out from
hiding," telling us that he had gone underground to avoid arrest.
          In the previous year, during the time I was debating whether to
come, UCT students had marched against apartheid. Police broke up
their demonstrations and came on campus more than once with tear
gas. By the time I arrived the new state of emergency was in effect

and there were no more demonstrations. Chafing perhaps more than
before under the police-state rule, the students knew that
demonstrations would send them directly to prison. A fresh report from
UCT's Institute of Criminology, which I found in my packet of faculty
orientation materials, was headed "83~o Claim Torture in Detention"
and went on, with soberingly persuasive statistics and graphic
examples, to justify that claim.
          There were thirty-three students in my class, twenty white and
thirteen black. (The government assigns three classifications to those
persons it does not call white: Black (African), Indian (Asian), and
Colored (mixed race). Politically sensitive Indians and Coloreds call
themselves black in protest against the government's racially-based
classification system and as an expression of their solidarity with
the African majority.*) UCT is an "open" university, refusing to
accept a quota system mandated by the government. Its student body of
11,845 is fifteen percent black.
          
             The 1985 figures, by major group, were: African,
2.9 percent; Colored, 9.7 percent; Indian, 2.4 percent; White, 85.0
percent. Nomenclature is full of political significance. Roger Omond
puts it succinctly: "The largest variety of terms has been applied to
those of African descent. Someone holding extreme white supremacist
views will often refer to Africans as 'kaffirs.' Official terminology
was originally 'native,' then 'Bantu' (literally 'people'), and is now
'black.' The word 'African' is officially taboo because it translates
into Afrikaans as 'Afrikaner'--just the word used for the white,
Afrikaans--speaking South Africans who have been largely responsible
for institutionalizing apartheid." Omond, Apartheid
Handbook, p. 23.
          
          The course was not a study in comparative history and social
movements, but the students were drawn irresistibly to
comparisons. Toward the end of the semester I asked them if they had
been more impressed by the similarities or the differences betwen the
two liberation struggles. Unanimously they replied the differences,
and quickly ticked them off. Their conversation then turned to the
similarities, for it was those that engaged them most: the mixture of
material and psychological forces undergirding white supremacy; the
common experience of suffering and exploitation; the heroic will to
overcome oppression; and the search for appropriate liberation
strategies, leaders, and ideologies.
          Most of all, my students were impressed by the resilience, hope,
and vision of the future they saw in the Southern movement.
          Echoing them, I said that I would take back with me the same
impression of their liberation struggle -a deep respect for the
resilience of the people, their hope, and the vision of a new South
Africa I had encountered so often.
          Explaining this sense of optimism in the face of the despair and
human destruction we saw can perhaps best begin with an account of my
visit to Crossroads.
          I was told it might be impossible to visit Crossroads. Army
Casspirs were everywhere and it was sealed off. The huge squatter
community had gone up in flames in a violent small war just a few
months earlier. That was before the television censorship had become
complete, and we had seen the shanties burning and the people
fleeing. Thousands of persons had been made homeless and much of the
talk when we were there was about how best to provide for the
dispossessed.
          Crossroads has a special place in the history of the South African
liberation struggle. I had first learned about it in 1979 when I saw a
film that explained its origins as an act of defiance and resistance
against influx control and pass laws--against the state's grand scheme
for what it called separate development. Under this plan black men
were allowed to come to the cities to work, but their wives must
remain back in the homelands to which the husbands might return for a
brief yearly visit. Protesting against this, the founders of
Crossroads, with women in the forefront in the early days, built their
own shanty town out of materials their ingenuity secured. Crossroads
grew and so did the government's determination to wipe it
out. International pressure mounted at one point to prevent it from
being bulldozed, the fate the government had in mind for it.
          By 1985-86 it still stood--vast and sprawling and now wracked with
internal dessension that had been fostered by the government. Playing
a crucial role in May of 1986, the government saw part of its aims
achieved when many of its worst enemies were burned out. Still,
Crossroads stood there and was apparently finding its way back to some
form of stability, despite the enormous strains that had been place on
it and despite the resident autocrat, well ensconced with government
support.
          At the end of August word came that the Casspirs previously
patrolling the section of the township we wanted to visit had moved
elsewhere, at least for the day, and that we might slip in for a brief
visit. My guide, a physician associated with a nutrition clinic we
were to visit, drove past charred remnants of the May war, including a
burnt out small bus, and led me on foot through the maze of shacks
down a sandy path that a street sign told me was a recognized
thoroughfare, even though it was largely under water left by a recent
rain. I had watched the Crossroads documentary, seen the township on
television, and read a long research paper on its history, but I was
not prepared for the feel of it, the vastness, the closeness of the
shanties to each other, the narrow sand roads, the sense that a
stranger could get lost here and never find the way out.
          The clinic was small and packed with women and children. On a table
resting on a scale--the first thing I saw as I entered--was a baby with
a distended stomach. I was quickly introduced to a woman, a Crossroads
resident, who would take us on a brief tour. We saw the rest of the
clinic, then went outside to admire the vegetable garden, a small
patch of green that was a powerful statement of faith in the future as
were the occasional fruit trees I saw planted in sandy front yards. We
sat briefly in one of the homes. The walls, lined with newspaper, made
me think, as I had several times since I had arrived, of James Agee
and of his Let Us Now Praise Famous Men with its
meticulous, 

