The barrage of apartheid legislation passed after the National Party came to power in 1948 aimed to achieve total segregation. One of the very first laws was the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949). In 1950, in remorseless succession, came the Group Areas Act, authorizing racially exclusive areas of residence and removals to effect them; the Population Registration Act, categorizing all South Africans into four primary “racial categories”: “White,” “Coloured,” “Indian,” and “Bantu”; and the Immorality Act, prohibiting sex between the races. Clearly the ideologists aspired to control the most intimate relationships, leaving no sanctuary in private life. Anyone associating beyond the prescribed racial boundaries became criminalized.
In one of the most aggressive, explicitly political steps taken in the first years, the apartheid regime introduced a bill to exclude coloured voters from parliamentary constituencies in the Cape Province. The colour-blind franchise had legitimated an exaggerated sense of the “civilized,” as opposed to the uncouth or culturally “other.” Such a system of franchise had discriminated against unpropertied Boers, as well as ordinary coloured or African subjects. The determination to purge the non-white electorate, first by excluding the Africans and then disenfranchising coloured voters, had been an explicit program of certain Afrikaner Nationalists from the time of the unification of South Africa in 1910. Although the Cape franchise was constitutionally “entrenched,” requiring a two-thirds majority of the parliament to alter, that majority in the all-white parliament was achieved in 1935 for the purpose of disqualifying Africans on the basis of their race and ethnicity.
The proposed coloured exclusion precipitated a constitutional crisis; only in 1956 were parliamentary objections about the exclusion and judicial appeals defeated.6 Most politics had been urban based: the franchise issue would not have aroused the largely apolitical community Wicomb evokes in Little Namaqualand. Unlike Africans and Indians, before 1950 coloured people were not required to carry identity passes and, consequently, did not share in the attendant tradition of resistance.7 In the 1950s, however, the coloured population came under a similar administrative overrule, that of the Coloured Affairs Department, a parallel to the Bantu Affairs Department. The draconian combination of the Population Registration and Group Areas Acts circumscribed their freedom to own property within their province.
The Group Areas Act as implemented in the 1960s and 1970s displaced urban-dwelling people from historically mixed residential areas, to be confined in putatively homogeneous townships. During the thirty-four years from 1950 through 1984 in the Cape Province, only 840 white families were moved, compared with 65,657 coloured families.8 In You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town several episodes reflect the herding of people into coloured townships in Little Namaqualand. The references are somewhat veiled, but removals inflect the portrait of Auntie Truida in “Jan Klinkies” and the defeat that weighed on Mr. Shenton when he had to move, “to be boxed in” in a coloured village (29). In the book, this forced retreat is converted into a hope for the future when the small proceeds from the sale of the Shenton’s former home are invested in Frieda’s two years of education at an Anglican secondary school, enabling her to matriculate and move on to the University of the Western Cape (UWC).
In fact, the UWC would become a hotbed of Black Consciousness, a movement of young activists who had grown up under apartheid, led by such people as Steve Biko. Established under provisions of the Extension of University Education Act of 1959, the UWC was apartheid-defined as for coloureds only. Frieda is wry about the limited consciousness she possessed at the time of the boycott of memorial services for the April 1966 assassination of Prime Minister Verwoerd, who was, among other things, chief architect of the racially defined education system. Frieda suggests that the huddle of young men behind the school boycott was not deeply politicized.
In 1973 students suddenly exploded, moving away from the muted protest described in You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town. Black Consciousness developed the polarity of white versus black as the epitome of the struggle, and aligned Indian, coloured, and black South Africans in common struggle. UWC students bonded with their peers in other nonwhite universities, declaring on June 5, 1973, in their first major manifesto:
We reject completely the idea of separate ethnic universities because it is contrary to the historic concept of a university — that of universality — but are forced by the laws of the land to study at the [coloured] University of the W. Cape. 9
They pointed out the inequities in pay between white and coloured teaching staff and the overwhelming preponderance of white lecturers (seventy-nine) over black lecturers (twelve). They concluded that the institution was run by Afrikaners for Afrikaners, which is to say that it provided employment for Afrikaners who were Nationalist clients committed to the regime. In the first flush of radicalization, the UWC students rejected Afrikaans, although it was their mother tongue, in favor of English. Later thinking brought them to repossess Afrikaans as a language of liberation.10
Frieda’s love affair with the English language and literature is her passport to the wider world, specifically Britain. Living in Britain from 1972 to 1984, she is removed from the main cut and thrust of the confrontations of students and of an increasingly aroused populace with the enforcers of apartheid.
The egalitarian stance of the UWC manifesto might have rooted the students in a tradition of South African political dissent that advanced equality and unity, as manifested, for example, by the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), which since 1943 had followed a Marxist line independent of the South African Communist Party. A movement attractive to schoolteachers, it had recruited a few Indians, Africans, and whites, as well as coloureds. A revived Unity Movement, however, failed to capture the mood of the times. The students drew on Black Consciousness. The movement contained elements of spontaneity, impatience with structural analysis, intolerance of compromising elders, and great heroism. Black became a metaphor for nonwhite, a very suitable one for a struggle against the white racist regime.
When in 1983 a new Tricameral Parliament provided for a separate chamber where coloureds would legislate on their “own affairs,” several parties offered candidates. The strongest was the Labour Party, essentially the voice of the most skilled and organized coloured labor unions. Coloured voters stayed away from the polls in these elections, which extended franchise to coloured and Indian voters but excluded Africans. Many coloured voters were made aware by the active campaign of the United Democratic Front (UDF) of the falsity of democracy when racial segregation remained intact.11
Frieda returns from Britain after a twelve-year absence still politically naïve, as are most of her friends (with the exception of her friend Moira) and certainly her family, who are still defined by their localities and histories in South Africa. She encounters once again the depth of coloured acquiescence.
Wicomb published this book originally in 1987, three years before the end of apartheid, while state violence and insurrection were at a height. Close readers of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town at that time would have been cautioned and perhaps less surprised than many political observers when, in the months before the 1994 general elections, the coloured voters moved from “undecided” to support of the National Party, which courted them as part of an enlarged constituency of Afrikaans-speakers. They delivered the Western Cape provincial government to the old Afrikaner ruling party, while in most other provinces the African National Congress swept the elections. Peter Marais, one of the victorious candidates, wrote of his personal sense of identity: