1959: WHAT IS APARTHEID?
How shall we look at each other then?
Men are not born brothers; they have to discover each other, and it is this discovery that apartheid seeks to prevent.
What is apartheid?
It depends who’s answering. If you ask a member of the South African government, he will tell you that it is separate and parallel development of white and black. If you ask an ordinary white man who supports the policy, he will tell you that it is the means of keeping South Africa white. If you ask a black man. . well, he may give you any of a dozen answers arising out of whatever aspect of apartheid he has been brought up short against that day, for to him it is neither an ideological concept nor a policy, but a context in which his whole life, learning, working, loving, is rigidly enclosed. He could give you a list of the laws that restrict him from aspiring to most of the aims of any civilised person, or enjoying the pleasures that everyone else takes for granted. But it is unlikely that he will. What may be on his mind at the moment is the problem of how to save his bright child from the watered down ‘Bantu Education’ which is now being substituted for standard education in schools for black children. Or perhaps you’ve merely caught him on the morning after he’s spent a night in the police cells because he was out after curfew hours without a piece of paper bearing a white man’s signature permitting him to do so. Perhaps (if he’s a man who cares for such things) he’s feeling resentful because there’s a concert in town he’d not be permitted to attend, or (if he’s the kind of man who isn’t) he’s irked at having to pay a black market price for a bottle of brandy he’s debarred from buying legitimately. That’s apartheid, to him.
All these things, big and little, and many more.
If you want to know how Africans — black men and women — live in South Africa, you will get in return for your curiosity an exposition of apartheid in action, for in all of a black man’s life, all his life, rejection by the white man has the last word. With this word of rejection apartheid began, long before it hardened into laws and legislation, long before it became a theory of racial selectiveness and the policy of a government. The Afrikaner Nationalists did not invent it, they merely developed it, and the impulse of Cain from which they worked was and is present in many white South Africans, English-speaking as well as Afrikaner.
Shall I forget that when I was a child I was taught that I must never use a cup from which our servant had drunk?
I live in the white city of Johannesburg, the biggest city in South Africa. Around the white city, particularly to the west and north, is another city, black Johannesburg. This clear picture of black and white is blurred only a little at the edges by the presence of small Coloured (mixed blood) and Indian communities, also segregated, both from each other and the rest. You will see Africans in every house in the white city, of course, for every house has its servants’ quarters, built not less than a certain minimum regulation distance from the white house. Sophisticated Africans call this backyard life ‘living dogs-meat’—closer to the kennel and the outhouses than to the humans in the house. But no black man has his home in the white city; neither wealth nor honour or distinction of any kind could entitle him to move into a house in the street where I or any other white persons live. So it easily happens that thousands of white people live their whole lives without ever exchanging a word with a black man who is like themselves, on their own social and cultural level; and for them, the whole African people is composed of servants and the great army of “boys” who cart away or deliver things — the butcher’s boy, the grocer’s boy, the milk boy, the dust boy. On the basis of this experience, you will see that it is simple for white men and women to deduct that the black men and women are an inferior race. Out of this experience all the platitudes of apartheid sound endlessly, like the bogus sea from the convolutions of a big shelclass="underline" they’re like children. . they don’t think the way we do. . they’re not ready. .
Black men do all the physical labour in our country, because no white man wants to dig a road or load a truck. But for every kind of work a white man wants to do, there are sanctions and job reservations to shut the black man out. In the building trade, and in industry, the Africans are the unskilled and semi-skilled workers, and they cannot, by law, become anything else. They cannot serve behind the counters in the shops, and cannot be employed alongside white clerks. Wherever they work, they cannot share the washrooms or the canteens of the white workers. But they may buy in the shops. Oh yes, once the counter is between the black customer and the white shopkeeper, the hollow murmur of the apartheid shell is silenced — they are ready, indeed, to provide a splendid market, they do think enough like white people to want most of the things that white people want, from LP recordings to no-iron shirts.
The real life of any community — restaurants, bars, hotels, clubs, and coffee bars — has no place for the African man or woman. They serve in all these, but they cannot come in and sit down. Art galleries, cinemas, theatres, golf courses, and sports clubs, even the libraries are closed to them. In the post offices and all other government offices, they are served at segregated counters.
What it means to live like this, from the day you are born until the day you die, I cannot tell you. No white person can. I think I know the lives of my African friends, but time and time again I find that I have assumed, since it was so ordinary a part of average experience, the knowledge in them of some commonplace experience that, in fact, they could never have had. How am I to remember that Danny, who is writing his Ph.D. thesis on industrial psychology, has never seen the inside of a museum? How am I to remember that John, who is a journalist on a lively newspaper, can never hope to see the film I am urging him not to miss, since the township cinemas are doubly censored and do not show what one might call adult films? How am I to remember that Alice’s charming children, playing with my child’s toy elephant, will never be able to ride on the elephant in the Johannesburg Zoo?
The humblest labourer will find his life the meaner for being black. If he were a white man, at least there would be no ceiling to his children’s ambitions. But it is in the educated man that want and need stand highest on the wrong side of the colour bar. Whatever he achieves as a man of learning, as a man he still has as little say in the community as a child or a lunatic. Outside the gates of the university (soon he may not be able to enter them at all; the two ‘open’ universities are threatened by legislation that will close them to all who are not white) white men will hail him as ‘boy’. When the first African advocate was called to the Johannesburg Bar, just over a year ago, government officials raised objections to his robing and disrobing in the same chamber as the white advocates. His colleagues accepted him as a man of the law; but the laws of apartheid saw him only as a black man. Neither by genius nor cunning, by sainthood or thuggery, is there a way in which a black man can earn the right to be regarded as any other man.
Of course, the Africans have made some sort of life of their own. It’s a slum life, a make-do life, because, although I speak of black cities outside white cities, these black cities are no Harlems. They are bleak rectangular patterns of glum municipal housing, or great smoky proliferations of crazy, chipped brick and tin huts, with a few street-lights and few shops. The life there is robust, ribald, and candid. All human exchange of the extrovert sort flourishes; standing in a wretched alley, you feel the exciting blast of a great vitality. Here and there, in small rooms where a candle makes big shadows, there is good talk. It is attractive, specially if you are white; but it is also sad, bleak, and terrible. It may not be a bad thing to be a Sophiatown Villon; but it is tragic if you can never be anything else. The penny whistle is a charming piece of musical ingenuity; but it should not always be necessary for a man to make his music out of nothing.