evocative, and loving description of the homes of three
Alabama tenant families of the 1930s. I wished for his ability to see
and record.
          Outside again I exchanged greetings with small children, smiling,
playing games, eyes alert. I thought of Agee again, and almost recited
a passage from Famous Men: "In every child, of whatever
condition or circumstances, is born again the potentiality of the
human race." Crossroads, far from depressing me, was lifting my
spirits. The adults had a vibrancy, an ability to make contact, to put
a stranger at ease, that I am not likely to forget. Later the doctor
answered my questions about how it felt to work with the women and
children in such circumstances. I recorded the answer in my diary that
night: "Isn't discouraged or depressed by working with these people:
they give life more meaning because you see they are not beaten
down. They look to have a future."
          I also recorded some of my own responses that night drawing
political lessons from the day's visit: Thoughts on
Crossroads: Again impression of enormous resilience of SA people and
incredible friendliness. Warm & welcoming people determined to
make a life for themselves in this place, their own turf. Immense
blindness of PW & Co. to the reality of their own people. How to
get them to see it? Probably impossible. Probably too blinded by
ideology, privilege & circumstances of their lives to be
reached. Only way is for power to transfer, circumstances of lives to
change, and new views and senses of reality to emerge out of altered
circumstances.
          Of course I had no idea how power was to be transferred to change
the circumstances of their lives. No one seemed to believe that
incremental reform would phase out apartheid and introduce power
sharing within the existing social framework. Here was a fundamental
difference between the South African liberation struggle and the
American civil rights movement. As one friend put it to me: "In the
U. S. the civil rights movement was fighting for incorporation into
the American dream while we are struggling for a new society."
          It was this struggle for a new society that we came back
remembering most vividly, impressed by most deeply. We did not see
much of the young people in the townships, the controversial comrades
who are filling the vacuum created by the state's systematic
elimination of adult leaders. Brave in many ways, they engage in acts
of violence that trouble deeply those in the struggle we came to
know.
          Our closest contacts were with the intelligentsia--writers,
academics, filmmakers, clerics, lawyers, and doctors (black and white)--who had linked their professional lives to the struggle. They
contrasted sharply with their counterparts in the States, blurring
almost completely the distinction Americans make between activist and
detached observer. They had all the professional integrity we prize,
but they seemed to value it primarily for its power to facilitate
social change. Thus, they moved easily into what we would call
"activist" organizations without sacrificing their professionalism.
          Sharing such company was exhilarating. The intensity caused by the
constant threat of the security forces gave life a keen edge and
nurtured a sense of sharing and support. It also gave a richness to
ordinary social intercourse where we found none of the inanity that
poisons the social gatherings of American professionals. Instead,
virtually every group we joined turned its moral and intellectual
energies to the crisis and to discussion of the social order of the
new South Africa.
          As a scholar, I was struck by the flood of writings about the
country. At a conference on the history and problems of the Western
Cape, nearly every monograph had implications for the liberation
struggle. I said to one of the participants that South Africa seemed
to me the most studied society in process of change of any I knew. He
agreed. After this I began to ask authors why they wrote. What did
their books mean to them? The answers 

followed a pattern. Like
scholars everywhere, they wrote to understand, to explain to
themselves. They also wrote to make the truths they saw part of the
record, to undermine the myths of the state. But most of all, perhaps,
they wrote because they believed their ideas would have consequences
and this meant, as one influential political scientist told me, that
"we have faith there will be a future." Like the people of Crossroads
who plant their vegetable gardens and fruit trees, these allies in the
academy believe their ideas about the new South Africa will take root
and flourish.
          Shortly before I left I had a long luncheon with a friend whose
educational training ranged from eleven years as a political prisoner
on Robben Island, where he was a classmate of Nelson Mandela, to
graduate seminars in a European university. What, I asked him, should
I tell Americans about the South African struggle?
          "America," he began, "needs to be educated about the truly
revolutionary changes that are in South Africa's future." Describing
the tight web of American involvement in South African life--from
philanthropy to multinationals--he warned against thinking of a new
South Africa in American reformist, liberal-democratic, capitalist
terms. The nonracial democracy of the future, he told me, will not be
built on an American model. But neither will it follow a Soviet
model. Nor would it be a Cuban or Mozambican model. Non-capitalist,
because only with some form of socialism could there be any hope for a
decent distribution of wealth and opportunity, the model for the new
South Africa was constantly emerging from the ferment of specifically
South African conditions.
          It was this ferment that I found infectious and
encouraging. Discussions--in luncheons like this one, at clandestine
meetings, in public forums--ranged over every aspect of the ideal
society. "All kinds of fundamental rethinking, at odds with
traditional society, is going on," my luncheon companion
explained. "It's not enough to talk of the politics of a nonracial
democracy or the economics of a socialist state. We are examining, and
planning for, new educational institutions and philosophies
appropriate to a free society, rethinking the roles of the sexes, and
questioning all forms of elitism."
          It was from conversations like this one as well as the daily
encounters with compassionate people joined in a struggle they know
will not end soon-and from the resilient people of Crossroads-that I
drew the optimism I brought back. Optimism may be the wrong word. I
don't mean by it that I see clearly the best possible outcome. In
fact, the opposite may well happen. These gentle revolutionaries I
have come to admire may well be crushed by the fanatacism of
counterrevolution. It has happened before.
          But no one can predict the future, and if by optimism one means
that there are hopeful aspects of the situation to stress, then there
is abundant basis for optimism in South Africa. From the people who
give rise to this optimism one can draw courage. One can also identify
with them and look to them for guidance in the long struggles
ahead.
          
            Paul M. Gaston, Professor of History at the University of
Virginia, is president of the Southern Regional Council and a
contributing editor of Southern Changes.
          
        