‘I heard about a thousand white farmers have been killed in ten years,’ I said.
He howled at me, ‘Twice that number! The world doesn’t care. I say to Jews, “This is our holocaust! This is our genocide!” They say, “You deserve it.” You have seen this?’
He opened Volksmoord/Genocide, a book of photographs, grisly dismemberments, decapitations and maimings, the text by Haltingh Fourie, in Afrikaans and English. Not much text was needed to know that what was being depicted were the murders of white farmers by African vigilantes in the hinterland. The crime-scene photographs were so horrific I had to turn away.
‘This is happening on our farms right now,’ Swanie said. ‘They think they can drive me out, but I am not going anywhere. Not to Australia, thank you very much. My people have been here for three hundred years! No one cares.’
‘I’m listening to you, aren’t I?’ I said.
‘No one is writing about this,’ Swanie said.
‘What do you want people to write about?’
‘The genocide,’ he said, and tapped the picture of a disemboweled and headless farmer in Volksmoord. He gave a rueful laugh. ‘I know Mandela. I wanted to complain. He said, “Call my secretary.” So I did. The secretary says, “Who are you?” I tell her who I am, Swanepoel, such and such. She says, “Where were you for twenty-seven years when we were in prison?” I says, “Lady, what prison were you in?” She says, “What?” I says, “Don’t what me!” She says, “You Boers,” and hangs up.’
‘How do you know Mandela?’ I asked.
‘Because he was around,’ Swanie said. ‘He wasn’t in prison for twenty-seven years. He was on Robben Island for nineteen and then he had a very easy time of it in Victor Verster over in Drakenstein’ — I had seen it myself on the way back from Franschoek, a rural prison now renamed in the heart of the wine country. ‘Mandela was living in the warder’s house, like a bloody summer camp. And he lied to me.’
Since there was no way I could verify how well Swanie knew Nelson Mandela I changed the subject. But he was so aggrieved, there was no subject for which he did not have a ready-made rant.
‘We’re blamed for everything,’ Swanie said. ‘You know about that march in Cape Town in ninety-two?’
I said I knew nothing of it.
‘They were marching and chanting, “One Boer! One bullet!” Mandela didn’t stop them! And that woman Jabavu! You know her?’
I said I didn’t. But he was in full cry, so what I said hardly mattered.
‘An Indian woman, she wrote a book saying, “If a black was in line waiting to be served in a shop, and a white person entered, the black had to stand aside.” She was talking about District Six, and maybe there was some truth in it. But who owned the shops? Indians! The Jabavus! The Jews! The Muslims! The Boers never owned shops. We were farmers. We were in the Karoo — in the country, on the farms.’
Swanie was now so angry that he threw down Volksmoord and began to close his shop, slamming the burglar bars, hoisting the metal screen, setting the padlocks in their hasps.
‘I fought in the war — how many of these other bloody people fought in the war?’ he howled. ‘It’s the same as always, like when we were invited to sit at Dingaan’s kraal. “Leave your weapons — we won’t hurt you.” The Boers thought the Zulus were being honest, so they went along. That’s what this is now. It is Dingaan’s kraal. The Boers went along and they were slaughtered!’
Like many another South African his sense of history was immediate and aggrieved. To illustrate betrayal he had plucked an episode from 1838. Dingaan was Shaka the Zulu’s son and successor. And what Swanie did not say was that the Boers in revenge for that bit of trickery massacred 3000 Zulus in the Battle of Blood River — the river so named because its waters frothed incarnadine with Zulu blood.
The District Six that Swanepoel mentioned had been polyglot, multiracial, colorful, a cultural hothouse that was a cross between Catfish Row and the French Quarter. It had occupied about forty acres at the edge of Cape Town center, not far from Swanie’s shop. I met many people who had lived there, who regretted its passing. District Six had represented what the whole of South Africa could become without racial barriers. The big happy community had produced writing and music that was so full of vitality and a spirit of freedom that the white government was worried.
A former resident of District Six named Hassan explained to me, ‘One day in 1962 we all got a letter from the government. “This is now designated as a white area.” But there were many whites there. We all lived together happily. Malays, Indians, blacks, coloreds.’
‘So what happened?’
‘We were relocated to the Cape Flats, and District Six was bulldozed,’ Hassan said. ‘All the houses were destroyed. They left the churches and the mosques. You can see them.’
But redesignating District Six as white was such a controversial decision that the land was not built upon, the white houses that were planned never went up.
‘We had to live in an awful place near Muizenberg — Mitchell’s Plain. Hot, dusty, windy,’ Hassan said, in his local snarl — hoat, darsty, weendy. ‘There had been prisoners there in the war. Eye-talians. We got those prisoners’ barracks. We hated it.’
Forty years later, Hassan still lived in Mitchell’s Plain, and District Six was still unpopulated. What remained was the District Six Museum, where I learned that, such was the stupidity of the apartheid government and the irrationality of their Group Areas Act, the harmonious multiracial community of District Six had been separated and dispersed. The District Sixers were sent to monochromatic communities, the coloreds like Hassan to Mitchell’s Plain, the Indians to another outer suburb, Athlone, the blacks to Langa and Guguletu and Khayelitsha. By the mid-1970s most of the residents had been relocated and District Six was renamed Zonnebloem, ‘Sun Flower,’ though the name didn’t stick.
On the floor of the District Six museum was a plan of the streets and the individual houses, with snapshots attached and scribbled over by former residents who offered details and memories in notes and testimonials, many of them heartfelt. I was shown around the museum by Noor Ebrahim, a writer who had grown up in District Six. His grandfather had come to South Africa from Bombay in the late nineteenth century with his four wives and the money to start a ginger beer business. His father had also been in the business. Noor said they were Gujaratis.
‘I’m curious. Did you speak Gujarati at home?’
‘No. We spoke Kitchen English.’
‘Not Kitchen Dutch?’
‘It was Dutch — sort of. But we called it Kombuis Engels. Everyone spoke it in District Six.’ Noor gave me a few examples, all of them Dutch. ‘We spoke proper English at school.’
This word kombuis for kitchen was interesting for being archaic and obsolete. I was told by a South African linguist that the word would have been laughed at in Holland, for it referred to a ship’s kitchen — a galley, in fact. The Dutch word for kitchen was keuken. Every now and then, this man said, a Dutch person would be startled by something in Afrikaans, like the busload of theologians who were told that the bus was slowing down on the highway so that they could pull off. The expression ‘pull off,’ aftrek in Afrikaans, meant masturbate in Dutch.
Of the paraphernalia in the District Six Museum the saddest were the sign boards and warnings of an earlier era, plainly worded cautions: For Use by White Persons (Vir Gebruik deur blankes) and drinking fountains and entry ways labeled Non White (Nie Blank) or Whites Only (Slegs Blanks). The earlier era was not so long ago, for the signs had been displayed as recently as the late 1980s. But such signs, familiar and ubiquitous in the American South, had persisted in the 1960s — White and Colored over side-by-side drinking fountains, for example. Any American who could look upon South African bigotry feeling anything but shame was a hypocrite.